James Burke - Dixie City Jam

Death is the smell that rises green and putrescent from a body bag popped open in a tropical mortuary; the luminescent pustules that cover the skin of VC disinterred from a nighttime bog of mud and excrement when the 105's come in short; the purple mushrooms that grow as thick and knotted as tumors among gum trees, where the boys in butternut brown ran futilely with aching breasts under a rain of airbursts that painted their clothes with torn rose petals.

But there are other kinds of endings that serve equally well for relocating your life into a dead zone where there seems to be neither wind nor sound, certainly not joy, or even, after a while, the capacity to feel.

You learn that the opposite of love is not hate but an attempt at surrogate love, which becomes a feast of poisonous flowers. You learn to make love out of need, in the dark, with the eyes closed, and to justify it to yourself, with a kiss only at the end. You learn that that old human enemy, ennui, can become as tangible and ubiquitous a presence in your life as a series of gray dawns from which the sun never breaks free.

I wasn't going to let it happen.

Bootsie and I met at a dance on Spanish Lake in the summer of '57. It was the summer that Hurricane Audrey killed over five hundred people in Louisiana, but I'll always remember the season for the twilight softness of its evenings, the fish fries on Bayou Teche and crab boils out on Cypremort Point, the purple and pink magic of each sunrise, the four-o'clocks that Bootsie would string in her hair like drops of blood, and the rainy afternoon we lost our virginity together on the cushions in my father's boathouse while the sun's refraction off the water spangled our bodies with brown light.

It was the summer that Jimmy Clanton's 'Just a Dream' played on every jukebox in southern Louisiana. I believed that death happened only to other people, and that the season would never end. But it did, and by my own hand. Even at age nineteen I had learned how to turn whiskey into a weapon that could undo everything good in my life.

'What're you thinking about, bubba?' Bootsie said behind me.

'Oh, just one thing and another.' I stopped cleaning the spinning reel that I had taken apart on top of the picnic table. The air was wet and close, the willows dripping with water along the coulee.

'I called you twice through the window and you didn't hear me.'

'Sorry. What's up?'

'Nothing much. What's up with you?'

I turned around and looked at her. She wore a pair of white shorts and a T-shirt that was too small for her, which exposed her navel and her tapered, brown stomach.

'Isn't anything up with you?' she asked, and rested one knee on the bench, her arms on my shoulders, and leaned her weight into my back.

'What are you doing?' I said.

'Ummm,' she answered, and her hand moved down my chest.

I reached behind me and held the backs of her thighs and arched my neck and head between her breasts. She widened her legs and drew me tightly against her.

'Let's go inside,' she said, her voice husky and close to my ear.

'Alafair'll be home in a half hour.'

'A half hour will do just fine,' she said.

She drew the curtains in the bedroom, undressed completely, and pulled back the bedspread. Her skin was flushed and hot when I touched her.

'Are you okay, Boots?'

She pressed me down on the pillows and got on top of me, then cupped my sex with both hands and put it inside her. Her mouth opened silently, then her eyes became veiled and unfocused and she propped herself on her arms above me and adjusted her weight so that I was deep inside her, lost now in a place where breath and the heart's blood and the thin sheen of sweat on our bodies all became one. The only sound I could hear was a moist click in her throat when she swallowed, and the wind arching a thick, rain-slick oak limb against the window.

She came before I did, her breasts and nipples hard between her stiffened arms, her mouth wide, her hair curled damply on her cheeks. Then I felt it build and crest inside me, my loins dissolving like a hot ember burning through parchment. A sound unlike my own voice rose from my throat, and I pulled her close against me, my face buried in her hair, my mouth pressed like a hungry child's against her ear, while outside mockingbirds lifted clattering into the lavender sky.

I had believed that my will alone could solve the problem in our lives. As I lay beside her on top of the sheets, I realized that, as usual, I was wrong. But at a moment like that, who cares where gifts come from?

At five the next morning Clete Purcel knocked on my back screen. He wore canvas boat shoes without socks, a pair of baggy safari shorts covered with snap-button pockets, his porkpie hat, and a sleeveless purple and gold Mike the Tiger jersey wash-faded to the thinness of cheesecloth. His face was unshaved and bright with fresh sunburn.

'You're not going to dime me, are you, Streak?'

'What do I know about warrants in Orleans Parish?' I stepped outside into the blue coolness of the morning and eased the screen shut behind me. 'Bootsie and Alf are still asleep. Let's walk down to the dock.'

We went down the slope through the deep shadow of the trees, stepping over the trip wire I had strung for Buchalter. Clete kept cracking his knuckles, as though they were big walnut shells. His eyes were red and irritated along the rims, as though he were hungover, but I could smell no alcohol on him.

'You look like you're getting a lot of sun,' I said.

'Why not? Life in the Quarter was turning me into a fat slug, anyway.'

Inside the shop I poured coffee and hot milk for both of us, and we took it out on one of the spool tables by the water. He unsnapped a pocket on his shorts and unfolded a nautical chart on the table.

'Can you show me where that sub is?' His eyes looked at the chart and not at me.

'What are you up to?'

'What do you care?'

'You look wired, Clete. What's wrong?'

'I've got a warrant on me, my business is in the toilet, Nate Baxter's trained shitheads'll probably try to smoke me on sight, and you ask what's wrong?'

I smoothed the chart flat with my palm. The marsh was emerald green after last night's rain, and the cypress knees along the bayous were grained and dark and shining with water from a passing boat's wake.

'Don't get in any deeper,' I said.

'In for a penny, in for a pound. You going to show me where it is or not?' He lit an unfiltered cigarette and flicked the match hard into the air.

I took a mechanical pencil from my shirt pocket and made three marks on the chart.

'These are the places where either I saw it or Hippo's friend pinged it. You can see the pattern. There's probably a trench that bleeds back off the continental shelf. A guy with a depth finder could set up a zigzag pattern and probably locate it. Unless it drops off the shelf and only gets blown back in by a storm.'

He stared down at the chart, his hat cocked over one eye.

'What are you going to do?' I asked.

'Maybe I should remodel it with some C-4.'

'Is the preacher mixed up in this?'

'Not yet. But he was sure beautiful on the radio last night, you know, that call-in show where the geek in the street gets to express his opinion. Brother Oswald is telling people the Beast is about to rise from the sea.' He looked at me and tried to smile. 'Maybe he's talking about my ex.'

'What are you hiding from me, partner?'

He arched his cigarette out on the bayou and watched it hiss in the water and float downstream.

'I've got to quit this. My lungs feel like they've got battery acid in them,' he said.

'What's the gig, Clete?'

'I got to boogie, noble mon,' he said.

'Eat some breakfast.'

'Got to make it happen, Streak. Like you used to say, miles before I sleep and all that stuff. Hang loose.'