Music of the Swamp (13 page)

She had a new red plastic barrette in her hair, and she was sunburned, and she looked like a child.

She said, “Don't tell me you love me if you don't really love me.”

I knew I should leave but I did not. I picked up pieces of broken window glass and Coke bottles and sidearmed them at huge dead sea turtles in the sand.

Daddy looked back out at the porpoises.

He said, “Do you love me?”

She said, “Yes. I mean, no. I mean, I don't know. Don't make me answer this.” She said, “I can't do this any more. Second honeymoons are just too hard on a girl.”

She turned and walked away, up towards the beach house.

Daddy called out to her, angry, hopeless. “Look at this beach!” he said. “Look at it! Porpoises was the best I could do! Porpoises was the best metaphor I could think of!”

My mother kept walking up the filthy sand.

Daddy called, “Jesus Christ, honey! I can't do no better! Maybe if we lived near a better beach!”

T
HAT'S NOT
the end of the story. It seems like it could be, since it's just the kind of thing I'm always hearing myself say these days: If the world were different, I would be different, I would be more in love.

But it's not the end. There is one more thing to tell.

We did not drive back to the Delta that day. We stayed on the coast the whole month. Federal grant money came through while we were still staying at the beach house, and so the bulldozers started up. Cranes with steel balls swung into the walls of buildings and finished the collapse the hurricane had begun. Politicians stumped around making speeches, billboards with clever sayings went up:
THE SOUTH SHALL RISE AGAIN
. Pumper barges and dredges cleared the Gulf channels and pumped new white sand up onto the beaches. Dead fish and turtles were hauled off in garbage scows, the whale full of buzzards was dragged out to sea by a tugboat. The red lights of ambulances and police cars flashed all night, as the last bodies were carted away to funeral homes. Plate glass in windows was replaced, fallen trees were chainsawed into firewood and stacked in ricks. The ospreys and the swamp creatures lay quiet, quiet in the Mississippi darkness. The knife-throwers went back to New Orleans, the swamp-midgets got work in the construction industry.

My parents and I took long drives in the car and watched the reconstruction. The Gulf coast slowly became beautiful again.

One day as we drove along we realized we had left the state of Mississippi altogether and were actually speeding down a Florida highway, and this made all of us happy, but for some reason it also frightened us, and so Daddy turned the car around and we drove back in the direction of Biloxi and Symbol City and Pass Christian and Gulfport and Pascagoula.

Daddy looked longingly out the car window at house painters on high ladders, brightening the walls and corners of big houses that the hurricane had stripped of paint. He spoke wistfully of possibly moving here, where work was so plentiful, and where the land was so beautiful and the Gulf waters smelled like flowers on the islands beyond the reef.

We kept all the windows of the car rolled down and Mama's hair was beautiful when the wind blew it. Daddy's face got sunburned and his freckles stood out like copper pennies. I found
Connections
magazine in the trash one day, and so I took it out to the dumpster with the shells of shrimp we had peeled and eaten together the night before.

There was no more talk of love or of romance or of metaphors, though this seemed to be a good thing, not bad. My parents talked more, I would say, and kissed less, and this seemed to make both of them happy, though I cannot say why.
We spent less time on the beach and more time in the car, driving, driving, driving along the Gulf of Mexico.

Daddy said, “Symbol City is a funny name for a town.”

Mama said, “Mississippi was never a subtle state.”

Daddy said, “It's funny how you end up somewhere, and then that's your life.”

Mama said, “I guess.”

Daddy said, “I think I would like to read more books. I used to always be reading a book when I was in the army.”

Mama said, “I guess.”

Daddy said, “I met this guy who was writing a book. He was a writer, that's what he told me.”

Mama said, “Is that right? I heard John Dillinger the gangster used to drive down this very highway.”

Daddy said, “What has that got to do with a writer?”

We were in the car with the windows down. I was in the backseat thinking about cocksuckers.

I said, “Daddy.”

Daddy said, “What is it, Sugar-man?” Then he said, “I could have given this writer a few tips for his book, if I'd of thought of it.”

Mama said, “Tell the truth.”

I said, “What if I wanted to grow up to be a cocksucker?”

Daddy said, “Sex facts about animals, that's what the book was about, see. He was collecting sex facts about animals.”

Mama said, “I know one. I know a good one.”

Daddy said, “You do? You know a good sex fact about animals?”

Mama said, “The common opossum has a forked penis. That's one, that's the one sex fact about animals that I know.”

I got real quiet in the backseat. I had never heard my mother talk about sex before. It was stranger than seeing the silk ties on the bed posts.

Daddy said, “A
forked
one?”

Mama said, “That's it.”

Daddy said, “Woo-ee.”

Mama said, “In case they want to boink up the nose, I guess, I don't know.”

The two of them laughed quietly at the joke. The wind was whipping through the car and stirring up dust devils in the backseat. The Gulf skies were blue, blue. It would have been an excellent time to be sitting on a hardwood floor instead of in the backseat of a car, I was thinking.

We drove along for a while and didn't talk.

Daddy said, “In the army I was stationed in Sarasota for a while.” He said, “Friend of mine was with the circus. He was a swordswallower.”

He seemed to be talking to me. I wondered if this was an answer to my question about cocksucking.

I said, “The circus?”

He said, “The winter circus. It's in Venice, near Sarasota. If we had an extra day or two we could drive down there. I wonder
if he's still alive. He could take eighteen inches right down his throat.”

Mama said, “It's so far to Sarasota, honey, and we're so comfortable here.”

Daddy said, “Okay, all right, it was just a thought.” He looked at Mama. He scrunched down in the driver's seat and looked through the steering wheel at the highway. He said, “I'm John Dillinger, rolling through, balling the jack, watch out, po-lice, watch out law-abiding citizens, watch out all you possums and cocksuckers!”

She said, “You're John Dillinger all right. You
think
you're John Dillinger.” My mama was blushing and laughing, and she was flushed with excitement and joy.

He said, “You're my moll, bebby. You're a dangerous woman. You're the Lady in Red. You're my pistol-packing mama.”

He gunned the engine and we sped along laughing like a bunch of wild Indians down the long bad coastal highway of the Gulf of Mexico.

Daddy said, “Git on down the damn road! Yeah!”

M
Y GIFT
under the Christmas tree the year I turned twelve was a single-shot .410 gauge shotgun. It was a fine-looking little gun, with a dark-wood stock and forepiece. It breeched with a sharp metallic crack, so that a shell might be dropped into the chamber.

The shells were another gift, a bright box of number six shot. And also a canvas hunting jacket with a game bag built into the lining, and a canvas cap as well, with earflaps that could be pulled down in case of cold weather. Next to these was a stiff bright pair of wool boot socks, gray with a red stripe around the tops.

Not only were these things under the tree, which would have made my life complete in any case, but also a small sturdy metal box with two suitcaselike latches. I flipped open the latches and saw what was almost too good to be true, a sectional ramrod, a bottle of cleaning solvent, patches of cotton swabbing and a length of soft cotton rope. Also, a can of gun oil, a bottle of something called “blueing,” and a thin pamphlet titled “Care and Cleaning of Firearms.”

It was just daylight Christmas morning. My father was puking in the bathroom from drinking too much the night before. The fat red Christmas tree lights were shining and
there was an angel on top of the tree. My grandfather was in his room smoking a cigar, though it was only six o'clock on a misty Mississippi morning, and the house stunk weirdly of tobacco and oranges.

I was holding the shotgun across my lap where I sat on the floor.

My mother said, “Do you like it?”

I said, “It's okay. Yeah, it's fine.”

She said, “I wasn't sure it would be what you wanted. I was guessing. I hope I guessed right. Is a .410 all right? Is a .410 what you wanted?”

I said, “You can't hunt deer with it. It's too small for deer hunting.”

My mother said, “Well, but maybe you wouldn't want to start with, you know, big game. Maybe you'll want to hunt, maybe, squirrels at first, until you're more experienced, maybe. Maybe rabbits.”

I turned the gun on its side. I had to force myself not to pet it, like a living thing. I read the writing stamped into the barrel.
Winchester .410 gauge Full Choke

I said, “Full choke.”

My mother said, “Was full choke the wrong thing to get? Mr. Gibson at the Western Auto Store didn't mention anything about ‘choke.' Or if he did, I mean, I guess I didn't hear, wasn't listening carefully. I don't even know what ‘choke' means. Is full choke all right?”

We could hear my father finishing up in the bathroom. The big finish this morning, with the final gags of dry heaving and the scuffing sounds of his crawling on the floor, where he had been lying with his head in the toilet. Now the spitting and the cursing. Next the gargling.

Even my mother had to notice. She said, “Dad's driving the porcelain bus this morning.”

I said, “‘Modified' or ‘open' choke would be better for quail.”

She said, “But how about squirrels, or maybe rabbits? Just to start, you know, to get some experience first. Would full choke be all right for either of them?”

My mother was sitting on the floor beneath the Christmas tree with her hands in her lap. The fat red bulbs burned among the tinsel behind her. I cocked the hammer, and then eased the hammer back to the ‘Safe' position. I sighted along the barrel, out the window at a pecan tree, black with rain from the night before.

I knew nothing at all about guns. This was the first gun I had ever held in my hands. I lowered it from my shoulder and did not look up.

I said, “Full choke is perfect for squirrels.”

In my room, behind the closed door, I held the gun, I breeched it, and cocked the hammer. I even loaded it once, dropped a dangerous bright little plastic-coated cylinder into the chamber and snapped the gun shut and cocked the hammer
and aimed from the hip at my closed door and knew that I could shoot right through it.

I took the gun apart, barrel and stock, and laid each piece on my bed separately. Then I put the parts back together.

I read
Field and Stream
magazine. I read about rifled slugs, about removing musk glands from animals, about cooking wild game, about constructing a dove blind in a harvested corn field. I read advertisements for insulated boots, for “pocket warmers,” for battery-operated socks, for long underwear and waterproof shell bags. I looked at the men in the ads wearing flannel and leather and canvas and rubber. Men with pipes in their mouths and color in their faces.

And sometimes I even took the gun to bed with me, beneath the covers. I dumped the shells out of their box and scrambled them with my hand over the sheet, just to listen to the click. I picked them up and let them run through my fingers like gold.

T
HOUGH
I did these things, I did not go hunting. With the exception of one aborted attempt soon after Christmas, my father resisted steadfastly all my mother's suggestions that he take me. Whenever the subject came up, he lapsed into sentimental memory. He told of a man who hunted with “a little beagle dog, sweetest baby voice you ever heard on a dog, like banjos far off in the woods somewhere,” and when that poor
man accidentally shot and killed that sweetest of animals one day, why, my father said, “He set down on the bumper of his truck and believe it or not because he was a big man, six foot ten or eleven, he set down on the front chrome bumper of his truck and he cried. I mean
cried like a baby
.” He would tell this story several times in rapid succession, only varying the height of the crybaby on the bumper of the truck.

And yet, at night beneath the covers I fed a romance of nature and all its rhythms of forest and field.

For weeks my mother worked her small manipulations. “You know, there's nothing quite so beautiful to me as a father and son together,” she might say at the dinner table. She might actually place her right hand on my father's shoulder and her left hand on mine and make a physical connection between us. Her words were the blessing and benediction that should have made the magic work.

Nothing did work, of course, hinting least of all. And not direct pleading. “Please take him, Gilbert. Take the boy hunting. Get to know him, you hardly know the child.” This had as little effect as her subtler attempts.

Then one frozen Saturday morning in February, I woke up with both of my parents standing above my bed, my father saying, “Get up, Sugar, I'm taking you hunting.”

My mother was actually wringing her hands. The wedding ring on her left hand, a simple thin gold band that fitted
loosely beneath the knuckle, was for a moment the only thing of her that I could see, and it struck me to the heart with loneliness.