The Hard Blue Sky (32 page)

From the radio inside there was a burst of static. Al jumped up and went to fix it. Annie chewed on a piece of chicken. “It’s tough.”

“You got a bad piece,” Adele said, quick and eager, “take another one.”

“All tough,” Annie said.

“What we had was fine.”

“Tough old rooster.”

“You talking about me?” Al had come back.

“Annie says the wing is tough.” There was just a little edge of nervousness in Adele’s voice. Annie felt a funny little quiver of satisfaction, and she almost grinned to herself.

“That right?” her father said. “Wasn’t nothing wrong with mine.”

“Like leather,” Annie said.

“Pelicans leading by four runs in the seventh,” he said.

Adele gave him a quick little uncertain smile and glanced back at Annie.

“Two out and two on,” he said. “Don’t pay any attention to her, che’. She don’t feel too good this morning.”

“I feel fine,” Annie said. “Why do people keep telling me how I feel?”

“You was asking me the other day,” Al said. “Thought we’d go take a look at Bayou Cantaque.”

“Hell,” Annie said, “I been up there a hundred times.”

“Wasn’t talking to you,” Al said. “You want to, che’?”

“I never been up there,” Adele said.

Al waved his hands, like a priest. “So we go.”

Annie said: “Thought you’d be sick to death of boats, being on ’em all week long.”

For a minute Adele looked like Claudie when he was going to cry.

“God damn it,” Al said, “Don’t nobody ask me? I want to go, me.”

Annie drank the spilled coffee from her saucer, feeling again the twinge of satisfaction.

“I don’t think I’m coming,” she said.

“Okay,” Al said.

“You sure you don’t want to?” Adele asked.

“Told you I been a hundred times.”

“She wants to stay and see her boyfriend,” Al said.

“You don’t know nothing,” Annie said.

“You think so, bébé?” her father pulled the ends of his mustache, curling them carefully.

“Yea,” Annie said and licked the last spot of coffee off her saucer.

“You want me to tell you what I know about what you was doing last night.”

“Yea,” Annie said and curled up her lip.

“Okay, bébé,” AIsaid. “George Manint, he been by this morning, asking if you get home all right.”

“Talk,” Annie said, “all people do around here—talk, talk, talk and talk. Times I think I’ll go to New Orleans to live.”

“You was asking me,” Al said, “and I’m telling you. … George got a real fine hangover, him. Can hardly open his eyes. And he feel sort of bad … he took a swing at Marie Louise and she’s beginning to get a bruise on her jaw, and she threw a can at him, only it went out the open window instead. Anyhow he’s feeling sick and he don’t see how he can go home, things being the way they are there.”

“I could get me a job in New Orleans,” Annie said. “Easy as anything. At the telephone office.”

“And there another thing he feeling bad about. … Seems he nearly cut up you boyfriend account of he thought he was waiting for Marie Louise.”

Annie was staring up into the blue-white sky, her lips curled back and smiling.

“So,” Al said. “And when you come home you stumbling around. Nobody got to be smart to put that together. …”

Annie continued staring up in the sky. “I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t care the least bit.”

Al got to his feet. “If we going, we got to go soon.”

Adele said: “I’m all fixed.”

When they were gone, Annie sat lazily following the flight of a green mosquito hawk. He perched finally on her knee and softly she got hold of his wings. She held him up then, close to her eyes, watching the waving legs and the straining arc of the tail.

“Sh—oo,” she said and blew at him.

Under her fingers the wings were crisp and fluttery and dry as paper. She stared into his goggle eyes. “Sh—oo.”

She threw him up into the air. Her aim was bad. He hit one of the porch posts and fell into the yard. A fat jay swooped down and gobbled him in a minute.

“All they do is talk,” she told the hot afternoon. “You go to the can and somebody knows it. … I don’t care, me.”

But she did. If everybody knew it, something was spoiled. She shrugged and got up, went inside and turned on the radio.

They had ruined it, she told herself bitterly. They ruin everything. …

She stretched out on the sofa. Her head was aching and her eyes felt funny. She began to wish she hadn’t taken the chicken.

What was it like up in Bayou Cantaque, she wondered. What it was like in all of them, she answered: grasses that were always moving slightly and rustling slightly even when there was no wind, and water that was thick and black and so still—if you dropped a leaf, it sat motionless on the shiny surface.

The shiny surface that reflected back at you like a mirror. And you could no more see through it than you could through a mirror. But you could guess what was under it. Alligators, for one; they came up sometimes to kill muskrats on the bank with one flick of their tails. And Congos, the long black snake that swam like a fish, people said, and had a bite that would kill the strongest man alive in just three hours. You’d see their heads standing up sometimes out of the water, and looking for all the world like a plain dark stick. And the creatures lines and nets brought up: gars whose scales made belts tough as leather; big catfish with whiskers and twin barbs; and eels, their mouths filled with sharp white teeth.

She shivered and swallowed a couple of times. She was glad she wasn’t a man and had to work those waters.

I’d as soon give up and go in to Port Ronquille and get a job at the sulphur plant, she thought. Even if the sulphur got in your lungs and killed you, little by little, it was better.

And then there were people who had never done anything. Not one thing their whole lives long. Like Beatriz, who couldn’t even do her hair. Who hardly knew how to brush it. Who had never seen an iron. Who learned to use it with floods of Spanish words. If I had just remembered them, Annie thought.

And what would Beatriz be doing right now? This same minute. She might be still at the convent. Or she might have gone home. Annie had thought about that home sometimes; she could imagine the place (Beatriz never talked about it, but one of the nuns had told Annie the little bit she knew). The shadowy rooms, one stretching after the other in endless procession, tremendous halls lined with mirrors, a court where mimosa was so sweet and heavy you could hardly breathe.

Annie thought over the picture slowly, touching here and there, smiling to herself. There’d be closets so crammed with clothes you couldn’t shut the door. And the curtains at the windows would be satin. In her room there’d be blue satin, pale blue, at the sides draped up by big gold hooks, and over the window part there’d be white lace, sheer as organdy, and billowing out in the small steady breeze. And there’d be white bearskin rugs on the floor, changed every day so there was never a speck of dirt on them. And a dressing-table, all mirrors with tall thin bottles of perfume, so many that you’d forget about the ones in the back.

Annie stretched and drifted back to the island. That would be the life, she thought. How did some people get it, she wondered. How were some born lucky. …

She liked this house better when it was empty. She walked from room to room. It wasn’t a bad house, the way island houses went. And it was pretty cool in summer. She’d seen worse places in New Orleans, and that was for sure.

In the kitchen she found some left-over coffee and poured it into a dirty cup. She drank it, watching the fat sparrow that perched on the tablette outside the window.

And all of a sudden she was facing her big problem, and it was plain as the dumpy form of the bird: did she put on some lipstick and take a walk down to the wharf or did she wait for Inky to look for her?

Adele had left a pack of cigarettes on the table. She took one and lit it. She tried to inhale, choked, and gave up. She held the cigarette to her knee and watched the white thread of smoke crawl over her skin.

It wouldn’t do to let him think she was too eager. … She half closed her eyes and tried to look bored. … She’d just have to wait until he came. Of course there was nothing that said she couldn’t go down and have a peep, if she stayed behind the palmettos and was careful that he didn’t see her.

And if he forgot, maybe she could think of an excuse to send somebody down there, her father, maybe, or Cecile. Somebody who would remind him, without saying, of her. … She could work something out, if she had to. But he wouldn’t forget.

The cigarette was out. She must have knocked off the coal. She got another match from the back of the stove and lit it. … A holder would be nice. She was crazy not to bring one from New Orleans. … Maybe she should wash her hair today; it was beginning to have a little sweet-sweaty smell. And what sort of shampoo. …

She’d just have to take a walk over to Arcenaux’s and have a look at what he had. She’d try a new one.

She dropped the cigarette into the last little bit of coffee. And then she remembered something else: Inky did not know where she lived.

She ran her fingers under her hair, fluffing it up.

She could go then. She could just happen along the dock. That was better than his coming up to the house anyway. Because of Adele.

She was an old maid, Annie thought as she started another cigarette. She should have gone to the convent; they’d have loved her there. She even sat like a lady or a nun—straight up, so straight that her back curved a little. Jesus. …

And what was it the nuns had told her: a lady never spills things in her lap. If she spills, she spills on her bosom. …

Annie dropped the half-smoked cigarette into the dish water. Let Adele object. … If her hair was going to be dry by tonight, she’d have to get going.

She got a chair and climbed up to the top cupboard shelf. There was a coffee can there. She opened it, reached below the dark brown grounds and got a dollar bill.

She started to leave, hesitated a minute, then went back to the coffee pot and shook it thoughtfully. She drank the little that was left through the spout, not bothering with a cup.

F
OR A WHILE FATHER
Ryan waited patiently on the
Bozo,
sitting in the little shade of the wheelhouse, reading his breviary. But he came to the end of that, and he put the book on top of his coat, which he had taken off and folded carefully on the deck, stood up and looked around.

The wharf was completely deserted—not even a seagull or a pelican moving—with one exception: a young man by the sailboat a couple of hundred feet away. He wore bathing-trunks and his body was shining with sweat; he was finishing his washing in a big tub set on the dock. Father Ryan walked over. “Hot work,” he said.

The young man looked up briefly. “Yea,” he said.

There was a line running from forestay to mast, and hung over it were some long pieces of foam rubber, mattress-shaped. Other lines from spreaders to mast held blue-and-white-striped cotton covers.

Inky straightened up. “This is no day for work.”

The priest nodded. “Most people wait till early in the morning.”

“I spilled some coffee on the covers,” Inky said, “and I had to get it out before it stained.” He tipped the tub and poured the water through the cracks in the wharf. “Mildew got in some,” he said, “so I did the lot.”

“A fine-looking boat.”

“Yes,” Inky said, “I just work on her.”

(Annie had come up just then and stopped behind the heavy tangle of bay trees and palmettos. She held the bottle of shampoo in her left hand and with her right she lifted a single palm leaf to see.

She saw the freshly washed covers hanging limp in the still air. And she could feel first her ears, then her whole face go bright red.

It was the sunburn, she told herself, she’d have to get some grease on it before she got sick.

She backed out of the thicket and walked home slowly. She did not want to do her hair any more. She stretched out, flat on her back, on her bed, and cried small angry tears.)

“A racing-boat?” the priest asked.

“And cruising.”

“I used to go to the races on the lakefront sometimes when I was in New Orleans.”

“It’s fun,” Inky said. He hung the tub upside down over a piling. “I got some ice below,” he said, “how about a drink?”

Father Ryan nodded and came on board.

“Up in the shade under the covers,” Inky said, “it’ll be cool enough.”

They were sitting there, cross-legged on the deck, when Mike Livaudais came back. He did not seem to notice them. He walked on to the
Bozo.
Father Ryan got up to follow him.

“Better luck this time,” Inky said.

Mike was staring sadly into the engine hatch. He straightened up when the priest came aboard. “I offer you my house,” he said, “instead of the hard deck.”

He was different, Stanislaus Ryan thought; he was less sad now, and more determined. The priest wondered. He took off his glasses and polished them on his sleeve. “How long will it take you to fix the engine?”

Mike shrugged. “It is old, yes, and, like old people, it get funny things wrong with it.”

“Was it the battery?”

Mike threw out his hands. “How can I tell? Can I look in the inside of the case and see what is going on there? Can I see through lead?”

The priest was scratching his chin with his glasses. “You were going to get somebody to test the battery.”

Mike waved his hand around again. “And that Story LeBlanc, I have looked for him. I have looked all up and down for him. Everywhere I could think of, I look for him. And he is not there.” He walked twice around the open engine hatch and stood looking down. “I got to do the best I can, myself, me. I got to get to work.”

“And how long will that take?”

Mike shrugged.

“And the other boats now … do you think they could be taking me back?”

Mike straightened up and stared down the line of moored luggers. “Hector, now, he is working on his hull.”

“Where?” Father Ryan asked, “I don’t see.”

“From inside,” Mike said. “And the
Mickey Mouse
got something wrong with her rudder. And the
St. Cristopher
—that the same Story LeBlanc I am looking for and don’t find. … And for sure we don’t want to take you back in a chabec … but no! That is just too much a risky business. And what would everybody say if we drown the priest. …”