James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

The infirmary had been built by an American mining company in the oblong shape of a barracks on a bench above the main street of the village. The lumber had warped the nails out of the joists, and the windows were covered with ragged plastic sheets that popped in the wind. In back, a gasoline-powered generator throbbed next to a water well that had been dug in the middle of a chicken yard.

Inside, the beds were in rows, squared away, either a slop jar or spittoon under each one, the steel gray blankets taut with a military tuck. The woodstove was unlighted, the open door congealed with dead ash. The bare walls and floors seemed enameled with cold.

But the man named Arana needed no heat source other than his own.

He lay on top of the sheet, naked except for a towel across his loins, the scarlet tattoos on his skin emblazoned with sweat. His chest was peppered with wounds that had been dressed with squares of gauze and tape and a yellow salve that smelled like an engine lubricant. But that was not where the offensive odor came from. His right thigh was twice the size it should have been, the shiny reddish black color of an eggplant.

The priest who had called the sheriff brought us chairs to sit by the bed. He was a thin, pale man, dressed in a windbreaker, flannel shirt, khaki pants and work boots that were too big for his ankles, his black hair probably scissor-cropped at home. He put his hand on my arm and turned me aside before I sat down. His breath was like a feather that had been dipped in brandy.

"Arana has absolution but no rest. He believes he served evil people who are going to hurt you," he said. "But I'm not sure of anything he says now."

"What's he told you?"

"Many things. Few of them good."

"Father, I'm not asking you to violate the seal of the confessional."

"He's made himself insane with injections. He talks of his fears for young people. It's very confusing."

I waited. There was a pained glimmer in the priest's eyes. "Sir?" I said.

"The man some think killed children up at the mines is his relative," the priest said. "Or maybe he was talking about what he calls the bugarron. I don't know."

Helen and I sat down next to the bed. Helen took a tape recorder out of her purse and clicked it on. The man who was named Arana let his eyes wander onto my face.

"You know me, partner?" I said.

He tilted his chin so he could see me better, breathed hard through his nostrils. Then he spoke in a language I didn't recognize.

"It's an Indian dialect," the priest said. "No one speaks it here, except his relative, the crazy one who lives inside the mines."

"Who sent you to New Iberia, Arana?" I said.

But my best attempts at reaching inside his delirium seemed to be of no avail. I tried for a half hour, then felt my own attention start to wander. The priest left and came back. Helen yawned and straightened her back. "Sorry," she said. She took one cartridge out of the recorder and put in another.

Then, as though Arana had seen me for the first time, his hand cupped around my wrist and squeezed it like a vise.

"The bugarron ride a saddle with flowers cut in it. I seen him at the ranch. You messing everything up for them. They gonna kill you, man," he said.

"Who's this guy?"

"He ain't got no name. He got a red horse and a silver saddle. He like Indian boys."

Inadvertently, his hand drew mine against his gangrenous thigh. I saw the pain jump in his face, then anger replace the recognition that had been in his eyes.

"What's this man look like?" I said.

But I had become someone else now, perhaps an old enemy who had come aborning with the carrion birds.

Helen and I walked outside with the priest. The sunlight was cold inside the canyon. Heriberto waited for us in the Cherokee.

"I have no authority here, Father. But I'm worried about the fate of the man from the mines, the one inside the police station," I said.

"Why?"

"Heriberto says the rurales are serious men."

"Heriberto is corrupt. He takes money from drug smugglers. The rurales are Indians. It's against their way to deliberately injure an insane person."

"I see. Thank you for your goodwill, Father."

That night Helen and I boarded a four-engine plane for the connection flight back to El Paso. She looked out the window as we taxied onto the runway. Heriberto was standing by a hangar, one hand lifted in farewell.

"How do you read all that?" she said, nodding toward the glass.

"What?"

"Everything that happened today."

"It's an outdoor mental asylum," I said.

Later, she fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. I watched the clouds blowing through the propellers, then the sky was clear again and far below I saw the lights of a city spread through a long valley and the Rio Grande River glowing under the moon.

Monday morning Karyn LaRose walked through the department's waiting room and paused in front of the dispatcher's office. She didn't need to speak. Wally took one look at her and, without thinking, rose to his feet (and later could not explain to himself or anyone else why he did).

"Yes, ma'am?" he said.

She wore a snug, tailored white suit, white hose, and a wide-brim straw hat with a yellow band.

"Can Dave see me?" she asked.

"Sure, Ms. LaRose. You bet. I'll call him and tell him you're on your way."

He leaned out his door and watched her all the way down the hall.

When I opened the door for her I could feel a flush of color, like windburn, in my throat. Two deputies passing in the hall glanced at us, then one said something to the other and looked back over his shoulder again.

"You look flustered," she said.

"How you doin', Karyn?" I said.

She sat down in front of my desk. Her hat and face were slatted with sunlight.

"Clay said I have to do this. I mean apologize… here… in your office. To the sheriff, too. Otherwise, he says I'll have no serenity," she said. She smiled. Her platinum hair was tucked inside her hat. She looked absolutely beautiful.

"Why are you hanging around with Clay Mason?" I said.

"He was a guest of the university. He's a brilliant man. He's a very good poet, too."

"I heard he blew his wife's head off at a party in Mexico."

"It was an accident," she said.

I let my eyes drop to my watch.

"I'm sorry that I wronged you, Dave. I don't know what else to say." She took a breath. "Why do you have to treat me with fear and guilt? Is it because of the moment there in the hotel room? Did you think I wanted to seduce you with my husband sleeping a few feet away, for God's sakes?"

"There's only one issue here, Karyn. Buford's not the man people think he is. He's taking money from Jerry Joe Plumb. The guy who delivered it to y'all's house was Mingo Bloomberg."

"Who?"

"He kills people. Right now he's in custody for leaving a black girl to drown in a submerged automobile in Henderson Swamp."

"I never heard of him. I doubt if Buford has, either."

"Jerry Joe's mobbed-up. Why do mobbed-up guys want your husband in Baton Rouge?"

"I can't understand you. What are you trying to do to us? Buford's opponents are the same people who supported David Duke."

"So what? Y'all have made a scapegoat out of Aaron Crown."

"Dave, you've let yourself become the advocate of a misanthropic degenerate who molested his daughter and murdered the bravest civil rights leader in Louisiana."

"How do you know he molested Sabelle?"

"I'm sorry, I'm not going to discuss a man like that."

I looked out the window, fiddled with a paper clip on my blotter.

"You're committed to lost and hopeless causes," she said. "I don't think it's because you're an idealist, either. It's pride. You get to be the iconoclast among the Philistines."