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.