The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (21 page)

Jazz from more romantic days played on a tape machine and came swinging sweetly from speakers hung below the ceiling. Feet shod in high heels and flat heels, cowgirl boots and tennies tapped the polished wood floor unconsciously but in perfect time with Sidney Bechet or Johnny Hodges, Fletcher Henderson, the Duke, the Count, the Hawk or the Prez.

Shade, one of only three males in the room, was diverted from his smiling surveillance when the bartendress, Nicole Webb, said, “See anything interesting, Rene?”

“Oh,” he said beatifically, “it’s
all
interesting.”

“Is that so,” Nicole said. “You pick the ones you like, point ’em out, and I’ll be glad to make the introductions for you, there, stud.”

“That’s a very modern offer,” Shade said as he turned to face her across the bar. “But I’m just here waiting on you, Nic.”

Nicole was on the perky side of thirty and had wild, tumbling cascades of black hair that hung to her ribs and had never been quite brushed into submission. Her eyes were green and widely spaced on her thin, sharp-chinned face, giving her a vaguely vulpine expression. She was tanned and tall, with no slack on her at all. Every move she made gave an impression of cultivated energy. Though it was the baseball season she wore a red basketball tank top with blue lettering across the front that read, Maggie’s Keyhole Peepers.

“Well, why don’t you look at
me
, once in a while?” she asked.

Shade tapped his empty glass, shrugged, then said, “If you’d bend over more, I would.”

Nicole pulled herself straight, arched her spine, theatrically jutted her rear, then slid a hand over her tight denimed haunch.

“Nice stuff, huh, buster?”

“You know it,” Shade answered. “Private stock.”

“That’s odd,” she said as her posture folded back to normal and she removed the empty glass. “The Culligan Man always says the same thing. You two ought to meet.” She put the glass in the sink, dried her hands and pulled out a deck of cards. “One hand for the next drink, okay?”

“Deal ’em.” Shade won three hands in a row and demonstrated his recent conversion to cocktails rather than neat slugs of rum by ordering a manhattan, a vodka martini, and a sidecar. “I’m on a roll, which is maybe good, or bad. My gut doesn’t know yet.”

As Nicole dealt the blackjack hands Maggie Gallant came in from the back room and stood behind her. Though Maggie was well into her seventies, her hair was still colored in a dark hue so vigorously youthful that only vain old dames or presidents would try to pass it off as natural. She wore, as usual, a floor-length black outfit that hid her wide beam and gnarled legs and gave her a serious presence.

She looked at the cards and said to Nicole, “Take a hit, honey.”

“On seventeen, Mag?”

“Take a hit.”

Nicole did so, and when the down cards were flipped found she had bested Shade’s pat nineteen with a longshot three.

“Hah, hah,” Maggie said, stating a laugh but not having one. “Don’t try that with your own money, honey.”

“My streak is ended,” Shade said. “I guess I’ll actually
buy
a beer now.” He put a dollar on the bar and Nicole pulled a draw, then slid the mug to him. “Bois-sec,” he said, raised the beer and took a swallow.

Maggie tapped one of her sharp-nailed fingers on his forearm, snagging his attention. “So, Diamond Jim,” she said in her low raspy voice, “I heard you’re gonna take my gal here up into the woods somewhere and make her sleep on the ground, in the mud where snakes crawl. I heard you’re callin’ it a vacation.”

“It’s a fishing trip, Maggie.”

“You have to sleep on the dirt in the woods to go fishin’?”

“That’s part of the experience.”

Maggie shook her head and sighed with something akin to disdain.

“It figures,” she said. “You cops are the cheapest fuckers I ever met. Any two-bit horse player’d at least take her to the Biloxi Beach and put her up at a Motel Six.”

“Right,” Shade said. “And charge it all on a stolen credit card.”

“So? What kind of a cop are you who can’t scare up an extra buck for vacation?”

“A more or less straight one, Mag.”

“Oh, I get it,” she said with raised brows, “you think that’ll help you someday.”

“Naw, Mag, I’m cute but not stupid.” He drank some more beer and smiled. “I’ll make her a bed of pine needles and feed her rainbow trout grilled fresh from the stream.”

“That part sounds fine,” Nicole said. “But I’ve gone fishing with you before and I’ve never seen you actually
catch
a fish.”

“I will up in the Ouachitas,” he said. Shade was about sixty stitches
past good-looking, with pale nicks around his eyes and a high-bridged nose that had been counterpunched level lower down. His blue eyes were suggestive of heat and doggedness, and the trimness of his body indicated physical discipline. His hair was long, brown, and weeded out slightly on top. Though he had lately begun to yearn to cast a more dashing silhouette, he still dressed like a laid-off longshoreman, favoring tight, dark T-shirts and khaki slacks, no socks and white, slip-on deck shoes. “From what I read in the paper, the trout up in the Ouachitas are practically gangstomping unwary anglers.”

“How exciting,” Maggie said. “I think you can buy ’em tamed and frozen at Kroger’s. It’s not even that far of a drive.”

A Johnny Hodges version of “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” was lilting from the speakers, and the miscellaneous hullabaloo of the tavern merged with the jaunty sax to make a pleasant racket. Two women sitting on a short couch near the bar seriously debated the merits of Krystle and Alexis, while another audible pair clanged empty beer pitchers and said, “
Home-
ward!
Home-
ward!”

“Aw,” Shade said, “listen, up there it’s another world. That’s what I want on my vacation. I don’t want a beach version of St. Bruno. I want another world for five days. The river up there, it’s not the color of shoe leather like this one here. Huh-uh. It’s clearer’n baby piss and cooler’n Duke Ellington. You drop in a six-pack and in ten minutes you got the perfect beer.” He emptied his own mug of brew. “I got a pup tent, too, you know. For comfort.”

Shade’s conception of comfort, trotted out so baldly, caused a pause in the badinage, the two women looking on him with the same sort of worldly pity that a claim of actually preferring store-bought biscuits over those made from scratch would have drawn. Their unsmiling but tender stares masked the little voices in their heads that said, “Son, you are not to be trusted on matters of taste. But to tell you would be too sad.”

For his part Shade was transported between his ears, already several hours away by car, in the middle of a brisk, chill stream of modest depth, sniffing the abundance of mountainside pines, using ancient
angling cunning to con a few fillets from that old bumpkin, Mother Nature. He would watch for the eagles known to be there, in the highest parts of that rugged geography, always ready to be awed by a glimpse of the elegant floating predator, the swooping national symbol.

“Did I tell you they’ve got eagles up there?” he asked. When no one seemed to have heard him he said in a louder voice, “Hey, give me another beer.”

Shade watched as saucy Nicole, the longest-running romance of his adult life, her arms and shoulders bare in the hoop top, went to the tap and pulled back the spigot, the movement raising her left arm, offering him a tantalizing view of her pit hair which she never shaved, a fashion touch she’d adopted at nineteen while spending a year in Trieste pretending to be a Euro-peasant. As she brought his mug toward him he watched the familiar, slight wobbling of her endearing, pert little tits, and found himself suddenly flashing on sweaty, naked scenes in a soft bed.

“When is Maggie going to let you off, Nic?”

She set the beer on a square pad in front of him.

“Oh, Carol should be here in a few minutes. At midnight. Mags’ll let me leave then.” She put her elbows on the bar and rested her chin in her palms, her face close to his. “Baby, you’re getting a little red around the eyes.”

“It’s those cocktails,” Shade said. “I should stick with what I know.”

Near the door a clutch of white-haired gals called out, “Yoo-hoo, dearie—we need more of that sour-mash tea, please.”

As Nicole headed off to wait on them she said from the side of her mouth, “Just don’t drink yourself useless.”

Maggie rejoined Shade, a can of diet Dr Pepper in her hands.

“I’m holdin’ some dough for you,” she said.

“I know.”

“You want to cash it in or let it ride on something?”

“There can’t be much,” he said.

“Thirty-five measly dollars,” Maggie said. “I wouldn’t even bother to handle your chickenshit bets if I didn’t like you.” She sipped her
soda, hardly taking enough to swallow. “Less my ten percent and you got thirty-one fifty.”

“Ooh, I’m rich,” Shade said in a flat tone, “but I’ll risk it all.”

“I
adore
you sporty cops. Who’re you takin’?”

Half lit and feeling expansive behind that recent flash of carnal expectations, Shade said, “The trustee at the nut house gave me a tip, Mag. Those crazies are so wired to the unseen I’m going to take it, too. Whoever’s going against the Atlanta Braves gets my nod. And let it roll like that day by day ’til I lose, or own this joint, okay?”

“Whatever you say, mon petit chou.” She placed her hand over his. “But that’s sort of a wild bet for you.”

“Aw,” Shade said, “I’m trying to build up my retirement fund.”

For the next several minutes Shade kept his whistle wet and watched as Nicole marched up and down the narrow room, carrying pitchers of beer and margaritas to the needy. Finally there was a respite when everybody had a drink and she came and stood behind the bar at his end of the rail.

“Whew,” she said, “it’s midnight—where’s Carol?”

“Wish I knew.”

A second later a pair of hands slapped down on the bar.

“Hey, Nicole,” the young woman said, “how you doin’?”

“All right, Wanda. How ’bout yourself?”

“Aw, the normal. Give me two sixes of Jax in a sack, will you?”

“Sure.”

Shade always checked out anybody named Lulu, Candy, Dixie or Wanda, so he did a quick scan: a young gal of about the old voting age with hair of that eye-catching, burnt-red color that spelled trouble in pulp paperbacks, a short, juicy build with an abundance of feminine bounce and a feisty freckled face that dared you to make something of it.

As the sack of beer was laid out Wanda pushed a bill across the wood. When she pocketed the change she picked up the bag and said, “Be seein’ you, Nic.”

“Not for a while,” Nicole said.

“Oh, yeah? Why is that?”

“Rene, here,” Nicole said, pointing her head toward him, “is taking me on a fishing trip tomorrow. We’re going to sleep outside on the dirt—like the homeless.”

“That’s men for you,” Wanda said and favored Shade with an unfavorable glance. “They always expect
you
to sleep on whatever hard ground
they
picked out.” She then turned back to Nicole and smiled. “Have as much fun as he’ll let you.”

After Wanda was out the door Shade asked, “Who is she?”

“Just a Frogtown girl,” Nicole answered. “Tough kid. Plays on The Peepers basketball team. Rugged little heartbreaker, too—flings elbows all over and led the team in rebounds from the guard spot.”

“I guess I don’t know her.”

“Well, her name used to be Wanda Bone, but she’s married now. It’s Bouvier, I think. Something like that.”

“I know a couple of Bouviers,” Shade said. “But not the young ones.”

Nicole looked at the clock, then at the door, hoping to see Carol.

“Well, the one she married is a lot older’n her,” she said. She took a sip of Shade’s beer. “He’s older’n you.”

“Could it be Ronnie Bouvier?”

“Yeah, I think so. I think that’s him.”

“Ronnie’s in the joint.”

“Yeah, life’s a bitch,” Nicole said. There were other things on her mind. “If Carol doesn’t show pretty quick I’m going to send you out to find her.”

Well, just at that moment huffing Carol came in the back door, carrying her shoes. Nicole huddled with her briefly to hear the latest excuse, for Carol generally excelled at them, but this time she told the lame one about the dead car battery and the long dutiful walk in the midnight hour. In any case she took Nicole’s place behind the bar.

After telling Maggie they’d be on the road at dawn and back next week, Shade and Nicole made it out of the bar and into the pleasant shirt-sleeve weather of a late summer night in the delta.

“So,” Nicole said, “what’s the plan?”

“Don’t need one,” Shade answered cryptically. “The rest of tonight is preordained, Miss Nastiness.”

“How’s that?”

“I read my horoscope this morning,” Shade whispered as he pulled her close, slipping the straps of her tank top down and cupping a bared breast. “It was spelled out.”

They made it to his car behind the bar and leaned against it, doing some sloppy tongue weaving there beneath a dim streetlight.

“Uh-huh,” Nicole said, “I’ll bite—what’d your horoscope say?”

“It said, and I think it’s true, that I should follow you tonight and sex you down.”

“Oh, that’s all?” Nicole pulled her shirt all the way to her waist and clasped her hands above her head. “It didn’t say where?”

“Baby, the stars left that up to you.”

3

W
ANDA
B
ONE
Bouvier had that thing that makes a hound leap against his cage. It was a quality that was partly a bonus from nature and partly learned from cheesecake calendars and Tanya Tucker albums. Wanda had realized early on that her body was a taunt that sent would-be Romeos off on quests for Love Oil and ceiling mirrors and nerve. She had gone clean up to her sixteenth year, wandering school halls and pool halls, public parks and private parties, doing an earthy shimmy and sashay through them all. Though she had a deadpan gaze she had always sharply noted the weak knees and lolling tongues around her. She had found this effect to be delightful and fun until that fateful sixteenth year when she had gone with a girl friend to a roller-skating rink at dusk, and left before midnight in love forever with a fortyish gangster.