The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (32 page)

Pugh and Byrne were both essentially state-raised social problems, government-parented misfits. They’d lived the institutional life in different places, Dean from age eight in Maryland, and Cecil from age four in Florida, and met at what somehow seemed to them to be the bosom of their family—the federal pen. Both men moved with that
odd, fearful underdog gait, jerking around like disoriented lizards, gawkily uncoordinated, stoically confused.

“We’re gonna back you up all the way,” Dean said. “ ’Cause what is it that
always
flies above the shit?”

“The Wing,” Jadick said in unison with Cecil. “The Wing soars above it.”

“There it is, brother.”

Wanda was in the kitchen where she’d listened to Jadick’s pep talk while doing the dishes. She began to dry the plates and silverware with a towel, and Jadick walked up behind her and cupped her breasts.

“Do all men do that?” she asked, not missing a stroke.

“Do what?”

“Get the hots for women in the kitchen.” She shook her head quizzically. “Every man I ever been around gets all touchy-feely when I do dishes or cook.”

Jadick backed away and sat at the table.

“I’d have to think about that,” he said.

Wanda put the dried dishes in the cupboard, then got herself a cup of coffee. She leaned against the counter, holding the cup.

“Is your gang up to it?” she asked in a low voice.

Jadick shrugged.

“They’re givin’ the right answers,” he said.

“Oh, man,” Wanda said, “I’ve heard beer farts that made more sense than them two.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Jadick said. He studied her closely, eyes narrowed. “Don’t plant bad seeds, pun-kin. Don’t plant no bad seeds in me when you
know
we got a job tonight.”

She blew on her coffee and looked at him over the rim of the cup.

“I’m just concerned,” she said. “That’s all.”

“Now, look,” Jadick said, “the upshot is…”

“… Oh, I dread that,” Wanda said, turning away.

“Dread what?”

“The upshot. Man, I dread that motherfucker.”

At this moment Dean and Cecil came in from the porch, grinning and bouncing with criminal vim. Dean put an arm around Cecil’s shoulders, face beaming, and said, “You know, I
like
my life. Really, I do. Lots of people would say it’s a shitty kind of life, but I don’t. I like my life, you know. Things happen in it. I don’t see how as that should be considered shitty. Everybody has things that happen in their life, but I
like
the things that happen in mine.”

Jadick slowly swiveled his gaze from Dean to Wanda, then he pointed an admonishing finger at her.

“You got anything to say to that, pun-kin?”

Wanda leaned back on the counter and raised her eyes to the naked bulb on the ceiling, shuddering though smiling, and said, “Well, now, ain’t
everything
just
beauti
ful, in its own way.”

When Shade came trudging up the dark sidewalk and in through Nicole Webb’s front door, Sleepy LaBeef was cranked up on the speakers, singing a wry and lively country boogie about the path he’d taken to The Wayside Lounge. Nicole was in the kitchen leaning over a pan of boiling water, turning crawdads into food. She wore a long cotton country dress that was festooned with flowery things that had been paled by repeated washings. Her feet were bare, her long hair was a dark unbrushed bramble, and she wore her black-framed reading glasses. Her back was turned to Shade, her eyes were focused on the reddening mud lobsters. She said, “I heard you come in, Rene, so don’t bother sneakin’ up behind me and grabbin’ my butt.”

“I don’t like sneaks either,” he said. He walked over and reached below the hem of her dress and raised his hand to the split where it lingered. “Sorry about today,” he said into her ear. “A cop was shot.”

“I heard,” she said. She put stove gloves on her hands and raised the bucket of crawdads. “Now watch out,” she said, “they’re done.”

Shade opened the refrigerator and saw a stock of longnecked Texas beer, and selected one, then sat at the kitchen table. As was the case with most flat spaces in Nic’s house, the tabletop had several books laid
open to the spine on it.
The Women at Point Sur, A Moveable Feast
, something about Vermeer and two novels by Shirley Ann Grau were spread out for handy reading while cooking.

“What’re you making?”

“Crawdads, yellow rice and sliced tomatoes—any complaints?”

“No.”

“That’s damned good news if you feel like eatin’. ’Cause this is it.”

From birth to the age of eighteen, Nicole had called Port Lavaca, Texas, home. She’d been raised up smelling the salt air of the Gulf and it seemed even now that her gaze was naturally trained on the distant horizon. During her final year in high school, she’d busted her hump both before and after class peeling shrimp at the dock, saving every penny for postgraduation flight. It was Italy that she fled to, along with Sandy Colter, her lifelong best friend. But after eight weeks Sandy said she had some problems with the water, the men, the women, the dogs, the motor scooters, and “all the fucking garlic,” and went home. Nicole stayed on alone and tried to go native in Trieste. Months later on a rambling excursion to Greece, she took the ferry from Brindisi to Patras and overheard two longhairs speaking with Texas accents and suddenly the sky opened and she was hunkered down with them beneath a rainslicker, sucking on a bottle of ouzo while puddles developed around their feet.

The more charming Texan was named Keith Goodis and he claimed he was a stock-car driver in his mind, and would soon be so in fact. Two weeks later she was back in Trieste by herself, and behind a sense of heightened loneliness she began to find the Old World to be crotchety rather than charming, and flew home.

In Port Lavaca she stuffed the necessities of her life into an army surplus duffel bag and thumbed to Austin, where she presented herself on Keith Goodis’s doorstep, and was welcomed. For the next three years, while Keith tried to prove himself on the oval dirt tracks of the South, she went to the university with the vague notion of turning herself into something decent, like an English teacher. But as time went by a certain sour melody sound-tracked her days, for good ol’ Keith had fallen
into the trap of loving a life he had small talent for, and after seventeen straight Sunday finishes out of the money he blamed her and domesticity for leeching from his soul the wildness required by his career, and she responded with an unkind comment or two concerning hand-eye coordination and pudding for brains.

The next day she deep-sixed education and called her old friend Sandy, who told her she’d finally found her true self in St. Bruno, where she lived with her friend Kathleen and had a neat little business renovating and refurbishing old houses. Come on over, she said, and Nicole did. Nic worked with Sandy and Kathleen until Kathleen began to resent her for having known Sandy since infancy, and she went hungry for a while, then took a job at Maggie’s Keyhole. She was now twenty-eight and at home in Frogtown and at ease with Shade, but there was still something quietly unsettled about her that made it seem she was only marking time.

As Nicole set the bowl of crawdads along with rice and tomatoes on the table, Shade said, “What’s with the fridge full of Texas longnecks?”

“Oh, now and then I can’t help gettin’ sentimental for some Lone Star.”

“Uh-huh,” Shade said. He filled his plate with a glob of everything, then belted back some brew. He was pulling the tail off a crawdad when he said, “I’ll bet Lone Star was ol’
Keith’s
favorite pabulum,
wudn’t
it?”

“Don’t do that,” she said. “Please—it knocks you down in my eyes.”

“All right,” he said. “I hear you.” Ever since she’d made the mistake of telling him the details of her previous major fling he’d needled her about it, usually by implying that she’d been love-suckered by a crybaby. “The mud lobster is done
just right
,” he said.

“Thank you.”

While dinner was eaten Nicole told Shade that How Blanchette was looking for him and would be at Ma Blanqui’s early, early in the morning. She then segued into a pretty passionate explanation of Robinson Jeffers’s “inhumanism” and he nodded cunningly as her whole theory whooshed right past him. During a lull in her explication he explained to her that he was flattened out from postspeed-sag and fatigue and that
he might have to get back on the street in a few hours. What he needed was to relax.

After the meal Nicole put a stack of Nanci Griffith albums on the stereo, filled a yellow salad bowl with ice, then stuck in bottles of beer. She went into the bedroom and came back with two joints and a lighter and said, “Come on into the backyard, Rene, and smooth your ragged self out.”

Shade followed her outside and they sat on the concrete blocks that served as back steps. The yard was not much larger than a regulation billiard table, squared off by the neighbors’ fences, screened in somewhat by the honeysuckle that grew on those chicken wires. Several cottonwood trees rose up and spread out, partially blocking the light cast by a half-moon on a clear, delta summer night. The previous tenants of this cozy but ramshackle house had had their union blessed by a set of quickly spoiled twins, and a few obsolete toys were trashed along the fencerows, and a pink wading pool with penguins painted on the side sat in the center of the yard.

Shade drank while Nicole smoked, joining her for only two or three tokes out of a sense of etiquette that was a holdover from his teens. In less time than it takes to drink one cold longneck on a hot night, while Nanci Griffith sang “Spin on a Red Brick Floor,” Nicole began to go gypsy beneath the moonglow, dancing exuberantly in a tight circle, spreading her skirt, her rhythmic jostles causing foam to rise from the lips of her bottle and spray about. Soon she came back to the steps and picked up the yellow salad bowl of iced brew, and said, “I feel like a dip in the pool.”

The honeysuckle scent flavored the night breeze, and voices laughing at “The Late Movie” carried from nearby houses. Distant hounds howled from pen to pen, relaying the nocturnal edition of the dog news.

Nicole shimmied out of her dress and plopped into the shallow pool.

“Aw, I filled it fresh at dark,” she said. “It’s cool—come on in. Surf ’s up.”

Shade stood up from the steps and walked over to the pool. He looked around and saw a few upstairs lights on in rooms that had a view of the pool. He drank from his bottle, then looked down to where Nicole reclined, using her hands to cup cool water and splash it onto her chest.

“Rene, don’t be bashful,” she said, “there’s no X-ray eyes around here.”

“I’m kinda tired,” he said.

“I wanna have fun, Rene.”

“Okay,” Shade said, and kicked out of his slip-on shoes, then pulled his shirt off and unbuckled his britches, letting them fall, then stepping free. He stood there in his birth suit, drained the beer and tossed the empty into the undergrowth by the fence. “Darlin’,” he said as he crouched into the water, “you’re fixin’ to have yourself
multiple
funs, hear?”

Nicole chuckled and said, “I believe in the deed, honey, not the threat.”

A shared beer later, there in the children’s wader, beneath the sweet night sky, Shade admitted to feeling chemically limp, and turned to the tongue for amusement. “It must be the French in me,” he said, then slithered across the slick pool bottom. He put his hands beneath her hips and raised her pubis to the waterline. He crouched forward, knowing that there were certainly nights, and he’d experienced many of them, when he’d rather be right where he was now, buried in muff, exercising a learned tongue, licking her breathless, his own rocks on hold.

The Wingmen rolled to a stop in the white rock-dust of The Rio, Rio Club parking lot. They’d appropriated a black Trans-Am from the employees’ parking lot of an open all-night Kroger’s. Cecil sat behind the wheel, the engine running, the headlights doused. The low rumble of the engine heightened the sense of coiled readiness that filled the car. Jadick said, “Masks,” and the three of them pulled ski masks on, adjusting the eye slots into satisfactory position. The car rocked while
idling and Jadick, from the backseat, said, “Who is it?” and the proper response, “The Wing,” came from the front. Jadick then leaned over Dean and opened the door.

“Let’s fuck ’em up,” he said, and The Wing climbed out, and swooped.

13

T
HIS IS
the part I like,” Shuggie Zeck said with a wide smile. He patted Hedda’s knee and leaned close to her on the couch, pointing at the TV screen. “Watch this—Red Skelton just has always cracked me up. See?”

Shuggie was in a blue robe, freshly showered and shaved, smelling of Old Spice. He watched the screen with lips parted in a small, constant smile. “I should get back to the club,” he said, “but I love this guy.”

On the coffee table in front of the couch there were two snifters containing Frangelico over ice. Beside the snifters sat two empty bowls that had a thin coating of ice cream and a few crumbs of peach cobbler growing sticky on the sides.

In the movie Red found himself in Cuba where he was helping a New York society dame get settled into the vinecovered, shutter-slapping spooky mansion that was her haunted inheritance. Skelton’s spaz reactions to the living dead who abounded on the estate caused Shuggie to roar and Hedda to smile serenely. In between guffaws Shuggie pulled his socks on, then stood and stepped into a pair of white slacks.

“The hell with it,” he said and sat back down. “So I get back to the club a little late—I gotta see the end of this one again.” He wiped laughter-tears from the corners of his eyes. “Christ, I loved Red Skelton movies since I don’t know when.”

“I know since when,” Hedda said. She was also in a robe, a red one, and a pink bandeau covered her hair. “Since childhood.”

“Yeah,” Shuggie said. “I s’pose that’s so.”

The movie plot had dragged the ever jittery Red Skelton to the house of an old crone who wore silver-dollar earrings and a secretive mien, and Shuggie was watching contentedly, when the phone rang.