“How they been treating you, Daddy?”
“They like my urine. The doctor takes it away every two days after the nurse puts stickers all over it.” He laughed down in his chest, and a bubble of saliva formed on the corner of his mouth. “They must not have much to do down at the Charity except look at somebody’s piss.”
“Daddy, did Rita and Ace put you in at Charity?”
“They got families of their own, Iry. It costs fifteen dollars a day to keep that nigra woman out here. They ain’t got money like that.”
I had to clench my fingers between my legs and look away from him. My sister and brother had married into enough money to bring in the best of everything for him.
“Look at me, Son, and don’t start letting those razor blades work around inside you. The one thing I regret is that my children never held together after your mother died. I don’t know what they done to you in the penitentiary, but don’t take your anger out on them.”
His watery blue eyes were starting to fade with the sedation, and he had to force his words past that obstacle in his throat. I looked at his white hair on the pillow and his thin arms stretched down the top of the sheet, and wondered at what disease and age could do to men, particularly this one, who had gone over the top in a scream of whistles at Belleau Wood and had covered a canister of mustard gas with his own body.
“Why don’t you go to sleep and I’ll see you later,” I said.
“I want you to do one thing for me this evening. Cut some azaleas by the porch and take them down by your mother’s grave.”
“All right, Daddy.”
“I know you don’t like to go down there.” The light in his eyes was fading away like a quick blue spark.
“I was going down there anyway,” I said.
His eyes closed, and the lids were red against the paper whiteness of his face.
I had heard stories about the effects of intestinal cancer and how fast it could consume a man and his life’s energy, in spite of radiation treatments and the morphine shots to take away the pain, but you had to look at it to make it become real.
I walked down the hall to my room, which he had kept as it was the day I went on the road again with the band and ended up in the penitentiary. My over-and-under, with the .22 magnum and .410 barrels, was propped in the corner, my clothes hung limply in the closet, the creases on the hangers stained with dust, and my double guitar case that held the Martin flattop and the dobro sat on top of the bed, with the gold-embossed inscription THE GREAT SPECKLED BIRD across the leather surface. I opened the case, which had cost me two hundred dollars to have custom-made in Dallas, and for a moment in the crinkled flash of the Confederate flag that lined the inside and the waxed shine off the guitars, I was back in the barroom with the scream of voices around me and the knife wet and shaking in my hand.
I stripped naked and dressed in a pair of khakis and a denim shirt and slipped on a pair of old loafers. I put everything from Angola inside the suit coat, tied the sleeves into a hard knot, and pushed it down in the wastebasket.
Downstairs, I found the bottle of Ancient Age that my father always kept under the drainboard. I poured a good drink into a tin cup and sipped it slowly while I looked out the window through the oak trees in the yard and at the sun starting to fade over the marsh. Purple rain clouds lay against the horizon, and shafts of sunlight cut like bands of crimson across the cypress tops. I had another drink, this time with water in the cup, and took a butcher knife and the bottle outside with me to the azalea bushes by the side of the house.
I snipped the knife through a dozen branches covered with red flowers and walked down the slope toward the graveyard. It was close to the bayou, and ten years before, we had had to put sacks of cement against the bank and push an old car body into the water to prevent the widening bend of current from eroding the iron fence at the graveyard’s edge. There were twenty-three graves in all, from the four generations of my family who were buried on the original land, and the oldest were raised brick-and-mortar crypts that were now cracked with weeds and covered with the scale of dead vines. The graves of my mother and sister were next to each other with a common headstone that was divided by a thin chiseled line. It was brutally simple in its words.
CLAIRE PARET AND FRAN
NOVEMBER 7, 1945
There was a tin can full of rusty water and dead stems on the grave, and I picked it up and threw it back in the trees, then laid the azaleas against the headstone in the half-light. It had been seventeen years, but I still had dreams about the fire and the moment when I raced around the back of the house and tried to break open the bolted door with my fists. Through the window I could see my mother’s face convulsed like an epileptic’s in the flames, the can of cleaning fluid still in her hand, while Fran stood with a halo of fire rising over her pinafore. Alcide, the Negro who worked for us, threw me backward off the porch and drove a pickax up to the helve into the door-jamb. But the wind blew the inside of the house into a furnace, and Fran plunged out of the flames, her clothes and hair dissolving and streaming away behind her.
I took a drink from the bottle and walked down the mud flat and skipped a stone across the bayou’s quiet surface. The stone hit in the lily pads on the far side, and the water suddenly became dimpled with small bream. The light was almost gone from the trees now, and as I sat back against a cypress and pulled again on the bottle, I had to wonder what I was doing there at all.
When I neared the top of the slope by the smokehouse, I saw a Cadillac parked by the front porch where the nurse’s automobile had been. It must be Ace, I thought. Rita’s preference would lean toward smaller expensive cars, something conservative enough not to make the wives of her husband’s law partners competitive. Or maybe both of them at once, I thought, which was more than I was ready for at that moment.
I walked around the side of the front porch just as Ace was holding open the screen door for her. Ace’s face had the formality of an undertaker’s, with his mouth turned downward in some type of expression that he had learned for all occasions at a chamber of commerce meeting, and his wilted tie seemed almost glued to his throat. Rita saw me before he did, and she turned in the half-opened screen with her mouth still parted in the middle of a sentence and looked steadily at me as though her eyes wouldn’t focus. She was pregnant, and she had gained a good deal of weight since I had seen her last. She had always been a pretty, auburn-haired girl, with small breasts and hips that were only slightly too large for the rest of her, but now her face was oval, her thighs wide, and her maternity dress was stretched tight over her swollen buttocks.
It wasn’t going to be pleasant. Their genuine ex-convict was home, the family’s one failure, the bad-conduct dischargee from the army, the hillbilly guitar picker who embarrassed both of them just by his presence in the area.
But at least Ace tried. He walked down the steps with his hand outstretched, as though he had been set in motion by a trip switch in the back of his head. He must have sold hundreds of ad accounts with the same papier-mâché smile.
Rita wasn’t as generous. Her face looked like she had morning sickness.
We went inside and stood in the hall with the awkwardness of people who might have just met at a bus stop.
“How about a drink?” I said.
“I could go for that,” Ace said.
I took three glasses from the cupboard and poured into the bottom of them.
“I’m not having any,” Rita said. She was looking in her handbag for a cigarette when she spoke.
“Take one. We don’t get the old boy home much,” Ace said, and then pressed his lips together.
“I’ll go look in on Daddy,” she said, putting the cigarette in her mouth as though it had to be screwed in.
“Have a drink, Reet. The nurse gave him sedation about a half hour ago,” I said.
“I know that.”
“So have one with us.” It was hard, and maybe there was just a little bit of bile behind my teeth.
&
nbsp; She lit her cigarette without answering and dropped the match in the sink. Sometimes, without even trying, you can step in a pile of pig flop right up to your kneecaps, I thought.
“Do you have a finger on a job?” Ace said.
“Not a thing.”
“There’s a lot of money being made now.”
“The taxicab driver told me.”
“I’m selling more accounts than I can handle. I might get into some real estate on the side, because that’s where it’s going to be in the next five years.”
“Do you know if any of the band is still around?” I said.
His face went blank, and his eyes searched in the air.
“No, I didn’t know any of them, really.”
“We went to high school with most of them,” I said.
Rita put out her cigarette in the sink and went upstairs. I finished my drink and had another. The whiskey was starting to rise in my face.
“Between the two of us, you think you might want to get in on something solid?” Ace said. He could never drink very well, and his eyes were taking on a shine.
“I think I’m just going to roll, Ace.”
“I’m not telling you what to do, but isn’t that how you got into trouble before?”
“I finished all my trouble as of noon today.” I poured another shot in his glass.
“What I’m saying is you can make it. I’ve got kids working for me that are bringing in ten thousand a year.”
“You’re not offering me a public-relations job, are you?”
He started to smile, and then looked again at my face. Rita came back in the kitchen and opened the oven to check on the warmed plate of mashed potatoes and gruel that the nurse had left for my father. I shouldn’t have started what came next, but they were drumming their nails on a weak nerve, and the whiskey had already broken down that polite line of restraint.
“Y’all really took care of the old man, didn’t you?”
Rita turned from the oven, holding the plate in a hot pad, and looked at me directly for the first time. Her eyes were awful. Ace started to nod at what he thought was an automatic expression of errant-brother gratitude, but then that toggle switch in the back of his head clicked again and his face stretched tight.
“What do you mean, Iry?” The bourbon in his glass tilted back and forth.
“Like maybe Lourdes wants too much gelt to handle him, since they have the best doctors in southwest Louisiana.”
“I don’t think you understand everything that was involved,” Ace said. His face was as flat as a dough pan.
“The emergency ward at Charity looks like a butcher shop on Saturday afternoon. I mean, just check out that scene. They deliver babies in the hallways, and the smell that comes off” that incinerator is enough to make your eyeballs fall out. For Christ’s sake, Ace, you could write a check to pay the old man’s way a year at Lourdes.”
“That’s very fine of you,” Rita said. “Maybe there are some other things we’ve done wrong that you can tell us about. It was also good of you to contribute so much while you were in Angola.”
“All right, but you didn’t have to put him into Charity.”
“You’re really off base, Iry,” Ace said.
“Where did you learn that one? At an ad meeting?”
“Ridiculous,” Rita said.
“How do you think he feels being shoveled in with every reject from the parish? He even defended you this afternoon.”
“If you think so much of his welfare, why don’t you lower your voice?” Rita said.
And then Ace, the PR man for all occasions, filled my glass and handed it to me. I set it back on the drainboard, my head tingling with anger and the bourbon’s heat and the strange movements of the day.
“It was a rotten thing to do,” I said. “You both know it.”
I walked out the house into the twilight. I felt foolish and light-headed in the wind off the bayou, and there was a line of sweat down the front of my shirt. Through the kitchen window I heard them start to purge their anger on each other.
The trees were filled with a mauve glow from the sun’s last light, and I went down to the shed where the pickup was parked, my legs loose under me and a bright flash of caution already clicking on and off in one sober part of my mind.
But the old reckless impulses had more sway, and I scooped some mud out of the drive and smeared it thickly over the expired plate. I turned the truck around and banged over the wooden bridge and roared in second gear down the board road, the ditches on each side of me whipping by the fenders like a drunken challenge.
I stopped at the beer joint by Joe’s Shipyard, which contained about fifteen outlaw motorcyclists and their women. They wore grease-stained blue jeans, half-topped boots with chains on the side, and sleeveless denim jackets with a sewed inscription on the back that read:
DEVILS DISCIPLES
NEW ORLEANS
Their arms were covered with tattoos of snakes’ heads, skulls, and hearts impaled on bleeding knives. I didn’t know what they were doing in this area, far from their usual concrete turf, but I found out later that they had come to bust up some civil-rights workers at a demonstration.
The bar had divided in half, with the doodlebuggers, deckhands, and oil-field roughnecks on one side and the motorcyclists on the other, their voices deliberately loud, their beards dripping with beer, and their girls flashing their stuff at the enemy.
I bought three six-packs of Jax and a carton of cigarettes at the bar and walked through the tables toward the door. Someone had turned the jukebox up to full tilt, and Little Richard screamed out all his rage about Long Tall Sally left in the alley. I was almost home free when one of them leaned his chair back into my stomach.
His blond hair hung in curls on his denim jacket, and a pachuco cross was tattooed between his eyebrows. There was beer foam all over his moustache and beard, and his eyes were swimming with a jaundiced, malevolent light at the prospect of a new piece of meat.
“Why don’t you just watch it, buddy?” he said. His breath was heavy with the smell of marijuana.
I lifted my elbow and the sack of beer over his head and tried to squeeze by the chair, which was now pressing into a corner of my groin.
“Hey, citizen, you didn’t hear the word,” he said.
Two of the girls at the table were grinning at him with a knowing expression over their cigarettes. A real stomp was at hand. One of the straights was going to get his butt kicked up between his ears. Or maybe, even better, he would shake a little bit and then run for the door.
The one advantage that an ex-con has in this kind of situation is that you have seen every one of them before, which is a very strong credential, and as physical people they are always predictable if you turn their own totems and frame of reference against them. In fact, sometimes you look forward to it with anticipation.
I pulled a beer loose from the top of the sack and set it down before him; then I leaned casually into his ear, the gold earring just a breath away from my lips, and whispered: “Don’t turn your head now, but a couple of those oil-field roughnecks are narcs, and they know your girl friends are holding for you. One of them was talking in the head about stifling you with a dealing charge. That’s a sure fifteen in Angola, podna.”
He turned in his chair and stared at me with his yellow, blood-flecked eyes, and I walked out the door and got into the pickup before he could glue it all together in his brain.
The Point was thirty miles south of town, down a blacktop that wound through rows of flooded cypress and fishing shacks set up on stilts. The brackish water was black in the trees, and pirogues and flat-bottomed outboards piled with conical nets were tied to the banks. I drank one beer after another and pitched the cans out the window into the back of the truck while the salt wind cut into my face and the great cypress limbs hung with moss swept by overhead.
The Point extended into the bay like a long, flat sandspit, and the jetties and the collapsed fishing pier looked li
ke neatly etched black lines against the grayness of the water and the sun’s last red spark boiling into the horizon. The tide was out, and sea gulls dipped down into the rim of white foam along the sand, and in the distance I could see the gas flares burning off the offshore oil rigs. There was a seafood place and dance pavilion by the dock where you could sit on the screened porch and drink draught beer in mugs thick with ice and feel the wind blow across the flat water. I ordered a tray of boiled crawfish and bluepoint crabs with a half bottle of wine and sucked the hot juice out of the shells and dipped the meat in a tomato sauce mixed with horseradish.
The pavilion was almost empty except for a few fishermen and some kids who had come in early for the Saturday night dance. The food had helped a little, but I was pretty drunk now, past the point of worrying about a DWI bust and what that would mean to the parole officer on my first day out of the bag, and I ordered another beer. There was only a thin band of purple light on the horizon, and I looked hard at the distant buoy that marked where a German submarine had gone down in 1943. Once years ago, when a hurricane depression had drawn the tide far out over the flats, you could see just the tip of the bow breaking the water. The Coast Guard had tried to blow it up, but they managed only to dislodge it from the sand and send it deeper down the shelf.
Once I worked a doodlebug job out in the bay, and we would ping it occasionally on the recorder’s instrument, but it was never in the same place twice. It moved a mile either way in an easterly or westerly direction, and no one knew how far it went south into the Gulf before it returned again. And as I sat there on the screened porch, with my head in a beer fog, I felt for just a moment that old fear about all the madness everywhere. The crew was still in that crusted and flattened hull, those Nazis who had committed themselves to making the whole earth a place of concertina wire and guard towers, their empty eye sockets now strung with seaweed, and they were still sailing nineteen years after they had gone down in a scream of sirens and bombs.