Read DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox for Free Online Page A

that's your bidness. Just don't come around here to do it. You
with me on this?"
          Clete looked at me,
then lit a cigarette.
          "Hey, don't
smoke in here, man," Jimmy Ray said.
          "Adios" Clete
said to me and went out the door and closed it behind him.
          "Have any of
these documentary movie people been to see you?" I asked.
          "Yeah, I told
them the right man's in jail. I told them that was his rifle lying out under
the tree. I told them Crown was in the KKK. They turned the camera off while I
was still talking." He glanced at the dial on his watch, which was turned
around on the bottom of his wrist. "I don't mean you no rudeness, but I
got a bidness to run."
          "Thanks for your
help."
          "I ain't give
you no help. Hey, man, me and my brother Ely wasn't nothing alike. He believed
in y'all. Thought a great day was coming. You know what make us all
equal?" He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, splayed it open with
his thumb, and picked a fifty-dollar bill out of it with his metal hook.
"Right here, man," he said, wagging the bill on the desk blotter.
     
     
    L ate the next day, after we ate supper, I helped Bootsie wash and
put away the dishes. The sun had burned into a red ember inside a bank of
maroon-colored clouds above the treeline that bordered my neighbor's cane
field, and through the screen I could smell rain and ozone in the south.
Alafair called from the bait shop, where she was helping Batist close up.
          "Dave, there's a
man in a boat who keeps coming back by the dock," she said.
          "What's he
doing?"
          "It's like he's
trying to see through the windows."
          "Is Batist
there?"
          "Yes."
          "Put him on,
would you?"
          When Batist came on
the line, I said, "Who's the man in the boat?"
          "A guy puts
earrings."
          As was Batist's way,
he translated French literally into English, in this case using the word put for wear.
          "Is he bothering
y'all?" I said.
          "He ain't gonna
bother me. I'm fixing to lock up."
          "What's the
problem, then?"
          "They ain't one,
long as he's gone when I go out the do'."
          "I'll be
down."
          The air was heavy and
wet-smelling and crisscrossed with birds when I walked down the slope toward
the dock, the sky over the swamp the color of scorched tin. Batist and Alafair
had collapsed the Cinzano umbrellas set in the center of the spool tables and
turned on the string of overhead lights. The surface of the bayou was ruffling
in the wind, and against the cypress and willows on the far side I could see a
man sitting in an outboard, dressed in a dark blue shirt and a white straw hat.
          I walked to the end
of the dock and leaned against the railing.       
          "Can I help you
with something?" I asked.       
          He didn't reply. His
face was shadowed, but I could see the glint of his gold earrings in the light
from the dock. I went inside the bait shop.
          "Turn on the
flood lamps, Alf," I said.
          When she hit the
toggle switch, the light bloomed across the water with the brilliance of a
pistol flare. That's when I saw his eyes.
          "Go on up to the
house, Alafair," I said.
          "You know
him?" she said.
          "No, but we're
going to send him on his way just the same. Now, do what I ask you, okay?"
          "I don't see why
I—"
          "Come on,
Alf."
          She lifted her face,
her best pout in place, and went out the screen door and let it slam behind
her.
          Batist was heating a
pot of coffee on the small butane stove behind the counter. He bent down and
looked out the window at the bayou again, a cigar in the center of his mouth.
          "What you want
to do with that fella, Dave?" he said.
          "See who he
is."
          I went outside again
and propped my hands on the dock