The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (30 page)

He entered the fur trade and fucked the Indians via pelt prices that fluctuated downwardly from drink to drink, and soon he prospered. Alas, he did so well that other rugged entrepreneurial types paddled north and muscled in on the fur biz, and Frechette’s aromatic past caught up to him in the person of one Pierre Blaise whose downriver brother had been slashed to death over a canoe. Blaise’s harsh comments forced a duel on the mound that was to become known as Frechette Park, in commemoration of the better shot.

Marcel and Nathalie spawned a slew of children who would make river travel dangerous for another generation, and the old man lived on and on, and a town named St. Bruno wobbled up around him, and in the last summer of his four-score-and-two life, he saw the old Frenchtown streets paved with the red cobblestones that still stood up to modern traffic.

Detective Rene Shade now buzzed over those thumpety-thumpety brick streets, riding on the passenger side of Shuggie Zeck’s showboat El Dorado. Shade slumped in the seat and lay back, his eyes steady, staring out the window. The car sped past the cracked sidewalk, loitering corners of Frogtown, where the anarcho-capitalism of the street daffies
was theorized, praised, and practiced. Misery was the lectern, and a gin rage the motivation, for meandering, harshly phrased harangues, and Shade and Shuggie had come up that way, hearing them all, believing most. In the thick summer offensive of heat and humidity, the cop and the hood rode in air-conditioned plushery through the worn, slick streets where the T-shirted sweaty backbones of democracy staggered about, drunk with despair or loaded on imported hope, game for any free enterprise that resulted in cash.

“How far to Gumbo?” Shade asked.

“Twenty minutes,” Shuggie answered. “Unless the water’s up.”

They rode the blacktop north, parallel to the river. The land was flat and sogged with swamp and overgrown with indistinct greenery. The road slithered through the backwater country in a series of curves and loops necessitated by the need for solid ground. On either side of the paved surface the sloughs were coated completely by lily pads that gently heaved on the water like breathing ribs.

“Shuggie, you figure we’ll have to butch down on this tush hog Gillette?”

“If we find him.” Shuggie pointed to the glove box. “There’s a pint of cherry vodka in there—hand it to me, uh?”

Shade opened the glove box.

“Cherry vodka? You still drink cherry vodka?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I haven’t had any for a long time, that’s all.” Shade handed the bottle to Shuggie. “I think it was when the Twist was new, the last time I drank cherry vodka.”

“I’m proud of how you’ve grown all up, Rene,” Shuggie said as he unscrewed the top. He took a gentlemanly swallow. “I happen to have a sweet tooth, and I
ain’t
apologizin’ for it.”

As the car whipped down the back road Shade thought of his brother, Francois, who was an assistant D.A., and wondered if li’l bro Frankie could bail his ass out if this thing went Byzantine on him. And somehow the thought of Francois rewound the years and Shade was remembering a time when he, Francois, and this very same Shuggie had set off
on an adventure together. It had been the fourteenth birthday of big brother Tip, and Shade, nine years old and earnest, wanted to find a present suitable for presentation to an idol. For this was in the time when Tip, with his already deep chest and huge arms, his street-stompin’ rep that was even then spreading beyond Frogtown, was his hero. He sort of worshiped his own brother because didn’t grown men, hardasses themselves in some cases, nod to Tip and give him wide berth? And Tip, with his variety of sucker punches and his horseshoe-tapped army boots, had the back-alley swagger that inspired young Rene and Francois and Rene’s good pal Shuggie.

They would watch Tip as he stood on the roof of the row house putting pigeons, his odd choice of a hobby, through tumbles and tumults and a whole vaudeville of tricks. And on this birthdate it had been Shuggie who’d solved the gift mystery for Rene by saying, “He loves them birds on the roof—I know where we can get some more.”

Young Isaac “Shuggie” Zeck led the expedition to Second Street and St. Peter’s Cathedral, where he leaned against the bricks that had been faded by several generations of weather, and said, “Let’s climb.” He latched onto a drainpipe, then with blubbery bravado mountaineered up the cathedral wall until he came to a section where brick ornamentations jutted out, making for excellent handholds.

Once the trio was on the roof, in between the steep peaks, they began walking in the rain gutters looking for nests and trying not to stare down to the sidewalks where they would certainly splatter if they fell. Flocks of pigeons winged about overhead, scudding like cannon-shot clouds, while the boys kicked through nests, coming up with only two possibly rotten eggs. They put the eggs in a brown lunch sack, then sat at an angle on the steep peak, below the huge cross, their sneakered feet braced in the gutter. They were forlorn, for two paltry eggs were clearly insufficient gift for an idol.

Soon Shuggie began to swivel his head, staring here and there, down, and then up, where he spied a veritable thatch of nests on the flat space beneath the cross. He brought this to everyone’s attention. “I don’t think so,” Rene said. He held the sack with its miserable offering,
then studied the path to the cross, the climb up the steeply angled slippery roof, and said, “No way.” Li’l brother Francois concurred mutely, merely running his bug eyes to the nests and shaking his head.

“Aw, give me the sack,” Shuggie said, snatching it from Rene. Then he set off. He went up fast and low, his fat heinie bouncing with each step of his short legs, the laces of his high-tops flopping loose to the sides of his feet. Rene watched open-mouthed, his mind envisioning the one misstep on the steep incline and Shuggie sliding down, beyond control, whooshing off the roof in a deadly plummet, wafting to the sidewalk like something spit from the steeple. But, no, young Shuggie humped up the daunting path with a positively inspiring disdain for consequences. He breathed hard and his cheeks flushed, but he reached the nests and pillaged the eggs. For his descent he sat on the tiles with the sack at his side, inching down, but then, his feet raised, he flopped onto his back, and accelerated. There was hardly time to react. Rene and Francois stood motionless, shocked, expecting to be clipped by the tumbling Shuggie and dashed below.

Shuggie put his feet down like brakes and stopped on a dime. “I wish you could see the looks on your faces,” he said, laughing. He opened the sack and checked on the looted eggs. “I didn’t break a one. Let’s go.”

Big Tip, the birthday boy, was run down on Voltaire Street, outside The Chalk and Stroke, where he occupied an exalted spot against the wall, surrounded by lesser badasses. Rene approached him with the sack and held it to him. “Happy birthday from us guys,” he said, gesturing at Francois and Shuggie. Tip stayed against the wall but held out his hand and accepted the gift. When he opened the sack, Rudy Regot and Harky Gifford and Lou Pelitier rubbernecked over his shoulder. Tip spit, then closed the sack and twisted the top. “Them’s mongrel eggs,” he said, then whipped his arm like he was snapping locker-room butt with a towel and smashed the sack against the bricks. He then lifted the sack by the bottom, turned it over, and drained the mongrel muck to the hot sidewalk, where it made a stain that lasted for months.

When Shuggie wheeled the El Dorado off of the hard road and onto the dirt, the jolt pulled Shade out of the past.

He looked at Shuggie and asked, “Do we have a plan, Shug?”

Shuggie wagged his head but kept his eyes on the narrow dirt road.

“We’ll try the classic approach, man,” he said. “Hustle in through the door with our guns out and see what runs.”

“That’s asking for disaster,” Shade said.

Shuggie groaned. He raised the cherry vodka and treated himself to a nice long drink.

“Man, send out for some balls,” he said harshly. “If these are the tush hogs we’re lookin’ for you’re goin’ to be
glad
you got that gun out.”

“And if it’s
not
them?”

“Uh, well, we’ll make a strong first impression on ’em.” Shuggie grinned. “That’s one of the keys to a new relationship, you know—the first impression.”

A few minutes later they began to pass houses built on stilts, raised aloft in recognition of the region’s regular floods. Shuggie slowed before a yellow house made of thin, warping wood planks. There was a dirt yard worn down smooth as a defendant’s bench. The windows were
sans
screens, allowing open-range rights to an occasional bat and all manner of smaller, winging specks of misery.

“His truck ain’t here,” Shuggie said. He leaned on the gas. “We’ll go on down the road to The Boylin’ Kettle. That’s the local watering hole.”

The bar looked just like any other house except for the gravel parking lot and a handpainted sign nailed to a lob-lolly pine that read
THE BOYLIN’ KETTLE
. Shuggie parked behind a pea-green truck, raised high on swamp tires. There was a sticker on the truck’s rear bumper that said Coonasses Do It in the Dark.

“That’s his pickup,” Shuggie said. “We got him.”

Shade checked his pistol, knowing that there were no dull followers of the law out here, and that the local populace was mightily leavened by ’backy-chawin’ muskrat bashers, whose business lives were attuned to the illegal games markets, St. Brunians’ vacation schedules, and the low-flying international aviators who patronized their modest backwoods landing strips.

“If there’s more than six coonasses in there,” Shade said, “we should give it a skip and catch him alone. I don’t have any jurisdiction out here.”

“For Christ sake,” Shuggie said disgustedly, “did somebody buy you a subscription to
Redbook
since the old days, or what? Geez!” He reached under the front seat and brought out a well-cared-for sawed-off shotgun. As he slipped shells into the chambers he said, “Man, I bet you can do seventy-seven clever things with tuna now, too, can’t you?”

It was at this moment, chided by his old and present rival, that Shade decided it was time to revert to the shitkicker verities. Brazen dash, rough talk, and an ounce or two of mean were clearly required.

“I should be on vacation,” he said, “and maybe I am. Trade with me.” Shade held his pistol toward Shuggie. “Let me swing that cannon.”

Shuggie asked, “Why?”

“Hey, look,” Shade said, “you know Gillette when you see him and I don’t. That means I’ve got to take your back, man, and cover your fat ass. There might be a passel of tush hogs in that dive, and I want something
seriously bulldog
in my hands when I come through that door. Now give me that double-barrel.”

A slow, tense smile moved onto Shuggie’s face.

“I hear you, man,” he said, and they made the trade.

By the time they’d stepped out of the car, Shade had adopted a shrewd personification of those ancient shitkicker verities, and went toward the door with his shoulders back, chin up, eyes straight, in the long striding saunter of the rough n’ ready.

“Now I recognize you,” Shuggie said, walking beside Shade with the same stride and posture. “Now you look like the Rene Shade I used to know. Man, it’s good to see you again.”

The sun was behind the high branches of the tall timeless trees, giving a nice shadowiness to their movements as they went up the three slabwood steps to The Boylin’ Kettle.

“Come on,” Shade said. “We’ll cut through these tush hogs like a rake through shit.”

*     *     *

Bobby Gillette looked like a boy soprano who’d fallen in with the wrong crowd for twenty years or so and liked it. He had a frothy wave of sandy hair breaking down his forehead, and big soulful brown eyes and thin lips. When lying down he would’ve been perfect for measuring off two yards of cotton muslin, but when the bad-news duo came in the door he was sitting at a round table in the center of the room, nursing a Michelob, reading a copy of
Outdoor Life
.

“P’pere,” he said to the old man behind the bar. Then he recognized Shuggie and added, “Oh, pas de merde.”

Shuggie cocked the police .38 in his hand and held it barrel-up, palm toward Gillette.

“Bonjer, Bobby,” he said, and stood over his target. “Some fool bizness went down in town, there, Bobby. Are you the guy who done it?”

Gillette turned a page of the magazine, aping nonchalance, and said, “I don’t know, I might be. I’m a nasty motherfucker on a regular basis.”

Shade stood just inside the door, his hand on the shotgun, the shotgun resting on the plywood surface of the bar. He looked at the old man behind the rail and the trio of drinking men in sweat-soaked shirts at the other end of the bar.

“Keep your hands where I can see them, Jethro,” he said to the bartender. “That goes for you fellas, too. I filed the trigger on this sucker, so it’ll spring off if I breathe too deep. I thought y’all should know that.”

In the center of the room Shuggie was gently tracing a part in Gillette’s hair with the pistol barrel, gentling the blue steel along the top of his skull.

“Whoever done it killed a man,” he said sweetly.

“C’est triste,” Gillette responded.

“Speak English, coonass,” Shade barked. Shade was half-and-half, Franco-Irish American, but at the moment it was the Irish side he identified with. He spoke no more French than “bonjour,” “merci,” and a few other phrases, and thought the whole business of bilingualism was a trendy gimmick. “Or I’ll give you something to ‘c’est triste’ about.”

“Better listen to him,” Shuggie said. “My man over there’ll chew your face off and shit it in your mommy’s roux, you mess with him.”

Gillette sat up, stiffly erect, his hands on the table. He said, “I feel another phony burglary beef comin’ on, Zeck.”

“Worse,” Shuggie said. “You know what worse adds up to, don’tcha, Bob? Huh? Worse means you could be chunked out and baitin’ a meaty trotline by dawn.”

Still stiff, as the police .38 rested on his head, Gillette said, “Man, I didn’t do it, whatever it was. That other thing, back you know when, I did do. I did that. But I ain’t done nothin’ in St. Bruno since.”