The Lost Get-Back Boogie

“Why don’t you just watch it, buddy?” he said. His breath was heavy with the smell of marijuana.

I lifted my elbow and the sack of beer over his head and tried to squeeze by the chair, which was now pressing into a corner of my groin.

“Hey, citizen, you didn’t hear the word,” he said.

Two of the girls at the table were grinning at him with a knowing expression over their cigarettes. A real stomp was at hand. One of the straights was going to get his butt kicked up between his ears. Or maybe, even better, he would shake a little bit and then run for the door.

The one advantage that an ex-con has in this kind of situation is that you have seen every one of them before, which is a very strong credential, and as physical people they are always predictable if you turn their own totems and frame of reference against them. In fact, sometimes you look forward to it with anticipation.

I pulled a beer loose from the top of the sack and set it down before him; then I leaned casually into his ear, the gold earring just a breath away from my lips, and whispered: “Don’t turn your head now, but a couple of those oil-field roughnecks are narcs, and they know your girl friends are holding for you. One of them was talking in the head about stifling you with a dealing charge. That’s a sure fifteen in Angola, podna.”

He turned in his chair and stared at me with his yellow, blood-flecked eyes, and I walked out the door and got into the pickup before he could glue it all together in his brain.

The Point was thirty miles south of town, down a blacktop that wound through rows of flooded cypress and fishing shacks set up on stilts. The brackish water was black in the trees, and pirogues and flat-bottomed outboards piled with conical nets were tied to the banks. I drank one beer after another and pitched the cans out the window into the back of the truck while the salt wind cut into my face and the great cypress limbs hung with moss swept by overhead.

The Point extended into the bay like a long, flat sandspit, and the jetties and the collapsed fishing pier looked li

ke neatly etched black lines against the grayness of the water and the sun’s last red spark boiling into the horizon. The tide was out, and sea gulls dipped down into the rim of white foam along the sand, and in the distance I could see the gas flares burning off the offshore oil rigs. There was a seafood place and dance pavilion by the dock where you could sit on the screened porch and drink draught beer in mugs thick with ice and feel the wind blow across the flat water. I ordered a tray of boiled crawfish and bluepoint crabs with a half bottle of wine and sucked the hot juice out of the shells and dipped the meat in a tomato sauce mixed with horseradish.

The pavilion was almost empty except for a few fishermen and some kids who had come in early for the Saturday night dance. The food had helped a little, but I was pretty drunk now, past the point of worrying about a DWI bust and what that would mean to the parole officer on my first day out of the bag, and I ordered another beer. There was only a thin band of purple light on the horizon, and I looked hard at the distant buoy that marked where a German submarine had gone down in 1943. Once years ago, when a hurricane depression had drawn the tide far out over the flats, you could see just the tip of the bow breaking the water. The Coast Guard had tried to blow it up, but they managed only to dislodge it from the sand and send it deeper down the shelf.

Once I worked a doodlebug job out in the bay, and we would ping it occasionally on the recorder’s instrument, but it was never in the same place twice. It moved a mile either way in an easterly or westerly direction, and no one knew how far it went south into the Gulf before it returned again. And as I sat there on the screened porch, with my head in a beer fog, I felt for just a moment that old fear about all the madness everywhere. The crew was still in that crusted and flattened hull, those Nazis who had committed themselves to making the whole earth a place of concertina wire and guard towers, their empty eye sockets now strung with seaweed, and they were still sailing nineteen years after they had gone down in a scream of sirens and bombs.

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.