Dixie City Jam

Orleans at nighttime, an avenue like St. Charles, except, as in the paintings of Bavarian villages by Adolf Hitler, there were no people. The sky was a black ink wash, the mosshung oaks along the sidewalks as motionless as stone; the houses had become prisons that radiated fear, and the empty streets were lighted with the obscene hues of sodium lamps that allowed no shadows or places to hide. It was a place where the glands had replaced the heart and the booted and head-shaved lout had been made caretaker of the sun.

The next morning I called the bishop's office again. This time I was told the bishop had gone to Washington and the monsignor was in Opelousas and would not be back until that afternoon. I left my number.

At noon I got a phone call from Tommy Bobalouba.

'I'll treat you to some etouffee,' he said.

'I'm working right now.'

'I drove all the way over here to talk. How about getting your nose out of the air for a little while?'

'The last time you were over here, you set me up as your alibi while somebody tried to clip Nate Baxter.'

'So you lost money? It don't mean I don't respect you.'

'What do you want?'

'I want to talk. I got a heavy fucking problem, man. It's something I can't talk to nobody else about. You don't got thirty minutes, then fuck you, Dave.'

'Where are you?' I said.

I drove up to the seafood restaurant on the back road to St. Martinville and found him inside, seated on a tall stool at the bar, eating raw oysters from a tray. He had covered each oyster with Tabasco sauce,.and sweat was trickling out of his meringue hair. I recognized three of his crew at one of the tables, dour-faced Irish hoods with the mental capabilities of curb buttons, who had always run saloons or upstairs crap games for Tommy or shut down the competition when it tried to establish itself in areas Tommy had staked out for himself.

But Tommy had never used bodyguards and, always desirous of social acceptance by New Orleans's upper classes, did not associate openly with his employees.

'What are you looking at?' he said.

'Your crew seem to be enjoying their meal,' I said.

'I can't bring my boys to your town for a lunch?'

'What's up, partner?'

'I got some personal trouble.' He wiped his mouth with his hand and looked at it.

I waited.

He looked around, closed and opened his eyes, his face flexing like rubber, then stared disjointedly out into space. Then he tried to smile, all in seconds.

'Hey, Dave, you went to Catholic school, you boxed in Golden Gloves,' he said. 'You ever have a mick priest for a coach, guy who'd have all the fighters say a Hail Mary in the dressing room, then tell them to get out there and nail the other guys in the mush?'

'It sounds familiar, Tommy.'

'It was good coming up like that, wasn't it? Them was good days back then.'

'They weren't bad. Are you going to tell me what's on your mind?'

'I tried to get out of this prostate operation. The doc said it might leave me wearing a diaper. So we tried other stuff. Three days ago the doc tells me it's spread. Like a big worm eating its way through my insides. I ain't got to worry about an operation anymore. You understand what I'm saying? It's a funny feeling. It's like you're looking at a clock somebody just snapped the hands off.'

Then I saw it in his face, the grayness and the pinched quality around the mouth, the remoteness in the eyes, the knowledge that he had entered a piece of psychological moonscape on which there was no traveling companion.

'I'm sorry, Tommy,' I said.

He used a folded paper napkin to blot the perspiration around his hairline. He glanced through the big plate glass window at the back of the restaurant. Outside was a small, dark lake, and dead leaves were falling into the water.

'You still go to Mass?' he said.

'Yes.'

'I mean, for real, not just to make your old lady happy or something like that?'

'What can I do for you?'

'Look, if a guy maybe knows about something, maybe about even some people being clipped, people maybe even that's got it coming, but he don't do it himself, like it's out of his hands, you know what I mean, then it ain't on his soul, right?'

I tried to assimilate what he had said, but that was like trying to make ethical or theological sense out of Sanskrit read backwards.

'You want to float that one by me again?' I said.

'Look, I took out one guy in my life, I mean besides Korea. That was the guy I did with the fire hose. This guy was such a bum even the judge said he ought to be dug up again and electrocuted. I don't go around killing people, Dave. But what if I knew what was going on, maybe like there was other people doing it, and I figure it's their choice, I don't make people do what they got to do, I just hold on to my ass and walk through the smoke, it's a rough fucking town to keep a piece of, the hair ends up on the wallpaper, that's the way it shakes out sometimes, right?'

'I'm a police officer, Tommy. Maybe you'd better give some thought to what you're telling me.'

'I'm standing on third base here. You gonna come to the bone yard to arrest me? What if I made a contribution to the church? Maybe you know a priest don't go through everything with a garden rake. It ain't easy for me to figure all this stuff out, talk about it with people I don't know. I get a headache.'

His knuckles and eyebrows were half-mooned with scar tissue; his blue eyes had a bright sheen like silk. What do you say to an uneducated, confused, superstitious, angry man, with a frightened child inside him, as he tries to plea-bargain his sins and cop to a fine before he catches the bus?

'I can introduce you to a priest, a friend of mine,' I said. 'Just tell him what you told me. I wouldn't get into the area of contributions at that point, though.'

'What? It sound like bribery?'

'You might say that.'

'Oh.'

'Tommy, do you know something about the vigilante killings? Is that what we're talking about here?'

He wiped at the tip of his nose with one knuckle.

'If that's the case, why not come clean on it, get it out of the way?' I said.

His eyes bulged, and he poked me in the chest with his stiffened finger.

'Hey, I don't dime, I don't rat-fuck, you saying I do, Dave, you and me are about to remodel this place.'

'Adios,' I said.

'Hey, don't be like that,' he said, and grabbed my coat. Then he released it and smoothed the cloth with his hand. 'I'm sorry, I got a Coke bottle up my butt. I don't know how to act sometimes. Look, me and the Calucci brothers are quits. They welsh, they lie, they got no class, they'll blindside you and take you off at the neck. You do business with shit bags and greaseballs, you invite a load of grief into your life.

'I can't change what's already happened, I mean, maybe some stuff I'm part responsible for, but maybe I can make up for it a little bit. Your buddy Purcel… Hey, I got your attention.'

'What about him?'

'He filled up Max and Bobo's Caddy with cement while about a hundred people were laughing and clapping and grabbing themselves. Even the cops were making jokes about it over their radios.'

'What are you saying, partner?'

'You know how many guys in New Orleans would like to take Purcel down? How many guys he's sent up the road or run through glass windows or stuck their heads in toilet bowls? It's an open contract, fifteen large, Dave, he's anybody's fuck. That ain't all, either. There's a ten large bonus if it's in pieces. You know, with Polaroids or a videocassette.'

He squeezed a lemon slice on an oyster, then lifted the shell and sucked the muscle into his mouth. But