The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (18 page)

“Roughly,” she said. “You know anything about TVs?”

“Not much.”

“Too bad. I’m not much of a talker when the tube’s on the blink like it is. I ain’t a thumbsucker but I
do
need that tube, you know?”

“Where’s Ledoux?”

“Brazil.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Not really,” Peggy said. She drank some beer, then rested the can on her thigh, where it left damp circles. “It’s one of my lies. Not too good, is it?”

She was still an attractive woman, Shade saw, beneath that sullen veneer of bloat.

“I’ve heard worse and I’ve heard better. You are in between.”

Peggy shrugged.

“I’m not even really tryin’.”

“Where is he?”

Peggy stared at the television.

“Now you tell me something,” she said, pointing at the static warped screen, “that picture, there—is that Ted Koppel or Johnny Carson? Which is it?”

“You stump me,” Shade said. “But I’m gettin’ bored with it.” Curiosity about how lazy one person could be drove Shade to check the set. He noticed that the screws holding the antenna wire were loose. “Got a screwdriver?”

“I don’t know where. Can I get you a beer?”

“No thanks.”

Shade pulled a dime from his pocket and used it in lieu of a screwdriver. The picture cleared immediately.

“Is that better?”

Peggy was attacking a fresh beer but took the time to look at the picture.

“Somewhat,” she said. “It’s somewhat better. Let me see that dime.”

Shade handed it to her.

“Wouldn’t Cobb fix it for you?”

“Who?”

Her face was calm. She bent over the television set and scraped the dime against the panel, then dropped it in her pocket.

“That’s my dime.”

She backed off, sluttishly coy.

“You have the prettiest blue eyes,” she said. “Why don’t we wrestle for it?”

“No thanks,” Shade said. “Get yourself somethin’ pretty, though.”

She slumped back to the couch.

“Bashful,” she said.

She caught Shade looking at the pile of laundry.

“Pete won’t let me touch that,” she said, then nodded. “It’s a scientific experiment.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He’s an evolutionist, you know. None of that Bible blather. He thinks you leave enough dirty T-shirts in a pile, sooner or later there’ll be some bubblin’ and gurglin’ and a rack of Arrow shirts’ll come foldin’ out.”

“Old Pete sounds like quite a guy.”

“Oh, he is. He really is. Scientific mind, that guy.” She stood and closed in on Shade. “It’s my weakness. I’m just a sucker for scientists.”

“That sounds pretty safe.”

“You know what makes a kettle of water boil?” she asked, sliding her leg between his and turning her tomatoey eyes up to him.

“Heat,” he replied.

A look of viperine certainty came into her face, and her free hand dropped to his crotch.

“See,” she said with a loll to her head, “you’re sort of a scientist yourself.”

“I thought I might qualify.”

Someone began to knock on the screen door in banging combinations. Without waiting for an answer a tall man with an angry face and an overfed midsection came inside.

“Where’d your fuckin’ old man go, Peg?” he asked. He looked at Shade and didn’t seem impressed, then did a double take. “I know you. You used to be a boxer.”

“Right.”

The man snorted.

“Saw you get your clock cleaned a couple of times.”

“Sure. Nobody seems to have seen the ones I won.”

“Yeah, well, I seen you and you never showed me shit.” He poked a finger at Peggy. “Your old man came down and took my boat. I don’t like that. He didn’t ask, he just took it.”

“Our boatline snapped,” Peggy said. She was looking at Shade. “He’s tryin’ to catch it before it drifts too far.”

“Huh. I didn’t see it float by. And I just come up here on my other boat and I seen runnin’ lights
upriver
at the swamp.”

Peggy’s chin went south and she faced away.

Shade went to the phone on the table and began to dial.

“What in hell’s goin’ on?” the neighbor asked.

“Have a beer,” Peggy said.

When Blanchette answered, Shade said, “It’s me, How. Ledoux’s in this thing. It’s him. I’m at his place.”

“You got him?”

“No. He’s in a boat. I think Cobb is, too. They’re over in the Marais du Croche. I’m going after them.”

“Hey, be cool, comrade. That’s a mess over there.”

“You just get up here and back me up, How.”

Shade dropped the phone back into the cradle, then looked out the window. He saw the running lights of a boat tied to the dock.

He approached the neighbor and flipped his badge.

“I’m goin’ to need your boat. Police business.”

“I don’t think so,” the big man said, then blocked the doorway. “Nobody’s takin’ my boat.”

“I’m a cop.”

“I don’t fuckin’ care if you’re
six
cops, buddy. I’m Harlan Fontenot, that’s
my
boat.”

Shade feinted a right toward the jaw, and when the big man’s hands went up he leaned into a left hook that sank deep into the mashed potatoes. The man sagged, and slumped to the floor.

Shade stepped around the man. “I just don’t have the time.”

He went out the door and ran down the walkway to the dock. He got into the boat and pulled away from the dock, trailing at least one killer into the swamp called the Marais du Croche.

20

T
HE
M
ARAIS
du Croche was whorled with sloughs and mud rises like a gigantic fingerprint. It teased those who thought they knew it, and made a mockery of maps, as it changed with each heavy rain and was born anew with the floods of spring.

It had been years since Shade had been in the swamp. At the ducktail hairstyle and matching jackets stage of Frogtown adolescence the edges of the Crooked Swamp had provided a haven for queasy rites of passage. Chicken coops were erected there and called clubhouses, with blotched mattresses on the floor, surrounded by Stag beer cans, crushed by fresh virility, and empty mickeys of fruit-flavored vodka, dramatically pitched toward the corners. Unlikely magazine pages were taped to the walls and desperate girls acquired insurmountable local reputations there, on the mattresses, in the clean spots between the major stains. Shade had once felt that this was his turf, that he knew it well. But he knew he was a visitor to it now.

The moon was full and the sky had been dusted clean of clouds, so the half light of the bright orb was unobstructed.

Shade circled in his borrowed craft, slowly searching the inlets and ditches for the other boats. The various waters flowed and ebbed and splashed and heaved, keeping up a constant fluidic murmur. Sometimes he could hear another boat but the sound was diffused by the swamp—one moment seeming to come from the main-coiled slough, and an instant later from downriver where the huge sandbars were.

The low arch of branches forced Shade to kneel as he steered the
boat down sluggish tracts of bilious water. His hair was snatched at by swamp-privet strands, and the moonlight was no longer of use in such density. The water bubbled. Stinks that had been fermenting for lifetimes rose from the alluvial depths, then farted beneath his face. It was a rare, rich, meaningful stink, and not unpleasant to his nose.

He hadn’t been here in a time that was too long. He felt that now.

To have a plan in a place that defied plans so completely was to embrace delusion, so Shade went where accidents took him and stayed alert for signs.

As one branch of swamp circled into another, taking him in toward the center, then drifting him back to the fringe, Shade hefted his pistol. He hoped to save a life, but he was awake to the possibilities and prepared also to take one if things fell that way.

This boy Cobb had the ways of a punk and a loser’s heart, and Shade hoped not to kill him. Things could happen so many screwy ways, and half a lifetime ago he might, but for timidity or luck, have been in the same boat. He had always known that.

This is where Shade thought his life could make a difference. He was not guided by a total love of law, but he was more for it than against it, and this, he felt, made him reasonable. And that was the summit of his aspirations.

He hadn’t heard the other motor for a long time when he saw a boat jumped up on a spit of land. The rotors of its engine had dug into the mud like frantic fingernails.

He pulled up to the spit and tied his bowline to the grounded boat. The beached craft was empty. There was a string of earth that led between the trees, deeper into the swamp.

The ribbon of mud was untraceable by sight, trailing into the gloom of undergrowth and woods—a mystery after twenty yards.

He decided to follow it.

Jewel Cobb soon decided that trying to get anywhere in this swamp was sort of childish. The next step was half the time into darkness, sinkhole or ditch, the rest of the time it was mud that gave way enough
to goose your heart, then solided up. He’d fallen into the water twice. His shorts seemed full of coffee grounds and his asshole felt pounded with sand. There was ancient compost between his teeth and his boots squeaked like a third-grade violinist.

For a while Jewel had broken into a demented sprint, bouncing off trees, catching his boots in willow roots, stumbling, moaning, and kicking his feet high through the ditches, and laughing, propelled by some hopeless hilarity.

These could be the very last laughs coming to him from life as he’d made it, he knew, but that didn’t make them worth much more.

Soon he just sat. There was a bullfrog chorus, gone silent at his approach, which quickly sized him for a chump and began to blat amphibian blues. Their tune made him feel less alone. But he couldn’t relax. He nodded to the syncopation of the gut-bucket blats and tried to breathe quietly because telltale sound carried on the water and there was water everywhere.

Duncan, lard-faced cousin Duncan. Meet him again, someday sure, kick his butt around the block and piss on the bloody spots. Uh-huh.

Snakes, Jewel sensed them everywhere on the tangled floor. Limbs and slithery roots shadowed indistinct, all over. Anything could be a cottonmouth sleeping with a poison sac waiting to squirt the end of everything into your ankle veins. These places were famous for that. Fangs.

He shook through his pack to find an unsoaked smoke, which he then lit with his lighter, dangerous motion or not. The fatigue of prolonged tension had weakened his limbs and they began to shudder. His life was all a dream now back there behind his eyes and he thought of highlights from it when he had fun or fought and won. Then some when he lost. And other times, too, when he’d been up to this or that but all of them began to have an “Oh, shit, I never should’ve did that” coda tacked on.

They want me dead now. Stone cold and dirt hidden.

He flipped the cigarette butt away from himself in a loop and it disappeared instantly, not even the smoke of it left in the air.

Yeah—it’s like that.

*     *     *

Pete Ledoux had managed to unjam the shotgun, and when he’d gone back to the house Peggy had uncovered the good paper shells, which made him want to finger God or something. So much of life had come to him that way, too late, overdue, never enough of it there when it did show up.

This whole thing was fucked up beyond taking pride in now. You devise a scheme like an exotic domino loop but if the first bone tumbles sideways instead of straight it won’t fall in the design you planned for. So then you made it up as you went. That meant trouble.

The Cobb kid had some kind of ridiculous gris-gris working for him, too. That couldn’t’ve been planned for. You never know who’ll have luck like that and certainly not why. Any grumbling about fairness was for kids and clergy.

Ledoux’s face was pebbled with mosquito bites. Forget the Cutter’s and that means every needle-nose bug in the woods spare-changes you for blood like cornerboy hustlers spotting a strung-out Kennedy trying to score on Seventh. Like you got plenty to give.

The water reflected moonlight in between trees. Ledoux cut the engine and now pulled the boat down the waterways by grabbing at the dome of branches and vines. It seemed that all the twigs had stickers and where there weren’t stickers there were natural points. He could feel the blood beading on his hands.

There were things running through the trees. Scampering things that chattered and squatty bold things that he could feel looking back at him. There were rabbits that could swim out here. Flying squirrels. Bobcats that weren’t too good at either feat but ended up eating plenty anyway. That seemed natural somehow.

None of this was new to him, not swampy nights or mortal chases or killing. He’d seen it all before. The sounds were not baffling nor were the sensations of the hunt. But when he did hear something that pricked his senses he knew it was a man. Then he knew the metallic click as that of a lighter being lit. Straining, it seemed that he could hear an inhalation, even the dull smoky taste, that was coming to him, too.

He was trying to scent in on the cigarette but that smoky hint was
hard to locate. Ledoux slid out of the boat and sank titty deep into the water. He held the shotgun level with his forehead and walked with the sluggish current at his back. That Zippo click clue seemed to have come from the peak of a mudbank that was covered by cockspur hawthorn.

Must be very careful and silent, get into range, then boom! boom! and birds and squirrels and even some unnameables will scatter like that peckerwood’s head. To quieter places.

Even in daylight it was hard to tell solid ground from sinkhole in this place. Take a step wrong and you’ll come up coughing shit that flushed out of St. Louis about a year ago. The surface of the water was coated with scum, branches, and greenery, looking like a path to morons. Like fool’s gold, only it was earth. Fool’s earth.

Ledoux walked down the slough, holding his upper body rigid, stepping stiff-legged underwater to avoid splashing. When his feet slipped he went with the slide instead of fighting it. The key to the swamp was to agree with it, accept the way it was.