The Hard Blue Sky (47 page)

Between trips, Claudie sat on the porch with his mother, on the screen porch where the mosquitoes wouldn’t bother them.

“Now you listen to me,” Adele told him, “you listen to me good. In the daytime, when you go playing around, you know?”

He nodded, trying very hard to understand what she was saying. The tone already told him it was important.

“You go playing around and with one thing and another you don’t notice where you going and where you are. …”

He nodded again.

“You don’t do that any more.” Her voice was deep and sudden and sharp.

“No?” he offered uncertainly.

“When you play you watch where you are and you don’t go far off. Or the old men of the woods’ll get you. And they feed you to the loup-garous, just one little piece at a time.”

Claudie shivered. From the back yard Al yelled, “Hey, towel …”

“Go on,” Adele told him. “Towel’s on the chair in the kitchen.”

“God-damn fool kid,” Hector said, “son of a bitching fool.”

Cecile said: “His mama, she call the clinic and they say he going to make it, most likely.”

“No,” Hector said, “she tell you that?”

Cecile shook her head and grinned.

“Who told you?”

“I was over talking to Papa, when she comes in and wants change because she’s going to use the phone.” Cecile spread her hands. “So I know.”

“Used to tell me your ears would drop right off from listening.”

“They didn’t,” Cecile said.

“I’m right glad to hear that.”

“Wonder if he did much,” Cecile said.

“How the hell would I know?”

Cecile gave a quick grin. “Thought maybe you been over and ask.”

“Oh sure,” Hector said with heavy irony. “Can’t hardly wait.”

She was putting buttons on a shirt of Don’s. “And what you think they fixing to do?”

“Nothing,” Hector said, “with somebody watching the boats all the time. Can’t do nothing much.”

Perique had brought Mamere Terrebonne a present: a small bottle of anisette, bright-red-colored. And he stood on her porch a minute talking to her.

“There is some doings, no?” Her yellow-toothed smile flashed at him. And her little eyes disappeared in the crinkly folds of skin.

If I get old, Perique thought, I be glad to see somebody too. “We had some excitement for sure,” he said.

She tilted back and forth in her rocker. “I have seen excitement before.”

“The same thing?”

“Or another … just alike.”

“Tell me.”

She grinned again. And shook her head. “You got to find out for yourself.”

“Okay, cherie.”

“I seen before …”

“What you predicting?”

“Nothing.”

“You predicting hurricanes this year?”

The corners of her old mouth turned down and she sulked.

“Tell me now what you predicting?”

“Layovers to catch meddlers,” she muttered.

Perique had a date. He had put on a fresh shirt and a clean pair of pants. Therese was waiting for him too, in the swing on her front porch. She was wearing a bright pink dress and she’d done her hair different too. It was pulled up on top and drawn through a ring of pink flowers.

She’s expecting to marry me, Perique thought suddenly. And stopped perfectly still. When Therese turned around and called to him, it was all he could do to get his feet moving in the direction of that porch. When he finally got there, he sat in the rocking-chair where her mother usually sat.

She was looking at him with a very hurt expression, but he didn’t care.

Finally she said: “You thinking about Annie, no?”

He jumped. “No,” he said, truthfully. He hadn’t been at all.

She didn’t believe it. She looked even more hurt. Finally they went back into the kitchen and found a bottle of her father’s orange wine. After a couple of glasses of that, he felt better. And went back and sat in the swing with her.

Her parents went to bed. They turned off the porch light. The dark hit him like a sharp jab. He rubbed at his eyes.

“I brought the wine out here,” Therese whispered, “so Papa wouldn’t find it.”

There were no glasses so he drank out of the bottle.

He put one arm around Therese. The other one slipped in the neck of her dress.

For a minute he thought of Annie and her high hard breasts. Then he forgot. Therese was the softest woman he’d ever felt.

T
HE NEXT FEW DAYS
were still and hot. But there were certain signs that made people shake their heads and wonder.

The Gulf had the restless uncertain feeling of a storm on it somewhere. And the surf on the south side of the island was much higher.

“Nervous, for sure,” Cecile said with her bright fierce grin.

The sky was still blue-white overhead, but the thunderheads had moved closer. They looked higher and thicker now too, and their underbellies were darker. Long ragged streaks of lightning reached from one to the other and sometimes flashed down into the gray water.

None of the boats went out. The men had been making good money lately; now they were tired and they had enough. They wanted to lay around the house for a while, sleeping in the afternoon. Some of the younger unmarried kids took Dan Rivé’s boat and went into Petit Prairie. They went to see Pete Livaudais in the hospital. They all tiptoed down the ward and crowded around his bed and made jokes in whispers. And Pete answered them best he could from under the bandage. He was very pale under his sunburn, a kind of muddy color. But he grinned with the good side of his face.

After a while the nurse made them leave. So they went to have a couple of drinks and see if they could pick up some money shooting pool. And that night they got into a fight. Nobody knew if they started it, but around nine o’clock everybody was fighting and yelling over at Rose’s Café, and it was a miracle pure and simple that the big front window didn’t get broken. The fighting spilled out on the street. And the deputy sheriffs came and looked at it and wondered what they should do. And finally did nothing.

Free-for-alls always ran down. There was a time when people stopped swinging and blinked and straightened up and looked around. And felt kind of sheepish and sneaked away off into the darker streets.

They even went back to the island a whole day earlier than they’d intended to. The fight had been depressing.

Back at the island the family men nailed up shutter hooks and patched screens and cleaned drainpipes. It was as if the feel of a storm in the air had reminded them that the houses could stand a little fixing.

Hector sat cross-legged on the flat tin roof of his house. The last brief rain had shown a leak up there, and he had to find it. He had got it now, and after two hours up there he was almost finished. His leg went to sleep. He stood up, stretching it, and knocked the hammer to the ground.

He looked down at it and yelled: “Cecile, hey, Cecile, hey!”

She came out of the house and stood looking up at him, hands on her hips.

“Reach me the hammer.”

She did. “You going to get it fixed?”

“We got a bottle beer?”

“Sure.”

“Reach me that too.”

“Up there?” she said; “in the sun?”

“Hell,” he said, “sure.”

While she went to get it, he began to hammer again, but this time the noise made his ears ache and he stopped.

He drank the beer slowly, while Cecile stood below and watched him.

“Got nothing to do?” he asked her politely.

She just grinned.

“You making me nervous.”

She went away. He balanced the hammer across his thigh and rubbed at his eyes with the backs of both hands. The sun was getting to him—always the same place, the back of his neck, on the old scar there.

But he’d have to get the roof finished. He tossed the empty can down into the yard, and began again. After a few minutes he stopped again and stared into the greenish brown tops of the trees. He yawned.

Cecile came out again. “You finish?”

The silence has worried her. “When I finish,” he said, “I come tell you.”

The other island—he’d been thinking about it a lot lately. And wondering what the people over there were going to do.

That Livaudais kid, he thought wearily. Somebody should locked him up.

He took off his cap, fanned himself with it a couple of times and flipped it back on his head again.

He found himself thinking about Cecile, about the soft, heavily fleshed curves of her body, the faint musky smell of her skin. A smell that could drive a man clean out of his mind.

There was another aching in his body now, apart from his tiredness. He got up and scrambled down the ladder.

If she’d just let him alone … if she just hadn’t gone running in and out every half-minute … he’d have finished.

He picked up the beer can and heaved it along the side of the house into the grove of hackberries at back.

He’d go find her. And he wouldn’t be able to finish the roof today. Tired as he was he wouldn’t be able to get out of bed again.

He shrugged. Some things a man had to be glad of. And this was one of them. The roof could wait.

He let the screen slam after him. “Cecile,” he called. “I got something to show you. Come quick.”

T
HE FOLLOWING EVENING NOTHING
seemed different either. Story LeBlanc had started painting the inside of the wheelhouse on the
St. Christopher
and he worked for a while on it after supper. Dan Rivé and Ozzie Pailet were being guards that night, and they sat on the edge of the pier and told each other jokes for a little while. Then Dan got out a handline and dropped it over, not looking to catch anything particularly, just wanting something to do.

Hector came down and got a screwdriver off his boat. Don came with him. They stopped and talked for a while, until Don got so sleepy he began to cry.

About eight o’clock Annie came down to the
Pixie.
Inky was waiting. They took a short silent walk—it was too hot a night to go far—and came back to the boat. It was a bad evening. Inky was restless. Annie was angry, furiously angry, only she wasn’t quite sure at what.

“Jesus,” he said, “I’ll be crazy and talking to myself if I stay here much longer.”

That was when the cold heavy feeling had started in her chest. “What been happening to you?”

“Get so I talk to myself,” Inky switched on the little radio so hard that the knob came off in his fingers. “Jesus God!”

“If you went slower,” Annie said, “that wouldn’t happen.”

“Jesus. … You keep out of it.”

She waited a minute. She was not sure whether she felt hurt or not. “You call Arthur again?”

“God damn it,” Inky said, “how the hell do you think I talk to him?”

“You didn’t say you talk to him.”

“The hell I didn’t.”

“What he say?” Annie asked quietly.

Inky screwed up his mouth, mimicking. “Can’t get anybody … can’t get away himself. … But he’s trying like hell … and he’s going out to the yacht club this afternoon because he thinks he’s got a line on a guy. … Horse shit!”

“Well,” Annie said and rubbed her hands up and down her thighs, “maybe he will.”

“Another week,” Inky said, “and I’m leaving the boat right here and going in myself.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Hell,” Inky said, “I’ve had it.”

“You can’t take it back alone?”

“Jesus!” Inky said and threw himself back, full length on the bunk.

“Maybe we could get somebody from here to take you up the bayou.”

“They too busy,” he said. “I been asking around.”

“Maybe,” she said, “I can ask.”

“I got enough trouble,” he said, “you stay out of it.”

There was that funny little twisting pain. “I was just helping.”

He sat up then, surprised by her tone, and patted her shoulder. “Don’t pay any attention to me, honey.” He got up and rummaged around the medicine cabinet. “You like perfume?”

“Sure,” she said.

“Here.” He found two bottles, the ones that had belonged to Helen, the ones he had put away weeks ago. “Don’t know anything about it, but I bet this is good stuff.”

Annie held it up, sniffing at the tops.

“Go ahead,” he said, “put some on, put some of each on, smear it around.”

“I never heard of this kind …
Balenciaga.”

“There’s some more around,” Inky said, “I’ll find ’em and you can have them too.”

“This is plenty.”

“Hell,” he said, “I’m sure not going to use it.”

“Me, neither,” she said. She put a little of one bottle on carefully, behind her ears. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I know the channel, and I could help you take the boat back.”

He laughed shortly. “Don’t make funnies like that.”

“I could.”

“For God’s sake,” he said, “quit, will you. I don’t want to fight.”

“I’m not trying to fight,” she said and her voice was very small.

“Here,” Inky said and took the bottle away from her, “lemme do that. You’re not putting enough of the stuff on.”

“Don’t waste it.”

“Hell,” he said, “you got to put it all over. Or it’s no good.”

Annie went home very late that night. She didn’t notice anything. But then she was too tired. And she felt sick. All over. In spite of the hot night she shivered every few minutes. Her ears were singing.

Maybe I’m getting malaria, she thought. Her legs ached. They felt heavy and swollen and she kept stumbling. When she did get home she fell down on the bed, not bothering to undress.

She lay in the dark and wondered, breathing in the heavy musky odor of the perfume.

She heard the yelling, vaguely and far off. But she didn’t get up. It was coming to her from miles away. It didn’t matter to her. It didn’t matter at all.

P
EOPLE ON
I
SLE
A
UX
Chiens slept heavily that night. Maybe having a guard out on the boats made them feel safer. Maybe they just couldn’t quite believe anything would happen. It was such a quiet still night, dark with just a flickering of heat lightning off to the south. Occasionally a bird would squaak or a kid would call out or a hot tomcat would yeowl. But you could almost feel the sleep all around, thick, like a fog.