Dixie City Jam

'I don't care you UA me or not. I don't care you try to scare me with that kind of talk, either. I ain't used no dope, Sergeant Motley.'

'What do you know about Camel Benoit?' I said.

'Everybody up Magazine know Camel. He's a pimp.'

'He was a drug dealer, too, Zoot,' I said.

He fastened his eyes on his shoes again.

'Do you know who killed him?' I said.

'Sergeant Motley just said it. I wasn't here.'

He locked his hands on his knees, then rested his forehead on the back of his wrist. His eyelashes were as long as a girl's.

'You trying to fuck your mother?' Motley said.

'Suh?' Zoot said, raising his head. His face was the color of dead ash.

'You heard me, fuck your mother. Because that's what you're doing, you stupid little shit.'

Zoot tried to return Motley's stare, but his left eye began to tremble and water.

'Get out of here,' Motley said.

'Suh?'

'You got earplugs on? Get out of here. If I catch you around a crack house again, I'm going to kick your skinny ass all up and down Martin Luther King Drive.'

Zoot got to his feet uncertainly. He flinched when he straightened his back. Motley opened the door and leaned over the stair railing.

'There's a kid coming out. Let him go. He doesn't know anything,' he called to the detectives below. Then he walked back to Zoot and punched him in the breastbone with his forefinger.

'Don't ever give me reason to get mad at you. Do you understand me?' he,said.

'Yes, suh. I ain't.'

'You tell anybody I cut you loose, I'll kick your ass anyway.'

'Yes, suh.'

'Get out!'

After Zoot was gone, I looked at Motley. He was lighting a cigar. His whiskers were jet black inside the grain of his cheeks.

'You're all right, Motley.'

'Tell me that five years from now. That kid's going to end up facedown on a sidewalk.'

'Why?'

'Because he's like half the black kids in New Orleans. Every day he's got to prove he doesn't have his mama's pink finger up his butt. Come on, I'll buy you a beignet. This place is depressing me.'

I spent the next two hours in the library, or morgue, as it's called, of The Times- Picayune. I could find almost nothing on German U-boat activity in the Gulf of Mexico that had been printed during the war years, since all military news was censored from late 1941 until after V-J Day. There was one exception, however: a headline story which ran for three days concerning four Nazi saboteurs who had been apprehended by the FBI south of Baton Rouge in a truck loaded with explosives.

A page one photograph showed them in fedoras and baggy suits, locked to a wrist chain, staring out at the camera with pale, rectangular faces and buckshot eyes. The cutline below said they had planned to blow up the Standard Oil refinery on the banks of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge. The last article in the series dealt with the arrest of an American accomplice, a retired oil man in Grand Isle by the name of Jon Matthew Buchalter, who had been a founder of the American Silver Shirts.

I jumped the microfilm ahead to the year 1956 and found the name of Jon Matthew Buchalter once again. It was in a twenty-inch feature story in the regional section, written with the detached tone one might use in examining an anthropological curiosity, about the oil man who had betrayed his country, flashed a signal one night through the mist at a U-boat south of Grand Isle, and helped bring ashore four men who, had they succeeded in their mission, would have dried up the flow of fuel to American and English forces for at least two weeks.

At the bottom of the page was a 1935 wire-service photograph of Buchalter with Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. Buchalter was a barrel-chested, vigorous-looking man, resplendent in white riding breeches, silver shirt, polished Sam Browne belt, black tie, and red-and-black armband. His right hand clasped Hitler's; he was smiling with the confidence of a man who knew that he had stepped into history.

After he was arrested in Grand Isle, a drunken mob of shrimpers tried to break him out of jail. They fled when sheriff's deputies began firing shotguns in the air. They left behind a thirty-foot spool of chain and a five-gallon can of gasoline.

He did his fourteen years of federal time in isolation, despised by both his warders and his fellow prisoners, eating food delivered through a slit by a trusty who in all probability spat in it first.

His wife and children had long ago moved out of state; his property had been confiscated for taxes. He weighed eighty pounds when his liver finally failed and he died in a public ward at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. There was no marker placed on his grave in potter's field other than a stamped tin number pressed into the sod.

I wondered what importance he would give the fact that the old potter's field in Orleans Parish was not segregated, like other cemeteries during that historical period, and that he would sow his teeth and bones among those of Negroes and perhaps even Jews.

Later that afternoon I parked in front of Lucinda Bergeron's house off Magazine. Just as I was turning off the engine, an open Jeep with oversized tires and four black kids inside pulled to the curb in front of me. The rap music playing on the stereo was deafening, like an electronic assault on the sensibilities. Zoot got out of the Jeep and went inside his house, his eyes straight ahead, as though I were not there. The three other boys did leg stretches on the lawn while they waited for him. All three were dressed in an almost paramilitary fashion-baggy black trousers like paratroopers might wear, gold neck chains, Air Jordan tennis shoes, black T-shirts with scrolled white death's-heads on them. Their hair was shaved to the scalp on the sides, with only a coarse, squared pad on the crown of the skull. Zoot came back out the front door and gave each of them a can of Pepsi-Cola.

When they drove away, the rap music from their stereo echoed off housefronts all the way down the street.

'You get an eyeful?' Zoot said.

'You run the PX for these characters?'

'The what?'

'Sergeant Motley's worried about you.'

He looked at me, waiting to see what new kind of trap was being constructed around him.

'He thinks you're going to get cooled out one of these days,' I said.

'Cooled… what?'

'He thinks you're cruising for a big fall.'

'Why y'all on my case? I ain't done nothing.'

'Did you tell your mother about what happened this morning?'

His eyes flicked sideways toward the house. He sucked in his cheeks and tried not to swallow.

'I remember something a guy told me once,' I said. 'He said it's as dishonorable to let yourself be used as it is to use someone else.'

'What you mean?'

'Your friends impress me as shitheads.'

'I don't care what you say. We stand by each ot'er. They're my friends in all kinds of ways.'

'Zoot, I didn't see one of those guys say thank you when you handed him a soft drink. Who's kidding who, podna?'

I found his mother on her knees in the backyard, spading out a hole for a pot of chrysanthemums. The Saint Augustine grass was thick and spongy underfoot, and the beds along her weathered wood fences were bursting with azaleas, banana trees, elephant ears, flaming hibiscus, and pink and blue hydrangeas. She was barefoot and wore a pair of white shorts and a purple blouse with green flowers on it. Her hair was on her shoulders, and her