The Hard Blue Sky (20 page)

“I hope I ain’t been trouble to you.”

She smiled and her teeth were small and square and even. “No,” she said.

“It was your boy wake me up this morning?”

“Yes.”

He leaned across the table; his elbow knocked the coffee cup. The blackish liquid slushed into the saucer, but he did not notice. “He ain’t never said a mumbling word to me. I wasn’t even sure he was big enough to talk, him.”

She smiled, a little bit of her tongue showing through her square teeth. “Didn’t you never have children?”

“Sure,” he said. “Only I never noticed how big she was before she got to talking.”

“You want some more coffee?”

He held out the cup. “I be turning green and yellow from it soon, but it’s good all the same.”

She asked: “Where’s your girl now?”

He watched the dark liquid come out of the blue enamel spout. “New Orleans.”

“Oh,” she said.

“At a convent.”

“Oh,” she said, “she went to the church.”

“Hell, no,” he looked up quickly. He put three teaspoons of sugar into the coffee. “She just went there for a while. So she can get over her mother’s dying.”

He was surprised that it didn’t hurt him to talk about it.

“She been dead, but not long.”

He drank his coffee slowly. The little boy stuck his tousled head around the corner of the door. He stared at Al for a while, sucking up his mouth. Then his thin body followed his head inside. He was holding a kitten to his stomach. He slipped around Al and went up to his mother.

“Make bo-bo,” he said.

She took the arm he held up. There were three long scratches down the forearm.

“The cat do that?”

He shook his head violently.

Al grinned at him. “He ain’t going to say nothing, him.”

“No,” she said. “Nothing against that cat.”

The kid giggled and then sobbed when his mother put iodine on the scratches.

“Hi there, boy,” Al said. “Look at me. You papa give you that cat, no?”

The boy looked confused. The cat got away and he scurried off after it.

“He got no papa,” Adele said.

Al stared at her, not understanding.

“He was killed two years past.” There wasn’t a flicker in her face. Her eyes didn’t even blink: they were brown and dry.

“Oh,” Al said and looked down at the floor. “Nobody told me that … or I wouldn’t have said nothing, me.”

“It is all equal,” Adele said.

In the quiet, they could hear the cat yeowling outside, and the little boy begin a singsong chant to it.

“It is strange, no, the way things go,” Al said and rubbed his finger around the edge of the coffee cup. The coffee had stained the white china.

“It is strange, for sure.”

“I have sat and tried to figure it out, sometimes. And it don’t come out.”

“No,” she said.

“I marry twenty-three years—a long time. So I can’t hardly remember what it is like before I got married, when I was courting the girls.”

“We was married four years,” she said.

He took a long guarded look at her. She’d be near forty now, from the shadows around her eyes. And that meant she hadn’t got married until she was an old maid.

He stood up. “I got to be getting back. I got work to do.”

“I never been out to the island.”

“It ain’t bad,” he said. “I like it better than any place I seen.”

He went down the steps, then turned and looked back over his shoulder. “Thanks for the breakfast,” he said. “It put me back on my feet all right.”

“It wasn’t anything,” she said. “Just fixing breakfast.”

He had turned to walk away when she asked: “Do you ever come back this way again?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I might.”

It was a month or so before he did. But he went back. First thing, he looked for Dan at the dry-goods store. He was not there. Only his wife was keeping store.

“I don’t know where he is, me,” Francine told him, “but it wouldn’t surprise me none if he was having him a couple of beers someplace.”

Sure enough he found him, in the second bar he looked into, a fair-sized building, neat and painted, and called the Tipsy Kitty. Al had only just peered inside the dusky room, past the red glow of the juke box, when he heard Dan holler: “Hey, brother-in-law, boy, what you say?”

He stood blinking. The large square room had only one small window over the bar cash register. Gradually he began to make out the pool tables on the left side of the room, the worn floor of the empty dancing-space, in its exact center a slot machine, and finally Dan, perched up on a stool and leaning against one of the tin-foil covered posts that supported the roof.

“How you doing, man?”

“I been just looking for you,” Al walked over and pulled a stool alongside. “This time I’m wanting to buy you a drink.”

“Always welcome, boy.” Dan slapped him on the shoulder. “If I heard you was coming, I’d be doing something stronger than beer, me.”

Al poured the beer, tipping his glass so that there was just a thin little line of foam. “I been hearing about your sister’s husband.”

“Which one?”

“One married your sister, what’s her name, Adele.”

“Jeez,” Dan said, “he was a funny one.”

“Heard he got killed.”

Dan finished his beer and reached for the next one. “All Saints’ Day, two years ago—ain’t likely to forget that.”

“Seems I heard.”

“I bet you ain’t heard all about it.”

“I don’t know,” Al said, “what’s all about it.”

“He was driving a truck. His truck. I don’t know exactly why he went and bought a dump truck—he was postmaster here. But he got this truck, got it cheap too, had to go all the way over to Lafayette for it. And for two solid days it stood in his back yard in the rain, while everybody sat and tried to figure out what he was going to do with it.

“And Adele she tried to figure it out too. And she asked him but he wouldn’t tell her either.” He stopped and took a swallow of beer. Hesitated, tasted and took another long drink.

“What’d he have it for?” Al asked.

Dan swallowed. “He wouldn’t say. Only on All Saints’ Day, it stopped raining. And everybody is fixing to go to the cemeteries and some people is all ready there when they see him—Bob was his name—go driving out the road in his new truck. And nobody could make any sense out of that either. And then Adele and the boy come down to the cemetery, and they didn’t know either. Only for a long time we could hear the motor. He must have been gunning it like crazy, we could hear it so long.

“And after a while we sort of forgot him. There was lots of flowers to put up, and lots of people to talk to. And for sure, old lady Billion goes and has the fainting fit she has every year when she looks at the grave of her husband and her boy that died when he was a baby.

“Then we hear this damn truck again, hear it far off, roaring and coming fast. And in a little while we can see it. One of the kids is standing out in the road and he yells: ‘Là-bas, she come.’ And he goes scurrying out of the road as fast as he can. And this fucking truck comes right down the middle of the road, so fast you can see daylight under the wheels—he’s hitting the bumps that hard. He’s flying, man.”

He finished the rest of the beer out of the bottle, pushing the glass aside. Then he twirled the bottle in small circles by his finger tips.

“We want a couple more,” Al said.

“Don’t shake them up,” Dan said and wiped off the foam from the bottle neck with his finger. He carefully sucked it dry. “That’s a plain waste, man.”

“Then what happen?”

“Why, man, he come along the road until he get right to the edge of the cemetery lot, and then he blows a tire—ain’t never no good tire on a second-hand truck. So he goes off the road and over that little stretch of grass there—you could see the skid marks burned in the ground, until the grass grew up so high last summer—and right into that oak tree there … man, this here is real cold beer.”

“Me, I want some oysters,” Al said.

“Not here, man,” Dan waved his hand, “I show you where they got some nice fat cock oysters.”

For all that it was the middle of the week, the main street was crowded. Dan knew every person they passed; he nodded or waved or smiled.

They passed the bank with its green-painted door and barred front window. “This is a big town, now,” Al said.

“And, man, it sure the place for business,” Dan said. “You ought to quit fishing. Ain’t no money in that.”

Al stopped to tie his shoelace. “No,” he said. “There ain’t. But I reckon you do what you’re used to. And I’m accustomed me to that.”

They ate the oysters in silence, opening them themselves, spearing them up with the tips of the knife, and draining the liquor from the shell.

Dan said: “You asking about Adele’s husband—he always cut his nose to pieces drinking out of oyster shells. I remember me one night when we musta had six dozen a piece. And our noses was bleeding.” Dan rubbed the tip of his nose slowly. “You know,” he said, “they didn’t get on much.”

“She wasn’t no girl when she got married.”

“Hell, no, man. She was living at home. And they thought they never would get her out the house. She just didn’t seem much interested in any boys, nor them in her. Never knew where she met him. But one day she just walks into the parlor with Bob Reynal. And they say they going to get married. … Alors, they get married.”

They finished the last oysters and tossed the shells into the heap already in the pail.

“He was a hard man, him. Lived around here all his life, but nobody knew much about him. His family been dead, and he was just another kid around here, when I was a kid. Then he worked at the ice plant for a while, and then he got to be postmaster and then he got married.”

“Do you reckon,” Al asked, “she would mind if I went calling on her?”

“Find out for yourself, man,” Dan said. But all of a sudden, the voice had a different ring.

Al left him then, trying not to notice the change.

He saw her then, and he went back every week-end he could manage. When Annie came home in May, he said nothing to her but went as often as ever. But he never had a drink with Dan again, nor went to his house.

He could figure out what the trouble was. Town people—people who had a store and were headed places in the world—wouldn’t want their sister going with a fisherman. But he kept coming just the same.

He asked Adele once if they’d said anything about him, and she just shook her head and said: “Nothing. They ain’t said nothing much or important.”

Her son had fallen asleep underneath a chair in the corner.

“If he ain’t just like a kitten,” Al said, “curling up under things and going to sleep.”

She picked him up and carried him to bed. Al followed.

“He sure is a pretty little boy. And me, I don’t even know his name.”

“Claudie.”

“That is a nice name.”

She took off his overalls without his waking. She took off his shoes and socks and put the thin little body in its underpants on the bed.

“I wish he’d put a little flesh on him.” She pulled the cotton blanket up. He did not even flicker an eye.

“He will,” Al said. “Why, I bet he grows up to be the fattest man you ever did see.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Why sure he will,” he said. “My wife, she was the skinniest little girl you ever saw.” He hesitated and wondered if he should have said that.

They left Claudie’s room and closed the door behind them. “Was she pretty, her?”

“Like I was telling you, from being the skinniest kid she turned nice and round when she grew up.”

“She was very fine?”

“Yes,” he said slowly, because he did not understand. “She was very fine, her.”

“And she always had a good time, always laughing?”

“I don’t know, me,” he said. “Maybe.”

“And my husband, he was fine too. Only he did not laugh much. He was a quiet sort.”

Al nodded as they sat down again in the living-room. “They do say those people, they are born on a day when the sun don’t shine.”

“And you believe that, what the old women say?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

“And maybe not.”

The quick hard tone of her voice startled him and he stood up. “But you got other things to do without just talking to me.”

Almost before he could blink she was on her feet, and she had one hand on his arm. “Ain’t you got time to drink a beer with me?”

While she got the bottles he glanced out the window and saw the lights in her brother’s house next door. “They finished supper and gone into the parlor,” he said.

She glanced out briefly. “Looks that way.”

He smiled slowly. “They don’t seem to have no love for me, somehow.”

“That ain’t so,” she said. And he jumped a little, her voice was so flat and stiff you could almost touch it.

The whole island was watching him. They didn’t follow him over to Port Ronquille, because that way they would have found out for sure, and they preferred to talk. (Annie just shrugged and forgot about it.) The old women shook their heads; and the young girls giggled and felt a hot touch in their parts. The young men wondered what sort of a girl would have anything to do with Alastair Landry, who was an old man of forty-two or -three and who had heavy, thick, drooping black mustaches that he waxed so carefully.

He had not even so much as held her hand, though he hadn’t had a woman in months and it bothered him. He hadn’t even kissed her until after they’d decided to get married.

They were sitting in her living-room on a hot August evening. He had had supper there—he had left the island in mid-afternoon to get there in time.

They were just sitting with the radio playing and he wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, just fanning himself slowly with a latanier—the towns were always hotter than the island.

He didn’t quite remember afterwards how the talk had come around to that. But she’d said flatly and calmly: “What do you think people say, if we was to
get
married?”

“I don’t know, me,” he said automatically.

“What was you to say, if we did?”

“I don’t know.”

“We ain’t young kids, can’t say we don’t know what we doing.”