“I did it,” she says.
“Did what?”
“Called him.”
“Who?”
“What’s with you, Son?”
“Nothing’s with me.”
“Something’s with you.”
“Ty-D-Bol.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“O.K. Bar Number Two, Mamou.”
“Tokyo tumbler egg foo, to you.”
“Son, you asked me to find him, I did.”
I had no idea — well, some idea, but wasn’t happy about my disadvantages. The best thing to do was bluff, so I got her to repeat the information and got off the phone. It was a wall phone and somehow I nearly fell down hanging up, and would have had I missed the cradle. I straightened up and did not feel as drunk as I had, and I had a reasonable guess that this information regarded the man-myth Taurus, and that I’d called my mother during the deep passion storm of the early rising part of the drunk. I was in the late used-rag part now, where passion is an old fond friend you wish well. You trust he’s well but would be content never to see him again. But here I’d gone and made a date during the friskies. Mamou.
I sat back down and the bartender came over with a drink and swept the money out of the way and leaned over the bar with both arms — as if to straighten my tie, which I was not wearing — her hands coming in tenderly and slowly at my throat and sliding around my neck and lacing behind it, and she pulled me to her, hard, and kissed me, hard, full on the mouth, and turned her head forty-five degrees, serious. It was done with such energy I gave her energy back, and tried to give back what seemed the spirit of the thing. It’s just a kiss, do it well, she seemed to be saying. She let me go and I rocked back down on the four legs of the stool.
“Not bad,” she said.
“No,” I said.
She went back to her station and didn’t regard me much after that; some regulars came in and I knew we were over. It was an agreeable affair. Her hair — I grabbed her neck, too — was like bleached hemp, almost as coarse and stiff as shredded wheat, and felt very sturdy and good to the hands but nothing like hair. People were calling her Dotty.
By way of saying goodbye, I told her, over some of the regulars, which made me look nuttier than anything I’d done in there yet, I think, “Hey, Dotty, I’ve got to go. I’ve got a dog to feed.” It was as if I were Admiral Byrd saying, “Hey, I’ve got to go. I’ve got a pole to claim.” I said this to a group of explorers who had not yet begun their journeys. The entire bar paused and did a very discreet but palpable eye roll, except Dotty, who managed, unseen by anyone, to wink at me. It was the wink of one-kiss lovers, a salutation across all time between two people forever in love who had strained to do something mystifying to each other across a countertop. “Well,” I said when the eye roll had completed itself and I felt they were all embarrassed to have presumed Dotty would join them, and I wanted to say Hi-yo, Silver! as well, but did not, and left.
Outside, the mud and gloom had changed to something radically more Hallmark: it was all bright bayou and butterflies. At my car I had a shock: I did have a dog. There was a robust, gnashing Dalmatian in my car. There was a glimmer of history about this dog, which I sought to mollify with some Easy, boy, which he was having none of. St. Tammany Parish Animal Control Center. Had stopped thereat. Why? Because had stopped at Tulane Primate Research Center. Why? To see monkeys with wires coming out of their heads. Was not allowed to. Why? Probably because they had monkeys with monkeys coming out of their heads, which is why primate research centers are in swamps. This had pissed me off, so I stopped at dog pound down road to see what abuse they were up to. Not an animal nut, but even the name Primate Research Center gives me willies. So whip in dog pound, and first dog run has Dalmatian nearly breaks through chain-link to get me. This I remember vividly, standing now at my car wondering how to get in it: this very dog hitting the fence with force enough to bulge it in rhomboids of fur and bounce back, squinting very meanly and sideways at me, growl almost inaudible, saliva on galvanized wire.
“That ain’t no fire-station dog out there,” I said inside the place with some old-boy gusto and sawmill conviction, and a fellow chuckled, No, it ain’t, it was the pound guard dog, though, and I said I wanted it, and evidently I got it. I had got bad drunk and got a bad dog and called my bad mother and made a date to meet one of her bad lovers. I had torn a page, I believe the locution goes. All I could do now was buy some meat across the street and throw it in the backseat and drive and hope the dog did not bite me in the back of the head. I had gotten him in the car; it looked marginally tenable he’d let me in it now.
He did and we drove off. I named him My Inner Life. At the first pee stop My Inner Life ran off down a logging canal on a bayou named, as near as I can tell, Tennessee Williams. If it was not Tennessee Williams it was Joe Bourgeois, my map was considerably out of register. Up this same canal down which My Inner Life had disappeared shortly came loping toward me a giant nutria, bounding part beaver, part rat, with yellow incisors visible like a nine ball in its mouth. I could not get Louisiana. Huey Long and open-skulled monkeys and logging canals and South American rodents gamboling the land, and that land a weird admixture of ordinary South — landscaped colonial brick Farmers & Merchants Banks at crossroads where there appears no need for a bank, or for a crossroads, or for roads, and no farms are about — and unordinary South. The unordinary obtained when you found a canal named for a man named Joe Bourgeois or Tennessee Williams, take your pick. This canal here, in this swamp we ruined pulling oil out of it, and pulling logs out of it before that, let’s name it for John Doe — no, for that guy (queer, I think) who made that streetcar of ours, which no longer runs, I think, famous. Yes. Need him a canal. Somewhere out in the vast swamp before me could be an intersection of forgotten waterways called Dealey Plaza and Garrison Slough. I ran, a little ahead of the nutria, back to my car. There I found a receipt that indicated My Inner Life had had all his shots and was worm free and had cost forty-five dollars.
19
AT A JOINT CALLED the O.K. Bar No. 2 outside Mamou, I waited for my mother’s old lover, I think. I think it was the No. 2—perhaps I was in one of a chain of rough Cajun roadhouses (there was a great iron pan of crayfish for everyone, and I had some and was a stranger to no one’s discomfort) — and I think I waited for him, though it is possible he had been waiting for me, so smoothly and unceremoniously did he slide into the chair opposite me at some point. I had the feeling he’d been watching me.
There was immediately none of the big-brother directness, frontal elderliness, that I recall from our time before, but instead a kind of diffidence. He did not look so much at me as at the table between us, a little landscape of the lost lousy life: crayfish heads and beer in puddles. He put a crayfish head on his finger and moved it slightly, puppetlike.