Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

He didn't answer.

'Does she know where you are?' I said.

'What she care? She told me this morning I ain't gonna be no better than my daddy. How can I be like my daddy when I never even seen my daddy? I want to join the Marine Corps but she won't sign for me. She say all they'll use me for is cleaning their toilets. She called up the sergeant at the recruiting center and tole him that. That's what she done.'

'Let me be up-front with you, partner. I've got a mess of grief around here right now. I can't help you out, at least not in the way you want me to.'

'Mr. Dave—'

'Sorry, Zoot.'

The air was cool, and red and gold leaves tumbled out of the sunlight into the water. He looked down the road at the shadows among the oak trees, as though they held an answer to his situation.

'I'll find you a place to stay tonight, then I'll drive you to the bus depot in the morning,' I said.

I saw the flicker of injury in his face.

'There've been some bad people around my house, Zoot. I don't want you getting mixed up in it,' I said. 'Look, maybe you should give your mom another chance. Maybe she's scared. In her mind, you're all she's got. That makes her possessive and probably a little selfish. But it's not because she doesn't respect you.'

'It don't make what she say right. You ain't got to find a place for me. That fellow yonder's from New Orleans. He say when he get his van fixed, I can ride back wit' him.'

'You want me to call your mom for you?'

'I ain't going back home. Mr. Tommy'll he'p me out. Y'all can say what you want about him, he ain't a bad white man. He don't get on my case and run me down, he don't tell me he got a mess of grief and don't got time for his friends.'

'I'm sorry you feel that way.'

'You a cop, Mr. Dave.'

'What's that mean?'

'You talk different, you ain't mean like Mr. Baxter, you're smart and educated, too, but you a cop, just like my mama. When it come down to it, you ain't gonna go against the rule, you're on the side got the power. Don't tell me it ain't so, neither.'

He walked down the road through the tunnel of oak trees. His tennis shoes and the bottoms of his jeans were gray with dust, and one elbow poked through the sleeve of his sweater. He squatted in a clump of four-o'clocks and watched the man in coveralls work on his van. In the waning afternoon light his black skin seemed lit with an almost purple sheen.

I went in the house, and Bootsie, Alafair, and I had supper at the kitchen table. Later, Alafair and I fed Tripod and put him in his hutch so he wouldn't make noise in the dead leaves during the night, then I checked the baling wire and tin cans that I had strung the day before and locked up the house. Just after Bootsie and Alafair went to bed, someone knocked on the front screen door.

It was Zoot. He was yawning when I opened the door, and his hair was mussed with pieces of leaves under the yellow porch light.

'Can you come he'p the man wit' the van?' he said.

'I thought you didn't want any favors, Zoot.'

'I didn't ax for one. The man did. He got the tire rod fixed. His batt'ry dead, though.'

'Oh, I see, that's different. Zoot, you're becoming a pain in the butt.'

'He tole me to ax. You don't want to he'p, I can walk down to the fo' corners.'

I locked the door behind me, and we got in my truck. Zoot rubbed the sleep out of his face. Then he said, 'I ain't meant to be rude, Mr. Dave. I just had a lot of stuff on my mind today. I don't see no answer for it, either.'

'You really want to join the Corps?'

'Sure.'

'Let me talk to your mom about it.'

'You'll do that?'