James Burke: Cadillac Jukebox

"Dave, it's Buford and Karyn's house," Bootsie said.

We came around the curve, and across the cleared acreage the house looked like it was lit from within by molten metal. Only one pump truck had arrived, and the firemen were pulling a hose from the truck toward the front porch.

I stopped on the opposite side of the road and ran toward the truck. I could already feel the heat from the house against my skin.

"Is anybody in there?" I said. The faces of the firemen looked like yellow tallow in the light from the flames.

"Somebody was at the window upstairs but they couldn't make it out," a lieutenant said. "You're from the sheriff's department, aren't you?"

"Right."

"There's a trail of gasoline from the back of the house out to the stables. What the hell kind of security did y'all have out here?"

"Buford worried about Aaron Crown, not Dock Green," I said.

"Who?" he said.

Another pump truck came up the road, but the heat had punched holes in the roof now, the poplars against the side wall were wrapped with fire, and the glow through the collapsing shingles bloomed in an ever-widening circumference, defining everything in red-black shapes that was Buford's-the brick stables and tack rooms, the fields that had already been harrowed for next year's planting, the company store with the barrels of pecans on each side of the front doors, the stark and leafless tree that his ancestors in the Knights of the White Camellia had used to lynch members of the carpetbag government, the horses with Mexican brands that spooked and thudded through the rolling hardwoods as though they had never been bridled or broken.

Then I saw Buford come through the front door, a water-soaked blanket held in a cone over his head.

He tore the blanket away and flung it aside, as though the blanket itself contained the heat that had scalded his body. He smelled like ashes and charcoal and scorched hair, and smoke rose in dirty strings from his clothes.

"Where is she?" he said, staring wild-eyed at the firemen in his yard.

"Who? Who else is in there?" a fireman said.

"Where is she, Dave?"

"I don't know, Buford," I replied.

"She was on the stairs, right next to me…"

"She didn't make it out, partner," I said.

I reached out to take his arm in my hand. I felt the smooth hardness of his triceps brush my palm, then he was gone, running toward the rectangle of flame beyond the Greek pillars on the front porch. A fireman in a canvas coat and a big hat tried to tackle him and hit hard and empty-armed against the brick walkway.

Buford went up the steps, his arms in front of his face, wavering for just a moment in the heat that withered his skin and chewed apart the interior of his house, then he crossed his forearms over his eyes and went through the flames and disappeared inside.

I heard a fireman yell, "Pour it on him, pour it on him, pour it on him, goddamn it!"

The pressurized spray of water caromed off the doorway and dissected the vortex of fire that was dissolving the stairway, filling the chandeliers with music, eating the floor away, blowing windows out into the yard.

Then we saw them, just for a moment, like two featureless black silhouettes caught inside a furnace, joined at the hip, their hands stretched outward, as though they were offering a silent testimony about the meaning of their own lives before they stepped backward into the burning lake that had become their new province.

Spring didn't come for a long time that year. The days were cold well into March, the swamp gray with winterkill. Batist would run his trotlines each morning at sunrise, his pirogue knocking against the swollen base of the cypress trunks. I would watch him from the bait shop window while he retrieved each empty hook and rebaited it and dropped it back in the water, wiping the coldness off his hand on his trousers, the mist rising about his bent shoulders. Then he would come back inside, shivering unduly inside his quilted jacket, and we would drink coffee together and prepare the chickens and sausage links for the few fishermen or tourists who might be in that day.

Persephone and Dock Green were never seen again; some say they fled the country, perhaps to South America. The irony was that even though a filling station attendant in St. Martinville identified Dock as the man who had bought gas in a can from him on the night Buford and Karyn died, the gas can found on the LaRose plantation had no fingerprints on it, and without an eyewitness to the arson Dock would have never been convicted.

The greater truth was that Dock Green's strain of madness had always served a function, just as Aaron Crown's had, and the new governor of Louisiana, a practical-minded businessman, was not given to brooding over past events and letting them encumber his vision of the future.

Jimmy Ray Dixon?

He has a late-hour radio talk show in New Orleans now, and with some regularity he tells his listeners that his brother's spirit has finally been laid to rest. Why now? He doesn't answer that question. He's not comfortable with the mention of Mookie Zerrang's name, and when he hears it, his rhetoric becomes more religious and abstruse.

Dock Green's girls still work the same bars and street corners, Jimmy Ray jerks his listeners around and they love him for it, and Aaron Crown sits in a maximum security unit at Angola, denying his guilt to European journalists who have done front-page features on him.

The players don't change, just the audience.

But maybe that's just a police officer's jaded interpretation of things, since few seem interested in the death of Short Boy Jerry, a man who everyone knew operated by choice on the edge of the New Orleans underworld and hence invited his fate.

No draconian sword fell into the life of Clay Mason, either. He was expelled from Mexico and his property seized, but in a short while he was visiting college campuses again, being interviewed on the Internet, selling his shuck on TV. A patron of the arts bought him a home in the hills outside Santa Fe, where his proselytes and fellow revelers from the 1960s gathered and a famous New York photographer caught him out on the terrace, his face as craggy and ageless as the blue ring of mountains behind him, a sweat-banded Stetson crimped on his head, his pixie eyes looking directly into the camera. The cutline under the photo read, "A Lion in Winter."

But I think I've learned not to grieve on the world's ways, at least not when spring is at hand.

It rained hard the third week in March, then the sky broke clear and one morning the new season was upon us and the swamp was green again, the new leaves on the flooded stands of trees rippling in the breeze off the Gulf, the trunks of the cypress painted with lichen.

Alafair and I rode her Appaloosa bareback down the road, like two wooden clothespins mounted on its spine, and put up a kite in the wind. The kite was a big one, the paper emblazoned with an American flag, and it rose quickly into the sky, higher and higher, until it was only a distant speck above the sugarcane fields to the north.

In my mind's eye I saw the LaRose plantation from the height of Alafair's kite, the rolling hardwoods and the squared fields where Confederate and federal calvary had charged and killed one another and left their horses screaming and disemboweled among the cane stubble, and I wondered what Darwinian moment had to effect itself before we devolved from children flying paper flags in the sky to half-formed creatures thundering in a wail of horns down the road to Roncevaux.

That night we ate crawfish at Possum's in St. Martinville and went by the old church in the center of town and walked under the Evangeline Oaks next to the Teche where I first kissed Bootsie in the summer of 1957 and actually felt the tree limbs spin over my head. Alafair was out on the dock behind the church, dropping pieces of bread in a column of electric light onto the water's surface. Bootsie slipped her arm around my waist and bumped me with her hip.