A rainy spell set in and the Chevy sank down in the backyard for a couple weeks with the crawfish chimneys coming up around it till I got a nice day and scrubbed it inside and out. Down at the home we got five new poor, helpless folks from the government without nobody dying to make room for ’em, so another week passed before I got to the hardware and bought me a nice orange FOR SALE sign.
—
Now this was when the priest kind of leaned back against the window frame and made a faraway smile and looked out to the rose garden Father Scheuter put in before they transferred him to Nevada. Priests try not to look you in the eye when you telling stuff. Scared maybe you won’t tell it straight, or tell it all. So I told him straight. The second night that old truck was parked back out on the street wearing that sign, it got stole. I called up Deputy Sid direct this time and let him know what happened. He said, you want me to look for that truck again? I told him hell yeah. He said, don’t you got a truck already? I think that pomade Sid been smearing on his head all these years done soaked in his brain, and I told him that. He said, you got a nice brick house, a wife, three kids, and two cars, you might could quit at that. Anyway, he said, he didn’t feel like burning fifty dollars’ gas looking for a forty-dollar truck. I told him I was gonna talk to the sheriff, and he said okay, he’d look.
I wound up at the home helping out for music day, when Mr. Lodrigue brings his Silvertone guitar and amp to play songs the old folks recognize. Man, they love that rusty stuff like “As Time Goes By,” “The Shrimp Boats Is A-Coming,” and such 78 rpm tunes they can tap a foot to. I get a kick out of them people—one foot in the grave and still trying to boogie. And Mr. Lodrigue, who has wavery silver hair and kind of smoky gray eyes, he looks like Frank Sinatra to them old gals.
I got through with music day and went out to where my car was at behind the home, and there was Sid sitting on the hood of his muddy police car, big as a hoss. I walked up and saw his arms was crossed. He said, I found it. I asked where it was, and he said, where it was before. I said, you mean Fernest Bezue got it back in Prairie Amère? Man, that made me hot. Here I let him go free and he comes back on me like that. I cursed and spit twice. Deputy Sid looked at me like I was the thief. I asked him why didn’t he haul him in, and he looked away. Finally, he said, he’s alcoholic. That got me hotter. Like I could go down to Generous Gaudet’s used-car lot drunk and steal me a car and somebody would let me off. Deputy Sid nodded, but he said, Simoneaux, you play with those old people like they your own grandpère and grandmère, yet you don’t know what they ever done wrong in they time. I sat down next to him when he said that. The hood metal popped in and shook loose a thought in my head that kind of got me worried. About the folks in the home. Maybe I was nice to ’em because I was paid for that. Nobody was paying me to be nice to a drunk Bezue from Prairie Amère. I spit on the sidewalk and wondered if Deputy Sid’s really as dumb as I thought. Then I remembered Fernest Bezue out under the oaks, staring at the road like crazy. So I said, okay, get the tow truck to pull it in, and he says, no, I can’t make a report because they’ll pick him up.
What you think about that? I got to go get my own stole truck, yeah. That’s my tax dollars at work.
—
The pot on the range gave a little jump like a steam bubble got caught under its bottom, and the priest turned and got us another cup. He was frowning a little now, like his behind’s hurting in that hard-bottom chair, but he didn’t say anything, still didn’t look.
I went on about how I wanted to do the right thing, how me and Monette got out on the gravel past Prairie Amère, trying to beat a big thunderstorm coming up from the Gulf. When we got to where the truck sat in the mud, the wind was twisting those live oaks like they was rubber. Monette stayed in the Buick and I walked up to the old red truck, and in the bed was Fernest, sitting down with a gallon of T&T port between his legs, just enjoying the breeze. You stole my truck again, I told him. He said he had to have a place to get away. He said it like he was living in a vacation home down on Holly Beach. He was staring up into the black cloud bank, waiting for lightning. That’s how people like him live, I guess, waiting to get knocked down and wondering why it happens to them. I looked at his round head and that dusty nap he had for hair and started to walk off. But he had what was mine and he didn’t work for it, and I figured it would do him more harm than good to just give him something for nothing. I said if he could get two hundred dollars he could have the truck. I didn’t know where that come from, but I said it. He said if he had two hundred dollars he wouldn’t be sitting in the woods with a $5 gallon of wine. I wondered for a minute where he wanted to go, but just for a minute, because I didn’t want to get in his head. So I looked in the cab where he’d hot-wired the ignition, and I sparked up that engine. I pulled out his blankets and some paper bags of food and threw them in a pile. Then I jumped into the bed and put down the tailgate. I had to handle him like the real helpless ones at the home, he was that drunk, and even in that wind he smelled sour, like a wet towel bunched up in the trunk. I put the truck in gear and left him in the middle of that clearing under them oaks, him that wouldn’t pay or work. When I rolled up on the road ahead of Monette in the Buick, the rain come like a water main broke in the sky. I looked back at Fernest Bezue and he was standing next to his pile of stuff, one finger in that jug by his leg and his head up like he was taking a shower. Then a big bolt come down across the road and the rain blew sideways like busted glass, and I headed back for town.
All that night I rolled like a log in the bed. I thought the weather would blow over, but the storm was setting on Grand Crapaud like a flatiron and dropped big welding rods of lightning almost till dawn. On the way to work I got tempted to drive back to Prairie Amère, but I didn’t, and all that day I was forgetting to change bed linen and was slopping food on the old babies when I fed ’em. It took me a week to relax, to get so I could clean the truck some more without seeing Fernest looking up at the sky, waiting. I got it ready and put it on the lawn, but this time I took out the battery and left it in the carport. Nobody looked at it for about a week. One morning Lizette, she kissed me bye and went out to wait for the school bus. A minute later I heard the screen door open and Lizette said the old truck was trying to run. She said it was making running noise. So I went out and looked through the glass. Fernest Bezue was in there snoring on his back like a sawmill. When Lizette found out it was a big drunk man she yelled and ran for the house. She was scared, yeah, and I didn’t like that. I opened the driver door and it took me five minutes to convince him I wasn’t Mr. Prudhomme, a cane farmer he used to work for ten years back. When he sat up, his left eye capsized, then come back slow, and it was weak, like a lamp flame at sunup. He stared out the windshield at a place I couldn’t see.
I told Fernest I ought to pull him out and turn the hose on him for scaring my little girl like he did. He mumbled something I didn’t catch, and I told him to get the hell away. But he just sat there in the middle of that old sprung bench seat like he half expected me to get in and drive him somewhere to eat. Finally he told me the house had fell in and his mamma went off somewhere and didn’t tell him. Man, I let him have it. Told him to stop that drinking and get a job. He said that his drinking was a disease, and I told him yeah, it was a lazy disease. He said if he could help it, he would. That his daddy was the same way and died in a wreck. I told him he was having a slow wreck right now. I looked back at my house and them wilting camellias Monette planted under the windows. Then I told him if he could stay dry for a week I’d see if I could get him a mopping job at the rest home. He could save up and buy my truck. Then he put his head down and laughed. I can’t stop, man, he told me. That pissed me off so bad I went in and called the cops. After a while Claude come up in the town’s cruiser, took one look at Fernest, then looked over where I’m standing by my Japan plum tree. How they made a gun belt skinny enough for that man, I don’t know. He asked me, Mais, what you ’spect us to do with him? Claude is real country, can�
�t hardly talk American. He said Fernest can’t do nothing to that truck he can arrest him for. If he steal it again the mayor gonna give him the town beautification award. I said arrest him, and I could see in Claude’s eyes that nobody was on the night shift to keep a watch on Fernest down at that one-cell jail. Do something, I told him. He’s scaring Lizette sleeping out here.
What Claude did is put Fernest in the squad car, stop by Bug’s Café and buy him a ham sandwich, and drop him off at the town limits, by the abandoned rice mill. They told me that when I called the station later on.
—
This was when the priest got up and stretched. He pointed to my cup and I shook my head. He fixed himself one more with lots of cream, got a glass of water from the tap, and sat down again, looking at me just once, real quick.
That made me feel like I could keep going, so I told him how that night and a couple nights more I couldn’t sleep without dreaming something about that no-good drunk. I mean, lots of people need help. My one-legged uncle needs his grass cut, and I’d do it, but he says he don’t want me to mess with it. Says I got better things to do with my time. Other people deserve my help, and Fernest didn’t deserve nothing, but every time I went to sleep, there he was in my head. When I read a newspaper, there he was in a group picture, till I focused real good. But after a while he started to fade again, you know, like before. I settled into business at the home, putting ointment on the bald men’s heads, putting Band-Aids on the old ladies’ bunions so they can wear shoes, even though there ain’t no place for them to walk to.
Then one morning here come Fernest’s mamma, all dried up like beef jerky, with three other poor folks the government paid us to take. She had herself a stroke out on Mr. Prudhomme’s farm, where she was staying for free in a trailer, and one side of her wouldn’t work. I stayed away from her for three days, until it was time for Mr. Lodrigue, the music man, when everybody gets together in the big room. I was just walking by to get Mr. Boudreaux his teeth he left in the pocket of his bathrobe when her good arm stuck out and grabbed my fruity little uniform. I didn’t want to look in her eye, but I did. She slid out her tongue and wet her lips. The mailbox is the onliest thing standin’, she told me. The house fall in. I told her it’s a shame and wanted to walk away, but she got hold of my little smock and balled it up in her fist.
She said his government check come in the mailbox, then he walk five mile for that wine. She told me he was gonna die of the wine and couldn’t I help. I looked at her and I felt cold as a lizard. I asked her why me. She said, you the one. I told her he was past all help. He had the drinking disease and that was that. I pulled away and went and got old man Boudreaux’s choppers, and when I come back I saw her across the room, pointing at me with the one finger what would still point. You the one, that finger said. I laughed and told myself right then and there I wasn’t going to help no drunk truck thief that couldn’t be helped.
—
The priest, he made to swat a mosquito on his arm, but he changed his mind and blew it away with his breath. I didn’t know if he was still listening good. Who knows if a priest pays a lot of attention. I think you supposed to be talking to God, and the man in the collar’s just like a telephone operator. Anyway, I kept on.
I told him how after work I used the phone out in the parking lot to call Deputy Sid to help me find Fernest. Yeah, I was ashamed of myself. I didn’t know what I was going to do if Sid found him for me, but I had to do something to get the old lady’s pointing finger out my head. I went home, and about a hour before sundown Deputy Sid pulled up in my front yard and I went out to him carrying Lizette, who had a cold and was all leechy like a kid gets when she’s feeling bad. Sid had him a long day. His pomade hair hung down like a thirsty azalea. He said we got to go out to Prairie Amère, so I put my little girl down, got in the old truck, and followed him out.
We went through the pine belt and past the rice fields those Thibodeaux boys own and by them poor houses in Tonga Bend, then we broke out into Prairie Amère, which is mostly grass and weed flowers with a live oak every now and then, but no crops. The old farmers say everything you plant there comes up with a bitter taste. All of a sudden the cruiser pulled off into the clover on the side of the road, so I rolled up behind. There ain’t a thing around, and I walked up and Deputy Sid said over his shoulder that empty land’s a sad thing. He stretched and I could hear his gun belt creaking. I asked why we stopped and he pointed. Maybe a hundred yards out in the field, eat up by weeds, was a little barn, the kind where a dozen cows could get in out of the sun. We jumped the ditch and scratched through the buttonbush and bull tongue. Deputy Sid stopped once and sneezed. He said I told him to find Fernest and he did. It wasn’t easy, but he did. He asked what did I want with him, and I said his mamma wanted me to check, but that wasn’t it, no. It was the people at the home what made me do it. I was being paid to be nice to them. I wanted to do something without getting paid. I didn’t give a damn about some black truck thief, but I wanted to help him. I couldn’t tell Deputy Sid that.
We got to the tin overhang on the barn and wasn’t able to see much inside. The sun was about down. We stepped in and waited for our eyes to get used to the place. I could smell that peppery-sweet cypress. A building can be a hundred years old—if it’s made of cypress, you going to smell that. Along the side wall was a wooden feed rack three feet off the ground, and sleeping in there was Fernest, his face turned to that fine-grain wood. Deputy Sid let out a little noise in his throat like a woman would make. He said Fernest was trying to sleep above the ground so the ants couldn’t get to him. He said one time, two years before, Fernest passed out on the ground and woke up with a million fire ants blazing all over him like red pepper in a open wound. He stayed swole up for three weeks with hills of pus running all over him, and when his fever broke, he was half blind and mostly deaf in one ear.
I went over to the feed trough and shook him. It took him five minutes to open his eyes, and even in the dark you could see ’em glowing sick. I asked him was he all right, and he asked me if I was his mamma, so I waited a minute for his head to get straight. Deputy Sid came close and picked up a empty bottle and sniffed it. I reached through the slats and bumped Fernest’s arm and asked him why he drank so damn much when he knew it would kill him. He looked up at me like I was stupid. He said the booze was like air to him. Like water. I told him maybe I could get him in the home with his mamma, and he stared up at the tin roof and shook his head. I asked Sid if maybe his mamma could get him picked up and put in the crazy house, and Sid told me no, he’s not crazy, he’s just drunk all the time. The state thinks there’s a difference. Fernest sat up in the trough, hay all stuck in his hair, and he started coughing deep and wet like some of the old folks do at the home late in the evening. Night shift is scary because them babies sail away in the dark. Anyway, Fernest’s face got all uneven, and he asked what I wanted. That stopped me. I opened my dumb mouth just to see what would come out, and I told him that Deputy Sid bought my truck and was giving it to him so he could stay in it sometime. I held up the key and handed it to him. He nodded like he expected this, like people wake him up all the time to give him cars. I looked at Sid and I could see a gold star on a tooth, but he stayed quiet. Then I told Fernest I knew he couldn’t drive it, and I was going to take the insurance off anyway, but he could use it to sleep out of the weather like he done before. He looked past me at Sid and reached out and gave him some kind of boogaloo handshake. In a minute I had the truck up in the grass by the barn, and I pulled the battery out just in case, and Deputy Sid drove me and the battery toward home. We pulled away from all that flat, empty land, and after about five miles Sid asked why I told Fernest he gave him the truck. I watched a tornado-wrecked trailer go by and said I didn’t want nothing for what I did. The cruiser rattled past Tonga Bend, and Sid tuned in a scratchy zydeco station. Clinton Rideau and the Ebony Crawfish started pumping out “Sunshine Can’t Ruin My Storm,” but I didn’t feel like tapping my foot.
/> I went home and expected to sleep, but I didn’t. I thought I did something great, but by two a.m. I knew all I did was give away a trashy truck with the floor pans rusting out and all the window glass cracked. I gave up the truck mostly to make myself feel good, not to help Fernest Bezue. And that’s what I told the priest I come there to tell him.
The priest looked at me in the eyes, and I could see something coming, like a big truck or a train. Then he leaned in and I could smell the soap on him. He told me there’s only one thing worse than what I did. I looked at the floor and asked, what’s that? And he said, not doing it.
I like to fell out the chair.
—
About a month later Fernest’s mamma died in the night, and I called up Deputy Sid at dawn. He went out to look but couldn’t find Fernest nowhere. Sid brought his big black self to my house, and I saw him bouncing up my drive like he got music in his veins instead of blood. He got on a new khaki uniform tight as a drumhead, knife creases all over. He told me the liquor store past Coconut Bayou said they ain’t seen him. The mailbox at the old place been eat down by termites. None of the farmers seen him. I said it’s a shame we can’t tell him about his mamma, and Deputy Sid looked at me sidewise and kissed his lips like he’s hiding a smile. I told him to come inside, where Monette fixed us all a cup of coffee, and we sat down in the kitchen and cussed the government.
—
Summer come and the weather turned hot as the doorknob to hell. The old babies at the home couldn’t roll around outside, so we had to keep ’em happy in the big room by playing cards and like that. I had to play canasta with six ladies who couldn’t remember the rules between plays, so I would spend three hours a day explaining rules to a game we’d never finish.
I guess it was two months after Fernest’s mamma passed. I got home and sat in my easy chair by the air condition when Lizette come by and give me a little kiss and said Deputy Sid wanted me on the phone. So I went in the kitchen, and he told me he’s in his cruiser out at Mr. Thibaut’s place in the north end of the parish, west of Mamou. He found Fernest.
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