The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (45 page)

“There,” Horace Nash said consolingly to Stew, “a new song.”

“I told him,” Stew said, repeating the finger pointing as he spoke, “not to say
another
word about her.”

“Please,” Mike said, shaking his head.

“I win,” Spit said. “Time’s up.”

He started to pull in the pot, but John X. grabbed his hand.

“Huh-uh,” John X. said. “I got seven bucks in there, too.” John X. folded his hands on the table and sat up straight. “Alright now, Stew—what’s your beef with me?”

“Look at him,” Stew said. He tossed the damp napkin onto the table. “Would you look at him? Mister Blue-eyed Innocent.” Stew stood up and angrily waved a hand at John X. “I can’t be around you. I thought I could. I sure thought I could, but I just can’t.”

“What
is
your problem with me?”

“You know what! Mister Snake-hips! You always dressed like you were
so
, so special, peddlin’ lies to every girl in town, actin’ so handsome! Spendin’ money like you didn’t have to work for it—which you didn’t!”

John X. lit a Chesterfield and eased back in his chair. His hands hung loose to his sides and he said, “I never felt like I had to apologize for bein’ a
dream
boat.”

This statement was at the heart of the matter, it rung true, and Stew
fell back on weeping. His shoulders shook and he tried to stammer a retort but gave up after, “I, I, I…”

Horace Nash stood up next to Stew.

“I wish I missed my Luann like you miss your Della,” he said. “Yes, sir, I wish I could work up some tears for that crocodile—if I could it’d mean my life once had
some
goddamned thing of value in it.” As Stew jerked and moaned he patted him on the shoulder. “I envy you, buddy. I really do.”

“Criminentlies.”

“You and me’ll split this,” Spit said, then began counting the pot.

Etta had been dozing on the couch, but now she came awake and sat up.

“What?” she mumbled. “Who?”

“I just can’t take you,” Stew said. “I think you know why.”

The old man was then led out the door by Horace Nash.

John X. watched the screen door smack shut, then said to Mike, “Hope he gets home safe.”

Mike had a fresh cigar in his mouth, unlit, and he rolled it from cheek-to-cheek, talking around it.

“I never married,” he said, “so I’ll drive ’em on home.” Fat Mike walked to the door and said “Sorry” as he went out.

Etta got up from the couch and stood before the screen door, taking in the night breeze. Bird noises sounded from high in the tall dark trees along the river. The breeze was scented with fermenting river stink.

“Dad,” she said, “what’s goin’ on?”

Burly Spit tossed a wad of bills John X.’s way.

“There’s your split,” he said. He raised his bottle of beer for a long drink. “We’ll get some players who ain’t so temperamental next time.”

“How’s
your
wife?” John X. asked.

“Oh, she’s dead, Johnny.” Spit rose from his chair, stretched his back, and yawned. “Seven or eight years back. Pamela couldn’t resist a bargain, you know, so she overdid the stingers durin’ Happy Hour at The Oasis one night. It was foggy. She run the Buick right into the bridge pilings on River Road.”

“Criminentlies,” John X. said. “Sorry to hear that.”

“Aw, hell, I rubbed a brick on it years ago,” Spit said. He slowly stepped to the door, pausing at the screen to inhale deeply. “Ol’ Stew should find hisself a good brick and give it a try.” He shoved the door open and stepped onto the porch. “Catch you later, Johnny.”

When the door smacked shut this time, John X. leapt from his chair and lunged for the couch and collapsed. With quivering hands he lit a smoke, inhaled needily, and coughed, his entire body arching as he hacked.

Etta sat on the couch beside him. Her little hand touched his knee.

Oh, but things were sinking in. Women you’d loved when they were young, had grown old and wide and infirm, and already died of natural causes. Women younger than yourself, and beautiful.

Criminentlies, but doesn’t that make the ticking clock an ominous fuckin’ bully to your mind?

“Dad, why ever did that man cry so?”

Thirty-five years back, him and Della, it was a summer thing, a summer fling, maybe part of the fall, and that one time the following year. He’d had a hideaway above Verdin’s Grocery, a tiny room with a Murphy bed and a radio and a back entrance from the alley, up one flight of stairs. Della was sort of beautiful, prettier when she spoke ’cause she said the damnedest things, and somehow they got together and began to meet above Verdin’s, usually in the afternoon while Stew loaded trucks at Bruns Van Lines. It was always hot, no fan, but plenty of music and slick sweaty skin. The day Della first tried to call it off the temp was a delta ninety-five, and they’d watered the sheets before laying on top of them. I shouldn’t be here, she said. Monique is my friend, ever since grade school. Della was dark skinned and plentiful, full of sass and never pissy, and she lay on the wet sheets belly-down, her skin moist and available. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t know why I do this. And John X. had sucked an ice cube from his gin and tonic into his mouth, then leaned over her, his tongue pushing the ice cube down her spine, over the hump to the crack of her ass, and he’d held the ice cube there with his tongue and slipped a finger between her thighs, lightly
fingering the slit. She growled, Oh, Johnny, and he swallowed the ice cube and said, You’re rememberin’
why
now, ain’t you?

Etta began to shake him.

“Dad? Dad?”

“What, kid?”

“Why ever did he cry?”

After two dismal, stalling puffs John X. patted her young, bony back, and said, “Kid, I’ll tell you, when someone you give two hoots about goes away for good, why, it’s a thing that can shake you hard and leave cracks behind in you.”

While contemplating this, Rosetta Tripp Shade folded her bare arms across her chest, her big ’Bama browns staring out a screened window toward Europe, then said, “How far off is France in hours?”

7

T
HE
L
ASSEIN
home was small and square, painted white, bought on a lifetime plan, and not quite paid for. When Stew got out of his brother-in-law’s car he didn’t say good night, but walked briskly up the dark stone walkway and into his house. He began to turn on lamps, first one, then two, then all of them; six in the front room, three in the big bedroom, two in each of the kids’ rooms, then the tall one with the fake fruit tree base and shade fringed by dangling green grapes that rose up from the kitchen table. Della had for some reason thought lamps to be perfect works of art, and affordable, and she’d made a hobby of their collection, haunting flea markets and church sales searching for lamps, the older the better, even if she had to rewire them herself. One corner of the garage was cluttered with two dozen lamps of all types, most hopelessly broken, that she had meant to repair but never had.

The lamps that worked certainly did light the place up, but the white glow they cast also illuminated dust bunnies and cobwebs and the wilting jungle of plants that Stew hadn’t taken much care of since early in the last winter, starting that day the ice storm pulled down the power lines and Della’d slumped over dead after bringing in firewood.

Stew’s reddened eyes noted the spreading disorder of his house and he sniffed, for he’d become negligent as a widower. In prior years his domestic surroundings had always been clean and tidy, perfectly presentable in case visitors arrived at the drop of a hat.

He put on a pot of midnight coffee and thought about where to
start. It seemed logical to begin with things living, so he went to the closet and found Della’s plant waterer, a red plastic pitcher in the shape of a heron with a thin beak for a spout.

Stew filled the heron at the kitchen sink, staring at the dusty family pictures on the ledge above. There was one of himself and Della, her in a hugely brimmed white hat and swimsuit, him in long white pants and shirt, with a wide gaudy tie around his neck. That must’ve been taken up at Hot Springs just after they’d married, when he’d loved her completely, with no fineprint of doubts at all. The other pictures were of their children, Cynthia and Donald, and in each Cynthia stood apart, withdrawn, while Donald smiled broadly, his lips spread nearly from one jug ear to the other.

When the heron was full, Stew set it down and poured himself a cup of coffee. He let the cup sit, for he preferred his java lukewarm.

Oh, my, but just the thought of Johnny Shade made him feel sick about his life. And hers.

He picked the heron up and began to move, tending to the living things. He went into the front room and began the watering. Philodendron, dracaena, Boston ivy, begonia, jade plant—he knew the names but he didn’t know which was which. Green things they were, unknown green growing things that overran their pots—the kind of crap Della had liked.

Stew sat on a stuffed footstool in the bright room, the pail in his hand, his head slumped.

She’d lied to him, he knew that. Hell-fire, there was no doubt about that at all. She’d lied to him and he’d let it pass, he’d let it pass from her sweet lips and into his own mind, where this single nasty falsehood had taken root and spread, growing like evil kudzu, growing over every thought he had of her, every casual comment she made to him, until whatever truths she may have told were hidden from him, overrun by his pitiful knowledge of her single lie.

He’d had her. That son of a bitch had known the smooth skin and sweet lips and strong hips of his wife.

And she’d lied about it.

And he’d let the lie take root around his heart, until real love had been choked off and died lonely.

Time to water the hanging plants now. There would be no sleep this night, and this house needed attention.

For nearly forty years Stew had loaded trucks at Bruns Van Lines, eventually becoming foreman. He had a knack for order, for keeping things straight, and as foreman these qualities proved to be worthwhile rather than merely prissy. To travel safely, truck cargo had to be packed precisely, the load balanced to avoid shifting and breakage, and he’d excelled at this. He’d sit in his tiny office off the loading dock, sketching the trailer and its dimensions down to the half-inch, then chart the cargo into place, each box or crate or tube destined for a precise position. The boys would do the work, surly boys most of the time, and he’d crab at them if they deviated at all from his design. Let’s do it my way, he’d say, and despite a few curses they would. As the boys toiled and the trailer filled, each item in its place, the cargo filling the trailer to the roof in exactly the order he’d charted, he’d chew gum and beam and think to himself—Now I know why those ol’ Pharaohs got so carried away!

To be a Pharaoh in his personal life had been his desire, with every small or large domestic charm a building block to be stacked skyward toward a flesh-and-blood perfection, a monumental family harmony. But, no, if one key thing is out of place…

Monumental family harmony went unattained because of three words and a puppy, the puppy named Coral, the three words, “The bake sale.” That was what she’d claimed, that’s where she’d said she’d been. She baked terrific foods at home, but that’s where she told him she’d been. She’d said it straight to his face, lying without any trace of effort, but her bag contained no bread, no pie, not even a single glazed donut, and because of Coral, their Beagle pup, the marriage was cracked, split wide, for Coral had slipped her leash and trotted off and he’d followed hollering for her, hollering up and down alleys and through vacant lots, the puppy lost to sight, and he’d come to the mouth
of the alley down from Verdin’s Grocery when he’d seen Della. He’d seen Della walking from behind the store, her hands held to her head, pinning her fragrant hair up, and he’d stood there watching, his throat dry from hollering and the whole terrible gamut of thoughts that immediately clutched at him, and he’d kept watching as she walked away, toward home, then Johnny Shade came from behind the store, in nearly the same footsteps as her, jauntily smoking a cigarette, but cunningly turning the opposite direction.

Stew had vomited against a fence, then gone off again after Coral. He couldn’t find the pup in an hour so he’d gone home, and Coral was there already, with Della on the porch. “Where you been?” he asked. Della patted Coral and the puppy jumped up on her lap. “The bake sale.”

After that he couldn’t stop himself from asking that same question over and over, Where you been? Where you been? Where you been? If pretty Della went out to mail a letter, or get a quart of milk, or borrow sugar from Luann Nash next door, he asked the question by reflex on her return, without thought, Where you been? And of course she tired of this and began saying Where do you think I’ve been? and in years to come she either ignored the question altogether or came back flip, with some retort such as, Humpin’ the Chinamen down at the laundry, or On a three-day toot with Frank Sinatra. He had tried to laugh sometimes, straining to find these comments funny, but more often he would suddenly become busy with the newspaper or start cleaning house, and say, Just curious is all.

Cynthia had been born the spring following the lie, and at first this had seemed a blessing, but the lie was loose in his mind now and not even a baby was safe from it.

These plants took more water than he had expected, so Stew went to the kitchen to refill the heron. While in there he knocked back a cup of coffee, then another. He intended to stay up all night cleaning. The time had come for it.

Just the thought of that man, that man and Della, and those three words of her answer, had ruined his marriage. Everything was affected.

He’d been a wrong father to Cynthia from the time her baby face
began to take shape. She didn’t look much like him, or Della, or any Lasseins or Rondeaus he’d ever seen. His uncle was blue-eyed, as was one of Della’s brothers, but whenever he looked into Cynthia’s big blues his chest would tighten. It was possible, just possible she was his, but by no means certain, and doubt is more evil than certainty, for a fact can be dealt with, got over, but doubt only feeds on itself and grows.