James Burke - Dixie City Jam

'Just leave things alone… Don't be messin'… Let the law handle hit… You put me in mind of a woodpecker tapping away on a metal light pole.' He pursed his lips and began to whistle, then opened the door to the truck cab and reached behind the seat. 'Tell me what you make of this?'

'An iron rose.'

'Hit was probably tore off a tomb or a gate. But this morning hit was on my front porch. The stem was stuck through the heart on a valentine card.'

It was heavy in my palm, the iron black with age, the edges of the petals thin and serrated with rust.

'Have you given somebody reason to be upset with you?' I said.

'I been working down in the Desire Project for the last week.'

'You know how to pick them.'

'Jesus didn't spend a lot of time with bankers and the fellows at the Chamber of Commerce.'

I placed the iron rose back in his hand.

'Good luck to you, Reverend. Call me if I can help with anything,' I said.

I left him there, a good man out of sync with the world, the era, even the vocabulary of his countrymen. But I doubted if anyone would ever be able to accuse the Reverend Oswald Flat of mediocrity. His kind ended on crosses, forever the excoriated enemies of the obsequious. To him my words of caution bordered on insult and my most reasoned argument had the viability of a moth attempting to mold and shape a flame.

A narcotics sting sounds interesting. It's not. It usually involves what's called rolling over the most marginal players in the street trade-hypes, hookers, and part-time mules, and any of their demented friends and terrified family members who are unlucky enough to get nailed with them. As a rule, the mules, or couriers, are dumb and inept and spend lifetimes seeking out authority figures in the form of probation officers and social workers. In the normal world most of them couldn't make sandwiches without an instruction manual. They are almost always users themselves, dress as though they're color-blind, speak in slow motion, and wonder why cops can easily pick them out of a crowd at a shopping mall.

They scheme and labor on a daily basis at the bottom of the food chain. When they're busted in a sting, their choices are immediate and severe-they either roll over and give up somebody else, or they go straight to jail, sweat out withdrawal over a toilet bowl in a holding cell, then meditate upon their mistakes while hoeing soybeans for several years at Angola.

Shitsville in the street trade is when you're spiking six balloons a day and suddenly you're in custody and the Man can snap his fingers and turn you into a Judas Iscariot or a trembling bowl of Jell-O.

'You telling me you want to ride the beef, Albert?' the plainclothes says to the frightened black man, who sits on the edge of the motel bed, his wrists handcuffed behind him, his thin forearms lined with the infected tracks and gray scar tissue of his addiction.

'If I give you Bobby, he'll fuck me up, man,' Albert answers. 'Cat's got a blade. He did a guy in Houston with it.'

The plainclothes, a heavy, choleric man in a sweaty, long-sleeve white shirt, reaches out and taps Albert sharply on the cheek with his hand.

'Are you stupid, Albert?' he says. 'You're already fucked up. You're taking Bobby's fall. Bobby has kicked a two-by-four up your ass. Look at me, you stupid shit. Bobby told me your old lady whores for lepers. He laughs at both of you behind your back. He's got you copping his joint and you're too fucking dumb to know it.'

'He told you my old-'

'You want to go back to Angola? You want to get turned out again, made into a galboy, that's what you're telling me, Albert? You like those swinging dicks to turn you out? I heard they tore up your insides last time.'

'You gotta he'p me on this. I cain't go down again, man.'

'Get him out of my sight,' the plainclothes says to another cop.

'You gotta keep my name out of it, okay? The cat tole me to meet him in a pizza joint out in Metairie. He's gonna be there in an hour.'

'You got to make him take you to his stash, Albert. That's the only deal you get. Bobby goes down, you walk. Otherwise, your next high is going to be on nutmeg and coffee. Is it true that stuff can give you a hard-on like a chunk of radiator pipe?'

Albert trembles like a dog trying to pass broken glass; Albert vomits in his lap; Albert makes the plainclothes turn away in disgust.

What's it all worth?

You've got me.

The people at the top usually skate. They buy defense attorneys who used to be prosecutors for the U.S. Justice Department. A million-dollar bond is simply factored into the overhead.

Albert goes to jail, or into a diversion program, or into the graveyard. And nobody, except Albert, particularly cares which one, since Albert doesn't even qualify as a footnote.

In an adjoining room Lucinda and I questioned seven individuals-five of them black, two white-about the vigilante. But these were people who long ago had accepted the sleepy embrace of the succubus or incubus that had insinuated itself into their lives through a tied-off, swollen vein. Their concept of mortality did not extend past the next five minutes of their day. They shot up with one another's syringes, used the public health clinic as a temporary means to knock their venereal diseases into remission, looked upon AIDS as just another way of dying, and daily accepted the knowledge that a vengeful supplier could give them a hot shot that would transform their hearts into kettledrums.

Their beef was with the narcs. Their angst was centered on their own metabolism and the fact that they were about to rat out their friends. Why bargain with a couple of homicide investigators who could offer them nothing? They turned to stone.

Then one of those terrible moments happened, the kind that you dream about, that you hope will never occur in your career, that will always somehow be the misfortune of someone else. Later, you'll attribute it to bad judgment, callousness, inhumanity, bad luck, or simple stupidity, like a safety-minded fool righteously padlocking fire exits, but it remains forever as the moment that left you with the mark of Cain.

The plainclothes who had been interrogating Albert decided to tighten and tamp down the dials a little more and whipped Albert repeatedly across his nappy head with a fedora, yelling at him simultaneously, until another cop stopped it and walked him outside for a cigarette. When they came back in, the plainclothes's face was still flushed and his armpits were.gray with sweat. The thermostat switch was broken, and the room was hot and dry with the electric heat from the wall panels. The plainclothes ripped off his tie, kneaded the thick folds in the back of his neck, then hung his shoulder holster on the back of a wood chair.

Albert was shirtless, his lap soiled with vomit, his face wringing wet. His shoulders trembled, and his teeth clicked in his mouth. He begged to go to the toilet.

The plainclothes walked him into the bathroom, unlocked one cuff, then snipped it on a water pipe and closed the door.

Albert was strung out, delusional, popping loose seam and joint. His body was foul with its own fluids; his pitiful attempt at integrity had been robbed from him; his new identity was that of snitch and street rat. With luck he'd be out of town before his friend Bobby made bail.

But Albert was jail-wise and had been underestimated.

He feverishly lathered his wrist with soap and pulled his thin hand through the cuff like it was bread dough. The plainclothes stared with disbelief as Albert came through the bathroom door and tore the.38 out of the shoulder holster that hung on the chair back, his hand shaking, his eyes blood-flecked and bulging with fear, sweat streaming down his chest.

The plainclothes's face looked like a large, round, white clock that had run out of time.