Same Place, Same Things

by Tim Gautreaux

  * * *

  The next evening the weather was mild, and at dusk Felix and Clarisse were sitting in the yellow spring-iron chairs, whose backs were flattened metal flowers. He had told her everything, and together they were staring at a few late fireflies winking on the lawn like the intermittent hopes of defeated people. Across the road a mother called her child for the second time, and they watched for him as he bobbed out of a field.

  In the house the telephone rang, and Felix got up slowly. It was Mrs. Malone, and she sounded upset.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked. He twisted the phone cord around his fist and closed his eyes.

  “I was in the clinic waiting room this afternoon,” she began, her voice stiff and anesthetized, “and I read the local newspaper’s account of the attack.”

  He winced when she said “attack” and looked down at the dustless hardwood of his living room. “I’m real sorry about that.” He thought of the expression on his wife’s face when she had brought the money for his bail.

  “And you did it right after you left my house,” she said, her voice rising. “I didn’t know what to think.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He listened to her breaths coming raggedly over the phone for at least a half minute, but he didn’t know what else to say. He wasn’t sure why he had hurt the Scalsons. At the time, he had wanted to keep them from damaging the world further.

  “I don’t want you to work for me anymore. I just can’t have you in the house.”

  “I wouldn’t bother you again, Mrs. Malone.”

  “No.” The word came quick as a shot. “You’ll stay away.”

  And that was it.

  * * *

  The Bug Man went back to his work at dawn, and for that day and every workday for the next ten years he walked through houses and lives. His business expanded until he had to hire three easygoing local men to spray bugs with him. He erected a small building with a storage area and office, hiring a young woman to manage appointments and payments. Clarisse attended the local college, became a first-grade teacher, and labored in her garden of children. With his spare time he began attending a local exercise club and soon lost his bulky middle, though much of his hair left with it.

  Felix had been thirty-seven when the other independent exterminator in town decided to sell the business to him. These new routes were profitable, and Joe Brasseaux, Felix’s best sprayer, tended them religiously, never missing an appointment for two years, except for one day when he called in sick. Felix looked over Joe’s route for the afternoon, and when he saw the addresses, he decided to treat the houses himself.

  About four o’clock, he pulled into the long drive that led to the Beauty Queen’s house. Getting out of the truck, he looked up at the oaks, which had changed little, and at the pool in back, which swirled with bright water. The plantings were mature and lush, rolling green shoulders of liriope bordering everything.

  The driveway was empty, but in the door was a key with a pair of small plastic dice hanging from it. He rang the bell and bent down to pump up his tank. When he raised his face, the door opened, and standing there was a young boy with sandy hair and blue eyes, a boy with a dimpled chin, an open, intelligent face, and, Felix noticed, big feet. “Yes, sir?” the child said, adjusting the waistband on what appeared to be a soccer uniform.

  For a moment, Felix couldn’t speak. He wanted to reach out and feel the top of the boy’s head, but he pointed to his tank instead. “I’ve come to spray for bugs.”

  “Where’s Joe? Joe’s the one takes care of that for us.”

  The Bug Man looked inside hopefully. “Is your mother Mrs. Malone?”

  “She’s not here, and I’m sorry, but she told me not to let in anyone I don’t know.” The boy must have noticed how Felix was staring, and stepped back.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of me.” Felix gave him his widest smile, all the while studying the child. “I’m the Bug Man.”

  The boy narrowed his bright eyes. “No sir. Not to me you aren’t. You’d better go away.”

  At once he felt shriveled and sick, like a sprayed insect, and he wondered whether he should tell the boy that he knew his mother, that he knew who he was, but the Bug Man was by now a veteran of missed connections and could tell when a train had left a station without him. He scanned the child once more and turned away.

  Pulling out of the drive, he saw in the rearview a small fair-skinned figure standing on the steps, looking after him, but not really seeing him, he guessed. He allowed himself this one glance. One glance, he decided, was what he could have.

  Little Frogs in a Ditch

  Old man Fontenot watched his grandson draw hard on a slim cigarette and then flick ashes on the fresh gray enamel of the front porch. The boy had been fired, this time from the laundry down the street. The old man, who had held only one job in his life, and that one lasting forty-three years at the power plant, did not understand this.

  “The guy who let me go didn’t have half the brains I got,” Lenny Fontenot said.

  The old man nodded, then took a swallow from a warm can of Schlitz. “The owner, he didn’t like you double creasing the slacks” was all he said, holding back. He watched a luminous cloud drifting up from the Gulf.

  “Let me tell you,” Lenny said with a snarl, his head following a dusk drawn pigeon floating past the screen, “there’s some dumb people in this world. Dog-dumb.”

  The grandfather rolled his head to the side. Lenny was angry about his next paycheck, the one he’d never get.

  “They was dumber back in my time,” the grandfather told him.

  Lenny cocked his head. “What you talking about? People today can’t even spell dumb.” He pointed two fingers holding the cigarette toward the laundry. “If it wouldn’t be for dumb people, modern American business couldn’t keep doing its thing selling fake fingernails and fold-up fishing rods.”

  “Give it a rest,” the old man said, looking down the street to the drizzle-washed iron roof of the laundry, where a lazy spume of steam rose from the roof vent. His grandson was living with him again, complaining of the evils of capitalism, eating his food, using all the hot water in the mornings. The grandfather pulled a khaki cap over his eyes and leaned back in his rocker, crossing his arms over a tight green knit shirt. Lenny would never hold a job because he suffered from inborn disrespect for anybody engaged in business. Everybody was stupid. All businessmen were crooks. At twenty-five his grandson had the economic sense of a sixty-year-old Russian peasant.

  “No. Really. Other than food and stuff you need to live, what do you really have to buy?” He took a searing drag on the last of six cigarettes he had borrowed from his girlfriend, Annie. “A car? Okay. Buy a white four-door car, no chrome, no gold package, no nothing. But wait. Detroit wants you to feel bad if you buy a plain car. You got to have special paint. You got to have a stereo makes you feel Mr. Mozart is pluckin’ his fiddle in the backseat. You got to have a big-nuts engine for the road. You got to have this, you got to have that, until that car costs as much as a cheap house. If you buy a plain car, you feel like a donkey at the racetrack.”

  His grandfather took a swig of Schlitz. “If you work on your attitude a little bit, you could keep a job.”

  Lenny stood up and put his nose to the screen, sniffing, as if the grandfather’s statement had a bad odor. “I can keep a job if I wanted. I’m a salesman.”

  “You couldn’t sell cow cakes to a rosebush.” The old man was getting tired. His grandson had been out on the porch with him for two hours now, pulling cigarettes from his baggy jeans, finding fault with everybody but his skinny, shaggy-haired self.

  Lenny threw down his cigarette and mashed it with the toe of a scuffed loafer. “As dumb as people are today I could sell bricks to a drowning man.”

  Grandfather Fontenot looked at the smudge on his porch. “No, you couldn’t.”

  “I could sell falsies to a nun.”

  “No, you couldn’t.”

  “I could sell�
��—Lenny’s mouth hung open a moment as he looked down into the cemented side yard and toward the old wooden carport at the rear of the lot—“a pigeon.”

  His grandfather picked up his hat and looked at him. “Who the hell would buy a pigeon?”

  “I could find him.”

  “Lenny, if someone wanted a pigeon, all he’d have to do is catch him one.”

  “A dumb man will buy a pigeon from me.” He pushed open the screen door and clopped down the steps to the side yard. At the rear of the lot was a broad, unused carport, swaybacked over useless household junk: window fans, a broken lawn mower, and a wheelbarrow with a flat tire. He looked up into the eaves where the ragged nests of pigeons dripped dung down the side of a beam. With a quick grab, he had a slate blue pigeon in his hands, the bird blinking its onyx eyes stupidly. He turned to his grandfather, who was walking up stiffly behind him. “Look. You can pluck them like berries under here.”

  Old man Fontenot gave him a disgusted look. “Nobody’ll eat a pigeon.”

  Lenny ducked his head. “Eat. I ain’t said nothing about eat.” He smiled down at the bird. “This is a homing pigeon.”

  The grandfather put a hand on Lenny’s shoulder. “Look, let’s go fix a pot of coffee and open up the Picayune to the employment ads. We can find something good for you to do. Come on. That thing’s got fleas like a politician. Put it down.” The old man pulled at his elbow.

  Lenny’s eyes came up red and glossy. “Your Ford’s got a crack in the head and you can’t even drive across the bayou for groceries. I’m gonna sell birds and get the damn old thing fixed.”

  His grandfather sniffed but said nothing. He knew Lenny wanted the car for himself. He looked at the bird in his grandson’s hands, which was pedaling the air, blinking its drop of dark eye. The old man had never owned a dependable automobile, had always driven junk to save money for his kids and grandkids. He remembered a Sunday outing to Cypress Park when his superannuated Rambler gave up in the big intersection at Highway 90 and Federal Avenue, remembered the angry horn of a cab, the yells of his son and wife as they argued about a tow truck fee while Lenny sat on the floor by a misshapen watermelon he had stolen with care from a neighbor’s garden for the picnic that never happened.

  “This bird,” Lenny said, turning it back into its nest,” is gonna get your car running.”

  “I told your parents I wouldn’t let you get in any more trouble.” He watched Lenny make a face. Maybe his parents couldn’t care less. The grandfather remembered the boy’s big room in their air-conditioned brick rancher, the house they sold from under him to buy a Winnebago and tour the country. They had been gone four months and had not called once.

  For two days he watched Lenny sink deeper and deeper into a red overstuffed sofa, a forty-year-old thing his wife had won at a church bingo game. It was covered with a shiny, almost adhesive plastic, broadly incised with X’s and running with dark, fiery swirls. The big cushions under Lenny hissed as he moved down into the sofa’s sticky grasp. For Lenny, sitting in it must have been like living with his parents again. They were hardworking types who tried to make him middle-class and respectable, who frowned on his efforts to manage the country’s only Cajun punk salsa band, which was better, at least, than his first business of selling cracked birdseed to grammar school kids as something he called “predope,” or “pot lite.” One day Lenny had come home from a long weekend and everything he owned was stacked under the carport, a SOLD sign in front of the house. For a long while, he had lived with his friends in Los Head-Suckers, but even the stoned longhairs tired of his unproductive carping and one by one had turned him out.

  Lenny folded back the classified section to the pet column and found his ad, which read “Homing pigeons, ten dollars each. Training instructions included,” and gave the address. His grandfather read it over his shoulder, then went into the kitchen and heated two links of boudin for breakfast and put on a pot of quick grits. Lenny came in and looked over at the stove.

  “You gonna cook some eggs? Annie likes eggs.”

  “She coming over again?” He tried to sound miffed, but in truth, he liked Annie. She was a big-boned lathe operator who worked in a machine shop down by the river, but he thought she might be a civilizing influence on his grandson.

  Lenny rumbled down the steps, and his grandfather watched him through the kitchen window. From behind the carport he pulled a long-legged rabbit cage made of a coarse screen called hardware cloth, and two-by-two’s. He shook out the ancient pellets and set it next to the steps. With his cigarette-stained fingers, he snatched from the eaves a granite-colored pigeon and clapped him in the cage. Most of the other birds lit out in a rat-tat-tat of wings, but he managed to snag a pink-and-gray, which flapped out of its nest into his waiting hands. The old man clucked his tongue and turned up the fire under the peppery boudin.

  Annie came up the rear steps, lugging a rattling toolbox. By the time Lenny came in and joined her, the old man had finished breakfast and was seated in the den beyond the kitchen. He didn’t like being with both of them at the same time, because he felt sorry for the girl. He didn’t understand how she could put up with Lenny’s whining. Maybe he was the only man who would pay attention to her. She got a second helping and sat at the breakfast table, spooning grits and eggs into herself.

  “Annie, baby.” Lenny plopped down across from her.

  “I saw that ad. The one you told me about.” She broke open a loaf of French bread. “Why would anybody buy a pigeon? They’re all over the place. Our backyard shed’s full of ’em.” She flipped her fluffy blond hair over her shoulders. “What are you trying to do?” she asked. “Prove something?” She looked up from her plate, her square jaw rising and falling under her creamy skin.

  “I want to scare up some money to fix the old guy’s car.”

  “And what else?” She chased a lump of grits out of a cheek with her tongue and brought her large cobalt eyes to bear on his.

  He bunched his shoulders. “I don’t know. It might be fun to see people throw away their money. You know. Like people do.”

  “You maybe want to find out why they do it? Or maybe you’re just mad you don’t have any to throw away. Am I reading your mind?”

  He looked down at the table, shaking his head. “We been going out too long.”

  A voice came from the den. “I’ll buy fifty shares a that.”

  Lenny spoke loudly. “I mean, she knows how I think.” He put a hand palm up on the little table. “It’s just that people throw money away on crazy stuff. It bothers the hell out of me. I could live for a year on what some people spend on a riding lawn mower or a red motorbike.”

  Annie took another bite and studied him. “You don’t understand this?”

  He looked away from her. “The more they get, the more they spend.”

  She put down her fork and glanced at her watch. She had to be down at Tiger Island Propeller by nine. “Lenny, in high school this teacher made the class read a play about an old guy was a king. I mean, it was hard reading, and she had to explain it or we wouldn’ta got much out of it, but this old guy gave his kingdom away to his two bitchy daughters with the reserve that he could keep about a hundred old fishing buddies around to pass the time with. After a while one daughter gets pissed at all the racket around the castle and cuts his pile of buddies to fifty. Well, he hits the road to his other daughter’s place, and guess what?”

  Lenny looked at the ceiling. “She gives him his fifty guys back and sucks the eyeballs out of the other bitch’s head, right?”

  Annie blinked. “You got snakes in your skull, man.” She raised a thick hand and pretended to slap him. “Pay attention. This second daughter cuts him back to twenty-five and the old man blows a gasket and calls her a dozen buzzards and like that. Then the first daughter shows up and says, ‘Look, what you want with ten, five, or even one old buddy? You don’t really need ’em.’”

  Lenny snorted. “Damned straight. What’d he say to that?”

 
; Annie ducked her head. “He told them even a bum had something he didn’t need, even if it was a fingernail clipper. That if he only had the things he needed, he’d be like a possum or a cow.”

  Lenny made a face. “What’s that mean?”

  The voice from the den called out, “When’s the last time you saw a possum on a red motorbike?”

  “What?”

  Annie put a calloused hand on one of his. “An animal can’t own nothing. Wouldn’t want to. Owning things is what makes people different from the armadillos, Lenny. And the stuff we buy, even if it’s one of your pigeons, sometimes is like a little tag telling folks who we are.”

  He turned sideways in his chair. “I don’t believe that for a minute. If I buy a Cadillac, does that tell people I’m high-class?”

  Again the voice from the den: “You could buy a pack of weenies.”

  “I said a Cadillac,” Lenny shouted.

  Annie Meyer stood up and pulled on a denim cap. “Time for work,” she announced. “Walk me to the bus stop.” She put her arm through his. “Hear from the parents any?”

  He shook his head. “Nothin’. Not a check, not a postcard.”

  The grandfather followed them with a plastic bag of trash in his hand. When they reached the street, they saw a white-haired gentleman standing there staring at a torn swatch of newsprint. He was wearing nubby brown slacks and a green checkered cowboy shirt. He stuck out his hand palm down and Lenny wagged it.