Sunday Scribbling #165: Covert

RC

Royal Crown set her middling pudge down on the bench at the corner of St. Charles and McGuffin. Middling. Corseted, she was a taut sack of feed, burlapped coffee beans. Grey rainy day, no commiseration for the rolls beneath her gray sweatshirt. Forty years since the bounce and sproing of her cheerleading quiver upon asphalt, the gasp as boys to men felt the ache of her wet mouth in the shock of their loins. There were always rolls beneath her starched blue and orange uni, but the thighs that gripped their minds were rubber band tight; those most reverent saw no underwear in sight. Holy mother of god, even in the dry days of her ruin she could still feel the kiss of her gash upon pay dirt, the moment she wept to be seen, to be the gleam of an eye, fire down the alleys of dreaming lust.

"RC, sweetness,” says Blanchard, bruised lips from his afternoon of trumpet revival. He spits blood onto a banana peel in the street. His pallor is dubious; the wave of his hair lacks precision. “I see you got sugar on them beignets.”

“Take it downtown, B. I ain’t sweatin’ no fiscal gloom this afternoon. Your Standard and Poor is down, my brother.”

"That is trenchant humor, Miz Crown. You ask Kathryn if I ain’t sublime. You seen this lip or not? I’m talkin’ Miles, sister. Wynton be talkin’ smack about Beethoven this and Haydn that, but he ain’t exactly bendin’ over backwards, now is he?”

“Save it, B. I ain’t doin’ musicology on the fly. I got groceries to make.”

“That where you’re goin’, then?”

“Sure ain’t for breathin’.”

Streetcar rolls up. Blanchard stops the commotion of RC flailing to a standing position. His hand palms the basketball of her belly.

“Old times sake?”

It’s winter on the avenue, but Royal smells Metairie green lawn, the turf behind the wreckage of Grace King High. The slit of B’s eye behind the bonfire of a Marley-sized joint. AP History gone up in smoke. Six months later, the University of Chicago faded to Thibodaux and Nicholls State.

“You on or off,” says the conductor. B’s still palming the ball.

“Avery,” says RC.

“Quo vadis,” says B. “I know this cat? I pinch his woman or something?”

Streetcar mutters off. RC uncorks a pint of KB vodka.

“AP History. Mr. Avery. You turned me out, you bastard.”

“Not what I heard, Crown. I heard it was the Rule of 78.”

“Rule nothing. I smell a confection.”

“This ain’t candy, my queen. Lord Avery had a sweet tooth for blue and orange. Carver brought it special delivery, but you punked out. AP smarts got nothin’ to do with the analytical geometry of the Rule of 78. I heard tell that only doggy style bought you anything better than a B+.”

“Take it out the Jayne Mansfield Highway, boy. Your head’s off, anyway.”

For a moment, RC looked him straight on, past the casual three-day grime, past the bulldog overbite, the sour smell of hands on himself in the very pants he was wearing. B. had been a soul brother, Teddy Pendergrass on his knees, ship out on the foam, arrogant minstrel with a socialist axe to grind. B. had blues to sweat and then some.

A sweet pea vine uncoiled and grabbed the finger still drumming the pudge. The middling pudge.

“Turn out the lights, Teddy.”

Teddy turned out the lights.



Anchovy Heights, third floor up. Emeril Lagasse in his demented mania goes landlord. Vegetable sconces, kitchen shrines of inlaid tile. Royal stands nude at her bedroom window, watching a big black mouth of storm brewing up off the river. She feels her body’s lines once again, survey lines of taut demarcation beneath its rolling tumble of wasted farmland. The wreckage is still there, menopausal belly, sagging oil can breasts, riot of pooch up and down the property, no evidence of capacity for bump and grind, just piddling huff and gasp. But, appearances can be deceiving. She’s always felt like fine metal in the pentathlons of her bed, bronze at the window for all the leering world to see, her mound a capacious forest of fall aspens, miraculous gold through the years of her long demise. She fingers her leaves, rounds her belly. Black sky crackles its appreciation, black swan leaning to his Leda.

“Angel’s face,” she says to her darkened lover.

B. mistakes himself as auditor, coughs a chuckle. His fingers trace the pepper sconce above his head.

Royal shapes the vision of dark wings about her face, figures the Greeks for fools to think it was a swan. What rampant god would loose himself in such effeminate garb? Royal had known the earthquake of a body taken by plutonian force, the gossamer lies that fill a room in its wake, and it had not been doggy style either. Title Avery had stood in full view above her on his desk, as she felt his torrid hunger tear a hole right through the last of her high blue Atchafalaya basin sky, his black waters flooding out the very back reaches of innocence, vulture-hung oxbow lake mausoleums of grim refuge for her haggard fall. You think Leda was coming back with the real story after that? The listening ear of a man always turns tail and runs.

“Landlord provide any real food, or just this shit on these walls?”

The stain of post-coital talk bled across her face. The bronze melted, she felt herself sucked back into her graveyard limbs. B. was B. again, not the dark screen of colors behind her eyes, the green waters she swam to oblivion in her long steady race to a blue swarm. Avery was the first and only she’d looked at. B.’s hairline was beyond imprecise, the riotous stew of a Mardi Gras street. Royal draped the afghan nearest, sat in white leather at the darkened glass.

A rued B gazed back. “Kitchen’s closed, I reckon.”

The rain struck behind her head like a pounding monster’s heat.

"Ain’t your lucky dog I’m hungry for. Sorry.” The words–any words, in the glory of such a storm–were ashes in the mouth.

"Make a dash for Mandina’s?”

“I ain’t standing at the bar for your thirty minutes of vodka appetizers.”

“Pee Wee’ll get us in the back.”

“Back smells like the shitcan.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Royal. Ten minutes at the bar, max.”

“I fuck you for free and you say I drive a hard bargain? Five minutes, B, and then I’m walking, monsoon or not. As soon get my oysters at Sally’s where it’s on the table the minute I walk through the door.”

“Oysters, my ass. Stuff she sells is gravel.”