James Burke: Cadillac Jukebox

She called me that evening, not at the house but at the bait shop. Through the screen I could see the lighted gallery and windows in my house, across the dirt road, up the slope through the darkening trees.

"Are you upset with Buford?" she said.

"No."

"He just doesn't want to see you used, that's all."

"I appreciate his concern."

"Should I have not been there?"

"I'm happy y'all came by."

"Neither of us was married at the time, Dave. Why does seeing me make you uncomfortable?"

"This isn't turning into a good conversation," I said.

"I'm not big on guilt. It's too bad you are," she replied, and quietly hung up.

The price of a velvet black sky bursting with stars and too much champagne, a grassy levee blown with buttercups and a warm breeze off the water, I thought. Celibacy was not an easy virtue to take into the nocturnal hours.

But guilt over an impulsive erotic moment wasn't the problem. Karyn LaRose was a woman you kept out of your thoughts if you were a married man.

Aaron Crown was dressed in wash-faded denims that were too tight for him when he was escorted in leg and waist chains from the lock-down unit into the interview room.

He had to take mincing steps, and because both wrists were cuffed to the chain just below his rib cage he had the bent appearance of an apelike creature trussed with baling wire.

"I don't want to talk to Aaron like this. How about it, Cap?" I said to the gunbull, who had been shepherding Angola convicts under a double-barrel twelve gauge for fifty-five years.

The gunbull's eyes were narrow and valuative, like a man constantly measuring the potential of his adversaries, the corners webbed with wrinkles, his skin wizened and dark as a mulatto's, as if it had been smoked in a fire. He removed his briar pipe from his belt, stuck it in his mouth, clicking it dryly against his molars. He never spoke while he unlocked the net of chains from Aaron Crown's body and let them collapse around his ankles like a useless garment. Instead, he simply pointed one rigid callus-sheathed index finger into Aaron's face, then unlocked the side door to a razor-wire enclosed dirt yard with a solitary weeping willow that had gone yellow with the season.

I sat on a weight lifter's bench while Aaron Crown squatted on his haunches against the fence and rolled a cigarette out of a small leather pouch that contained pipe tobacco. His fingernails were the thickness and mottled color of tortoiseshell. Gray hair grew out of his ears and nose; his shoulders and upper chest were braided with knots of veins and muscles. When he popped a lucifer match on his thumbnail and cupped it in the wind, he inhaled the sulfur and glue and smoke all in one breath.

"I ain't did it," he said.

"You pleaded nolo contendere, partner."

"The shithog got appointed my case done that. He said it was worked out." He drew in on his hand-rolled cigarette, tapped the ashes off into the wind.

When I didn't reply, he said, "They give me forty years. I was sixty-eight yestiday."

"You should have pleaded out with the feds. You'd have gotten an easier bounce under a civil rights conviction," I said.

"You go federal, you got to cell with colored men." His eyes lifted into mine. "They'll cut a man in his sleep. I seen it happen."

In the distance I could see the levee along the Mississippi River and trees that were puffing with wind against a vermilion sky.

"Why you'd choose me to call?" I asked.

"You was the one gone after my little girl when she got lost in Henderson Swamp."

"I see… I don't know what I can do, Aaron. That was your rifle they found at the murder scene, wasn't it? It had only one set of prints on it, too-yours."

"It was stole, and it didn't have no set of prints on it. There was one thumbprint on the stock. Why would a white man kill a nigger in the middle of the night and leave his own gun for other people to find? Why would he wipe off the trigger and not the stock?"

"You thought you'd never be convicted in the state of Louisiana."

He sucked on a tooth, ground out the ash of his cigarette on the tip of his work boot, field-stripped the paper and let it all blow away in the wind.

"I ain't did it," he said.

"I can't help you."

He raised himself to his feet, his knees popping, and walked toward the lockdown unit, the silver hair on his arms glowing like a monkey's against the sunset.

the flooded cypress and willow trees were gray-green smudges in the early morning mist at Henderson Swamp. My adopted daughter, Alafair, sat on the bow of the outboard as I swung it between two floating islands of hyacinths and gave it the gas into the bay. The air was moist and cool and smelled of schooled-up sac-a-lait, or crappie, and gas flares burning in the dampness. When Alafair turned her face into the wind, her long Indian-black hair whipped behind her in a rope. She was fourteen now, but looked older, and oftentimes grown men turned and stared at her when she walked by, before their own self-consciousness corrected them.

We traversed a long, flat bay filled with stumps and abandoned oil platforms, then Alafair pointed at a row of wood pilings that glistened blackly in the mist. I cut the engine and let the boat float forward on its wake while Alafair slipped the anchor, a one-foot chunk of railroad track, over the gunwale until it bit into the silt and the bow swung around against the rope. The water in the minnow bucket was cold and dancing with shiners when I dipped my hand in to bait our lines.

"Can you smell the sac-a-lait? There must be thousands in here," she said.

"You bet."

"This is the best place in the whole bay, isn't it?"

"I don't know of a better one," I said, and handed her a sandwich after she had cast her bobber among the pilings.

It had been almost nine years since I had pulled her from the submerged and flooded wreckage of a plane that had been carrying Salvadoran war refugees. Sometimes in my sleep I would relive that moment when I found her struggling for breath inside the inverted cabin, her face turned upward like a guppy's into the wobbling and diminishing bubble of air above her head, her legs scissoring frantically above her mother's drowned form.

But time has its way with all of us, and today I didn't brood upon water as the conduit into the world of the dead. The spirits of villagers, their mouths wide with the concussion of airbursts, no longer whispered to me from under the brown currents of the Mekong, either, nor did the specter of my murdered wife Annie, who used to call me up long-distance from her home under the sea and speak to me through the rain.

Now water was simply a wide, alluvial flood plain in the Atchafalaya Basin of south Louisiana that smelled of humus and wood smoke, where mallards rose in squadrons above the willows and trailed in long black lines across a sun that was as yellow as egg yoke.

"You really went to see that man Aaron Crown at Angola, Dave?" Alafair asked.

"Sure did."

"My teacher said he's a racist. He assassinated a black man in Baton Rouge."

"Aaron Crown's an ignorant and physically ugly man. He's the kind of person people like to hate. I'm not sure he's a killer, though, Alf."

"Why not?"

"I wish I knew."

Which was not only an inadequate but a disturbing answer.

Why? Because Aaron Crown didn't fit the profile. If he was a racist, he didn't burn with it, as most of them did. He wasn't political, either, at least not to my knowledge. So what was the motivation, I asked myself. In homicide cases, it's almost always money, sex, or power. Which applied in the case of Aaron Crown?

"Whatcha thinking about, Dave?" Alafair asked.

"When I was a young cop in New Orleans, I was home on vacation and Aaron Crown came to the house and said his daughter was lost out here in a boat. Nobody would go after her because she was fourteen and had a reputation for running off and smoking dope and doing other kinds of things, you with me?"