Dixie City Jam

'Where's your mom?'

'She ain't here. Something wrong?'

'I've got to get ahold of her. I need a boat.'

'She went to the grocery. What kind of boat you looking for?'

'A fast one,' I said.

'You ax the right man.'

'Oh?'

'I tole you at your house. But you wasn't listening real good, remember? I worked on all kinds of boats.'

'Who owns this boat, Zoot?'

'A man who don't mind lending it, I promise. When you coming?'

An hour and a half later I parked the truck at a boatyard way out in Jefferson Parish. It had quit raining; and the sky was dark, and water was dripping off the tin shed where Zoot waited in a cabin cruiser with the interior lights on. I took my Japanese field glasses from the glove compartment, then unlocked the iron box welded to the bed of my pickup and removed my old army field jacket and the AR-15 and my Remington twelve-gauge with the barrel sawed off right in front of the pump that I had wrapped in a canvas duffel bag. I dropped a box of.223 rounds and a box of double-ought buckshot into the bag and pulled the drawstring. When I walked out onto the dock under the shed I saw that Zoot wasn't alone.

'Hello, Lucinda,' I said, stepping down into the boat.

She was dressed in jeans, a purple sweater, and a nylon NOPD windbreaker. Zoot fixed his attention on the clearing sky, tapping his palms on the wheel, whistling quietly.

'What would you like to hear from me first?' she said.

'I beg your pardon?'

'You call my house and ask a seventeen-year-old to provide a boat for you?' she said.

'Believe what you want, Lucinda. I'm not up to an argument tonight.'

'You were willing to bring a minor and civilian into a potentially dangerous situation? With no consultation with anyone else?'

'I couldn't get a boat from Motley. I don't have time to go back to New Iberia. You think it's right Purcel may be out there by himself?'

'I can't quite tell you how angry I am,' she said.

'Then why'd you let him come?'

She didn't answer. I lowered my voice. 'Maybe nobody's out there. Maybe I should have waited for you to come home. Maybe I should have gone back to New Iberia,' I said. 'I did what I thought was best.'

I waited. Her arms were folded across her chest, her hands cupped on her elbows. I looked at Zoot, and he turned over the engines and backed us out of the slip. The wind was cool and damp and smelled of salt and dead gars that had been hit by boat propellers. Lights flickered across the clouds in the south.

We headed down Bayou St. Denis. It was a beautiful boat, custom-built with teakwood and mahogany panels in the cabin, brightwork that had the soft glow of butter, wide beds down below, sonar, a pump toilet, a small galley, and twin two-hundred-horsepower Evinrude outboard engines that could hit fifty knots. When we entered Barataria Bay, Zoot tried to open her up.

'The chop's too heavy. You're going to beat us to death, partner,' I said.

The glass was beaded with the spray off the bow. The moon had broken from behind the clouds, and our wake glistened behind us like a long brown and silver trough. Zoot wore a black knitted cap rolled up on top of his head and chewed on a matchstick. When he eased back on the throttle, I saw the two ignition wires wrapped together and swinging loose at the bottom of the instrument panel.

'What kind of engineering do we have here, Zoot?' I said, raising my finger toward the wires.

'The man out of town right now. He forgot to leave the key where it's always at,' he said.

'I see.'

'That's a fact. He lets me take it all the time. I'll introduce y'all sometime.'

'That's very kind of you.'

I looked down below at Lucinda, who was sitting on a cushioned storage locker with her legs crossed, staring straight ahead. Her nickel-plated.357 revolver glinted in her belt holster. I realized that I had read her wrong.

I walked down the steps and sat on a bunk across from her. I could feel the steady vibration of the bow coursing through the chop.

'You're over the black dude in the motel?' I said.

Her mouth parted slightly.

'It's like anything else. It passes,' I said.

The skin wrinked at the corner of her left eye.

'The first time a guy dealt the play on me, I thought I'd wake up with his face in front of me every day of my life,' I said. 'Then one day it was gone. Poof. Three years later I put another guy down.'

'Why are you doing this?' she said.

'Because this boat's a little warm.'

'It's a little…'

'Right. Warm. Not hot exactly. Terms like borrowed and lend- lease come to mind,' I said, and leaned forward on my hands. 'You've got your own agenda tonight, Lucinda.'

'He tortured my son.'

'You know when a good cop does it by the numbers? The day he thinks he shouldn't do it by the numbers.'

'I get this from the friend and advocate of Clete Purcel? Wonderful.'

'Don't let Buchalter remake you in his image.'

She looked into my face for a long time.

'Your advice is always good, Dave,' she said. 'But it's meant for others. It has no application for yourself, does it?'

We stared silently at each other as the hull of the boat veered toward the cut at Grand Terre.

It was a strange, cold dawn. With first light the sky looked streaked with india ink, then the wind dropped suddenly and the sun came up red and molten on the gulf's watery rim. The tide was coming in, rose-dimmed, heavy with the fecund smell of schooled-up trout, flecked with foam toward the shore, the air loud with the cry of gulls that glided and dipped over our wake. I watched the gray-green landmass of Louisiana fall away behind us,

Zoot stood erect in front of the wheel, his hooded workout jersey zipped up to his chin, his long hands resting lightly on the spokes. He had cranked open the glass, and the skin of his face looked taut and bright with cold.

'How you doing, Skipper?' I said.

'Not bad. She asleep?'

'Yes.'

'You know what she said about you the other day?'

'I wouldn't want to guess.'

'She say, 'He's probably crazy but I wouldn't mind if I'd met him before he was married.''

'You'd better not be giving out your mama's secrets,' I said.

'Why you think she tell it to me?' he said.

Through my field glasses I could see the black, angular silhouettes of two abandoned drilling platforms against the sun and a freighter with rusty scuppers and a Panamanian flag to the far west. Zoot cut back on the throttle, and we rocked forward on our own wake.

'Look at the sonar, Mr. Dave,' he said. 'We're in about forty feet now. But see where the line drops? That's a trench. I been over it before. It runs maybe two miles, unless it drifts over with sand sometimes.'

'You're pretty good at this.'

'I ain't even gonna say nothing. You and her just alike. Got one idea about everything, so every day you always surprised about something.'

'I think you're probably right.'