James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

The man under the truck saw the mud-encrusted basketball shoes, the shapeless seersucker pants that hung on ankles scarred by leg manacles, and knew his last night on earth had begun even before Aaron began to rock the truck back and forth on the jack.

The man on the creeper almost made it completely into the open when the truck toppled sideways and fell diagonally across his thighs. After the first red-black rush of pain that arched his head back in the dirt, that seemed to seal his mouth and eyes and steal the air from his lungs, he felt himself gradually float upward from darkness to the top of a warm pool, where two powerful hands released themselves from his face and allowed light into his brain and breath into his body. Then he saw Aaron bending over him, his hands propped on his knees, staring at him curiously.

"Damn if I can ever get the right nigger or white man, either one," Aaron said.

He looked up at a sound from the shack, shadows across a window shade, a car loaded with revelers bouncing down a rutted road through the trees toward the clearing. His face was glazed with sweat, glowing in the humidity, his eyes straining into the darkness, caught between an unsatisfied bloodlust that was within his grasp and the knowledge that his inability to think clearly had always been the weapon his enemies had used against him.

Then, as silently as he had come, he slunk away in the shadows, like a thick-bodied crab moving sideways on mechanical extensions.

"How do you figure it?" Helen said.

"It doesn't make sense. What was it he said to the man under the truck?"

She read from her notepad: '"Damn if I can ever get the right nigger or white man, either one.'"

"I think Aaron has an agenda that none of us has even guessed at," I said.

"Yeah, war with the human race."

"That's not it," I answered.

"What is?"

It's the daughter, I thought.

I visited Batist in the hospital that afternoon, then picked up three pounds of frozen peeled crawfish and a carton of potato salad in town, so Bootsie would not have to cook, and drove down the dirt road toward the house. The bayou was half in shadow and the sunlight looked like gold thread in the trees. Dust drifted out on the bayou's surface and coated the wild elephant ears that grew in dark clumps in the shallows. My neighbor was stringing Christmas lights on his gallery while his rotating hose sprinkler clattered a jet of water among the myrtle bushes and tree trunks in his yard. It was the kind of perfect evening that seemed outside of time, so gentle and removed from the present that you would not be surprised if a news carrier on a bike with balloon tires threw a rolled paper onto your lawn with a headline announcing victory over Japan.

But its perfection dissipated as soon as I pulled into the drive and saw a frail priest in a black suit and Roman collar step out of his parked car and glare at me as though I had just risen from the Pit.

"Could I help you, Father?" I said.

"I want to know why you've been tormenting Mr. Dolowitz," he said. His face called to mind a knotted, red cauliflower.

I stooped down so I could see the man in the passenger seat. He kept his face straight ahead, his biscuit-colored derby hat like a bowl on his head.

"No Duh?" I said.

"I understand you're a practicing Catholic," the priest said.

"That's correct."

"Then why have you forced this man to commit a crime? He's terrified. What the hell's the matter with you?"

"There's a misunderstanding here, Father."

"Then why don't you clear things up for me, sir?"

I took his hand and shook it, even though he hadn't offered it. It was as light as balsa sticks in my palm and didn't match the choleric heat in his face. His name was Father Timothy Mulcahy, from the Irish Channel in New Orleans, and he was the pastor of a small church off Magazine whose only parishioners were those too poor or elderly to move out of the neighborhood.

"I didn't threaten this man, Father. I told him he could do what was right for himself," I said. Then I leaned down to the driver's window. "No Duh, you tell Father Mulcahy the truth or I'm going to mop up the yard with you."

"Ah, it's clear you're not a violent man," the priest said.

"No Duh, now is not the time-" I began.

"It was the other guy, that animal Purcel, Father. But Robicheaux was with him," No Duh said.

The priest cocked one eyebrow, then tilted his head, made a self-deprecating smile.

"Well, I'm sorry for my rashness," he said. "Nonetheless, Mr. Dolowitz shouldn't have been forced to break into someone's home," he said.

"Would you give us a few minutes?" I said.

He nodded and started to walk away, then touched my arm and took me partway with him.

"Be easy with him. This man's had a terrible experience," he said.

I went back to the priest's car and leaned on the window jamb. Dolowitz took off his hat and set it on his knees. His face looked small, waxlike, devoid of identity. He touched nervously at his mustache.

"What happened?" I asked.

"I creeped Dock Green's house. Somebody left the key in the lock. I stuck a piece of newspaper under the door and knocked the key out and caught it on the paper and pulled it under the door. They got me going back out. They didn't know I'd been inside. If they had, I wouldn't be alive," he said.

"Who got you?"

"Persephone Green and a button guy works for the Giacanos and some other pervert gets off hurting people." For the first time his eyes lifted into mine. They possessed a detachment that reminded me of that strange, unearthly look we used to call in Vietnam the thousand-yard stare.

"What they'd do to you, partner?"

The fingers of one hand tightened on the soft felt of his hat. "Buried me alive…," he said. "What, you surprised? You think only Dock's got this thing about graves and talking with dead people under the ground? Him and Persephone are two of a kind. She thought it was funny. She laughed while they put a garden hose in my mouth and covered me over with a front-end loader. It was just like being locked in black concrete, with no sound, with just a little string of dirty air going into my throat. They didn't dig me up till this morning. I went to the bathroom inside my clothes."

"I'm sorry, No Duh. But I didn't tell you to creep Dock's house."

"My other choice is I miss the vig again with Wee Willie Bimstine and get fed into an airplane propeller? Thanks for your charitable attitudes."

"I've got a room behind the bait shop. You can stay here till we square you with Wee Willie."

"You'd do that?"

"Sure."

"It's full of snakes out here. You want the gen on Dock? Persephone eighty-sixed him after she caught him porking his broads."

"That's old news, No Duh."

"I got in his desk. It's full of building plans for hospitals. Treatment places for drunks and addicts. There was canceled checks from Jimmy Ray Dixon. Go figure."

"Figure what?"

"Dock supplies broads for every gash-hound in the mob. That's the only reason they let a crazy person like him come around. But he don't cut no deal he don't piece off to the spaghetti heads. When'd the mob start working with coloreds? You think it's a mystery how the city got splashed in the bowl?"

"Who set up Jerry Joe Plumb, No Duh?"

"He did."

"Jerry Joe set himself up?"

"He was always talking about you, how your mothers use to work together, how he use to listen to all your phonograph records over at your house. At the same time he was wheeling and dealing with the Giacanos, washing money for them, pretending he could walk on both sides of the line… You don't get it, do you? You know what will get you killed in New Orleans? When they look in your eyes and know you ain't like them, when they know you ain't willing to do things most people won't even think about. That's when they'll cut you from your package to your throat and eat a sandwich while they're doing it."