James Burke - Dixie City Jam

The woman named Charlotte put her hand in his lap.

'It's one way or the other, Tommy,' I said.

'What is?'

'You either know something about the sub through your mother, or you've got a serious personal problem with Hippo Bimstine that you're not talking about.'

His tangled, white eyebrows were damp with perspiration against his red face. I saw the woman named Charlotte biting her lip, kneading her hand in his lap.

'What problem you talking about?' he said.

'You want it right down the pipe?'

'Yeah, I do.' But his face looked like stretched rubber, like that of a man about to receive a spear through the breastbone.

'He says you killed his little brother.'

His breath went in and out of his mouth. His eyes looked unfocused, impaired, as though he had been staring at a welder's electric arc. He pinched his nose and breathed hard through his nostrils, rolled his head on his neck.

But it was the woman who spoke.

'You filthy bastard,' she said.

'You want a free shot, Tommy?' I said.

'If I want to take a shot, you won't know what hit you,' he said. But his voice was suddenly hoarse and somehow separate from himself.

'Maybe it was a rough thing to say. But Will Buchalter is doing a number on my wife,' I said. 'It has to stop, Tommy. You understand what I'm saying to you? When you create a free-fire zone, it works both ways. We're not operating on the old rules here.'

'Where you get off talking free-fire zone? I had a Chinese bayonet unzip my insides when you were still fucking your fist.'

'You want one of my Purple Hearts?'

'You're a sonofabitch, Robicheaux,' he said.

'You don't make a convincing victim, Tommy.'

'We were all kids. It was an accident. What's the matter with you, what kind of guy you think I am? Why you doing this?'

'Are you going to help me out?'

'Get off my property.'

'All right,' I said, and stood up to go. Then I saw Zoot Bergeron jogging up the drive in black gym shorts, a red bandanna tied around his forehead. I looked down at Tommy Lonighan.

'I've got a deal for you,' I said. 'You put Buchalter in my custody, you'll probably never see me again. But if he comes back around my house, I'm going to punch your ticket.'

'Yeah?' he said, the rims of his nostrils whitening. 'That's what you're gonna do? You can't bust the right people, you can't protect your own wife, you need somebody to wipe your ass for you, you come around making threats, telling me I killed a child, I'm about to take your fucking head off, Dave, you got that?'

'We'll see who walks out of the smoke, Tommy,' I said, and walked across the sun-spangled, blue-green lawn toward my truck. I didn't look back.

Zoot slowed from his jog, his sleek chest rising and falling, his sweat-soaked gym shorts twisted around his loins.

'What are you doing here, partner?' I asked.

'Mr. Tommy give me a job around his yard, let me work out wit' him.'

'You're staying here?'

'I did last night.'

'Why?' He didn't answer, and I said it again, 'Why's that, Zoot?'

'She got a man at the house.' His eyes avoided mine. 'A white man she goes out wit' sometimes. I come over here and Mr. Tommy let me stay.'

'I don't want to tell you what to do, Zoot, but I think Tommy Lonighan is a gangster and a racist prick who you ought to avoid like anthrax.'

Then, too late, I saw the alarm in Zoot's eyes as they focused on something behind me.

Tommy Lonighan was moving fast when he hit me between the shoulder blades and drove me into the side of my truck. Before I could turn, he had ripped my.45 loose from my belt holster. He clenched it at an upward angle in front of me, his neck corded with veins, his nostrils flaring, and pulled back the slide, feeding a hollow-point round into the chamber. I could hear the gravel crunch under the soles of his shoes.

'Don't be a dumb guy, Tommy,' I said.

'You think you can punch my buttons, make me ashamed of myself in front of people?'

'Give me the piece, Tommy.'

'You want it? Then you got it, cocksucker.'

He jammed the butt into my palm, but he didn't let go. He wrapped both his hands around mine, tightening his fingers until they were white with bone, and pointed the.45's barrel into his sternum. His blue eyes were round and threaded with light; his breath stank of the pieces of meat wedged in his teeth.

'You talk war record, you talk Purple Hearts, you got the balls for this?' he said.

The hammer was cocked, the safety off, but I was able to keep my fingers frozen outside the trigger housing.

'Step back, Tommy.'

His breath labored in his chest; there was a knot of color like a red rose in his throat.

'I didn't kill no kid back there in the Channel,' he said. 'It was an accident. Everybody knows it but that mockie. He won't let go of it.'

For just a moment the focus in his eyes seemed to turn inward, and his words seemed directed almost at himself rather than at me. I felt the power go out of his grip.

I flipped up the safety on the slide, jerked the.45 loose from his grasp, and whipped the barrel across his nose. He stood flat-footed, his fists balled at his sides, his eyes the same color as the sky, a solitary string of blood dripping from his right nostril. I started to hit him again.

But his face broke, just like a lamp shade being burned in the center by a heat source from within. One eye seemed to knot, as though someone had put a finger in it; his mouth became a crimped, tight line, downturned at the corners, and the flesh in one cheek suddenly filled with wrinkles and began to tremble. He turned and walked into his house, his back straight, his arms dead at his sides, his eyes hidden from view.

I stared openmouthed after him, my weapon hanging loosely from my hand like an object of shame.

I had always wanted to believe that I had brought the violence in my life with me when I came back from Vietnam. But one of the most violent moments in my life, or at least the most indefensible, came at the end of my first marriage and not because I was a police officer or a war veteran.

My first wife was a beautiful, dark-haired girl from Martinique who loved thoroughbred horses and racetrack betting as much as I, but she also developed a love for clubhouse society and men who didn't daily mortgage their tomorrows with Beam straight up and a Jax draft on the side.

We were at an afternoon lawn party on Lake Pontchartrain. The sky was storm-streaked, the water out on the lake slate green and capping, the sailboats from the yacht club dipping hard in the swells. I remember standing at the drinks table, next to my wife, while a black waiter in a white butler's jacket was shaking a silver drink mixer. Then my wife's current lover, a geologist from Houston, was next to her, chatting with her, idly stroking the down on her forearm as though I were not there.

I could hear the palm fronds rattling overhead, a jazz combo playing on the terrace, the words of my wife and her lover disappearing like bubbles in the wind. He was an athlete and mountain climber and had the profile and rugged good looks of a gladiator. Then I remember a sound like Popsicle sticks breaking and a wave of red-black color erupting behind my eyes.

When they pulled me off him, he was strangling on his own tongue.

Later, I pretended that he had deserved it, and that my wife had deserved to be shamed and humiliated in front of her friends. But I was deceiving myself, as was my way in those days when I sincerely believed that I could experience no worse fate in this world than to be deprived of charcoal-filtered whiskey and the amber radiance with which it animated and filled my life. I had simply made my wife and her lover pay for events that had occurred many years earlier.