Not One of Us(4)

I shook off my worries as best I could. Tonight was supposed to be a fun evening with an old friend. Last thing I needed was more problems. Still, I couldn’t help sneaking a glance at the thin, tatted man drinking his beer alone. His head was bent, his full attention on the glass in his hands. His hair was heavily streaked with gray and pulled severely into a ponytail. He wore a clean but faded T-shirt and jeans. “Surprised he came back to the bayou when they let him out,” I observed.

“He didn’t. He only came for his mom’s funeral a few days ago. I expect he’ll be moving along soon. There’s nothing to keep him here.”

“Good. I wouldn’t want Aunt Tressie running into him. Not that there’s much chance of that. She only leaves assisted living once a month to get her hair done.”

Now that Dana had pointed him out, I noticed other patrons eyeing him with covert sideways glances. Ray appeared oblivious—or was deliberately avoiding everyone by keeping his head down.

“He appears older than he must be,” I said, signaling to the waitress for another bloody mary. The noise of patrons mixed with speakers blaring music on the dock and the clink of pool balls in the back room formed a steady drumbeat of colors that swirled and morphed into blackish splatters of ugly blobs. Hence the multiple bloody marys to cope with the cacophony. “My cousin would have been fortyish if Strickland hadn’t murdered him.”

“Ray was only a couple years older than Jackson. Prison life must really age you,” Dana agreed.

“Geez. I would have guessed he was at least in his midfifties.” My temples began to throb with the overload of sound, and I rubbed them.

“You hurting?” Dana asked.

Close as we were, Dana didn’t understand the half of it, only that I had a sensitivity to sound that could result in headaches.

“I thought you’d be okay since there’s no live band tonight.”

“Music is fine. It’s all the background buzz of people talking.”

“You want a pain pill?” Dana rummaged through her purse and produced a bottle. “I always keep some handy. My scoliosis aches kick in when I least expect it.”

I raised a brow, remembering her reputation in high school for experimenting with drugs—not that she ever did anything in front of me. She knew my position on the matter. I’d heard talk that she’d gone through rehab a couple of years ago, but since she’d never confided in me, I didn’t bring the subject up. My philosophy was that if someone wanted you to know anything personal, they’d tell you themselves.

“No thanks. I took some over-the-counter pills about twenty minutes ago. They’ll kick in soon enough.”

Dana shrugged and dropped the medicine back into her purse. “If you say so.”

I returned my attention to Ray Strickland, imagining the long, thin fingers now wrapped around his beer as the same hands that had held a gun and pulled the trigger to shoot Jackson. I thought of my aunt and her early descent into assisted living. It’s like her mind and body slowly checked out of reality with her son’s death. Her husband left, and she sat alone in her small house, day after day after day, immersed in her grief. By the time I was old enough to remember weekly visits to her place with Mimi, Aunt Tressie had been a fragile shell, distant and confused, eyes permanently reddened from crying.

Once, I made the mistake of drifting into Jackson’s old bedroom, where all his possessions had been left untouched. But instead of being stale and dusty, the room smelled of lemon polish, and every surface gleamed with an unnatural, unlived-in cleanliness. A shrine to her dead son. Aunt Tressie had roused from her vague, passive manner and run screeching through the house to grab me roughly by the shoulders, screaming at me to get out and stay out of Jackson’s room. As a child, I’d had a secret terror of the woman after that, always imagining her rousing from a stupor and turning wild with grief, ready to lash out at me. Of course, as I’d grown older, I’d realized she was a tragic woman who meant no harm.

My mouth hardened into a thin line. This man was the one who had done that to her. The waitress brought my cocktail, and I downed a large gulp before setting the glass down hard on the scarred wooden table. “He shouldn’t be here,” I said darkly. I rose up and slid out of the booth, glaring at Ray.

Dana grabbed the front hem of my T-shirt. “What are you doing? Sit back down,” she demanded with a hiss of breath.

But I was pumped with liquid courage and a self-righteous resolve to tell this man how much he’d hurt my family. I easily shrugged from Dana’s grasp and made my way around several tables jammed in the middle of the bar.

“Jori!” she called after me several times. People looked up from their drinks or bowls of gumbo, sniffing out trouble. But not Ray. The man appeared impervious to the brewing shitstorm. I slipped into the booth, and his head jerked up with a start.

“What you want?” he asked sourly. His tone was a bruising purple-black, the color of storm clouds accompanied by a howling wind. The shade wasn’t particularly vivid since I’d never met him before. The longer I knew someone, the more vivid and distinctive the color and shapes of their voices became.

He scowled, emphasizing the lines around his mouth that betrayed a serious tobacco habit. His eyes narrowed at me with suspicion. “I been drinkin’ and mindin’ my own bizness. I ain’t botherin’ nobody.”