The Hard Blue Sky (43 page)

She went on looking, up and down the tangle of the connecting shell paths, slower now and not hurrying, never hurrying, but moving just the same.

The island seemed quiet and empty. Most of the boats were out working (the
Mickey Mouse
was the only one back early), and most of the men with them. And the women, they weren’t walking around. They’d be gathered in little groups of three or four in kitchens somewhere.

Annie could have found them fast enough. If she’d wanted to. She kept strolling on, hands in the back pockets of her shorts. The only one, except for the kids and the animals, moving.

She had covered most of the paths on the eastern end. Finally she headed out along the single straight path that went out to Point Caminada to the west. Minute she came out of the trees she saw him, sitting on top of the tumble of concrete blocks where the light had been once.

“Hey!” she called. She was afraid to come on him by surprise. Afraid of what his face might look like, if he turned it on her suddenly. Stupid …

He looked over his shoulder. And lifted his left hand slightly. There was a little breeze out here, even in the sun. The big old straw hat tugged at its strings under her chin as she scrambled up the blocks and squatted down by him. “Crabbing?”

“Hell, no.”

“You shouldn’t be out without a hat.”

“Yea, I know,” he said.

She felt the top of his head. “You get sunstroke.”

“What are you doing down here?”

“Looking about the crabs,” she lied. “I didn’t want to lug all the nets and bait down here for nothing.”

“I been seeing some,” he said.

“I see one right now.”

“Where?”

She pointed. Down almost directly below them, in the rocks and seaweed, a single big blue claw.

“Man I knew in New Orleans could catch ’em with his bare hands.”

“I wouldn’t try it, me.”

“He could all right.”

She half-closed her eyes against the glare from the water. “What were you doing?”

“Going crazy.”

“Huh?”

“Look,” he said, “I got a sailboat that don’t belong to me. And I been on it how long? And it’s hot as hell there and there ain’t room enough. …”

“It’s a beautiful boat.”

“Sure,” he said, “only a sailboat’s no good unless it’s moving and there a breeze going through it.

“A real unusual hot summer—they call ’em weather breeders.”

“Yea?”

“Say it’s a sign of hurricanes coming.”

“Hell,” he said, “a hurricane would be cool.”

“Don’t go joking.”

“I mean it,” he said. “Where’s your shadow?”

“Who?”

“Claudie.”

“I got away from him.”

A young gull—soft brown color—settled on the water and waited, watching them.

“The boy they been looking for,” Inky said, “he a friend of yours?”

“Who?”

“The kid who didn’t come back—”

“Henry?”

“Yea.”

“Sure I knew him,” she said. ‘You know everybody on this island or you’re blind, deaf
and
dumb.”

“I guess so.”

“Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“Wondering what?”

“Nothing special.”

A clump of seaweed with bright orange berries washed up and hung on a cement projection, gleaming under the sun.

“You know,” Inky said, “place where I was last summer, had six-and eight-foot tides?”

“No tide here,” Annie said.

“Few inches,” Inky said.

“That’s what I meant.”

“You didn’t say that.”

My head hurts, Annie thought. And my back too. Maybe I’m going to have a period.

“The gal was from over there, huh?” Inky pointed ahead toward Terre Haute.

I got no reason to feel bad, Annie thought, except maybe the heat. I ought to feel fine.

“Over there?” Inky repeated.

“Huh?”

He pointed to the low rise of trees across the pass.

“Oh,” she said, “yea.”

Inky wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. And then he closed his eyes against the glare.

She yawned, and hunching over settled her forehead in her hands. She tipped back the hat so that the sun did not burn her neck.

“Look,” he said without opening his eyes, “haven’t you got anything else to do?”

“No,” she said.

“Don’t you have to wash the dishes or mop or something?”

“Where?”

“At your house.”

“Hell,” she said, “Adele does all that. … Anyway, it’s her house.”

“Oh.”

“You want me to go away?”

“Hell, no,” he said. “I was wondering if you wasn’t bored.”

“Nuh-uh.”

A kingfisher shot right over their heads, screaming.

Annie said: “When are you going into New Orleans?”

“With the
Pixie?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Jesus,” he said, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t like it here?”

“Not the most exciting place I’ve ever been.”

“I know,” Annie said.

“I bet you don’t get bored.”

“But I do … awful sometimes.”

She opened her eyes; he was shaking his head.

“I do,” she said. “Can I come in to New Orleans with you?”

“What?”

“I can get a job,” she said. “I saw the want ads just last week.”

He scratched his head: the sweat tickled.

“At the telephone office,” she said.

“Bet you could at that.”

“I just don’t want to go in all by myself,” she admitted slowly. “And looks like we going about the same time.”

“Hell,” he said, “I didn’t know you wanted to leave here.”

“Only I don’t want to go in by myself … kind of scary,” she said and felt ashamed. “You don’t think I can get a job?”

“Hell,” he said, “there’s lots of jobs in New Orleans.”

“You going to take me in?”

“Sure,” he said.

She felt herself relax. She stretched, slowly, carefully, all over, like a cat.

A
ND THAT NEXT DAY
Pete Livaudais came back from the western end of the island where he had been hiding. Story LeBlanc saw him first, walking along the main shell road, which was just a little wider than the other paths. He looked sort of hungry, and there was a growth of spotty kid-beard on his face—but he didn’t look bad, except for his clothes being muddy.

When he saw him, Story wondered what he should say or if he should take himself back into the brush and disappear. But when they passed, Pete Livaudais just lifted his hand in the half-gesture he had had since he was a child, and said: “Hi.”

And Story LeBlanc spent the rest of the afternoon telling people what he had seen and how it looked like the kid was over the worst of it.

“Without losing his wits,” Mamere Terrebonne said when she heard, “yes?”

“Look all right to me,” Story said.

“Sometime …” and Mamere touched one yellow wrinkled finger to her forehead.

When Eddie Livaudais came down to the Rendezvous for a drink later on, he didn’t have to be asked questions. He knew what everybody was wondering and so he told them. “Had to get over the worst,” he said, “and the kid had to do it by himself. Had to go out there where there wasn’t nothing but dogs and animals to watch him.”

Coming over to hear the news, Annie met Perique just outside the Rendezvous. She hadn’t talked to him for a couple of weeks. “Where you been keeping yourself?” She was glad to see him now.

“Working,” he said.

“You going to ask me in for a beer?”

“If you boyfriend don’t object.”

There was a little twinge, a little hurt. But she laughed. “I got no boyfriend.”

“No?”

“How’s Therese?”

“Okay.”

“Haven’t seen her much either, lately.”

“She been around.”

His face had gotten more serious in the last couple of weeks, she thought. But maybe it was just the dark. “You look different,” she said.

“Me? No.”

They went inside. Over in one corner of the bar, Eddie Livaudais was talking to a little group. Perique went down to the other.

“You don’t want to hear?”

He shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Don’t like listening to other people’s miseries, me.”

“I never thought of it that way … but I guess it is so.”

Perique went around behind the counter and got the two beers himself. “Too busy down there to give us any attention.”

“They’re interested, all right.”

“Forgot the glasses.” And he went around the counter again and fished the glasses out from the ice locker. He shook them out, then put them up on the counter.

“It’s interesting,” she said, “for sure.”

“You go listen.”

She shook her head.

“That what you come over here for.”

“In a way, but I can hear it later.”

She poured the beer carefully so that there was no foam. “I’m glad Pete come back, anyway.”

He nodded.

“You don’t look happy about it,” she said.

“There’s all sorts of ways of coming back.”

“I don’t get it.”

He leaned sideways against the bar. “You seen Pete yet?”

She shook her head.

“Well, I see him.”

She brushed the hair back out of her eyes. “So?”

“He don’t look good to me.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“You ask me,” Perique said, “and I tell you what I think. Only I can’t tell you why I think it.”

“What’s he look like?”

Perique shrugged.

“Everybody say he look tired to death.”

“He was plain crazy about that brother of his,” Perique said. “Maybe nobody ever figured out how much until just now.”

“He took it hard.”

“Still taking it hard,” Perique said.

“Everybody say he’s coming out of it.”

“Maybe,” Perique said.

Annie turned and squinted into the cracked mirror behind the bar, a mirror trimmied with red and green feathers and some that were just plain gray-brown (that had come straight from ducks). Annie looked at herself and at Perique.

“You never come by the house,” she said.

“I thought you was busy.”

“Not all the time.”

Down at the other end of the bar, Eddie Livaudais straightened up and pushed his way through the people around him. “I got to get home,” he said over his shoulder. He crossed the room in that loping bowlegged gait of his. “Hi, love birds,” he said to Annie and Perique. And then again over his shoulder to the group that had re-formed in a straight line along the bar, he said: “I got to see how he make out … tired as a puppy dog he come in.”

“It’s a funny thing for sure,” Perique said quietly, “how getting one back after two days makes him forget how he lost the other one for good.”

Annie went back to staring at the feathers that fringed the mirror. You could see the lacy work of cobwebs linking them all together.

“I wish I knew what I thought,” she said.

“You having trouble?”

There was a little mocking twist in his voice and she was very sorry the words had slipped out.

“I haven’t been feeling too good, lately.”

“Sick?”

“My head hurts all the time.”

“It’s all the thoughts,” he said, “swirling around inside.”

“Quit making fun of me.”

Like colors, all mixed. And how would you straighten them out? And how would you make sense out of them? Or did you just wait?

Perique did not come by the house to see her. For a couple of days she thought he would. Then she didn’t expect him anymore.

T
HE PICTURES HAD DONE
it. Inky kept thinking about her now. First he spread them all out carefully on the port bunk, except one which he pinned to the wall with scotch tape. Then the next day he gathered them all up, and got them set in his hands for tearing up—only he stopped just at the last minute. And put them under the cushions. By the next day they were back out again.

Still, when he spotted her coming, he ducked below and gathered them up and put them in the big locker. When she got there he was back on deck, polishing the brass lamps. They were lined up on the dock with the little heap of rags and the bottle of polish.

“Hi,” she said.

The dock was empty. Mid-afternoon—most people would be home taking a nap after dinner if they weren’t actually out on the boats. Even the September sun was too strong around noon. She could feel it now, burning through the straw hat she had perched on the back of her head.

“Can I come aboard?” she said.

He waved his arm. She came. The varnished wood burned the soles of her feet. And when she sat down beside him—he had not put out the cushions—the wood stung the backs of her thighs with its heat. She lifted up her legs, hugging them with her hands.

“It’s too hot to sit.”

“Want me to get you a cushion from below?”

“No,” she brought her legs down, sitting half on her hands. “It get cool in a minute.”

“You think you ought to be coming out here in broad daylight?”

“Why not?”

“People’ll figure out something’s been going on.”

She watched his face with the prickles of light brown beard. He hadn’t shaved that morning. And he was frowning as he looked at her. “I reckon,” she said, “most everybody know I been sleeping with you.”

His pipe was out. He stopped and relit it.

“They ain’t going to mind that,” Annie said.

“Look,” he said, “if your old man’s coming after me with a shotgun, I want to know it.”

She smiled, very slowly. “He ain’t going to care about it.”

“Yea,” he said doubtfully.

A big brown pelican skimmed over the top of the mast and settled on the water.

“Want me to help you?” She jumped up suddenly and scrambled out of the cockpit to the dock. Let’s us clean up the lamps.”

“I’ll be damned,” he said softly as he picked up the polishing rag.

She crouched back on her haunches, holding the lamp against her thigh. By the time they had finished there was a big black smear reaching almost all around her leg.

She giggled. “Look what I done.”

“Got some on the front of your shirt too. And on your face.”

She rubbed her face with the back of her hand. “Off?”

“Hell, no.” A single fat torn cat swaggered past them and sniffed the polished lamps. “Come on down below and I’ll get a washrag.”