The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (35 page)

Shade crept forward, hand on the wall. Halfway there he happened across the light switch, and flipped it up.

Hedda Zeck sat at the dining table, her face submerged in a clear glass mixing bowl full of ice and water. There were wisps of blood sloshed among the ice cubes. She raised her head, looked blankly at Shade, then said, “I didn’t holler cop.”

“Jesus,” Shade said.

She had Killer Bee–stung lips and her visage had been brutalized into asymmetry. The left side was puffed out to here and the eye on that side would be winking purplish at the world for a while. Finger-sized bruises were imprinted on both cheeks and high on the throat.

“Did you hear me?” she asked.

“God damn, Hedda,” Shade said. He holstered his pistol and stepped toward her. “Shuggie whipped you like that?”

She gave no answer but the dropping of her face into the ice bowl. When she pulled up out of the bowl Shade repeated his question. She answered, “Of course not. I bought a case of bad makeup, you dumb fuck.” Then she resubmerged, trying to hold down the swelling.

Shade went to the phone and found that the cord had been yanked from the wall. He went back to Hedda, pulled out a chair and sat next to her. When she paused to breathe again, he said, “Want me to run you to St. Joe’s?”

“Oh, Rene,” she answered and started to weep. She turned to him and he held her. “He was mean,
so
mean. I did something wrong, but he was
so, so
mean.”

During the long, slow courtship of Shuggie and Hedda, Shade had been a fairly constant witness to the proceedings. He’d sat one seat removed in the balcony of The Strand Theater while the lovebirds had experimented with tongues and touches and fingerbanging, and he’d been the fella with the bottle and the weed on the night Shuggie popped her cherry on a picnic table in Frechette Park while he sat at the other end, drinking peach brandy, too close to ignore their sounds, too stoned to want to.

“I didn’t think he could do this,” Shade said. She held him tightly, water dripping onto his shoulder. “I never would’ve believed it.” He
stood and raised her alongside. “Come on, I’m going to run over to St. Joe’s. You ought to be checked out.”

She pulled loose of him, her head shaking wildly.

“No. No. Huh-uh. He’ll kill me. No. Or my dad’ll find out and shoot Shuggie.” She backed away, hands up. “I did wrong.”

“Maybe so,” Shade said, “but now you’re a victim.”

“Well,” she said, as if pondering a multiple-choice question, “well, you know, the weak, the
weak
are notorious for bein’ victims. There’s a chain of events involved.”

“Where is that motherfucker now?”

“Uh, well. Well, Rene, I got a friend, a good friend, I
love
her, really. Her name is Wanda. Shuggie’s gone to kill her.”

“Why?”

“Oh, he thinks she’s in with a gang, or whatnot. He thinks they robbed his games, you know?”

“Who is she?”

“Wanda Bouvier, Rene. That’s her name.”

Hedda began walking toward the couch, walking with the abysmal choreography of a woman who was out on her feet. “She’s married to Ronnie Bouvier.”

“I get it,” Shade said. “I get it now. How do I find her?”

Hedda stumbled over the coffee table, dumping the Frangelico bottle, dessert bowls, and her bridge to the carpet. She sort of drooled down to the couch, a slow caving in.

“I wouldn’t tell him,” she said with a faint tone of pride. “But I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you.”

16

A
LL KINDS
of bad feelings had huddled around Leon Roe in the lonely darkness of his house and tormented him. He sat on a metal folding chair near the window that faced Wanda’s place, peeking out through the curtains. His hair was disheveled from the several times he had grabbed it and jerked his head around, punishing himself. On his lap sat an open bottle of Fighting Cock bourbon, which he usually kept under the kitchen sink and only dusted off when his mother visited. But tonight, feeling sneak-punched by love and hope, he had suckled down a few inches of hundred proof.

A couple of swigs ago he had seen a car leave Wanda’s drive with three people in it, and now he tapped the toes of his boots to the floor in a fast upbeat tempo, impatiently waiting to see if anyone else came out. He didn’t know if Wanda had been in the car or not, but he didn’t think so. As he put the bottle to his lips there were tears in his eyes, for the prettiest girl in Frogtown clearly didn’t know or care how much he dug her,
no, more
than dug her,
grooved
on her. All he wanted was to win her heart and take her away from all this and give her nice, soft, silky things to wear and write songs based on her bein’ a spike of honeyed sunshine in a lonesome rockabilly boy’s life and play with her tits whenever he wanted. But she refused to see this. She didn’t see it at all. She was with
them
.

Swig, sniffle, and sigh.

And they were bad.

Leon rose up from his chair and, bottle in hand, went outside. Between the swaying limbs of trees he could see a light on across the street. He went toward it, sidling a bit to the left of straight, unaccustomed as he was to heavy drink. But he felt like a new man, or at least a man, and staggered right up the steps and in the front door.

He knew the layout of the house from visits he’d paid to previous tenants. The rooms had hardwood floors and were sparsely furnished and his footsteps seemed to drum out. He swilled more liquor and dribbled some down his chin and onto the nice shirt that was already stained by blood, so what the hell.

A narrow hallway led past the john and that’s where he heard her. She was in there tootin’ and turnin’ pages.

The door was open a crack and there she sat on the commode looking at the fashion pictures in an old waterstained
Cosmo
.

He shoved the door open and her eyes turned to him, and with the Fighting Cock in his hand he pointed at her. He said, “Wanda, you put me face-to-face with death tonight. You put me in a horrible place.” He burped and wobbled. “My quick thinkin’ saved
you
. For the moment.”

“Is that so?” Wanda said. “By the time I wipe my ass you better have done some more quick thinkin’, Leon.
Boy
.”

Instinctively courteous, Leon turned his back and listened to the toilet paper roll on the spindle. Then, after the flush, he said, “Shuggie Zeck is gonna kill you deader’n Elvis.”

“What?” she said. She squeezed past him and walked toward the kitchen, her face hot and her step panicky. “Leon, why would he…”

“Because you’re guilty.” She stood by the wall and he sat at the table. He shoved empty cans off the tabletop, pinging them to the floor, and set the bottle down. “That’s a plain, plain fact, Wanda. You’re guilty as hell.” He stared at her feet, chin on his chest. “But I ain’t givin’ up on you yet. Not just yet.”

Wanda went to the sink and turned on the cold water. She held her head under the tap trying to cool her brain, for cool thinking was called for here. When her head was thoroughly soaked she stood erect and
swept her red hair straight up and back, using her fingers as a comb, and fashioned a dripping, jumbo pompadour.

Then she sat at the table, and said, “You better tell me all about it.”

The Wing was driving slowly and hee-hawing in the car toward Holiday Beach. Though the turnoff was clearly marked they’d missed it twice. Dean Pugh drove, Cecil Byrne rode shotgun and Emil Jadick sat in the back. They were riding high, feeling strong, frequently comparing themselves to fantastic miscreants of the past. Several tortured parallels had been drawn between themselves and The James Gang, Dillinger, Lieutenant Calley, E. F. Hutton and Al Capone.

When Pugh turned down the road to the beach he punched the lights off. He hunched toward the windshield, following the road as nearly as he could.

“You know,” he said, “I’m glad we’re flippin’ off the mob here. In a special sort of way it makes me feel good, flippin’ off the mob.”

“This is a mob,” Jadick said, “but not the dago mob.”

“This is a peckerwood mob,” Dean said, “but it
is
a mob.”

“Sure it’s a mob,” Jadick said. “But flippin’ off the dago mob is where we’ll come into the real,
real
money.”

“I always stood aside from them,” Cecil offered. “The Mafia, I mean.”

Jadick made a sarcastic bodily sound.

“Fuck the Mafia,” he said. “The Mafia is just all these short tubby greasers who wouldn’t last a week on The Yard if you didn’t know their friends on the outside would kill your whole family.”

“I was in Marion when Roy-Roy Drucci was,” Dean said. “He was only about yea tall and plump, and one time this big nigger named Blue went after him.” Dean shook his head. “Roy-Roy chopped big bad Blue down like he was a weed, man. Took a wood chisel to his head, skinned him like a turnip. Sort of awesome, really.”

“All right, all right,” Jadick said tartly. “I didn’t mean none of them was rough, just in general.”

Pugh put on the brakes. He pointed down the road a ways, and said, “Is that the lights? Is that it?”

And they all leaned forward and peered out the windshield and something came roaring up beside them.

The squad car was all smoked up when Officer Tommy Mouton said, “Hey, look.”

“See lights?” Shuggie asked.

“No, but there’s a dark shape on the road, movin’ slow this way.”

“Lock and load,” Shuggie said. “We own ’em.”

The slow-moving shape was opaque and humped, grumbling on the gravel. Despite the snitching glow of moonlight, the dark car felt its way down the road, right past the black and white. When it was but a few lengths beyond the ambush, Shuggie said, “Let’s straighten ’em out,” and Mouton fired the engine and whipped up alongside The Wingmen. When Shuggie was abreast of Pugh and Byrne, Mouton flashed the spotlight in their faces, and their expressions of surprise were superb, authentically loose-jawed with eyes stunned wide, and fatal, for that long elastic second of shock allowed Shuggie to aim.

By no design other than sheer opportunity, Shuggie saved both Pugh and Byrne from a period of bereavement, for he saw to it that they died together. With just one pull on the twin-triggered blaster he shredded them in tandem, the spotlight illuming their corporeal dispersal against the dash and windshield. And now, rudderless, The Wing mobile oozed off the graveled road and went nose-down in a shallow gully, slamming the grill against a ripple of earth.

The jolt hurled Jadick against the front seat, pounding the air from his lungs. Without time for a good breath, he acted. He climbed wheezing over the seat, sliding down on the fabric chummed with his gang. There was stench from sphincter release and blood and it was on his arms and he opened the door on the driver’s side and shoved Dean Pugh from the car and the body flopped under the wheel, but Jadick slammed the shifter to R and backed over it and up the gully.

The spotlight was swinging around as the squad car pulled a U-turn and this soured any chance for secrecy as it beamed on Jadick. He flipped on his own headlights but couldn’t see through the crimson
muck on the windshield so he wiped a peephole clear and tromped the gas. The shotgun sounded again and metal tore, but the only hope was flight.

The road was fairly straight and Jadick took it fast, grinding the gravel beneath his wheels, billowing a dust trail. Where the road met the highway there was an antique store with a streetlight near it and Jadick swung wide through the parking lot, beneath the light, and he saw Cecil Byrne in a wad on the floorboard, his head a frayed mop, and a glance in the rearview told him that his current problems drove a St. Bruno police car. And he slid back onto the two-way blacktop and screamed a great, thick-necked, tendon-stretching cry, for he instantly understood just how potent Mr. Beaurain’s “protection” was in this chitlin’ city.

He picked up Pugh’s pistol from the seat beside him and sent a forlorn shot in the other direction.

Foot to floorboard he raced toward town, recognizing all too clearly, but not at all sadly, that he was in yet another of those life crises where the odds for success were the ubiquitous slim and none.

When he was a few hundred yards from the turnoff to Wanda’s the rear window shattered. Much to his own surprise he freaked at this, and warm piss ran down his leg.

They were on him. Aiming, he could see. Ready to shred the final Wingman, and he leaned hard on the steering wheel and flew the car off the low bank of the road, and into the bayou.

He bailed out as the car sank to its wheels, for the water here was not deep, and the squad car squealed to a stop. As the spotlight spun on its swivel and beamed on the wet surface, he submerged.

And with each underwater stroke there was a chant in his brain. It went—Set up. Set up. Set up.

17

S
HADE WAS
rediscovering all sorts of old skills this night, and as he crept along the narrow walk that ran behind Wanda’s house to the back porch he utilized the style of stealth that he’d learned at age twelve when it came to his attention that Connie Pelligrini’s knockout momma liked to take her evening bath with the curtains parted in hopes of a breeze. He edged along the brick walkway, inches from the bayou, then quietly went up the steps to the porch. At window height he paused and looked into the kitchen. There was a man in rustic finery and snakeskin boots bent over the sink, retching. An open suitcase sat on the table and every few seconds the bricktop beauty came whirling over to it and stuffed something in.

Despite the myriad night sounds Shade could hear Wanda saying “Oh, no,” with every trip to the suitcase, and the retching man came across loud and clear. Shade was waiting to check for more people in the house before making an entry, and he had leaned against the porch door, settling in, when a splash sounded behind him. Then dripping sounds. He heard a breath, and when he turned toward it he looked down a pistol barrel that was backed up by a stocky, swamp-scented creature who said, “One of Mr. B.’s boys, I presume.”