James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

Something was wrong. One, two, three, then a total of four men had come out the cabin doors onto the decks of their boats, cautious not to expose themselves, the bills of their caps turned backward on their heads.

It couldn't be what he thought. The offer had come through a man he trusted in the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department. The state policeman had given his word, also. And where was that damn Buford LaRose? Aaron knew Buford would never miss an opportunity like this one, to stand before the cameras, with a wetlands background, his aristocratic face softened by the lights of humanity and conscience.

Then a terrible thought appeared in a bright, clear space in the center of his mind with such vividness that his face burned once again with a memory that was sixty years out of his past, a little boy in rent overalls being shoved into a school yard puddle by a boy whose father owned the cotton gin, the words hurled down at him, Aaron, you 're dumber than a nigger trying to hide in a snowbank. It was the old recognition that his best efforts always turned out the same: he was the natural-born victim of his betters. In this case the simple fact was that Buford LaRose had already been elected. He didn't have to prove anything to anybody. Aaron Crown was nothing more than a minor nuisance of whom the world had finally tired and was about to dispose of as you would an insect with a Flit can.

Aaron saw this thought as clearly as he saw the face of the man with the inverted cap working his way forward on the lead boat, between the gunnel and cabin. They were like two bookends facing each other now. But Aaron refused to wince or cower, to let them see the fear that made his bowels turn to water. You'd like to do it, yessiree Bob, blow hair and bone all over the trees, but you're one of them kind won't drop his britches and take a country squat till somebody tells you it's all right. Aaron's hand crushed the aluminum soda can in his palm, the bottom glinting like a heliograph.

He was wrong.

The muzzle of the M-16 rifle flashed in the rain just as the boat's bow rose in the chop, and the.223 round thropped past Aaron's ear, punching a neat hole in the wall behind him, its trajectory fading deep in the swamp. A second later the other uniformed men cut loose in unison, firing tear gas and M-16's on full automatic and twelve-gauge pump Remingtons loaded with double-ought buckshot.

But Aaron was running now, and not where they thought he would. While gas shells hissed on the deck and buckshot and.223 rounds perforated the oyster boat's cabin, crisscrossing the gloomy interior with tubular rays of light, he slid down the ladder inside the ship's steel hull, his rifle inverted on its sling, then exited the boat through the far side, where the plates had been stripped from a spar by a salvager. As he ran through a chain of sandbars and stagnant pools of water, he could hear the steady dissection of the cabin, glass breaking, bullets whanging off metal surfaces, shattered boards spinning out into the trees like sticks blown from a forest fire.

He glanced once over his shoulder after he kicked over the outboard. Fire. He hadn't imagined it. Their magazines had been loaded with tracers, and the oyster boat's cabin was liquid with flames.

Inside the caked patina of mud on Aaron's face, his eyes were as pink as Mercurochrome, filmed with the reflected glow of what he knew now had been the final demonstrable evidence of the lifetime conspiracy directed at him and his family. Somehow that gave him a satisfaction and feeling of confirmation that was like being submerged and bathed in warm water. He bit down on his molars with an almost sexual pleasure but could not tell himself why.

Late that same night, a voice with a peckerwood accent that did not identify itself left a message on my recording machine: "Buford got to you. I don't know how. But I'd just as lief cut the equipment off two shithogs as one."

The account of Aaron Crown's escape from the state police is my re-creation of the story as it was related to me by a St. Martin Parish deputy in the waiting room down the hall from Batist's room at Iberia General. Clete Purcel and I watched the deputy get into the elevator and look back at us blank-faced while the doors closed behind him.

"What are you thinking?" Clete asked.

"It's no accident Mookie Zerrang came to my house the same night Crown was set up for a whack."

Clete leaned forward in his chair and rubbed one hand on the other, picked at a callus, his green eyes filled with thought. He had driven from New Orleans in two and a half hours, steam rising from the hood of his Cadillac like vapor off dry ice when he pulled under the electric arc lamps in the hospital parking lot.

"Zerrang's got to go off-planet, Streak," he said.

"He will."

"It won't happen. Not unless you or I do it. This guy's juice is heavy-voltage, mon."

I didn't answer.

"You know I'm right. When they deal it down and dirty, we take it back to them under a black flag," he said.

"Wrong discussion, wrong place."

"There's a geek in Jefferson Parish. A real sicko. Even the wiseguys cross the street when they see him coming. But he owes five large to Nig. I can square the debt. Mookie Zerrang will be walking on stumps… Are you listening?"

I went to the cold drink machine, then put my change back in my pocket and kept on walking to the nurses' station.

"I have to talk to my friend," I said.

"Sorry, not until the doctor comes back," the nurse said. She smiled and did not mean to be impolite.

"I apologize, then," I said, and went past her and into Batist's room.

He was turned on his side, facing the opposite wall, his back layered with bandages. The intruder had used a type of ASP, a steel bludgeon, sold in police supply stores, that telescopes out of a handle. The one used by the intruder was modified with an extension that operated like a spring or whip, with a steel ball the size of a small marble attached to the tip. The paramedics had to cut away Batist's overalls and T-shirt with scissors and peel the cloth off his skin like cobweb.

His head jerked on the pillow when he heard me behind him.

"It's okay, partner," I said, and walked around the foot of the bed.

His right eye was swollen shut, his nose broken and X-ed with tape.

"I ain't felt a lot of it, Dave. He hit me upside the head first, 'cause I raised up and caught him another one in the mout'," he said.

I sat down on a chair by his bedside.

"I promise we'll get this guy," I said.

"It ain't your fault, no."

"I helped set up Aaron Crown, Batist. I didn't know it, but I was giving somebody permission to wipe me off the slate, too."

"Who been doing all this, Dave? What we done to them?"

"They're right up there on the Teche. Buford and Karyn LaRose."

His eyes closed and opened as though he were on the edge of sleep or looking at a thought inside his mind.

"It ain't their way," he said.

"Why?"

"Their kind don't never see bad t'ings, Dave. Any black folk on a plantation tell you that. The white folk up in the big house don't ever want to know what happen out in the field or down in the quarters. They got people to take care of that for them."

The nurse and the doctor came through the door and looked at us silently.

"You going to be all right for a while?" I said.

"Sure. They been treating me good," Batist said.

"I'm sorry for this," I said.

He moved his fingers slightly on the sheet and patted the top of my hand as my father might have done.

Clete followed me home and went to sleep in our guest room. I lay in the dark next to Bootsie, with my arm over my eyes, and heard rainwater ticking out of the trees into the beds of leaves that tapered away from the tree trunks. I tried to organize my thoughts, then gave it up and fell asleep when the stars were still out. I didn't wake until after sunrise. The room, the morning itself, seemed empty and stark, devoid of memory, as it used to be when I'd wake from alcoholic blackouts. Then the events of the previous night came back like a slap.