Dixie City Jam

'I live in New Iberia. I'd like to help you. That's on the square. Do you understand me?'

'I go to jail because of boys?'

'Forget those guys. They're pukes. Nobody cares about them.'

'No jail?'

'That's right. What do you know about the vigilante, Manuel?'

He twisted his face away from me and stared out the passenger window, his lips as tight as the stitched mouth on a shrunken head. His leathery, work-worn hands looked like starfish clutched around the sack in his lap.

It was still raining a half hour later when I drove down Tommy Lonighan's drive, past the main house to the cottage where Manuel lived. Steam drifted off the coral-lined goldfish ponds; the door to the greenhouse banged like rifle shots in the wind. I cut the engine. Manuel sat motionless, with his hand resting on the door handle.

'Good luck to you,' I said.

'Why do?'

'Why do what?'

'Why help?'

'I think you're being used.' I took my business card out of my wallet and handed it to him. 'Call that telephone number if you want to talk.'

But it was obvious that he had little comprehension of what the words on the card meant. I slipped my badge holder out of my back pocket and opened it in front of him.

'I'm a police officer,' I said.

His hairline actually receded on his skull, like a rubber mask being stretched against bone; his nostrils whitened and constricted, as though he were inhaling air off a block of ice.

'All cops aren't bad, Manuel. Even those guys at the jail wanted to help you. They could have called Immigration if they had wanted.'

Bad word to use. The top of his left thigh was flexed like iron and trembling against his pants leg. I reached across him and popped the door open.

'Adios,' I said. 'Stay away from the pukes. Stay off Dauphine Street. Okay? Good-bye. Hasta whatever.'

I left him standing in the rain, his black hair splayed on his head like running paint, and drove back down the driveway. The gateman, a rain hat pulled down on his eyes, opened up for me. I rolled my window down as I drew abreast of him.

'Where's Tommy?' I said.

'He went out to the St. Charles Parish jail to pick up the Indian. He's gonna be a little pissed when he gets back.'

'It's not Manuel's fault.'

'Tell me about it. I'm working his shift. The guy's a fucking savage, Robicheaux. He eats mushrooms off the lawn, he's got a fucking blowgun in his room.'

Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought. You frighten and confuse a retarded man, then leave him to the care of a headcase like Tommy Lonighan.

'Leave the gate open,' I said.

I made a U-turn in the street and headed back up the drive. I got out of the truck, a newspaper over my head, and walked toward Manuel's cottage. Then I stopped. At the rear of the greenhouse, kneeling in the rain, Manuel was chopping a hole through the roots of a hibiscus bush with a gardener's trowel. When the hole was as deep as his elbow, he dropped the trowel inside and began shoving the mound of wet dirt and torn roots in on top of it. The, hibiscus flowers were red and stippled with raindrops, puffing and swelling in the wind like hearts on a green vine.

Ten minutes later I called Ben Motley from a pay phone outside a drugstore. A block away I could see the water whitecapping out on Lake Pontchartrain and, in the distance, the lights glowing like tiny diamonds on the causeway.

'Get a warrant on Tommy Lonighan's place,' I said.

'What for?'

I told him what I had seen and where they should dig.

'The vigilante is some kind of headhunter or cannibal?' he said.

'I don't know, Ben. But if you bust him, don't let the Caluccis or their lawyer bond him out.'

'The poor ignorant fuck.'

Welcome to Shit's Creek, Manuel.

chapter twenty-eight

The word death is never abstract. I think of my father high up on the night tower, out on the salt, when the wellhead blew and all the casing came out of the hole, the water and oil and sand geysering upward through the lights just before a spark flew from metal surface and ignited a flame that melted the steel spars into licorice; I think of his silent form, still in hobnailed boots and hard hat, undulating in the groundswell deep under the gulf, his hand and sightless face beckoning.

Death is the smell that rises green and putrescent from a body bag popped open in a tropical mortuary; the luminescent pustules that cover the skin of VC disinterred from a nighttime bog of mud and excrement when the 105's come in short; the purple mushrooms that grow as thick and knotted as tumors among gum trees, where the boys in butternut brown ran futilely with aching breasts under a rain of airbursts that painted their clothes with torn rose petals.

But there are other kinds of endings that serve equally well for relocating your life into a dead zone where there seems to be neither wind nor sound, certainly not joy, or even, after a while, the capacity to feel.

You learn that the opposite of love is not hate but an attempt at surrogate love, which becomes a feast of poisonous flowers. You learn to make love out of need, in the dark, with the eyes closed, and to justify it to yourself, with a kiss only at the end. You learn that that old human enemy, ennui, can become as tangible and ubiquitous a presence in your life as a series of gray dawns from which the sun never breaks free.

I wasn't going to let it happen.

Bootsie and I met at a dance on Spanish Lake in the summer of '57. It was the summer that Hurricane Audrey killed over five hundred people in Louisiana, but I'll always remember the season for the twilight softness of its evenings, the fish fries on Bayou Teche and crab boils out on Cypremort Point, the purple and pink magic of each sunrise, the four-o'clocks that Bootsie would string in her hair like drops of blood, and the rainy afternoon we lost our virginity together on the cushions in my father's boathouse while the sun's refraction off the water spangled our bodies with brown light.

It was the summer that Jimmy Clanton's 'Just a Dream' played on every jukebox in southern Louisiana. I believed that death happened only to other people, and that the season would never end. But it did, and by my own hand. Even at age nineteen I had learned how to turn whiskey into a weapon that could undo everything good in my life.

'What're you thinking about, bubba?' Bootsie said behind me.

'Oh, just one thing and another.' I stopped cleaning the spinning reel that I had taken apart on top of the picnic table. The air was wet and close, the willows dripping with water along the coulee.

'I called you twice through the window and you didn't hear me.'

'Sorry. What's up?'

'Nothing much. What's up with you?'

I turned around and looked at her. She wore a pair of white shorts and a T-shirt that was too small for her, which exposed her navel and her tapered, brown stomach.

'Isn't anything up with you?' she asked, and rested one knee on the bench, her arms on my shoulders, and leaned her weight into my back.

'What are you doing?' I said.