The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (50 page)

“It sure is dark,” John Smith said.

“Dark enough?” Mary asked.

“Yup.”

She reached into her knitting bag and raised out a nickel-plated revolver. She pulled back the hammer and put the barrel at Lunch’s head.

“If you want to stay cute, li’l man,” she said in a jailhouse tone, “you’ll stop when I tell you to.”

“What the hell is this?” Lunch said.

“Banditry,” John Smith said. “Hee, hee, hee.”

He leaned forward from the rear seat and touched a hunting knife blade to the side of Lunch’s throat. “Welcome to the Devil’s Backbone, you redneck punk.”

The lane abruptly ended at the river’s edge. High beams from the Bug shone way out across the water.

“Stop,” Mary said. “Or I’ll bust a cap in your fuckin’ face.”

“Hey, now,” Lunch said as he braked. “Don’t shoot me, Mary. Please. I’m a harmless tiny fella.”

“You are now,” John Smith said. “Where’d you do your time?”

“What time is that?”

“Oh, cut the comedy,” Mary said. “You’re a jailbird if we ever seen one—were you fixin’ to rob us?” She leaned across and tapped the pistol barrel to his bruised cheek. “You cute tiny man—did you figure you could take
us
off?”

“Hee, hee, hee.”

“Leave the lights on,” Mary said. “And get your ass out that door. You run and I’ll drill you.”

“She can do it, Rich,” John Smith said. “I’ve seen her.”

“Y’all ain’t from Iowa,” Lunch said. He kept both hands firmly on the steering wheel. “Corn country don’t behave like this.”

“The hell it don’t,” John Smith said. “Hee, hee, hee. You need to travel more.”

All three of them got out of the Bug.

“Stand in the light,” Mary said. “And toss that big wad of cash you got tucked in your pocket on the ground there, Rich.”

As Lunch emptied his pocket of cash, John Smith kicked at the gravel, spraying tiny rocks about.

“This stuff is too small,” he said sadly.

Mary came into the light, her red dress brilliant in the glow, shiny pistol glinting, her blond hair gleaming like Rayanne’s used to do when she’d just finished washing it.

“One thing,” she said, “would you say our skit worked, Rich?”

“Skit?”

“The knitting, Rich. The knitting and the corn country yucks—did it make us come across as lovey-dovey hicks, ripe for pluckin’?”

“Totally took
me
in,” Lunch said.

John Smith grabbed the pistol from Mary, then they kissed briefly.

“We just love the outlaw life,” he said, waving the pistol. He did a little dance on the gravel, his large body bouncing. “The way we live it, it could go on forever.”

“There aren’t too many couples like us, Tiny Baby,” Mary said. “We’re gonna make this romance last.”

“There it is, Gina,” Tiny Baby said. “Shared interests bind.”

“Your names ain’t John and Mary Smith neither, huh?”

“Not exactly.”

“This is devastatin’,” Lunch said. “I’ll never fully trust a blond slut and a big fat slob again.”

Tiny Baby said, “I doubt you’ll be meetin’ any more, Rich.” He smacked the black hat from Lunch’s head, then shoved Lunch toward the river. “I’ll bet that water’s
just right
.”

When Lunch was shoved again he fell, and while down he slid the derringer from his boot.

“I’m scared,” he said. “I’d like to pray.” And as Tiny Baby swaggered toward him, smirking, he raised the derringer and shot the big man, catching him in the throat. Tiny Baby staggered back into the light, blood spraying from his neck. The pistol fell from his hands, and he sunk to his knees. Lunch said, “Crawl, you dirty dog!”

Tiny Baby gurgled blood, wheezing on his knees, his head bowed to the ground.

“Well, I got a heart,” Lunch said.

Then he put the derringer at Tiny Baby’s temple and pulled the trigger. The big man dropped, face down in the gravel.

Gina screamed once, her hands held to her chest, then she whirled and ran into the canebrake that grew tall along the riverbank. Her flight was heavy footed and noisy, canes cracking and twigs snapping to give away her trail.

Lunch picked up the nickel-plated pistol Tiny Baby had dropped, then retrieved his black hat. He set the hat on his head at a Bogartish angle, then began to follow the woman. The golden light cast by the harvest moon imparted a magically real quality to the night. A beautiful light more real than real illumination. As Lunch followed Gina he inhaled deeply, and paused to savor the scene. This river, that moon, this light, those goofy people—yet more evidence of Nature’s fantastic production values!

The path Gina had blazed through the canebrake made Lunch’s task simple. He slowly followed in her own footsteps until her red dress gave her away. She was trying to hide, all rolled up low to the ground, but the red dress was so brilliant the entire maneuver was a waste of time.

“Hide and seek,” Lunch said. “I
see
you!” He stood over her and gave her a soft kick. “Come on, Mary—let’s negotiate.”

“Don’t kill me. Oh, don’t.”

“You know what? You
look
a lot like my sister, Rayanne, and you
act
like her, too.” He grabbed a handful of her blond hair and pulled her up. “Let’s check on Tiny Baby.”

She walked weakly, her knees all rubbery. Lunch shoved her along, back to the Bug and the headlight beams. When she saw Tiny Baby laying there, bloody and inert, she collapsed beside him.

“I’ll do anything you want,” she said. She rolled onto her back, the light in her eyes, and looked up at Lunch. “I do great french—anything you want, please, please.”

Lunch watched her for a moment, then said, “It’s weird—you really
do
look like my sister. She had hair like yours.” He squatted beside her, then reached a hand to the top of her red dress and pulled down, baring her breasts. “Whew!”

“Please, please. Anything.”

“Too weird!” he said. “So much alike.” He put the pistol barrel against her chin and forced her head back. Then he lowered his lips to her left breast and sucked. He circled his tongue around her nipple. “Sweet,” he said. “Hers weren’t this big.”

“Please, pl—”

“No beggin’!” he said. He ran his fingers through her blond hair, tangling his fingers in the long fine locks. “Did Tiny Baby say something?” he asked, and as her eyes swung hopefully toward Tiny Baby he pulled the trigger, and blew her face away in a red pulpy mist. The sound of the blast ran up and down the river, spreading over the water. “So much for forever, sis.”

Lunch tossed the pistol into the river, listening to the echo the splash made. He searched Tiny Baby’s pockets for cash but found none. Then he found his own cash on the ground, rolled the cash tightly, and tucked it in his pocket. He walked back to the Bug and opened Gina’s knitting bag. The thick booklet of money they’d flashed was in there, and he carried it to the headlights to examine. He fanned the bills in the light, and quickly saw that it was a Michigan Roll, five twenties wrapped around two inches of cut paper. All of this for a C-note! What fakers!

His heart sank. He doused the headlights, then stood slouched against the fender of the Bug and smoked Salem number six, exhaling wistful trails of smoke. Another part of the blue leaflet Lunch had read earlier in the day popped into his mind. It dealt with days like this one. The passage was to the effect that the actual river, as well as the river of life, was festooned with innumerable shoals, sucks, snags, and sawyers, all of which posed dangers, both seen and secret, to the craft that floated down them. That was all of the passage Lunch could recall for sure. There may have been a solution or remedy mentioned farther down the page, but he’d just skimmed that part.

When the Salem was burned to the filter, Lunch flipped it into the dark. He opened the bonnet of the Bug where the storage space was on these things. He reached in and grunted loudly as he heaved three large rocks onto the gravel beside Tiny Baby and Gina. “His,” he said, then started heaving smaller rocks onto the black graveled earth. “And hers.”

Part III

Choices

10

R
ENE
S
HADE
had started his evening off in the community center gym, sitting in the bleachers with his father, watching a bar league basketball game and trying to plumb the depths of his strange love for the power forward in red. Nicole Webb, the high scorer for his affections and on the court, was leading the Peepers, the team from Maggie’s Keyhole, against the much feared ladies from Barb’n Bob’s Bowl’n Brew. Shade sat impassively next to his father, only occasionally pointing toward the court as the woman in his life flung elbows at ribs, kicked at shins, set vicious moving picks, dove for loose balls, and got into shoving matches with burly, emphatic spinsters as if she wanted this sport and its attendant violence to make a personal choice for her.

“Your lady friend is good to watch,” John X. said. “She ain’t afraid of contact.”

“She doesn’t usually play this rough a game,” Shade said.

“Well, you’re a lucky fella, son. She runs the court very nicely for a pregnant gal.”

Out on the hardwood the sweat and curses and jump shots were flying. Nicole’s skin had flushed to a temperamental pink, and she’d picked up three fouls and one new enemy in seven minutes of rough play. The expression on her face was as intense and bellicose as it had been earlier, when the subject of the future had come up between Shade and herself. The discussion had been held over cups of coffee at Maggie’s Keyhole where Nicole was bartender, and it had been a friendly, open discussion for the first minute and a half. Then Shade had said the routine things
about feeling pressured and somewhat roped, and she said a caustic thing about his predictable comments, and from there they went at it in a strained, snapping, he-said-she-said squabble that eventually ended with a to-each-his-own proposition being coolly stated by her, seconded by him.

“I couldn’t even guess what marriage to her would be like,” John X. said. He lit a Chesterfield and smiled. “The women I’ve attracted always ran more to the type that are fans instead of players.”

Shade said, “Marriage hasn’t even been mentioned, Johnny. Lots of other shit has been, though.”

The Peepers had a fast break going down-court, and the twenty-five or thirty people in the bleachers made an appreciative murmur as Nicole caught the pass out on the wing and drove toward the hoop, curling around one opponent, then going body-on-body with another as she skyed for the lay-up, and drew the foul. Both women fell to the floor, and when her opponent offered a hand up, Nicole shook her head. She got to her feet and trudged to the foul line, small trickles of blood below both knees.

“She
is
knocked up, ain’t she, son?”

“Yeah. Yeah, she is. But don’t start stockin’ up on cigars just yet.”

Watching Nicole from the bleachers, seeing the way she muscled into the paint for rebounds and whipped those hard elbows around, Shade wished he could take back over half the things he’d said to her. The Peepers’ jerseys were red with blue lettering, and Nic had on black shorts and bright red sneakers. When she raised her arms to rebound or shoot, lush tufts of dark pit hair were displayed. She moved from hoop to hoop with gangly grace, fluffy ponytail flopping down her back. Her jump shots were fluid and deadly below the key, and she fought for all of the garbage under the basket.

Probably she
would
make a fine mother, if that was the point.

“Well,” John X. said, “I guess you don’t have to get hitched these days just because she’s pregnant. Plenty of women who are pregnant don’t want to either. So they don’t. Nobody throws rocks at ’em nowadays.”

“What if
I
want to get hitched?”

“You do?” John X. stubbed his smoke out and dropped it between the slats.

“Could be. I don’t know.”

Down on the court the contest was slipping away from the Peepers. Nicole sat on the bench to take a blow, and the inside game of the large Bowl’n Brew ladies asserted itself. The Peepers began to laugh helplessly on defense, and with the ball they were dispirited and failed to set up any offense other than individual attempts to execute the fabulous. By halftime the Peepers were down by fourteen points. The two teams huddled at opposite ends of the gym. A few voices were raised to shout advice to the desperate. Players from both teams took turns walking slowly to the water fountain.

“I think I’ll head for the shed,” John X. said, stretching his back. “Not much of a game anyhow.” He put his hands in the pockets of his dead man’s coat and looked at his son. “But listen, Rene—there always was two things I wanted to never ever do in my life, and I did ’em both. That’s right. One was gettin’ married, and two was gettin’ married
again
. Both times I found myself locked in jail by wrong choices, see. I would’ve had to draw a picture of Betty Grable on the wall and crawl out the crack to escape.”

“What’re you saying? You’re
legally
married to Etta’s mom?”

“Of course I am.”

Shade just stared at his dad. “Shit, you mean you’ve added bigamist to whatever
else
you are?”

“Why, I don’t think so, son.”

“That’s what it is, when you’re married to another woman, besides Mom.”

“Not besides, son—married
after
ward.”

“What are you talking about? That’s not what Ma said. You two never got divorced.”

“Really? That’s what she said?” John X. shakily lit another smoke. “Geez, that’s awful romantic of her, son. I can see where she could make it vivid to you boys. I don’t mind much. It was one of her talents, you see. But actually, she divorced
me
after I hit the road. Why, the
papers finally caught up to me the night I saw you at that fight of yours in Tampa. You must’ve told her I was comin’.”

“I might have,” Shade said.

“Criminentlies, remember that fight, son?”

Shade raised his fingers to his broken nose. “That was when I hooked up with that kid they had down there then. Wolburn. Tom-Tom Wolburn. He was quick, but he tired late.”