DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox Read Online Free PDF Page A

door. She slipped her skirt and
blouse on, wadded up her undergarments and shoes and purse and almost flew out
the door.
    Dwayne Parson's face had drained. He started to get up from the
    bed.
          "No, no, my
man," the black man said, approaching him, blocking off the camera's view
of Parson's face. "Hey, it comes to everybody. You got it on with the
sister. It could be worse. I said don't move, man. It's all gonna come out the
same way. They ain't no need for
    suffering."
          He picked up a
pillow, pressed it down in front of him, his upper
    arm swelling to the diameter and hardness of a fireplug while
Dwayne Parson's body flopped like a fish's. The man with the gun stepped back
quickly and fired two shots into the pillow— pop, pop — and then went past
the camera's lens, one grizzled Cro-Magnon jaw and gold tooth flashing by like
a shark's profile in a zoo tank.
          In the distance the
street band thundered out "Fire House Blues." Dwayne Parson's body,
the head still covered by the pillow, looked like a broken white worm in the
middle of the sheet.
     
     
    T he LaRose plantation was far out in the parish, almost to St.
Martinville. The main house had been built in 1857 and was the dusty color of
oyster shells, its wide, columned front porch scrolled by live oak trees that
grew to the third floor. A row of shacks in back that had once been slaves
quarters was now stacked with baled hay, and the old brick smithy had been
converted into a riding stable, the arched windows sealed by the original iron
shutters, which leaked orange rust as though from a wound.
          Bootsie and I drove
past the LaRose company store, with its oxidized, cracked front windows and
tin-roofed gallery, where barrels of pecans sat by the double screen doors
through which thousands of indebted tenants had passed until the civil rights
era of the 1960s brought an end to five-dollar-a-day farm labor; then we turned
into a white-fenced driveway that led to the rear of the home and the lawn
party that was already in progress against a backdrop of live oaks and Spanish
moss and an autumnal rose-stippled sky that seemed to reassure us all that the
Indian summer of our lives would never end.
          While the
buffet was being laid out on a row of picnic tables, Buford organized a touch
football game and prevailed even upon the most reluctant guests to put down
their drinks and join one team or another. Some were from the university in
Lafayette but most were people well known in the deceptively lighthearted and
carnival-like atmosphere of Louisiana politics. Unlike their counterparts from
the piney woods parishes to the north, they were bright, educated, openly
hedonistic, always convivial, more concerned about violations of protocol than
ideology.
          They were fun to be
with; they were giddy with alcohol and the exertion of the game, their laughter
tinkling through the trees each
    time the ball was snapped and there was a thumping of feet across
the sod and a loud pat of hands on the rump.
          Then a white-jacketed
black man dinged a metal triangle and everyone filed happily back toward the
serving tables.
          "Run out, Dave!
Let me throw you a serious one!" Buford hollered, the football poised in
his palm. He wore tennis shoes, pleated white slacks, the arms of his
plum-colored sweater tied around his neck.
          "That's enough
for me," I said.
          "Don't give me
that 'old man' act," he said and cocked his arm to fire a bullet, then
smiled and lofted an easy, arching pass that dropped into my hands as though he
had plopped it into a basket.
          He caught up to me
and put his hand on my shoulder.
          "Wow, you feel
like a bag of rocks. How much iron do you pump?" he said.
          "Just enough to
keep from falling apart."
          He slipped the
football out of my hands, flipped it toward the stable. He watched it bounce
and roll away in the dusk, as though he were