RED ROSES FOR A BLUE LADY 

by Jim Bishop

It is Friday night and I don’t know that I am even born yet. Surely a Friday though, and on the jukebox a western song is playing. Not as odd as it seems that in Bill’s tonight, here at the edge of the northern wilderness, a western song should be on the jukebox. A country song, I should say, speaking of heartache and lonely nights, lost love in a place without meridian. My mother and father are sitting with another couple I almost recognize. The four of them are squeezed into a wooden booth in a room much longer than it is wide. The lights in the room, appropriately dim, and the smokiness, seem in keeping with the drift of the song, whose words penetrate only in snatches.

I am surprised, and aroused slightly I admit, by the sight of my mother. Neither her petiteness nor the very proper cut of her five-and-dime white blouse distract from some very nice curves. Her complexion and her blue-black hair suggest maybe some Indian blood. But the gestures, the mobility of the face, are decidedly French-Canadian. You can see the others in the booth look to her to keep it rolling and are ready to laugh when she opens her mouth.

My father is wearing a white shirt open at the neck and a standard gray sport coat. A compact, well-knit man, not really young but short of middle age, whose laughter and body movements seem more residual, more "kept up," than truly spontaneous. But it is Friday night after all, and they are "out" together, and he has had a few beers. Something growing and darker in him can have been let go for now. And so my father laughs too, more than he ever would in daylight or on weeknights, I can tell.

I don’t recognize him at first, the man who stops by the table to banter and enter in, but I am the son of my father, and right away I don’t like him. He laughs in all the right places, but his eyes, when the conversation turns away from him, sneak hungry glances.

It comes back to me—the curly hair and a certain set of the shoulders—he is the man who will later father a moose-like, slack-jawed son, luckily years younger than myself. He is leaning into the table now, addressing my mother directly in what is meant to pass for playful—including my father every so often with a sidelong wink in his direction.

"I can tell a good dancer when I see one. I bet she’s a good one, hunh, Fred? Why don’t you dance with her, Fred?" And again to my mother, "Doesn’t he like to dance, him?’’

The man across the table from my father seems to be trying to give my father a way to ignore the intruder. He keeps talking as if the other man were a temporary inconvenience they will just have to bear. My father is half-way going along with this but a small muscle in his jaw keeps flexing as if he is grinding something with his back teeth.

"Well, a woman like you... she should be dancing, right, Fred? I’m going to play a good song and I want to see you and Fred dancing now when I get back here."

My mother is trying to laugh the whole thing away. As the man gets up to go to the jukebox, he turns back. "You get Fred ready now. If the old man won’t dance, I’ll have to dance with you myself."

As he moves toward the jukebox, my mother says something in French to the woman opposite her in the booth. It means something like, "I guess Emile (that’s the name she uses) has had a few too many." The boys-will-be-boys tone of dismissal is meant for my father to pick up on, but he doesn’t turn his head in her direction; he is still chewing on something.

Even though my father and his friend both know they’re only pretending to talk now, the subject has come round to the mill, not a Friday night subject. My father has apparently given up whatever pretense has kept this Friday night separate from whistles, bosses, and unfair numbers. The talk becomes spiked with obscenities, English and French. A different tone enters in. The women have no choice but to talk between themselves. I can’t make out what they are saying, but there is the sense of filling in.

Which is when Emile arrives at the table. The trip has apparently caught up with him, too much sway in his swagger, but he’s caught the jukebox in a down moment and pretty well times his entrance to coincide with the opening bars of his selection.

"I bought some Re-e-e-ed ROses for a Blueoooo LAdy / Sent them to the Sweetest gal in Town..."

With his right palm, Emile is holding an invisible partner in tight to his chest and, bent forward at the waist, is swinging her around in his best mime of what, in my time, was broadly labeled Foxtrot on high school dance programs.

"Re-e-e-ed ROses," he is crooning into her invisible ear, his own eyes swooning shut. "Okay, blue lady," he says, still shuffling in a little half-circle at the edge of the booth, "on va dancer. Fred, lah, y’l est trop fatigué pour ca, unh Fred? Viens, viens, Eva. On vah y montrez comment faire ça. Ben vientanh! On n’peut paw danser sur les fesses!"

My father has been chewing on whatever it was for too long. The word "fesses," or backside—but given the plural form in French, seeming to describe more than denote—is the toenail across the line my father needed. In one quick move he jerks himself out of the booth and onto his feet. Emile, who has probably not been clear all night whether he’s wanted to fuck or fight, is caught with his jaw hanging open, his left arm still up there over his slightly cocked head, his right hand to his breast in what now seems an awkward salute. Just as he lowers his left arm and straightens himself, my father grips him around the bicep with his right hand. "We don’t want you here. Get back where you were or get out."

My father’s "where you were," said in a voice at the margin of control, sounds more like "where you came from" and carries with it some very dark insinuation.

For a long moment the abrupt silence in the bar overwhelms even the song from the jukebox, which must still be playing. Emile tries to pivot away from my father’s grip but has neglected to plant his feet and almost falls into my father instead. Whether to catch his balance or to lock my father in his grasp, Emile’s right arm moves to catch my father around the neck, but my father intercepts it and steps forward with all his weight, shoving Emile backward. Emile’s feet can’t catch up with his momentum, he lands flat on his ass ten feet down the aisle.

My father and Emile seem equally stunned. For a moment they are frozen, my father standing there, Emile sitting, his legs fully outstretched in the aisle just staring at one another. Emile utters a curse in English. He struggles to right himself just as Bill makes it from behind the bar and steps in front of him. Two guys at the end of the bar swivel in and clamp on.

My father’s friend—christ, my godfather—jumps up and stands in front of my father, who shows no sign of moving anyway. Bill, who has apparently had an eye on the proceedings all night, tells one of the men to get Emile’s coat and escorts him to the door. My father sits down again in the booth. How do I know his legs are shaking, he’s not letting on. My mother is leaning across the booth, trying to say something to him, but he’s looking straight ahead, straight through. The man who will be my godfather does what he can think of to do. He turns to the bar and orders another round. He doesn’t have to raise his voice to make himself heard. The song has stopped playing.