The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (8 page)

“You got a point there,” Ledoux said, then unleashed his hand and let it snatch up the onion quarter and chicken part.

Roque’s hand sprang forward and grabbed Ledoux by the wrist.

“Put that back!” he said.

“What?”

“Put it back! You deaf or something?”

Roque shook Ledoux’s preying hand until the food splashed back in the bowl.

Ledoux wiped his released hand on a napkin.

“What’s the fuckin’ deal?” he asked.

“You don’t take my food, that’s what. That’s
my
food. If I wanted you to take it I’d tell you to take it.”

“You were done.”

Roque leaned forward, scooting the table in on Ledoux.

“You hungry, Pete? You said you weren’t hungry, but if you are I’ll get you a bowl of stew and you can eat it with your own spoon and everything.”

After a sip of beer Ledoux shook his head.

“Ever since I was a kid,” Roque said, “I haven’t liked that. People nibbling at
my
food, I don’t like it.”

“It was just goin’ to be wasted. I didn’t see the point in wastin’ it when I’m just a little bit hungry.”

“If I want to waste it, then I waste it. It’s mine.”

“Forget it,” Ledoux said. He didn’t know where to look, what to put his eyes on. He finished his beer and stood. “I better go get this peckerwood and his cousin in gear for us.”

“Don’t go away mad, Pete. If you’re hungry—eat. I’ll buy.”

“I’m not fuckin’ hungry!”

As Ledoux stared at Roque’s hard face he heard steps coming up from behind. He felt a hand clap him on the back.

“How’s it goin’, Pete?” Tip Shade asked.

“Okay.”

“Hemorrhoids botherin’ you, or are you on your way out?”

Tip sat down at the table and nodded at Roque.

“He’s decidin’ whether or not to eat,” Roque said.

“No I ain’t.” Ledoux wiggled a hand in front of his zipper. “I’m goin’ to go shed a tear for Ireland, that’s what. Then I got business.”

“Good enough,” Roque said.

“What’s this about pissin’ on Ireland?” asked Thomas Patrick Shade, a tricultural man with dangerous pride in the two homelands he’d never seen.

“It’s just an expression,” Ledoux said. Nods of agreement appeared all around and Ledoux smiled. “Besides—who you think you’re kiddin’—you’re a Frog.”

“When I want to be, I am,” Tip said. “Every March I’m Irish.”

Ledoux walked away, and as he sighted in on the john he heard Tip ask: “Say, what about old Alvin Rankin, there, Steve. That’ll shake Pan Fry up, won’t it?”

“I would guess it would,” Roque said. “But as long as they only kill each other, who can gripe? Not you, not me. That’s what I got to ask—who’s goin’ to be upset?”

6

I
N THE
heart of Frogtown, or Old French Town, as the historical markers labeled it, the streets were burnt-orange cobblestone, and brick row houses were built so that the front doors opened onto traffic instead of sidewalks. There were handmade signs for Pierre’s Shoes, Secondhand and New, Jacqueline’s Herbs and Spices, and at the corner of the line of row houses on Lafitte and Perry, Ma Blanqui’s Pool House.

The downstairs of the house had two pool tables in what had once been the parlor and one in the former dining room. In the rear was a small kitchen, a bedroom, and a large closet without a door on it. Monique Blanqui Shade sat in the closet on a high stool from which she kept an eye on the tables. A large Dr Pepper cooler served as a counter and gave her storage space for the extras she sold.

The upstairs was a separate apartment although the door that connected it to the downstairs had no lock on it. That had never been a problem, for Rene Shade lived in the upper half. He lived there partly because he believed, despite considerable contrary evidence, that his mother might need his protection in this neighborhood, but primarily because it was cheap.

On the morning following his meeting with Mayor Crawford, Shade woke sometime before noon but could not pull himself from bed. The apartment was dark and he looked around the room, his familiarity with its accoutrements causing him to overlook the fistful of trophies on a bookcase, the Brueghel reproductions on the wall, and
the clothing strewn across the floor. He found himself staring at a cooing pigeon on the window ledge, a ledge well used by pigeons; a pigeon he could not hush by voice command alone. He considered throwing something that would rattle the window and panic the bird, then passed on such a serious test of his aim so early in the day.

He pulled a pillow over his eyes and tried to sleep.

Sometime later, caught in the lucid but immobile state where the subconscious rambles and the conscious listens, Shade became aware of wet blossoms sprouting from his body. The damp tulips unfolded on his neck, his belly, and then on ground where sweet blossoms live dangerously. His hand began to follow the pattern of moist horticulture and finally grasped a bud just planted but beginning to spread.

“Got me,” a voice like a blue saxophone said.

Slowly Shade sat up, a few strands of Nicole Webb’s hair wound between his fingers.

“What round is it?” he said.

Nicole draped her arms around his neck.

“The first,” she said. “And you’re winning.”

“Just a minute,” Shade said. He rolled out of bed and clumsily walked to the bathroom. He bent over the sink to splash water on his face, then crouched to the faucet and irrigated the potato field that his mouth had become.

Nicole, a rare good fortune for a post-twenties single man in that she was mature but not cautious, and confident but not aloof, leaned against the doorjamb.

“You’re not wearing the underwear I bought you,” she said. “You must not like it.”

Shade rubbed his face with a towel.

“See a beach?” he asked. “Where’s the sand?”

“They’re bikini briefs,” Nicole said. “That just means sexy underwear.”

“I thought naked was sexy.”

“Well, it is. But sexy comes in stages.”

Nicole wore cutoff jeans, with stylish unravelings that formed slits
along the seams, and a black T-shirt that advertised Sister Kettle’s Cafe. The benefits of racquetball and modest weight training gave her arms a fetching versatility of attitude. Black hair, with traces of red when in sunny silhouette, was tucked in a bun. Her waist was thin, her breasts indisputably there, although not garish, all set atop a length of leg that was extravagant and winning.

Shade tossed the towel into the tub, then put his arm around Nicole, and whispered, “I have something to show you.”

They started toward the bed, the tangling energies of their affections making for awkward strides.

“I hope it’s something I’ve seen before,” Nicole said.

As the sun began to ruin the day with heat, Nicole traced her fingers over Shade’s variety of acquired imperfections. There were tiny pale nicks above both eyes, evidence of his former livelihood, and a long gash beneath his chin, put there by the dangerous mix of a too-large bicycle, a small boy, and a hill of challenging steepness. Behind his left shoulder there was a puckered horseshoe, hung there by the doting mother of a busted drug dealer and the avenging end of a broken ketchup bottle.

Shade looked up at Nicole, then rolled over.

“How’d you get in here, anyway?” he asked.

“I came through from downstairs.”

“Hunh.” Shade stood and began to gather his clothes. “Ma let you up, or did you sneak?”

“We had a cup of coffee, then I came up.”

“She never lets anybody come up those stairs. You start up those stairs, usually she hits you.”

“She likes me,” Nicole said with a grin. “And I don’t have a key to the other door.”

In his pants now, Shade walked to the refrigerator and pulled out a can of juice. He popped the top, drank, then wiped his mouth.

“That ought to tell you something,” he said.

“What ought to tell me something?”

“That you don’t have a key.”

Groaning, Nicole twisted away from Shade and smirked at the opposite wall.

Shade went on: “You don’t have a key because I’ve never given you one. You didn’t call or anything before you came over, you just showed up. That’s why I don’t give out keys.”

“Ho, ho,” Nicole said. She slid into her shorts, then turned her T-shirt right side out, hunching away from Shade. “I’ve been presumptuous. There are crowds clamoring for your house key, and I circumvent your rationing plan by coming in the door that doesn’t lock.”

“You don’t have the right to just come in anytime you want, Nicole.”

Nicole pulled her shirt on, then cocked her head and smiled sarcastically.

“Your privacy wasn’t so precious an hour ago. You could’ve sent me packing right at the start.”

Bent over to tie his shoes, Shade said, “I guess I was still groggy.”

Nicole laughed, though it wasn’t the sweetest laugh in her repertoire.

“You could’ve told me before you fucked me.”

“Before
I
fucked
you?
You mean before
we
fucked, don’t you?”

“That’s a pretty modern concept for you, Rene.”

Shade’s face drained of personality, and a dull commonness became his expression.

“Yeah,” he said. “I can also use a telephone, plug in a toaster, identify airplanes—stuff like that.”

As she wagged her head, and dazedly smiled at this intrusion of romantic debate, Nicole searched the floor for the panties that had been furiously abandoned earlier, when privacy had been a secondary desire.

In the small kitchen, Shade turned the fire on beneath a kettle of water, then put a filter in the coffee pot and scooped in a pile of Yuban. He set two cups on the counter, then turned to Nicole.

“This is crazy,” he said. “I don’t even mind, really. I don’t know why I barked at you. A hard-learned habit, I guess.”

Spotting the wad of her red panties on the top shelf of the bookcase, Nicole did not respond.

“You want a key?” Shade asked. “You want a key, you should have a key. I’m not pokin’ anybody else, anyway.”

“Poking?” Nicole said, the panties now in her hand. “Is that what you’re doing? You’re
poking
me? Is that what you tell people?”

“Ah, shit,” Shade said. He concentrated on watching the kettle not boil. “It’s just an expression. A bad one, maybe.”

“
Maybe?
”

Nicole rolled the panties tight, then squeezed them into the watchpocket of her cutoffs. She walked to the back door and opened it. The river roiled just beyond the railroad tracks and formed the background for her dramatic pose in the doorway.

“You have some things to think about,” she said. “Me, too.”

“You want a key, you can have a key.”

“Rene,” she said, a sonorous rebuke in her intonation. “That’s not it. This is
not
about a key.”

“Oh, I see,” Shade said. He raised the now boiling water and poured it into the steeping chamber of the coffee pot.

“I’ll get a copy knocked off over at the hardware store and leave it in your mailbox for you.”

Nicole shrugged, looked down, then up.

“If you really want to,” she said.

“I do.”

She eased inside then, and pulled the door closed behind her.

“Today?”

7

J
EWEL
C
OBB
had long conjured scenarios of murder during his nighttime fantasies, but when he was finally prepared to make the big step up in his midnight world, he found himself in a premature nocturne, the sun still walking its watchful beat, and the sidewalks becoming hectic as five o’clock neared.

He dripped potato chips as he slouched in the front of an alley between three stories of soot-bricked warehouse and two stories of Teejay Crane’s retrospectively opulent theater, his hand on a string between a Kitty Clover bag and the vicinity of his mouth. There were glass chunks on the asphalt and he pushed at them with his boots until they crunched and gave way. A quart of Falstaff beer in a paper bag sat near his feet, and he occasionally crouched to it for a swig.

The shotgun was in the second of four trash cans outside the fire exit of the theater. He’d brought it in a grocery sack, the piece broken into two components, both the barrel and the stock shortened by a hacksaw. He’d huddled over the trash can like a retching drunk while he reassembled the shotgun, loaded it, then eased it along the edge of the garbage, careful not to clog the barrel, stock up for easy grabbing.

The instructions Duncan and Ledoux had given him played over and over in his mind. In the alley, wait, whack him, head shot, drop the piece and walk down Seventh Street, turn left, and escape will be waiting there in a car. Jewel had it all memorized but that failed to plump up his confidence.

The chips were all gone. He kicked at the empty bag, then squatted to the Falstaff.

He was within twenty feet of Seventh Street but no one paid much attention to him. He blended into the surroundings, just another down-and-outer, although younger than most, and somewhat of a pacesetter sartorially. Whenever there was accidental eye contact he dropped his head and began to rock it on his neck as if shaking off one of those famous drinking companions who are mammoth and pink but very rarely seen by more than one drunken witness.

He was telling time by the clock in the window of Shevlin’s Fair Deal Pawnshop and Rentals across the street. Crane was said to be as predictable as misery and Jewel could see that he was due in five minutes.

All he could do was wait, and watch. He did not like the area. It was like all the cracked-shingle scruffy houses he’d ever lived in, but pushed all together in one spot, then stacked up to make a city.

The marquee of the theater announced that
Candy and the Eighth Dwarf
was “Now Playing.” Jewel wondered what it was that cities put over on folks that made them want to spend money to watch strangers have real good times.

At almost straight-up five a wino with a bald head laced by what looked like scuff marks, and with fermenting clothes and white gloves, pulled out of the ambling herd on Seventh and into the alley. He carried a large grocery bag that clearly contained a gallon-sized bottle.