The Hard Blue Sky (18 page)

Then she turned, facing the building, put the fingers of her left hand in his eyes, hooking them for a little balance. Her right arm reached around his head. And hugging the concrete, she stepped.

For a second her foot touched nothing, and she felt a little flutter of panic in her stomach. She was reaching too high. She brought her foot down along the edge of the building until it found the ledge. Then very carefully, spread-eagled on the corner of the building, she shifted the weight to her right foot, then brought the left leg over. She felt the cloth of her pajama knee scrape and tear, but she did not even bother looking. Her fingers were tingling with excitement, as she straightened up on the other side and let her breath go out in a hissing sigh.

She forgot why she had come. She forgot to look down into the rows of pecan trees for the couple. She forgot everything except the feel of the concrete under her bare feet, the wind, and the bright hard moonlight. She could feel how sharp and cold the wind was but she did not care. She was as warm as if she had a heavy coat.

The tops of the trees were on a level with her feet, soft trees, still as a painting. A car went by on the street; the headlights flicked along the trunks and broke into little snatches of light in the leaves.

She was moving with more assurance now. Her feet seemed to have learned to find the way. She spread her toes flat and broad and clutching as she moved. Her body felt so light, so very light. The air up here was different from the air down on the ground. It held her up.

She stopped for a minute and closed her eyes, the better to feel the air all around her. “If I let go,” she said aloud, “if I let go …” The air would take her and lift her, even higher. She could hold her arms stretched out, and the air would lift her, the way a bird is lifted, though he doesn’t move his wings, floating in great swooping upward circles, right in the path of the light that was funneling down from the moon.

There was a faint smell of jasmine vine. Her mother had always used that. She’d put whole flowering strands in the armoire with her clothes, so that she always smelled of summer. Her mother who was dead. Her mother who was gone for good, who would never come back.

She began to cry with her eyes still closed.

Her fingers were loosening under the soft pressing of the wind. Her left hand patted the bricks of the wall, gently. And she took a few more steps forward, waiting for the wind to pick her up, for the wind to lift her up, for the wind to carry her away. She was holding her right arm straight out and a little back, in the arc of a bird’s wing. And her left hand was brushing the wall lightly. She was moving back and forth to the touch of the wind. And the faint sound of the trees beneath her.

There was a loose piece of brick on the ledge: it had fallen out of the crumbling old wall. She stubbed her bare toe against it, knocking it from the ledge. It snapped through the little branches and thudded dully into the ground. There was a strangled sound over to the right, and then everything was very quiet again.

Annie clung to the wall with two hands, laughing softly to herself, feeling the two pair of eyes that were fastened on her from below. She forgot about the wind and the way she had wanted to lean on it and be lifted away. She made her way across the side of the building until she came to the flat ladder workmen used when they were repairing the roof: three rungs up to the slant of the roof and then a single long piece of board flat on the slates, with short cross-ties for steps. She climbed quickly, sitting at last on the peak of the roof. Her toe was hurting. She twisted up her foot, trying to see in the bright moonlight. There was a little blot of black blood on the big toe. She squeezed; the little spot grew.

A car engine started. She looked up and around. Over at the edge of the grounds, over on the dark back street, she saw a car drive off. A dark car, without headlights.

So that was how he came, she thought. She’d frightened them off. She giggled softly. “Nearly dropped it right on their heads,” she said aloud.

She sat up on top the roof, pressing her sore toe and looking out over the trees and the little peaked roofs of houses and the straight lines of streets and the little spots of electric lights—frilled, most of them, by the trees; and down a little way, the green and red glow of neon signs; and still farther, the tall buildings of the city itself. She stared for a long time at one with a peaked tower, a point sharp as a needle.

She turned her head slowly, keeping her shoulders straight, and she swung around the horizon: more trees and little irregular heaps of houses, and here and there a taller apartment building. And over, way over to the right, the moon picked out the arches and the criss-cross bracing of the river bridge, thin little spiderweb lines.

She sniffed the air. Just the musty night smell of an old building. The smell of jasmine was gone. And then she remembered that the vine did not bloom this early, there would be no flowers in March. … She looked over her shoulder and up in the sky; and was surprised to find it empty.

She got to her feet, unsteadily, and swaying just a bit. She backed down the ladder, one foot after the other. Halfway she stopped and looked up, up the steep black angle. She saw how the slates were cracked and chipped and how some of them were blown up by the wind. And she looked behind her: the same slates slanting down at a sharp angle and where they ended, little puffs of trees.

She got to the ledge and stood holding to the ladder. The wind blew in little gusts; she shivered and held tighter to the wood. She stood without moving until her legs began to cramp.

“Hey,” she called. “Hey, hey, hey, hey.” She waited. Nothing. “Up here, up here.”

Then she remembered: no one slept on this side of the building. Just the library and the reception parlors and the little private visiting-rooms. There was no one to hear her. The back of her throat began to ache. She started to cough and almost lost her balance. She began to inch her way back, slower this time and uncertainly, her left hand waving straight out for balance. By the time she got to the cement lion at the corner she was covered with sweat; it was running in long trickles down her back; it covered all her face in little round blobs that turned icy cold in the wind.

She stood hugging the lion with both arms, whimpering softly, shivering each time a gust of wind hit her body. It did not occur to her to call again.

The moon had gone down a bit. She stared directly at it, then closed her eyes, seeing the green moldy reflection.

Hugging the lion as tight as she could, she stepped out and around the corner. Her foot missed: too low. But before she realized it, she was down on one knee, almost. She had to drag herself upright again. Her leg muscles burned and one of her fingernails snapped back and off. She took a few short breaths. She was beginning to panic: she could feel the fingers run across her scalp. She was almost crying as she tried to swing around the corner again. Her foot reached the other ledge. She tested it: solid and balanced. Her stomach was quivering, fluttering as she swung her weight around and over. Her hands were so wet they slipped a little and she dragged the right leg too closely over the concrete: she could feel the flesh all along her shin tear. But she was on the other side. Right down the way, not too far now, was her window. She could see it even, the white curtains blowing out like the skirts of a dress.

She began to move quickly now, too quickly. Her fingers caught at the window frame, and she bent down. One foot slipped. Her toes made a final grab: there was only air.

She pitched herself forward, hard as she could, arms out straight, reaching. She fell across the sill, her elbows hooked inside. The sudden pain made her eyes reel. She shifted her balance, wearily, until she tumbled headfirst into the room.

The floor was cold under her cheek, and her body ached in pulsing waves. Her closed eyes were dazzled by light, little crumbly points of light like grains of sand.

She could only think of one thing, and her body quivered with disappointment as much as pain: I didn’t get to see them, I didn’t get to see them at all.

A
NNIE CAME BACK TO
the island in early summer—in May. She had learned three things at the convent: to chant the responses and the hymns at Benediction, to do some very fine embroidery, to crochet in wool. She came with her suitcases full of stoles done in green wool and tablecloths of unbleached linen covered with leaves and birds until there was hardly a piece of cloth showing.

She had learned to sit very straight at table. “Now,” her Aunt Justine said when she saw her, “that is the way a young lady sits, for sure.” And she brought her own daughter to see. “Sit at the table, che’,” she told Annie, “so Therese can see how you do.”

So Annie pulled the straight chair up to the table.

“See,” her aunt said, “you should do like that. Sit like the nuns.”

Annie had been home a little over a week when her spine relaxed.

“But you forget all you have learned!” her aunt said.

“But she look better this way,” her father said. And he put one arm around her shoulder.

Annie slipped away, pleasure burning in her stomach, but her face frowning and her manner brusque.

“What the matter with her?” her father called after her.

She did not look back. She ducked around the corner of the house and around behind the little shed where he kept his skiffs and pirogues out of the weather. Then she sat down on the ground.

From there she could hear her father and her aunt talking—she couldn’t make out the words, just the sounds of the voices.

She picked at the ground with her fingers. A blackbird flew down to watch. She put her head on her knees and began to cry.

She could not, for the life of her, have said why. She cried easily that summer, mostly when there was nobody to see her. The tears came spurting out and she felt better for it. Her eyes didn’t even seem to get red.

A
FOUR-HOUR TRIP FROM
the island—almost straight east—is Port Ronquille. It is a larger town than Petit Prairie, because of the sulphur mines. One whole tract of land around the plant—a good ten acres square is colored bright yellow. Everything yellow, the ground, the trees, the little scraggly tough chinaberries, the machinery, the wood sides of the buildings, the barges into which the stuff is loaded. They say that for twenty miles around the sun is yellower than anywhere else—but they like to talk.

The town itself is about two miles from the sulphur plant. It is maybe a mile long, strung out along the bayou. And three streets deep: that is all the solid ground there is here. Beyond is the swamp.

The houses are good and tight and painted. The yards are fenced with palings all about the same size so that it looks very neat. There are chickens in the yards, and ducks, and now and again a cow. You can see the kids in the morning, driving the cow out to the open grass on the edge of town, the side away from the plant. All the youngest kids, six or eight maybe, in one hand a switch or a whip, in the other the coil of rope for a tether. On the main street, which is right along the bayou, there is the sea food plant where the luggers bring shrimp and oysters. And right next to it, but across the dirt street, is the ice company. A broad wood chute slung about ten feet above the street, connects them. When the plant is working, the chute shudders and grates as the ice flows down it.

There are four groceries and half-a-dozen bars, one a big barnlike structure where the dances are held on week-ends.

When Al Landry took to going over to Port Ronquille every single week-end, people on Isle aux Chiens began to whisper and shake their heads. Such a thing for a man to do, they said, who’d been grieving for his wife only a while before.

Once or twice, maybe—that they could have understood; that was nature. But every week, nearly …

For Port Ronquille is known all along the coast for its fine whorehouse, the fanciest and most expensive south of New Orleans. It is the largest building in town, seven rooms. There are lace curtains on all the windows, full three-yard curtains that reach right down to the floor. And in the front parlor, there is a picture window, new last year, framed by yellow satin curtains and in the exact middle, on a little round brown table is a very large lamp with a yellow shade. The shade still has its cellophane wrapping and the lamp has never been lighted: there are no outlets close enough. The madam is a short Italian woman from New Orleans. Her sister runs the one beauty shop.

It was his cousin, Roy Gaudet, finally asked him.

Al chuckled quietly to himself. “Man, man,” he said. “They too expensive for me. I can’t have nothing like that for a steady diet.”

“So it ain’t a whore,” Roy said. “But you got a girl, no?”

“Man,” Al said, “since when you believe all you hear?”

Her name was Adele, and he had not even held her hand.

W
HEN HE’D GONE OVER
to Port Ronquille that first time, he had not been looking for any woman, whore or virgin.

He went because he couldn’t stand the island any more. One morning (six months after his wife’s death and four months after Annie had gone to the convent), when he had finished fixing his nets, he came back to the house to find a can of paint. He’d put it in the kitchen or under the house. But he never found it; he never got to look. He stood in the middle of the empty quiet house and rubbed his forehead with both hands. He was so tired of working; and he was tired of going to Petit Prairie. He knew every inch of the street, every plank of the lands, every little single piece of dust that blew around in the air.

He would go see what they were doing in Port Ronquille. He had not been there in years. Without telling anyone that he was going, he walked out of the house and down to the landing, cast off his lines and started the engine without even first using the blower, he was in that much a hurry.

It was November, but hot. The people who’d gone up to work in the cane fields would be having a rough time. Sun like that could put a man on his face in no time at all, if he wasn’t very careful. He’d seen eggs fried on pieces of slate in the November sun. They’d thought that was a great joke, back when he was a kid, working in those fields: breaking an egg on a flat piece of rock and leaving it there to turn white and milky and cooked. And when they came back and found it, they all stood around laughing and slapped each other on the back, and tried to talk somebody into eating it. But everybody knew that a sun-fried egg wasn’t good for the stomach; so much of the sun had made it bad, even while it cooked it. But they stood around and poked their fingers at the egg, and thought it was a fine joke.