by Taylor Brown
On the bank stood the pitcher, his wife, his twins. All of them in white. They, like their neighbors, had left dinner cooling to see what glowed orange beyond the ballroom windows. The pitcher’s boat was unrecognizable; he knew it only by the empty slip. Furious, he started to tear off his ball cap to stomp on, but succeeded only in mussing his neatly combed hair. Other spectators noticed the fit. Whispers began to circulate through the crowd.
“It’s the Slocum boat,” they said. “Who would do such a thing?”
“Probably a woman,” said one man.
“Or a Marlins fan,” said another, joking.
Profanities quaked in the pitcher’s throat, wanting release.
But each to each, his daughters grabbed a hand, averting an outburst. They spoke in English now, knowing he understood it better.
“Papa,” one of them said, “it was a bad boat for the manatees anyway.”
They had thrust this line hard on him the last week. He’d been standing staunch though, taking side with his boat. But they, these miniatures of full-grown women, did not back down easily.
“Nonsense,” he told them, but wondered. He wondered too at the river of fire, how awful it was, and a sudden dread gripped him.
He squeezed his daughters’ hands.
“Maybe,” he told them, “we can get us a different boat next time. One of those airboats. Flat bottom, no propellers. Would that be better?”
“Yes, Papa!” exclaimed the two of them, his twins, squeezing his hands in their own. The gripping warmth of those tiny hands, the warmth that bound them, would hold him to all his promises. They reached out and took their mother’s hands, closing the circle of them into a single shape against the night. His family smiled then, even for the whispers, their faces like jack-o-lanterns in the floating blaze.
The pitcher managed to smile too, but still he wondered what madness must lurk beyond them, in those black depths beyond the flames. And somewhere in the deep of him, where he kept things never to surface, he remembered the sickening bump of impact. He’d been trying to keep that truth down, hidden, but what burned before him peeled back darkness like a torch. And with the blaze hot on his face, on his smile, he wondered whether all the madness was within him or without.
WHOREHOUSE PIANO
She played whorehouse piano, bawdy and loud, on a 1901 stand-up with bubbling paint, red-coated over black, under a ceiling brown-stained with water spots. She, Lucy, had straight-chopped bangs, black, like she’d done them herself with kitchen shears, and cheek bones so high and firm they made dark razors of her eyes, just a wink of vision in them.
No one listened to the piano, the songs so well-keyed to damage and abandon that no one could hear them, like the way you forgot your own breathing. She played soundtrack to their unfolding dramas, ass-groping and well drinks and let’s go upstairs, honey. They staggered this way and that in the dimness of smoke and glass, in this nowhere place where they could be something other than the bad-inked tattoos that swathed them like bruises, too muddy to decipher.
Tables sat in broken ellipses, chairs off-kilter with a shorted leg, the whole barroom an assemblage of wreckage picked up from the floor again and again, daily during the closed hours of daylight by skilled barkeeps who set them teetering for those scant hours before darkness fell.
That was Lucy’s favorite time. She came from the barrage of daylight, the mean Louisiana sun, into dank darkness, the spotted ceiling arching high overhead, like spoiled heavens. She crossed the barroom floor on flagstones of light thrown down from the high windows, her stepping stones laid out in fours that matched the windowpanes, the cruciform darkness that divided them.
She did not go into the darkened corners. She stepped from light into light, careful to avoid the tenuous erection of tables and chairs, and then she stepped the six inches onto her stage, that dizzying height, and swept her dress underneath her to sit on her stool, the toes of her red high heels set daintily on the pedals, her red-painted fingers and scar-nicked knuckles crackling in preparation, like a prizefighter’s before they put the gloves on.
The keys rang more crisply in that quiet time before nightfall, the light fading, the congregation of wrecked furniture sitting broken-backed and hulk-like before her. She did not sing then, singing only when other voices could drown her own. She hummed, her once-cut throat glistening whitely in scar.
Later the working girls. They came clear-heeled with fancy purses slung underneath their armpits, the newest fashions bright-spangled and fringed. Lucy had been one of them, of course. In her teens. Driven from home to here, hardly different, forced to conduct and indulge all orifice, all pleasure. Some of the men liked to see blood, hers, but she had teeth, nails, knucks, and did the thing she’d learned long ago to do, at home: fight.
Now she played the piano, no whoring, her voicebox coarsened with grit, her voice itself a hard and perfect rasp for the songs she played.
***
Her brother came looking for her on a black night in July, a guitar case slung over his shoulder.
“Papa’s dying,” he said.
Lucy had already played thirteen songs about death that night, each more tragic than this. She told him to tell the family he couldn’t find her. She told him he didn’t know nothing about daddies and their little girls.
***
The man who’d done her throat was Patterson Goode, known everywhere as Whoreson for his temperament, or how it used to be. He did underwater work for the Gulf rigs, globe-helmeted with breathing hoses and undersea torches. He stopped the black clouds that pooled underneath the water, the leakage of cracked pipes. He welded fissures and busted girding. He kept the rich men in Houston getting richer, the black gold sucked twenty-four-seven from the earth’s crust.
Whoreson carried an eight-inch fixed-blade in his boot and loved Lucy more than anything, his cheek white-raked by her nails, his shoulder moon-stamped by her teeth. He listened to her songs now and called her a pianist, the only one. He no longer drank or frequented whores and had to buy other people drinks to earn his seat. He would have killed her Daddy in a heartbeat, had she asked him to. Still he said she should go see him on his deathbed.
Lucy started playing a wordless tune left-handed and lit a cigarette with her right. Then she looked at Whoreson.
“He can die without me,” she said.
“I’ll go with you,” said Whoreson. “We can take my truck. I got three days till next shift.”
He looked pleadingly at her, needing, as always, whatever redemption she’d give him. Her nearest eye cut him up and down, steel-specked.
“Tonight,” she said.
***
They drove all night into bayou darkness, low-hung moss and the scarce reflection of blackwater amid the mangroves. Highway signs reared before them, bleary and wayward-tilted. Red-flattened carcasses of small mammals littered the road. Whoreson crossed himself when he saw them, reborn. Her hand retreated when he tried to hold it. They never touched, not since the night he slit her throat.
***
They stopped at a truckstop outside town, too early to wake her family. They drank burnt coffee from styrofoam cups under the yellow florescence. Lucy saw little black things huddled at the corners of the hanging lights, insects dead in brainless awe of Louisiana Power & Light.
***
At dawn, they took the backroad to the little house where she’d grown up, the sky-blue paint weathered green, vines clawing upward on all sides, the whole house moldering slowly back into the fecund swampland on which it sat.
Lucy told Whoreson to stay in the truck. She pushed her door open on its rusty hinges and shut it and approached the rip-screened porch, moths with wide-eyed wings clinging to what screen there was.
Her mother and brother came to the door in pajamas, her mother heavy-footed with gnarled toes. Lucy had perfect feet, sleek and shapely, like her father’s.
They led her through dark rooms that smelled the same as they always had, that made her feel the
passing of time all at once. How much she’d done, seen, sang, and everything here the same. The brown carpet, the yellow linoleum, the faucet bleeding rust into the kitchen sink.
They’d made the sickbed in her old room, her father swaddled in damp sheets, his breathing jagged as glass in his throat.
“Throat cancer,” they whispered.
She bent over him, his closed eyes, her piano hands crackling into hard knots of fist. He would die peaceful in this blue room, no one to blame him for anything that had happened here. Lucy wished she could claw down into his innards and pluck the words out of him, the ones she wanted to hear: the I’m sorry’s and please forgive me’s. She wanted to see fear in that gaunted face, fear of what might be coming next when you left behind the kind of legacy he did, when you wrecked things in the dark and never turned on the lights.
Her brother and mother stood behind her. Lucy looked at them watching, no knowledge in their faces, not hearing the cacophony erupting inside her skull, like they never had. She reached out to touch her father, a final gesture of some kind, but could not open her fist. She turned and walked out of the house, the screen door banging behind her.
Whoreson saw her coming and leaned over; the shotgun door creaked open. She got inside and told him to drive home. He nodded.
On the drive back, they drove right into the rising sun. It rose white and clean over the cripple-armed trees, the twisted trunks and swamp. Whoreson squinted into the new day, his face unravaged in light, the busted pilings of his teeth white where the sun struck them.
Lucy looked at him.
“If you hadn’t of almost killed me, you never would of been saved. You’d be at your old ways, whiskey-drunk, cutting whores. You ever think of that?”
He nodded slowly. “Don’t seem real fair, huh?”
Lucy looked out her window and nodded. Then she shook a cigarette from her pack and lit it, cracked her window a half-turn of the crank, and blew the smoke outside.
Whoreson looked at her.
“You did save me though. I believe that. You’re like a angel to me.”
“Like hell I am,” said Lucy.
But a sudden urge ran at odds to her words. She wished she were already back at the whorehouse tonight, at her piano amid the night’s wreckage, playing a song for this one man who would listen. Who wanted to. She touched the scar at her throat with her thumb, and then she put both hands on the dashboard, the cigarette slanted sideways from her mouth, and started to thump a tune on the sun-warmed vinyl, a low voice of song rising from her cut throat.
Whoreson didn’t look at her for fear she’d stop.
HOME GUARD
He doesn’t look so tough for a hero, if that’s what he is. He’s way too short first of all, like five foot nothing. Looks like he’s still in high school, even though he’s a couple years older than me, and I’m about to be a sophomore. At State. Before now, the last I’d heard of him was when he did Mallory Dawson in the back seat of his black Mustang convertible. We were freshmen, Mallory and me both. She was my sweetheart then, though she didn’t know it. She was starry-eyed for older guys, guys like David Doogan laying in wait to steal her virginity. Son of a bitch. He became my arch-nemesis then, though he didn’t know it.
I hadn’t seen Doogan in about five years when I saw him at the bar last weekend. He looked the same as always, except for two things. First, he had these veins running all down his forearms. Looked like a map of the Mississippi Delta I once saw. He isn’t so big, as I was saying, but those sons of bitches gave me pause. Other thing was his haircut: buzzed Marine Corps style. All that had changed him. He might’ve looked downright dangerous if it wasn’t for his posture, all slumped-like. Backbone hunched, shoulders pushed forward—not what you’d expect from a Marine.
Anyways, when I got there Doogan was talking to this guy Bear. His Dad being a urologist, Bear is loaded but tries to act like a redneck. Drives a street truck, wears camo, has a pit bull on a chain leash named Attila. That truck of his—it has a goddamn aerodynamic wing on the back. If that’s not in bad taste, I don’t know what is.
Bear was just towering over Doogan, talking up close to ear, and Doogan was just standing there with a draft beer in a plastic cup, nodding his head. Right then, any old bitterness I was harboring about his exploits with Mallory evaporated. I don’t why.
When I walked up to them, Bear wheeled on me and said, “Wyatt! Doogan’s been shot!”
I gave Doogan a thorough perusal. He didn’t look shot to me.
“Shot?” I asked. “Where at?”
“Son of a bitch was a sniper, Wyatt.”
“In Iraq?”
Bear nodded. “Killing towelheads,” he said, “and camels.”
I looked at Doogan and gave him a substantial head nod. I’ve got two such nods. One’s where my chin goes up. That’s the one I give when I reckon I could kick a guy’s ass. The second one is a downward nod of the head. That’s the one I gave Doogan, you can be sure. And I’ll give it to anybody who’s taken a bullet. I even gave it to Eddie Lovett one time, who shot his own self in the shoulder hopping a fence with a shotgun in tow. Dumbass. Even still, I gave him the downward nod. I don’t know what it is to be shot, but it’s something.
“You okay?” I asked him.
Doogan nodded. That was when I noticed he had himself an acne breakout, just a couple of red petals on either side his nose. Besides that, his face was pretty white for a boy who’d been in the desert for so long. He started to say something, but Bear’s big head swung between us.
“Got shot right here,” said Bear, jabbing a fat finger just above my pelvic bone. Last damn place I wanted the son of a bitch sticking me.
“Hit his flak jacket first.”
I looked over at Doogan, his mouth just hovering somewhere between open and closed. Not much to read in it.
Bear went on. “Only went in yea far, or thereabout.” He made a two inch space between thumb and forefinger.
I leaned over toward Doogan’s ear and asked what round it was.
“AK-47,” he told me.
“7.62 by 39 millimeter,” Bear said. “Full-metal jacket.”
“Where’d it happen?” I asked.
Doogan looked at me and I saw his mouth shape a word, but it got swept away in all the gabble and bottle-clink. Bear leaned over to translate for me.
“Fallujah,” he said. “Goddamn bloodbath.”
I’d seen some pictures of Fallujah in Newsweek. All the buildings were the same color and that was the color of sand.
“Shit,” I said.
Doogan leaned toward me and said some more, but the din in there blew his sentences all to shit. Luckily I could pretty much string together the story on my own: rooftop, convoy, waiting, sunset, nothing, spotter, extraction, helicopter, stood, shot, dead.
As he talked I nodded my head real gravely, like I was stone sober. At the same time I pictured him all decked out in desert camo and black webbing, grenades and canteens and flares and pistols and all. Just this little guy and his spotter and a big .308 sniper rifle with the heavy barrel trained on a corner in the road. Waiting for some bad guys to come round the bend and them not coming and the sky getting dark and cold and no helo to pick them up.
Seemed to me he was telling this story like he was telling a whole other one. Can’t really explain it, but I tell you, he wasn’t talking like no Rambo. Looked more like Mr. Youngblood, my old Bible teacher. Full of holy dread and all that.
Me, I was just matching up his words with the pictures I’d seen. From what I could gather, they’d got stuck up there on that building way behind enemy lines. Chopper wouldn’t come, LZ too hot. So it got dark and them all alone. Finally a Blackhawk arrived all decked in green lights and turning the dust off the rooftop in big tendrils, and when they stood up to clip into the ropes somebody with an AK-47 opened up on them. Full-auto. His spotter didn’t make it and Doogan took that one in the gut.
This whole time Bear was hopping up and down on his toes,
too tickled. Finally it burst out: “Show us the scar!”
Doogan strained a fake smile. I could tell it was fake because it showed too many teeth for a boy who wasn’t telling a teeth-showing type of story. Then he peered down at his shoes. Bear, he looked down there, mouth agape, then looked up again.
“Show us the scar!”
He was getting squirmy now, Doogan was. Fidgeting a lot for a boy trained as an expert in sitting still for maybe days at a time. Pissing in his own pants if he has to. Now looking sheepish as hell, like he spilled something he shouldn’t have.
“Show us the scar!”
Believe you me, he didn’t want to show that thing at all. I nudged Bear in the side. Thought he’d get the message to lay off. But Bear just looked at me with these beads of sweat trembling across his lip, and then he turned back to Doogan.
“Wyatt wants a peek too! Come on, son!”
He was looking everywhere but at us. Doogan, I mean.
Me, I was just looking at Bear and calling him a jackass in my head, feeling like the world’s greatest asshole just by association. But then, just as I was about to apologize to Doogan, I saw him raise up his shirt.
It was not like any scar I’d ever seen. I expected a pale circle where the scarred skin was shinier than the rest, but this was a wound: black, blue, purple, yellow. And real big. Size of a donut at least. Just looking pissed and mean and new. I was pretty grossed out, to be honest with you. Shit was pretty horrible to look at. Made me feel my own kidneys swimming down there in my guts.