She yelled at the kids, waving her arms. One of her big breasts popped over the top of her slip, but she did not seem to notice.
Marie looked up the palm tree, squinted, and then stomped down into the yard, hands on her hips.
“Come on down out of that tree there, that’s been leaning and shaking in every little wind, before you break you fool neck!”
The boy in the tree did not move. He wrapped his legs tighter around the trunk and yelled: “Yaaaaaa, toe cheese.”
She gave one more quick look up the tree and then began to scan the ground. She crossed the yard, pushing aside the kids and stepping through the middle of the circle of marbles.
She found what she was looking for: a piece of brick. She weighed it in her hand, decided it was too heavy and smashed it on an oyster shell. She picked up the two largest pieces and looked up the tree again. Then she closed one eye and very carefully and deliberately threw the first piece. It hit Robby’s hip. He yelped but did not move. She walked around the tree and threw the other; it clipped him in the center of the back.
He slid down the trunk quickly. The bark burned the inside of his legs, and he was rubbing them when she caught up with him.
“Sal au pri!” She grabbed him by one arm and almost lifted him up. He began to cry.
She yelled back at him: “I got a mind to shake you till you brains fall out or you get some sense. And there ain’t no telling which come first.”
His eyes shut tight, he screamed. The other kids came up in a circle, their heads sticking forward on their necks, watching.
“Hey,” Burt said. “He’s popping blood all around, him.”
“Where you bleeding?” Marie said. “Where?”
Robby stopped yelling and opened his eyes. He pointed to his legs. There were long red brushburns down the inner sides, still with pieces of the heavy rough bark sticking to them.
Marie half carried, half dragged the boy up the steps and into the house. “All I got to do is take a rest, me, and you go find a way to mess yourself up good, and come screaming to me.”
“You hit me,” Robby wailed.
“And you got to say a prayer to the Blessed Mother that you didn’t come falling down with that tree that’s been shaking at its roots for I don’t know how many years, and you jumping around up at its top, like you was a monkey, and nothing come falling down.”
She sat him on a kitchen chair. The other kids crowded up to the screen door. She got a bottle of iodine from the corner of the cupboard and smeared it across the brushburns. He yelled. She reached up and got a piece of sugar. “Open up you mouth.”
She dropped a lump in and yanked her finger away fast. “Ha! … I ain’t so stupid I don’t know what you thinking.” She went back to work with the iodine. “Ain’t gonna bite me.”
Burt said: “He going to be decorated up like a Christmas tree, him.”
“You pay no mind to them,” Marie said and glared at them over her shoulder. “They ain’t got nothing but dirty feet and dirty noses and not one handkerchief.”
He bent over studying the stained skin on his legs, pulling the broken skin apart with his fingertips.
“Quit that!” She moved over to the sink, took down a cup, shook a little bit of Octagon soap powder in it, filled it up with water so that the suds spilled over the rim. “I almost forgot me what you call me, still up in that tree that ain’t no more than just brushing in the ground and shaking all over while you was up there.”
He began to whimper again. Over at the door, the kids shuffled and pressed their noses on the screen.
She dragged a wood kitchen chair in front of the sink. With her still holding his arm, he scrambled up.
She swished the suds around in the cup. “You remember what you was calling me.”
He nodded, his eyes on the yellowish soapsuds.
“You just keep thinking on that, and you start saying the Hail Mary and praying to God you tongue don’t drop out with cancer for saying things like that.”
He didn’t move. He only rubbed one bare foot against the other ankle.
“You started, huh?”
He nodded again.
She released his shoulder and put that hand on the back of his head. She brought the cup of soapsuds up to his lips. He squirmed and kicked. The cup made a little clinking sound against his teeth.
“Quit, you,” she said, “before I bust you teeth like they was acorns falling down.”
She tilted the cup, and pressed his head back. “Open you teeth or I going to pry them up like a hound dog.”
The water was running down his chin and splashing off the chair. His mouth filled. He blew the liquid out, opening his clenched teeth. She poured the rest of the soapsuds down and clamped her hand around his mouth. She shook his head then, just the way she would shake a jar she was washing out. “Jesus, Mary,” she said, “you got to get you mouth clean out of words like that, talking like a trapper out in the marsh.”
She held his head over the sink and took away her hand. He sputtered so that his whole body shook.
“Now wrench out.”
He grabbed for the pitcher of water and took a mouthful from it.
She yanked it away from him. “Ain’t you never learned to use a glass?”
She tasted the water and made a face. “Just wasting, and with the water so low that the wigglers is coming out the pipes.” She sighed and went out on the porch. The kids scattered back to the edges, but she didn’t notice them. She poured the pitcher of water on the four scraggly wax plants growing in the rusty coffee cans by the steps. She picked up the mop from where it hung handle down over the railing, shook the small bright red roaches out of the head and went inside to mop up the soapy puddle on the kitchen floor. Then she hung the mop out of the window.
Finally she turned on Robby. “You ain’t moved?”
He shook his head.
“Get out of here,” she said. “Go play around a million miles from here. Go feed the gars in the middle of the bay.”
He scrambled away. The kids, who were still standing just the other side of the screen, pulled back to make room for him.
Once the door had slammed behind him, he stopped and looked at them. He let his lids fall until his eyes were half closed and he had to lift his chin to see.
“Jeez,” Burt said.
Robby blew a little saliva bubble, slowly.
“Look at him,” Didi said.
“He still bubbling,” Mercy said.
“Jeez,” Burt said.
Robby blew another bubble and, crossing his eyes, tried to look down at it. Then, because she was the closest, he grabbed hold of Didi’s shirt front and pushed her off the porch. She didn’t make a sound, just plopped down into the dirt. He made a wide left-handed swing at Burt, who ducked. He climbed to the top of the porch railing and jumped down from there, rolling over and over. Then he tried standing on his head.
Finally he stood up, blew a couple of bubbles very carefully, and started down the road. The other kids followed, first Didi, then Mercy and then Burt. Robby pretended not to notice them but every once in a while he turned and threw a handful of dust. And he swaggered so hard he wasn’t even walking a straight line.
Half an hour later he was perched up on the highest limb of the camphor tree behind the Arcenaux grocery, while the other kids climbed restlessly around in the lower branches. When they tried to come up with him, he kicked them away. Finally they all settled down and watched the white-hulled sloop that was beating toward the island.
TEN MINUTES AFTER HE had cast off from the sloop Pixie Inky D’Alfonso was approaching Isle aux Chiens. He throttled down the outboard and came in slowly.
Ahead of him was the island, a long low strip, perfectly straight on this side. He didn’t remember ever seeing such a straight line before. There was a sand-colored line and then a curving line of green, lifting up to a kind of point three quarters of the way to the east end. The trees looked glossy and heavy there.
He g
lanced over his shoulder. The sloop was moving east, on a reach now. And the main was luffing. A little. … Damn fool had no tiller hand. …
The dinghy swayed and quivered. All he’d need, he told himself, was a spill overboard. He was a fool to get himself in a crazy trip like this. Nothing about it was right.
And then he grinned. … Nothing was right, except that he couldn’t keep away from a sailboat.
He’d quit high school to crew on a West Indies job. And that was only the beginning. …
He got a splash of murky sour water in his mouth. He spat and wiped his lips and got back to business.
He came in around the eastern end of the island, through the narrow pass between it and Isle Cochon, where the charts said there should have been a line of reflectors. The sand fringe went around this side of the island too. It looked white and soft to lie on.
But there was nobody on it, not even kids. Maybe the afternoon sun was too much for them. He circled the end of the island and saw that it was a kind of point, jutting northward. Farther down in the circle, he could see the rigging of a lugger. And even at this distance he could smell the tar of the nets.
He swung the dinghy down into the circle. The edges of this side of the island were marshy: he could see the alligator grass and the cattails and the saw grass. A yellow and black ricebird whizzed over his head.
He saw a kind of rickety fishing-pier, and behind it a little path that ran straight into the trees. He eased the dinghy over and made it fast to the last pole. The pier was chest high and only two boards wide. He had to hoist and swing himself carefully sideways. The ragged edge of the board scraped his stomach. He sat for a minute, catching his breath, and staring into the heavy green shadows of the trees.
Somebody was watching him. He could feel it as plain as a hand on his shoulder. It was the sort of thing that made his spine prickle. He could feel himself begin to get angry, could feel it in a certain restless movement of his hands.
There wasn’t a thing he could see beyond the oaks and the oleanders and the vines and the low flat leaves of the palmettoes. The ricebird was sitting on the post nearest shore.
Almost as soon as he stepped ashore, he saw the houses, four of them, not a hundred yards from the water. In the fenced yard of the first was a dog, a fair-sized black and white animal who crouched quivering behind the gate, his teeth showing just slightly in a silent snarl.
Inky stopped and talked to him. “Hi, boy.” The dog hugged the ground tighter.
“Okay,” Inky said, “okay.” He looked at the house. Like the other four it was lifted off the ground on high foundations. The front porch was empty. “Hey,” he yelled, “anybody home?”
It was absolutely still. Inky waited a minute, scratching his ear. Then he walked to the second house. There was no dog this time and he went up to the front door. He pounded on the door frame. “Nobody here either?” He stuck his nose against the torn screen. He could see a center hall, with a dresser and some chairs in it—but nothing else.
“Nobody here?” He waited perched on the railing, picking the shells from the soles of his topsiders.
There was only the very faintest creak of a board inside. He got up and peered down the hall again. It was empty.
“Hell,” he said softly and went down the steps again. He lit a cigarette very slowly and flicked the match away in a high arc.
The other houses looked just as deserted, thin spidery houses with little threads of footpaths between them.
Take the one that goes west, Inky thought. There’s got to be somebody sooner or later.
“Somebody who won’t hide,” he said aloud. He felt better—let them hear him. And if he couldn’t get anybody to show them the channel—What did he care? Let Arthur keep sailing the god-damn boat up and down along the coast. God-damn fool who had to stop and wet his finger before he was sure where the wind was.
“You looking for somebody?”
He spun around. For a minute he did not see the woman. And when he did, he blinked and shook his head and looked again. Back under a tangle of bougainvillea and slung from the thick branches of a tough oak was a faded gray-black hammock. She was sitting on the edge, her bare feet dangling.
“It was you yelling down at the houses, no?”
“You heard me?”
She grinned. “You was making enough racket to wake the whole island.”
She slipped off the hammock. She was quite short, a stocky figure, wide shoulders and wide hips. But she had a very small waist—the sort you could put your two hands around, Inky thought.
“I’m Cecile Boudreau.”
“Ignatius D’Alfonso—call me Inky.”
“You come off the boat that’s running up and down along the coast?”
“We been trying to find the channel.”
“It ain’t marked,” she said.
“You’re telling me,” Inky said. “What’d they do? Use it for a shotgun target?”
She was a good-looking woman, he thought. Not more than twenty-five or so. She looked fine in the shorts—good legs and big breasts.
“The charts say it’s marked.”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t nothing but a reflector at night.”
She had brown skin—sunburned or not, he couldn’t tell—and black hair cut short, very short; and greenish eyes.
“Any sort a mark and we could come in.”
She grinned. Some of the teeth on the right side of her mouth—far back—were missing. “It ain’t hurt you being out there.”
“Depends how long we got to stay.”
“What you coming here for?”
“Look, honey,” he said, “I don’t know anything. It’s not my boat.”
She was staring at him directly. He’d never had a woman look at him quite that way.
This one now, she just stood staring right straight at him. Those light eyes began right at his shoes and went all the way up him. That should have meant just one thing. But this time he wasn’t sure. The way she was staring—appraisingly, interestedly but sexless too.
And then he knew where he’d seen that sort of look before. Back in the athletic club in New Orleans. (He’d worked there a couple of years, the time when he was crazy to be a fighter.) He’d seen wrestlers look at each other that way just before starting a match.
That was the way she was looking at him. …
“Do you know the channel?” he asked.
“Sort of.”
“Could you get us in?”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t take a chance with such a pretty boat, me.”
“Hell,” he said, “you want us to spend the rest of the year cruising up and down out there, waiting for the government to come put up new markers?”
She slapped at a mosquito on her arm. “You find somebody.”
“Where?”
“You tried the Rendezvous?”
“You been watching me ever since I set foot on the ground.”
“Not watching.”
“Okay … listening.”
“You was making so much noise, I couldn’t help it.”
A black and yellow ricebird came and sat on the tip of a swaying branch. “He’s following me too,” Inky said—and found that funny. “Don’t people ever come out when you knock on their front door?”
“They wasn’t home.”
“Hell, no,” he said, “I could hear somebody inside.”
She slapped the mosquitoes on her bare thighs. “That’s the Caillets.”
“They don’t answer?”
Her light eyes crinkled with laughter.
A door slammed, the sound muffled by the trees.
“That’s the Caillets’ now, for sure,” Cecile said.
“Look,” Inky said, “all I want to do is get in that channel.”
She clucked her tongue. “I keep telling you go try the Rendezvous.”
“Okay,” he said. “Where’s that?”
She was staring at him, as if she wanted to remember jus
t exactly what he looked like. “I show you.”
“Which way?”
There was a rosebush growing at the side of the path, an old climber gone wild, with thorns like a rooster’s spur.
“Move,” she said, “or I get scratched up.”
He hesitated for a moment, not seeing what she meant. She put a hand in the center of his chest and pushed him back, hard.
He started to grab her hand and then stopped. She went on ahead.
“Back this way here.”
He found himself staring at the heavy back lines of her thighs. And he found himself thinking: That’s not fat, not one bit. That’s muscle. If you touched it, it would be hard.
“You find somebody at the Rendezvous, for sure.”
“Won’t they be out working, this time of day?”
She glanced over her shoulder. “Not all.”
They passed between the houses; their porches were still empty.
“You know,” he said, watching the way her shoulder blades moved through the thin shirt, “I thought the place’d be full of dogs.”
“There plenty of dogs all right,” Cecile said.
They crossed the little clearing where the houses were and took another path. There were hackberry bushes taller than a man’s head and clumps of thick heavy blueberries.
“They just ain’t around now,” Cecile said.
“What?”
“The dogs.” She turned around and stared at him. “You was the one was asking.”
“Oh,” he said, “sure.”
They came out of the bushes and the trees and were on the beach.
“This here is easy walking,” she said.
“The sand is yellow. It hadn’t looked that way.”
She looked up and down the beach, still not stopping her walk, and pursed her mouth. “Guess so.”
He kicked at a big piece of driftwood. “That looks like a telephone pole for sure.”
“All sorts of things come up.”
“I bet.”
“My old man found a rocking-chair, upholstered and all.”
“Dry it out?”
“He’s been sitting on it ever since I can remember.” She grinned, sharp, eager, boylike. (It was funny, Inky thought, with a shape like hers, how she could remind you of a boy.)
The Hard Blue Sky Page 2