"It's me," Brazil said.
From the bottom of the steps, where he waited with wine, he was excited, and clueless. He assumed the old black Corvette on the street belonged to a neighborhood kid. It had never occurred to him that Denny Raines might drive anything besides an ambulance. West opened the door, and Brazil lit up at the sight of her. He offered her } the bottle of wine in its brown paper bag.
"I thought we should at least drink a toast ..." he started to say.
West awkwardly took the wine from him, acutely conscious of his reaction to her tousled hair, to the red marks on her neck, and her blouse buttoned crooked. Brazil's smile faded as his eyes wandered around her crime scene. Raines appeared behind his woman, and looked down the steps at Brazil.
"Hey, what'cha know, sport?" Raines grinned at him.
"Like your stories ."
Brazil ran back to his car as if someone were chasing him.
"Andy!" West yelled after him.
"Andy!"
She hurried down the steps as his BMW roared off into the setting sun.
Raines followed her back into her living room as she buttoned her blouse properly, and nervously smoothed her hair. She set the wine on a table, where she did not have to look at it, and be reminded of who had brought it.
"What the hell's his problem?" Raines wanted to know.
"Temperamental writer," she muttered.
Raines wasn't interested. He and West had several downs yet to go, and he tackled her from behind, grabbing, fondling, and working his tongue into her ear. The play was incomplete as she broke free, leaving him yards behind, and taking the ball with her.
"I'm tired," she snapped.
Raines rolled his eyes. He'd had enough of her poor sportsmanship and penalty flags.
"Fine," he told her as he ejected his bloopers tape from the VCR.
"Let me just ask you one thing, Virginia." He furiously strutted to the door, pausing long enough to fix smoldering eyes on hers.
"When you're eating and the phone rings, what happens after you hang up? Do you go back to your meal, or do you forget that, too? Do you just quit because you had a tiny interruption?"
"Depends on what I'm eating," West told him.
t^ Brazil's dinner was late and spent at Shark Finn's, on Old Pineville Road, at Bourbon Street. After roaring away from West's house, he had driven around, getting angrier by the moment. It had not been one of his wiser moves, perhaps, to stop by Tommy Axel's Fourth Ward condominium with its blush rose front door. Brazil noticed a number of men noticing him during his approach from the parking lot.
Brazil wasn't especially friendly to them, or even to Axel.
What Axel considered a first date and Brazil considered revenge began in Shark Finn's Jaws Raw Bar, where a mounted sailfish caught in a net protested with an open mouth and startled glass eyes. Wooden tables were uncovered, the plank floor unvarnished. There were faces carved on coconuts, and curled starfish and stained glass. Brazil nursed a Red Stripe beer and wondered if he might be going insane as he considered the senseless and impulsive behavior that had landed him here in this place at this moment.
Axel was burning holes in him, living a fantasy, and fearful the vision would vanish if he looked away for even a second. Brazil was certain that other people slipping down raw oysters and getting drunk had figured out Axel's intentions and were miscalculating Brazil's.
This was unfortunate since most of the men drove pickup trucks and believed it was their higher calling to get women pregnant, own guns, and kill queers.
"You come here a lot?" Brazil swirled beer in its dark brown bottle.
"Whenever. You hungry?" Axel grinned, displaying his very nice white teeth.
"Sort of," Brazil said.
They got up and moved into the crab shack, which was no different than the raw bar, except there were captain's chairs at the tables, and the ceiling fans were working so hard they looked like they might take off. Jimmy Buffet was playing over intercoms. A candle and Tabasco sauce were on their table, which rocked, requiring Brazil to fix it with several packets of Sweet & Low. Axel started by ordering a Shark Attack with lots of Myers's rum, and he convinced Brazil to try a Rum Runner, which had enough liquor in it to turn the lights out in half of Brazil's brain.
As if Brazil were not in enough trouble already, Axel ordered a tin bucket filled with iced-down bottles of Rolling Rock beer. This was going to work just fine, the music critic was sure of it. Brazil was a puppy and could be trained. Axel was stunned to suspect that the guy might never have been drunk in his life. Incredible. What did he grow up in, a monastery, the Mormon church? Brazil was wearing another pair of slightly too-small jeans left over from high school days, and a tennis team T-shirt. Axel tried not to think about what it might be like to get those clothes off.
"Everything here's good," Axel said without looking at the menu, as he leaned into candlelight.
"Conch fritters, crab cakes, Po-Boy sandwiches. I like the baskets, and usually get fried scallops."
"Okay," Brazil said to both Axels sitting across from him.
"I think you're trying to get me drunk."
"No way," Axel said, signaling for the waitress.
"You've hardly had a thing."
"I don't usually. And I ran eight miles this morning," Brazil pointed out.
"Man," Axel said.
"You're sheltered. Looks like I'm gonna have to educate you a little, pull you along."
"I don't think so." Brazil wanted to go home and hide in bed. Alone.
"I don't feel too good. Tommy."
Axel was insistent that food would prove the cure, and what he said was true to a point. Brazil felt better after he threw up in the men's room. He switched to iced tea, waiting for his internal weather to clear.
"I need to go," he said to an increasingly sullen Axel.
"Not yet," Axel said, as if the decision was his to make.
"Oh yes. I'm out of here." Brazil was politely insistent.
"We haven't had a chance to talk," Axel told him.
"About what?"
"You know."
"Do I have to guess?" Brazil was getting annoyed, his mind still in Dilworth, really.
"You know," Axel said again, his eyes intense.
"I just want to be friends," Brazil let him know.
"That's all I want." Axel couldn't have agreed more.
"I want us to get to know each other real well so we can be great friends."
Brazil knew a line when he heard one.
"You want to be better friends than I want to be. And you want to start right now. No matter what you say, I know how it works. Tommy. What you're saying is insincere. If I told you this minute that I'd go home with you, you'd go for it like that." He snapped his fingers.
"What's so wrong about it?" Axel liked the idea quite a lot, and wondered if it were remotely possible.
"See. A contradiction. That's not called being friends. That's called being laid," Brazil enlightened him.
"I'm not a piece of meat, nor do I care to be a one-night stand."
"Who said anything about one night? I'm a long-term kind of guy," Axel assured him.
Brazil could not help but notice the two guys with bulging muscles and tattoos, in greasy coveralls, drinking long-neck Budweisers, glaring at them as they eavesdropped. This didn't bode well, and Axel was so obsessed, he wasn't picking up on the stubby fingers drumming the table and toothpicks agitating in mean mouths, and eyes cutting, as plans were being made for the dark parking lot when the fags returned to their vehicle.
"My feelings for you are very deep, Andy," Axel went on.
"Frankly, I'm in love with you." He slumped back in his chair, and dramatically threw his hands up in despair.
"There. I've said it. Hate me if you want. Shun me."
"Puke," said Rizzo, whose visible tattoo was of a big- breasted naked woman named Tiny.
"I gotta get some air," agreed his buddy, Buzz Shiftier.
"Tommy, I
think we should be smart and get out of here as fast as we can," Brazil suggested quietly, and with authority.
"I made a mistake and I apologize, okay. I shouldn't have come over and we shouldn't be here. I was in a mood and took it out on you. Now we're going to make tracks or die."
"So you do hate me." Axel was into his crushed, you have-deeply-wounded-me routine.
"Then you stay here." Brazil stood.
"I'm pulling your car up to the front porch, and you're going to jump in. Got it?" He thought of West again, and anger returned.
Brazil was looking around, as if expecting a gunfight any moment, and ready for one, but aware of his limitations. There were rednecks everywhere, all drinking beer, eating fried fish with tartar and cocktail sauces, and ketchup. They were staring at Axel and Brazil.
Axel saw the wisdom in Brazil getting the car by himself.
"I'll pay the bill while you do that," Axel said.
"Dinner's my treat."
Brazil was completely cognizant of the fact that the two big boys in coveralls were this very second out in the dark parking lot, waiting for the two queers. Brazil wasn't especially concerned by their erroneous impression of him and the choices he made in life, but he was not interested in having the shit beat out of him. He thought fast, and tracked down the hostess in the raw bar, where she was parked at a table, smoking and writing tomorrow's specials on a chalk board.
"Ma'am," he said to her.
"I wonder if you could help me with a serious problem."
She looked skeptically at him, her demeanor changing somewhat. Guys said similar words to her every night after they'd been through buckets of beer. The problem was always the same thing, and so easy to remedy if she didn't mind slipping off behind the restaurant for maybe ten minutes and dropping her jeans.
"What." She continued writing, ignoring the jerk.
"I need a pin," he said.
"A what?" She looked up at him.
"You mean, something to write with?"
"No, ma'am. I mean a pin, a needle, and something to sterilize it with," he told her.
"What for?" She frowned, opening her fat vinyl pocketbook.
"A splinter."
"Oh!" Now that she understood.
"Don'cha hate it when that happens?
This place is full of 'em, too. Here you go, sugar. "
She fished out a small sewing kit in a clear plastic box that she'd gotten from the last hotel some rich guy took her to, and she slid out a needle. She handed him a bottle of nail polish remover. He dipped the needle in acetone, and bravely retreated to the porch. Sure enough, the two thugs were prowling near cars, waiting. They lurched in his direction when they spotted him, and he quickly stabbed his left index finger with the needle. He stabbed his right index finger and thumb. Brazil squeezed out as much blood as he could, and smeared in on his face, which he then held in his hands, as if he were reeling.
"Oh God," he moaned, staggering down steps.
"Jesus." He fell against the porch railing, groaning, holding his disgusting, gory face.
"Shit." Rizzo had gotten to him, and was completely taken aback.
"What the fuck happened to you?"
"My cousin in there," Brazil weakly said.
"You talking about that fag you was sitting with?" asked Shifflet.
Brazil nodded.
"Yeah, man. He's fucking got AIDS, and he threw up blood on me! You believe that! Oh God."
He staggered down another step. Shiftier and Rizzo moved out of the way.
"It went in my eyes and mouth! You know what that means! Where's a hospital around here, man? I got to get to the hospital! Could you drive me, please?"
Brazil staggered and almost stumbled into them. Shifflet and Rizzo ran. They leapt into their Nissan Hard Body XE with its four-foot-lift oversized tires that spun rocks.
Chapter Twenty-five.
The next night, Monday, Blair Mauney III was also enjoying an agreeable meal in the Queen City. The banker was dining at Morton's of Chicago, where he typically went when business called him to headquarters. He was a regular at the high- end steak house with stained-glass windows, next to the Carillon, and across from First Presbyterian Church, which also had stained glass, only older and more spectacular, especially after dark, when Mauney felt lonely and in the mood to prowl.
Mauney needed no explanation from the pretty young waitress with her cart of raw meat and live lobster waving bound claws. He always ordered the New York strip, medium rare, a baked potato, butter only, and the chopped red onion and tomato salad with Morton's famous blue cheese dressing. This he downed with plenty of Jack Black on the rocks. Tomorrow he would have breakfast with Cahoon, and the chairman of corporate risk policy, and the chairman of the credit corp, in addition to the chairman of US Bank South, plus a couple of presidents.
It was routine. They'd sit around a fancy table in Cahoon's fancy Mount Olympus office. There was no crisis or even good news that Mauney knew of, only more of the same, and his resentment peaked.
The bank had been started by his forebears in 1874. It was Mauney who should be ensconced within the crown and have his black and white portrait regularly printed in the Wall Street Journal. Mauney loathed Cahoon, and whenever possible, Mauney dropped poison pellets about his boss, spreading malicious gossip hinting at eccentricities, poor judgement, idiocy, and malignant motives for the good in the world Cahoon had done. Mauney requested a doggie bag, as he always did, because he never knew when he might get hungry later in his room at the luxurious Park Hotel, near Southpark Mall.
He paid the seventy-three-dollar-and-seventy-cent bill, leaving two percent less than his usual fifteen-percent tip, which he figured to the penny on a wafer-thin calculator he kept in his wallet. The waitress had been slow bringing his fourth drink, and being busy was no excuse. He returned to the sidewalk out front, on West Trade Street, and the valets scurried, as they always did. Mauney climbed into his rental black Lincoln Continental, and decided he really was not in the mood to return to his hotel just yet.
He briefly thought of his wife and her endless surgeries and other medical hobbies, as he cataloged them. What he spent on her in a year was a shock, and not one stitch of it had improved her, really. She was a manikin who cooked and made the rounds at cocktail parties.
Buried somewhere deep in Mauney's corporate mind were memories of Polly at Sweetbriar, when a carload of Mauney's pals showed up for a dance one Saturday night in May. She was precious in a blue dress, and wanted nothing to do with him.
The spell was cast. He had to have her that moment. Still, Polly was busy, hard to find, and cared not. He started calling twice a day. He showed up on campus, hopelessly smitten. Of course, she knew exactly what she was doing. Polly had been mentored thoroughly at home, at boarding school, and now at this fine women's college. She knew how men were if a girl acknowledged their attentions. Polly knew how to play hard to get. Polly knew that Mauney had a pedigree and portfolio that she had been promised since childhood, because it was her destiny and her entitlement. They were married fourteen months after their first meeting, or exactly two weeks after Polly graduated cum laude, with a degree in English which, according to her proud new husband, would make her unusually skilled in penning invitations and thank-you notes.
Mauney could not pinpoint precisely when his wife's many physical complications began. It seemed she was playing tennis, still peppy and enjoying the good fortune he made possible for her, until after their second child was born. Women. Mauney would never figure them out. He found Fifth Street and began cruising, as he often did when he was deep in thought. He began getting excited as he looked out at the night life and thought about his trip tomorrow afternoon. His wife thought he would be in Charlotte for three days. Cahoon and company believed Mauney was returning to Asheville after breakfast. All were wrong.
^ While family traveled from the distant airports of Los Angeles and New York, the bereft chief and her sons went through closets and dresser d
rawers, carrying out the painful task of dividing and disposing of Seth's clothing table in Gaboon's fancy Mount Olympus office. There was no crisis or even good news that Mauney knew of, only more of the same, and his resentment peaked.
The bank had been started by his forebears in 1874. It was Mauney who should be ensconced within the crown and have his black and white portrait regularly printed in the Wall Street Journal. Mauney loathed Cahoon, and whenever possible, Mauney dropped poison pellets about his boss, spreading malicious gossip hinting at eccentricities, poor judgement, idiocy, and malignant motives for the good in the world Cahoon had done. Mauney requested a doggie bag, as he always did, because he never knew when he might get hungry later in his room at the luxurious Park Hotel, near Southpark Mall.