The best view of what happened next was from the mill yard. A geyser of steam shot from a pipe in the saw shed’s roof, and there was a sound like someone dynamiting a stump. The carriage and a huge oak log splintered through a wall and support beam, flying out into the mill yard and crashing down onto a late-model Cadillac, the only decent automobile for miles around. Planks, bolts, and hunks of iron rained down onto the sawmill, and an angry roar of steam rose from the punctured building. Curtis was seated on the carriage, his hands clenched white on the control levers. He stared with sober attention at the flattened Cadillac under him and tried to put his mind in motion again, but he could not think of what to do, whether to shout or run or cry, and as he studied the shiny catastrophe under him, it seemed that his mind would never start, that perhaps it had never worked at all.
Mr. Cantrell walked out into the mill yard and stood next to his car, tapping a crushed fender with the clipboard he carried. He looked up at the figure seated on the carriage, who had come through a wall of timber uninjured. “Curtis Lado. Is that what you said your name is? Well, I guess you got a little property somewhere, maybe a car, maybe your granddaddy’s watch? By the time my company lawyer gets through with you, the only thing you’ll have is your skin, and we’ll put that in jail, and when you get out of jail, whenever you make a nickel, I’ll have four cents of it for the rest of your life.” He turned his back and began yelling for a crew to go to Hammond for a crane and jacks.
Curtis climbed down and walked across to his truck, his face on fire under the derisive looks he drew from the workers hurrying about the mill yard. He was embarrassed into soberness. Going home occurred to him at once. He would hole up there like a man waiting for a hurricane.
Jamming the key into the old Dodge’s ignition, he turned it, but there was only a pained grunt in response. He tried the switch again, and again, until the engine would do nothing more than utter a series of snickering clicks. Out in the yard, men watched him while they worked. Cantrell put his hands on his hips and stared, then began writing on his clipboard, his eyes now on the truck’s license. Through the window of the office, Curtis could see a man on the phone, staring back at him. Deep in his chest, his heart fluttered like an engine running out of gas. He lay down out of sight on the front seat, reached up, and turned on the radio.
An announcer was speaking in a smooth, educated voice, saying that writers living in France during the seventeenth century thought Louisiana was a wasteland. There were only evil men, pestilence, and wild Indians, and no one who lived there had any hope for a bright future. Curtis closed his eyes and tried to understand the commentary, which was about an opera, but the radio voice might as well have been using the language of owls. “A French writer,” the announcer continued, “once introduced a section of his work by stating that it was set ‘in the deserts of Louisiana.’” Curtis rolled onto his side and, for as long as he was able, listened to the words carefully, but they were being spoken in a tongue he had not been taught. A cloud of steam rolled past the windshield, and an orchestra filled the cab of the rusting pickup with a somber, incomprehensible music.
Floyd’s Girl
T-Jean
Airborne, T-Jean’s big sedan flew across the main highway, landing on a shell road like a crop duster coming down wrong. He had to find his cousin Floyd before the little girl was lost. The car hydroplaned over dips filled with rainwater, blasting muddy showers over the hood. T-Jean was afraid of the brimming roadside canals, so he watched instead the white frame house up ahead in the big field, and in a minute he swirled onto the farm road that was also the driveway, his tires spraying shells into the rice ponds. He braked, leapt from the car before it fully stopped, and charged up across the gallery and through the screen, almost knocking down Tante Sidonie.
“Floyd, where he’s at?” T-Jean asked, his breath coming in little gasps.
Tante Sidonie adjusted her bifocals to look at him. “You T-shirt is wet as a dishrag,” she said.
“Where’s Floyd? The Texas man got his lil’ girl.”
She had to think for one second who the Texas man was. When she remembered, she yelled, “All the way to the tree line.” She followed him out the door, her hands on his back, pushing.
T-Jean gunned his big Ford and drove straight back until the shell drive turned to mud and rainwater. When the car settled down to its frame, he was by the old tractor shed, and he headed for it, his boots blasting the sloppy mud. Without breaking stride he ran up onto the only machine left, a heavy International M, retired because it was too old to pull and ate gas by the drum. One yank on the starter ring and the worn engine rolled twice and fired, T-Jean slamming it into second gear and taking out the rotten back wall of the shed, the big rubber cleats throwing boards in the air behind and then biting ground as the machine found high gear and waddled up on top of the mud track toward the tree line, where Floyd’s big air-conditioned John Deere was stopped in the water. T-Jean stood on the seat and yelled Floyd’s name over the roaring tractor, his voice cracking with effort, but he was too far away. Floyd was a short, blue-jeaned island off at the edge of two thousand acres of swamped rice field. It was five minutes before T-Jean got there.
Floyd
“What’s wrong with you?” Floyd asked. The wildness in T-Jean’s gray eyes was contagious, and Floyd wanted to stay calm. Since he’d turned thirty, he’d tried to cool down. He had a ten-year-old daughter to raise.
“The man from Texas, he came when you mama’s at the store and got Lizette.”
Every feature of Floyd’s face shifted, a movement of flesh terrible to watch. “You mean my wife’s new boyfriend?”
“Yeah, man. Grandmère saw him. She sent me. She’s waitin’ by the house.”
“How long?”
“Not twenty minutes.”
“Ninety west?”
“His favorite way to Texas.”
Floyd cupped his elbows in his palms, curled his upper lip, and sniffed his mustache, the whole parish road system lighting up in his mind, an aerial view of black lines against a green watery screen. He batted the other man on the knee, wheeled, and leapt up on his hulking green tractor, starting up and rolling the balloon tires north out of the field and into a trash woods of briers and saplings taller than his machine, exploding through in a scream of machinery and a rattling black column of diesel smoke. Trees snapped under his tires like breaking bones. A mile through all this was Mrs. Boudreaux’s little white house, closer to the main road than Tante Sidonie’s, if he indeed could come out of the woods in her backyard. Floyd adjusted his cap and pushed the pedals of the frantic machine with his thin legs, trying to think, trying to stay calm. He didn’t know where his wife lived. She was still his wife, because once the priest married you, you were married forever, in spite of a spiritless divorce court and a Protestant judge and a Texas lounge bum in snakeskin boots.
Floyd pictured his daughter, Lizette, her moon face and dark hair. The girl was scared of her mother, who had beaten her with a damn chinaball branch for playing with her makeup. But she was smart, smarter than Floyd, the kind of smartness that sometimes got you in trouble with people. He hoped that she would not sass the Texas man. Not him.
Mrs. Boudreaux
“Chick-chick-chick-chick, venez ici. Mangez ça.” Mrs. Boudreaux scolded her white hens in the voice she long ago used to discipline her six children at breakfast. She broadcast the chicken scratch over the dirt of her backyard, then turned for the steps of her small cypress house, which shone white with rainwater. A terrific noise in the woods startled her chickens, and they raced ahead of her under the house. She turned to watch Tante Sidonie’s big green machine mash three willow trees down into her yard; then she saw Floyd climb down from the cab and step over her one rosebush. He was sad-looking, she thought, like his grandpère with the big mustache. When Floyd was a baby and she held him in her lap, he was like a tough little muscle made hard by God for a hard life ahead. He was not a mean man, but determined enough to al
ways do a thing right when it counted. It was rough, raising a young daughter with no help, having a wife who ran off with a cou rouge. She clucked her tongue at him when he came over to her; he was a pretty man, little, like she liked them, and dark from work.
“Hey, Misres Boudreaux, is T-man still in the service?”
She hitched her chicken-scratch bowl up under her bosom. “What you need his car for, you?” Why else would he come here through the woods like that? she thought.
“The Texas man, he came stole Lizette just now. I got to catch him. T-Jean’s grandmère is waiting to tell me.”
She looked past him toward the rattling tractor, remembering the Texas man. A fear crept up through Mrs. Boudreaux’s stomach as she saw the dark-haired Lizette ruined by outlanders, dragged off to the dry plains of Texas she imagined from cowboy movies. She wondered if her mother would take her to Mass or to the Stations of the Cross during Lent. She knew Texans had some kind of God, but they didn’t take him too seriously, didn’t celebrate him with feast days and days of penance, didn’t even kneel down in their churches on Sunday.
“My old Dodge can’t go fast, but you can use T-man’s car if you can crank it,” she told him.
She watched Floyd run over to a plastic-covered hump next to the barn and pull bricks and tire rims off so he could get to T-man’s primer-painted Z. The key was in the car and it started immediately, sounding hot and mad as a bee in a bird’s beak. In ten seconds, he was on the blacktop road, and Mrs. Boudreaux imagined her house as a white speck shrinking in his rearview mirror. He disappeared onto Sugarmill Highway, and she heard the exhaust storm as he accelerated toward his house three miles away, where she imagined that T-Jean’s grandmère was standing in the tall grass by the mailbox, leaning against her walker, her faded cotton dress swinging at her ankles.
T-Jean’s Grandmère
Potato salad. I’m going make me some potato salad and then something with gravy to pour over that and then some sweet peas. I got a deer roast in the icebox. I could put some garlic in that and make a roux. She was always planning meals. Three a day, if not for her husband, then for her children who lived in the neighborhood. Her grandbaby, T-Jean, asked her to stand by the road and tell Floyd something. What was it? Why was she standing out in the mist? Then she remembered Lizette. What would that poor baby eat for supper?
Can she get turtle sauce piquante in Lubbock? And T-Jean’s grandmère thought of the gumbos Lizette would be missing, the okra soul, the crawfish body. How could she live without the things that belong on the tongue like Communion on Sunday? Living without her food would be like losing God, her unique meal.
She heard the approaching blast of a car and the cry of brakes as Floyd stopped next to her, driving something that looked like a dull gray space capsule on wheels. He asked her what color the Texas man’s car was, and she remembered why she was there. She began to talk in her creaky voice: “Ey, Floyd, bébé, comment ça va? Ah, it’s a big man what come up you driveway wearing a John Wayne hat, a skinny man straight as a railroad, with big tall boots. An’ Lizette, she was crying she wanted to take a suitcase, but he pulled her in the car like this.” Here she cranked up an arm, a bony right angle. “This is what her arm was like.”
“Mais, what kind of car was he driving?” Floyd banged the backs of his hands on the steering wheel.
“Oh, yah. It was a green Chevrolet truck. A old one. At least I think it was that. Me, I don’t know one from the other. I ought to have a garde de soleil on my head in this weather.” Floyd revved the engine, getting ready to tear off, but she reached over the rail of her walker and put a hand on the window ledge. “How you gonna ketchum?” Her face darkened as she leaned down to Floyd’s window. He told her quickly, all the while staring down the blacktop. “Ah,” she said. “You should take the farm roads and pass up Eunice and catch him at Poteau. Look,” she told him, “take this. I pulled it off the dashboard of my Plimmet.”
He took a plastic statue of St. Christopher from her spotted hands. “Grandmère, the Pope said St. Christopher wasn’t for real.” He glanced at the magnet on the bottom.
T-Jean’s grandmère gave him a scoffing look. “If you believe in something, then it’s real. The Pope’s all right, but he spends too much time thinking about things instead of visiting people in grass huts like he ought.”
Floyd stuck the statue on the dash. “There.”
She made a poking motion with her knobby forefinger. “Turn him so he sees the road.”
Floyd twirled the plastic. “Comme ça?”
“Mais oui. Hey, Floyd?”
“Quoi?”
“The Texas man.”
“What?”
She smiled widely, wrinkles chasing around her face like ripples on a sun-bright pond. “Bus’ his ass.”
Floyd
The parish had just blacktopped the farm roads, so he drove hard, afraid to look at the speedometer, feeling for safety through his tires, sensing from the sway and swirl of rubber for the point at which the car would slip off the asphalt and pinwheel out into the green blur of a rice field. The image of his daughter, Mary Lizette Bergeron, her pale face and dark hair inherited from her Cancienne forebears on his side, appeared on the shimmering road ahead. He saw his daughter growing up on the windy prairie in a hard-bitten town full of sun-wrinkled geezers, tomato barbecue, Pearl beer, and country music. There was nothing wrong with West Texas, but there was something wrong with a child living there who doesn’t belong, who will be haunted for the rest of her days by memories of the ample laps of aunts, daily thunderheads rolling above flat parishes of rice and cane, the musical rattle of French, her prayers, the head-turning squawk of her uncle’s accordion, the scrape and complaint of her father’s fiddle as he serenades the backyard on weekends. Vibrations of the soul lost for what? Because her mama wants her, too? Her mama, a LeBlanc gone bad, a woman who got up at ten o’clock and watched TV until time to cook supper. Who learned to drink beer and smoke dope, though both made her throw up the few things she ate. Who gave up French music and rock and roll for country. Who, two years ago, began to stay out all night like a cat with a hot butt, coming in after he left for work on Tante Sidonie’s farm. Who disappeared like that same cat would, leaving him to rock on the porch in the evenings, wondering whether she was alive or dead, kidnapped for the nervously pretty brunette thing she was, dead in the woods, or, worse, cowboy dancing in some bar out west, laughing at him with all the cous rouges she thought she loved. Six months ago, she called and asked him for Lizette. He told her to come home. He heard her laugh so loud that he thought he might hang up the phone, open a window, and hear that keening laughter threading in from the west over the bending heads of the rice plants. Then she told him she would send the Texas man and that he’d never find Lizzette in a place as big as Texas.
Floyd’s black eyes were shiny and small, his mustache as dark as a caterpillar. There was not one ounce of fat in his 145 pounds, though he was fed by Tante Sidonie, who had already loved her husband to death with her dark gumbo. Floyd drank beer and made noise with his friends on weekends, spent his extra money on his daughter, her clothes, her Catholic school, her music lessons. Everyone in the community of Grand Crapaud knew he had good sense and would do a thing as soon as it needed doing. They knew this because he never hit a man when he was down, the grass in his yard stayed cut, he washed his car, and there were no holes in the screens of his house.
T-Man’s Z seared the asphalt on the straight road south of Highway 90, spinning between the rice fields that lay swollen with steamy mirrors of rainwater. After two panic stops at intersections, he reached the turnoff to the north, blistered along for two miles, and cut a smoky bow bend onto 90 west, heading toward Texas, looking for the truck. “What kind of man would drive a green truck?” he said aloud. He checked his watch and struggled with the math until he figured he should be close, unless, of course, the Texas man had taken another route to fool him. But he felt in his bones that the cowboy, who used to
drive a cement truck on this route day in and day out, would try to escape him this way, this road.
He had gone but three miles, skimming the potholes at eighty-five, when he saw the truck, a three-quarter-ton model with steel mesh across the back of the cab. Through the window he could barely see the top of Lizette’s head on one side of the cab and the Texas man’s broken-brim hat on the other, not a real cowboy’s hat, just a dance-hall hat. He passed them, blowing the horn and motioning them to the side of the road. In his rearview mirror, he saw the truck move onto the grassy shoulder, and Floyd smiled. It was easy, he thought. He got out and the Texas man got out. They came together, and Floyd realized that he was much smaller than his wife’s new boyfriend. He looked down at his own white shrimper boots and then over at the reptile splendor of the Texas man’s footgear.
“You must be the coon-ass,” the cowboy said. He had a nasty way of holding his head tilted off to the side, with his mouth belled out a bit to the left, like he was used to drooling on himself.
“I want my daughter back,” Floyd told him, looking past at the pale, wise face of Lizette in the truck. She leaned out the window on her side.
“Daddy, I want to go home,” she said. “This man talks funny.”
“She’s a-going to where she belongs, with her mama,” the cowboy said.
“No, she’s not,” Floyd said, starting for the truck. The Texas man grabbed him, punched him in the mouth, and Floyd went down. He came up swinging, striking the other man in the jaw, but after a flurry of counterpunches and two sharp kicks from a set of pointed boots, Floyd found himself on his back in the roadside mud, staring at a new set of storm clouds coming up from the Gulf, listening to the green truck screeching off into the flat distance. He sat up, feeling his head spin, and thought it best to rest a while before trying to drive. A car slowed down and a farmer asked him if he needed help, but he waved him off. Then another car came along and pulled off onto the shoulder. It was a twenty-year-old Dodge driven by Mrs. Boudreaux. In the front seat was T-Jean’s grandmère, who pushed open the door with her tiny hands. He got in and sat next to them.
Same Place, Same Things Page 18