The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (19 page)

As Ledoux worked his way toward the suspect mudbank he knew that this whole affair was too sloppy to come through unhurt. Bound to get caught out in a messy deal like this. He knew he could do another bit in Jeff City if he had to, not standing on his head or without taking his shoes off, but he could stand it. But he couldn’t handle pulling life and that Cobb kid could whine some plea-bargain ballad that would get that done to him.

Plenty of reason to erase the boy’s voice right there, even if he didn’t, by now, just plain old
want
to kill him.

Everything was pale in the sky, black on the ground, gray in the nightwash that was the huge in between. Shade tried to will his eyes to adjust, to focus into X ray and show him where he was. He was as lost as any child could get but more worried by it. He looked this way and that, and saw all that could be expected. It wasn’t enough.

He thought about climbing one of the hairy-barked trees that cowlicked out of sight. But it’d just be to rip his britches and see more trees and less ground. No point.

Shade had quit on trying to stay dry. Wetness was dues in a swamp, and he had paid up, first just to his knees, then a backstep misstep had put him into the thick water, flat, face up, nostril-deep. Unknown things rubbed against his skin and he had frequently walked into the ditch-spanning webs of absurdly ambitious spiders. They felt like nets breaking over his head and shoulders, sticking like spun sugar.

Leeches.

Shade’s hands went inside his shirt. He ran his fingers over the tautness of his chest and belly, and found three moist clingers at his midriff. They felt like nose hockers but they’d buried their heads and wouldn’t pull loose. Have to singe them out. Shade slumped. Forget them for now.

He trudged on resolutely, staying in the ditch water because once you were past dainty notions of dryness it was the clearest path to follow. The growth on the banks was an incestuous tangle of verdure. No single plant stood out, just a solid mass of related limbs and leaves and vines, all atop one another with stickers on the handholds.

The hum of everything that flowed or splashed, sang or chattered, was in constant need of deciphering. Was that a footstep? A cough? Wind? A rifle sighting in on the back of your head?

At some places the bottom went deep and Shade had to dog-paddle to the next muck promenade. He tried to keep his pistol dry but it didn’t really matter.

After a while he began to hear a soft thump, a regular flat tap that seemed out of rhythm. He went toward it but couldn’t see what it was until he was nearly touching it.

A johnboat adrift. That meant two people at least were out there somewhere.

Shade chinned himself on the gunwale, tilting the boat for a look inside. Nothing but a cracked paddle and an empty coffee can. He’d thought there might be an inert someone in the boat and was not entirely relieved that there wasn’t.

As he released the gunwale and eased back down into the water, he found himself remembering a time that he kept hoping he would forget.
It had been one of those gentle summer nights when the whole world had sweet breath, especially if you were sixteen and barely scarred, and he’d felt magically carefree, standing as he was in front of De Geere’s Skelly Station because it was the closest place to home that sold red cream soda, holding a handful of bottletops that he flying-saucered across the traffic. On such a night he had believed that no one could take offense at harmless fun, even if the serrated disks had skimmed the hood of your new Impala. So he had hardly noticed the car suddenly whipping to the curb and the wad of man that jumped onto the sidewalk before the door could bounce shut behind him. The man was thirtyish with high straight shoulders and a face that said he had many scores to settle but couldn’t, yet had lucked onto one that he could. As he closed gregariously on teenaged Shade, his cheeks jerked and he said, “Don’t mess with me. You’re goin’ to learn that.”

Shade was surprised witless, an incredulous smile on his face, holding his soda and the remaining tops. “What’s the problem?”

“Ain’t none.” And a serious fist popped upside Shade’s head. He saw stars and daylight and fell, then skittered on his hands and knees across the pavement. A toe caught him in the butt, hurting more than he thought it could. He came up then with the Big Boy cream soda bottle and whacked the man on the elbow, which straightened his arm, then on the ear, which downed him. Shade stood over the flat man and shook with indecision, then bent and bashed the prominent teeth out, then hit again in the empty spot, blood pulp and white chips flecking his hand.

Old lazy-eyed De Geere had come running from the limestone station, “Get on out of here!” Then, as Shade stood by dumbly, “See what you done? You done killed the man, fool! Whoever told you you was tough, you sissy? ’Cause you ought’ve done it to them! You just one more Frogtown idiot boy.”

And for two wired, crazy days he had run for relatives, believing that it was true, he’d killed a man and life was over.

But he hadn’t really, and it wasn’t, but that is when it had started to change.

*     *     *

Not much for it but to sit it out, Jewel thought. Off to one side he could see a tree that was leafless, drowned by too much water. The tree rose all dead by itself amid the live ones, beckoning like a lean-fingered taunt from the deep-sixed beyond.

Why would one die from what the rest get fat on?

He was in contemplation of that and other big questions, like had his life turned in the fifth grade when he’d had a teacher he could tell to shove it and she’d just shrug, when he began to hear the sounds.

Somebody was coming up the little rise, not even being too quiet about it. Boots dragged in the mud and saplings were bent into grips. Loud breaths.

Running wasn’t worth it anymore. After this there could be nowhere left to run. He was caught. There were men who’d been shot up to seventeen times and lived to talk about it too much, and commandos with shoe-polish faces could slit half a dozen sentry throats in a night’s work. But he didn’t have a blade or any real confidence that he was one of those seventeen-bullet guys.

So he sat back in the shadows and waited, wanting only to die like a man, although no one much would ever know if he did or he didn’t. Not out here.

The noise was closer now, on top of the bank. He could see that it was Pete the frogfucker he never should’ve known.

He watched as Pete poised catlike and swiveled his eyes all around the dark spots and tangled shapes. There was nothing for it now, and Jewel’s hand hoisted a chunk of rock. He stood, hoping only to bean the guy once before he was exploded across the woods like so much red sand.

“Yo, Pete,” he called. “You wouldn’t be lookin’ for me, would you?”

Ledoux hunkered small at the jibe of the voice, his fingers tapping on the stock of the shotgun, his body swinging toward the sound.

“Hey, boy. Why’d you run out?”

Shade, immobilized by the memory of a man he’d almost killed, was shaken when he heard something a little bit clumsy going up a muddy
incline straight ahead, rustling bushes. He crouched in the water and stared toward the sound. There was more of it. The mud terrace had cockspur all over it, and he distinctly heard a sharp breath. He began to slow-motion through the water, careful not to splash, sneaking up from behind.

Moonlight oozed through the trees and spotted the water now and then. In one such brief illumination Shade saw the surface wriggle with a chilling sashay two steps in front of him.

Cottonmouth.

He stood still but the snake had some interest in him and turned toward the heat of his body. The curiosity of the reptile had peril at its core, and Shade pulled no air, shyly watching the triangular head weave side to side to within inches of his face. He tried to not look edible and to remember correctly the folklore that said either snakes never bite in the water or they
only
bite when afloat. It was confused in his mind.

The snake’s length was strung out in the weak current, but his head was still right there.

The sound on the mudbank became louder and regular, then there was a blast of a shotgun and a yell.

Shade cupped both hands beneath the water, then shoved a wave at the snake and dove to his right, his face submerging. When he came up he began to run toward the shot, looking for the cottonmouth that he couldn’t see, reaching for his pistol which he pulled and cocked.

In the pause, Jewel heard the click of the safety being punched off. It rang out like half of a ding-dong.

“Couldn’t stand the idea of corned beef, you frogfuckin’ shit.”

One of the myriad of shroud shadows moved and Ledoux stared at the area. He peered into the thicket, then shot, hoping for luck.

The pellets ripped through the leaves above Jewel, pattering like supercharged rain. He fell to the ground and began to crawl. His elbows squeaked in the mud. The rock was still in his hand, but useless.

Rapid splashes began to sound from the ditch down the mudbank. A pistol was fired in the air.

Jewel saw Ledoux stop, startled by the new dynamics, and thought, Duncan, Duncan has come to the aid of blood thicker than any water, even this.

Quickly another form appeared and a voice unrelated to him said, “Don’t, Ledoux!”

Ledoux backed toward Jewel, going “Huh?” then suddenly fired at the man. The pellets were screened by the curtain of leaves and limbs and the man did not fall or even cry out. He fired back, and Ledoux did a headfirst backflop into the mud, the shotgun flying from his hands.

Just one bullet, Jewel thought.

He went after the body with the rock swinging his hand, knowing that he didn’t know much but this was it. No mistake.

One more chance.

Shade came forward under the trees, his pistol hand trembling, his gaze centered on the man he’d just tumbled. The man was bucking convulsively and groaning a long single tone.

The shooting had the sanctity of self-defense but the gurgle of the downed man ruled out any feeling of righteousness. Shade had never shot another man and he walked cautiously, looking for the shotgun that might still figure in all of this.

A wild screaming blond came running from the dark, crouched to the ground, one hand raised above his head.

“Stop!” Shade yelled.

But the blond closed on Ledoux and began to beat at the fallen man with a frenzy of blows. Something cracked and the feral sounds from both men were raised in a sickening duet.

“Damn it, stop!”

Shade stepped quickly to the men and shoved Cobb away. He saw the rock in the boy’s hand and pointed his pistol in his face.

“No more, Cobb.”

Jewel breathed loudly, sitting back on his haunches, his legs spread before him.

“I got to kill him, he wants to kill me.” Jewel sucked for air and
jerked his words. “He wants to kill me.” He looked up at Shade, his eyes glowing. “I’m a killer.”

“No, it’s over. It’s over.”

Jewel backed off and lay on the ground, sobbing for breath.

Kneeling, Shade checked Ledoux. He’d been ripped in the lower left chest, inches below the heart. Blood was leaping from the wound. Cobb’s rock pummeling appeared to have been ineffective, only adding some deep bruises to his chest.

“It’s bad,” Ledoux said. “I know. Oh, shit this upstream life.”

Shade stiffened his fingers straight, then pressed them inside the hot wound, trying to block the hole.

“Oh! Oh!”

“You try to run, Cobb, and I’ll kill you.”

“I guess I won’t,” Jewel said, his voice dreamy with weakness.

“We can’t get out of here in the dark, Ledoux,” Shade said. He pressed his fingers against the moist rim of the wound he’d given the man. “You’ll have to hang on.”

They all sat silently for a moment. Ledoux, his face warping with pain, stared up at Shade.

“I’ve seen you,” he said.

“I’m Rene Shade. I want you to know.”

“Ugh. Sure. Lafitte Street Shades. Shot by you.”

“You made me.”

“Oh, I remember you, mon petit homme. You ain’t clean. None of you are.”

Shade nodded.

“You were a punk,” Ledoux said, his voice warbling, his breath flecking blood. “You stole, all of you.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, hell, you’ve shot me.
You
.”

The sounds of the swamp had come back to life, the intrusion of the shots having been forgotten. The amphibian blats and limb-rattling movements of coons and others sounded all around.

“You hurt people,” Ledoux said. “Where do you get off shootin’ me?”

“I never would’ve killed,” Shade said. “Take it easy, Ledoux. You would’ve.”

“So? Ugh, ugh. I had ambitions, so?”

“Save your strength.”

Jewel Cobb was now relaxed with the final relief of having been caught. He lay on his belly, head on arms, and mumbled sleepily into the mud. Shudders made his body palpitate in the muck, and his voice would raise incoherently.

For a long time Shade had hopes that Ledoux would live, but he felt the odds get longer against that chance with each squirt through his fingers.

Once Ledoux raised his head, with an effort that shocked by its difficulty, and said, “Can I be forgiven?”

“I don’t know.”

Ledoux slumped back.

“Fuck it.”

“Maybe.”

Soon after that Shade withdrew his fingers from their pointless position and leaned against a tree trunk, weary, sick to the bone, and sad. He looked up through the trees where a bit of sky showed. Since the swamp was essentially impenetrable at night, they could not leave until morning and help arrived. He sat looking at the sky and the corpse he’d made, waiting.

Waiting.

As the night sky began to pale, carp, following some primal urge, came up to the mudbanks and began their fishy barks that sounded the coming of dawn. The weird prehistoric grunts roused Shade from a flinching slumber.

The Cobb kid was still asleep and the world was coming awake. The sun rose pink in the east and the various flows seemed somehow louder in the light.

Shade, his eyes like robin’s eggs in tablespoons of blood, stood when full dawn arrived. Soon he heard them. The full throttle hum of searching boats.