The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (44 page)

Nature was a force Lunch felt compelled by, both as an observer and a participant. His fondest memories were of watching puppies and calves being born on the farm back home, and of the ferocious and sweet vibrations that hummed through his arms and legs, his brain and vital organs, the first time he’d killed a man. It had been for money, so that humming in his veins hadn’t been venom or spleen, but an inner, almost musical sense of being connected to the natural order, linked very high up on the chain of things.

Like an owl, sort of, when it hoots in the dark.

When Lunch contemplated the life he’d been raised up in back among the Appalachians, it seemed like some dreamily remembered folk-ballad, a folk-ballad that was lunatic in spirit, for the way he recalled the years back there was that they were full of ominous moonscapes where phantasm hounds and poltergeist ancestors gave out unearthly cries from the nearby hollers, and voices of the congregated dead chewed the fat in his ear every night at bedtime, while his actual daylight life was oppressed by his grandma and aunt, who lamented his
vile birth and administered constant Bible thumpings to his head to shoo away the evil he’d inherited.

Only his older sister, Rayanne, turned out at all well in his memories. It was Rayanne who would slowly check his head for lice, or lance painful boils on his childish ass, or bundle him and light candles for him when the electricity was shut off, or remember his birthday.

Even though Rayanne had often mocked or taunted him, she’d still come closest of anyone to being good to him, and when he was old enough he went to work pimping for her in Charleston, and eventually she arranged the first hit contract for him, sending him after a tavern owner in Marietta who thought he needn’t listen to reason from a whore.

Man, Lunch thought, that hummin’, that sweet music in the veins, it comes back over you at totally unpredictable times.

He lit Salem number five, and traced the present humming back a week or so, he thought, to the hospital and his visit to Enoch Tripp. He’d had questions for Enoch, but Enoch had had better questions for him. The old dude looked like hell, and the nurse said they’d given him something to take his mind away from all this. His eyes were wide but he hadn’t seemed to recognize Lunch, his silent partner, at all.

Where are they? Lunch had asked, and Enoch had thrashed around a little and said, Second Grade. All in Second Grade now that Uncle Sam found his kittens. Do you get one?

There were tubes of oxygen going into Enoch’s nose. His skin hung off him loose like a borrowed suit.

Where did ol’ Paw-Paw Shade light out for? Lunch asked in a crooning voice. Where are they?

Would you sit by me? Enoch had said. Won’t you set here by me and spell somethin’ out plain the way you do?

Lunch had reached over and slid the tubes from the old coot’s nose. Then he pinched the nostrils together, and Enoch’s eyes got big, and bigger, then, of a sudden, they went peaceful, and he nodded.

Lunch let go, and the old man gasped until he reinserted the tubes. Enoch’s eyes calmly followed him the whole time.

Maybe forty Japs I did in, Enoch said. Is that too much on account?

Forty? Shit, man, that’s a lot. I was too young for ’Nam, and forty, man, that’s a bunch in peacetime.

The old man’s eyes studied Lunch from a far place.

Looky here, Lunch said, I
could
do you, ’cause I think you know I’m here, and why and all, but doin’ you now would be for nothin’. Lunch leaned over Enoch, tugged his beard, and whispered, ’Cause, Enoch, nature is already killing you in a worse way than I could ever dream up. No, sir, I couldn’t improve on it, not in a hundred years of tryin’.

Salem number five was down to the filter, and Lunch stuck it in the ashtray, then kept on cruisin’ west in the Bug with that music still hummin’ in his veins, unblinking eyes watching the golden sun smother beneath the black horizon.

Part II

Sinking in

6

I
T SEEMS
I’ve been backin’ this same king-high nada all night long,” John X. Shade said as Spit McBrattle pulled in another pot. “Time to change the game.”

The deal had worked its way around the table once more, back into the control of John X. He named Draw as the game because, he said, he suddenly liked the very notion of having more than one chance to catch a winning hand. All of the old and unnecessary fellas sitting around the table nodded, winked, or sighed at his comment, for at their time of life the sweet dream of more than one chance was often indulged, though scenes in it sometimes deviated uncontrollably from the benign and lush toward the numbing and stark.

The cards were shuffled and dealt in the front room of Tip’s bachelor heaven, a place of rough wood and stained rugs, set atop stilts near the river, with an oil-drum dock floating on the water. The summer was long gone but a straggling day of heat had strayed into early autumn and warmed the sunlit hours, and even at this hour of the night a nice summery breeze was breathed in through the screened windows.

“Criminentlies,” John X. said as he folded his hand. “So much for extra chances.” He leaned away from the table and stretched his arms. “Anybody for a beer?”

Spit, red faced and riding a good streak, raised his brown bottle and held it toward his host.

“I’m ready,” he said. “Suds are goin’ down cool this evenin’.”

John X. took the bottle and held it out to his side. He looked over by
the screen door to where Etta knelt on a rug playing Solitaire, her hair ruffling in the draft, her green lips pursed in concentration as she cheated the pee-waddy-doo out of ol’ Sol, the lonely cardsharp’s constant nemesis. Sol hadn’t a chance the way the kid flexed the rules on him, and when she smirked in victory her lips looked like a twisted dollar.

“Angel,” he said to her, and as she looked up he wagged the bottle. “One for Spit.”

Etta hopped up and took the empty into the kitchen.

The kitchen of Tip’s bachelor heaven was solidly square in shape, with the static atmosphere of a museum exhibit. Things gleamed from cleanliness and lack of use. The shelves were severely ordered, with canned goods in tight ranks, arranged in ascending value from pure vegetables, to vegetable soups, to basically vegetable soups with
some
meat, to meat soups with
some
vegetables, on up to the head of the parade, Spam. Next to the vintage stove a neat stack of white paper plates sat on the sideboard, but above the sideboard there were red-labeled cans brimming with congealed grease drippings, lined on the window sill like potted flowers that blossomed forth a porcine fragrance. The refrigerator was shiny white, huge, and of some historical interest but also defunct, so the beer was in a gray washtub on the floor, classically chilled by large blocks of ice.

Etta dropped a hand into the ice tub and fished out a beer. She wiped the bottle dry on a towel and twisted the cap off. When she set the bottle beside Spit, she used a new monetary term she’d learned, saying, “That’ll be eight bits.”

Spit held the dollar bill up and she snatched it from his fingers, then went back to her cards.

“That’s three bucks to you, Johnny,” Mike Rondeau said. “So shit or get off the pot.”

“Guess I’ll shit,” John X. said, and tossed in three ones.

The players kicked two bucks an hour apiece to John X. for hosting, plus he had the concession business. Etta had made sandwiches modeled on the ones Dagwood ate in the funny papers and sold them for
two bucks apiece, and that had added up, along with the beer sales. So far John X. was down about twenty from poker, but up fifteen or so overall.

On this particular hand John X. had stayed to the end with two pair, treys and eights, but lost to the three fives Spit held in ambush.

“Oh, man,” John X. said with a groan. “I keep gettin’ tripped up by the sin of pride.”

“That’s not the sin that used to trip you,” fat Mike said, his bald head bobbing.

“No,” John X. said as he lit a Chesterfield. “That one used to be hid so far down the list I didn’t snap to it even bein’ on there.”

So this was the foreseeable future, hosting a weekly poker game for a pack of cranky old hounds who’d never quite caught up to the golden rabbit, but couldn’t stop yapping about how close, how tantalizingly close they’d come. They’d all grown up in Frogtown during years long gone by, and most had done this and that when wars or trade carried them to various distant parts of the map to experience the life of other spots, but soon or late, for any or all of the possible reasons, they’d come back to this, the neighborhood of their youth, to live out the string.

The All Big Band radio station played constantly behind the conversational hubbub, and every second or third song one or another of the swing era swains would close his eyes and float off from this actual night, called away by the siren sounds of Kay Kyser or Les Brown or Claude Thornhill, catching slow boats to China in their minds, on sentimental journeys, having Sunday kinds of love.

And when the aged eyes of John X., Spit, Mike, or Mike’s widowed brother-in-law, Stew Lassein, or Stew’s widowed neighbor, Horace Nash, would slowly open once again to this place and time, they’d give their heads a shake and say something like, “Oh,
brother,
we had
music
back then.”

The night air was warm as an illicit cuddle, and Spit was dealing Hold ’Em, his thick fingers flying like Benny Goodman’s on a clarinet while that very instrument and man made music over the radio, and
John X., feeling the warmth
and
the music, said, “What the hell, angel—free beer all around.”

Etta fetched the beers to the table, then, as the old fellas raised the bottles, she said, “Ice cold beer on a sweaty day sure ’nough proves there once was saints afoot on this earth.”

Mike, fat, bald, and pale, looked closely at Etta, then said to John X., “Where’s a kid get stuff like
that?
”

John X. winked at his daughter.

“Me,” he said. “She’s a little echo of my own words.”

Etta put her arms around her old man’s neck, her green lips near his ear, and said, “I got you memorized.”

“That’s a scary thought,” he said. “I think I won’t have it.” He reached up and jerked a rat tail of her hair, pulling her head back. “Now go away, we’re gamblin’.”

“
Huh
,” she grunted, then went over to the couch and stretched out, watching him.

A little after ten the All Big Band radio station called up “Pennsylvania 6-5000” and changed the tempo of the night. The recently widowed Stew Lassein was on the receiving end of that musical number, and as it played he turned to fat Mike, his dead wife’s brother, and said, “You remember? That was Della and me’s song.”

This song and comment came up in the middle of a stud hand dealt by Spit.

“I remember,” Mike said, looking down.

Stew, a naturally fair man faded by age to the very edge of transparency, went misty in the eyes.

“ ‘Pennsylvania 6-5000,’ she’d say to me, anytime we talked, on the phone, or at night, or, really, any ol’ time, and it meant, ‘I got your number, and you, you got mine.’ ” Stew turned his wet eyes on John X. and said, “But I guess you knew that, Johnny. I would guess you knew her favorite songs.”

“Can’t say that I did,” John X. said. Certainly can’t say that it was that one, specifically. Della did like music, and she liked to do everything
to musical strains, from drinking coffee along with “String of Pearls,” to chewin’ the sheets in tune to “Sugar Blues.” There always had to be a song playin’ backup to the actions in the life of pretty li’l Della Rondeau, even after she became Della Lassein. “That was a popular song, though—every juke had it.”

Stew wiped a finger at his wet eyes, then his lips drew back into a snarl.

“I s’pose I look like I believe that,” he said. “I s’pose I look like the sort who’ll believe anything.”

“Are we playin’ cards, or what?” Spit said.

“Aw, please, Stew,” Mike said as Stew’s eyes began to leak, “would you please quit it? Just stop it.” He shrugged apologetically toward the other players. He turned his hands up. “Della only died this last winter. He’s still kind of raw.”

“Let’s play around him,” Spit said. “Your jack is high, Nash.”

Horace Nash, Stew’s neighbor, also widowed and lean and cranky, looked at the tears and said, “Fold.”

At the part of the song where the band chants “Pennsylvania six, five, oh-oh-oh,” Stew Lassein responded by trumpeting a muted sob solo.

Fat Mike grimaced. He hung his head, then said, “Johnny, you remember my kid sister, Della, don’t you?”

John X. studied the tears running down Stew’s face. He couldn’t look away from them. They irrigated the dry old skin of Lassein’s cheeks, the weeping and sobbing strangely taking years off the old man for a few seconds at a time. As the tears glistened on his reddening cheeks and his body lunged along with the sobs, the old man looked alive, and lucky in his ability to grieve.

“Sure I do,” John X. said. “Her and Monique were close back then.” His gaze did not shift from Stew’s face as he spoke. “I remember Della as this short, dark, imported-lookin’ sort of dame, who had a stylish way of smokin’ a Sweet Caporal, and wore feathery hats cocked on her head like a double-dare. Mm-hmm, I remember.”

“That’s enough!” Stew said. His lips trembled and he pointed a finger at his host. “Enough! Don’t say another thing you remember about my wife!”

Spit slammed his hand on the table.

“Look,” he said, “I got eleven bucks in this pot, and if y’all don’t quit your crab-assin’ and
play
, I’m gonna call myself winner and rake it in. I mean it—I’m here to gamble.”

Stew scooted his chair back from the table. He wiped at his eyes with a party napkin, then blew his nose on it.

“I remember she liked to go to dances,” John X. said, “and she always showed up at ’em with Stew, here.”

The radio had moved on to a new tune, some sort of discombobulatin’ rhythm from abroad, probably Cuba. The brass section was agitated and the drummers pounded out a tropical war beat.