James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

I walked to the end of the dock and leaned against the railing.

"Can I help you with something?" I asked.

He didn't reply. His face was shadowed, but I could see the glint of his gold earrings in the light from the dock. I went inside the bait shop.

"Turn on the flood lamps, Alf," I said.

When she hit the toggle switch, the light bloomed across the water with the brilliance of a pistol flare. That's when I saw his eyes.

"Go on up to the house, Alafair," I said.

"You know him?" she said.

"No, but we're going to send him on his way just the same. Now, do what I ask you, okay?"

"I don't see why I-"

"Come on, Alf."

She lifted her face, her best pout in place, and went out the screen door and let it slam behind her.

Batist was heating a pot of coffee on the small butane stove behind the counter. He bent down and looked out the window at the bayou again, a cigar in the center of his mouth.

"What you want to do with that fella, Dave?" he said.

"See who he is."

I went outside again and propped my hands on the dock railing. The flood lamps mounted on the roof of the bait shop burned away the shadows from around the man in the boat. His hair was long, like a nineteenth-century Indian's, his cheeks unshaved, the skin dark and grained as though it had been rubbed with black pepper. His arms were wrapped with scarlet tattoos, but like none I had ever seen before. Unlike jailhouse art, the ink ran in strings down the arms, webbed in bright fantails, as though all of his veins had been superimposed on the skin's surface.

But it was the eyes that caught and impaled you. They were hunter's eyes, chemical green, rimmed with a quivering energy, as though he heard the sounds of hidden adversaries in the wind.

"What's your business here, podna?" I asked.

He seemed to think on it. One hand opened and closed on an oar.

"I ain't eat today," he said. The accent was vaguely Spanish, the tone flat, disconnected from the primitive set of the jaw.

Batist joined me at the rail with a cup of coffee in his hand.

"Come inside," I said.

Batist's eyes fixed on mine.

The man didn't start his engine. Instead, he used one oar to row across the bayou to the concrete ramp. He stepped into the water, ankle-deep, lifted the bow with one hand and pulled the boat up until it was snug on the ramp. Then he reached behind him and lifted out a stiff bedroll that was tied tightly with leather thongs.

His work boots were loud on the dock as he walked toward us, his Levi's high on his hips, notched under his rib cage with a wide leather belt and brass buckle.

"You oughtn't to ax him in, Dave. This is our place," Batist said.

"It's all right."

"No, it surely ain't."

The man let his eyes slide over our faces as he entered the bait shop. I followed him inside and for the first time smelled his odor, like charcoal and kerosene, unwashed hair, mud gone sour with stagnant water. He waited expectantly at the counter, his bedroll tucked under his arm. His back was as straight as a sword.

I fixed him two chili dogs on a paper plate and set them in front of him with a glass of water. He sat on the stool and ate with a spoon, gripping the handle with his fist, mopping the beans and sauce and ground meat with a slice of bread. Batist came inside and began loading the beer cooler behind the counter.

"Where you from?" I said.

" El Paso."

"Where'd you get the boat?"

He thought about it. "I found it two weeks back. It was sunk. I cleaned it up pretty good." He stopped eating and watched me.

"It's a nice boat," I said.

His face twitched and his eyes were empty again, the jawbones chewing.

"You got a rest room?" he asked.

"It's in the back, behind those empty pop cases."

"How much your razor blades?" he said to Batist.

"This ain't no drug sto'. What you after, man?" Batist said.

The man wiped his mouth with the flats of his fingers. The lines around his eyes were stretched flat.

Batist leaned on his arms, his biceps flexing like rolls of metal washers.

"Don't be giving me no truck," he said.

I eased along the counter until the man's eyes left Batist and fixed on me.

"I'm a police officer. Do you need directions to get somewhere?" I said.

"I got a camp out there. That's where I come from. I can find it even in the dark," he said.

With one hand he clenched his bedroll, which seemed to have tent sticks inside it, and walked past the lunch meat coolers to the small rest room in back.

"Dave, let me ax you somet'ing. You got to bring a 'gator in your hog lot to learn 'gators eat pigs?" Batist said.

Ten minutes passed. I could hear the man splashing water behind the rest room door. Batist had gone back out on the dock and was chaining up the rental boats for the night. I walked past the cooler and tapped with one knuckle on the bolted door.

"We're closing up, podna. You have to come out," I said.

He jerked open the door, his face streaming water. His dark blue shirt was unbuttoned, and on his chest I could see the same scarlet network of lines that was tattooed on his arms. The pupils in his eyes looked broken, like India ink dropped on green silk.

"I'd appreciate your cleaning up the water and paper towels you've left on the floor. Then I'd like to have a talk with you," I said.

He didn't answer. I turned and walked back up front.

I went behind the counter and started to stock the candy shelves for tomorrow, then I stopped and called the dispatcher at the department.

"I think I've got a meltdown in the shop. He might have a stolen boat, too," I said.

"The governor in town?"

"Lose the routine, Wally."

"You hurt my feelings… You want a cruiser, Dave?"

I didn't have the chance to answer. The man in the white straw hat came from behind me, his hand inserted in the end of his bedroll. I looked at his face and dropped the phone and fell clattering against the shelves and butane stove as he flung the bedroll and the sheath loose from the machete and ripped it through the air, an inch from my chest.

The honed blade sliced through the telephone cord and sunk into the counter's hardwood edge. He leaned over and swung again, the blade whanging off the shelves, dissecting cartons of worms and dirt, exploding a jar of pickled sausage.

Batist's coffee pot was scorched black and boiling on the butane fire. The handle felt like a heated wire across my bare palm. I threw the coffee, the top, and the grinds in the man's face, saw the shock in his eyes, his mouth drop open, the pain rise out of his throat like a broken bubble.

Then I grabbed the tattooed wrist that held the machete and pressed the bottom of the pot down on his forearm.

He flung the machete from his hand as though the injury had come from it rather than the coffee pot. I thought I was home free. I wasn't.

He hit me harder than I'd ever been struck by a fist in my life, the kind of blow that fills your nose with needles, drives the eye deep into the socket.

I got to my feet and tried to follow him out on the dock. One side of my face was already numb and throbbing, as though someone had held dry ice against it. The man in the white straw hat had leaped off the dock onto the concrete ramp and mounted the bow of his boat with one knee and was pushing it out into the current, his body haloed with humidity and electric light.

Batist came out of the tin shed in the willows where we stored our outboard motors, looked up at me, then at the fleeing man.

"Batist, no!" I said.

Batist and I both stood motionless while the man jerked the engine into a roar with one flick of the forearm, then furrowed a long yellow trough around the bend into the darkness.

I used the phone at the house to call the department again, then walked back down to the dock. The moon was veiled over the swamp; lightning forked out of a black sky in the south.