DR07 - Dixie City Jam by James Lee Burke Page B

backseat, drove out of the shade into the
sunlight. I started-to block their exit with the truck, but it was
unnecessary. Max Calucci, the driver, and one of the women in back were
arguing furiously. Max stepped hard on the brakes, jolting everyone in
the car forward, turned in his leather seat, and began jabbing his
finger at the woman. The woman, the one who had been doing lines
through a soda straw earlier, climbed out of the backseat in her shorts
and spiked heels, raking a long, paint-curling scratch down the side of
the Cadillac.
    Max got out of the car and struck the woman full across the
mouth with the flat of his hand. He hit her so hard that a barrette
flew from her lacquered red hair. Then he slapped her across the ear.
She pressed her palms into her face and began to weep.
    None of them saw us until we had walked to within five feet of
their car.
    'Better ease up, Max. People might start to think you abuse
women,' Clete said.
    'What are
you
doing here?' Max said. He
was bald down through the center of his head, and drops of sweat the
size of BB's glistened in his thick, dark eyebrows. Up close, the scabs
on his face and neck looked like curlicues of reddish brown,
fine-linked chain.
    'Art didn't let you know we were out here?' Clete said.
'That's why you didn't invite us in?'
    'You blindsided me the other night, Purcel. It's not over
between us. You better haul your fat ass out of here,' Max said.
    'Y'all know a dude by the name of Will Buchalter? Streak
here'd really like to talk to him,' Clete said.
    'No, I don't know him. Now get out of here—' He
stopped and raised his finger in the face of the woman with the dyed
red hair. 'And
you
, get back in the car. You're
gonna polish that scratch out if you have to do it with your twat. Did
you hear me, move! You don't open that mouth again, either, unless I
want to put something in it.'
    He clamped his hand on the back of her neck, squeezed, and
twisted her toward the car while tears ran from her eyes.
    The shovel lay propped among some rosebushes against the brick
wall. It had a long, work-worn wood handle with a wide, round-backed
blade. Max Calucci did not see me pick it up. Nor did he see me swing
it with both hands, from deep behind me, as I would a baseball bat,
until he heard the blade ripping through the air. By then it was too
late. The metal whanged off his elbow and thudded into his rib cage,
bending him double, and I saw his mouth drop open and a level of pain
leap into his eyes that he could not quite find words to express.
    Then I reversed the shovel in my hands and swung the blade up
into his face, as you would butt-stroke an adversary with a pugil
stick. I saw him tumble backwards on the grass, his knees drawn up in
front of him, his face bloodless with shock, his mouth a scarlet circle
of disbelief. I heard feet running down the drive, Bobo Calucci blowing
the car horn with both hands in desperation, then Clete was standing in
front of me, pressing me back with his palms, his armpits drenched with
perspiration, the strap of his nylon shoulder holster biting into one
nipple.
    'For Christ's sakes, back off, Dave, you're gonna kill the
guy,' he was saying. 'You hear me? Let it slide, Streak. He's not the
guy we care about.'
    Then his big hands dropped to the handle of the shovel and
twisted it from my grasp, his Irish pie-plate face two inches from
mine, his eyes filled with pity and an undisguised and fearful love.

----
chapter
eight
    That night, as I lay next to Bootsie
in our bed, I did not
tell her about the incident with the Calucci brothers. Even though I
had been in Alcoholics Anonymous a number of years, and to one degree
or another had been through the twelve steps of recovery and had tried
to incorporate them into my life, I had never achieved a great degree
of self-knowledge, other than the fact that I was a drunk; nor had I
ever been able to explain my behavior and the way I thought, or didn't
think, to normal people.
    I always wanted to