DR07 - Dixie City Jam by James Lee Burke

believe that those moments of rage, which
affected me almost like an alcoholic blackout, were due to a legitimate
cause, that I or someone close to me had been seriously wronged, that
the object of my anger and adrenaline had not swum coincidentally into
my ken.
    But I had known too many cops who thought the same way.
Somehow there was always an available justification for the Taser dart,
the jet of Mace straight into the eyes, the steel baton whipped across
the shinbones or the backs of the thighs.
    The temptation is to blame the job, the stressed-out
adversarial daily routine that can begin like a rupturing peptic ulcer,
the judges and parole boards who recycle psychopaths back on the street
faster than you can shut their files. But sometimes in an honest moment
an unpleasant conclusion works its way through all the rhetoric of the
self-apologist, namely, that you are drawn to this world in the same
way that some people are fascinated by the protean shape and texture of
fire, to the extent that they need to slide their hands through its
caress.
    I remember an old-time gunbull at Angola who had spent
forty-seven years of his life shepherding convicts under a
double-barreled twelve-gauge out on the Mississippi levee. During that
time he had killed four men and wounded a half dozen others. His liver
had been eaten away with cirrhosis; the right side of his chest was
caved in from the surgical removal of a cancerous lung. To my
knowledge, he had no relatives with whom he kept contact, no women in
his life except a prostitute in Opelousas. I asked him how he had come
to be a career gunbull.
    He thought about it a moment, then dipped the end of his cigar
in his whiskey glass and put it in his mouth.
    'It was me or them, I reckon,' he said.
    'Beg your pardon?'
    'I figured the kind of man I was, one way or another I was
gonna be jailing. Better to do it up there on the horse than down there
with a bunch of niggers chopping in the cane.'
    I didn't tell Bootsie about the Caluccis, nor did I say
anything to her about the smell of bourbon that she brought to bed with
her that night. I fell asleep with my hand on her back. At about one in
the morning I felt her weight leave the mattress. I heard her walk
barefooted into the kitchen, open a cabinet without turning on the
light, then clink a bottle against a glass. A moment later she was in
the bathroom, brushing her teeth.
    She seldom drank and had little physical tolerance for
alcohol. The following morning she stayed in the shower for almost
fifteen minutes, then ate an aspirin with her coffee and talked
brightly at the breakfast table for a long time, until finally her face
became wan and she put her forehead down on her palm.
    I walked around behind her chair and rubbed her neck and
shoulders.
    'Sometimes it's hard to accept this, Boots, but there's no
reason to feel shame when we're overcome by superior physical force,' I
said. 'No more than a person should be ashamed of contracting the flu
or being undone by the attack of a wild animal.'
    'I keep smelling his odor and feeling his tongue in my mouth,'
she said. 'I feel somehow that I allowed him to do it.'
    'It's what all victims feel. We open our doors to the wrong
person, then we think that somehow our expression of trust means we're
weak and complicit. You didn't do anything wrong, Boots. You mustn't
think that way anymore.'
    But that kind of advice, under those kinds of circumstances,
is similar to telling a person who has been stricken with a cerebral
disease to rise from his sickbed and walk.
    I turned off the grits on the stove, washed and put away our
coffee cups and saucers, and took Bootsie to a restaurant on the
Vermilion River in Lafayette for brunch. When I went to the men's room,
she called the waiter back to the table and ordered a vodka collins.
After we had eaten, we walked out on the deck that overlooked the water
and watched some kids waterskiing. The sun was white and straight up
in the sky, the air laced with the