The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (47 page)

“You liked to go there, Dad?”

“Oh, my yes,” he said. “Everybody did. The whole world packed into that little joint on a good night.” John X. lit a cigarette and stared at the gas station. He was still wearing clothes from a dead man’s wardrobe, and though nothing fit quite right, somehow everything was comfortable. “Kid, let me tell you, women wore flowers in their hair in them days. To dances, bars, whatnot. Their hair would be long and hanging, but organized, you know, not running loose, and there’d be a big bright sweet flower of some sort planted in their hair. Just above the ear, usually, where a fella’s face would nuzzle during a dance. They’d be red, or white, maybe yellow or pink—definitely sweet.”

“Flowers?” Etta said. “I don’t think that’s cool anymore.”

John X. looked down at Etta for a moment, then nodded once.

“Probably not,” he said. “But it was not considered corny, then, kid, believe me.”

They walked on down the sidewalk, and a minute later he added, “
Fetch
ing is more what it was considered.”

The route to The Catfish led the old man and the kid past the intersection of Lafitte and Perry where Ma Blanqui’s Pool House occupied the corner portion of a brick row house.

“That’s where the mother of your brothers lives, kid.”

“Are we goin’ in?”

“Not today, kid. Let’s get a move on.”

As they walked past, Etta asked, “Did you do her like Mom done you?”

“I don’t know. I guess. One mornin’ I came to in Beaufort, South Carolina, and it was clear we’d drifted apart. I realized I was nowhere near done driftin’, neither, and damn few wives can live with that.”

“Mm-hmm. What’s she like now?”

“She’s an opinionated older woman, I imagine.” John X. patted his daughter on the head so she’d follow him as he crossed the street. “Makes a mighty fine peach kuchen as I recall. Nice long hair to her shoulders. She raised your brothers up pretty decent.”

The sign with the debauched blue catfish on it was now in sight.

“They seem sort of
rough
, Dad.”

“Well,” he said, shrugging.

“Tip cooks good coffee, though,” Etta said.

“That’s what I mean,” John X. said.

John X. Shade, pool hustler in decline, was looking for a price on his Balabushka cue. Over the years he had hocked the cue perhaps twenty-five times, and on a few occasions left it temporarily in the custody of fellas who’d had his Number. He set the case on the bar of The Catfish and opened it. The cue lay in slots lined with green felt, and John X. rolled his hand along the fine pretty length of it. He rubbed his fingers over a slight score in the wood just below the ferrule that had already been there when he’d gotten the cue at a Johnson City Jamboree he’d played in back when his hands could form a firm bridge, and stroke smoothly, even brilliantly at times, and every honky-tonk or corner beer joint with an eight-foot table had represented a career opportunity.

“What’ll you give me for this, son? You know what it’s worth, don’t you?”

Tip leaned over the counter from his side of the bar. He had a huge white apron on, and smelled strongly of after-shave.

“I know that stick is worth plenty to somebody who feels like payin’ plenty for it,” he said. “That person wouldn’t be me, though.”

“Why, hell,” John X. said, “it’s worth plenty to anybody with good sense. George Balabushka is dead, son, so this stick is like good earth as an investment—I mean, they won’t be makin’ any more of it.”

This dickering with his own boy was not exactly fun, but fortunately there wasn’t much of a crowd to see it. The lunch rush had passed. In the back two biker couples wearing Harley T’s and tattoos lingered over their empty plates and full mugs to discuss the many traffic tickets they had earned but not paid, motorcycle maintenance, and similar domestic trivia. Three Catfish regulars, two of them older males, the other a squat, sulky woman in her thirties, sat nearer the door, each tippling at a separate table, though occasionally a few words were passed among them. Etta was down at the end of the bar sitting on a stool beside Tip’s hippie chick, the kid eating hush puppies while Gretel read a tabloid.

Stew Lassein sat brooding over a beer glass two stools away from the girls. He was wearing white pants and a white shirt and a wide gaudy tie loose around his neck, appropriately duded up for an ice cream social that’d ended forty years ago. His normally pale skin was even paler, rinsed out, and he seemed in need of sleep.

That guy always was too square for this wicked round world, John X. thought. He actually liked Lawrence Welk and Kate Smith! And became a
foreman
, for cryin’ out loud. He’s now ending up exactly where the middle of the road leads you.

Let
that
sink in.

“This
is
a handsome thing,” Tip said, looking at the cue. “I don’t play much, or care to, but I can tell it’s special.” He lifted the butt from the case and hefted it. “Let me see you take a few shots with it, Johnny.”

“No, no, now Christ, Tippy,” John X. said, “I can’t run six balls anymore. I might jaw out a hanger, even. It’s terrible.”

“Just shoot so I can see the stick in action before I put up money for it.”

“Are you tryin’ to embarrass me, boy? Is that it?”

Tip raised a hand to his long brown hair, flicked a stray strand behind his ear, then smoothed it back into greased formation. His face was down, as if studying the cue.

“Well, now, look,” he said, “I’ll hold this stick for you, Dad, and spot you fifty against it.”

“Fifty?” John X. reached for the cue, then began to screw it together. The Balabushka had a blue twine grip, shiny brass fittings, and subtle cross-hatching on the lower shaft, but was otherwise austere and purposeful. “I need a hundred—maybe it’d help if you saw me run a few balls.”

“I’ll rack ’em,” Tip said.

When John X. and Tip went toward the pool table, Gretel looked up from her reading. She’d been hip-deep into a story about a man in central Florida whose garden was attracting attention as a walk of fame because he had this weird knack for growing edibles, mainly potatoes and melons, that seemed to resemble certain movie stars, especially Curly from the Three Stooges and Shelley Winters, though he’d produced a far wider range of recognizably famous body parts, almost all of which were noses or breasts. There was a picture of a sweet potato that
did
sort of look like Curly, and the man held up two honeydews that had odd shapes for melons but perfect shapes for a starlet’s breasts, and the man called them Marilyn. The man said the garden was a miracle, a pure gift, though the article seemed to poke some fun at him.

“Phooey,” Gretel said. She then reached over and rubbed her hand across Etta’s flattop, causing the hairs to bristle, and said, “I really do dig your hairstyle.”

“My mom picked it,” Etta said. “But I wear it.”

“Don’t you like it?”

Etta shrugged, nodded, shrugged again.

“I’m used to it,” she said. She rolled another hush puppie through a puddle of tartar sauce, then popped it into her mouth. Gretel loomed over her, hugely pregnant in a red shift, her gray highland eyes looking resigned but alert. The scar on Gretel’s cheek was fingernail wide, pink and mysterious, perhaps even romantic in origin. It started about an inch below the outside corner of her right eye, plowed a straight row at an angle across her cheek, and tailed off a fraction above the corner of her mouth. As Etta chewed the hush puppie she slowly raised her hand toward Gretel’s cheek, stopping shy of contact. She swallowed hard. “How’d you get that scar?”

Gretel put the tips of four fingers lengthwise on the scar.

“Yah-weh hung it on me,” she said somberly, “for not payin’ attention. I was s’posed to be steerin’.”

“Yah-who?” Etta asked.

“Yah-weh. That’s God in other places.”

“Could I touch it?” Etta asked. “I’ll take care not to scratch.”

Gretel pulled her fingertips from the scar and raked back her blond hair.

“Help yourself,” she said. “It’s different.”

Oh so lightly Etta touched her fingers to the scar, then slid them along the track of proud flesh. Her young face and bright eyes reflected her enthrallment.

“Wow,” she said. “Holy freakin’ wow! It’s slick, ain’t it? Slick like satin.”

Laughing softly, Gretel leaned her face down to Etta’s touch.

“I’ve come to love the feel of it,” she said. “Spiritually, it’s quite a reminder.”

“It’s slick like satin,” Etta said again. Then: “Say, could I rub your butterfly, too?”

“Sure,” Gretel said. “The Monarch just feels like skin, though.”

In a gruff, tired tone, Stew leaned toward Gretel and said, “Tell me about it. Tell me about scars from not payin’ attention. I got mine that very same way.”

Gretel smiled at him, and Etta said, “Where is it?”

“What?”

“Your scar.”

Stew held a hand to his chest, then tapped a finger over his heart.

“Uh-huh,” Etta said. “That scar is what set you cryin’ last night.”

Stew said, “Your daddy doesn’t love you, li’l girl. I feel I have to tell you that. Your daddy doesn’t love nobody he don’t see in the mirror when he shaves.”

“Now that is harsh talk, mister,” Gretel said. “You hush up.”

“Li’l girl needs to know,” Stew said. He was avoiding eye contact. “Things need to be brought out, you see.”

“Hush up.”

“It’s for the good of all.”

“Mom used to say the same thing,” Etta said.

“Listen to your mom, li’l girl.”

“I didn’t believe her, neither.”

“What do you call love anyhow?” Gretel asked. “Answer me that, mister, then I’ll hear you out. But if you can’t answer me that, you should hush up.”

The trio fell silent at this, and went back to their individual contemplations: Gretel, the tabloid; Stew, the past; Etta, the number of faces in Dad’s mirror.

Down toward the rear of the room, at the one pool table, John X. stood slouching with the cue in his hands, watching as a simple cut-shot on the nine missed the corner pocket by a full inch.

“Over-cut,” he said. He lined up a cross-table bank on the three ball, and stroked it toward the side-pocket, but it went wide and skidded down-table. “Are these rails soft?”

“Maybe,” Tip said. “That could be it.”

John X. made two hangers in a row, though his stroke was shaky even on them.

“More like it,” he said. Then he leaned over the table, his eyes watering, bridge wavering, and missed six straight puppy shots, not even slopping one in. “What’d I tell you, son?” He began to unscrew the cue as he led the way back to the bar. At the bar he put the cue in the case and snapped it shut. “Terrible. Fuckin’ terrible. I’m cursed. The pool god hates me, and that’s a spiteful, petty son-of-a-bitch when he hates you. I told you it was terrible.”

Tip set the cue under the bar.

“You didn’t lie,” he said. “You told it like it was.”

John X. rattled the ice in his glass.

“I’m cursed,” he said. “I should’ve got a job forty years ago. Maybe fifty. That’s right. A
job
. But I thought, Work? The only things that like
work
are donkeys, and they turn their ass to it. Where’s the future in work when I could use that stick, there, and hold the table for three–four hours at a whack—know what I’m tryin’ to say, Tippy?”

“Sure. You’re cursed.”

“Nail on the head, son.”

Tip went to the register and slapped together some fives and tens, then spread the money on the bar.

“There you go,” he said to John X. “And, Johnny, I ain’t your mother or nothin’, but you think maybe you should eat something?”

“Might be I’ll eat a peach later,” John X. said jauntily. He scooped up all the money but a twenty. He put the roll in his pocket, then waved the twenty overhead, swishing the bill through the air before slapping it on the bar. “Refreshments for all, Tippy! Set everybody up. Get those gorgeous gals at the end of the bar another of whatever they’re drinkin’, and give ol’ Stew, there, a nice libation on me.”

Stew snorted derisively.

“I don’t want a lie-bation on you,” he said.

John X. sidled down the bar toward Stew, but left a few feet of polished bar rail between them. He tapped out a smoke and fired up. “Somethin’ wrong with my money, Stewart?”

“Don’t call me Stewart. It’s insulting the way you say it.”

“That beer in front of you looks dead, Stew,” John X. said with a shrug. “Hey, Tip, a couple of live whiskies over here.”

Bent over the broad surface of the bar, with his white attire, white hair, and pale skin, his thin lips curled back from a mouthful of bright expensive teeth, Stew had the appearance of a truculent ghost. A ghost with a grudge.

“I won’t take a drink bought with bad money,” he said.

Tip set the drinks in front of the two old men, his head bent to hear their conversation.

“Now how can money be bad?” John X. asked. He spit on his hands, then ran his fingers through his wavy hair. “If it spends, it spends.”

“This’ll spend,” Tip said, and picked up the twenty.

Stew snatched his drink aloft and dumped it to the floor.

“If money ain’t worked for,” he said, “then it ain’t good.”

The whisky made a puddle on the rough wood of the floor. John X. tapped the toes of his black sneakers in the puddle.

“Criminentlies,” he said as he smeared the whisky underfoot, “that was a buck and a half, Stew. This ain’t VJ Day anymore, slick. Drinks ain’t a quarter no more, with a beer back and a pig’s foot thrown in free.”

“Your money is bad money,” Stew said. “Which is the only breed of money a bad man spends.”

“How bad a man am I if I’m buyin’ you a drink?”

“There’s guilt in you, Johnny.”

“I think I’ll pause to let
that
sink in, slick.”

The bar was made of dark sturdy wood, and behind it there was a narrow passage backed by a small mirror, and a three-tiered display of liquor bottles. Sunlight came through the front windows and glinted off the bottles and the mirror.

“I
can
say I never
wanted
to be a bad fella,” John X. said. He lifted his drink and held the whisky to his nose, inhaling the scent. “But, I’ve got to admit, sometimes opportunity was in such a lenient position I couldn’t turn my back to it.”