The Southern Cross

by Skip Horack

  “So Mr. Quinn called this morning,” he said.

  Jolie lifted her head to look into his eyes.

  “A spot opened on a ship leaving for Argentina tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Last-second deal. He knows a captain who needs to replace a deck hand laid up in Charity.”

  “How long?”

  “Three months.” Clayton scratched the side of his neck and shrugged. “Four months tops, depending on weather.”

  Jolie winced. “That’s all you need, right? Three more months?”

  “Yeah” He stroked her hair with the back of his hand. “I just hoped I’d get a longer break between trips.”

  “You took it already?”

  “Might be months before he can find me another berth”

  “That a yes?”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

  “No, we knew this might happen. But we need to do something today.”

  “You’re tired, sugar. We’ll do something tonight before you go in.”

  “You sure?”

  Clayton soft-kissed her full on the lips and saw the half circles ashed on the smooth Cajun skin beneath her glass blue Catahoula eyes. “Positive,” he said. “Get some sleep.”

  Jolie took his hand and pulled him toward the white-noise hum of the window unit in the back of the house. Reaching their bedroom, she spun like a dancer and fell backward onto the mattress. Clayton sat down beside her and, like he did every morning when she came home from work, placed her legs across his lap. One at a time, he untied her tennis shoes and slipped them off her feet.

  “Tell me about Africa,” she whispered.

  So Clayton lit a cigarette and told her about the ports in Africa. About Liberian stowaways and revolution. Open-air markets where honest-to-God warriors sold Zippos and antelope no bigger than dogs. Then, leaving talk of Africa, he massaged her feet and told her about the beautiful fabric that he would bring back from South America. The whales he would see in the shipping lanes on his way home.

  They had been high-school lovers—the option quarterback and the queen of the Duck Festival—and then one day it was 2004, and they were twenty-one apiece and both still living at home. That summer they spent Independence Day in a cinder-block roadhouse on the edge of the Cajun prairie, watching the Banded Mallards warm up as their relationship cooled off. They were beer-chasing tequila when Jolie cried and told him that she couldn’t do this anymore. She needed out of the rice fields of Gueydan and places like the Blue Goose Lounge. Desperate, gasping for air, Clayton brought her out to the starlit parking lot and told her that he was through with all the drinking and the drugs and the being shiftless. He promised her New Orleans. Falling to his knees onto crushed oyster shells, he begged her to marry him.

  Within a month, they were renting the one-bedroom shotgun in the Marigny. Jolie found work waitressing in the Quarter, and a black man named Quinn Freeman hired Clayton to stevedore the Press Street Wharf. “You’ll be working with some tough sons a bitches,” Quinn had warned him. “Just mind your own business and you’ll be all right.”

  Quinn’s crew arrived at dawn and worked ten-hour shifts in the September heat. They were all thick black men, prison-inked and scarred. Clayton watched them stumble off the city bus in the morning and imagined their nights were harder than anything Quinn threw their way. He stayed clear.

  The best jobs—operating the power winch and crane, the lift truck and grain trimmer—those went to the men who had been around the longest. As a rookie, Clayton worked pure labor on the dock with a man named Redfish less than four months out the farm at Angola. Without sharing a word, Clayton and Redfish would lash and shore cargo, attach slings and hooks to crates and containers, reposition the spouts of the trimmer after a hatch filled with grain. When they broke at noon, the others threw dice against the side of the warehouse, and Clayton would sit alone atop a granite boulder on the bank of the Mississippi and eat the sandwich Jolie had made for him. It was a living.

  But during his second week working, too impatient to wait for the dock to clear, Clayton pulled a pallet out from under a suspended container, moving away moments before the sling slipped and a thousand pounds of steel came crashing down. He was trembling even before Redfish grabbed him by the back of the neck and slammed him against the side of a forklift—told him that he was a stupid white boy, that no job was worth dying for.

  Clayton began to have nightmares, dreams in which he didn’t step out from under the shipping container in time. He would watch himself being crushed and wake up in a cold sweat, punish Jolie as he flailed around searching for more of her warm body.

  The thing Clayton could not understand was why, with all of his bad history, that reckless dash under a suspended container to move a worthless pine pallet was the one act that he could not forgive himself for. At work, over the roar of commerce and cursing men, he would hear the voice of his bedridden father, hand mangled by a rice husker, telling him over and again that heavy machinery and flexible people simply did not mix.

  Though never a coward, Clayton became convinced he would be killed on the job. These thoughts paralyzed him at work, and a week after the accident, haunted by this bizarre demon, he went to see Quinn and asked if there was anything else available, maybe something on one of the tugboats.

  Quinn was sitting behind the desk in his cluttered office scratching at his graying beard. He looked up from the racing form he was studying. ”The insurance folks won’t let me hire anyone onto a tug unless they have their Z-card and at least six months’ sea time.” He blew a cloud of cigarette smoke at the ceiling. ”So the answer’s no, I don’t have nothing else available.” Quinn returned to his racing form and Clayton came closer. He watched the cords of muscle in the man’s forearm flex as he circled the sixth horse in the seventh race with a grease pencil.

  “So then how do I do it?” Clayton asked, refusing to leave.

  “Do what?”

  “Get the license? The sea time?”

  Clayton bought a new pair of coveralls at the Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas before driving out to the lakefront to find Quinn. He parked the truck and spotted him drinking coffee at his usual Sunday-morning spot, a line of fishing rods staked out along the seawall in front of him.

  “Hey, hey.”

  “All right, Cajun. What you know good?”

  “Catching anything?”

  Quinn nodded at the five-gallon bucket resting a few feet from his lawn chair, and Clayton walked over to look inside. When his shadow passed over them, two monster blue crabs blew bubbles of angry sea foam and lifted their thick claws in defense.

  “Pretty crabs,” said Clayton. “They look fat.”

  “Just lagniappe. They’re yours if you want them.”

  Clayton considered the offer as he dug a soft pack of Camels from the front pocket of his yellow guayabera, a sun-bleached gift from a Latin shipmate. He tapped out two cigarettes and offered one to Quinn.

  Quinn waved him away. “I got my menthols.”

  “Don’t know how y’all smoke those things.” Clayton smiled. “Taste like fiberglass.”

  “Y’all as in ‘you people’?”

  “Exactly.”

  Quinn shook his head. “I’d be careful. You’re darker than a Schwegmann’s bag yourself.”

  Clayton laughed and knelt down next to him. Out in the lake, a raft of white pelicans was pushing its way toward the shoreline.

  “Shouldn’t you be packing or something?” Quinn asked. “Spending time with your pretty wife instead of out here baiting me?”

  “I’m leaving, I’m leaving. I just wanted to come out here and say thanks.”

  “Bullshit. You wanna make sure I’ll keep my word before you hop on a ship for another three months.”

  “That too.”

  “Like I told you already, you finish up your sea time and I’ll make you a deck hand. Spend a year as a deck hand, pass the exam, I’ll make you an apprentice. After that, hit all your marks and don�
�t piss me off, I’ll make you a captain.”

  Clayton stared out at Lake Pontchartrain. The morning haze had lifted off the water, and in the bluebird distance he could see the faint outline of the causeway bridge to the North Shore. “Why bother giving me this shot?” he asked.

  Quinn looked over at him. “I’m not doing you any favors, kid. Trust me, make captain under me, you’ll have earned it.”

  “But that ain’t no answer.”

  Quinn sighed. “Fine,” he said. “You know anything about horseracing?”

  “Some. Me and Jolie used to hit the races over in Lafayette.”

  “Well, I know a whole hell of a lot about horseracing.”

  Clayton nodded, agreeing that was so.

  “Know what my tiebreaker is?”

  “What you mean?”

  “When I have two horses I can’t decide on. You know how I go and break the tie?”

  “Tell me,” said Clayton.

  “The jockeys. Horses come and go, but if you get a feel for the jockeys, you’ll do okay. Good jockeys usually ride good horses. Crap jockeys usually ride crap horses.”

  “Except when they don’t”

  “I said usually. Ain’t nothing in life always. Give me fifty-one percent and I’m happy.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Of course it makes sense, and that’s how I run my business. A Thoroughbred is only as good as its jockey. A tugboat is only as good as its captain” Quinn refilled his coffee mug from a silver thermos. “Look, before you I bluffed off at least a dozen guys with the same deal. Not one of them was willing to get on a ship for six months. So I guess that says something about you.”

  Clayton smiled. “I knew if I stayed out here long enough I could get you to say something nice about me.” Quinn grunted and Clayton laughed. The pelicans were feeding on a school of mullet a hundred yards down the seawall. “Go cast around those birds, boss. There might be a big red cruising for scraps.”

  “Goddamn it, don’t tell me how to fish” But Quinn rose from his chair and grabbed a spare rod rigged with a gold spoon. He shook Clayton’s hand. “Be careful out there, son. I’ll see you in three months.”

  Clayton watched Quinn jog down the seawall, then he walked to his truck to find something to put the two crabs in.

  That afternoon, Clayton boiled an inch of water in a stockpot and began steaming the blues. Jolie would be hungry in a few hours, and he planned to surprise her with breakfast in bed.

  Crabmeat omelets like the ones they had eaten during their honeymoon on Mobile Bay.

  He was in good spirits because he enjoyed cooking and because, driving home from the lakefront, he had experienced a vision. Clayton was stopped at an Elysian Fields red light when a stray Mardi Gras bead—suspended on a telephone line for decades, perhaps—somehow broke free in the breeze and landed square on the hood of his pickup. An Asian woman shuffling across the intersection hesitated when she spotted the strand of plastic pearls, a relic from when parades still rolled in that part of town. Clayton gestured for her to pick them up, and, smiling, she lifted the beads from the hood of the Ford, then stepped back onto the sidewalk just as the light switched to green.

  But that wasn’t the vision, that was real.

  The vision came because the wonderful old lady had been wearing a beautiful silk kimono and—like whenever he saw something beautiful—Clayton had thought of Jolie. Driving home, he pictured his wife in a kimono and, doing so, began to imagine that she was no longer a waitress serving drunks in an all-night diner. Instead, she was a hostess at some young, hip restaurant off Magazine or Prytania. A place really more like a bistro. Clayton saw her checking reservations and wearing the silk kimono, her blond hair pulled back and pierced with a pencil. He would come in after a day on the water, and, no matter how busy she was, she would find him a table, a good table, a table in the bar where he could watch her work while he ate his dinner. And the people she worked with—young college kids and artists, for the most part—they would tease them both about their clipped Vermilion Parish accents. But the girls would also copy Jolie’s walk and try to mimic her toughness. And the men, the bartenders and the kitchen crew, they would call Clayton Captain and spend their smoke breaks at his table, pumping him for stories about the river and his time at sea. Finally Jolie would seat the last customers and be let go for the night. They’d drive to the sweet little home they had bought in the Bywater, and Clayton would be the only man ever lucky enough to slide the kimono’s cool sleekness off her warm body.

  Clayton sat at the kitchen table picking clean his two crabs and smiled because he knew that now it was this vision, Jolie as a savvy-shining-hostess, that would sustain him at sea. The vision that—even on the slippery, windswept deck of a flag-of-convenience freighter—would come to replace his crushed-by-a-shipping-container nightmare.

  The crabmeat was cooling in the fridge, and Clayton was sprawled out under the Ford. A thin sheet of cardboard protected his bare back from the street as he contemplated the pair of small, white-stockinged legs that had appeared alongside his truck.

  “That you, Kenyatta?”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” she said. “You broke down?”

  “Just changing the oil, baby.” He didn’t want the old pickup giving Jolie any problems while he was away.

  “I come by to warn you.”

  “Yeah?” Clayton slid the socket onto the drain plug, grunting as he gave the wrench a hard twist. “About what?”

  “God and Jesus are up to something.”

  “That so?”

  “Reverend Gray says they gonna punish this city soon enough.”

  A car alarm started up just a few blocks over, and Clayton grinned to himself. “Yeah,” he said. “I imagine they will.”

  He spun the wrench as Kenyatta spoke of discipline coming from above, how God would not abide the vice and corruption that had washed ashore on that big bend in the river. “Bad dealings are afoot.” She stomped a buckled shoe, pretty and polished, hard on the pavement. “You need to be careful”

  “I will” Clayton promised. “Thanks for thinking of me.”

  “You already had a serpent show up under your house,” Kenyatta reminded him.

  “That’s true. I surely did” He finished unthreading the plug with his fingers, and a rush of spent oil, still warm from his drive out to the lakefront, spilled down into the catch pan. He brushed away the flecks of rust and dirt that had settled onto his face. “You’re a voodoo child, for sure. You know that?”

  But Kenyatta didn’t answer. Clayton glanced over and saw that she had left him alone.

  Spooky as she was, he was a little sorry to see her gone. It was sort of nice having her around, his steady lookout for pestilence and plague—a friend to help him recognize the angels among us and signs from God. She was right, in a way, they really were everywhere.

  The Gulf Sturgeon Project

  Landon drained the last swallow of bourbon from the plastic coffee mug he’d found in his motel room. A dark-haired woman was throwing a cast net from the fuel dock beneath his window. She released the net lasso-even and heavy onto a bubbling school of mullet while, downriver, noisy gulls chased a trawler under the Highway 98 bridge and back to Apalachicola. Onboard, young men in filthy white boots broke from sorting shrimp on the afterdeck. They waved to the woman, and she smiled big to the boys as she arranged herself for another throw.

  With a little effort, Landon could imagine Gulf sturgeon swimming somewhere beneath that beaten trawler. His Gulf sturgeon. The five spawning females Cassie had helped him affix satellite pop-up tags to the previous spring. They were massive fish. Six, seven, even eight feet long. The largest of his research subjects—the one Cassie had dubbed Bertha—weighed over two hundred pounds and was pushing thirty years old.

  The tags were programmed to release at midnight. They would bob to the surface of the river, and, thousands of miles above, the Argos satellite system would locate those tiny computers and begin downloading
all the data they had collected over the past year. Finally Landon would have the mountain of data he needed to prepare his dissertation. He wondered if Cassie even remembered that they were supposed to be here tonight, that they were supposed to share this moment together. He pulled the cell phone from the back pocket of his shorts again. Maybe she would call. Maybe she would still come.

  Landon returned to watching the sunset shrimp boat diesel upriver, the men working hard but no doubt already making plans to meet up later with their girls at some riverfront bar, a place where they would pay cash for salty steamed oysters and pitcher after pitcher of cold draft beer. In high school, Landon had spent his summers fishing crabs on Mobile Bay. He watched those men and suddenly he was certain that he would have been happier as a commercial fisherman. A life without research or dissertations. A life of just being out there on the water.

  If Landon was Highway 98, Cassie was A1A. A South Florida beach girl who collected seashells in the Keys as a child and later, as a teenager, rode nesting loggerheads into the rising tide until the ancient turtles left her treading water in the midnight Atlantic. Or so she said.

  They had been paired together as instructors of a freshman biology lab during their first semester as grad students at Florida State. She was loose-limbed and tan, with a husky voice that made him think of women in old movies. A week into fall classes, they were helping a hung-over Theta dissect a bonnet shark when Landon felt Cassie’s weight shift against him. It was a simple thing really, just denim brushing denim and her hip pressed against his thigh. But Landon didn’t pull away, and after that, well, it was just a matter of time.

  And that time did come. Less than a month later he bumped into her in the parking lot of Po’ Boys. He was leaving for Panama City. The pompano were migrating and he planned on night-fishing the surf. She wished him luck and then went on inside. He was pulling onto Pensacola Street when she came running up to his window. “So,” she said, “would you mind so much if I tagged along?”