The Hard Blue Sky

by Shirley Ann Grau

  She stuck out her tongue, around the corner of the cigarette. “Il vient d’poulailler,” she said to nobody in particular.

  Perique blushed. The sunburned back of his neck got red. “No more than you.”

  “Man, man,” Hector said, “ain’t love something.”

  “Shut up,” Annie said.

  She bent her knees and slowly lowered herself back to a sitting position in the pirogue. Then she picked up the paddle and moved off a bit. “So I don’t got to look straight up when I talk to you,” she explained.

  The two men sat astride the rail, looking down at her. It was funny, Hector thought, how quick she’d come to growing up. Last year, or a little before, she’d been a kid.

  He remembered her, when her mother died, and that wasn’t a year and a half past—a kid with a round fat face and pimples.

  Well, Hector told himself, she wasn’t a kid anymore.

  In the bright white sun, her hair was even whiter than usual. She was the only person on the island with blond hair: her mother (Mary, Rest her soul, Hector thought) had been a big blond German woman from up Bayou Lafourche. Alastair Landry had gone far off to get himself a wife.

  It was a pretty girl, for sure, Hector thought. In all the sun her skin just got darker and with a deeper pink glow so that her eyes looked brittle-blue.

  “I got business,” Annie said, “soon’s I finish this here cigarette.”

  Perique was silent staring over the back bay.

  Hector looked at Perique’s thin sulking profile and said: “Where you going?”

  “Fetch some soft shells, if they biting.”

  “Where, huh?”

  “Over across there.”

  A few days ago she had stuck some branches, leafy ends down, into the shallow water. And today when she went back and pulled them up, there’d be crabs hanging to them, like fruit.

  “I ain’t seen your old man today,” Hector said, “where he at?”

  “Over by Port Ronquille.”

  “Again, huh?” Hector grinned. “He been there a lot.”

  “I don’t mind,” Annie said. She reached up one hand and pushed back her short blond hair. “Me, I got work to do.”

  She paddled off, with long easy strokes.

  Hector shook his head, “I can’t ever figure, me, how that kid grow up.”

  Perique said, “What about that place on the bow—don’t that got to be sanded off?”

  “Man,” Hector said, “that Annie sure is something to bother a guy.”

  “Reckon I could work on that.”

  “I ain’t ready to paint yet.”

  Perique got the sandpaper and wrapped it around a block of wood. “If you had a power-sander, man, this would be just fun.”

  “Going get one.” Hector sat down in the shade of the wheelhouse.

  Perique went up in the bow and knelt down, curving his body over the low wood rail, stretching one leg out behind him for balance, and began to work on the spot.

  “Man,” Hector said, “it do make me feel good to watch you work.”

  Perique straightened up, stretched and bent down again.

  “It ain’t going to be near that hard if you go get my old man’s skiff and work up from it.”

  “I reach it.”

  “You getting split wide open.”

  Perique’s face was flushed red with large white splotches when he finally finished and came over to the patch of shade. He stretched out full length, face down, on the boards. “Jesus,” he said softly.

  Hector tipped back his head and stared up into the sky that was still bright and hot but was getting the darker tone of the evening coming. A small fat sparrow flew down and perched on the swinging nets.

  After a while Perique rolled over and grinned. “That is hard work for sure.”

  “You could have got the chabec, easy as nothing.”

  “Didn’t feel like it.” Perique shrugged one shoulder.

  “You know,” Hector asked, “what I’m thinking about?”

  “Nuh uh.”

  “How I don’t feel like drinking beer tonight, me … feel like this is a night for whisky.”

  Perique sat up and rubbed his stomach. “I’m gonna be black and blue.”

  “Yessir, when we come to get through with supper, I’m gonna get out that bottle of whisky.”

  “What kind you got?”

  “Four Roses.”

  “Ain’t bad,” Perique said.

  “Hell it ain’t!” Hector bent his knee and began to scratch it hard. “Mosquito bites near three day old and driving me crazy.”

  “Put some Campho-Phenique on ’em.”

  “You come over tonight and I’ll give you a drink too, man. That’ll help out you stomach.”

  Perique straightened up and took a deep breath slowly. “You reckon Annie got the crabs?”

  “She ain’t come back this way.”

  “She could gone round and tied up at Arcenaux wharf and we wouldn’t seen her.”

  Hector said: “All I can think of, me, is that bottle sitting home waiting.”

  “I ain’t been drunk in a long time.”

  “Why you don’t come get drunk and go over by Annie’s.”

  “What for?”

  “Maybe work better that way than sober.”

  “I ain’t up to bothering,” Perique said.

  “Hell you ain’t.”

  Perique put his hands behind his head and kicked off his shoes. “Don’t know why you making a fuss.”

  “Cause you ain’t moving.”

  “I got hot pants for her. But there ain’t nothing so important in that.”

  “Okay, man,” Hector said.

  He got to his feet very slowly and went to the wheelhouse, took the ignition key out and dropped it in his pocket. “You remember the time LaHarpe left his key and the Perrin kids took the boat clean up to Port Ronquille?”

  Perique did not answer. He was lying perfectly still looking up at the sky. It was very quiet.

  Hector came back on deck, and stood scratching his chin. “Seems like all I can think about is that whisky.”

  “Leastways, all you can talk about.”

  Hector nudged him gently with his toe. “Come on, man, and I match you drink for drink.”

  “Not me.”

  “Ain’t that much work to do tomorrow.”

  “And I wanted to,” Perique said, “ain’t no amount of work tomorrow gonna stop me.”

  “Half a bottle of good whisky.”

  “Quit kicking me,” Perique said.

  Hector pulled back his toe. “Man, I hate to see you moping around like that for her.”

  Perique kept opening and closing his eyes, very slowly. “She going to do something one of these days, and I ain’t gonna want nothing to do with her.”

  “Me, I’m going home.” Hector stepped over the gunwale. The pier creaked and shifted under his weight. “Jesus …” he said, “I gotta fix this.” He tiptoed across the boards.

  Perique stared straight up. It was going to be a hot night, and still. The mosquitoes were beginning to come in already.

  A seagull squaaked. He turned his head in time to see the white shape spin down and splash into the water. And a second gull follow it.

  He sat up. “Jesus, Mary!”

  The two white shapes flew up from the water, got only a couple of feet above the surface and splashed back in. This time Perique could see the length of string between them. The kids were fastening two fish together by a couple of feet of string and tossing them into the air where two gulls swallowed them.

  “Can you make seagulls drown, mister?” one of the girls mocked in a high, shrill baby voice, “show us how you make seagulls drown.”

  The other girl whooped and buried her head in her lap.

  Charlie Alain was untangling a piece of twine. “I’m working on it, honey.” He stopped and picked up one of the fish and waved it around his head. “Look!” he yelled at the gulls, “see!”

  P
erique stepped to the wharf, looking after them. The mosquitoes were biting, and he stood on one leg, scratching the other with his foot.

  “Hi,” Annie said.

  She was almost beneath him. She had slipped the pirogue almost under the pier.

  Perique squatted down. “You get any crabs?”

  She pointed to the bow, to a basket covered with wide mulberry leaves. “What you think that is?”

  “It didn’t take you long.”

  “You sorry or glad for that?”

  “I ain’t neither,” Perique said. “I was just saying what you was.”

  The pirogue rubbed against the piling and she shoved it off gently with her paddle.

  He shook his head and fished out a cigarette.

  “You ain’t going to offer me one?”

  “Your old man don’t want you having one.”

  “Since when you take sides with my papa?”

  He stood up, stretched. “You see all the excitement on the other side?”

  “Like what?”

  “Sailboat,” he said, “hunting for the pass, I guess.”

  “Here?”

  “Go have a look.”

  “What they come here for?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know,” Perique said. “About noon, maybe.”

  “Nobody told me.” With a jab of her oar, she moved the pirogue clear of the barnacle-crusted pilings.

  “I got to be going,” Perique said.

  “Where to?”

  “I’m getting drunk tonight, me, and I got to go get supper first.”

  The pirogue had swung back near the pilings.

  “With who?

  “Huh?”

  “With who you going get drunk?”

  He winked: “See you.”

  He went off down the pier, whistling soundlessly into the hot afternoon. He’d have to find Hector and tell him that he’d just given away half a bottle of his whiskey.

  Perique looked down at his feet, the way they went flicking back and forth under him. Man, he told himself, man, you are flying for sure.

  BY SIX O’CLOCK THAT day the Pixie was in harbor.

  Inky and Dan Rivé had made an agreement, sitting there in the Rendezvous with a bottle of beer. They’d shook hands on it, drained their bottles, and went off to get Rivé’s boat.

  It was a twenty-foot hull with a half-cabin, and it stank of dead fish. And Inky wondered what Helen was going to think of it—maybe with her tooth she wasn’t going to notice.

  And in less than half an hour, Inky and Arthur had dropped the Pixie’s sails (lashed the jib to the lifelines, hurriedly, and left the main uncovered) and were following Rivé back through the channel under power.

  Except for one lugger the wharf was empty. “Where do we tie up?” Inky yelled.

  Rivé waved his hand. “No matter where.”

  Even before the lines were fast, Rivé had his boat alongside, and Arthur was loading a couple of suitcases in it. Then Helen got in, a scarf tied around her head and holding one cheek, complaining: “Don’t push me.”

  The noisy old motor gunned, and the hull swung away showing the name on her stern: Dorothy R. After a couple of minutes it got quiet, and then quieter, until there was only a faint sound left and a faint shape that was heading straight across the bay.

  Inky was alone with a boat that wasn’t his and a fat roll of bills that were. (Just before leaving Arthur had called him below and given them to him—“Ought to be enough,” he said. And Inky had put them in the locker in the head, in the center of a roll of toilet paper.)

  Behind him the island was very quiet, with just the faint smell of cooking. Inky redid the lines; they had been done so fast they were sloppy. A lugger was coming in. He watched her dock. Then got out his own canvas fenders and began to string them from the stanchions on his outer side.

  He was so busy and they came so quietly—he jumped when he saw the line of kids standing on the pier watching him. But he just stared back at them, and said nothing, and went forward to take in the jib.

  It seemed to him that all the kids of the island were lined up there, giggling and pointing to the fenders he had just put out. Occasionally one of them would put out his foot and pretend to step down to the deck—and the others would roar with laughter.

  It struck Inky suddenly that, in a group like that, they had a funny smell, like peanuts. …

  Finally, one of them—it was Didi LeBlanc—actually jumped down to the deck. Inky heard her land—the kids got very quiet suddenly—but he kept on working steadily. Didi scuttled over to the forward porthole and peeped in. Inky finished unsnapping the jib from the forestay, turned suddenly and with one quick step was across the deck. Didi did not even have a chance to turn around. Inky caught her around the waist and tossed her up on the wharf, the way you’d toss a bag.

  She landed on all fours with her back arched, like a cat.

  Inky went back to his work. Now that he had started, he found so many things to do. So he did them, one after the other.

  One or two of the kids stayed for nearly an hour, watching him. By that time he was groggy with the stifling, late-day heat. It was getting toward sunset and even the light afternoon breeze had dropped. The water had a faint sweet-sour smell, and when you looked at it, it was dark with an almost oily surface, in spite of the Gulf so close.

  “Jesus,” he said softly and straightening up, rubbed his hands slowly down his back. The dryness was still in the back of his throat and his mouth. The way it felt just before you were beginning to be seasick, before your mouth turned salty and wet.

  Harbor sick, he thought, damned if I knew there was such a thing.

  What would the kids do, he thought suddenly, if he hung his head over the side and vomited into the water. Which was what he felt like doing. He kept imagining them: they’d all come running back down to the wharf, from wherever they were hiding now and they’d stand there pointing and laughing and slapping their knees.

  He shook his head. He could see it so clear: their open mouths—most of them were at that age where they had no front teeth, just red spaces.

  Jesus, Inky told himself, I’m getting sunstroke, and I got to get something to eat.

  He went below.

  The cabin was hot and close. Just the smell of varnished wood baking in the sun. Inky stretched out on one of the bunks. It was Helen’s bunk, his own was up forward. There was still the faint smell of perfume on the covers. He’d never seen a woman use perfume on a boat, but she did, lots of it, because, she said, the winds blew the scent off. Over there, in the locker there’d be two or three bottles still—she hadn’t taken them with her.

  That was one of the first things he’d done—checked all the after lockers, to see what she’d left.

  It was a god-damn stupid business, he told himself.

  Behind his closed eyes bright little patterns of color floated; little trickles of sweat ran down his cheeks. And just that little odor of perfume. Did she put drops of it on the covers, he wondered. It wasn’t a heavy scent, nor musky. He sniffed. It was more spicy. And, he thought, it didn’t smell bad on a boat, small and fresh under the smell of paint and tar.

  God, he thought, I’ve got a bad case.

  He rolled over.

  He’d have to get the topside covers up by tomorrow for sure, before the sun got to the brightwork.

  And for a few days or a week he could play at being on his own boat. Until Arthur gave him his orders. … He opened one eye and stared at the white-painted wood. It was a pity he didn’t have a girl on the island to give the perfume to.

  He’d have to spread out the sails tomorrow, the ones stowed up forward—the storm jib and the spinnaker—the ones they hadn’t used at all this trip. No use letting mildew get in them. He’d have to get the mattresses up in the sun too. And dry out the cockpit cushions.

  I’ll have to do that before the sun is too high, he thought. There’s an alarm cl
ock around here somewhere.

  He’d have to find it and set it.

  He closed his eyes again and listened. There was just the little sucking sound of water against the hull (and he thought about the girl—Cecile, she said her name was—who said the Gulf had sucked away the beach: it was just exactly that sort of sound) and the little creaks of the mooring-lines. He wiped the sweat off his face with the back of his arm. Now that he was alone on the boat, he realized what a large shape it was.

  All those planks, he thought sleepily, pointing up to a bow. And there’s a keel right under me and a couple of tons of lead.

  Lying there, he imagined he was in the stomach of some big animal.

  He heard the feet jump lightly down to the deck. The boat rocked a little with their weight. He swung his legs out of the bunk. He lay for a minute without opening his eyes, trying to wake up.

  It would be the kids, he thought. They never got tired and they never went away.

  He scrambled up the ladder, fast as he could.

  Halfway up, his head and shoulders above the hatch cover, he stopped. There, sitting on the aft seat in the cockpit, grinning her bright hard smile, was Cecile Boudreau.

  “You surprise to see me?”

  “Yea,” he said, “sort of.”

  “We just come calling.”

  “Matter of fact,” he said, “I was thinking about you.”

  “Man, man,” she said over Inky’s shoulder to the man who stood on the deck, leaning against one of the pilings. “Ain’t you getting jealous?”

  “Ain’t nobody else want you, che’,” he said.

  She threw back her head and laughed. Those missing side teeth, Inky thought, made her face look more like a child’s.

  “This is my husband, Hector.”

  Inky came one more step up the ladder and held out his hand. Hector’s palm was hard, very hard, and very warm.

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  Hector was fairly tall, tall as most on the island, and very broad with a back so heavily muscled it seemed stooped. He was sunburned too, burned until the undercolor was no longer red but gray. He had black hair, perfectly straight, cut short in front and long in back so that it fell over the collar of his paint-spattered shirt.

  His face was broad, with black eyes set very far apart. He wasn’t good-looking and he certainly wasn’t ugly.