The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (51 page)

“I remember,” John X. said. “He was a will-o-the-wisp type of fighter. He painted your face up pretty gaudy with that jab of his. Pop-pop-pop. He had that mitt on your nose all night long.”

“Shit,” Shade said. “I busted his guts. He stayed in the hospital for two days pissin’ blood. I beat his belly to fuckin’ jelly.”

John X. shrugged.

“I thought they could’ve seen it as a draw.”

“Draw? I
won
that fight.”

“No.”

“
I
thought I won it.”

“No,” John X. said, shaking his head with certainty. “You didn’t win it, son, by no means, but they could’ve called it a draw.”

Smoke curled above the two men.

Then, Shade nodded his head, smiled, and said, “His fuckin’ jab was a beautiful punch. I couldn’t do nothin’ with it, and there was no way to hide from it. Bob, weave, peek-a-boo, it didn’t matter, the fuckin’ jab found me.”

John X. inhaled a long slow draw of smoke. As he exhaled he flicked the cigarette down through the bleacher slats. “We saw the same fight, after all, son. Honesty can siphon off a few regrets and resentments if you tap in to it. Let that sink in.” He half weaved as he stood, and Shade heard the creaking of his father’s knees. “Bleachers are hell on old men.” John X. patted Shade’s back, then shuffled a few feet down the bleacher aisle. “It’s your choice,” he said. “See you around, kid.”

The second half was more of the same, but Shade kept watching until Nicole fouled out with three minutes to play. The Peepers were down
by twenty-three points so he left the gym and began to walk through Frogtown. The sidewalks were dark and uneven. Here and there small piles of leaves had been raked into the gutter and set afire, imparting to the night the smoky, wistful smell of another year gone.

On North Second Street Shade came abreast of the Sacred Heart Academy and took a seat on a bench at a bus stop there. The Sacred Heart encompassed a full city block, and inside the tall iron-pike fence that surrounded it there were beautiful parklike grounds. The night was warm and fallen leaves scuttled in the breeze. Birds roosted in the bare trees, and Shade could see a few sisters strolling past gas lamps that lit the paths inside the fence. Though he’d lived in Frogtown all his life, he’d only been inside the Sacred Heart grounds twice, both times when he was a child, for reasons now forgotten.

For fifteen minutes Shade stared through the pike fence, watching as nuns from the Sacred Heart took their evening stroll, listening to the cadence of their steps and occasional laughter. He resumed his own stroll then, and headed toward Nicole’s place on the fringe of the neighborhood.

Frogtown, the oldest quarter of St. Bruno, had been founded by the flocking of outdoorsy miscreants who saw business opportunity in the swamps and the river and the parade of suckers who boated down that treacherous brown flow. It was by now a neighborhood of rowhouses of brick or wood, shotgun apartments, small weary stores, robust vice franchises, and abundant dirt alleys that made for excellent escapes from the scene of the crime. Small backyards were strung with clotheslines from which flapped the work clothes of the occasionally employed, a work force that generally punched the clock on various nearby stools where they drank at the bar, toked in the alley, and gambled upstairs with their cut of the take or this month’s disability check, and when that was lost, the last smoke ashes, and the bottles only glass, they posted themselves to the street with their empty pockets held open wide, faces turned to the sky, on a red-eyed alert for that much ballyhooed trickledown of wealth.

Nicole’s place was a frail frame house on Perkins Street. Shade went
up the steps of the front porch, then took out his key and let himself in. As the door opened into the dark front room, bells tinkled gently against the glass, and he called out a questioning “Nic?” to announce himself. The light from a street lamp fell through the lace curtains on the tall narrow windows of the living room, casting paths of faint blue light across a worn Persian rug. Shade walked through the shotgun apartment, heading toward the back until he saw light seeping out from beneath the bathroom door. He rapped his knuckles gently to the wood. “It’s me,” he said. He heard water lap against the tub. He pushed on the door and slipped into the small, steamy bathroom that he and Nic had painted a startling shade of peach one Saturday afternoon in the spring. She was lying in the deep water tinted blue from the bath salts she used, her toes curled over the enamel lip of the old clawfoot tub.

“If you half close your eyes,” she said, “it’s like Cozumel.”

“Tough game,” he said. Nicole released a long heavy sigh, then, blue water slishing past her breasts, she leaned forward, her hair falling around her face as she stared down into her lap. Shade sat on the edge of the tub, picked up the bar of soap, and began to wash her back with long, unbroken strokes of his hand.

“I been thinking,” he said.

When he finished her back and rinsed her with long pours from a plastic beer pitcher lifted from Maggie’s Keyhole, Nic pulled the plug chain with her toes, then stood silently, and he handed her a towel. Her knees were scraped, and swollen red from hot water, and he made out the beginning of a long yellow bruise on her upper left thigh. Nic stepped out of the tub, as water cascaded to the tile floor. For a moment she buried her face in the towel, muttered something indecipherable, then padded into the dark bedroom leaving a wet trail of footprints behind. Shade pulled another towel from the rack and kicked it toward the puddle on the bathroom floor. He still kept his own apartment—a tiny bachelor pad in the upstairs of his mother’s pool hall—but most nights he curled up against the perfect fit of Nicole’s buttocks, in her bed that was, in practice, theirs.

She had dropped herself like a sack of groceries, flat out, face down
on the bed. He turned on a night-light on the bed stand. It was a fifties lamp, a plastic cylinder depicting Niagara Falls, with a couple standing beside an overlook above the blue and white waters churning below. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, as he reached for a tube of Ben Gay next to the lamp, then sat down on the bed, and pressed some cream into the palm of his hand.

“Thinking what?” she spoke into the pillow folds.

“About a honeymoon.” He rubbed the Ben Gay between his hands. “We could go to Niagara Falls. Something like that.” He leaned over her and began to knead her shoulders and her shoulder blades.

“Oh geez,” she said with a groan, but it was unclear to him whether she was saying no or saying yehess to his massaging hands. He worked his hands in circles over her ribs, then down to the small of her back, and she released a long, yielding moan.

When she spoke, however, her voice was monotone. “You want to get married now?”

“I’ve been giving it some thought,” he said.

She tilted her head forward so he could knead the nape of her neck. “Why do you think you want to get married, Rene?”

“It could be the right way to go,” he said.

“I’m asking
why
, Rene.”

“Well, come on, you know I’m Catholic.”

“You’re
what—
”

“I’m Catholic. That’s what I was baptized.”

“Oh, Christ, you’re not doing this to me. You’re not going to say the Catholic Church is why you have to marry me.”

“Okay, okay, forget the Catholic. I don’t go anyhow. But maybe I just want to then. I was just sort of spooked before. I was caught off-guard. Here I am on suspension and all—it just seemed at first like
one more thing
that went wrong, and smacked me in the head. I sort of panicked at first, okay? But now I’m getting used to the idea, and if you think about it, I mean, where
are
we going, Nic, if we don’t eventually get married and so on.” Shade pressed his hands back and forth across her rib cage, then began to knead the muscles in her buttocks.

“I don’t know,” she said, drawing the words out as he massaged. “You’re pretty good at
this
.”

Shade moved down to her thighs, and Nicole groaned as her hamstrings stretched with his fingertips. “Thank Chester Anderson for this stuff. Chester taught me everything I know. That old man could draw the pain out through his fingertips. Best rubdown man a fighter like me could ever hope to find.”

“Rene,” Nicole said through a mouthful of sheets, “you don’t even have a job.”

“I’ll be back with the cops,” he said. He slid down on the bed to reach her calves. “This idleness is just temporary.”

“You’re through with the cops, Rene. You’re through. Unless you say you’re sorry, or something. Tell them you’ll be happy to be their bagman from now on, and knock off anybody they tell you to. Unless you knuckle under you’re through as a civil servant.” She sighed, and he turned his attentions to her feet.

“Look, Nicole, if I have a family, I
will
provide.”

“Oh great—great! I’m not going to be the excuse for you to become evil. I’m just not
fucking
going to be that excuse for you.”

“Hold still,” he said. “You like the feet part best.”

“Rene, Rene, Rene,” she said. “What about me? I mean, I never planned to end up in a place like this, a little grubby town where everything gets dirty just hanging in the air. What will I become? I’m a bartender, for chrissake. I could be something different. I just never planned to sling suds forever.”

“You never planned anything,” he said. “That’s why you’re a bartender.” He rubbed the ball of her foot, but her foot was taut, resisting him. “So you’re a bartender, anyhow, so what?”

“I wanted to go back to Europe, especially to Spain,” she said. “Could we go live in Spain? I mean, what do you care about St. Bruno, anyway?”

“Spain?”

“Barcelona. Costa Del Sol. Ibiza. There’s a world of blue water out away from here.”

“You gonna keep drifting all your life?”

“I like new places. I’m a traveler.”

“Yeah, right. You oughta talk to my dad about that. About traveling.” He let her foot drop to the bed. He stood over her prone body.

“I love you, Nic. I want to marry you. I’m asking you to marry me. Have the little thing. Crumb snatcher crawling on the floor. Drooling and squalling, I can handle that. Not just one, though. It’s bad to have one kid. If you’re gonna have one, have—three. Three’s a good size.”

“
Three?
You’re out of your fuckin’ mind, man,” she said. She sat up and pulled on a robe. “My God, you
are
a Catholic—a frigging Catholic—”

“So what’s it going to be? Do you love me, or what?”

“Or what? Or what? I love you,” she said, “but I’ve got to think.” She looked at the blue night lamp. Inside there was a fettered wheel above the bulb, and when it heated up enough the slatted wheel turned round and round causing an illusion of white water roiling upward from below the falls. They had picked up the lamp at a flea market for fifteen bucks. It seemed like a lot for celluloid, but they liked the notion of an idealized Niagara Falls forever cascading inside the lamp, so they bought it anyway.

“We’re not going to Niagara Falls,” she said. “I can tell you that.”

“What does that mean?” He took hold of her shoulders and pulled her face closer. “What does that mean?”

“It means I’m not going to act impulsively. We’re talking about deep shit here, Rene. The rest of our lives. If we’re lucky we’d still be kickin’ when our little ingrates would go off to the state university, or the vo-tech, or maybe just down to the corner for a few zillion drinks.”

Shade leaned to her until he could smell the faint scent of jasmine and musk in her hair, then he brushed his lips across her forehead just below the hairline. “So you’re going to think about it?”

“Yeah. I’m gonna think about it
all.
You bet I am.” She patted his
rear end the way two athletes do between plays. A dismissal of sorts. “You’d better sleep at your place tonight,” she said. “I’ve got things to sort through.”

As Shade came down Lafitte Street, walking through a light mist, he saw that the lights were all on in Ma Blanqui’s Pool Room, which meant his mother had customers. When he reached the door he saw his brother Francois’s white Volvo parked down the block, the shiny import seeming to gleam amid the domestic heaps.

There was some straight pool education going on at the front table, the lessons being taught by J. J. Guy, who lived in a flop across the street, and absorbed by Henry DeGeere, a neighborhood fella who had, by local standards, gotten rich off the gas business, but who still couldn’t run six balls to save his life.

“J. J.,” Shade said. “Henry.”

Both of the older men nodded and said, “Rene.”

There were two teenaged boys at the center table playing eight ball, no slop, call your pocket, and though Shade had seen them all over the neighborhood he knew them only as the Freckle-Faced Kid from around the corner, and the Four-Eyed Chubby Kid who lives where the Pelligrinis used to. They both knew him, though, and Freckle-Face said in a mocking drawl, “What’s happenin’, off-i-cer?”

Shade stopped, and said, “What you
want
to happen?”

Freckle-Face got interested in his next shot. He kept his face down, scrutinizing the green felt.

“Nothin’,” he said.

“That sounds right,” Shade said, and walked on toward the back where he could see his mother on her high stool behind a red Dr Pepper cooler, a wide cooler that his younger brother was now leaning against.

Francois, the tallest of the Shade brothers, was a lean man with carefully styled dark hair, and the sartorial flair of a Latinate dandy. He was an Assistant D.A. and lived in Hawthorne Hills in a landmark home his
wife, Charlotte, had inherited. The suit jacket he wore was of a smoked silver color, over a pale blue shirt now open at the collar, a gray striped tie dangling from a jacket pocket.

“It’s your birthday, Ma,” he said to Monique, “just tell me what you want.”

Monique had her long gray hair braided and pinned up like a crown. She wore horn-rimmed glasses that magnified her eyes, a black cigarette dangling from her lips. She was dressed in khaki trousers, a green army shirt, with pink fuzzies on her feet.