He parked his car, an old blue Mercury with sarcastic tail fins and speckled bumpers, in front of his father’s office, a handsomely remodeled farmhouse on West Deadrock, and went in. He presented himself shakily to the secretary, the very Eileen who now worked for him, who waved him on with a gesture that suggested she knew all about people like Frank and his friends. And perhaps she did, he thought. It’s easy to detect motion when you’re frozen in position, an old hunter’s trick.
“Come in, Frank,” said his father evenly.
“Hi, Dad.”
His father stayed at his desk while Frank sank subdued into an upholstered chair placed in front of the desk, a chair so ill sprung that Frank, at six-one, was barely able to see over the front of his father’s desk. The view of his father’s head and neck rising from the horizontal line in front was reminiscent of a poorly lit documentary shot of a sea serpent and added to the state begun by Frank’s shattered condition.
Mr. Copenhaver made a steeple with his fingertips. The high color in his cheeks, the silver-and-sand hair combed straight across his forehead and the blue suit gave him an ecclesiastical look, and Frank felt a fleeting hope that this was no accident and Christian forgiveness lay just around the corner.
“Frank, you’re interested in so many things.” His father glanced down; Frank could see he had the desk drawer slightly open so that he could make out some notes he had made for this conversation.
“Yes, sir.”
“You like to hunt and fish.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You like the ladies. You like a high old time. You like to meet your buddies for a drink in the evening and you read our daily newspaper, indicating, I might have hoped, an interest in current events but probably only the ball scores. I rarely see you with anything uplifting in your hand bookwise and the few you’ve left around the place are the absolute utmost in prurience, illustrated with photographs for those who are unable to follow the very descriptive text. So far so good: at least it was confined between the covers of a book. There was a day in time when I had my own Tillie the Toiler comics and I am not here setting myself up to moralize about your condition. I have for a long time now, heaving a great sigh, accepted that I was the father of a drunken sports lecher and let it go at that. But when I gave you the opportunity to find some footing in the day-to-day world that would have implications for your livelihood many years down the road, you gave it the kind of disrespect I have to assume was directed at me. Last night, I felt personally smothered in straw and pig manure. That was your valentine to your father, Frank, thank you. And Frank, see how this flies: I’m not going to put up with it anymore. You’re not going to run that building anymore and my hope that you would one day manage the old home place is dead. I think your brother Mike is the man for that job.”
Mr. Copenhaver tipped back in his chair and began to talk about growing up on the old home place, the long walk to school, the cold, some parenthetical remarks about rural electrification and rural values. Frank tried to stare out the window but his eyes were too weak to get past the glass. He was cottonmouthed with exhaustion and prepared to endorse any negative view of his character. At the same time, he’d had enough. He got to his feet on his leaden legs and raised his hand, palm outward, to his father.
“Goodbye,” Frank said. He went out the door and rarely saw his father again. Mike saw him frequently, even driving down from the school of dentistry. They had a nice, even relationship that Frank envied. Mike never made an attempt to be a businessman like his father. That, much later, would be Frank’s job, seeking approval from someone who had departed this world for the refrigerated shadows of death.
2
First he went to Seattle, where he worked for a short time tying up seaplanes at Lake Union. Coming from a land of little rain, he felt his clothes would never dry. He lived with a Quinault Indian his own age who was studying marine biology at the University of Washington and who wanted to go home and manage the salmon fisheries on his reservation. Frank kept tying up the planes and admiring the pilots and waiting for the weather to clear. It never did. So, he went to Los Angeles and worked as a framer on what was to be the biggest semi-enclosed air-conditioned seaside synagogue west of the Mississippi, but the funding went tits up and Frank was again unemployed, living in a pleasant rented room one block off Westwood and going to lavish previews of off-the-wall motion pictures made by other hippies.
He had various girlfriends, ones who cooked, ones who didn’t, ones who got on top and watched traffic at the same time, ones who passed a joint and held their breath while humping like a wild dog, flat-chested ones and ones whose breasts surged halfway to their belly buttons before trying to jump over their shoulders, ones who dealt, ones who typed screenplays for fake hippies from New York, ones who delivered singing telegrams and ones who sold airline tickets or served in-flight snacks and ones who like Frank himself were willing to support his weight but really just wanted to go back where they came from. It was sex en masse. It got monotonous and lasted one year, one month and nineteen days. He was out of there like a kerosened cat. He wanted to go back where he came from but he still couldn’t quite bring it off. Everyone in California seemed surrounded by quotation marks.
He answered an ad promising travel and went to work for a crew that drifted around the country wrecking old homes and hauling the doors, chandeliers, windows and hardware back to Los Angeles for use in houses that duplicated other periods. They even demolished a few mansions in Montana. Frank thought of getting home but the brute work of making sure the booty made it to the West Coast was all-consuming. He would have liked a shot at the old home place but it was too much to ask. The old home places of others would have to do. The billiard table of a Butte mining baron ended up as a striking salad bar in Van Nuys, and numerous farm wagons and buckboards met a similar fate in steak joints, shrimp joints, king crab joints. Frank had felt a subtle change of character as he took on the world of atmosphere, as a thing unto itself. It was like the covering of straw and pig manure of the Farm Life party that had put him on the road in the first place. It was interesting to try to produce atmosphere directly, without tediously waiting for human life to create it.
Frank rose up in this work and became an independent contractor. His work had a look. If a chili chain wanted ambience, Frank went to the border and returned with wetback cafés loaded on tractor-trailer rigs. By the time the Cajun mania hit, Frank already was deep into Louisiana and in fact had inventoried the lower Mississippi, all the way to Plaquemines Parish, for an earlier gumbo empire that had stretched from Ventura to Redding before falling of its own weight and turning back into gas stations. It was in the minute town of Chalou, Louisiana, on the crumbling riverbend steps of a fallen-down indigo plantation house, that he met Gracie. She looked a little bit like an Indian. She was brown-eyed, black-haired, five-four and carried a two-barreled shotgun with big mule-ear hammers and a white ivory bead for a sight and had some connection with the building. He knew right then he had totaled his last heirloom. Ever afterward he would marvel at his own solitary experience with love at first sight. He stood there under her gun, as he would later be under the gun of her departure and then absence. His diagnosis, after she’d gone, was that he had spent their time together building something to please his parents when he should have been building something to please Gracie.
Once Frank was directed off the property, Gracie put the mule-eared gun in the back seat of the convertible she had driven out to the river and explained that the house had been in her family. Frank took her to lunch at a place on the road out to Thibodaux and they shared a huge platter of boiled crawfish. The waitress was a great big Cajun woman wearing a T-shirt with a red portrait of a crawfish on the front. The woman’s T-shirt said, “You want me to suck what?” Gracie told him that real Cajuns suck the crawfish shells when they’re done eating them. Then she told him her family story in compressed form so that he wouldn’t think she was some trigger-happy hillbilly. Somehow t
hey had been planters a century and a half earlier, been ruined, been “kinda like” rednecks for three or four generations and were now on their way back up. “Up” being a wholesale furniture outlet so successful they had acquired control of the headquarters in New Orleans. Gracie said that someday she hoped they would live back out on the river, in sight of the ruined plantation house. “Maybe you will,” said Frank. At this point, he didn’t realize that it mattered much. He guessed she had a romantic streak.
After lunch, Gracie took him to the furniture outlet. It was just outside the town of Houma, a vast cinderblock building that faced a parking lot that would have suited a small stadium. Something had been added to the gravel in the parking lot, causing it to sparkle, and the building itself was faced with a sparkling material. There must have been a hundred cars parked there. The great show windows rose almost a story and a half, and the name of the store, Bouget’s Lagniappe Furniture, was written in neon script across the top of the building, where it flashed at an emergency level. Beneath the sign was an enormous portrait of Gracie’s father wearing a shining crown to indicate that he was the king. There were low pines in the distance and the smell of a refinery in the air.
Inside, families and individuals wandered aisles of furniture, chattering in French and trying out merchandise. One olive-skinned paterfamilias was testing the mechanism of a TV lounger in front of his large and admiring family. He sat in the chair and pushed the footrest; the chair swept back so that Papa was gazing at the ceiling. The children sighed. Then Papa got up abruptly with a superior little smile on his face indicating that things were not so easily put over on him.
A little farther on, another family was seated at a dinette set pretending to have dinner. And beyond, an old man sat at a desk and imagined himself to be doing business while his wife pretended to be his secretary, scratching away at an imaginary writing tablet while he chattered at her in French.
Gracie led him to the back of the store and into an office, which was simply partitioned off from the vast warehouse-display area. Inside this office, Frank was introduced to Antoine “Fatso” Bouget, Gracie’s father. He was not quite round enough, Frank thought, to be called Fatso; but with his oval, smooth, olive face and unmoving arched black eyebrows, he was very distinctly one of the locals. He deftly questioned Frank about his work and background, then turned to Gracie and said, “Him we have out to the house.”
The house, on Bayou Teche, was a modern ranch house except that it had a big front porch on it filled with comfortable furniture for lounging and looking out on the bayou. Mr. Bouget gave Frank a tour of his property, which included numerous pens for pigs and ducks and a great variety of noisy fowl in general but especially the cautious-looking guinea hens that Mr. Bouget liked to toss into his gumbo. Gracie stayed in the house to talk to her mother, who was small and dark like she was and seemed to be continuously thinking of a very private joke. He showed Frank a loudly painted and powerful water-ski boat under a corrugated metal shed. A warm wind sighed in the trees and made an even ripple on the water.
“Dat’s my pirogue, Frank. I use dat to find the crawfish in his home. I find his little chimney and dere I place my trap!”
With his left hand he gestured toward his big Oldsmobile until Frank acknowledged it and, as though they shared the same tissue of good fortune, he smoothly swept his hand to the boat. Frank nodded in vigorous complicity and said, “Uh-huh,” and now they were damn sure buddies. Mr. Bouget leaned toward Frank from the waist. His little smile was a V.
“By the way, Frank, my name ain’t really Fatso. Dat ain’t even my nickname. My name Antoine but my real nickname is Fais Dodo. Buncha ignorant Américains called it Fatso.”
“Faye Dodo?”
“Yessuh.”
“Why do they call you Faye Dodo?”
“Did. Don’t no more, call me Fatso.”
“But why did they call you Faye Dodo?”
“Why! ’Cause I always liked to party!”
This time, when Frank was unable to keep the complete confusion from his face, Antoine Fais Dodo Fatso Bouget pounded him on the back and shouted, “You better get some food into yo’ ass. You peakit!”
“What do you call this body of water, Mr. Bouget?”
“This here’s Bayou Teche.”
“You always live here?”
“Aw hell, no. Maman and me come from Bayou Terrebonne. But you must go where your life take you.”
As they walked back toward the house, Mr. Bouget jostled along in a comradely way, bumping into Frank and making amusing remarks, ending with, “You ain’t by any chance Catholic, are you, Frank?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Uh-huh. Frank, if you excuse me half a sec, I must have a word with Maman.”
Gracie leaned out the door as her father went in. She was lightly dusted with corn meal from cooking. “You making out all right?”
“Just fine,” said Frank, “just fine.”
She went back inside and Frank wandered around the back, looked out at the dark water of the bayou, at the other houses and docks on its shore. Here and there boats were drawn up and there were piles of crawfish traps, net floats, defunct outboard motors, galvanized tubs and caved-in Styrofoam boxes.
Mr. Bouget held up two bottles of beer to call Frank in and Frank joined him. Inside, loud rhythmic accordion music played on the stereo. “Is that what they call zydeco?” Frank asked.
“Zydeco!” said Mr. Bouget. “Spare me, cher! Zydeco num’ but nigga music.”
“You’re listening to the sweet sounds of Ambrose Thibodeux,” said Gracie helpfully. Her mother returned to the kitchen and her father went into the living room to turn the music down. Gracie leaned over and said, “You should have never told them you were Catholic.” Frank didn’t mind. Though he rarely went to Mass, he took what he thought was the Bougets’ view, that Catholics were different people.
Frank ate without having any idea what he was eating, except for the rice it was ladled onto. It was filled with beans and thick, furiously spicy sauce. Frank ate an enormous amount of it because it was better than anything he’d eaten in a long time. He ate so much that the family was fascinated by it. He drank a bit too much, and in his inebriation he knew how they approved of his overeating, both as a sign of admiration for Mrs. Bouget’s cooking and as a sign to Mr. Bouget that he was comfortable with their family. He stuffed himself more than he really wanted to and elevated his voice. The Bougets asked Gracie vaguely set-up questions that would allow her to talk about her education and prospects. She had just finished at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. “Up in Lafayette!” shouted Mr. Bouget. That seemed to be the important part to him.
After dinner, Mrs. Bouget took Frank back to a huge closet where she was storing Gracie’s trousseau — endless handmade quilts, sheets and pillowcases. Never have to leave the bedroom, thought Frank. While they were looking at the trousseau, Gracie and her father set up the slide projector. Gracie was filled with comic glee and Frank was uncertain what was causing it. They went back to the living room, turned out the lights and projected a photograph of the family standing in front of Bouget’s Lagniappe Furniture headquarters in the Algiers section of New Orleans. Mr. Bouget was wearing the crown that he wore for his portrait on the front of the local outlet. Gracie looked proud in her white cotton dress.
“Sonofagun, look at Fais Dodo smilin’!” called Mr. Bouget to these images of himself. “He the king of the outlet!”
“He smilin’ good now!” called Gracie.
“Show respect, Gracie,” said her mother. “College smarty.”
By ten o’clock, Frank and Mr. Bouget were both drunk and standing next to the bayou in the dark. There was a roar of nocturnal insects. Frank’s high spirits had declined to a polite stupor.
“Want to run my pirogue, Frank?”
“No, sir. I can’t see, hardly.”
“Call me Fatso, Frank.”
“Okay,” said Frank, but he couldn’t do it. Fatso
wasn’t a nice thing to call someone where Frank came from. But anyway, here came Fatso under his own steam.
“Frank, once Gracie come home from college, it was like she was lookin’ for somethin’, somethin’ she couldn’t find here in La Teche, somethin’ she used to have but she lost up there at the college, and now she’s back hangin’ out at the old plan’ation thinkin’ she can call back all them dead Creoles. I tell her, Cher, they gone, they gone. And guess what? They are gone but we are not. No sir, we are not. Anyway, all I’m tellin’ you, Frank, is I know this girl ’bout as good as a father can, and you need to be paying extra close attention ’cause they ain’t gonna make but one like Gracie.” The day would come, years later, when Frank would recall this speech with anguish. “They ain’t gonna make but one like Gracie.”
Mrs. Bouget was winding down her household, pulling her kitchen together efficiently and turning off lights from room to room. There was an inside staircase to the guest room, almost an attic room. Frank said good night to Gracie and her mother and followed Mr. Bouget upstairs. Mr. Bouget showed Frank his bed and turned back the covers for him. He told Frank he needed a little air and slid up the one window, letting the rich dampness of the bayou come inside. Frank was drunk enough to be able to abandon himself to this smell, filling his lungs with the fine air as though trying to store it for the year. Mr. Bouget watched him and then he began to do the same. Then they laughed and stuck their heads out the window. “Here’s where it’s comin’ from,” cried Fatso Bouget. They both took deep breaths.
Nothing but Blue Skies Page 2