“It’s your eyes,” he said thickly.
He was drunk, she thought. And there was another lovely little goosepimply shiver.
“Papa hasn’t come back,” she said, “he must be staying the night.”
“I figured that,” he said.
“I was in bed.”
“That’s a nice place to be.”
“I meant I had to get dressed again, in skirts and all.”
“Okay,” he said, “let’s us talk about your skirts.”
“You been drinking?”
“Honey,” he said, “I am drunk. You got any beer?”
“You don’t need any more.”
He got up and walked quietly past her and out to the kitchen. “Know your house well as mine.”
She went around, turning on the lights. He came back, three beer cans balanced on one hand, and squinted into the light. “God damn,” he tumbled the cans into her lap. “Hold on to these.” And he turned them all back out. “Open me a beer,” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said, “you had enough.”
“Not going to do it, huh?”
She caught the warning in his voice and shivered again.
“Okay,” he said. “Do it myself, me. And that there is one against you.”
“One what?”
“Tell you when the time come.”
“What?”
He drank the beer in long gulps. “I’m real thirsty,” he said. “Whisky give you a thirst.”
“Don’t I get one?” she said.
“More out there. Go get you’ own.”
She got up, angry now, went out to the kitchen, and brought a couple of cans for herself.
He was in the big chair. She sat on the sofa, realized that was a mistake, and was a little shy about changing her seat abruptly.
He gathered up his beer cans and came over to sit beside her. She started to move. He dumped the cans quick to the cushion, and grabbed her.
“Don’t spill it,” she said. “I got a clean dress.” She was excited now, she could feel her ears get hot—it was almost like anger, only it wasn’t.
“It’s a clean dress,” she repeated.
“Take it off if you worrying about it.”
“No. …” She pulled back, but he had her by one wrist and yanked her back down. “Ouch,” she said, “you hurt. …”
“Don’t go whining like a puppy dog.” He finished the can. “Hector, he was right.”
“About what?” she asked.
“None of your damn business,” he said.
He held her on the sofa with one hand, while he finished the three cans. “You didn’t drink yours,” he said.
“I did.”
“I been around here,” he said, “I been around here, me, and around here and around here some more. … And no this and no something else. And a man get enough somewhere.”
He put the empty cans down carefully on the floor. “Don’t want to go ruining you papa’s rug none.” He paused, thinking. Then he stood up. “Come on.”
In the hall he staggered, and she pulled free and was almost out the front door when he caught her. They knocked the little tabouret over.
“Jesus,” he said.
The only light in the hall was a small bare bulb without a shade. He left that on, and he left the door to her room open. That made a dim yellowish light inside as he pushed her down on the bed and carefully, with drunken precision undid the back buttons.
“Go head and yell,” he was saying, “go ahead.”
She was more afraid now than anything else. And she held herself perfectly stiff.
He dragged the dress off. “Being careful,” he said. “Me, I’m being real careful.”
“Not bad,” he said in a minute, “I seen better, but not bad.”
And he said: “It’s the god-damn likker.”
She laughed a little uncertainly.
“Bitch,” he said, “nobody’s through with you.”
She pulled away, but not very hard. Her nipples were burning and her belly quivered.
“Take care of you …”
“Your teeth,” she said, “they hurt.”
“Nothing to what they going to do … nothing.”
The night was very still and there were mosquitoes singing away in the corners of the room. “God-damn fucking likker,” he said, “but it don’t matter.”
“Jesus,” Perique said, “better go pass out home.”
He stumbled out through the hall. She heard him cursing the front gate, heard it spring shut behind him, and then heard the irregular rhythm of his steps on the gravel.
Annie wondered what time it was. The Baby Ben clock which always stood on the bureau had got knocked over; she couldn’t find it. A round white spot of mosquito bite began to rise on her stomach, and she scratched at it fitfully.
Finally she pushed herself up, and sat on the edge of the bed. She looked back, around her shoulder, at the sheet. She was surprised that there was no blood.
Annie did not see Perique for two days. Then she met him on the path between the grocery and the Livaudais house. She wasn’t sure what to say. So she said nothing. She started to look down at the ground and pass by him. But he took her arm and stopped her.
“Look,” he said, “don’t worry.”
Still looking at the ground, she shook her head, agreeing, and wondering what he was talking about.
“I had a load on, me,” he said, “but I can tell you just exactly what happened. Like I been cold sober.”
She nodded, afraid to say anything. She didn’t understand, and she knew she should have.
“Didn’t want you worrying about nothing.”
“I wasn’t,” she said.
“Wasn’t even near you.”
She nodded and tried to think of something to say. “It was the likker,” she said finally, echoing him.
He blushed. She stared as the tips of his ears got red. “I had some too much,” he said.
“Didn’t matter.”
His ears were bright red now. “You didn’t have a hard time of it,” he said defiantly. “You got some fun out of it.”
“Sure,” she said, “sure.”
But he was walking rapidly off.
She stared after him, wondering what they had been talking about.
ISLE AUX CHIENS
JULIUS ARCENAUX RUBBED HIS eyes. It was so quiet even the flies weren’t stirring; they were just still black spots on the dark ceiling. Way off some dogs were yipping, their cries sounding strangled in the heat. From their tone, they’d be after a bitch.
On hot days, with nobody to talk to in the store all the long afternoon, he had a hard time keeping awake. Sometimes he’d just give up and go to the back of the grocery where he lived and take a nap. If any customers came, they would yell for him.
His wife was always furious when she found him sleeping in the middle of the bed. “Comme cochon,” she would tell him, “rolling in his sweat on the bed all day long.”
They had been married a little over thirty years, and it had been a long time since he minded what she said.
He wouldn’t even open his eyes; he’d just turn over and go back to sleep. He slept better in the bed alone.
Sometimes when he woke up at night he could feel the form alongside him, feel her without touching her. And it would seem to him then that her body filled the whole small room. He could feel her expanding, expanding, blowing up like a balloon. And he would lie with the side of his face pressed hard into the pillow and look up at her silhouetted against the open window, the mounds of her thighs and her breasts. And he’d feel so crowded that he would roll out of bed and finish off the night on the linoleum of the floor.
Julius Arcenaux loosened the handkerchief around his neck. He’d tied it there in the early afternoon to catch the sweat that poured down the wrinkles of his thick neck.
“Ain’t doing no good,” he told himself aloud. All over, the shirt was sticking to his body. He could hear it squish wh
en he moved his shoulders against the chair back. There were only two dry spots: the upper crease of each short sleeve. Otherwise the yellow cotton was soaked through: he could see the black hairs that covered his chest and stomach.
He changed his shirt three or four times a day in summer. Philomene, his wife, didn’t bother washing them anymore. She just hung them over the back of the rocking-chairs on the back porch. It didn’t matter to him that the shirts weren’t fresh as long as they were dry.
Slowly and tiredly he walked back to the bedroom and got another shirt, dropping the wet one in a small ball on the floor. Philomene was not around. She’d be visiting next door or at their daughter Cecile’s, a couple of hundred yards away. One thing was sure: she’d be somewhere close. In the last ten years she hadn’t left the island except for her daughter’s wedding.
Julius changed his shoes too, because he could feel how wet the canvas tops had got. And went back to the store.
This time he moved his chair over by the Coca-Cola icechest. He tilted back against it, his arms stretched out along the top. There was just a little cool coming through to the porcelain surface. He stared straight up, sighing gently. Right in the path of his eyes was a cluster of shoes, half-a-dozen pairs, their laces knotted together at different lengths, all hanging from a single big hook, the way you’d hang garlic or gourds.
He cocked his head for a minute listening. Then he shouted: “Get off my porch there. And quit doing that.” And then the scamper of bare feet.
The kids were just about the only people moving around during the afternoon, and lately they had all wanted to carve their initials on the posts of his front porch. He’d chased them off three or four times a day for the last week. He wondered what was so special about his front porch; but there was no telling with kids.
He listened. Then he called again: “I done told you to get off that porch.” There was a pause. “Get the hell off there, you!” And then clearly, the sound of a single pair of feet running.
Julius Arcenaux sat grinning in his chair. The kids never did understand how he knew they were there.
Back when he was a boy he had trained himself to catch the little sounds people make—even the tiny sound of breath. If it was perfectly still, as it was now, he could hear the lightest breathing.
His brothers had teased him about that when he was a kid. “Hey, boy,” they’d say, “you in training for a dog, no? You going to go jumping in the water to fetch us duck?”
Sometimes he’d swing at them, but he was too little to win any fight. So most time he’d just walk away, his ears burning and a dry twitching feeling behind his eyes. Once he’d gone straight to one of the largest of the cane brakes. He’d walked in as far as he could, sliding his thin body between the reeds; then he crawled in the rest of the way, his elbows digging into the soft earth.
He lay flat on his stomach in the deepest part of the brake, squinting into the dusty sifted twilight—the bright noon sun never penetrated the thick growth—and listening: the rustle of the wind passing over the top of the reeds far above his head, the squawk of birds, the bumble of insects as they flew between the canes, and the slither of snakes—little grass snakes and the larger blue runners.
He held his breath so he could hear the other sounds: the busy movement of ants on the earth as little grains of mud rolled away under their feet. If he put his ear to the ground, he could hear a murmuring, deep inside. He sat up suddenly, rattling the cane around. He stared down at the ground, at the crumbling mossy worm-scarred surface. Then he put out one hand, almost afraid and touched a stalk. He let his fingers run up and down it, far as he could reach. He bent his head again and listened.
“I can hear the roots growing,” he told himself. “Me, I can hear them pushing and growing through the ground.”
All of a sudden he was afraid—as if he had come on something he shouldn’t have. The same way he felt when he saw Augustin Billion and the girl lying out one night, close behind the big oak tree back of the Landry house.
He went crashing out of the cane brake, his arms beating a path before his face, but the sharp dry edges cut his skin and left him bleeding.
When his mother saw the cuts, she shrugged and put a pot of salt water on the stove to warm. “Boys always fighting somehow, and you ain’t no different.”
She’d wanted girls; and she’d had boys, six of them. Julius was the youngest and the smallest. “I was getting tired out when I come to bear you,” she told him.
The others were the roughnecks of the island. She’d get sick to her stomach sometimes, seeing them come home after a fight, bruised and cut by knives or socks filled with lead weights from the nets. Sometimes they would fight with lengths of chain, swinging them from their hands like whips.
When they came home, Julius was there, watching. The mottled blue skin, the sight and smell of blood—they excited him so that he could not sleep afterward.
“What?” he would ask his brothers. “What happened?” And they would only grunt and curse under their breath.
Once his father was hurt—Julius remembered that so clear, as if it were a couple of months ago and not near forty years. An accident on the boat left a long gash down his father’s arm. His mother had taken the finest needle and white silk thread and sewed the edges together. Then she went outside and got the newest strongest spider web she could find and brought it in carefully so that it would not break and laid it back and forth across the wound, to make it hold together.
And then she’d put both hands to her mouth and run out of the room. Julius took over, without anybody having to ask him; he knew exactly what to do. He wrapped the rags around and around the arm, perspiring with the effort, so careful to make them even and comfortable.
His father looked at him with a kind of a grin that was just a little lift of the mouth. “Takes after his mother, him. He is going to be a fine nurse.”
His father fell asleep then, right in his chair, even before the bandaging was finished. It was the whisky—his mother gave them all the whisky they could drink before she started work, so that there would not be so much pain.
That day when Julius came out of the cane brake, cut and scratched, his mother asked: “You been fighting, no?”
He pulled up his shoulders and lied: “Oui.”
A couple of days later, his brother Raoul was talking about cane-cutting over in Napoleonville. Then spotting Julius, he grinned. “For what do you listen, dogaree?”
“Nothing.”
“You don’t know what it is about.”
“But I do.” Julius said something he knew he should not have said: “I know about the cane.”
“How do you know?”
“I heard it growing.”
“Holy mother!” his brother said. “You never even seen sugar cane.”
Julius did not answer.
His father asked: “Where you heard the cane?”
Julius dropped his head and tried to move away.
His father caught him by the shoulder. “Where you heard the cane?”
“Down beyond the Robichaux grocery, I heard it.”
Raoul pounded both hands on his knees as he laughed. “We have an idiot who hears things but does not know the difference between sugar cane and all the others. He would try to eat a fishing-pole.”
“Let him alone,” his mother said.
He followed her outside. “I did hear the cane.”
“I got to go get the clothes in. Come along. What else you heard?”
He took a quick look into her face, but there wasn’t any laughter there, just a serious question. “What else you heard?”
“I hear the sun come up in the morning; and I hear the leaves come out the stalk; and I hear the worms crawling in the ground. And when I sit and watch a moonflower open, I can hear that, me.”
“And what does it sound like, that?”
“It creaks, like.”
“Next time,” his mother said, “I will listen.”
Julius
Arcenaux stretched and shifted in his chair. That had been such a long time ago.
He cocked his head and listened to the hum of the mud daubers building their nests on the underside of the drainpipe just above the window.
The dogs were still yelping—they were closer. A man’s voice shouted at them.
Julius Arcenaux got to his feet and stood for a minute, hands scratching his thighs. He kept his nails short, very short, or he bit them, and the soft skin made no impression on the khaki pants. “God damn.” He rolled up one leg at a time, and methodically scratched. The heat made the skin prickle like a nest of ants.
Outside the man’s voice yelled again: “Hi, hi, hi!”
Julius grinned. That would be the dogs, all right. Packs of them roamed all over the island.
When he was a boy a whole pack had gone running over him. He’d lain on the ground, screaming, until one of his brothers jerked him up to his feet and felt him all over, carefully, looking for broken bones, and laughed at him for being afraid.
To this very day, Julius thought, his brothers thought he was a coward because he had never liked to fight and because he hadn’t taken his place on the boat with them.
Maybe, Julius thought, or maybe not. “I can’t help what I am, me,” he said aloud.
And he hadn’t been scared that day when the painter had almost jumped him. That had been ten or fifteen years back, when his daughter was still little. He’d taken her into the swamp. They weren’t going anywhere in particular, just fooling around because he hadn’t wanted to stay home. It was early spring, he remembered, because the girl had reached over the pirogue and pulled a handful of crawfish from under a big fallen branch. He’d taken one look at the grayish things and motioned her to throw them overboard, they were that small.
He’d gone on, paddling the pirogue slowly, until there were too many vines to see the bright sun overhead and the water was still and gleaming with slime and the cypress knees were covered with green mold. He felt a prickling down his back, and out along his fingers, right to their tips. He’d always felt that way about the swamp.
The narrow strip of water passed between mounds covered with thick green bushes and splotches of colored flowers.
The Hard Blue Sky Page 6