James Burke - Dixie City Jam

It rained that afternoon, then the sun came out again and the air was bright and cool and the palm and oak trees along the street had a green-gold cast to them. Just as I was signing out of the office at five, Wally, the dispatcher, whose great bulk made his breath wheeze even when he was seated, looked up from a message that he was writing on a piece of memo paper.

'Oh hi, Dave. I didn't know you were still here,' he said. 'The monsignor called from the bishop's office in Lafayette. His message was-' He squinted at his own handwriting. 'Yes, he knows Sister Guilbeaux and he wants to know is she in any kind of trouble.'

'Did he say anything else?'

'No, not really. He seemed to wonder why the sheriffs office is interested in a nun. What's going on? A big bingo raid coming down?' His round face beamed at his own humor.

'You're up at the hospital sometimes. Did you ever see a nun there with reddish gold hair, about thirty or thirty-five years old?'

'I don't place her. What's the deal, the nuns been rapping the patients on the knuckles?' He smiled again.

'How about giving it a break, Wally?'

Then Wally raised himself from his chair, just far enough to stick his head out the dispatcher's window and look both ways down the hall. His face was ruddy from hypertension, and his shirt pocket bulged with fat, cellophane-wrapped cigars.

'Can I tell you something serious, Dave?' he said. 'All that stuff going on over in New Orleans, leave it alone. It's blacks killing blacks. Ain't we got enough problems here? Let them people clean up their own shit.'

'Thanks for taking the message, Wally.'

'Hey, don't walk out of here mad. People round here care about you, Dave. This Nazi guy been causing all this grief, he gets caught in the right situation, it's gonna get squared, you'd better believe it, yeah. You ain't got no doubt about what I mean, either, podna.'

He peeled the cellophane off a cigar, rolled it wetly in the center of his mouth, and scratched a kitchen match across the bottom of his desk drawer.

That night I couldn't sleep. At one-thirty in the morning I heard the tink of a tin can on the baling wire I had strung around the house. I took the AR-15 with the thirty-round magazine from the top of the closet, slid a shell into the chamber, and walked outside with it. It was windy in the trees, and the sky was full of moonlight. There was nobody in the yard or down by the bait shop. Tripod had gotten out of his hutch and was digging in an armadillo's hole by the tractor shed. I picked him up in my arms, refilled his food and water bowls, and put him back inside his hutch. Then I sat down on an upended bucket, under the darkness of an oak tree, the AR-15 propped against the trunk, and waited ten minutes to make sure that the noise I had heard earlier had been caused by Tripod.

The moonlight was the color of pewter on the dead cypress in the marsh. My neighbor had been burning the sugarcane stubble in the field behind my house, and the air was hazy with smoke and dense with a smell like burnt cinnamon. In the quietness of the moment, in the wind that blew through the leaves overhead, in the ruffling of the moonlight on the bayou's surface, and in the perfect black silhouette of my cypress and oak house against the handkerchiefs of flame that twisted and flickered out of the scorched dirt in my neighbor's field, I felt almost as if I had stepped into a discarded film negative from my childhood, in another time, another era.

In the wind I thought I could hear the fiddle and accordion music and the words to ' La Jolie Blonde . ' For some reason I remembered a scene clipped out of the year 1945. It was V-J Day, and my parents had taken me with them to a blue-collar bar with a colonnade and a high sidewalk in front and big, green-painted, collapsible shutters that folded flush with the walls. My mother wore a plum-colored pillbox hat with a white veil pinned up on top, and a purple sundress printed with green and red flowers. My father, Aldous, had just been paid, and he was buying beers for the bar and dancing with my mother, while the jukebox played:

Jolie blonde, gardez donc c'est t'as fait.

Ta m'as quit-té pour t'en aller,

Pour t'en aller avec un autre que moi.

The doors on the bar were all open to let in the cool air after the rain, and the evening shadows and the sun's afterglow had the soft purple-and-gold tone of sugarcane right before the harvest. The streets were filled with people, some of them in uniform, some of them a little drunk, all of them happy because the lights were about to go on again all over the world.

Then my mother picked me up and balanced me on her hip while my father grinned and set his battered fedora on my head. My mother smelled like milk and bath powder, like the mint leaves and bourbon-scented cherries from the bottom of her whiskey glass. It was a happy time, one that I was sure would never end.

But both my parents were dead and so was the world in which I had grown up.

Then another image floated behind my eyes, a fearful and perhaps solipsistic projection of what it might be like if the Will Buchalters of the world were ever allowed to have their way. In my mind's eye I saw a city like New Orleans at nighttime, an avenue like St. Charles, except, as in the paintings of Bavarian villages by Adolf Hitler, there were no people. The sky was a black ink wash, the mosshung oaks along the sidewalks as motionless as stone; the houses had become prisons that radiated fear, and the empty streets were lighted with the obscene hues of sodium lamps that allowed no shadows or places to hide. It was a place where the glands had replaced the heart and the booted and head-shaved lout had been made caretaker of the sun.

The next morning I called the bishop's office again. This time I was told the bishop had gone to Washington and the monsignor was in Opelousas and would not be back until that afternoon. I left my number.

At noon I got a phone call from Tommy Bobalouba.

'I'll treat you to some étouffée,' he said.

'I'm working right now.'

'I drove all the way over here to talk. How about getting your nose out of the air for a little while?'

'The last time you were over here, you set me up as your alibi while somebody tried to clip Nate Baxter.'

'So you lost money? It don't mean I don't respect you.'

'What do you want?'

'I want to talk . I got a heavy fucking problem, man. It's something I can't talk to nobody else about. You don't got thirty minutes, then fuck you, Dave.'

'Where are you?' I said.

I drove up to the seafood restaurant on the back road to St. Martinville and found him inside, seated on a tall stool at the bar, eating raw oysters from a tray. He had covered each oyster with Tabasco sauce,.and sweat was trickling out of his meringue hair. I recognized three of his crew at one of the tables, dour-faced Irish hoods with the mental capabilities of curb buttons, who had always run saloons or upstairs crap games for Tommy or shut down the competition when it tried to establish itself in areas Tommy had staked out for himself.

But Tommy had never used bodyguards and, always desirous of social acceptance by New Orleans's upper classes, did not associate openly with his employees.

'What are you looking at?' he said.

'Your crew seem to be enjoying their meal,' I said.

'I can't bring my boys to your town for a lunch?'

'What's up, partner?'

'I got some personal trouble.' He wiped his mouth with his hand and looked at it.

I waited.

He looked around, closed and opened his eyes, his face flexing like rubber, then stared disjointedly out into space. Then he tried to smile, all in seconds.

'Hey, Dave, you went to Catholic school, you boxed in Golden Gloves,' he said. 'You ever have a mick priest for a coach, guy who'd have all the fighters say a Hail Mary in the dressing room, then tell them to get out there and nail the other guys in the mush?'