James Burke: Cadillac Jukebox

I waited for Helen to get behind the wheel, drumming my fingers on the cruiser's roof, trying to conceal the disjointed expression in my face.

If you seriously commit yourself to alcohol, I mean full-bore, the way you take up a new religion, and join that great host of revelers who sing and lock arms as they bid farewell to all innocence in their lives, you quickly learn the rules of behavior in this exclusive fellowship whose dues are the most expensive in the world. You drink down. That means you cannot drink in well-lighted places with ordinary people because the psychological insanity in your face makes you a pariah among them. So you find other drunks whose condition is as bad as your own, or preferably even worse.

But time passes and you run out of geography and people who are in some cosmetic way less than yourself and bars where the only admission fee is the price of a 6 a.m. short-dog.

That's when you come to places like Sabelle Crown's at the Underpass in Lafayette.

The Underpass area had once been home to a dingy brick hotel and row of low-rent bars run by a notorious family of Syrian criminals. Now the old bars and brick hotel had been bulldozed into rubble, and all that remained of the city's last skidrow refuge was Sabelle's, a dark, two-story clapboard building that loomed above the Underpass like a solitary tooth.

It had no mirrors, and the only light inside came from the jukebox and the beer signs over the bar. It was a place where the paper Christmas decorations stayed up year-round and you never had to see your reflection or make an unfavorable comparison between yourself and others. Not unless you counted Sabelle, who had been a twenty-dollar whore in New Orleans before she disappeared up north for several years. She was middle-aged now, with flecks of gray in her auburn hair, but she looked good in her blue jeans and V-necked beige sweater, and her face retained a kind of hard beauty that gave fantasies to men who drank late and still believed the darkness of a bar could resurrect opportunities from their youth.

She opened a bottle of 7-Up and set it in front of me with a glass of ice.

"You doin' all right, Streak?" she said.

"Not bad. How about you, Sabelle?"

"I hope you're not here for anything stronger than Seven-Up."

I smiled and didn't reply. The surface of the bar stuck to my wrists. "Why would a New Orleans gumball named Mingo Bloomberg have an interest in your father?" I said.

"You got me."

"I went over everything I could find on Aaron's case this afternoon. I think he could have beat it if he'd had a good lawyer," I said.

She studied my face curiously. The beer sign on the wall made tiny red lights, like sparks, in her hair.

"The big problem was Aaron told some other people he did it," I said.

She put out her cigarette in the ashtray, then set a shot glass and a bottle of cream sherry by my elbow and walked down the duckboards and around the end of the bar and sat down next to me, her legs hooked in the stool's rungs.

"You still married?" she said.

"Sure."

She didn't finish her thought. She poured sherry into her shot glass and drank it. "Daddy went to the third grade. He hauled manure for a living. Rich people on East Main made him go around to their back doors."

I continued to look into her face.

"Look, when this black civil rights guy got killed with Daddy's rifle, he started making up stories. People talked about him. He got to be a big man for a while," she said.

"He lied about a murder?"

"How'd you like to be known as white trash in a town like New Iberia?"

"Big trade-off," I said.

"What isn't?"

She gestured to the bartender, pointed to a shoebox under the cash register. He handed it to her and walked away. She lifted off the top.

"You were in the army. See what you recognize in there. I don't know one medal from another," she said.

It was heavy and filled with watches, rings, pocketknives, and military decorations. Some of the latter were Purple Hearts; at least two were Silver Stars. It also contained a.32 revolver with electrician's tape wrapped on the grips.

"If the medal's got a felt-lined box, I give a three-drink credit," she said.

"Thanks for your time," I said.

"You want to find out about my father, talk to Buford LaRose. His book sent Daddy to prison."

"I might do that."

"When you see Buford, tell him-" But she shook her head and didn't finish. She pursed her lips slightly and kissed the air.

I went home for lunch the next day, and as I came around the curve on the bayou I saw Karyn LaRose's blue Mazda convertible back out of my drive and come toward me on the dirt road. She stopped abreast of me and removed her sunglasses. Her teeth were white when she smiled, her tanned skin and platinum hair dappled with sunlight that fell through the oak trees.

"What's up, Karyn?"

"I thought this would be a grand time to have y'all out."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Oh, stop all this silliness, Dave."

"Listen, Karyn-"

"See you, kiddo," she said, shifted into first, and disappeared in my rearview mirror, her hair whipping in the wind.

I pulled into our dirt drive and parked by the side of the house, which had been built out of notched and pegged cypress during the Depression by my father, a huge, grinning, hard-drinking Cajun who was killed on the salt in an oil well blowout. Over the years the tin roof on the gallery had turned purple with rust and the wood planks in the walls had darkened and hardened with rain and dust storms and smoke from stubble fires. My wife, Bootsie, and I had hung baskets of impatiens from the gallery, put flower boxes in the windows, and planted the beds with roses, hibiscus, and hydrangeas, but in the almost year-round shade of the live oaks and pecan trees, the house had a dark quality that seemed straight out of the year 1930, as though my father still held claim to it.

Bootsie had fixed ham and onion sandwiches and iced tea and potato salad for lunch, and we set the kitchen table together and sat down to eat. I kept waiting for her to mention Karyn's visit. But she didn't.

"I saw Karyn LaRose out on the road," I said.

"Oh, yes, I forgot. Tomorrow evening, she wants us to come to a dinner and lawn party."

"What did you tell her?"

"I didn't think we had anything planned. But I said I'd ask you." She had stopped eating. I felt her eyes on my face. "You don't want to go?"

"Not really."

"Do you have a reason? Or do we just tell people to drop dead arbitrarily?"

"Buford's too slick for me."

"He's a therapist and a university professor. Maybe the state will finally have a governor with more than two brain cells."

"Fine, let's go. It's not a problem," I said.

"Dave . .."

"I'm looking forward to it."

Finally her exasperation gave way to a smile, then to a laugh.

"You're too much, Streak," she said.

I wiped at my mouth with my napkin, then walked around behind her chair, put my arms on her shoulders, and kissed her hair. It was the color of dark honey and she brushed it in thick swirls on her head, and it always smelled like strawberry shampoo. I kissed her along the cheek and touched her breasts.

"You doin' anything?" I said.

"You have to go back to work."

"The perps will understand."

She reached behind the chair and fitted her hand around the back of my thigh.

The curtains in the bedroom, which were white and gauzy and printed with tiny flowers, puffed and twisted in the wind that blew through the trees in the yard. When Bootsie undressed, her body seemed sculpted, glowing with light against the window. She had the most beautiful complexion of any woman I ever knew; when she made love it flushed with heat, as though she had a fever, and took on the hue of a new rose petal. I kissed her breasts and took her nipples in my mouth and traced my fingers down the flatness of her stomach, then I felt her reach down and take me in her palm.