“What?” Leonard looks at his watch. “After walking all the way over here?”
“It’s not too late,” she says again.
“Yes, it is, goddammit. It is too late.”
The party man shows up. He is a boy of perhaps thirteen. You can see the waistband of his boxers, small hearts impaled with arrows. His navel, also visible, looks like a maraschino cherry precisely centered in his lower belly. Clusters both of whiskers and acne mark his small, moon-shaped face and he has the wrecked voice of a three-pack-a-day smoker. When he isn’t watching the street, he’s watching the cemetery behind him. “Marie Laveau is in that tomb right there,” the boy explains. “She comes out at night and walks around putting curses on people.”
“Isn’t she a skeleton yet?” Juliet says.
“Hell no. She’s a voodoo queen.”
“What’s your name, little man?”
“What’s my name?”
“I only ask out of a genuine interest in your personal well-being,” Juliet says. “I was wondering if you might like to expand your horizons in the American workforce.”
“I know what you mean. You mean like a pizza route in one of them cars with a flag on the antenna.”
“This is better,” Juliet assures him. “I’ve got this particular item and I’m recruiting an individual to take it someplace and place it somewhere. You think you might be interested in a job like that?”
“No, I don’t.” He’s watching cars pass by. He doesn’t look at her.
“But you can fit this thing in the palm of your hand, it’s that small. And you won’t have to take it far, take you ten minutes. You take it to a parking garage in the Quarter and drop it off in this cart I’ll give you directions to. You do it late at night when no one’s around.”
“And it blows up because it’s a bomb, right? No, ma’am, none of that shit.”
“It’s an hourglass. ’Bout yay big.”
He thinks about it awhile. He shrugs.
“Twenty-five dollars,” Leonard tells him.
The boy doesn’t respond.
“Would you do it for fifty?” Juliet says. She looks at Leonard, whose money she’s spending, after all. “You could do it for fifty, right?”
The boy watches Leonard with the recognition that here is one motherfucker to be concerned about. “Fifty if that’s all I have to do. Drop it in a cart.”
Less than twenty minutes later they consume the powder in Leonard’s room with the aid of a rolled-up dollar bill and Juliet, after snorting more than is sensible, blows a gob of pink-stained mucus into the tail of a bedsheet. “Sonny was never right for me,” she says, “but I did like to kiss him. His breath was always nice. He kept his teeth immaculate.”
“You’ll have to include that in your memoirs.”
“I asked him once why he never had bad breath and he said the trick was to swallow a little mouthwash after you finished gargling in the morning. He said the taste stayed in your mouth.”
“That, too.”
At daybreak they turn off the television and Leonard surrenders to sleep on the shag rug while Juliet, who is naked but for a pair of pink socks, sits beside him with ocean sounds sloshing around in her head. Her hands shake and her mouth is so parched that her lips stick together. A trickle of something keeps emerging from her right nostril, while her left one merely burns. She removes the hourglass from a rumpled Schwegmann’s bag and turns it over, letting the sand run.
What is the good of time, she’d like to know, if it stays perpetually stuck in 1971, visiting again and again the year when her mother killed her father and her volvo was scarred forever?
“There is no forever,” Juliet says out loud to the room.
A stirring from Leonard but nothing more.
“There’s yesterday, though. Shit yeah. There’s always that.”
She and Leonard sleep until late afternoon. When they wake he goes to the bathroom and relieves himself in an erratic stream. “When Roland would piss it was like a horse.”
“Who’s Roland?”
“Who’s Roland?”
And in that instant she remembers. “Oh, okay. Was that his name?” Juliet, still on the floor, rolls over and looks for something to cover herself with. “I don’t think I ever went with any Rolands before. A Ronald, maybe. Maybe two or three Ronalds.” All she can find is newspaper, but that is fine. “Whatever happened to that boy?”
“Went back to the wife.”
“Know what I still don’t get? I still don’t understand how someone can be gay and straight both at the same time?”
“Yours is not to understand,” Leonard answers. “It’s love, baby.”
He returns to the room and in the imperfect light from the window she can see what kind of old man Leonard will turn out to be. Rings of blubber around his gut, scraps of frizz for hair, long nose with bumps, no penis to speak of, a feminine chest with spark plug nipples that could use training in a brassiere. Like Anthony, Leonard was just an underage boy then, but Juliet still can’t see what her father possibly could have liked about him.
Juliet stands and her brain seems to expand in her skull and the pain makes her wonder if maybe she wouldn’t be better off beaten and strangled to death herself. She takes the hourglass off the table and throws it from hand to hand, tossing it higher each time. “Knowing Sonny he finds this in his cart and takes it as a message I still love him.”
Leonard checks the top of the dresser for remnants of last night but there is none. A look of profound disappointment comes to his face.
“Don’t pout,” Juliet tells him. “It was mostly baby powder anyway.”
On the Chef Menteur Highway they make their usual stop for provisions, and today along with the shrimp bait and pork rinds Sonny buys a fifth of whiskey.
They take turns with the bottle and by the time they reach the Rigolets Sonny can barely keep the truck on the road and Mr. LaMott is sleeping with his back against the door, head lolling, neck bent like the stalk of a flower with too big a blossom. Whiskey stains the front of his shirt and a rope of drool hangs from his chin. It is early afternoon and the parking lot at Captain Bruce’s holds only a couple of pickups, a refrigerator truck and a late-model Cadillac Seville tattooed with Saints stickers on the rear bumper. Along with the beer neons, Christmas tree lights burn in the window of the building despite the fact that the holiday is more than seven months away. A cowbell clatters when Sonny pushes the door open.
“This ain’t your regular time,” Captain Bruce says from behind the bar.
“I had a day off. Daddy wanted to do something.”
The captain is peeling boiled shrimp piled high on a platter. He laughs and shows the pink ground meat on his tongue. “Other than just sit there looking like a retard, you mean?”
“What did you say?”
“The last time your daddy wanted to do something he did it in his pants.”
In the corner a kid is playing pinball, banging his groin against the machine. On one of the stools, bellied up to the counter, an old fart in a baseball cap drinks beer from a can. “Mind if we fish from your dock?” Sonny says.
Another look at the shrimp in his mouth. “Not so long as you pay me my fee.”
Sonny hands over five one-dollar bills and starts back outside.
“Next time it’ll be double,” says the captain, then drops a heavy fist on the counter. “He scares my fish away.”
The pinball player lets the machine go silent. The beer drinker, lowering his can, mutters, “Now that’s some ice cold shit, Cap’n.”
Sonny ties his father’s waist with the rope and gives him a couple of folding chairs to carry, then he collects the fishing gear and leads the way to the pier. If not for the breeze off the lake the heat would be too much to tolerate. Sonny gives his father the bottle of whiskey and tells him to drink up but his father is unable to do so. Mr. LaMott slumps in a chair, the straw hat on his head giving a latticed effect to the shadow on his face.
“W
e’d better catch something,” Sonny says. “This is it, our last time.”
Mr. LaMott doesn’t respond but to gurgle and nod and Sonny takes the bottle from his hands and puts it on the warped gray boards. He tears a shrimp in half and baits his father’s hook and casts about thirty yards out. “You hear me, Daddy? This is it. Let’s catch us some big ones.”
He fits the rod in his father’s hands but his father is sleeping.
“I never thought I’d live all that long anyway,” Sonny says. “I always had a feeling.” He could be talking to himself in an empty room at home. Talking to a barge on the river. Talking to a piece of raw canvas before he primes it and starts with the underpaint. “Maybe that’s why I wanted to make a mark when I was still young,” Sonny says. “After Juliet left I thought if I could do some nice paintings that would be enough. You think I was wrong?”
When his father doesn’t answer, Sonny unties the rope around his own waist and drops it to the boards. He kneels on the edge of the pier and bends over lowering his rod into the water until the water creeps up past his elbow and chops hard against his face. He still hasn’t touched bottom.
“That’s at least eight feet,” he says to Mr. LaMott.
Sonny takes a seat and drinks more whiskey and wonders why he never thought to paint the Rigolets. “I was good painting Juliet,” he says. “Just admit that. I could really paint that woman. Everything else might not’ve been so great, but my Juliets had something. Know what they had?” His father doesn’t respond and Sonny says, “It’s called immortality. Not to brag or anything, but that’s what they had. You looked at one and you knew you were seeing the big way a man can love a woman. Why am I talking like this, Daddy? These words I’m using, are you as embarrassed as I am? Jeez!” But Sonny doesn’t stop. “I guess I let her do all she did to me,” he says, “because I knew to let her go was to lose forever the one thing that made me any good.”
Sonny removes the old man’s hat and places his hand on top of his head. “Mama wouldn’t want you having to live out your days in the home without me, Daddy. Hey, you. Hey, Pops. You taking any of this down?”
The shrimp boats on the water, the men made old young by the sun and the sea, the shanty camps on stilts at the end of long weed-choked dirt roads. Why didn’t he paint any of it?
Mr. LaMott’s rod falls to the floor and Sonny places it next to his. He doesn’t bother to reel in the line. The restaurant behind them is quiet, the blinds closed. No one fishes from the piers nearby. Sonny spends a long time looking at his father, trying to recall how he was before the Alzheimer’s advanced to where he stopped being recognizable to anyone who knew him.
Sonny has his father’s nose and eyes. But his hair is like his mother’s was. He doesn’t know where his ears come from. They’re smaller and better formed than Mr. LaMott’s. The source of his big lantern jaw is also a mystery.
Sonny’s hands begin to shake and it’s hard for him to breathe for the tightening of his chest. You should be happy, he tells himself. It’s the right thing to do. The only thing. He pulls the old man out of the chair, surprised by the weight. He kicks the fishing gear out of the way and drags him over to the end of the pier where it’s deepest and lifts him to stand against a piling with his back to the water. Mr. LaMott mumbles. He seems to be coming to. His tongue is heavy in his mouth as he tries to speak. “No red pepper,” he seems to say.
“No red pepper?”
“I don’t want any.”
The wind is coming strong and wet now and it blows Sonny’s shirt flapping against his body and throws his hair back in a flutter. Mr. LaMott’s hat flies off his head and lands in the water and drifts in the ripples toward the shore.
In the end it isn’t necessary to give his father a push. Mr. LaMott starts to pitch forward, then he loses his balance and drops to the black water without any attempt to break his fall. There’s hardly a splash. The rope screams against the boards and goes slack and Sonny can see the blurred yellow shape that is his father growing smaller as it descends. Sonny sits on the pier and takes a swallow from the bottle and when he looks again the shape resembles an angel with wings fighting for purchase against the darkness all around. Sonny drinks and he feels he has to vomit and more rope pays out. He waits then scrambles to his feet and frantically yanks at the rope until the yellow shape comes back into view.
When his father reaches the surface he comes up gasping and flailing his arms and water balloons his clothes and his hair fans out white in a single wave.
“I’m sorry,” Sonny shouts in a panic. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”
He loops the rope around a piling and reaches down sobbing and grabs his father by the belt and pulls him up fighting to the dock. Mr. LaMott coughs roughly and he is stronger than Sonny imagined. He lies on his side holding his arms at his chest and Sonny lies beside him and puts an arm around him pulling him close. A long time passes before his father’s body stops shaking and quiets and he seems to sleep. “I’m sorry,” Sonny says again, whispering. “I didn’t mean it.”
He decides to abandon the fishing supplies and the bottle. The chairs. He lifts Mr. LaMott in his arms and carries him to the truck. His father shakes as if from the cold and his scalp is pink past the ribbons of matted hair. More cars and pickups fill the lot now and a woman watches from the building, her face colored red and green by the lights in the window. “Is that a person?” she calls in a drunken voice. “Hey, what are you doing with that person?”
Sonny doesn’t answer. He closes the door behind his father and walks past her and enters the lounge to the clank of the cowbell.
The same boy is playing pinball and the bar now is crowded with beer drinkers and Sonny can smell crab boil past the cigarette smoke. The captain is standing in the same place as before working on another platter of shrimp. Above him the TV shows news from the city and yet another story about an abandoned house torched by arsonists. The captain, gazing upward, absorbs it all as if with a superior understanding. “Your coloreds can’t be trusted with kitchen matches,” he says. He talks in the direction of the set. “They’re like children that way.”
“Bruce?” Sonny says.
He wishes he had the club. He wishes he had the captain alone in the room of a house in a bad neighborhood where drug dealers and gangbangers own the streets and anybody who lives there is asking for whatever they get. The story about the fire ends and one about a wreck on the Chef Highway begins. Two people were killed, one injured. The traffic delay lasted for hours while state police investigated the scene.
“Bruce?” Sonny says again, louder now. He waits and the captain slips under the shelf that serves as a door to the elevated run behind the bar. “What did you call my father when I came in here earlier? You called him something.”
“I called him something?” The captain wipes his hands on a dish towel and shrimp scales fall to the floor. He laughs and his open mouth shows more of the pink ground meat and dark spaces where teeth are missing. “Oh. You mean when I said he was a retard?”
Sonny walks closer. “He’s got Alzheimer’s. You don’t know the difference between being sick and being retarded?” And before the captain can answer Sonny lunges at him and clutches his neck in his hands. The captain is slow to react and for a moment Sonny believes he has the strength to crush him. He shoves him against the bar and some of the beer drinkers scatter and a stool topples over and meets the floor with a heavy, metallic thud. Sonny chokes him until a jolt of pain radiates up from his groin and he falls to the floor clutching himself and bellowing for the pain.
Something forces the whiskey up into Sonny’s mouth and he coughs it out.
“I’ll show you sick,” says the captain, then spits his mouthful of shrimp at Sonny. “Jimmy, teach this boy some more about sick.”
The kid who was playing pinball walks over and brings his foot hard into Sonny’s ribs.
“A little more,” says the captain. “He comes from town.” And Sonny absorbs another one.
Somebody pours beer on his head as they’re dragging him outside. As they walk away Sonny can hear them laughing but no one says anything. He crawls to where he’s parked and leans back against the front bumper needing to throw up again. His chest stings and he feels where he wet his pants and where the shells dug holes in his hands. When he looks up five or six of them are watching from the window. Someone waves and he recognizes the woman who wanted to know what he was carrying earlier. He doesn’t return the gesture but it crosses his mind he should show he hasn’t lost his humor.
He pulls himself up and gets behind the wheel and starts the engine.
“Did we catch anything?” asks a voice.
Sonny looks over and Mr. LaMott, pushed back against the door, waits with what is either a smile or a frown, depending on your point of view.
They are a long time down the road before Sonny answers.
Nathan Harvey’s bristly white mustache, stained yellow in the middle from a forty-year nicotine addiction, tarnishes the shine on his otherwise high-polished demeanor. His outfit today is a light silk weave finished with a raspberry bow tie, argyle socks and wing tips buffed to a military shine. He is older, perhaps seventy. But he carries himself with the confidence of a blue-chip athlete with miles and miles left to run.
His office is a suite of rooms on a top floor of One Shell Square, an imposing tower of stone and glass in the Central Business District whose majority occupant is Shell Oil, the petroleum giant. Perhaps because her mother employed him, Juliet expected Harvey to keep a less modern workplace, something of the pile-of-bricks variety, say, with flaking plaster on the walls and badly scarred wood floors protesting wherever you walked. Harvey’s office commands panoramic views of the Mississippi River and the French Quarter. That it is equipped with personal computers, and not Remington Noiseless, also impresses.
“Miss Beauvais, please meet Mr. Nathan Harvey,” the attorney’s secretary says as the two come together. “Mr. Harvey, Miss Juliet Beauvais.”
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