Colored Town

New Jersey

            “That was fun, let’s do it again,” Jasmine said.

            “Sure,” I replied, “do it by yourself now.”

         She pushes the release button on the butt, drops the empty magazine and locks in a fresh one.  She works the slide, and chambers a round.

              “Like this?”

         “Uh huh.”

         She holds it double-handed.  The shots sound sharper, heavier than normal for a Glock Nine.  That’s because it’s the special model, banned from the US.  The thing is made out of ceramic and plastic.  Not as accurate, but then again it goes through metal detectors like a ghost.

         I watch the rounds kick up sand when it misses, or tear bleeding holes in the rusted car door we’re using as a target.

         Seagulls wheel above, undisturbed by the shots.  They’re used to all kinds of noises out here, in New Jersey’s biggest waste pit.  The air smells of corruption and things long dead in the sun.  Whispering susurrations from traffic in nearby I95 wrap around the noise from the gun. 

         Suddenly I want a drink.  The need is so intense it burns like Jack Daniels used to do on that first shot.  I light a Malboro instead and clear my head.  I used to be a drunk.  Now I’m an alcoholic.  I go to meetings.

         “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” I ask her.

         Jasmine looks at me and I see things swimming in her eyes like whirlpools from the dorsal fins of leviathans in some deep, primordial sea.

         She’s beautiful, Jasmine is.  More beautiful than anything I’ve seen in all my thirty-five years.  It’s July of 1985, fifteen years back from my last tour in Vietnam.  I still hear the pounding bursts and screams.  Sometimes when people talk to me, its like their voices are coming through a whirling fan like the blades of a long-destroyed Huey gunship.  At night the dreams come, all the long-dead faces, and blood coats the night like background fabric.  I wake up painted in sweat, the bed destroyed and sometimes flecked with red like splatter from a careless painter.  Going on the wagon didn’t help.  In fact, it made it worse, removed the anesthetic of beer with bourbon shots.

         “Maybe, a little, when I was a kid.  I’ve got older brothers, you know?”

         I look in her eyes again and I know some of her words are lies.  But I don’t want to really know; if you don’t see it its not there.  I cough once, again, but thankfully no blood comes out this time.

         “You okay?”

         “Yeah, I’m okay.” 

         But I’m not.  It’s lung cancer.  They talk about tobacco and I’ve been smoking since I was thirteen.  Throw in two tours in the Crotch, Marine Corp LURPS, patrols in the boonies, breathing, eating and wearing Agent Orange and it’s a wonder I didn’t check out years ago.  Of course the VA says the Orange’s got nothing to do with it.  The government never lies to you, right?  But I believe the VA doctors:  nine months, maybe a year, who knows?

         We walk through the hole in the fence and find the rented car parked on the dirt road.  We head back to the hotel.

         She showers first.  When she’s done I go in.  We use the courteous moves of two people who aren’t intimate, yet share a room.  I dress in jeans and sport shirt and when I come out she’s on the bed wearing some white robe that barely reaches her knees.  CNN is on but she’s not watching it.

         “I don’t want to go out,” she says. “Order in.  Let’s get pizza.”

         “You sure?”

         “Yeah.”

         The pizza arrives with two large Diet Cokes and we eat on our individual beds, channel surfing.

         “I never did thank you,” she says, not looking at me.

         “Don’t bother, they’re paying me.”

         “Is that why you did it?  I mean go all the way to France to get me?  Or is it because my name is Jasmine DuPain and I’m Jimmy’s little sister?”

         It hurts.  Memories can hurt worse than anything physical.  He’s never been out of my mind, not since that afternoon on the outskirts of Chu Lai, twenty years ago.

              I still see it coming down like a skull.  The orbs where the eyeballs should be, just holes where blue sky shines through, only it’s not blue but deep maroon the color of arterial blood like death approaching.  My vision is narrowed and the thwump-thwump of the Medivac Huey’s blades hurl cascades of hot air pulsing down.  It doesn’t dispel the acrid smell of cordite and savaged flesh.  I sense the field dressings tight across my chest and midsection, crusted with blood, dirt and crushed insects.  I float above it all on the morphine.  A medic sinks another needle in my arm and adds a line to the M written on my forehead with a grease pencil. 

            I turn and look over at Jimmy.  They covered him with a poncho from head to toe but I can see his entrails peeking from beneath the plastic, contrasting with his black skin.  An entire body’s worth of Jimmy’s blood soaked in the thirsty soil of Vietnam.

         He’d been my friend like no other in my life.  I loved him as only soldiers in combat can love each other.  When that RPG flared toward us, he shoved me hard to the side and took the brunt of the explosion. 

         The chopper lands and they hustle me on board.  Jimmy remains behind.  The dead lose their priority.  I spent three weeks at the hospital in Da Nang before getting on a freedom bird back to the world.

         But I’m not free.  I’ll never be free.

         I look over at Jasmine.  Her light brown skin holds a golden sheen like burnished copper.  Her hair falls to her shoulders in tight curls and her face reminds me of Janet Jackson.  Smooth muscles run beneath the skin, somehow accentuating her beauty.  She wears a thick chain with a heavy pendant that hangs just above the cleft of her breasts.

         “Well?” she says.

         “There is that, yeah.  Jimmy’s a part of it.”

         “You’re a mercenary, aren’t you?” she asks.

         “No, I’m a private investigator who goes the extra mile.”

         Her dark eyes bore into mine like beams of green light.  It takes a special kind of effort to break from that gaze.  I still feel her eyes on me.

         She comes to me later that night, her hair fragrant with lilac shampoo, her skin dotted with Jean Nate perfume.  There’s wildness to her moves and desperation in mine.  I enter her, feeling the firmness of her curves beneath and for those moments I no longer see Jimmy’s face.  We turn over and she rides me, controlling our lovemaking as if I’m a child.

         There are no dreams that night.

         We catch the flight at Newark the next morning.  The Glock’s secured in a special pocket in my jacket.  It doesn’t set off the metal detector as I walk through.  I retrieve my carry on bag with the bullets secured inside a hollowed out aerosol shaving cream.

         The flight is due to land at Bayou Cocher a little past noon.  Jasmine’s seat is next to mine.

         “You know why Hap hired you, don’t you?” she asks.

         “Because I grew up in Bayou Cocher?”

         “Well, maybe a little bit, but the truth is you’re the only white man he trusts.”

         “So why didn’t he send a couple of brothers?”

         She smiles, her lips open against perfect teeth, her eyes filled with mysteries.

         “Okay, let’s rephrase that.  You’re the only man he trusts.”

         I look out the window before answering her.  Twin cravings for alcohol and tobacco tug at my body, competing with the ache in my lungs.

         “That’s what happens when you run Colored Town,” I reply.

         Hap DuPain is to colored town what John Gotti is to Brooklyn.  There isn’t a crack deal, grifter, card game, con artist, whore or pimp that can operate in colored town without Hap’s approval - And a little piece of the action in his pocket.

         They call it Colored Town, but a visitor would find all kinds in there, especially at night.  Some whites men looking for a walk on the wild side with the black hookers, or losing Friday’s pay at the illegal games.  Mostly though, it’s blacks, mulattos and redbones running a street of gin mills, cribs, gambling joints, clapboard corner bars that never close, matchbox barbeque joints smelling of hickory ribs and crack corners that cut a swath nearly through the center of Bayou Cocher. 

                On one side are the middle class homes of mostly white folks with an outside ring of high-end McMansions with price tags starting at half a mill.  Most of these folks commute to New Orleans and six figure jobs.  On the other side is the black section, small three bedroom ranches, bungalows, trailers and old paintless frame houses with clapboard shutters for ventilation and Christmas lights that never come down.

         The Marcel Serrano family runs the mob action between New Orleans and Bayou Cocher, taking up residence in the smaller town much the same as Al Capone used to run Chicago from Cicero.  Sanctioned by the old Luchesse Family out of the Bronx, Marcel Serrano couldn’t run the action in Colored Town.  That was sub-contracted to Hap DuPain.  Keeping the peace over it all was Sheriff Roger O’Day, a lawman crooked as a mile of bad mountain road.  O’Day’s in the bag to the Serrano’s and all power in colored town flowed from there.

         There are no signs or markers to delineate Colored Town’s boundaries.  None of it was ever advertised, yet it remains the hottest spot outside of the Big Easy.

         “Can I ask you something, Jasmine?”

         “Sure, Dan.”

         “How come Hap wants you back so bad he sends somebody like me to get you all the way from France?”

         “Cause I got something they want.”

         “What’s that?”

         “Uh huh, now its my turn to ask something.”  The plane hits an air bump, the seat belt lights up.  Heavy clouds the color of lead race beneath the wings.

         “Do you remember me, last time you saw me? I must have been twelve,” she says.

         “I remember you, when I used to hang around with Hap, Jimmy and LeRoux, just before me and Jimmy joined the Corp.”

         She smiled and gave her hair a little tug.  I swear I’m falling in love with that girl and it hangs like an anvil hooked to the tender parts of my heart.

         “Yeah,” she says. “I remember the bigger girls talking about you.  You were so cool. Dan the Man,” and she grinned again at my old nickname.

         “That was the year you kinda vanished, Jasmine.  Went away with your aunt or something, and you never returned.  What happened?”

         Something ran across her tight features and the smile vanished like smoke on a windy day. She leaned her head on the window and didn’t answer.

         There are storms out in the Midwest and it screws up our connections.  It’s nearly dark when we land a Bayou Cocher Regional Airport.  It’s actually pretty big and there’s talk of expanding it to International status and taking the overrun from New Orleans.

         I take a quick run into the bathroom while Jasmine waits outside.  In the privacy of a stall I load a full clip in the plastic Glock.

         “What’d you do?” she asks.

         “What do you think?”

         She doesn’t reply.  In that second something passes through her eyes.  There’s a certain concern, and something else that I can’t quite read.

         “Just watch yourself, okay, Dan?”

         “Sure, c’mon girl,” and I take her hand as we head out the exit.

         Hap waits outside with his limo parked at the curb.  A gnome-like black man sits in the driver’s seat.  Another one leans against the door.  He’s big enough to be a line backer – Hap’s muscle.

         Hap’s no slouch himself in the strength department, never was.  His shaved head gleams in the sun like a Caddy’s bumper.  His features have the rough looks of someone who’s been in one brawl too many.  The flesh of his face is stretched tight across bones like skin on a drum.  A piece of his ear is missing from a long ago bar fight and a jagged scar cuts a white line across the indigo of his cheek.  He steps toward Jasmine and she hugs him.  “Howya doin’ Jazz,” he greets her but she says nothing.  He turns to me.

         “Dan the Man.  You lookin’ good, m’man.  Ssup?”

         “Not much, Hap,” I reply.  We haven’t seen each other in a decade.  Even back then, we weren’t close, like with Jimmy.  Hap had hired me in New York over the phone, to bring back Jasmine.                     

                We get in the limo and the driver pulls out in traffic.  But he’s not heading toward downtown Bayou Cocher.  He’s taking a side road that leads toward the water and the boonies.  I don’t say a word, just letting things develop.  I feel Jasmine fingers close over mine and the warmth of her hand is good as rain in summer.

         A little while passes and the scenery outside the limo’s windows change.  On the one side is the swamp bordering the Mississippi River.  Great expanses of flooded woods filled with Cypress and dead logs where cottonmouth moccasins lay coiled.  Low branches touch the water and great tropical shrubs spring up, creating viscous pools of darkness that sunlight never penetrates.  It reminds me of the Mekong Delta.

         The raised roadbed acts as a levy and the other side is a thick forest of oaks, pine, and weeping willows laced with Spanish moss.

         The limo clips along at sixty and now even the occasional shack gets farther in between.  We flash past a grassy recess in the woods and for a second I see a patrol car, squatting there like a crab on a piling.

         I look out the back window and see the car pull out, tires kicking great plumes of dust as the driver nails the gas.  In moments the patrol car is right on out bumper and I see the Sheriff Department logo on the hood.  The lights on the roof flash blue and red and the wail of the siren penetrates the air-conditioned interior of the limo. 

         The big bodyguard looks at Hap and says, “right on time, you called it, big mon.”

         Hap grins, leans over to the chauffeur and says, “not yet, not yet.”  In the distance I see another car heading toward us.  This one is an unmarked unit, plain-Jane Crown Vic model with antennas.  I don’t know why they call it unmarked.  It screams “cop” and every city kid over the age of eight can recognize it.

         A side road on a section of dry woods appears ahead of us.  “That’s the one,” Hap says, “now.”

         The driver hits the brakes, spins the wheel and the big limo sluices into the side road.  It travels a mile or so and stops.  The Sheriff’s car pulls ahead and stops across the road in front of the limo.  The Crown Vic pulls behind.  We’re boxed in.

         No words need to be said.  We all know the drill and we exit the limo, Hap, his bodyguard, the driver, Jasmine and I.  We’re outside before the Sheriff reaches us.  He’s grinning and in no hurry.  A .357 Magnum revolver hangs from his right hand.  His passenger, a deputy, is on his left.  He cradles a short barrel, twelve-gauge, all cocked and locked.  The deputy’s nametag reads LaChaise. 

         How well I remember Sheriff O’Day and Deputy LaChaise.  O’Day’s a red-faced, heavy Irishman, usually sweating and always mean.  LaChaise is a skinny, white trash cracker who never had a kind thought in his life.  Those two have one quality that’s allowed them to retain control over Bayou Cocher:  They spread the wealth.  From direct contributions to all the politicians that control things in Louisiana, and even more effectively, to the undertow of real power trough Marcel Serranno and his mob.  There’s no doubt that numerous strange disappearances of those who crossed O’Day, can be put at his doorsteps.

         A third man gets out of the unmarked car.  Unfurls is more like it.  This guy has to top out at six four at least.  He wears brown slacks straining against overdeveloped thigh muscles.  His arms stick out of a short sleeve shirt like tree trunks.  The face is pale and dry as dough left out in the sun.  His features filled with sharp angles topped with eyes containing the barely-restrained rage of the habitual steroid user.  The guy’s a perfect compliment to O’Day and LaChaise.  He carries a gun in a shoulder holster but doesn’t draw it.  It’s like he’s saying he doesn’t need it to handle the likes of us.  He looks like a malevolent version of the Hulk.

         The four of us are standing close to the open doors of the limo, just a few feet from each other.  The sun is a tip of flame in the sky and the air feels like a baker’s oven that’s just been opened.  Smells of rotted vegetation surround us but can’t override the odor of sour milk from O’Day’s sweating body.  He stops in front of us.  LaChaise now holds the shotgun at port arms.

         “Well, well, looka’ heer,” he says.  “Y’all out for a ride in the country.  Ain’t that nice.”  Then he looks over at me.  “Dan the Man, back from Noo Yawk and still hanging out with niggers.  Ain’t you learnt nothin’ boy?”

         Something inside me curls into a fist.  I’d give up the few months of life I’ve got left to sink my fist into his fat, evil face.  But there’re the .357 and the shotgun.

         “What’s this about, Sheriff O’Day?” I ask.  “Were we speeding?”

         He laughs, a sound like swamp gas bubbling from something long dead.

         “Well now, you can ask ol’Hap, here.”

         I look at Hap.  He says nothing.

         “Way to go,” the Hulk says.  “Always thought silence be a good quality for a nigra.”

         The deputy gives a low chuckle as he holds the shotgun steady.  He spits something brown into the dirt of the road.  His teeth are blackened and I imagine I can smell the rotted tooth enamel from here.

         The Sheriff looks at me and I hold his gaze.  “By God,” he says.  “You really don’t know what this’here’s all about, don’t you?  You gotta be about the dumbest white man around, you know that, boy?”

         I shrug and say nothing.

         “All right, let me tell you what you’re friends been up to and how they dragged your ultra-stupid ass into it.  You ever hear of the Rochambeau Museum heist, y’all get that news up in Noo Yawk?”

         I nod because I can’t trust myself to speak to him.  Of course I’d heard of it.  Kept in the Rochambeau Museum in New Orleans was a collection of precious jewels that was supposed to be part of the treasure hoarded by the legendary New Orleans pirate Jean Laffitte.  Valued at about six millions, the collection was heisted one night in spite of heavy security.  No one had been caught and the jewels never recovered.

         “Now you see,” O’Day continued, “rumor has it that the perpetrators could only fence it through Colored Town.  So the jewels wind up safely stashed in some locker somewhere by the king of Colored Town, good ol’Hap hiself.  But he don’t want to share it like he’s supposed to, so he gives the key and location to his little sister here for safekeeping in France.  Y’all following me?  Dumb as you are, I cain’t ever be sure.”

         I follow him, alright.  Things are clear now.  It wouldn’t be suspicious for a PI like me to bring Jasmine back, but I was actually a bodyguard.  Hap had known my relationship with Jimmy and that I’d let nothing happen to his little sister.  Now O’Day turned to Jasmine.

         “Well look at you.  Little Jasmine all growed up.”  Even his voice was dirty, his face a leer.  “Maybe I’ll give you over to Ray-Ray here,” he said, nodding toward the Hulk.  “He likes that sort of stuff. Just be sure to dispose of her properly when you done, Ray-Ray.”

         O’Day now reached over, quick as a rattler’s strike, grabbed Jasmine’s pendant and tore it off her neck.  She let out a cry and he backhanded her, sprawling her into the dirt.

         I leaped at him, but the Hulk caught me in the midsection with a short punch.  I went down to my knees.

         I may have been a drunk, smoker and sometimes stoner, but I’m still Marine Recon.  Since I left the Corp, martial-arts training’s been my one constant.  I guess I didn’t look that dangerous to the Hulk and he didn’t put everything he had into the punch.

         He should have.

         I rose from my knee and hit him with a solid roundhouse punch.  When you fight for keeps, you don’t hit the face.  It’s filled with big, tough bones.  I caught him on the  side of the neck, right where the bones are smaller and easier to break.  Those are the ones that protect the spinal cord.  There was a noise like dry wood snapping.  The air went out of him and he fell like a Guignol that’s had the puppeteer’s strings cut.  He didn’t move and his head hung at an angle nature never intended.

         LaChaise stepped toward me, “You sum’bitch,” he rasped.  The shotgun was raised and time seemed to slow down and evaporate.  I looked into the bore, my eyes in the direct line of fire.  I swear I could see the finger tightening on the trigger.  Then a strange thing happened.

         Deputy LaChaise’s head exploded into red mist.  A second later the crack of a sniper rifle washed over us and I recognized the sound of a modified M-14, the favored weapon of Marine snipers in Vietnam.

         Sheriff O’Days eyes turned wild and he looked around him with the fear of the bully who’s had the tables turned on him.  Before he could say anything, Jasmine stepped up and shot him twice in the chest.  He collapsed and she shot him four more times.  Satiny red pools spread out in clover-shape from under his body.  A fly landed on his face and crawled across his still-opened eyes.

         I heard a motorcycle start in the distance.  I barely saw a rider before the machine vanished around a curve.  He carried a rifle slung across his back.

         “You remember Bubba Jones, don’t you, Dan?” Hap said.

         Yeah, I remembered Bubba, went to school with him.  Enlisted a year before me in the Corp and was reputed to have been top sniper in Vietnam.   

         I looked across at Jasmine.  She held my eyes with a silent plea.  I turned away, felt Hap’s hand on my shoulder.

         “Let me tell you a story,” he said, as he walked me to the back of the limo, past the three bodies and the patrol cars with their lights still flashing.  In the distance I saw a truck approaching with four black men inside - Hap’s people, the cleanup crew.

         “See, Dan, once upon a time there was a Sheriff back in Bayou Cocher.  Now we all got a little darkness in us, don’t we?  I mean a little piece of us that wants to do evil things.  That’s the devil in us, don’t you see?  But the goodness overrides and we don’t let ourselves do those things, but a few of us do. That Sheriff did. I ain’t talking about graft, stealing, all that stuff, I’m talking true evil here.  You see, that Sheriff liked little girls, eight, ten, twelve, surely no older than twelve.  Jasmine almost made it past that.  She was exactly twelve when O’Day set his eyes on her.  He picked her up one day after school, in his patrol car, took her behind the feed store and did things to her.  He was a big ole white man with a badge and a gun.  What’s a poor little twelve year old colored girl gonna do?  He picked her up again the next day and the next.  This went on for almost a month a’fore she came to me.  Wasn’t nothing I could do.  He’s got that greaseball mob and all the crooked politicians and the law behind him.  I managed to send Jasmine away to Ocean City, in Virginia, with her aunt.  I could do that much, and nothing more.”

         “There were never any jewels, were there?”

         “No, we made it up.”

         “Where’d they go?”

         “Don’t know.  We had nothing to do with that heist.”

         I looked over at Jasmine.  Her eyes burned into mine.  I turned away and started walking.  Hap grabbed my arm and I stopped.

         “Dan…I mean, I’m sorry we got you into this, but Jasmine, she’s got real feelings for you.  Give her a chance.  She’s a good woman.  All she needs is some of your time.”

         That’s the one thing I don’t have to give her.

         I turn and walk away.  A breeze stirs the cattails along the side of the road.  I feel the sun at my back like the breath of Satan.  I sense Jasmine, watching, and it hurts as if fishhooks flayed my skin.  I keep on walking.

         Later, I reach the main road and stick out my thumb.  An old truck the color of rust, pulls over and the driver opens the passenger door.

         I get in.