The Hard Blue Sky (54 page)

“Talk,” Al said.

“What they say?” Adele asked.

Lacy shrugged. “I can’t remember for them, me.”

“Don’t pay any attention to them,” Al said. He added Seven-Up to the whisky. “Here.”

“More people been in here drinking,” Lacy said.

“A good idea, no?”

“But now most everyone home eating their dinner.”

“Except us.”

“That is right.”

“They don’t do nothing for a while.”

“Why?” Adele said.

“They going to have some good storm to keep them busy.”

“When?” Adele asked, “when?”

“Oh hell,” Lacy said, “always get storms in September. Nothing peculiar in that.”

“Who said it was?” Al took his wife’s hand and put it around her glass. “Only it’ll keep people too busy to think of fighting for a while.”

Claudie gulped his beer, sputtered and rubbed his face hard with both hands. Then, because they were laughing at him, he went back and tried again. This time it was a little better.

They finished the bottle. Al pulled his watch out of his pocket and looked at it. “Take the boy and go home,” he said.

“Where you going?”

“Me?” Al said. “I think maybe I go take a walk down to the boat and have a look at it.”

Adele opened her mouth to object.

“Go on.”

“I feel the likker,” she said.

“Go home and lay down.”

She nodded, short little jerky nods, grabbed Claudie by the hand and went.

Al checked the mooring-lines of his boat. They were secure. But then he had checked—and reworked them—just a few hours before.

When he had finished, he put his hands to his back and for the first time let his eyes run down the line of moored luggers. The mast, the one tall thin mast that shot over the stocky clumsy rigging of the workboats—that one was gone. Then, no longer trying to be casual, he went up on the high pointed bow, stood on the thick wood rail, and looked out at the bay. The boats were not very far out, the sailboat and the little launch that was guiding her in. The
Pixie
was going on power, its mast a naked stick against the low clouds. Without sails it was unbalanced. The hull wobbled and pitched in the little swells.

He could see Annie’s yellow shirt, see it quite clearly even in the mist. She was standing in the cockpit, standing upright, on the port seat, and leaning at a little angle, one arm wrapped around the boom. She must have been looking back. She must have seen him. She went below. And there was just a gray-blue smear, Inky’s shirt, left by the tiller.

When Al got home, Claudie was in the front door, swinging back and forth on the screen door. He could put just one foot on the bottom of the frame, and he could push off with the other. The door would sag slowly out and swing slowly back, creaking.

“You want to break it off?” Al asked. And then he heard the sobbing.

Adele was sitting in the living-room, sitting in the middle of the sofa, head in her hands, crying. “I made her leave,” she said.

When Al sat alongside her and tried to comfort her, she put her head in her lap and cried harder.

“It’s the likker,” Al tried to tell her. “It does some people that.” It had made him feel levelheaded and had given him a little glow. So that in spite of Annie’s leaving, he felt pretty good.

Claudie swung back and forth on the screen with a strange frightened look on his face. And Al went right on patting Adele’s head and wondering what the hell had made him give her that much whisky.

When she was too tired to cry any more, she sat up and poked at her eyes with her fingers.

“Now look,” Al said, “no use to take it like that. I been expecting this, halfway. And it wasn’t but time till she find a way to go back.”

A few minutes later Perique came down to the dock. The
Pixie
was blurred now and indistinct. Even as he watched, she disappeared. And only the sound of her engine remained, clear and loud, echoed by the fog.

A
NNIE CAME UP TO
the cockpit again. The island was out of sight in the heavy mist, and the other side hadn’t come into view. “You want the compass?” she asked.

“They got a compass.” And he tipped his chin to the little launch a couple of hundred yards ahead.

“Don’t look like we’re anywhere.”

Inky looked back over his shoulder. “Can’t see anything.”

Annie settled down in the corner, facing the stern, back to the cabin. The heavy mist gathered and ran down the wood in little streams. The boom dripped water steadily. She could feel her cheeks turn wet and she wiped at them impatiently.

“You ought to have a cap on,” Inky said.

“I don’t want to go after it.”

“Take this,” he said. “I’ll go get it.”

She slid down the seat, getting wetter and not caring. She took the end of the tiller, lightly.

“Got it?”

She nodded and he crossed over, balancing himself against the roll of the boat, and dropped down the hatch.

She squinted after the launch ahead. And around into the soft gray-white fuzziness. She moved the tiller, hesitantly. The boat responded, clumsily, heavily, the way it would always do under power.

“Hold her steady,” Inky called. “Where’s the god-damn cap?”

“On top the locker.” Her voice sounded sleepy and muffled. She could feel her hair begin to cling to her head, wet and close. A gull squaaked somewhere, very far off, and she lifted her head to look. There was just light gray overhead, not even a round spot for the sun.

The clouds were right on top now. Around her shoulders like a coat. But over them, if you went high enough, it was always clear—sun or moon—clear and warm or clear and cold.

That part didn’t reach you, wasn’t the one you had to worry about. The lower part of the sky now, the part that touched your head, touched the ground—there was trouble in it: storms and rain and wind. Things like that.

She had swung off course. The launch was over to the right. And one of the men (she had met him at the dock, not even an hour before: what was his name?) was waving at her. She pushed the tiller over.

“What’s going on?” Inky called, feeling the bow swing around. “I was dreaming,” she said, “I’m back on.” You won’t lose me, she told the man in the other boat, silently. You can’t lose me. Not when I’m going to New Orleans. Not when I’m going to get married.

“Be damned if I can find the cap.”

“Maybe,” she said, “I left it up by the anchor.”

She could hear him swearing softly as he went climbing over the baggage. The cabin was littered, her stuff mostly. But there wasn’t room to put it away.

Not my fault, she told herself. Not at all.

“Got it,” he yelled. He did not come right up. She could hear him rattling things around up there.

She sat holding the tiller, feeling the nervous vibration of the engine and the heavy dull pull of water on the rudder. If I put it over hard, she thought, and step up the motor, we’d be out of sight in no time, and there’d be just us, and the fog all around, nobody but us.

Until we got stuck, she thought with a little laugh. Maybe she didn’t know her way around good as some, but she knew that much.

“It’s a stupid boat to have,” she told Inky when his dark sleek head came out of the hatch.

“For around here?” Inky said. “You’re telling me?”

She caught the rubbery faintly sour odor of the pale blue coats he held on one arm. “They stink.”

“So they stink. Put ’em on.” He handed one to her. “Just the tops.”

She held out the blue jacket and shook it violently.

“Put it on,” he said. “We want a wedding instead of a burying.”

She pulled it over her head. And pulled up the hood.

“Jesus,” he said, “we’re way off course.”

“Well, come take it. I was putting on this stuff.”

He took the tiller, and swung the bow around again. “You were really off.”

“There’s enough water way out here.”

“But if we lose them, what happens then?”

“We could find them again.”

“Sure we could,” Inky said. “Only I don’t want to have to do that.”

She slid along the seat until her back touched the cabin. Then she swung up her feet and wrapped her arms around her knees. Mist condensed on the boom dripped steadily on her hood, with a kind of flat plopping sound, like batter hitting the sides of a bowl.

“They’re wavin’,” Inky said once, and lifted his arm to wave back. “Everything’s okay!” he yelled.

They were both quiet. Her legs went to sleep and she had to stretch them out and rub them, hard. The gearshift began to rattle in its slot; Inky got out his pocketknife and tightened the bolts on each side.

The swell died. There was no wind and what you could see of the water was flat and glossy, except for the two wakes.

After a while Inky said: “Look at me. Getting married and liking it, too. Man, man, how strong is that. …” He sounded nervous.

“I was thinking,” Annie admitted, “about that.”

“It sure is funny.”

“I guess so.”

Inky scratched behind his ear. “I’m sure glad to get off.”

“Me too.”

“It’s nice and all that,” he said, “but it’s not the most exciting place in the world, you know what I mean.”

“I been living there, remember?”

“Can I show you some living in New Orleans! Man … is it good.”

“I want to,” Annie said.

“Maybe I won’t go back to the boats for a while. There’s this guy I know has a place on Iberville, always can use a man at the bar.”

“I can get a job too,” Annie said.

“It’s going to be fine,” Inky said, “it’s going to be real fine.”

That gull was still calling, somewhere overhead. She tried to see through the drizzle.

“You won’t see him,” Inky said, “less he comes down and sits himself on the mast.”

Annie stood up and stretched. “Not being able to see where you’re going always makes me kind of nervous.”

“They using a compass, so we know.” …

Annie walked up to the bow.

“Stay on board,” Inky told her.

“Don’t worry about me.”

The decks were slippery and her sneaker bottoms were glassy, so she kept one hand on the lifelines until she could swing around the forestay and settle herself on the railing of the pulpit. The water was directly beneath her now and she stared into it for a while, watching the lines of the bow wave go curling up on the hull. She felt peculiar and she held on to the stay very tightly to keep from falling.

It was not being able to see backward or forward. That was it.

After a while she got up and went back to the cockpit.

“I’m always glad when you make it back here,” Inky said.

“Look,” she said after a little, “you don’t have to.”

“To what?”

She clicked her tongue. “Get married.”

He lifted the tiller and scratched his chin on it. “Suppose I want to?”

“You didn’t want to last week.”

“That was last week.”

“I meant … it’s all right with me if you just drop me off in New Orleans.”

He was resting his chin on the polished wood tiller. “I don’t get it.”

“I just don’t want you feeling you got to do anything.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake.”

“I’m being serious.”

“Look,” Inky said, “if you don’t want to you can get off at Petit Prairie.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“So I don’t get it.”

The shift began to rattle again. “Damn,” Inky said, and pulled out the handle. “Get up a minute,” he said. And lifted the seat to check the dial for the r.p.m.’s. “Okay.”

“I guess I don’t get anything,” he said. “Maybe. I thought they’d make a lot more fuss over your leaving and all.”

“Huh?” she had only half heard him.

He lifted the cover again and pointed. She peered in: his automatic was there, on a carefully spread piece of canvas.

“What for?”

“I thought somebody’d object, with a shotgun maybe. A lot of shooting around the last couple of days.”

She reached in and touched the cold steel of the handle and then the barrel. She straightened up and he closed the compartment. She stood looking at him.

He shrugged and settled down cross-legged. “Look,” he said, “how was I to know? I thought maybe your father or what’s-his-name? Perique? They would go making trouble.”

Annie just shook her head.

“Well, it figures. … He was an old boyfriend of yours.”

“Who?”

“Perique.”

“In a way,” she nodded.

“He wanted to marry you.”

“For a little while.” She rested her forehead against the cool wood of the boom and closed her eyes, remembering. Remembering, or trying to remember. There was something there, a feel maybe. She tried … a color, maybe, or a smell … the times when Perique had hung around the porch, shoving himself back and forth slowly in the swing. And when the swing had broke, when the hook had pulled clean out of the beam overhead, he had got a new hook down at the store, and then dragged up a ladder and put it back in, and when he saw that one of the slats had been broken falling, he fixed that too. That time then … there was more between it and now than just a couple of month. …

There had been a feel to those days, for sure. … It wasn’t so much that she longed for it, as that she wanted to remember. … She was irritated, and she shifted restlessly from one foot to the other.

“Maybe you are sorry,” Inky said softly.

She looked down at him, surprised. “I never thought of that.”

It was true. She hadn’t. It hadn’t once occurred to her that there was a way back. She thought about it now and shook her head: there wasn’t. And the reasons why were just as vague as her memories. … The happenings of last night, just last night, were as far away as those days before Inky had come.

“I wanted to tell you …” But what? She wasn’t sure. Just last night. And it was the dinghy. “I had to.”

“What?” Inky asked. “Get off the island?”

That too. That too.

She would tell him someday. When she had gotten some sleep, and she knew more exactly what had happened. She would tell him that she had lost him part of his precious boat. Or maybe (she thought with a sudden burst of shrewd woman-thought) she just wouldn’t.

And her mind went back to those days before Inky had come, trying to find them, trying to find some detail that she could hang a thread of memory on.