Madeleine's Ghost (27 page)

“Hey, mister,” she says.

I jump around, embarrassed, and go to remove the hat, but she waves me off.

“Don't worry,” she says. “Everyone likes to try on that hat. Most people look stupid in it, but it looks good on you, I think.”

“I can't very well walk down the street looking like one of Napoleon's marshals,” I say.

“Why not?” she says, and she is serious. Then she glances over her shoulder to where the others are busy with the cash and lowers her voice. “I want to talk to you. Out here.” She pulls me out the back door onto the porch overlooking the courtyard garden. She is wearing a frilly pirate shirt, bloomers, and riding boots, a bandanna tied over her blond hair. Still in my Knights of Columbus hat, I have the odd feeling that we are two characters out of H.M.S.
Pinafore.

“I want to talk to you about Nettie,” she says. Her expression beneath the makeup is earnest and without guile.

“You mean Antoinette?”

“Listen, are you her boyfriend or something?”

“No,” I say.

“Well, she was talking about you like you're her boyfriend.”

“What?” I feel a light tingling at the back of my neck. “Antoinette talks about me?”

“Yeah, she was saying that you were coming down from New York and that she hadn't seen you in a while, and she seemed real excited about it, so I thought you were her boyfriend. But you're not her boyfriend.”

“Not that I know of.”

“But you are her friend, right?” She plucks at my sleeve for emphasis.

“Yes.”

“O.K. I just want to say that I'm worried about her. I mean, I don't know her family or anything, or I would tell them—Nettie's been doing a lot of speed lately. I mean, a lot of speed. She got depressed when all this stuff happened with Victor last year—”

“Who's Victor?”

She makes an impatient gesture. “Nettie's old boyfriend. So she was sleeping a lot—you know how it is when you're depressed, you just lie around in bed all day and smoke cigarettes and sleep—and to get herself out of it, she started doing speed. It's a classic, right? She hasn't ever really gotten off of the stuff since then. And lately she's been coming into the store and taking money from the cash register, like today. I don't have to tell you that's bad for business, right? We used to make real good money here; the store's a very popular place, one of the only real vintage places in New Orleans. But now I think we're losing money, and I wonder …” She looks over her shoulder again to make sure no one has crept up on us. “I wonder if she's starting to get back into coke again.”

“You mean …?”

“Oh, yeah, cocaine. She and Victor used to take baths in the stuff. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I see the telltale signs. Anxiousness and such. It's none of my business; it's just that someone close to her ought to know. That's all.”

Sticky is slightly out of breath when she finishes. I am silent for a moment, taking all this in. Then we hear Antoinette calling from inside.

“Sticky? Need to ask you about some receipts.”

“O.K., that's me,” Sticky says. “I don't want to be an alarmist, but Nettie's great and she needs some help maybe, and if you can help her out, that would be great. O.K.?”

Antoinette calls again and the girl ducks away and I am left on the porch in my bicorne hat, grave as the emperor himself, arms crossed and musing over the green garden wet with rain just below.

T
HE SUN
is out now, and the sky, clear of clouds, shows an unremitting blue. That's the way it is down here. Rain in the morning, then clear and hot in the long hours that extend from noon till dusk. Antoinette's got her Italian shades down, and we're racing along the Belle Chasse Highway, a glittering red bug against the dark asphalt. Soon the highway banks sharp to the right, and there's the river, a brown lazy snake on the other side of the levee.

“What did you think of my girls?” Antoinette calls over the Swedish-aluminum whine of the Saab.

“In the store?”

“Yes.”

“They're in an awful hurry to grow up. Bohemians, junior version. They remind me of some people I know in New York. I can see them in the Village in a couple of years, making the scene. But clove cigarettes? I thought clove cigarettes went out years ago.”

Antoinette grins. “Not with these chicks.”

“Actually I thought one of them made some sense. The girl in the pirate's outfit. A good kid.”

“Sticky? Oh, yeah. Sticky's great. She loves me.”

“I'd say she's worried about you, too. The pills—”

“Shit. I can't believe she said anything about that.” Antoinette frowns into the windshield, and when her lips pull down, I see sharp worrylines around her mouth.

“What about the pills, Antoinette?”

“The pills are nothing, forget the pills. They're not much stronger than the average espresso.”

“And what about cocaine? Doing any of that?”

She shakes her head and gives the wheel an impatient tap. “Let's drop it, O.K.?”

“Antoinette …”

“Later,” she says. “The afternoon is too beautiful. Let's not spoil it right now.”

She's right. We pass Jesuit Bend, and there is a high flush of cirrus in the blue sky and the smell of the open country. Soon we are rolling alongside miles of orange groves interspersed with odd-looking squares of magnolia and live oak that were once the site of great plantation homes.

In the days before the Civil War, when a single white man could own as many as seventeen thousand black slaves, this country of the Plaquemines delta was the center of a fantastically opulent plantation culture built on the sweat of others. Rice, sugarcane, and indigo grown in fields reclaimed from the swamp were traded upriver for the luxuries of the world: Carpets and Sèvres china and books from France, bolts of silk and spices from the Orient, dueling pistols and silverware and beaver hats from England, even Renaissance paintings from Italy. Each planter then was monarch and law on his land and owed allegiance only to the profit margin and his own bad conscience. But all of it came to an end in 1862, when Admiral Farragut's gunboats crashed through the chain the Confederates stretched across the mouth of the river. The Federals bombarded Fort St. Philip and Fort Jackson into submission, then steamed past the plantations to New Orleans, which capitulated without a fight.

About five miles south of Naomi, Antoinette turns off the highway onto an access road that leads through an orchard of orange trees into the bayou. There is the buzzing of many bees here and the smell of honey, and down one of the green shaded alleys between the trees, I catch a glimpse of a man in overalls and a mesh veil tending to rows of square white boxes that are the hives. A few of the yellow and black insects splat against the windshield before we pass off the gravel and onto a narrow road marked “Private—No Trespassing.” It is paved with shells and just wide enough for one vehicle to pass. The air here is live with gnats and mosquitoes. On both sides of the road the terrain falls away to swamp, and all around is the green press of vegetation. I see sap willow and pine, cypress, magnolia, and low, scrubby bushes punctuated with the occasional burst of wildflowers: wild Creole lilies, camellias.

“Alligator,” Antoinette says as we cross a new wooden bridge, and I turn quickly to see what looks like a mossy log sink beneath the green surface of the bayou. The shell pavement ends here. She bumps the Saab none too gently onto a rutted track, and I have to reach out and push branches away from the car as we pass. Now there is only the green light through the trees and the noisy hush of the swamp.

“Jesus,” I say, “this is …” But I am too awed to finish.

“Not New York,” she says, and she smiles.

T
HE RIVAUDAISES
' fishing camp occupies a clearing on a rise overlooking the still waters of a lagoon. This dark, oblong body of water drains into a navigable creek which meanders through the bayou to the Indiana shaped lake known as the Pond, which is in turn connected through a complicated series of bayous to the open waters of Lake Salvador. At one end of the Pond is the small town of Coeur de France. There's a bait and tackle shop, a saloon that is also a general store and post office, a Catholic church built by the Spanish two hundred years ago, a jail, and a few dozen shotgun houses raised from the sandy soil on cypress stilts. It is the closest bit of civilization, about three hours by pirogue through the bayou.

“They used to have dances there all summer long,” Papa Rivaudais says. “Real country-French dances. Had a kind of dance hall attached to the old church. But that was a long time ago. Before the girls came along when we were still a young married couple, Mrs. Rivaudais and I, we spent all our weekends down here. Come Saturday afternoon, we'd hop in the pirogue and paddle all the way out to Coeur de France, dance all night, then hop in the pirogue and paddle all the way back again. But a hurricane came through—oh, sometime in the late fifties—and knocked that dance hall right out of there. The priest, he was a superstitious old buzzard, and he decided God didn't want any more dancing at the church, and that was that. Never did rebuild the place. Otherwise I'd tell you, latch on to
Nettie, get the pirogue, and get on over to Coeur de France. Dancing's just about the best thing two young people can do to get acquainted. Know what I mean?”

I am sitting with Antoinette's father at the end of the small landing that juts about twenty yards out into the black water of the lagoon. Papa Rivaudais is supposed to be fishing. But in actuality he is just slumped in a canvas-backed folding chair, staring out at the lagoon, a dull expression in his faded blue eyes. The expensive-looking fiberglass reel is propped loosely in one hand. At his feet, a Styrofoam cooler of alcohol-free O'Doul's, a tackle box, and an empty wicker basket for the fish. The years have finally caught up with the man, still one of the twelve richest citizens of the state of Louisiana. His hand trembles upon the pole; one eye droops, the legacy of a stroke the year before. His white hair floats in wisps from underneath his long-billed fishing cap, and the once handsome mustache is thin and yellow-looking. I remember the robust patriarch of ten years before, a man still in grips with life, and I am sorry. Papa Rivaudais has become old. He survives on a bland salt-free diet and a shoe box full of medications. Even as we speak, his lungs are filling up with fluid.

He leans over and spits cottony white phlegm into the black water of the bayou. It is a messy business. He wipes his mouth with a red bandanna that he stuffs back into the pocket of the long-sleeve plaid shirt he wears, even in this stifling heat.

“You'll have to excuse me,” he says now. “When the stuff comes up, the stuff comes up. My doctor says it's better to spit than swallow.”

“That's O.K.,” I say. Then we settle down to a long silence. From somewhere nearby there is the cry of a loon.

The three cabins, arranged on a rise overlooking the lagoon, are connected by covered walkways and surrounded by a raised wooden patio. The center cabin with an old-fashioned porch, stone chimney, and sash windows probably dates from the twenties. The two side cabins with sliding glass doors and air-conditioning units are new additions, just a couple of years old. Still, there is a rustic feel about the place. This is the way the first French settlers must have lived, it seems to me, before slaves and plantation opulence, when they came to the province in the wake of
the Sieur de Bienville and his soldiers. Then there was just the trees and the sky and the Indians off in the bayou. The primeval purity of frontier life.

From the cabins now I hear the high shriek of a child's laughter and a baby crying and the sound of women's voices. I look over my shoulder to see Antoinette and her sisters emerge onto the patio. They are preparing to barbecue. I recognize Jolie, though her hair is dyed blond. She's got a baby in one hand and a bottle of Abita in another. Also, there are two little girls, twins from this distance, pulling each other's hair.

“You don't mind sitting with an old man, do you?” Papa Rivaudais says, looking up at me. “Unless you'd prefer to go up and join the women.” There is a trace of the old irony in his voice and a spark behind the faded blue.

“No, I don't mind,” I say.

“The husbands have all gone off fishing. I'm getting too old for that. Two hours in a pirogue nowadays, and the damp settles into my bones for weeks.”

“And Mrs. Rivaudais?”

“My wife's up the road taking care of her people. She does that now, like any good Creole housewife. Always in the end, if you live long enough, you come back to the old ways. As for me, about a year ago, I actually talked to a priest. Haven't talked to a priest to say anything other than ‘Hello, Father, how are you?' in something like forty years. Know what the bastard asked me?”

I shake my head.

“He asked me if I believed in God. I didn't know what to say for a minute there. Then I said, ‘Well, yes.' First time I'd thought about it since I was a boy. God! You believe in God, Mr. Conti?”

This is the second time I've been asked this question in as many months. I consider for a moment, still hesitating, but the old man doesn't give me the chance to answer. He takes a deep breath that rattles in his throat and leans forward.

“You ever hear tell about this Frenchman Pascal?” he says, and he
draws a carefully thumbed copy of the
Pensées
out of the deep pocket of the khaki hunting jacket hanging off the back of his chair.

Pascal? I am stunned. I had always pegged the Rivaudais family for one in which any ideas beyond the purely practical were not tolerated. So much for my smug complacency.

“Amazing guy, Pascal,” Papa Rivaudais continues. “Highly religious but also a brilliant mathematician and the father of public transportation among other things. He instituted the first horse-drawn bus line in Paris in the seventeenth century. But he started out a skeptic like me, like yourself, and he came up with a proposition for skeptics. Make yourself a bet, he said. Bet yourself that God exists. If he does exist, you win. If he doesn't exist, you win anyway, because it doesn't really matter and you've managed to give yourself something to hold on to in this sad life. Something to keep you warm against what old Pascal calls
les silences effrayantes de ces espaces inconnues.
You know what I'm saying? Here …”he says, and hands me the book. “Read it cover to cover three times.”