DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox by James Lee Burke Page B

buttock.
          "You didn't
report an accident. If we find anything in that car we shouldn't, you'd better
be in our good graces. You with me on this?" I said.
          His wife, who wore a
print-cotton dress that bagged on her wide shoulders, whispered close to his
face while her hand tried to find his.
          "He tole me to
forget what I seen," the man said. "He put his mout' right up against
mine when he said it. He grabbed me. In a private place, real hard." The
flush on the back of his neck spread into his hairline.
          "What did he
look like?" Helen said.
          "He was a white
man, that's all I know. He'd been drinking whiskey. I could smell it on his
mout'. I ain't seen him good 'cause the moon was down."
          "You see that
power pole there? There's a light on it. It comes on every night," I said.
          The diver walked out
of the shallows next to the overturned Lincoln as the winch slid it up on the
mud bank. All the windows were closed, and the interior was filled from the
roof to the floor with brown water. Then, through the passenger's side, we saw
a brief pink-white flash against the glass, like a molting fish brushing
against the side of a dirty aquarium.
          The diver tried to
open the door, but it was wedged into the mud. He got a two-handed ball peen
hammer, with a head the size of a brick, and smashed in the passenger window.
           The water burst through the folded glass,
peppering the levee with crawfish, leeches, a nest of ribbon-thin cottonmouths
that danced in the grass as though their backs were broken. But those were not
the images that defined the moment.
          A woman's hand, then
arm, extended itself in the rushing stream, as though the person belted to the
seat inside were pointing casually to an object in the grass.
The fingers were ringed with costume jewelry, the nails painted with purple
polish, the skin eaten by a disease that had robbed the tissue of its color.
          I squatted down next
to the man who had seen the accident and extended my business card on two
fingers.
          "He didn't try
to pull her out. He didn't call for help. He let her drown, alone in the darkness.
Don't let him get away with this, podna," I said.
     
     
    C lete called the bait shop Saturday morning, just as I was laying
out a tray of chickens and links on the pit for our midday fishermen.
          "You got a boat
for rent?" he asked.
          "Sure."
           "Can you rent the guy with me some
gear?"
          "I have a rod he
can borrow."
          "It's a fine day
for it, all right."
          "Where are
you?"
          "Right up the
road at the little grocery store. The guy's sitting out in my car. But he
doesn't like to go where he's not invited, know what I'm saying, Dave? You want
Mingo? Anytime I got to run down a skip, all I got to do is talk to the guy in
my car. In this case, he feels a personal responsibility. Plus, y'all go back,
right?"
          "Clete, you
didn't bring Jerry Joe Plumb here?" I said.
     
     
    H e was notorious by the time he was expelled from high school his
senior year—a kid who'd grin just before he hit you, a bouree player who won
high stakes from grown men at the saloon downtown, the best dancer in three
parishes, the hustler who cast aluminum replicas of brass knuckles in the metal
shop foundry and sold them for one dollar apiece with the ragged edges unbuffed
so they could stencil daisy chains of red flowers on an adversary's face.
          But all that happened
after Jerry Joe's mother died his sophomore year. My memory was of a different
boy, from a different, earlier time.
          In elementary school
we heard his father had been killed at Wake Island, but no one was really sure.
Jerry Joe was one of those boys who came to town and left, entered and withdrew
from school as his mother found work wherever she could. They
used to live in a shack on the edge of a brickyard in