The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (56 page)

“You about awake?” she asked gruffly.

The girl kept her eyes shut and breathed steadily in a fair imitation of true sleep.

“Get up,” Monique said. She was stout, sturdy, and her brown eyes were large behind the lenses of horn-rimmed glasses. “These eggs are practically done.”

The girl’s eyes fluttered, and she sort of tossed on the bed, as if only now nearing consciousness.

“I raised three boys,” Monique said, “and all of ’em was better fakers than that. Get on up, Etta.”

“What time is it?” Etta asked, almost sourly.

“Time to get up and kill a snake, girl.”

“What did you say?”

“I said it’s snake killin’ day, girl, and I’m up for it. Want to tag along?”

“Criminentlies,” Etta said. She spun off the bed and began to dress.

“Wear old clothes,” Monique said. “It’ll be muddy from the overnight rain.”

“I only got these clothes, ma’am.”

“Wear ’em, then. And I told you to call me Ma.”

When the girl had come to the door during the night, Monique had turned on the front door light, looked at the girl standing on the stoop with a pink suitcase held to her chest, and known who she was before they even spoke. She’d given the girl milk with banana bread and butter to calm her, for she was fidgety and shyly evasive. They’d sat at the table and talked in sentence fragments for a half hour, then turned in. Monique had gone to bed thinking, she looks like a Shade, like a Shade girl, which is what I wanted, but never had.

The sandwiches made, Monique sat on a chair and began to braid the witchy length of her gray hair, braiding the strands into coils that she pinned up like a crown. Bright morning sun blared in through the small east window, shining on her back. A long black cigarette dangled from her lips.

Etta came into the kitchen, sniffed the sandwiches, then slouched against a wall.

“Do you really kill snakes?”

“Yup.”

“You ain’t shittin’ me, are you?”

“I see John X. has passed his potty mouth on to you, girl.”

“He says words like that are part of our language.”

“Your dad says more ridiculous shit than any three lunatics do.”

“Maybe. Sometimes he’s right.”

Monique began to pin the final braid into place.

“It’s only fair to admit that, I s’pose.” She stood and opened the closet door. “Look here.”

On the inside of the door snakeskins were nailed to the wood and hung down like pennants, rustling as the door yawned wider.

“Wow!” Etta said. She advanced on the door, slowly approaching the slightly swaying snakeskins. She carefully raised her hands and began to feel the skins, and as the initial sensation was pleasant, she ran her fingers up the long dry length of the various copperheads, cottonmouths, and one stray rattlesnake. She leaned into the skins and smelled them. There were over a dozen faded, vanquished serpents nailed to the door, and the smell of them was neutral, but their colors and designs were exotic, fetching, and she pulled them to her face and pressed her young unpainted lips to the brittle, brilliant scales. “Ma—you killed
all
these?”

“Yup.”

“They’re so pretty—are they poisonous?”

Monique blew a cloud of smoke from the side of her mouth.

“The poisonous ones are
always
the prettiest.”

“Gee, that’s too bad.”

“I s’pose, but it’s something good to know.”

The back screendoor squeaked as it was jerked open, and Nicole Webb walked into the kitchen, wearing a black T-shirt, washed-out bib overalls, and high-top sneakers. Her expression was vague, not quite awake, and her dark hair was amok.

“Coffee,” she said. She had taken a chair at the table before she became aware of Etta. “Who’re you?”

“Nic,” Monique said, “this is Etta—Rene’s half sister.”

“I was gonna guess that,” Nicole said. “How’re you, Etta?”

“Peachy,” Etta said. “You’re Rene’s girl?”

“That’s right,” said Monique.

“Approximately,” Nicole said. “Where is he, anyhow?”

“Still asleep.”

“Good.”

Monique lashed the necessary bags to her belt, then pulled three long sharp canes from the closet. She passed the canes out, keeping her favorite, a cracked pool cue that had been converted to a snaking instrument. She put a straw hat over the crown of her hair, cupped a hand to her ear, cocked her head, and said, “Can you hear ’em, girls? Their forked tongues are callin’ me.”

North along the railroad tracks the steady thump of Monique’s heavy boots set the pace. Church bells were tolling in the far distance, the clanging bells causing the winos and bums who flopped beside the tracks in boxes and upturned rowboats and other makeshift suites to come awake. The derelicts pissed in the weeds or vomited or picked up nearly empty jugs for an eye-opener. The three generations of womanhood kept marching, stomping along to the pace set by the oldest among them, tapping their canes to the railroad ties in rhythm with their steps.

When the snakers were abreast of a slough, a slough in the midst of a foul but alluring thicket, the thicket rich in serpent potential, Monique turned off the tracks and down a slender path. Horseweed grew beside the path, taller than the tallest head among them, and though the weeds were beginning their autumnal wilt, they blocked from view any step but the next step. Nearly bare cottonwoods towered overhead, while limbs of the more squatty chinaberry, catalpa, and unknowns closed in snugly around the path. The path was clear but muddy, and the wet earth seemed to suck at footsteps.

After leaping over a small felled tree that had splayed across the path, Monique halted. She jabbed the sharp point of her pole into the mud, her eyes surveying the lush thicket, the fallen leaves and limbs and ancient muck of the swamp.

“It’s fall,” she said, “and they could be in their holes. Or this warm weather could have them out still—sunnin’ on rocks, lyin’ in wait—let’s beat ’em into the open, girls.”

“It’s
your
birthday, Ma,” Nicole said. “Hope we find you a present.”

The snakers, their sharp tips down, began to poke into dark corners, tangled vines, mysterious holes, jabbing with their canes, driving the bladed tips into likely spots. They snaked roughly parallel to the river. They swung their poles, slashing through vines and under bushes, cracking weak branches, sweating, joking, cursing, thoroughly enjoying the hunt, eyes alert for anything poisonous that might slither into view.

“Have you killed any?” whispered Etta to Nicole.

“Not really. Ma’s skinned quite a few.”

“Seventeen,” Etta said. “I counted.”

As they went deeper into the swamp they splashed through shallow water and soft marsh mud. Grime clung up to their hips. Eerie cypress grew in these wetlands, their trunks swollen, and fluted. In the shallows cypress knees, some a few inches in size, some several feet tall, rose above the water, each supported by a vast root system, root systems that frequently tripped the snaking women. Every few slashes of the canes seemed to occasion unseen plops into water—a bull frog, perhaps, or a water turtle, or muskrat, or maybe a cottonmouth as thick as a grown man’s arm.

Near a cypress knee, gnarled and indomitable, Monique stood alongside Nicole, and lit a smoke.

“How’re you feeling?” she asked. “Any mornin’ sickness?”

“Sort of,” Nicole said. “More like constant confusion.”

“Uh-huh. Yup. Girl, all I can say to you is—don’t count on
him
to know what’s right.”

“The trouble is I don’t trust
me
that much either,” Nicole said. “I’m not exactly sittin’ on top of the world.”

Etta was spearing the thicket ahead, and Monique started to follow, but after two wet steps she called over her shoulder, “Sure you are.”

After two more snakeless hours the women were hungry and thirsty but had seen only a single black milk snake, already dead and partly consumed.

Monique pried the tip of her pole under the snake and flipped it into the brush.

“Not much of a present,” she said. “I think we should eat.”

Monique led the way down the path to the river’s edge. A huge white rock dike protruded into the wide flow, and the snakers picked their way out onto it. Mud covered them to the waist, their arms, necks, and cheeks splattered with dark swamp muck. Monique and Nicole, knowing the rituals, stood on white rocks and undressed, peeling down to their damp skivvies. Etta watched with suspicion for a moment, then did the same. The women squatted at the water’s edge and rinsed the mud from their various shirts and pants and socks and overalls, then spread the clothes on rocks to dry in the sunlight.

“I believe a beer would refresh,” Monique said, her eyes shadowed beneath the rim of her frayed straw hat.

Then the three snakers, clad only in underpants, their bodies open to the air, squatted on rocks, unwrapped the bags, and began to picnic.

Monique passed a beer to Nicole, then, after a brief hesitation, passed one to Etta. Nicole popped the top and chugged.

“I’m definitely drinking,” she said.

“I hear that.”

When Etta popped the top on her brew, foam flew out. She licked the suds from the rim on the can, her eyes shining, licking carefully, coolly, as if she’d done this before.

The egg and onion sandwiches were distributed, and the women sat there, lunching beside the river, looking like a nude illustration of three crucial stages in a woman’s life.

Etta ate her sandwich with big bites, her eyes straying to Nicole’s interesting armpits, so full of hair, and Ma’s huge heavy breasts that drooped toward the roll of fat around her belly.

“My mom has terrific knockers,” Etta said. “Does that mean I’ll have ’em like that, too?”

Nicole laughed, looking at her own smallish breasts.

“Don’t ask me.”

“Maybe,” Monique said. She took her glasses off and wiped the lenses on her skivvies. “I’ll bet
he
was fond of ’em.”

“Huh?” Etta said. “I don’t want ’em—they get in the way for sports. Mom couldn’t even throw a baseball without makin’ a face.”

The noon bells at St. Peter’s sounded, ringing faintly through the warm air.

“Why’d your daddy send you to me?” Monique asked.

“I can’t talk about that.”

“He told you that?”

“No. I just don’t
know
why. That’s why I can’t talk about it.”

“Was he drunk?”

“Well, just the normal.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Half of Etta’s beer was gone, and she was buzzed, her eyes suddenly fluttering.

“You ever wondered what would’ve happened if they hadn’t killed Christ for our sins?” she asked. “I mean, if instead they’d just dragged Him out back and slapped Him around some?”

Nicole and Monique raised up from their private thoughts and looked at her steadily.

Nicole said, “Now that is a morbid thing for a girl your age to say.”

Monique grunted amiably. “She
ain’t
sayin’ it—that’s Johnny Shade talkin’.”

A cool peal of laughter came from Etta. She tapped a finger to her temple. “I got him memorized,” she said.

“I better take some of that,” Nicole said, and took the beer from the girl. She swished the beer in her mouth and swallowed. “My tummy is dry.”

Monique nodded and said, “I think maybe you’ve made your mind up.”

With the sandwiches eaten and the beers drunk, the snakers lay back on the rocks and silently sunned. After a while Etta sat up and said, “Hey! A tugboat!” The women came upright. “There’s a man on deck lookin’ at us!”

Nicole shaded her eyes with a flat hand.

“Oh,” she said, “he’s a little bit cute.”

She stood, watching the man on the tug, and stretched her arms overhead.

“
Nicole!
” Etta said, “he’ll—”

Then Monique stood beside Nicole, and, as the tug drew near, they turned their backs to the man on deck, bent over and rolled their undies to their ankles, shining contrasting moons across the river.

“Criminentlies!”

The man on deck called out something cheerful. Then another man rushed out to join him. They both waved frantically, and did flagrant pelvis bumps.

“Fuck you, too,” Monique hissed under her breath. “Monkeys.”

The tug whistled twice as it pulled away downstream.

Etta jumped up, now, and offered her own tiny hairless moon for view. She was giddy, bent over with her head between her knees, her skimpies stretched from ankle to ankle.

“Can they see this? Can they see this from there?”

“Maybe,” Monique said. The old woman laughed. “You’re okay, li’l girl. You did swell on the hunt. I watched you. You’ve got all kinds of Shade qualities.”

“This is fun.”

Soon after the tug disappeared, the women dressed. They put the trash into the bags, lifted their poles, and walked on up the path toward home. They stuck to the trail through the thicket, no longer pausing to thrash for snakes. On the railroad tracks Monique put an arm around Etta’s shoulders. She held her close, then rubbed the girl’s hair.

“You’re one of us,” she said. “No matter what might happen, Etta, we’ll do what we can for you.”

The sun beat down, and overhead a small band of late migrating birds scurried south.

“I’ll let
that
sink in,” Etta said.

When they reached the back door of the pool hall Monique unlocked
it, pushed it open, and the tired women went directly to the table and collapsed into chairs, their poles clattering to the floor.

Monique Blanqui Shade slumped in her chair, her chin low, eyes on the snakeskins draped from the open closet door. She sighed.

“No snakes today,” she said.

Part IV

Que sera and so on

15

T
HERE HAD
been a time in river country when the sky from delta to headwaters blackened into one solid thunderhead, then busted open, punishing the land with far too many inches of rain in short order, and the big river, swollen by the runoff from the heart of the country, jumped its banks and kept on jumping, forever changing the face of the downriver world. The flood was named for its year, 1927, and in its wake towns became sloughs, riches became forlorn memories, and whole families were washed to the Gulf, never to be found. The swamps were flushed by the surging water, and all who lived there were forced to seek the haven afforded by higher ground, where they huddled in Red Cross camps and met the world that existed outside their own.