DR07 - Dixie City Jam Read Online Free PDF Page B

lighting up a crack pipe
or
somet'ing. I say no I ain't seen it, you got to see a coon climb in a
tree to know coons climb in trees?
    'So I kept watchin' out the window at that nigger's do'. After
a while he come out with two womens, I'm talkin' about the kind been
workin' somebody's crib, and they got in the car with them kids and
drove round the block. When they come back them kids was fallin' down
in the grass. I call the po-lice again, and they ax what crime I seen.
I say I ain't seen no crime, long as it's all right in New Orleans for
a pimp and his whores to get children high on dope.
    'This was a white po-liceman I was talkin' to. So he put a
black man on the phone, like nobody but another black man could make
sense out of what I was sayin'. This black po-liceman tole me to come
down and make a repote, he gonna check it out. I tole him check out
that nigger after I put my boot up his skinny ass.'
    'You went over there?'
    'For just a minute, that's all. He wasn't home. I never gone
inside. Maybe he went out the back do'. Why you look like that, Dave?'
    I rested my chin on my fist and tried not to let him read my
face.
    'Dave?'
    'I'm going to call a bondsman now. In the meantime, don't talk
about this stuff with anyone. Not with the cops, not with any of those
guys in the lockup. There're guys in here who'll trade off their own
time and lie about you on the witness stand.'
    'What you mean?'
    'They'll try to learn something about you, enough to give
evidence against you. They cut deals with the prosecutor.'
    'They can do that?' he said 'Get out of jail by sendin'
somebody else to Angola?'
    'I'm afraid it's a way of life, podna.'
    The turnkey opened the door and touched Batist on the
shoulder. Batist stared silently at me a moment, then rose from his
chair and walked out of the room toward a yellow elevator, with a
wiremesh and barred door, which would take him upstairs into a lockdown
area. The palms of his hands left tiny horsetails of perspiration on
the tabletop.
     
    It was going to cost a lot, far beyond
anything I could afford
right now. I had thirty-two hundred dollars in a money market account,
most of which was set aside for the quarterly tax payments on my
boat-rental and bait business, four hundred thirty-eight dollars in an
account that I used for operating expenses at the dock, and one hundred
thirteen dollars in my personal checking account.
    I went back to the guesthouse and called every bondsman I knew
in New Orleans. The best deal I could get was a one-week deferment on
the payment of the fifty-thousand-dollar bail fee. I told the bondsman
I would meet him at the jail in a half hour.
    I couldn't even begin to think about the cost of hiring a
decent defense attorney for a murder trial.
    Welcome to the other side of the equation in the American
criminal justice system.
    Our room was still in disarray after being tossed by Nate
Baxter and his people. Batist's cardboard suitcase had been dumped on
the bed, and half of his clothes were on the floor. I picked them up,
refolded them, and began replacing them in the suitcase. Underneath one
of his crumpled shirts was the skull of what had once been an enormous
catfish. The texture of the bone was old, a shiny gray, mottled with
spots the color of tea, polished smooth with rags.
    I remembered when Batist had caught this same mud cat three
years ago, on a scalding summer's day out on the Atchafalaya, with a
throw line and a treble hook thick with nutria guts. The catfish must
have weighed thirty-five pounds, and when Batist wrapped the throw line
around his forearm, the cord cut into his veins like a tourniquet, and
he had to use a club across the fish's spine to get it over the
gunwale. After he had driven an ice pick into its brain and pinned it
flat on the deck, skinned it and cut it into steaks, he sawed the head
loose from the skeleton and buried it in an anthill under a log. The
ants boiled on the impacted meat and ate the bone and eye sockets
clean, and now