James Burke - Dixie City Jam

'Clete, I've got every cop in Iberia Parish looking for this guy. How-'

'You think he was there today. You didn't see him. Listen, big mon, we're going to turn it around on this guy. They all go down, it's just a matter of time… Are you listening?'

'Yes.'

'Your problem is you think too much.'

'Okay, Clete, I've got your drift.'

'I thought you were calling me about Nate Baxter.'

'Why would I call you about him ,'

'Nate almost got deep-fried in his own grease early this morning. Evidently he gets it on in Algiers sometimes with this biker broad who used to be his snitch in the First District. But he wakes up this morning, the broad is gone, and the dump she lives in is burning down. Except she's got French doors that are locked across both handles with Nate's handcuffs. He wrapped his head in a wet sheet and curled up in the bathtub or he wouldn't have made it.'

'Where's he now?'

'At Southern Baptist, up on Napoleon. Why?'

'Is he pressing any charges?'

'Not according to the cop who told me about it. I guess getting set on fire just goes with the territory when Nate tries to get laid.'

'Who's the woman?'

'Pearly Blue Ridel, you remember her, she used to work in a couple of the Giacanos' massage parlors, then she got off the spike and hooked up with some born-again bikers or something. Too bad Baxter's still got her by the umbilical cord.'

'Pearly Blue's no killer, Clete. She starts every day with a nervous breakdown.'

'Tell that to Nate.'

'I think it's a hit. A heroin mule in Baton Rouge sheriff's custody told me and Lucinda Bergeron that the Calucci brothers were going to take somebody out, somebody they weren't supposed to touch. Then this morning Tommy Lonighan showed up at my dock and made a point of establishing his whereabouts from six to noon or so.'

'Let them whack each other out. Who cares? If Baxter had caught the bus, half of NOPD would be plastered right now.'

'Would you like Lonighan setting you up for his alibi?'

'Keep it simple, Streak. Buchalter's the target. These other guys are predictable. Your man is not.'

Your man? I thought, after he had hung up. For some reason the possessive pronoun brought back the same sense of visceral revulsion and personal shame and violation that I had felt when Mack, on that raw, late-fall afternoon in the barn, had extended the backs of his fingers to my face and made me an accomplice in the sexual degradation of my mother.

Why?

Because as, the object of someone else's perverse sexual obsession, you feel not only that you are alone, and I mean absolutely alone, but that there is something defective in you that either attracts or warrants the bent attentions of your persecutor.

Ask anybody who has ever been there. Even a cop.

I knew Pearly Blue Ridel on another level besides the one that Clete had mentioned over the telephone, but the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous prevented me from acknowledging to an outsider that she was a member of our fellowship.

Bootsie, Alafair, and I went to an early Mass at St. Peter's in New Iberia the next morning, then I dropped them off at my cousin Tutta's in town and headed back for New Orleans.

Pearly Blue's AA group was not a conventional one. It was made up of low-bottom drunks and outlaw bikers across the river in Algiers, and it was called the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker group. Because most of the members rode chopped-down Harleys, often had shaved heads, were covered with outrageous tattoos, and were generally ferocious in their appearance, they couldn't rent a meeting hall anywhere except in a warehouse that adjoined a biker bar where many of them used to get drunk. I parked in the alley behind the warehouse and used the rest room in the back of the bar before I went into the noon meeting.

On the condom machine someone had written in felt pen, Gee, this gum tastes funny . Written in the same hand on the dispenser for toilet-seat covers were the words Puerto Rican Place Mats .

The AA meeting area in the warehouse was gray with cigarette smoke, dense with the smell of sweaty leather, engine grease rubbed into denim, expectorated snuff, and unwashed hair. I stood against the wall by the doorway until Pearly Blue would look at me. She wore Levi's that were too large for her narrow hips, no bra, and a tie-dyed shirt that showed the small bumps she had for breasts. Her hair was colorless, stuck together on the ends, and the circles under her eyes seemed to indicate as much about the hopelessness of her life as about her emotional and physical fatigue. You did not have to be around Pearly Blue long to realize that she was one of those haunted souls who waited with certainty at each dawn for an invisible hand to wrap a cobweb of fear and anxiety around her heart.

My stare was unrelenting, and finally she got up from the table and walked with me out into the alley. She leaned against my truck fender, put a cigarette in her mouth, and lit it with both hands, although there was no wind between the buildings. She huffed the smoke out at an upward angle, her chin pointed away from me.

As with most of her kind, Pearly Blue's toughness was a sad illusion, and her breaking point was always right beneath the skin.

'You want to tell me what happened with Nate Baxter?' I said.

She looked down at the end of the alley, where a clump of untrimmed banana trees grew by a rack of garbage cans and traffic was passing on the street. She took another hit on her cigarette.

'Pearly Blue, as far as I'm concerned, we're still inside the meeting. Which means anything you tell me doesn't go any farther.'

'I went down to the store to buy some eggs to make his breakfast,' she said. She had a peckerwood accent and a peculiar way of moving her lips silently before she spoke. 'He always wants an omelette when he gets up in the morning. When I came back, fire was popping the glass out of all the windows.'

'Who handcuffed the doors together?'

'I don't know. I didn't.' She looked up at the telephone wires, an attempted pout on her mouth, like a put-upon adolescent girl.

'Why are you still hanging around with a guy like Baxter, Pearly Blue?'

'I wrote a couple of bad checks. He said he'll tell my P.O.'

'I see.'

'I wasn't hanging paper. It was just an overdraft. But with the jacket I already got-'

She made a clicking sound with her tongue and tried to look self-possessed and cool, but the color had risen in her throat, and her pulse was fluttering like an injured moth.

'Who torched the place?' I said.

'I don't know, Streak. Everything I owned was burned up. What am I supposed to tell you?' Her eyes were wet now. She opened and closed them and looked emptily at the graffiti-scrolled wall of a garage apartment.

'Were the Calucci brothers behind it?'

'Don't be telling people that. Don't be using my name when you go talking about them kind of people,'

'I won't let you get hurt, Pearly Blue. Just tell me what happened.'

'Some guy called, it was like he knew everything about me, about my kid getting taken away from me, about where I work, about some stuff, you know, not very good stuff, I did at the massage parlour, he said, "Get out of your place by six, have yourself a nice walk, when you come back you won't have to be this guy's fuck no more."'

'You don't know who it was?'

'You think I want to know something like that? You remember what happened to my roommate in the Quarter when she told a vice cop she'd testify against one of the Giacano family? They soaked her in gasoline. They-'

'You're out of it, Pearly Blue. Forget about Baxter, forget about the Calucci brothers. Where are you living now?'

'At my sister's. I just want to go to meetings, work at my job, and get my little boy back. My P.O.' s a hard ass, he hears about the checks, calls from the wise guys, stuff like that, I'm going down again. It's full of bull dykes in there, Streak. I just can't do no more time.'