AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I don’t own it. I’m mortgaged up to my eyeballs. It all went into the college. That ain’t a shuck, either, Loot.”
“What do you pay that black woman with?”
He laughed.
“I don’t pay her anything. She works three hours a day for room and board. She just got out of St. Gabriel. She did five years for murdering her pimp.”
“What you do is your business, Lyle, but I think you have a dangerous and psychotic man staying at your home.”
“That black gal, Clemmie, might cut my throat, but a good fart would blow ole Vic off the planet like a dandelion. Come on, let’s eat. You’re too serious about everything, Dave. That’s always been your problem. Treat the world seriously and in turn it’ll treat you like a clown. You ought to learn that, Loot.”
“How about saving it for a wider audience, Lyle?”
“It’s just one guy’s opinion,” he said, and shrugged his shoulders. Then he waved at the man who called himself Vic Benson and who was now flinging a pile of dried banana fronds into a trash fire by a brick wall at the back of the property. His body was silhouetted like a figure cut from tin against the puffs of sparks and plumes of black smoke. He walked toward us, out of the shade, his eyes red-rimmed, unblinking, welded on mine, his puckered face as unreal as rubber twisted around a fist.
I didn’t look directly at him while the black woman served us plates of black-eyed peas, dirty rice, and barbecued pork chops. But I could smell him, an odor like turpentine, tobacco smoke, wind-dried sweat.
Because part of his lips had been pared away, you could see everything in his mouth when he chewed his food. He reached across the table for a second pork chop, and a patch of black hair on his arm brushed the rim of my iced-tea glass.
“The way I eat, it bothers you?” he asked.
“No, not at all,” I said.
“I seen them a lot worse than me. In an armed service hospital,” he said. “They had to eat their food out of toothpaste tubes.”
He drank from his glass. The iced tea gurgled across his teeth. His splayed fingers looked like gnarled and baked tubers.
“Someone used a piano wire on Weldon Sonnier and tried to remodel him into a stump,” I said. “Do you know anything about that, Vic?”
“About what?”
“You heard me.”
“Piano wire? That’s a good one. The last time I seen you, you ax me if I was looking in somebody’s windows. Maybe you got a bump on the brain or something.”
The black maid had put on a Walkman headset and was dusting the patio furniture by slapping it with a dish towel, one hand propped on her hip, while she jiggled to music that no one else could hear. Vic pushed a piece of meat back into his mouth with his thumb and studied her undulating curves.
“I talked with the gentleman who runs the Sally in Lafayette,” I said. “He said you were watching Lyle on TV one time and you mentioned how you’d like to pour lye down his throat.”
Lyle’s fork paused over his food a moment, then he continued eating with his eyes askance.
“What a drunk man says don’t have no more meaning than horse piss on a rock,” Vic said.
“He says you flipped a hot cigarette into a child’s face.”
“Then I say I don’t have no recollection of him being there to say what I done and what I ain’t done in my life.”
“People sure seem to know when you’ve been around, though, Vic,” I said.
“How about we ease it down a notch, Dave?” Lyle said.
“It don’t bother me none,” Vic said. “One guy like me gives a job to a hunnerd like him. He knows it, too.”
“You’re wrong about that, partner,” I said. “You become a job for me when I have to cut a warrant on you. But right now I can’t prove that you tried to take your son’s head off with a piece of piano wire. That means you have another season to run. If I were you, I’d take advantage of my good fortune and change my ways. Change ta vie, t’connais que je veux dire?”
“I’m tired of this. Where’d you put that tobacco at?” he said, and pushed his plate away with the heel of his hand.
“I think I set it up on the brick wall. Stay where you’re at. I’ll get it,” Lyle said, rose from his chair, and walked across the lawn.
