James Burke - Dixie City Jam

'I'm tied up. Thanks, anyway,' I said, and walked up the dock toward my house just as Alafair was coming down the slope, with Tripod on his chain, to get me for breakfast.

At noontime Batist and I were outside in the cool lee of the bait shop, serving our customers barbecue chickens from our split-barrel pit, when I saw Tommy and the woman named Charlotte coming up the bayou in one of our boat rentals. The engine was out of the water, and I Tommy was paddling against the current, his face heated and knotted with frustration as the boat veered from side to side. It had rained hard at midmorning, then had stopped abruptly. The woman's hair and sundress were soaked. She looked disgusted.

A few minutes later they came into the bait shop.

Without asking permission the woman went around behind the counter and unrolled a huge wad of paper towels to dry her hair.

'I owe you some money. I ran the motor over a log or something,' Tommy said.

'It's in the overhead,' I said.

He hit on the surface of his watch with his fingers.

'What time is it?' he said.

I pointed at the big electric clock on the wall.

'Twelve-fifteen. Boy, we were out there a long time,' he said. 'A snake ate my fish, too. It came right up to the boat and sucked it off my stringer. Are they supposed to do that?'

'Take an ice chest next time.'

'That's a good idea.' He opened two long-necked beers from the cooler and gave one to the woman, who sat in a chair by a table, rubbing the towels back over her long hair. 'I guess we better hit the road. I didn't know it was already afternoon.'

They went out the screen door, then I saw Tommy stop in the shade, tap one fist on top of another, turn in a circle, then stop again. He looked back through the screen at me and raised his fists momentarily in a boxer's position, as though he wanted to spar. He reminded me of a mental patient spinning about in a bare room.

I walked outside. It was breezy and cool in the shade, and the sun was bright, like yellow needles, on the water.

'What's on your mind, podna?' I said.

He craned a crick out of his neck and pumped his shoulders. The cords in his neck flexed like snakes. Then he shook my hand without speaking. His palm felt like the hide on a roughened baseball.

'You got to understand something, Dave. You mind if I call you Dave?'

'You always have, Tommy.'

'I go by the rules. I don't break rules, not the big ones, anyway. The greaseballs got theirs, cops got 'em, guys like me, micks who've made good from the Channel I'm talking about, we got ours, too. So when somebody breaks the rules, I got no comment. But I don't want to get hurt by it, either. You understand what I'm saying here?'

'No.'

'I never hurt anybody who didn't try to do a Roto-Rooter on me first.'

'A hit's going down that you don't like?'

'I said that? Must be a ventriloquist around here.'

'What's the game, Tommy?'

'No game. I got to do certain things to survive. You hold that against me? But that doesn't mean I wasn't on the square about Hippo. He was once my friend. I ain't trying to job you on that one.'

I watched him walk up the dock toward his car, his head turned sideways into the breeze, the red scab on his nose like an angry flag, his blue eyes hard as a carrion bird's, as though hidden adversaries waited for him on the wind.

I decided that it would take a cryptographer to understand the nuances of Tommy Lonighan.

I walked around the side of the house to the backyard and turned on the soak hose in my vegetable garden. The bamboo and periwinkles along the coulee ruffled in the breeze. Beyond my duck pond, the sugarcane in my neighbor's field flickered with a cool purple and gold light.

Bootsie had gone shopping in New Iberia, and Alafair was fixing sandwiches at the drain board when I walked into the kitchen. From the front of the house I heard the flat, tinny tones of a 1920s jazz orchestra, then the unmistakable bell-like sound of Bunk Johnson's coronet rising out of the mire of C-melody saxophones.

'What's going on, Alf?' I said.

She turned from the counter and looked at me quizzically. I could see the outlines of her training bra under her yellow T-shirt.

'Who put one of my old seventy-eights on the machine?' I said.

'I thought you did,' she said.

The record ended, then the mechanical arm swung back automatically and started again. I walked quickly into the living room. The front door was open, and the curtains were swelling with wind. I opened the screen door and went out on the gallery. The yard and drive were empty and blown with dead leaves. Out on the dirt road black kids on bicycles, with fishing gear propped across their handlebars, were pedaling past the dock. I went back inside, lifted the arm off the record, and turned off the machine. The paper jacket for the record lay on the couch. The record itself was free from any finger smudges; it had been placed on the spindle with professional care.

'Alf, it's all right if you wanted to play the record,' I said in the kitchen. 'But it's important you tell me whether or not you did it.'

'I already told you, Dave.'

'You're sure?'

'You think I'm lying?'

'No, I didn't mean that. How long has it been playing?'

'I don't know. I was outside.'

'Did Bootsie put it on before she left?'

'Bootsie doesn't play your old records, Dave. Nobody does.'

'Bootsie hasn't been herself, Alf.'

She turned back to the counter and began spreading mustard on her sandwich bread, her face empty, the way it always became when she knew something was wrong in the house. Her pink tennis shoes were untied, and her elastic-waisted jeans were stained with grass at the knees from weeding in the garden.

I saw her hand with the butter knife slow, then stop, as a thought worked its way into her face.

'Dave, I heard the front screen slam about fifteen minutes ago. Was that you?'

'I was at the dock, Alf. Maybe it was Bootsie.'

'Bootsie left an hour ago.'

'Maybe she came back for something.'

'She would have said something. Was it that bad man, Dave?'

I picked her up and sat her on top of the drain board, like she was still a small child, and began tying her tennis shoes.

'Was it that bad man?' she said again.

'I don't know, Alf. I truly don't.' My fingers were like a tangle of sticks when I tried to tie the bow on her shoe.

That evening, at dusk, the clouds in the western sky were marbled with orange light, and fireflies spun their wispy red circles in the darkening trees. Bootsie had taken Alafair to the video-rental store in town, and the house was empty and creaking with the cooling of the day. I called Clete at his apartment in the French Quarter.

'Buchalter was here,' I repeated. 'No one else would have put that record on. The guy went in and out of my house in broad daylight and nobody saw him.'

'I don't like what I'm hearing you say, Streak.'

'I don't either.'

'I don't mean that. The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide don't rattle.'

'The guy seems to float on the air, like smoke or something. What am I supposed to say?'

'That's what he wants you to think.'

'Then tell me how he got in and out of my house today?'

'That's part of how he operates. He wants you to feel like you've been molested, like he can reach out and touch you anytime he wants. It's like you don't own your life anymore.'

I could hear my own breath echoing off the receiver.

'My ex's first husband tried to do a mind fuck on her the same way,' he said. 'He hired a PI to take zoom-lens pictures of her on the toilet and mail them to her boss, then he got in her bedroom while she was asleep and slashed up all her underwear with a razor… Hey, lighten up, Dave. Buchalter is flesh and blood. He just hasn't moved across the right pair of iron sights yet.'