The Levee: A Novel of Baton Rouge

by Malcolm Shuman

  “But what did he say?” I asked.

  “It didn’t make no sense. My daddy told me just to shut up my ears. I mean, I was just a little girl then.”

  “What did Sikes say?”

  “I don’t know. Something crazy. My daddy told him to stay away from us kids and Sikes said it was Drood he ought to be worried about, something about ‘After what Drood done to my son somebody ought to kill him.’”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said.

  “Why?” she demanded. “What difference does that make?”

  “Because of Stan,” I said, reaching out to grab her by the shoulders. “Don’t you see? If he does things to kids, he might do something to Stan.”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  “I didn’t think about Drood,” I admitted, turning to Blaize. “All this time I was thinking about Sikes. But it might have been Drood who killed Miss Gloria. And if he killed her, and he’s done things to other kids, then who knows what he’d do to Stan?”

  Michelle tried to twist free, then gave up.

  I faced her again: “If Drood has him, where would he take him?”

  “I don’t know. Probably the old house.”

  “Windsong?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe the sugar house.”

  “The sugar house?”

  “Yeah, it’s all tumbled down, but there’s part of it still standing. We used to play like it was a fort when I was little. Me and the little nigger kids used to sneak in until Sikes would run us off. They started saying it was because he buried bodies back there, but I never saw none.”

  “We have to check it out,” Blaize said. “We can’t just go off and leave him.”

  “You’re going there?” Michelle asked, her face white. “You’re crazy.”

  “Come on,” Blaize said.

  I let Michelle go and we started out of the store.

  We’d reached the gas pumps when the front door creaked open.

  “Wait …” she called. “You really going back there looking?”

  “When it’s dark,” I said.

  She bit her lip, as if trying to decide something.

  “You don’t know the path,” she said.

  “You can see it from the road,” I said. “We’ll go over the fence.”

  “No. There’s a path from the old graveyard. It takes you behind the first fence lines. It’s easier.”

  “We’ll look for it,” I said.

  “Wait,” she cried again, as I opened the car door.

  “What?”

  “Be at the graveyard at midnight,” she said. “I’ll take you.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Michelle, where are you now? A grandmother eight times over? The gray matriarch, long gone to fat; whose memories dim with each passing day? Or do you perhaps sometimes think back to that day on the levee? Do you confuse me in your memory with the faces of all the others? Even after what happened? And would you recognize me now? Would you want to talk to me, or would you avoid me, afraid I’d ask you to explain?

  I know one thing: That is that even this many years later the image of her will never fade. She will always be what she was then, knowing, sultry, and more than a little afraid.

  When I got back with the car it was making a strange sound. My father listened and I went with him to the filling station on Dufroq Street, where the mechanic opened the hood and pronounced the timing chain ready to give up the ghost. He told us it was a good thing we hadn’t been on the highway, because not only would the engine have suddenly quit, but the motor itself would have locked up.

  We left the car in his care, because he said we’d be taking a chance to drive it another block, and we walked home, through the Garden District. My father said tomorrow we’d get a ride from one of his colleagues. To my relief, he didn’t ask me what I’d done to the car.

  I called Blaize when we got home.

  “There’s no way to get to the levee now,” I told him. “Unless we call Toby.”

  “I don’t want to fool with him,” Blaize said.

  “I don’t either. But what else can we do?”

  There was a long silence and then he said:

  “I know where my mother keeps the keys.”

  “You mean use your car?”

  “What choice do we have?”

  “But you don’t even know how to drive.”

  “You can drive it. Just don’t go fast.”

  “But if she wakes up and the car’s gone …”

  “I told you, she takes things to make her sleep.”

  I exhaled. After a few more seconds of silence I nodded into the phone.

  “Okay.”

  And that’s how, at eleven-thirty, I came to be driving the long yellow Olds, choking from the smell of perfume that seemed to saturate the interior. It was as if Blanche St. Martin was in the car with us, hovering from the back seat, and I know Blaize felt it, too.

  “It’ll be okay,” he said. “If we find him, nobody’ll blame us for anything, because we did what none of them could do.”

  “Yeah,” I said, but there was still a gnawing in the pit of my belly.

  Standing here now in the hammering sun I wonder how we ever nerved ourselves to do it. And what if we hadn’t? How would things have come out then? That is the one question that obsesses me the most, the question I have come here in hopes of answering. Because if we hadn’t gone out that night, if I had accepted the hint from fate, which caused my father’s car to be broken, then I would have recognized that this was not meant to be. Call it God, destiny, or whatever: I, the lifelong agnostic, have labored all these years with the biting doubt that I ignored a sign from on high.

  I have tried to reconcile it with the realization that, by myself, I never would have mustered the courage, that the courage came from Blaize, who perhaps had his own manhood to prove. That left alone I would have stayed in that night and things would have turned out differently. I would have spent the rest of my life harboring a small doubt as to my own loyalty to friends, but that would have been a small price to pay.

  Price for what? Things turned out all right, didn’t they? I am alive and Blaize is alive and justice was done. Is that an outcome to ignore? Or is it that I have harbored doubts all these decades? That perhaps my own memory has been pressed into the service of these doubts, so that at this point I cannot even be certain of what happened, and Blaize, with his own demons to combat, is not willing to awaken them in order to tell me?

  The store was a black lump as we passed it, the tires making popping sounds on the gravel. I wondered if Michelle was watching from somewhere inside the darkened structure. I wondered if she would even come at all.

  There was no sign of life from Windsong, either, and the Sikes place was closed up tight, the red truck sitting in the front yard beside the broken-down Belair.

  I reached the cemetery road and turned in, careful to keep the big car from sliding in the loose dirt.

  “She won’t come,” I said, cutting the headlights so that all we had to guide us were the dimmers.

  We reached the end of the road and I looked over at Blaize. We were thinking the same thing: Our last chance to leave. It only needed one of us to shake his head, tell the other this was a bad idea. But he only gave a little nod.

  I cut the engine and hit the dimmer switch.

  The night fell over us like a tent, suffocating with the heat of a day that had died hard. A smell of hay, mixed with the dank odor of earth, emanated from the graveyard. Crickets chirped and then the chirping stopped.

  I stood on the little track, half in and half out of the car, then eased the door closed to shut off the interior light.

  And saw her.

  She was rising up from the tombstones, just like before, a wraith, beckoning, coming toward me. I tried to run, but my legs refused to work. Then I heard Blaize’s voice.

  “It’s Michelle.”

  She came toward us then and halted.

  “I didn’t think you’d come,” I said.
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  She stared from Blaize to me, and then her fist flew to her mouth, as though stifling a scream. She lurched past us and I saw her form vanish into the darkness of the road.

  “What the hell?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Blaize said. “Something scared her.”

  “You reckon it was something in the graveyard?” I asked.

  A shrug.

  I took out my flashlight, hand shaking.

  What if there’d been another murder?

  “Maybe we should …” But the words choked in my throat. It was too late now. We started forward together, scanning the ground with the flash. But there was nothing—no body, no blood, no sign of anything out of the normal.

  “You think it could be a trap?” I asked.

  “Why? What could Michelle have to do with it?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s kind of like up on the levee yesterday. She took one look at Drood and spooked.”

  “Do you see Drood here?” Blaize asked.

  “You’re right.”

  I used my light to guide us to the little gate at the far side of the cemetery. Sure enough, a path led out through the pasture, vanishing into the darkness.

  “This must be the path to the sugar house ruin,” I said. “If she was telling the truth.”

  He nodded. “Better shut off the light, though.”

  I flipped off the flashlight and we started out in single file. Overhead the moon was a sliver and the stars blinked down as if in doubt. We picked our way along the footpath, smelling fresh horse and cow droppings. To the left, half a mile away, was the black hulk of the plantation house, and ahead, set back at the edge of the field, was an even deeper blackness that I knew was the brick wall of the old sugar mill.

  There were stories about places like this, that in the old days, before the Civil War, all hands had been pressed into twenty-four-hour service during grinding time, and that during those December and January nights, the tired slaves who manned the machine were wont to grow careless with fatigue. But there was always an overseer or overseer’s helper standing by the machinery with a sword, to hack off the arm of any slave who, lurching too near the great grinding wheels, allowed his hand or sleeve to be caught. I didn’t know if it was true, but it had been repeated so often that now it had taken on the strength of myth.

  My mental meanderings were broken by a cough behind me. I turned.

  “You okay?” I whispered.

  “Yeah. Just my allergies.”

  I listened for a moment. He was wheezing.

  “We can rest,” I said. “No. Let’s keep going.”

  A shape moved under an oak tree and a head turned in our direction.

  “Cows,” I whispered. “Let’s go around. No need to spook ’em.”

  We made a semicircle, going around the herd lying by the feeding trough.

  “Almost there,” I breathed.

  Blaize didn’t answer but when I checked over my shoulder he was still behind me.

  The brick wall of the tumbled structure loomed in front of us and I stopped.

  “Stay here,” I whispered and crept toward the bricks.

  Michelle had said it was a place to look, but as I flashed the light inside, against the bare walls reeking of earth-smell, I saw she was wrong. No one had been here for a long time and there was cow manure on the grass. I shined the light in a corner, the inner sanctum where Michelle said she and the little black children had once played, but there were no tin can lids, no cellophane wrappers, not even old newspaper.

  “Well?” Blaize asked.

  “Nothing here,” I said.

  He lurched toward me and I heard his breath coming in ragged gasps.

  “Are you going to make it?” I asked.

  He nodded, grabbing the wall for support.

  “It’s just I left my inhaler,” he said.

  “We can go back.”

  “No.” It was almost a shout. “Not until we find out if he’s here.”

  I nodded at the plantation house and then at the outbuildings just south of it.

  “Then we’ll have to go there,” I said.

  Another nod while he sucked in air.

  “Look, why don’t I go scout it out?” I said. “You wait here and I’ll whistle if I find anything.”

  A fierce head shake. “I’m going.”

  I saw there was no arguing and started forward, toward the big house, wending my way around piles of brick rubble. I heard Blaize stumble behind me, but when I looked he was still upright.

  Something bit into my chest and I gave a little cry, then realized it was barbed wire.

  “Careful. We’ll have to go under.”

  I held the strands apart for him and then slipped across while he did the same for me.

  His wheezes were louder now, like a leaky bellows. Scenarios raced through my mind: Him collapsing, my having to carry him out. And all along we’d assumed his mother was exaggerating his condition.

  The big building loomed before us now, exuding decay. What little light there had once been from stars and fingernail moon had been sucked up by the big house as if the latter were a vacuum and I had the sense of standing on the edge of’ a precipice, overlooking a whirlpool. Even the trees seemed to have been folded into its blackness, their trunks permanently twisted toward the vortex.

  I came to the back porch and stopped.

  “What?” Blaize wheezed.

  “Nothing.” I found the steps and tried the lowest one. It gave under my weight but held. Then I tried the next and the next until I was on the porch.

  “Come on,” I whispered.

  Blaize followed, standing beside me in the center of the porch.

  “There’s nobody here,” I said. “I’m going to turn on the flashlight.”

  The beam lapped along the rotting floorboards, spilled up onto the sagging back door. I gave the door a push, but it was either locked or nailed shut. I went to the downstairs windows and found one that was broken.

  “It doesn’t look like anybody’s been in here for a long time,” I whispered.

  “They could have used the front door,” Blaize said, breathing fast.

  “Well, I don’t want to go around there. It can be seen from the road.” I carefully removed a jagged glass shard from the pane and stepped through. Dust swirled up from the floor and I sneezed.

  “Better not come in,” I told Blaize. “It’s full of dust.”

  I might as well have saved my breath. He was tying a handkerchief over his face and now he, too, stepped into the dark room. I flashed the light along the floor. Small, furry things ran squeaking out of the way and I shuddered. We were in what had been the dining room, for there was a long table, covered by a cloth. No kitchen; I seemed to remember that in the older plantation houses the kitchen was a separate structure, outside. I went through the doorway, into the living room and gasped when I saw the ghosts. Except they weren’t ghosts, just furniture covered by sheets.

  I ran the light across the walls. No one had taken down the paintings and I saw that one was of a beautiful young woman with night-black hair and a demure smile. She wore a white bridal gown and I thought she looked almost afraid. But maybe it was my imagination. The spot next to her was a bare square, as if another picture had hung there, but had been removed.

  We tiptoed through the rest of the downstairs, the boards creaking under our feet, and at one place the wood gave way and I jumped back.

  I went around the rotten spot and scanned the downstairs sitting room. There was an old treadle-type sewing machine and a rocking chair, but nothing to show anyone had been here for years. Unlike the other rooms, this one exuded a faint odor of mothballs.

  “What about up there?” Blaize asked, pointing.

  I followed his finger and saw the staircase.

  “Okay.”

  I tested the risers with my weight, one by one. They gave but held me. When I reached the top I turned and waited for Blaize. He seemed thinner, his dark eyes larger in
the glow of the flashlight, almost as if his atoms were on the verge of flying in all directions.

  “I don’t think he’s up here,” I said. “I don’t think anybody is. But I guess we’ve come this far.”

  I made my way down the hall, past peeling wallpaper, to a room at the end. The master bedroom, I guessed, because it held a canopied four poster bed like I’d seen at my grandmother’s house while my mother was still alive. There was a desk, an armoire, and even an enamel chamber pot just under the bed itself. There was a smell in this room that was worse than in any of the others, worse than decay, worse than mere mildew or mold. It was something I’d never smelled before, not even from animal carcasses rotting on the road, and it awakened a sense of dread I couldn’t explain. I wheeled and bumped into Blaize in my hurry to get out the door.

  “You smelled it, too,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  We went down the hall to the other room, wondering what we would find and not really wanting to know.

  I stopped at the closed door.

  “You really want to?” I asked Blaize.

  He nodded. “We’ve got to.”

  I pushed it gently open, surprised that it swung noiselessly on its hinges.

  “Damn,” I said and stopped, Blaize bumping into me.

  “What?”

  “Look.” I moved the circle of light from the bunk bed in the corner to the wooden toy chest at the bed’s foot, to the Lionel train set on the floor. A tiny flagman held his lantern permanently on high and a signal arm showed red, as if by rising it had stopped the train forever.

  “Who?” Blaize asked.

  Before I could answer we heard the creak from below, echoing up like a shot.

  “Oh, Christ,” I breathed.

  “Rats?” Blaize asked, hopeful.

  But he’d barely said it when we heard it again, and I recognized it for what it was: the sound of a door being pushed open on rusted hinges.

  We stood paralyzed as the steps made their way slowly across the big living room.

  I looked around, frantic. There was a closet but whoever it was would surely look inside.

  The steps went into the dining room, halted, then came back. Then, to my horror, I heard the first riser of the stairs squeak.