We came out of the trees into a cotton field that stretched away on both sides as far as you could see in the starlight. The taillights of two or three other vehicles showed ahead of us. A ground fog was starting to form in the field, and I shivered in the damp breeze that came through Mary’s window. She must have felt my leg shake, because she patted it once and rolled up her window.
The field eventually came to an end in another stand of trees. We could see lights shining through the trunks and branches. We pulled into an open place in the trees that served as a parking lot, stopped between two other pickups, and got out onto a surface that was part gravel, part dust and part flattened beer cans. Dozens of cars, trucks and motorcycles were parked helter skelter around us. Light and honky tonk music shot out at us from a building barely visible through the trees.
As we got closer to the source of the lights and music, we could see an old one story structure made of gray, weathered boards with a rusted tin roof. It sat out over black water, supported by pilings that stuck up a good ten feet out of the water, its floor higher than our heads. A ramp made out of wide planks ran from the shore to an uncovered porch along the right side of the building. A frame without a door stood at the end of the ramp, and a neon sign affixed to its top proclaimed “Dude’s Joint.”
Dude’s was built over an oxbow lake, formed when the river changed channels and left a semicircular lake, full of the fish and other creatures that lived in the Mississippi. Cypress trees dotted its shoreline and grew out in the lake, their knees sticking up here and there out of the water like shark fins. It filled in some each year with mud and vegetation, but the annual flood helped scour it back out and replenished its marine life. It would probably disappear altogether eventually, but not in my lifetime. It had been six months since the last flood, and after a hot, dry summer the mud along the shore gave off a fetid odor of garbage and dead fish.
Dude’s had been at this location for more years than I could remember. It was only open for business when the water wasn’t high enough to cover the parking lot or the road across the cotton field, and the building itself was washed off its pilings every ten or fifteen years when a big flood came. The walls were always rebuilt out of some cheap material, plywood or pressboard or the lumber from abandoned farm buildings that made up this incarnation. Since 1953, when a corner of the outdoor deck collapsed and three drunken patrons had drowned, the floor had been made of stout lumber, but it still creaked and groaned under a full load of customers.
The place had always drawn an eclectic crowd, ranging from bikers and rednecks to fraternity boys from Ole Miss and slummers from Memphis. The mix made for an interesting crowd and more interesting fights. The only thing you didn’t see was any black faces. Dude didn’t believe in that kind of diversity.
Years ago, I had asked a bartender who Dude was, and had gotten only a shrug and shake of the head in reply. I knew who the current Dude was, though.
The mud stink was masked by the smell of beer and cigarette smoke as soon as we stepped off the ramp onto the porch. Men and women sat in metal folding chairs around small wooden tables made out of scrap lumber. The end of a chair leg occasionally fell down into a crack between the floor decking, adding to the confusion and hilarity. Naked light bulbs were strung along wires that ran from the building on the left to poles at the side of the porch, and a bar stretched along the side of the deck by the building. Four bartenders worked furiously to keep up with the waitresses bringing orders from the tables and the people stacked up two deep shouting their own orders and passing money over the heads of the people in front of them.
I had to pull Mary in front of me and guide her with a hand on her left shoulder as we weaved our way through the crowd toward the back of the deck. The cool wind through the truck window had accentuated Mary’s figure, and several of the men we passed couldn’t help staring at her. I didn’t blame them.
As Mary came abreast of a table halfway down the forty-yard long platform, a large hand attached to a beefy forearm shot out and grabbed her thigh. I pushed on her shoulder with my left hand and kept walking, slamming my right thigh up as hard as I could into the locked out elbow. I heard a grunt of pain above the music and crowd noise at the same time the arm and hand windmilled up past my face and back over the shoulder of a man with a red beard wearing a camouflage baseball cap and t-shirt. I had a fleeting glimpse of a fountain of beer shooting into the air as his hand impacted a cup held by a person sitting beside him, then we were into the crowd and out of sight.
It had happened in a second, and as I looked over at Mary I realized that she wasn’t even aware that she had been grabbed. I took a few quick looks over my shoulder to make sure the guy with the hand wasn’t coming, but I didn’t see any sign of him. The crowd was so thick that he might not have realized what happened, either.
The deck ran a few yards past the end of the building on its left. A yellow rope was strung waist high from the rail of the deck to the corner of the building. Behind the rope were four large tables, three of which were surrounded by small, boisterous crowds. One person sat alone at the fourth table.
A dark, wiry man about six feet tall wearing a western style shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, and a belt with a rodeo buckle, stood by the rope. He had a soda can in his left hand to hold the tobacco juice from the bulging cud in his cheek, and a lit cigarette in his right hand. His eyes looked like they had decided to go ahead and get it over with and not wait around till his habit killed the rest of him.
“This is a private area,” he said, not looking at Mary but keeping his zombie eyes on me. “You’ll have to find a table somewhere else.”
“Have you tried the patch?” I asked with my best sincere smile.
“What do you mean?” he asked me back.
“You know,” I said. “The nicotine patch.”
“I don’t want to quit,” he retorted.
“Not to quit,” I said. “So you can get more nicotine into your body.”
“Look, bud, ya’ll will have to go sit somewhere else,” was all he said, though I thought I had seen something flash in his eyes for a second.
“I came to say hello to Tommy,” I said, gesturing with a nod of my head to the table in the far corner with the solitary figure.
“Everybody wants to say hello to Tommy. My job is to make sure that he gets a quiet evening,” he said.
Mary was holding on to my left arm, smiling up at Smoky’s face, but he hadn’t looked at her once. I was beginning to think that he was either a great bodyguard or that something other than his eyes was dead, too.
“If Tommy wants a quiet evening, who are all the people at the other tables?” I asked.
“Just a few friends, partner. Now you and the lady need to move along.”
“Well, I’m another friend, and Tommy told me to drop by any time,” I said. I got a business card out of my wallet and held it out to him. “I’d appreciate it if you gave him my card and told him I’d like to give him my regards.”
He took a deep drag on the cigarette and then reached out for the card. As he took it with his thumb and forefinger he twisted his hand down, trying to catch my hand with the glowing ember of the cigarette sticking up between his index and middle fingers. Someone had done that to me before with a cigar and I still had a round scar at the base of my thumb. Once burned, twice shy, and I had my hand six inches back from his by the time the tip of his smoke punched through empty air. I kept my forearm up, ready to block the left jab that was the next move, but the soda can never moved. For the second time I thought I saw a spark in his eyes as he waited for my reaction, but when I made no move toward him they faded back into blackness.
He