The Hard Blue Sky (19 page)

Looking back, he could remember that time, but he couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe that he had been like that, been the sort of kid he knew that he was: ready for a fight or a joke, and always laughing. Nothing could have stopped him laughing, no matter how hard the work was.

He sighed and the sigh hurt him—in his chest. That had been a long time past.

People got old, he thought, and their chests got heavy and there was no more fun. Not the sort he used to have when he was young, even when the work was hard in the fields during grinding. He remembered the smell from the mill, the stifling smell of the crushed cane.

They’d be having hot work there today, he thought. Maybe someday he’d go take a trip and have a look at the fields again. Maybe he’d do that.

Thinking like that, he came to Port Ronquille. For a while after he had tied up the boat, he wandered around the streets, not quite knowing what he should do.

He passed the church, a yellow brick building, with a gold-colored cross over the door, and he went inside. It was twice the size of the church at Petit Prairie, he thought with satisfaction. And the pews were painted white and the kneeling benches even had little red pads on them. The stations of the cross were white-framed colored figures. The altar was all white and gold. And hanging behind it was a gold curtain.

Al went to the first pew and knelt there. He said three Hail Marys. He tried to remember some other prayers, like the Creed or the Glory-Be, but he couldn’t. So he added the only other one he could remember: “Her soul and the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace, Amen.” He made the sign of the cross and left. He walked down the street and looked in the window of a dry-goods store. He kept walking, not thinking about anything much, feeling the ground pass under his feet. He passed the school, a yellow wood building with its screens broken and hanging in long rips. He stopped a minute and listened to the kids: a steady murmur and now and then over it, a single voice, in a call or a wail. He walked until he came to the edge of town, until there were the empty fields stretching off toward the sulphur plant. He looked down at the ground and thought he could see the blackness begin to turn yellow already.

He turned and walked back. A woman, who had finished washing dishes on her tablette, a shelf outside her kitchen window, dumped the water down into the yard. The chickens came squaaking to peck up the little bits of food from the ground. She had been there when he walked out. Now that she saw him coming back she smiled and waved.

He took off his cap and bowed.

He walked back through the main street of the town, past the icehouse (where a single skinny little boy played with a lizard on the steps), past the sea-food packing-plant that was empty now, past a café, and a bar, and the big dance hall, and another café. He stopped, staring in the same dry-goods store window. This time he went inside and bought himself three handkerchiefs with the red initial A on them. When he had the box in his hand, he felt a sudden twinge.

I got no call to go wasting a dollar like that, he thought.

He was standing in the door, wondering if he could ask them to take the stuff back, if he could tell them he had changed his mind, when somebody behind him called: “Al, hey, Al.” He did not turn. The voice was familiar. So he stood quite still looking straight ahead, trying to remember.

Then somebody whammed him on the back, and put an arm around his shoulders, and pumped his elbow up and down. “Hey, brother-in-law, what you say?”

He had to look at the man before he remembered the name: Dan Cheramie. Sure. Sure.

Cheramie gave him a slap on the shoulder that sent the parcel flying out of his hand. “Man, I ain’t thought to run into you here.”

A little boy had scurried from out the back and picked up the package. He stood holding it out, silently, without a word, looking from one man to the other.

“My friend, I ain’t seen you in ten year or so.”

“That is right,” Al said. “Not since the army, no?”

Dan slapped him on the shoulder and shook hands again. He was a tall thin man with the long thin face of a tired old horse. His teeth were long and square and yellow like a horse’s too. His reddish hair had thinned until there was just a curly fringe over his ears and over his collar.

“Man,” Al said, “I thought you was working in New Orleans, the last I heard.”

“Been back quite a time.”

“Ain’t been over here in maybe five years,” Al said.

The little boy nudged his leg with the package. Al jumped, looked down and grinned. “Okay, bugaree, I take it.”

“That’s my sister’s boy,” Dan said, and pulled the tufty hair on top of his head. The boy had had a crew cut some weeks past. It had grown out now, ragged in all directions like a worn-out broom.

Al winked at him. The boy grinned and ducked away.

“Like my place, huh?” Dan said.

“You ain’t had a store when we was in the army.”

“Man, I ain’t had nothing when we was in the army.”

Al shook his head. “If this don’t beat hell.”

“Man,” Dan said, “Man. …”

“When you get this here store?”

“Two, three years ago. When I come back from New Orleans.”

“Don’t that beat hell.”

They moved out of the way to let a woman in the door. Dan bowed to her politely. A short red-haired girl got up from her seat behind the counter to wait on her.

Dan said with a wave of his hand: “I got four kids, me.”

“I only got one girl.”

Dan nodded and clicked his tongue lightly.

“She is staying for a while in the convent in New Orleans.”

Dan shook his head and rubbed his upperlip with his finger. “You know … my mother, she had seven and when one left—my first brother, the priest, I have told you about him, no?—the little ones did not know he was gone. And my mother, she cry for a week or so, but she get over it. There still so many left around in the house. But where there is only one,” he sighed hissingly, “God should not be so jealous.”

“She is coming back,” Al said.

They stood on the top step, just outside the door and watched up and down the street. Nothing was moving, except far down, a brown-and-white-spotted dog. A kitten pattered out from under the steps to chase grasshoppers in the weeds by the foundations. The little boy who was Dan’s nephew slipped between their legs to grab the cat and carry him back inside. It was quiet, the way it always was about two o’clock, before the kids came streaming and shouting and giggling along the street out of school. It was the time the old people took their naps and got ready to scold the kids when they should come in the houses.

Dan turned his head suddenly. “But I am stupid me, I forget to ask about your wife. How is she?”

Al stared down at the crinkled green leaves of the little palmetto that was growing right at the edge of the last step. “She been dead.”

The other man jumped he was so surprised. “That pretty little blond-haired girl, that come up to New Orleans to see you when we had that leave?”

Al nodded.

“And she been dead.”

A man walked by on the street, carrying a crab net over his shoulder and a fish trap by his left hand. He had a straw hat pulled well forward, so that its brim almost touched his hooked nose.

Dan slapped his hand to his head. “But what do you think of me—I am forgetting to ask you to come to my house.”

Al shook his head. “I got to be getting back.”

“What for?”

“I got work to do.”

“There always work to do. … This time maybe you have a drink with a friend.”

Al nodded and stroked his mustaches. The hot weather made them hard to keep in line.

It was a good house, whitewashed, with green-stained shutters and a paling-fence. Somebody had started to whitewash that too, but decided it was too much trouble. About ten feet of the part fronting on the street was white, the rest gray-brown. The kids were not home from school yet. Dan’s wife, Francine, a big tall fat woman with arms thick as a man and as muscled, was taking a nap. She came to the door of the living-room, her dress wet with perspiration and crinkled up over her knees, smiled sleepily at Al, and went back to bed.

They sat in the living-room and first had an anisette and Seven-Up, then a couple of beers. The kids came back from school and raced through the door. Their father shouted: “Get the hell out of here!” And they scattered.

Al could see them sometimes peeping around the corners of the door and giggling outside. Then Dan brought out a bottle of whisky.

The afternoon was almost over. Francine got herself up, combed her hair, put an apron over her crinkled dress, and went into the kitchen to start supper.

“I got to get going,” Al said.

“You got to stay for supper now. You can’t go back hungry.”

Francine looked out the kitchen door. “If he wants you to stay, you just stay. We going to have a good supper.”

Dan slapped him on the back and poured him another drink. The oldest boy came into the room and had a beer and a cigarette with them.

When Francine called: “It is ready,” Dan shouted back: “We ain’t ready yet.”

Al’s stomach was shriveled up with hunger so he took another drink. She fed the kids first. They could hear the sounds from the kitchen. The clattering of plates and forks and the clink of glasses. The swinging of feet on chairs and the snorting little breathings. And the scrapings of chairs being pulled back and forth to the table.

By this time Al forgot he’d been hungry. When the woman came back in the room and said: “And you, you not hungry either?” he answered: “Non, I thank you.”

They did not eat supper at all. They both got so drunk that they sat leaning hard against their chairs, sat sunk way back in their chairs. And after a while Al cried for his dead wife, and cried and cried, and felt better for it. Then he fell asleep. He woke once to hear Francine giving Dan hell, opened one eye, saw that Dan was peacefully sleeping through it, and took another swallow of his drink. It was, he noticed, beer. He did not remember having switched from whisky.

Francine put him in one of the kid’s beds. Vaguely, from faraway, he heard the kid fussing as he was moved to the living-room sofa.

Al started to object: “I don’t want no kid’s bed, me. I sleep on the floor.” But somehow, though he said the words, no sound came out. Francine half dragged, half guided him to the bed. He tried again. “I don’t want no kid’s bed.” She pushed him down. He was asleep almost before she’d got his shoes off.

He woke up with the sun falling in his eyes. The room began to spin in slow circles. And there was something inside his head that was pushing against his eyes until they were almost ready to pop right out. And that same something was beating against the inside of his skull. His tongue was twice its size and he was terribly thirsty.

He sat up on the edge of the bed, and his ears ached. He opened his eyes just a slit, shielding them with the lashes, and peered out. It was a small room, with a single window directly across from him. On it was a bright yellow print curtain—he looked away: it hurt his eyes. There were two chests on the wall by the window. And three beds, that was all. Two cot-type ones and the full-size iron bed in which he had slept. He bent carefully, keeping his head up, and felt around for his shoes. His fanned-out fingers reached a little face, touched a sharp nose and a soft mess of hair. He straightened up and put both hands on his knees. “Jesus Christ, what you doing under the bed?”

The kid made no answer.

“Come on out of there. I ain’t in no mood to play games.”

The kid scrambled out from under the foot, wriggling on his stomach like a snake. He bounced to the nearest bed and sat cross-legged on it, grinning.

Al looked at him through half-shut eyes. “Enfant garce …”

The kid grinned even wider.

He looked vaguely familiar. They sat and studied each other while Al rubbed his face with both hands: the skin was tight and sore to the touch.

“I remember me now. I see you at the store.”

The kid grinned and bounced a few times on the bed.

“Why ain’t you answering me? A gar ate up your tongue?”

The boy giggled and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. “No.”

“Find me my shoes, huh.”

The boy dropped almost head first off one bed and stuck his head under the other. He backed out with the shoes. He put them carefully on the bed, one on each side of Al. Then he scooted out the door.

Al put on the shoes very carefully. Then he stood up, testing his weight first on one foot, then the other. His legs were steady: he was surprised.

Dan was in the doorway grinning. “Beer is a mean thing, man.”

Out of sight, his wife snickered. “Beer ain’t got nothing to do with it. If you going to try to drink the Mississippi dry, you sure going to feel it the next day.”

Dan just grinned with the corner of his mouth. A screen door slammed.

“Now,” he said, “she went.”

“I hope I ain’t done nothing.”

“Hell, no, man, come get some coffee. Or milk maybe, milk is fine on a hangover.”

Al just shivered and swallowed hard.

“It fix me up,” Dan said, “but you don’t got to have it. My sister she is here. And she fix whatever you want.”

That was the way he met Adele.

At first he felt so bad he did not notice her. He just saw her hand, with the plain gold wedding-band, reach him cup after cup of coffee, and finally a plate of grits and hot milk.

He felt better then, and lifted his head out of his hands, and blinked at her, ashamed at being so weak. She wasn’t beautiful, not at all; her features were too irregular. But he looked at her again. Her skin was olive, perfectly even without a hint of color. You almost thought she was wearing a very heavy make-up—the skin was so tight and clear and colorless, it was almost like a mask. Her face was a long oval, from a small pointed chin to wide-set brown eyes, heavy-lidded and set at just a little slant under straight brows. She was not wearing lipstick; her lips were very pale and thin.

He looked again and saw that she was not young; there were little crepy patches of skin at the edges of her eyes and on her hands the veins stood out clearly.