How about that for conversation in a small city on Bayou Teche where decorum is a religion and manners and morality are interchangeable?
The back of my neck was burning, my scalp drawing tighter each time Rowena had something to say. I went to the restroom, located in a separate building by the patio, and washed and dried my face and went back inside. The bar area was crowded, but in the midst of drinkers, I saw Clete Purcel hunched over a po’boy sandwich and a frosted mug of beer.
When I went to places where alcohol was served, I usually avoided sitting at the bar or at tables where people were there to drink rather than eat. Those distinctions might seem foolish to normal people, but the
slip that puts a sober alcoholic back on the dirty boogie usually has innocuous origins. You accidentally eat chocolate cake that has whiskey in it; there’s brandy in the plum sauce; two miles from shore, the sun blazing on your head, a friend tosses you a cold can of Miller from the ice chest; or worse, you wake at one in morning, your head full of nightmarish images, and rather than deal with your dragons, you put on your beat-up leather jacket and a wilted hat and find an end-of-the-line dive that has no clocks or windows.
But I wanted to be near Clete, the man who’d carried me down a fire escape when I had two bullets in my back, a man who sought excoriation and feared approval, a blue-collar iconoclast who had to look up the word.
“Can you tell me how to get to Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room?” I said. Sharkey’s joint on Bourbon used to feature musicians like the Kings of Dixieland and Johnnie Scat Davis and Louis Prima and Sam Butera, and Clete and I had spent many wasted days and nights there.
Clete jumped when I put my hand on his shoulder. “Jesus, Dave, you know I have a coronary when people walk up on me like that? When did you come in?”
“I’m with Jimmy Nightingale and Levon and his wife.”
“You’re kidding.” He strained his neck to see into the dining room. “Oops, I shouldn’t have looked.”
“What do you mean?”
“That Australian broad gets to me. My big boy just went on red alert.”
“Will you stop that?”
“I know an animal when I see one.”
“I mean it, Clete.” But what was the point? Clete was Clete. “Join us. I feel like I’m in the middle of a blender.”
“I can’t take Nightingale. I know he’s cutting me a deal, but he’s still a bum and a fraud.”
“But it’s fine for me?” I said.
“Stop pretending. Nightingale hates my guts. I don’t know what you see in that prick. Anyway, he’s doing a favor for you, not me. He wants something from Levon Broussard. So does Tony Nine Ball.”
“Where’d you hear this?”
“From Nig Rosewater.”
Nig and Wee Willie Bimstine had run New Orleans’s oldest bail bond service, until Katrina drowned the city and FEMA transported their clients all over the United States, never to return.
“Tony thinks he’s going to be a Hollywood movie producer,” Clete said. “He bought this sword to give to Levon Broussard, except Nightingale took it away from him.”
“When did Fat Tony start rolling over for anyone?”
“He’s got diabetes and emphysema and cancer in his colon and lymph nodes. He carries a bucket in his car to puke in.”
The bartender leaned close to Clete. “Would you like another drink, sir?”
Clete lifted his mug, the shell of ice sliding down the sides, the beer almost to the top. “Do I look like I need one? But since you asked, give Dave a diet Doc with cherries and limes in it.”
The man on the other side of Clete left the bar, and I took his stool with no plan in mind other than to delay rejoining the group I’d come with. In seconds I felt at home, the television set tuned to a sports channel, stuffed shrimp I hadn’t ordered placed on a paper napkin in front of me, someone talking about the New Orleans Saints. Clete ordered a shot and poured it into his mug. I watched the whiskey bounce on the bottom and rise in a brown cloud.
“Why not just put your brain in a jar and give it to a medical school?” I said.
“I did that five years ago. They gave it back.”
He chugged half the mug. I bit into a stuffed shrimp and looked over my shoulder at the dining room, then at the icy cloud rising from the beer box, the bartenders uncorking bottles of Liebfraumilch and dark red wine, fitting an orange slice on the rim of a Collins glass, tipping a jigger of Jack into shaved ice and mint leaves, pouring a creamy-pink gin fizz, setting up a round of Hennessy for everyone, provided by the distributor.
“No?” the bartender said, after setting a shot glass in front of me.