DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox by James Lee Burke

Lafayette, then for
several years in a trailer behind a welding shop south of New Iberia. On
Sundays and the first Fridays of the month we would see him and his mother
walking long distances to church, in both freezing weather and on
one-hundred-degree afternoons. She was a pale woman, with a pinched and fearful
light in her face, and she made him walk on the inside, as though the passing
traffic were about to bolt across the curb and kill them both.
          For a time his mother
and mine worked together in a laundry, and Jerry Joe would come home from
school with me and play until my mother and his came down the dirt road in my
father's lopsided pickup. We owned a hand-crank phonograph, and Jerry Joe would
root in a dusty pile of 78's and pull out the old scratched recordings of the
Hackberry Ramblers and Iry LeJeune and listen to them over and over again,
dancing with himself, smiling elfishly, his shoulders and arms cocked like a
miniature prizefighter's.
          One day after New
Year's my father came back unexpectedly from offshore, where he worked as a
derrick man, up on the monkey board, high above the drilling platform and the
long roll of the Gulf. He'd been fired after arguing with the driller, and as
he always did when he lost his job, he'd spent his drag-up check on presents
for us and whiskey at Provost's Bar, as though new opportunity and prosperity
were just around the corner.
          But Jerry Joe had
never seen my father before and wasn't ready for him. My father stood
silhouetted in the doorway, huge, grinning, irreverent, a man who fought in
bars for fun, the black hair on his chest bursting out of the two flannel
shirts he wore.
          "You dance
pretty good. But you too skinny, you. We gone have to fatten you up. Y'all come
see what I brung," he said.
          At the kitchen table,
he began unloading a canvas drawstring bag that was filled with smoked ducks,
pickled okra and green tomatoes, a fruit cake, strawberry preserves, a jar of
cracklings, and bottle after long-necked bottle of Jax beer.
          "Your mama work
at that laundry, too? . . . Then that's why you ain't eating right. You tell
your mama like I tell his, the man own that place so tight he squeak when he
walk," my father said. "Don't be looking at me like
that, Davie. That man don't hire white people lessen he can treat them just
like he do his colored."
          Jerry Joe went back
in the living room and sat in a stuffed chair by himself for a long time. The
pecan trees by the house clattered with ice in the failing light. Then he came
back in the kitchen and told us he was sick. My father put a jar of preserves
and two smoked ducks in a paper bag for him and stuck it under his arm and we
drove him home in the dark.
          That night I couldn't
find the hand crank to the phonograph, but I thought Jerry Joe had simply
misplaced it. The next day I had an early lesson about the nature of buried
anger and hurt pride in a child who had no one in whom he could confide. When
the school bus stopped on the rock road where Jerry Joe lived, I saw a torn
paper bag by the ditch, the dog-chewed remains of the smoked ducks, the
strawberry preserves congealed on the edges of the shattered Mason jar.
          He never asked to
come to our house again, and whenever I saw him he always conveyed the feeling
I had stolen something valuable from him rather than he from us.
     
     
    C lete parked his dinged, chartreuse Cadillac convertible by the
boat ramp and walked down the dock with Jerry Joe toward the bait shop. Jerry
Joe was ebullient, enthused by the morning and the personal control he brought
to it. His taut body looked made of whipcord, his hair thick and blond and
wavy, combed in faint ducktails in back. He wore oxblood tasseled loafers,
beige slacks, a loose-fitting navy blue sports shirt with silver thread in it.
I said he walked down the dock. That's not true. Jerry Joe rolled, a Panama hat
spinning on his finger,