I couldn’t say nothing for half a minute. I asked him was he drunk, and he said no, he was way past that, and I asked when, and he said he died about yesterday in the truck. I got a picture of Fernest Bezue driving that wreck on the back roads, squinting through the cracked windshield, picking his spot for the night. I told Deputy Sid I was sorry and he said, don’t feel like that. He said, we couldn’t do nothing for him, but we did it anyway.
Gone to Water
The dawn seemed more like a sunset, the horizon a luminous peach-colored line, and above it, gray commas of cloud with copper bottoms, each the size of a small town. The old man came onto his back porch holding a cup of coffee and looked east over the sound, his great-grandson dawdling behind, hands in his pockets, a willowy boy of nine. Claude Ledet was eighty-eight, his skin a sun-eroded fabric of pale craters and burgundy spots. He looked down to his little wharf hugging the island.
“We goin’ fish today, down to the mouth of the river,” the old man said.
“The river?” The boy’s voice sailed high with the question.
“The Mississippi,” his great-grandfather snapped. “Don’t you know nothing?”
The boy grinned, goofy and sweet. “I know it’s a long way off, Pa Claude. For your boat.”
The old man turned west, looking for weather. Sometimes he would see what was there; other times his mind would layer memories over the present, and he would see what was there last year, or ten years before that, or sixty years earlier when he’d built his little frame house high up on pilings. The day before, he’d watched the big wooden oyster lugger The Two Sons go by, loaded down, and he’d waved to his cousins Henry and Rene where they sat on the deck sorting what they had dredged up from their lease, even though Henry and Rene had been dead of old age for many years and The Two Sons lay sunk and rotting in Lake Borgne. Sometimes he saw things from several different decades at once, steam tugs, coastal sailboats, brand-new Chris-Craft mahogany yachts, Jet Skis carrying windblown children racing above the swells, time-wandering images overlapping like a bowl of shucked oysters.
Claude looked down at the boy. “Why you here?”
“Aunt Brenda couldn’t come stay with you today. She’s at the doctor with the flu.”
“That oldest girl couldn’t come?”
“Suzie?”
“That’s right. So many come around to visit with me I can’t keep ’em straight.”
The boy gave him a long look. “Great-aunt Suzie’s your daughter.”
The old man nodded west. “Get two rods off the porch and my box. I’m goin’ bail the skiff.”
“Her friend’s husband got killed in that rig accident about three weeks ago. It’s a big mess out in the Gulf.”
“My radio’s burnt out, and that damn television don’t make no sense to me at all.”
“Everybody’s talking about it. You haven’t heard?”
Claude put a hand to his stubbly chin. “We need some crackers and potted meat and a jug of water.”
The boy settled a baseball cap down on his curls. “I didn’t know we were going fishing.”
—
Soon the two of them were in a plank skiff being pushed east by Claude’s five-horse Champion, a smoky old outboard he had to pull on ten times before it would even pop, the first tugs on the rope making only the noise of a startled hen. The twelve-foot boat rattled and wandered but managed after a while to get up to ten miles an hour as it cut between the big shrimp company dock and an incoming corporate trawler.
The boy looked back at the vessel as the wheelman leaned out of the cabin to watch them tumble into his wake. “Pa Claude, you sure you want to go all the way to the river?”
The old man didn’t answer as he watched for the pass that led to the Gulf, which he saw after a minute and turned into, and then two minutes later turned back out of when three-foot rollers caused the skiff to buck and sway. They began to follow the grassy back of the island where there were no houses, still headed east, a longer but calmer route.
Several miles on, they began to pass oil company canals cut into the marsh on both the left and right, and the motor hit a stump, hard, jumping up and puttering in open air until Claude could find the kill switch. While he replaced the propeller’s shear pin with a cut nail, the boy asked him what a stump was doing out in open salt water.
“Aw, Jackie, this used to not be water.”
The boy brushed dark hair under his cap. “What was it?”
“Ha. Land, you little fool. You see how what we in now looks like a lagoon? Years ago it was a long, narrow cut, not a hundred feet wide.” He looked up from his work. “All this was land. Over there was camps, but they fell in the water every one. A farmer grew sugar cane in a sure-enough field over there. I remember a road.” He squinted into memory. “The world’s meltin’ away on account of all these rig canals.”
“Maybe you ought to stay off the shore and out of these stumps,” the boy said quietly.
“Yah.” The old man lowered the motor back into the water. “I’ll go out farther, take the old way.”
—
In another five miles the island fell away to the right and they stopped in a wide sound. “The chop ain’t too bad.” Claude pointed at a long, concave shore a mile off to the northeast that had been cut into with five canals. “We can head over there and then skin down that long bank south of it and around past the jetties at the mouth. We can anchor in a little hook inside the rocks where it’ll be calm. That’s where them redfish hide.” He looked across the water again. “This used to be cypress trees, here. Even a little high ground.”
As the motor idled, they studied a broad, whitecapped channel they would have to cross. A smell other than bitter marsh hung in the air. The great-grandfather pushed a lever on the motor and the skiff slid east. They rocked through a rough place, shipping only a couple gallons of water because the old man still knew how to play the swells.
Close to the crescent of marsh and out of the big currents, the boat cut into rusty water topped with an engulfing stench like that of a steaming refinery. “What the hell,” the old man yelled over the racket of the motor.
“Pa Claude, what’s that stink?” The boy leaned over and saw a glossy slime.
“I don’t know, baby. We run up on a little oil, I guess.”
But as the skiff slid along, they saw they were going through a broad, deep pool of reddish crude that had blown against the shore and was turning the marsh grasses into tarred pretzels. They saw pelicans trembling along the bank like bronze ghosts. The slathered skiff seemed lost in a vast storage tank of crude oil thick as glue. Looking overboard, Claude saw that the engine’s water pump was pulling pure oil and spitting it up in a fuming stench. He killed the outboard, fearing that the sea itself could erupt into flames.
“This must be some of that blown-up rig’s stuff,” the boy said.
“What? What rig? The steam plant by North Pass?” The old man was dizzy, afraid, and his mind suddenly went many years off track. To the east he saw more water than he remembered, open Gulf running all the way to the orange triangle at the eroded mouth of the river. He wondered what had happened to the land, its fish-filled inlets, the shrimp-spawning marsh, the oak groves, the hummocks overrun with white egrets, how a place that fed so richly whoever sailed through it could dissolve, history and church and graveyard and home.
They waited, the sun straight overhead; it was May, and the Louisiana heat was cooking the oil to fumes as the skiff stuck in place. After an hour the boy began to vomit overboard. Claude stuck his arm into the water and it came up covered with a black-and-red batter halfway to his elbow. The boy retched again, and the old man himself felt headspun and sick. He pulled the starter rope, figuring they should try for open water to the south. Doddering up to speed, the boat dragged through the oil until the bow suddenly rose up on, what, a thousand-year-old cypress stump, or one of a million abandoned pipelines? The hull ramped high and rolled off to the right, dumping Claude Ledet in
to the terrible slop, and as he went under, his mind came back to a splintered version of the present, and he knew at once that he had to get back to the surface because the boy, he felt sure, would jump in after him. A news account he’d read thirty years before suddenly bloomed into his head, of a grandfather and grandson gone fishing and not coming back at the appointed time, and when the sheriff’s men dragged the canal the next morning, the hooks brought up together the grandfather and a four-year-old boy wrapped tightly in his arms. Sweet Jesus, the old man thought, give us a hand.
He twisted to get his bearings but could not tell up from down until he felt ten narrow fingers pulling on his arm and he knew with a pang that Jackie was in the water with him, driven by that blood-kin urge that nobody understands, but now the old man knew which way was up, so he spread his arms, cupped his hands, and pulled for the sky. He remembered not to take a breath too quickly once his head broke the surface. His great-grandson he knew to be a weak swimmer, and the boy had taken in a large amount of oil, now jetting from his nostrils as he coughed and spat. The old man took him by the collar and struggled fifty yards toward shore, slow as a giant water bug. Reaching his depth, he walked them in the rest of the way where they fell onto a thin shell reef and coughed and puked burning red streamers of oil until they were nearly unconscious with the strain of it. They sat like oiled birds and longed after the skiff, which had beached far across the open water. In another hour the boy began to cry that his skin was burning all over and he couldn’t breathe. Claude had pulled his handkerchief and mopped the thickest sludge from Jackie’s face and eyes, but the white skin itself would not come clean and kept the color of thin-smeared tar. The old man stood and walked off the ledge of shells into the grass, but all he could see was the great flat marsh spreading north. Miles away, a ship seemed to navigate on land as it followed the river toward the Gulf. A helicopter chopped over at two thousand feet. They would just have to wait.
—
Claude sat next to Jackie, but it hurt the boy to be touched, so the old man just watched and slept, dozing now and then, rousing with a start and forgetting what had happened, who this weeping person next to him was, why his own neck and back flamed and blistered. Around four o’clock they saw a sports fisherman, and Claude stood and waved his bony arms. They were taken into a smudged new boat and brought to the landing on the island, where an ambulance sped them up Highway 1 to the hospital. The old man spent one night there because it took that long for the nurses to scour him and test his blood over and over. Against all prohibitions he walked down the hall past the priest, through a crowd of relatives and friends, or people he guessed were such, to see Jackie, who was on a ventilator, his eyelids blue, his beanlike fingers cold. Claude waited long to see if the boy would at least open one eye to discover that his Pa Claude was in good shape. But he didn’t. The nurses had cleaned Jackie up, but the smell of oil hung in the room like an unwelcome spirit.
—
A week later, the relatives took Claude’s boat away from him, and then his car, which he had not driven in three years anyway. On a Tuesday he woke up and dressed for work at the fish plant, which had been closed twenty years, and his daughter had to tell him to go sit on the little porch and drink his coffee. He walked down to his wharf instead and stood at the very end, remarking to no one how the land had dissolved all around him just since yesterday. So much water and no place to go. He turned for a moment and saw his graying daughter seated on a rush chair on the porch, her head down in her hands.
An engine throbbed in his ears, and looking again at the water he saw his old uncle, Monsieur Abadie, from all the way over in Tiger Island, going out in his long skiff propelled by a one-cylinder inboard. On the north side of his uncle raced the freshly painted Aztec, the sailing lugger owned by the Czechs who lived on the river, and knifing between the boats, but coming in, was The Two Sons, its decks piled high with sacks of oysters, Jackie standing at the very bow, raising his arms and waving with big sweeps of his sun-brightened hands.
The Bug Man
It was five o’clock and Felix Robichaux, the Bug Man, rolled up the long, paved drive that ran under the spreading live oaks of the Beauty Queen’s house. He pulled a one-gallon tank from the bed of his little white truck and gave the pump handle five patient strokes. When a regular customer was not at home and the door was unlocked, the Bug Man was trusted to spray the house and leave the bill on the counter. Her gleaming sedan was in the drive, so he paused at the kitchen door and peered through the glass. A carafe of steaming coffee sat near the sink, so he knew Mrs. Malone was home from the office. When he tapped on the glass with the shiny brass tip of his spray wand, she appeared, blonde and handsome in her navy suit.
“Mr. Robichaux, I guess it’s been a month? Good to see you.” He always thought it funny that she called him Mr., since he was five years younger, at thirty-one the most successful independent exterminator in Lafayette, Louisiana.
He gave her a wide smile. “You been doing all right?”
“You know me. Up’s the same as down.” She turned to place a few dishes in the sink. He remembered that a touch of sadness lingered around the edges of nearly everything she said, around the bits and pieces she had told him about herself over the years, about her dead husband. Why she told him things, the Bug Man was not sure. He had noticed that most of his customers eventually told him their life stories. He began to walk through the house, spraying a fine, accurate stream along the baseboards. He treated the windowsills, the dark crack behind the piano, her scented bathroom, the closets hung with cashmere and silk. Soon he was back in the kitchen, bending behind the refrigerator and under the sink.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked. Then, as he had done off and on for five years, he sat down with her at the walnut breakfast table and surveyed her fine backyard, which was planned more carefully than some people’s lives, a yard of periwinkle beds skirting dark oaks, brick walks threading through bright, even St. Augustine, and in the center an empty cabana-covered pool. The Beauty Queen had been a widow for four years and had no children. He called her this because she had told him she once won a contest, he forgot which—Miss New Orleans, maybe. Each of his customers had a nickname he shared only with his wife, Clarisse, a short, pretty brunette who worked as a teacher’s aide. She liked to be around children, since she couldn’t have any of her own.
“Hey,” he began, “have you seen any bugs since the last time?”
She turned three spoons of sugar into his cup and poured his cream. He stirred. “Just a couple around the counter.”
“Little ones, big ones, or red ones?”
“Red ones, I think. Those are wood roaches, aren’t they?” She looked at him with her clear, cornflower-blue eyes.
“They come from outside. I’ll spray around the bottom of the house.” He put a hairy arm on the table and raised the cup to his mouth, sipping slowly, inhaling the sweet vapor. “You don’t have newspaper piled up anywhere, do you?”
She took a sip, leaving a touch of lipstick on the ivory cup. “I quit reading the newspaper. All the bad news bothers me more than it should.”
Felix looked down into his coffee. He thought it a waste for such a fine woman to live an empty life. Clarisse, his wife, kept too busy to be sad, and she read every word in the newspaper, even police reports and the legals.
“I’d rather read sad stuff than nothing,” he said.
She looked out the large bay window into one of her many oaks. When she turned her head, the natural highlights of her fine hair shimmered. “I watch TV, everybody’s anesthesia. On my day off, I shop. More anesthesia.” She glanced at him. “You’ve seen my closets.”
He nodded. He had never seen so many shoes and dresses. He started to ask what she did with them all, since he guessed that she seldom went out, but he held back. He was not a friend. He was the Bug Man and knew his place.
In a few minutes he finished his coffee, thanked her, and moved outside, spraying under the dec
k, against the house, even around the pool, where he watched his reflection in a puddle at the deep end, his dark hair and eyes, his considerable shoulders rounding under his white knit shirt. He saw his paunch and laughed, thinking of his wife’s supper. Turning for the house, he saw the Beauty Queen on her second cup, watching him in an uninterested way, as though he might be a marble statue at the edge of one of her walks. He was never offended by how she looked at him. The Bug Man lived in the modern world, where he knew most people were isolated and uncomfortable around those not exactly like themselves. He also believed there was a reason that people like Mrs. Malone opened the doors in their lives just a crack by telling him things. He was a religious man, so everything had a purpose, even though he had no idea what. The Beauty Queen’s movements and words were signals to him, road signs pointing to his future.
After Mrs. Malone’s came Felix’s last job of the day, the Scalsons’; he had nicknamed them the Slugs. As the Bug Man, he had seen it all. Most customers let him wander unaccompanied in and out of every room in the house, through every attic and basement, as though he had no eyes. He had seen filthy sinks and cheesy bathrooms, teenagers shooting drugs, had sprayed around drunken grandfathers passed out on the floor, had once bumbled in on an old woman and a young boy having sex. They had looked at him as though he were a dog that had wandered into the room. He was the Bug Man. He was not after them.
Even so, he faced the monthly spraying of the Scalsons’ peeling rental house with a queasy spirit. Father Slug met him at the door, red faced, a quart bottle of beer in his hand. “Come on in, Frenchie. I hope you got some DDT in that tank. The sons of bitches come back a week after you sprayed last time.”
Signals Page 14