The Hard Blue Sky (22 page)

He took them and held them in his own hand. He put a single one on his tongue and let it melt there until there was just a pulpy flour-tasting mess.

He did not move until he was sick again.

This time his stomach kept turning itself over and over and emptying air into his mouth as his mother held him there, over the low wood rail. When his eyes were open he could look directly down at the water. He saw how it came in flat bits, like the kaleidoscope toy he had got at Christmas, that shifted and changed and was never still for one minute. It wasn’t blue either, but a kind of gray-blue, streaked with froth, and you couldn’t see down through it.

His mother pulled him to his feet and took him back to the cabin. “Mary Mother,” she said, “maybe he’s going to do that the whole way.”

“It ain’t far,” the man said. “It ain’t far at all.”

“He ain’t got anything left to throw up,” his mother said.

Claudie stood, swaying back and forth with the motion of the boat, letting his head hang and swing too, so that the floorboards passed back and forth in front of his eyes.

“Stop him swinging his head like that,” the man said. “That just making things worse.”

His mother picked him up and sat on the edge of the bunk and held him in her arms, all the rest of the way. He put his head as far under her arm as he could.

The man said: “There it is.”

His mother almost dropped him down on the floor, she was in such a hurry to get up.

And he scrambled up her leg and made her hold him too, so that he could see.

There was land on two sides now. On the right, the thin green line of marshes, an edge of grass that reached back, far as you could see from here, without a single tree or a single rise of ground. Just grass, shifting and moving and showing little shadows when the wind blew over it. Ahead was the island, thick clusters of oak trees and a few thin tall palms.

“It look nice,” his mother said slowly and in a very quiet voice. Claudie cocked his head and looked at her; he could tell she was uncertain. And he waited to see if they should turn around and go back.

“It’s a fine place,” the man said. “You’d know if you was ever out before.”

“No,” his mother said; “I never thought to come here, me.”

Claudie kept staring at her. He didn’t understand her tone. He had never heard it before.

She turned down to him, giving him a swat on the rear. “Why do you stare at me, macac?”

The man picked him up in one arm. Claudie had not been this close to him before. He could smell the strong sweat odor from the white shirt. He squirmed a little and tried to get down. His mother did not smell like that. She had a soft warm smell, not sharp and metallic. But the man paid no attention to his movements.

Claudie looked over the shoulder to his mother. But she was staring straight ahead and there was just a little bit of a smile curling up the corners of her mouth.

“Which end is your house?” she was saying.

“In the middle,” the man said. “But back from the landing. Way back. Where there’s a little shade on a hot day.”

Claudie squirmed and kicked, and the man let him down. He ran for his mother and tried to pull her skirts around his head, but she only lifted him up too. He hung his head and whimpered.

“What the matter with you, dogaree?” she said. “Don’t you want to see where you going to live?”

He thought about that for a while, until finally understanding, he lifted up his eyes and frowned at her.

“Ah … that got a rise out of you, no?” she pointed. “There. That where we going to live.”

He shook his head.

“Yes we are.”

He shook his head again. That wasn’t where they lived. The place where they lived had a street of gravel out front and a front porch and four cane rockers on it. And his room had yellow and blue linoleum on the floor.

He shook his head.

“Sure,” his mother said. “That other place,” she said, “we don’t live there. It wasn’t no more than a picture.”

He whimpered again and put his face down in her shoulder. He wasn’t sure any more.

“I’m sure glad we put that tarpaulin on the stuff,” the man said. “There’s more spray than I figured on.”

“I reckon it’s dry.”

“Sure,” he said. “They fixed it so it would stay dry in most any sort of weather.”

“Maybe,” his mother said slowly and doubtfully.

“Look, che’,” he said, “nothing got spoiled coming across.”

“I wouldn’t know what to do without I got my things.”

“Look,” he said. “They all there. Nothing gone overboard.”

She smiled suddenly and slipped her arm through his. “I ain’t nothing but sort of edgy.”

He kissed her on the cheek. His breath, heavy with tobacco, reached over to Claudie. The boy sniffed and then sneezed.

They were coming to the dock. The man let the boat in slowly, the engine idling. The hull touched with a soft bump. He opened the door and shouted: “What you say, there, Perique!”

The tall thin boy, who was sitting on a keg on the dock, had not moved until then. But he stood up and got the stern line and dropped the big loop over the post. Then he slowly secured the one at the bow.

“Perique, hey, come here,” the man called. “I got somebody for you to meet.”

Perique came back, his rubber-soled shoes making soft little padding sounds on the boards.

“I got married. And this is my wife, here.”

Perique grinned. “Vieux couillon! If you ain’t the one.” He bowed very formally to Adele. “God make you happy.”

“And now, man, how about us taking some of this stuff off?”

“Sure,” Perique said. “Let’s us go.” He saw Claudie standing in the middle of the wheelhouse, right where his mother had set him down. “And who the hell we got here?”

“That’s Claudie,” his mother said. “My son.”

“How you, dogaree?” Perique said. Claudie slipped behind the door. “He don’t want to talk, him.”

“He’s scared,” his mother said.

The two men began pulling back the tarpaulins. His mother came and took Claudie by the arm, and sat down on the deck close to him. “Bébé, listen at me. I got something to tell you.”

He looked at her. Now that the boat was steady he was beginning to feel much better. He even grinned a little bit.

“No,” his mother said, “listen at me.”

So he looked at her, looked at the thin little lines that ran from the edge of her eyes up toward her eyebrows and down toward her cheeks.

“I didn’t tell you before, because I never had chance.”

“Let’s us just take these bags here,” the man said, “and we can come back for the other stuff later.”

“When we got some extra help,” Perique said. “Sure.”

“Adele,” he called, “come on!”

“Moment,” she said over her shoulder. “I am busy.”

Claudie was watching a big fat green fly that circled around the door, landed on the deck. He jumped after it, with his foot raised, and missed.

“Listen at me, macac.” His mother took his shoulder and turned him around. “That man there, the one who just called. You know which one I mean?” Claudie nodded. “He is your papa.”

Claudie shook his head.

His mother sighed. “I got no time to play with you … You got to call him Papa.”

Claudie scuffed the toe of his shoe along the deck.

“Say it now. Say Papa.”

He hesitated, opening his mouth. And he remembered. Gene, the boy who lived next door, and had a big mole on his upper lip, used to point out a field, full of low whitewashed brick vaults and stones with names and dates on them, and say: “There’s your papa, boy. Out there he is.” And once he’d gone over just inside the gate and squatted down, almost hidden by the long grass. He’d looked all around him carefully, but the grass was just grass and the mud was just mud like it was around his back doorstep. There were a couple of big black crickets but they got away before he could catch them. So he left, without seeing his papa.

“Go ahead,” his mother said. “What you going to call him?”

He looked at her.

She stepped back away from him and sighed with annoyance. “Mary Mother, I got no time to be playing games with you. … Tell me or we leave you right here on the boat and don’t take you with us. We leave you here alone and don’t come back for you. … Tell me!”

He looked down at the toes of his shoes, white shoes that she had polished just yesterday. There were scuff marks on each toe.

“Tell me what you going to call him!”

“Papa,” he said. Hesitated a minute because it was so easy to say, like any other word that came out of his mouth. And then began to cry.

“What the matter with him?” Perique said.

“Completely ga-ga,” his mother said.

The two men carried the bags; his mother tucked a brown paper parcel under her left arm and with her right took hold of his hand. For the first few steps she had to drag him, crying. But then he forgot about that, and looked around him, at the strange new place.

They left the dock and walked along a white shell road. Claudie picked up one of the shells and tossed it at a palmetto leaf.

“Come on,” his mother said and pulled him to his feet.

Perique glanced over his shoulder. “Come on, boy. Pick up your feet and move. This ain’t feathers we’re carrying.”

They turned off the shell road to a narrow path. There were trees now, short thick trunk oaks and under them scrawny oleander bushes. In the open places the oleanders grew heavy and full, tall almost as the oaks.

Claudie wanted to look around, but his mother kept dragging him so fast that he would stumble sometimes and fall but she had such tight hold that he just swung along in the air until his feet hit ground again.

His mother slowed down, so that he had chance to see. There were houses, a couple of hundred feet apart on each side of the path, houses built high off the ground on brick foundations. And there were people sitting on the front porches, sitting with their chairs tilted back against the wall, or sitting and rocking. His mother was looking at these people. He could see a smile beginning at the corners of her mouth.

The man slowed his pace and dropped into step alongside her. “You getting tired out, honey?”

She looked from him to the people on the porches. “You know them there?”

“Sure,” he said without looking. “Ain’t so many people on this island you can’t know them.”

“You don’t want to stop?”

“No,” he said, “let’s us get on home.”

“If they friends of yours …”

“No,” he said, “Perique tell them.”

“You didn’t tell them we was getting married?”

“It wasn’t none of their business. … Let’s us get on home.”

“You ain’t even going to wave to them?”

“No,” he said. “Let’s us get on home.”

“What they going to think?”

“Don’t tell me how to do things, che’.”

Claudie had found a black dog on one of the porches. A small dog with shiny hair—it was lying right on the edge of the porch with its muzzle sticking out. He was just about to whistle to it when he felt his feet fly off the ground and he had to start running to keep up with his mother. He didn’t have breath to whistle but he did wave, hard as he could.

The dog did not lift its head.

When his mother let go his hand, they were on the porch of one of the houses. Claudie walked over to the edge and peered down and around the corner. There was a big oak there, growing close to the house. And an old tire on a heavy rope swung from one of the low branches. A big fat green caterpillar walked along the edge of the railing. He flipped it down with his finger and squashed it with his foot. Then he crossed the porch to peer around the other side. There was just a cistern there and a small pile of lumber, neatly stacked up on sawhorses. With his hands behind his back, he walked up and down the porch a couple of times. Inside he could hear the voices—his mother was laughing. He had never heard her laugh quite like that before: high-pitched and giggling. He went to the screen door, but the handle was too high for him to reach. He stepped back and thought for a minute, then began to kick the frame of the door hard as he could with his left foot, yelling all the time.

Perique came to the door. “Quit that, dogaree, before you smash in the screen and fill the house up with mosquitoes.”

He opened the door and Claudie ran in, brushing past his legs.

The smells of the strange house confused him. He followed the voices to a room on the right of the hall. His mother was there, all right, sitting on the man’s lap. Claudie could see his drooping heavy black mustache over her shoulder. He went up to her and tugged on her dress.

She tickled him under the chin. He jerked his head away. He hated that; she knew it.

“Look him jump,” she said. “Fraidy cat.”

He stepped back and looked at both of them.

“What you staring at, boy?” the man said.

“Come sit here,” his mother said.

She put both arms around him and hugged him. Rubbing softly he tucked his head in the familiar place under her chin and stretched out his legs. Then he looked down. The man’s other hand was patting his mother’s thigh in a nice steady rhythm. Claudie caught at one of the fingers. The hand turned up and grabbed.

“Want to play catch, no … I got you.”

He pulled on his hand to free it. The man just laughed. “I got you.

He pulled harder, whimpering a little. “Al, let him go,” his mother said.

The hand did not loosen. “I ain’t hurting him.”

“He want to get loose.”

“I ain’t stopping him,” the man said.

Perique came to the door. He was such a tall thin boy that he never stood straight if he could lean on anything. Now he braced his feet on one side of the door and put his shoulder on the other so that he stood criss-crossed.

“You want to go get the rest of the stuff, man?”

“No,” Al said. “Let’s us wait until it is cooler, tonight.”

“Okay,” Perique said. “I got nothing better to do.” He pulled himself to a standing position and disappeared.

“So,” the man whistled softly, “we get everything done. He go to see about the truck and he tells everybody we are married. It is that simple and easy.”

His mother tried to smooth down the hair on top of Claudie’s head. “And will they come back, do you think?”