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He nodded his head toward the rear of the building and dipped a crackling into his bowl and inserted it in his mouth, an amused light in his eyes.
His entourage of rappers and whores were at tables by the dance floor. They paid no attention to me as I passed. Inside the rest room I washed my face with cold water and looked in the mirror. I could hear a sound in my ears, like wind whistling inside a tin can, feel a pressure band along the side of my head, as though I were wearing a tight hat. A jukebox began playing by the dance floor, and I would have sworn the voice on the recording was Guitar Slim’s.
I washed my face again. When I closed my eyes against the coldness of the water, I saw faces from my platoon, kids who had been out too long, their legs pocked with jungle ulcers, the smell of trench foot rising from their socks, scared shitless of night-trail toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105’s, nobody in touch with who they used to be. A San Bernardino hot-rodder with a juju bag tied under his throat and a scalp lock to his rifle. A black kid from West
Memphis, Arkansas, zoned on uppers and too many firefights, a green sweat towel draped over his head like a monk’s cowl, the barrel of his blooker painted with tiger stripes. I could hear them marching, blade-faced, their uniforms stiff with salt, feeding off one another’s anger, their boots thudding across a wooden bridge.
I spit in the lavatory and dried my face on my shirt rather than touch the cloth towel on the roller, then went out the door, the breeze from a fan suddenly cool on my skin, my heart racing.
Jimmy Dean Styles closed his newspaper and lifted a demitasse of coffee to his lips.
“Marse Charlie not wit’ you today?” he said.
“You were at Rosebud Hulin’s art class. That area is now off-limits for you. If she needs a ride, I’ll provide one,” I said.
“I don’t know you, never brought you no grief, never given you no truck, but you always in my face and on my case. What is it wit’ you, Chuck?”
“I don’t think you’re hearing me. Rosebud Hulin is out of your life. We’re together on that, right?”
“You wrapped too tight for your job, man. I got a girl over there can take care of that for you, unzipper your problem, know what I’m sayin’, but in the meantime don’t be jabbing your finger at me.”
“Just so you understand later why it all went south, you shouldn’t call a guy ‘Chuck,’ not unless you’ve paid some dues, humped a sixty-pound pack for twenty klicks in the rain, had Sir Charles kick your ass, seen your friends blown into hamburger, that sort of thing. You reading me, partner?”
“You got a serious jones, Lou’sana Chuck. Now shake your cakes down the road, before I have you picked up,” he said.
I caught him solidly on the jaw with a right cross, snapping his head sideways, slinging food out of his mouth, then hooked him in the eye and caught him with another right, this time in the throat, before he could get off the bar stool. He threw two fast punches at me, off balance, unable to draw his arms back for a full swing, and I slipped one of his punches, took the other on the ear, and then hit him with everything I had.
I put my whole weight into each blow, breaking his nose, splitting his mouth against his teeth, gashing open the skin above one eye. He managed to roll off the stool and right himself, even to get his guard up and catch me once, hard, in the chest, but I drove my fist into his rib cage, right under the heart, and saw his willpower leave him, his resistance drain from his face, like water bursting from the bottom of a balloon. I hooked him in the kidney, then in the stomach, doubling him over, forcing him to cling to the stool for support.
But I couldn’t let go of it. I seized the back of his head and drove his face down on the knurled edge of the bar, smashing it into the wood, over and over, while behind me women screamed and a tall black man with orange and purple hair and rings through his eyebrows tried to get his arms around me and put himself between me and Jimmy Dean Styles.
I pulled my .45 and barrel-stroked the man with orange and purple hair across the face, knocking him to the floor, then racked a round into the chamber and aimed the sight between his eyes, my hands streaked with Jimmy Sty’s blood, shaking on the grips.
“I’ll get out of town. I promise. Don’t do it, man. Please,” the man on the floor said, turning his face to one side.
A dark stain spread through his slacks.
I was arrested before I could get out of the parking lot. Ten minutes later I was escorted in cuffs inside the St. Martin Parish Jail, my shirt split down the back, and pushed inside the drunk tank. My skin felt dead to the touch, my muscles without texture or tone, as though I had just come off a two-day whiskey drunk. The voices of the inmates around me seemed muffled, filtered through wet cotton, even though some of them appeared to know me and were speaking directly in my face. In my mind’s eye I saw a homeless man bent under a cross made of a rolled yellow tent stuffed with all his earthly belongings, and I knew that for all of us who had been there the war would never be over and the real enemy was not Jimmy Sty but a violent creature who rose with me in the morning and lived quietly inside my skin, waiting for the proper moment to vent his rage upon the world.
CHAPTER 17
When the Iberia sheriff arrived at the jail, I thought he would have me released. Instead, he had me moved out of the drunk tank to an empty holding cell, one with a drain hole and a urine-streaked, rusty grate in the center of a cement floor, graffiti and female breasts and male genitalia smoked on the ceiling with Bic lighters. I sat on a wooden bench, the sheriff in a chair on the other side of the bars, his eyes deep-set with his anger and disappointment. I felt light-headed and my hands were swollen and as thick as grapefruit when I tried to close them. “Were you trying to kill him?” the sheriff asked.
“Maybe.”
“Everyone in the bar says there was no provocation. They say Styles was just sitting on a stool and you went apeshit and starting tearing him apart.”
“He owns the bar. He owns most of the people in it. I’m a cop. What are they supposed to say?”
“You’re being charged with felony assault.”
“Thanks for passing on the news,” I said.
“You just going to sit there and act like a wiseass?”
“Styles is a human toilet. Someone should have ripped out his spokes a long time ago,” I said.
He rose from his chair and put on his Stetson hat and stared down at me, the light from a high window breaking around his head.
