My Juliet

by John Ed Bradley

  Out on the gallery, as she leaves without the check, Juliet can still hear her mother’s voice from inside the house. Past that mysterious echo, and past the still-distant siren, it is stuck on but two words, and these don’t come from any book.

  “Why, Juliet?” she is screaming, over and over.

  Louis Fortunato, dressed in a collection of khaki safari clothing that only the day before hung on racks at a Canal Street sporting goods store, has joined Sonny and Mr. LaMott on their weekly fishing trip to the Rigolets. Munching pork rinds and sipping from a can of Dixie beer, he sits in the middle of the cab seat and tries unsuccessfully to jog the old man’s memory about people and events that even Sonny has difficulty recalling.

  “Think back, Mr. Cecil. Think way back. Don’t you remember how you and my dad—this is Santo Fortunato, Mr. Cecil, remember your good friend Santo . . . ? How you and Santo played hooky from school and went down to the recruiter’s office and enlisted together?”

  Mr. LaMott is fooling with the window vent.

  “Y’all signed up and did boot camp together then got sent in different directions before meeting up again in some muddy trench out in Korea?”

  Now it’s the glove compartment.

  “You’re wearing him out with all those questions,” Sonny says.

  “He doesn’t look worn out to me.”

  “Daddy, is Louis wearing you out?”

  Mr. LaMott doesn’t say anything and Sonny says, “See? He’s too tired to talk.”

  At Captain Bruce’s Sonny and his father lounge on lawn chairs at the end of the pier with the rope hanging lax between them. Louis’s clothes, unwashed yet, excite his proclivity to sweat a lot. Bad leg used as a prop for his fishing rod, he sits on top of the Igloo until the lid starts to bend and Sonny orders him to move his big butt elsewhere. No one catches a fish but for most of the afternoon no one tries to. By evening empty beer cans lay scattered across the warped gray boards and all the chips and sandwiches have been consumed. On the water lights from fishing rigs look like small fires burning and up in the heavens contrails from passing aircraft spiral toward the stars. A steady breeze keeps the men cool. Mosquito dope, two whole bottles of it, keeps the bugs away.

  “Ever wonder what it must be like to forget practically everything you ever knew?” Sonny says to Louis, then nods in his father’s direction.

  “No,” Louis answers. “To be honest, brother, I never have wondered that.”

  “Neither have I,” Sonny says, then pulls hard on his line, pretending to have a bite.

  Toward the end of the night Sonny starts talking with the same moronic emphasis on the past that Louis did earlier in the truck. In particular he gets stuck on the year 1965 and the weeks after Hurricane Betsy ravaged the city, when Mr. LaMott, working alone, rebuilt their carport and raised a birdhouse in the yard. The birdhouse, fixed atop a platform on a twenty-foot iron pole, was a replica of a Louisiana plantation home called Uncle Sam that had been razed in 1940 to accommodate the Mississippi River levee. Each year purple martins returned to Mr. LaMott’s house and nested in the dark space past the portholes cut between small white columns. Mr. LaMott gave names to the birds and seemed to know each one personally. “I liked the one you called Little Billy,” Sonny says to his father. “Do you remember Little Billy?”

  “Little Billy?”

  “That bird you called Little Billy?”

  “Who is Little Billy?”

  Mr. LaMott’s joy, as Sonny recalls, was to sit in the yard late in the afternoon after work with his necktie thrown over a shoulder and his brogans off, feet in the grass. Some days he dozed off with his face turned to the sky and the birds cutting circles above him. With darkness Mrs. LaMott sent Sonny out to get him. “Supper’s ready,” Sonny routinely called as he bounded down the stairs outside, taking two at a time. “Hey, old man, Mama says supper’s ready.”

  This was how they did it, a piece of the day they could always count on.

  “I’m hungry too,” his father says now, sitting up in his chair.

  “Do you remember what you’d say whenever I said ‘Supper’s ready’?”

  “Let’s eat,” says Mr. LaMott, lowering his rod to the weathered boards.

  Sonny shakes his head. His father would rise to his feet and slip his shoes on and straighten his tie. “Sonny, I wish I was a bird,” he always said. Then he’d flap his arms more like the wings of a chicken than those of a purple martin as he and Sonny raced to the house and up the stairs to the kitchen where his mother waited with dinner on the table and her face lit up in a smile and years and years to go before the stroke that would take her life.

  “I wish I was a bird,” Sonny says now. “Daddy, you don’t remember that?”

  His father is sipping from the empty beer cans, lifting one after another.

  “There was Speedo. He was faster than the rest. Speedo, Mr. Jones, Blue Boy, Pencilneck, Popeye. They used to fly around eating all the bugs.”

  Mr. LaMott throws each can in the water when he’s certain he’s sucked out every drop.

  “The termites finally got to Uncle Sam like they get to everything else in New Orleans. They must’ve been hungry to climb all the way up that pole, huh, Daddy?”

  “Jackpot,” says Mr. LaMott, finally finding a can with more than a few drops left.

  “Was there a Jackpot?” asks Louis.

  “No,” Sonny says. “There wasn’t even a Jack.”

  Sonny reels in his line. He takes his time doing it, driving the plastic cork down into the water before letting it bob back to the surface and forcing it down again. “What about my name, Daddy? Do you remember my name?” Sonny puts the rod down and squats in front of the old man. “What is it? Come on and tell me. What’s my name?”

  “Little Billy,” says Mr. LaMott.

  “I’m Little Billy? You think I’m Little Billy?” Sonny’s voice is shaky. He brings his face closer to his father’s. “Look at me. You still think I’m Little Billy? Do I look like a bird, Daddy?”

  His father stares without recognition.

  “Sonny,” Sonny says. “It’s Sonny, Daddy. Well, Sonny’s not my real name. My real name is Cecil, Cecil Junior. You and Mama named me after you. Don’t you remember?”

  Mr. LaMott gently places a hand on Sonny’s face. “I wish I was a bird.”

  They are only a few miles from the Maison Orleans when Louis, whom Sonny had thought was asleep, clears his throat and announces in a soft voice, “I’ll whack her for you.”

  “No,” Sonny answers. “Whack me instead.”

  “I break the tall clock but I don’t stop time. Saw, Mama, how the light stayed on even after the lamp crashed to the floor? Likewise there is a thing in me that will never die. And don’t think I mean spirit, either. What I’m talking about is deeper than that.

  “Daddy used to say it’s the thing that colored my eyes. He’d say we were going to write to the Crayola crayon people and tell them there’s a new color to include in their box. It was aqua and royal and navy and powder and turquoise all mixed together. It was the prettiest color there was. Kids would want to use nothing else once that one got in the box.

  “ ‘We’ll call it Beauvais,’ he said.

  “You may have spirit but, bitch, I got soul.”

  For two days after the fishing trip Sonny doesn’t leave his house. He takes the phone off the hook and he runs a box fan in the living room. He plays the radio louder than usual to keep his mind from unwanted ruminations and he sleeps for long periods without caring whether it’s day or night. He eats canned tuna and beans, bananas whose skins have turned brown, and French bread so stale that it turns to dust when he attempts to slice it. He takes one shower after another until his skin begins to shrivel and there isn’t a dry towel left in the house.

  At last he puts the phone back on the hook and gets dressed, determined to go out for a hot meal and conversation, for anything. But down in the street his pickup won’t start. Hoping to fire the engine, Sonny pus
hes the old heap a ways down Chartres, then jumps inside and pops the clutch. He succeeds only in wearing himself out.

  Panting for breath, his shirt and trousers wringing with sweat, Sonny goes to his neighbors’ apartment and bangs a fist on the door. It slowly opens a crack and Florence Bonaventure, her face muddy with bruises, hair a mess, appears in the narrow space. Discovering that it is only Sonny, son of the landlord, she turns and walks away without inviting him in.

  Moments later her husband appears wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and boxer shorts. On his bare arms and shoulders stand bunches of wiry hair and a mélange of coin-shaped moles.

  “Can’t get my truck to start,” Sonny says.

  “Saw that from the bathroom.”

  “Did I make a fool of myself?”

  “You just look like a person needs some help.”

  “Right. Me and my truck both.”

  They head down to the street and Curly Bonaventure drives his station wagon up to the pickup and juices Sonny’s battery. The truck comes to life and over the roar of the engines Curly says, “You sick, Sonny? I notice you been home a lot.”

  “A case of the quiets, Curly. Nothing serious.”

  “And how’s Mr. LaMott getting along?”

  “About as well as that thing he’s got will let him be, I suppose.”

  Curly removes the cables but leaves his motor running. “Not that it’s any of my business,” he says, “but you don’t answer your door. I notice that.”

  “How much I owe you for the jump?”

  “Oh,” Curly Bonaventure glances at the cables in his hands as if hoping they will give him a number, “you don’t owe me nothing.”

  Sonny figures he likes his neighbor about as much as you can like a man who regularly beats the living crap out of his wife.

  “You knock again, Curly, I’ll make certain to answer.”

  “Oh, no, Sonny, that wasn’t me that knocked.” Curly shuffles from foot to foot, eyes cast down. “She came yesterday and spoke to me out in the yard. Said if I saw you to leave a message.” Curly looks at him. “The Lé Dale on Saint Charles Avenue. Said you could find her there.”

  Sonny doesn’t understand until Curly says, “Real pretty thing with titties out to here.” He drops the cables and shows Sonny how far.

  Sonny knows the hotel. It’s a flophouse downtown just a block away from the Hummingbird Grill, the greasy spoon where he and Juliet often dined together in the old days. It never closes, does the Hummingbird, and it owes its considerable reputation to the diversity of its clientele and to the breakfast it serves around the clock. Sonny and Juliet liked to go there on weekends after movies and walking tours of the French Quarter, and to sit at the counter chugging black coffee and gorging on chunks of sweet Virginia ham and homemade biscuits stuffed with pats of oleo. It was always exciting to be among the odd mix of pimps and politicos, homeless drifters and Uptown frat boys, hookers and debutantes, and even more so to survive such a night without getting robbed at gunpoint outside on the street.

  “One day when we’re rich and married and too tired to drive home we’ll be able to walk over to the Lé Dale and get a room,” Sonny said once to Juliet. “The Hummingbird rents rooms, too. I guess we could just go upstairs. But I always liked the Lé Dale.”

  “What is it you like so much?”

  “The name. I like the name, Lé Dale. I like any hotel that would call itself that.”

  “You’re a classy guy, Sonny LaMott.”

  “Durn right I am.”

  They generally stayed until around 11:30 P.M., when Sonny, faced with midnight curfew, announced that it was time to be getting home. “Mama says nothing any good happens after twelve o’clock,” Sonny routinely told her.

  To which Juliet routinely replied, “Mine says the same. But for different reasons.”

  Today Sonny chooses to take Juliet’s staying at the Lé Dale as a nod to the past, as a gesture with as much promise as a blown kiss.

  Without bothering to go back upstairs and change clothes, Sonny leaves Curly Bonaventure standing on the lawn with his jumper cables and heads downtown.

  “Juliet Beauvais, please,” he says to the clerk at the front desk.

  The man, a greasy sort with a face eternally damaged by an adolescent siege of acne and ingrown hair follicles, doesn’t seem to appreciate being inconvenienced. He’s busy eating a box of candy, after all. “What’s your name?”

  “Sonny LaMott.”

  The man, gnashing red hots, picks up the phone and dials a number. “Yeah. You have Sonny somebody down here in the lobby. You want me to send him up?” The man nods and puts a hand over the mouthpiece. “She ain’t dressed. She says to wait.” The man nods again. “I’ll tell him.” After he puts the phone down he says, “She says she’ll call me soon as she’s decent.”

  Sonny feels like telling the man he finds it odd that he has to wait for Juliet to be decent after all they’ve experienced together lately, particularly at the Royal Sonesta. But the man doesn’t look like the type you complain to. He looks more like the type who makes others complain.

  Sonny sits on a couch with yellow sponge poking through tears in the fabric. On the wall behind him hang a crucifix, a pay phone and a small, hand-lettered sign that reads YOU ARE TO BE FULLY DRESSED WHILE IN THE LOBBY. Three different fans churn at high speed, all failing to dent the heat. Nearly twenty minutes go by before the phone rings at the desk and the clerk gives Sonny the room number and tells him he can go on up. As Sonny climbs the stairs, he passes a boy who is coming down them, and who seems to speak Sonny’s name under his breath as he walks by.

  “Did you say something?” Sonny is standing in the middle of the dark stairway.

  “I didn’t hear nothing.”

  Sonny starts to climb again, and the boy says, “What would I say? Do I know you?”

  Sonny looks at him. The pale, stringy hair, whiskers not nearly as plentiful as pimples. The whites of the boy’s eyes are shot red, while the irises are so clear as to seem diluted of color. He is wearing jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt similar to the one Curly Bonaventure had on earlier. A tattoo, made to resemble a strand of barbed wire, encircles an upper arm.

  Sonny says, “I thought I heard you say my name.”

  “How could I say your name? I don’t even know you.” The boy laughs and pulls at his nose. “You think I guessed it—I just picked your name out of all the names in the English language and all the other languages—out of Japanese, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese. There’s a lot of fuckin’ languages, man. And, holy moly, think of all the names.”

  “You’re right,” Sonny says.

  “Todd, Tim, Bill, Brent, Jeff, Tarzan, Tonto, Coco, Mojo, Bobo, Toto. That would make me a mind reader, to come up with your name.”

  Sonny has the impression the boy would name names all day if he let him. “Look, I’m sorry. I must’ve been mistaken.” But as he starts back up the stairs, and the boy starts down, Sonny hears him say it again. “Sonny,” he hears him say, louder now than before.

  Bath towel in hand, Juliet is waiting for him on the second floor, the door open to her room. “Where on earth have you been?” she says. “I went by the square, I went by your house.”

  They embrace and she kisses him. Despite the stage prop, it is plain that she hasn’t taken a shower. Her skin is hot and damp with sweat, and her hair needs to be washed. Her clothes smell of smoke and grease, the cloying stink of a hash house like the Hummingbird. Neither does her makeup look right. It appears to have been hastily applied—there’s just enough color to mask whatever needs to be hidden, but not enough to fool whoever might be looking for it.

  “There was a boy on the stairs who said my name,” Sonny says.

  She looks at him expectantly, as if waiting for the rest.

  “I thought maybe he was coming from your room.”

  “A boy was coming from my room? What boy would that be, Sonny?”

  “He had a tattoo on his arm.”
>
  “What kind of tattoo?”

  “Barbed wire, looked like.”

  “Oh, no, that one wouldn’t have been coming from my room. The guy coming from my room had a tattoo of a big, red heart with his mother’s name plastered across it.”

  Sonny steps past her. The room, though far from elegant, isn’t the pit that Sonny imagined. The bed doesn’t take coins and vibrate, in any case. And the hotel has provided a TV set. A black-and-white model, but a TV no less. “Look,” Juliet says, throwing a door open, “I even have a bathroom.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “It’s cozy,” she says. “Fifteen bucks a night, you can’t beat it.”

  “Not for fifteen you can’t,” Sonny says. “But think of what sixteen will get you.”

  His attempt at sarcasm doesn’t seem to register. “Sonny, I was just watching this episode of The Andy Griffith Show that reminds me of us. Do you like Andy?”

  “Andy’s all right.”

  “Andy has his high school reunion coming up, and his old girlfriend is going to be there. She’s gone off and made a big life for herself in Raleigh or someplace. Well, they get together at the reunion dance, and everything is like before. They’re happy as can be, and Andy’s wondering what broke them apart. They go outside and sit on a bench under the stars and they get to talking. And before you know it they’re arguing over some little nothing. She’s upset and so is he, and Andy’s screaming and she is screaming. Then all of a sudden it comes to them why they didn’t make it together way back when.”

  Sonny has never seen that particular show, but his recollection of events that broke Juliet and him apart differs dramatically from those she just described. “Why didn’t they make it?”

  “They were different people. Different people like that never last. One wants Mayberry, the other Raleigh. If not for their differences they wouldn’t have anything.”

  Sonny walks over to the window and looks down on the avenue. Streetcar rails lie in silver ribbons against the blacktop. “Did that girlfriend of Andy’s ever ask him to kill her mother?” he says.