James Burke: Dixie City Jam

'You think I might actually have that kind of potential?' he said.

'People have said worse things about both of us.'

' The Lone Ranger was a radio show, mon. I don't believe there's any vigilante. I think we're talking about massive wishful thinking. These hits are just business as usual in the city. We've got a murder rate as high as Washington, D.C.' s now.'

'Five or six of them have been blacks in the projects.'

'They were all dealers.'

'That's the point,' I said.

'Dave, I've run down bond jumpers in both the Iberville and Desire projects. Life in there is about as important as water breaking out the bottom of a paper bag. The city's going to hell, mon. That's the way it is. If somebody's out there taking names in a serious way, I say more power to them. But I don't think that's the case, and anyway it's not me.'

He took a long drink from the beer. The inside of the bottle was filled with amber light. Moisture slid down the neck over the green-and-gold label.

'I'm sorry. You want me to send out for a Dr Pepper or some coffee?' he asked.

'No, I've got to be going. I had to bring my boat up from New Iberia for some work. It'll be ready about noon.'

He picked up the slip of memo paper by his phone and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger.

'I ought to save you a headache and throw this away,' he said. But he flipped it across the desk blotter at me.

'What is it?'

'That black broad, the sergeant who was in front of Calucci's, called this morning. She didn't know how else to get ahold of you. My advice is that you pitch that telephone number in the trash and go back to New Iberia. Forget New Orleans. The whole place is just waiting for a hydrogen bomb.'

'What's the deal?'

'She's a hard-nosed black broad named Lucinda Bergeron from the projects who doesn't take dog shit from white male cops. That's the deal.'

'So?'

'Last night she evidently got in Nate Baxter's face. So today he's trying to kick a two-by-four up her ass. He wrote her up for insubordination. He says she cussed him out. She says she's innocent and you can back her up.'

'She didn't cuss him out while I was there. In fact, she really kept her Kool-Aid.'

'Don't get sucked in, mon. Messing with Baxter is like putting your hand in a spittoon.'

I picked,up the slip of paper and put it in my pocket.

'What do I know?' he said.

I called the dock from the guesthouse and was told that the mechanic had gone home sick and my boat would not be ready until the next day. Then I called the number on the slip of paper, which turned out to be Garden District police headquarters, and was told that Lucinda Bergeron was not in. I left my name and the telephone number of the guesthouse.

Batist was sitting on the side of his bed, his big, callused, scar-flecked hands in his lap, staring out the French doors, his face full of thought.

'What's troubling you, partner?' I asked.

'That nigger out yonder in the lot.'

'That what?'

'You heard me.'

'What'd he do?'

'While you was still sleepin', I got up early and went down to the dining room for coffee. He was eatin' in there, talkin' loud with his mout' full of food, puttin' his hand on that young white girl's back each time she po'ed his coffee. Pretendin' like it's innocent, like he just a nice man don't have no bad t'oughts on his mind, no.'

'Maybe it's their business, Batist.'

'That kind of trashy nigger make it hard on the rest of us, Dave.'

He walked to the French doors, continued to stare out at the parking lot, peeled the cellophane off a cigar, and wadded the cellophane up slowly in his palm.

'He leanin' up against your truck,' he said.

'Let it go.'

'He need somebody to go upside his head.'

I knew better than to argue with Batist, and I didn't say anything more. He took off his short-sleeve blue denim shirt, hung it on the bedpost, and lathered his face with soap in front of the bathroom mirror. The muscles in his shoulders and back looked like rocks inside a leather bag. He began shaving with a pearl-handled straight-edge razor, drawing the blade cleanly down each of his jaws and under his chin.

I had known him since I was a child, when he used to fur-trap with my father on Marsh Island. He couldn't read or write, not even his own name, and had difficulty recognizing numbers and dialing a telephone. He had never been outside the state of Louisiana, had voted for the first time in 1968, and knew nothing of national or world events… But he was one of the most honest and decent men I've known, and absolutely fearless and unflinching in an adversarial situation (my adopted daughter, Alafair, never quite got over the time she saw him reach into a flooded pirogue, pinch a three-foot moccasin behind the head, and fling it indifferently across the bayou).

He walked back to the French doors, blotting a cut on his chin with a towel, the razor still in his hand. Then he folded the razor, dropped it in the back pocket of his denims, and began buttoning on his shirt.

'What are you doing, Batist?'

'Take a look out yonder.'

A tall, thin mulatto with skin the color of a new penny was talking to a half dozen black kids by my truck. He wore striped brown pants, with a braided black belt, and a lavender short-sleeve shirt with a white tie. He grinned and jiggled, and his hands moved in the air while he talked, as though a song were working inside him.

'A man like that just like a movie star to them raggedy kids, Dave.'

'At some point they'll learn he isn't.'

'It won't be no he'p then. He's a dope dealer or a pimp, don't be tellin' me he ain't. He'll use up them young boys' lives just so he can have money for a nice car, take womens out to the racetrack, put dope up his nose… Hey, you t'ink I'm wrong? Come see.'

The mulatto man rubbed one kid on his head, the way a baseball coach might, then hooked two fingers inside the kid's belt, drew the kid close to him, and stuffed something small inside his pants. Then he cupped his hand around the nape of another kid's neck, his face beaming with goodwill and play, and shoved something down inside his pants, too.

'I be right back,' Batist said.

'Leave this guy alone, Batist. I'll call the locals and they'll send somebody out.'

'Yeah, in t'ree hours they will.'

'This isn't our pond, partner.'

'Yeah? How come you run across town last night to get mixed up with Purcel and them dagos?'

He picked up his dry cigar from the ashtray, put it deep in his jaw, and went out the door.

Oh boy , I thought.

Batist walked from the guesthouse through the shade of the mulberry tree to the edge of the parking lot. The mulatto man was leaning against the headlight of my truck, entertaining his audience by one-handedly rolling a half-dollar across the backs of his fingers. He propped one shined shoe behind him on the truck bumper and gingerly squeezed his scrotum. I don't know what he said to Batist. It may have been a patronizing remark or perhaps even a pleasant greeting; he was smiling when he said it. But I don't think he expected the response he got.

The flat of Batist's right hand, which could curve around a brick and shale the corners off it, seemed to explode against the side of the man's head. His face went out of round with the blow, and the blood drained from his cheeks; his jaw hung open, and his eyes were suddenly small and round, shrunken in his head like a pig's. Then Batist hit him with his open hand again, harder, this time on the side of the mouth, so that the bottom lip broke against the teeth.

Batist waved his hands in the midst of the black kids like someone shooing chickens out of a brooder house. They ran in all directions while the mulatto man held the back of his wrist against his mouth, one palm turned outward in a placating gesture.