Bad Boy Boogie

by Thomas Pluck

  “Was she sorry you didn’t have a tail?”

  Harold broke into a deep laugh. “Yes she was, at least at first.” He took a long draw from his Coke. “Don’t chase your blue-eyed girl around so much, is what I’m trying to say. Women got a bit of cat in them, they get curious.”

  “Mama Angeline says men got some dog in them.”

  “Can’t say she’s wrong there. I’m a good dog, now that I found my Theresa.”

  Jay swam his laps while Ramona strutted to the diving board. It hurt his neck not to turn and look at her. He played with the boys, and didn’t use the diving boards. He held his breath for time at the five-foot mark and watched aquamarines roll on the surface.

  White arms cut the water past him. Jay lost his count as she kicked by in a royal blue one-piece. She doubled back, braided hair following her like a water moccasin.

  Jay fought the fire in his lungs until he was near choking before he kicked to the surface.

  “What were you doing down there, creep?” Her forehead was lined with thought. “Watching girls like a pervert?”

  “I can hold my breath for two minutes,” Jay gasped, holding the pool edge.

  “You weren’t down there that long.”

  “I counted a hundred twenty, that’s two minutes.”

  “You must count fast,” she said, legs kicking as she treaded water.

  “You can time me.”

  “That’s dumb,” she said, pointing her nose at the boards. “You wanna race? Let’s go.”

  She ducked under and zipped off like a seal. Jay splashed behind her, but never caught up. They met at the ledge in the deep end, and she kicked off the wall for the return lap. She kept her head down and breathed from the side, bobbing like a sea serpent. Jay swam his heart out, but couldn’t keep pace.

  Ramona doubled back and met Jay in the shallow end, barely winded.

  “Don’t make the lifeguard come in and drag you out like a baby,” she said, and shook water from her ear.

  “I’m fine,” Jay wheezed.

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Jay.”

  “That short for anything?”

  “Just Jay.”

  “Jay what?”

  “Jay Desmarteaux. It means two hammers.”

  “No it doesn’t. I know French. It means ‘of the hammer.’”

  “Close enough.” Jay coughed.

  She slapped him on the back. “Jay Desmarteaux, you need to take swimming lessons.”

  “I know how to swim.”

  “You’re fast, but your form is lame.” She climbed on the edge of the pool and sat with her legs dangling, kicking, leaning over to talk.

  “I’m from Louisiana,” Jay said. “We have to outswim gators and snakes.”

  “There’s no snakes in a pool, dummy.” She laughed. “You sound like that Cajun cook on public television.”

  “I do not.”

  “Say ‘guarantee.’”

  “Guarantee,” Jay said.

  “I thought you all said gah-rawntee.”

  “Papa Andre does sometimes,” Jay said. “You gonna tell me your name?”

  “You didn’t need an ambulance,” she said. “So I don’t have to tell you.”

  “That’s not nice. That could’ve been my dying wish. Mrs. Teresa told me anyway. Your name’s Ramona Beth Crane.”

  “Ugh, don’t call me Beth. What’s your middle name?”

  “Ain’t got one.”

  “Don’t say ‘ain’t.’ It’s not a real word. Why don’t you have a middle name?”

  “Couldn’t afford one.”

  She wrinkled her brow for a moment, then smirked and flicked water at him with her toes. “My dad says your mother livened up the cafeteria,” Ramona said, wringing out her braid. “He took home some of her gumbo. It was so good.”

  “You hungry? Mama brought fried chicken,” Jay said. “I always have a drumstick and a breast, you can have my drumstick if you want. I’d rather have the breast.” His ears turned red when he heard the words come out of his mouth.

  Ramona laughed and splashed him. He splashed her back, and she launched in and dunked him. She was soft but strong. They tussled underwater, laughing and tickling and pinching until her foot jabbed his crotch. They swam away, embarrassed and exhilarated.

  Ramona climbed out and slapped the water. “You’d better come out of the water. There’s snakes,” she snickered.

  After Jay swam it off, he found Ramona wrapped in Mama Angeline’s beach towel, nibbling chicken and laughing with the older women. Harold snored in a lounge chair.

  Jay pulled two of Teresa’s ribs from the rack, and licked the sauce off his fingers.

  “Thought you wanted chicken?” Ramona snorted and poked him.

  Ramona came to the pool when she didn’t have riding lessons, or the dreaded piano lessons with her Irish great uncle. She taught Jay a proper dive and how to swim freestyle. She spoke stilted French and Jay answered in Cajun patois. When they went to the kitchen for Cokes she held his hand.

  The leaves had gone gold at the tips, the breeze edged with cold. Ramona said that on Labor Day, the maintenance men would haul out the pool cover. They swam all day, racing and playing games until their friends went home. Then she dragged him to the clubhouse to get sodas.

  Her lips had gone blue. She pushed him against the chipped white siding of the clubhouse and pressed her lips to his. Closed her eyes and gripped his wrists. When her eyes popped open, Jay stared into the cracked blue. She kissed him again, heart rabbit-quick in the swell of her chest, and Jay decided this was where he belonged.

  She broke the kiss with a smack. “Don’t tell a soul or I’ll cut your little bird off.”

  Jay nodded, wide-eyed.

  “School starts next week,” she said. “Maybe we’ll have the same homeroom.”

  “I hope so, Blackbird.”

  “You’re supposed to kiss me back, you know.”

  Her lips were cold and he warmed them.

  Chapter 8

  The sun shot blades of light through the big oaks that ringed the bowl of the athletic fields behind Jay’s old home. He sat atop the concrete steps, eating a pair of Rutt’s Hut rippers and sipping coffee, working up the strength to walk the cracked sidewalks and knock on the door and beg for some memento of his past before leaving this cursed place forever.

  The house looked the same. The garages had been torn down, Andre’s workshop erased. The little workbench Andre had built for him to hammer out his rage had likely been broken apart for scrap.

  Jay stared down the steps to the baseball diamond and soccer fields where they’d played as children, swinging stripped tree branch swords and dirt clod grenades. The pear tree they once climbed for the tough, tart treats remained, the scent of fallen fruit thick in the air.

  Honey bees half-circled him, caught in the whirlpool of his bay rum aftershave on their drunken search for rotten pears. After the Berlin Wall fell, International Avionics sold its campus. He’d driven through the maze of crushed little townhouses that replaced it. The clubhouse was now the Umbria Americana Pavilion, a private dining club and recreational facility. The pool remained, but indoors. Ringed with chaise lounges, filled with tanned mothers, splashing children, and sagging middle-aged men. He watched through the glass until a squat woman stepped out and asked for his membership card.

  Jay asked how much it was to join. She told him they weren’t taking applications.

  The town hadn’t wanted him when he was a kid and it didn’t want him now. The Challenger had a full tank. He would drive south, find his folks.

  Do his best to live well.

  He bit through the frankfurter’s crispy fried skin. Mama Angeline called this place the armpit of the nation, but acknowledged that rude as New Jersey was, the people knew how to eat. He would miss the hot dogs and the pizza, the diners and their Bible-thick smorgasbord menus. And Tony, who had told Mama Angeline that if Jersey was the armpit, then Louisiana was the crotch.<
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  A horn barked from behind. A large black truck butted the Challenger’s rear bumper.

  Jay finished his hot dog slowly, interrupted by frequent jabs of the horn. He took his time, then sauntered to the black GMC Denali, coffee in hand.

  The tinted window descended to reveal faded gray wisps feathered back over a glaring skull. Leo Zelazko had become a distilled version of his younger self, the inefficient layers sloughed away. A pepper gray goatee covered his chisel point chin. Lean to the bone, his lips a perfect line. None of the softness of his son.

  Jay squinted a smile. “You dinged my bumper. Hope you got insurance.”

  Leo blinked gold-eagle eyes. “I see you take after your so-called parents, Joshua. Squeezing this hot-rod out of Anthony Giambotta. If you think you deserve something for what you endured, you should have taken your vindictive friend’s offer.”

  “My name’s Jay, you emaciated prick.”

  “Let’s see your driver’s license,” Leo said. “And prove it. Oh, you don’t have one? I know. You need a birth certificate to get one nowadays, thanks to the ragheads who blew up the Towers.” He nodded to the empty space in the sky where the World Trade Center had been. “And if you had your birth certificate, you’d know that that’s not what it says. A man should know his name, his calling.”

  “Leo suits you fine,” Jay said. “You being a big pussy and all.”

  Leo spoke in measured tones. “I would consider it a challenge to pit myself against a man twenty years my junior, who’s had nothing better to do but pound weights and defend his asshole in the prison yard, but it won’t be with swamp trash like you. Because you’re going to get in the car you extorted out of your fat guinea friend and drive it out of town.”

  “I’m a free man, unlike some.” Jay sipped his coffee. “Big Man Bello’s still got you by the short and curlies, I reckon. Must hurt something bad, being his whipped dog all this time.”

  “No worse a sting than that of the fatherless whelp, Jesse. No, that’s not your name, either.”

  “My name’s Jay, shitbird.”

  “Want to see your birth certificate?” He popped the glove box and ruffled papers.

  Jay stood on tiptoe to peer within.

  Leo produced a well-worn service revolver and aimed it at Jay’s chest. Braced over his crisp uniform sleeve, the dark eyes of hollow points stared from the cylinders.

  “You remember this,” Leo said. The Smith & Wesson Model 36 he’d used to dispatch the carjacker when he became the town hero. Grown men would ask to touch the checkered wood grips as it rode in his holster. “It’s what put down the last animal stupid enough to threaten the sanctity of this town.”

  The shooting had entered suburban legend. A stolen Mustang packed with joyriders from Newark totaled out on the border. The driver ran and evaded police in the tight-packed Nutley side streets until he found a young woman returning from the late shift at the Avionics factory and carjacked her at gunpoint.

  She intentionally crashed her vehicle at the Kingsland park bridge where police converged, and her captor fled into the park. Officers Zelazko and Carnahan gave chase through the chestnut trees that gave the town its name, and emptied their service revolvers after cornering the gunman by the waterfall. The story made the state paper on the year Jay arrived, and again when the carjacking victim married her savior, Officer Stanley Carnahan.

  “You should’ve filed the sights off before you stuck that in my face. It’ll hurt less when I shove it up your ass.” Jay broadened his smile, raised his coffee. The old man was smart. The hammer was down, but Jay had nowhere to go. If he tossed the coffee at Leo’s eyes and ran, he’d have a clean shot at his back. Dive under the truck, he’d get flattened when Leo reversed.

  “Enough of your jailhouse bravado. Mayor Bello is unaware of your early release. I had to call in a lot of favors for that to happen. You will be out of the state before he and his wife are the wiser. Consider the weeks shaved off your sentence my gift of pity. You don’t even know what dog fucked your bitch whore of a mother.”

  Jay thumbed the lid off his coffee.

  Leo cocked the hammer with the sound of cracking teeth. “It ruins a boy, to be raised without a father. Leaves him unanchored in the storm of adolescence. The prisons are full of fatherless wreckage like you, washing up on our shores. The hospital records said you had chlamydia and a prolapsed rectum. That must have hurt as almost much as your real father tossing you aside before birth.”

  “My father is Andre Desmarteaux,” Jay said. “You ruined his name, ’cause you were too greedy or chickenshit to put Joey Bello in a cage.”

  “I know you want to kill me, Jason.” He smiled. “Jacob. Furious with the rage of the fatherless. You should focus that anger on the people who dragged you here. You never belonged here. We’d like to go back to living like you never existed. You’re a stain we scrubbed out of the mattress.”

  Leo levered the shifter into gear and reversed, keeping the sights trained on him. The truck lurched forward, and knocked Jay aside.

  “I ain’t going anywhere, you son of a bitch!” He hurled his coffee cup as the truck roared away. He stalked back to the Challenger and wiped the coffee from his hands.

  Chapter 9

  The driveway of his old house was empty. Jay rang the doorbell with his knuckle.

  No one answered.

  He pulled on a hairnet and a pair of blue nitrile gloves from the drugstore around the block. Okie had been obsessed with forensics. “You can’t get away with shit nowadays,” he’d said. “They find one red cock hair and you’re done. Might as well climb into a big Ramses condom and cut eyeholes before a job.”

  Jay hopped the fence and walked to the cellar door, ducking by the hedge. He taped over the casement window. Looked around and cracked it with his fist, then peeled the glass back before shimmying inside.

  The dank unfinished cellar contained a shop sink and storage boxes stacked on cinder blocks. The cellar’s familiarity washed over him like a drug. Phantom scents wafted from what had once been Mama Angeline’s kitchen upstairs. He crept up the steps and eased the knob open.

  Walking through his old house now inhabited by strangers felt like the impossible reality of a dream. The carpets replaced with polished hardwood, paneling torn out for bright pastel paint. Here and there the house he knew shined through. A gouge he had left in the molding, playing with a screwdriver. A built-in bookshelf he’d built with Andre on a breezy autumn day.

  Jay’s bedroom was now an office, cluttered with paper and a stocky beige computer tower. He padded upstairs to the master bedroom. Andre had built a platform bed with a sunburst maple headboard, and the new owners either appreciated its massive beauty, or couldn’t be bothered dismantling it. Jay knelt to stroke the grain, and it felt like shaking his father’s hand. The wood glowed a soft ruby beneath the rich brown.

  Two steps up to a sunk-in mattress, now spread with a stranger’s sheets. Jay pressed the panel by the headboard. The wood eased in, then popped open to reveal a hideaway.

  Jay blinked at what lay inside the cubby.

  Two of the few things Jay had been forbidden to touch. The tomahawk Andre had taken home from Vietnam, and the combat knife with the finger grooves cut in the handle, so sharp that Andre’s arm hairs used to pop off before its edge. Jay hefted the Lagana war hatchet’s worn hickory handle with reverence, his reflection warped in the hand-hammered blade, the edge scratched from field sharpening.

  A worm turned in his stomach, as if he could smell his parents’ fear. They had left everything.

  In the matching nook on Angeline’s side he found two rolls of cash wrapped in desiccated rubber bands, a tiny zip bag of ancient weed, and a yellowed envelope.

  The envelope was not sealed. Jay peered inside. It held several Louisiana driver’s licenses, with names like Evangeline Anne Calvin. Andrew and Antoinette Demonde. Birth certificates to match.

  No birth certificate for little Jay, but there was a faded check made
out to Joyce Anne Calvin from Kuhn Law Partners, for five thousand dollars.

  Jay tilted his head and studied the documents and puzzled through their meaning. A door creaked downstairs and clicked shut.

  Jay tucked the cash and papers into his pockets, stuffed the knife in his boot, and eased the nooks closed. He froze by the door and heard a woman lumber into the kitchen cursing to herself, slamming cabinets as she put away groceries.

  He could run straight out the front door but Leo Zee would find out he’d been here when she called the cops. And what if he left a cock hair someplace?

  The bedroom window offered a sheer drop. The master bath opened to the back porch roof, but the window was a mere sliver, no way he’d squeeze through.

  He eased down the carpeted steps one by one. The woman in the kitchen was putting away canned goods and having a lively argument with an absent male who apparently did nothing but scratch his balls and fart up the couch. Jay timed the squeaky third step with one of her cabinet slams, and padded past the kitchen to the downstairs bathroom. He hid behind the shower curtain while she swore up a storm.

  The fella wasn’t there to defend himself, but he had left the toilet seat up.

  Jay gripped the hatchet and waited for the woman to plop her ass on the farted-up couch.

  The bathroom door hit the wall.

  “Useless lazy bastard!” The toilet lid slammed, then squeaked as she sat on it.

  Prison had robbed Jay of all expectation of privacy. The first time he’d used a private toilet again outside he had lingered and wished for a newspaper. Now he sank with dismay as he heard the woman ruffle pages.

  Jay covered his mouth as she did her noisy business.

  He hoped it wasn’t so bad she needed a shower. From the sounds she was making, he considered it a distinct possibility.

  Jay relaxed once she washed her hands. Then she announced, “No, I’m putting the lid up! You can put the damn thing down.”