Desperation Road(34)

Russell got them two more beers and they sat and rocked. Russell started to say something about finding a house to paint but he liked it better with nothing to say. Consuela finally came back and she went into the house and got a beer for herself and she sat down with the men.

“You know it. Don’t you?” Mitchell said.

“Know what?”

His father drank. Paused.

“It’s a pretty night,” he said.

“That ain’t what you were about to say.”

“No. It ain’t.”

“Then what?”

“Just that he’s gonna come for you, Russell.”

“He already has.”

“He ain’t all there. Never has been.”

“I’m aware.”

Mitchell raised from the chair and stood at the edge of the porch. He spit into the yard and looked out at the deepening night and said he’s gonna come and keep on coming. Until he thinks he’s done.





22


LARRY SAT IN THE TRUCK WITH HIS ARM HANGING OUT THE OPEN window. The truck was parked on the street in front of Russell’s house and the windows were down and the radio was turned low. A crowbar and empty beer cans rested on the seat beside him. He started out simply riding. After a few he’d kept on riding. Now he was parked and trying to figure out the best way to put another scare into the man who killed his brother.

Larry was known as the tall one because he stood a head taller than any man in the Tisdale family, all of whom lined up nearly identical at six feet. Grandfathers, uncles, brothers, all of them. Six years separated him and his brothers, the youngest to the oldest. All of them had square foreheads and chins and kept their black hair cut short and parted on the left and their mouths were small and serious. He was the oldest. And the youngest had been in the dirt for eleven years.

His problem was that he was as loyal as a dog and he thought everyone else should be the same way. Over the years that had kept him in parking lot fights over girls and then later in bar fights over women. And it had kept him thinking about the day that Russell Gaines was going to be set free.

For his second wife he had married a woman who was ten years younger. Heather was Corvette curvy and she liked to dance until she was sweaty and she didn’t seem scared of him in the moments when his temper revealed itself. He had met her at a bar in the Quarter after a Saints game. She was the daughter of a banker and she had that carefree swagger of the beautiful and the rich. She never went out into the night without being detailed from head to toe and she drank like a man. Her natural hair color had long been forgotten and she was well versed in using what she had to get whoever or whatever she wanted. She’d been surprised when Larry asked her to marry him and he’d been surprised she said yes. She shined on his arm when he walked into a room and he had at one time liked the envious and lusty stare that she commanded.

In the first years they had been sustained by a rough, physical energy, like two rival prizefighters. Heather had always liked that Larry could find something to hate. Liked it when he talked about his dead brother and how one day he was going to settle the score. Liked it when he talked about somebody who had screwed him on a job or tried to get the best of him in a barroom. Liked that he was raw, the fierceness that came into his eyes when he was rushing toward the edge. She stoked his temper and picked fights with him just to get the blood up so that they could tear into one another like starving animals. But like those prizefighters, they were also driven by wins and losses and their relationship was more like a competition and recently Heather seemed to be winning.

Larry had always known that sooner or later she would grow restless and drift toward the stares that followed her. Knew she’d look for something else to do. And though he had known it was coming, when it began he ignored it. Told himself that her excuses were legit. No I don’t care if you spend the weekend shopping with your friends and no I don’t care if you go down to the Panhandle with your friends and no I don’t care if you go and gamble with your friends. And as she caroused he sat at home and raged. He drove around and raged. And then he recruited Walt, who had lost a marriage of his own, to ride around and rage with him. And he drank more and more and walked around with unfocused eyes, the same unfocused eyes that looked out the truck window now at the house where the man lived who had killed Jason.

The clouds had been gathering in him for a long time now and the storm had arrived. Snuck up on him the way that they sneak up in the summertime with the heavy gray clouds appearing in the western sky and then moving in like vultures and bringing lightning and wind and sometimes there isn’t even time to close the windows. The clouds had been gathering and somebody was going to fucking pay.

He was there to do something but he hadn’t decided what. It didn’t look like anyone was home. Not a light on. Nothing parked in the driveway. He had taken a box of matches from the glove compartment and thought about a fire but instead he had lit a cigarette. He took the beer from between his legs and finished it and tossed the can into the yard.

He reached over to the glove compartment again and this time he pulled out an envelope. He opened it and took out a handful of photographs of Heather and a blond man sitting in a restaurant in the Quarter. They sat at a long table covered with a white tablecloth and the wineglasses glimmered in the light of the low chandelier. She smiled in every photograph. And so did he. The people leaning around the table with them all smiled. Even the goddamn waiter was smiling. Her dress was cut low and she wore a necklace he had given her two birthdays ago. Larry thumped the face of the blond man and knew the motherfucker wasn’t smiling right now. There were more photographs of them leaving the restaurant. Going into the lobby of Hotel Monteleone. Sitting at the Carousel Bar with her hand between his legs. Holding hands as they waited on the elevator that had taken them up and into the room where the blond man had done thrilling things to Larry’s wife. Or she had done thrilling things to the blond man, which is the way Larry figured it.