Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 06 - Lucky Man (9 page)

Twila brightened in recognition and hurried into the restaurant, pushing through the line of people waiting for takeout.

“I’ve been looking for you,” she told Sapphire breathlessly. “I’ve got a line on that creep. I met a girl who works for him.”

Raisin was not sure which creep she meant. He hid behind his sandwich and took a large bite. It was Italian sausage, dressed with lettuce, tomatoes, and pickles.

“The guy who puts the ads in the paper?”

“Yeah. I asked around like you told me to, and one of the girls at the Tomcat Inn recognized him from the description. She’s even been to a party at his house, though it was all straight and aboveboard according to her.”

“My name is Raisin,” Raisin said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t introduce you. Twila is a friend of mine for as long as I’ve lived in the Quarter.”

“Our cats are best friends,” Twila said.

“That’s a bond,” Raisin agreed.

“Who is the guy?”

“I don’t know his name, but this girl Bonnie does. She hangs out with a rave crowd, if you know what I mean. She’ll be at their concert tonight. She’s one of the drummer’s groupies. That’s the best place to find her.”

“Oh, boy,” Sapphire said. “I can’t wait to catch that guy Harrell.”

“What are you going to do when you find him?” Raisin asked.

“You can punch him out for me.”

“If that’s what you want, I’m your guy.” Raisin might have been serious.

“Or at least tell him we know what he’s doing and we’re going to turn him over to the cops if he keeps putting those advertisements in the newspapers.”

“Punching him out might have a greater effect,” Raisin said.

“But I mainly want to see him in the light of day and just walk right up to him and tell him what a true asshole he is. Will you go with me to find Bonnie?” She was addressing Raisin.

“Why not?” He checked his watch. “I’ve got time.” It would soon be happy hour. He could handle anything after that.

***

Tubby’s plan to cook a special meal for Faye had boiled itself down to picking up a couple of porterhouse steaks at Langensteins to grill in the backyard. First, he had in mind that they would sit outside and eat some cheese and maybe drink a beer; make that lemonade.

He saw Faye’s hippie van when he pulled into his driveway. He had left a key under the mat for her, and she was already inside, poking around in the kitchen.

“You keep a strange pantry,” she told him. Tubby dropped his briefcase on a chair.

“You mean empty?”

“I mean five gallons of olive oil, a huge bag of pistachio nuts, the biggest jar of crushed garlic I’ve ever seen, five kinds of cheese, and two honeydew melons. That’s about it. What do you live on?”

“What you just said. That’s what I eat.” He was a little embarrassed.

“Do you have a name for this diet?”

“Yeah, ‘Garlic-lusters.’ Have you ever heard of that?”

“No. Does it involve a beer? Because I’d like one.”

Tubby fetched a Coke from his grocery bag and offered it apologetically. She shrugged and accepted it with a smile. He got a ginger ale for himself.

“What time do you have to get back to your meeting?”

“There’s a film on at eight o’clock that I’m supposed to see.”

“Has the conference been worthwhile so far?”

“I suppose. What they’re saying we already knew. If everybody lived in a place where they were fed and loved, most of the world’s problems would disappear.”

“Do you think it’s really that simple? Aren’t some people just bad?”

“Yes, there are bad people,” she said thoughtfully, “but I still believe love can help most of us.”

She stood at the back door and looked through the glass at the leaves in the fading sunlight.

“You have a nice yard,” she said.

“Thanks. That reminds me. If you’ve got to get back by eight, I’d better light the coals.”

She put her hand on his chest when he came to the door.

“I hate to tell you this, but I don’t eat meat.”

“Are you a vegetarian?” It was nice to stand this close.

“Sort of,” she said. “Would you like to kiss me?”

He smiled, and she smiled back.

No one ever saw Purvis, and that was a lucky thing. He lived in the crawl space underneath a shotgun house on Burdette Street. He kept to himself and only slipped out at night to raid the Dumpster at the grocery store a few blocks away. Sometimes days passed when he did not emerge, but through a crack under the front porch, he could watch the comings and goings of people’s feet on the sidewalk. Most of the time he just hid.

Purvis sometimes caught a rat, and once he had trapped a cat and eaten it. His drinking supply was a cold-water pipe under the kitchen that dripped into a pet-food can. He could hear the woman’s footsteps on the wooden floor above his head. He could also listen in on her conversations, though they didn’t make much sense to him.

Once he had lived in the upstairs, as it seemed to him, of this house, but that was a long time ago when he was married. Back before his wife had run him off with her lawyer and a dog. He was, in fact, under the impression that the woman thumping about above him was his wife, not realizing that she had moved to Thibodeaux three years before with a man who raised gourds.

The footsteps actually belonged to an old woman who rented the house from a man in Slidell. He kept the rent low because she was on a longshoreman’s pension, but mainly because she never complained about anything like the deteriorating neighborhood or the tall weeds in the tiny yard. Or when her cat disappeared.

The little man only had the vaguest sense of the passage of seasons, but this had been an especially thankful Thanksgiving for him. He had found someone who was even less demanding than he was.

First, on a midnight foray for sustenance, from a hiding place under a bush, he saw a car speed away from the grocery-store parking lot. Then, as he hopped from the shadows into the open door of the Dumpster, there she was. Curled up and still, hair pasted over a still-wet spot on her temple.

With great effort, Purvis dragged and carried his find to his crawl space, careful to stay out of sight. He set her up on his blanket on which was written an inscription he had often puzzled over—FT. WALTO ACH. He shared what he had with her. It gave him great satisfaction to comb her hair and dress and undress her.

There came a time, however, when her very presence seemed to become too large and ripe for his space, and he became concerned about the attraction she seemed to exert upon a great many insects and a neighbor’s dog. Respectfully, he tugged her out one night and laid her gently in the tall weeds growing around a telephone pole by the street. Once back in the solitude of his den he was glad that she was gone. He heard the bedsprings creak above him and laid his head down to sleep.

“This is not for me. I’ve got to tell you that up front.” Raisin was not pretending to enjoy himself.

“You’ve got a bad attitude,” Sapphire told him.

“I may go berserk and embarrass you in front of your friends.”

“Loosen up.” She patted his blue-jeaned butt. They were in a long line waiting to get into the rock scene at an old cotton warehouse that had been converted into a rave hall. The gang of teenagers behind them got into a contest to see who would do the most obnoxious thing with a rubber football, and one of them jostled Sapphire from behind.

“Hey, dude,” Raisin said, but she stepped on his toe and told him to shut up.

Loud music like elephants mating pounded out of the barn doors, which were guarded by a huge bearded man with a cutoff Harley-Davidson T-shirt. He was sitting on a stool and collecting ten-dollar bills.

“Don’t I know you?” Raisin asked, trying to make out the face behind the red sunglasses and tangled yellow beard.

“Da Nang, 1969,” the toad said through a hole in the hair.

“I don’t think so,” Raisin said thoughtfully, but he couldn’t finish the reminiscence before he was herded into the dark hall by the crowd behind him.

“I’m in a generation gap,” Raisin moaned.

“Hold my hand,” Sapphire cried over the music. “The girl we’re looking for has a tattoo of a tongue on her forehead.”

A band called Galactic Fellatio was banging away at one end of the warehouse. A rotating strobe light on the ceiling, that the producers might have rescued from a wedding-reception ballroom, and a thousand handheld glow sticks provided most of the light. Raisin noticed bundles of electrical cables snaking across the floor. The place looked like maybe yesterday longshoremen with forklifts had cleared out all the cotton. Tonight, juiced-up kids were dancing and falling over each other.

“Where’s the bar?” Raisin yelled.

She pointed to the far wall where there was some encouraging neon.

“I’ll meet you back here in ten minutes.” he roared. “Want anything?”

She shook her head. Sapphire was busy scanning the room, jumping from toe to toe, trying to spy her friend— the one who knew where the man from the newspaper lived.

Raisin pushed his way across the floor. The people whose feet he was stepping on were about evenly divided between short-haired types with baseball caps worn backwards and a more diverting breed with spiked hair, acrylic makeup, and ring collections on their noses and lips. Lots of them had plastic bottles hanging from their necks on nylon cords. The girls wore slips longer than their dresses. Quite a few had baby pacifiers stuck in their mouths, wore pants like potato sacks, and were gyrating like Sufis. He saw tattoos galore. There were flowers and birds and gargoyles, penises and ice cream cones, sunsets and ankhs and thunderbolts, but he didn’t see any tongues.

He reached the tangle where drinks were being served from ice chests tended by a pair of guys with lots of muscles and gold chains.

“Beer!” he bellowed, when one finally looked his way.

“Coke or spring water,” the kid yelled back.

“Ah, shit,” Raisin cursed, and barged away.

“Want to buy some vodka?” a pretty girl with a lip bracelet whispered in his ear. Instead of a blouse she wore lace from Yvonne LaFleur’s. He nodded and she pulled a clear plastic flask out of her floor-length sarong and showed him five fingers twice.

Why not? He dug a bill out of his wallet, and she traded for the bottle. He took the precaution of unscrewing the cap and sniffing before he let the money go. Sure enough, it had that memorable distilled smell. Lots of other people’s money was changing hands around him, he saw. Life savers, breath mints, and match boxes all were being passed around for unusually large sums. Being a streetwise kind of a guy, he suspected these kids were trafficking in the
d
-word. The fact that there were also funny cigarettes burning everywhere tipped him off too.

A pimply-faced girl naked from the waist up gave him a quick hug and moved on, followed by her fans. He could not see Sapphire anywhere.

Hi-ho, he told himself and tilted his bottle back. Should have got a Coke for a chaser, he thought.

Hi-ho, he said again, as the room morphed into a purple onion. “Should have closed a cockatiel for dinner,” he said out loud.

A stampede of bison pounded past, and he wondered why his eyeballs wouldn’t stay in his head where they were supposed to be. They were bouncing around all the bare-assed Egyptians eating golden apples in the icebox.

Sapphire pressed her nose to his leer, and before their mind-meld became complete she was replaced by a woman with two mouths and a nipple on her lip. She expressed some concern about his condition. He sensed that he might be a lost little boy and was relieved when a hand took his and induced him to walk.

Enchanted, in slow motion, he considered the infinite variety of humanity as its many forms presented themselves to him. He quickly decided he would greatly prefer solitude in a woodland glen. Tears of gratitude slipped from his eyes when he inhaled some fresh air and saw familiar stars above. They broke apart in a fountain of diamonds. The exhilaration of the thrust when his big engines kicked in caused him to snort like a horse, and he rocketed off into space.

Sapphire got him onto the streetcar, arresting the conductor’s alarmed expression with a stony glare, and prayed that Raisin would just shut up.

“The air is full of pixies,” he crooned.

***

Cherrylynn had primped for her date with man number five. She had gotten five responses to her ad in the paper. Part of what she received for $29.95 was a package deal including a voice mailbox where callers could leave messages describing themselves. The one who said he was a Tulane student and the one with the Australian accent she could eliminate. Likewise the guy who said he was from Shreveport and the one who worked seven-on and seven-off on an oil rig. That left a deep voice that said, “My name is Harrell. Yes, I like to dance. Give me a call when you’re tired of dead ends. Your ad is really cool. You won’t be sorry.”

Setting aside her first four suitors for a rainy day, she returned “Harrell’s” call and, of course, got his message service.

Since that first call they had swapped messages several times, and he asked her out. When he suggested meeting at a coffee shop on St. Charles Avenue, she was sure she had her man. They made a date for Wednesday afternoon without ever actually talking in person.

Cherrylynn wore a short gray suit for the occasion and a black sweater and thought she looked smart. She carried her mocha latte to a table in the corner where she could watch two men in dashikis playing chess.

She became quite engrossed and did not notice the person behind her until a voice said, “Are you Cherrylynn?”

“Oh,” she said, looking around. “You’re a lot better looking than Mel Gibson.”

“It’s a Mary Kay cosmetics party, dear. I’m afraid I’ll be gone all afternoon.” Norella Finn was sprucing up her hair with delicate finger flicks. She was short, compact and dark— a sultry Latin, she called herself. The mirror she was using covered the entire wall of the living room in what the Finns called their boathouse. She could watch the reflection of her husband, who was reading a yachting magazine and sipping a cup of coffee, sitting on one of the straw-and-chrome barstools. Beside him were the spiral stairs that led to the bedroom above, and behind his bowed head was the picture window through which he could keep an eye on his sleek thirty-eight foot OmniMach HydroRocket, driven by twin 454 V-8 engines. The boat was safely hoisted above the water in its shed.