“I’m not telling you what to do, but isn’t that how you got into trouble before?”
“I finished all my trouble as of noon today.” I poured another shot in his glass.
“What I’m saying is you can make it. I’ve got kids working for me that are bringing in ten thousand a year.”
“You’re not offering me a public-relations job, are you?”
He started to smile, and then looked again at my face. Rita came back in the kitchen and opened the oven to check on the warmed plate of mashed potatoes and gruel that the nurse had left for my father. I shouldn’t have started what came next, but they were drumming their nails on a weak nerve, and the whiskey had already broken down that polite line of restraint.
“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:
DEVILS DISCIPLES
NEW ORLEANS
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.