Jimmy Ray Dixon was one of those in-your-face people who insult and demean others with such confidence that you always assume they have nothing to hide themselves.
It's a good ruse. Just like offering a lie when no one has challenged your integrity. For example, lying about how you lost a hand in Vietnam.
After Jimmy Ray and his entourage had left the dock, I'd called a friend at the Veterans Administration in New Orleans.
The following day, when I got back to the department from the LaRose plantation, my friend called and read me everything he had pulled out of the computer on Jimmy Ray Dixon.
He didn't lose a hand clearing toe-poppers from a rice paddy outside Pinkville. A gang of Chinese thieves, his business partners in selling stolen PX liquor on the Saigon black market, cut it off.
A cross-referenced CID report also indicated Jimmy Ray may have been involved in smuggling heroin home in GI coffins.
So he lied about his war record, I thought. But who wouldn't, with a file like that?
That was not what had bothered me.
At the dock Jimmy Ray had said somebody had shot into his home and had killed his brother.
His home.
I went to the public library and the morgue at the Daily Iberian and began searching every piece of microfilm I could find on the assassination of Ely Dixon.
Only one story, in Newsweek magazine, mentioned the fact that Ely was killed in a two-bedroom house he rented for fifty dollars a month from his brother, Jimmy Ray, to whom the article referred as a disabled Vietnam war veteran.
I drove back to the department and went into the sheriff's office.
"What if the wrong man was killed?" I said.
"I have a feeling my interest is about to wane quickly," he said.
"It was the sixties. Church bombings in Birmingham and Bogalusa, civil rights workers lynched in Mississippi. Everybody assumed Ely Dixon was the target."
"You're trying to figure out the motivation on a homicide that's twenty-eight years old? Who cares? The victim doesn't. He's dead just the same."
He could barely contain the impatience and annoyance in his voice. He turned his swivel chair sideways so he wouldn't have to look directly at me when he spoke.
"I like you a lot, Dave, but, damn it, you don't listen. Leave the LaRoses alone. Let Aaron Crown fall in his own shit."
"I told Helen we don't execute people in Iberia Parish."
"Don't be deluded. That's because the electric chair doesn't travel anymore."
He began fiddling with a file folder, then he put it in his desk drawer and rose from his chair and looked out the window until he heard me close the door behind me.
Batist went home sick with a cold that evening, and before supper Alafair and I drove down to his house with a pot of soup. His wife had died the previous year, and he lived with his three bird dogs and eight cats on a dirt road in an unpainted wood house with a sagging gallery and a peaked corrugated roof, a truck garden in a side lot and a smokehouse in back. The sparse grass in his yard was raked clean, his compost pile snugged in by chicken wire, his crab traps stacked next to a huge iron pot in the backyard where he cooked cracklings in the fall.
Over the years, in early spring, when he broke the thatched hard-pan on his garden, his single-tree plow had furrowed back bits of square nails, the rusted shell of a wagon spring,.58 caliber minié balls, a corroded tin of percussion caps, a molded boot, a brass buckle embossed with the letters CSA, the remains from a Confederate encampment that had probably been overrun by federals in 1863.
I first met Batist when I was a little boy and he was a teenager, a blacksmith's helper in a rambling, red barnlike structure on a green lot out on West Main. Batist worked for a frail, very elderly man named Mr. Antoine, one of the last surviving Confederate veterans in the state of Louisiana. Every day Mr. Antoine sat in the wide doors of his smithy, to catch the breeze, in red suspenders and straw hat, the skin under his throat distended like an inverted cock's comb.
Anyone who wished could drop by and listen to his stories about what he called "the War."
Few did.
But I'll never forget one he told me and Batist.
It was during Jubal Early's last assault on the federals before the surrender at Appomattox. A fourteen-year-old drummer boy from Alabama was the only unwounded survivor of his outfit. Rather than surrender or run, he tied a Confederate battle flag to an empty musket and mounted a horse and charged the union line. He rode two hundred yards through a bullet-cropped cornfield littered with southern dead, his colors raised above his head all the while, his eyes fixed on the stone wall ahead of him where five thousand federals waited and looked at him in disbelief.
Not one of them fired his weapon.
Instead, when the boy's horse labored up the slope and surged through a gap in the wall, three federal soldiers pulled him from the saddle and took his colors and pinioned him to the ground. The boy flailed and kicked until one soldier in blue said, "Son, you ain't got to study on it no more. You're over on the Lord's side now."
Mr. Antoine slapped his thigh and howled at the implications of his story, whatever they were.
Later, I would read a similar account about Cemetery Ridge. Maybe it was all apocryphal. But if you ever doubted Mr. Antoine's authority as a veteran of the Civil War, he would ask you to feel the cyst-encrusted pistol ball that protruded like a sparrow's egg below his right elbow.
The irony was the fact that the man who probably knew more firsthand accounts of Mr. Antoine's War, and the man who grew food in the detritus of a Confederate encampment, was a descendant of slaves and did not know how to read and write and consequently was never consulted as a source of information by anyone.
He sat down with the soup at the kitchen table in a pair of slippers and surplus navy dungarees and a denim shirt buttoned at the throat. The sun glimmered off the bayou through the trees behind his house.
"Fat Daddy Babineau brought me some poke chops, but they ain't good for you when you got a stomach upsetness. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, though," he said.
"You going to be all right by yourself?" I said.
"I'm gonna be fine." He looked at Alafair, who was examining some minié balls on his kitchen shelf. Then he looked back at me.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Fat Daddy just left. I was fixing to call you." He kept his eyes on my face.
"Alf, you want to take the truck to the four corners and get a half gallon of milk?" I said.
"Pretty slick way of getting rid of me. But… okay," she said, one palm extended for the keys, the other on her hip.
"Fat Daddy seen this man bring his pirogue out of the swamp," Batist said after Alafair had gone out the door. "Him and his wife was fishing on the bank, and this big nigger wit' one side of his head shaved paddled out of the trees. It was the same morning you seen that man wit' a light out past our dock, Dave.
"Fat Daddy said this big nigger had gold teet' and arms thick as telephone poles. There was a gun up in the bow, and when Fat Daddy seen it, the nigger give him such a mean look Fat Daddy's wife wanted to get in the car. It's the same man come to our shop, ain't it?"
"It sounds like him."
"That ain't all of it, no. Fat Daddy and his wife was walking down the levee when they seen the same nigger again, this time busting out the bottom of the pirogue with his foot. He smashed big holes all over it and sunk it right in the canal. Why he want to do somet'ing like that?"
"Who knows? Maybe he didn't want to leave his fingerprints around."
"That ain't all of it. He seen them watching him and he walked up on the levee and got between Fat Daddy and Fat Daddy's car and says, 'Why you following me around?'
"Fat Daddy says, 'We come here to fish, not to mind nobody else's bidness.'
"The nigger says, 'You gonna tell somebody you seen a man poaching gators? Because if you do, you a goddamn liar.'
"Fat Daddy goes, 'We don't know nothing about no gators. So you leave us alone. We ain't give you no truck.'"
"The nigger smiles then. He says, 'You a nice fat man. You know why I bust up my pirogue? 'Cause it got leaks in it.' All the time he was squeezing his hand on his privates, like he got an itch, like he didn't care there was a woman there. Fat Daddy said when you looked into that nigger's face, you didn't have no doubt what was on his mind. He wanted you to say just one t'ing wrong so he could let out all his meanness on you.
"Fat Daddy's wife got in the car, not moving an inch, not hardly breathing she was so scared, praying all the time Fat Daddy would just come on and get them out of there.
"Then the nigger takes Fat Daddy's pole and his bucket out of his hand and puts them in the backseat and opens the front door and heps Fat Daddy get behind the wheel. He says, 'I'm gonna show y'all somet'ing I ain't sure I can still do. Y'all watch, now.'
"He hooked his hands under the front bumper and Started straining, like all the veins in his face was gonna pop out of his skin, grinning with them gold teet', snuff running out of his mout'. Then the car come up in the air, and the back wheels started rolling off the levee, just befo' he let it crash on the ground again.
"He come around to the window, still grinning, like he done somet'ing great, and let spit drip out of his mout' on his finger. He took Fat Daddy's sun helmet off his head and put his finger in Fat Daddy's ear and then dropped his hat back on his head again. Didn't say one word. Just rubbed spit in po' Fat Daddy's ear and walked off.
"What kind of man do t'ings like that, Dave? It makes me feel real bad. I wish I'd done somet'ing to stop that man when he come in our shop. Lawd God, I do."
Batist shook his head, his spoon forgotten by the side of his soup bowl.
A therapist once told me that dreams are not a mystery. They simply represent our hopes and fears, he said. But unfortunately I was never good at distinguishing between the two.
I see an arbor atop the grassy slope of Bayou Teche. The tree trunks look hard and white under the moon, stonelike yet filled with power, as though the coldness in the light has trapped a trembling energy inside the bark. Inside the arbor is a wicker picnic basket filled with grapes and bananas, a corked green bottle of burgundy, a bottle of black label Jack Daniel's wrapped in a soft towel, a bucket of shaved ice with two chrome cups chilling inside it.
I can taste the charcoal and the oak in the whiskey, as weightless as liquid smoke on the back of the tongue. I can feel its heat spread from my stomach into my chest and my loins. But my system is dry, as though my glands have become dust, and the real rush doesn't come until the second hit, a long deep swallow of sugar and shaved ice and mint leaves and bourbon, then it reaches every nerve in my body, just as if someone had struck a sulfurous match across the base of the brain.
But this time the dream is not just about the charcoal-filtered product of Lynchburg, Tennessee. She's on her knees inside the arbor, her bottom resting on her heels, eating a sandwich with both hands, somehow vulnerable and reminiscent of a wartime photo of a frightened and starving child. She smiles when she sees me, as she would greet an old friend, and she gathers her dress in her hands and works it over her head. Her tan body seems glazed with moonglow, her breasts swollen and hard, her face innocent of any agenda except the welcoming press of her thighs around mine. In the dream I know it's wrong, that I've reached a place where I can't turn it around, just like the whiskey that lights old fires and once again claims a landscape inside me I'd long forgotten. Her mouth is on mine, her fingers on my hips, then kneading the small of my back, and I feel something break inside me, like water bursting through the bottom of a paper bag, and when I look into her face, my body trembling with the moment, I see a tangle of platinum hair and eyes like black glass and a self-indulgent lazy smile that ends in a kiss of contempt upon the cheek.
I woke and sat on the side of the bed, my fingers clenched on my knees, my loins aching like those of an adolescent boy trapped inside the unrelieved fantasies of his masturbation.
Outside, I heard Tripod running on his chain and wind coursing through the trees and dead leaves swirling across the yard. When the wind dropped, the night was silent for only a moment, then I heard leaves again, this time breaking under someone's foot.
I looked out the window and saw Tripod sitting on top of his hutch, motionless, his face pointed toward the backyard.
I slipped on a pair of blue jeans and my tennis shoes, took my.45 out of the dresser and the flashlight from the nightstand, and checked the lock on the front door. Bootsie was asleep on the couch, her arm across her eyes, a magazine splayed on the floor by her. I turned on the flood lamp in the mimosa tree and stepped out into the yard.
The wind blew plumes of ash out of my neighbor's field and ruffled the starlight's reflection on the duck pond by my fence line. I searched the side yard, the horse lot and stable, the aluminum tool-shed where we still kept my father's old tractor, then I walked along the edge of the coulee toward the duck pond.
The batteries in my flashlight grew weaker and I turned them off and started back toward the house. I heard the shrill, hysterical-like cry of a nutria out in the swamp.
A man with the sinewy proportions of an atavistic throwback moved out quickly from behind a stand of banana trees and shoved the blunt, round end of a hard object into the center of my back.
"I could have used a telephone. I come here in trust. Don't mess it up," he said.
"What do you want, Aaron?"
"Give me your pistol… I'll give it back. I promise. I ain't gonna harm nobody, either."
His hand moved down my arm and slipped the.45 free from my fingers. He smelled like humus and wool clothes full of wood smoke and dried sweat.
"I got you! Sonofabitch if I didn't! Slickered you good!" he said. He squatted and roared at his own humor, slapped his thigh with one hand. "Didn't have nothing but this old corncob pipe I got out of a garbage can! How you like that!"
"Why don't you act your age?"
"Did y'all use the same kind of smarts against them Viet Cong?" He danced like an ape under the overhang of withered banana leaves.
"You going to give me my piece back?" I said.
"Cain't do that." Then his face went as blank and stark as a sheet of tin under the starlight. "I want you to set up my surrender to Buford LaRose."
When I didn't reply, he said, "You deaf? Just set it up. Out in the country somewheres. He'll go for it. It'll make him a big man."
"I don't know if I trust what you've got in mind, partner."
"They sent a little pisspot Eye-talian after me. Man I was in jail with and knowed where my camp was at. Some people is cursed by their knowledge."
"What are you saying?"
His eyes were wide, lidless, burning with certainty about the adversarial nature of the world.
"You might say I talked to his conscience. He said me and you are the shit on somebody's nose and it's suppose to get wiped off before a certain governor gets sworn in. He was at a point in his life he didn't want to keep no secrets."
"I don't like what you're telling me, Aaron."
"They treated me worsen they would a nigger rapist. You think I give a fuck about what you don't like?… We got a mutual interest here."
"No, we don't."
He put the.45 under my jaw. "Then you walk to the shed."
"You're starting to seriously piss me off, Aaron."
He pushed the barrel harder into my throat. "LaRose used my daughter and throwed her away. Then he sent me to the penitentiary. You side with them, then you're my enemy."
His face was bloodless, his dilated nostrils radiating gray hair. He wasn't a bizarre old man anymore, or even a pitiful and ignorant victim. For some reason, as I stared into the vacuity of his eyes, I was absolutely convinced he would have found reason to wage war against Buford LaRose's world even if Buford LaRose had never existed.
"I'm not going in that shed, Aaron. It ends here," I said.
He breathed loudly in the darkness. His tongue looked like a gray biscuit inside his mouth.
"I done cut your phone line already. I'll give you back this later. But don't come after me," he said.
"You're a foolish man, sir."
"No, I'm a dead one. That's what they call people in the Death House, the Dead Men. Wait till you feel that big nigger's hand on you. Or one of yourn up at the house. See how goddamn liberal you are then."
"What did you say?"
But he was gone, running like a crab through the trees, his prison work boots crashing in the leaves.
I sat on the floor by the couch where Bootsie slept. Her eyes opened into mine.
"What is it?" she said.
"Aaron Crown was outside…" I placed my hand on her arm before she could get up. "It's all right. He's gone now. But he cut the phone line."
"Crown was-"
"I'm giving it up, Boots. Aaron, the LaRose family, whatever they're into, it's somebody else's responsibility now."
She raised herself on one elbow.
"What happened out there?" she asked.
"Nothing. That's the point. Nothing I do will ever change the forces these people represent."
Her eyes steadied on mine and seemed to look inside me.
"You want to fix something to eat?" she said.
"That'd be swell. I'll use the phone in the bait shop to call the department."
When I locked the front door behind me, I could see her in the kitchen, shredding a raw potato on a grater to make hash browns, her robe cinched around her hips, just as though we were waking to an ordinary dawn and the life we'd had before I'd allowed the fortunes of Aaron Crown and the LaRose family to grow like a tentacle into our own.
In the morning Batist found my.45 wrapped in a Kentucky Fried Chicken bag under the doormat on his gallery.