The Levee: A Novel of Baton Rouge

by Malcolm Shuman

  We stopped in the driveway, right behind the pale blue fiftytwo Dodge my father had bought soon after my mother died. I got out, hoping to make it to the door first, but the deputy, with longer legs, beat me and was already pressing the doorbell.

  I heard the chimes sound inside.

  My father opened the door. He was in his shirtsleeves, not yet dressed for Mass, and for an instant he stared at the deputy as if the policeman might be from outer space.

  The deputy, whose name I found out was Legier, explained while my father listened without expression. When the lawman had finished, my father turned to me.

  “That true, you and Stanley were out looking for Toby?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you didn’t see anything else?”

  I thought of the white form, rising up toward me, and then I shook my head.

  “No, sir.”

  “All right, take your gear and go on inside.”

  My father stayed talking to Legier for a few minutes more and then I heard the front door close and my father walked back to the breakfast room where I sat at the old green table where we ate our meals.

  “I never liked you going out with Toby,” my father said. “I never trusted him.” He shook his head. “Leaving you and Stanley up there. Well, that won’t happen again.”

  “Dad, did he say anything about the woman?”

  My father blinked, a tall, thoughtful man who seemed to take an extra few seconds to register spoken words, as if he were turning all the possibilities over in his mind.

  “No, son, he didn’t say anything. Except that she was young, white, in her twenties.”

  “Did he say how?”

  “Well, I think he said she’d been stabbed. Look, this isn’t a good thing to talk about. Though I suppose it’s natural to wonder, your being so close to it.” He shook his head. “My God, do you know how close you came?” He reached out and hugged me to him. It was the first time I’d seen real emotion since my mother had died.

  “I’m okay, Dad, really.”

  “Well, better get dressed. I think we have something to offer thanks for at Mass this morning.”

  It was only later that I got the news. It was just before supper and I was going over my history notes at the kitchen table where I studied when the phone rang and I heard my father let out a little gasp of surprise.

  “Oh, my God. Are they sure?”

  I froze, putting my notebook down on the table.

  “No, the boys didn’t see anything. I talked to the police. Right. Yes, you don’t know how relieved I am. Well, thanks for calling. Yes. Of course. Did she have family here? I see. I’m sure they’ll have something in the paper.”

  He hung up and I felt my hand start to tremble. When my father appeared in the doorway he was pale.

  “That was Dr. O’Brien, my chairman,” he said, his voice scarcely above a whisper. “They’ve identified the body on the River Road.”

  I felt my breath catch, waiting for the bullet to strike. My father shook his head, still disbelieving.

  “I thought it would just turn out to be some woman from north Baton Rouge, you know, the kind who …” His voice trailed off.

  He licked his lips. “Colin, it was Gloria Santana. The Spanish teacher at your school.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The phone rang several more times before I went to bed, but each time my father swooped on it. I could tell from his hushed voice, however, what he was discussing.

  Stan’s mother, I thought. She has to have spread the word and now people are calling to ask if it’s true, whether we’d been out there, what, if anything, we’d seen.

  I lay awake most of the night, wishing I could communicate with Stan or even Toby. But you did not make midnight phone calls in those days and, while sneaking out was something Toby might have done, it was not something I’d ever tried.

  I’d never had a class with Senorita Gloria, because she taught Spanish and my father had prodded me into Latin—the language of the classics, which was taught by crabby old Mrs. Krech, who’d probably been a witness to Caesar’s assassination. Originally, she’d taught Spanish, too, but a couple of years before the school had hired Senorita Gloria. I’d heard Mrs. Krech was unhappy with the arrangement, but if she communicated her displeasure to Senorita Gloria, the new Spanish teacher never showed it. Always smiling, she seemed full of energy and love of life. I’d only spoken to her once and that was when I’d collided with her rounding a hallway corner between classes, making me drop my books, but the image has stayed with me through the years—the laughing dark eyes, onyx hair, amused smile, and, most of all, the scent. It bespoke that mysterious world of jungles and hidden cities and cloud fortresses I’d seen in National Geographic. Even at fifteen, as I watched her melt into the surge of bodies in the hall, my blood had quickened and I’d felt the stirrings of an erection.

  She hadn’t looked at all like the pale, pleading figure that had staggered toward me last night.

  She’d wanted my help and I’d run away.

  But had I really recognized her, or was it just my mind putting a face to the image now that I knew she was dead?

  The school held a special assembly that morning at nine. Dr. Cornwall, the principal, flanked by all the teachers and a thin, young priest from the campus chapel, stood in the middle of the gym at a microphone, looking grave while we sat on the benches and listened to him describe “this terrible thing” in his mellifluous voice. Students shot one another looks and whispered while he talked, and I was aware of eyes on me, as I had been aware of them throughout my first hour’s math class. I looked over to find Stan, but his mother had kept him home, which left only Toby, who seemed to be enjoying a new popularity, nodding to whispered questions, and grinning behind his hand. Inexplicably, my eyes sought out Blaize, a thin, pale boy at the edge of the row just below me. He’d been kept in Saturday because he was asthmatic and now I resented the fate that had plucked him out of harm’s way, when it could as easily have been he who had seen the apparition and not me.

  It would only have been fair: he was taking Spanish, I wasn’t.

  “Incomprehensible …” I heard Dr. Cornwall say. “… dangerous place … irreparable loss … vibrant personality … great contribution to the school …”

  I tried to focus on Mrs. Krech, to see if she agreed, but her face was impassive. After a final warning to report anything suspicious to him, personally, Dr. Cornwall asked the priest to come forward and say a prayer for Senorita Gloria.

  When we were dismissed I started away, but Cornwall’s honey-rich voice caught me.

  “Colin, I need to see you for a moment.”

  I followed him mutely down the wax-smelling hallway like a fish being towed on a line, eyes on the ground to avoid the stares of my classmates. When we reached the office, even Mrs. O’Neil, the horse-faced secretary, looked away quickly when she saw me, as if it were not polite to make eye contact with a prisoner on his way to the chair.

  Cornwall breezed into his private office, hung his gray coat on the hook, and told me to close the door and sit down.

  I sank into a chair on the far side of the big, polished desk, and wondered why I was here. For a long time he stared at me through his rimless glasses, his face giving nothing away.

  “Colin,” he said finally, “I understand you were on the levee with some other boys Saturday night.”

  He said it conversationally, as you might ask someone what they thought of a movie, but something told me to be careful. He had a reputation for appearing when you least expected: in the boy’s restroom when you were puffing a cigarette, behind the gym at the bike rack when two football players were squaring off, in study hall when the monitor had left for a bathroom break. Sometimes it seemed those passionless gray eyes were everywhere, and though it was unclear what the consequences of being spied out in some forbidden act were, no one wanted to make the dreaded walk to this office to find out.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

&nb
sp; “What were you doing?” he asked.

  It occurred to me that it was not a school matter, and the levee was not school property, but I decided not to test him.

  “Camping.”

  “You and who else?”

  “Stan and Toby.”

  He considered for a moment.

  “Your parents knew you were there?”

  “Yes, sir.” My indignation emerged more like a squeak.

  “Camping.” He repeated, as if rolling the word around on his tongue to savor the taste.

  He picked up a silver pen with the name of the school on it and rolled it in his fingers.

  “You were there all night?”

  “Yes.”

  I waited for him to ask about Toby, but for some reason he didn’t. Maybe Toby’s desertion had been missed in the excitement.

  “Did you see or hear anything while you were there?”

  The lie slipped out unbidden. “No, sir.”

  “Nothing at all.”

  I shrugged.

  “We are all shocked by what happened to Gloria—Miss Santana. I cannot tell you the depth of my own personal shock and outrage.”

  It came out like an accusation and I shrank in the chair.

  “And I cannot tell you how much worse it is when students from my school are involved, even peripherally, in such a horrible crime.”

  My God, did he think we..? But he had used the word peripherally …

  “Colin, you know that if you or Stanley heard or saw anything, it is your moral duty to come forward.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded, as if it were settled. “So if you remember anything you’ll come to this office.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And in the meantime, I’d avoid the levee and the River Road. It isn’t a good place. I’m sure your father agrees. I know that if I had a son I wouldn’t want him down there, and I intend to call your father.”

  “My father …?”

  “Just to pass along my thoughts.” He summoned up a rare smile and unlimbered from behind the desk, a muscular man who seemed deep into middle age but whom I now realize could hardly have been more than forty. He drifted over and draped an arm over my shoulder as I moved toward the door, but somehow it felt like a shroud.

  If I had a son, he’d said, as if I’d committed a crime, or, worse, as if my father had. But he didn’t have a son, because he wasn’t married, and somehow I couldn’t envision him ever marrying a woman, with his prim, precise ways.

  Toby caught me at my locker while I was getting out my books for the next class.

  “What did Cornhole want?”

  “None of your business. Why didn’t you come back for us?”

  “I did, but then I saw the cop cars.”

  “So you chickened out? I thought your old man could fix things.”

  “Fuck you, I don’t have to do anything for you. For all I knew they’d caught you and Miss Stanley sucking each other off.”

  “Get out of here.”

  He leaned forward, undeterred. “Come on, what did old Cornhole say? Is he pissed because he won’t be getting any more from Gloria?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Shit, you know he’s been punching her every time he gets a chance. You’ve seen her going to his office, seen him hanging around her like a damn hound dog.”

  “I don’t know any damned thing.”

  “Remember? ‘Down by the river where nobody goes, there stood Santana without any clothes, along came Cornwall with his walking cane, downed his pants and out it came’?”

  It was a jingle that had made the rounds of the male students (although I’d never seen the principal with a cane of any kind) but I’d never given any thought to there being any truth behind it.

  “That’s just talk,” I told him, shutting my locker.

  “You’re a dumbass,” Toby said with a laugh.

  He turned his back and lumbered off. I watched him go, riveted by a sudden doubt. He was right. There had been talk but …

  “Somebody ought to knock him on his ass.” I heard a voice and turned to see Blaize just behind me, hollows under his dark eyes. Thin as a matchstick, though a full head taller than I, he looked like a strong puff would blow him away.

  “Hey, you feeling okay today?”

  “Fine. I’m serious, Colin, somebody needs to deck Toby.”

  I shook my head. “Nah. I feel sorry for him.”

  “Why? He’s mean. He makes fun of people and he doesn’t even care what happened.”

  “You’re new here,” I told him. “But I’ve known Toby since the first grade.”

  “So?”

  “In the fifth grade,” I said, “we had a Christmas party at school. Everybody picked a name to give a Christmas present and you could also give presents to anybody else you felt like—you know, your special friends. Well, Toby gave a Christmas present to everybody in the class. A slingshot for the boys and a little mirror for the girls. I guess his dad paid for it. But all he got was the present from whoever drew his name. He acted like it didn’t matter, but I felt bad for him.”

  Blaize didn’t say anything.

  “Look, you want to come over after school?” he said finally. “Maybe you could help me with math. I missed Friday.”

  “Sure.” I said it without thinking, but the truth was I didn’t enjoy going to Blaize’s place because his mother always hovered, firing barrages of questions, as if there were an ever-present danger that something might happen to her son. My father said it was understandable, because she was a single woman, having divorced Blaize’s father years before, and having had to live on her own thereafter. He told me that single parents tended to be especially watchful because their children were all they had left.

  I started down the hall but Blaize stuck to my side.

  “The other night, when you guys were out there …”

  “Yeah?”

  “People are saying you saw something.”

  A shiver went through me and I hoped he hadn’t noticed.

  “People are full of shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  That afternoon, for the first time I could remember, my father picked Blaize and me up after school, so that we didn’t have to hitch-hike the mile or so to the Garden District where we lived. He told me he just happened to have some time off and thought he’d drop by, but I knew it wasn’t true. And when he asked me how the day had been, I told him fine, not mentioning my sudden popularity at lunch and recess, when people I’d barely nodded to in the junior and senior classes had crowded out my own classmates to ask me what had really happened that night, and what we had seen, and who we thought had committed the crime. I didn’t say anything about the apparition, of course, or even about how we went up on the levee looking for Toby. Nor did I say how many times I saw Toby in the center of little crowds, as he explained to his listeners how he’d been up there with us and thought he’d heard a scream, but how sometimes you couldn’t tell a human yell from that of a screech owl, which was true enough. I’d even heard him regaling them with details, supposedly gleaned from his father, of how Gloria Santana had been stabbed numerous times and how the police had already picked up a black man for questioning.

  After my father let us off at our house I called Stan, but there was no answer.

  I turned to Blaize.

  “Look, maybe we could study over here.”

  He nodded at once, and I sensed that he was as eager as I was to avoid his mother’s suffocating influence.

  “Let me call,” he said, and I listened while he explained on the phone and promised that everything would be fine.

  But nobody had counted on Toby.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The next morning, after breakfast, I drive to the part of town where Gloria Santana lived. It was just north of campus, a shady middle-class neighborhood of frame houses between Nicholson Drive and Highland Road, and the picture of a green ranch-style house sticks in my mind. But as I cruise the st
reets I realize that I may never find it: the neighborhood has changed. The older white residents have died or moved out and the neighborhood is now primarily black. The colors of houses are different, others have been leveled, and in the place where I thought her house stood is a two-story brick apartment complex, abandoned and falling to ruin.

  Or was her place a block over, on Aster?

  I slow before a row of one-story frame structures, drawing curious stares, and nudge the curb in the middle of the block.

  The house across the street, with weeds in the yard. It is pink now, but colors change. Still, it seems to face the wrong way, with the carport on the left.

  Or can I trust my memory? Isn’t that, after all, why I am here?

  We didn’t have any problem with memory that afternoon.

  Toby said he just wanted to cruise the block, see where she lived. Nobody had invited him to my house but here he was, in my driveway, motor running, cigarette dangling from his mouth, tapping the horn until I came out to tell him to stop the noise.

  “I promised to help Blaize with his math,” I told him.

  “This won’t take a half hour,” Toby said, flipping ash into the driveway. “I found out from my old man where she lived.”

  “It was in the newspaper,” I said.

  “Screw you then. Come on, Blaize, he doesn’t have to go. Just you and me. I won’t tell your mama.”

  Blaize colored. “Leave my mother out of it.”

  “Then stay.”

  Blaize looked at me. “Colin …”

  “Fifteen fucking minutes,” Toby said. “Or do the two of you want to be alone together?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I said.

  “Okay. I was gonna tell you about the man they arrested, but if you two fairies would rather jerk each other off …”

  “Who?” I asked. “What’s his name?”

  “Get in,” Toby said.

  I hesitated, then gave a little shrug. “Come on, Blaize, we can go over the math when we get back.”