James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

Batist's first reaction when he had seen me in the hospital had been to prevent me from worrying about his pain. He'd had no thought of himself, no desire for revenge, no sense of recrimination toward me or the circumstances that placed him in the path of a sadist like Mookie Zerrang.

I spent ten months in Vietnam and never saw a deliberate atrocity, at least not one committed by Americans. Maybe that was because most of my tour was over before the war really warmed up. I saw a ville after the local chieftain had called in the 105's on his own people, and I saw some Kit Carsons bind the wrists of captured Viet Cong and wrap towels around their faces and pour water onto the cloth a canteen at a time until they were willing to trade their own families for a teaspoon of air. Someone always had an explanation for these moments, one that allowed you to push the images out of your mind temporarily. It was the unnecessary cruelty, the kind that was not even recognized as such, that hung in the mind like an unhealed lesion.

A mental picture postcard that I could never find a proper postage stamp for: The mamasan is probably over seventy. Her dugs are withered, her skin as shriveled as a dried apple's. She and her granddaughter clean hooches for a bunch of marines, wash their clothes, burn the shit barrels at the latrine. Two enlisted men fashion a sign from cardboard and hang it around her neck and pose sweaty and barechested with her while a third marine snaps their photo with a Polaroid camera. The sign says miss north Dakota. If the mamasan comprehends the nature of the insult, it does not show in the cracked parchment of her face. The marines are grinning broadly in the photo.

Voltaire wrote about the cruelty he saw in his neighbor who was the torturer at the Bastille. He described the impulse as insatiable, possessing all the characteristics of both lust and addiction to a drug. Had he not been hired by the state, the neighbor would have paid to continue his tasks in those stone rooms beneath the streets of Paris.

Mookie Zerrang was not simply a hit man on somebody's payroll. He was one of those who operated on the edges of the human family, waiting for the halt and the lame or those who had no voice, his eyes smiling with anticipation when he knew his moment was at hand.

I couldn't swallow my food at breakfast. I went into the living room and finished cleaning the spot on the floor where we had found Batist. I stuffed the throw rug he had lain on and the paper towels I had used to scrub the cypress planks into a vinyl garbage bag

"I'm going down to the bait shop," I said to Bootsie.

"Close it up for today," she replied.

"It's Saturday. There might be a few customers by."

"No, you want to make a private phone call. Do it here. I'll leave," she said.

"We didn't get much sleep, Boots. It's not a day to hurt each other."

"Tell it to yourself."

There was nothing for it. I unlocked the bait shop and dialed Buford LaRose's home number.

"Hello?" Karyn said.

"Where's Buford?"

"In the shower."

"Put him on the phone."

"Leave him alone, Dave. Go away from us."

"Maybe I should catch him another time. Would the inauguration ball be okay?"

"It's by invitation. You won't be attending…" She paused, as though she were enjoying a sliver of ice on her tongue. "By the way, since you're a conservationist, you'll enjoy this. I talked to someone about the swamp area around your bait shop being turned into a wilderness preserve. Of course, that will mean commercial property like yours will be acquired by the state or federal government. Oh, Buford's toweling off now. Have a nice day, Dave."

She set the phone down on a table and called out in a lilting voice, "Guess who?"

I heard Buford scrape the receiver up in his hand.

"Don't tell me," he said.

"Shut up, Buford-"

"No, this time you shut up, Dave. Aaron Crown didn't do what he was told. He was supposed to throw his rifle in the water. Instead, he flashed a soda can or something in a window and a trooper started shooting. I tried to stop it."

"You were there?"

"Yes, of course."

"I think you're lying," I said. But his explanation was disarming.

"It's what happened. Check it out."

"The black man who works for me was almost beaten to death last night."

"I'm sorry. But what does that have to do with me?"

I felt my anger and confidence wane. I rubbed at one eye with the heel of my hand and saw concentric circles of red light receding into my brain. My hands felt cold and thick and I could smell my own odor. I started to speak but the words wouldn't come.

"Dave, are you okay?" he said. His voice was odd, marked with sympathy.

I hung up and sat at the counter and rested my forearms on the counter, my head bent forward, and felt a wave of exhaustion and a sense of personal impotence wash through me like the first stages of amoebic dysentery. Through the window I heard Bootsie's car back into the road, then I saw her and Alafair drive away through the long corridor of oaks toward town. A small metallic mirror hung on a post behind the counter. The miniature face of the man reflected inside it did not look like someone I knew.

CLETE and I went back to Iberia General to visit Batist, then drove to Red Lerille's Gym in Lafayette. Clete ordered a baked potato smothered with cheese and sour cream and bacon strips and green onions at the cafe outside the weight room and ate it at a table by the glass wall and watched me while I worked out for a half hour on the machines. Then he put on a pair of trunks and swam outside in the heated pool and later met me in the steam room.

"How you feel?" he said.

"All right. It's just a touch of the mosquito."

A man sitting next to us folded the newspaper he was reading and lay it on the tile stoop and went out. Clete waited until the man closed the door behind him.

"You're beating up on yourself unfairly, big mon," he said.

"People are dead. No one's in custody. A man like Batist is attacked by a degenerate. Tell me what I've done right."

"You listen to me," he said, and raised his finger in my face. The skin of his massive shoulders and chest looked boiled and red in the steam. "You're a police officer. You can't ignore what you see happening around you. If you fuck up, that's the breaks. In a firefight you stomp ass and take names and let somebody else add up the arithmetic. Get off your own case."

"One day we're going to get your shield back," I said.

He cupped his hand around the back of my neck. I could feel the moisture and grease ooze out from under his palm and fingers. "If I had to play by the rules, I couldn't cover my old podjo's back," he said.

His smile was as gentle as a girl's.

I dropped him off at a motel by the four-lane in New Iberia and drove home alone. I waved at the deputy parked in a cruiser by the bait shop and turned into our dirt driveway and cut the engine and listened to it cool and tick while I looked at Bootsie's car and the doves that rose out of my neighbor's field against the late sun and then at Bootsie's face in the middle of a windy swirl of curtains at a window in the rear of the house before she turned away as though I were not there.

I started toward the back door, forming words in my mind to address problems I couldn't even define, then stopped, the way you do when thinking doesn't work anymore, and walked down the slope to the bait shop, into the green, gaslike odor of the evening, the pecan husks breaking under my shoes, as though I could walk beyond the box of space and time and loveless tension that my father's hand-hewn cypress house had become.

The string of electric lights was turned on over the dock and I could hear music through the screens.