DR07 - Dixie City Jam (33 page)

'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.

'Bought hit at a shipyard outside Lake Charles—air
hoses,
compressor, weighted shoes, cutting torch, stuff I don't even know the
name of. Now I got to get aholt of a boat.'

'You're going to try to find that sub?'

He smiled and didn't answer.

'Do you know what's in it?' I asked.

'I'd bet on a lot of Nazis ready for a breath of fresh air.'

'I think you're going to get hurt.'

'Hit's something they want. So I'll do everything I can to
make sure they don't get hit.'

'Don't do this, sir.'

'I cain't fault you. You mean well. But you still don't get
hit. You ain't chasing one man, or even a bunch of men. Hit's something
wants to take over the earth and blot out the sun. Hit's evil on a
scale the likes of ordinary people cain't imagine.'

His eyes searched in mine like those of a man who would never
find words to adequately explain the enigmas that to him had the
bright, clear shape of a dream.

'You lost your son to forces you couldn't control, Reverend,'
I said. 'I lost my wife Annie in a similar way. I was full of anger,
and after a while I came to believe the whole earth was a dark place.'

He was already shaking his head before I could finish.

'I was on a tanker got torpedoed. Right out yonder,' he said,
and pointed toward the southern horizon. 'There ain't no way to
describe hit for somebody ain't been there. Holding on to the life
jacket of a man whose face is burnt off… Boilers blowing
apart under the water… Men crawling around on the hull like
ants just before she slips to the bottom… Somebody screaming
out there inside an island of flaming oil. You don't never want to hear
a sound like that, Mr. Robicheaux.'

'Sometimes you have to let things go, partner.'

'They got to make people afraid. That's the plan. Make 'em
afraid of the coloreds, the dope addicts, the homeless, the
homosexuals, hit don't matter. When they got enough people afraid,
that's when they'll move.'

'Who?'

'The Book of Revelation says the Beast will come from the sea.
In the Bible the sea means politics.'

'I think you're a decent man. But don't go down after that sub
with this junk.'

'Just leave things alone… Don't be
messin'… Let the law handle hit… You put me in mind
of a woodpecker tapping away on a metal light pole.' He pursed his lips
and began to whistle, then opened the door to the truck cab and reached
behind the seat. 'Tell me what you make of this?'

'An iron rose.'

'Hit was probably tore off a tomb or a gate. But this morning
hit was on my front porch. The stem was stuck through the heart on a
valentine card.'

It was heavy in my palm, the iron black with age, the edges of
the petals thin and serrated with rust.

'Have you given somebody reason to be upset with you?' I said.

'I been working down in the Desire Project for the last week.'

'You know how to pick them.'

'Jesus didn't spend a lot of time with bankers and the fellows
at the Chamber of Commerce.'

I placed the iron rose back in his hand.

'Good luck to you, Reverend. Call me if I can help with
anything,' I said.

I left him there, a good man out of sync with the world, the
era, even the vocabulary of his countrymen. But I doubted if anyone
would ever be able to accuse the Reverend Oswald Flat of mediocrity.
His kind ended on crosses, forever the excoriated enemies of the
obsequious. To him my words of caution bordered on insult and my most
reasoned argument had the viability of a moth attempting to mold and
shape a flame.

A narcotics sting sounds interesting.
It's not. It usually
involves what's called rolling over the most marginal players in the
street trade—hypes, hookers, and part-time mules, and any of
their
demented friends and terrified family members who are unlucky enough to
get nailed with them. As a rule, the mules, or couriers, are dumb and
inept and spend lifetimes seeking out authority figures in the form of
probation officers and social workers. In the
normal world most of them couldn't make sandwiches without an
instruction manual. They are almost always users themselves, dress as
though they're color-blind, speak in slow motion, and wonder why cops
can easily pick them out of a crowd at a shopping mall.

They scheme and labor on a daily basis at the bottom of the
food chain. When they're busted in a sting, their choices are immediate
and severe—they either roll over and give up somebody else,
or they
go straight to jail, sweat out withdrawal over a toilet bowl in a
holding cell, then meditate upon their mistakes while hoeing soybeans
for several years at Angola.

Shitsville in the street trade is when you're spiking six
balloons a day and suddenly you're in custody and the Man can snap his
fingers and turn you into a Judas Iscariot or a trembling bowl of
Jell-O.

'You telling me you want to ride the beef, Albert?' the
plainclothes says to the frightened black man, who sits on the edge of
the motel bed, his wrists handcuffed behind him, his thin forearms
lined with the infected tracks and gray scar tissue of his addiction.

'If I give you Bobby, he'll fuck me up, man,' Albert answers.
'Cat's got a blade. He did a guy in Houston with it.'

The plainclothes, a heavy, choleric man in a sweaty,
long-sleeve white shirt, reaches out and taps Albert sharply on the
cheek with his hand.

'Are you stupid, Albert?' he says. 'You're already fucked up.
You're taking Bobby's fall. Bobby has kicked a two-by-four up your ass.
Look at me, you stupid shit. Bobby told me your old lady whores for
lepers. He laughs at both of you behind your back. He's got you copping
his joint and you're too fucking dumb to know it.'

'He told you my old—'

'You want to go back to Angola? You want to get turned out
again, made into a galboy, that's what you're telling me, Albert? You
like those swinging dicks to turn you out? I heard they tore up your
insides last time.'

'You gotta he'p me on this. I cain't go down again, man.'

'Get him out of my sight,' the plainclothes says to another
cop.

'You gotta keep my name out of it, okay? The cat tole me to
meet him in a pizza joint out in Metairie. He's gonna be there in an
hour.'

'You got to make him take you to his stash, Albert. That's the
only deal you get. Bobby goes down, you walk. Otherwise, your next high
is going to be on nutmeg and coffee. Is it true that stuff can give you
a hard-on like a chunk of radiator pipe?'

Albert trembles like a dog trying to pass broken glass; Albert
vomits in his lap; Albert makes the plainclothes turn away in disgust.

What's it all worth?

You've got me.

The people at the top usually skate. They buy defense
attorneys who used to be prosecutors for the U.S. Justice Department. A
million-dollar bond is simply factored into the overhead.

Albert goes to jail, or into a diversion program, or into the
graveyard. And nobody, except Albert, particularly cares which one,
since Albert doesn't even qualify as a footnote.

In an adjoining room Lucinda and I
questioned seven
individuals—five of them black, two white—about the
vigilante. But
these were people who long ago had accepted the sleepy embrace of the
succubus or incubus that had insinuated itself into their lives through
a tied-off, swollen vein. Their concept of mortality did not extend
past the next five minutes of their day. They shot up with one
another's syringes, used the public health clinic as a temporary means
to knock their venereal diseases into remission, looked upon AIDS as
just another way of dying, and daily accepted the knowledge that a
vengeful supplier could give them a hot shot that would transform their
hearts into kettledrums.

Their beef was with the narcs. Their angst was centered on
their own metabolism and the fact that they were about to rat out their
friends. Why bargain with a couple of homicide investigators who could
offer them nothing? They turned to stone.

Then one of those terrible moments happened, the kind that you
dream about, that you hope will never occur in your career, that will
always somehow be the misfortune of someone else. Later, you'll
attribute it to bad judgment, callousness, inhumanity, bad luck, or
simple stupidity, like a safety-minded fool righteously padlocking fire
exits, but it remains forever as the moment that left you with the mark
of Cain.

The plainclothes who had been interrogating Albert decided to
tighten and tamp down the dials a little more and whipped Albert
repeatedly across his nappy head with a fedora, yelling at him
simultaneously, until another cop stopped it and walked him outside for
a cigarette. When they came back in, the plainclothes's face was still
flushed and his armpits were.gray with sweat. The thermostat switch was
broken, and the room was hot and dry with the electric heat from the
wall panels. The plainclothes ripped off his tie, kneaded the thick
folds in the back of his neck, then hung his shoulder holster on the
back of a wood chair.

Albert was shirtless, his lap soiled with vomit, his face
wringing wet. His shoulders trembled, and his teeth clicked in his
mouth. He begged to go to the toilet.

The plainclothes walked him into the bathroom, unlocked one
cuff, then snipped it on a water pipe and closed the door.

Albert was strung out, delusional, popping loose seam and
joint. His body was foul with its own fluids; his pitiful attempt at
integrity had been robbed from him; his new identity was that of snitch
and street rat. With luck he'd be out of town before his friend Bobby
made bail.

But Albert was jail-wise and had been underestimated.

He feverishly lathered his wrist with soap and pulled his thin
hand through the cuff like it was bread dough. The plainclothes stared
with disbelief as Albert came through the bathroom door and tore the
.38 out of the shoulder holster that hung on the chair back, his hand
shaking, his eyes blood-flecked and bulging with fear, sweat streaming
down his chest.