James Burke - Dixie City Jam

'You won't, not if I have anything to do with it.'

'Baxter's gonna find me. He's gonna make me ball him again. It's sickening.'

I took a business card out of my wallet, pressed it into her palm, and closed her fingers on it. Her hand was small and moist in mine.

'Believe me when I tell you this,' I said. 'If Nate Baxter ever bothers you again, call me, and he'll wish his parents had taken up celibacy.'

Her face became confused.

'He'll wish his father'd had his equipment sawed off,' I said.

The corner of her mouth wrinkled with a smile, exposing a line of tiny, silver-capped teeth.

Nate Baxter's room was as utilitarian and plain and devoid of cheer as his life. It contained no flowers, greeting cards, clusters of balloons, and certainly no visitors, unless you counted the uniformed cop on duty at the door.

'You don't look too bad, Nate,' I said. Which wasn't true. His face was wan, the reddish gold beard along his jawline was matted with some kind of salve, and stubble had grown out on his cheeks.

He didn't speak; his eyes regarded me carefully.

'I talked with an arson inspector. He said somebody put a fire-bomb under your bed, probably gasoline and paraffin,' I said.

'You're making that your business, along with everything else in Orleans Parish?'

'I've got a special interest in Max and Bobo Calucci. I think you do, too, Nate.'

'What's that mean?'

'You're on a pad.'

'I remember once when you smelled like an unflushed toilet with whiskey poured in it. Maybe that's why IA busted you out of the department. Maybe that's why you can't ever get that hard out of your pants. But I'm not up to trading insults with you. Do me a favor today, go back home.'

He turned his head on the pillow to reach a drinking glass filled with Coca-Cola. I could see a tubular, raw-edged lump behind his right ear.

'I think you tried to up the juice on the Caluccis, Nate. Then they decided to factor you out of the overhead.'

'It's always the same problem with you, Robicheaux. It's not what you don't know, it's what you think you know that makes you a fuckup. No matter where you go, you leave shit prints on the walls.'

'You were asleep, maybe you still had a half a bag on, Pearly Blue went to the store, somebody sapped you across the head, then he really lit up your morning.'

'I was in her apartment because she's still my snitch. You want to give it some other interpretation, nobody's going to be listening. Why? Because you don't work here anymore. For some reason, you can't seem to accept that simple fact.' His hand moved toward the cord and call button that would bring a nurse or the guard at the door.

'You know what denial is, Nate?'

'I breathed a lot of smoke yesterday. I'm not interested in wetbrain vocabulary right now. Every one of you AA guys thinks you deserve the Audie Murphy award because you got sober. Here's the news flash on that. The rest of us have been sober all along. It's not a big deal in the normal world.'

'A heroin mule in Baton Rouge custody knew about the hit. So did some greaseballs in Mobile. So did Tommy Lonighan. They're talking about you like you're already off the board.'

'Get out of here before I place you under arrest.' His hand went toward the call button again. I moved it out of his reach.

'You're a bad cop, Nate. Somebody should have clicked off your switch a long time ago.'

I pushed back my seersucker coat and removed my.45 from my belt holster. His eyes were riveted on mine now.

'You're bad not because you're on a pad; you're bad because you don't understand that we're supposed to protect the weak,' I said. 'Instead, when you sense weakness in people, you exploit it, you bully and humiliate them, you've even sodomized and raped them.'

'You've got a terminal case of assholeitis, Robicheaux, but you're not crazy. So get off it.' He tried to keep the conviction in his voice, his eyes from dropping to the pistol in my hand.

'I know an AA bunch called the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker group. Some of them are bad dudes, guys who've been on Camp J up at Angola. They say you've been hitting on Pearly Blue for a long time. They wanted to do something about it.' I pulled back the slide on the.45 and eased a round from the magazine into the chamber. 'But I told them I'd take care of it.'

'That gun-threat bullshit is an old ruse of yours. You're firing in the well. Get out of my room.'

I sat on the edge of his bed.

'You're right, it is,' I said. 'That's why I was going to shove it down your mouth and let you work toward that conclusion while you swallowed some of your own blood, Nate… But there's no need.'

'What are you-'

I released the magazine, ejected the round from the chamber, and dropped it clinking into his drinking glass.

'She found out this week she's HIV positive,' I said. 'I'd get some tests as long as I was already in the hospital. But no matter how you cut it, Nate, Pearly Blue is out of your life. We're clear on that, aren't we?'

His lips looked gray and cracked, the texture of snakeskin that has dried in the sun, and the whites of his eyes were laced with pink blood vessels. The light through the blinds seemed to reflect like a liquid yellow presence in his incredulous glare. I heard his drinking glass crash to the floor and the call button clicking rapidly in his fist as I walked toward the door.

That evening I had to go far down the bayou in a boat to tow back a rental whose engine one of our customers had plowed across a sandbar. It was dark before I finally locked up the bait shop and walked to the house. Boptsie was asleep, but as soon as I entered the bedroom I knew how she had spent the last three hours. Her breathing had filled the room with a thick, sweet odor like flowers soaked overnight in cream sherry.

I sat on the edge of the bed in my skivvies and looked at the smooth white curve of her hip in the moonlight. I rubbed my hand along her rump and thigh; her skin felt heated, flushed, as though she were experiencing an erotic dream, but it was also insensitive to my touch.

I put my fingers in the thick curls of her hair, kissed her back, and felt like a fifty-five-year-old adolescent impotently contending with his own throbbing erection.

I had been saved from my alcoholism by A A. Why did it have to befall her?

But I already knew the answer. The best way to become a drunk is to live with one.

What are we going to do, Boots? I thought. Bring the dirty boogie full tilt into our lives, then do a pit stop five years down the road and see if the trade-off was worth it?

But somebody else was already working on an answer for me. At 2:00 a.m. I heard the door on my father's old tractor shed, which was always padlocked, knocking against the jamb in the wind, then I heard music, a song that was a generation out-of-date, that seemed to float across wine-dark seas crowded with ships in a time when the lights almost went out all over the world.

I slipped on my khakis and loafers, took my.45 from under the bed, and walked with a flashlight along the edge of the coulee to the shed. I bounced the beam ahead of me on the willows and the weathered gray sides of the shed, the open door that drifted back and forth on two rusty hinges, the hasp and padlock that had been splintered loose from the wood.

Then I clearly heard the words to 'Harbor Lights.'

I clicked off the safety on the.45, flipped back the door with my foot, and shined the light inside the shed.

In front of my father's old tractor was a butcher block where we used to dress game. Someone had covered it with white linen that was almost iridescent in the moonlight burning through the spaces in the slats. On the tablecloth was a cassette player, a clean china plate with a blue, long-stemmed rose laid across it, a freshly uncorked bottle of Jack Daniel's, a glass tumbler filled with four inches of bourbon, and a sweat-beaded uncapped bottle of Dixie beer on the side. A crystal goblet of burgundy that was half empty stood in a shaft of moonlight on the far side of the butcher block. On the rim of the glass was the perfect lipsticked impression of a woman's mouth.