“What?”
She gave me a look, then, like she could see right through me into the next county. “What yourself,” she said, and walked into the hall, out of my sight.
—
So the next day I got in her Buick to drive to North Dakota, about two and a half hours away. I was up real early, so it was dark, but the weather didn’t look too bad. Cold as a cube, but no snow. I was kind of excited, like I was finally going to find out something that would lead me to Jack. Not that I wanted to see him or anything. Maybe get a little phone time with him, wherever the hell he was. See if he needed some advice or something. If he was ever coming back.
At dawn it was cloudy, and about an hour later, before I hit the border, here came the snow, so much of it that I knew it was a mistake not driving my truck. The wind blasted out of the northwest and the light wasn’t coming up, like the sun got stuck to the horizon.
I got to the village of limited people around eight-thirty, and it looked like a nice place, with a few hardy trees and old Chicago brick veneer. Inside at the desk the attendant told me to speak loudly when I met Elsa Schoen, that she was awake and well enough to see me. I walked along a hall and found her apartment. Elsa was only about forty-five but suffered, she told me, from a rare type of epilepsy. She was in storage, she joked, waiting for a cure. She didn’t know Jack even existed, but she did give me a phone number and e-mail for his great-uncle, Ewe Brot Swenson, in Germany. I was let down, but figured the lady deserved some small talk. After I had been visiting for twenty minutes, the wind started to sound like a pack of wolves, so I thanked her for her time, held her shaky hand awhile, then headed down the hall.
Outside, the wind pushed me like a forklift, skidding me over to the car. I had to break the floppy wipers loose on Linda’s old sedan and scrape off the ice. On the highway the wind seemed to die down, but the snow came curling like a dense migration of moths. I drove over the flat area toward the Minnesota line, and pretty soon traffic thinned to where I was the only one left moving, creeping along at twenty-five miles an hour, past a couple stopped cars with their emergency flashers glowing under a glaze of sticky snow. Then the wind came up again, and I could feel my rear tires slide sideways a little. I was stupid for coming away from home with no chains in a two-wheel-drive sedan. Being out in the storm made me wonder about my judgment in general. About my whole life, maybe.
When I hit a slight downgrade I felt all four tires lose it. I remembered not to mash on the brakes and tried to accelerate out of the skid. I went on like this, like a cat on slick ice, until right after I crossed the state line. The snow suddenly got so heavy that the wiper on the passenger side snapped off and blew away. I saw a cow standing by a roadside cell tower looking like a powdered éclair, no legs showing, just this big-headed tube on top of all that white. After a while, a gust blew me in a circle and spun me down into a ditch, a pretty deep and wide swale full of chunks of ice. I knew better than to get out. A plow or cop would find me, and I had warm clothes and lots of gas. It was about eleven o’clock, and I called the house, but Linda wasn’t there. I called the highway patrol and they said they’d find me, eventually. And then I sat, my windows turning to milk glass as the snow covered me up.
I hated being idle like this, because I’d begin thinking about things. My memories attacked me, and after a half hour I realized how seldom I did this, this going over my own history, the things I did that I was proud of and the ones maybe not so proud of. I’m never without something to occupy my time, and now here I was barreling down a chute of self-examination that was as scary as the storm outside. I called Butchie, and evidently his cell was off. I wished I could’ve called my father, who’d passed away last year. He wouldn’t have answered anyway, because right now was his naptime. I began to think of all the dead people I wish I’d talked to.
I got desperate for something to do, so I started going through the glove box, rounding up all the expired proofs of insurance. Then I opened my wallet and threw away all the old AAA cards, fishing licenses, phone numbers with no faces to them, and like that. Then I saw Uwe Swenson’s phone number. In high school I did a science project about time zones, so I figured it was around eight p.m. in Germany. It was something to do, so I went through the rigmarole of making a call to Europe. Pretty soon a man picked up the phone and said something I didn’t understand.
“Uh, hi, this is Mel Todd in the U.S.,” I said.
“Okay,” the voice said. “I’m good with English.”
“That’s great. Look, I have a young friend by the name of Jack Swenson, and I was wondering if by some chance he’d contacted you? I think he’s your great-nephew or something.”
“Well, no,” he said, and my heart sank. “Not since this morning. Is something wrong?”
I was speechless. He couldn’t be talking about the same kid. “No, no. But just to be sure, is this the same young man who used to live in Minnesota?”
“Yes, it is. And now I recall that he mentioned he used to work for you, Mr. Todd.”
“Sure. That’s right. Is he at home? Can I talk with him a minute?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, no. Jack is still in the next town estimating a job.”
“He’s found work over there, eh? He always was a smart kid.”
Mr. Swenson laughed at this. “He’s not exactly a kid anymore. He’s twenty-three years old and owns his own heating company.”
I looked at my lap. “He was a go-getter,” I said, my voice flat, feeling like I’d lost some sort of lottery.
“I’m sorry he’s not here to speak with you,” Uwe Swenson said. “He mentioned you several times. What he learned from you. Call back anytime, maybe on a Sunday.”
I began to feel short-winded but had to ask, “Did you have to help him out?”
“Well, I took him in. I used to be an architect, so I could help him find work. He took German lessons and at the same time spent two years at a technical institute. He’s started to do quite well. Jack and his new wife live in a house just down the road. He’s a big help to me and my wife, as we’re getting on a bit.”
I felt that the air in my car had run out of oxygen. “Very generous of you. I mean, to take in a stranger like that.”
“Well,” Mr. Swenson said, “sometimes you have to gamble.”
—
We talked a little longer, then I hung up and watched the inside of the car get darker and darker. I turned off the engine to save gas and buttoned my jacket up to the neck, swung my arms against my chest, and stomped my legs. About four o’clock, I began to get afraid and started thinking about all the people caught out in the storm, people like me who were marooned, slowing down, going over everything. I thought about what life would be like if Jack was still around. I tried to start the car but it wouldn’t turn over. After full dark, I began to feel sleepy and sick. Why hadn’t my wife tried to call? When my phone did ring, it was the state police.
“Mr. Todd?”
“Yes?”
“You still stuck, eh?”
“Stuck as I’ve ever been.”
“Well, we’re coming east from the North Dakota line on Highway 10. Where are ya?”
“Maybe five miles on the right side, off in a ditch. About a mile past where some cows are milling against the fence.”
“Are you completely covered?”
“Buried.” I could imagine him moving slow, behind a plow or tow truck, craning his neck. In a half hour I heard the noise of an engine go past, then nothing. Right then I wished I could have reached my brother. Nobody looks out for you like family, people you’ve gone to bat for in the past and are used to returning the favor. Now even the wind was fading away, sound itself forgetting me.
My phone rang again. “I can’t find you, bud,” the trooper said.
For the first time, I felt the cold all the way inside me. “Aw, no. Please.”
“You say you’re at the bottom of a ditch?”
“The very, very bottom,” I said.
�
�You have people with you, or are you alone?”
My fingers were dying, my toes. I couldn’t bring myself to say that word.
Deputy Sid’s Gift
I’m going to tell you about the last time I went to confession. I met this priest at the nursing home where I work spoon-feeding the parish’s old folks. He noticed that I had a finger off, and so he knew I was oil field and wanted to know why I was working indoors. This priest was a blond guy with eyes you could see through and didn’t look like nobody inside of two hundred miles of Grand Crapaud, Louisiana. He didn’t know that when sweet crude slid under $12 a barrel, most oil companies went belly-up like a stinking redfish, and guys like me had to move out or do something else. So I told him I took a night class in scrubbing these old babies, and he said I had a good heart and bull like that and invited me to come visit at the rectory if I ever needed to.
One day I needed to, yeah. Everybody’s got something they got to talk about sometime in their life. I went to the old brick church on LeBlanc Street on a Saturday morning and found him by himself in his little kitchen in the old cypress priest house, and we sat down by the table with a big pot of coffee.
So I told him what had been going through my head, how I used to have a 1962 Chevrolet pickup truck, a rusty spare I kept parked out by the road just to haul off trash. It was ratty, and I was ashamed to drive it unless I was going to the dump. One day after Christmas my wife, Monette, told me to get rid of the tree and the holiday junk, so I went to crank the truck. Well, in a minute I’m standing by the road with a key in my hand, looking at a long patch of pale weeds where the truck used to be. I’m saying to myself that it coulda been gone a hour or a week. It’s just a thing you don’t look at unless you need it.
So I called Claude down at his little four-by-four city jail and he said he’d look for it the next day, that he had more expensive stuff to worry about. Ain’t that a hell of a note. Then I called the sheriff’s office down at the parish seat, and when I told them the truck’s over thirty years old, they acted like I’m asking them to look for a stole newspaper or something. It was my truck and I wanted it back.
The priest, he just nodded along and poured us our first cup of coffee from a big aluminum Drip-o-Lator. When he finished, he put the pot in a shallow pan of water on the gas stove behind his chair and stared down at his shoe, like he was hearing my confession, which I guess he was. He even had his little purple confession rag hanging on his neck.
I told the priest how the cops searched a lil’ bit, and how I looked, but that old truck just disappeared like rain on a hot street. Monette, she was glad to get it out the yard, but I needed something for hauling, you know? So after not too long I found a good old ’78 Ford for a thousand dollars and bought that and put it right where the other one was.
One day my little girl Lizette and me, we was at the nursing home together because of some student-visit-the-parent-at-work deal at her school. She was letting the old folks hug her little shoulders and pat her dark hair. You know how they are. They see a child and go nuts to get at them, like the youngness is gonna wear off on their old bodies. At the end of my shift, one of the visitors who was there to see his dried-up wife—I think he was a Canulette, kind of a café au lait dude from out by Prairie Amère—his truck won’t crank, so me and Lizette decided to bring him home. Me in my smocky little fruit uniform and Lizette with her checkerboard school suit went off in my shiny thirdhand Buick, old man Canulette sitting between us like a fence post. We rolled down the highway and turned off into the rice fields and went way back into the tree line toward Coconut Bayou. We passing through that poor folks’ section on the other side of Tonga Bend when Lizette stuck her head out the window to make her pigtails go straight in the wind. Next thing I knew, she yelled, Daddy, there’s your truck, back in the woods. I turned the car around in that little gravel road and, sure enough—you couldn’t hardly see it unless you had young eyes—there was my old Chevy parked up under a grove of live oaks maybe 150 yards away.
We walked up on it, and judging from the thistles that had growed up past the bumper, it’d been there maybe three months. I held back and asked Monsieur Canulette if anybody lived around there, and he looked at the truck and said the first word since town: Bezue. He said here and there in the woods a Bezue lived, and they all had something wrong in they heads. I told him I’d put me a Bezue in jail if he stole my truck, but he just looked at me with those silver eyes of his in a way that gave me les frissons. I brought the old man to his little farm and then came back to Tonga Bend Store to call the deputy, who took most of an hour to get out there.
They sent Sid Touchard, that black devil, and he showed up with his shaggy curls full of pomade falling down his collar, the tape deck in his cruiser playing zydeco. He got out with a clipboard, like he knows how to write, and put on his cowboy hat. He asked me if I was the Bobby Simoneaux what called, and even Lizette looked behind her in the woods for maybe another Bobby Simoneaux, but I just nodded. He looked at the truck and the leaves and branches on it and asked me do I still want it. Mais, yeah, I told him. Then Sid walked up and put his hand on the door handle like it was something dirty, which I guess it was, and pulled. What we saw was a lot of trash paper, blankets, and old clothes. I looked close, and Lizette stepped back and put her little hands on her mouth. The air was nothing but mildew and armpit, and by the steering wheel was a nappy old head.
He’s living in it, Deputy Sid said. His eyebrows went up when he said that. Even he was surprised, and he works the poor folks of the parish. He asked again do I still want it. Hell yeah, I said. He spit. He’s a tall man, yeah, and it takes a long time for his spit to hit the ground. Then he reached in to give him a shake, and he sat up and stared at us. He was black—back-in-the-country black. He wasn’t no old man, but he had these deep wrinkles the old folks call the sorrow grooves, and he looked like he was made out of Naugahyde. His eyeballs was black olives floating in hot sauce, and when Sid tried to get out of him what he was doing in the truck, he took a deep breath and looked over the rusty hood toward the road.
Finally he said, I’m Fernest. Fernest Bezue. My mamma, she live down that way. He pointed, and I could see he been drunk maybe six years in a row. The old cotton jacket he had on was eat up with battery acid and his feet was bare knobs. Sid give me that look like he got on bifocals, but he ain’t. Hell no, I told him. I want my truck. He stole it and you got to put him in jail. So Sid said to him, you stole this truck? And Fernest kept looking at the road like it was something he wasn’t allowed to see, and then he said he found it here. When he said that, I got hot.
Deputy Sid tugged Fernest out into the sunlight, slow, like he was a old cow he was pulling from a tangle of fence wire. He put him in the cruiser and told me and Lizette to get in the front seat. He said where Fernest’s mamma lived, my Buick can’t go. So we rolled down the gravel a mile, turned off on a shell road where the China ball and sticker bushes about dragged the paint off that beat-up cruiser. Lizette, she sat on my lap, looking at Deputy Sid’s candy bar wrappers on the floor, a satsuma on the seat, and a rosary around the rearview. The road gave out at a pile of catbrier and we turned left into a hard-bottom coulee full of rainwater next to Coconut Bayou. The water come up to the hubcaps, and Lizette wiggled and told Deputy Sid we on a ferryboat for sure, yeah.
There’s this little shotgun shack up on brick piers with the tar paper rottin’ off it, stovepipe stub sticking out the side wall, no steps to the door, cypress knees coming up in the yard, egg cartons and water jugs floating around on the breeze. Deputy Sid leaned on the horn for maybe fifteen seconds till the front door opened and a woman look like a licorice stick stood there dressed in some old limp dress. He rolled down the window and asked if it’s her son in the backseat. She stooped slow, squinted a long time. That Fernest, she said to the water. She sure wasn’t talking to us. Sid stepped out on a walk board and told me to follow. I jacked up my legs, slid over all the junk, and brought out that satsuma with me. Can’t
leave this with Lizette, I told him. She loves these things. Sid took it from me, give it a toss, and she caught that with one hand.
While he talked to the woman I looked in the house. All this while, my shoes was filling up with water. The first room had nothing but a mattress and a kerosene lamp on the floor and some bowls next to it. The walls was covered with newspaper to keep the wind out. In the second and last room, the floor had fell in. The whole place was swayback because the termites had eat out the joists and side beams. It didn’t take no genius to tell that the roof rafters wasn’t gonna last another year. A wild animal would take to a hole in the ground before he lived in a place like that.
Deputy Sid asked the woman did she know about the truck, and she said he was living in it. He turned to me and said, look around. You want me to put him in jail?
Hell yeah, I told him, and Sid looked at me hard with those oxblood eyes he got, trying to figure a road into my head. He told me if I file charges and put him in jail, that’d cost the parish. My tax money was gonna pay to feed him and put clothes on him. He said let him stay with his mamma. The old woman stooped down again, and Fernest stared at her like maybe she was a tractor or a cloud. I looked at the house again and saw that putting him in jail would be a promotion in life, yeah.
Sid took off the bracelets and walked him to the steps. The old lady said he could stay. Then we left, that cruiser bottoming out and fishtailing from the yard, its mud grips digging down to the claypan. Back at my truck I threw all his stuff in a pile, old coats with cigarette holes burnt through, medicine bottles from the free clinic in town, dirty drawers I handled with a stick, fried chicken skin and bones, a little radio with leaking batteries. I put my key in but the engine didn’t make a sound. When I opened up the hood, all I saw was a pile of a thousand sticks and three long otter-looking animals that took off for the woods. The sheriff’s tow truck brought the thing back to my house and that was that. My wife took one look at it and one smell of it and told me it had to be gone. I already had me a truck.
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