Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'You talk war record, you talk Purple Hearts, you got the balls for this?' he said.

The hammer was cocked, the safety off, but I was able to keep my fingers frozen outside the trigger housing.

'Step back, Tommy.'

His breath labored in his chest; there was a knot of color like a red rose in his throat.

'I didn't kill no kid back there in the Channel,' he said. 'It was an accident. Everybody knows it but that mockie. He won't let go of it.'

For just a moment the focus in his eyes seemed to turn inward, and his words seemed directed almost at himself rather than at me. I felt the power go out of his grip.

I flipped up the safety on the slide, jerked the .45 loose from his grasp, and whipped the barrel across his nose. He stood flat-footed, his fists balled at his sides, his eyes the same color as the sky, a solitary string of blood dripping from his right nostril. I started to hit him again.

But his face broke, just like a lamp shade being burned in the center by a heat source from within. One eye seemed to knot, as though someone had put a finger in it; his mouth became a crimped, tight line, downturned at the corners, and the flesh in one cheek suddenly filled with wrinkles and began to tremble. He turned and walked into his house, his back straight, his arms dead at his sides, his eyes hidden from view.

I stared openmouthed after him, my weapon hanging loosely from my hand like an object of shame.

* * *

chapter fifteen

I had always wanted to believe that I had brought the violence in my life with me when I came back from Vietnam. But one of the most violent moments in my life, or at least the most indefensible, came at the end of my first marriage and not because I was a police officer or a war veteran.

My first wife was a beautiful, dark-haired girl from Martinique who loved thoroughbred horses and racetrack betting as much as I, but she also developed a love for clubhouse society and men who didn't daily mortgage their tomorrows with Beam straight up and a Jax draft on the side.

We were at an afternoon lawn party on Lake Pontchartrain. The sky was storm-streaked, the water out on the lake slate green and capping, the sailboats from the yacht club dipping hard in the swells. I remember standing at the drinks table, next to my wife, while a black waiter in a white butler's jacket was shaking a silver drink mixer. Then my wife's current lover, a geologist from Houston, was next to her, chatting with her, idly stroking the down on her forearm as though I were not there.

I could hear the palm fronds rattling overhead, a jazz combo playing on the terrace, the words of my wife and her lover disappearing like bubbles in the wind. He was an athlete and mountain climber and had the profile and rugged good looks of a gladiator. Then I remember a sound like Popsicle sticks breaking and a wave of red-black color erupting behind my eyes.

When they pulled me off him, he was strangling on his own tongue.

Later, I pretended that he had deserved it, and that my wife had deserved to be shamed and humiliated in front of her friends. But I was deceiving myself, as was my way in those days when I sincerely believed that I could experience no worse fate in this world than to be deprived of charcoal-filtered whiskey and the amber radiance with which it animated and filled my life. I had simply made my wife and her lover pay for events that had occurred many years earlier.

My father, whose name was Aldous, who was also called Big Al in the oil field, where he worked as a derrick man up on the monkey board, was a huge, dark, grinning Cajun with fists the size of cantaloupes. He loved to fight in bars, sometimes taking on three or four adversaries at once. Oil field roughnecks would break their hands on his head; bouncers would splinter chairs across his back; but no one ever hurt Big Al except my mother, who worked in a laundry with Negro women to support us while he was in the parish jail.

When he went back to Marsh Island for the muskrat season, a man named Mack, a bouree dealer from Morgan City who wore a fedora, zoot slacks, suspenders, French cuffs, and two-tone shoes, began to come by the house and take her for rides in his Ford coupe.

One day in late fall I came home early from school. There was no sound in the house. Then I walked past my parents' bedroom door. My mother was naked, on all fours, pointed toward the head of the bed, and Mack was about to mount her. He had a thin, white face, oiled black hair parted in the center, and a pencil mustache. He looked at me with the momentary interest that he might show a hangnail, then entered my mother.

I sat on a sawhorse in the barn until it was almost dusk. The air was raw, and leaves were blowing across the dirt yard. Then Mack was standing in the barn door, his silhouette etched with the sun's last red light, a bottle of beer in his left hand. I heard him tilt it up and drink from it.

'What you t'ink you seen?' he said.

I looked at my shoes.

'I ax you a question. Don't be pretend you ain't heard me,' he said.

'I didn't see anything.'

'You was where you didn't have no bidness. What we gonna do 'bout that?' He held out his right hand. I thought he was going to place it on my shoulder. Instead, he put the backs of his fingers under my nose. 'You smell that? Me and yo' mama been fuckin', boy. It ain't the first time, neither.'

My eyes were full of water, my face hot and small under his stare.

'You can tell yo' daddy

'bout this if you want, but you gotta tell on her, too.' He drank out of the beer bottle again and waited. 'What's you gonna do, you? Sit there and cry?'

'I'm not going to do anything.'