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 madhouses 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 rest rooms reached out to the edge of the dance floor. The crowd was made up of airmen from the base, tough kids with ducktail 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 in 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 wood bridge, I stood under an oak tree and watched the two grave-diggers 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 a while 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.
I had to roll, stretch it out, shake it down the road. I had put in for interstate parole to Montana with my parole officer two days after I got out of Angola, but it was very hard for an ex-convict with three years’ time still ahead of him, particularly one who had been sent up for manslaughter (which had been a reduction from second-degree murder), to be accepted by the parole and probation office in another state. First, there had to be reason for the transfer, such as the presence of family, social reformers, psychologists, good guys of any description, who would aid the state in the rehabilitation of their product. Second, there was the problem of employment, which meant that you would hold a regular job sanctified by a machine-stamped payroll check each week, one that would not lead you into association with other ex-cons, boost artists, and the like. And in Louisiana, as in many other states, an ex-convict could violate his parole by quitting a job without due cause. Finally, a good part of your case depended on the whim of the parole officer.
Mine was a middle-aged man who had transferred fro
m the welfare agency. He wore dark J. C. Higgins suits even in the summertime, and there were blue and red lines all over his cheeks and nose. His blunt hands were too large for the fountain pen and papers that he tried to handle, and his stomach pressed the flap of his fly outward as though he had a hernia. I had known him around town most of my life, in an indirect way, because he belonged to almost every civic organization in the parish, or at least you could always find him on the edge of newspaper photographs showing the sponsors of civic drives to promote American Legion baseball or a new park that would include areas for colored citizens.
My file perplexed him. He said he couldn’t fully understand how a man who had been decorated with two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star could also receive a bad-conduct discharge. Also, he didn’t think it was a good plan for me to go to Montana. My family was in south Louisiana, and both my brother and sister could help me get started in business or whatever I would choose, since I had two years’ college education at Southwestern Louisiana Institute. His thick thumb dented and creased the papers in my folder, and his eyes wandered over my face in his abstraction as he talked about the inadvisability of leaving home roots and the possibilities of working with my brother. He ignored my open smile at the thought of an ex-convict in the employ of a public-relations and advertising company.
I had put on a pair of slacks and a sport shirt and had gotten a shine at the newsstand before coming into his office, but as I looked at his well-meaning face and clear blue eyes that didn’t fit the dark suit, and listened to the recommendations for my future, I wished that one of the bosses from Angola were there in his place, someone who had felt the same miserable touch of the prison farm that left a salty cut in the edge of your eye. Or at least someone whom you didn’t have to con.
Because that was what he wanted. I had already talked with a state supreme court judge, a friend of my father’s, who said he would push all the paper through Baton Rouge to get me an out-of-state parole. Also, Buddy Riordan, who had pulled time with me, had gotten his father to sponsor me with the Office of Parole and Probation in Missoula. But we still had to go through with the con.
The strange thing about conning a man who deliberately opens his vest to a series of lies is the fact that both of you have to protect him from knowledge of his own dishonesty. In this case my parole officer recorded every insult to his intelligence without an eyelid faltering over the movement of his pen, but occasionally the hand would pause and an eyebrow would lift off the paper to register some abstract discrepancy in my account, a small warning that would keep us both honest tomorrow.
So we went through it. I would like to do ranch work up in Montana, dig postholes in frozen ground, shave sheep with electric barber clippers, dehorn cows, wring the necks of chickens and shuck their feathers in pots of scalding water, shovel boxcar loads of green horse manure in one-hundred-degree heat.
Actually, most of what I told him was true. I did want to go to Montana and live on a ranch in the mountains with Buddy and buck bales on a new morning. But I couldn’t tell him that most of all I just needed to roll, to flee the last two years of my life, to exorcise from my sleep the iron smell of jail and the clack of the count man’s baton against my cell door.
I knew that the parole transfer might take weeks or longer to be approved in Baton Rouge, and I had only thirty-five dollars left from my discharge money. My father had left each of the children one-third of the farm, but he had borrowed against it twice, and an oil company was claiming that four acres of it was somehow part of a royalty pool. Which meant, in effect, that there was a legal cloud over the house and land tide, and before the estate could be divided, we would have to settle in or out of court with Texaco as well as deal with the bank. Ace was the only one of us who had the combination of what it took to wait it through: money, a disregard for time, and an ambitious energy for the profits to be made in land development.
And Ace stayed right on top of it. Two days after my father was buried, he had his agency’s lawyer draft a quitclaim settlement on the inheritance for Rita and me to sign. He drove his Cadillac up the front lane one afternoon while I was on the porch steps tuning my dobro, and began explaining in his serious way the advantages of settling the estate now. I didn’t feel like talking with him or listening to his practical statements of figures and legality. And his self-deluded attitude of magnanimity was more than I could stand at the moment.
He offered me five thousand dollars in exchange for the quitclaim and power of attorney. I drank out of my beer and set the can down on the step.
“I tell you what, Ace. Get your lawyer to draw up another one, and give me the old man’s truck and four of the back acres by the bayou. You can have the rest of it, and I’ll sign the oil rights over to you, too. But don’t put any of your tract homes near my property.”
“You’re cutting yourself short,” he said.
“That’s all I need, Bro’.”
I had cut myself short, but I couldn’t take any money from him, and I felt better at evening off any debt I owed for my father’s care. And inside he was very happy because he had gone through his act of generosity and fairness and later would realize a fortune in the subdivision of the land.
So in a moment’s irritation I had become an equal member of the family at a large cost: I was still broke and had taken to buying sardines and soda crackers with my six-packs of beer at the little store down the dirt road.
Sunday morning I drove to New Iberia and looked up Rafe Arceneaux, the tea-head singer in our band. He was married now, with twin boys, and working ten days on and five off as a radio man on an offshore oil rig. We sat on the wood porch of his small house and drank chicory coffee in the clang of church bells and the screams of his kids and the loud voice of his wife in the back of their house. The triangular scar from the barroom fight was raised like an inner-tube patch on his forehead.
“I wish I could say something helpful, man, but it’s bad right now,” he said. “Most of the old guys are gone. Bernard’s wife got him locked up for nonsupport, Archie got busted for possession in Pascagoula, and the rest of us catch a gig when we can. They only want rock ‘n’ roll bands now, and they can get the colored guys to play cheaper than we do.”
“How about the Victory Club?”
“Some of the local punks burned it down while you were gone.”
His wife came through the screen door and put one of his diapered boys in his lap without speaking to either of us. The screen slammed shut after her. Rafe directed his embarrassed eyes at the line of dilapidated storefronts across the street. “She’s mad because I wouldn’t take her to her mother’s last night. It’s one of those things you have to live with when you play it straight.”
I finished my coffee and started to leave, because his wife’s anger hadn’t been directed at him but me, the ex-convict and bad influence out of his past.
“Hey, don’t cut out yet, Iry. Look, I’m sorry about all this. It’s just that things aren’t the same anymore. I mean, ten years ago we all thought we’d be playing Nashville by this time. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. Let’s face it, man—we’re getting to be history.”
I finally found a job working four nights a week at a road-house outside of Thibodaux. They didn’t really need a lead-guitar man, but when I opened my case and took out the dobro, I had the job. A dobro is a bluegrass instrument, inlaid in the sound box with a metal resonator and played flat with a bar like a steel guitar, and you don’t see many of them outside the southern mountains. I had bought mine on order from El Monte, California, for four hundred dollars, and the thin neck and gleaming wood of the box was as light as an envelope of air in my hands.
I made twenty-five dollars a night and my share of the tips from the money jar on the bandstand. I worked in well with the band, which was made up of hillbillies who played only country and juke-joint music. My first night I played and sang six Hank Williams songs in a row, then went into “Poison Love” by Johnny and Jack and “Detour” and
“I’ll Sail My Ship Along,” and the place went wild. They jitterbugged and did the dirty boogie, yelled from their tables, roared with some type of nostalgic confirmation when they recognized an old song, and dropped change and dollar bills into the money jar. Oil-field roughnecks with tin hats and beery faces and drilling mud on their clothes looked up at me with moist, serious eyes when I sang “The Lost Highway.” I was good at imitating Hank Williams, and I could make the dobro sound just like the steel that he had used behind him.
I was just a lad, nearly twenty-two
Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you.
Now when I pass by, all the people say
Just another guy on the lost highway.
I played there three weeks and picked up an afternoon job on Sundays at a club in St. Martinville, which got me into trouble with the parole office. The St. Martinville band had a thirty-minute television show on Sunday mornings, and as an aside into the microphone the singer decided that he would mention that their dobro man, Iry Paret, would be at the club with them that afternoon.
So when I went in for my visit with the parole officer that week, I noticed first the stiffness of his handshake and then the rigidity of his elbows on the desk and the folded hands under his chin while he talked. We had to go around three corners before he got to it, but he did. And like most people who ask to be conned, he now felt that he had stepped too far over a line into a large hole.
“You didn’t report that you were working in a nightclub,” he said.
“It’s not much of a job. I’m just sitting in temporarily.”
It was an easy offering if he wanted to continue the con, but I could see the struggle in his face to turn the compromise around, and I knew that it was going to be at my expense.
“Your parole agreement stipulates that you won’t return to any of the past associations that contributed to your crime. I know that’s vague on a piece of paper, but in your case it means playing in beer joints and driving home drunk at four in the morning.”