instrument but a sorrow wrapped in warrior loneliness. Chester treated her like the dark mystery she was, never bringing her out until the final set of the night, queen of the ball-which was why she’d been in the bus, not onstage, when the Western Flyer got jacked.
Chester glanced down at the table, saw the woman’s fingers lacing his own, felt the nagging heat of her touch. “Darlin’ dear,” he repeated, snapping to. “As I have told you at least twice now, and which should be obvious to a fan as devoted as you claim to be…” He lumbered to his feet as, at long last, the headlights of Geno’s Firebird appeared in the lot. “The name is pronounced
She cocked her eye, a dark glance, the rice pudding curdled. “Oh, boo.”
“Adieu.”
“Boo!”
He tipped his hat and hustled into the night.
Inside the car, Chester collected a pearl-handled Colt.45 from an oilcloth held out to him by Skillet, who kept for himself a.44 Smithy and a buck knife big enough to gore a dray. Geno carried a.38 snub-nose and a length of pipe. You play enough bayou jump joints and oil-coast dives, you habituate your weapons.
Geno, sitting behind the wheel, glanced over his shoulder at Chester who straddled the hump in the backseat. “I’m guessin’ there ain’t no guesswork to who took the bus.”
“No.” Chester dropped the magazine on the Colt, checked to be sure it had all seven rounds, plus one in the pipe, slammed it home again, then tucked the pistol under his belt as Geno slipped the Firebird into gear and took off. “I think not.”
Skillet, true to his nature, remained quiet. Black as Houston crude and wiry with cavernous eyes, he’d been hit with a fry pan in ’77, still had the telltale dent in his skull. Geno, plump as a friar with slicked-back hair, kept up a low, tuneless hum as he drove. He was the band’s gadfly mystic, always wandering off on some oddball spirit craze, and he’d recently read somewhere that you ought to chant “Om” to get right with the cosmos. Apparently, though, he’d snagged some cross-signals, for the effort came out sounding like some rural Baptist dirge, hobbling along in waltz time. Chester almost asked for the radio, then reconsidered. Who knew what sort of ass-backward mojo you’d conjure, stopping a man midchant?
They pulled over for food at an all-night canteen on the Port Arthur outskirts: crawfish etouffee, hush puppies, grilled boudin sausage. Using his fingers to scoop the food from its white cardboard carton, Chester dug in, reminding himself that vengeance is but one of many hungers.
“Boudin,” he said. “Proof that God loves a Creole man.” To himself, he added:
They took Route 73 to catch I-10 near Winnie, figuring the thief was heading west. He’d mentioned home was El Paso, just across the border from Ciudad Juarez, murder capital of the planet.
His name was Emigdio Nava but he went by Feo, the Ugly One. The handle was not ironic. Small and hunched but muscular, arms sleeved with tats, he had a scrapper’s eyes, a mulish face, the complexion of a peach pit. He’d approached Chester about two weeks back, at a private party they were playing out on the levee road in East Jefferson Parish. He invited himself back into the greenroom between sets and sat himself down, a cagey introduction, smile like a paper cut. Everybody in the band figured him for a dealer-except for a few old locals too big to unseat, the Mexican gangs ran practically everything dopewise now-but he made no mention of such.
He did, though, have an offer.
“Want you to write me a song,” he said, whipping out a roll of bills. He licked his thumb, flicked past five hundreds, tugged them free, and handed them out for Chester to take. “For my girl.”
Chester glanced toward Skillet, by far the best judge of character in the band. He’d played up and down the coast for over thirty years, headliners to pickup bands, seen everything twice. It took awhile, but finally Skillet offered a nod.
“Tell me about your girl,” Chester said, taking the money.
Her name was Rosa Sanchez but everyone knew her as La Monita, Little Monkey. Again, Chester learned, irony was not at issue. Feo showed him snapshots. She was a tiny woman with unnaturally long arms. Her small round face was feathered with fine black hair. An upturned nose didn’t help, though the rest of the package was straight-up fine. And being clever and resourceful, or so Chester surmised from how Feo told it, she turned misfortune to her advantage. A hooker who worked near the ship channel, she gained the upper hand over the more attractive girls by, more or less, outfucking them.
Geno, catching a glance at the picture, muttered, “Ain’t we funky.”
Chester cut him with a look.
“We got this tradition in Mexico,” Feo said, ignoring them both. “Ballads. We call them
Skillet watched him like a cat perched beneath the hummingbird feeder.
“You people,” Feo continued, “have such a tradition also, no?”
“Called
Feo rose from his chair, that slashing smile. “How hard can it be?”
Harder than Chester thought, as it turned out, but he’d taken the money and so was stuck. The problem was simple: how to pen something apt that wasn’t at the same time offensive. It proved the better of him-he put it off, scratched out a few sorry lines, cast them aside:
Mama would shoot me dead onstage, he thought, if I dared sing that out loud. She’d been a torch singer famous up and down the bayou country, Miss Angeline her stage name. She’d died when Chester was seven, the cancer setting a pattern for women he’d lose.
Seeing that Chester was suffering over the lyrics, and sensing in that the chance for some clowning, Geno tried his hand too, singing his version over lunch, a plate of fried chicken and string beans with bacon:
Chester glanced up from his own plate, jambalaya with shrimp and andouille. “You looking to get me killed?”
Geno veiled his grin with a shrug. “Not before payday, no.”
Two nights later, Feo showed up unannounced at the club they were playing, gripping an Abita beer, working a path through the crowd to the bandstand. He offered no greeting, just gestured once with a cock of his head.
Desperate for an idea-something, anything, quick-and unnerved by the small man’s stare, Chester turned to the band and counted off the first thing that popped into his head:
No sooner did the lyrics escape than he felt the sheer disastrous lunacy of what he’d done. And the band hadn’t played the tune since forever, execution falling somewhere between rusty and half-ass, a dash of salt in an already screaming wound. The gleam in Feo’s eye turned glacial. The bottle of beer dropped slowly from his mouth, and the mouth formed an O, then reverted to slit-mode as he vanished. Chester thought maybe that would be it, a feeble wish, but then he spotted him at the bar between sets, and at the end of the night, like a bad itch, he turned up again, drifting across the parking lot as they loaded up the Flyer.
Approaching Chester, “Got time for a word, cabron?”
Chester led him off a little from the others, not sure why. “Nice night-no, mon ami?” Cringing. Lame.
