Same Place, Same Things

by Tim Gautreaux

  “You caught ’em and he beat you up,” the older lady said, running a cool hand over a lump on his forehead.

  “Mais, that about sums it up.”

  Mrs. Boudreaux, who still had on her stretch jeans from the chicken yard, leaned over to look at him closely. “You got to catch ’em, Floyd.”

  “I’ll start in a minute.” His head spun like a pirogue caught in an eddy.

  “Yah,” T-Jean’s grandmère began, “you got a bump on the goo-goon that’s gonna make you wreck for sure. Me and Alida will drive after him.” She tried to see over the dash to check the traffic.

  “No, no. I’ve got to drive fast.”

  Mrs. Boudreaux clucked her tongue thoughtfully. “It’ll take an airplane to catch him now.” She and Floyd looked at each other instantly.

  “Nonc René,” they said in unison.

  Nonc

  René Badeaux sat on his front porch steps, patching a hole in a diatonic accordion with Super Glue and a piece of oilcloth torn from an old table covering. He pulled the bellows, and the instrument inhaled a squawk. “Merde,” he said. He tried to play “Allons à Lafayette,” but on the fourth note the little patch blew off and floated toward the road like a waxy leaf. Then a C button stuck. He shook his head, thinking that he should have played a waltz until the glue dried. Looking up at a plane taking off from his strip, he remembered that the black fellow he had hired last week as a pilot was going thirty miles north to spray some worms. He waited until the drone of the engine had gone over the tree line, and then he popped the C button loose and laid the bellows of the old Monarch against his great belly and played, spraying the reedy music around the yard like nutrient for the atmosphere, breaking into whiny song. “Mon coeur est tout casse,” he sang, himself a wind box of lyrics playing for his own amazement.

  Floyd was sitting next to him on the step before he saw him. That was one thing about Floyd—he was a quiet man, saying only what needed to be said, not yammering all sorts of bullshit when he came up. And then he said what needed to be said to his uncle. He told him about Lizette.

  Nonc René had sung so many sentimental songs so badly over the years that he had become a tender man. Every woman he knew was an Evangeline bearing some great sorrow in life, and now he imagined his grand-niece dragged off to live among lizards and rock and only Mexican accordian music. How could she bear to stay there without the buzz of a fiddle and the clang of a triangle in her pretty head, the love songs sung through the nose?

  “Please, Nonc,” Floyd was saying, his little eyes shining with need in the late-afternoon light. “You know what I’m talkin’ about. You know what to let me do. I can fly good.”

  “You could call the police,” René teased.

  “Louisiana police? Give me a break, Nonc.”

  René rubbed his gray stubble and rolled his eyes toward the plane shed. “Lollis took the good machine.”

  “Even a bad plane can beat a pickup truck,” Floyd said with that smile that wasn’t a smile, but a trick with those little dark eyes.

  Nonc René was waiting for that smile that wasn’t a smile. That’s all. He wasn’t hesitating for a minute. He remembered that Floyd was still famous in the region for installing an ancient DC-3 engine in a big biplane, and when he got that Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp tandem radial engine in the sky, it corkscrewed his homemade canvas plane through a cloud like the engine was twirling the wings instead of the propeller, and straight down he came into a rice paddy. When Nonc René and his brothers got to the field, there was just a gasoline slick on top of the mud and nothing else. They dug Floyd out with their hands and boards torn from a fence. His clothes had been ripped off by the concussion of the crash. Three brothers at once had their fingers in his mouth, digging out a pound of mud so he could breathe. They pinched clay out of his nose, washed it from under his eyelids, cleared it from his ears with twigs. When they put him on the toilet that night at the hospital—mud and six grains of rice.

  Now, in eight minutes, they were in the sky, Mrs. Boudreaux and T-Jean’s grandmère watching them through the windshield of the old Dodge. The biplane burbled off toward the west, following Highway 90 at two hundred feet.

  Lizette

  It had seemed the thing to do at first. The tall bony man with the long neck—she had never seen a neck like that, with a big bump in the middle—he came into the house without knocking, took her by the arm and said, “Let’s us go see yore mama.” She could smell the raw leather of his gaudy belt. He would not let her pack a stitch, and when she protested, he jerked her along the way you pull an animal out of a hole, and her arm still hurt. She asked him where he was taking her and he said, “God’s country,” which made her wonder if he was an Arab terrorist, though she didn’t think Arabs had red hair and yellow freckles up their arms. She had ridden along hoping for the best, watching the fields full of blackbirds and puddles fly by the truck’s windows. Then her father had stopped them and she had screamed when she saw the tall man knock him down and kick him, and she kept on screaming when the Texas man got in the truck. He hit her then, a bone-hard backhand to the mouth, a striking-out that she had never felt before, and her teeth went into her lip and stuck. But the pain and the blood didn’t bother her, just the flying scent of his hand, the pasty tinge of cigarettes, which made her think of her mother, lying on the sofa smoking one after another, staring past her at the television, always the television. She had looked back at her father as the truck tore off toward Texas, wondering when he would get up. They drove by little wood-and-tin towns, rice elevators connected by bent and rusted railroads, and she felt an empty-hearted flutter when she saw the sign that said Texas was a few miles ahead. She knew then they would pass out of the land of her blood and into some strange, inevitable place, into what must happen sooner or later. She looked over at the man in the checkered shirt, glanced at his pearl buttons, bent over and spat blood on the floor mat, looked between her knees at the blood on the floor and thought of her mother again, closed her eyes and said a Hail Mary, opened her eyes and said a second Hail Mary, but stopped after “blessed art thou among women” when she saw a crop duster fly across the road under the phone wires about a mile ahead. The plane looped and rolled over, coming back under the wires again, flying in front of an eighteen-wheeler, drifting over the field to the south and looping again, as though the pilot and his passenger were practicing for the air circus. She saw a barrel roll, another loop, a pass over the truck, and then the plane disappeared, swallowed up by a field of tall coastal Bermuda. She looked out of all the windows, but the plane was gone. She settled down to watching the straight strip of narrow highway threading through open fields now, fields with rows freshly plowed for cotton or soybeans, some experiment the rice and cane farmers were constantly trying, those dogged Labats or Thibodeauxs, who had owned the land for more than two hundred years.

  When Lizette looked west again, she saw a movement out of a low cloud and the same plane came down over the road a mile away, flying toward the green truck, coming lower and lower until its wheels were touching the highway behind a sedan that sped up as though it were a bug being chased by a hawk. When the sedan blew past, the Texas man slammed on the brakes because the plane was taxiing now, taking up both lanes and the narrow shoulders, which sloped down into twelve-foot canals topped off with the morning’s rain. Lizette began to bounce on the seat, but only a few times. Her face was rimmed with a brassy border of pain. She watched the cowboy take off his hat and place it on the seat next to her. Turning his flinty face toward hers, he told her not to move an inch. He got out, and she was glad to be rid of the smell of him, whiskey and cigarettes and some mildew-smelling aftershave.

  Her daddy and uncle climbed down out of the plane, her small daddy and her old and wobbly nonc René. She knew the Texas man would beat both of them up and throw them in the canal, and she began to cry all at once with a fierce suddenness that startled her. Her father and uncle had to see her, and then it would be all right. If they did not s
ee her, they would be beaten to pieces, so she blew the horn. She became angry when they wouldn’t look, and then, as she thought would happen, the freckled, long-legged foreign thing took a swing, knocking the soft René to the ground. Her father came on punching, but in only a minute the Texas man had him down and rolling on the ground. Nonc came back up in front of the truck and fell on them both, and all three fought, her relatives taking a beating.

  Ensemble

  A little traffic began to back up behind the idling plane and in the westbound lane, too. A five-ton truck pulled up behind the Texas man’s vehicle, and two men in coveralls got out to watch the brawl. The rolling and grunting battle went on and off the blacktop. After a good five minutes, Nonc René fell away and breathed on his back like a fish, his huge belly heaving. Floyd yelled and sat down, holding his hand between his legs. The Texas man tried to get up out of the mud, went down on one knee, and rested a while. Lizette blew the horn and tried to get someone to look at her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a puff of silver smoke by the driver’s side door, and she heard a tapping. Looking down, she saw the top of T-Jean’s grandmère’s head. Opening the window, she reached down for the old woman’s hand and bawled. The woman looked up from her walker.

  “How did you bus’ you mouth?” was all she asked.

  “The Texas man did it,” she whined.

  T-Jean’s grandmère lowered her head and worked her walker ahead of her like some sort of field machine, and when she got to where the Texas man was still down on one knee, she raised the aluminum frame and poked one of its small rubber feet an inch into his eye socket. The Texas man roared, stood up, and fell back into a muddy rut, where he wagged his head and cried aloud in pain.

  “You don’t come to Grand Crapaud and take no Bergeron child to drag off to no place,” she scolded, threatening him with the walker. She looked around at the fields, the thin highway. “This child belongs with her papa. She’s got LeBlanc in her, and Cancienne way back, and before that, Thibodeaux.” Her shapeless print dress swelled as she gathered the air to tell him more. She pointed her walker off at the horizon. “You see that tree line two miles over there? Look with you good eye.”

  The Texas man, one bleeding eye held shut with his left hand, obeyed.

  “Them tree, they used to be right there, across that ditch. Thibodeaux boys cleared all that with axes. With axes. Live oak and cypress with axes. Two hundred acre.” She swung around to look across the road. “Over there.” She pointed into a rice field, in the middle of which an oil-well pump drifted up and down. Nonc René rolled up on one elbow with a groan and followed the line of her walker. “Before the Thibodeaux was more Thibodeaux living in a house made out of dirt.” She stamped her walker into the mud and turned on the Texas man, giving him such a look that he held up his free hand. “What you got to say, you what come to steal a Bergeron baby?”

  “Yeah, man, what you got to say for yourself?” asked one of the two men who had walked up from the five-ton truck. Lizette saw that they were twins dressed in identical gray coveralls, fellows with dark, oily curls, crooked noses.

  Floyd picked up his head and laughed. “Victor. Vincent Larousse.”

  “Floyd, baby. Quoi ça dit?”

  “Tex stole my lil’ girl and then broke my hand with his head.” Floyd stood up, still cradling his hand against his work jeans.

  “Shut up, all you crazy Larousse,” T-Jean’s grandmère told them. “I got to hear what he’s goin’ to say to me.” Her small head bobbed like a fishing cork.

  The Texas man rocked back in the mud a bit, a rill of muddy water beading over his thighs. “I’m a-goin’ get in my truck, head on down the road, and when it’s time, I’m a-goin’ come back and get that little gal for her mama.” He looked over at Mrs. Boudreaux, who was leading Lizette along the shoulder of the road toward her Dodge.

  T-Jean’s grandmère slammed her walker into the mud again. Turning to the Larousse twins, she asked them if they were still bad boys over in Tiger Island. Vincent spat between his teeth at the Texas man, who flinched. He chucked his brother on the shoulder and they walked back to their utility truck, which had MOUTON’S SCRAPYARD painted on the doors in orange paint. Two cutting-torch rigs sat in the bed, and the twins put on goggles, ran the gauges up to eighty pounds oxygen, fifteen pounds acetylene, and walked backward to the front of the Texas man’s truck, pulling gas line behind them, the torches hissing blue stars. When they cut the hood off the truck, the Texas man began yelling for the police.

  Floyd looked at the little circle of farmers and truck drivers forming around the scene. “You gonna tell a policeman you stole a little girl that was given me by a judge? You gonna tell him you punched her?”

  The Texas man, who was climbing out of the rut, settled back down again, watching the Larousses burn off his fenders, the torches spitting through the thin metal as though it were paper.

  “My truck,” he cried, still holding his eye.

  “Hot damn,” T-Jean’s grandmère said. “Them boy is still bad, yeah.”

  The Larousses cut bumper braces, motor mounts, frame members, and transmission bolts as two volunteers from the crowd rolled large pieces of truck hissing into the big ditch, where they disappeared. After fifteen minutes’ work, they cut the frame and rolled the cab and the bed into the canal like boulders. Soon, all that was left on the side of the road was a puddle of oil and a patch of singed grass. The twins rolled up their lines, zeroed their gauges, and walked back to the Texas man. The one who had spoken the first time, Vincent, smiled slowly. “Mais, anytime you come back to Louisiana, Floyd gonna phone us,” he said, holding his palm up and pointing with his middle finger. “An’ unless you drive to Grand Crapaud in a asbestos car, you gonna wind up with a bunch of little smokin’ pieces shoved up you ass.” Vincent gave him a little salute and followed Victor back to the truck, where they washed their hands with Go-Jo, pulled two Schlitzes from an ice chest, and climbed into the truck to wait.

  T-Jean’s grandmère gave the Texas man a long look, turned to walk off, then looked down at him again. “You, if you woulda went off with her, all you woulda got was her little body. In her head, she’d never be where you took her to. Every day she’d feel okra in her mouth.”

  Floyd began walking with her to Mrs. Boudreaux’s car, and Nonc René limped over to the Texas man, handing him a parachute. “Come on,” Nonc said softly, with the voice he used to call a chicken from the coop before dinner. “I’ll take you somewhere.”

  “I got to get to a hospital,” he moaned. “That old lady like to kilt me.”

  * * *

  When everyone was loaded into the bobbing Dodge, Floyd pointed Mrs. Boudreaux’s own St. Christopher statue forward and began to drive with his good hand. Several men turned the plane at a right angle to the road so it could roll over a culvert into the field, where Nonc René guided the balloon tires in the furrows. The machine splattered along until it gained the sky in a furious storm of flying mud.

  Floyd drove his group west, not east to Grand Crapaud, and everyone in the car was silent. In a few minutes they pulled to the side of the road in front of the state-line marker, a rough-cast concrete slab shaped like Louisiana. In the backseat, T-Jean’s grandmère laughed and clapped her hands once. Floyd turned off the engine and put his arm around Lizette, kissing the top of her head, right where her fragrant hair was parted.

  “Why we stopped here?” she asked, looking at the flat fields around the car. After a few moments, a plane moaned over their heads at a hundred feet, crossing into Texas and curving rapidly upward to ten times that height. It did a barrel roll and Lizette giggled. “Is that Nonc and the cou rouge?”

  “Yes, baby.” They all watched through the front windshield as the plane ascended into Texas, kept watching that leaden sky until the little wings banked off to the southeast for homeland, beneath them a distant silken blossom drifting down and west on a heavy Gulf breeze.

  Returnings

  Elaine thought that har
d work might clear her head, might not let her thoughts turn to her son. She had been coaxing the tractor through the field for four hours, turning two hundred acres into corduroy. When the rusting International was dead center in the farm, it began to miss and sputter, giving up under the April sun, far from the tractor shed. Elaine reached around the steering wheel, pulling the choke out a bit, hoping the carburetor would pass the water that she knew was in the gasoline, remembering with a pang that she had not drained the little glass water trap under the fuel tank. She hoped that her husband had been wrong when he’d told her that middle-aged women couldn’t farm. Yet she had forgotten to get the water out of the line on a tractor that had been sitting up three months, its gas tank sweating on the inside. She frowned at the coughing machine. They were supposed to buy a brand-new tractor that year, a 1967 model. But there was no longer any need.

  The engine fluttered and died. She checked her watch and saw that it was eleven o’clock. Climbing down, she poured a drink of water from a thermos tied under the metal seat with a strand of twine. She turned to stare at her house nearly a mile away, satisfied at the even rows of brown dirt she had heaped up. Like most women, she liked to grow things.