Dixie City Jam Page 21

  1. Max and Bobo Calucci: In popular literature their kind are portrayed as twentieth-century Chaucerian buffoons, venial and humorous con men whose greatest moral offense is their mismatched wardrobe, or charismatic representatives of wealthy New York crime families whose palatial compounds are always alive with wedding receptions and garden parties. The familial code of the last group is sawed out of medieval romance, their dalliance with evil of Faustian and tragic proportions.

  Maybe they are indeed these things. But the ones I have known, with one or two exceptions, all possessed a single common characteristic that is unforgettable. Their eyes are dead. No, that's not quite correct. There's a light there, like a wet lucifer match flaring behind black glass, but no matter how hard you try to interpret the thought working behind it, you cannot be sure if the person is thinking about taking your life or having his car washed.

  I once spent three hours interviewing a celebrity mafioso who lives today in the federal witness protection program. Two-thirds of his stomach had been surgically removed because of ulcers, and his flesh was like wrinkled putty on his bones, his breath rancid from the saliva-soaked cigar that rarely left his mouth. But his recall of his five decades inside the Outfit was encyclopedic. As he endlessly recounted conversations with other members of the mob, the subject was always the same-money: how much had been made from a score, how much had been pieced off to whom, how much laundered, how much delivered in a suitcase for a labor official's life.

  Thirty years ago, in the living room of a friend, he had wrapped piano wire around the throat of an informer and pulled until he virtually razored the man's head off his shoulders.

  Then I said something that my situation or job did not require.

  'The man you killed, he had once been your friend, hadn't he?'

  'Yeah, that's right.'

  'Did that bother you?'

  'It's just one of them things. What're you gonna do?' He shrugged his shoulders and arched his eyebrows as though an impossible situation had been arbitrarily imposed upon him.

  Then I posed one more question to him, one that elicited a nonresponse that has always stayed with me.

  'You've told the feds everything about your life, Vince. Did you ever feel like indicating to God you regret some of this bullshit, that you'd like it out of your life?'

  His eyes cut sideways at me for only a moment. Through the cigar smoke they looked made from splinters of green and black glass, watery, red-rimmed as a lizard's, lighted with an old secret, or perhaps fear, that would never shake loose from his throat.

  I clicked off my recorder, said good-bye, and walked out of the room. Later, he told an FBI agent that he never wanted me, in his presence again.

  2. Tommy Bobalouba: Like Max and Bobo, he operated on the edges of the respectable world and constantly tried to identify himself with an ethnic heritage that somehow was supposed to give his illegal enterprises the mantle of cultural and moral legitimacy. The reality was that Tommy and the Caluccis both represented a mind-numbing level of public vulgarity that sickened and embarrassed most other Irish and Italians in New Orleans.

  Tommy had been kicked out of his yacht club for copulating in the swimming pool at 4:00 A.M. with a cocktail waitress. At the Rex Ball during Mardi Gras he told the mayor's wife that his radiation treatments for prostate cancer caused his phallus to glow in the dark. After wheedling an invitation to a dinner for the New Orleans Historical Association, he politely refused the asparagus by saying to the hostess, 'Thank you, anyway, ma'am, but it always makes my urine smell.'

  3. We'll call the third player Malcolm, a composite of any number of black male kids raised in New Orleans's welfare projects. Caseworkers and sociologists have written reams on Malcolm. Racist demagogues love Malcolm because he's the means by which they inculcate fear into the electorate. Liberals are far more compassionate and ascribe his problems to his environment. They're probably correct in their assessment. The problem, however, is that Malcolm is dangerous. He's often immensely unlikable, too.

  A full-blown crack addict has the future of a lighted candle affixed to the surface of a woodstove. Within a short period of time he will be consumed by the unbanked fires burning inside him or those that lick daily at his skin from the outside. In the meantime he drifts into a world of moral psychosis where shooting a British tourist in the face for her purse or accidentally killing a neighborhood child has the significance of biting off a hangnail.

  I knew a kid from New Iberia whose name was Malcolm. He had an arm like a black whip and could field a ball in deep center and fire it on one hop into home plate with the mean, flat trajectory of a BB. At age seventeen he moved with Iris mother into the Desire Project in New Orleans, a complex of welfare apartments where the steady din is unrelieved, like the twenty-four-hour noise in a city prison-toilets flushing, plumbing pipes vibrating in walls, irrational people yelling at each other, radios and television sets blaring behind broken windows. The laws of ordinary society seem the stuff of comic books. Instead, what amounts to the failure of all charity, joy, and decency becomes the surrogate for normalcy: gang rape, child molestation, incest, terrorization of the elderly, beatings and knifings that turn the victims into bloody facsimiles of human beings, fourteen-year-old girls who'll wink at you and proudly say, 'I be sellin' out of my pants, baby,' or perhaps a high school sophomore who clicks his MAC-10 on up to heavy-metal rock 'n' roll and shreds his peers into dog food.

  In a year's time Malcolm smoked, hyped, snorted, bonged, dropped, or huffed the whole street dealer's menu-bazooka, Afghan skunk, rock, crank, brown scag, and angel dust. His mother brought him back to New Iberia for a Christmas visit. Malcolm borrowed a car and went to a convenience store for some eggnog. Then he changed his mind and decided he didn't need any eggnog. Instead, he sodomized and executed the eighteen-year-old college girl who ran the night register. He maintained at his trial that he was loaded on speed and angel dust and had no memory of even entering the convenience store. I was a witness at his electrocution, and I'm convinced to this day that even while they strapped and buckled his arms and legs to the oak chair, fitted the leather gag across his mouth, and dropped the black cloth over his face, even up to the moment the electrician closed the circuits and arched a bolt of lightning through his body that cooked his brains and exploded his insides, Malcolm did not believe these people, whom he had never seen before or harmed in any way, would actually take his life for a crime which he believed himself incapable of committing.

  That evening I sat at the kitchen table with a nautical chart of the Louisiana coast spread out before me.

  Through the open bedroom door I heard Bootsie turn on the shower water. Recently she had made a regular habit of taking long showers in the afternoon, washing the cigarette smoke from a lounge out of her hair, holding her face in the spray until her skin was ruddy and the appearance of clarity came back into her eyes. I had not spoken to her yet about the DWI she had almost received the previous day.

  I flattened and smoothed the nautical chart with my hand and penciled X's at the locations where I had sighted the German U-boat when I was in college and on my boat with Batist. Then I made a third X where Hippo Bimstine's friend, the charter-boat skipper, had pinged it with his sonar. The three X's were all within two miles of each other, on a rough southwest-northeastwardly drift line that could coincide with the influences of both the tide and the currents of the Mississippi's alluvial fan. If there was a trench along that line, tilting downward with the bevel of the continental shelf, then the movements of the sub had a certain degree of predictability.

  But I couldn't concentrate on the chart. I stared out the back window at the tractor shed by the edge of the coulee. The door yawned open, and the late sun's red light shone like streaks of fire through the cracks in the far wall. I called Clete at his apartment in New Orleans and told him about the break-in of last night, the linen-covered butcher block, the offering of bourbon, the crystal goblet half-filled with burgundy and rimmed with lips
tick and moonlight.

  'So?' he said when I had finished.

  'It's not your ordinary B and E, Clete.'

  'It's Buchalter or his trained buttwipes, Streak.'

  'Why the blue rose on a china plate?'

  'To mess up your head.'

  'You don't think it has anything to do with the vigilante?'

  'Everybody in New Orleans knows the vigilante's MO now. Why should Buchalter be any different?'

  'Why a woman's lipstick on the glass?'

  'He's probably got a broad working with him. Sometimes they dig leather and swastikas.'

  I blew out my breath and looked wanly through the screen at the fireflies lighting in the purple haze above the coulee.

  'You got framed once on a murder beef, Dave. But you turned it around on them, with nobody to help you,' Clete said. 'I've got a feeling something else is bothering you besides some guy with rut for brains opening bottles in your tractor shed.'

  I could still hear the shower water running in the bathroom.

  'Dave?'

  'Yes.'

  'You want me to come over there?'

  'No, that's all right. Thanks for your time, Clete. I'll call you in a couple of days.'

  'Before you go, there's something I wanted to mention. It sounds a little zonk, though.'

  'Zonk?'

  'Yeah, deeply strange. Brother Oswald told me he was in the merch when World War II broke out.' He paused a moment. 'Maybe it's just coincidence.'

  'Come on, Clete, get the peanut brittle out of your mouth.'

  'He says he was a seventeen-year-old seaman on an oil tanker sailing out of New Orleans in nineteen forty-two. Guess what? A pigboat nailed them just south of Grand Isle.'

  A solitary drop of perspiration slid down the side of my rib cage. Through the back screen I could see black storm clouds, like thick curds of smoke, twisting from the earth's rim against the molten red ball of setting sun.

  'He says while the tanker was burning, the sub came to the surface and rammed and machine-gunned the lifeboats. He was floating around in the waves for a couple of days before a shrimper fished him out… It's kind of weird, isn't it, I mean the guy showing up about the same time as Buchalter?'

  'Yeah, it is.'

  'Probably doesn't mean anything, though, does it? I mean… What do you think?'

  'Like somebody told me yesterday, I'm firing in the hole on this one, Clete.'

  After I hung up I walked into the bedroom. Through the shower door I could see Bootsie rinsing herself under the flow of water. She held her hair behind her neck with both hands and turned in a slow circle, her buttocks brushing against the steamed glass, while the water streamed down her breasts and sides. I wanted to close the curtains and latch the bedroom door, rub her dry with a towel, walk her to our bed, put heir nipples in my mouth, kiss her lean, supple stomach, then feel my own quivering energies enter and lose themselves in hers, as though my desperate love could overcome the asp that she had taken to her breast.

  Then I heard her open the medicine cabinet and unsnap the cap on a plastic vial. Her face jumped when she saw me in the mirror.

  'Oh, Dave, you almost gave me a coronary,' she said. Her hand closed on the vial. I took it from her and read the typed words on the label.

  'Where'd you get these, Boots?'

  'Dr. Bienville,' she said.

  'Dr. Bienville is a script doctor and should be in prison.'

  'It's just a sedative. Don't make a big thing out of it.'

  'They're downers. If you drink with them, they can kill you.' I shook the pills into the toilet bowl, then cracked the vial in the palm of my hand and dropped it in the wastebasket. Her eyes were blinking rapidly as she watched me push down the handle on the toilet. She started to speak, but I didn't let her.

  'I'm not going to lose you, Boots,' I said, wrapped her terry-cloth robe around her, and walked her to our bed.

  We sat down on the side of the mattress together, and I blotted her hair with a towel, then laid her back on the pillow. Her face looked pale and fatigued in the gloom. I remained in a sitting position and picked up one of her hands in mine.

  'The sheriff told me about your almost getting a DWI,' I said. 'If a person commits himself to an alcoholic life, he or she is going to drive drunk. Then eventually that person gets a DWI or maybe he kills somebody. It's that simple.'

  Her eyes started to water; she looked sideways at the window and the curtains that were lifting in the breeze.

  'The sheriff's a good guy,' I said. 'He knows we're having problems. He wants to help. Everybody does, Boots. That's why I want you to go to a meeting with me in the morning.'

  Her eyes tried to avoid mine. Then she said, 'It's gone that far?'

  'An AA meeting isn't the worst fate in the world.'

  'Do you think I'm an alcoholic?'

  'Booze is starting to hurt you. That fact's not going to go away.'

  She turned her head sideways on the pillow and rested the back of her wrist on her temple.

  'Why did this come into our lives?' she said.

  'Because I let Hippo Bimstine take me over the hurdles.'

  'It goes deeper than that, though, doesn't it? This man… Buchalter… he's evil in a way I don't know how to describe. It's as if he has the power to steal the air out of a room. If I think about him, I can't breathe. It's like I'm drowning.',

  'The only power he has is what we allow our fear to give to him.'

  But I was falling prey to that old self-serving notion that well-intended rhetoric can remove a stone bruise from the soul.

  I pulled the sheet over her and didn't say anything for what seemed a long time. Then I said, to change the subject, 'Who was the woman with you when you got stopped?'

  'Sister Marie.'

  'Who?'

  'Marie Guilbeaux, the nun from Lafayette.'

  'What were you doing with her?'

  'She was bringing some potted chrysanthemums out to the house. Then she saw me coming out of the convenience store, and I asked her to go with me to the drive-in for a beer. She's a nice person, Dave. She felt bad about her last visit here. What's wrong?'

  'I don't want her around here anymore.'

  'I don't understand your attitude.'

  'She keeps showing up at peculiar times.'

  'I don't think you should blame Sister Marie for my behavior, Dave.'

  'We'll address our own problems, Boots. We don't need anybody else aboard. That's not an unreasonable attitude, is it?'

  'I guess not. But she is nice.'

  'I'll fix supper now. Why don't you take a short nap?'

  'All right,' she said, and touched my forearm. 'I'm sorry about all this. I want to go to a meeting with you. First thing tomorrow morning. I won't break my promise, either.'

  'You're the best.'

  'You too, kiddo.'

  Later, I strung an entire spool of baling wire, six inches off the ground, hung with tin cans, through the oak and pecan trees in the front and side yards, around the back of the house, across the trunk of the chinaberry tree and the back wall of the tractor shed, over the coulee, and back to Tripod's hutch, where I notched it tightly around an oak trunk. Then I put the sheriffs AR-15 on the top shelf of the bedroom closet, my.45 under the mattress, and got under the sheet next to Bootsie. Her body was warm with sleep, her mouth parted on the pillow with her breathing. The muscles in her back and shoulders and the curve of her hip were as smooth as water sliding over stone. Deep inside a troubling dream she began to speak incoherently, and I pressed myself against her, pulled the contours of her body into mine, breathed the strawberry smell of her hair, and, like a bent atavistic creature from an earlier time, his loins caught between desire and fear, waited for the tinkling of cans on a wire or the soft, milky glow of a predictable dawn.

  After work the next afternoon, just as I pulled into the drive, I saw Zoot Bergeron sitting on top of a piling at the end of my dock, flipping pea gravel at the water. I parked my truck under the trees and wa
lked back down the slope toward him. He jumped from the piling, straightened his back, and flung the rest of the gravel into the canebrake. His skin was dusty and his pullover sweater stained with food. In the lobe of his left ear was a tiny green stone, like a bright insect, on a gold pin.

  'What's happening, Zoot?' I said.

  'I need a job. I thought maybe you could put me on here. I done this kind of boat work before. Lot of it.'

  'How'd you get here?'

  'Rode the bus to New Iberia. Then walked.'

  'You walked fifteen miles?'

  'That man yonder give me a ride the last two miles.' He pointed up the road to a parked, mud-caked van where a man in coveralls was working under the front end with a wrench. 'I'll work hard for you, Mr. Dave. I won't get in no trouble, either.'

  'What about school, partner?'

  'I ain't going back there. I need to train, get in shape, maybe get on a card. You don't need school for that. Mr. Tommy tole me he quit school when he was sixteen.'

  'That's part of the reason he's a moral imbecile, Zoot.'

  'A wha-'

  'What's your mom say about all this?'

  He didn't answer.

  'Does she know where you are?' I said.

  'What she care? She told me this morning I ain't gonna be no better than my daddy. How can I be like my daddy when I never even seen my daddy? I want to join the Marine Corps but she won't sign for me. She say all they'll use me for is cleaning their toilets. She called up the sergeant at the recruiting center and tole him that. That's what she done.'

  'Let me be up-front with you, partner. I've got a mess of grief around here right now. I can't help you out, at least not in the way you want me to.'

  'Mr. Dave-'

  'Sorry, Zoot.'

  The air was cool, and red and gold leaves tumbled out of the sunlight into the water. He looked down the road at the shadows among the oak trees, as though they held an answer to his situation.