The Clearing (19 page)

Randolph pushed his coffee cup away and made a face. “I’m sorry.”

She looked at him then. “I learned something, though.” She reached over, took his empty plate, and placed it in her lap. “I know who I am, and I’m not too proud to be colored. But I know what I look like. I understand that the main reason people know I’m colored is my old daddy out there. But when he’s gone, I can take what I’ve got set aside and head out.” She stood and threw the plate into the dishpan. “I’m
not
going to be somebody a doctor won’t touch. No, I’m
not
.”

He rose and went over to her, studying her face. “You can pass, and when you can get away from here, I’ll get you employment elsewhere.” She was tearing up, so he took her fingers and pressed a thumb on the back of her hand.

“Mr. Jules gave me the idea last year,” she said. “He says up North some of the quality folks are Jews, Spaniards, and all kinds I can be taken for.”

“You’ve been speaking to Jules?”

She nodded, looked at her hand in his, and straightened up. “Some days before you got here, I went with him. But Mr. Jules felt guilty, and he was scared his wife would find out, so we just went the one time.”

“You slept with Jules?” He remembered how the big assistant manager would sometimes scream at the saw teams, calling them “rafts of worthless niggers.”

She shrugged. “That sap was from good white oak.”

At that moment, he sensed how infinitely trapped she must feel, but before he could say anything, he heard the scuff of shoes on the back steps and she pulled her hand away.

A man wearing a pointed hat wrapped with a red silk hatband walked up out of the yard to the screen door and began gesturing with his hands. “Ey. I don’t want to in’errupt, but I’m lookin’ for the manager.” His eyes were dark and hard and bounced back and forth between the two of them in the kitchen. “Can I come in?”

“I’m Aldridge. What do you want?”

“Joe Buzetti.” He straightened up and put his fingers through the handle.

The mill manager pushed the door open in his face and walked out onto the porch. “How’d you get here?”

Buzetti looked at him, glanced inside at the housekeeper, then shrugged. “I got a motorboat can come from Tiger Island in about ninety minutes.”

Randolph looked over at the canal, where he saw a long skiff and two men in it tending a gleaming three-cylinder inboard engine. “What brings you out here?”

“I got a little business to talk.” He looked over his shoulder across the sun-stricken mill yard toward the saloon. “Normally I’d send somebody, you know. But an important man like yourself, I thought I should come myself.” He spread his hands out before his waist, as though offering himself as a present.

“What business?”

“My cousin, Vincente, he tells me your constable don’t want him dealing in the saloon no more.”

The mill manager nodded. “He killed my chief engineer, for God’s sake.”

Buzetti put up his palms. “Ey. It’s a habit. He was in the war, you know? He kill five or six of them Dutchmen before breakfast.” He laughed.

“He’s killed his last Dutchman around here,” Randolph said.

Buzetti raised a thumb and forefinger and brought them together slowly, in front of the mill manager’s face. “Vincente. He and me we kind of close, you know?” He lowered his hand and bobbed his head to the right. “If I replace him out here it might be with somebody worse. My cousin, he been out here pretty long, and this the first time you got cause to complain.” He made a motion, a little starburst of fingers. “He’s sorry about the guy. He told me he had to do it, and tried to hit him where it wouldn’t be, you know, fatal.”

Randolph put a hand up and leaned against a porch support. “He shot him four times with a .45.”

“Hey, you let Vincente come back I’ll tell him to carry a Luger. In the war, I seen a kraut dump three or four Luger rounds in a big farmboy and it didn’t even slow him down.”

Randolph looked at the man’s hat as though it offered some clue to the inexplicable reasoning of the brain beneath it. Growing serious, Buzetti turned sideways and looked down. “Ey, your brother pushed Vincente around some already. He coulda done your brother anytime. He held back, you know. He’s just interested in the family and the poker game, not no sad sack constable. The next guy I put in could be some young New Jersey guy who don’t give a shit. Who knows?”

The mill manager looked at the man’s slippery smile and wanted to plant a fist in the middle of it. He glanced over at the thugs, now standing on the canal bank. “You know what I’m thinking, don’t you?”

Buzetti shrugged.
“Scuzi?”

He leaned back against the wall. “I could call up some sawyers to feed your ass to the alligators in the millpond.”

Buzetti laughed again, a hacking noise. “Yeah, that’s right. You got lotsa people do what you say.”

When he heard this laugh, Randolph understood that Buzetti lived in a world where a house could be burned for ten dollars, a tree spiked for twenty, a man sleeping next to his wife shot dead for a wad of five-dollar bills.

Buzetti sniffed, seemingly disappointed. “I thought you had good sense, you know? I thought you was worried about your brother’s welfare.”

“You could talk to him yourself.”

Buzetti blinked. “Last time we talked, my place of business fell in the river.”

Randolph looked again at the hat, its foreign angles and too-bright hatband. There were things he did not understand, so he decided to be cautious. “I’ll talk to him,” he said, turning inside.

“Fine. That’s fine,” Buzetti called after him.

Randolph watched him swagger over to where his men waited in the shade of a discarded boiler, and they all laughed and started toward the saloon.

Coming up from behind, May cleared her throat and said, “Throw him to the alligators, huh?”

“What?”

“Your talk is changing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look out,” she said, hefting a pan full of gray water and heading through the door. When she flung it off the little back porch, her father, sitting in the shade of his cabin, looked up but seemed not to see her. A hot wind began to push down the weeds along the fence. “I mean this place is changing you.”

“Nonsense.” He followed her out into the chicken-scoured yard, pretending to examine the smoke rising from the mill’s stacks. He knew she was waiting for him to look at her, and when he did his eyes fell to her billowing apron, where her hands blended into the cloth.

Randolph convinced his brother that Vincente should continue as the dealer. In return Buzetti told his cousin not to carry his big Colt, that if he felt threatened, he should deal with his back to the corner of the room. But the first night of renewed gambling, Galleri took Byron aside and told him there was a Luger in a cigar box under the dealer’s chair. When he heard this, he laughed and asked Galleri to fix him a tall drink.

The mill manager continued to ride off to New Orleans on weekends feeling as if that were the strange world, the big city, unreal in its pleasures, in the whiteness of his wife’s house, in the pale and giving body that enveloped him like a glowing cloud on Saturday nights and sometimes on Sunday mornings when the deep steamship whistles floated up the river and the vegetable man sang out of cabbages and beets, bananas and plums, muskmelons and grapes, the harness of his wagon jingling down the brick streets. But sometimes when he heard the vegetable man’s voice rising pure, two blocks away, Randolph thought of the German and his dying song, and again he would try to figure out whose fault it was the engineer was dead: Vincente, or himself, or Buzetti—or a war that had taught so many how to kill.

Randolph began to give the agent at Poachum twenty dollars a month to alert him at once if any suspicious men came into the station, men not dressed for the woods, men with big mustaches, striped suits, flashy hats. When Jules rode into Tiger Island for supplies he brought back the news that Buzetti had repaired his barroom, brought down a new raft of cousins and soldiers. A Chicago madam, yet another cousin, had set up a new whorehouse.

One afternoon the phone rang in the office and it was Merville.

“Mr. Aldridge, you there?”

“I’m here, marshal.” Randolph smiled at the old man’s voice. “What can I do for you?”

“I got a bill from the city for twenty-three dollars. The burial plot for that engineer what got killed out at your place. Will you pay that?”

Randolph closed his eyes, wondering how long such reminders would show up in his life. “Yes. Send the invoice and I’ll take care of it.”

“All right.” Then Merville’s voice brightened. “This new line is something. The mail woulda took ten days. I remember the time I’d have to lug a city bill that needed some face-to-face explaining out to Shirmer on horseback, and it would take me two days on the road. Hell, a car trip would take me a whole day. Now it’s over in a minute.”

The mill manager thought about this. “That’s right.”

“While I got you, can you tell me if Galleri got him a big storage shed out there?”

“Why, no. I think he’s got a little attic space, that’s all.”

“I heard Buzetti was bringing in cases of stuff from Cuba. I was kind of wondering where he was storing that. I can’t even figure how he’s bringing it in.”

“Why’re you asking? You people don’t seem too worried about alcohol.”

“I just like to keep my finger on things,” Merville told him. “It’s the stupid finger what gets burnt.”

Even in November the swamps steamed, but overnight the weather came down cold and hard as a hammer on the fingers, a blue wind blowing the long flags of Spanish moss to the south all day as the men worked on in their light clothes. At quitting time, a skim of ice was forming in the shallowest puddles. Two days later, fever swept through the camp, and new men had to be hired. One morning, Jules came into Randolph’s office with a large Negro following behind him.

“Mr. Aldridge, this buck wants work in the rack yard.” He jerked a thumb sideways. “Says he knows you.”

The mill manager looked over at a very dark man in shirtsleeves, barefoot, a hemp cord for a belt. He was about to ask Jules when he’d started recruiting hoboes when the office bulb ignited a black streak of lightning running down the man’s face. “So you made it,” Randolph said.

“Yas suh. I healed up and stayed on the
Newman
.” He turned his head to let the scar catch more light. “You patched me up good.” His features didn’t move when he spoke. His was a face prepared to show nothing.

“Why’d you quit the river?”

“Boat hit the lock wall at Plaquemine and broke half in two.” He looked at the floor. “You hire me and I be grateful, boss. I got a good back and no rupture no place.”

The scar ran thick as yarn. Randolph nodded toward Jules. “Put him on and see how he does.”

“All right,” Jules said. “What’s your name?”

“Clarence Williams. I from ’round Vicksburg.”

Randolph thought of something. “Did your engineer live through the sinking?”

“Mr. Minos?”

“Yes.”

“He on the bank cussin’ right now.”

“Jules, go find him and hire him on. He’s that old policeman’s son.”

Jules stood in the door and reached into a coat pocket for his plug. “He any better than the German?”

Randolph looked again at Clarence William’s face, at the wholeness of it. “Yes, I’m sure he is.”

“I do you proud, suh.”

“Go by the commissary and draw a pair of boots against your wages. By the way, what happened to the waiter on that boat?”

“Speck?”

“Yes, that’s the man.”

Clarence Williams smiled, and the scar belled sideways. “He drownded in the kitchen. I reckon he burnin’ in hell right now.”

The men left, and the mill manager began thinking about the workers in the mill below, in the woods for miles around, pieces of mechanism that now and again failed, only to be discarded and replaced. He was the chief gear in the machine, where the motion started, and he was not supposed to worry about who was broken or stripped down the line. He reached for his bottle of brandy in the warped desk, found a dusty little tumbler in a file drawer, and wiped it clean with the bottom of his vest.

The horse was tied at the office steps, and at lunch he mounted the shivering animal and rode through the icy slop to Byron’s house, leaving the reins on the saddle when he got down. He saw Ella come out the back door and walk toward the two rows of houses in the white section. Inside, his unshaven brother was rubbing his hands next to a woodstove. He watched him for a moment and shook his head.

Byron looked up at him, his eyes worried. “I just noticed your housekeeper. You know, sometimes I’m not very observant.” His hands were shaking, though the room felt warm.

“She’s getting big, all right.”

“Sit down. I’ve got something to tell you, and I don’t know how you’ll take it.”

Randolph pulled a chair next to the stove and put his hand on his brother’s back, admiring the heavy, pent-up feel of the muscles. “Whatever it is, I’ll take it well.”

“That woman’s baby?”

“Yes?”