Lone Star Noir

by Bobby Byrd

WHO STOLE MY MONKEY?

  BY DAVID CORBETT & LUIS ALBERTO URREA

  Port Arthur

  Can you really make it stink?

  —Beau Jocque and the Zydeco Hi-Rollers

  Looking back later, Chester could not convince himself he’d heard the sound at all, not at first, for what memory handed up to him was more sensation than sound, the tight sawtooth grind of a key in a lock, opening the door to hell.

  They were midway through a cover of “Big Legs, Tight Skirt,” Chester caressing the custom Gabbanelli Cajun King he used for the night’s first sets. Saturday night at the old Diamond 21, some of the dancers in western getup, down to the Stetsons and hoopskirts, the rest in the usual Gulf Coast duds—muscle shirts, ass-crack jeans, shifts so cellophanetight a blind man would weep—the cowboy contingent arrayed in three rows for the line dance, the others rocking to their own inner need, women holding the hair off their necks, men combing back damp locks, the band double-clutching but bluesy too, John Lee Hooker meets Rockin’ Dopsie with a tip of the hat to Professor Longhair. Yeah—’fess, chile. Midnight in East Texas, the music savage and hip, the band hitting it good, the room steamy, the dance crowd punchy from the beat but craving more, always more.

  But the sound. It came from outside, no denying it now, that distinctive growl, like the sulfurous thunder-chuckle of the devil himself—a rear-mounted diesel, rebuilt Red Diamond in-line six. Chester even caught a scent of the oil-black exhaust and the muffled scattershot of spewed gravel as the bus tore out of the parking lot.

  No, he thought, blinking like a man emerging from a silly dream. Two-toned copper and black, a perfect match not just for the gear trailer but his ostrich-skin boots—100 percent personal style, that bus. Last gasp of the days when oil money ran flush, when Chester had a nice little stilt home in Cameron Parish (before the hurricane took it to Belize, that is), when the clubs were paying sweet money and Beau Jocque was still alive and touring the country and a good two-step chanky-chank band could make beaucoup cash dollars. That bus was just about it for the Chester Richard empire, the final signature on a bleak dotted line.

  But that wasn’t what broke his heart.

  Lorena, he thought.

  His fingers stopped their flight across the mother-of-pearl buttons as a drop of sweat, fat as a bumblebee, splashed onto the accordion’s Honduras rosewood. He wore a tight leather apron-vest, cut and sized in Lafayette so the bellows didn’t pinch his nipples. Underneath, his chest was a swamp.

  The rest of the band, oblivious, pushed on, the dancers unfazed too, a whirlwind thrall of spins and dips and shuffles. He glanced into the mold-speckled mirror above the stage as though the smile of some last hope might reveal itself. Fog hazed his reflection.

  Turning his back to the dance floor, he waved the band to a stop. Geno, his frottoir man, lost the rhythm with his spoons. Skillet, the drummer, faltered when the rubboard did. The tune stumbled and fell apart.

  “You didn’t hear that?” They stared at him gape-eyed. “Someone just stole the motherfucking Flyer.”

  Two hours later he sat in a nearby diner, waiting for Geno and Skillet to return with a car, the night pitch-black beyond the screens. One fan hummed in the doorway to keep out the wasps and skeeters, another sat propped on the ancient counter to whip the soupy heat around, the air thick with the smell of sweet crude off the ship channel. The cook was in back puzzling out the walk-in’s condenser. A plain bare bulb swam overhead in the breeze, casting a dizzy light.

  Chester, craving a pinch, leaned back in his chair, shirt clinging to his skin as he pretended to listen. The woman did go on. If he only had some Red Man. Hell, any chaw at all—he’d take gas station rubbish right now if it had some mint in it. All the other club patrons had trudged on home, demanding their cover charge back, getting half, everybody ripped off one way or the other. But this woman here, she’d elected to stay.

  He remembered her from the first set, waltzing with the others in the grand counterclockwise circle, her partner a doodlebugger wearing throwback pomade. Small wonder they’d parted. Coppery freckles dusted her cleavage which, from time to time, she mopped with a white paper napkin. Her hair was the color of bayou amber and she wore it swirled messily atop her head, strands curling down like so many afterthoughts, a pair of chopsticks holding it so. Another time and place, he could imagine himself saying, I bet you taste just like rice pudding, sha.

  Chester had suffered three marriages, survived as many divorces, more time spent with lawyers, it seemed, than in love. He had a wandering eye and a ravenous crotch and a Category 5 temper, his love life a tale of wreckage—one judge had nicknamed him Hurricane, given his knack for sheer, mean, indifferent destruction. No woman could endure him for long, but few could resist him, neither. Like fortune tellers staring into a glowing ball, they could sense within him a tragic, beautiful, lonesome soul. Hell, he was the crown prince of lonely; open his heart you’d find a howling wasteland, make West Texas look like Biloxi. And the ladies could not resist that—I’ll soothe you, sugar. Save you. But no bride, no groupie, no rice-pudding blonde with chopstick hair had ever honored his longing, or yielded to his touch, like Lorena.

  “Mr. Richard,” she whispered, pronouncing it richered, like something that happened when money landed in your lap, “I have been a hopeless fan ever since that night at Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki Lounge in Opelousas, that first night I heard you, heard you and your band.” Her hand rushed across the table like a hawk toward his. “I’ve been on my share of tailrides and I’ve been not just to the Y-Ki-Ki but Harry’s Club over in Beaux Bridge and Richards Club in Lawtell, the Labor Day festival in Plaisance …”

  Chester, cocking an ear for sounds of the car, shook himself from his thoughts. “Let me stop you, darlin’ dear.”

  She clutched his hand as though afraid it might escape, her eyes a pair of low-hanging plums; their skin a telling contrast, hers creamy and white like egg custard, his the shade of caramel.

  I must be hungry, he thought.

  “I have never,” she intoned, “never heard a man play as wild, as free, as hard as you.”

  He could no longer see her face. His mind’s eye conjured Lorena.

  She was a custom Gabbanelli, not unlike the one he’d been playing onstage when the music stopped, but finer, older, one-of-a-kind. Handmade in Castelfidardo sixty-five years ago, during the war, she’d been bought by his granddad for twenty dollars and a pig.

  Chester thought he’d seen one of the Cheniers play one just like her at the Acadiana music festival, and the prospect had coiled a skein of fear around his heart. But no, theirs lacked the purple heart accents, the buttons of polished bone, much more. And sure enough, Lorena proved her royalty that day. An accordion war, oh yes, him and Richard LeBoeff at the end, Chester taking the prize with a fiery rendition of an original he’d penned just the night before, titled “Muttfish Gumbo.” Next day, the local headlines screamed, The Jimi Hendrix of the Squeezebox, and there she was, in the picture with Chester: Lorena. Who else was worthy to share his crown? He grinned, in spite of himself. What would Granddad think of that?

  He’d been a marksman in the 92nd Infantry, the fabled Buffalo Soldiers, moving up the Italian peninsula in ’44 while most white troops got shipped to Normandy for the push to Berlin. He hefted Lorena on his back like a long-lost child as the Mule Pack Battalion marched up alongside Italian blacksmiths and resistance volunteers, South Africans, Brazilians, trudging across minefields and treadway bridges, scaling manmade battlements and the Ligurian hills toward von Kesselring’s Gothic Line.

  He endured the march up the Serchio Valley, survived the Christmas slaughter in Gallicano, suffered the withering German 88s and machine-gun fire as the 92nd crawled across the Cinquale Canal. Throughout his boyhood, Chester sat beside his granddad’s rocker and listened to his tales, enthralled, inspired, and each one circled back to guess who? The accordion became his granddad’s prize, his lucky talisman, his reason for fighting, and he named her Lorena, same as
his girl back home, the one who refused to wait. In time, the beautiful box with all that luck inside became the real Lorena, the one who was true.

  And she was a stone beauty—pearl inlays, seasoned mahogany lacquered to the color of pure cane syrup, the grille cut lath by lath from brass with a jeweler’s saw, double reeds made from Swedish blue steel for that distinctive tremolo, a deep mournful throbbing tone unmatched by any instrument Chester had ever heard. She had the voice of a sad and beautiful thrush, the tragic bride of a lost soldier. And yes, Granddad had come back from that war lost. The accordion became a kind of compass, guiding him back, at least halfway.

  In time, Granddad passed her on to Papa Ray and he in turn handed her over to Chester, the prodigy, the instrument not so much a gift as a dare. Be unique and stunning and wise, she seemed to whisper, like me. And that was the full shape of the inheritance, not just an instrument but a sorrow wrapped in warrior loneliness. Chester treated her like the dark mystery she was, never bringing her out until the final set of the night, queen of the ball—which was why she’d been in the bus, not onstage, when the Western Flyer got jacked.

  Chester glanced down at the table, saw the woman’s fingers lacing his own, felt the nagging heat of her touch. “Darlin’ dear,” he repeated, snapping to. “As I have told you at least twice now, and which should be obvious to a fan as devoted as you claim to be …” He lumbered to his feet as, at long last, the headlights of Geno’s Firebird appeared in the lot. “The name is pronounced Ree-shard.”

  She cocked her eye, a dark glance, the rice pudding curdled. “Oh, boo.”

  “Adieu.”

  “Boo!”

  He tipped his hat and hustled into the night.

  Inside the car, Chester collected a pearl-handled Colt .45 from an oilcloth held out to him by Skillet, who kept for himself a .44 Smithy and a buck knife big enough to gore a dray. Geno carried a .38 snub-nose and a length of pipe. You play enough bayou jump joints and oil-coast dives, you habituate your weapons.

  Geno, sitting behind the wheel, glanced over his shoulder at Chester who straddled the hump in the backseat. “I’m guessin’ there ain’t no guesswork to who took the bus.”

  “No.” Chester dropped the magazine on the Colt, checked to be sure it had all seven rounds, plus one in the pipe, slammed it home again, then tucked the pistol under his belt as Geno slipped the Firebird into gear and took off. “I think not.”

  Skillet, true to his nature, remained quiet. Black as Houston crude and wiry with cavernous eyes, he’d been hit with a fry pan in ’77, still had the telltale dent in his skull. Geno, plump as a friar with slicked-back hair, kept up a low, tuneless hum as he drove. He was the band’s gadfly mystic, always wandering off on some oddball spirit craze, and he’d recently read somewhere that you ought to chant “Om” to get right with the cosmos. Apparently, though, he’d snagged some cross-signals, for the effort came out sounding like some rural Baptist dirge, hobbling along in waltz time. Chester almost asked for the radio, then reconsidered. Who knew what sort of ass-backward mojo you’d conjure, stopping a man midchant?

  They pulled over for food at an all-night canteen on the Port Arthur outskirts: crawfish étouffée, hush puppies, grilled boudin sausage. Using his fingers to scoop the food from its white cardboard carton, Chester dug in, reminding himself that vengeance is but one of many hungers.

  “Boudin,” he said. “Proof that God loves a Creole man.” To himself, he added: Let’s hope some of that love will hold.

  They took Route 73 to catch I-10 near Winnie, figuring the thief was heading west. He’d mentioned home was El Paso, just across the border from Ciudad Juárez, murder capital of the planet.

  His name was Emigdio Nava but he went by Feo, the Ugly One. The handle was not ironic. Small and hunched but muscular, arms sleeved with tats, he had a scrapper’s eyes, a mulish face, the complexion of a peach pit. He’d approached Chester about two weeks back, at a private party they were playing out on the levee road in East Jefferson Parish. He invited himself back into the greenroom between sets and sat himself down, a cagey introduction, smile like a paper cut. Everybody in the band figured him for a dealer—except for a few old locals too big to unseat, the Mexican gangs ran practically everything dopewise now—but he made no mention of such.

  He did, though, have an offer.

  “Want you to write me a song,” he said, whipping out a roll of bills. He licked his thumb, flicked past five hundreds, tugged them free, and handed them out for Chester to take. “For my girl.”

  Chester glanced toward Skillet, by far the best judge of character in the band. He’d played up and down the coast for over thirty years, headliners to pickup bands, seen everything twice. It took awhile, but finally Skillet offered a nod.

  “Tell me about your girl,” Chester said, taking the money.

  Her name was Rosa Sánchez but everyone knew her as La Monita, Little Monkey. Again, Chester learned, irony was not at issue. Feo showed him snapshots. She was a tiny woman with unnaturally long arms. Her small round face was feathered with fine black hair. An upturned nose didn’t help, though the rest of the package was straight-up fine. And being clever and resourceful, or so Chester surmised from how Feo told it, she turned misfortune to her advantage. A hooker who worked near the ship channel, she gained the upper hand over the more attractive girls by, more or less, outfucking them.

  Geno, catching a glance at the picture, muttered, “Ain’t we funky.”

  Chester cut him with a look.

  “We got this tradition in Mexico,” Feo said, ignoring them both. “Ballads. We call them corridos. It’s how we sing the praises of the outcasts, the unlucky ones, the tragic ones, but also the bandits, the narcotrafficantes, the pandilleros. Anyone who understands what it means to suffer, but also to fight.” The dude had picked up a bit of a Texas accent, and it was weird, hearing the Mexican and the Texican wrestling in his voice. Gave him a case of the mush-mouth.

  Skillet watched him like a cat perched beneath the hummingbird feeder.

  “You people,” Feo continued, “have such a tradition also, no?”

  “Called raconteur.” Chester, too, could be a man of few words. You people, he thought. “When do you need this by?”

  Feo rose from his chair, that slashing smile. “How hard can it be?”

  Harder than Chester thought, as it turned out, but he’d taken the money and so was stuck. The problem was simple: how to pen something apt that wasn’t at the same time offensive. It proved the better of him—he put it off, scratched out a few sorry lines, cast them aside:

  Only the homely

  And the angels above

  Know how to suffer

  The pain called love

  Mama would shoot me dead onstage, he thought, if I dared sing that out loud. She’d been a torch singer famous up and down the bayou country, Miss Angeline her stage name. She’d died when Chester was seven, the cancer setting a pattern for women he’d lose.

  Seeing that Chester was suffering over the lyrics, and sensing in that the chance for some clowning, Geno tried his hand too, singing his version over lunch, a plate of fried chicken and string beans with bacon:

  She is my monkey

  I’ll make her my wife

  Gonna be funky

  For the rest of my life

  Chester glanced up from his own plate, jambalaya with shrimp and andouille. “You looking to get me killed?”

  Geno veiled his grin with a shrug. “Not before payday, no.”

  Two nights later, Feo showed up unannounced at the club they were playing, gripping an Abita beer, working a path through the crowd to the bandstand. He offered no greeting, just gestured once with a cock of his head.

  Desperate for an idea—something, anything, quick—and unnerved by the small man’s stare, Chester turned to the band and counted off the first thing that popped into his head:

  My monkey got a cue-ball head

  A good attitude and them long skinny legs

 
No sooner did the lyrics escape than he felt the sheer disastrous lunacy of what he’d done. And the band hadn’t played the tune since forever, execution falling somewhere between rusty and half-ass, a dash of salt in an already screaming wound. The gleam in Feo’s eye turned glacial. The bottle of beer dropped slowly from his mouth, and the mouth formed an O, then reverted to slit-mode as he vanished. Chester thought maybe that would be it, a feeble wish, but then he spotted him at the bar between sets, and at the end of the night, like a bad itch, he turned up again, drifting across the parking lot as they loaded up the Flyer.

  Approaching Chester, “Got time for a word, cabrón?”

  Chester led him off a little from the others, not sure why. “Nice night—no, mon ami?” Cringing. Lame.

  “You were supposed to write me a song.”

  The boys in the band sidled up, watching Chester’s back.

  Chester worked up a pained look, phony to the bone. “I thought I did.”

  “That thing you played?”

  “It’s called ‘Who Stole My Monkey?’”

  “Bartender tells me it’s an old tune, written by some dude named Zachary Richard. Not you. You’re Chester.”

  “He’s my uncle,” Chester lied.

  “Still ain’t you.”

  Chester tried an ingratiating smile. “How’s about a few more days?”

  “And you insult my girl too?” Feo held Skillet and Geno with his eyes, warning them that he could take all three. “You diss me twice? Know how much money you could make writing me love songs, güey?”

  Got a fair idea, Chester thought, just as he knew how many grupero musicians had been murdered the past two years by cats just like this. The situation had snuggled up next to awful, but before he could conjure his next bad idea, the Mexican turned away. Chester saw a whole lot of luck heading off with him.

  Over his shoulder, in that inimitable mush-mouth Texican-Mexican, Feo called out, “Fuck all, y’all!”