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"He also bought a bunch of rural property south of the city limits. How well do you get along with him?"
"All right."
"Find out what he's up to. I don't want any more phone calls."
"Where is he?"
"Watching a bulldozer level the house that's on the lot by the Shadows."
I drove down East Main under the arched live oaks that spanned the street, toward the Shadows, a red brick and white-columned antebellum home built in 1831 on Bayou Teche. The acre Jerry Joe had purchased was located between two Victorian homes and went all the way back to the bayou and was shaded by oaks that were over one hundred years old. I drove through the piked gate and parked next to a salvage truck and an earth grader, where a group of workmen were eating lunch. Down by the bayou was a huge pile of splintered cypress boards, twisted pipe, crushed plaster powdering in the wind, and a flattened gazebo with the passion vine still clinging to the lattice work.
"Y'all couldn't move it instead?" I said.
"The termites was too heavy to get on the truck. That's a pure fact," a man in a yellow hard hat with a jaw full of bread and Vienna sausage said. He and his friends laughed.
"Where's Jerry Joe? I'll tell him how effective you are at doing PR with the sheriff's department."
It was a short drive to Mulate's in Breaux Bridge. As soon as I stepped through the door I heard Clifton Chenier's "Hey Tite Fille" on the jukebox and saw Jerry Joe out on the polished wood floor, dancing with a waitress. His elbows were tucked close to his ribs, his fingers pointed at angles like a 1940s jitterbugger, his oxblood loafers glinting. His whole body seemed animated with rhythm. His shoulders titled and vibrated; he jiggled and bopped and created an incredible sense of energy and movement without ever stepping out of a twelve-inch radius, and all the while his face beamed at the waitress with genuine pleasure and affection.
I ordered a 7-Up at the bar and waited for him to sit down. When he finished dancing he squeezed the waitress's hand, walked past me, his eyes fixed on the black bar man, and said, "Bring my friend the same order I got."
"Don't do that, Jerry Joe," I said to his back.
He pulled out a chair at a table covered with a red-and-white-checkered cloth. "You got it whether you want it or not . . . Catfish filet with etoufee on the top. This is food you expect only in the afterlife," he said. He twisted another chair out. "What's the haps?"
"Some people want to know why you just bulldozed down a house that George Washington Cable once lived in."
"Who?"
"A famous writer."
"Because it had an asbestos roof, because the floors were like walking on wet cardboard, because there w
ere vampire bats in the drainpipes."
"Why not work with people, Jerry Joe, explain that to them, instead of giving them heart failure?"
"Because the problem is not what I'm tearing down, it's what they think I'm going to build. Like maybe a pink elephant in the middle of the historical district." He put a stuffed mushroom in his mouth. "What? Oh, I get it. They got reason to have those kind of concerns?"
"I didn't say that."
"What are we talking about, then? I got it. It's not the house, it's me."
"No one can accuse you of being a Rotarian."
"I told you, my sheet's an embarrassment. I'm on a level with unlicensed church bingo."
"You and some others guys hit a fur truck. You also stuffed a building contractor into a cement mixer."
"He was taking scabs through our picket. Besides, I pulled him back out."
"Why are you buying property south of town?"
He patted his palm on top of his forearm, glanced toward the sound of someone dropping coins inside the jukebox. "Maybe I want out. Maybe I'm tired of New Orleans, being in the life, all that jazz. So maybe I got a chance and I'm taking it."
"I'm not with you."
"Buford LaRose is good for business . . . Turn on your brain for a minute, Dave . . . What if these peckerwoods get in Baton Rouge? New Orleans will be a worst toilet than it already is."
