Same Place, Same Things

by Tim Gautreaux

  “I hope your tractor starts now,” he said, ducking his head, forcing a smile.

  She reached over and grabbed his neck, kissing him on the cheek. “Call Ralph Campbell in Poireauville and tell me how you did,” she said.

  He was surprised, but he nodded, understanding her order. After seeing her jump down and clear the blades, he gave a broad wave, then mounted the sky.

  She watched until the craft disappeared over a distant neighboring farmhouse, the home of John Thompson, whose blond daughter had loved her son. She listened to the clamor of the machine pounding into the eastern sky.

  When she turned, she noticed her husband’s truck lurching out toward her. Quickly, she reached under the tank and turned off the gasoline valve. He arrived, getting out this time, holding his back and walking over like someone much older. She held her breath, then asked the question. “What brings you out here?”

  “I been sleeping,” he said, rubbing his smooth jaw. “Something woke me up. I just looked out and saw you still hadn’t started the tractor.” He gave her a questioning look. “Why didn’t you walk in and get me?”

  “How’s your back?”

  He straightened up slowly, as if to test himself. “Feels better this afternoon.”

  “That’s good. No, I’ve taken everything apart and blown out the water. It just won’t start.”

  He walked up to the controls, pulled the starter ring twice, and listened. He reached up under the tank. “You forgot to reopen the gas line,” he said.

  She kicked at a clod of dirt. “I can’t believe I forgot that.”

  “Women farmers,” he said, smiling that cool, wrinkled smile of his.

  “I suppose you’ve never done the same.”

  He thought a bit. “One morning I tried and tried to start this thing. I ran down a battery before Joe—he was about nine then—came out to the shed and turned on the gas for me. He said, ‘Daddy, what would you ever do without me?’”

  She walked over and stood next to him, the skin on her arms prickling. The empty quiet of the field was oppressive, and she pulled the starter ring. The tractor chuckled alive, but as soon as it did, he reached over and pushed the kill switch, the quiet settling on them like a memory. “We’ve got to get away for a while,” he said, his voice so shaky it scared her. “Leave the tractor here. Let’s get cleaned up and drive into town.” He glanced up into the sky. “Let’s drive two towns over and get a fancy meal. You need it. You never get off this place.” He pounded the dull red tractor once with a fist.

  She looked at the eastern horizon, then put her arm easily around his back and hugged him, her freckled cheek pressing against the fresh khaki of his shirt. Slipping a hand up to the hot skin of his neck, she felt his blood coursing away, knowing it to be her blood as well. They stood together in the half-plowed field, in the middle of all they had lost. He took her hand and led her to the passenger door of the truck, opening it for her as though they were on a date.

  An hour later she was clipping small gold circles to her earlobes, and her husband was shaving. In the den the telephone began its slow rattle, and she bolted past the bathroom door for it. At first she was afraid to pick it up.

  “Yes?” she answered, then said, “I see. Yes.” Her expression remained neutral. “I understand you perfectly. Sure. And thank you for calling.” She replaced the receiver and put a hand over a smile.

  * * *

  They got into the shimmering sedan and drove out onto the unlined road, heading through the hot afternoon toward town. In a month the land around her would bear cornstalks growing like children. She cast a long admiring gaze at the field she’d been plowing, at the straightness of her rows where they glimmered under the sun, rails of dirt running east under a safe and empty sky.

  Deputy Sid’s Gift

  I’m going to tell you about the last time I went to confession. I met this priest at the nursing home where I work spoon-feeding the parish’s old folks. He noticed I had a finger off, and so he knew I was oil field and wanted to know why I was working indoors. This priest was a blond guy with eyes you could see through and didn’t look like nobody inside of two hundred miles of Grand Crapaud, Louisiana. He didn’t know that when sweet crude slid under twelve dollars a barrel, most oil companies went belly-up like a stinking red-fish, and guys like me had to move out or do something else. So I told him I took a night class in scrubbing these old babies, and he said I had a good heart and bull like that and invited me to come visit at the rectory if I ever needed to.

  One day I needed to, yeah. Everybody’s got something they got to talk about sometime in their life. I went to the old brick church on LeBlanc Street on a Saturday morning and found him by himself in his little kitchen in the old cypress priest house, and we sat down by the table with a big pot of coffee.

  So I told him what had been going through my head, how I used to have a 1962 Chevrolet pickup truck, a rusty spare I kept parked out by the road just to haul off trash. It was ratty and I was ashamed to drive it unless I was going to the dump. One day after Christmas my wife, Monette, told me to get rid of the tree and the holiday junk, so I went to crank the truck. Well, in a minute I’m standing by the road with a key in my hand, looking at a long patch of pale weeds where the truck used to be. I’m saying to myself that the truck coulda been gone a hour or a week. It’s just a thing you don’t look at unless you need it.

  So I called Claude down at his little four-by-four city jail and he said he’d look for it the next day, that he had more expensive stuff to worry about. Ain’t that a hell of a note. Then I called the sheriff’s office down at the parish seat, and when I told them the truck’s over thirty years old, they acted like I’m asking them to look for a stole newspaper or something. It was my truck and I wanted it back.

  The priest, he just nodded along and poured us our first cup of coffee from a big aluminum dripolator. When he finished, he put the pot in a shallow pan of water on the gas stove behind his chair and stared down at his shoe, like he was hearing my confession, which I guess he was. He even had his little purple confession rag hanging on his neck.

  I told the priest how the cops searched a lil’ bit, and how I looked, but that old truck just disappeared like rain on a hot street. Monette, she was glad to get it out the yard, but I needed something for hauling, you know? So after not too long I found a good old ’78 Ford for a thousand dollars and bought that and put it right where the other one was.

  One day my little girl Lizette and me, we was at the nursing home together because of some student-visit-the-parent-at-work deal at her school. She was letting the old folks hug her little shoulders and pat her dark hair. You know how they are. They see a child and go nuts to get at them, like the youngness is going to wear off on their old bodies. At the end of my shift, one of the visitors who was there to see his dried-up wife—I think he was a Canulette, kind of a café au lait dude from out by Prairie Amère—his truck won’t crank, so me and Lizette decided to bring him home. Me in my smocky little fruit uniform and Lizette with her checkerboard school suit went off in my shiny thirdhand Buick, old man Canulette sitting between us like a fence post. We rolled down the highway and turned off into the rice fields and went way back into the tree line toward Coconut Bayou. We passing through that poor folks’ section on the other side of Tonga Bend when Lizette stuck her head out the window to make her pigtails go straight in the wind. Next thing I knew, she yelled, daddy, there’s your truck, back in the woods. I turned the car around in that little gravel road and sure enough—you couldn’t hardly see it unless you had young eyes—there was my old Chevy parked up under a grove of live oaks maybe 150 yards away.

  We walked up on it, and judging from the thistles that had growed up past the bumper, it’d been there three months. I held back and asked Monsieur Canulette if anybody lived around there, and he looked at the truck and said the first word since town: Bezue. He said here and there in the woods a Bezue lived and they all had something wrong in they heads. I told him I
’d put me a Bezue in jail if he stole my truck, but he just looked at me with those silver eyes of his in a way that gave me les frissons. I brought the old man to his little farm and then came back to Tonga Bend Store to call the deputy, who took most of a hour to get out there.

  They sent Sid Touchard, that black devil, and he showed up with his shaggy curls full of pomade falling down his collar, the tape deck in his cruiser playing zydeco. He got out with a clipboard, like he knows how to write, and put on his cowboy hat. He asked me if I was the Bobby Simoneaux what called, and even Lizette looked behind her in the woods for maybe another Bobby Simoneaux, but I just nodded. He looked at the truck and the leaves and branches on it and asked me do I still want it. Mais, yeah, I told him. Then Sid walked up and put his hand on the door handle like it was something dirty, which I guess it was, and pulled. What we saw was a lot of trash paper, blankets, and old clothes. I looked close and Lizette stepped back and put her little hands on her mouth. The air was nothing but mildew and armpit, and by the steering wheel was a nappy old head.

  He’s living in it, Deputy Sid said. His eyebrows went up when he said that. Even he was surprised, and he works the poor folks of the parish. He asked again do I still want it. Hell yeah, I said. He spit. He’s a tall man, yeah, and it takes a long time for his spit to hit the ground. Then he reached in and woke the man, who sat up and stared at us. He was black—back-in-the-country black. He wasn’t no old man, but he had these deep wrinkles the old folks call the sorrow grooves, and he looked like he was made out of Naugahyde. His eyeballs was black olives floating in hot sauce, and when Sid tried to get out of him what he was doing in the truck, he took a deep breath and looked over the rusty hood toward the road.

  Finally he said, I’m Fernest. Fernest Bezue. My mamma, she lives down that way. He pointed, and I could see he been drunk maybe six years in a row. The old cotton jacket he had on was eat up with battery acid and his feet was bare knobs. Sid give me that look like he got on bifocals, but he ain’t. Hell no, I told him. I want my truck. He stole it and you got to put him in jail. So Sid said to him, you stole this truck? And Fernest kept looking at the road like it was something he wasn’t allowed to see, and then he said he found it here. When he said that, I got hot.

  Deputy Sid tugged Fernest out into the sunlight, slow, like he was a old cow he was pulling out a tangle of fence. He put him in the cruiser and told me and Lizette to get in the front seat. He said where Fernest’s mamma lived, my Buick can’t go. So we rolled down the gravel a mile, turned off on a shell road where the chinaball and sticker bushes about dragged the paint off that beat-up cruiser. Lizette, she sat on my lap, looking at Deputy Sid’s candy bar wrappers on the floor, a satsuma on the seat, and a rosary around the rearview. The road gave out at a pile of catbrier and we turned left into a hard-bottom coulee full of rainwater next to Coconut Bayou. The water come up to the hubcaps and Lizette wiggled and told Deputy Sid we on a ferryboat for sure, yeah.

  There’s this little shotgun shack up on brick piers with the tar paper rotting off it, stovepipe stub sticking out the side wall, no steps to the door, cypress knees coming up in the yard, egg cartons and water jugs floating around on the breeze. Deputy Sid leaned on the horn for maybe fifteen seconds until the front door opened and a woman look like a licorice stick stood there dressed in some old limp dress. He rolled down the window and asked if it’s her son in the backseat. She stooped slow, squinted a long time. That Fernest, she said to the water. She sure wasn’t talking to us. Sid stepped out on a walk board and told me to follow. I jacked up my legs, slid over all the junk, and brought out that satsuma with me. Can’t leave this with Lizette, I told him. She loves these things. Sid took it from me, tossed it to her, and she caught that with one hand.

  While he talked to the woman I looked in the house. All this while, my shoes was filling up with water. The first room had nothing but a mattress and a kerosene lamp on the floor and some bowls next to it. The walls was covered with newspaper to keep the wind out. In the second and last room, the floor had fell in. The whole place was swayback because the termites had eat out the joists and side beams. It didn’t take no genius to tell that the roof rafters wasn’t gonna last another year. A wild animal would take to a hole in the ground before he lived in a place like that.

  Deputy Sid asked the woman did she know about the truck, and she said he was living in it. He turned to me and said, look around. You want me to put him in jail?

  Hell yeah, I told him, and Sid looked at me hard with those oxblood eyes he got, trying to figure a road into my head. He told me if I file charges and put him in jail, that’d cost the parish. My tax money was gonna pay to feed him and put clothes on him. He said let him stay with his mamma. The old woman stooped down again, and Fernest stared at her like maybe she was a tractor or a cloud. I looked around again and saw that putting him in jail would be a promotion in life, yeah.

  Sid took off the bracelets and walked him to the house. The old lady said he could stay. Then we left, that cruiser bottoming out and fishtailing from the yard, its mud grips digging down to the claypan. Back at my truck I threw all his stuff in a pile, old coats with cigarette holes burnt through, medicine bottles from the free clinic in town, dirty drawers I handled with a stick, fried chicken skin and bones, a little radio with leaking batteries. I put my key in but the engine didn’t make a sound. When I opened up the hood, all I saw was a pile of a thousand sticks and three long otter-looking animals that took off for the woods. The sheriff’s tow truck brought the thing back to my house and that was that. My wife took one look at it and one smell of it and told me it had to be gone. I already had one truck.

  A rainy spell set in and the truck sank down in the backyard for a couple weeks with the crawfish chimneys coming up around it till I got a nice day and scrubbed it inside and out. Down at the home we got five new poor helpless folks from the government without nobody dying to make room for ’em, so another week passed before I could get to the hardware and buy me a nice orange FOR SALE sign.

  * * *

  Now this was when the priest kind of leaned back against the window frame and made a faraway smile and looked out to the rose garden Father Scheuter put in before they transferred him to Nevada. Priests try not to look you in the eye when you telling stuff. Scared maybe you won’t tell it straight, or tell it all. So I told him straight that the second night that old truck was parked back out on the street wearing that sign, it got stole. I called up Deputy Sid direct this time and told him what happened. He said, you want me to look for that truck again? I told him hell yeah. He said, don’t you got a truck already? I think that pomade Sid been smearing on his head all these years done soaked in his brain, and I told him that. He said, you got a nice brick house, a wife, three kids, and two cars. He said, you might quit at that. He said he didn’t feel like burning fifty dollars gas looking for a forty-dollar truck. I told him I would talk to the sheriff, and he said okay, he’d look.

  I wound up at the home helping out for music day, when Mr. Lodrigue brings his Silvertone guitar and amp to play songs the old folks recognize. Man, they love that rusty stuff like “As Time Goes By,” “The Shrimp Boats Is A-Coming,” and such 78 rpm tunes they can tap their feet to. I get a kick out of them people—one foot in the grave and still trying to boogie. And Mr. Lodrigue, who has wavery silver hair and kind of smoky gray eyes, he looks like Frank Sinatra to them old gals.

  I got through with music day and went out to where my car was at behind the home, and there, big as a hoss, was Sid sitting on the hood of his muddy police car. I walked up and saw his arms was crossed. He said, I found it. I asked him where it was, and he said, where it was before. I said, you mean Fernest Bezue got it back in Prairie Amère? Man, that made me hot. Here I let him go free and he comes back on me like that. I cursed and spit twice. Deputy Sid looked at me like I was the thief. I asked him why didn’t he haul him in, and he looked away. Finally, he said, he’s alcoholic. That got me hotter. Like I could go down to Generou
s Gaudet’s used-car lot drunk and steal me a car and somebody would let me off. Deputy Sid nodded, but he said, Simoneaux, you play with those old people like they your own grandpère and grandmère. You don’t know what they done wrong in they time. I sat down next to him when he said that. The hood metal popped in and shook loose a thought in my head that kind of got me worried. It was about the folks in the home. Maybe I was nice to the old people because I was paid for that. Nobody was paying me to be nice to a drunk Bezue from Prairie Amère. I spit on the sidewalk and wondered if Deputy Sid’s as dumb as he looks. Then I thought about Fernest Bezue out under the oaks, staring at the road. So I said, okay, get the tow truck to pull it in, and he says, no, I can’t make a report because they’ll pick him up.

  What you think about that? I got to go get my own stole truck, yeah. That’s my tax dollars at work.

  * * *

  The pot on the range gave a little jump like a steam bubble got caught under its bottom, and the priest turned and got us another cup. He was frowning a little now, like his behind’s hurting in that hard-bottom chair, but he didn’t say anything, still didn’t look.

  I went on about how I wanted to do the right thing, how me and Monette got out on the gravel past Prairie Amère, trying to beat a big thunderstorm coming up from the Gulf. When we got to where the truck was, the wind was twisting those live oaks like they was rubber. Monette stayed in the Buick and I walked up to the old red truck, and in the bed was Fernest, sitting down with a gallon of T&T port between his legs, just enjoying the breeze. You stole my truck again, I told him. He said he had to have a place to get away. He said it like he was living in a vacation home down on Holly Beach. He was staring up into the black cloud bank, waiting for lightning. That’s how people like him live, I guess, waiting to get knocked down and wondering why it happens to them. I looked at his round head and that dusty nap he had for hair and started to walk off. But he had what was mine and he didn’t work for it, and I figured it would do him more harm than good to just give him something for nothing. I said if he could get two hundred dollars he could have the truck. I didn’t know where that come from, but I said it. He said if he had two hundred dollars he wouldn’t be sitting in the woods with a five-dollar gallon of wine. I wondered for a minute where he wanted to go, but just for a minute, because I didn’t want to get in his head. So I looked in the cab where he’d hot-wired the ignition, and I sparked up that engine. I pulled out his blankets and some paper bags of food and threw them in a pile. Then I jumped into the bed and put down the tailgate. I had to handle him like the real helpless ones at the home, he was that drunk, and even in that wind he smelled sour, like a wet towel bunched up in the trunk. I put the truck in gear and left him in the middle of that clearing under them oaks, him that wouldn’t pay or work. When I rolled up on the road ahead of Monette in the Buick, the rain come like a water main broke in the sky. I looked back at Fernest Bezue and he was standing next to his pile of stuff, one finger in that jug by his leg and his head up like he was taking a shower. Then a big bolt come down across the road and the rain blew sideways like busted glass, and I headed back for town.