The Hard Blue Sky (36 page)

“You got to be young and tough. If I wasn’t so old I could found him.”

Eddie stopped moving his feet around. He stared at Perique and his eyes were big and almost round. You could see the long red strain lines at the corners, deep almost as cuts.

“You coming, Perique man, no?”

“I said I was coming, me.” Perique swung the screen door back and forth. “When you want to go?”

Eddie stopped moving and sat very still. “I don’t know, me.”

“Don’t know when you want to go?”

“Ought to get some sleep first, maybe.”

“Sure,” Lacy said, “you can’t tell what you doing without that you got some sleep.”

“Look, man,” Perique closed the screen behind him and came one step farther into the room. “You go get some sleep and I go get everything ready.”

“We got to have somebody else,” Eddie said. “Not just us.”

“Okay,” Perique said. “I go find them. Who you want?”

Eddie fell asleep sitting there, sitting straight up on the edge of the bed, with his head resting over on one shoulder. They tipped him over, very slowly, until his head was on the pillow; then they picked up his feet and stretched him out. His mouth fell open and he began to snore.

They tiptoed out, closing the wood door behind them.

“Man,” Andrée said with a sigh, “man, man, man.”

“You ain’t serious about going out with him, no?” Lacy said to Perique.

“If he say so.”

“In the morning, when he wake up, he going to see that ain’t no good,” Andrée said. “It be just for nothing.”

“Maybe he still want to do it,” Perique said.

“He ain’t going to.”

“I don’t reckon he is,” Perique said.

“I sure don’t want to be in his place, when he comes to waking up.”

He slept only a couple of hours, until about five o’clock. They weren’t sure what woke him. Maybe somebody slammed the front screen door, or maybe a kid yelled under the window. Or maybe it was his own dreams. Andrée had looked in at him once, when he’d been asleep about an hour. (She got the idea, somehow, that he might have just stopped breathing, lying there on her bed.) He was sleeping heavily, muttering a little and his shoulder was twitching. She said when she’d tiptoed away: “He is still paddling, him.”

After a couple of hours he sat up, with his eyes swollen and half closed so that it was hard for him to see. He got down on his hands and knees and found his shoes. The strings were knotted. His fingers were too stiff to loosen them, so he stuck his toes in, slipper fashion. The canvas heels flattened easily under his weight.

He did not go through the main part of the bar. He hesitated for just a minute in the center of the room, then went out the side door, quietly.

The screen had a heavy spring on it. It got away from his clumsy fingers and slammed. He blinked at the sudden sharp noise, but he did not turn or stop. He kept walking, down the little path, in the direction of home. The shoes dragged along the ground.

Behind him he heard Andrée’s sharp voice: “He ain’t here. He done gone out the side door, him.”

And then she was right alongside him, panting a little with the sudden run—she wasn’t young any more, for all that she had the thin figure of a teenager.

“Why you ain’t sleeping?” She had hold of his arm. “Why you go running out?”

He just shook his head slowly and kept walking.

She kept pace with him. “You come back and I give you some supper. I got some real fine shrimp, me.”

He looked at her slowly through his puffy lids. The skin on his cheeks and chin was beginning to turn bright red and crack from the sun. “Belle, she got some shrimp, too.”

“We got good cold beer, man,” she said. “And that go with shrimp for sure.”

“I got to get home,” he said.

“Wait and put you shoes on straight.”

There was a mockingbird right over them, screaming and diving at their heads. She waved her hand at it.

“Rest a minute.”

He did not answer.

She kept running alongside him, with her quick little nervous steps. “Come take a cup of coffee with us, no?”

He ducked his head and kept on moving. Her legs stopped making their quick pecking little movements and she stood still. “Ga-ga,” she whispered to herself.

He kept walking, listening to the little white bits of shell grind away from under his feet. It was beginning to get cooler—just a little—and the wind had dropped. It must be about five o’clock. Shadows were criss-crossing the shell path; he walked over them.

It took him such a long time to get home. He was surprised how slow he’d been walking.

There was a cat sitting on the edge of the path, sitting, tail curled over feet, one paw combing bits of cobwebs out of its whiskers. A yellow cat, with yellow eyes and white whiskers. He wondered if they had got his duck: they slipped in the house sometimes. He kicked at the cat and sent it yeowling away. His shoe fell off. He started to bend to pick it up: he was too stiff. His back ached just bending a little way over. He slipped the shoe on, without looking. Some of the shell had got inside, but he hardly noticed.

He opened his front gate; it swung crookedly from one hinge. Henry had been promising to fix that since the winter. Only he’d never got to it.

Eddie swung the gate back and forth, listening to the scraping sound. He would have to fix it, or get Pete to do something. They’d be a lot of things Pete’d have to do now, that he hadn’t before.

Eddie closed the gate carefully. The small white dog came and smelled around his flapping shoes. “Get away.”

There was the gray shell of a shrimp right there by the front walk: one of the cats must have carried it. He crouched down slowly and painfully and picked it up. He turned it over and over, just a piece of shell, slightly curved. He tossed it over his shoulder.

His wife said from the porch: “Supper is fixed, if you want it.”

He looked up slowly: he hadn’t noticed her. She wasn’t doing anything—there wasn’t a sign of work near her. She was just sitting there, rocking slightly in the cane chair.

“I don’t want nothing,” he said.

He started up the steps, very slowly, putting both feet on each one. He crossed the porch and opened the screen, letting it slam behind him. The house was full of the odor of duck cooking. He sat down in the big armchair in the living-room, put his elbows on his knees and rested his head in his hands. It was so quiet all he could hear was the creak of the rocker on the front porch.

C
ECILE
B
OUDREAU HAD BEEN
crabbing. It had taken hours—the crabs weren’t biting—and her head was swimming with the heat. Under the very first tree that was big enough to give shade—the small oleander bushes weren’t much use in a sun like this—she stopped and squinted out over the bay to the marsh, to the shifting grasses and the little chênières.

And she’d seen Eddie come back, not half an hour ago, hunched over and leaning so hard on his paddle that it seemed he’d go overboard each stroke. And she could tell by the way he held himself that he hadn’t found the slightest sign and that he wasn’t going to look anymore—that he was beat.

The shells of the crabs rustled together and the basket shook. She’d have to be getting them home before they ate each other up. But she didn’t feel like hurrying, not today. She sat down instead. The ground was hot through her cotton shorts. She reached out one hand and parted the brown burned grass. She picked up a shell and tossed it over her shoulder.

She heard it snap against the trunk of another tree and then fall. A couple of gulls passed overhead, squaaking and fighting. Then it was very quiet, even the dust still under the heat from the sun.

She rubbed her eyes slowly. The basket shook. She sat up took a deep breath, put two fingers in her mouth and whistled, four short sounds. Then she leaned back, fanning herself, and waited.

The close-clipped black head of her son peeped around one of the chinaberry trees. She saw him, winked. He made two enormous one-legged hops and landed behind her.

“Don, boy,” she said, “take that basket home, che’.”

Flat on his stomach on the grass he squirmed over to the basket and lifted the cover.

“Put that down,” she said.

He hesitated, his hand raised, ready to reach in.

“They going to take a piece out your fingers.” She stood up, looked briefly at the bluish shells and put the cover back on. “Now take this home, bougre, before I got to lay my hand to your rear end.”

When he had gone she still hesitated, putting the hat back on her head, patting it slowly in place with her palms, and looking out across the back bay. The sun was so bright—and there was no wind, no wind at all—the water was flat and reflecting like a mirror, it was hard to see the grasses on the other side.

She gave the hat a final pat, tipping it forward over her eyes and started home, shaking her head just slightly.

Her father was standing on the front porch of the store. She waved and then went over to him.

Without getting up, Julius Arcenaux hooked a toe over another rocking-chair and pulled it toward her. “Sit down, Cecile che’, and pass some talk with the old man.”

She sat down and gave herself a little flipping rock.

“I been crabbing.”

“So,” he said and scratched the top of his bare head. “You been lucky?”

“Enough …” she paused, looking down at her own hands, that were picking at the splintered cane of the chair seat. “Only I couldn’t help wondering. Sitting there, you begin to wonder.”

Her father stopped rocking and let his face rest in the palms of his hands. “Henry, no?”

A big yellow tomcat crossed the edge of the porch. He had a bird in his teeth.

“I seen his papa come back.”

“I heard tell about that.”

“And he was nothing but a kid.”

Julius picked up the cigar and lit it again. “He ain’t much younger than you.”

She looked away, down the shell path, toward her own house, out of sight there, behind the oaks and the oleanders and the summer hibiscus.

“I reckon,” she said, “only with kids you feel older.”

He puffed hard on his cigar, making the tobacco gurgle.

“Maybe I just plain feel old.”

Perique and Therese came by, waved but did not stop.

Julius nodded after them. “Perique now, he seem to get over losing his girl quick.”

Cecile looked after them. “Annie didn’t ever like him much.”

“Maybe,” Julius said with a grin, “she like him better when she don’t have him.”

“You think he sleeping with Therese?”

Julius shrugged. “You think he sleeping with Annie?”

“How I know that?”

“I seen Inky out washing the covers one Sunday morning.”

“You don’t know nothing,” Cecile said.

“Maybe,” Julius said. “Only Annie got herself another man, and Perique got himself another girl. And everybody is happy.”

Cecile stood up and stared along the path, back the way she had come. “And Henry,” she said, “it don’t change anything.”

“Some,” Julius said.

“Except maybe for his family, everything keep going like he never was here.”

Julius scratched his cheek. “Can’t go stopping,” he said. “Just one crazy kid.”

“Get all upset, and then we forget it. … And he ain’t even buried here to remind nobody.”

Julius got up. “I got to change my shirt,” he said. “Wringing wet”

She heard him cross the store and then heard him talking briefly to her mother back in the living-quarters. She walked around the building, outside.

“Tell Mama I be back.” She remembered all of a sudden that she had sent Don home with the basket of crabs. “I got to go look at something back home.”

She trotted off: the weight of her swinging breasts was almost distasteful to her in the heat. She was up the steps in two hard jumps that shook the house and woke Hector who was dozing, a newspaper over his face, in the shady corner of the porch.

“Hey,” he said.

She stopped with the screen door open in her hand. “Ain’t seen you.” She let the door slam shut and went over to perch on the rail by him.

“To look at you,” he said, “you think the whole island was sinking down in the Gulf.”

“You hear about Henry?”

“I hear Eddie come back.”

“Didn’t find anything.”

“You expect he was going to?” Hector asked quietly.

Cecile sat down. She took off her straw hat and rubbed a hand across her neck. The back of her head was tingling: she’d had too much sun, she thought. It came through a hat, even. She’d have to be more careful, and maybe put a handkerchief inside.

“You not getting sunstroke?”

She shook her head, and her ears buzzed.

“Don come home with some crabs.”

“I told him put the basket in the kitchen.”

“You know,” Hector said, “you can’t take the sun like you used to. You look groggy.”

“No,” she said.

“I got to put the water on, if those crabs going to be done by suppertime.”

“I get it, me,” he said. “Big tubful of water’s too heavy.”

“I lift it before,” she said, “and I reckon I can lift it again.”

“Quit,” he said, “I plain said I do it.”

“Maybe I better go see if the kid left the cover on tight.”

“If we got to chase crabs all over this here house,” Hector said, “I’m gonna warm his tail for good.”

He filled the big tub and put it on the stove. Then he sauntered down the steps, stopping to pat the big black dog whose name was Grandpa. “Reckon I get back to work,” he said.

She nodded.

When the water finally began to boil she dumped in the crabs. And then began to wash the dishes she’d left from breakfast, working slowly in the water that was left in the dishpan from that morning. She did not think of heating it, though she had to rub the plates harder to clean them in the cold water. She wiped them and put them away.

She lifted the cover and looked at the crabs: they were still now and turning bright red. Good fat ones, she thought.

The afternoon sun made the house stifling, even with the shutters all closed on the west side.

She put some of the baby’s diapers to soak in the big galvanized tub in the back yard and lit the little charcoal pot under them. Outside she felt better; there were thin streaks of shade from the oleander bushes and there was a little breeze moving. She pulled a sprig of parsley from the little plot by the side of the house and chewed on it. The clear, almost peppery green taste made her mouth feel cooler. She pulled the last of the oleander flowers and stuck them in her hair.