He pulled into his driveway, exhausted, his back aching like a sore tooth, and was surprised that no lights were on in the house. Bulling into the kitchen, he fumbled the switch on and saw a single sheet of paper on the table. It was a note from his wife stating, in the declarative tone of someone reminding him to take out the trash, that she was leaving him. He went to the phone and called her, but no one answered, and neither did his daughters, so he suspected they all were looking at their caller IDs, biting their lips, waiting for him to give up. He called her friends, but they didn’t know where she was. Her sister and brother were reserved with him, telling nothing. He called an old uncle of hers and he said she was probably at her mother’s house. Her parents had been dead a few years, but the family had never gotten rid of the outdated house or most of its furniture. He tried there, but the land line had long been disconnected.
Practically starving, he got something to eat out of the refrigerator. Twenty minutes later he went back to look for dessert, and the phone rang.
“There’s pie on the second shelf, in the back.”
He held the phone with both hands. “Why’d you take off?”
“Sid, I need some time away from you. Maybe forever.”
“What the hell? I don’t know what’s happening.”
“That’s the problem.”
“You’re trying to hurt me?”
“Sid, nobody is trying to hurt you. That you believe everybody’s out to get you is your biggest problem.” And she hung up.
—
She wouldn’t meet him. He thought she’d be gone three days, but she didn’t return his calls for the many days he left messages. Over the next month, he learned to cope with the empty house. Then one week she called twice, around eight in the morning, and he tried to argue with her. At work, his associates would ask about his wife, but never about him. It killed him that they knew. Gilman Raider passed him in the hall and said, over his shoulder, “Kind of lonely in the house, eh?”
Every day he’d check Amazon at least four times, his sense of expectancy growing as the weeks slid by. And then, two months after he had returned from Indiana, there it was, a new novel titled The Summer of No Returns, by Zeno Bardol, associate professor of English at Jason Polinski Community College. He ordered it at once and paid extra to have it sent overnight. The next afternoon, it was sitting on his side porch, and he tore the package apart like an excited child and went in to sit with the hardback at his kitchen table, a red pen in his hand, ready to slash through passages, to attack. He wanted to be the first to comment on the novel, to set the tone for anyone else who might want to take a crack at old Zeno. He read the first two sentences carefully, the way a clinician might study a biopsy. The novel began: “At false dawn, the boy appeared in the farm lot and placed a pail next to his animal. It was a three-winters cow, its silky coat the color of red mahogany, and it submitted to slender white fingers pinned deep in its fur as the boy pulled the huge head around to baptize the soap off it with the hose. After a short time, they stood still together in the scanty fall snow, the red Charolais now steaming and clean for the fair and breathing a silver crown above the child’s head.”
Sidney read thirty pages and couldn’t mark a word. He fixed himself a sandwich and a beer, then took the book into the den and sat in his leather lounger, reading another fifty pages, never letting go of the red pen. Around eight, he reluctantly put the book down and went upstairs to turn on his laptop to check his mail.
The $18.75 records check on Zeno Bardol had sent a bonus report, and some bot crawling through the world’s records added newspaper content. Sidney looked for something that would make him hate the guy, write him off as a loser, but all he found was a long series of articles about Zeno Bardol’s nine-year-old son, a Boy Scout, science-project winner, altar boy, a blond, green-eyed kid who had been kidnapped years and years before, held for ransom, and murdered. There were ten articles in the state paper. The description of what the kidnapper had done to the child made Sidney suddenly press the off button on the machine and pull his finger back as if it had been burned. He understood why Zeno and his wife had decided not to stay together. It was because they had created this child who was delivered to such a dark fate. Each look at the other would remind them of that fate for the rest of their lives.
Sidney went back to his chair and resumed reading. It wasn’t a long novel, barely three hundred pages, and he read carefully until first light, the red pen forgotten on the table next to the chair. When he closed the book, he was agitated and confused. There wasn’t one bad sentence anywhere. There was dark tragedy, there was light, there was understanding that could only be drawn from living through it all. He dropped the book to the floor. It was time to write the review.
In his upstairs office he turned on his laptop, logged on to Amazon, and set up the evaluation. First the customer had to click from one to five stars. With the mouse in his hand he felt the power to hurl meteors at all the people who had hurt him down through the years. He floated the cursor above the first star and set his jaw. At that moment, the desk phone next to his left hand began to ring. He picked up the receiver and heard his wife ask if he’d like to meet her for breakfast. To talk.
He was drowsy and disoriented. “Talk about what?”
“Sid, please.”
He didn’t know why, but he was able to recognize an attempt at connection in her voice, something that must have always been there. “You want to talk about me?”
“Yes,” she said, and he slid the cursor over the second star, wondering if his wife really wasn’t who he’d thought she was, someone always trying to get his goat, to make him feel small.
“I’m pretty tired, but…well, sure, I’d be glad to have breakfast with you.”
“That’s good, honey. We have to try something different.”
“Something different,” he repeated, remembering his wife’s eyes, how she had looked at him back when they were first married. The cursor slid above the fifth star, his forefinger trembling over the mouse as if paralyzed by a lifetime of bad decisions and trying to break free from the shadow of all of them at once. “Different’s good,” he said at last.
Easy Pickings
He drove into Louisiana from Texas in the stolen sedan, taking the minor roads, the cracked and grass-lined blacktop where houses showed up one to the mile. The land was overrun with low crops he did not recognize, and was absolutely flat, which he liked because he could see a police car from a long way off. He was a short man, small of frame, tattooed on the neck and arms with crabs and scorpions, which fit his grabbing occupation of thief. In the hollow of his throat was a small blue lobster, one of its claws holding a hand-rolled cigarette. He thought of the woman in Houston he’d terrorized the day before, coming into her kitchen and pulling his scary knife, a discount Bowie he’d bought at the KKK table at a local gun show, and putting it to her throat. She wept and trembled, giving him her rings, leading him to her husband’s little stash of poker money. The day before that, he’d spotted an old woman in Victoria returning alone from the grocery store, and he’d followed her into the house, taking her jewelry, showing the knife when she balked, and getting the cash from her wallet. He’d robbed only these two women, but it seemed that he’d been doing it all his life, like walking and breathing, even though he’d just got out of jail the week before after doing two years for stealing welfare checks. He looked through the windshield at the poor, watery country. Anyone who would live out here would be simple, he thought, real stupid and easy pickings.
His name was Marvin, but he called himself Big Blade because the name made him feel other than what he was: small, petty, and dull.
He noticed a white frame house ahead on the right side of the road, sitting at the edge of a flooded field, clothes on the line out back. Big Blade had been raised in a trashy Houston subdivision and had never seen clothes dried out in the open. At first he thought the laundry was part of some type of yard sale, but after he stopped on the s
houlder and studied the limp dresses and aprons, he figured it out. Across the road and two hundred yards away was a similar house, an asbestos-siding rectangle with a tin roof, and after that, nothing but blacktop. Big Blade noticed that there were no men’s clothes on the line, and he turned into the driveway.
—
Mrs. Arceneaux was eighty-five years old and spoke Acadian French to her chickens because nearly everyone else who could speak it was dead. She came out into the yard with a plastic bowl of feed and was met at the back steps by Marvin, who pulled out his big knife, his eyes gleaming. Mrs. Arceneaux’s vision was not sharp enough to see the evil eyes, but she saw the tattoos and she saw the knife.
“Baby, who wrote all over you? And what you want, you, wit’ that big cane cutter you got? If you hungry, all I got is them chicken labas, and if you cut off a head, throw it in the bushes at the back of my lot and pluck them feather over there because the wind is blowin’ west today and—”
“Shut up, and get inside,” Big Blade growled, giving the old woman a push toward her screen door. “I want your money.”
Mrs. Arceneaux narrowed her eyes at him and then hobbled up the back steps into her kitchen. “Well, I be damn. Ain’t you got nobody better to rob than a ol’ lady whose husband died twenty-nine years ago of a heart attack in a bourrée game holding ace, king, queen of trumps? The priest told me—”
Big Blade began to seethe, his voice aspirate and low. “I will kill you if you don’t give me your jewelry and money. I’ll gut you like one of your chickens.”
The old lady stopped speaking for just a second to bring him into focus. “You with the crawfish drew on your throat, you trying to scare me wit’ a knife? Like I ain’t use to death? I break a chicken neck three time a week and my brother he got shot dead next to me at the St. Landry Parish fair in 1936 and all my husband’s brother got killed in that German war and that Lodrigue boy died with his head in my apron the day the tractor run over him, ’course he was putting on the plow with the damn thing in gear and even the priest said it wasn’t too bright to get plowed under by your own plow and—”
“They call me Big Blade,” Marvin thundered.
“My name’s Doris Arceneaux, I used to be a Boudreaux before—”
He slapped the old woman, and her upper plate landed on the Formica dinette table. With no hesitation she picked up her teeth and walked to the sink to rinse them off. Grabbing the incisors, she slid her dentures back in place. “Hurt?” she yelled. “You want to hurt a old lady what had seven children, one come out arm-first? Look, I had eight major surgeries and a appendix that blowed up inside me when I was first marry, made me so sick I was throwing up pieces of gut and the priest gave me extreme unction nine time.”
“Shut up,” Big Blade yelled, raising his hand over her puff of hair.
“Oh, you kin hit me again, yeah, and then I’m gonna drop on the floor and what you gonna do with me then?”
“I can kill you,” he hollered.
“But you can’t eat me,” Mrs. Arceneaux shrilled back, wagging a knobby finger in Big Blade’s befuddled face.
—
In the other house on that stretch of road old Mrs. Breaux realized with a gasp that she was not going to take a trick in a bourrée game and would have to match an $18 pot. The third trick had been raked off the table when Mrs. Breaux turned up her hearing aid with a twist of her forefinger and began begging, “Oh, please somebody don’t drop you biggest trump so I can save myself.”
“I can’t hold back, chere,” Sadie Lalonde told her. “I got to play to win. That’s the rules.” Mrs. Lalonde’s upper arms jiggled as she snapped down a trump ace.
Mrs. Breaux’s eyes got small as a bat’s, and her mouth turned into a raisin. “You done killed my jack,” she yelled, following suit with her card. “I’m bourréed.”
Mr. Alvin crossed his legs and sniffed. “You bourréed yourself, girl. You should know better to come in a game with the jack dry.” Mr. Alvin shook a poof of white hair out of his florid face and carefully led off with a four trump followed by Sadie’s ten and a stray diamond by Mrs. Breaux, whose little cigarette-stained mustache began to quiver as she watched the money get raked off the table.
“You done it!” Mrs. Breaux hollered. She shrank back in her wooden chair and searched over her ninety years of evil-tempered earthly existence for the vilest curse words she’d ever heard, and none of them packed the power she wanted. Finally she said, “I hope you get diabetes of the blowhole!”
The other three widows and one never-married man laughed aloud at her exasperation and fidgeted with the coins in their little money piles, digging for the next ante. Mrs. Guidroz pulled her aluminum cane off the back of her chair to get up for a glass of tap water.
“There’s ice water in the fridge,” Sadie offered.
Mrs. Guidroz shook her tight blue curls. “I wasn’t raised to drink cold water. That stuff hurts my mout’.” As she drew a glassful from the singing tap, she looked out the window and down the road. “Hey. Doris, she got herself some company.”
“If it’s a red truck it must be her son, Nelson,” Sadie said. “Today’s Tuesday, when he comes around.”
“Non, this is a li’l white car.”
“Maybe it’s the power company,” Mr. Alvin suggested.
“Non, this is too little for a ’lectric company car. Where would they put their pliers and wire in that thing?”
Sadie Lalonde hoisted herself off the two chairs she was sitting on and wobbled to the window, putting her face next to Mrs. Guidroz’s. “That’s either a Dodge or a Plimmit.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I think they the same car, but they label the ones with ugly paint Plimmets.” Sadie looked over her glasses. “Doris don’t know nobody drives a car like that.”
Mr. Alvin came to the window and wedged into the women. “You sure it ain’t a Tyota? One of her two dozen granddaughters drives one like that.”
“Nanette. I think she sold that, though.”
Mr. Alvin shook his head. “Oh, no she wouldn’t. You know, them little yellow fingers make them Tyotas and they don’t never wear out.” He looked through the window. “But that’s one of them little Freons.”
“Is that a Chevrolet?”
“No, it’s a cheap Dodge with a rubber-band motor. Only a Jehovah Witness would drive something like that.”
“Aw, no.” Mrs. Guidroz stamped her cane on the linoleum. “You think we ought to call over there and see if she needs help runnin’ them off. Them Jehovah Witness like cockleburs on corduroy.”
From the card table behind the group at the sink rose Beverly Perriloux’s voice. She had lit up a Camel and was talking out the smoke. “Y’all come back and play some cards before Mrs. Breaux catches herself a little stroke.” She took another intense drag, all the tiny warts on her face moving in to the center.
“Damn right,” Mrs. Breaux complained. “I got to win my eighteen dollar back.”
Mrs. Guidroz gulped two swallows of water while Sadie reached for her wall phone.
—
Big Blade looked around Mrs. Arceneaux’s kitchen at the plywood cabinets, the swirling linoleum that popped when he stepped on it, at a plastic toaster that was a clock and out of which a piece of plastic toast slowly arose every ten seconds. It occurred to him that he was trying to rob the wrong woman.
“I want your wedding rings,” he announced.
She held her hand out toward him. “I stopped wearin’ one when Authur told me to.”
Big Blade wiggled his knife. “Arthur?”
“Yah. Arthur-ritis.”
“Where is it?”
“It wasn’t but a little silver circle and I gave it to a grandbaby to wear on her necklace. Oh, I had a diamond up on some prongs, too, but it used to get plugged up with grandbaby shit when I changed they diapers, so I gave that away.”
The phone rang and Big Blade stepped toward it. “Answer and act normal. One false word and I’ll c
ut you open.”
She gathered her arms vertically in front of her, her fists under her chin, feigning fright, and tiptoed to the wall phone.
“Hallo,” she yelled. Then turning to Big Blade she told him, “It’s Sadie Lalonde from down the road.” Speaking back into the receiver she said, “No, it ain’t no holy-rolly, it’s some boy with a sword trying to rob me like the government.”
Big Blade reached out and cut the phone cord with a swipe. “I ought to kill you where you stand,” he said.
Mrs. Arceneaux grabbed the swinging cord and gave him a savage look. “And then what would you have?”
He blinked. “Whoever called better not cause no trouble.”
She put a thumb over her shoulder. “Sadie and that gang playing bourrée. You couldn’t blow ’em out that house with dynamite.”
He looked around, perhaps wondering if the worn-out contents of her kitchen would fit into the stolen car he’d left idling out front. “You got to have some money around here somewhere. Go get it.”
She raised a hand above her head and toddled off toward the hall. “If that’s all it takes to get you out my hair you kin have it, yeah.” Abruptly she turned around and walked toward the stove. “I almos’ forgot my chicken stew heatin’ on the burner.”
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