The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (52 page)

She was looking at Rene’s approach as she said, “How’s about world peace, and a river of beer?”

Shade leaned against the cooler beside Francois, who said, “We’ll save that for Christmas, Ma.”

“What’s up?” Shade asked.

Francois patted him on the shoulder.

“Trying to get her to confess on the subject of what she
really
wants for her birthday.”

Monique turned her magnified eyes on Shade, pointing at him with the black cigarette.

“One thing I want is for you to be good to Nicole, you rat.” She jabbed the smoke in his direction. “You hurt that girl, son, and I
will
take a fuckin’ skillet to your head.”

“I love you, too, Ma,” Shade said. “Now butt out.”

“What’s up with Nicole?” asked Francois.

“Nothin’,” Shade said.

“Hah,” went Monique, “that’s a man talkin’ there.”

“Oh,” said Francois. “I think I get it.”

At the front table Henry groaned loudly over some sort of pool injustice, and Shade looked that way.

“Saw the old man tonight,” he said. “He doesn’t look too good.”

“How could he?” Francois said. “He’s been holed up in a bottle for thirty years, at least.”

“He don’t look too good, but he can still be pretty funny,” Shade said.

“Don’t I know it,” Monique said. “His sense of humor got you boys born. Tell me about this daughter he’s got now.”

“Well,” Shade said, “she’s a weird kid.”

“I always wanted a daughter,” Monique said, smoke clouding around her face. “It just wasn’t to be.”

Shade turned to Francois, and said, “You ought to drop in on the old fart. He’s stayin’ over at Tip’s. This girl, her name is Etta, she’s half your sister, Frankie.”

“No,” Francois said. He spun away, his eyes on the pool players. His clean teeth scraped at his lips. “He’s a phantom to me. That’s all—a fuckin’ phantom. I don’t want anything to do with him.” He raised his left arm and looked at his watch. “I’m late. I’ve got to get home.” He smacked his hand on top of the cooler. “See you for your birthday party, Ma.”

He patted Shade’s shoulder once more as he walked toward the door.

When the door closed behind Francois, Monique asked, “So what’s this li’l girl of Johnny’s like? Is she pretty?”

“That’s hard to say, Ma. Her hair is cut funny, and she’s been taught to use, like, Crayolas on her face. She’s a sight.”

“L’il girls are different, son.”

“This one sure is,” Shade said. He yawned and stretched his back against the Dr Pepper cooler. “I’m crashin’ upstairs tonight.”

Monique regarded him coolly from behind another black cigarette.

“That’s interestin’,” she said.

“I’ll tell you what’s interestin’, Ma,” Shade said. “You know how you always told us you’n Dad were still married, legally? How he was just a runaway husband and daddy, runnin’ for all these years? Well, the way he tells it is
you
divorced him
years
ago. Years and years, actually.”

“That so?”

“Yeah. Why’d you keep tellin’ us you were still married if it wasn’t true, huh, Ma?”

From her seat on the high stool Monique leaned forward and planted
her elbows on the cooler top. Her eyes looked huge behind her glasses. She raised her chin to a belligerent angle, then blew smoke at her son.

“Why, it should be obvious,” she said in a caustic tone. “I wanted to fuck with your head, pure and simple.”

11

M
RS
. C
ARTER
had a number of rules. A tallish woman of considerable age, Mrs. Carter was usually attired in a calico dress and plain black shoes, and though the expression on her pinched face suggested an inner, ineffable sadness, she was diligent in the performance of her duties. When new girls came into her house, she sat them down and ran off a short speech to them that explained her various general rules: “A healthy child is what folks want, and it’s what they pay for, too. That means we’ll have zero vices here. No drinkin’, dopin’, cigarette smokin’, or godawful eatin’ habits. You’ll eat vegetables in this house. You’ll eat lean meats, all varieties of vegetables, lots of fruit and milk, and you’ll have no sex. Don’t get outside here and meet up with some boy who is just dreamy to you, and his arms are so very, so very, very warm to you, and his tongue darts quick in your mouth and you plumb blow it out your mind that you are fatter’n a blue ribbon pumpkin because you are
preg-
nant, girls. There’s a child in you. So, no carnal relations—hear?”

Mrs. Carter’s house was ranch style, basically, everything on one floor to avoid the strain of stairs. Gretel and the four other girls didn’t do much around the place but languish on the soft furniture and expand. They nibbled at trays of fruit Mrs. Carter set out and watched television from the early morning agricultural reports right up to the late local news, the end of which signaled bedtime. Three of the girls were from the area, with Gretel and one other being the only out-of-state recruits.

The girls talked quite a bit of worried talk about the birthing of their babies. There were rumors of tremendous pain in the delivery process. The girls talked about it like Marines in a foxhole talk about being taken alive. Gretel was quietest on this subject because she’d seen field-hippie women have babies while lying on Navaho rugs in Delirium’s kitchen, and they’d come out of it fine, healthy, sometimes joyous.

Mrs. Carter’s house was well known in the neighborhood, and once in a while it would be the site of a disturbance. Ex-boyfriends might drive up drunk, screaming insults, or parents would arrive to lecture one of the girls about their deep disappointments in her, then escalate in their anger. Sometimes after dark young boys on spider bikes mooned around on the sidewalk and front lawn, calling out enticements and lusty claims to this household of girls who clearly would
fuck
if they could be lured into the bushes.

The bedroom Gretel slept in was farthest from the kitchen, which discouraged snacking in the early
A.M.
hours, but it had a window facing onto the street, and studying the view soon came to be her hobby. Gretel shared the room with Lori, an older woman of twenty-two who’d lived a life of rancid nothingness down on the south side of town, but because of the positioning of the beds, she had the view to herself.

Three houses were constantly in sight, and if she craned her head to wider angles two more houses and a garage were visible. The men of these houses seemed to lead lives similar to those Gretel had been told about by Zodiac and Delirium. These men went off in the mornings fresh-shaven and in crisp clothes but came home around supper time all tore down by soulless work of some sort, their clothes sagging, their faces weary. Two of the men nearly always carried six-packs of beer to kill their evenings with. The various wives were about perfectly split between going away to work or staying put at home. So many children ran around the worn lawns that she wasn’t sure which houses which ones belonged to.

The way these people lived was so weird. They were under the thumb of society to the extent where they probably thought they had it
good. Would Zodiac mock them if he was here? For sure he’d flip his gray ponytail at them and bark. He’d bark and grin and sing a song about their humdrummery as loud as he could and possibly do the Pawnee Dance of Doom on the trunks of their cars. Zodiac spent
his
days doing whatever he wanted, the only thumb he came under was Nature’s, a fairly ferocious thumb at times, but one he found agreeable. The crop he tended was an Afghani strain called Razorback Red that he’d grown for years on government land, an ungreedy stand of twenty-five plants budding in the Mark Twain National Forest. Generally Gretel and Delirium handled the chores around the house. Delirium gardened and sewed through the daylight hours, then, as darkness fell, she turned to her poetry, which was all concerned with her childhood back in Tarrytown, New York. The poems, some rhyming, some not, spelled out how this childhood in privileged circumstances had turned her away from the shallow urge to own and destroy, and toward the hidden part of herself that society would kill, the part that was best expressed nude, under bright stars, with a reefer in one hand and the laughter of freedom pealing from her lips.

When darkness fell on this street, the people of all five houses closed in around TV sets. They didn’t come out again until their alarm clocks made them.

Weird. But interesting.

Gretel was sitting cross-legged on her bed, letting her skin breathe, watching the street, when Tip slowly drove by in his big ol’ gas-eater car. She rolled carefully off the bed and went down the hall to the bathroom. She ran some water and splashed her face. She slipped into a green dress, brushed her hair, then went into the front room. The other girls were all gathered there, ignoring the sitcom on the tube, making jokes about Tom’s child.

“Tom’s child is kickin’ this evenin’,” Lori said.

“Tom’s child is healthy,” said Carol.

“And so damn cute!” said Dorothy.

The four of them giggled, their big ripe bodies wallowing on the soft furniture. This Tom’s child business was the house joke, a variety
of unwed mother humor. All of the girls had wearied of explaining who they knew or thought or hoped was the father of their baby, and after a few bull sessions Carol had loftily claimed that the man responsible for her condition was none other than Tom Cruise, the cutest dude in the galaxy, and after a moment of silence, Gretel had said, “Well, me, too.” Pretty soon it developed that all five women believed themselves to have been knocked up by the very same movie star dick, and from there on all referred to their common burdens as Tom’s child.

“I’m takin’ Tom’s child to a movie,” Gretel said. “Show him his daddy, maybe.”

“You take good care of my man’s child,” Carol said.

On her way out Gretel encountered Mrs. Carter on the front porch. Mrs. Carter smoked a pack and a half of Marlboros per day, but, in keeping with her own rules, she only smoked on the outside porch.

“Where you goin’?” she asked.

“A movie.”

“Seems like you’ve been goin’ to a lot of movies.”

“I enjoy them. I hardly saw any back home.”

“Uh-huh. Where do you get the money?”

“The movie money?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Today—a man gave it to me.”

“Ah.” Mrs. Carter stuck her cigarette in the big sand ashtray she kept on the porch. “Why’d he give money to you?”

“I watched his dog.”

“His dog?”

Tip’s car was not in view.

“While the man shopped. At Krogers. His dog has run away twice this week, and he didn’t have a chain with him, so I said I’d watch.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It was an Irish Setter.” She looked down the street. “Named Bono.”

Mrs. Carter lit another Marlboro. She flicked the dead match on the lawn.

“You be home early.”

Gretel went walking down the sidewalk, occasionally placing her hands under her belly and hefting. One of those dirty little boys trailed her on a spider bike for a minute, wheeling up close to her side and breathing heavy, but on his own like this he didn’t have anything foul to say, and soon pedaled away.

Around the corner and halfway down the block Tip was waiting on her. The night was warm, his windows were down, and she could hear his radio tuned in, as always, to a Golden Oldies station, blaring “White Rabbit,” a song Delirium had often sung to her when she was young.

When Gretel slid into the car Tip started the engine, grinned at her, and pulled away from the curb.

Pio’s Italian Garden was a spot of make-believe Brooklyn, a loving re-creation of the joints Pio had known during his childhood back in the Red Hook section of what he often called “the old country.” The authentic touches in this decorative homage were the vast scenes of Neapolitan kitsch that were painted on the walls, the small square tables with red-and-white checkered cloths, the DiNobili cigars in the glass case below the cash register, and the jukebox on which Ol’ Blue Eyes was the boss songster, backed up by a goombah choir of underboss songsters mostly named Tony.

One painted wall depicted a spectacular scene wherein a Naples tenement was built at an angle that extended far enough over the bay that a chubby mama with a big toothy grin could fling a platter of linguini from a third floor window across the sailboats and yachts to a wedding group dining al fresco on the Isle of Capri.

Tip leaned back in his chair, pulling away from a plate of savory manicotti he was too nervous to eat. Gretel sat across from him, slowly chewing a meatball, her eyes intent on the wall painting. Despite all the spice in the air, he could smell her, her certain scent. She smelled so sweet, but not of perfume. This fragrance of hers couldn’t be bought in a bottle. It was a scent that must rise from the spirit or soul, then waft
from her pores, her hair, that huge bulge, or perhaps that scar. He raised his nose and sniffed.

Gretel turned her face from the wall, and said, “I don’t believe that’s accurate.”

“The mural?”

“It’s not like that abroad. Zodiac’s been everywhere.”

In his red shirt with black buttons, black sports coat and slacks, with his glistening brown hair swept back and hanging to his shoulders, big Tip looked potentially dangerous but sincerely spruced. A series of curious smiles kept coming to his pocked face. These smiles were small in stature, but quick and relentless.

“I’d like to take you there,” he said. “Rome.”

Chewing, Gretel pointed a fork at the wall, then swallowed.

“It won’t look like that. Don’t get your hopes dashed.”

“By boat, maybe,” he said. Three quick smiles. “Or do you get seasick?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She touched four fingers to her scar. “On curvy, hilly roads I
can
get carsick. Maybe the sea is different.”

“By plane would probly be best,” Tip said.

“I haven’t had better food,” Gretel said, her fork wrapping up a wad of spaghetti. “I like these meatballs, even though I realize animals have personalities. Spirits, even.”