The Hard Blue Sky (39 page)

It went on that way. And during the war, people at Petit Prairie used to grin and say that they hadn’t heard of a fight with the Germans. The only war they knew about was the one going on across the pass. One thing just led to another, that was all.

Hector Boudreau, who was loafing near the chute of the icehouse, pretended not to notice that morning, along toward noon, when Anthony Tortorich, from Terre Haute, edged his outboard up to the wharf at Isle aux Chiens. Tortorich tossed a line around one of the posts, made a quick knot, and stepped to the dock. He stretched and hitched up his pants. He was a short man, with a very heavy body and very thin arms and legs. His pants didn’t close in front; he left the top three buttons open and hung them under the curve of his belly by a pair of checked suspenders. But across his chest and his slightly hunched back was the thick band of muscle the old oystermen had—from a time when oysters were raked up by hand.

He looked around, saw Hector and went slowly over, walking like a potato on toothpicks. “Hey,” he said. Hector turned around. “You tell me where old Livaudais house is?”

“Why?” Hector said. The old fellow was alone, he could see that.

“I got talk to him.”

“What for?”

“I got talk to him.”

“What business you got over here?”

Anthony Tortorich walked away. At the end of the dock, he hesitated a minute and then turned to the left. Hector followed right along beside him.

Some kids who were playing catch stopped and stared. “Sal cochon!” Tina Roualt yelled.

The old man looked sidewise out of his eyes and spat a yellow stream of tobacco juice down at his feet.

Hector said: “You don’t know where the house is at, but you sure going in the right direction.”

The old man stopped and turned. “I go all right?”

“You know for god damn sure you are.”

“I ain’t come to have fight.”

“No, huh?”

Anthony Tortorich shifted his tobacco slightly and sucked on it with a plopping sound. “I am old man.”

“What you come for?”

“I want talk with the old Livaudais.”

“You keep telling me that.”

“I want talk to him.” He began walking again, slowly putting his heels down hard, the way old men do.

The kids were following behind them, at a little distance, giggling and scuffling.

Tortorich said softly, almost to himself: “I talk to him about his boy.”

Hector stared at the broad hunched back under the faded plaid shirt. He looked at the little puffs of dust the old man’s heels raised. “What you know about the boy?”

Anthony Tortorich turned very slowly; but this time he kept walking, speaking over his shoulder. “I want talk with him.”

“Okay,” Hector said. “And I hope you ain’t starting nothing.”

“I am old,” Tortorich said. “I have my belly full with fighting.”

Hector pointed out a house to the left. “The white painted one, there.”

They walked together to the gate. Hector called, “Eddie, hey man, come here.”

And Tortorich planted his elbows on the gate post and called, “Old man Livaudais, I got something say to you.”

Belle came and stood in the screen door. Then Eddie pushed her aside and stepped out on the porch.

“Look who just come here,” Hector called.

Eddie came down the steps, scratching his chest slowly through the thin undershirt he wore. His wife followed him.

“What you want?” Eddie said.

“I got something say to you.”

“Huh?” Eddie reached inside the undershirt, to scratch better.

“He just come in,” Hector said, “and I fetch him here.”

“Your boy,” Tortorich wiped the dribble of tobacco from the corner of his mouth, “he is gone.”

Belle was standing without moving a single muscle, her hands folded across her stomach.

Tortorich leaned harder on the fence post. The wood creaked lightly.

“He know right where you live,” Hector said.

Still leaning on the fence post, old Tortorich pushed up the brim of the baseball cap he wore. It was an old cap, stained by sweat and faded by sun, the sort cafés all along the bayou sold. They kept long lines of them hung over the bar on clotheslines and pinned with clothespins.

“Who?” Eddie said.

Tortorich did not answer, he stared off into space, his brown eyes squinting just a little in the glare. He pursed his lips until they stuck straight out. “I got a son.”

“So?”

“And he got a girl, name of Niccolene.”

“That is a stupid name for a girl,” Belle said. “For sure.”

“You cannot shut up for nothing, huh?” Eddie said without turning his head.

“And Niccolene does not come home either.”

It was so quiet then that they could hear the old man’s heavy wheezing breathing, slow and even. Eddie’s fingers had found a tear in his undershirt; they were twisting and pulling at it. The sparrows fluttered and squaaked in the mulberry tree.

“Belle, hey,” Eddie said, “go get us some chairs.”

She got two cane chairs from the porch and carried them out to the front yard. She plunked them down behind Eddie. “There,” she said.

Eddie opened the gate, pushed it open wide. Then he took the chairs by the backs and put them down, facing each other, about four feet apart on the shell walk that led to his front door. He sat down in one. Tortorich pushed the baseball cap even farther back on his head, came in the yard and sat down.

“You get back in the house,” Eddie said to Belle. She did not even move. She stood behind the chair, hands folded on her stomach, her eyes jumping from one to the other. Hector squatted down on his haunches.

“You got ears, you can hear,” Tortorich said, “but you got minds to think?”

The kids came close up to the fence, giggling and kicking at each other. They had long daisy chains around their necks and they were chewing on the heavier reddish flowers.

“Fi’ d’ici!” Belle yelled at them. She bent and scooped up a handful of gravel and threw it. They scattered in all directions and disappeared.

“Niccolene she does not come back,” Tortorich said. “We find this out.”

Loretta had said nothing about her daughter that evening. She went quietly about her business, tending the baby and washing the clothes and cooking. Nick, her husband, was working very hard then in the oyster beds over in Marsh Bayou. He came home so tired that he could hardly lift up his arms or see. And when he had eaten, he wanted nothing more than to lie down on the front porch where the night was a little cooler. She sat alongside him, fanning him with a palmetto leaf. Once she started to tell him about Niccolene, but he fell asleep in the middle of her first sentence.

So she left him there on the porch and went to bed herself.

And that night her second to the youngest who was called Josef woke up with a malaria chill. When she saw him there, shaking so hard that his teeth clacked together like an old man who is dying, she wrapped him in a blanket and held him tight in her arms. And she forgot everything else. She began to yell for Niccolene to get out the other blanket and heat some water.

Nick went into the little back room to wake the girl. He came out with a hard look on his face, saying: “She ain’t here.” And then Loretta remembered and clapped her hand to her mouth.

He lit the stove and got the blanket himself. He didn’t ask Loretta anything until nearly an hour later, when the spasm had passed and the boy was asleep again.

“I ask you,” he said, “and I still continue to ask you. Niccolene, is she living in this house no more?”

Loretta wiped her hands on the apron she had tied over her nightdress, very slowly. “I have meant to tell you.”

Nick waited.

“She go this afternoon.”

Nick said: “Where she go?”

“She tell me not to say nothing at all.”

“Where she go?”

Loretta shook her head. “My heart been aching with her gone and never coming back.”

Nick lit his pipe silently. No one had ever seen him angry. “She ain’t coming back?”

“She gone with the boy.” And Loretta bent her head over into her apron and wailed.

“What boy?”

Loretta tapped her heels on the floorboards and sobbed. “She gone for good.”

“What boy?”

“She meet him at Petit Prairie. And she never say his name.”

“She ain’t never told you?”

“It ain’t a boy from this place,” Loretta said.

Nick’s pipe went out.

“One from over there.”

He kept turning the black stained pipe in his thick calloused fingers. Finally he put it away.

“You see why she ain’t told me,” Loretta said.

He stood up.

“But they ain’t there now,” Loretta said.

He leaned against the door frame and waited.

“I know you want to get her back.”

His face did not move. “Where they go?”

She shook her head. “Isle aux Chiens, no. She know you come for her there.”

“What did she do?”

“Not to the other island … but you know the little bayou that is back of there, the one they call the rabbit?”

He nodded.

“She meet him there.”

“And how she got there?”

Loretta ducked her head. “I ain’t ask her.”

Nick squatted down and began to tie the laces of his shoes.

“What I could do,” Loretta said, “is nothing.”

He finished the knot methodically, stood up and lit a cigarette. “I come back to deal with you.”

He went down the steps very slowly and walked away, the cigarette in his hand now. She sat and watched the yellow glow swing back and forth until it passed the bushes and disappeared.

Henry was at Rabbit Bayou early. There was a little half-circle in the marsh there, where the bayou drained into the bay. He slipped his pirogue out of sight, backing it in through a passage so narrow the reeds brushed hard on each side of the shell. And he settled down to wait.

Niccolene did not come until nearly twelve o’clock. By then the wind was up, and there were small flat pieces of cloud scudding low across the sky. Henry was just beginning to wonder when he heard the distinct crisp sound of a paddle in water. He kept perfectly still until the girl came into the mouth of the bayou. The first thing he recognized was her eyes—they were very large and close-set, and the shiny irises looked always as if they were full of tears.

She had stopped in the center of the little open space and was turning her pirogue in a slow circle, looking. She was panting; he could hear that even from where he was. Hard going in the wind out there in the bay, he thought. He pushed his way out of the grass.

She swung her pirogue over to meet him. “I didn’t see nothing.”

“You have trouble out there?”

She nodded. “I been thinking the wind was coming up.”

“Yea,” he said.

There was a small sloping bank, a tiny beach not more than four feet wide. They pulled the pirogues up there and put the bundle and the two brown paper bags from hers into Henry’s. Then, together they lifted her pirogue and ran it even higher up the shells.

“That ain’t going nowhere,” Henry said.

“My old man be fit to tie, and something happen to it.”

It don’t matter any more what he do, Henry started to say. But didn’t.”

His pirogue, now that Niccolene was in it, rode low in the water. He paddled it about a bit, testing. Finally he shook his head. “We ain’t going out in this.” The mouth of Bayou Verde was a mile north on the circle of the open bay.

“So we go the other way,” she said quietly.

Up Rabbit Bayou to Timbalier and then along its snaking route until it reached Bayou Verde.

“Longer.”

“We ain’t that hurried.”

“We better not be.”

“My old man going to think I gone out fishing when he don’t see me there in the morning.”

He nodded and headed the pirogue up Rabbit Bayou.

Later that night, when it began to storm they had to stop, and cut back some grass and push the pirogue into the empty spot to steady it a little because the wind was very high. They pulled a tarpaulin over their heads and waited a couple of hours, holding to the heaviest of the reeds to steady the canoe against the stiff wind.

“It getting cold,” Niccolene said once.

“Bottle whisky there.”

She got it and offered it to him first. He took it, surprised as he always was. Girls on Isle aux Chiens, he thought, would have taken a swallow first. But on the other island they didn’t. The women didn’t even eat with the men. Niccolene had told him that.

He took one gulp and handed it back. “Take it easy.”

“So cold my insides shivering.”

“Scared?”

She screwed the top back on the bottle and put it carefully away. “Nothing to be scared of,” she said.

The lightning rolled in around them. Even under the heavy tarpaulin they saw each other’s faces clearly in the bluish light.

“Don’t worry about it hitting you none,” Henry said. “I’m feeling real lucky, me.”

“I seen lightning before,” she said.

They were both silent, only shifting their weight slightly to balance the pirogue.

Finally she said: “Tell me what it like in New Orleans.”

“I told you,” he said, “all I got to know.”

It was daylight when they reached the end of Timbalier and turned up Bayou Verde. The sun was just barely up, but it was burning hot already and there were little steaming dazzles of heat mirages on the water ahead.

They were both paddling now and the heavy pirogue moved rapidly. The water ran smoothly past a half-inch below its gunwales.

They heard the lugger nearly half an hour before it appeared, heard the thump and bang of its gas engine echo out over the marsh grass.

To the right, maybe thirty feet back in the grass away from the bayou, was a little chênière, a shell ridge, covered with salt-burned slanting oaks, and vines, and palmettos. Without looking behind, without once saying anything, they swung the pirogue’s bow over and threaded through the little passes in the grass until they were behind the chênière. Then still without saying anything, Henry left the pirogue and, with his cane knife, cut his way to the top of the chênière.

Henry looked back over his shoulder once to be sure the pirogue was hidden in the grass and saw that Niccolene had come up silently too and was standing at his elbow. He motioned her back. She shook her head. They both peered out at the bayou from under the fringed leaf of a latanier.