I thought the yelling and table-pounding from the crowd was going to blow the glass out of the windows.
The rest of the night should have been wonderful. It wasn’t. Not for me, at least. In my lifetime I guess I’ve known every kind of person there is—brig rats, pimps, drug pushers, disk jockeys on the take, promoters who split for Vegas with the cashbox, and, my favorite bunch, scrubbed-down ministers who preach Jesus on Sunday and Wednesday night and the rest of the week screw teenage girls in their congregations. But none of them can hold a candle to a friend who stabs you in the back. That kind of person not only steals your faith in your fellow human beings, he makes you resent yourself.
We had taken a break about 11:30 p.m., figuring to do one more set before we called it a night, and I hadn’t seen the Greaser in the last hour or so. I glanced out the back window at a gazebo that was perched up on a little hill above a picnic area. I couldn’t believe what I saw.
Silhouetted against the moon, the Greaser and Kitty Lamar were both standing inside the gazebo, the Greaser bending down toward her so their foreheads were almost touching, her ta-tas standing up inside her cowboy shirt like the upturned noses on a pair of puppy dogs. I felt sick inside. No, that doesn’t describe it. I wanted to tear the Greaser apart and personally drive Kitty Lamar down to the bus depot and throw her and her puppy dogs on the first westbound headed for Big D and all points south.
But that would have been easy compared to what I knew I had to do. I’d kept my silence ever since we’d first met Kitty Lamar at the roadhouse in Vinton. Now I was the guy who’d have to drive the nail through Eddy Ray’s heart. Or at least that was what I told myself.
I waited until he and I were alone, at breakfast, the next day, in a restaurant with big windows that looked out on the Mississippi River. Eddy Ray was fanging down a plate of fried eggs, ham, grits, and toast and jam, hammering ketchup all over it, his face rested and happy.
“I got to tell you something,” I said.
“It’s not necessary. Eat up.”
“You don’t even know what I was gonna say.”
“You’re worried about the Greaser. I had a talk with him last night. Kitty Lamar and him are just friends.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“You got a hearing problem?”
I stared out the window at a tug pushing a long barge piled with shale. The barge had gotten loose and was scraping against the pilings of the bridge. The port side had tipped upward against a piling and gray mounds of shale were sliding through the starboard deck rail, sinking as rapidly as concrete in the current.
“I saw her about five years back in a Port Arthur cathouse,” I said. Eddy Ray studied the barge out on the river, chewing his food, his hair freshly barbered, razor-edged on the neck. “What were you doing there?”
“I got a few character defects myself. Least I don’t go around claiming to be something I’m not,” I said.
“Kitty Lamar already told me about it. So quit fretting your mind and your bowels over other people’s business. I swear, R.B., I think you own stock in an aspirin company.”
“I’ve heard her talking to him on the phone, Eddy Ray. They’re taking you over the hurdles. I saw them in the gazebo last night, too. They looked like Siamese twins joined at the forehead.”
This time he couldn’t slip the punch and I saw the light go out of his eyes. He cut a small piece of ham and put it in his mouth. “I guess that puts a different twist on it,” he said.
I hated myself for what I had just done.
Could it get worse? When we got back to the motel, the desk clerk told Eddy Ray to call the long-distance operator.
“Nobody answered the phone in my room?” Eddy Ray said.
“No, sir,” the clerk said.
Kitty Lamar was supposed to have met us in the diner but hadn’t shown up. Evidently she hadn’t hung around the room, either. Eddy Ray got the callback operator on the line and she connected him with our agent in Houston, a guy who for biblical example had probably modeled his life on Pontius Pilate’s.
The agency had booked us in a half-dozen places in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana, but as of that morning all our dates were canceled.
“What gives, Leon?” Eddy Ray said into the receiver. He was standing by the bed, puffing on a Lucky Strike while he listened, his back curved like a question mark. “Investigation? Into what? Listen to me, Leon, we didn’t see an
ything, we don’t know anything, we didn’t do anything. I’ve got a total of thirty-seven dollars and forty cents to get us back to Houston. The air is showing through my tires. Are you listen—”
The line went dead. Eddy Ray removed the receiver from his ear, stared at it, and replaced it in the telephone cradle. “Do you have to be bald-headed to get a Fuller Brush route?” he said.
“Leon sold us out for another band?” I said.
“He says some Houston cops want to question us about Johnny’s death.”
“Why us?”