The Do-Right (11 page)

“Think Debbie would ruther you say your own hello's. Just a idea I got.”

Debbie had greeted him the day he went in to open a business account, and Phelan had recognized her right away, bleached hair and all. After the army, Phelan had spent a lot of down time with Debbie McClary, partying across the Louisiana line at The Oaks or The Pelican Club or lying zonked on Crystal Beach. In those days her dark hair had been stiff with salt water. Him with sand in his crack, a cooler with beers bobbing, the waves rushing like erasers over Phelan's mind.

“Debbie's an old friend from a lost time,” he said. “Why don't you take the rest of the day off, Miss Wade. I'm going to.”

XIV
XIV

HAVING A DAY, and having the day off—like having fudge icing on top of pecan pie. Back at the New Rosemont, she asked Calinda did she have anything to fish with. Calinda went and pried open a door at the end of a corridor, rooted around. The storeroom inside was a treasury of broke-down furniture and headless lamps, lame floor sweepers, yellow stacks of papers jumbled one over another—could have been a lease for the Lucas gusher itself in there somewhere leveling up a bedstead that last saw happy action during Prohibition. The rattling and prying went on for some time. Finally, batting webs out of her stubby hair, she heisted out a pole with some line on it.

Held out the keys to her '55 Ford, too. “Bus doesn't take you to fishing holes. You know how to drive?”

Half-smile from Delpha. “I can't wait to remember. You got a hat, Miss Blanchard?”

Miss Blanchard did, a straw with a wide brim for shade. In return, she wanted Delpha to do some grocery shopping for the hotel.

Delpha considered driving all the way down to Rollover Pass, putting her cane in the water and letting the Gulf's salt air soften her thoughts. But she ended up rubbing 6-12 on her arms, hands, neck, and face, rolling down the long plaid
sleeves of her Goodwill shirt and heading for a bayou. She bought a container full of worms and three hours with a squat little boat and outboard.

A lank-haired white woman wearing overalls over a tank top took her money, then plopped down in an aluminum lawn chair, hauled up onto her lap a blond thumb-sucker with a doll, and turned back to the black and white TV flickering behind the counter. Another blond girl, older, maybe ten, jumped up from behind the counter, flapping a coloring book and crayon, making sounds at the woman, who raised two fingers and snapped them downward. The girl's face crumpled. She made a fist and rolled it repeatedly at the woman. The thumb-sucker copied her sister, letting go of the doll in order to wiggle her fist in the mother's face.

The mother snuck a sideways glance at Delpha, mumbled, “They cain't hear.” She made a waving-off motion. The older girl imitated that, her face questioning. The mother rolled a fist at her. The blond girl grinned. She and the coloring book disappeared behind the counter. Delpha said, “Bye-bye,” made her own wave. The littler girl popped the thumb from her mouth and waved bye-bye, big, open-mouthed smile. Nothing from the other one.

Delpha walked out to the dock and chose a boat. None of them looked perky.

She yanked the cord, and the Evinrude bucked up. Hadn't known if she could stand being out here, but now—just riding over the brown water eased a clench in her stomach. She wound around the channels, minding her direction, the bowing willow there, stand of reeds and cattails, ahead some cypress she veered right to avoid. She cut the engine and as the boat eased on a ways of its own silent accord, the insect-singing—the bugs, the frogs, the locusts, the whole chittering,
clicking, sawing, whirring choir—descended over her like a lofted sheet on its airy way back down.

Delpha let out a breath that felt fourteen years trapped. May be that these bayou channels weren't wide as two-lane. May be the trees folded over and clutched, paring the sky to a high blue strip, thickening the green shadows. She could hear laughter floating back over the water, a kid's yell. Didn't matter. She couldn't see them.

Alone. A better alone even than in the hotel where there were walls and people noise. Noises everywhere out here, but they added up to one big quiet. There was no next cell, next door, next hall, line up, count off, lay down, shut up, lights go out, lights flip on. No concrete in sight, no khaki guard with B.O.-black armpits, no potato peel to scrape off linoleum with your thumbnail, no reek and burn of bleach. Nobody griping, fighting, crying in the night, lying, spinning such backwards bullshit sometimes you'd wrap your arms around the poor woman and hold her until she just ran out of it. More times you wanted to bust her skull with a ladle for the soul-nourishing crunch of it. Make her quit that sweetie wishy voice or the chin-out bragging one. Man got her in here would not be shifting one foot to the other waiting for her when they let her out. Kids she hadn't seen in seven years wouldn't holler Mama and come flinging to her. Hell, they grew up without her and they got accounts too. God, no thigh fat jamming hers on a dining hall bench, no screaming overhead light, no used Kotex smeared across a bathroom wall so a finger could write in it.

Delpha opened the cardboard container full of dirt and reddish veins. Pulled out a rubbery worm and dropped it into the bayou. Little fish head appeared, big old mouth, nipped it down. If she'd stayed in her room, she'd have paced around.
Here she could breathe air. She dropped in another worm, to see the splash and the rings. Did this for a while, fed the fish.

Fourteen years without touch save a few women with chapped hands, a shoulder-patting chaplain, and a fat guard captain who liked to make her lay over a desk in the furniture supply room, liked to say,
What you gone do, kill me?

She set the faded orange life preserver down in the boat and sat on it, leaned her elbows back on the wood seat. Drifted some, paddled a couple times so the line would drag the water. Sky and water and the keening of presence. Pole-tall pines and bending willow and the yaupon and the slim grasses of the land were here, grasses that bowed and nodded and stood. The stirring water and all the swimmers singers flyers burrowers and twiners, sun spot prying through the brim of Calinda Blanchard's straw hat. A splash and rings of water.

Eventually she threaded a worm on the hook. Careful not to hang up in the reeds, she tossed out her line. By the time the sun was slanting, she had dropped back a few baby bream and caught three fair-size bass. Plastic bucket in the boat. She put them in that. She was sitting top of the seat by then, water sloshing in the boat bottom had soaked her tennies. Egret in the reeds. Mosquito whine. She was about to start the Evinrude when a broad stick drifted by. Only it wasn't a stick, it was a gator submerged past the eyes. She jerked the cord, the motor ground, sputtered and caught, loud. The egret lifted off flapping, coasted to another landing farther down the bank. The stick put on a spurt of speed, away down the brown channel.

End of her fishing day. Two dollar deposit for Delpha to collect, somebody's kids popping up and down hollering
RC Cola
and
Eskimo pie
, a teenager and a couple of sweaty men with six packs weighing down their arms. The woman with the deaf kids was not behind the counter.

It was an old man in stained khakis, a flat ball cap low on his forehead.

Not long after somebody hits you in the mouth, your lips swell tight. Maybe the skin splits, maybe it holds, but it burns so that every second you are aware of it like you are never aware of skin. That was happening to Delpha, all over.

The old man yawned in her face as he pushed her deposit across the counter. To a fisherman blustering about having to bail his leaky boat, he said
You knew it was a piece of shit you got in it. Git outa here, pal, go git you a ocean liner
. His hand ranged under the counter and the customer left grumbling but the counterman's voice—which Delpha, stepped back, the two bills crushed in her hand, had been waiting to hear—was bored. Bored, the threat in it a tired habit. She stepped back up, scooped a peanut patty from the shelves underneath the counter. Eyes rolling past her, he handed her ninety cents change. There was the scar. Where it should be, starting at the wrist and rising, the way the veins ran. Where she put it.

He stooped to get some Redman for the teenage boy. The back of his neck was crosshatched, cheeks flabby, neck skin dragging. His speckled arms were burned brown except for the raised white scar underside of the arm.

This old man had claimed he tried to stop his boy from hurting her, got cut for his efforts. His word against hers. The cops, the judge, the jury—he pissed down their backs and told them it was raining. What he had done was slammed Delpha's face into the plank floor, raped her and turned loose his son. That son. The son straddled her back, gripped up her hair and carved into her neck. Each line a long sting that did not abate and a warm falling off to either side. Punched her in the head when she struggled. Did that till he was hard enough, flipped
her and climbed on top. Bucked and slammed but he couldn't come, couldn't come.

Then finally a stuttering grunt burst from him and his eyes rolled back. Fingers slacked apart, and he lost his hold on the knife. Delpha had had to skin it across her throat to grip it in her right hand. The blade was facing toward him or she'd have cut her own throat.

Headlights raked across a window. The old man'd jumped after the knife. Blade up like that, she'd dug, opening his arm wrist to elbow. He'd lurched back, and the son rared up—she stuck it into his chest. The young man made that knuckly fist again, but he was only swatting. Rolled onto his back, said “Daddy.” The old one looked at him, but then he ran.

There are true words for a place and a time—like funeral words, promises, gratitude, apology words. Remorse was a parole-board word. Those two men'd had a gun, she'd have been in the bayou fifteen years. There was nothing in her world truer than that.

She was in the old groove, the old
When
and
How
. She turned the Ford into Weingarten's Grocery, harked briefly to a voice coming from a car in the next parking space, jawing about owning a '55 Ford too, and how it ran for a hundred forty thousand miles…Delpha walked off. The three fish she caught were wrapped in newspaper on the front seat: she couldn't tarry.

Five loaves of Rainbo bread, four dozen eggs, margarine, four packages of bacon, two giant-size cans of Folger's. She pulled it all off the shelves like she was fighting somebody for it.

Her arms were full with the two sacks. Out by the store doors, a little girl in dirty pink shorts and impetigo legs was parked on a galloping horse machine still pretending to ride the thing after her quarter was spent. Leaning toward her was a smiler in a short-sleeved shirt offering out a box of gumdrops.

“This your child?”

The guy straightened up, gripping his affable expression, his ground. Thought maybe he could smile her by, let him get back to it.

“Have some gumdrops 'fore they all stick together, young lady.”

Delpha's head was shaking No.

“All y'all,” she said. “Ever goddamn one. Playing like you ain't a rattler. You just ain't been stepped on yet.”

His nice smile flatlined, and he slid away down the sidewalk.

She set her brown paper sacks down on the hot concrete, lifted the little girl off the saddle of the butterscotch-colored horse with the bucky teeth, carried her on her hip into Weingarten's. She seated the child on the Customer Service counter and told the manager to call the mother on his loudspeaker. The young man plucked a quarter from his pocket, said, like it was bonus points for her Green Stamps book, “On us. Let the little buckaroo ride some more.”

“Call her,” Delpha said.

His undershot chin moved back into his neck. He made a production out of returning the quarter to his pocket. Then he flipped a switch and picked up a microphone on a short gooseneck. “Will the mother of the little girl out on our hobbyhorse please come get her at the Customer Service Booth?”

Delpha stretched tiptoe over the counter to get into the vicinity of the microphone. Raised her voice.

“Before another pervert tries to lure her off, you stupid bitch.”

Rung out good
.

The checkers and shoppers snapped around. Depha
strode out the door again, snatched up her groceries by the riderless horse. The crown of her head was afire. Her mind was burning. Not just with the old man back at the bayou, but—how's she sposed to not see this stuff? People preying on kids, preying on other people. Others of them act surprised, act scandalized.
Oh, that's just terrible, that's a shame
, and then they go their way. The girls at Gatesville would agree with the terrible, with the shame, but surprise—c'mon. Who hadn't been messed with there, who hadn't been broke?

Car smelled like a dead whale.

She carried in Calinda's groceries, filled the refrigerator. Leaned over the sink and gutted the fish, went out the hotel's alley door and dropped the slimy mess on yesterday's newspaper. Cats already galloping, necks stretched, as she turned to go back in, the tan ones that would have been white if they got a scrub, the one-eyed tom.

What was she going to do about that old man? She had meditated on that question since she was eighteen years old. Each answer had been handled and put back tattered. The first answer, move away from Beaumont, move up north or to California and never come back—she'd blown that one. Now she knew he was still alive, knew where he worked.

Forgive, like the chaplain explained to her?

“I'm just advising you to let it go. Not to turn the other cheek.”

Good he wasn't because those two made sure Delpha had done that.

“Your problem is a conundrum.”

Several chaplains rotated through Gatesville, but Delpha cared to see only this one. His harelip repair looked to have been sewn with twine. His shirt was pressed even if the collar had creases ironed in it. He'd shaved, his nails were clean; he
didn't come through the gates like this was some backyard crawdad-boil. Delpha credited him for that. During her next visit to the prison library, she lingered over that word,
conundrum
, in the donated Webster's Dictionary with the loose spine. She credited the chaplain for that too, because of how it made her feel—changing the sound
co-nun-drum
—into a word, into a meaning that stopped, for a while, every noise and movement around her while it told her a secret about her life.

The chaplain said, “Miss Wade.” That's what he called her. Not Wade. Not Delpha right-off, before he'd been invited to. “Miss Wade, the forgiveness is not for his sake, it's for yours. As long as you allow yourself to harbor hate, you're the one it hurts.”