DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox Read Free

home on vacation and Aaron Crown came to the
house and said his daughter was lost out here in a boat. Nobody would go after
her because she was fourteen and had a reputation for running off and smoking
dope and doing other kinds of things, you with me?"
          She looked at her
bobber floating between the pilings.
          "So I found her.
She wasn't lost, though. She was in a houseboat, right across the bay there,
with a couple of men. I never told Aaron what she had been doing. But I think
he knew."
          "You believe
he's innocent?"
          "Probably not.
It's just one of those strange deals, Alf. The guy loved his daughter, which
means he has emotions and affections like the rest of us. That's something we
don't like to think about when we assign a person the role of assassin and
community geek."
          She thought the word geek was funny and snorted through her nose.
          It started to
sprinkle, and we hung raincoats over our heads like cloistered monks and pulled sac-a-lait out of the pilings until mid-morning, then layered them with
crushed ice in the cooler and headed for home just as a squall churned out of
the south like smoke twisting inside a bottle.
          We gutted and
half-mooned the fish at the gills and scaled them with spoons under the canvas
tarp on the dock. Batist, the black man who worked for me, came out of the bait
shop with an unlit cigar stuck in his jaw. He let the screen slam behind him.
He was bald and wore bell-bottomed blue jeans and a white T-shirt that looked
like rotted cheesecloth on his barrel chest.
          "There's a guard
from the prison farm inside," he said.
          "What's he
want?" I said.
          "I ain't axed.
Whatever it is, it don't have nothing to do with spending money. Dave, we got
to have these kind in our shop?"
          Oh boy, I thought.
          I went inside and saw
the old-time gunbull from the lockdown unit I had visited at Angola just
yesterday. He was seated at a back table by the lunch meat cooler, his back
stiff, his profile carved out of teak.
    He wore a fresh khaki shirt and trousers, a hand-tooled belt, a
white straw hat slanted over his forehead. His walking cane, whose point was
sheathed in a six-inch steel tube, the kind road gang hacks used to carry, was
hooked by the handle over the back of his chair. He had purchased a fifty-cent
can of soda to drink with the brown paper bag of ginger snaps he had brought
with him.
          "How's it goin',
Cap?" I said.
          "Need your
opinion on something," he replied. His accent was north Louisiana hill
country, the vowels phlegmy and round and deep in the throat, like speech
lifted out of the nineteenth century.
          His hands, which were
dotted with liver spots, shook slightly with palsy. His career reached back
into an era when Angola convicts were beaten with the black Betty, stretched
out on anthills, locked down in sweatboxes on Camp A, sometimes even murdered
by guards on a whim and buried in the Mississippi levee. In the years I had
know him I had never seen him smile or heard him mention any form of personal
life outside the penitentiary.
          "Some movie people
is offered me five thousand dollars for a interview about Crown. What do you
reckon I ought to do?" he said.
          "Take it. What's
the harm?"
          He bit the edge off a
ginger snap.
          "I got the
feeling they want me to say he don't belong up there on the farm, that maybe
the wrong man's in prison."
          "I see."
          "Something's
wrong, ain't it?"
          "Sir?"
          "White man kills
a black man down South, them Hollywood people don't come looking to get the
white man off."
          "I don't have an
answer for you, Cap. Just tell them what you think and forget about it." I
looked at the electric clock on the wall above the counter.
          "What I think is
the sonofabitch's about half-human." My eyes met his. "He's got