Dixie City Jam

I followed him deep into his house, which had been built in the 1870s, with oak floors, spiral staircases, high ceilings, and enormous windows that were domed at the top with stained glass. Then we crossed his tree-shaded, brick-walled backyard, past a swimming pool in which islands of dead oak leaves floated on the chemical green surface, to a small white stucco office with a blue tile roof that was almost completely encased by banana trees. He used a key on a ring to unlock the door.

The furniture inside was stacked with boxes of documents and files, the corkboards on the walls layered with thumbtacked sheets of paper, newspaper clippings, yellowed photographs with curled edges, computer printouts of people's names, telephone numbers, home and business addresses. The room was almost frigid from the air- conditioning unit in the window.

I stared at an eight-by-ten photograph in the middle of a cork-board. In it a group of children, perhaps between the ages of five and eight, had rolled up their coat sleeves from their right forearms to show the serial numbers that had been tattooed across their skin.

'Those kids look like they're part of a hoax, Dave?' he said.

'What's going on, partner?'

He didn't answer. He sat down at his desk, his massive buttocks splaying across the chair, his huge head sinking into his shoulders like a pumpkin, and clicked on his computer and viewing screen. I watched him type the name 'Buchalter' on the keyboard, then enter it into the computer. A second later a file leaped into the blue viewing screen. Hippo tapped on a key that rolled the screen like film being pulled through a projector while his eyes narrowed and studied each entry.

'Take a look,' he said. 'I've got a half dozen Buchalters here, but none of them seem to be your man. These guys are too old or they're in jail or dead.'

'What is all this?'

'I belong to a group of people who have a network. We keep tabs on the guys who'd like to see more ovens and searchlights and guard towers in the world-the Klan, the American Nazi party, the Aryan Nation, skinheads out on the coast, a bunch of buttwipes called Christian Identity at Hayden Lake, Idaho. They don't just spit Red Man anymore, Dave. They're organized, they all know each other, they've got one agenda-they'd like to make bars of soap out of people they disagree with. Not just Jews. People like you'd qualify, too.'

'Try another spelling,' I said.

'No, I think we've got the right spelling, just the wrong generation. I'll give you a history lesson. Look at this.' He tapped the key again that rolled the screen, then stopped at the name Buchalter, Jon Matthew. 'You ever hear of the American-German Bund?'

'Yeah, it was a fascist movement back in the nineteen thirties. They held rallies in Madison Square Garden.'

'That's right. And an offshoot of the Bund was a group called the Silver Shirts. One of their founders was this guy Jon Matthew Buchalter. He went to federal prison for treason and got out in nineteen fifty-six, just in time to die of liver cancer.'

'Okay?'

'He was from Grand Isle.'

'So maybe the guy who came to my house is related to him?'

He clicked off his computer and turned to face me in his chair. His head sank into his neck, and his jowls swelled out like the bottom of a deflated basketball. 'I've got no answers for you,' he said. 'Sometimes I wonder if I haven't gone around the bend. How many people keep a rat's nest of evil like this in their backyard?'

I looked into his eyes.

'I don't want to offend you, Hippo, but I don't think you've squared with me. Is there something about this submarine you haven't told me?'

'Hey, time for a flash, Dave. You told me about the sub, remember? You bargained with me about the finder's fee. You think I got secrets, I live in a private world? You bet your oysters I do. The bars on my house windows, the electronic security system, the rent-a-cops I pay to watch my kids, you think I got all that because I'm worried a bunch of coloreds from Magazine are gonna walk off with my lawn furniture? You're living in the New Jerusalem, Dave. It's the year zero; it's us against them. We either make it or we don't.'

'I'm not sure I get what you're saying, Hippo. I'm not sure I want to, either. It sounds a little messianic'

His face was flushed, his collar wilted like damp tissue paper around his thick neck.

'Go on back to the worm business, Dave,' he said. 'That guy comes around your house again, do the earth a favor, screw a gun barrel in his mouth and blow his fucking head off. Leave me alone now, will you? I don't feel too good. I got blood pressure could blow gaskets out of a truck engine.'

He wiped at his mouth with his hand. His lips were purple in the refrigerated gloom of his office. He stared at a collection of thumbtacked news articles and photographs on his corkboard as though his eyes could penetrate the black-and-white grain of the paper, as though perhaps he himself had been pulled inside a photograph, into a world of freight cars grinding slowly to a stop by a barbed-wire gate that yawned open like a hungry mouth, while dogs barked in the eye-watering glare of searchlights and files of the newly arrived moved in silhouette toward buildings with conical chimneys that disappeared into their own smoke.

Or was I making a complexity out of a histrionic and disingenuous fat man whose self-manufactured drama had accidentally brought a stray misanthrope out of the woodwork?

It was hard to buy into the notion that somehow World War II was still playing at the Bijou in New Orleans, Louisiana.

I left him in his office and walked outside into the light. The heat was like a match flame against my skin.

'It sounds deeply weird,' Clete said, biting into his po'-boy sandwich at a small grocery store up by Audubon Park, where the owner kept tables for working people to eat their lunch. 'But maybe we're just living in weird times. It's not like the old days.'

'You believe this American Bund stuff?'

'No, it's the way people think nowadays that bothers me. Like this vigilante gig and this Citizens Committee for a Better New Orleans. You knew Bimstine and Tommy Lonighan are both on it?'

'No. When did Lonighan become a Rotarian?'

'Law-and-order and well-run vice can get along real good together. Conventioneers looking for a blow job don't like getting rolled or ripped off by Murphy artists. Did you know that Lucinda Bergeron is NOPD's liaison person with the Committee?'

He chewed his food slowly, watching my face. Outside, the wind was blowing and denting the canopy of spreading oaks along St. Charles.

'Then this preacher whose head glows in the dark shows up at your dock and tells you he's part of the same bunch. You starting to see some patterns here, noble mon?' he said.

'I don't know what any of that has to do with the guy who hurt Bootsie.'

'Maybe it doesn't.' He watched the streetcar roll down the track on the neutral ground and stop on the corner. It was loaded with Japanese businessmen. In spite of the temperature they all wore dark blue suits, ties, and long-sleeve shirts. 'If I were a worrying man, you know what would worry me most? It's not the crack and the black punks in the projects. It's a feeling I've got about the normals, it's like they wouldn't mind trying it a different way for a while.'

'What do you mean?'

'Maybe I'm wrong, but if tomorrow morning I woke up and read in The Times- Picayune that an election had just been held and it was now legal to run the lowlifes through tree shredders, you know, the kind the park guys use to grind oak limbs into wood chips, it wouldn't be a big surprise.'

'Did you ever hear of anybody in the city who fits the description of this guy Buchalter?'

'Nope. I've got a theory, though; at least it's something we can check out. He's an out-of-towner. He went to your house to shake up your cookie bag. Right? There doesn't seem to be any obvious connection between our man and any particular local bucket of shit we might have had trouble with. Right? What does all that suggest to you, Streak?'

'One of the resident wise guys using out-of-town talent to send a message.'