* * *
On the first Monday of each month, Our Lady of Perpetual Help Nursing Home would bring Merlin’s grandfather over for a daylong visit. About eight-thirty a white van pulled into the farm lot and two attendants rolled out Octave LeBlanc in his wheelchair and installed him on the porch. There wasn’t much left to him. Sixty-five years before, he had been a millwright with the F. B. Williams Lumber Company in the bayous of St. Mary Parish, but now he was a pale eighty-pound rack of bones. He was blind, but he could still think and talk. Etienne drew up a rush-bottomed chair on one side of him and Merlin and the baby sat on the other side in the swing. The old man blinked his dead eyes, flung a gray arm against the weatherboard of the house, and dragged his palm along the wood. “You gonna have to paint next year, Merlin.” The voice was thin and whispery, like a broom sweeping a wood floor.
Merlin looked at the peeling paint under the eaves. “It might last longer.”
“It might not.”
The baby moved in Merlin’s arms, subsiding and yawning, dangling a naked foot over his arms, testing the air. Merlin was so full of worry about the child, he could hardly pay attention to his grandfather. He couldn’t raise her. What if he died? Worse, what if he didn’t do any better with her than he had with his own?
“You got a beer for me?”
“No,” Etienne said. “You don’t need no beer at eight something in the morning.”
“What,” the old man said, “you scared it’s going to kill me?”
Etienne leaned back in his chair and laughed. “Poppa, if we give you a beer, you’ll sleep through your visit.”
The old man turned his head quick as a bird. “It’s a hell of a thing you won’t give me one son-of-a-bitchin’ beer.” He flung a hand toward his son, who crossed his arms against his overalls and leaned back against a peeling white roof support.
The baby stuck her tongue out and blew a bubble over it. It was very warm outside, and she was in a diaper only. She made a fist with her left hand, put it into her right palm, pulled them apart, and made a noise like a laugh. Octave’s head turned. “What the hell’s that?”
“A possum,” Merlin said.
“Let me see.” The old man held out two trembly arms bound with black veins. The baby went at once to him. “Ow,” the old man said as she settled in his lap. He ran his hand over her head and over her stomach. “Merlin,” he said fondly, a smile showing his cracked dentures, “you tricky bastard.”
“Granpop.”
“This ain’t no possum.” He put his hand between the baby’s legs and gave the diaper a quick squeeze. “This ain’t no lil’ boy, either.”
Etienne leaned over to help the baby find its foot. Merlin bent down, picked up a shotgun shell, and handed it to the child.
“Whose baby is this?” Octave asked, finding the girl’s nose with his fingers and gently pushing it like a button. The baby opened her mouth and sang a note.
“Lucy’s,” Merlin said. “Remember, we told you about the airplane.”
“That’s right. Didn’t that girl know no better than to go up in one of them damn things?” And then he turned his eyes on Merlin as though he could see, and said, “Didn’t you teach her nothin’?” and Merlin shuddered like a beef cow hit with the flat side of an ax. The old man had always told people what he thought and what they should think. Merlin feared his directness, didn’t understand it. But he was ninety-three years old and all his children were still alive.
“Don’t be hard on me, Granpop.”
The old man turned his head toward where he thought his son was sitting. “Somebody shoulda,” he accused.
“Come on, now.” Etienne lost his smile.
Octave bent over and planted a shaky, slow kiss on the top of the baby’s head. She looked up and burped. “Ha-haaaa,” Octave rasped. “You feel some better now for sure, eh, bébé?” His hand found the shell she was playing with and seized it. “What’s this?” He picked up his face and aimed it at Merlin.
“A play toy,” Etienne said.
“She likes it to play with.” Merlin and his father exchanged worried looks.
Octave ran his forefinger around the rim. “Feels like a number-six play toy with a ounce-and-a-quarter shot.” He tossed it over the back of the wheelchair, where it bounced on the porch and rolled off into the grass. “You don’t give no baby a damn shot shell to play with.” His voice was little, but it spoke from a time and experience Merlin could not imagine. One of his stiff legs fell off its step on the wheelchair. “I ought to be put in jail for causing two muskrats like you. You lying to me just because I can’t move out this chair and get you.”
Etienne put a meaty hand on his father’s shoulder. “Easy, Poppa.”
“’Tien, what I told you. Talk to the boy. He got no more heart than a alligator. All he cares about is his berries and his tractor.” The old man’s eyes began to brim with a filmy moisture.
“Hush,” Etienne said, looking at the porch floor.
“Perrin came in the home last night. He told me about Valentino in a yellow shirt. I heard it and I believed it.”
“Hush, now. This won’t do no good.”
The old man grimaced as he moved the baby over in his lap. She put four fingers in his limp green shirt pocket and pulled. “I know what I know. Merlin in a damn barroom lookin’ for a woman like a pork chop.”
Merlin put his hands together and stared at the baby. Old men made him feel weak and ignorant, because he trusted them and believed what they said about things. They had been where he was going. Here was his grandfather, ninety-three years old, his blood and his bone telling him what he was afraid to hear.
Octave coughed deeply and his whole chest caved in, his eyes closing and even his ears moving forward with the slope of his shoulders. It was a while before he got his breath back, and then his voice was weaker than ever. “Looking for a woman like a damn toaster he can bring home and take in the kitchen and plug in. Plug in and forget it. Hot damn.” He began coughing again, but he had so little wind in him, his cough was more like a slow aspirate rattle. He seemed to be drowning in a thimbleful of liquid deep in his chest. Merlin took the baby and brought her inside while his father bent over Octave. When he came back out, Etienne’s face was red, and tears were streaming down.
“What is it?” Merlin asked, holding on to the screen door handle.
“I don’t know. I guess he’s asleep. His heart’s just like a little bird, you can’t hardly hear it at all.” He sat down and began to feel for a pulse in the soft skin of his neck. “You know,” Etienne began, “what he said about you is true. You never felt much about your children. You never had no kind of emotions.” He placed a huge spotted hand on Octave’s forehead.
Merlin sat back in his chair, pulled a handkerchief, and mopped the sweat from his face. “Daddy, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m not no rock like you and Granpop make out.”
Etienne looked over at the lean-to and the dull red tractor it sheltered. “When you was thirteen I took you to a movie in town. Before it started up, the Movietone news come on and showed four fellows killed by a tornado, laid out next to they barn. When you saw that picture you said, ‘Look, Daddy, them fools nailed the seams wrong on that tin roof.’” He looked down at the floor and blinked. “I shoulda pulled you outside and talked to you right then.”
Merlin sat in the swing and put his head in his hands. A breeze slowly stirred high in the pecan tree by the porch, the way a spirit might rattle the leaves passing through. He thought about the women in town. He might try again. Maybe at church. Maybe at the KC bingo game. And he wouldn’t look for a toaster.
“Merlin.” His father called his name. He was staring at the old man’s face, which was the color of wood ash. “I think he’s gone at last.”
Merlin swung close. “You want me to call the ambulance?”
“What can they do? Look.” Etienne nudged Octave’s open mouth shut and pulled down his eyelids.
“Damn,” Merl
in said. “And I didn’t let him have a beer.”
“They’s a lot of things we didn’t let him have.” Etienne turned his wet face away and looked over the disked-up fields to a group of starlings wheeling along the edge of the far tree line. “When you first got married, you was young. We all married young. We didn’t know no more about raising children than a goat knows about flying. He knew,” Etienne said, straightening up and touching his father’s shoulder. “I told you what he told me, but you looked like you … aw, what the hell. When I saw how you was ignoring your kids, I should have come over and whipped your ass good three or four times and thrown you in the slop with the pigs.” He put his head down and placed a hand on his father’s cool leg.
It was not easy for Merlin to touch his father, but he reached over and swatted him on the shoulder.
“Damn it,” Etienne cried, “he told me to do it, too.” He jerked his thumb at the still form in the wheelchair.
“I bet,” Merlin said. He heard the baby stirring in her new playpen and beginning to whimper. He got up and went to her, bending to pick her up the way he would lift a puppy, then changing his mind and slipping his palms under her arms. Returning to the porch, he stood next to Octave and stared down. The baby made a noise. Octave turned his head in reflex. “Hot damn, where that baby?” he said.
Etienne sat back in his chair so hard he lost his balance and tumbled off the porch onto the grass. Merlin froze, his mouth open. Only the baby spoke, singing laaaaaaaaa and holding out a fist to the old man, who sensed where she was and touched her foot.
“We thought you was dead,” Merlin said at last.
Octave did not change the faraway smile on his face. “Oh, I come and I go. The nurses said I passed away three times last week.” His hands, blue and trembly, pulled the baby toward him.
Etienne sat up on the lawn, his hand on his shoulder. “I’m all right,” he said to Merlin. “Just give me a minute.” He seemed to be caught between pain and laughter.
“What’s this baby’s name?” the old man asked in his whispery voice.
“Susie.”
He grunted. “No, sir. Her name is Susan. Susie sounds like someone you gonna meet in the Red Berry after ten o’clock.”
“Yes, sir,” Merlin said.
“Her name is Susan. Su-san. You hear that? You gonna keep her here and raise her even if you don’t find no wife.”
“Yes, sir.” Merlin sat in the swing and held on to the chain.
“You gonna talk to her every day about everything. Tell her about dogs and salesmen.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell her about worms and bees.” Here he wiggled his finger into Susan’s belly and silver giggles rang from her round red mouth.
“Yes, sir.”
“About cooking and cars and poker and airplanes.”
“Oh sweet Jesus.” Merlin got up and went down the two steps to help his father. Making a face, Etienne reached under his bottom and pulled out the shotgun shell. He banged it upright on the edge of the porch. Octave’s head wavered above the baby’s bright face as he swung a foot off the wheelchair stirrup and kicked the shell back down to the ground. Merlin hugged his father under the arms and hoisted him up, keeping his hold after they were standing, trying for balance. The two of them stood there in the sunshine, chastened but determined, amazed by the smiles on the porch, where Octave and Susan whispered and sang.
Navigators of Thought
At ten-thirty Friday morning, Bert was in the wheelhouse of the company’s oldest tugboat, trying to figure out its controls. The jagged squawks of the shortwave set were interrupted by Dixon’s trombone voice. “Phoenix, come back.”
Bert turned and stared at the peeling machine, wondering why his boss was on the air instead of the dispatcher. He grabbed the microphone. “Phoenix by.” Please, not a towing call, he thought. Not already.
“Doc, are you cranked and hot?”
Bert made a face at the expression. “Max had some trouble with the engines, but he’s got them started now.”
“Hang by the set,” Dixon told him. “A tanker hit the fleet above Avondale Bend and some barges are coming down. If the other tugs can’t catch them, you might have to go out and lasso one.”
Bert placed a palm on the top of his bald head. “You want us to chase a barge downriver?”
“What’s the matter, Doc? Don’t your speaker work?”
“You can’t send the Mexican fellows after it?” Dixon’s crews were hired by their captains, and the Sonny Boy was run by Henry Gonzales, who had employed all his relatives. The Aspen gleamed under the attentions of its Vietnamese operators, and the Buddy L twanged around the New Orleans harbor with a crew from Biloxi.
“Gonzales hung up a hawser in his prop. You might see a big grain hopper coming down in a half hour. Look out.” In a tearing snort of static, Dixon was gone, replaced by a low, whistling fabric of dismembered voices. Bert hung the mike on the set and looked upriver through the wheelhouse door. The Mississippi was a gray deserted street. He sat on the stool behind the spokes of the varnished wheel and thought of how his crew had trouble tying on to drifting equipment. Like the other captains, he had been allowed to hire his own people, so he gathered men like himself, college teachers who had been fired. He wondered whether they could change form in midlife like amphibians.
He thought back to the week before, when he had been at the controls of the new Toby, shoving a small barge to a dock downriver from the city. He had jerked the throttle levers into reverse, and the boat had hauled back on the barge, her engines shuddering. His mouth fell open when he saw the starboard and port lines seeming to untie themselves, paying overboard as the barge charged the dock at an angle, hammering two pilings into kindling.
Several stevedores wandered over to see what had caused all the thunder. Two of them pointed at the Toby and laughed. Bert shoved the throttle levers up, easing the bow against the barge to keep it pinned in place. Thomas Mann Hartford and Claude McDonald, the deckhands, appeared on the push knees, and on the third try attached a rope to their tow, turning when they had finished to look warily up to the wheelhouse. Bert pushed open a window.
“Clove hitches on a barge? You’ve got to be kidding.” His deckhands sometimes reminded him of the cloudy-eyed freshmen in the backwoods college where he had taught for four years.
Thomas Mann lowered his small blond head to look at one of the ropes that had come undone. Bert studied his unraveling dress slacks and greasy Izod shirt, waiting for him to look up. “I’m really sorry, Bert, but a couple of hours ago when we were picking up the barge, Claude told me about the new book on John Donne’s poetry, and I went to his bunk to see it.” The deckhands had been denied tenure at a small state college and were unable to find full-time work anywhere. Thomas Mann looked up at the shattered pilings. “We forgot to ratchet up the cables after we made the preliminary tie-off.”
Bert leaned out farther to get a better look at the damage. “I can’t believe you expected two rowboat knots to hold that thing. What the hell do you think Dixon is going to say when he finds out you two were twittering over seventeenth-century metaphors when you should have been lashing a barge?”
Claude McDonald shook the mane of dark curls clustered over his thick glasses. “It’s a formidable consideration,” he said.
* * *
At seven the next morning, the five-man crew of the Toby had filed onto the deep carpet of their employer’s office. Dixon was the owner of two tugboat fleets, a person who could appreciate the true value of intellectuals. At sixty-six, the former deckhand still looked out of place in his fine office, his gray suit. He sat back in a tall leather chair and popped his knuckles. A series of wrinkles ran vertically across his forehead like hatchet scars. “Please don’t try to explain nothin’,” he said. “I wouldn’t understand what you was talking about if you did. Last month, you ruined three hundred dollars’ worth of cable, and you had me believing it was my fault, like I wrapped it around that ferr
yboat myself.” He looked at them hard, and Bert watched the old eyes, which were like two olives forgotten in the bottom of a jar. The crewmen kept back from the big desk, afraid for their jobs. The middle-aged cook, Laurence Grieg, was trembling, facing the loss of the first employment he had found in two years.
The engineer, a bony man with Nordic features, was Maximilian Renault, a Romantics scholar given to slow, spooky movements and inappropriate smiles. Dixon threw a hard look his way and Max backed up a step, running long fingers through his dark hair.
“You guys have tore up more machinery in six months than the other five crews put together.” Dixon looked at them carefully, his intellectuals, sorry at the expense they had caused him, but at the same time enjoying their failures. The college boys, all Ph.D.’s, would never make the money he had made. “I realize,” he continued, turning a heavy white-gold ring on his left hand, “that times is bad. All the good professor jobs been sucked up years ago.” He paused, letting the obvious sink in. If these had been ordinary crewmen, they might have traded glances, told Dixon to go to hell, and walked out. But discarded teachers would take anything. “So I’m gonna keep you on, but remember this,” he said, falling forward in his chair and aiming his chopped face at them. “I pay you damn good money—union scale. I deserve better for my boats than you been doing. If you can’t do better, I got to let all of you go.”
The five men were silent. The tension had been broken, and they waited to be told to leave. Dixon sent a bored glance out over the grassy median of Carrollton Avenue, where a green-roofed streetcar clattered past. “I can’t let you stay on the Toby. She cost too much. Today, I’m gonna put all the Cajuns on her. I’ll sell their tug and you can go on the spare.”
“The spare?” Bert looked over his shoulder at Max, who shrugged.
Mr. Dixon pulled a form from his desk and began writing. “The Phoenix Three,” he said.
“The old red tug tied up against the willows?”
“That’s it,” Dixon said, sucking his teeth and looking up to study Max’s frayed Arrow shirt. “It was built in the twenties out of carbon steel and rivets. Even you people can’t tear it up.” He looked Bert in the eye. “Go on down to the dock and get familiar with the boat. It’s got old controls. Steering it will be like dancing with a cow.”
Same Place, Same Things Page 8