The first musicians came in and set up their instruments on the bandstand. The Negro waiter took away my tray and brought me another beer, and I listened to the band tuning their guitars and adjusting the amplifiers. Bugs swam against the screen, trying to reach the light inside the porch, and as I ticked my fingernails against the glass and heard the musicians talking among themselves in their French accents, like on a hundred gigs I had played from Biloxi to Port Arthur, my mind began to fade through that bright drunken corridor to the one spot of insanity in my life, a return to the dream with all its strange distortions and awful questions that left me sweating in the middle of the night for two years at Angola.
We had picked up two weeks’ work at a club by the air base in Lake Charles. It was like most roadhouses along that part of Highway 90, a flat, low-ceilinged, ramshackle place built of clapboard and Montgomery Ward brick with a pink facade on the front and blue neons that advertised entertainment like Johnny and his Harmonicats. By ten o’clock the smoke always hung thickly against the ceiling, and the smell of the restrooms reached out to the edge of the dance floor. The crowd was made up of airmen from the base, tough kids with duck-tail and boogie haircuts, oil-field workers, people from a trailer court across the road, and sometimes the dangerous ones, who sat at the bar with their short sleeves turned up at the cuffs over their muscular arms, waiting to roll a homosexual or bust up anybody who would like to take his glance into the parking lot.
It was Saturday night, and because we didn’t play Sundays, we were getting loaded on the bandstand and blowing up weed behind the building between sets. By two in the morning our lead singer couldn’t remember the words to some of the songs, and he was faking it by putting his lips against the microphone and roaring out unintelligible sounds across the dance floor. I had my Dobro hung in a flat position like a steel across my stomach, with the strap pulled down tight against my arm, but when I slipped the bar up and down the frets, the marijuana singing in my head, I hit the nut and soundboard like a piece of loud slate and my finger picks were catching under the strings. One of the bad ones, who was sitting with a couple of prostitutes at the bar, kept returning to the bandstand to ask for “The Wild Side of Life.” His hands were large and square, the kind you see on pipeline fitters; the fingers on one hand were tattooed with the word LOVE, the fingers of the other with the word HATE. His shirt was bursting with a cruel, animal strength, and a line of sweat dripped out of his hairline and glistened brightly on his jawbone.
Our singer, Rafe Arceneaux, our one real tea head, nodded at him a couple of times when he came back for his song, but on the third time the man put his hand around Rafe’s ankle and squeezed just hard enough to show what he could do if he was serious.
“Hey, get fucked, man,” Rafe said. He kicked against the man’s grip and fell backward into the drums.
The people on the floor stopped dancing and stared at us through the smoke. Rafe’s electric Gibson was cracked across the face, and the wire had been torn loose from the electronic jack. He got up in a rumble of drums and a clash of cymbals with his guitar twisted around his throat. He wasn’t a big man, and he had always been frightened of bullies in high school, and there was sweat and humiliation all over his face.
“Get your ass out of here, you bastard,” he said.
Tables and chairs were already scraping and toppling across the floor, and the tattooed man had an audience that he would probably never get again. I heard some glass break in the front of the building; then the man raised himself in an easy muscular step, with one hand on the rail, onto the bandstand and threw Rafe headlong into the bar.
Rafe struck like a child thrown from an automobile. There was a deep triangular cut on his forehead, sunken in as though someone had pushed an angry thumb into the soft bone. He lay on the floor with one of his arms caught in the legs of an overturned barstool.
The bad man was still on the stand with us, and he had had just enough of somebody’s blood in his nostrils to want some more.
He came for my Martin next, his face grinning and stupid with victory and the knowledge that there was nothing in his way.
“That’s your ass if you touch it, podna.”
He got his hand around the neck and I hit him with my fist against the temple. He reeled backward from the guitar case with his eyes out of focus and put one elbow through the back window. I aimed for the throat with the second punch, but he brought his chin down and I hit him squarely in the mouth. His bottom lip broke against his teeth, and while I stood there motionlessly, looking at the blood and saliva run off his chin, he reached behind him in the windowsill and came up with a beer bottle in my face.
It was very fast after that. I had the Italian stiletto in my pocket, and it leaped into my hand with the hard thrust of the spring before I knew it was there. It had waving ripples on each side of the blade, and just as he brought the bottle down on my forearm, I went in under him and put all six inches right up to the bone handle in his heart.
When I would wake from the dream in my cell, with the screams still in my head, I would go through all the equations that would justify killing a man in those circumstances. I would almost be free of the guilt, but then I would have to face the one inalterable premise that flawed all my syllogisms: I already had the knife in my pocket. I already had the knife in my pocket.
Three
My father died two weeks after the day I returned home. We buried him during a sun-spangled rain shower in the family cemetery by the bayou. The aunts and uncles were there in their print-cotton dresses and brushed blue suits, the old men from town who had grown up with him, and the few Negroes who lived on the back of our property. Rita and Ace kept their children in the car because of the shower, and an old French priest read the prayers for the dead while an altar boy held an umbrella over his head.
My relatives nodded at me, and two of the old men shook hands, but I could have been a stranger among them. After they were all gone and the last car had rumbled over the wooden bridge, I stood under an oak tree and watched the two gravediggers from the mortuary service spade the dirt over the coffin. Their wet denims were wrapped tight across their muscles as they worked. One of them became impatient to get out of the rain, and he started to push the dirt off the mound into the hole with his boot.
“Do it right, buddy,” I said.
I walked back to the house, and the grass on the lawn was shining with water and light. I sat on the porch swing awhile and smoked cigarettes with a glass of bourbon and listened to the tree frogs begin to sing in the swamp. The air was cool from the rain, and the wind was blowing off the gulf, but it was all outside of me and the whiskey didn’t do any good and one cigarette burned up between my fingers. I went upstairs and tried to sleep. The house was dark, and the tree frogs became louder in the twilight’s stillness. I woke sometime in the middle of the night and thought I heard the count man click his stick on the bars at the same time a shovel scraped deep into a pile of dirt.