The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (7 page)

But no sweat, cuz.

Suze slept in an old red football jersey with the sleeves cut out. Her skin was so pale that Jewel found merely looking at it to be nasty. It was like she never went outside, the sun never caught her at her work, ’cause her work was all in pillowed rooms with the curtains drawn. She was a country girl with just one real talent, but it was the one that travels well and is appreciated around the world.

The bed shifted as Jewel sat on the edge. Suze’s body was curled like a hook, and he began to lightly float his fingers around the place where the worm would go. With his other hand he stroked her rump.

She swatted at him, then turned over.

He tried again.

The pillows flew from Suze’s face. She raised her upper body and rested on her elbows, blinking at him.

“I am tryin’ to sleep, Jewel.”

“I was just gonna wake you up sweet, is all.”

“What’s sweet is sleep.”

“There’s sweet and there’s
sweet
,” Jewel said. “Anyhow, I’ll be busy later. Won’t be home.”

He began to force his fingertips into her, but it was like stretching rubber and he wasn’t sure he was on the right trail. She lifted his hand.

“That hurts.”

Jewel grew sheepish, then a little bit angry that she was making him feel bad for going after his own girl. That’s supposed to be settled, that you get
that
when you want it.

“We never done nothin’ last night,” he said.

“You were too drunk.”

“And yesterday was too hot.”

Suze rubbed her eyes and yawned, then fell back on the bed.

“Oh, baby,” she said. “Your hair is a mess.”

“I can’t find my comb—you got it?”

“Come here, baby,” she said. She took his head into her arms. He leaned into her embrace.

Then he found himself remembering Duncan’s instructions.

Now listen to me. Wait at the mouth of the alley with the shotgun in the trash cans there, hear me, cuz? Then all you gotta do is this, and it’s not much.

Then he remembered Suze and bent to her neck.

“You a natural rooster, ain’t you, baby? You see that sun and you got to rise with it, don’t you, lover?”

Now he’s a big buck with a crippled right foot, so he’ll be limpin’ when you see him.

“Sure. The crack of dawn is askin’ for it in my book.”

Somehow Jewel’s body was not following his mind’s command and things were not happening right.

“I know what you want,” Suze said. She sat all the way up and pushed him over, then crouched to him and took him in her mouth.

This cat dresses nice, he really does, with big red ties and diamond clips, and he drives a maroon LTD with all kind of Afro gadgetry hangin’ off it. Can’t miss him. He owns the theater there, and he shows up at five. Every day.

“Baby?”

Jewel started, then looked down at Suze.

“Baby,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothin’.”

“I know better. This ain’t like you.”

She giggled.

He won’t know you. None of them will know you. You pull the shotgun when he gets out of the car. He probably won’t even look at you. And if he does, he never saw you before.

“I think I’ll go get me some eats,” Jewel said, then pushed up from the bed.

“What? What?” Suze’s mouth dropped and her face scrunched unpleasantly. “Not now. Not now you don’t, buster.”

“Shut your face.”

“It ain’t right,” she said. “I was sleepin’. Before you started on me I was sleepin’. Now I’m started I ain’t goin’ to be able to sleep.” Suze swung out of bed and followed Jewel while he rounded up his clothes. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere under these circumstances.”

He’ll walk right past the alley and you’ll be hidden pretty good. The blast will shake people up. They’ll be runnin’ every which way, so you step up close and spread his head out real good. We got to be sure
.

“I’m not in the mood,” Jewel said. “I got to be in more of a mood.”

“Jew-el! For God’s sake—I was sleepin’.”

“So go back to sleep! It’s all you got to do anyhow.”

“Well,” Suze said, then collapsed her shoulders in surrender. “I mean, praise the Lord, Jew-el.”

She grabbed her clothes off the bedpost and went to the bathroom, slamming the door as a final comment.

Immediately admitting that he was no hungrier for food than he’d been for Suze, Jewel dropped his shirt and jeans back to the floor and slumped onto the couch. He pulled his guitar out from beneath the high-legged couch and began to strum an approximate rendition of “Mama Tried.” As he played he could see the sidewalk across the street, a sidewalk clotted with strangers doing business, a street he didn’t like. Creepy fuckin’ Frogs, anyhow.

It’s a piece of cake, if you keep cool.

Jewel jerked upright, then flipped the guitar across the room, snapping the E string on the dresser edge. He put his head in his hands and growled.

And you’ll keep cool, right, cuz?

5

P
ETE
L
EDOUX
sat on the hood of his black Pinto in the shadows of the line of trees that surrounded the graveled parking lot of the Catfish Bar, using his keys to chisel at splatters of guano deposited on his car by a rare bird that shit cement and seemed to follow him around. Occasionally he looked across the lot, foul with white dust and heat shimmers, toward Lafitte Street. He was waiting for Steve Roque, and that meant that he could not become impatient and leave. Roque had said wait, and Ledoux had no choice but to do so.

The sidewalk on this stretch of Lafitte, even before noon, was rich with rod-and-reel luggers in rubber boots sneaking toward a favorite slough where a dry stump overlooked a bullhead hole; double-wide women with surplus neck who squeezed grocery bags to their chests; and diddy-bop strutters in Foster Grants who acknowledged one another with terse chin gestures. Ledoux watched as if Frogtown, the version of it that he’d always known, was on the verge of disappearing. The area had not been totally French since Lewis and Clark had partied down here prior to their famous trip, and even when Ledoux had been born the Frogs had been equaled in number by rogue Germans, ambitious Irish, and hillbilly trash. It was this new influx of wetbacks that troubled him. Those people stank the streets up with peppery smells and burned beans, and they didn’t understand who was boss. If native Frogtowners didn’t snap out of their soft slumber they’d wake soon to find they lived on Pancho Villa Boulevard. He was sure of that.

When Roque arrived it was on foot. He stood at the corner of the bar building and raised a hand toward Ledoux. Ledoux crossed the parking lot and joined him beneath the big sign with a blue catfish on it that swung above the door.

A bouncy kid was swaggering down the walk. He was summer brown and wore a coffee-stained dago T-shirt, dress slacks, and slick shoes with the de rigueur horseshoe taps that sparked as he walked, as if his strut were a blade and the street a perpetual whetstone. When he was even with the two men he picked Ledoux to make eye contact with.

Ledoux returned the gaze, superior and cool.

The kid shrugged and looked away, then glared back.

“Hey, punk,” Ledoux said sharply, “I don’t want to be your friend. Keep walkin’.”

“Fuck you,” the kid said, then looked over his shoulder.

Ledoux leaned toward him and the kid flashed a couple of running steps, then slowed to a walk when he saw he wasn’t being seriously chased.

“I don’t think I can put up with it,” Ledoux said.

“Shouldn’t have to,” Roque said. “That’s my opinion.”

Steve Roque was built in the style of the local French: about five-ten, with a thick-boned frame, filled out by two hundred pounds of unpretentious, but useful, bulk. So many Frogtowners were of this body type that it was referred to as “Froggy.” But Roque sidestepped stereotyping by being bald, with a long gray rough of hair on the sides. He wore a black Ban-Lon shirt, white slacks, and white shoes.

Roque jerked his thumb at the door.

“I heard there’s a cool spot in this town; could be it’s in here.”

Froggy Russ Poncelet, the day bartender, a friend to many and enemy to none, was busy behind the bar dropping cans of beer into the floor coolers. He looked up as Roque and Ledoux entered.

“Tip’s in back,” he said.

“Hard worker, that Tip,” Roque replied.

“How do you like this heat?” Poncelet asked.

“Not much. It’s yours for a cheeseburger.”

They took a table in the back, far removed from the other customers. The Catfish drew a decent lunch business but it was still too early for the legitimately hungry to appear, so the few tables of customers were made up of unemployed, but entrepreneurial, young men, as well as the diurnal conventions of phlegmatic tipplers.

Roque peeled a thin cigar and lit it. As he inhaled, he looked over the room and received waves from two of the tables. Not familiar waves, but respectful acknowledgments of his presence. He nodded back.

Less relaxed than Roque, Ledoux spent considerably more time inspecting the clientele before hunching forward and saying, “I saw the papers this morning. Man, are they confused.”

“Of course they are,” Roque said. “What’d you expect?” His brown eyes were not cold, but warm with malice and bright with confidence. “They might unravel it, but not in time to change much. That is, if
you
can hold
your
end up.”

Poncelet approached the table, drying his hands on the untucked portion of his white T-shirt.

“What’ll it be, fellas? Something to drink, or you want some chow?”

“How about air conditioning?” Roque asked. To emphasize his request he scraped a finger across his forehead, then flicked sweat to the floor.

“We don’t carry it,” Poncelet said.

“How much is Tippy kickin’ to the building inspector, huh? ’Cause this is unsafe heat.”

“Is that supposed to be in the nature of
news
to me?”

Roque grunted.

“No, I guess not. You hungry?” he asked Ledoux.

“Nah. I’ll just have a Stag with a glass.”

“Merci,” Poncelet said. “And you, Steve?”

“I want to eat,” Roque said. “I’ll have a tall glass of ice water and some chicken stew.”

“Coq au vin, you mean.”

“Right. Chicken stew with a sneer. You sound like my grandmother.”

“Look like her, too,” Poncelet said, then returned to the bar.

“He’s a smart-ass,” Roque said.

“But a likable one.”

“Most of them are—up to a point.”

The men sat in silence until Poncelet returned with their orders, then left them.

“So—Crane had it in him, hunh,” Ledoux said. “I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think he would for sure.”

“Well, he did,” Roque said. “Took some convincin’. Had to mention Tony Duquette and Ding-Ding Stengel a couple of times. Had to remind him about Curly Boone, and how his house burned down around his ears that time when
he
couldn’t pay up. And he owed me less than
you
do, I said to Crane.”

“And Teejay Crane’s a nigger, too. Boone at least was white.”

Roque grunted, then shook his head.

“That doesn’t mean a thing.” Roque spooned a piece of chicken from the bowl, then took it in his fingers and sucked the meat from the bone. “Payin’ what you owe is all that counts.”

Ledoux’s eyes narrowed as he looked away. It couldn’t be true, what Roque said, about black or white not making a difference.

“Why’d you bring up Duquette and Stengel? Ain’t I takin’ care of business good enough for you?”

“Sure you are. I think. You keep tellin’ me you are, anyhow. But no sense in mentionin’ a guy like
you
to Crane, who was nervous and no idiot, you know. I think he could see how he’d be extra weight once he’d done the big dance with Rankin.” Roque nodded, then sipped some ice water. “I think he’d done this sort of thing once before.”

After draining half a glass of Stag Ledoux began to stroke his chin reflectively.

“It’s nice,” he said. “The way it fits together is nice. Crane thinks his dirty movie racket, there, is solvent again, and he don’t have to worry no more about his kids and stuff. That was ruinin’ his days, I’ll betcha, wonderin’ what closet was goin’ to spring open full of Frogs with bad intentions.”

“I think maybe you’re right,” Roque said. “He knew he was in a spot. If Rankin hadn’t’ve started thinkin’ he could be cute with me like he did, Crane would’ve tried to swim to New Orleans some time back. Me, though, I always plan for the future.”

Ledoux, flush with the pleasures of conspiracy, began to smile serenely.

“You know, if Sundown Phillips figures out his main man got whacked by Crane, why Crane would die bad, mon ami. A lot worse than we’re goin’ do to him.”

Roque laughed, a steel-on-cement rumble.

“Must be goin’ to parochial school that made us so thoughtful.”

“I always went to public.”

“Well, me too. After the third grade.”

The bowl of stew was not empty but Roque shoved it to the middle of the table. Ledoux, with a beer growling on an empty stomach, began to appraise an onion quarter and a piece of chicken that were left over.

“Yeah,” Roque said, “if Rankin hadn’t’ve gotten the not-so-bright idea that his committee, there, the Bids Committee, could throw us over for his own people, Phillips Construction, why, a whole lot of peace never would’ve got disturbed.”

“It always happens. A guy needs you, so you help him, then he doesn’t need you so much anymore, mon ami, ’cause you’ve been
so
much help, and then it’s out to the shithouse with you.” Ledoux shook his head at the disappointing nature of human intercourse. “You were makin’ each other rich, but he wanted more—am I right?”

“Well, there’s another thing here.” Roque lifted his powerful shoulders and turned his hands out. “One—I really want to be the man who builds the Music Center. It’s none of your business why, but I do. Leave it at that. Two—I think Phillips would’ve done less for him over the long run anyhow, but he didn’t want to see that.”