James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

The sheriff was turned sideways in his swivel chair, his bifocals mounted on his nose, twisting strips of pink and white crepe paper into the shape of camellias. On his windowsill was a row of potted plants, which he watered daily from a hand-painted teakettle. He looked like an aging greengrocer more than a law officer, and in fact had run a dry cleaning business before his election to office, but he had been humble enough to listen to advice, and over the years we had all come to respect his judgment and integrity.

Only one door in his life had remained closed to us, his time with the First Marine Division at the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, until last year, when he suffered a heart attack and told me from a bed in Iberia General, his breath as stale as withered flowers, of bugles echoing off frozen hills and wounds that looked like roses frozen in snow.

I sat down across from him. His desk blotter was covered with crepe paper camellias.

"I volunteered to help decorate the stage for my granddaughter's school play. You any good at this?" he said.

"No, not really. A movie director, a fellow named Lonnie Felton, was out at my place with Sabelle Crown this morning. They say some blacks are trying to re-create the Garden of Gethsemane for Aaron Crown. I called Angola, but I didn't get any help."

"Don't look for any. We made him the stink on shit."

"I beg your pardon?"

"A lot of us, not everybody, but a lot of us, treated people of color pretty badly. Aaron represents everything that's vile in the white race. So he's doing our time."

"You think these movie guys are right, he's innocent?"

"I didn't say that. Look, human beings do bad things sometimes, particularly in groups. Then we start to forget about it. But there's always one guy hanging around to remind us of what we did or what we used to be. That's Aaron. He's the toilet that won't flush… Did I say something funny?"

"No, sir."

"Good, because what I've got on my mind isn't funny. Karyn LaRose and her attorney were in here earlier this morning." He set his elbows on his desk blotter, flipped an unfinished paper flower to the side. "Guess what she had to tell me about your visit last night at her house?"

"I won't even try to."

"They're not calling it rape, if that makes you feel any better." He opened his desk drawer and read silently from a clipboard. "The words are 'lascivious intention,''attempted sexual battery,' and 'indecent liberties.' What do you have to say?" His gaze moved away from my face, then came back and stayed there.

"Nothing. It's a lie."

"I wish the court would just accept my word on the perps. I wish I didn't have to offer any evidence. Boy, that'd be great."

I told him what had happened, felt the heat climbing into my voice, wiped the film of perspiration off my palms onto my slacks.

His eyes lingered on the scratch Karyn had put on my cheek.

"I think it's a lie, too," he said. He dropped the clipboard inside the drawer and closed it. "But I have to conduct an internal investigation just the same."

"I go on the desk?"

"No. I'm not going to have my department manipulated for someone's political interests, and that's what this is about. You're getting too close to something in this Aaron Crown business. But you stay away from her."

I still had my morning mail in my hand. On the top was a pink memo slip with a message from Bootsie, asking me to meet her for lunch.

"How public is this going to get?" I asked.

"My feeling is she doesn't intend it to be public. Aside from the fact I know you, that was the main reason I didn't believe her. Her whole account is calculated to be vague. Her charges don't require her to offer physical evidence-vaginal smears, pubic hair, that kind of stuff. This is meant as a warning from the LaRose family. If I have to, I'll carry this back to them on a dung fork, podna."

He folded his hands on the desk, his face suffused with the ruddy glow of his hypertension.

Way to go, skipper, I thought.

Most people in prison deserve to be there. Old-time recidivists who are down on a bad beef will usually admit they're guilty of other crimes, perhaps much worse ones than the crimes they're down for.

There're exceptions, but not many. So their burden is of their own creation. But it is never an easy one, no matter how modern the facility or how vituperative the rhetoric about country club jails.

You're a nineteen-year-old fish, uneducated, frightened, with an IQ of around 100. At the reception center you rebuff a trusty wolf who works in records and wants to introduce you to jailhouse romance, so the trusty makes sure you go up the road with a bad jacket (the word is out, you snitched off a solid con and caused him to lose his good-time).

You just hit main pop and you're already jammed up, worried about the shank in the chow line, the Molotov cocktail shattered inside your cell, the whispered threat in the soybean field about the experience awaiting you in the shower that night.

So you make a conscious choice to survive and find a benefactor, "an old man," and become a full-time punk, one step above the yard bitches. You mule blues, prune-o, and Afghan skunk for the big stripes; inside a metal toolshed that aches with heat, you participate in the savaging of another fish, who for just a moment reminds you of someone you used to know.

Then a day comes when you think you can get free. You're mainline now, two years down with a jacket full of goodtime. You hear morning birdsong that you didn't notice before; you allow your mind to linger on the outside, the face of a girl in a small town, a job in a piney woods timber mill that smells of rosin and hot oil on a ripsaw, an ordinary day not governed by fear.

That's when you tell your benefactor thanks for all his help. He'll understand. Your next time up before the board, you've got a real chance of entering the world again. Why blow it now?

That night you walk into the shower by yourself. A man who had never even glanced at you before, a big stripe, hare-lipped, flat-nosed, his naked torso rife with a raw smell like a freshly uprooted cypress, clenches your skull in his fingers, draws you into his breath, squeezes until the cracking sound stops and you hear the words that he utters with a lover's trembling fondness an inch from your mouth: I'm gonna take your eyes out with a spoon.

It was late afternoon when the gunbull drove me in his pickup down to the Mississippi levee, where Aaron Crown, his face as heated as a baked apple under a snap-brim cap, was harrowing an open field, the tractor's engine running full bore, grinding the sun-hardened rows into loam, twisting the tractor's wheel back through the haze of cinnamon-colored dust, reslicing the already churned soil as though his work were an excuse to avenge himself and his kind upon the earth.

At the edge of the field, by a grove of willows, four black inmates, stripped to the waist, were heaping dead tree branches on a fire.

"Y'all ought to have Aaron in isolation, Cap," I said.

He cut the ignition and spit tobacco juice out the window.

"When he asks," he replied.

"He won't."

"Then that's his goddamn ass."

The captain walked partway out in the field on his cane and raised the hook and held it motionless in the air. Aaron squinted out of the dust and heat and exhaust fumes, then eased the throttle back without killing the engine, as though he could not will himself to separate entirely from the mechanical power that had throbbed between his thighs all day.

Aaron walked toward us, wiping his face with a dirty handkerchief, past the group of blacks burning field trash. Their eyes never saw him; their closed circle of conversation never missed a beat.

He stood by the truck, his body framed by the sun that hung in a liquid yellow orb over the Mississippi levee.