The Lost Get-Back Boogie

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.

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nbsp; 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.”