The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (36 page)

“Me? No, no.”

“No, no?” Jadick patted Shade down and removed the pistol from his belt holster. “These things are dangerous. You a hitter for Mr. B., huh?”

“No,” Shade said. “Ronnie, man. Don’t bust that cap on me, man. Come on, I’m a friend of Ronnie’s.”

Jadick pushed the barrel against Shade’s nose.

“A friend, huh? That’s interesting.”

Mud and leaves and mossy hairs were stuck on Jadick. His eyes seemed to be glowing spots in a bucket of primordial ooze.

“Up the stairs,” he said. “In we go.”

Shade opened the screen door and stepped onto the porch. A pistol bumped against the back of his head. At the kitchen door he was belted on the neck, then shoved to the floor. As he skidded across the linoleum, Jadick said, “Set another plate, pun-kin. We got company.”

Wanda was frozen, bent over the suitcase, her lower lip covering the upper, a long black dress dangling from her hand.

“What’s that?” Jadick asked, waving pistols in both hands.

“Oh, man, it’s my good dress.”

“Not that. The suitcase. What’s with the suitcase?”

“I’m packin’, Emil.”

“So I see.” He gestured at Shade. “I don’t know who this guy is, but he was scopin’ you through the window. I don’t know who the other guy is, either, but I’m pretty sure you’ll have an explanation.”

Wanda turned and dropped the dress into the suitcase. She swept her hands back and across her jumbo pompadour, looking like a very showy juvenile delinquent from a gone era.

“Oh, Emil. Emil. I got scared. Man, I just started to shake, I didn’t know what to think.”

Jadick walked past Shade and over to the counter. He plugged the deep-fat fryer into the wall socket. “I’m hungry,” he said. “I can’t wait. You southern coozes, you don’t think it’s food if it ain’t fried, do you? Huh? Travel has broadened me.” As he walked past Shade again he bashed him above the eye.

Shade felt the skin part, as the barrel broke open an old boxing scar. Instinctively he reached out, only to be hit on the ear. He fell dizzily back against the wall. Shade tried to focus his eyes, but the right orb was awash in his own blood. The eyeball seemed to slide. This was an old ring sensation, partial blindness was, and the haunted rules of the
past came pointlessly to mind: get on one knee; take an eight count; cover up. Shade slumped sideways.

“Something about him unsettles me,” Jadick said. He then gestured at Leon who was curled over the sink. “Hey, you. Yeah, you. Get on the floor with Droopy, here.” When Leon had obeyed and sat beside Shade, Jadick said, “So, pun-kin, what
was
it that got you so scared?”

“I realized it was true,” she said. She shrugged her shoulders slowly and looked down. “I loved
you
, man. I loved you more than Ronnie, and like the thought scared me.”

“Aw, Wanda,” Jadick said wistfully, “I know some things about
love
, and what you did to me ain’t it.” He shook his head, mud clumps and twigs falling from his hair. “It ain’t even close. You set me up.”

“What? No, man!”

“Sure you did. Dean and Cecil are dead now.” He nodded at her several times. “That part of your plan worked fine.”

“I can’t believe this,” Wanda said.

“You can’t believe I ain’t dead is what you mean.” He swiveled and aimed pistols at both of the men on the floor. “So, which one of these guys is your boyfriend?”

“You’re my boyfriend.”

“No. You’re a tramp. You set me up.”

Wanda’s fingers pulled her T-shirt taut, and she turned partly sideways, and breathed very deeply.

“You got a stigma in your mind on me, Emil. I never set you up.”

The fryer began to give off faint simmering sounds in the background.

“I was open with you, Wanda. I was revealing of myself. You’ve come to sort of know me, ain’t you? That’s what you used to set me up.”

Dizzy on the floor, Shade put his palms to the linoleum to steady himself. Jadick’s blows reverberated through his head, causing his thoughts to meander. He closed his right eye and focused with the left, gaining a lopsided view of things. The man next to him stank of bourbon-based vomit, and on the counter grease sizzled, and standing
in a shadow the bricktop beauty was engaged in a menacing minuet with what appeared to be the Missing Link.

Jadick said, “Get out some eggs and cornmeal, Miz Bouvier.”

“Huh?”

“Eggs and cornmeal, pun-kin. I want that golden batter. It’s the truth I’m after, and I’m gonna fry your fingers to get it out of you.”

The kitchen was lit by a single bare light bulb. Shade felt suddenly alert as he watched what was happening in the shadows around the edges of the room. Thus lit, the whole room, and every gesture made in it, had a quality of the surreal.

Wanda stepped backward into the light. The pink drained from her face. Her hands came up to her chest, palms out.

“Man, you’re serious.” She breathed hard and fast. “You’ll kill me, won’t you?”

“You know I would,” Jadick said. “That’s why you were packin’.”

“Oh, man. I didn’t cross you.”

Leon Roe had puked himself nearly sober. He squatted on the floor, his legs crossed beneath him, his shirtfront soiled a couple of different ways. In his head one of his dreams was being run. Leon’s secret dream was the lurid, darkly lit one, wherein a decent but necessarily dangerous lad had lived the sordid, stray tom life, being no better than he oughta be and often worse, especially where heartbreaking was concerned, until his prowling led him to the back door of an ivory-skinned, clear-eyed earth angel and he unexpectedly succumbed to love and reformation. In the third reel of this tear-drizzler the ex-scoundrel was ratpacked by circumstances and forced to employ various skills from his unsavory past to safeguard the fair lady, her crippled brother, and, in some versions, The American Way itself.

With this dream playing continuously in his mind, Leon began to conjure solutions to the problems of the prettiest girl in Frogtown.

Across the room, Jadick stood before the open doorway of the refrigerator. He turned and shoved a carton of eggs down the counter. He reached to the telephone that hung nearby, and tore it from the wall.

“No help from that quarter,” he said, as the phone slammed to the floor. “Get an egg in your hand.”

Tears were thinly pouring from Wanda’s eyes, and tears were strange to her, but she opened the carton and extracted an egg. It was a brown-shelled egg and she held it in her fist, her face down.

“Squeeze,” Jadick said.

As she squeezed the egg and the yolk gooed between her clenched fingers, Wanda reached the last ditch and said, “Emil, don’t hurt me—I’m with child.”

“You’re what?”

“I’m carryin’ your baby, man. I’m pregnant by you.”

“How could you know that?” Jadick’s head shook sternly. “I only been humpin’ you a week, how would you know you’re knocked up?”

Wanda brought both hands to her lower stomach and clasped them, yolk and shells falling to the floor.

“A woman can tell these things. Emil, a woman just
knows
sometimes. I felt it when you fucked me.”

“Let me feel of it,” Jadick said. He advanced on her and touched the barrels of both pistols to her tummy. “That’s where the little critter is?” he asked.

“I know it is,” she said. “I know it is.”

“Huh,” he said, then slammed a pistol butt to her belly. As she slumped to her knees, he said, “Welcome to Daddy’s world.”

Reviving from his tearjerker dream, Leon embarked on an act of solo bravado, and sprang forward and grabbed Jadick at the knees and pulled him to the floor. Jadick banged him on the head with the pistol then rolled away from him.

Then he shot the rockabilly boy in the stomach.

And Wanda reacted despite the pain in her gut, and raised up and swept the hissing fat fryer off of the counter and onto Emil’s mid-section.

The pain caused The Wingman to drop both pistols and scream, his eyes rolling back in his head.

Wanda stood, transfixed by the steaming man below her, and the gut-shot man across the floor.

Shade knew good fortune when he saw it and rose to his feet, then retrieved his pistol. Jadick was going into shock, his voice locked in a steady, monotonous, “Uhhhh…” A pool of grease smoldered on and around Jadick’s legs and hands. Burning flesh scented the room.

Shade straddled Jadick’s shoulders, wiping the blood back from his own eyes. He leaned over the prone man, the man he’d been told to hit, cocked his pistol, put the muzzle near the forehead, then, for reasons he would long wonder about, he did not shoot. He eased the hammer down, and stepped back.

“Oh, man,” Wanda shrieked. “Who are
you?
Do I know you, man? Oh, man, tell me, who the fuck are
you?
”

His thoughts were still fuzzy around the edges, but Shade said, “As much good luck as you could ask for.” He gestured at the two men on the floor.

“They might make it. Help me get them to the car.”

But Wanda Bone Bouvier just stood there, stalled by the crimson events, until Shade spun her about and kicked her hard on the ass, the jolt bouncing her against the kitchen sink.

“Help me get them to the car!”

18

I
THINK
Leon’s dead,” Wanda Bone Bouvier said from the backseat. She sat between the two wounded men, smeared with gore from fingertips to forehead. “Oh, man, he’s dead.”

Shade was driving, trying to see through the film of his own blood running into his right eye, his right hand held to the rip in his brow, attempting to divert the flow.

“Which one’s Leon?”

“The boy. Man,” she said, her voice hitting awkward, brittle notes, “Leon is the boy.”

Jadick was in shock, his hands blistered rare, eyes rolling in his head.

“We’ll be at St. Joe’s in a minute,” Shade said. Pain and blood and punishment; he knew these things, he had no confusion when confronted with them. “I’m a cop,” he said, “in case you’re too fuckin’ stupid to know that.”

“Oh, man, my life has turned out just like Momma said it would—a screamin’ mess of shit. She said that to me, way back in time.”

That’s when the cherrytop appeared in the rearview mirror, the light revolving, stabbing beams of red into the car. He watched the redness infuse Wanda’s face, which had suddenly become still.

“Zeck,” he said under his breath, certain somehow that Shuggie was behind him now. “Mouton.”

Leon the dead boy lay with his head on Wanda’s shoulder. She moved him away and turned to look out the rear window.

“Oh, man, it’s him—it’s Shuggie Zeck!” Her voice came out in a flat whine. “Oh, man, oh, man, oh, man.”

Shade punched the gas pedal and the blue Nova shot forward. The wheels skimmed over the hard cobblestone street, sounding like a jet distant in the clouds. He turned hard left up Voltaire Street.

Wanda lurched forward and clutched at his shoulder blades, her fingernails biting in. “You can’t give me up to Shuggie, man. You can’t do that! He’ll turn me inside out!” That close she had a strong metallic odor of blood and fear-laced sweat and some lingering jasminy perfume. “You gotta promise! You gotta—”

“Shut up!” He stole a look into the rearview mirror. “Sit back and keep your fucking head down.”

His mind shifted into another gear where action came independent of precise thought. He floated the car over a blacktopped rise in the road, then turned into a used-car lot, cutting toward the alley. It was Laughlin’s Car Lot. A part of the neighborhood. He and Shuggie, here at night after seeing
Love Me Tender
at The Strand, hair slicked into a duckass, and they’d been jamming an unwound wire hanger through the window seal of a highly coveted ’57 Chevy, yearning to cruise the backroads with the wind in their hair, when Laughlin himself had fired a shot over their heads, and strong young legs had carried them to safety. And Shade’s thoughts that night and this had centered on the issue of bad companions, bad choices, and questionable self. To be alive, alive to the bone, is to make mistakes, but to stay alive you must learn from them. Then and now.

Shade’s Nova was small and light and overhorsed and it maneuvered easily through the maze of parked cars. Wanda’s sobs and invitations to the deity to save her were constant background noise. He pulled onto Second Street, going the opposite way, and her voice pitched higher as they jolted over the curb. The patrol car was still on him, right there, behind by a few lengths. St. Joe’s Hospital was in sight, a tall pale stone building that rose into view just beyond the dark brick of St. Peter’s.

Would they dare make a hit in front of the hospital?

From the backseat Wanda wailed, “Those cops will blow me away! Look, look, you can’t—”

“Shut up!”

Shade shook the steering wheel, surprised by the frantic heat of his own voice.

The tires squealed musically as he swerved around a corner on Second Street. The sky was lightening and there was some traffic farther up the street. The street itself, with its bumps and holes, formed a useless kind of jolting litany. Memory has a rhythm all its own, and Shade’s lips moved soundlessly as his mind flashed back on the mournful quality of a certain rainy afternoon when they’d fought on a sandbar below the highway bridge, but he couldn’t remember why… and the warm expansiveness of a spring evening when their feet clapped down this street, this very street, outrunning Father Geoghegan who’d made an irresistible target for their peashooters. Memories came one after another, like the ruby beads on his rosary which he’d once known how to use. And all the time Shade could hear a bubbling, gurgling sound from the wounded man, Jadick, in the backseat, like a fish drowning in air.

There was a shortcut through the church parking lot that he’d used all his life, especially after having learned to drive. By following it youths could fashion a circular racing track without resorting to an actual road. Many scores had been settled here and many grudges born.

Shade wheeled into the church parking lot, instinctively taking the path he’d used so many times before. He swung past the jungle gyms and the swings with crooked seats. He raced toward the alley behind the dumpster, between the church and rectory, hoping to put distance between himself and the pursuing red light. He was well into the alley when he saw that a line of cement posts now barricaded the passageway. For a brief moment the posts seemed unreal to Shade, they didn’t belong to the landscape that he knew and his mind rebelled. The loud scream of his brakes brought him to. The Nova fishtailed as it came to a halt.