James Burke: Cadillac Jukebox

I clenched the.45 in both hands and pointed it at the enormous black shape behind the door, my finger slick with sweat inside the trigger guard.

My eyes wouldn't assimilate the naked man in front of me. Nor the fact that he was upside down. Nor what had been done to him.

The fence wire that had been looped around his ankles and notched into the roof beam was buried so deeply in his ankles that it was nearly invisible.

Helen lumbered into the room, her shotgun pointed in front of her. She lowered it to her side and looked at the hanging man.

"Oh boy," she said. She propped open the shutter on a window and cleared her throat and spit. She looked back at me, then blew out her breath. Her face was discolored, as though she had been staring into a cold wind. "I guess he got his," she said. Then she went to the window again, with the back of her wrist to her mouth. But this time she collected herself, and when she looked at me again her face was composed.

"Come on, we can still nail him," I said.

The plainclothes homicide investigator and two of the uniformed deputies were waiting for us at the bottom of the ladder.

"What's up there?" the plainclothes said. His eyes tried to peel meaning out of our faces. "What, it's some kind of company secret?"

"Go look for yourself. Be careful what you step in," Helen said.

"Crown killed Mookie Zerrang. He couldn't have gone far," I said.

"He ain't gone far at all," the third deputy said, sloshing toward us from the opposite side of the woods. "Look up yonder through that high spot."

We all stared through the evenly spaced tree trunks at a dry stretch of compacted silt that humped out of the water like the back of a black whale. It was covered with palmettos and crisscrossed with the webbed tracks of nutria, and in the middle of the palmettos, squatting on his haunches, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, was Aaron Crown.

We waded toward him, our guns still drawn. If he heard or saw us, or even cared if we were in his proximity, he showed no sign.

His body and clothes were painted with blood from his pate to the mud-encrusted basketball shoes he wore. His eyes, which were finally drained of all the heat and energy that had defined his life, seemed to look out of a scarlet mask. We stood in a circle around him, our weapons pointed at the ground. In the damp air, smoke hung at the corner of his mouth like wisps of cotton.

"You know about Sabelle?" I asked.

"That 'un in yonder couldn't talk about nothing else before he died," he replied.

"You're an evil man, Aaron Crown," I said.

"I reckon it otherwise." He rubbed the cigarette's hot ash between his fingers until it was dead. "If them TV people is out there, I need to wash up."

He looked up at our faces, his lidless eyes waiting for an answer.

ON CHRISTMAS MORNING I sat at the kitchen table and looked at a photograph in the Daily Iberian of Buford and Karyn dancing together at the country club. They looked like people who would live forever.

Bootsie paused behind me, her palm resting on my shoulder.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked.

"Jerry Joe Plumb…No journalist will ever mention his name in association with theirs, but he paid their dues for them. "

"He paid his own, too, Dave."

"Maybe."

The window was open and a balmy wind blew from my neighbor’s pasture and swelled the curtains over the sink. I filled a cup with coffee and hot milk and walked outside in the sunshine. Alafair sat at the redwood picnic table, playing with Tripod in her lap and listening to the tape she had made of the records on Jerry Joe’s jukebox. She flipped Tripod on his back and bounced him gently up and down by pulling his tail while he pushed at her forearm with his paws.

"Thanks for all the presents. It’s a great Christmas, " she said.

"Thanks for everything you gave me, too, " I said.

"Can Tripod have some more eggnog ice cream? "

"Sure."

"Those creeps are gone, aren’t they? "

"Yeah, the worst of the lot are. The rest get it somewhere down the road. We just don’t see it."

I thought perhaps I might have to explain my remarks, but I didn’t. She actually lived through more than I had in her young life, and her comprehension of the world was oftentimes far better than mine.

She went inside the house with Tripod under her arm, then came back out on the step.

"I forgot. We ate it all," she said.

"There’s some in the freezer down at the shop. I’ll get it," I said.

I walked down the slope through the leaves drifting out of the oak and pecan branches overhead. I had strung Christmas lights around the bait shop’s windows and hung wreaths fashioned from pine boughs and holly and red ribbon on the weathered cypress walls, and Alafair had glued a Santa Claus made from satin wrapping paper to the door. The bayou was empty of boats, and the sound of my shoes was so loud on the dock that it echoed off the water and sent a cloud of robins clattering out of the trees.

I had gotten the ice cream from the game freezer and was about to lock up again when I saw Dock Green park a black Lincoln by the boat ramp and walk toward me.

"It’s Christmas. We’re closed," I said.

"LaRose has got my wife up at his house," he said.

"I don’t believe that’s true. Even if it is, she’s a big girl and can make her own choices."

"I can give you that guy, diced and fried."

"Not interested."

"It ain’t right."

He sat down at a spool table and stared out at the bayou. His neck was as stiff as a chunk of sewer pipe. A muscle jumped in his cheek.

"I think you were involved with Jerry Joe’s death. I just can’t prove it. But I don’t have to talk to you, either. So how about getting out of here?" I said.

He rubbed the heel of his hand in one eye.

"I never killed nobody. I need Persephone back. It ain’t right he can steal my wife, pull a gun on me, I can’t do nothing about it…I told Seph this is how it'd be if we messed with people was born with money… They take, they don't give," he said.

Then I realized he was drunk.

"Get a motel room or go back to your camp, Dock. I'll get somebody to drive you," I said.

He rose to his feet, as though from a trance, and said, more to the wind than to me, "He controls things above the ground, but he don't hear the voices that's down in the earth… They can call me a geek, it don't matter, her and me are forever."

I went back into the shop and called for a cruiser. When I came outside again, he was gone.

That night Alafair and Bootsie and I went out to eat, then drove down East Main, through the corridor of live oaks, looking at the lights and decorations on the nineteenth-century homes along Bayou Teche. We passed the city hall and library, the flood-lit grotto, which contained a statue of Christ's mother, where the home of George Washington Cable had once stood, the darkened grounds and bamboo border around the Shadows, and in the center of town the iron-and-wood drawbridge over the Teche.

I drove past the old Southern Pacific station and up the St. Martinville road, and, without thinking, like a backward glance at absolved guilt, I let my eyes linger on the abandoned frame house where Karyn LaRose had grown up. The garage that had contained her father's boxes of gumballs and plastic monster teeth and vampire fingernails still stood at the front of the property, the doors padlocked, and I wondered when she drove past it if she ever saw the little girl who used to play there in the yard, her hands sticky with the rainbow seepage from the gum that mildewed and ran through the cracks inside.

"Look, up the road, y'all, it's a fire," Alafair said.

Beyond the next curve you could see the reddish orange bloom in the sky, the smoke that trailed back across the moon. We pulled to the side of the road for a firetruck to pass.