Nothing but Blue Skies (3 page)

Once Frank was directed off the property, Gracie put the mule-eared gun in the back seat of the convertible she had driven out to the river and explained that the house had been in her family. Frank took her to lunch at a place on the road out to Thibodaux and they shared a huge platter of boiled crawfish. The waitress was a great big Cajun woman wearing a T-shirt with a red portrait of a crawfish on the front. The woman’s T-shirt said, “You want me to suck what?” Gracie told him that real Cajuns suck the crawfish shells when they’re done eating them. Then she told him her family story in compressed form so that he wouldn’t think she was some trigger-happy hillbilly. Somehow they had been planters a century and a half earlier, been ruined, been “kinda like” rednecks for three or four generations and were now on their way back up. “Up” being a wholesale furniture outlet so successful they had acquired control of the headquarters in New Orleans. Gracie said that someday she hoped they would live back out on the river, in sight of the ruined plantation house. “Maybe you will,” said Frank. At this point, he didn’t realize that it mattered much. He guessed she had a romantic streak.

After lunch, Gracie took him to the furniture outlet. It was just outside the town of Houma, a vast cinderblock building that faced a parking lot that would have suited a small stadium. Something had been added to the gravel in the parking lot, causing it to sparkle, and the building itself was faced with a sparkling material. There must have been a hundred cars parked there. The great show windows rose almost a story and a half, and the name of the store, Bouget’s Lagniappe Furniture, was written in neon script across the top of the building, where it flashed at an emergency
level. Beneath the sign was an enormous portrait of Gracie’s father wearing a shining crown to indicate that he was the king. There were low pines in the distance and the smell of a refinery in the air.

Inside, families and individuals wandered aisles of furniture, chattering in French and trying out merchandise. One olive-skinned paterfamilias was testing the mechanism of a TV lounger in front of his large and admiring family. He sat in the chair and pushed the footrest; the chair swept back so that Papa was gazing at the ceiling. The children sighed. Then Papa got up abruptly with a superior little smile on his face indicating that things were not so easily put over on him.

A little farther on, another family was seated at a dinette set pretending to have dinner. And beyond, an old man sat at a desk and imagined himself to be doing business while his wife pretended to be his secretary, scratching away at an imaginary writing tablet while he chattered at her in French.

Gracie led him to the back of the store and into an office, which was simply partitioned off from the vast warehouse-display area. Inside this office, Frank was introduced to Antoine “Fatso” Bouget, Gracie’s father. He was not quite round enough, Frank thought, to be called Fatso; but with his oval, smooth, olive face and unmoving arched black eyebrows, he was very distinctly one of the locals. He deftly questioned Frank about his work and background, then turned to Gracie and said, “Him we have out to the house.”

The house, on Bayou Teche, was a modern ranch house except that it had a big front porch on it filled with comfortable furniture for lounging and looking out on the bayou. Mr. Bouget gave Frank a tour of his property, which included numerous pens for pigs and ducks and a great variety of noisy fowl in general but especially the cautious-looking guinea hens that Mr. Bouget liked to toss into his gumbo. Gracie stayed in the house to talk to her mother, who was small and dark like she was and seemed to be continuously thinking of a very private joke. He showed Frank a loudly painted and powerful water-ski boat under a corrugated
metal shed. A warm wind sighed in the trees and made an even ripple on the water.

“Dat’s my pirogue, Frank. I use dat to find the crawfish in his home. I find his little chimney and dere I place my trap!”

With his left hand he gestured toward his big Oldsmobile until Frank acknowledged it and, as though they shared the same tissue of good fortune, he smoothly swept his hand to the boat. Frank nodded in vigorous complicity and said, “Uh-
huh
,” and now they were damn sure buddies. Mr. Bouget leaned toward Frank from the waist. His little smile was a V.

“By the way, Frank, my name ain’t really Fatso. Dat ain’t even my nickname. My name Antoine but my real nickname is Fais Dodo. Buncha ignorant Américains called it Fatso.”

“Faye Dodo?”

“Yessuh.”

“Why do they call you Faye Dodo?”

“Did. Don’t no more, call me Fatso.”

“But why did they call you Faye Dodo?”

“Why! ’Cause I always liked to party!”

This time, when Frank was unable to keep the complete confusion from his face, Antoine Fais Dodo Fatso Bouget pounded him on the back and shouted, “You better get some food into yo’ ass. You peakit!”

“What do you call this body of water, Mr. Bouget?”

“This here’s Bayou Teche.”

“You always live here?”

“Aw hell, no. Maman and me come from Bayou Terrebonne. But you must go where your life take you.”

As they walked back toward the house, Mr. Bouget jostled along in a comradely way, bumping into Frank and making amusing remarks, ending with, “You ain’t by any chance Catholic, are you, Frank?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Uh-
huh
. Frank, if you excuse me half a sec, I must have a word with Maman.”

Gracie leaned out the door as her father went in. She was lightly
dusted with corn meal from cooking. “You making out all right?”

“Just fine,” said Frank, “just fine.”

She went back inside and Frank wandered around the back, looked out at the dark water of the bayou, at the other houses and docks on its shore. Here and there boats were drawn up and there were piles of crawfish traps, net floats, defunct outboard motors, galvanized tubs and caved-in Styrofoam boxes.

Mr. Bouget held up two bottles of beer to call Frank in and Frank joined him. Inside, loud rhythmic accordion music played on the stereo. “Is that what they call zydeco?” Frank asked.

“Zydeco!” said Mr. Bouget. “Spare me, cher! Zydeco num’ but nigga music.”

“You’re listening to the sweet sounds of Ambrose Thibodeux,” said Gracie helpfully. Her mother returned to the kitchen and her father went into the living room to turn the music down. Gracie leaned over and said, “You should have never told them you were Catholic.” Frank didn’t mind. Though he rarely went to Mass, he took what he thought was the Bougets’ view, that Catholics were different people.

Frank ate without having any idea what he was eating, except for the rice it was ladled onto. It was filled with beans and thick, furiously spicy sauce. Frank ate an enormous amount of it because it was better than anything he’d eaten in a long time. He ate so much that the family was fascinated by it. He drank a bit too much, and in his inebriation he knew how they approved of his overeating, both as a sign of admiration for Mrs. Bouget’s cooking and as a sign to Mr. Bouget that he was comfortable with their family. He stuffed himself more than he really wanted to and elevated his voice. The Bougets asked Gracie vaguely set-up questions that would allow her to talk about her education and prospects. She had just finished at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. “Up in Lafayette!” shouted Mr. Bouget. That seemed to be the important part to him.

After dinner, Mrs. Bouget took Frank back to a huge closet where she was storing Gracie’s trousseau — endless handmade quilts, sheets and pillowcases. Never have to leave the bedroom,
thought Frank. While they were looking at the trousseau, Gracie and her father set up the slide projector. Gracie was filled with comic glee and Frank was uncertain what was causing it. They went back to the living room, turned out the lights and projected a photograph of the family standing in front of Bouget’s Lagniappe Furniture headquarters in the Algiers section of New Orleans. Mr. Bouget was wearing the crown that he wore for his portrait on the front of the local outlet. Gracie looked proud in her white cotton dress.

“Sonofagun, look at Fais Dodo smilin’!” called Mr. Bouget to these images of himself. “He the king of the outlet!”

“He smilin’ good now!” called Gracie.

“Show respect, Gracie,” said her mother. “College smarty.”

By ten o’clock, Frank and Mr. Bouget were both drunk and standing next to the bayou in the dark. There was a roar of nocturnal insects. Frank’s high spirits had declined to a polite stupor.

“Want to run my pirogue, Frank?”

“No, sir. I can’t see, hardly.”

“Call me Fatso, Frank.”

“Okay,” said Frank, but he couldn’t do it. Fatso wasn’t a nice thing to call someone where Frank came from. But anyway, here came Fatso under his own steam.

“Frank, once Gracie come home from college, it was like she was lookin’ for somethin’, somethin’ she couldn’t find here in La Teche, somethin’ she used to have but she lost up there at the college, and now she’s back hangin’ out at the old plan’ation thinkin’ she can call back all them dead Creoles. I tell her, Cher, they gone, they gone. And guess what? They are gone but we are not. No sir, we are not. Anyway, all I’m tellin’ you, Frank, is I know this girl ’bout as good as a father can, and you need to be paying extra close attention ’cause they ain’t gonna make but one like Gracie.” The day would come, years later, when Frank would recall this speech with anguish. “They ain’t gonna make but one like Gracie.”

Mrs. Bouget was winding down her household, pulling her
kitchen together efficiently and turning off lights from room to room. There was an inside staircase to the guest room, almost an attic room. Frank said good night to Gracie and her mother and followed Mr. Bouget upstairs. Mr. Bouget showed Frank his bed and turned back the covers for him. He told Frank he needed a little air and slid up the one window, letting the rich dampness of the bayou come inside. Frank was drunk enough to be able to abandon himself to this smell, filling his lungs with the fine air as though trying to store it for the year. Mr. Bouget watched him and then he began to do the same. Then they laughed and stuck their heads out the window. “Here’s where it’s comin’ from,” cried Fatso Bouget. They both took deep breaths.

“Antoine,” came the voice of Mrs. Bouget.

“Yes, Maman,” said Mr. Bouget, facing down the stairs with his thumbs in his ears and his fingers wiggling madly. “Here I come.”

All the lights were out and the house was silent. It was a still night outside and Frank could hear fish jumping in the bayou. Many songs have fish jumping in the bayou, he thought. Frank loved to fish so much that even their sounds in the dark made his heart pound. By rolling onto his stomach, Frank could gaze out his window to the dim yellow light at the end of the pier and see the whirling moths that attracted the fish, the moist air, the light and water running together.

He awoke from a deep sleep. Something was happening inside his stomach. He rested his right hand on his swollen middle and looked at his watch on his left wrist: almost three in the morning. Years later, when Gracie left, he still had the watch but could no longer read the dial. He’d been asleep for over four hours and his stomach was getting ready to explode. He was thoroughly sober now and had a mild headache. He was going to have to relieve himself fairly quickly. The house was dark and for the life of him he couldn’t remember where the bathroom was. He had great misgivings about going downstairs into the darkened house anyway. This family didn’t know him well enough for him to go
prowling at three
A.M
. One of these goofy Cajuns is liable to blow my ass off, he thought in his new hangover.

Then it was upon him. He jumped from the bed with only moments to spare. Unable to come to a decision, he threw off the shorts he had been sleeping in. He looked frantically around the room. He had but one choice. He thrust himself backward through the window, hanging on to the frame with both hands, and let loose. There was a prolonged stormy moment, and then it was over. He wiped himself with his shorts and then threw them as far as he could from the window.

He found he could sleep again. When he awoke in the morning, he immediately remembered what had happened and felt anxious and miserable. He got dressed and went downstairs for breakfast. The family was already eating, more or less in silence, and they scarcely greeted him. Remembering the high spirits of the previous night, the heavy eating, their enthusiasm over the slide show, he just took it to be a spell of recovery. Still, he tried to remember if he had said something awkward. His feeling of unease was exaggerated by his hangover.

When breakfast was finished, Gracie announced she was taking him back to Thibodaux so that he could be on his way. He escaped into his plan for work. He was supposed to meet a colleague in Nacogdoches, Texas, in another day anyway; and it was easier to think about that than this lack of friendliness and silence, especially from Fatso, who had been so voluble.

Nevertheless, Mr. and Mrs. Bouget got to their feet to see Frank off. Gracie walked out with him to the front yard. She bade her parents goodbye and got in to drive. Frank opened the door on the passenger’s side, and turning to get in and to thank the Bougets, or even amusingly say “
au revoir
,” he chanced to see the streak down the front of the house under the upstairs window, the shorts dangling from a tree branch. A mop and pail rested next to the wall. But Frank thought that he would say goodbye as simply and quickly as possible and use his limited French on another occasion.

Frank sat in the bleachers at the sale yard reading the
Wall Street Journal
and ignoring a bunch of black baldie heifers being steered under the auctioneer’s gavel. Bush’s heartbeat was back to normal, Croats attacked soldiers at Split and high winds diverted the space shuttle
Discovery
from California to Kennedy Space Center. It’s a bitch. Desperate new immigrants. Seventy-two percent of 3,500 police officers polled at John Jay College of Criminal Justice said they wear bulletproof vests. Image of Dan Quayle remains “bumbling.” Worker stress was climbing toward widespread burnout and Japanese auto towers were under construction in Detroit. Out at the ranch the sage buttercups were blooming, supplying the blue grouse with spring forage; and the great horned owl had a nestful of gold-eyed downy young. And this just in — a point of pride for all Americans — the first AIDS patient, it would seem, was a Frenchman identified by the initials LAI, placing the American HTLV-IIIB in the situation of being little more than a “contaminant” of LAI. In landing the Sony account, the Burnett advertising firm announced it wanted to “communicate not only our products, but the lifestyles and emotions that surround us as a company.” What sincerity there is out there in the business community, thought Frank, what personnel and marketing resources. Burnett claimed that its paternalistic and excellence-oriented approach to business helped land the thirty-five-million-dollar
deal, that and changing the slogan “It’s a Sony” to “Be Sony.” Jesus fucking Christ.