Dixie City Jam

'That's the way it goes,' he said. 'I wouldn't feel bad about it. It took me a half day and Son of Sambo here to work this scam.'

'What's going on, Mr. Dave?' Zoot said.

'Who you working for, podjo?' I said.

'Podjo? I dig it. I heard you were a cute motherfucker,' he said, still smiling, and moved past me to my open truck door, the Luger aimed at my chest, and switched off the ignition and headlights.

'Cut the kid loose. He's not a player,' I said.

'Nits makes lice. Stamp 'em out when you get the chance. That's what some people say.'

'I think you're standing in your own shit, buddy,' I said. 'You pop a cap on this road and you won't get back across the drawbridge.'

But even while I was talking I saw a shadow, a large one, moving from the parked pickup truck, along the side of the van, and I knew that I had not yet confronted my real adversary that night.

A scorched-black bank of thunderclouds over the marsh pulsed and flickered with veins of lightning, and in the white glow through the canopy of trees I saw Will Buchalter step out in front of the van, his Panama hat pushed back on his head, his lopsided Will Rogers grin as affectionate as that of an old friend.

He reached out with his hand to feel my face, just as a blind man might. My head jerked back from the sour smell of his palm.

'I'm sorry to do this to you, Dave, but you don't ride the beef easy,' he said, stepped close to me, his thighs widening, and clamped both his forearms on each side of my neck.

'Yeah, ride the beef„ man. Ride that motherfucker down,' the other man said, and began giggling.

Then Buchalter's forearms flexed as tight as iron and squeezed into the sides of my neck like machinery breaking bird bone. I could feel his body trembling with strain, his breath quivering like a feather against my ear, then I felt the arteries to the brain shut down, and my knees buckled as though the tendons had been severed. A wave of nausea and red-black color slid across my eyes, and I was tumbling into a dark, cool place where the rain bounced off the skin as dryly as paper flowers and the distant thunder over the gulf was only the harmless echo of ships' guns that had long since been muted with moss and the lazy, dull drift of sand and time.

chapter nineteen

Pain can be a bucket of gasoline-smelling water hurled into the face, the concrete floor that bites into the knees, the hemp knotted into the wrists behind the squared wood post, the wrenched muscles in the arms, the Nazi flag coming back into focus against a urine yellow cinder-block wall, then once again the gears turning dully on a hand-crank generator, gaining speed now, starting to hum now, whining louder through the metal casing as the current strikes my genitals just like an iron fist, soaring upward into the loins, mashing the kidneys, seizing an area deep in the colon like electric pliers.

I was sure the voice coming out of my mouth was not my own. It was a savage sound, ripped out of the viscera, loud as cymbals clapped on the ears, degrading, eventually weak and plaintive, the descending tremolo like that of an animal with its leg in a steel trap.

A redheaded, crew-cut, porcine man in a black Grateful Dead T-shirt, with white skin, a furrowed neck, and deep-set, lime green eyes, sat forward on a folding chair, pumping his chubby arms furiously on the handles of the generator. Then he stopped and stared at one of his palms.

'I got a blister on me hand,' he said.

'Ease it up, Will. You're gonna lose him again,' the man with the silver beard said.

'It ain't Will's fault. All the sod's got to do is flap 'is fouking 'ole for us,' the man at the generator said.

'Electricity's funny, Will. It settles in a place like water. Maybe it's his heart next,' the man with the beard said.

Will Buchalter was shirtless, booted in hobnails. His upper torso tapered down inside his olive, military-style dungarees like the carved trunk of a hardwood tree. His armpits were shaved and powdered, and, just above his rib cage, there were strips of sinew that wrinkled and fanned back like pieces of knotted cord from the sides of his breasts. He sat with one muscular buttock propped on a battered desk, his legs crossed, his face bemused, lost in thought under the brim of his Panama hat.

'What about it, Dave?' he asked.

My head hung forward, the sweat and water streaming out of my hair.

'Answer the man, you dumb fouk,' the porcine man in the black T-shirt said, and lifted my chin erect with a wood baton. His skin was as white as milk.

'Don't hurt his face again, Freddy,' Buchalter said.

'I say leave off with the technology, Will,' the man called Freddy answered. 'I say consider 'is nails. I could play a lovely tune with 'em.'

Will Buchalter squatted down in front of me and pushed his hat to the back of his head. A bright line of gold hair grew out of his pants into his navel.

'You've got stainless-steel cojones, Dave,' he said. 'But you're going through all this pain to prevent us from having what's ours. That makes no sense for anybody.'

He slipped a folded white handkerchief out of his back pocket and blotted my nose and mouth with it. Then he motioned the other two men out of the room. When they opened the door I smelled grease, engine oil, the musty odor of rubber tires.

'Freddy and Hatch aren't the sharpest guys on the block, Dave. But armies and revolutions get built out of what's available,' Buchalter said. His eyes glanced down at my loosened trousers. He picked up one of the generator's wires and sucked wistfully on a canine tooth. 'I promise you you'll walk out of it. We have nothing to gain by hurting you anymore or killing you. Not if you give us what we want.'

A bloody clot dripped off the end of my tongue onto my chin.

'Go ahead, Dave,' he said.

But the words wouldn't come.

'You're worried about the Negro?' he said. 'We'll let him go, too. I promise I won't let Freddy get out of control like that again, either. He's just a little peculiar sometimes. When he was a kid some wogs took a liking to him in the back room of a pub, you know what I mean?'

He placed his palm across my forehead, as though he were gauging my temperature, then pressed my head gently back into the post. His eyes studied mine.

'It's almost light outside,' he said. 'You can have a shower and hot food, you can sleep, you can have China white to get rid of the pain, you can have a man's love, too, Dave.'

He brought his face closer to mine and smiled lopsidedly.

'It's all a matter of personal inclination, Dave. I don't mean to offend,' he said. He looked at the smear of blood and saliva across his squared handkerchief, folded it, and slipped it back into his pocket. Then the light in his eyes refocused, as though he were capturing an elusive thought. 'We're going to take back our cities. We're driving the rodents back into the sewers. It's a new beginning, Dave, a second American Revolution. You can be proud of your race and country again. It's going to be a wonderful era.'

He shifted his weight and settled himself more comfortably on one knee, like a football coach about to address his players. He grinned.

'Come on, admit it, wouldn't you like to get rid of them all, blow them off the streets, chase them back into their holes, paint their whole end of town with roach paste?' he said. He winked and poked one finger playfully in my ribs.

'I apologize, it's a bad time for jokes,' he said. 'Before we go on, though, I need to tell you something. In your house you said some ugly things to me. I was angry at the time, but I realize you were afraid and your only recourse was to try to hurt and manipulate me. But it's all right now. It makes our bond stronger. It's pain that fuses men's souls together. We're brothers-in-arms, Dave, whether you choose to think so or not.'

He got to his feet, went to the desk, and returned with a nautical chart of the Louisiana coast unrolled between his hands. He squatted in front of me again. In the shadow of his hat the spray of blackheads at the corners of his eyes looked like dried scale.