They say that while he was in the pokey, Louis cured the police chief’s wife of her insomnia by having the chief cut the ears off a live wild rabbit and strap them, still warm, to her temples before turning in at night. They say it cured more than her insomnia, though, and she began to want more in bed than her husband, who was almost sixty years old, could deliver. This made the chief think poorly of Louis, and the word was put out that Louis had better keep his nose clean while in the city limits.
Louis got the blues after that episode. He’d come into Lucky’s, but his smile was thin and far away and not meant for any of us who sat at his table. He didn’t have any new stories to tell. We went ahead and asked him, “What’s troubling you, Louis?” He’d take a deep lungful of air and let it sigh out. “You don’t seem like yourself, Louis,” He’d shake his head as if to unseat a fly and raise his beer to his Ups. “Does it have to do with Moley?” we asked. “Or being in jail? Are you worried about the chief?” But he’d just look puzzled as if he didn’t have the first idea of what we were talking about. Finally, after about a week of this, he said, “Step away.” We did what he wanted because of our respect for him, and no one tried to figure out why he said it.
It was about this time that Louis took a sales job with a farm implement company. Louis was well liked by the business people and could get work whenever he wanted it. Most people in the selling business knew that Louis had the power to move merchandise. They’d put him on straight commissions and he’d earn enough in three or four months to last him and Lily the year. I saw him one hot July afternoon driving a big Farmall down the middle of the main drag leading a parade. He was wearing a wide-brim straw hat and sunglasses and I could tell by his color that he’d been drinking for a while. There was a troop of horsemen behind him, and behind them there was the high school marching band. A small crowd had gathered along the sidewalks to watch the parade, which was being held to celebrate the invention of the internal combustion engine. Behind the high school band there was a float that was supposed to illustrate the theme of the parade. It was a ten-foot-tall piston made out of silvered cardboard. Two girls in bathing suits were cranking the piston up and down. A three-year-old boy on top was dressed up like a spark plug. I saw Lily, narrower than ever, in the crowd of onlookers. She was walking slowly, so as to not get ahead of Louis’s tractor. Her face was as colorless as skim milk. She was carrying her big red purse, but she wasn’t holding it like a weapon. I could see by the look in her eyes that she was worried. I knew Lily didn’t have any use for me or for any of us from Lucky’s, but I caught up with her and touched her elbow anyway. “All of us over at Lucky’s are pretty worried about Louis,” I said.
“You have reason to be,” she said without taking offense or getting that look of total disgust she reserved for Louis’s friends.
“What’s troubling him, Mrs. Quenon?” I asked.
She looked at me then and the old contempt came back into her eyes for a second. “Dreams,” she said.
She told me that Louis was having dreams he couldn’t figure out. They’d started up when he was in jail and they got worse after they let him out. The dreams didn’t scare him any, but he was having trouble reading them. He wrote to a man in Morocco, but all his letters had been returned unopened. Every night for a week he’d called an old friend of his named Art One Pipe who lived in the far northeast comer of the state. One Pipe told Louis that he was well known for his patience and not to act like a teenage girl with acne when he needed his best quality most. One Pipe drove the three hundred miles to see him and to help him work things out. “All they did was drink bourbon and puke,” Lily said.
The word began to go around that Louis was in a bad way. He’d quit his job after he’d made a couple of thousand dollars and had gone on a two-week tear, dropping most of it. Those of us who understood that Louis was the indispensable center of our circle as well as the spokes of the wheel that held it together, decided that something had to be done. I was elected to go to his house and make a plea, reminding him how important every one of us felt him to be. Lily let me in. She had an abandoned look on her face as if she didn’t care what might happen next because the worst had already come about.
I found Louis in bed with a bottle of Canadian whiskey. He was naked and covered with a sheet. The room smelled fiercely of the rancid oil only a sick body can produce. He saw me and smiled a little. He tried to sit up. I helped him and fixed the pillows behind his head. He took the bottle of whiskey by the neck and poured some of it into his glass. He handed me the glass and took a drink himself directly out of the bottle. He had that same faraway look. I started to say something because I felt the time had come for me to say what I had come here to say, but he held up his hand to stop me. “Step away,” he said.
I sat there for a full minute, not knowing what to do. Then I finished my drink and stood up. “Okay, Louis,” I said. “But I’ll come back a little later on, if that’s all right with you.”
Louis shook his head, frowning at my failure to understand him. “Me, I mean,” he said. “I’m a step away. I think I always have been.”
I guess I just had a blank look on my face. It seemed to exasperate him.
“The farther upstream you go,” he said slowly, as if he didn’t trust my ability to understand simple English, “the meaner becomes the terrain. I’m tangled up in some high brush country, and it’s beginning to look like there’s a real chance I won’t be able to go any farther or even find my way back.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Sometimes these dreams say, ‘Yes.’ Sometimes they say, ‘No.’ Sometimes they say, ‘You are ninety percent stone, and should spend the rest of your time selling tractors and making Lily happy and quit tampering with what you are not going to be able to figure out.’” He grunted at the humor of such a possibility.
“Do they ever tell you to go down to the yards and lay your head on a rail?” I mumbled into my empty glass.
Louis looked at me, his eyes sharp and mean. He hadn’t had his hair cut for some time and it hung down over his ears, damp and oily-looking. He scratched his beard and chest. Then he grinned. I could see that his gums were nearly white and his teeth looked bad, too. “Maybe so,” he said. Then he threw off his sheet and swung out of bed. “Hell,” he said. “Let’s go down to that place on the comer and hear some music.”
That place on the comer, the closest bar to Louis’s house, was a mean little cowboy bar called the Bar-None. The Bar-None was a long, narrow hole-in-the-wall with no elbowroom, no light, and no way to keep out of trouble. I thought it was the poorest idea Louis could have come up with but decided to string along, hoping that maybe we wouldn’t get that far. Louis had to walk slow, with me holding his arm, because he’d been lying in bed for nearly a week with nothing but whiskey for food and feeling bad about everything. But by the time we got to the Bar-None, the fresh air and exercise had perked him up. “Why don’t we go on down to Lucky’s?” I suggested. It was only another four blocks.
“No,” he said. “Too far. Too many leeches.”
I can only say that I was knocked flat. It was the first truly unkind words I’d ever heard from Louis Quenon. I looked at him and he didn’t try to avoid my eyes, but there was still too much distance in his face for it to mean anything to me.
We went in. There was the usual crowd of rough trade you never see anywhere except in places like the Bar-None. We took two stools toward the dark end of the bar. The jukebox was turned up loud and thumping. The lights were flickering—bad wiring. A fight was getting under way someplace in back. Louis ordered the first round of drinks. The cowboy next to me knocked my arm off the bar with his elbow. He didn’t say he was sorry. He looked at me and then at Louis and then went on with his conversation. He was talking in an enterprising way to a nearly unconscious hawklike woman. A bloody face pushed itself between me and Louis and whispered hoarsely for a bottle of gin to go. Someone was trying to waltz with an Indian woman who hated the idea. She
had dropped something on the floor, but the hardleg she was with wouldn’t let her stop long enough to pick it up. I decided to keep my eyes on the few square inches of bar in front of me until Louis figured he’d had enough of this place.
Someone came in by mistake. It was a woman and her husband. They had a dog on a leash. They stood in the doorway, squinting through the smoke haze and hammering roar. The woman said something to the man and they turned to leave. Something stopped them. Their dog, a gray poodle with a red ribbon on its neck, had gotten loose. Someone had scooped it up and set it on the bar. It skittered along, dodging glasses and hands, looking for a place to get down. The woman was trying to make her way toward it. “Banjo!” she yelled. “Banjo!” And pretty soon everyone in the place was yelling, “Banjo! Banjo!” and laughing crazy. Banjo was trembling, and even though you could tell he didn’t want to antagonize anyone, his lips began to curl back over his teeth in spite of himself, and he growled. This made everybody at the bar laugh all the harder. A cowboy with a long mortician’s face stuck a Polish sausage into Banjo’s mouth. The bar-tender snapped the bar rag at him and said, “Off, mutt.” The strain was too much for Banjo. He peed. The pee rolled down against the face of a garage mechanic who had passed out on the bar. The woman next to the passed-out garage mechanic woke him up by tickling his throat with her fingernail. “You’re laying in a puddle of poodle piss,” she said, straight-faced. Those at the bar who heard it passed it down. “He’s laying in a puddle of poodle piss,” they said. Pretty soon nearly everyone in the place was saying it. For a minute there you couldn’t hear yourself think. The garage mechanic began to realize that he was the butt of a joke of some kind. He wiped his face on his sleeve and looked at the trembling dog. He took the Polish sausage out of its mouth. Banjo tried to bark but only managed a humiliating whine. The mechanic grabbed the dog’s leash and jerked it up into the air. The woman who had been trying to retrieve her dog broke into tears. She made a kind of high-pitched yelping sound that cut through the general racket. The mechanic held the dog over the bar by its leash. He looked at it as you might look at a wriggling fish on a line, trying to decide if it’s a keeper or not. The dog’s hind legs were digging frantically at the air. Then the mechanic began to twirl the dog in big lazy circles, letting the leash out to its full length. Everybody near them had to duck as the dog went by. The woman who owned the dog was screaming, “No! No! Please!” Her husband was still in the doorway, his hand on his forehead. Someone had put a country tune on the jukebox about a man and his hound. “Me and my hound, we go round and around.” The woman had made her way to the mechanic. She began to punch him in the face. She didn’t know how to punch, though. It looked like she was knocking at a door shyly, hoping that no one was home. The mechanic laughed and twirled the dog all the harder. Then his face went vicious and he gave the leash one more hard swing and let it go. The dog helicoptered through the air and landed somewhere in the dark rear of the bar. The woman was still putting her balled-up little fists in the mechanic’s face. He grabbed her by the coat and lifted her off the floor. Then he set her down on the bar. Someone handed her a glass of beer. Her husband was still in the doorway, his hand on his forehead.
Louis sat through it all as if it were a partway interesting movie he was watching on the TV set above the bar. He took his whiskey neat and sipped it. Someone said, “This dog here is suffering.” An old cowboy with the face of a child had picked up Banjo. The dog was having a convulsion. Louis slipped off his stool and went over to the old cowboy. “Look here,” said the cowboy. “He needs a vet, real quick.”
Louis took the dog from the arms of the old cowboy. He brought it over to the bar and laid it down on its side. He felt along the dog’s spine and the back of its neck. He ran his fingers along the rib cage. The dog was jerking and its hind legs were trying to get traction. Louis opened the dog’s jaws and put his fingers into its throat. The woman, who was still sitting on the bar holding the glass of beer they gave her, yelled, “What is he doing! What are his qualifications!” Her husband was still in the doorway. He raised his hand as if to get someone’s permission to speak. Louis pressed his ear against the dog. He straightened up then and looked at the woman down the bar.
“Your doggie is dead, ma’am,” he said.
She heard him. “No!” she yelled. “Look, he’s still moving his legs! Here, Banjo! Here, my darling!”
Louis pushed the dog aside to the man next to him and he in turn pushed it aside, and so on, until the dog finally got to the woman. She picked it up and held it close to her face. She began to speak to it in baby talk. Banjo began to wag his tail.
“No use,” Louis said. “That dog is dead.”
Banjo got to his feet and began to dance up and down, trying to lick the woman’s tear-streaked face. A man and a woman were trading Sunday punches next to the men’s room. The woman would take a punch, then grin and spit at the man. Then the man would take a punch from the woman and he would also grin and spit. It was some sort of contest. They were both heavyweights, two hundred pounds or more.
“No use,” Louis said again. “No use in carrying on like that. The doggie is dead.”
The garage mechanic helped the woman down from the bar and she and her poodle made their way back to the man in the doorway. The little dog was barking happily and jumping up and down against the woman’s legs.
“It’s dead,” Louis said. “They shouldn’t fool themselves like that. It only makes it harder.”
Louis left town for a couple of months. No one knew where he went. When he came back, Art One Pipe was with him. One Pipe had brought most of his belongings. Louis put him up in a spare room. Lily, by that time, had had enough. One Pipe was the last straw, and she moved out, taking a room in the George A. Custer Hotel, uptown.
Louis had changed. He’d lost a lot of weight and he looked ten years older. I never realized how tall he was. When he was filled out, you didn’t notice his height so much. But now he was skin on bone and had taken off his beard. His hair was cropped short. We’d see him, now and then, walking uptown, his clothes flapping on him like there wasn’t anything inside them. His big round face looked sunken in and his shoulder blades poked up against his shirt like broken-off wings. He must have been close to seven feet tall, and it looked as though he had all he could do just to keep standing upright, like a narrow reed that had outgrown its ability to keep itself straight. He never came into Lucky’s, and those of us who once counted on his being around gave him up for lost. No one came right out and said it, but it was in the air every time two or more of us would sit down together. Then the stories began to come in.
Louis had begun to stop people in the street to tell them what they didn’t want to hear. He would block their way and point a finger in their faces, like a crazy prophet, drunk on his own visions. “Your baby will likely be torn up pretty bad in a baler,” he told a woman, who fainted dead away on the spot. “The day after you have the family photograph taken, happiness will fly out of your window forever,” he told a young pair of newlyweds. “In the little sealed-off rooms behind your eyes there is a coiled-up animal itching to drill holes in your ability to figure things out,” he said to Nestor Claig, the high school principal and supposedly the smartest man in town. Sometimes he’d act as if he were listening to people’s deepest thoughts. He’d cock an ear at them, squint, then put his big hand on their shoulders. “No, never do that twice,” he whispered into the long hair of a beautiful young woman. “The corrected promise is all you can hope for,” he said to a tired-looking man of fifty. And to a bank vice president, he said, “Her mind, you know, is shot through with tidy lies. Leave her before she drags you under.”
Someone called the police and they threatened to lock him up again for disturbing the peace. The chief went to Lily with a plan to have Louis put away in the state mental hospital. But Lily didn’t want any part of the chief’s plan. “He keeps this up, Lily,” said the chief, “and we won’t need you to sign any papers. I�
�ll get the court to put him away.”
“Do what you want,” Lily said. “Just don’t ask me to do your job for you.”
Then one day Lily showed up at Lucky’s with a gentleman friend. He was over seventy and wore a fine silk suit. He carried a black cane and had a little white mustache. Lily had a proud look on her face. Her eyes dared anyone to say something. No one paid them any attention except when they moved their hands or opened their mouths to speak. Lily didn’t care. She talked in a loud, relaxed voice about the big savings-and-loan company her gentleman friend used to work for as chief accountant. He didn’t seem to mind her bragging him up. He’d sit with one hand in his lap and his other hand on a glass of sweet port, a real gentleman. He had a calm, distant gaze on his face that seemed to reach all the way back to Minneapolis, where he’d spent his best years. His name was Roland Towne. He lived in the room across from Lily’s in the George A. Custer.
This went on for a while. Then Louis caught sight of them together, on the sidewalk, heading for Lucky’s. He trailed them to the door but he didn’t follow them inside. We could see him in the doorway, silhouetted against the light, like a staring pile of bones. Lily ignored him. Roland Towne ignored everything. Leonard would get a worried look on his face every time Lily and Roland came in trailed by Louis. “This is coming to a head,” he whispered to me.
He was right. You could see that Louis was becoming agitated. He began to pace up and down in front of Lucky’s, biting his fingernails and scratching his beard, which he’d begun to let grow again. He was still skinny, though, as if he’d given up the idea of eating proper food. One evening he came into Lucky’s with Art One Pipe. Lily and Roland weren’t there. “I’m going to tell you people something you probably don’t want to hear,” he said, to all of us. Art One Pipe shook his head. “Hell, Louis,” he said. “It’s better you just kept quiet.”
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