A half hour later we’d retrieved our bags from the cabins and loaded them in the car. The girls got in the back seat with Russell. Our old road map was practically in tatters so I went in the office to buy a new one. Buck had settled the bill for the car repair and the rooms and was standing outside the office, counting what was left of our stake money. He was still there when I came out.
“Here’s the lucky stud gets her all to himself,” he said, punching me lightly on the arm.
He was smiling but there was something in his tone. I smiled back and shrugged. “I guess,” I said.
“I want you to know,” he said, “if she said I forced her it’s a lie.”
“She didn’t say that. Only that she asked you to go.”
“I don’t recall that she did.”
“We were all pretty soused,” I said. “Except for her.”
He spat and looked off at the distant mountains. “I wasn’t so soused I ain’t sure she didn’t say no.” He turned to me again. “I ain’t no rape fiend, kid. I can’t abide a rape fiend.”
“Hell, Buck, I know that.”
“Like as not she couldn’t deal with Mr. Stub,” he said, using the name he’d given his mutilated pecker. “It’s some who can’t.”
I made a wry smile and shrugged. “Maybe. She’s pretty much the fraidy-cat type as it is.”
“I thought I had her figured,” he said, “but now I ain’t so certain.”
“Cries at the drop of a damn hat,” I said.
He smiled. “Yeah she does.” He looked over at the car, where she and Charlie were laughing at something Russell was saying. “But Lordy, don’t that body beat all?”
“You said a mouthful.”
“Couple of nice mouthfuls is what she got. Well, hell, enjoy it while it lasts, kid.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Just one thing. You sappy for her?”
“Sappy?” I said. I peered at the car and lowered my voice. “Hell no, man, it’s not like that.” And told myself I meant it.
He studied my face. “Good,” he said.
“I mean it.”
“All right.” He smiled. “Let’s go.”
On our way to the car he said in a low voice, “You know, even if I had tried to force her—and I sure as shit didn’t, but even if I had—it couldn’t’ve been but attempted rape nohow. Can’t be nothing but attempted with a damn one-inch pecker, right?”
We were laughing when we got to the car, and Charlie asked what was so funny.
“This damn Sonny,” Buck said. “Listen here to the dumbass joke he just told me.”
As I drove out of the parking lot and started down the highway with the sun directly behind us, he told the one about the woman who goes to the doctor and tells him she just all of a sudden went deaf in one ear. The doctor takes a look and says, “Well, I see your problem—you’ve got a suppository in there.” And the woman says, “Oh for Pete’s sake…now I know what happened to my hearing aid.”
Indigo night of drizzling rain. Water dripping from eaves and clattering on banana fronds, running off gutters and spattering on cobblestones. Sporadic and trembling heat lightning. Hoarse bellows of ships’ horns out on the river.
He works the pick gently. Feels the lock yield to his expert application. Eases the door ajar and listens intently. Opens it further and slips inside and closes it softly behind. Stands immobile and studies the geography of the place by the intermittent flares of lightning at the windows. There the kitchen. There the bath. There the bedroom door. Light and dark, light and dark. Mapping in his head the furniture’s array. And then a quavering illumination finds him gone from the front door, transported as by the darkness itself to the bedroom threshold.
The bed stands empty and neatly made. He cannot know if she will return this selfsame evening, whether she will be alone or in company. The lightning quits. He positions himself in a chair in the bedroom and listens in the darkness for sound at the front door. And remains thus for hours. The rain ceases. The windows turn pink with the rising of the morn. When the place is sufficiently daylit he begins to search. And comes to find an envelope in the bedside drawer. The word Sonny inscribed upon it. Two items within. A sheet of paper with the single word Dolan’s and the initial B. And a note.
Chérie—Sorry to leave this way, but got word of B & R! Have to catch a train in 15 min. Took $50. I owe you more than $. Be back soon. You’re an angel—an incomparably lovely vixen—the classiest dame in the Quarter—the most erotic of dreams made flesh—the cat’s veriest whiskers. In other words, you ain’t bad, kiddo. Think of me, S.
She will never know of her inestimable good fortune in choosing to go to St. Louis at this time to appraise an oil collection for possible exhibit in the Fontaine. So deft was his search she will also never suspect that someone was prowling her home in her absence and prying into the recesses of her life. Some days after her return she will hear a neighbor play Blue Skies on the saxophone and her lingering resentment toward Sonny for his rude departure will quite suddenly give way to missing him terribly. She will go to the bedside drawer for his goodbye note and read it yet again for reassurance of his intention to come back. And will again get nothing from it but the sinking feeling that she has seen him for the last time.
Though well outside his bailiwick, the Quarter is not unfamiliar to him. He has made occasional visits to its ranker pockets, has had dealing with various of its meaner denizens, is not without notion of where to begin his search. And thus, on an early-darkening evening of impending rain, after two days of discreet inquisitions he stands informed of the Dolan who worked for a time with the brothers LaSalle….
At his small table in the back room of the garage Jimmyboy sups on a small pot of tomato soup and listens to the radio. He has the volume turned up loud against the rain’s drumming on the roof, but the reception is poor and crackles with static. Rudy Vallee opens the show with his customary greeting of Heighho, everybody! and the band swings into a rendition of I’m Just a Vagabond Lover.
So badly rusted are the hinges of the door at Jimmyboy’s back that the radio’s loudness does not mute their screech. He turns with a sardonic intention of telling the intruder to learn to read so he can understand window signs that say Closed, then sees a tall lean man with gray face and mustache, a broad-brimmed hat dripping rainwater, a chrome contraption where his hand should be. A man not here with complaint of car trouble. A man—and Jimmyboy knows this with instant and iron certainty—of grave intolerance for bullshit.
He turns down the radio and pushes his chair back and points at his prosthetic foot. I got a part missing too, mister, he says, and it done give me all the pain I care to know in this life. I ain’t no tough guy even a tiny bit. You tell me what you want and if I can give it to you I will, believe you me.
John Bones holds up Sonny LaSalle’s prison photograph. Name? he says. Seeking to see how truthful this gimp is.
Jimmyboy names Sonny without hesitation. He tells everything he knows about the LaSalles, even producing the sketch of Russell attached to the newspaper report of the Bogalusa bank robbery, and concluding with what he learned by steaming open the envelope the brothers had left for Sonny and reading its contents before sealing it up again. He tells of the note’s instruction to go to a filling station that he’s sorry he can’t remember the name of but he remembers it’s right next to the Houston train depot and it said talk to a guy named Miller.