Dragonfly

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Dragonfly Page 21

by Farris, John


  Norse's minipack consisted of a stoned-looking redhead in a black cowboy hat and a petite blonde with hot-pink hormones who looked to be, just barely, street-legal. She had a rough complexion and one eye that was noticeably smaller than the other; a mere buttonhole, it gave the left side of her face a surreptitious look. It was the little blonde who eventually was the cause of his beef with Norse. Even before she sat down she had scanned the room like a Nazi submarine commander looking for unescorted shipping and had managed to catch Joe's eye, although he turned his head immediately. Norse didn't notice him right away. He had a big laugh and hearty greetings for everyone he knew.

  The sound on the dual TVs was turned off when the midnight show began.

  The featured artist was a jockey-sized young man with long hair that lay on his shoulders in ringlets, and a tattered black muleskinner's hat. He was not introduced; they all seemed to know him, as if he was a long-time favorite at the café. Confined to a motorized wheelchair with rubber tires like those on a small motorcycle, he played guitar with a semiclenched and crooked right hand and also blues harp. Once he sang a capella, a nearly whispered, enthralling version of "Nearer My God to Thee." His repertoire was a mix of Piedmont blues, rockabilly and gospel.

  The stool next to Joe at the bar was vacated; twenty seconds later the blond girl who had come in with Norse and the redhead claimed it.

  Her perfume was a little loud. Joe turned and she smiled at him. Her feet couldn't touch the floor; she sat with one shapely leg across her other knee. She was wearing a mini skirt that, in the pose she'd adopted, covered virtually nothing.

  "Hi, I'm Dayna. You looked like somebody who wanted to be left alone, but I said to myself, Whatthehell, I'll take a chance."

  It was instinctive for him to smile back. She was not pretty but interesting, with the small eye, a lot of lip to her smile and a nose that had been broken and remained bent in a way that didn't mess up her face but gave it a quixotic, sensual appeal.

  "Joe."

  "Niceameetcha, Joe." She wasn't a Southerner; snowbird, lower-middle-class Pittsburgh, to Joe's educated ear. She kept her voice way down, leaning toward him to speak out of deference to the performer on the small stage, which was steeped in rose-colored light between the entrance to the kitchen and the hall that led to the bathrooms in back. "Isn't he great? Name's Reggie. Somepin or other. I got a thing for the blues, not metal, not Techno. Why I like it down here. Hard to get a good job, though, they pay you dick. Where're you from?"

  "Midwest."

  "Jack, gimmee Bud?" she requested, turning briefly to one of the bartenders. She turned to Joe again, speaking to the back of his head. "Reggie's, in my opinion, he's better than Sleepy La Beef, when I caught him at Blind Willie's in Atlanta this summer. It's a bitch about Reggie, though. He's incurable. Scur roses, or somepin. All of his joints are falling apart, which is what it is mainly, but after a while you can't swallow or breathe. They named the disease after a ballplayer, Gary, I don't know. Cooper? Gary's disease. Probably Reggie won't be playing the twelve-string a whole lot longer." She subsided during an impassioned blues harp break that had her writhing on the barstool. "So-ooo good," she crooned, reaching around to pick up her beer. "Hey, you wanta join us? Norse says he knows you from someplace."

  "No, thanks."

  "Be that way," Dayna said with a false pout, not conceding a thing. "Ohh, look who's here tonight! This is gonna be good. She can really get it on."

  Reggie the blues man had been joined on stage by a woman whom Joe recognized, after a few moments, as Frosty Clemons, demonstrating a calorie-conscious figure in a ribbed cream tank top, tight fawn-colored corduroy pants and brown high-heeled patent leather boots. She kissed Reggie on the cheek to a smattering of applause and verbal greetings from the regulars, whom she acknowledged with a casual wave.

  Frosty and Reggie conferred. He found a chord on his amplified guitar, and began to wail.

  "Low-down mama

  Got a fist like stainless steel.

  Ain't nothing sweet about her kisses

  Lips just like a lemon peel."

  Joe reached for his beer and discovered, on tilting the bottle to his lips, that it was empty. Dayna, alert to his every move, slid her bottle toward him.

  "Have some of mine."

  "Thanks." He tasted her lipstick on the rim. The beer wasn't very cold; they'd been selling a lot of it at the Lost Sea Turtle Café since he'd come in. He was relaxed and still lucid; the tangle of nerves he'd brought with him to the café had, almost unnoticeably, unraveled into cooled-down strands. He had begun to feel grateful for Dayna's previously unwelcome and barely acknowledged presence. "I owe you my front-row seat in hell, Dayna."

  "Hey," she beamed. "My treat." She put a hand in the crook of his elbow, all but leaning on him now.

  "Well she comedown that road jrom Macon

  Borned there in a hollow log.

  Lord you know she ain't a bit good-looking

  She give points to a mangy dog"

  "Reggie oughta have a recording contract," Dayna said. "That's what I think. Before he gets, like, too bad off to play anymore."

  "Lateral sclerosis," Joe said.

  "Yeah, that's what he's got, how'd ja know?"

  "I'm a doctor."

  "I knew it would be something like that! I said to myself, 'He's a cut above the usual kind of guy they get in here. You gotta meet him, Dayna.'"

  Until now Frosty Clemons hadn't sung; but after another harmonica break she joined in, with a Voice reminiscent of Aretha Franklin's.

  "But she sister to the Fisher Man

  Four winds in her cheek

  When she blow a mean old trumpet

  All us sinners howl and weep."

  "God, this really gets me going," Dayna said, taking the beer back from Joe. "I've got a real good collection of CDs, including the whole Alligator series, if this is your thing too."

  "And when she barefoot to her navel

  Walking round and round my hall

  You know she hand me palpitations

  She stop my heart like a pistol-ball."

  The applause was close to frenetic; Frosty stepped back, deferring to Reg, who was breathing hard, smiling abashedly, nodding his thanks. Then Frosty stepped forward and spoke to Reggie, her mouth close to his ear. He looked around at her, as if something she had said shocked him.

  "Do you live around here?" Joe asked Dayna.

  "My pad's on Calisto. I mean the pad I share, but one of my roommates went home for a wedding and Brenda's visiting her boyfriend at Camp Lejeune, so, you know, I'm just rattling around up there all weekend."

  Frosty and Reg were conferring again. He nodded to her, blew a few notes on the blues harp he wore around his neck to signify that it was break time and followed her down a ramp to the hail beside the itage. Frosty had retrieved her clutch purse from atop one of Reggie's amps.

  Joe turned and said, "Excuse me, Dayna. Have to hit the nature trail. Why don't you get us a couple of Buds while I'm gone?"

  "Hurry back."

  The Lost Sea Turtle Café was across the street from the commercial fishermen's pier, occupying an oblong of asphalt between a marine-supply company and a two-story brick building with a sagging second-floor balcony. The parking lot was enclosed on three sides by a weathered cypress-board fence. There was an additional enclosure for a Dumpster outside the kitchen door.

  It was raining, lightly, a blowing mist off the bay. Reg had paused to open an umbrella, which Frosty held over both their heads as they passed through a narrow alley of parked cars and sports vehicles to a minivan shining like forsythia against the gray fence at the rear of the lot. Joe watched them from the doorway of the emergency exit. He could hear their voices, but wasn't able to distinguish much of what they were saying. A couple of words were unmistakable: "Abby" and "scared." Somebody was arguing loudly on a pay phone behind him about visitation rights. A kitchen worker unloaded garbage cans into the Dumpster ten feet away.

  The
rain misting his face felt good to Joe. There was a line for the men's john. He stepped outside and went to his left, glancing a couple of times at Reg and Frosty. She had opened the sliding door of what he assumed was her van. Joe crossed the drive that was marked off with white lines and walked between a sixties pickup truck with a custom paint job and a Jeep with a fabric top. He came to the fence four vehicles removed from Frosty's yellow minivan and heard Reg say, "I'd do anything for Abby, but—"

  "No, no, there is something you can do." Frosty slammed shut the door of her minivan.

  "What's that?" Reg asked, a few moments later, as if he was referring to something she'd taken from the minivan.

  Joe had unzipped his pants, but decided to wait before wetting down the fence. He moved cautiously around the high chrome bumper of the customized pickup, just far enough to see them beside the minivan. Frosty's back was turned to him; her tightly curled dark brown hair gathering mist and gleaming like a spider's web in the floodlights mounted beneath the overhanging roof of the café. Reggie was looking up at her face, the umbrella at an angle that screened him from Joe.

  Frosty had something in her right hand, holding it so that it gave off a silvery flash.

  "This is the new drug Dr. Luke's been giving her. I took it from the cabinet in his infirmary."

  "Did what? Frosty, I don't want to get into trouble." When he wasn't singing the blues there was a simplistic, adolescent tone to Reggie's words.

  "You won't. I'm the one, if he wants to make trouble! But I fixed it so he can't know. All you need to do is—"

  She reached behind Reggie, opening a backpack he had hanging from his wheelchair, and put the stolen drug into a zippered compartment.

  "—find out what's in that little bottle when you go up to Duke University for your checkup next weekend. Because I'm telling you, what he's injecting into her bloodstream has got to be the reason she's fallen off lately.

  Reggie, clearly puzzled, said, "Why would Dr. Luke give Abby something that's bad for her?"

  "I didn't say that! It don't even make sense, he'd want to hurt her. Abby's given Dr. Luke everything he owns. But he's always ordering these new drugs he hears about. They come by Fed Ex from pharmaceutical houses in Switzerland or Puerto Rico. Maybe he's looking to cure her with some new miracle discovery. I know for sure it ain't working. No, sir. But you can't tell him. He's stubborn. He's the doctor. Don't want her to see any other doctors; don't listen to nobody else's opinion. Well, I took that mean drug away. The next shot he gives her from the ampule he thinks is the right one can't do Abby harm, it's nothing but a little squirt of distilled water. That ought to give us time to get another doctor's opinion on why that stuff I just put in your backpack is so bad for her."

  "Okay, okay, Frosty. I'll take care of it. Let's get back inside; I got another set to do. Hey, you want to sing some Bessie tonight? How about 'Empty Bed Blues'?"

  "Hmmm. I'll be okay on part one, anyhow."

  "Then we'll do 'Walk Around, Jesus,' to close. Brought my tambourine."

  "Man, I am ready to rock the house down."

  They were laughing together on their way back to the café.

  Joe turned his attention to the fence in the nick of time, and began with childlike fascination to write his name with his stream. He had almost enough to write the Gettysburg Address. Greatly relieved, he returned to the café, where Reg and Frosty were joking around on stage before beginning the last setoff the night.

  Dayna perked up on her stool at his approach.

  "Must've been a long line."

  "You said it." He picked up the beer she'd ordered for him. Dayna had nearly finished hers. She leaned complacently against him, fingers at the nape of his neck.

  "What'dja do, take a shower? You're all wet, man."

  "I used the outdoor facility."

  Joe drank beer and listened to the good music that Reg and Frosty were making. Dayna took an occasional slug from his bottle but told him she didn't drink much and didn't do drugs, she was high on life. He wondered how many times, in how many bars, he'd heard that particular cliché from personable young women, each of whom was convinced that she was somebody pretty damned special. Hip, smart, always ready to party, wise in the ways of men. Sexually adept but certainly not promiscuous. In truth they laughed readily, but lacked real wit. They were sufficiently undereducated, despite college degrees, to keep them in a rut for most of their lives, always a little behind on the credit cards and the rent, working at jobs that required no more ability than does autoeroticism. Their sophistication was packaged for them by the media manipulators who published popular magazines and produced endless hours of glossy empty programming for the electronic asylum. They eventually married, once or twice or three times, men who were male twins of themselves. The prevailing propaganda about the accessibility of the Good Life that swarmed through them daily like neutrinos from space kept them sufficiently anesthetized until they reached that age of no return when there were too many cards missing from the deck to hope for a winning hand.

  He decided he was being an asshole, dumping an unrealized rage at his own transitory state on Dayna, who at the least was vital and not jaded, and appealing in her desire to be thought interesting.

  Norse came over after the music stopped. Joe renewed his dislike of the physical therapist with a glance at the diamonds in Norse's earlobe.

  "Hello," he said to Joe. Hello and goodbye. To Dayna he said, "Ready to go?"

  "Joe and I made some plans," Dayna said.

  "Oh. What does that mean?"

  "It means I don't feel like another night of sniffing glue and skinning cats with the two a ya's. Tell the truth, it's been kind of boring."

  "Why don't we all go somewhere together?" Norse said. "If that's the way it is."

  "The way it is, Norse, is that Joe and me are going somewhere separately."

  "But we have no car, Dayna."

  "Glad to drop you, Norse. If you can get Freddie on her feet long enough to walk her outta here."

  The other girl's cowboy hat had fallen off. She was sprawled half across the table, the cheeky valentine of her face resting in the crook of a forearm, lips parted as she enjoyed chemicalized rapture.

  Dayna said, "Nice. What've ya been feeding her tonight? So here's the revised plan. You take Freddie out to the car and Joe and me'll see she gets home okay, and you can take a hike."

  Norse's mood fell, like a hammer on his thumb. "I don't like that plan."

  Joe said, "Do it anyway, Norse."

  Dayna looked gratefully at Joe. Norse attempted to stare him down. Joe focused on the bulge between Norse's blond eyebrows and smilingly waited him out. Meanwhile Dayna got down from her stool and went over to the table, sat Freddie up and put her hat on her head. Freddie was as boneless as a cuttlefish, a goofy smile on her face.

  When Norse failed to move, Joe got up to give Dayna a hand. Together they walked Freddie down the hall and out the back door of the café.

  Mist and fog obscured everything around them; the license pates of the remaining vehicles parked by the fence were unreadable, and the floodlights had no power to define the geometry of the building they graced. Joe had put away a lot of beer, but his perceptions were okay. In spite of the sensation of being in a fishbowl, he felt reasonably well focused and in touch with his body. He saw that Frosty Clemons's yellow minivan was gone. Dayna drove a pink Jeep Wagoneer.

  They leaned Freddie up against the Jeep and Dayna said, "Are you gonna be sick? If you are, do it out here."

  "M'okay."

  "All right, sweetie. In ya go."

  Norse showed up while they were stowing Freddie in the backseat. He watched them with his arms folded, then said to Joe, "Now you will take a hike."

  Joe shook his head.

  Dayna said, "Chrissake, Norse, grow up, why don't you?"

  Joe indicated an empty expanse of parking lot.

  "How about over there?"

  "I should warn you," Norse said. "I have a black
belt."

  "For what? Wrestling your own dick?"

  Norse smiled condescendingly and stalked Joe, who backed off. Another couple who had come out of the café stopped and stared at them. They were all but faceless in the misty drifting murk. Threat produced valuable moments of total clarity. Joe put his hands up and studied Norse's movements closely while he circled, making Norse follow him. He would want to show off, Joe thought. And, knowing from Joe's stance that he could at least box a little, Norse probably would want to finish him without getting in range of Joe's fists. That meant a kick. Right or left foot? Joe feinted twice, giving Norse the opportunity to gauge his quickness. Norse wasn't impressed. He squared up, shifting his weight smoothly, his left—back—shoulder coming forward. Round kick. The only way to go was inside. He caught Norse with his right foot coming around as fast as a power hitter can swing a baseball bat and hit him twice: short left to Norse's solar plexus as his torso was twisting away from the torque of the round kick, right hand crossing to the exposed jaw, just under the ear. The two punches dumped Norse as hard as if he'd fallen off a roof. He lay stunned on his stomach with his jaw dislocated, making small sounds of distress.

  "Good Lord, I didn't even see that," Dayna said excitedly. "It was like, boom-BOOM! What did you do to him?"

  "I worked him like a heavy bag, that's all. It's basic boxing."

  "Are you some kind of pro?"

  "I'm not even a dependable amateur anymore; I don't work at it enough. He's fast, and I was lucky." He sounded angry, as if he felt he didn't deserve his luck.

  She looked glumly at the fallen Norse.

  "Well, we can't just leave him lie there."

  With the help of a couple of wide-bodied men who had come out of the Lost Sea Turtle, Joe packed Norse into the front seat of the Wagoneer. Norse and the slack, snoring redhead in back took up the available seating. Norse's eyes were open; his head lolled woozily. He sighed painfully several times, but was disinclined to speak.

  Joe felt the angle of Norse's swelling jaw, and wondered how hard he'd hit his head on the asphalt parking lot.

 

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