The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (49 page)

“This heat,” Lunch said. “Whew! Could I interest y’all in somethin’ cool to drink?”

Mary looked up at him and smiled, then turned to her husband.

“I
love
the way they talk down here.”

“I know it,” John Smith said. Then, to Lunch, “Hell, yes, little buddy, lead the way.”

“That’s a problem,” Lunch said. “I just got here. I don’t know the way.”

“Oh, well,” John Smith said, “we’ve been here two days, so we’ll think of a spot.”

“The saloon,” Mary said, still knitting. “The old one under the hill.”

Lunch pulled a wad of cash from his pocket.

“I’ll get the first round,” he said.

John Smith clapped his hands together.

“By golly, it looks like you can afford to,” he said. He patted Lunch on the shoulder. “Follow us, little buddy.”

The Smiths walked Lunch to Natchez Under-the-Hill. They pointed out several antique houses and lampposts that dated from the era when the town was jammed with river men, whores, bandits, slumming gentry, and assorted frontier ruffians. It was the memory of those lively times that prompted tourists to come here and gawk at surviving reminders of that rough-and-ready past.

The tavern they chose was called the Under-the-Hill, and it had been opened originally back when the very term Under-the-Hill meant buckets of grog, long knives, loose women, expansionist dreams, and sudden endings. The walls did seem to give off some faint echoes from key events in the lives of people who’d been dead a century or more.

The threesome sat at a table near a window, the river in easy view.

“We were here yesterday,” John Smith said. “What’re you drinking, Rich?”

“I’m a Bud man,” he said, “and a Cub fan.”

“He knows our motto!” Mary exclaimed, not addressing Lunch directly.

“I heard it,” said John Smith. “Everybody back home is a Cub fan—I didn’t know they were down here.”

“Cable,” Lunch said. “When Harry Caray says somethin’, he speaks for me, too.”

“Grrr-eat,” said Mary. “I think I’ll have a Bud with you guys.”

Over three bottles of beer Lunch got the story of John and Mary Smith’s lives, which were, though dull in the telling, extremely detailed. The details were relentlessly tacked on to the main body of the dull narrative, and there were several sidetracks in the tale where the Smiths took shots at each other over minor domestic disputes. He didn’t pick up his socks, or do dishes, or cook anything but red-hot chili and spareribs, while she irked him by buying cheap beer instead of good beer, letting her sister visit for up to six weeks at a time, and by singing Patsy
Cline songs in such a horrible manner that they were ruined for him as tunes, even when Patsy herself sang them. Late in the tale Lunch found himself appointed as the final judge in a wrangle that the Smiths had kept going for most of their marriage, to wit: should coffee be electro-perked and taken black so it tasted like
coffee
(him), or dripped and taken with milk to avoid throat cancer (her).

Three beers and no sleep had Lunch ready to feel like a judge, and he ruled on the coffee case by saying, “Electro-perk it, and serve it black, but make sure he gets ten minutes or more of titty-suck per diem, and that should make things
just
all around.”

For a moment the only sound was knitting needles clicking. Then Mary looked directly at Lunch for a change. Her eyes were green and hot on him. She said, “That is an interesting answer. Black coffee and titty-suck—we never thought of it, but it’s good.”

John Smith had his head tilted back, and a lopsided smile put a kink in his mustache.

“Hee, hee,” he went. “She’s got the titties for it, doesn’t she?”

Lunch glided his beer bottle along the wet spots on the table.

“No gentleman would answer that question,” he said. “But she damned sure does.”

Mary laughed and said, “He’s the
cutest
little man.”

John Smith again made the noise of “Hee, hee, hee.” Then he said, “Let’s us all go for a carriage ride—what say?”

They caught a carriage on Canal Street. Lunch and the Smiths spread across the seat, with Mary in the middle, still knitting. The carriage was open to the air and hot sun, pulled by a dark horse that didn’t seem anxious for the work. The driver, a pudgy young man in regular modern clothes, except for a funky period hat, called out the landmarks and special memories of the town in a loud voice and tended to get a mite hysterical about old-timey architecture and certain ancient bloody deeds.

Lunch found the ancient bloody deeds to be especially interesting. The Natchez Trace had been nicknamed the Devil’s Backbone, which
was a phrase so strong it belonged in a song, perhaps as the chorus. The Devil’s Backbone had been run all up and down by bottom-born, forceful types of fellas who Lunch wouldn’t’ve minded drinkin’ a few Buds with. Their criminal actions, and the still remembered drama of their bloody lives, spooked feelings awake and made them flit about in Lunch’s deeper parts.

The carriage rattled past this old house and that old house, all of them with the proper names of people, and the horse and driver cut around pick-up trucks hauling pumpkins, RVs of the retired, and Japanese automobiles. Only Mary really liked the house stuff (this was the Smiths’ third carriage ride in two days), while Lunch and John Smith both studiously blotted their minds with the historical gore and all its fine points.

When the carriage ride ended the trio went into a tavern called Mike Fink’s. Mike Fink was another riverfront legend, one who had apparently talked a whole lot of boastful trash that had been passed down. His daddy was an alligator, his mammy was a hurricane, he ate gunpowder for breakfast, and whipped whole armies with his farts, and so on. Several of his allegations in this vein had been painted on weathered boards and tacked to the walls.

Lunch and the Smiths stuck to Bud, with the addition of burgers, the Smiths buying, since, as it now came out, they had thirty-six hundred dollars on them.

Though she didn’t seem to look at him much, Mary made some observations about Lunch. For one thing, she said the bruise on his face looked older than from last night. Lunch answered by saying the human body is a funny piece of work. A while after that she pointed a knitting needle at his feet, then his hands.

“He has the itsy-bitsiest hands and feet—have you noticed?”

John Smith made that hee, hee, hee sound again, which was becoming an irritant.

“Haw, haw, haw,” Lunch said, as an antidote.

“Well you
are
small, little buddy,” John Smith said. “Like Little Harpe, who was the brother of Big Harpe, who as brothers murdered
and robbed countless travelers along the Devil’s Backbone. I’ve read up on it.”

“Little and Big who?”

“Harpe,” John Smith said. “One was known as Little and the other as Big, and the different gangs along the Devil’s Backbone considered both the Harpes to be beyond the pale, just too darn strange in their crimes. There was a freaked-out style to the way they murdered and carried on that shook these other murderers up to where they avoided Little and Big as much as possible.”

The thing Mary was knitting had begun to take shape as a sturdy knee-sock. From the side of her mouth she said, “Tell him about the baby, and the bodies.”

“The Harpes had some women with them, little buddy, and naturally they ended up with kids. But Big was real uptight, and when a baby, his
own
baby, mind you, bothered him by squalling and keeping everybody awake, why, Big snatched the baby up by its heels and smashed its head against a tree trunk.”

“No shit?” Lunch said. He was listening raptly, as if to his own family history. “What’d Little do?”

“I think they all went to sleep,” John Smith said. “The squalling was over. Their great talent, though, was the disappearance of bodies. The folks they murdered didn’t get found very often. See, the Harpes were farm boys, mean farm boys, and they’d learned some things slaughtering animals back home. You take a body of a person, hee, hee, hee, and you split it through the gut, the tummy, scoop out the innards and toss in rocks, see, then kick it in the river. It won’t come up. The gas escapes through the split as the victim rots, instead of ballooning up, and with the rocks in the tummy, it just sits in the riverbed and bottom-feedin’ fish nibble away all evidence of the crime.”

“Gee,” Lunch said. “History is really okay.”

“History was always my best subject,” John Smith said.

“Mine was recess.”

“I guess that’s why I’m tellin’ this, and you’re hearin’ it.”

“I guess.” Lunch checked the clock on the wall. “Those sure were wild times.”

“That they were, little buddy,” John Smith said. “I must say I think it’d’ve been a real adventure to be down here in those days. I really do. I expect I could’ve handled myself among that sort pretty well. I’ve got the size, plus, I can
fight
if I got to.”

Mary said, “You ain’t been in a fight since you smacked Alice Buchtel’s boy for throwin’ a snowball at your Caprice.”

“But in
those
days, hon, I would’ve had to be in them all the time, which would improve my hand-to-hand skills. I
can
fight when I have to. And when I’ve
had
to I’ve ended up on top as a rule.”

“Oooh,” Lunch said. “I can’t imagine such violence. A little fella like me, why, it wouldn’t do for me to mix in violence like that.”

Mary said, “You know his tiny boots look like they’d fit
me
.”

“Please don’t wrestle me down and take my clothes from me, ma’am. Especially my boots.”

“He’s cute. He’s the
cutest
little man.”

When the trio had finished their burgers and Buds, Lunch wowed them by showing off his left forearm tattoo that read Cubs Win! They gushed about that for a moment, then Lunch said he had to go check on the status of his Bug at Virgil and Bill’s. The Smiths needed an update on their Caprice, so they all walked to the station together.

Neither Virgil or Bill wore name tags, but for some reason Lunch thought it was Virgil he talked to. This possible Virgil said that Lunch had lucked out, and at a nearby car cemetery they’d found a fender for the Bug, though it was a flat black color. A new tire had been slapped on, balanced, and aligned. The dents in the front bonnet had been pinged out fairly well, but not perfectly.

“I’ll see to that myself,” Lunch said. “What do I owe you?”

With the tow charge, the tire, the fender, the labor, and the inscrutable miscellaneous, the total bill was equal to the take from three convenience-store robberies. But the immediate future seemed so rich in prospects that Lunch paid up without any complaint.

The deal on the Smiths’ Caprice was less certain. It was set to roll as soon as a side door was put on, but the side door was on order from Vicksburg and late in arriving.

“This lazy ol’ river has slowed these people down,” Mary said. “I want to go back to the room and get some rest. My eyes hurt.”

“I hate to see good folks like you turn spiteful on the region,” Lunch said. “Folks down here are nice as pie. I mean, the sun’ll set in two hours, and my car is runnin’. How’s about I carry y’all to dinner in the country? A mom-and-pop place out at the crossroads. The moon’ll be on the water.”

“Well,” John Smith said. He looked at Mary, who nodded. “It’s a date, but only if you let us pay, okay?”

Lunch waited mostly on a park bench for the sun to set. He did some scurrying around the grounds. A snort of cocaine added flaky clarity to his thoughts. For amusement he had the river and the birds in view. Pretty soon he needed to push on to St. Bruno, which he’d learned was an easy drive away. But first, dinner with the Smiths from corn country. When it was dark he went into action.

He drove the Bug at a slow speed toward The Cromworth Motel, where the Smiths had a room. Their room was off the road, and as he cruised back that way he saw them, standing in front of room one eleven, both holding pink wine coolers, staring at the small swimming pool in the courtyard.

Lunch parked a foot short of their kneecaps. He leaned his head, hat and all, out the window.

“Howdy, howdy,” he said. “Feelin’ hungry?”

“Famished,” Mary Smith said. She had her blond hair fanned out around her face, and she wore a short red cocktail dress that showed her fit, firm gams on one end, and a mile of creamy cleavage on the other. “I could eat your black hat with ketchup.”

“We can do better’n that,” Lunch said. He kept the clutch put in and revved the Bug engine. “This mom-and-pop place Virgil told me about
special-
izes in catfish and chicken.”

“Big platters, I hope,” John Smith said as he opened the passenger door.

“They serve family style,” Lunch said. “You’ll get your gut stuffed alright.”

“Hee, hee, hee.”

The Smiths tossed their wine coolers into a trash can, then climbed into the Bug. Because of his size John Smith crawled into the back seat, which he needed all of. Mary rode shotgun, her large bag of knitting resting on her lap.

“In case I get bored,” she said, tapping the bag.

“You won’t,” Lunch said.

Lunch pulled away from The Cromworth Motel. At the main drag he guessed south. Streetlights and assorted neon lit the way, and Lunch drove slowly through sparse traffic.

“This thing seems to be luggin’,” John Smith said.

“All this weight,” Lunch said.

At the edge of town Lunch kept going. There were still pockets of houses along the way on one side of the road. A big yellow harvest moon was hung in the sky, casting a terrific golden glow that seemed peculiarly invented, perhaps by some lone nut spiritual figure, or else rigged up by Hollywood technicians to bathe a love story in. Once in a while the river burst into view between rows of trees, the brown water golden in the night.

“Are we lost yet?” Mary asked.

“It’s a little further out this way,” Lunch said. He saw a gravel lane in the high beams, a lane that turned toward the water. “I think this could be it.”

He turned off the paved road and onto the gravel.