Dixie City Jam

warm off the river behind us, the sun bright on the banana and myrtle trees inside the square, and water sprinklers ticked along the black piked fences that bordered the grass and separated it from the sidewalk artists and the rows of shops under the old iron colonnades. I left Batist in the cafe and walked through the square, past St. Louis Cathedral, where street musicians were already setting up in the shade, and up St. Ann toward Clete's private investigator's office.

Morning was always the best time to walk in the Quarter. The streets were still deep in shadow, and the water from the previous night's rain leaked from the wood shutters down the pastel sides of the buildings, and you could smell coffee and fresh-baked bread in the small grocery stores and the dank, cool odor of wild spearmint and old brick in the passageways. Every scrolled-iron balcony along the street seemed overgrown with a tangle of potted roses, bougainvillea, azaleas, and flaming hibiscus, and the moment could be so perfect that you felt you had stepped inside an Utrillo painting.

But it wasn't all a poem. There was another reality there, too: the smell of urine in doorways, left nightly by the homeless and the psychotic, and the broken fragments of tiny ten-dollar cocaine vials that glinted in the gutters like rats' teeth.

The biscuit-colored stucco walls inside Clete's office were decorated with bullfight posters, leather wine bags, banderillas that he had brought back from his vacation in Mexico City. Through the back window I could see the small flagstone patio where he kept his dumbbells and the exercise bench that he used unsuccessfully every day to keep his weight and blood pressure down. Next to it was a dry stone well impacted with dirt and untrimmed banana trees.

He sat behind his desk in his Budweiser shorts, a yellow tank top, and porkpie hat. His blue-black.38 police special hung in a nylon holster from a coatrack in the corner. He pried the cap off a bottle of Dixie beer with his pocketknife, let the foam boil over the neck onto the rug, kicked off his flip-flops, and put his bare feet on top of the desk.

'You trying to leave the dock early today?' I said.

'Hey, I was in the tank all night. You ought to check that scene out, mon. Two-thirds of the people in there are honest-to-God crazoids. I'm talking about guys eating their grits with their hands. It's fucking pitiful.'

He pushed at a scrap of memo paper by his telephone.

'I was a little bothered by something Nate Baxter said last night,' I said.

'Oh yeah?'

'This vigilante stuff. He thinks you might be the man.'

He drank out of his beer and smiled at me, his eyes filled with a merry light.

'You think I might actually have that kind of potential?' he said.

'People have said worse things about both of us.'

'The Lone Ranger was a radio show, mon. I don't believe there's any vigilante. I think we're talking about massive wishful thinking. These hits are just business as usual in the city. We've got a murder rate as high as Washington, D.C.' s now.'

'Five or six of them have been blacks in the projects.'

'They were all dealers.'

'That's the point,' I said.

'Dave, I've run down bond jumpers in both the Iberville and Desire projects. Life in there is about as important as water breaking out the bottom of a paper bag. The city's going to hell, mon. That's the way it is. If somebody's out there taking names in a serious way, I say more power to them. But I don't think that's the case, and anyway it's not me.'

He took a long drink from the beer. The inside of the bottle was filled with amber light. Moisture slid down the neck over the green-and-gold label.

'I'm sorry. You want me to send out for a Dr Pepper or some coffee?' he asked.

'No, I've got to be going. I had to bring my boat up from New Iberia for some work. It'll be ready about noon.'

He picked up the slip of memo paper by his phone and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger.

'I ought to save you a headache and throw this away,' he said. But he flipped it across the desk blotter at me.

'What is it?'

'That black broad, the sergeant who was in front of Calucci's, called this morning. She didn't know how else to get ahold of you. My advice is that you pitch that telephone number in the trash and go back to New Iberia. Forget New Orleans. The whole place is just waiting for a hydrogen bomb.'

'What's the deal?'

'She's a hard-nosed black broad named Lucinda Bergeron from the projects who doesn't take dog shit from white male cops. That's the deal.'

'So?'

'Last night she evidently got in Nate Baxter's face. So today he's trying to kick a two-by-four up her ass. He wrote her up for insubordination. He says she cussed him out. She says she's innocent and you can back her up.'

'She didn't cuss him out while I was there. In fact, she really kept her Kool-Aid.'

'Don't get sucked in, mon. Messing with Baxter is like putting your hand in a spittoon.'

I picked,up the slip of paper and put it in my pocket.

'What do I know?' he said.

I called the dock from the guesthouse and was told that the mechanic had gone home sick and my boat would not be ready until the next day. Then I called the number on the slip of paper, which turned out to be Garden District police headquarters, and was told that Lucinda Bergeron was not in. I left my name and the telephone number of the guesthouse.

Batist was sitting on the side of his bed, his big, callused, scar-flecked hands in his lap, staring out the French doors, his face full of thought.

'What's troubling you, partner?' I asked.

'That nigger out yonder in the lot.'

'That what?'

'You heard me.'

'What'd he do?'

'While you was still sleepin', I got up early and went down to the dining room for coffee. He was eatin' in there, talkin' loud with his mout' full of food, puttin' his hand on that young white girl's back each time she po'ed his coffee. Pretendin' like it's innocent, like he just a nice man don't have no bad t'oughts on his mind, no.'

'Maybe it's their business, Batist.'

'That kind of trashy nigger make it hard on the rest of us, Dave.'

He walked to the French doors, continued to stare out at the parking lot, peeled the cellophane off a cigar, and wadded the cellophane up slowly in his palm.

'He leanin' up against your truck,' he said.

'Let it go.'

'He need somebody to go upside his head.'

I knew better than to argue with Batist, and I didn't say anything more. He took off his short-sleeve blue denim shirt, hung it on the bedpost, and lathered his face with soap in front of the bathroom mirror. The muscles in his shoulders and back looked like rocks inside a leather bag. He began shaving with a pearl-handled straight-edge razor, drawing the blade cleanly down each of his jaws and under his chin.

I had known him since I was a child, when he used to fur-trap with my father on Marsh Island. He couldn't read or write, not even his own name, and had difficulty recognizing numbers and dialing a telephone. He had never been outside the state of Louisiana, had voted for the first time in 1968, and knew nothing of national or world events… But he was one of the most honest and decent men I've known, and absolutely fearless and unflinching in an adversarial situation (my adopted daughter, Alafair, never quite got over the time she saw him reach into a flooded pirogue, pinch a three-foot moccasin behind the head, and fling it indifferently across the bayou).