The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (48 page)

“I have it in mind to break your face,” Stew said. He made no move, but stayed hunched over, talking into his glass of dead beer. “You always was Mister
So-
handsome—like there wasn’t a man on earth handsomer’n you.”

“Well, now, I always figured any man better lookin’ than me was just a li’l
too
pretty—know what I mean? Like, say, Tyrone Power.”

“And a funny talker, too,” Stew said. “I never liked that about you neither. It’s somethin’ girls work at. I never liked it in you. Another reason to break your face. That makes two.”

“Do you need more?” John X. asked. He tossed his drink back, and swiveled to face Stew. “Maybe I could tell you some more, slick, if you have this terrible need to add ’em up.”

“I know your whole story,” Stew said. “You used to screw about every third girl over ten years old in this neighborhood. Tell ’em lies, or true things they dream of hearin’, then whisk their li’l cotton panties to their knees.”

“Jealous?” John X. asked. He glanced toward Etta. “That’s horseshit,
anyhow.” He smiled at Stew. “It’s horseshit I actually wish was true—I could think back on such events and grin.”

“Monique wasn’t but about twelve when you married her, you rat.”

“Rat? You better watch it. And she was
fourteen—
there’s a difference.”

“That’s three,” Stew said, then spun from his stool, and belted John X. with the bitter haymaker he’d been wanting to land ever since Coral the Beagle slipped her leash. This sucker punch landed on the button, and John X. was propelled from his stool and onto his ass.

John X. wobbled up from the floor, his eyes fixed on Stew. He spit theatrically, then raised his shaky old dukes.

“Why you sissy,” he said. “I’ll whup you ’til you pooch.”

“Hah!” Stew barked. He then reached to his mouth and pulled his dentures out. He set them beside his beer. “Awl bwek oo flace!”

“Hey, hey,” Tip said. He’d been pouring sodas for the ladies but now he rushed up the bar. “What is this shit, Johnny?”

John X. shot a pretty left jab plunk onto Stew’s nose.

“Dinn hur!” Stew blurted, without the usual translation that dentures made. “Midda Wo-ansom!”

One of the bikers in the back laughed, then said, “Scope the old scrappers!”

Etta and Gretel got off their stools and stood watching the fracas, holding hands.

John X., in his comfortable suit of dead man’s clothes, circled left, dukes held high, while Stew, in his apparitional attire, planted his feet and looked to land a bomb. John X. tried another jab but was short by a foot, and Stew lunged forward, his wild swing missing totally, but the two old noggins collided. Both men turned away, rubbing at their foreheads while making grunts of pain.

Tip wiped his hands on his apron and said, “Get him, Johnny. Kick his ass.”

Stew recovered first and banged a right to John X.’s shoulder. John X. winced, then began to bounce on his toes, attempting lateral movement, but all the bouncing caused him some dizziness and he appeared ready to swoon.

“I got another reason for you,” he said angrily. “Della told me I danced better’n you!”

“Huh-uh!”

“Oh, yeah, she did—at the Half-a-Heaven.”

“Huh-uh!”

“On a slow dance, too.”

Stew moved forward, his gnarled fists clenched and held low to his sides, and John X. stuck another jab to his beak, drawing blood, but Stew’s low fists hooked to the belly, and John X. landed on his ass again, looking up.

Darting quickly to the bar, Stew reinserted his dentures so his insult would be intelligible. “That’s the power of a
man!”
he said, then slipped the dentures out again and set them on the bar.

“Man?” John X. muttered as he stood. “Why, you’re just a
baby
fartin’ around in a
man’s
suit. You always was, Stew.”

Though his aching ribs caused him to hunch forward somewhat, John X. was slightly bouncing again, attempting to employ the tactical strategy of Billy Conn, his idol of yore. He slid left to right and back again, then pumped out a double jab, landing one on Stew’s upper lip and nose. Blood spots began to appear on the shirtfront of Stew’s apparitional attire, but suddenly John X. grimaced and crouched to one knee, from which position he vomited onto the brass foot rail of the bar.

Gretel and Etta had stood watching the old men fight, Etta rubbing her flattop nervously, Gretel massaging her pregnant hump. Now Etta pulled her hand free of Gretel and ran to John X. Instant tears appeared on her face.

“Dad!” She flung herself on John X. from behind, her arms around his neck. “Dad!”

Gretel said, “Can I stop this? Can I put a stop to this?” She approached Stew. “Aren’t you ashamed?” she said to his face. “You’re bleedin’ bad—what’s violence settle, anyhow?”

Some sort of retort came from Stew, but the words were mysterious and weakly offered.

“Fight! Fight! Fight!” the biker couples chanted.

“Here, Gretel,” Tip said, and handed her some napkins.

Gretel took the napkins and began to swab Stew’s bloody nose. He stood there and let her, making weird humming sounds as her fingers wiped his nose and lips of blood.

After a moment he pulled away from her. His eyes were wild and red. He slid his teeth back into place, his hands trembling and his breath shallow. He looked toward the door and shook his head.

“Oh, I don’t know!” he said. “I don’t know still!”

Then he walked past John X., to the door, and out.

When the door closed the ladies helped John X. up, then sat him on a stool. Etta clung to him while Gretel took a napkin to the vomit around his mouth.

“Maker’s Mark,” he said. “A double.”

This entire event seemed to strike Tip as humorous, and as he set the drink before his father, he said, “As a dad maybe you have been a pretty sorry deal, but as an ol’ fucker to get drunk with and have around, Johnny, you’re a fistful of fun. Know it?”

“I’m touched,” John X. said.

“What’s his problem with your face, anyhow? I couldn’t catch his drift about that.”

After a soothing sip, John X. said, “See, son, in years gone by I always was your basic average citizen of the type who should’ve been arrested but only once in a while was. Folks of a certain sort
will
hold that against a man. I guess I did this, I did that, and now and again some other thing altogether. I wore flashy clothes for Frogtown, and my pockets didn’t have no fishhooks in ’em, and the neighborhood girls liked that about me. And maybe not too many mirrors cracked when I looked in ’em, and I think girls liked that, too. Flashy clothes, no fishhooks in my pockets, and bein’ a dreamboat were things quite a few fellas
did not
care for about me, but girls did, and girls that liked me, well, as a rule, I found things I liked about them, too. A nice shape, or lovely hair of any hue, brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes, a wet voice, a cute gap in their front teeth—if they liked my style I liked theirs. Stew, for one, never could stand me for my bigheartedness.”

“Long time to hold a grudge,” Tip said.

John X. turned on his stool, and the ladies were standing close by. He stroked Etta’s hair, while looking into Gretel’s face.

“That scar is hard to get out of my mind,” he said. “It makes you look like a woman of intrigue, a visitor from faraway places.”

Gretel grinned and shuffled her feet.

“I wish,” she said.

John X. raised his glass in salute.

“To you two gorgeous kids,” he said, then tossed back the whisky. He stood and started walking toward the door, Etta hanging onto his coattail. He pulled the door back and stood in the opening. He looked out onto Lafitte Street, then up at the bright hot sun. “It may be that all I ever did with my life was to the bad, but, damn, son, I sure would like to do it all again.”

9

A
S HE’D
driven up from the coast and through the night, Lunch Pumphrey had trusted totally to the map of geography retained in his memory, and thus ended up well away from his destination. The atlas in his mind had gotten foggy at the ’Bama border, but not scarily so, and he’d plunged on into the dark night only to finally find himself in an actual place that wasn’t on his map at all. No way could he reconcile himself to this lost position. He hadn’t seen any sign whatever of Memphis, and he was positive he had to pass through there before he hit the Big River. Or, if not Memphis, certainly Arkansas, or some such southern state whose name he’d blanked on entirely, but that would still be there to pass beneath his wheels anyhow. Yet Memphis had not appeared, nor had any expected state name known or blanked.

Early in the
A.M.
, with merely a clouded moon above, Lunch admitted his lostness to himself and took to studying road signs so intensely that the Bug faded off the blacktop, through a ditch, then into a billboard that said See Rock City. The right headlight was blinked. Metal had screamed from the fender and rolled down to bog the front tire, which had been cut open and hissed angrily for a moment.

Lunch leaned his unhurt head to the steering wheel, and his lips kissed the horn.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

It was very early in a new day but Lunch was already on Salem number three before he’d found a farmhouse and called a tow truck. The wrecker hauled the Bug into a place called Natchez, and Lunch found
himself stuck there until Virgil or Bill, the head grease monkeys, could get around to fulfilling his mechanical needs.

As the sun rose Lunch learned that he had found the river, at least, and the town itself was one of those places that bubbled over with history. For a while Lunch stood around in Virgil and Bill’s station, but there were others milling around there, too, which meant he had a long wait coming to him. So he set his snap-brim hat atop his head at a rakish angle and went for a stroll along a sidewalk on a bluff that overlooked the huge brown water.

The bluff was grassy, with rock-walled flower beds, and fallen leaves seemed to be picked up as they fell, for there were only a few on the ground. The day was weirdly hot. It should have been jacket weather, but it was bare skin weather, and Lunch sweated in his all-black attire. A kindly woman gave him one of the leaflets she’d been fanning her face with, and he found a park bench to squat on while he read it.

Before reading the leaflet he opened his eyes to the wide view of the river and let himself absorb the wonder of it. Only those immigrants who dive for sponges, or a South Seas type of person, could swim across it. The water was that wide, the current that strong. A shitload of birds flew above this majestic landmark, and a barge floated on it. Lunch felt that he might possibly come to where he could care for a body of water like that. Especially when these birds are strung all along above it, and others fill the trees on the banks, which makes our feathery friends seem like they are an audience swooping to take seats at an upcoming event of a pleasing sort.

“That’s a river, ain’t it?” a man’s voice said.

A man and woman in their thirties sat on the next bench. They’d been at Virgil and Bill’s also.

“Good view,” Lunch said.

The leaflet was on blue paper, and he picked it up to read. The whole thing concerned Natchez and the Natchez Trace. There were suggestions on where to go, where to eat, where to sleep, what times the seven-dollar horse-drawn carriages took off, and what special spots they trotted past. The few lines about history had a section that stood
out, and Lunch read it twice: “John Thompson Hare, the hoodlum, was among the first who shrewdly saw the possibilities of banditry on the Trace. The Trace made him rich, but moody. In its wilderness he went to pieces, saw visions, was captured, and hanged.”

“Damn,” Lunch said. “This place makes you think.”

The man on the next bench said, “It’s got a bizarre history that’s awfully attractive.”

“Our forefathers,” Lunch said, “were a rugged bunch.”

“Oh, yeah, buddy,” the man said. “The dudes down here in historical days were truly some rough cobs. No doubt about it.”

“Some of it’s sad, too,” Lunch said.

He stood and approached the couple and held his hand out to the man, who was large. They shook, then Lunch extended his hand to the woman, who was knitting away at a ball of red yarn. She took his hand and slightly over-held it.

“Rich Moody,” Lunch said, “pleased to meet you.”

“Our name is Smith,” the man said, then the woman said, “John and Mary Smith,” then they both said, “and we ain’t kiddin’!” This bit was well rehearsed, and the Smiths giggled at the end.

“That’s cute,” Lunch said.

“Thanks,” said John Smith. “We hail from corn country, north of Cedar Rapids, south of Waterloo.”

“Uh-huh. I saw you at Virgil and Bill’s.”

“That’s right. We saw you there, too. Is that bruise on your face from your wreck?”

Lunch touched his fingers to his face.

“Oh, yeah,” he said.

“We were in one, too,” Mary said. “We got blindsided by a local resident.”

“That’s true,” John Smith said. “We’ve been on vacation, but, as it turns out, we’ve made money on the whole deal.” He inclined his large form toward Lunch. “The other driver was tipsy, see, but well-to-do, and her family paid off in cash an hour ago.”

Mary reached into her handbag and held up a flat thick booklet of money.

“This’ll spend,” she said, and her husband went “Hee-hee.”

At this moment Lunch decided to scrutinize John and Mary Smith.

John Smith had the complete barnyard of personal characteristics: ox-sized, goose-necked, cow-eyed, a hog gut, probably mule-headed, and clearly goaty of appetite. His hair was black and worn in the style of an early Beatle. He sported a thin decadent mustache that suggested he just might have a few perversions he wouldn’t
insist
on keeping private. Possibly John Smith would pass for kinda cute at an I-80 truckstop.

The distaff half of the Smiths from corn country acted meek but talked from the side of her mouth. Her fingers were diligent, clicking those needles, knitting something red that would surely be warm. Her hair was the color Rayanne’s had been, the color of corn ready for harvest, not too long, pulled back into a ponytail. Mary Smith’s hips were thin, maybe even skinny, but somehow her breasts were huge presences behind a white T-shirt that advertised The Old Creamery Theater.