Same Place, Same Things

by Tim Gautreaux

  All that night I rolled like a log in the bed. I thought the weather would blow over, but the storm set on Grand Crapaud like a flat iron and dropped big welding rods of lightning almost till dawn. On the way to work I got tempted to drive back to Prairie Amère, but I didn’t, and all that day I was forgetting to change bed linen and was slopping food on the old babies when I fed ’em. It took me a week to relax, to get so I could clean the truck some more without seeing Fernest looking up at the sky, waiting. I got it ready and put it on the lawn, but this time I took the battery and left it in the carport. Nobody looked at it for about a week. One morning Lizette, she kissed me bye and went out to wait for the bus. A minute later I heard the screen door open and Lizette said the old truck was trying to run. She said it was making running noise. So I went out and looked through the glass. Fernest Bezue was in there snoring on his back like a sawmill. When Lizette found out it was a big drunk man she yelled and ran for the house. She was scared, yeah, and I didn’t like that. I opened the driver door and it took me five minutes to convince him I wasn’t Mr. Prudhomme, a cane farmer he used to work for ten years back. When he sat up, his left eye capsized, then come back slow, and it was weak, like a lamp flame at sunup. He stared out the windshield at a place I couldn’t see.

  I told Fernest that I ought to pull him out and turn the hose on him for scaring my little girl like he did. He mumbled something I didn’t catch, and I told him to get the hell away. But he just sat there in the middle of that old sprung bench seat like he half-expected me to get in and drive him somewhere to eat. Finally he told me the house had fell in and his mamma went off somewhere and didn’t tell him. Man, I let him have it. Told him to stop that drink and get a job. He said that his drinking was a disease, and I told him yeah, it was a lazy disease. He said if he could help it, he would. That his daddy was the same way and died in a wreck. I told him he was in a slow wreck right now. I looked back at my house and them wilting camelias Monette planted under the windows. Then I told him if he could stay dry for a week I’d see if I could get him a mopping job at the rest home. He could save up and buy my truck. Then he put his head down and laughed. I can’t stop, man, he said to me. That pissed me off so bad I went in and called the cops. After a while Claude come up in the town’s cruiser, took one look at Fernest, then looked over where I’m standing by my Japan plum tree. How they made a gun belt skinny enough for that man, I don’t know. He asked me, mais, what you ’spec us to do with him? Claude is real country, can’t hardly talk American. He said Fernest can’t do nothing to that truck he can arrest him for. If he steal it again the mayor gonna give him the town beutimfication award. I said arrest him, and I could see in Claude’s eyes that nobody was on the night shift to keep a watch on Fernest down at that one-cell jail. Do something, I told him. He’s scaring Lizette sleeping out here.

  What Claude did is put him in the squad car, stop by Bug’s café and buy him a ham sandwich, and drop him off at the town limits, by the abandoned rice mill buildings. They told me that when I called the station later on.

  * * *

  This was when the priest got up and stretched. He pointed to my cup and I shook my head. He fixed himself one more with lots of cream, got a glass of water from the tap, and sat down again, looking at me just once, real quick.

  That made me feel like I could keep going, so I told him how that night and a couple nights more I couldn’t sleep without dreaming something about that no-good drunk. I mean, lots of people need help. My one-legged uncle needs his grass cut, and I’d do it, but he says he don’t want me to mess with it. Says I got better things to do with my time. Other people deserve my help, and that Fernest didn’t deserve nothing, yet when I went to sleep, there he was in my head. When I read a newspaper, there he was in a group picture, until I focused real good. But after a while he started to fade again, you know, like before. I settled into business at the home, putting ointment on the bald men’s heads, putting Band-Aids on the old ladies’ bunions so they can wear shoes, though there’s no place for them to walk to.

  Then one morning here she come, in with three poor folks the government paid us to take, Fernest’s mamma, all dried up like beef jerky. She had herself a stroke out on Mr. Prudhomme’s farm, where she was staying for free in a trailer, and one side of her wouldn’t work. I stayed away from her for three days, until it was time for Mr. Lodrigue, the music man, when everybody gets together in the big room. I was just walking by to get Mr. Boudreaux his teeth he left in the pocket of his bathrobe when her good arm stuck out and grabbed my fruity little uniform. I didn’t want to look in her eye, but I did. She slid out her tongue and wet her lips. The mailbox is the onliest thing standing, she told me. The house fall in. I told her it’s a shame and I wanted to walk away, but she got hold of my little smock and balled it in her fist.

  She told me his government check come in the mailbox, then he walk five miles for the wine. She told me he was gonna die of the wine and couldn’t I help. I looked at her and I felt cold as a lizard. I asked her why me. She said, you the one. I told her he was past all help. He had the drinking disease and that was that. I pulled away and went got old man Boudreaux’s choppers, and when I come back I saw her across the room, pointing at me with the one finger what would still point. You the one, that finger said. I laughed and told myself right then and there I wasn’t going to help no black drunk truck thief that couldn’t be helped.

  * * *

  The priest, he made to swat a mosquito on his arm, but he changed his mind and blew it away with his breath. I didn’t know if he was still listening good. Who knows if a priest pays a lot of attention. I think you supposed to be talking to God, and the man in the collar is just like a telephone operator. Anyway, I kept on.

  I told him how after work I used the phone out in the parking lot to call Deputy Sid to help me find Fernest. Yeah, I was ashamed of myself. I didn’t know what I was going to do if Sid found him for me, but I had to do something to get the old lady’s pointing finger out my head. I went home, and about a hour before sundown Deputy Sid pulled up in my front yard and I went out to him, carrying Lizette, who had a cold and was all leechy like a kid gets when she’s feeling bad. Sid had him a long day. His pomade hair hung down like a thirsty azalea. He said we got to go out to Prairie Amère, and so I put my little girl down, got in the old truck, and followed him out.

  We went through the pine belt and past the rice fields those Thibodeaux boys own, and by them poor houses in Tonga Bend, then we broke out into Prairie Amère, which is mostly grass and weed flowers with a live oak every now and then, but no crops. The old farmers say everything you plant there comes up with a bitter taste. All of a sudden the cruiser pulled off into the clover on the side of the road, so I rolled up behind. There ain’t a thing around, and I walked up and Deputy Sid said empty land is a sad thing. He stretched and I could hear his gun belt creaking. I asked why we stopped and he pointed. Maybe a hundred yards in the field, eat up by weeds, was a little barn, the kind where a dozen cows could get in out the sun. We jumped the ditch and scratched through the buttonbush and bull tongue. Deputy Sid stopped once and sneezed. He said I told him to find Fernest and he did. It wasn’t easy, but he did. He asked what did I want with him, and I said his mamma wanted me to check, but that wasn’t it, no. It was the people at the home what made me do it. I was being paid to be nice to them. I wanted to do something without being paid. I didn’t give a damn about some black truck thief, but I wanted to help him. I couldn’t tell Deputy Sid this.

  We got to the tin overhang on the barn, and we wasn’t able to see much inside. The sun was about down. We stepped in and waited for our eyes to get used to the place. I could smell that peppery-sweet cypress. A building can be a hundred years old—if it’s made of cypress, you going to smell that. Along the side wall was a wooden feed rack three feet off the ground, and sleeping in there was Fernest, his face turned to that fine-grain wall. Deputy Sid let out a little noise in his throat like a woman would make. He said
Fernest was trying to sleep above the ground so the ants couldn’t get to him. He said one time two years before, Fernest passed out on the ground and woke up in blazes with a million fire ants all over him like red pepper in a open wound. He stayed swole up for three weeks with hills of running pus all over him, and when his fever broke, he was half blind and mostly deaf in one ear.

  I went over to the feed trough and shook him. He smelled strong and it took five minutes before he opened his eyes, and even in the dark you could see them glowing sick. I asked him was he all right and he asked me if I was his mamma, so I waited a minute for his head to get straight. Deputy Sid came close and picked up a empty bottle and sniffed it. I reached through the slats and bumped Fernest’s arm and asked him why he drank so damn much when he knew it would kill him. He looked up at me like I was stupid. He said the booze was like air to him. Like water. I told him maybe I could get him in the home with his mamma, and he stared up at the tin roof and shook his head. I asked Sid if maybe his mamma could get him picked up and put in the crazy house, and Sid told me no, he’s not crazy, he’s just drunk all the time. The state thinks there’s a difference. Fernest sat up in the trough, hay all stuck in his hair, and he started coughing deep and wet, like some of the old folks do at the home late in the evening. Night shift is scary because them babies sail away in the dark. Anyway, Fernest’s face got all uneven, and he asked me what I wanted. That stopped me. I opened my dumb mouth just to see what would come out, and I told him that Deputy Sid bought my truck and was giving it to him so he could stay in it sometime. I held up the key and gave it to him. He nodded like he expected this, like people wake him up all the time and give him cars. I looked at Sid and I could see a gold star on a tooth, but he stayed quiet. Then I told Fernest I knew he couldn’t drive it, and I was going take the insurance off anyway, but he could use it to sleep out of the weather like he done before. He looked at Sid and reached out and gave him some kind of boogaloo handshake. In a minute I had the truck up in the grass by the barn, and I pulled the battery out just in case, and Deputy Sid brought me and the battery toward home. We pulled away from all that flat, empty land, and after about five miles Sid asked why I told Fernest he gave him the car. I looked at a tornado-wrecked trailer on the side the road and said I didn’t want nothing for what I did. The cruiser rattled past the poor folks in Tonga Bend, and Sid tuned in a scratchy zydeco station. Clinton Rideau and the Ebony Crawfish started pumping out “Sunshine Can’t Ruin My Storm,” but I didn’t feel like tapping my foot.

  I went home and expected to sleep, but I didn’t. I thought I did something great, but by two A.M., I knew all I did was give away a trashy truck with the floor pans rusting out and all the window glass cracked. I gave up the truck mostly to make myself feel good, not to help Fernest Bezue. And that’s what I told the priest I come there to tell him.

  The priest looked at me in the eyes then, and I could see something coming, like a big truck or a train. Then he leaned in and I could smell the soap on him. He told me there’s only one thing worse than what I did. I looked at the linoleum and asked, what’s that? And he said, not doing it.

  I like to fell out the chair.

  * * *

  About a month later Fernest’s mamma died in the night, and I called up Deputy Sid at dawn. He went out to look but he couldn’t find Fernest nowhere. Sid brought his big black self to my house, and I saw him bouncing up my drive like he got music in his veins instead of blood. He got on a new khaki uniform tight as a drumhead, knife creases all over. He told me the liquor store past Coconut Bayou said they ain’t seen him. The mailbox at the old place been eat down by termites. None of the farmers seen him. I said it’s a shame we can’t tell him about his mamma, and Deputy Sid looked at me sidewise and kissed his lips like he’s hiding a smile. I told him to come inside, and Monette fixed us all a cup of coffee, and we sat down in the kitchen and cussed the government.

  Summer come and the weather turned hot as the doorknob to hell. The old babies at the home couldn’t roll around outside, so we had to keep ’em happy in the big room by playing cards and like that. I had to play canasta with six ladies who couldn’t remember the rules between plays, so I would spend three hours a day explaining rules to a game we’d never finish.

  I guess it was two months after Fernest’s mamma passed. I got home and sat in my easy chair by the air condition when Lizette come by and give me a little kiss and said Deputy Sid wanted me on the phone. So I went in the kitchen, and he told me he’s in his cruiser out at Mr. Thibaut’s place in the north end of the parish, west of Mamou. He found Fernest.

  I couldn’t say nothing for half a minute. I asked him was he drunk, and he said no, he was way past that, and I said when, and he said he died about yesterday in the truck. I got a picture of Fernest Bezue driving that wreck on the back roads, squinting through the cracked windshield, picking his spot for the night. I told Deputy Sid I was sorry and he said, don’t feel like that. He said, we couldn’t do nothing for him but we did it anyway.

  Acclaim for Same Place, Same Things

  “Strikes notes true and clear.… Robustly local in its settings, speech, and folkways, Same Place, Same Things creates a vividly realized milieu.”

  —Rand Richards Cooper, Commonweal

  “Simply as great as anything Flannery O’Connor or Anton Chekhov ever wrote about their corners of the world.”

  —Hope Norman Coulter, The Arkansas Democrat Gazette

  “Captivating.… [These stories] remind us that it is compassion and grace that make ordinary life bearable.”

  —Alice Lankford Elmore, Southern Living

  “A terrific debut collection from a Louisiana writer whose stylish, sympathetic understanding of working-class sensibilities and Cajun culture gives his work a flavor and universality unique among contemporary writers.… Moving and memorable.… The gifted Gautreaux harkens back to the early work of Flannery O’Connor.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Memorable.… Gautreaux’s empathy for his characters strings a shimmering thread of hope and redemption throughout these dramatic, compelling tales.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Delightful.… More than any book I’ve ever read, even more than John Kennedy Toole’s masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, Same Place, Same Things captures south Louisiana.… You will be disappointed when you turn the last page, and you will join me in waiting impatiently for the next book by Tim Gautreaux.”

  —Laurie Parker, Bookpage

  About the Author

  Tim Gautreaux was born and raised in south Louisiana. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, GQ, Story, Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, and elsewhere. The recipient of an NEA fellowship and a National Magazine Award, he has taught creative writing for many years at Southeastern Louisiana University.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which these stories first appeared:

  The Atlantic Monthly: “Same Place, Same Things,” “Died and Gone to Vegas”; Story: “People on the Empty Road,” “Waiting for the Evening News”; Stories: “The Courtship of Merlin LeBlanc”; The Standard: “Navigators of Thought”; GQ: “The Bug Man,” “Little Frogs in a Ditch”; The Crescent Review: “License to Steal”; The Virginia Quarterly Review: “Floyd’s Girl”; St. Anthony Messenger: “Returnings”; Harper’s: “Deputy Sid’s Gift.”

  SAME PLACE, SAME THINGS. Copyright © 1996 by Tim Gautreaux. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gautreaux, Tim.

  Same place, same things / by Tim Gautreaux.

  p. cm.

  Contents: Same place, same things—Waiting for the evening news—Died and gone to Vegas—The courtship of Merlin LeBlanc—Navigators of thought—People on the empty road—The bug man—Little frogs in a ditch—License to steal—Floyd’s girl—Returnings—Deputy Sid’s gift.