Jim Lewis - The King is Dead

I left a girl in Abilene

I left a girl in Abilene

Prettiest girl I’ve ever seen

Waits for me in Abilene.

I want to go dancing, said Lukas. Let’s go find us a dance somewhere. You a dancer, Coonass?

Chenier nodded, his face serious and proud. King of St. Tammany Parish, he said. Ain’t nobody better.

There’s a big band down at the Regis Hotel, said Walter. Let’s go, then. Let them swing.

Let them swing, said Lukas, and they rose a little unsteadily and started back into the night.

The hotel ballroom was dark but the bandstand was bright, the music was hot and loud, and Chenier could dance just as he said, jitterbugging furiously, with his hat clenched in one hand and a local girl grasped by the other, his lined face shining and a smile fixed upon his features. Walter watched him with a combination of curiosity and admiration, as if the other man were an exhibit of some sort, a demonstration of human physical skill taken beyond the practical and into festive excess; and he danced one song himself, with a tall, heavily made-up woman with straight black hair and ocher skin, and then retired to the bar, where Lukas and Hamilton III were waiting.

Look at that man go, said Lukas. Chenier had loosened a button on his dress shirt and his legs and arms were flying this way and that.—He looks like a goddamned rooster trying to fly. Can’t compete with that: let’s get drunk. Bartender! You got any bourbon in behind that fancy bar of yours?

Then it was midnight and the band members were taking their bows, there was applause all around, and the three of them were as blind as worms, as bent as worms and with as little left to lose. Last hours on earth. Outside, the palm trees were being whipped around by a dark Pacific wind; inside, Hamilton III was lecturing to no one. My mother … he started, and then he stopped again, as if mentioning her was all he had intended. Coonass had come off the dance floor soaked in sweat, his hair as wet as if he’d just stepped out of the ocean. A big round-faced sandy-haired boy was waiting for him at the bar, watching him as he came across the polished floor, finally laying hands on the bar top and huffing for air as he gazed down to the far end, where the bartender was wiping up a spill.

Tell me something, nigger, said the sandy-haired boy. He wiped his small bent nose with the back of his hand and sucked back the water from his lips.

Chenier shook his head. Not so, he said, though he was so breathless it came out in a single slurry syllable. It made no difference at all. The sandy-haired boy put his hand on Chenier’s shoulder and squeezed a little.

Tell me, how did you get in here? You’re a sneaky little son of a bitch, aren’t you? Sneak your way into a white man’s Marines, where you don’t belong. Sneak into this hotel.

Down the bar Walter noted a certain dissonance in one corner of his consciousness, but it was late and he didn’t want to look, so he turned slightly, facing himself a little farther toward the dance floor, where a pair of Red Cross girls in chiffon dresses were holding hands and giggling about something.

You’re crazy, Chenier said to the sandy-haired boy. I don’t need no trouble.

Yes, said the boy. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, you do need trouble. Why don’t you come outside, and I’ll show you what you need? Come outside, and I’ll shove your black head up your black ass.

Chenier said nothing and didn’t move. The sandy-haired boy smiled and nodded to a pair of friends who were standing in the corner; the two friends smiled back, and then turned and left the bar. Idly, Walter watched them go. He studied his hands; he gently rocked his glass. Chenier caught the bartender’s attention. Shot and a beer, he said, and he cocked his head up to look at the chandeliers in the mirror behind the bar.

You can’t serve him, said the sandy-haired boy. The bartender made a puzzled face. Don’t you know who this man is? the boy continued. The bartender shrugged. This man, said the boy, is of the African race. Now … now … now, I don’t know how he got here, I don’t know who he lied to, or what. I don’t even know why he’s trying to pass. They’ve got plenty of places of their own. But I’ll tell you this, he insisted, leaning over the bar top. You keep serving him, and no white man is ever going to want to come in here again.

That’s enough, said Chenier. In the dim light he suddenly looked very much older, more formidable as a man, but also more frail.

It’s not even close to enough, said the sandy-haired boy, leaning in, and Chenier sighed. Come on outside, and we can settle this real quick.

Can I get a drink, my friend? said Chenier to the bartender.

Why don’t you boys take care of whatever you’ve got between you, said the bartender. Go take care of it, and then you can come back in and have a drink, O.K.?

The sandy-haired boy waited while Chenier stopped by Walter’s end of the bar to pick up his hat. By then Harrison III had begun the saga of his mother, her many marriages, her money, her mansion. The Cajun paused and leaned in to listen.

What’s going on? said Walter.

I don’t know…. said Chenier, slowly. This boy here seems to have a problem with me.

The sandy-haired boy smiled and spoke loudly from down the bar. I’m going to teach your nigger friend a lesson, he said, but Walter made no effort to argue with him; he was too drunk to quite register the insult, there in such crimson luxury with women and music; it caused him little more than a thought to the wind outside and his home back home. There was a bit of banal silence, and then the other two were gone.

The Cajun died that night, beaten to death in five minutes in the night behind the hotel’s service entrance, by three men who were never found. At the end there was steam coming off of him, but he was shivering, and the last thing he saw was a big dirty grey cat licking at his ankle. Skk, said Chenier. Skk.

It was only when the M.P.s entered the ballroom that Walter, Hamilton III, and Lukas realized that anything was wrong at all. They’d noticed that the Cajun was missing, and they knew he was in some kind of trouble, but they’d figured it was just going to be a little bit of pushing, something in the dark that any one of them might have confronted. Maybe he’d made friends with the sandy-haired boy and gone off to other pleasures. No.

The policemen separated them and brought them back to the station; there they were questioned, one by one: What are your names, and what unit are you from? Where have you been tonight? What have you been doing? Who was your friend? Who was he talking to at the bar? The three of them, Hamilton III, Lukas, and Walter himself, had hardly looked at the boy long enough to see him; they had heard the word nigger , and that had told them everything they needed to know. You didn’t see him? said the investigating officer to Walter. Your buddy goes out to fight three other men, and you don’t even see who it is? Why didn’t you go with him? Why didn’t you help him?

Walter was eighteen years old and had nothing to say, though a mad tear of dishonor slipped down the side of his nose. The drinking had long since left him, and their loss was strange; no one was supposed to get hurt until combat, and then only gloriously. No one was supposed to die upon dancing. Back at the base the three who were still alive had their last conversation. God damn it, said Lukas. Why’d the son of a bitch leave us? Why didn’t he ask for help? But all of them knew that they had done something too indecent to be washed away by sunlight or sobriety, or even the war to come. They had been careless and star-cursed, and Chenier had died.

The following week Walter Selby boarded a transport ship bound south for the Gilbert Islands. Riding on the back of the giant greygreen ocean he waited patiently to die, to be cut in half by a shard of metal come whistling down from the empty sky, to be thrust upward on a column of fire, to tumble overboard and drown in the deep—not so much because he deserved it as because he was out of moral luck. Instead, the seas turned gradually blue, the islands appeared, the gorgeous jungles, coral reefs, a lagoon, a beach; forward and forward, under the palms and pandanus and in the event, he discovered how clever he was at killing men, and he killed every man he could.