James Burke - Dixie City Jam

'Put it down, Albert!' Lucinda shouted, pointing her nickel-plated.357 Magnum straight out with both hands from the doorway.

The plainclothes's chest was heaving; he clutched at his left breast, and his breath rose from his throat like bubbles bursting from an underwater air hose. Lucinda's feet were spread, her midriff winking above her Clorox-faded Levi's. Albert's eyes were half-dollars, his clenched right hand trembling as though it were painted with electricity.

'You don't want to do this, Albert,' she said, fitted her thumb over the knurled spur of the hammer, and cocked it back. The notched grooves and the cylinder locked into place with a sound like a dry stick snapping. 'We can all walk out of this. You'll go downtown. Nobody'll hurt you. I give you my word. Lower the gun, Albert… Wait… Don't do it, don't let those thoughts get in your head… Albert!'

But it was too late. A facsimile of a man, with the soft bones of a child and muscles like jelly, with lint in his navel and a snake feeding at his heart, was imploding inside and looking for his executioner. He gripped the pistol with both hands, squeezed his eyes shut, turned toward Lucinda, and lowered his head between his extended arms as he tightened his finger inside the trigger housing.

She fired only once. The round caught him in the crown of the skull and knocked him back against the wall as though he had been struck by an automobile.

The air was bitter with the smell of gunpowder, dry heat, and a hint of nicotine and copulation in the bed clothing. My ears were ringing from the explosion, then I saw the plainclothes pointing at the red horsetails on the wallpaper while he giggled and wheezed uncontrollably, his left hand clawing at his collar as though it were a garrote about his neck.

Three hours later, after the paperwork, the questions, the suspension from active duty, the surrender of her weapon to Nate Baxter, I drove her home. Or almost home.

'Stop at the corner,' she said.

'What for?'

'I want a drink.'

'Bad day to feed the dragon,' I said.

'Drop me off and I can walk.'

'Lucinda, this is what happens. Tonight, you'll finally fall asleep. You'll have troubling dreams, but not exactly about the shooting. It's like your soul has a headache and can't allow itself to remember something. Then you'll wake up in the morning, and for a few moments it'll all be gone. Then, boom, it'll wash over you like the sun just died in the sky. But each day it gets better, and eventually you come to understand there's no way it could have worked out differently.'

Her eyes had the unnatural sheen of an exhausted person who just bit into some black speed.

'Are you coming in or not?' she said when I pulled to the curb in front of an old wood-front bar with a colonnade on Magazine.

'I guess not.'

'See you around, sport,' she said as she slammed the door and walked into the bar, the tip of a white handkerchief sticking out of the back pocket of her Levi's, her bare ankles chafing against the tops of her dusty tennis shoes.

Bad situation in which to leave a distraught lady, I thought, and followed her inside.

It was dark and cool inside and smelled of the green sawdust on the floor and a caldron of shrimp the black bartender was boiling on a gas stove behind the counter. I used a pay phone by the empty pool table to call home. It was the second time I had called that afternoon and gotten no answer. I left another message.

Lucinda drank a whiskey sour in two swallows. Her eyes widened, then she let out her breath slowly, almost erotically, and ordered another.

'Join me?' she asked.

'No thanks.'

She drank from the glass.

'How many times has it happened to you?' she said.

'Who cares?'

'I don't know if I can go back out there again.'

'When they deal the play and refuse the alternatives, you shut down their game.'

'How many times did you do it? Can't you answer a simple question?' she said.

'Five.'

'God.'

I felt a constriction, like a fish bone, in my throat.

'Who'd you rather have out there, people who do the best they can or a lot of cops cloned from somebody like Nate Baxter or that blimp in the motel room?'

She finished her drink and motioned to the bartender, who refilled her glass from a chrome shaker fogged with moisture. She flattened her hands on the bar top and stared at the tops of her fingers.

'I busted Albert four years ago,' she said. 'For stealing a can of Vienna sausage out of a Winn-Dixie. He lived in the Iberville Project with his grandmother. He cried when I put him in the holding cell. His P.O. sent him up the road.'

'A lot of people wrote that guy's script, but you weren't one of them, Lucinda. Sometimes we just end up being the punctuation mark,' I said, slid the whiskey glass away from the ends of her fingers, and turned her toward the door and the mauve-colored dusk that was gathering outside in the trees.

I drove her to her house and walked with her up on the gallery. The latticework was thick and dark with trumpet vine, and fireflies were lighting in the shadows. The lightbulb above our heads swarmed with bugs in the cool air. She paused with her keys in her hand.

'Do you want me to call later?' I said.

'I'll be all right.'

'Is Zoot here?'

'He plays basketball tonight.'

'It might be good if you ask somebody to come over.'

Her face looked up into mine. Her mouth was red; her breath was soft with the smell of bourbon.

'I'll call when I get back to New Iberia,' I said.

Her face looked wan, empty, her gaze already starting to focus inward on a memory that would hang in the unconscious like a sleeping bat.

'It's going to be all right,' I said, and placed one hand on her shoulder. I could feel the bone through the cloth of her blouse.

But nothing was going to be all right. She lowered her head and exhaled. Then I realized what she was looking at. On the tip of her tennis shoe was a red curlicue of dried blood.

'Why did it have to be a pathetic and frightened little man like Albert?' she said. She swayed slightly on her feet, and her eyes closed, and I saw the tears squeeze out from under the lashes.

I put my arms around her shoulders and patted her softly on the back. Her forehead was pressed against my chest; I could feel the thickness of her hair against my cheek, the thin and fragile quality of her body inside my arms, the brush of her stomach against my loins. On the neighbor's lawn the iron head of a broken garden sprinkler was rearing erratically with the hose's pressure and dripping water into the grass.

I took the door key from her fingers. It felt stiff and hard in my hand.

'I have to go back-home now, Lucinda,' I said. 'Where can we get hold of Zoot?'

Then I turned and saw the car parked at the curb, a two-door white Toyota. The car of Sister Marie Guilbeaux, whose small hands were as white as porcelain and resting patiently on the steering wheel. In the passenger seat sat Bootsie, her face disbelieving, stunned, hurt in a way that no one can mask, as though all the certainties in her life had proved to be as transitory as a photographic negative from one's youth dissolving on top of a hot coal.

Bootsie looked straight ahead as we followed I-10 past the sand flats and dead cypress on the northern tip of Lake Pontchartrain. My mind was racing. None of the day's events seemed to have any coherence.

'I left Motley's and Lucinda's extensions on the answering machine, I left the address of the motel. I didn't imagine it,' I said.

'It wasn't there, Dave.'

'Was there a power failure?'

'How would I know if I wasn't home? It wouldn't have affected the recording, anyway.'

'There's something wrong here, Boots.'