Louisiana Breakdown Read online

A car cruised toward them, slowed. The cop waved, a honk, and then the car—a black Corvette—accelerated, exceeding the speed limit.

  “Man’s in a hurry,” said Mustaine, hoping the cop might notice and give chase.

  “Wouldn’t worry ’bout him if I’s you.” The cop studied the license a while longer before handing it back; he squinted at Mustaine. “’Pears yo’ barber didn’t stand close enough to you.”

  Fuck you, Mustaine thought, and was tempted to ask if they still hated hippies here. Was Vietnam still an issue?

  A vehicle with a winking caution light atop the roof pulled off onto the shoulder twenty yards away. Tow truck. Mustaine got the picture. Somebody had notified the wrecking service, told them that some guy with a fancy car and California plates was stalled east of town, and in the spirit of opportunism—like how about we screw a few bucks outa this fool?—the operator had called the cops. Looking away in frustration, Mustaine glanced up at the sign and this time saw the two faces; in the blue darkness above it the stars were thick and patternless.

  The driver of the tow truck approached, taking a stand just beyond the spill of light from the sign; the cop sidled around back of the car, shined his flashlight in the window.

  “What’s all this heah?” he asked, indicating three guitar cases.

  “Guitars,” Mustaine said, his paranoia increasing.

  “Open ’em up.”

  Mustaine pulled the cases out, set them on the hood and undid the latches. Inside were a Gibson L-5 with a cherry sunburst finish, an old white Telecaster, and a big blond Guild acoustic.

  “You a musician?”

  “That’s right.”

  “My kid brother’s got hisself a little group plays ’round heah.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Mustaine affected interest. “What’s he play?”

  “Buncha fuckin’ noise makes him think he’s God.” The cop snorted in disgust. He plucked the B string of the Guild. “I s’pose you got bills of sale for these instruments.”

  Mustaine fought to keep irritation out of his voice. “I’ve had ’em for ten, fifteen years. Nobody keeps sales slips that long.”

  “These heah look pretty damn valuable. Somethin’ valuable, you be wise to hang onto proof of ownership.”

  “The stores where I bought ’em’ll have records.”

  “I s’pect so, but you might could do some real unpleasant waitin’ if they take theah time sendin’ ’em along.” The cop held out his hand. “Lemme have yo’ keys.”

  “Look,” said Mustaine. “They’re my guitars, okay? If you let me make a couple of calls…”

  “Didn’t say they wasn’t yours.” The cop waggled his fingers. “Keys.”

  After Mustaine had passed him the key ring, the cop tossed it to the driver and said, “Run it on in now, Wallace.” Then he pointed to the cases. “Close ’em up. You kin stick ’em in the cruiser.”

  As he went about latching the cases, fetching them over to the police car, stowing them in the back seat, Mustaine toyed with the idea of making a break. It would be unrealistic to expect that he could escape, but the way things were shaping up he didn’t much care for his chances no matter how you sliced it. They had his car, his guitars. Lot of money there. What was to stop them from dropping him into a bayou and chopping the BMW into spare parts? Selling the instruments, or maybe giving them as presents to brothers and nephews. He stood by the open rear door, beginning to shake with adrenaline, poised to run. He wiped sweat from his eyes.

  “Go on…git in,” said the cop.

  A westbound car slowed. The black Corvette returning, its engine rumbling fatly, light channeled into shimmers along its hood. It pulled off the highway behind the BMW; its headlights drained shadows from ruts in the dirt shoulder. The cop said, “Goddamn it!” as a black-haired man in jeans and a blue work shirt climbed out and walked up to them. An Asian woman wearing a red ao dai, carrying a bottle of vodka, got out from the passenger side and leaned against the flank of the BMW. The man nodded pleasantly to Mustaine and said to the cop, “What’s the story, Randy? You’n Wallace back in the rip-off business?” His voice, a baritone, was a couple of sizes too big for his body, but had no real richness or tonality; it was simply big and peremptory, falsely emotive in the way of an actor who was just learning to project.

  “You got no call stickin’ yo’ nose in,” said the cop.

  “I was waiting for a tow,” Mustaine said eagerly, staking his hopes on this stranger. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

  The man hitched his thumbs in his hip pockets and regarded the cop with displeasure. He was short and heavily muscled, his hair a cap of tight curls that fit low on his forehead. His face was tanned, deeply lined, but the lines betrayed neither gloom nor meanness nor good humor; they appeared to be incidental detail. His features were generous, yet unremarkable. He resembled, Mustaine thought, a police sketch that had captured the likeness—but not the character—of a handsome Italian suspect.

  “This boy’s got valuable musical instruments,” the cop said, pointing out the guitar cases. “He ain’t got shit to prove he owns ’em.”

  “Lemme see if I got this straight,” said the man. “You’re bustin’ him ’cause he’s got a coupla guitars?”

  The Asian woman laughed and had a sip of the vodka. She had a sexy catlike face, with full lips and almond eyes. Her nipples poked up the silk of the ao dai; black hair tumbled about her shoulders. She caught Mustaine staring and laughed again.

  “What am I s’posed to do with you, Randy?” the man said to the cop in a tone of patience sorely tried. “I told you I won’t tolerate this shit.” He looked to the tow truck driver. “Put this man’s possessions back in his car. And send me the bill for the repairs.”

  The driver said he’d take care of it and started hauling the guitar cases; the cop scowled and adjusted the hang of his holster.

  “Now look heah, Joe,” he said. “I know you ’spect people to squawk ever’ time you set on a tack, but you can’t go ’round interferin’ in police business.”

  “That is pretty bull-headed of me, isn’t it?” said the man.

  Mustaine sensed the possibility of violence. There was a passive menace about the man, a blankness, an absence of vibrations that was more unnerving than rage or any strong emotion would have been.

  “I don’t know ’bout ‘bull-headed,’” said the cop, conciliatory now that he believed he had won a point. “God knows you got the right to have yo’ say. But theah’s a—”

  The man planted a hand flat on the cop’s chest. Mustaine expected him to shove the cop, but he just kept the hand there as if he were holding him up. The cop’s Adam’s apple bobbed; his eyes rolled down toward the hand. All the fizz had gone out of him. Mustaine could understand his reaction; he imagined how the hand felt—solid, a stony constraint, the frail heart beating against it, starting to ache, the skin growing painfully sensitive.

  “Go away,” said the man quietly. “Don’t lemme see you ’round for awhile.”

  The cop stared at a point above the man’s head; judging by the bewilderment of his expression, he might have been trying to recall something of profound importance.

  “I’m not givin’ you an option,” said the man. “There’s really nothin’ to decide.”

  After a moment the cop swung on his heel and walked briskly back to the cruiser. A few seconds later he pulled the car into a tight U-turn and headed toward town.

  “Stupid motherfucker!” The man spat out a breath, shook his head.

  Mustaine realized that his own chest was aching. He let out a sigh to clear the feeling of constriction. The man was watching him with amusement.

  “Thanks,” Mustaine said. “I…uh…”

  “No need,” said the man. “It was begging to be done.” He offered his hand; his grip was perfunctory, a quick squeeze. “My name’s Joe Dill.”

  “Jack Mustaine.”

  “You’re French extraction, are ya?” Joe Dill asked.

  “
Uh-huh.”

  “Me—” Joe Dill tapped his chest “—I’m Sicilian. The original name was Dilagrima, but my grandfather shortened it.” He grinned. “I don’t s’pose the old guy was aware of the humorous associations.”

  The driver of the tow truck began hooking up the BMW to his winch.

  “So.” Joe Dill rubbed his hands together. “How ’bout a drink? Lemme give you a proper welcome to Grail.”

  Mustaine was wary of this largesse, but Joe Dill steered him toward the Corvette. “I can’t let people get this kinda impression of my town,” he said. “It’s a matter of upholdin’ civic pride.”

  “I appreciate it.” Mustaine slid into the passenger seat. “But I’m wiped out. I maybe should take a rain check.”

  “Just one drink. Then we’ll find you a room.”

  To Mustaine’s surprise the Asian woman eased in to sit on his lap, enveloping him in a scent of jasmine. She smiled at him over her shoulder, then applied a squirming pressure with her buttocks that kindled warmth in his groin.

  “Pleased to meetcha,” Mustaine said, wanting to present an unruffled front; he had an idea she would enjoy seeing him flustered.

  “Okay, GI,” said the woman, and giggled.

  “You familiar with the Vietnamese?” asked Joe Dill, slipping behind the wheel, giving the woman’s thigh a pat.

  “I’ve known a couple,” said Mustaine.

  “They’re an exceptional people. Truly exceptional.”

  “You were in Vietnam?” Mustaine asked.

  Annoyance surfaced in Joe Dill’s face. “No, I missed it.” He nodded soberly as if agreeing with himself, then winked at Mustaine. “But I’m making up for it now.”

  The whimsical brightness with which he injected the statement unsettled Mustaine; he decided not to pursue the subject.

  “You’ll have to come visit me,” said Joe Dill. “You’ll see what I’m talkin’ about.” He glanced over at Mustaine. “I’m serious. You’d get a kick out of it. Maybe tomorrow, huh? But make it in the mornin’. From noon on I’ll be busy with St. John’s Eve.” He must have noticed Mustaine’s perplexity, because he said, “Most folks call it Midsummer Night’s Eve. It’s a big day for us. Quite a celebration. You picked a good night to have a breakdown.”

  Mustaine said that he’d have to see about his car, but maybe, yeah. With Joe Dill’s aggressive and unwarranted friendliness, and the woman on his lap impeding movement, blocking his view, he was beginning to feel more imperiled than he had alone with the cop.

  “Tuyet’s Vietnamese,” Joe Dill said.

  “I figured.”

  “Yeah—” Joe Dill fired up the engine, gunned it “—’bout ten years back some shrimpers was givin’ her family trouble over in Salt Harvest. I helped ’em out. Now she’s helpin’ me.”

  “Joe Dill number one American,” said Tuyet.

  Joe Dill grunted. “Don’t let her fool you with that pidgin talk. She gotta degree from Sarah Lawrence.”

  As he peeled out, fishtailing into the wrong lane, Tuyet took the opportunity to give Mustaine’s groin another massage. He had a glimpse of the gleaming white sign and its storm of moths. Once you noticed the profiles, it became difficult to see the grail. He supposed there was a lesson to be had from that—how a fascination with the superficial compromised one’s instinctive knowledge of the essential. The speed of the Corvette, the uncertainty of the situation, was making him feel young and uncaring. It occurred to him that this was the sort of feeling he had left Florida to recapture—to be lost and a little out of control, moving fast enough so that all the world became streaky lights, streaky darks.

  “How you doin’ there?” Joe Dill called out over the rush of the wind.

  “Real great!” said Mustaine.

  They rounded a curve, and as if the car were a compass needle oriented toward true north, the dome of the starry sky appeared to revolve a half-turn. The moon leaped along after them through the treetops like a bright monkey swinging branch to branch. The wind snuffed out the flame of Mustaine’s paranoia and he began to anticipate the night ahead.

  “Where we going?” he asked, clamping his hands to Tuyet’s waist to keep her still.

  Joe Dill, downshifting, said, “Little place up the road. You gonna love it,” and once again Tuyet laughed.

  4

  June 22 – 11:07 P.M.

  THE JUKEBOX AT THE REAR OF LE BON CHANCE looked like the Crown of Creation, like a rococo neon cathedral on the fritz. It was the gaudiest jukebox Mustaine had ever seen. Big as a pop machine, nearly six feet of glowing purple and crimson plastic, with gold filigree worked into clawed feet, and blinking lights that sprayed beams of ruby and indigo into the dimness, and a pearly tubular arch framing the domed upper portion. He pictured it seven stories tall on a hill of cloud with an endless file of sinners stretching away from its base—the One True Jukebox, the jukebox in whose image all lesser jukeboxes had been created, validating the Victorian concept of the Great Good Time to be had beyond the threshold of a sober, dutiful life. Zydeco music honked from the speakers. People dancing in front of it were sainted with a radiant nimbus. To Mustaine, more than a little drunk, its glowing niche provided a safe harbor in which he could get his bearings and avoid further conversation with Joe Dill and Tuyet—she had been riding him ever since he had restrained her in the Corvette, and his temper had begun to fray. They were rolling poker dice at the bar with the owner of the club, Miss Sedele, a slim fortyish redhead in a lime-green cocktail dress, while one of the bartenders, a cadaverous man with a greasy black pompadour, offered commentary.

  The room was about twice as long as it was wide. Hardwood floors and paneled walls on which were mounted photographs whose subject matter was hidden beneath glazes of reflection. Light bulbs in kerosene lamps hung from the ceiling cast a grainy yellowish murk. To the right of the jukebox was a bandstand, empty of equipment except for a solitary amp and a microphone, with stars and dice and smiling mouths of silver glitter pasted on the wall behind. To the left was a Ski Ball game; gathered around it, some old men were sucking on bottles of beer, watching younger men play. At the pool table a gawky kid with a prominent Adam’s apple and a chinless inbred look was rolling a cue ball back and forth and watching flies circle. About a dozen couples—most in jeans—whirled and stomped to the Zydeco tune, and at the tables beyond the dance floor, between eighty and a hundred people were hooting, laughing, and waving their arms. Waitresses in shorts and tube tops and dice-shaped earrings weaved among them, slapping at groping hands, beer slopping everywhere. The feeling was of All American stupidity, of gleeful dullness and working class fury—a zooful of brown passions. But the bar itself seemed part of a quieter, more exotic dimension. A number of heavily made-up women in low-cut dresses sitting together at one end, sipping on drinks loaded with fruit and looking restless. Their eyes swiveled toward the door whenever it opened, and one was engaged in what might have been a negotiation with an old man in a pink jacket and plaid pants. Farther along, a female dwarf in patched overalls was chatting up a black man in a dark blue silk suit, his fingers aglint with gold and diamonds. Next to them eight very tall college-age men in suits and ties were nursing their beers; they appeared unsure, apprehensive. Also an enormous bearded man with the build of a professional wrestler, a long-haired boy with a silver metal guitar, and a couple of girls who displayed the combination of studied disinterest and couturier clothing that Mustaine associated with big-time groupies. Then Joe Dill, Tuyet, and Miss Sedele. Taking it all in, Mustaine wondered if every element of Grail was imbued with this oddly congruent dissonance, whether—if he cut with a scalpel, slicing off a section of the entire town—he would find proportionate quantities of the predictable and the unexpected in every cell.

  He turned the jukebox’s metal pages. There were familiar names in among the Cajun and Zydeco tunes—Springsteen, Randy Travis, Alabama—but the selections on several pages were not only unfamiliar, they seemed once again to express Grail’s eccentric nature.
The labels were not printed but handwritten in a spidery script, and Mustaine had never heard of any of the songs or artists; he doubted he would ever have heard of them somewhere other than Grail, because the titles and the artists’ names had an idiosyncratic flair that hinted at a homegrown perversity. AA-108, for instance, was “Cruisin’ For A Bruisin’” by Some Guys In The Blue Ford. AA-112 was “Charlotte’s Last Dance” by Person Or Persons Unknown. BB-139 was “I Didn’t Know She Was Married” by The Salesman. Other titles were “Blast From The Past” by Cody’s Ex, “Satan Ain’t Waitin’” by Local Proffit, Jr., and “Guess What I Got In My Pocket?” by Little Fool. Several pages were blank. Curious, Mustaine fed in a quarter and punched up BB-174, “She-Bubba From Hell” by Victim. He tapped his fingers impatiently on the plastic until the Zydeco tune had ended. The jukebox whirred and clicked, the record was jacked onto the turntable, and someone began to breathe glutinously in counterpoint to a raggedly strummed guitar.

  After a few bars someone pulled the plug on the jukebox. Its lights died; the turntable slowed, dragging the music into a warped smear of sound. Some of the dancers were staring with obvious enmity at Mustaine, who felt more out of his element than before. Then the lights came back on, the record was rejected, and a new one dropped into place. Syrupy strings and a steel guitar. A few people started dancing again and Miss Sedele pushed through the crowd at the edge of the dance floor. She was pretty, crossing over into brittle, with slanty cheekbones, crow’s-feet like faint scratches in soapstone forking from the corners of her pale green eyes, and a Lady Cruella mouth made fuller by an excess of lip gloss. Her hair was piled high with solitary stylish curls hanging down past her ears; her breasts were served up white and plump by the tight bodice of the green dress. She frowned at him, put her hands on her hips and said, “Well, I guess you had no way a’knowin’.”

  “No way a’knowing what?” said Mustaine with a measure of belligerence.

  “Lotta these songs don’t get played ’cept on special occasions.”