The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (29 page)

“He’s just a friend,” Wanda said, coyly smiling, her eyes angled down demurely. “I only fuck elderly bartenders. Is he here?”

“Elderly? Girl, you are flat-out cruel.” The bartender pointed to a loft ten feet above the front door where audio equipment was set up. “He’s somewhere in there, honey. He spins the records. He’ll be done after this tune for the girl’s break.”

As she waited for the music to end Wanda scanned The Rio, Rio Club, furtively memorizing the layout. Basically, it was a barn, with only one interesting door, back in the left rear. She thought she heard a
hammer over the blues, then the music was gone and she knew she did. There was some hammering being done, back behind the interesting door.

“Hey, Wanda, I saw you come in,” Leon Roe said. He sat on the stool next to her. “Want a beer? I can get you a free one.”

“I got one.”

“I’ll make it free for you.”

“Thanks, Leon.”

Leon had a narrow face, with a shiny forehead perfectly halved by a well-trained spit curl. He had a hesitant way about him but he dressed like a cowpoke star who wanted to pull in a more fashion-conscious crowd. There was black piping on his lavender western-cut coat, and his eggshell shirt was capped off by a blue string tie held up by a turquoise clasp that resembled an extra-large spider. At some recent time he’d spent too much on a pair of rattlesnake boots, and he wore one of those silver belt buckles that made a statement about his favorite brand of beer.

“Well,” he said, his cheeks flushing, “what you been doing?”

“Anything, and a lot of it,” Wanda said.

“Oh,” Leon said, smiling. He found her to have a rare, exciting psychology, and he watched her now, as always, with an expression of nose-to-the-glass fascination. “Ever been here before?”

“No. It looks sort of cheap.”

“Uh-huh,” Leon said, “I agree, see, but, you know, I’m only here for the experience. To learn the entertainment business.”

“You call this the entertainment business?”

“I call it a start, the first step. Elvis once drove a truck.”

Wanda noticed a few workmen coming out of the door that concerned her. She turned to Leon and put her hand on his thigh.

“I need a job,” she said, staring him into a puddle. “Could you help?”

“Here? You mean, here, Wanda? I’ll loan you some money,” he said. “We
are
neighbors. That means something to me.”

“I’d rather earn it.”

Leon studied the toes of his snakeskins.

“This place is total nudity,” he said. “Some of the stuff gets pretty tasteless.”

“I noticed,” Wanda said. “I’d bring up the level, I reckon. Don’t you think I’d look pretty classy in the buff, Leon?”

“Oh, God,” he said, “I think you probably look too classy, too fine, for a place like this.”

She patted his thigh, her hand lightly, nearly accidentally brushing his crotch. He was so easy to play, she thought, sadly out of place in the nighthawk realm. The kind of guy who walked down Seventh Street in broad daylight and prompted muggers to look up and say “Bingo!”

“Leon, why don’t you find your boss and let
him
decide if he can use a fresh face? Won’t you do that for me, sweetheart?”

Leon ushered Wanda into the room behind the interesting door, and introduced her to Fat Frank Pischelle. He sat at a small table, hunkered over a plate of chili dogs. His black hair was swept straight back and he sported a long goatee with dangling streaks of gray.

“You ever done this before?” he asked.

“Sort of. At a party or two,” Wanda said. Fat Frank’s fatness was vaguely nauseating at this distance. “But never what you’d call professional.”

“We strip to the crack here,” Fat Frank said. “Are you sure you’re up for something that new and different?”

Wanda jutted her hips and smirked.

“Mister,” she said, “I bust a cherry every day gettin’ some new kind of kick.”

“I’ll bet that’s true,” he said. He used a fork to chop off a mouthful of chili dog, then sat back and stared at her while he chewed.

Wanda spun on her spikes, slowly spinning so that her selling points were highlighted, and as she did this modeling turn her eyes took in the two poker tables and the craps box, the exit door in the southwest corner, and the shotgun perch that had been built up on the wall. She put her hands on her hips and went into that salesmanship spin again.

“I’m an interesting thing if you look at me,” she said. “My figure’s nice. I play basketball like a man so you won’t find no cottage cheese
on my butt. No sir,” she said and patted her haunches, “this little fanny is harder’n married life.”

Fat Frank’s attention was split between the chili dogs and Wanda. His expression was dispassionate, cool and almost bored. He took in another bite of his meal that would’ve put two jockeys out of work.

“You gotta audition,” he said. “Leon, put a quarter in the juke over there.”

Leon was sweaty-faced and pale, silently pledging allegiance to Cupid, for his dreams were being answered. He gave Wanda a thumbs up and walked to the jukebox.

“What should I play?”

“A-seven,” Fat Frank said from behind a mouthful. He pointed at Wanda, wagging his finger until he’d swallowed. “That’s ‘Love Potion Number Nine,’ honey. I use the same song on everybody ’cause everybody knows it.” He picked up a napkin and daintily dabbed at his mouth, then clasped his hands on the tabletop. “Let’s see your version.”

In the brief moment before the song began Wanda decided she’d improvise a narrative strip, an impromptu skin story with plenty of tits and ass to hold her audience. As the tune boomed she went with the lyrics, holding her nose between two fingers, closing her eyes dramatically, then mimed taking a drink. She hopped about on her high heels a little awkwardly through the part where she wasn’t supposed to know if it was day or night, doing a wicked imitation of stunned innocence as she kissed everything in sight, and she loosened her dress and let it slide, slide, slide when she acted out kissing the wrong cop on Thirty-fourth and Vine, and her breasts were bared, revealing pink nipples the size of peach halves, then she kicked free of the folds, baring herself down to spikes, pearls, and red G-string panties, and bent over with her ass aimed at Fat Frank, her eyes on Leon, and she shook, shook, shook from side to side, then front to back in a crowd-pleasing mimicry of the thrusting arts, until the cop broke that little bottle of Love Potion Number Nine. She ended her recital standing straight, a hand on either side of her open mouth, in a wide-eyed gesture of surprise.

The song ended and she dropped her hands to her hips.

“Well?” she asked.

Fat Frank nodded slowly and said, “Corny interpretation, but lots of verve. I can use you starting a week from Friday. What’s your name?”

“How about Sinful Cindy?”

“Naw. We already got a Sinful Suzie.” Fat Frank raised his fork. “How about Moaning Lisa?”

Wanda shrugged.

“Kind of artsy, ain’t it?”

Fat Frank nodded, then drove the fork deeper into the chili.

“That’s the secret me,” he said. “My face fools people. Leon, explain things to her, somewhere else. This is my mealtime.”

Wanda picked up the wadded dress, then followed Leon back to the front room, her heels clicking on the cement. She went to the bar, naked still, and lifted her beer for a drink. The bartender stared at her, smiling, and all eyes in the place focused on her. She gave the bartender a direct deadpan gaze, snorted, then raised her arms and shimmied into her dress.

“Uh, Wanda,” Leon said, “the pay here is good. Two bills a week plus twenty-five percent of your tips.” He ran his tongue over his lips. “You, you’ll be rich by Christmas. You got something special. I’m glad you did this, coming here today. I hope it wasn’t an accident that you came to where
I
worked.”

“Sweetheart,” Wanda said and pinched his nose, “I never try
nothin’
unintentional.”

On the back porch at home Wanda settled down with a can of Jax and said to Jadick, “It was easy. They pay better’n I thought they would, too.”

Jadick stood in the doorway looking down on Wanda, who was stretched out with her feet in their regular resting spot on the windowsill. She’d shed the spike heels and the summery dress draped down between her spread legs.

“You get any cookies out of it?” he asked. “You get any kind of kick stripping off in front of them guys?”

“Oh, man,” Wanda said, “lemonade has got more kick to it than bare-assin’ it in front of men like them. I mean, if they knew what to do with a naked gal they wouldn’t be out there studyin’ up on it, would they?”

“You wouldn’t think so,” Jadick said. “The layout sounds a little hairy but I think we can handle it.”

“We’ve got to sober up your desperadoes,” Wanda said. “They been in the cold shower for ten minutes but that ain’t going to get them sober.” She stood up and started wearily toward the kitchen. “I’ll have to heat up the fryer and feed them something.”

“That’s awful sweet and wifey of you,” Jadick said.

Wanda laid one of her flattest looks on him, then ducked under his arm across the doorway.

“I’m in this thing way too deep not to want it to work,” she said.

Thirty minutes later the deep-fat fryer was sizzling and Wanda was turning out a giant platter of golden brown home fries.

“There ain’t no meat in the house,” she said as she watched the fryer steam, and heard the grease pop and hiss. “Which is a pity ’cause I fry chicken so all-around special even you boys might take up with women.”

Dean and Cecil sat at the table, having already shoveled away the first small portion of fries. Their plates were streaked with fat and ketchup, and Cecil used his finger to etch a heart in the congealing grease.

“I
been
married,” Dean said, still shaky on his chair. “To a woman, I mean.”

“What was she like?” Wanda asked.

“Pretty tight for a gal with three kids. What kind of question is that, though?”

“A dumb one,” Wanda said, and meant it.

There was a pot of coffee on the table and Jadick made his cohorts partake heavily of it. He sat like an overseer, directing the fellas to eat more of them taters, drink more java, think more clearly and listen up.

“I wonder if you guys have been hearing me,” he said.

“We heard,” Cecil said. Even his voice was puny and pale as his skin and hair. “We done rougher things.”

“The timing has to be just right,” Jadick said forcefully. “A stickup man has got to have timing—like a comedian. Robbery and comedy have a lot in common, ’cause if the punch line is slow, then the joke is really on the teller. Rob someplace with your timing off a heartbeat this way or that and it ain’t gonna be too damn much fun. You guys hear me?”

“We ain’t in this for the fun,” Dean said. His lips pulled back and his greenish teeth went on display. He laughed and Cecil matched his giddy wheeze with his own high-pitched screech. “We’re in it for the glory, ain’t we Cecil?”

The fun buddies went AWOL, lost to some secret mirth, and Jadick stood up and went onto the porch.

Wanda poured the last basket of fries onto the platter, then set the platter on the table in front of the still cackling men.

She went to the porch herself, then, and found Jadick sitting on the chair arm, bent forward in the thinker’s pose, with his chin resting on his fist.

“What you thinkin’?” she asked.

“A deep thought, pun-kin.”

“Oh, yeah? Which one?”

“The one where I like to imagine the sun rising tomorrow and me still bein’ alive to see it.”

“Oh,” Wanda said, and waved her hand at him with disappointment, “
that
one.”

11

I
N THE
year of 1753, way downriver in the Crescent City, the Marquis de Vaudreuil was the appointed governor, and under the stewardship of this grand and elegant European one of the first truly successful ongoing criminal enterprises in North America flourished. The marquis’s soldiers shook down the
cantine
owners along the docks, taking wine and rum as payment, and they patronized the bordellos where “correction girls,” who’d been imported by the romantic governor, charmed these law-and-order types gratis, and with enthusiasm. There was tremendous eighteenth-century skim from all the city’s affairs. The soldiers arrested or murdered any of the citizenry who defied them or insisted upon their right to two-step to the screech of a different fiddler, and soon this noble corruption spread and several of the soldiers turned sullen with success and began to hold out on the Grand Mamou himself.

Marcel Frechette, a Gallic entrepreneurial sort from near Calais, had enlisted under de Vaudreuil partly because his sales techniques had become too celebrated in the old hometown, but mainly because he liked the soldiers’ hats. In the New World he very quickly found that being the law bore fruit that no mere gimmick could ever bear, and he shook down the pimps and the prostitutes, grogshop owners, and aristocrats with secret pastimes they preferred to keep that way. Frechette’s zeal in his pursuit of other people’s do-re-mi soon led him to decide that the governor’s piece of the ice was too large, for wasn’t he the one who parried the blades and bludgeons of those who were slow to pay?
The Marquis de Vaudreuil, famed for the haute couture he and his wife flaunted on all the gay occasions, had standards to uphold, so he sent a squad of good, loyal policemen to bring him this insolent Frechette, an alligator, and a bamboo cage.

In an upstairs rumpus room on Rampart Street, Frechette learned of the shift in the marquis’s sentiments from a love-struck fourteen-year-old whore, and set off quickly toward the river where a demonstration of fine Spanish cutlery was required to secure a canoe for himself and the girl, who went by the name of Nathalie. They scurried upriver from the Gulf, paddling close to the bank day after day after day, until he saw a few modest mounds rising from the general soak. He called the hills Les Petites Côtes and appointed himself seigneur of the mounds, the marsh, and that stretch of the river. With the aid of the robust and uncomplaining Nathalie, Frechette hacked out space for a house and built a home overlooking the swamp.