The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (22 page)

And, though this fine love had turned her around, and once or twice out, it had not turned suitors away. Her butt got pinched more than a baby’s nose and even her snappy slaps back couldn’t stop them. Since Ronnie had gone away to the Braxton Federal Pen she had come to feel like she was a go-go girl in strange men’s dreams, for so many of them called or stopped her on the street to say they’d been thinking of her, constantly.

When Wanda parked in the drive of the drafty hulk of a house she’d been reduced to by jail widowhood, one of the more harmless of her trailing pack came across the street from the only other nearby house, and said, “I got off early, Wanda. Can I carry the sack?”

“That’s okay, Leon,” she said. She hoisted the sack and held it with both hands. “I’m tired tonight, but I can carry a little beer.”

Leon Roe was a couple of years Wanda’s elder, and he worked at a bump-and-grind place called The Rio, Rio. Roe was a combination disc jockey–emcee. The man’s sad slouch kept him under six feet tall. He was thin, with brown spit curls drooling down his forehead, and he wore a black coat with narrow lapels, a white shirt and a string tie, all in accordance with the resurging style of the rockabilly bad boy.

“When are you gonna take a lunch with me?” he asked, using a phrase that was meant to demonstrate that though he was on the bottommost rung of the showbiz ladder, he knew the lingo.

“Oh, are we goin’ through this again?” Wanda said. “I always reserve the right to do whatever turns me on, Leon. And takin’ a lunch with you ain’t it.”

Leon looked down at his boots, then up at the trees that swayed gently in the murky night.

“You know,” he said, “it’s totally dark out here.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Wanda said firmly. “Look, you’re an okay fella but not my sort. That’s all. But if you think that because it’s dark out here you got any chance of doin’ somethin’, you just forget it.”

“I think you’re the most beautiful girl in Frogtown,” he said.

“Yeah, you’ve said that before, Leon. It won’t get you anywhere.” Wanda started up the dirt rut to the house, the sack of brew rustling in her arms. “See you later, Leon. Don’t be mad.”

When she reached the front door she looked over her shoulder and saw her only neighbor going back across the street to his house. Once inside she started turning on lamps in all the rooms, a nightly exorcism of fears she kept to herself. For, living out here past the railroad bridge, beyond the comforting reach of family and streetlights, Wanda survived cheaply but nervously. Vache Bayou, an offshoot of the Marais du Croche, was less than a freethrow toss behind the house. Being alone in this remote stretch of Frogtown, a section of the city where folks who thought they were tough got plenty of chances to prove it, left her feeling vulnerable to any number of the sneaky vicissitudes.

After a hot shower Wanda took a Baggie of home grown wacky-backy from the vegetable crisper in the fridge and sat at the kitchen table to twist a few sticks while letting the warm air dry her damp body.

A few minutes later she felt dry so she lit a joint and padded into the back room and turned on the stereo. As she listened to Roseanne Cash sing of people who could just about be her, Wanda dressed. She slipped on a sky-blue camisole with a ragged hem that reached to the bottom of her ribs, then pulled on a pair of shiny white satin shorts that seemed wetted onto her ass like hot breath on a cold jewelry window.

On her way through the kitchen she grabbed a Jax and went out to the screened-in back porch that overlooked the vast gumbo known as the bayou. She had left the arm up on the stereo so the album played over and over, and as she listened she pondered the regular things, the things she’d been pondering for the twenty-two months that Ronnie Bouvier had been in stir. Tonight she mainly contemplated what he’d asked her to do; that worried her the most by far, because she was already doing it. She loved him and she would do what needed to be done, as she always had. And to think that once upon a time, really just twenty-two months ago, he had seemed in possession of the answer to every important question in her life. But now
she
was expected to take care of
him
and get him out of Braxton with his future wrapped up and waiting pretty as a gift.

Oh, it was a spring night only five years before when she’d gone roller skating, a girl with a grown-up bod and an undeniable naughty rep, only to have Ronnie Bouvier, his black hair slicked back like a singer, pull up in a blue Corvette, idling alongside her at the Dairy Maid next to the rink. The first thing he’d said to her audible over the rumble of the powerful motor, was, “Those your tits, darlin’? They look like a movie star’s tits to me.” And she said back to him, “Well, I never,” but truly she had, and in what seemed no more than a blink this man who was actually older than her father worked a romantic smash-and-grab on her, right there next to the skating rink, big-timing her out of her hip huggers before they even left the parking lot. She had
instantly understood that he was different, and that this clothes-off grunting and pumping was the sweaty way of love. Two days later she moved out of her parents’ house and into a brand-new world of sit-down restaurants, late nights in roadhouse back rooms, and money. Plenty of money. Then one day Ronnie told her the news that bad luck had been circling his block his whole life long and once again it had found a parking space right outside his door. It was a little federal thing Mr. B. set him up for, he explained, and it sounded worse than it was, so don’t fret.

One week before beginning his sentence they were married legal at city hall.

Wanda heard the front door open but did not rise from her chair. She stared out through the screen, into the black and noisy bayou night. Her inhalations made the joint beam in the dark, and then the music died, and over the beep of bullfrogs she heard not one person, but a few, coming through the kitchen toward her.

The clopping feet stopped and she turned to see three men, backlit by the kitchen light, staring down at her.

“Emil,” she said in a tone stoned flat, “you’re supposed to come alone.”

“I knew that,” Jadick said. He came onto the porch and sat on the wide arm of her ratty old chair. He plucked the joint from her lips and took a hit. “I wanted to come alone, pun-kin, but we got ourselves a slight problem.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. Dean, here, killed a dude at the country club.”

“Tell me you’re lyin’.”

“It ain’t no lie.”

“Oh, man,” Wanda said. “Oh, man.”

“He had to do it, Wanda. The dude did a no-no. He went for his piece. You understand we couldn’t allow that.”

Wanda raised her feet to the wide windowsill, crossed them, then leaned way back in the chair and kept her eyes fixed on some unclear thing out there in the nightbog that had her mesmerized.

“I sure am glad I’m ripped,” she said. “There’s beer in the fridge. Help yourselves.”

Later, Dean Pugh came out of the bathroom and stood in the hall, rubbing his skinny butt with both hands, and said, “I feel like I shit a hungry kitty!” After this unprovoked announcement he took a seat at the kitchen table, joining the others. “I want you to know,” he said straight at Wanda, “that I hated killin’ a white guy.”

“Uh-huh,” Wanda responded. Her eyes matched the shade of her hair now. Another half-smoked joint was dried to her lower lip and bobbed as she spoke, the cold ashes fluttering down. “I don’t think they’ll let you hide behind that, though.
Not legally
.”

“Well, I done hid behind a mask, lady, and it worked just fine.”

Wanda had already listened to the whole dingy tale twice. The victim, “just another golfer type,” was clearly dead, definitely in the processing department of Hell even now, the stolen getaway car had been left in an unpopulated part of Frogtown, and while they’d driven the clean car from there to here, the death gun had been pitched into the bayou. It hadn’t seemed smart to be driving around town late at night after a robbery-murder so they would lay up here until it felt like time to leave. Probably by midday they’d cut out and get upriver to the deep swamp cabin they’d intended to stay in, and wouldn’t be back until she’d cased the next job.

“Auguste’s goin’ to be awful mad,” she said somberly. “That’s a scary event, too, when
he
loses his temper.”

“Fuck him,” Jadick said. “Let him run all over bein’ mad—that’s what we want. That’s what
Ronnie
wants.” Jadick smoothly sucked off half a can of brew. “When us guys have got it set up and Ronnie and them other Wingmen get out, why, bein’ mad at us will be a mistake.”

Finally noticing the dead roach dangling from her mouth, Wanda spit it onto the tabletop.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know about doin’ any more of this if you all’re goin’ to waste people. That might be the wrong gimmick for around here.”

“Bullshit,” said Dean, hotly. Cecil, wraithlike Cecil, watched him with admiring eyes. “Listen up to me, girl. We got a schedule, a plan, a design for The Wing.” He pointed at her face and his own bony visage scowled. “Now, Ronnie won’t be happy if you wuss out on us, and I
guarantee
you the rest of The Wing won’t be happy with Ronnie, either. And Braxton is a small place. Funny things happen with steel around there.”

“I get it,” she said.

“Do you?” Jadick asked.

“Yeah, Emil. It’s simple and I understand you all’s sort of subtraction.”

This Dean Pugh character would need close watching. He was foul and lean, junk-food raised and opposed to dentistry judging by his greening teeth. His skin had a yellow tinge, beneath shitfly green eyes, and his brain was possibly odd enough to posthumously set off a bidding frenzy among scientists. He generally seemed batty as a loon, goofy as a goose on ice, immaculately weird, with no stain of normalcy on him at all.

And Cecil Byrne was his
friend
.

They could have Ronnie killed with a phone call.

“I’ll get right on checkin’ out the next place,” she said, looking down. “It might take awhile to find.”

“That’s what The Wing wants to hear,” Jadick said pleasantly. “Us and Ronnie and you, we’re going to use this town to get even.”

“Even with what?”

“Just even,” he said. “That’s what everybody really wants, is to get even.”

“If gettin’ even is so hot,” Wanda said, absently rubbing a flat palm over her midriff while staring out through the porch door, “how come nobody ever stops there?”

In the wee hours she said, “I’d like it if you’d shut the bedroom door first.”

“Ain’t we delicate?” Jadick said, but he did close the door. A thick red candle sat before a vanity mirror, filling the room with soft, waltzing light. Emil pulled his shirt off, looking down at Wanda, who lay on
her back on the bed, watching him. He checked himself out in the mirror, admiring the jailhouse sculpture he’d pumped his body into being. “I’m as strong as I look, too,” he said.

“I know,” she said. Last week Wanda had thrown him a fuck to seal the pact, and, though she’d done it out of a sense of duty, she’d been shocked at how badly she desired this duty. She had nimble fingers, a dirty mind, and plenty of privacy in which she’d utilized the two, but it had been a long time between injections of the real. “Your tummy is the strongest one I’ve ever seen in person.”

Jadick smiled.

“Three hundred sit-ups a day, pun-kin. Nothin’ else to do in Braxton, you know. Locked up like that, you get into fitness.” Jadick had short, limp black hair, a stumpy neck, and muscles everywhere. His face was wide and flat, a common enough look back in Parma, Ohio, a bohunk, polack, et cetera section of Cleveland. “With baby oil,” he said, “my body’s a real slick temple.”

Suddenly his face split with a wide smile.

“I got something for you,” he said. “Answer me this—what’s the most romantic word there is?”

Wanda stared at him dully, showing him that tough expression she generally showed the world.

“Ouch?” she said.

“Ouch?” He looked at her with his eyes narrowed. “No, no, ouch is the
second
most romantic, there, pun-kin.” He reached into his pants pocket and brought out a handful of rings. “Diamonds, Wanda.
Diamond
is the number one most romantic word.”

The bed was a Salvation Army bargain, a mottled pink mattress tossed on the wooden floor. Jadick sat on the edge and lifted Wanda’s left hand. He held various rings up to her fingers, then pushed a nice showy one on, shoving it up next to her wedding band.

“Wanda,” he said in a childish, playful tone, “will you be my valentine?”

“Valentine’s is long past, Emil.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said. He slid his hands between her shiny
white shorts and her ass, palms up, and squeezed. “So, you wanna fuck?”

She smiled up at him and his highly defined arms and chest, and said, “I’m too worn out to scream.”

Jadick pulled his hands free, then stood. He positioned himself so that he was visible in the mirror. As he undid his trousers he fixed his face into a stern but smoldering expression. He kicked his slacks off, then stood on the bed over Wanda, and put his hands on his hips and flexed here, there, and all over. She went, “Mmm,” and he slowly lowered himself until he was kneeling between her legs. His hands went back to her hard round ass and as he lifted her up, he pulled the shorts apart at the seams, then raised her higher, his eyes on hers, and higher still, then licked her buttocks and ran his tongue straight up through the wetness to her belly button. He sprang forward on his knees, beneath her, and lowered her onto his cock, pushed her back flat and thrust hard once, then raised himself on stiffened arms. A bead of sweat ran down his nose as he glared at her from above, and he gruffly said, “Ouch, huh?”

The dawn came on, pink and sweet, to find Emil Jadick sitting bare-assed on the back porch, having an eyeopener of beer. Somehow, being down here in chitlin country made him feel reflective. He was now at that jarring, mid-thirties turning point, that age where persistent losers often decide that the cause of their failure is not lack of talent, but scope. Yeah. That’s it. Something big, something truly audacious, would cause that self-rumored talent to boil to the top and be seen.