DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox by James Lee Burke Page A

philosophically but said nothing.
          "Why'd y'all run
him off?" I asked.
          '"Cause the man
don't have the sense God give an earthworm."
          "Come on,
Billy."
          "He used to make
whiskey and put fertilizer in the mash. That's where I think he got that stink
at. His old woman left him for a one-legged blind man."
          "You want to
help him, Billy, or see him hung out to dry at Angola?"
          His hands draped over
his thighs. He studied the backs of them.
          "It was 'cause
of the girl. His daughter, what's her name, Sabelle, the one runs the bar down
at the Underpass."
          "I don't follow
you."
          "The meeting was
at a church house. She wasn't but a girl then, waiting outside in the pickup
truck. Two men was looking out the window at her. They didn't know Crown was
sitting right behind them.
          "One goes, 'I
hear that's prime.'
          "The other one
goes, 'It ain't bad. But you best carry a ball of string to find your way back
out.'
          "That's when
Crown put the wood to them. Then he tore into them with his boots. It taken
four of us to hold him down."
          "You kicked him
out of the Klan for defending his daughter?" I said.
          Billy Odom pried a
pale splinter out of his grease-darkened desk and scratched lines in his skin
with it.
          "When they're
young and cain't keep their panties on, the old man's in it somewhere," he
said.
          "What?"
          "Everybody had
suspicioned it. Then a woman from the welfare caught him at it and told the
whole goddamn town. That's how come Crown moved down here."
          "Aaron and his
daughter?" I said.
     
     
    T he man who had seen the accident did not report it for almost
three days, not until his wife was overcome with guilt herself and went to a
priest and then with her husband to the St. Martin Parish sheriff's office.
          Helen Soileau and I
stood on the levee by a canal that rimmed Henderson Swamp and watched a diver
in a wetsuit pull the steel hook and cable off the back of a wrecker, wade out
into the water by a row of bridge pilings, sinking deeper into a balloon of
silt, then disappear beneath the surface. The sky was blue overhead, the moss
on the dead cypress lifting in the breeze, the sun dancing on the sandbars and
the deep green of the willow islands. When a uniformed sheriff's deputy kicked
the winch into gear and the cable clanged tight on the car's frame, a gray
cloud of mud churned to the surface like a fat man's fist.
          Helen walked up on
the wood bridge that spanned the canal, rubbed her shoe on one unrailed edge,
and walked back down on the levee again. The front tires of the submerged car,
which lay upside down, broke through a tangle of dead hyacinths.
          The man who had seen
the accident sat on the levee with his wife at his side. He wore a greasy cap,
with the bill pulled low over his eyes.
          "Go through it
again," I said.
          He had to crane his
head upward, into the sunlight, when he spoke.
          "It was dark. I
was walking back to the camp from that landing yonder. There wasn't no moon. I
didn't see everything real good," he replied. His wife looked at the steel
cable straining against the automobile's weight, her face vaguely ashamed, the
muscles collapsed.
          "Yes, you
did," I said.
          "He fishtailed
off the levee when he hit the bridge, and the car went in. The headlights was
on, way down at the bottom of the canal."
          "Then what
happened?" I asked.
          He flexed his lips
back on his teeth, as though he were dealing with a profound idea.
          "The man floated
up in the headlights. Then he come up the levee, right up to the hard road
where I was at. He was all wet and walking fast." He turned his face out
of the sunlight again, retreated back into the shade of his cap.
          I tapped the edge of
my shoe against his