The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Two

I could have taken a bus home or hitchhiked, because it was only a three-hour trip to the coast, but I always loved trains, their rows of quiet, angular seats and the suck and rattle of the vestibule opening, and also, there is no dignity in hitchhiking when you are thirty years old. The clapboard general stores and taverns and oaks clicked by the window, and beyond the highway the gray trees of the marsh began. Negroes in flop straw hats cane-fished along the canal, and white cranes rose with their wings gilded in the sunlight above the dead cypress. The butcher boy swayed down the aisle with the roll of the train, his basket loaded with magazines, newspapers, cans of grape drink, and paper cones of plums. I bought a Times-Picayune from him and walked to the club car.

The porter brought me a Jax, and after I tired of the front page and its serious treatment of something the state legislature was doing, I sipped the beer and watched the fields of new sugar cane and black Angus roll past. But as we neared New Orleans, the country began to change. Somebody had been busy in the last two years; it was no longer a rural section of the delta. Land-development signs stood along the highway, replacing the old ads for patent medicine and Purina feed, and great areas of marsh had been bulldozed out and covered with landfill for subdivision tracts. Mobile-home offices strung with colored flags sat on cinder blocks in the mud, with acres of waste in the background that were already marked into housing plots with surveyors’ stakes. The shopping-center boys had been hard at work, too. Pecan orchards and dairy barns had become Food City, Winn-Dixie, and Cash Discount.

I had to change trains in New Orleans for the rest of the trip home. The train was an old one, with dusty seats and yellowed windows cracked on the outside of the double glass with BB holes. We crossed the Mississippi, and my head reeled when I looked down from the window at the wide expanse of water far below. The tugboats and Standard Oil barges and the brown scratches of wake off their hulls looked as miniature and flat as painted pieces on a map. The train clicked slowly across the bridge and the long stretch of elevated track above the levee and mud flats and willow trees, then began to gain speed and bend through the bayou country and the achingly beautiful dark green of the cypress and oak trees, covered with moss and bursting at the roots with mushrooms and cowslips.

Most of the passengers in my car were French people, with cardboard suitcases and boxes tied with string in the luggage rack. An old man in overalls and a suit jacket was speaking French to his wife in the seat behind me, and I listened to them with a violation of privacy that normally I would have walked away from. But in Angola the hacks, who came primarily from north Louisiana and Mississippi, never allowed anyone to speak French in their presence, and even back in the Block it wasn’t used unless there was no non-French-speaking person within earshot, because it was considered to have the same clandestine quality as a private whisper between two snitches.

The train crossed Bayou Lafourche, and I leaned into the window and looked at the men in pirogues floating motionlessly against the cypress roots, their cane poles arched and beaten with light against the pull of a bull bream below the lily pads. Before the train moved back into that long corridor of trees through the swamp, I saw one man rip a large goggle-eye perch through a torn leaf and dip one hand quickly into the water with the cane bending in his other hand, the boat almost tilted into the shallows, and catch the line in his fingers and pull the fish slowly away from the lily pads.

Then we were back into the long span of track through the trees and the dead water in the irrigation canals and the occasional farmhouses that you could see beyond the railroad right-of-way. I walked up to the dub car and had a bourbon and water while the train slowed into my hometown. The X signs and LOUISIANA LAW STOP warnings on the crossings moved by gradually with the decreased speed of the train, and then the uplifted faces of the people on the platform stared suddenly at mine, then turned with a quick brightness of recognition at someone stepping off the vestibule.

There was an ice wagon on the loading ramp with a tarpaulin stretched across the ice blocks, and the evaporated coldness steamed on top of the canvas in the sun. Two taxicabs were parked in the shade of an oak that grew through the sidewalk in front of the depot.

“Do you know how to get to Robert Paret’s place?” I said.

“Who?” The taxi driver’s breath was full of beer through the window, and he smoked a filter-tipped cigarette in a gap between his teeth.

“It’s up Joe’s Shipyard road. You reckon you can take me there?”

“That’s fifteen miles, podna. I’ll turn the meter off for you, but it’ll still cost you ten dollars and maybe some for the tires I bust on that board road up there.”

The town was changed. Or maybe it had been changing for a long time and I hadn’t noticed it. Many of the old brick and wood-front stores had gone out of business, the hotel had a FOR LEASE sign in its dusty main window, and only a few cars were parked in front of the beer tavern and pool hall on the corner. The dime store, which used to be crowded with Negroes on Saturday afternoon, was almost empty. We passed the courthouse square and the lines of oak trees shading the wide sidewalks and wooden benches where the old men used to sit, but it looked like a discarded movie set. The Confederate monument, inscribed at the base with the words THEY DIED IN DEFENSE OF A HOLY CAUSE, was spotted with pigeon droppings, and someone had stuffed trash paper in the barrel of the Civil War cannon next to it. Only one or two offices besides the bail bondsman’s were open, and the corner bar that used to have a card game upstairs was now boarded over.

“Where did the town go?” I said.

“It just dried up after they put in that new highway,” the driver said. “People ain’t going to drive into town when you can get everything you need out there. You just getting out of the service or something?”

“I’ve been away awhile.”

“Well, there’s lots of money to be made here. Like, I could be making twice what I’m getting today if that dispatcher didn’t put me on call at the depot.” He belched down in his throat and loosened a can of beer from a six-pack on the seat. He pulled the ring, and the foam slid over his thumb. “You can pick up fares at the airport and run them a half mile down to the motel, and what you get on tips is more money than I make all afternoon at the depot. Take one of them beers if you like.”

“Thank you,” I said. The can was hot, but I drank it anyway.

We drove out into the parish, crossed the wooden bridge over the bayou at the end of the blacktop, and bounced along the yellow, rutted road by the edge of Joe’s Shipyard. Shrimp boats, rusted oil barges, and quarter boats used by seismograph companies were moored along the docks in the dead water, and Negro children were fishing with cane poles for bullheads and gars among the cattails. The driver was out of beer, and we stopped at a tavern filled with deckhands, fishermen, and doodlebuggers (seismograph workers), and I bought him a round at the bar and a carton of Jax to go.

The road followed along the edge of the bayou and the cypress trees that hung out over the water. The expanded swell of the trunks at the waterline was dark from the wake of passing boats, and white egrets were nesting in the sand, their delicate wings quivering as they enlarged the depression around them. I had fished for bream, sacalait, and mud cat under every cypress on that bank, because they always came into the shade to feed in the hottest part of a summer afternoon, and there was one tree that had rusted mooring chains nailed into the trunk with iron stakes that the bark had overgrown in stages until the chain looped in and out of the tree like a deformity. My grandfather said that Jean Laffite used to tie his boat there when he was blackbirding and that he had buried a treasure between two oaks on the back of our property. The ground around the two oaks was pitted with depressions and ragged holes that cut through the roots, and as boys my older brother and I had dug six feet down and scraped away the clay from around the lid of a huge iron caldron, hollowing out the hole like sculptors, to prize up the lid with our shovels and finally discover the bones of a hog that had been boiled into tallow.

We hit the section of board road that Shell Oil had put in three years before when the road had washed out again and the parish refused to maintain it any longer, since the only people who used it were my father and the two or three doodlebug companies that were shooting in that part of the parish. The boards twisted under the tires and slammed upward into the oil pan, and then I saw the mailbox by the short wooden bridge over the coulee.

I paid the driver and walked up the gravel lane through the oak trees. The house had been built by my great-grandfather in 1857, in the Creole architectural style of that period, with brick chimneys on each side and brick columns supporting the latticework veranda on the second story. The peaked roof was now covered with tin, and the foundation had sunk on one side so that the brick columns had cracked and started to shale. The decayed outlines of the slaves’ quarters were still visible in the grass down by the bayou, and the original stone well, now filled with dirt and overgrown with vines, protruded from the ground at an angle by the smokehouse. My father had held on to forty-three acres since the depression, when we lost most of the farm, and he had refused to lease the mineral rights to the oil companies (he called them Texas sharpers who destroyed your land, cut your fences, and gave you a duster in return), but in the last few years the only sugar cane had been grown by Negroes who worked on shares. His Ford pickup truck with last year’s tag was parked in the shed, and there was an old Buick pulled onto the grass at the end of the lane.

The swing on the porch twisted slightly against the chains in the breeze. I tapped on the screen door and tried to see inside into the gloom.

“Hello!”

I heard someone at the back of the upstairs hallway, and I went inside with a strange feeling of impropriety. The house smelled of dust and a lack of sunlight. For some reason the only detail that caught in my eye was his guns in the deer-antler rack above the mantelpiece. The.30-.40 Kraig with the box magazine on the side, the lever-action Winchester, and the double-barrel twelve were flecked with rust and coated with cobwebs in the trigger guards and barrels.

“What you want here?”

I looked up the stairs at a big Negro woman in a starched nurse’s uniform. Her rolled white hose seemed to be bursting around her black thighs.

“I’m Mr. Paret’s son.”

She walked down the stairs, her hand on the banister to support her weight. There were tangles of gray hair above her forehead, and I knew that she was much older than she looked.

“You Mr. Iry?”

“Yes.”

“He figured you’d be home this week. I just give him his sedative, so he won’t be able to talk with you too long. After he takes his nap and has his supper, he can talk a lot better to you.”

“How bad is he?”

“He ain’t good. But maybe you better wait on the doctor. He’s coming out tonight with your sister. She stays with him on my night off.”

“Thank you.”

“Mr. Iry, he talks funny because of that medicine. He’s all right after his supper.”

I walked up the stairs into his room. It was dark, and the only light came from the yellow glow of sun against the window shade. Small bottles of urine were lined on the dresser, and there was a shiny bedpan on a stool at the head of the tester bed. His curved pipe and tobacco pouch rested against the armadillo-shell lamp on the nightstand. I didn’t know that his face could look so white and wasted. The sheet was pulled up to his chin, and the knobs of his hands looked like bone against the skin. He ticked a finger on his stomach and squinted into the glare of light from the open door with one watery blue eye, and I saw that he couldn’t recognize me in the silhouette. I eased the door closed behind me. He smiled, and his lips were purple like an old woman’s. He moved his hand off his stomach and tapped it softly on the side of the bed.

“How’d they treat you, Son?”

“It wasn’t bad.”

“I thought you might be in yesterday, from your letter. I had that nigra nurse make up your room for you. Your guitars are on the bed.” His voice clicked when he spoke, as though he had a fishhook in his throat.

“How they been treating you, Daddy?”

“They like my urine. The doctor takes it away every two days after the nurse puts stickers all over it.” He laughed down in his chest, and a bubble of saliva formed on the corner of his mouth. “They must not have much to do down at the Charity except look at somebody’s piss.”

“Daddy, did Rita and Ace put you in at Charity?”

“They got families of their own, Iry. It costs fifteen dollars a day to keep that nigra woman out here. They ain’t got money like that.”

I had to clench my fingers between my legs and look away from him. My sister and brother had married into enough money to bring in the best of everything for him.

“Look at me, Son, and don’t start letting those razor blades work around inside you. The one thing I regret is that my children never held together after your mother died. I don’t know what they done to you in the penitentiary, but don’t take your anger out on them.”

His watery blue eyes were starting to fade with the sedation, and he had to force his words past that obstacle in his throat. I looked at his white hair on the pillow and his thin arms stretched down the top of the sheet, and wondered at what disease and age could do to men, particularly this one, who had gone over the top in a scream of whistles at Belleau Wood and had covered a canister of mustard gas with his own body.

“Why don’t you go to sleep and I’ll see you later,” I said.

“I want you to do one thing for me this evening. Cut some azaleas by the porch and take them down by your mother’s grave.”

“All right, Daddy.”

“I know you don’t like to go down there.” The light in his eyes was fading away like a quick blue spark.

“I was going down there anyway,” I said.

His eyes closed, and the lids were red against the paper whiteness of his face.

I had heard stories about the effects of intestinal cancer and how fast it could consume a man and his life’s energy, in spite of radiation treatments and the morphine shots to take away the pain, but you had to look at it to make it become real.

I walked down the hall to my room, which he had kept as it was the day I went on the road again with the band and ended up in the penitentiary. My over-and-under, with the.22 Magnum and.410 barrels, was propped in the corner, my clothes hung limply in the closet, the creases on the hangers stained with dust, and my double guitar case that held the Martin flattop and the Dobro sat on top of the bed, with the gold-embossed inscription THE GREAT SPECKLED BIRD across the leather surface. I opened the case, which had cost me two hundred dollars to have custom-made in Dallas, and for a moment in the crinkled flash of the Confederate flag that lined the inside and the waxed shine off the guitars, I was back in the barroom with the scream of voices around me and the knife wet and shaking in my hand.

I stripped naked and dressed in a pair of khakis and a denim shirt and slipped on a pair of old loafers. I put everything from Angola inside the suit coat, tied the sleeves into a hard knot, and pushed it down in the wastebasket.

Downstairs, I found the bottle of Ancient Age that my father always kept under the drainboard. I poured a good drink into a tin cup and sipped it slowly while I looked out the window through the oak trees in the yard and at the sun starting to fade over the marsh. Purple rain clouds lay against the horizon, and shafts of sunlight cut like bands of crimson across the cypress tops. I had another drink, this time with water in the cup, and took a butcher knife and the bottle outside with me to the azalea bushes by the side of the house.

I snipped the knife through a dozen branches covered with red flowers and walked down the slope toward the graveyard. It was close to the bayou, and ten years before, we had had to put sacks of cement against the bank and push an old car body into the water to prevent the widening bend of current from eroding the iron fence at the graveyard’s edge. There were twenty-three graves in all, from the four generations of my family who were buried on the original land, and the oldest were raised brick-and-mortar crypts that were now cracked with weeds and covered with the scale of dead vines. The graves of my mother and sister were next to each other with a common headstone that was divided by a thin chiseled line. It was brutally simple in its words.

There was a tin can full of rusty water and dead stems on the grave, and I picked it up and threw it back in the trees, then laid the azaleas against the headstone in the half-light. It had been seventeen years, but I still had dreams about the fire and the moment when I raced around the back of the house and tried to break open the bolted door with my fists. Through the window I could see my mother’s face convulsed like an epileptic’s in the flames, the can of cleaning fluid still in her hand, while Fran stood with a halo of fire rising over her pinafore. Alcide, the Negro who worked for us, threw me backward off the porch and drove a pickax up to the helve into the door-jamb. But the wind blew the inside of the house into a furnace, and Fran plunged out of the flames, her clothes and hair dissolving and streaming away behind her.

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.

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.”

“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:

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.

“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 girlfriends are holding for you. One of them was talking in the head about stiffing 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 like 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 roadhouses 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 restrooms reached out to the edge of the dance floor. The crowd was made up of airmen from the base, tough kids with duck-tail 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 into 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.