James Burke - Dixie City Jam

'What?'

On Saturdays Max and Bobo Calucci usually had supper, with their girlfriends and gumballs, at a blue-collar Italian restaurant off Canal near the New Orleans Country Club. It was a place with checker-cloth-covered tables, wood-bladed ceiling fans, Chianti served in wicker-basket bottles, a brass-railed mahogany bar, a TV sports screen high overhead, and a good-natured bartender who had once played for the Saints.

An off-duty uniformed police officer stood guard at the front door. The patrons were family people, and white; they celebrated birthdays and anniversaries at the restaurant; the mood was always loud and happy, almost raucous. It was like going through a door into a festive and carefree New Orleans of forty years ago.

Tommy Lonighan was by himself when he arrived in a rental stretch limo. Tommy Bobalouba, the stomp-ass kid from Magazine who could knock his opponent's mouthpiece into the fourth row, stepped out on the curb with the perfumed and powdered grace of castle Irish. He looked like an elegant resurrection of the 1940s, in a tailored white suit with purple pinstripes, a wide scarlet polka-dot tie, oxblood loafers, his face ruddy with a whiskey flush, his blue eyes as merry as an elf's. His lavender shirt seemed molded to his powerful physique.

Outside his shirt and under his tie, he wore a gold chain with what looked like two mismatched metal objects attached to it.

The cop at the door, who was nearing retirement, grinned and feigned a prizefighter's stance with him. When he walked through the tables, people shook his hand, pointed him out to each other as a celebrity; the bartender shouted out, 'Hey, Tommy, Riddick Bowe was just in here looking for you! He needs some pointers!'

Tommy sipped a whiskey sour at the bar, with one polished loafer on the rail, his smile always in place, his face turned toward the crowd, as though the collective din that rose from it was an extension of the adulation that had rolled over him in a validating crescendo many years ago, when thousands in a sweaty auditorium chanted, 'Hook 'im, Bobalouba! Hook 'im, Bobalouba! Hook 'im, Bobalouba!'

He gazed at the Caluccis' table with goodwill, bought a round for the bar, dotted a shrimp cocktail with Tabasco sauce, and ate it with a spoon like ice cream.

Then one of Max's people, a pale, lithe Neapolitan hood named Sal Palacio, walked up to him, his palms open, a question mark in the center of his face.

'We got a problem, Tommy?' he said.

'Not with me you don't,' Tommy answered, his dentures showing stiffly with his smile.

'Because Max and Bobo are wondering what you're doing here, since it ain't your regular place, you hear what I'm saying?'

Tommy looked at a spot on the wall, his eyelids fluttering. 'I need a passport in New Orleans these days?' he said.

'They said to tell you they got no hard feelings. They're sorry things ain't worked out, they're sorry you're sick, they don't want people holding no grudges.'

Tommy cocked his fists playfully; Sal's face popped like a rubber band.

'Man, don't do that,' he said.

'Take it easy, kid,' Tommy said, brushing Sal's stomach with his knuckles. 'You want a drink?'

'I got to ask you to walk into the washroom with me.'

'Hey, get this kid,' Tommy said to the people standing around him. 'Sal, you don't got a girlfriend?'

'It ain't funny, Tommy.'

Tommy pulled back his coat lapels, lifted his coattails, slapped his pockets, turned in a circle.

'Sal, you want to put your hand in my crotch?' he asked.

'You're a fucking lunatic,' he answered, and walked away.

But the Caluccis were becoming more and more nervous, self-conscious, convinced that each time Lonighan spoke into a cluster of people at the bar and they laughed uproariously, the Caluccis were the butt of the joke.

Max stood up from his chair, a bread stick in one hand, a pitcher of sangria in the other, working his neck against the starch in his collar.

'Hey, Tommy,' he said, over the heads of people at the other tables. 'You don't want to have a drink with your friends, you crazy guy?'

Tommy walked toward the Calucci table, still smiling, a dream-like luster in his eyes, his cheeks glowing from a fresh shave. He patted Max on the shoulders, pressed him into his chair, bent down and whispered in his ear, as though he were confiding in an old friend.

Few people noticed Tommy's left hand biting into the back of Max's neck or the charged and fearful light in Max's eyes, or Tommy raising his right knee and slipping a.38 one inch from the cloth holster strapped to his calf.

Then the conversation at the other tables died; people stopped eating and became immobile in their chairs, as though they were part of a film winding down on a reel; waiters set down their trays and remained motionless in the aisles. Tommy pushed Max's face into his plate as though he were bending the tension out of a spring.

The cop at the door had stepped inside out of the rain. He stared dumbfounded at Lonighan.

'Walk back outside, Pat. Or I pop him right now. I swear to God I will,' Tommy said.

'You're having some kind of breakdown, Tommy. This ain't your way,' Sal Palacio said.

'Put your piece in the pitcher, Sal. You other two fucks do the same,' Tommy said.

Sal and the other two bodyguards dropped their pistols into the sangria. Tommy twisted the barrel of the.38 into the soft place behind Max's ear and clicked back the hammer.

'This guy here, the one with the linguine in his face, him and his brother been killing the colored dealers in the projects,' he said. 'You think the city's shit now, wait till you see what it's like when the Caluccis got the whole dope trade to themselves.'

'Tommy, you're taking us all over the edge here,' the cop at the door said, his mouth parting dryly after his words had stopped.

'Hey, Pat, tell Nate Baxter I just fucked his meal ticket,' Tommy said, and pulled the trigger.

Max's mouth opened sideways on his plate, like that of a fish that had been thrown hard upon the bank. Tommy pulled the trigger again, with people screaming now, this time the barrel a half inch from the crown of Max's skull. A tuft of Max's hair jumped as though it had been touched by a puff of wind.

Then, with Bobo under the table and the cop drawing his weapon, Tommy went through the curtained hallway behind him, stepped inside the men's room, and bolted the door.

For some reason he did it in a toilet stall, seated on top of the stool, with his trousers still on, the revolver pointed awkwardly toward his throat. The impact of the round wedged his head into the corner of the stall; the recoil sent the.38 skittering in a red trail across the tiles; the hemorrhage from the wound covered his chest like a scarlet bib. Later the coroner lifted the gold chain from his neck with a fountain pen. Attached to it were a lead-colored army dog tag and a small gold boxing glove from the Golden Gloves of 1951.

I wondered if Tommy heard the roar of the crowd just as his thumb tightened inside the trigger housing, or the echo of Chinese bugles and small arms through a frozen arroyo, or perhaps the squeal of an ice truck's brakes on a street full of children in the Channel; or if he stared into the shadows, seeking the epiphany that had always eluded him, and saw only more shadows and motes of spinning dust and the graffiti scratched into the paint on the door, until he realized, just as the hammer snapped down on the brass cartridge, that the eruption of pain and fear and blood in his chest was simply the terminus of an ongoing war that he had waged for a lifetime against his own heart.

Later I mentioned my thoughts to Hippo.

'Don't complicate that dumb mick, Dave. He even screwed up his own suicide,' he answered. Then, with his face turned so I couldn't see his eyes, 'He apologized before he checked out. Just him and me in the room. Just like when we were boys.'