The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (57 page)

This was the first peek at life beyond the swamp for most of the refugees, and as the weeks in the camp went by many of them came to like what they saw. When the big river calmed and the swamp settled back to level, families that had known no life but the swampy decided that the allure of wild rice ranching and nutria trapping was overshadowed by the grand tales they’d swallowed of city life, a place where sugar-cured hams were free so long as you bought a potato, pigeons were fat and sleek and tasted like shrimp, cash was doled out twice a month, and there was an endless supply of liquid cheer and hoochy-koochy bonhomie. The flood pushed these folks from the remote life of the swamp and into the bullshit embrace of the bluff, winking city.

John X. looked out the dusty bathroom window of Tip’s place to the
brown river wending its endless path through the night. He wedged his elbow against the sill to hold himself steady, then finished off the whisky in his glass. Among the families forced to flee before the flood were the Blanquis, who fled from a place with no name, deep in the swamp. They’d come to town in the summer of ’27, three months after the flood, and it was because of that rushing water that he had, later on, met a certain fourteen-year-old Blanqui girl, whom he’d wooed with spontaneous ditties on the subject of his desire, and ended up married to. And though that terrible flood had killed his mother, her drowned body never recovered, it had also round about brought him a wife and progeny.

John X. leaned back from the window, and when he turned he saw a drunken face in the mirror over the sink and sadly realized that drunken face was his own. Criminentlies, he hadn’t had his little angel to pour his whisky today, and on his own he’d made a mess. His little angel knew just the right size that an angel of whisky should be. On his own he had this problem with portions, and he’d been drunk since shortly after he’d come to on the couch at noon. His pale grizzled face was a blur in the mirror.

He looked blurrily at the blurred image of himself, and decided to shave. He opened the cabinet and found Tip’s razor and shaving cream. The foam hissed into his palm, and John X. lathered it to his cheeks. He leaned closer to the light, then dropped his jaw and pulled the razor down as it cleared a wobbly path from his cheekbone. Two red dots of blood bloomed immediately. He was trying to be at Monique’s for a seven-thirty dinner, but he’d seen the damn clock from a screwy angle and been thrown off on his reading. Two hours off. He’d believed it to be a quarter of six, which left plenty of time, only to look again in ten minutes and find that it was nearly eight, and he had to hurry. He flattened his lips and drew the razor rapidly over the bump of his chin. When he finished, thin furrows of whiskers that the razor had missed bristled up, and tiny bits of reddening toilet paper hung from the nicks he’d made on his skin.

He dressed in the front room. He selected the handsomest threads
from his suitcase of dead man’s finery. He struggled with the buttons, but overcame this new test of his dexterity. Unfortunately black sneakers were his only shoes, and he bent down to tie them. When he raised up, Lunch Pumphrey was standing in the doorway, all in black, his hat brim pulled down, one little hand stuffed in the pockets of his Levi’s, the other little hand holding a Colt .45.

“Paw-Paw, I’ve had Enoch’s orange truck staked out for hours,” Lunch said agreeably. “I got tired of waitin’ for you to show yourself.”

“Hey, sorry about that Lunch—” John X. said. “Say, what’cha drinkin’?”

“Oh my head’s still poundin’ from last night, Paw-Paw. I don’t think I want to drink none.”

John X. straightened the collar on his shirt and stood up straight, sneaking a glance toward the couch where Enoch’s pistol was hidden. “I’m gonna guess pain is in the forecast for me, huh, Lunch?”

“You don’t gotta guess, Paw-Paw.”

“Well,” John X. said, “that forecast calls for a drink.” He lurched across the room toward the kitchen and his bottle of Maker’s Mark. “I guess I half figured you’d be showin’ up.”

“You know I’m relentless this way,” Lunch said.

John X. pulled the cork with a flourish, and took a deep sniff of the sweet sour mash, then raised the bottle neck and drank deeply.

“Where’s the money?” Lunch asked.

“Oh, hell, slick, all that’s left of that money is a
beaut
iful memory, and nine hundred bucks. I had myself a time blowin’ it,” John X. said, shaking his head. “Yeah, Lunch, it all went to good causes, if you call bookies good causes. I’m gonna guess you don’t.”

John X.’s wrinkled face took on the mobile features of an animated raconteur, and he waved his arms with a sloppy charm.

“Looky here, Paw-Paw, you’re sayin’ nine hundred bucks is all you got left from forty-seven thousand dollars?”

“Well, really, nine hundred and fifty,” John X. said, waving his bottle around. “But I’d like to keep a fifty so’s I could slip it to ol’ St. Pete—it might make the difference.”

Lunch Pumphrey’s dark, sepulchral eyes narrowed, and he eased his snap-brim hat back from his face.

“What you did to me proves you’re in-sane. I might as well hear the details.”

“Randi was furious with me, and at Pascagoula she jumped out with the kid and split. So, bein’ alone, I decided I’d take that money of yours and run it up to where I was a millionaire!” He shook a cigarette loose, then flipped his eight-ball lighter open, and lit it.

“See, I took the advice of the pigskin experts, Lunch, and I put fifteen K down on them wily ’Bama boys. Saturday last, they lined up against a team from Florida whose star quarterback and favorite wide receiver had just been carted off to jail on rape charges. That oughta be an edge, right? Short of a fuckin’ jailbreak that game
had
to be a lock for the Crimson Tide. But as you might know, late in the fourth quarter their stud runnin’ back, the one that beat that burglary rap back in the spring, coughed it up inside the Florida ten-yard line, and that Florida linebacker who’d just come off suspension from that summertime assault beef the papers were full of, jumped on the ball and kept ’Bama from coverin’ the spread.”

John X. sucked on a cigarette, shook his head, and said, “Makes you wanta puke, don’t it?” The old man looked at Lunch’s face and grimaced. “Criminentlies, that’s what I did to your face, huh? Nothin’ broke?”

Lunch leaned against the wall, tapping the barrel of the pistol to his thigh.

“Just a bruise,” he said. “Some pain.”

“Randi told me I’d fucked up bad.”

“Randi’s a smart chick,” Lunch said. “So where’s the other thirty-two grand?”

“Oh, Slick,” John X. said. “It gets worse.” He flapped his elbows and gestured to the sky. “I doubled up to get the money back.”

“Shit, that’s stupid,” Lunch said. “That’s the same way I lost it to Short Paul in the first place.”

“But that’s what happened,” John X. said. “I mean, can you believe Notre Dame could get beat by the Air Force Academy?”

“That was a shocker,” Lunch said.

“Course then I spent another grand or so eatin’ and drinkin’, you know. I like good whisky.”

“Good whisky an’ bad luck, looks like to me,” Lunch said. “You know I’m gonna kill you, don’t you?”

A cigarette in one hand, a bottle of Maker’s Mark in the other, John X. raised his arms wide over his head.

“Que sera and so on.”

“Gimme what you got,” Lunch said. “And forget holdin’ out that last fifty.”

John X. pulled the roll of greenbacks from his pocket. He swayed loosely as he leaned toward Lunch, and handed him the wad.

“I hope you had fun,” Lunch said, “cause your fun is over.”

“I know,” John X. said. “I should be halfway to Dallas by now.”

Lunch briskly tapped down the brim of his little black hat, then pointed the pistol out the door.

“Let’s take a little ride in my Bug,” he said.

“Sure,” John X. said, lifting his bottle expansively. “Feelin’ the call of the open road, huh? That’s always been my downfall, too, Lunch.”

There were a handful of flowers he’d pulled out of a neighbor’s yard resting on the kitchen table, and as John X. passed, he paused to break a blossom off and insert it in his lapel. “I don’t know what these are,” he said. “Do you?”

“Might be tulips,” Lunch said.

They crossed the wooden deck, their footsteps echoing out across the water, then down the slab steps to the gravel drive. Gravel crunched underfoot as they walked to Lunch’s VW which was parked discreetly at the end of the drive. John X. took a deep breath of the autumn night air, then looked up at the bowl of stars above his head. Lunch’s pistol prodded him in the back when they reached the VW.

“Open the trunk,” Lunch said.

John X. pushed the button in and raised the bonnet, the hinges groaning loudly in the silent night. He looked down at three huge rocks on the bottom of the trunk.

“What are the rocks for?” John X. asked.

“Now, don’t you worry about them, Paw-Paw.” Lunch raised his pistol and planted it squarely at the back of John X.’s head. “Get in.”

The old man crawled inside, and curled into a fetal position on top of the rocks. He looked up at Lunch.

“Look all around you, Paw-Paw. Notice
every
little thing. Appreciate it all at once—and say good-bye.”

The birthday party was haunted by a white plate that set empty on the table. Monique Blanqui Shade hunched in her chair, smoking a long black cigarette. She wore a flower above her ear, a dainty gesture Etta had talked her into, and now she pulled the yellow rose from her hair and tossed it beside a dirty plate. Dinner had been eaten, and a jug of red wine was being passed around. All the children were gathered here. Rene and Nicole were avoiding eye contact, pointedly not talking to each other beyond banal courtesies, Nicole topping her wine glass with every passing of the jug. Big Tip, lonely since Gretel had been grounded by Mrs. Carter, shoveled in cake and smiled regularly; Francois, with his sports coat elegantly hung from the chair back, sat with his wife, Charlotte, a blonde of robust physique who smiled a lot, but always shrewdly studied the family as if her visits were part of a sociological inquiry. She’d expressed the keenest interest in meeting John X. Shade.

“He’s halfway to Dallas by now,” Etta said, looking at the empty plate. She propped her chin in her hand. “Mom predicted this.”

“I don’t care,” Francois said. “He was
always
a phantom to me.”

“Can I play pool with his cue now, Ma?” Etta asked.

Monique Blanqui Shade raised one long gray eyebrow, then gazed at Tip.

Tip shrugged, took a sip of wine. “Why not? I brought it back for him. Try it out, kid. Sure. Why not use the best? It’s how he liked to do.”

Etta got up from the table and went to the adjoining room where a pool table sat under a hanging lamp. She unlatched her father’s black
cue case, then lifted the sleek Balabushka from the slots lined with green felt. Then Rene was at her side.

“Pretty, ain’t it?” Rene said. “Here, let me show you how the pros do it.” He took the two pieces from her, then screwed the halves together. Rene picked up a square of chalk from the table edge and rapidly buffed the cue tip. “That’s how to chalk the cue,” he said. “Chalk between each shot. Always.” He slid the Balabushka appreciatively through his fingers, and leaned over to break. He smacked the cue ball low and drove it into the rack, spreading the balls around the table. “Yeah, Ol’ Johnny won hisself a lot of dough and free drinks with this piece of wood, kid.”

“Grampa Enoch told me Dad was real good once.”

“He sure was, kid,” Rene said. “Course you spend fifty years at this game you
oughta
get pretty good.”

Etta looked up at her half brother, twisting the crucifix in her ear. “He said his eyes got bad.”

“He used to have good eyes,” Rene said, “and a steady hand and the nerve of a back-door man.”

Rene handed Etta the Balabushka cue. She leaned over the pool table. “He never let me touch it before,” she said.

The party was breaking down along gender lines, Nicole and Charlotte remaining at the table with Monique—Nicole swirling the red wine in her glass, but looking deflated somehow; Charlotte saying, “What a lovely time this is,” but looking at her gold wristwatch; Monique sitting there, her eyes unfocused, her attention somewhere else. A couple of birthday presents lay opened on the table—a teapot in the shape of a fish, a green silk blouse, one used bass lure.

From time to time there was a loud clacking of balls on the pool table.

Rene, Tip, and Francois congregated over at the window, looking out at Lafitte, the dark cobblestoned street they’d spent their youths on and never left far behind.

“I guess I believed him this time,” Tip said.

“Sucker,” Francois said.

“But that was before I knew he had nine hundred bucks.”

The three sons stood in a rank, looking onto the black empty street, and finally Rene cupped a hand to his ear and said, “You hear it?”

Tip nodded slowly and said, “Honk, honk—”

Then, recognizing the prelude, all three sons hoisted the glasses in their hands together, raised them in salute toward the dark street as if seeing a certain bullet-shaped ’51 Ford cruising their way, and said in unison, “Hey, assholes.”