And at the end of every day Beau returned home to his new wife, Bethany. She still knew him only as Beau James, the man he was, and not the man he had been.
James Lee Burke
THE WILD SIDE OF LIFE
from The Southern Review
The club where the oil-field people hung out was called the Hungry Gator. It stood on pilings by a long green humped levee in the Atchafalaya Basin, a gigantic stretch of bayous and quicksand and brackish bays and flooded cypress and tupelos that looked like a forgotten piece of Creation before fish worked their way up on the land and formed feet. There were no clocks inside the Gator, no last names, sometimes not even first ones, just initials. By choice most of us lived on the rim. Of everything. Get my drift?
I liked the rim. You could pretend there was no before or after; there was just now, a deadness in the sky on a summer evening, maybe a solitary black cloud breaking apart like ink in clear water, while thousands of tree frogs sang. It was a place I didn’t have to make comparisons or study on dreams and memories that would come flickering behind my eyelids five seconds into sleep.
I worked on a seismograph rig, ten days on and five days off; on land, I sometimes played drums and mandolin at the club and even did a few vocals. My big pleasure was looking at the girls from the bandstand, secretly thinking of myself as their protector, a guy who’d been around but didn’t try to use people. The truth is I was a mess with women and about as clever in a social situation as the scribbles on the washroom wall.
I’d blank out in the middle of conversations. Or go away someplace inside my head and not get back for a few hours. People thought it was because I was at Pork Chop Hill. Not so. I was never ashamed of what we did at Pork Chop.
I was thinking on this and half in the bag when a woman at the bar touched my cheek and looked at me in a sad way, probably because she was half jacked on flak juice too, even though it was only two in the afternoon. “You got that in Korea?” she said.
“My daddy made whiskey,” I replied. “Stills blow up sometimes.”
Her eyes floated away from me. “You don’t have to act smart.”
I tried to grin, the scarred skin below my eye crinkling. “It wasn’t a big deal. On my face it’s probably an improvement.”
She gazed at herself in the mirror behind the liquor counter. I waited for her to speak, but she didn’t.
“Buy you a drink?” I said.
She lifted her left hand so I could see her ring. “He’s nothing to brag on, but he’s the only one I got.”
“I admire principle,” I said.
“That’s why you hang out in here?”
“There’s worse.”
“Where?”
I didn’t have an answer. She picked the cherry out of her vodka collins and sucked on it. “It’s not polite to stare.”
“Sorry.”
“I get the blues, that’s all,” she said.
“I know what you mean,” I replied.
I couldn’t tell if she heard me or not. Kitty Wells was singing on the jukebox.
“Will you dance with me?” I said.
“Another time.”
Through the screen door the sun was bright and hot, and heat waves were bouncing on the bay. The electric fan on the wall feathered her hair against her cheeks. She had a sweet face and amber eyes, with a shine in them like beer glass. There was no pack of cigarettes or an ashtray in front of her. She bent slightly forward, and I saw the shine on the tops of her breasts. I didn’t think it was intentional on her part.
“I played piano for Ernie Suarez and Warren Storm at the Top Hat in Lafayette,” she said.
“Looking for a job?”
“My husband doesn’t like me hanging in juke joints.”
“What’s he do?”
“He comes and goes.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Not what you’re thinking. He flies a plane out to the rigs.”
“How’d you know I was in Korea?”
“The bartender.”
Her face colored, as though she realized I knew she’d been asking about me. “My name is Loreen Walters.”
“How you do, Miss Loreen?”
“Where’d you get the accent?” she asked.
“East Kentucky.”
She put her wallet in her drawstring bag. The leather was braided around the edges and incised with a rearing horse ridden by a naked woman. It was a strange wallet for a woman to carry. I glanced at Loreen. She seemed to be one of those people whose faces change constantly in the light, so you never know who they actually are.
“Are you fixing to leave?” I said.
“There’s nothing wrong in talking, is there?” she said.
“No, ma’am, not at all.”
I could see myself close to her, next to the jukebox, my face buried in her hair, breathing her perfume and the coolness of her skin. I felt my throat catch.
“Then, again, why borrow trouble?” she said. “See you, sweetie. Look me up in our next incarnation. Far as I’m concerned, this one stinks.”
I went back on my seismograph barge early the next day. The sun was red and streaked with dust blowing out of the cane fields, the steel plates on the pilothouse dripping with drops of moisture as big as silver dollars.
The lowest and hardest job in the oil business was building board roads through swamps and marshland; the second lowest was “doodlebugging,” stringing underwater cable off a jug boat, sometimes carrying it on a spool along with the seismic jugs through a flooded woods thick with cottonmouths and mosquitoes. We’d drop eighteen dynamite cans screwed end-to-end down a drill hole and teach the earth who was running things. The detonation was so great it jolted the barge on its pilings and blew fish as fat as logs to the surface and filled the air with a sulfurous yellow cloud that would burn the inside of your head if you breathed it.
Lizard was the driller. His skin looked like leather stretched on a skeleton. At age twenty he already had chain-gang scars on his ankles and whip marks from the Black Betty on his back. He whistled and sang while he worked, and bragged on his conquests in five-dollar brothels. I was jealous of his peace of mind. He knew about what happened on our drill site down in South America, but he slept like he’d just gotten it on with Esther Williams. I had nightmares that caused me to sit on the side of my bunk until the cook clanged the breakfast bell.
My first day back on the quarter boat, Lizard sat down across from me at supper. He speared a steak off the platter and scooped potatoes and poured milk gravy on it and sliced it up, and started eating like he was stuffing garbage down a drain hole. “Word to the wise, Elmore,” he said.
“What’s that, Lizard?” I asked.
“Don’t be milking through the wrong fence.”
“Who says I am?”
“Saw you with Miss Loreen at the Gator.”
“Then you didn’t see very much.”
He worked a piece of steak loose from his teeth. “Know who her old man is?”
“No, and I don’t care, because I haven’t done anything wrong,” I said.
“Except not listen to the wisdom of your betters.”
“How’d you like your food pushed in your face?”
“Where’s that shithole you grew up in?”
“The Upper South.”
“Much inbreeding thereabouts, retardation and such?”
My dreams were in Technicolor, full of murmurs and engine noise and occasionally the sundering of the earth. A man caught by a flamethrower makes a sound like a mewing kitten. A shower of potato mashers is preceded by the enemy clanging their grenades on their helmets before lobbing them into our foxholes. A toppling round becomes a hummingbird brushing by your ear. The canned dynamite we slide down our drill pipe kills big creatures stone dead and belly-up, somehow assuring us we are the dispatchers of death and not its recipient. Sometimes I heard a baby crying.