James Burke: Dixie City Jam

'So I kept watchin' out the window at that nigger's do'. After a while he come out with two womens, I'm talkin' about the kind been workin' somebody's crib, and they got in the car with them kids and drove round the block. When they come back them kids was fallin' down in the grass. I call the po-lice again, and they ax what crime I seen. I say I ain't seen no crime, long as it's all right in New Orleans for a pimp and his whores to get children high on dope.

'This was a white po-liceman I was talkin' to. So he put a black man on the phone, like nobody but another black man could make sense out of what I was sayin'. This black po-liceman tole me to come down and make a repote, he gonna check it out. I tole him check out that nigger after I put my boot up his skinny ass.'

'You went over there?'

'For just a minute, that's all. He wasn't home. I never gone inside. Maybe he went out the back do'. Why you look like that, Dave?'

I rested my chin on my fist and tried not to let him read my face.

'Dave?'

'I'm going to call a bondsman now. In the meantime, don't talk about this stuff with anyone. Not with the cops, not with any of those guys in the lockup. There're guys in here who'll trade off their own time and lie about you on the witness stand.'

'What you mean?'

'They'll try to learn something about you, enough to give evidence against you. They cut deals with the prosecutor.'

'They can do that?' he said 'Get out of jail by sendin' somebody else to Angola?'

'I'm afraid it's a way of life, podna.'

The turnkey opened the door and touched Batist on the shoulder. Batist stared silently at me a moment, then rose from his chair and walked out of the room toward a yellow elevator, with a wiremesh and barred door, which would take him upstairs into a lockdown area. The palms of his hands left tiny horsetails of perspiration on the tabletop.

It was going to cost a lot, far beyond anything I could afford right now. I had thirty-two hundred dollars in a money market account, most of which was set aside for the quarterly tax payments on my boat-rental and bait business, four hundred thirty-eight dollars in an account that I used for operating expenses at the dock, and one hundred thirteen dollars in my personal checking account.

I went back to the guesthouse and called every bondsman I knew in New Orleans. The best deal I could get was a one-week deferment on the payment of the fifty-thousand-dollar bail fee. I told the bondsman I would meet him at the jail in a half hour.

I couldn't even begin to think about the cost of hiring a decent defense attorney for a murder trial.

Welcome to the other side of the equation in the American criminal justice system.

Our room was still in disarray after being tossed by Nate Baxter and his people. Batist's cardboard suitcase had been dumped on the bed, and half of his clothes were on the floor. I picked them up, refolded them, and began replacing them in the suitcase. Underneath one of his crumpled shirts was the skull of what had once been an enormous catfish. The texture of the bone was old, a shiny gray, mottled with spots the color of tea, polished smooth with rags.

I remembered when Batist had caught this same mud cat three years ago, on a scalding summer's day out on the Atchafalaya, with a throw line and a treble hook thick with nutria guts. The catfish must have weighed thirty-five pounds, and when Batist wrapped the throw line around his forearm, the cord cut into his veins like a tourniquet, and he had to use a club across the fish's spine to get it over the gunwale. After he had driven an ice pick into its brain and pinned it flat on the deck, skinned it and cut it into steaks, he sawed the head loose from the skeleton and buried it in an anthill under a log. The ants boiled on the impacted meat and ate the bone and eye sockets clean, and now when you held up the skull vertically, it looked like a crucified man from the front. When you reversed it, it resembled an ecclesiastical, robed figure giving his benediction to the devout. If you shook it in your hand, you could hear pieces of bone clattering inside. Batist said those were the thirty pieces of silver that Judas had taken to betray Christ.

It had nothing to do with voodoo. It had everything to do with Acadian Catholicism.

Before I left the guesthouse for the jail, I called up Hippo Bimstine at one of his drugstores.

'How bad you want that Nazi sub, Hippo?' I asked.

'It's not the highest priority on my list.'

'How about twenty-five grand finder's fee?'

'Jesus Christ, Dave, you were yawning in my face the other day.'

'What do you say, partner.'

'There's something wrong here.'

'Oh?'

'You found it, didn't you?'

I didn't answer.

'You found it but it's not in the same place now?' he said.

'You're a wealthy man, Hippo. You want the sub or not?'

'Hey, you think that's right?' he asked. 'I tell you where it's at, you find it and up the fee on me? That's like you?'

'Maybe you can get somebody cheaper. You know some guys who want to go down in the dark on a lot of iron and twisted cables?'

'Put my schlong in a vise, why don't you?'

'I've got to run. What do you say?'

'Fifteen.'

'Nope.'

'Hey, New Orleans is recessed. I'm bleeding here. You know what it cost me to get rid of-when he was about to be our next governor? Now my friends are running a Roto-Rooter up my hole.'

(Hippo had spent a fortune destroying the political career of an ex-Klansman who had run for both the governor's office and the U.S. Senate. My favorite quote of Hippo's had appeared in Time magazine, during the gubernatorial campaign; he said of the ex-Klansman, '-doesn't like us Jews now. Check out how he feels after I get finished with him.')

'I won't charge expenses,' I said.

'I'm dying here. Hemorrhaging on the floor. I'm serious. Nobody believes me. Dave, you take food stamps?'

Hippo, you're a jewel, I thought.

Batist and I picked up my boat and left the dock at three the next morning. The breeze was up, peppered with light rain, and you could smell the salt spray breaking over the bow. The water was as dark as burgundy, the chop on the edge of the swells electric with moonlight, the wetlands to the north green and gray and metamorphic with mist. To the southeast I could see gas flares burning on some offshore rigs; then the wind dropped and the sky turned the color of bone and I could see a red glow spreading out of the water into the clouds.

It was completely light when I cut the engine and drifted above the spot where I had dove down into darkness and the sounds of grinding metal three days earlier. Batist stood on the bow, feeding the anchor rope out through his palms, until it hit bottom and went slack; then he tied it off on a cleat.

The water was smoky green, the swells full of skittering bait fish, the air hazy with humidity. I had fashioned a viewer box from reinforced window glass inset in a waterproofed wood crate, and I lowered it over the side by the handles and pressed it beneath the surface. Pockets of air swam across the glass, then flattened and disappeared, and suddenly in the yellow-green light I could see schools of small speckled trout, like darting silver ribbons, drumfish, as round and flat as skillets, a half dozen stingrays, their wings undulating as smoothly as if they were gliding on currents of warm air, and down below, where the light seemed to be gathered into a vortex of silt, the torpedo shapes of sand sharks, who bolted and twisted in erratic circles for no apparent reason.

Batist peered downward through the viewer box over my shoulder. Then I felt his eyes studying me while I strapped on my tanks and weight belt.

'This don't make me feel good, Dave,' he said.

'Don't worry about it, partner.'