Dixie City Jam

'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