Free DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox by James Lee Burke

twisting the
tractor's wheel back through the haze of cinnamon-colored dust, reslicing the
already churned soil as though his work were an excuse to avenge himself and
his kind upon the earth.
          At the edge of the
field, by a grove of willows, four black inmates, stripped to the waist, were
heaping dead tree branches on a fire.
          "Y'all ought to
have Aaron in isolation, Cap," I said.
          He cut the ignition
and spit tobacco juice out the window.
           "When he asks," he replied.
          "He won't."
          "Then that's his
goddamn ass."
          The captain walked
partway out in the field on his cane and raised the hook and held it motionless
in the air. Aaron squinted out of the dust and heat and exhaust fumes, then
eased the throttle back without killing the engine, as though he could not will
himself to separate entirely from the mechanical power that had throbbed
between his thighs all day.
          Aaron walked toward
us, wiping his face with a dirty handkerchief, past the group of blacks burning
field trash. Their eyes never saw him; their closed circle of conversation
never missed a beat.
          He stood by the
truck, his body framed by the sun that hung in a liquid yellow orb over the
Mississippi levee.
          "Yes, sir?"
he said to the captain.
          "Water it and
piss it, Crown," the captain said. He limped on his cane to the shade of a
gum tree and lit his pipe, turned his face into the breeze off the river.
          "I understand
you're having some trouble," I said.
          "You ain't
heered me say it."
          He walked back to the
watercooler belted with bungee cord to the wall of the pickup bed. He filled a
paper cup from the cooler and drank it, his gaze fixed on the field, the dust
devils swirling in the wind.
          "Is it the
BGLA?" I asked.
          "I don't keep up
with colored men's organizations."
          "I don't know if
you're innocent or guilty, Aaron. But up there at Point Lookout, the prison
cemetery is full of men who had your kind of attitude."
           "That levee yonder's got dead men in
it, too. It's the way it is." He wadded up the paper cup by his side,
kneaded it in his hand, a piece of cartilage working against his jawbone.
          "I'm going to
talk to a civil rights lawyer I know in Baton Rouge. He's a black man, though.
Is that going to be a problem?"
          "I don't give a
shit what he is. I done tole you, I got no complaint, long as I ain't got to
cell with one of them."
          "They'll eat you
alive, partner."
          He stepped toward me,
his wrists seeming to strain against invisible wires at his sides.
          "A man's got his
own rules. I ain't ask for nothing except out. . . Goddamn it, you tell my
daughter she ain't to worry," he said, his eyes rimming with water. The
top of his denim shirt was splayed tightly against his chest. He breathed
through his mouth, his fists gathered into impotent rocks, his face dilated
with the words his throat couldn't form.
     
    I got back home at dark, then I had to go out again, this time with
Helen Soileau to a clapboard nightclub on a back road to investigate a missing
person's report.
          "Sorry to drag
you out, Dave, but the grandmother has been yelling at me over the phone all
day," Helen said. "I made a couple of calls, and it looks like she's
telling the truth. The girl's not the kind to take off and not tell
anybody."
          A black waitress had
left the club with a white man the night before; she never returned home, nor
did she report to work the next day. The grandmother worked as a cook in the
club's kitchen and lived in a small frame house a hundred yards down the road.
She was a plump, gray-haired woman with a strange skin disease that had eaten
white and pink discolorations in her hands, and she was virtually hysterical
with anger and grief.
          "We'll find her.
I promise you," Helen said as we