Dixie City Jam

'Why'd Batist leave?'

'He has his own way of doing things.'

He lived in a rambling, paintless house that had been built on to randomly by three generations of his family. The tin roof was orange with rust, the dirt yard strewn with chicken coops, tractor and car parts. On the sagging gallery were stacks of collapsible crab traps and an old washing machine that he had turned into a barbecue pit. His small farm had once been part of a plantation where Federal and Confederate troops had fought a furious battle during General Banks's invasion of southwestern Louisiana. Through the pines on the far side of the coulee which bordered Batist's property, you could see the broken shell and old brick pillars and chimneys of a burned-out antebellum home that the Federals first looted and then fired as they pushed a retreating contingent of Louisiana's boys in butternut brown northward into New Iberia. Every spring, when Batist cracked apart the matted soil in his truck patch with a singletree plow, minie balls, shards of broken china, and rusted pieces of canister would peel loose from the earth and slide back off the polished point of the share like the contents of a fecund and moldy envelope mailed from the year 1863.

I found him in his backyard, raking leaves onto a compost pile that was enclosed with chicken wire. The dappled sunlight through the oak branches overhead slid back and forth across his body like a network of yellow dimes.

'If you're going to take off early, I'd appreciate your telling me first,' I said.

'When I tole you you gotta t'row people out the shop 'cause of me?'

'Those were low-rent white people, Batist. I don't want them on my dock. That's my choice.'

'If a white man got to look out for a black man, then ain't nothin' changed.'

'This is what you're not understanding, partner. We don't let those kind of people insult Alafair, Bootsie, you, or me. It doesn't have anything to do with your race.'

He stopped work and propped his hands on the wood shaft of the rake. His wash-faded denim shirt was split like cheesecloth in back.

'Who you tellin' this to? Somebody just got off the train from up Nort'?' he said.

'Next time I'll keep my hand out of it. How's that?'

'Get mad if you want. T'rowin' them white men out ain't solvin' nothin'. It's about money, Dave. It's always about money. The white man need the nigger to work cheap. That ain't no mystery to black people. It's white folk don't figure it out, no.'

'I need you to help close up tonight,' I said.

'I'm gonna be there. Hey, you runnin' round in circles lookin' for this man been killin' dope dealers, this man who hurt you so bad the ot'er day, it don't have nothin' to do with no vigilante. When somebody killin' black people, it don't matter if up in a tree, or breakin' in a jail and hangin' a man on a beam, they can say it's 'cause he raped a white woman, or he killed a white man, or he done some ot'er t'ing. But it's over money. It means the black man stay down at the bottom of the pile. The dumbest nigger in Lou'sana know that.'

His eyes lingered indulgently on mine. He squeezed the rake handle, and his callused palm made a soft grating sound like leather rubbing against wood.

Monday morning I returned to work. The first telephone call I received was from Lucinda Bergeron.

'Fart, Barf, and Itch are no help on Will Buchalter,' she said. 'I don't understand it. Is the guy made out of air?'

'He didn't seem like it to me.'

'Then why doesn't he show up in the system?'

'You can't throw an electronic net over every psychopath in the country.'

'Somebody has to know who this guy is. Being around him must be like getting up in the morning and biting into a shit sandwich for breakfast.'

Too much time around squad rooms, Lucinda, I thought.

'How's Zoot doing?' I said.

'He's fine, thank you.'

'What's the problem?'

'He said you thought he should join 'the Crotch.' That's swinging-dick talk, isn't it? Quite a vocabulary you guys have.'

'How about your own?' I said.

'I'm not the one encouraging a seventeen-year-old boy to drop out of school.'

'He wanted me to talk to you about joining the Corps. He can get a GED there. I don't think it's the worst alternative in the world.'

'He can forget about it.'

'You do him a disservice. Why'd you call, Lucinda?'

Her anger seemed almost to rise from the perforations in the telephone receiver.

'That's a good question. When I figure it out, I'll tell you.' Then she made that sound again, like she had just broken a fingernail. A moment later, she said, 'We're operating a sting out of a motel dump by Ursulines and Claiborne. You want in on it?'

'What for?'

'We're going to roll over some dealers from the Iberville Project.'

'You think they're going to tell you something about the vigilante?'

'They're the bunch most likely to undergo open-heart surgery these days.'

'You think this will lead you back to Buchalter?'

'Who knows? Maybe there's more than one guy killing black dope dealers.'

'Lucinda, listen to me on this one. Buchalter doesn't have any interest in you or Zoot. Don't make it personal. Don't bring this guy into your life.'

'That sounds strange coming from you.'

'Read it any way you want. Zoot and I were lucky. The time to go home is after you hit the daily double.'

'You want in on the sting or not?'

'What's the address?'

I talked with the sheriff, arranged to have a deputy stay at the house until I returned sometime that evening, then signed out of the office and went home to change into street clothes. Bootsie's car was gone, and Alafair was at school. I used the Memo button on our telephone answering machine to leave Bootsie a recorded message. I gave her both Lucinda Bergeron's and Ben Motley's extension numbers, and, in case she couldn't reach me any other way, I left the name and address of the motel off Claiborne where the sting was being set up.

It seemed a simple enough plan.

On the way back down the dirt road, on the other side of the drawbridge, I saw the flatbed truck, with the conical loudspeakers welded on the roof, of the Reverend Oswald Flat, banging in the ruts and coming toward me in a cloud of dust. Crates of machinery or equipment of some kind were boomed down on the truck bed.

Oswald Flat recognized my pickup and clanked to a halt in the middle of the road. His pale eyes, which had the strange, nondescript color of water running over a pebbled streambed, stared at me from behind his large, rimless glasses. His wife sat next to him, eating pork rinds out of a brown bag.

'Where you running off to now?' he said.

'To New Orleans. I'm in a bit of a hurry, too.'

'Yeah, I can tell you're about to spot your drawers over something.'

'Today's not the day for it, Reverend.'

'Oh, I know that. I wouldn't want to hold you back from the next mess you're about to get yourself into. But my conscience requires that I talk to you, whether you like hit or not. Evidently you got the thinking powers of a turnip, son. Now, just stop wee-weeing in your britches a minute and pull onto the side of the road.'

'Os, I told you to stop talking to the man like he's a mo-ron,' his wife said, dabbing at the rings of fat under her chin with a handkerchief.

I parked in a wide spot and walked back toward his truck. Through the slats in one of the crates fastened to the flatbed with boomer chains I could see the round brass helmet, with glass windows and wing nuts, and the rubber and canvas folds of an ancient diving suit.

'I hate even to ask what you're doing with that,' I said.