“Y’all really took care of the old man, didn’t you?”
Rita turned from the oven, holding the plate in a hot pad, and looked at me directly for the first time. Her eyes were awful. Ace started to nod at what he thought was an automatic expression of errant-brother gratitude, but then that toggle switch in the back of his head clicked again and his face stretched tight.
“What do you mean, Iry?” The bourbon in his glass tilted back and forth.
“Like maybe Lourdes wants too much gelt to handle him, since they have the best doctors in southwest Louisiana.”
“I don’t think you understand everything that was involved,” Ace said. His face was as flat as a dough pan.
“The emergency ward at Charity looks like a butcher shop on Saturday afternoon. I mean, just check out that scene. They deliver babies in the hallways, and the smell that comes off that incinerator is enough to make your eyeballs fall out. For Christ’s sake, Ace, you could write a check to pay the old man’s way a year at Lourdes.”
“That’s very fine of you,” Rita said. “Maybe there are some other things we’ve done wrong that you can tell us about. It was also good of you to contribute so much while you were in Angola.”
“All right, but you didn’t have to put him into Charity.”
“You’re really off base, Iry,” Ace said.
“Where did you learn that one? At an ad meeting?”
“Ridiculous,” Rita said.
“How do you think he feels being shoveled in with every reject from the parish? He even defended you this afternoon.”
“If you think so much of his welfare, why don’t you lower your voice?” Rita said.
And then Ace, the PR man for all occasions, filled my glass and handed it to me. I set it back on the drainboard, my head tingling with anger and the bourbon’s heat and the strange movements of the day.
“It was a rotten thing to do,” I said. “You both know it.”
I walked out the house into the twilight. I felt foolish and light-headed in the wind off the bayou, and there was a line of sweat down the front of my shirt. Through the kitchen window I heard them start to purge their anger on each other.
The trees were filled with a mauve glow from the sun’s last light, and I went down to the shed where the pickup was parked, my legs loose under me and a bright flash of caution already clicking on and off in one sober part of my mind.
But the old reckless impulses had more sway, and I scooped some mud out of the drive and smeared it thickly over the expired plate. I turned the truck around and banged over the wooden bridge and roared in second gear down the board road, the ditches on each side of me whipping by the fenders like a drunken challenge.
I stopped at the beer joint by Joe’s Shipyard, which contained about fifteen outlaw motorcyclists and their women. They wore grease-stained blue jeans, half-topped boots with chains on the side, and sleeveless denim jackets with a sewed inscription on the back that read:
Their arms were covered with tattoos of snakes’ heads, skulls, and hearts impaled on bleeding knives. I didn’t know what they were doing in this area, far from their usual concrete turf, but I found out later that they had come to bust up some civil-rights workers at a demonstration.
The bar had divided in half, with the doodlebuggers, deckhands, and oil-field roughnecks on one side and the motorcyclists on the other, their voices deliberately loud, their beards dripping with beer, and their girls flashing their stuff at the enemy.
I bought three six-packs of Jax and a carton of cigarettes at the bar and walked through the tables toward the door. Someone had turned the jukebox up to full tilt, and Little Richard screamed out all his rage about Long Tall Sally left in the alley. I was almost home free when one of them leaned his chair back into my stomach.
His blond hair hung in curls on his denim jacket, and a pachuco cross was tattooed between his eyebrows. There was beer foam all over his moustache and beard, and his eyes were swimming with a jaundiced, malevolent light at the prospect of a new piece of meat.
“Why don’t you just watch it, buddy?” he said. His breath was heavy with the smell of marijuana.
I lifted my elbow and the sack of beer over his head and tried to squeeze by the chair, which was now pressing into a corner of my groin.
“Hey, citizen, you didn’t hear the word,” he said.
Two of the girls at the table were grinning at him with a knowing expression over their cigarettes. A real stomp was at hand. One of the straights was going to get his butt kicked up between his ears. Or maybe, even better, he would shake a little bit and then run for the door.
The one advantage that an ex-con has in this kind of situation is that you have seen every one of them before, which is a very strong credential, and as physical people they are always predictable if you turn their own totems and frame of reference against them. In fact, sometimes you look forward to it with anticipation.
I pulled a beer loose from the top of the sack and set it down before him; then I leaned casually into his ear, the gold earring just a breath away from my lips, and whispered: “Don’t turn your head now, but a couple of those oil-field roughnecks are narcs, and they know your girlfriends are holding for you. One of them was talking in the head about stiffing you with a dealing charge. That’s a sure fifteen in Angola, podna.”
He turned in his chair and stared at me with his yellow, blood-flecked eyes, and I walked out the door and got into the pickup before he could glue it all together in his brain.
The Point was thirty miles south of town, down a blacktop that wound through rows of flooded cypress and fishing shacks set up on stilts. The brackish water was black in the trees, and pirogues and flat-bottomed outboards piled with conical nets were tied to the banks. I drank one beer after another and pitched the cans out the window into the back of the truck while the salt wind cut into my face and the great cypress limbs hung with moss swept by overhead.
The Point extended into the bay like a long, flat sandspit, and the jetties and the collapsed fishing pier looked like neatly etched black lines against the grayness of the water and the sun’s last red spark boiling into the horizon. The tide was out, and sea gulls dipped down into the rim of white foam along the sand, and in the distance I could see the gas flares burning off the offshore oil rigs. There was a seafood place and dance pavilion by the dock where you could sit on the screened porch and drink draught beer in mugs thick with ice and feel the wind blow across the flat water. I ordered a tray of boiled crawfish and bluepoint crabs with a half bottle of wine and sucked the hot juice out of the shells and dipped the meat in a tomato sauce mixed with horseradish.
The pavilion was almost empty except for a few fishermen and some kids who had come in early for the Saturday night dance. The food had helped a little, but I was pretty drunk now, past the point of worrying about a DWI bust and what that would mean to the parole officer on my first day out of the bag, and I ordered another beer. There was only a thin band of purple light on the horizon, and I looked hard at the distant buoy that marked where a German submarine had gone down in 1943. Once years ago, when a hurricane depression had drawn the tide far out over the flats, you could see just the tip of the bow breaking the water. The Coast Guard had tried to blow it up, but they managed only to dislodge it from the sand and send it deeper down the shelf.
Once I worked a doodlebug job out in the bay, and we would ping it occasionally on the recorder’s instrument, but it was never in the same place twice. It moved a mile either way in an easterly or westerly direction, and no one knew how far it went south into the Gulf before it returned again. And as I sat there on the screened porch, with my head in a beer fog, I felt for just a moment that old fear about all the madness everywhere. The crew was still in that crusted and flattened hull, those Nazis who had committed themselves to making the whole earth a place of concertina wire and guard towers, their empty eye sockets now strung with seaweed, and they were still sailing nineteen years after they had gone down in a scream of sirens and bombs.