Same Place, Same Things

by Tim Gautreaux

“I’m Perry Lejeune from over by Broussard Street. About ten blocks. I saw your ad.”

  Mr. Fontenot gave his grandson a scowl and pulled off his cap as if he would toss it.

  Lenny straightened out of his slouch and smiled, showing his small teeth. “Mr. Lejeune, you know anything about homing pigeons?”

  The other man shook his head once. “Nah. My little nephew Alvin’s living at my house and I want to get him something to occupy his time. His momma left him with me and I got to keep him busy, you know?” Mr. Lejeune raised his shoulders. “I’m too old to play ball with a kid.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll fill you in,” he said, motioning for everyone to follow him to the back of the lot next to the junk-filled carport. He put his hand on the rabbit cage and made eye contact with Mr. Lejeune. “I’ve got just two left. This slate”—he nodded toward the plain bird—“is good in the rain. And I got that pink fella if you want something flashy.”

  Mr. Lejeune put up a hand like a stop signal. “I can’t afford nothing too racy, no.”

  “The slate’s a good bird. Of course, at this price, you got to train him.”

  “Yeah, I want to ask you about that.” Mr. Lejeune made a pliers of his right forefinger and thumb and clamped them on his chin. Annie came around close, as though she wanted to listen to the training instructions herself. The grandfather looked at the bottom of his back steps and shook his head, wondering if this would be as bad as the fake pot debacle, when thirteen high school freshmen caught Lenny coming out of Thibaut’s Store and beat him into the dusty parking lot with their knobby little fists.

  Lenny put his hands in the cage and caught the pigeon. “You got to build a cage out of hardware cloth with a one-way door.”

  “Yeah, for when he comes back, you mean.”

  Lenny gave Mr. Lejeune a look. “That’s right. Now to start trainin’, you got to hold him like a football, with your thumbs on top of him and your fingers underneath. You see?”

  Mr. Lejeune put on his glasses and bent to look under the pigeon. “Uh-huh.”

  “You go to your property line. Stand exactly where your property line is. Then you catch his little legs between your forefingers and your middle fingers. One leg in each set of fingers, you see?” Lenny got down on his knees, wincing at the rough pavement. “You put his little legs on the ground, like this. You see?”

  “Yeah, I got you.”

  “Then you walk the bird along your property line, moving his legs and coming along behind him like this. You got to go around all four sides of your lot with him so he can memorize what your place looks like.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I got you. Give him the grand tour, kinda.”

  Annie frowned and hid her mouth under a bright hand. His grandfather sat on the steps and looked away.

  Lenny waggled the bird along the ground as the animal pumped its head, blinked, and tried to peck him. “Now it takes commitment to train a bird. It takes a special person. Not everybody’s got the character it takes to handle a homing pigeon.”

  Mr. Lejeune nodded. “Hey, you talking to someone’s been married forty-three years. How long you got to train ’em?”

  Lenny stood and replaced the bird in the cage. “Every day for two weeks, you got to do this.”

  “Rain or shine?” Mr. Lejeune’s snowy eyebrows went up.

  “That’s right. And then after two weeks, you take him in a box out to Bayou Park and set his little butt loose. You can watch him fly around and then go home to wait. He might even beat you there, you know?”

  The man bobbed his head. “Little Alvin’s gonna love this.” He reached for his wallet. “Any tax?”

  “A dollar.”

  Mr. Lejeune handed him a ten and dug for a one. “Ain’t the tax rate eight percent in the city?”

  “Two percent wildlife tax,” Lenny told him, reaching under the cage for a shoe box blasted with ice-pick holes.

  * * *

  When the man and bird had left the driveway, Lenny’s grandfather cleared his throat. “I wouldn’a believed it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes.”

  “That’s capitalism—”

  “Aw, stow it. You took that guy’s money and he got nothin’.” He started up the steps, pulling hard at the railing, but stopped at the landing to look down at them.

  Lenny turned to the girl and said under his breath, “He’ll feel better when I get that old Crown Vic running again.” Turning to the carport, he fished out a young pigeon from the eaves, one the color of corroded lead.

  “You think what you told him will work?” she asked, bending down for her glossy pink toolbox.

  “Hell, I don’t know what a bird thinks. Say, you got any cigarettes on you?”

  “They don’t let us smoke on shift.” She looked at his back, which had begun to sag again. “I got to get to work,” she said. “Try not to sell one to a cop, will you?”

  * * *

  That day Lenny sold pigeons to Mankatos Djan, a recent African immigrant who repaired hydraulics down at Cajun Hose, Lenny’s simple cousin, Elmo Broussard, who lived across the river in Beewick, and two children who showed up on rusty BMX bikes. The next morning an educated-looking man showed up, made a face at Lenny’s sales pitch, and got back into his sedan without a bird. Several customers had behaved like this, but by the third day he had sold a total of twenty-three pigeons and had enough to fix the leaf-covered sedan parked against the side fence. He had given everybody the same directions on how to train the birds. He told his grandfather that after two weeks, when the birds wouldn’t come back at the first trial, they would chalk things up to bad luck, or maybe a skipped day of training. Not many things could take up your attention for two weeks and cost only eleven dollars, he argued.

  Thirteen days after the ad first appeared, Lenny counted his money and walked up to the front porch, where his grandfather was finishing up a mug of coffee in the heat. He looked at the cash in Lenny’s outstretched hand. “What’s that?”

  “It’s enough money to fix the car.”

  His grandfather looked away toward the laundry. “I saw you take over twenty dollars from some children for a lousy pair of flea baits.”

  “Hey.” Lenny drew back his hand as though it had been bitten. “It’s for your car, damn it.”

  “That poor colored guy who couldn’t hardly speak a word of English. Black as a briquette, and he believed every dammed thing you told him. My grandson sticks him for eleven bucks that’d feed one of his relatives living in a grass shack back in Bogoslavia or wherever the hell he was from for a year.” He looked up at Lenny, his veiny brown eyes wavering from the heat. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with me?” he yelled, stepping back. “Everybody’s getting money but me. I ain’t even got a job, and I come up with a way, just like everybody else does, to turn a few bucks, not even for myself, mind you, and the old fart that I want to give it to tells me to shove it.”

  “You don’t know shit about business. You’re a crook.”

  “All right.” He banged the money against his thigh. “So I’m a crook. What’s the difference between me and the guy that sells a Mercedes?”

  The grandfather grabbed the arms of his rocker. “The difference is a Mercedes won’t fly off toward the clouds, crap in your eye, and not come back after you paid good money for it.”

  Lenny jerked his head toward the street. “It’s all how you look at it,” he growled.

  “There’s only one way to look at it, damn it. The right way.” His grandfather stood up. “You get out of my house. Your parents got rid of you and now I know why. Maybe a few nights down at the mission will straighten you out.”

  Lenny backed up another step, the money still in his outstretched hand. “Gramps, they didn’t get rid of me. They moved out west.”

  “And it was time they did. They shoved you out the house and got you lookin’ for a job, you greasy weasel.” He grabbed the money so hard he came close to falling back into his chair. “I’ll take that for
the poor folks that’ll start comin’ round soon for their money back.”

  “They’ll get eleven dollars’ worth of fun out the birds.”

  “Get out.” The old man brought his thin brows down low and beads of sweat glimmered on his bald head. “Don’t come back until you get a job.”

  “You can’t put me on the street,” Lenny said, his voice softening, his face trying an ironic smile.

  “Crooks wind up on the street and later they burn in hell,” the old man said.

  Lenny walked to the screen door and stopped, looking down North Bertaud Street where its narrow asphalt back ran toward Highway 90, which connected with the interstate, which connected with the rest of the scary world.

  He kicked the bottom of the screen and his grandfather yelled. A half hour later he was standing on the sidewalk in front, holding a caramel-colored Sears suitcase, listening to the feathery pop of wings as the old man pulled pigeons out of the rabbit cage and tossed them toward the rooftops.

  * * *

  He walked to Breaux’s Café, down by the icehouse, drank a cup of coffee, and read the paper. Then he wandered his own neighborhood, embarrassed by the huge suitcase banging his calf, enduring the stares of the women sweeping porches. He swung by Annie’s house even though she was still at work. Her father sat on the stoop in his dark gray plumber’s coveralls, drinking a long-neck in the afternoon heat. He watched Lenny come to him the way a fisherman eyes a rain-laden cloud. “Whatcha got in the suitcase, boy?”

  Lenny set it down on the curb and motioned down the street with a wag of his head. “The old man and me, we had a discussion.”

  Mr. Meyer laughed. “You mean he throwed your ass in the street.”

  Lenny tilted his head to the side. “He’s mad at me right now, but he’ll cool down. I just got to find a place to stay for a night or two.” He glanced up at Mr. Meyer, who looked like a poor woman’s Kirk Douglas gone to seed. “You couldn’t put me up, you know, just for the night?”

  Mr. Meyer didn’t change his expression. “Naw, Lenny. What with Annie in the house and all, it just wouldn’t look right.” He took a long draw, perhaps trying to finish the bottle.

  “That’s okay. When it gets dark, I’ll just go back and sleep in his car. The backseat on that thing’s plenty big enough.”

  “You sell all your birds?”

  “He put me out of the bird business. I was just doin’ it for him. I thought it was a good idea. I didn’t see no harm in it.”

  “That’s what got him hot.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t see no harm in screwing those people. I talked to Mr. Danzig over by the laundry. He said you didn’t see no harm in putting one, two extra creases in a pair of slacks. He told me on Mondays some pants had more pleats than a convent-school girl’s skirt. The trouble with you is, you ain’t seeing the harm. You see what you want to see, but you ain’t seeing the harm.”

  “I worked cheap for that old bastard. He could expect worse.”

  Mr. Meyer stood, took a last swig, then put the bottle in his hip pocket. “You hurt his business, boy.”

  “Business,” Lenny said with a snarl. “It’s bullshit. A business for people too lazy to iron their own clothes.” He kicked his suitcase and it rolled over onto the grass, flattening an old dog dropping. Mr. Meyer threw back his head and laughed.

  That night, the grandfather couldn’t sleep, and he rolled up the shade at the tall window next to his bed, looking into the moonlit side yard at his old car parked against the fence. He thought about how Lenny was sweating and rolling like a log on the squeaky vinyl of the backseat, trying to sleep in the heat and mosquitoes. The old man knelt on the floor and folded his arms on the windowsill, thinking how Lenny should be back at the cleaners, smiling through the steam of his pressing machine. He remembered his own work down at the light plant, where he tended the thundering Fairbanks-Morse generators for forty years. Down in the yard, the Ford bobbled, and he imagined that Lenny was turning over, putting his nose in the crack at the bottom of the seat back, smelling the dust balls and old pennies and cigarette filters. The grandfather wondered if some dim sense of the real world would ever settle on Lenny, if he would ever appreciate Annie Meyer, her Pet-milk skin, her big curves. He had seen her once at her lathe, standing up to her white ankles in spirals of tempered steel as she machined pump rods and hydraulic pistons. Lenny talked with longing of her paychecks, nearly $2,400 a month, clear, all of which she saved. The grandfather climbed into bed but couldn’t sleep because he began to see images of people Lenny had sold birds to—the dumb children, the African—and wondered why the boy had done them wrong. It was only eleven dollars he’d gotten. How could you sell your soul for eleven dollars?

  At dawn he went down into the yard and opened the driver’s door to the car. Lenny had used his key to turn on the power to the radio, the only thing in the car that still worked. He was listening to a twenty-four-hour heavy-metal station that was broadcasting a sound like the exhaust of a revving small-plane engine overlaid with an electrocuted voice screaming over and over something like “burgers and fries.”

  “That sounds like amplified puking,” the old man said.

  Lenny lay back against the seat and put his arm over his bloodshot eyes. “Aw, man.”

  His grandfather pushed on his shoulder. “You get a job yet?”

  Lenny cocked up a red eye. “How’m I gonna get a job so soon? How’m I gonna get a job smelling bad, with no shave and mosquito bites all over me?”

  The old man considered this a moment, looking into his grandson’s sticky eyes. He remembered the inert feel of him as a baby. “Okay. I’ll give you a temporary reprieve on one condition.”

  “What’s that?” Lenny hung his head way back over the seat.

  “St. Lucy has confessions before seven o’clock daily Mass. I want you to think about going to confession and telling the priest what you done.”

  Lenny straightened up and eyed the house. The old man knew he was considering its deep bathtub and its oversized water heater. “Where in the catechism does it say selling pigeons is a mortal sin?”

  “You going, or you staying outside in your stink?”

  “What am I supposed to tell the priest?” He put his hands in his lap.

  His grandfather squatted down next to him. “Remember what Sister Florita told you one time in catechism class? If you close your eyes before you go to confession, your sins will make a noise.”

  Lenny closed his eyes. “A noise.”

  “They’ll cry out like little frogs in a ditch at sundown.”

  “Sure,” Lenny said with a laugh, his eyeballs shifting under the closed lids. “Well, I don’t hear nothing.” He opened his eyes and looked at the old man. “What’s the point of me confessing if I don’t hear nothing?”

  His grandfather stood up with a groan. “Keep listening,” he said.

  * * *

  After Lenny cleaned up, they ate breakfast at a café on Tulane Avenue, and later, walking back home, they spotted Annie coming up the street, carrying her toolbox, her blond hair splashed like gold on the shoulders of her denim shirt.

  The old man tipped his cap. “Hi there, Miss Annie.”

  She smiled at the gesture. “Mr. F. Good morning.”

  Lenny gave her a bump with his hip. “Annie, you’re out early, babe.”

  She lifted her chin. “I came to see you. Daddy told me you were wandering the street like a bum.” She emphasized the last word.

  “The old man didn’t like my last business.…”

  “It wasn’t business,” she snapped. Annie looked down at a work boot as though trying to control her emotions. “Lenny, yesterday morning I went walking over by Broussard Street. You know what I saw? Shut up. Let me tell you.” She put down the toolbox and held out her hands as though she was showing him the length of a fish. “That old Mr. Lejeune, on his knees with that damned bird you sold him, wobbling down his property line.”

  Lenny laughed. �
��That musta been a sight.”

  Annie looked at the grandfather, then at Lenny’s eyes, searching for something. “You just don’t get it, do you?”

  “Get what?” When he saw her expression, he lost his smile.

  She sighed and looked at her watch. “Ya’ll come on.” She picked up her toolbox and started down the root-buckled sidewalk toward Broussard Street. After nine blocks they crossed a wide boulevard, went one more block, and stopped behind a holly bush growing next to the curb. Across the street was a peeling weatherboard house jammed between two similar houses separated by slim lanes of grass.

  “This is about the time of day I saw him yesterday,” Annie said.

  “Who?” Lenny asked, ducking down as though afraid of being recognized.

  “The old guy you sold the pigeon to.”

  “Jeez, you want him to see me?”

  She looked at him with her big, careful blue eyes. The grandfather thought she was going to yell, but her voice was controlled. “Why are you afraid for him to see you?” She was backed into the holly bush, fresh-scrubbed for the morning shift and looking like a big Eve in the Garden.

  Across the street, there was movement at the side of the house, and Mr. Lejeune came around his porch slowly, shuffling on his knees like a locomotive. The grandfather stood on his toes and saw that the old man was red in the face and that the pigeon looked tired and drunk. “Lord,” he whispered, “he’s got rags tied around his kneecaps.”

  “Yesterday I saw he wore the tips off his shoes,” Annie told him. “Look at that.” Behind Mr. Lejeune walked a thin boy, awkward and pale. “Didn’t he say he had a nephew?” The boy was smiling and talking down to his uncle. “The kid looks excited about something.”

  “Two weeks,” Lenny said.

  “Huh?” the grandfather cupped a hand behind an ear.

  “Today’s two weeks. They’ll probably go to Bayou Park this afternoon and turn it loose.”

  Mr. Lejeune looked up and across toward where they were standing. He bent to the side a bit and then lurched to his feet, waving like a windshield wiper. “Hey, what ya’ll doing on this side the boulevard?”

  The three of them crossed the street and stood on the short stretch of capsizing walk that led to a wooden porch. “We was just out for a morning walk,” Lenny told him. “How’s the bird doin’?” The pigeon seemed to look up at him angrily, blinking, struggling. Someone had painted its claws with red fingernail polish.