The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (12 page)

“Hah,” Sundown snorted. “You’re out of touch, honey. It’s the teachers who want dope now. They need it more.”

“I see. So you’re an asset to public education?”

“I
do
have that civic sense, yes.”

The basketball courts and baseball diamond behind the school were surrounded by a high fence and gates that were heavily padlocked after hours, but democracy had asserted itself and several low passageways had been slashed through the chain links. At this hour the gates were just being locked, and a small, pretty berry of a girl in a yellow dress with red knee socks and a sheaf of sheet music in her hands stood waiting on the sidewalk.

This was turning out to be as much a waste as Lester, Shade thought. So Phillips’s people were stunned, but not beyond alertness for gain. Who was?

“Rochelle,” Sundown called.

The young girl started toward him. A true smile crossed her face and she started to skip to her father, but then she reclaimed her dignity and slid back into a more stately stride.

Sundown leaned to her face and kissed her cheek.

This, Shade thought, is the same man who the most secret of secret whispers said had knotted two St. Louis Syrians together by their arms, then sent them bobbing for rocks in a remote slough.

“We listened to Chopin today, Dad,” Rochelle said brightly. “But we practiced ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’ ”

“Look,” Shade said. “This is heartwarming and all, but I need to know a few things.”

“Correction. A lot of things.”

“That’s trite. No score. Now we can talk here like citizens, or on Second Street like what we are. Suit yourself.”

“Come on,” Sundown said. “I don’t know what it’s all about. If I did you think I’d be sittin’ around my office
talkin’?
”

“Is that all you’re doin’?”

A car horn began to honk, and Shade turned to see Blanchette squealing up the street in the city-issue Chevy. When the car was abreast of Shade it stopped, and Blanchette called out, “Come on! There’s something on Seventh Street, and it’s ours.”

Without a word Shade jumped into the car, grateful for action, eager for a problem he could wrap his hands around.

11

E
VENTUALLY HE
recognized the river. He’d been running near it for many minutes before he realized that the great, flat, flowing noodle of murk was a signpost back to the apartment. But was he going the right way?

Jewel tried to judge directions. Was that east? Or south? No handy mossed trees to clear things up, so it’s all a toss-up. His face was scarlet in the cheeks, with webs of sweat running down his body. The blond pompadour that he usually doted on had now warped into fashions of desperate design.

No, that’s the sun. It is. That’s the sun!

Ooh, that man’s head was bad frayed but maybe he never did die.

But this way, this way is home. That’s the sun!

Although his lungs were clawing at his heart, he began to run once more. He followed the railroad tracks that paralleled the river. The woods were thick between the tracks and the water, but there were cracked-glass warehouses full of lunch-bucket men, and coal bins with roofs and lattice-planked walls on the other side. Too many people here. Some of them turned their faces on him. They looked strange.

Wads of paper were punched by the breeze and rattled like screams along the tracks. Occasionally suspicious heads popped up on the brush side and studied him before disappearing once more. Everywhere was now really a passing strange place.

They hate me. They talk. They hate me and they talk.

And I did do it.

His feet sank in the gravel between ties, sounding like a sprout of chains that he was going to have to get used to dragging.

When the heartscratch of exhaustion was becoming too much, he rounded a bend. He saw the tarnished copper dome of a church with a cross aged black atop it.

That’s it.

Frayed head and shells talk hate me all over.

That’s it! That’s home up there!

Pete Ledoux stepped carefully down the slabwood stairs to the basement, dipping his head at the overhang. Even the clearest of plans can be warped by events into a bog of confusion, he’d found out this day, and now he wanted to pass the buck to Steve Roque.

Mrs. Roque, a knowing and pleasingly plump woman in jeans and jewelry, had shown him to the basement door. In the musty basement with green-painted cement walls, he located his boss in gym shorts and T-shirt, exercising to keep some order behind the treacherous expansion of his gut. He explained the new situation as Roque did sit-ups.

At the completion of one hundred sit-ups, Roque stood. Ledoux had ended his canted recitation of the day and sat on an old chair, silently waiting.

Roque raked his fingers through his moist gray hair, then picked up dumbbells and began to do curls.

“What a fuckup,” he said between clenched teeth, at about the fifteenth curl.

“You’re awful strong, Steve,” Ledoux said, when he realized those were eighty-pound weights.

“Rheumatic fever,” Roque said. “I lost most of my hair at sixteen. And ever since I turned bald, I got serious about muscles.”

“Well, I don’t know—you look sort of good bald.”

“That’s ’cause you’ve never seen me with hair.” Roque laid the dumbbells down. “
I’ve
never seen me with hair, either, really. Not as a man.”

“Some women like bald guys,” Ledoux said, nodding at his own
perceptions. “Even if they wasn’t barkers themselves, and could have a guy with hair, why they’d rather take a bald one. I’ve seen it happen.”

“Listen, fuckup,” Roque said crisply. “Don’t pull that soft-con shit with me, hear?” Roque toweled sweat from his face and neck. “I mean, that’s a real boost to my confidence and all, Pete, but I was wonderin’ how much pussy you figure me to cop up in the joint?”

Roque tossed the towel to the floor and stared at Ledoux, who looked away.

“Maybe, though,” Roque went on, “you think I could be real happy over at the pen, now, in Jeff City, since I got lucky and went bald during high school, but bald is in now? I won’t have to be the lonely guy on the cell block, this time. Lots of ivory-assed canteen turnouts’ll be wantin’ to oil down my special bald head, you figure?”

Ledoux studied his feet with an embarrassed slump to his body.

“Now, you’re startin’ to talk negative, Steve. Nobody has us on this, mon ami.”

“The kid has you. You have me. Is that nothin’?” Roque stood spread-legged and tapped his belly. “It’s like one coil of the noose leads to another.”

“Well, you’re right. The kid’s a problem.”

“The kid’s a problem to you, fuckup.” Roque stripped his soggy shirt off and hurled it toward the washer and dryer in the far corner. “You’re a problem to me.”

With his chin cupped in one hand and the other fanning the clammy air, Ledoux said, “I don’t see where
I’m
a problem. To nobody.”

“As long as the kid’s a problem—you’re a problem.”

“That kid’s goin’ to die.”

“Sure he is,” Roque said. “But you stay away from him. You already fucked it up pretty good and now we can’t go near him. He’s too hot for us.”

“Maybe I could have his cousin whack him. Diddle his girl once or twice, then whack him in the head.” Ledoux hopefully wagged his eyebrows, and inclined his head toward Roque. “Now you might peddle
that as your basic crime of passion, if the cousin’s dick’s still wet, you know. It could work.”

“No. You’re very clever at dumb shit, fuckup, but I think I’ll nix that plot.”

Roque stood under the lone light bulb and did side-to-side cool-down stretches. There were purple gouges in the small of his back, and several thin crisscross scars on his chest.

“Where’d you get those bites taken out of your back?”

“Frozen Chosen. That was Korea. Mortar shower.”

“Ah. That’s kind of neat, really. They didn’t take me.”

“Bad heart or something?”

“Nah. I’m a crook from the cradle. They don’t want crooks who admit it. You should’ve told them.”

“Yeah. But actually I wasn’t much of a crook yet, at the time.”

“The war grew you up, eh, mon ami?”

“Something did.”

“You got to follow your talent,” Ledoux said. “That’s no sin.” He gestured at Roque’s hairy chest. “Those slits on your titties, there—those from the same mortar?”

“Uh-uh. That’s razor blades, from the neighborhood. I had a point, but I should’ve kept quiet about it.”

When he’d finished his stretches Roque sat down on the weight bench. His expression was smooth, nicely calmed by the workout, late-coming sweat dripping from his nose.

“I’m going to tell you what to do, dipshit. Then you’ll do it.”

“You know I will. If it can be done.”

“I never mistook you for Superman, take my word. This is something you can handle. We can’t go to the kid, now, and peg him in the neighborhood. Everybody knows us down there. So what you’re going to do is, you’re going to call Sundown Phillips and you’re going to tip our peckerwood shooter in to them. Say it’s because you don’t want no misunderstandings, just because the kid’s workin’ out of Frogtown.”

“But why would I do that?”

“You dumb-ass. You don’t even make me laugh, you know that?
Use your fuckin’ noodle, will you? You say something like you’ve been told this kid did it, robbery or something, and you’re giving him up for peace, that’s all.”

“They’ll go in and kill him.”

“No shit? Have I told you how dumb I think you are lately? I mean, no shit, Pete—if we’re lucky they’ll kill him.”

Ledoux stood, his legs not quite steady, and nodded toward his boss.

“You’re the man,” he said. “I’ll go do it. But I got to say I don’t like tellin’ niggers they can come into Frogtown, you know, and shoot a white man.”

“Grow up, Pete. Get the niggers out of your nightmares and grow up. It’s business.”

“I hear you talkin’, but I don’t like it, lettin’ ’em come in down here on their own and kill a white man. It could start a trend. I don’t like it. But I’ll do it ’cause you say to do it.” He faced away from Roque. “Nothin’ else could make me.”

Roque lay back on the workout bench and shaded his eyes with his hands.

“So long, Pete,” he said. “It’s time to cut fresh bait and fish deep. Don’t fall in.”

The inside of his car was still baking hot, and everything liquid in him seemed to be dripping down his neck. Ledoux drove along the cobblestone street where cars were jammed to the curb, and kids played fuzzball between passing vehicles. This was it: aged brick row houses; idly athletic punks; twelve-year-old cars; and ancient litter. Home. Ledoux had protected this ground many times in his life, stretching all the way back to when he was ten, and the south-side Germans had come in three quick cars to seek revenge for some slight to their vanity that was now long forgotten. He’d broken his wrist that day when knocked on top of it by a grim-faced Dutch Boy who was at least fifteen, twice his size, and no fan of fair play. There had been many such days, and nights, run consecutively to make a life.

And now he was inviting Pan Fry to forget old scores and come on
down and waste a white man. Or two, or three. Aw, things change so much.

But better it be him than me. That never changed.

Someday he would have it worked out so no man could treat him like Roque did. That was a life plan. But business came first.

At a pay phone outside Langlois’s Package Liquor Store, he pulled over. The hinges creaked as he shoved his way into the booth. The walls were mightily embellished with liquored taunts and slurs and several sloppily scrawled but robustly recommended phone numbers. He thought about how he had spoken to Teejay Crane a week or ten days earlier.

“Look,” Ledoux had said as they huddled in the lobby of Crane’s theater, “Roque has got you. I don’t know your excuse for why he’s got you, man, but he’s got you by the nads.”

Teejay Crane’s nose was tapered at the bridge and bellbottomed at the base. “A brother man sold me out,” he said. “That’s all that gives Steve a complaint with me.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Ledoux said. “I think it’s that you owe him money you ain’t paid. Steve’s one of these sensitive guys, you know. He don’t like gettin’ fucked over.”

“Who does?”

“You, I guess,” Ledoux said. “You go into hock to rev up a little coke and a live pussy show here, in this joint, only Sundown whatchamajigaboo don’t like you free-lancing. He’s down on your independence. In fact, that’s why you’re gettin’ shylocked by Roque. But then you get popped by the cops who seem to know exactly what you’re up to and in what room. And now you tell me you ain’t sure you want to square things up.” Ledoux wagged a finger in Crane’s face. “That to me sounds like a guy who sort of
likes
gettin’ fucked over.”

Crane leaned against the stair banister to rest his lame right leg. There were salty patches in his black hair and he didn’t look as though he’d slept too well lately.

“I needed the green to grease things,” he said. “Sundown, he’s one stingy nigger. He wouldn’t allow me to start out on my own. Like, you
know, my little bit of action might keep one or two pennies from rollin’ into his own big pocket. So I had to grease things on my own, all the way up to Alvin Rankin.”

“You think.”

“I know. I know ’cause Alvin called me and gave me about two breaths of warning that I was gettin’ raided. Said he couldn’t help me. Said he had bigger fish to fry.” Crane sighed and shook his head. “To my mind that man is just another snake. Give him your votes and he forgets where he got them. He could’ve stood up for me, but Sundown leaned on him to let me go down. I know that’s how it was.”

“Yeah,” Ledoux said, “it’s like, I sympathize with you, Crane. You’re givin’ my heart a nosebleed, no question about it. But if you want
me
off your case you got to get straight with us. Especially Steve. He’d rather waste a welsher than eat apple pie, if you know what I mean.”

“I understand that,” Crane said. “But try to see it from my side.”

“What I see from your side is a guy who’s in trouble and won’t try to get out of it. Rankin robbed you, you asshole.”