James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

Five minutes later I checked my weapon with a guard who sat inside a steel-mesh cage, and a second guard unlocked a cell at the end of a sunlit corridor that rang with all the sounds of a jailhouse- clanging doors and mop buckets, a dozen radios tuned to a half dozen stations, shouted voices echoing along the ceilings. Mingo Bloomberg sat in his boxer undershorts on a bunk that was suspended from the wall with chains. His body was pink, hairless, without either fat or definition, as though it had been synthetically manufactured. The stitches above his ear looked like a fine strand of black barbed wire embedded in his scalp.

"Kelso says you're being a pain in the ass," I said.

He let a towel dangle between his legs and bounced it idly on top of his bare toes.

"Did your lawyer tell you our witnesses are going to stand up?" I said.

I expected anger, another run at manipulation. Instead, he was morose, his attention fixed on the sounds out in the corridor, as though they held meaning that he had never quite understood before.

"Did you hear me?" I said.

"I talked to my cousin last night. The wrong people think you got dials on me. There's a black guy, out of Miami, a freelance 'cause Miami 's an open city. He's supposed to look like a six-and-a-half-foot stack of apeshit. The word is, maybe he's the guy did this screenwriter in the Quarter. My cousin says the Miami guy's got the whack and is gonna piece it off to some boons inside the jail."

"You're the hit?"

He stared at the floor, put his little finger in his ear as though there were water in it.

"I never broke no rules. It feels funny," he said.

"Who's setting it up, Mingo?"

"How many guys could I put inside? You figure it out."

"You ever hear of a bugarron?" I asked.

"No… Don't ask me about crazy stuff I don't know anything about. I'm not up for it." His shoulders were rounded, his chest caved-in. "You've read a lot, haven't you, I mean books in college, stuff like that?"

"Some."

"I read something once, in the public library, up on St. Charles. It said… in your life you end up back where you started, maybe way back when you were little. The difference is you understand it the second time around. But it don't do you no good."

"Yes?"

"That never made sense to me before."

That night a guard escorted Mingo Bloomberg down to the shower in his flipflops and skivvies. The guard ate a sandwich and read a magazine on a wood bench outside the shower wall. The steam billowed out on the concrete, then the sound of the water became steady and uninterrupted on the shower floor. The guard put down his magazine and peered around the opening in the wall. He looked at Mingo's face and the rivulets of water running down it, dropped the sandwich, and ran back down the corridor to get the count man from the cage.

IT was sunrise when I turned into Buford LaRose's house the next morning. I saw him at the back of his property, inside a widely spaced stand of pine trees, a gray English riding cap on his head, walking with a hackamore in his hand toward a dozen horses that were bolting and turning in the trees. The temperature had dropped during the night, and their backs steamed like smoke in the early light. I drove my truck along the edge of a cleared cane field and climbed through the railed fence and walked across the pine needles into the shade that smelled of churned sod and fresh horse droppings.

I didn't wait for him to greet me. I took a photograph from my shirt pocket and showed it to him.

"You recognize this man?" I asked.

"No. Who is he, a convict?"

"Mingo Bloomberg. He told me he delivered money to your house for Jerry Joe Plumb."

"Sorry. I don't know him."

I took a second photograph from my pocket, a Polaroid, and held it out in my palm.

"That was taken last night," I said. "We had him in lockup for his own protection. But he hanged himself with a towel in the shower."

"You really know how to get a jump start on the day, Dave. Look, Jerry Joe's connected to a number of labor unions. If I refuse his contribution, maybe I lose several thousand union votes in Jefferson and Orleans parishes."

"It sure sounds innocent enough."

"I'm sorry it doesn't fit into your moral perspective… Don't go yet. I want to show you something."

He walked deeper into the trees. Even though there had been frost on the cane stubble that morning, he wore only a T-shirt with his khakis and half-topped boots and riding cap. His triceps looked thick and hard and were ridged with flaking skin from his early fall redfish-ing trips out on West Cote Blanche Bay. He turned and waited for me.

"Come on, Dave. You made a point of bringing your photographic horror show to my house. You can give me five more minutes of your time," he said.

The land sloped down through persimmon trees and palmettos and a dry coulee bed that was choked with leaves. I could hear the horses nickering behind us, their hooves thudding on the sod. Ahead, I could see the sunlight on the bayou and the silhouette of a black marble crypt surrounded by headstones and a carpet of mushrooms and a broken iron fence. The headstones were green with moss, the chiseled French inscriptions worn into faint tracings.

Buford pushed open the iron gate and waited for me to step inside.

"My great-grandparents are in that crypt," he said. He rubbed his hand along the smooth stone, let it stop at a circular pinkish white inlay that was cracked across the center. "Can you recognize the flower? My great-grandfather and both his brothers rode with the Knights of the White Camellia."

"Your wife told me."

"They weren't ashamed of it. They were fine men, even though some of the things they did were wrong."

"What's the point?"

"I believe it's never too late to atone. I believe we can correct the past, make it right in some way."

"You're going to do this for the Knights of the White Camellia?"

"I'm doing it for my family. Is there something wrong with that?" he said. He continued to look at my face. The water was low and slow moving in the bayou and wood ducks were swimming along the edge of the dead hyacinths. "Dave?"

"I'd better be going," I said.

He touched the front of my windbreaker with his fingers. But I said nothing.

"I was speaking to you about a subject that's very personal with me. You presume a great deal," he said. I looked away from the bead of light in his eyes. "Are you hard of hearing?" He touched my chest again, this time harder.

"Don't do that," I said.

"Then answer me."

"I don't think they were fine men."

"Sir?"

"Shakespeare says it in King Lear. The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. They terrorized and murdered people of color. Cut the bullshit, Buford."

I walked out the gate and back through the trees. I heard his feet in the leaves behind me. He grabbed my arm and spun me around.

"That's the last time you'll turn your back on me, sir," he said.

"Go to hell."

His hands closed and opened at his sides, as though they were kneading invisible rubber balls. His forearms looked swollen, webbed with veins.

"You fucked my wife and dumped her. You accuse me of persecuting an innocent man. You insult my family. I don't know why I ever let a piece of shit like you on my property. But it won't happen again. I guarantee you that, Dave."

He was breathing hard. A thought, like a dark bird with a hooked beak, had come into his eyes, stayed a moment, then left. He slipped his hands stiffly into his back pockets.

The skin of my face felt tight, suddenly cold in the wind off the bayou. I could feel a dryness, a constriction in my throat, like a stick turned sideways. I tried to swallow, to reach for an adequate response. The leaves and desiccated twigs under my feet crunched like tiny pieces of glass.