Know Me From Smoke, page 4
As Stella started in on “Hey Jude,” the bathroom door behind the bar swung open. A tall man in an off-green button-down shirt, crisp blue jeans and tan work boots emerged from the men’s room. Stella’s breath caught in her throat when she saw him. His slim arms tapered into slim fingers, but his shoulders were broad and rippled with muscle. His face was brushed with just the right amount of five o’clock shadow, and Stella felt the clutch of his brown eyes as they swung up to meet her gaze. On one side, he had a thin scar angled downward, a fault line through his cheek. He had rugged good looks and his frame was well-built but still slim, like a former basketball player. His lips parted and Stella caught the sudden gleam of a gold-filled tooth in the upper part of his mouth. He pulled his eyes from her and walked to the booth where the man with the burned face waited. He slid into the booth and watched Stella pluck at the piano and hum the song’s first verse. Where do I know him from, Stella wondered? God, he’s handsome, but that face looks familiar. I swear I’ve seen him around the neighborhood or something. Maybe in your dreams, sister. Stella grinned and said to herself: You just like the way he looks, that’s all. What had Eddie said to her? There’s a couple we need to watch. That’s what he’d said.
Yes, Stella thought, I wouldn’t mind watching that man for a long while.
Chapter 10
A third man—drunk with a sour look on his chubby face—stumbled out of the men’s room as Stella finished her second song. He stopped and stared at her, felt his own lips with two crooked fingers on his right hand. After this tired motion of thought, he leaned into Stella’s piano and grinned. One tooth lay crosswise against the others. Sometimes, it’s true a man’s body mirrors his mind. “You got one hell of a voice, sister. Where’d you learn to sing like that?”
“My mama taught me.” Stella’s jaw set hard in her cheeks. She didn’t like this one, not him or the man with the burned up face—they were bad news and she could tell it from their faces, how they took the world in like it owed them something. You see that in people sometimes, Stella knew, a hard look of deep eyes and crushed cheeks, an expression pained with expectation and—one way or another—violent tendencies. She sipped from her martini glass and pursed her lips. “I guess I have a little talent.”
“Little,” the man said. “Shit. You got everything a good man could want.” He folded his arms atop the piano, scratched at ashy skin on his elbows.
Stella’s eyes searched over the man’s shoulder for Eddie, but he was busy behind the bar, his hands whipping the silvery cocktail tin through the air. As Stella thought about how she could cut this guy down—get him back to his bender and away from her—strong fingers and a large, heavy palm rested against her right shoulder blade. Her chest tightened slightly and after a moment released. It was the good looking guy in the pressed green button-down. His eyes met hers and Stella felt some switch move inside her, a latch she hadn’t touched in a long while, something rusted in place. But now it shifted. “Oh, it’s you. I didn’t think—”
“Markie’s bothering you, I know,” he said.
Stella stuttered, tried to force words from her throat—she failed.
“Markie, get your ass back in the booth. We got another drink coming for you. Even though you don’t need it.”
“Yeah, buddy. Sure, new guy.” Markie patted his partner on the shoulder. He pushed away from the piano, stumbled into the center of the room, caught himself, and shuffled to the booth where he fell in beside his other partner.
The large heavy hand drifted from Stella’s shoulder blade; the momentary touch left a hot sensation in her throat. It stretched down inside her like burning liquid, like butter running hot from an iron skillet. She said, “He’s some friend of yours, huh?”
“Nope, just a guy I got stuck with for a little while.”
“You always get stuck with people like him?” Stella’s mouth dried. She cleared her throat. Beneath her dress, a pounding heart pushed against her smooth skin and breast. She said, “At least he knows a good voice when he hears it. That makes him less of a fool than most.”
“Anybody, fool or not, would know you had the real blues and that you could sing it.”
Stella’s throat closed, released. She huffed in air. “You look like you know about the blues, but I bet you—”
“Gave some folks the real blues,” Royal finished. “You’re right.” He offered his hand. “My name’s Junior Lee Wells.”
“Like the singer, how about that?” Stella took his hand, held it for a moment too long. Or not long enough.
“Lots of Wells folks out there,” Royal said. He smiled. “I don’t know if the man is one of ours. It's just luck I got the same name.”
“You know what they say,” Stella said, “Luck and talent. It’s all you need.”
Royal’s smile widened. His gold-filled tooth gleamed in the barroom light. “I got neither, but you got one. How’d it turn out?”
“You think I’d be singing here if I had any luck?”
“Just the same. I’m glad you are—here, I mean. Singing.”
Stella smiled back. She felt the empty spot in her mouth ache. Time for another drink and maybe a pain pill. “I better get back to the singing, or some folks might get upset.” She shifted on the piano bench, crossed one leg over the other. Her thigh rippled beneath the fabric. She knew he had his eyes on her legs, her neck, her chin, her everything.
“Alright then,” Royal said. “I’ll be listening.” He moved away with a lingering gaze, slid back into the booth and raised a glass to his lips.
My, Stella thought, he’s one decent looking man, and he’s well-spoken. There was an urge in her to know more about him. And in some odd way, Stella felt she did know him. Yes, he was familiar to her, but she couldn’t place the slim, good-looking dude in the green button-down. I’ll have to ask him, spend some time with those nice, sweet eyes. Junior Wells, huh? She'd see about that.
As she started into the chords for another song, the coin-sized scar on her hip began to throb, to ache like a rotten molar.
Chapter 11
Markie said, “That’s one good looking woman. I bet that voice, ooh, that voice is nice in bed, right?”
Phoenix said nothing. His eyes were on Royal, pinned to him like darts to rotten meat. He grunted and stared—his latest drink was untouched.
Royal sipped and watched Stella Radney play her song. So long a time in the joint and he did not expect to see the woman ever again, but here she was, playing piano. Funny, this thing called life.
His eyes swung to Phoenix, cast downward. He said, “I know the woman, Markie. You just leave her alone.”
Now, his shoulders resting back flat against the vinyl booth, Phoenix pursed his lips. “You know the woman.” Flat repetition in his voice.
“That’s right,” Royal said. “She comes back over here, just leave her alone. We good with that?”
Markie’s eyes were half-closed. He nodded off, swayed to a sound inside his head.
Royal repeated: “We good with that?”
Phoenix grinned and his topography of facial skin stretched like a leather map. “You get out of the joint, first day out, and you happen to see some lady you know. How in the fuck?”
Royal shook his head, shrugged.
“How in the fuck?”
“Luck, I guess.”
Phoenix finished his drink. “You know what they say: Luck and talent.”
Royal cleared his throat, but said nothing.
“So, where’d you two meet? On the monkey bars?”
Royal brought his gaze up to Phoenix. Those eyes were like torpedoes in dark water. And Royal thought: shoot, maybe you need somebody on your side, somebody who knows what it is to do bad things. In his head, Royal went back to the scene with that fat prison guard leering at him. Was that sonofabitch right, am I bad man? It was Royal’s honest-to-God intent to do good once he got out of prison. He’d talked to the social workers about it, other inmates too. Hell, he’d prayed about what to do when he got out, but in that moment—sitting across from Phoenix—he sensed the deep, evil anger rising in him. There it came, like a southern flood pouring over the banks of a river. He made a decision—oh, boy did he—and said, “I killed the lady’s husband. Twenty years ago. I shot him in the back and they put his sorry skinny ass in the ground.”
Phoenix nodded the slow, savvy nod of a career crook.
The music in Wally’s Hideaway faded, died.
Phoenix rolled his eyes beyond Royal and said: “Well isn’t this nice? My friend here was just telling me he recognized you from somewhere. Isn’t that the truth? Isn’t that what you said?”
Royal Atkins gulped and turned to face the damn fine widow he’d made.
Chapter 12
To hear the woman speak Royal had to lean in close, feel the breath push from between her lips and land on his right ear. She was still slim, and with dark brown curls falling against bird-bone shoulders. It was the closest he’d been to a woman—save one or two prison guards—in two decades. His insides burned when he felt those little puffs of air, machine gun words coming at him.
She was saying, “I play downtown three nights a week, but I come up here on the weekends. This here, it’s a hip crowd and they tip pretty well, especially if you throw in a rock or pop song every now and then.”
Phoenix said, “That why you started with The Beatles?” He lifted the rocks glass to his face, pressed it against his rough skin.
Stella smiled and Royal watched her lips move back over her teeth. He saw a thin red line covering one side of her mouth like her lips were bleeding, or her gums. She sings so hard it hurts. Bleeding the words like they’re straight from her heart. That there, that’s a real singer.
“I always start with a popular rock song here, it’s kind of my tradition. First songs I ever learned to sing. I learned them from my mom—all the seventies radio tunes.”
“She was a singer too, huh?” Her scent came at him as she turned to answer. What’s that? Tulips maybe? Or roses? Or some other kind of flower, but I don’t know flowers and can’t name it. God, it’s nice though. Royal—for just a second, in his head—put his lips to Stella’s neckline, left a purple bruise in the shape of a half-crescent. If he got the chance, he’d suck on her like a grapefruit, man. Sweet. Tart. Luscious in the mouth.
“My mom sang backup for a jazz outfit down in Houston. That’s where she met my dad, back before he joined the Navy and they ended up out here, out west.” Stella scratched her neck, tried to pull her eyes from Royal.
You can bet he noticed that.
“She’s dead now,” Stella said. “Has been for a long time.”
“What about your daddy?” Phoenix lowered the glass, rotated it on the table. “What happened to him?”
Stella didn’t answer.
Royal interrupted, “Don’t worry about it, okay? We’re just being nosy.”
Stella’s eyes brightened and she cleared her throat. “He ran off and left us. I saw him on television one day. In the early nineties. Sonofabitch was playing trumpet in a band. You know he could have done that with us, too.”
“Man’s a beast,” Phoenix said without blinking. “And a beast has got to eat. He’s got to eat, or he’ll starve.” Those unblinking dead eyes moved to Royal.
“Prick is what he was,” Stella said. “You know, once he told me I looked like a rat, that I had little rat teeth and little rat eyes. Can you imagine telling a little girl she looks like a rat?”
“No Ma’m,” Royal said. “We sure can’t.”
Phoenix smacked his lips, chewed alcohol and ice. “I bet you’re happily married, huh? A woman as good looking as you—pardon my saying—I just don’t see how you can’t be married.”
Now it was Royal who pinned Phoenix with a bullet-eyed stare. You could mash the hatred coming off him with a burly fist. The fuck was this guy thinking? Royal sniffed hard and hung his head gangster-style. “Leave the lady alone, Phoenix—she’s on her break and here we are—”
“It’s okay.” Stella’s voice came at them steady, like fish scent through chain-link. “I happen to like talking about my husband. See, he can’t speak for himself—he’s a dead man.”
No, Royal pleaded with her in his head, you don’t need to go into all this, to put it out there with this sonofabitch. But he saw she was going to do it, that the bullets were still flying in her head, that he could never escape the worst mistake of his life, that he was doomed to relive his crime until the end of his rotten days. Damn, Royal thought, just God-fucking-damn.
Stella said: “We didn’t see the guy come in, not until it was too late.”
And Royal thought: That’s because I was quiet about it. I watched the place for three nights and I knew you closed down at two, threw all the drunks out before you started cleaning the joint. I hid outside in those shadows, Royal said to himself, right where the streetlights hit the corner of the building—in the darkest parts, where nobody could see me.
“I’ll never forget how it sounded, like a balloon booming back against itself, you know? Virgil was wiping down some of the bar tables. He was lazy about it, just used a clean rag with hot water. I always said, ‘You got to disinfect those tables, Virgil.’ But he hated the smell, how the degreaser made his nose run.”
And he was standing right there, Royal thought, looking at me like I was an alien, some kind of freak. That look set me off and that’s when I thumbed the safety, flipped it off, raised the pistol, man, that’s when I did it. I saw that look of his—too fucking honest for me—and I thought about shooting.
“Gunfire,” Stella said. “Right at me. Two shots real quick. There was a muzzle flash, like a guy striking some kind of big match, and then I saw he was wearing a Cowboys jersey. That big blue star came forward through the light and I thought about—this is weird—football. I thought about football for a second or two and I remember how odd that felt; it was like thinking about Halloween come Christmas Eve. And the sound, those reverse pops…”
I don’t know why I shot at you first. Hell, I didn’t even aim, not really. It was like tossing a crumpled piece of paper at a wastebasket. I just tossed the bullets at you. Two of them, the newspaper said. Probably right, too.
“And I felt a kind of bite on my hip. Like a snakebite or something. Like a dart hit me. And the pain shot all through me, a wave of it just ran warm up to my head and the whole bar got dark. I saw two more flashes real quick and—”
I spun him around with the first shot—got him up by the shoulder. It was when he turned around, when he spun like that, that I got him in the back. God knows I didn’t mean to do it, but it happened and I knew right then: You don’t come back from that. I knew he was gone.
“Virgil spun around. He fell. I know I screamed, but I didn’t hear it. Not even inside my own head. Could hardly talk for two days after that. There was red all over Virgil, and his arm kept moving like it was on its own. What happens when you cut a chicken’s head off. Or like a fish flopping on the sand.”
That’s accurate. Factual. That’s how it was. And I went to the bar and told you to give me the money. Demanded it. Made sure you knew—I’d do you, too.
“When he came at me, I was scared. I gave him what he wanted. Money. That’s it—a few hundred dollars. That’s all it was.”
About two hundred fifty, to be absolutely actual.
“And he ran out and here I am: I got my husband flopping on the floor in his blood. I look down and my belly, my legs, my feet…”
They’re covered in blood.
“They’re covered in blood.”
“You got shot,” Phoenix said.
“I got shot.” Stella tore her eyes from one man to the next, and then she did something Royal did not expect. She pried at the hem of her cocktail dress, worked it up across her thigh—that long, sweet, smooth landscape of thigh—and lodged it up near her waist.
Royal could not believe what he was seeing. His breath came hard through his ribs and his fingers gripped the table—my, her body was absolutely perfect. Not perfect, but perfect to him. Royal grunted.
Stella touched a semi-circular scar—risen like a coin—just above her black panty line. “Right there,” she said. “I got shot right there.”
“You see who did it?” Phoenix asked. “What he looked like?”
Stella shook her head. “No. I mean, I didn’t really want to see—I couldn’t see. He had a ski mask on, army green.” Her hand fell away from the scar on her hip, and her eyes tilted toward Royal, pried at him with a well-deep longing, some endless desire that filled the space between them.
He thought: She doesn’t know my face, not my beard or my curly black hair. The scar down my cheek and eye. Without hesitation, Royal reached out with one shaking finger and pressed it, like a burning cigarette, to Stella’s scarred hip. He swore—goddamn, he was sure—that just beneath the cream-smooth skin, no deeper than a lie, he could feel the firm solid shape of a .45 caliber slug.
I did that, he thought. I’m the one who did that.
Chapter 13
In the cab ride home, Stella popped a pain pill and rested her head against the seat. Her mouth ached and on one side she tasted blood. Shouldn’t be drinking, that’s what the dentist said, but Stella was a lounge singer. A lounge singer drinks, pulled molar or not. She thought about the tall, good looking number from Wally’s. Stella knew when she had a man latched onto her—It happened lots of times after Virgil died. Stella never went after any men though. I mean, what for? I’m old now, she thought, and who in the hell wants an old lady for an old lady?
