The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (39 page)

Etta’s face was pale, her mouth open. She hadn’t looked away from the flames since she first saw them. Her arms were wrapped around her shoulders, hugging herself.

John X. poured two fingers of whisky into a bar glass with pink elephants on it that he’d always kept in Enoch’s glove box. He swished the whisky around his mouth, then swallowed. The trailer walls had collapsed inward, and as flames destroyed his most recent home John X. closed his eyes to the awful fact and symbolism of the sight.

“Well, kid,” he said sadly. “I’m feelin’ the call of the open road. Whatta you think?”

Her eyes stayed bugged on the fire, and her tongue flickered over her young painted lips.

“You’re drivin’,” she said.

Three hours later the afternoon rains petered out and the sunset was pink and promising. After Pascagoula they’d left the big Gulf Highway for a smaller one that cut away from the coast and was flanked by loblolly pines, barbed wire fences, and chicken shacks.

“Fix me up with a tiny angel, angel,” John X. said.

“Just a sec,” Etta said. She’d been painting her fingernails out of boredom, and at present her hands hung from the window to dry the purple polish. The wind blew the black crucifix straight back from her ear. In a few seconds her nails were dry enough, and she pulled her hands in and poured him a tiny angel of Maker’s Mark in the pink elephant glass. When she held the glass toward him she said, “What’ll he do if Lunch should find us?”

“Now don’t you worry about that,” he said as he took the glass from her hand. “That’s my department.” He drank the whisky and set the glass on the seat. “I don’t want you worrying about that.” He kept his eyes on the road and straightened up like he meant business. “I realize I’m a little bit askew as a daddy, but, girl, I want you to know, if anyone messes with you or me, why, I’ll get P.O.ed pretty good, and, darlin’, when I get mad I’m just like
Popeye
.”

2

O
VER IN
the delta where the Big River flows brown and strong and sluggish sloughs lurk outside its channels, Rene Shade reclined on a blanket in the small backyard of Nicole Webb’s place in Frogtown and watched the sky. He was watching the autumnal parade of millions of birds wending south along the Big River flyway. They followed the river from the near and far north, and now they dominated the sky, coming on in lively legions, in wide variety, honking, tweeting, migrating to wherever. The yearly panorama above was wistful but reassuring to Shade, whose own world had flip-flopped when he’d been suspended from the St. Bruno detective squad for ninety days. The charge was insubordination, but the fact was that he’d failed to cap a disarmed suspect who’d killed a cop.

They’d confiscated his gun and badge and something else he couldn’t quite name.

This was his eighteenth day on suspension and there was a jelly jar of tequila sour nestled between his legs. Next to him lay a pile of newspapers and on it there rested a freshly cleaned, unregistered, and thoroughly illegal Taurus .38. His blue eyes had been brushed with redness, and a fresh pink scar had been added to the old familiar ones over his brow. He stared up at the avian parade across an afternoon sky colored heartbroken blue, lifted the pistol in one hand, the jelly jar in the other, and said, “You know, I’m very near to bein’ normal, but I just can’t get over the hump.”

“Well, I like you,” Nicole said. She was sitting in a chair against the
chicken-wire fence that surrounded the yard, reading a book. The scent from honeysuckle withering on the fence wafted about her. Nicole, out of Texas by way of romance and wanderlust, had been going through a psychedelic cowgirl phase, and she was wearing a sleeveless electric blue shirt with a pearl yoke, red boots with black eagles on them, and faded jeans that were worn to a wispy whiteness and fit her rump as aptly as the word nasty. She was tall and lean and olive skinned with long dark hair pulled back into a great, puffy ponytail. Black-framed reading glasses perched on her nose, but otherwise she came across pretty much like a cowgirl who might’ve ridden the purple range in some pre-Raphaelite’s fever dream. “I like you fine, Rene, but then, I’m partial to sociopaths.”

“That’s a piece of luck,” he said. Shade wore only gray track shorts and a demeanor that was both sullen and mystical. On tiptoes he was a six-footer, thick in the shoulders and arms, bodyshot firm at the waist. The archaic angle of his sideburns and the dead-end-kid swoop of his long brown hair raised some upfront doubts about his good citizenship that his face did nothing to allay. His eyes were blue and challenging, and his nose had been dented artlessly meeting those challenges. Mementos of his free-swinging past had been stitched around his face, the most recent scar still pink above his right eye. Despite his scuffed look there was a ragged allure to his features, and a democratically dispensed “up yours,
too
” aspect to his person that certain neighborhoods took a shine to.

“Maybe I’m where I ought to be—off the cops and back home in Frogtown.”

Without looking away from her book Nicole said, “Give it a rest, Rene. You’re bad mouthin’ yourself into something you’ll regret.”

It was still warm by day this far downriver but leaves were beginning to fall. The weaker leaves quietly retired from limbs, giving up the struggle in ones and twos, coming down in sad wafting swirls. There was an old children’s wading pool in the yard and dead leaves floated on top of the rank water. From a nearby neighbor’s porch a radio droned with a college football game, and somewhere down the
block a nascent biker gunned his engine like the roar was a symphony to all ears. Shade listened to the symphony and thought that maybe he
was
giving in to fruitless introspection. He set his pistol down, had a swallow of his drink, and asked, “What’re you readin’, anyhow?”

Her eyes stayed intently on the page.

“It’s a collection of short stories about what shithills men are,” she said. “It’s been gettin’
great
reviews.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he said. He dropped a hand to his crotch and hoisted his rigging. “But that won’t change certain facts.”

Nicole looked at him and smirked, then raised a hand from the book and pulled the buttons on her shirt open, flashing a pert bare breast at him.

“No,” she said, “I reckon it won’t.” She broke off a blade of grass from the ground beside her and used it as a bookmark. With her arms overhead and her legs stuck out, she stretched and sighed. Then she looked at the pistol and said, “Rene, that pistol is gonna be trouble. You’re liable to get caught with it somehow.”

Shade shrugged.

“I’d a lot rather get caught
with
it than get caught
without
it.”

“Alright. I heard you. I’m not goin’ to rag on your ass about it.”

The traffic on the flyover once again compelled Shade’s interest. He’d loved this sight all of his life and certainly he’d seen many of these exact same birds before. They always returned until death, taking the same path toward the same winter place.

Oh, yeah, they came back and back and back.

“Rene,” Nicole said, “you’re gettin’ that strange moody look again.”

“Well, color me weird,” he said.

“I don’t want to color you weird, I want you to pep yourself up.” She put the book down. “I know you’ve got things on your mind this evening, but I want some fun time, and you ain’t fun when you’ve got that strange moody look on you.”

On the bed, in twilight, Shade lay on his back and stared out the window, watching birds float down to roost in nearby trees. “In Memory
of Elizabeth Reed” was playing on the stereo and Nicole was playing with his body, using tongue and touch to bring his passion up to scratch. She’d coated him with oil, rubbed his back, fetched him a fresh drink, told him his pecker was pretty, and put in many kind words trying to raise his spirits. Now, her dark hair blooming out wild around her like a swamp shrub that might have stickers on its stems, she straddled him, nuzzling her bush to his nominally stiff dick.

She said, “Oh, sweet,” and slid down on him.

His thoughts were out the window, roosting in nearby trees. He said, “Only Redwing blackbirds are in the one tree, and only grackles are in the other.”

From her position astride him Nicole shoved a palm firmly against his cheek, pushing his head to the side, then pulled loose and rolled quickly off the bed. She grabbed a T-shirt from the dresser and held it in the hand she shook at him when she said, “Look, you son-of-a-bitch, we ain’t been together long enough for you to start passin’ out
courtesy
fucks! You hear me?”

“What’re you yellin’ about?”

“Hey,” she said, standing there naked with her hair all akimbo and her hands on her hips. “When we fuck I want your mind on
me
, not on some other fuckin’
species
, Rene. For pity’s sake, man, I ain’t desperate enough to take charity pokes from the likes of you, or anybody else.”

“I’m tired,” he said. He sat up on the edge of the bed and again his eyes strayed to the window. “I guess that’s what it is.”

“You’ve been this way ever since you got suspended.”

“What’re you sayin’? You sayin’ that I’m a lousy lay now, or what?”

“Oh, geez,” she said, and the steam went out of her. She sagged against the dresser. “I don’t believe we want to start tossin’ those sorts of bombs around, Rene. Or do you?”

He looked down to his feet on the hardwood floor.

“No, I don’t suppose,” he said. He conjured up a smile. He patted the bed beside himself. “Come on over here and we’ll make love nice, Nic. Set yourself down right here.”

Nicole picked her jeans up off a chair and said, “So, you want to
make love now, huh? Why don’t you get on your knees’n crawl over here and
kiss my ass
and we’ll
call it
making love.”

Then she went into the bathroom.

Undisturbed now, Shade crouched to the window and stared at the trees where every limb and branch held birds that had come to rest for a night during their long instinctive flight to some destination that was mapped in their bones. The trees and birds were in stark silhouette against the fading light of the sky, and the vision was elemental and exhilarating and comforting.

When Nicole came out of the bathroom in her cowgirl garb and a scowl, Shade went in and took a shower. Then, while some blue grievances were stroked from a fiddle and blasted by the stereo, he shaved and dressed in white pants, white shoes, and a short-sleeved black shirt. He combed his wet brown hair straight back to dry.

He went to the bedside table and lifted his jelly jar for a slosh of tequila but found it to be empty except for ice cubes. He then crossed the flood-warped wooden floor to the kitchen, jar in hand, looking for a refill.

The kitchen was small, as befits a shotgun house, with the stove, sink, and fridge on one side of a narrow aisle, and a high cupboard, shelves, and a small table on the other. The floor was aged linoleum and creaked when Shade walked across it to the freezer.

As Shade dropped ice cubes into the glass and reached for the tequila, Nicole sat at the table facing away from him and said, “You know, from teenaged pink on I always did have the desire in me to be a wanton woman, but I needed to go off and find the right lover to show me how.”

“Oh, yeah?” he said, pouring tequila over ice.

“Yeah,” she said. “But I ended up meeting you, instead.”

“Uh-oh,” Shade said. He sensed another one of those a-gal’s-gotta-do-what-a-gal’s-gotta-do fusses coming on, and he chugged at his drink. But he said, “Your feet ain’t nailed to the floor, sister.”

She said, “Thinks you.”

“Thinks me?” He stared at the back of her head and the olive skin of
her slender neck. “Come on, Nic, why don’t you roll a couple of joints and listen to the headphones or something?”

“I can’t,” she said.

“You can’t?”

“Not in my condition.”

Slouched against the wall, Shade held the jelly jar with both hands in front of his chest and said, “What condition is that?”

Nicole turned, then stood and faced him. She had a lean, muscular, girl-hoopster body, and eyes of a sea green hue that gave an impression of vastness.

“Well, now,” she said, “my condition is I’m pregnant.”

The jelly jar shook in Shade’s hands. He looked down into it, face lowered, blankly studying the swirling cubes of ice until, finally, he said, “So, what do you want to do about it?”

“Aw, man,” she said, then, lowering her head, she used both hands to shove him aside, the contents of his drink splashing onto his shirt as she scooted past him.

He stood there for a moment, alone, absently patting his wet shirt. Then he spoke toward the front room where she had gone, saying, “Good thing I’m wearin’ black tonight, or I’d have to go change.”

3

W
HEN
J
OHN
X. Shade was twenty-three he knocked up two girls in the same summer, so he married the fourteen-year-old. Almost everyone said he’d done the right thing. They were hitched quietly before Labor Day, and the nineteen-year-old left St. Bruno, headed west, and he never had heard if she’d been carrying a son or a daughter. His bobbysoxer wife was named Monique Blanqui and soon gave birth to a son, the first of three. The boy was christened Thomas Patrick but called Tip from the start, and he’d be about forty now. After five years of staid rhythm, the next two sons were born in jump time. John X. had by then ducked out on all but the most salacious domestic responsibilities, leaving Monique to tag names on the new kids, and her tastes ran more to the Gallic than Gaelic so she’d come up with Rene, then Francois.

As John X. came rolling toward St. Bruno on the blacktop from the east, he was thinking that, so far as he knew, Monique and all the boys had stayed put here, on the west bank of the big river, leading different sorts of lives on these narrow, bumpy streets. The old bridge fed his sputtering but still moving pickup truck across the broad murky expanse of water and into town.