I walked down the hall to my room, which he had kept as it was the day I went on the road again with the band and ended up in the penitentiary. My over-and-under, with the.22 Magnum and.410 barrels, was propped in the corner, my clothes hung limply in the closet, the creases on the hangers stained with dust, and my double guitar case that held the Martin flattop and the Dobro sat on top of the bed, with the gold-embossed inscription THE GREAT SPECKLED BIRD across the leather surface. I opened the case, which had cost me two hundred dollars to have custom-made in Dallas, and for a moment in the crinkled flash of the Confederate flag that lined the inside and the waxed shine off the guitars, I was back in the barroom with the scream of voices around me and the knife wet and shaking in my hand.
I stripped naked and dressed in a pair of khakis and a denim shirt and slipped on a pair of old loafers. I put everything from Angola inside the suit coat, tied the sleeves into a hard knot, and pushed it down in the wastebasket.
Downstairs, I found the bottle of Ancient Age that my father always kept under the drainboard. I poured a good drink into a tin cup and sipped it slowly while I looked out the window through the oak trees in the yard and at the sun starting to fade over the marsh. Purple rain clouds lay against the horizon, and shafts of sunlight cut like bands of crimson across the cypress tops. I had another drink, this time with water in the cup, and took a butcher knife and the bottle outside with me to the azalea bushes by the side of the house.
I snipped the knife through a dozen branches covered with red flowers and walked down the slope toward the graveyard. It was close to the bayou, and ten years before, we had had to put sacks of cement against the bank and push an old car body into the water to prevent the widening bend of current from eroding the iron fence at the graveyard’s edge. There were twenty-three graves in all, from the four generations of my family who were buried on the original land, and the oldest were raised brick-and-mortar crypts that were now cracked with weeds and covered with the scale of dead vines. The graves of my mother and sister were next to each other with a common headstone that was divided by a thin chiseled line. It was brutally simple in its words.
There was a tin can full of rusty water and dead stems on the grave, and I picked it up and threw it back in the trees, then laid the azaleas against the headstone in the half-light. It had been seventeen years, but I still had dreams about the fire and the moment when I raced around the back of the house and tried to break open the bolted door with my fists. Through the window I could see my mother’s face convulsed like an epileptic’s in the flames, the can of cleaning fluid still in her hand, while Fran stood with a halo of fire rising over her pinafore. Alcide, the Negro who worked for us, threw me backward off the porch and drove a pickax up to the helve into the door-jamb. But the wind blew the inside of the house into a furnace, and Fran plunged out of the flames, her clothes and hair dissolving and streaming away behind her.
I took a drink from the bottle and walked down the mud flat and skipped a stone across the bayou’s quiet surface. The stone hit in the lily pads on the far side, and the water suddenly became dimpled with small bream. The light was almost gone from the trees now, and as I sat back against a cypress and pulled again on the bottle, I had to wonder what I was doing there at all.
When I neared the top of the slope by the smokehouse, I saw a Cadillac parked by the front porch where the nurse’s automobile had been. It must be Ace, I thought. Rita’s preference would lean toward smaller expensive cars, something conservative enough not to make the wives of her husband’s law partners competitive. Or maybe both of them at once, I thought, which was more than I was ready for at that moment.
I walked around the side of the front porch just as Ace was holding open the screen door for her. Ace’s face had the formality of an undertaker’s, with his mouth turned downward in some type of expression that he had learned for all occasions at a chamber of commerce meeting, and his wilted tie seemed almost glued to his throat. Rita saw me before he did, and she turned in the half-opened screen with her mouth still parted in the middle of a sentence and looked steadily at me as though her eyes wouldn’t focus. She was pregnant, and she had gained a good deal of weight since I had seen her last. She had always been a pretty, auburn-haired girl, with small breasts and hips that were only slightly too large for the rest of her, but now her face was oval, her thighs wide, and her maternity dress was stretched tight over her swollen buttocks.
It wasn’t going to be pleasant. Their genuine ex-convict was home, the family’s one failure, the bad-conduct dischargee from the army, the hillbilly guitar picker who embarrassed both of them just by his presence in the area.
But at least Ace tried. He walked down the steps with his hand outstretched, as though he had been set in motion by a trip switch in the back of his head. He must have sold hundreds of ad accounts with the same papier-mâché smile.
Rita wasn’t as generous. Her face looked like she had morning sickness.
We went inside and stood in the hall with the awkwardness of people who might have just met at a bus stop.
“How about a drink?” I said.
“I could go for that,” Ace said.
I took three glasses from the cupboard and poured into the bottom of them.
“I’m not having any,” Rita said. She was looking in her handbag for a cigarette, when she spoke.
“Take one. We don’t get the old boy home much,” Ace said, and then pressed his lips together.
“I’ll go look in on Daddy,” she said, putting the cigarette in her mouth as though it had to be screwed in.
“Have a drink, Reet. The nurse gave him sedation about a half hour ago,” I said.
“I know that.”
“So have one with us.” It was hard, and maybe there was just a little bit of bile behind my teeth.
She lit her cigarette without answering and dropped the match in the sink. Sometimes, without even trying, you can step in a pile of pig flop right up to your kneecaps, I thought.
“Do you have a finger on a job?” Ace said.
“Not a thing.”
“There’s a lot of money being made now.”
“The taxicab driver told me.”
“I’m selling more accounts than I can handle. I might get into some real estate on the side, because that’s where it’s going to be in the next five years.”
“Do you know if any of the band is still around?” I said.
His face went blank, and his eyes searched in the air.
“No, I didn’t know any of them, really.”
“We went to high school with most of them,” I said.
Rita put out her cigarette in the sink and went upstairs. I finished my drink and had another. The whiskey was starting to rise in my face.
“Between the two of us, you think you might want to get in on something solid?” Ace said. He could never drink very well, and his eyes were taking on a shine.
“I think I’m just going to roll, Ace.”
“I’m not telling you what to do, but isn’t that how you got into trouble before?”
“I finished all my trouble as of noon today.” I poured another shot in his glass.
“What I’m saying is you can make it. I’ve got kids working for me that are bringing in ten thousand a year.”
“You’re not offering me a public-relations job, are you?”
He started to smile, and then looked again at my face. Rita came back in the kitchen and opened the oven to check on the warmed plate of mashed potatoes and gruel that the nurse had left for my father. I shouldn’t have started what came next, but they were drumming their nails on a weak nerve, and the whiskey had already broken down that polite line of restraint.