The Neon Rain (16 page)

“I like you a great deal.”

She sat back down on the couch and leaned her face close to mine.

“Loving somebody is being there when nobody else is. When it’s not even a choice. You should understand that, Dave,” she said. She bent and kissed me lightly on the mouth.

She was beautiful to look at, and her skin was smooth and warm and I could smell the sun and a perfume like the scent of four-o’clocks in her hair. She kissed me again and blew her breath on the side of my face and slipped her arms around my neck and pressed her breasts tight against me. I sat up on the side of the couch and took off my trousers; then she pressed me back into the cushions, raised herself up on her knees, and with her hand guided me inside her. Her eyes closed, she moaned and her mouth opened wide, and she leaned down over me on her arms with her breasts close to my face. She had ignored all my anger—no, my self-pity—and I felt humbled and dizzy and physically weak when I looked up into the electric blueness of her eyes.

There was a strawberry birthmark on her right breast, and it seemed to grow darker and fill with blood as her breathing became more rapid. I felt her warmth drawing me into her, felt her wet palms slip under me, felt her thighs flex and tighten around me, then her hands held my face and my heart twisted in my chest and I felt an aching hardness crest inside of me and burst apart like a heavy stone ripping loose in a rushing streambed.

“Oh, you fine man,” she said, and brushed the drops of sweat out of my eyes with her fingers, her body still shaking.

She fell asleep next to me, and I covered her with a sheet from the bedroom. The moon was out now, and the light through the glass made her curly blond hair look like it was touched with silver. Just the edge of her strawberry birthmark showed above the sheet.

I knew I was very fortunate to have a girl like this. But the great nemesis of the gambler is that he’s never satisfied with just winning the daily double; he’ll reinvest his winnings in every race remaining that afternoon, and if he’s still ahead when the window closes on the last race, he’ll be at the dog track that night and stay with it until he loses everything.

I didn’t have a parimutuel window handy, so I left Annie asleep and started walking down the lakefront toward Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park. The wind had picked up and the waves were cresting against the hard-packed sand of the beach and the palm fronds were rattling dryly against the darkening sky. By the time I reached the amusement park the air was cool and filled with flying grains of sand and smelled of the gale blowing out of the south. Most of the rides were closed, with tarpaulins stretched over them to protect them from the coming rain, and the red neon signs over the empty funhouse looked like electrified blood in the sky.

But I found what I had been looking for all day.

“A double Jack Daniel’s with a Pearl draft on the side,” I told the bartender.

“You look like you already lost a fight to a chainsaw, buddy,” he said.

“You ought to see the chainsaw,” I said.

But it was a dark, cheerless place, not given to either humor or protocol, and the bartender poured silently into my shot glass.

SEVEN

At five o’clock the next morning the eastern sky was gray and pink beyond the tree line on the far side of the Mississippi. I was in an all-night bar set back from old Highway 90 under the long, black, looming expanse of the Huey Long Bridge. Mist hung in clouds on the river’s surface and around the brush-choked pilings of the bridge; the air itself seemed to drip with moisture, and the shale rock in the parking lot glistened with a dull shine as the pinkness of the sun spread along the earth’s rim.

A bus loaded with carnival and circus people from Sarasota, Florida, had broken down on the highway, and the bar and the café counter were crowded with a strange collection of roustabouts, acrobats, and sideshow performers. I sat at a table with the Crocodile Boy, the Pencil Man, and a dwarf named Little Mack. The Pencil Man had arms and legs that were so thin and sort that they looked as though all the bone had been surgically removed from them, like rubbery snakes attached to his torso, which in itself could not have been much greater in circumference than a telephone pole. His kinky red hair was waxed and brushed into a conk so that it resembled a pencil eraser. The skin of the Crocodile Boy was covered with hard black bumps like barnacles, and his teeth looked as if they had been filed to points. In rotating order he sipped from his muscatel wine, chased it with beer, smoked a cigar, and ate out of a bowl of pickled hogs’ feet. Little Mack sat next to me, his tiny feet not able to touch the floor, his elongated jug face filled with concern at my situation.

I looked at the long-distance number I had written on a damp napkin. My head was filled with a steady buzzing sound, like a neon short circuit.

“You shouldn’t call those CIA people again, Lieutenant,” Little Mack said in his high-pitched mechanical voice. “They’re the ones tied in with those UFOs. We saw one once in the desert outside of Needles, California. It was glowing green and orange and it streaked over the top of the bus at maybe a thousand miles an hour. The next day the paper said a bunch of cows on a ranch were all mangled up. Maybe those UFO guys were trying to take some food on board.”

“That could be,” I said, and I motioned to the bartender to bring us two more shots of Jack Daniel’s.

“The government will mess you up,” the Pencil Man said. “Each time you have contact with a government agency, it creates a piece of paper on you. There’s people that’s got whole rooms of paper on their lives. I don’t have any, not even a birth certificate. My mother squatted down just long enough to squirt me out in the back of a boxcar. I been moving ever since. I never had a social security card, a driver’s license, a draft card. I never filed an in-come tax return. You let them get papers on you and they’ll jerk you around.”

“You guys are my kind of situational philosophers,” I said.

“What’s that?” the Crocodile Boy asked. He had stopped eating a hog’s knuckle, and his narrow green eyes were curious and perplexed.

“You deal with the action on your own terms, whether it’s a UFO or a bunch of government buttholes. Right?” I said.

“Have you seen a UFO?” Little Mack asked.

“I’ve heard reports on them,” I said.

I poured my jigger of whiskey into my beer glass, drank it down, then looked at the telephone number on the napkin again. I raked my change off the table into my palm and started toward the pay phone on the wall.

“Lieutenant, don’t use dirty words to anyone this time,” Little Mack said. “I read a story once they even put poison inside a guy’s condom.”

I called the number in McLean, Virginia, and asked for a duty officer. My ear felt thick and wooden against the phone receiver. I tried to focus my eyes through the front window on the clouds of steam rising off the river in the soft light. The neon buzz in my head wouldn’t stop. Finally the voice of an annoyed man came on the line.

“Who’s this?” I asked.

“The same guy you were talking to a half hour ago.”

“Then put somebody else on.”

“I’m all you get, pal.”

“Tell me your name so I can look you up sometime.”

“Let me give you the facts of life, Lieutenant. We traced your call, we know what bar you’re in, we ran your sheet, we know everything about you. If you weren’t such a pathetic asshole, I’d have your own people pick you up.”

“All right, try this with your morning coffee, motherfucker. I’m the loose cannon on your deck and I’m going to leave blood and shit all over the gunwales.”

“If you didn’t have the alcoholic titty in your mouth, I might even take you seriously. Call here one more time and you’re going to be sitting in your own drunk tank.”

The line went dead. When I lowered the receiver from my ear, the side of my face felt numb, as though I had been slapped with a thick hand.

“What’s the matter? Your face don’t look good,” Little Mack said.

“We need some more drinks,” I said.

“They threaten to assassinate you or something? The cocksuckers. You ever read
The Black Star
? There was a story about how the CIA used these Nazi scientists to make clones from Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, then they killed the clones when they couldn’t use them to spy anymore. I think they got the idea from this show about these seed-pod people taking over the earth. They put a seed pod under your bed, and when you go to sleep the pod sucks out all your ectoplasm and turns you into a dry shell that just blows away in the wind… Where you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“Better sit down, get something to eat,” the Pencil Man said. “You can ride with us when the bus is fixed.”

“Thanks, I need to walk. This last round is on me.”

But when I opened my wallet I had no money.

“You all right, Lieutenant?” Little Mack asked.

“Sure.”

“I mean, you’re listing pretty bad,” he said.

“I’m okay.”

“You got to be careful out there in the fog and all,” he said. “There’s crazy people on the highway, drunks and such. You going to be safe?”

“Sure,” I said. “Believe me.”

I started walking in the gray dawn toward the shining black outline of the Huey Long Bridge. I could hear car tires whir on the steel grid of the bridge. The air was cool and damp and smelled of the wet earth along the river-banks. I began the long walk up toward the apex of the bridge, my breath coming hard in my throat, my heart swelling with exertion. Far down below in the dark waters, a Standard Oil barge was headed north to the refineries in Baton Rouge. The spires, cables, and girders of the bridge seemed to sing and whip and groan in the wind. Then the sun broke through the clouds in a yellow ball, flooding the bridge with light, and for some reason I saw deep down in my mind a black cluster of jungle birds rise clattering into a hot tropical sky.

Late that afternoon I sat under an umbrella on the deck of my houseboat and tried to mend my day and mind back together with a bottle of Jax. I wasn’t having much luck. The sun reflected off the water and struck my eyes like broken shards from a mirror. I wanted to call Annie and apologize, but how do you explain that your craving for alcohol can be stronger than your need for someone’s love? And in truth, at that moment I didn’t have either the courage or the energy to face my own irresponsibility and weakness. Instead, I brooded on the relativity of time, the stark realization that no amount of years could successfully separate me from my nightmarish alcoholic past, that Philip Murphy’s cocktail had launched me totally back into a surreal world where the dragons and monsters frolicked.

I also brooded on my drowned father and wondered what he would have done in my situation. He was a big, powerful man, a dark laughing Cajun with white teeth and turquoise eyes who had been raised on
boudin, cush-cush
, and garfish balls. He had been a fur trapper on Marsh Island and a derrick man on oil rigs, working high up on the monkey board, and he had done his best to take care of Jimmie and me after my mother ran away with a
bourée
dealer from Morgan City. But when he was out of work he drank hard and sometimes brawled in bars and got thrown in the parish jail; the white streak in Jimmie’s and my hair was caused by a vitamin deficiency associated with malnutrition. However, during those bad times he could be imaginative and kind in ways that we would never forget. On a Halloween evening, when the pecan trees stood full and black against the orange sky, he would come home with carved pumpkins, chopped lengths of sugar cane, and blocks of hot gingerbread, or at our birthday breakfasts we would find by our plates of
cush-cush
and
boudin
a dozen Civil War minié balls or rose quartz Indian arrowheads, and one time a rusty Confederate revolver he had dug out of the bank on Bayou Teche.

He usually spoke to us in French, and he entertained us for years with an endless number of admonitions, observations, and folk stories that he said he’d learned from his father but that I think he made up as the situation demanded. An English paraphrase of a few:

• Never do anything you don’t want to, you.
  
• If everybody agrees upon it, it’s got to be wrong.
  
• Rather than the eagle, the crawfish should be the symbol of the United States. If you put an eagle on a rail road track and a train comes along, what’s that eagle going to do? He’s going to fly, him. But you put a crawfish on that railroad track and what’s he going to do? He’s going to put up his claws to stop that train, him.
  

But there was a piece of serious advice that he used to give us, and I could almost hear him whispering it to me now from below the green depths far out in the Gulf: When you’ve hunted through the whole marsh for the bull ‘gator that ate your hog and you come up empty, go back where you started and commence again. You walked right over him.

A cop had never been given a better suggestion.

I slept through the rest of the afternoon and woke in the cooling dusk when the cicadas were loud in the purple haze and the fireflies were lighting in the trees. I showered and felt some of the misery begin to go out of my mind and body, then I took a taxi to the Hertz agency and rented a small Ford.

Because most of the Quarter was closed to automobile traffic at night, I parked the car near the French Market, by the river, and walked back to Bourbon. The street was loud with music from the bars and strip houses, and the sidewalks were filled with tourists, drunks, and street people who were trying to hold on to their last little piece of American geography. My favorite bunch of hustlers and scam artists, the black sidewalk tap dancers, were out in force. They wore enormous iron taps that clipped onto their shoes, and when they danced to the music from the bars, their feet rang on the concrete like horseshoes. A tap dancer would stop a tourist, rivet him in the eyes, and say, “I bet you a half-dollar I can tell you where you got yo’ shoes.” If the tourist accepted the wager, the dancer would then say, “You got yo’ shoes on yo’ feet, and yo’ feet is on Bourbon Street. You ain’t the kind, now, to back out on yo’ bet, is you?”