Dragonfly

by Farris, John

  "Angel."

  Yvonne began to sob, and was instantly angry. Someday she would kill every one of them, the men who had beaten him. It was her duty. As she made her vow, her limited strength was increased by the size of her anger, and with some effort on Joe's part she heaved him to his feet. Together they stumbled through the swirling knee-deep water toward the companionway. She steeled herself not to hear his screams, and kept them moving.

  She had to shove Joe up the steps, laboring furiously behind and below him. They would sink, she thought, in one convulsive gulp the sea would swallow them before they could reach the bobbing boat tied to the wounded Dragonfly.

  In his nakedness he was too slippery to get a grip on, to move him, even by inches, when he faltered. She found rope in a cockpit compartment and tied it round him, tied his wrists together. She dragged Joe over the coaming into waves breaking over the stern. Maybe she was killing him, had killed him already. He appeared to be unconscious. And she was nearly exhausted, snorting through her mouth, shuddering from effort.

  But the fishing boat was still there, snubbed to the Dragonfly and in danger of going down with it. The Dragonfly was heeled permanently to port, so she simply rolled Joe over the grab rail and into the boat.

  Nothing left to do but untie the lines and push off with one foot, tilt the outboard upright. The engine failed the first time; Yvonne groaned. Then it caught, and she pushed the throttle lever hard right. The bow jumped out of the water and they bounced away from the sinking sloop.

  Joe lay facedown across two seats, his hands still lashed together. He looked like a drowned man. When she was a hundred yards abeam of the Dragonfly, Yvonne throttled down and opened a locker, looking for the fisherman's sweater her brother wore on chilly predawn mornings, a dry pair of denims.

  With a prayer to her patron saint on her lips, Yvonne paused to look back at the Dragonfly. Oddly enough, lights still shone aboard, although she was down to the gunwales in the sea. Then it seemed to her as if a bright brassy sun was rising from the interior of the scuttled sloop, which disappeared in a seething cloud. There was a concussion she felt more than heard as she stood up in the stern, staring at the conflagration that spread across the water toward her quicker than she could draw a breath.

  From the darkening cloud something huge and glowing materialized, writhing madly in the air like a fiery ghost: Dacron ejected from a sail locker as if it were the mouth of a cannon, and instantly ignited in the superheated, hurricane wind from the explosion. It was burning to pieces even as it passed over the fishing boat, and part of the falling sail engulfed Yvonne like a flaming shroud.

  Yvonne screamed, swallowing fire and charring her lungs. She toppled overboard in a sizzle of sparks. Beneath the water she fought free of the burned sail and broke the surface frantically; but her lungs were closed and she could no longer draw a breath. The fishing boat drifted a dozen feet away. She flailed with seared arms, attempting to swim. She had a last glimpse ofJoe in the diminishing light; then her eyes closed. The sea took her down.

  Chapter Six

  The slight rocking of the boat on the open sea; calm of midday. The sun.

  He was not conscious enough to know where he was, or why his hands seemed to be bound. Or why he should feel such terrible pain at every motion of the drifting boat. Better not to think about it: where he might be going, how long it would take him to get there. Try to ignore the power of the sun and his searing thirst, and sleep...

  "Joe?"

  No need to open his eyes, to acknowledge her. But he'd dozed and lost track of where they were. Maybe they were coming to a town, some place where they had a Dairy Queen.

  Big for his age. His eyes were above the level of the windowsill in the car, his face turned away from her. He peeked. It was the same old dry, baking landscape. Barren mountains that didn't seem to be any closer than the last time he'd looked. Hot wind poured into the car. His lips were so dry they had been bleeding for two days. The air conditioner didn't work anymore. And it had been a long time between drinks of water. You're going to love California. Not if it was like this.

  "I wish you'd wake up," his mother said, the note of complaint in her voice. She'd never been a complainer, before this trip. "I can't get anything worth listening to on the damn radio. Talk to me and keep me company. This is no fun for me either, Joely-Poly."

  He was scrunched against the door in the front seat of the Studebaker, and when she spoke he shut his eyes tightly, out of pique. No, he wasn't going to talk to her, because it was her fault they had to be moving again.

  When he thought about leaving New Orleans, he nearly convulsed from unhappiness. He forced himself to be very still in his corner of the front seat, clenching his hands between his knees.

  She'd been bad again, he knew that much. The policemen never came to the house on Dauphine Street unless she'd done something real bad.

  This time there were two of them, and there was a police car parked half on the sidewalk in front of the little frame house in Vieux Carré. He saw them when he turned the corner from Ursuline Street with Tante Berthe, who had taken him this Sunday morning to the Farmer's Market for beignettes and strips of fresh-cut sugarcane. Tante Berthe wasn't a relative; it was what she'd asked him to call her. She owned the house where he and his mother lived, in two rooms on the second floor.

  Joe pulled free of Tante Berthe's hand and ran calling to his mother, who looked around with a distracted smile. She was wearing her black leather pirate's vest with a rope of pearls, a short black skirt and parrot-green high heels. There were crumbs of mascara on the tips of her eyelashes.

  "It's okay, Joe," she said, holding him and touching a fingertip to the sticky corners of his mouth. "They just want to talk to me. I'll be back in a little while."

  But she was nervous, pale and snatched from sleep. He looked at the faces of the two cops. There was nothing likable in one of the faces—it was florid, mean, indifferent. But the younger of the two smiled at him.

  "Your name's Joe? Do you go to school?"

  "He finished the first grade at Saint Philip's," his mother said, and held him tightly, as if she felt confused by the morning light, punished by the sun. The rapid beating of her heart made him anxious. The last time police had come to the house, she'd been gone for three days. "He's the best reader in the class," his mother went on. "But he could read before he started school. I taught him myself."

  "Let's go," the older cop said.

  "I don't have anything to say! I told you. I didn't even know the guy." She seemed to be making a last-second pitch for clemency, as if Joe's presence somehow might prompt in them a change of heart.

  "I guess you didn't know a lot of them," the older cop said, with a sour smug twist to his mouth. "But this one's dead. Okay, do I bring out the bracelets?"

  His mother shook her head quickly. "Shit," she said, almost inaudibly, "there's a little boy here." Then she whispered in Joe's ear, "You stay with Tante Berthe, and I promise I'll be home by suppertime."

  Joe nodded. She smelled this morning of spritzed cologne, sleep-sweats, the pomade she used on her blond duck's-butt haircut. There was a peachy bruise on the side of her throat he hadn't noticed before. He usually didn't see much of her in the daytime. She worked all night, at a place on Bourbon Street. He'd walked by it and had been both curious and repelled by odors that came from the dim interior, that were repeated in her hair and on the clothing she left strewn around the bathroom floor: sweet and sour, like crushed fruit and gin; stale and salty, like old cigars.

  She let him go. Joe's throat was closing. He touched the delicately drawn, blue-and-green dragonfly tattoo on her right shoulder. She had often claimed that touching it would bring him luck, but nothing so far. Then he stepped back into Tante Berthe's protective embrace. Her thin fingers were always cold, even in the swampish heat of Louisiana June. She said something in French to the older cop, who shrugged. The doors of the police car closed, and his mother, knees together, hands locked in he
r lap, twisted around to look at him wanly as she was driven away.

  Tante Berthe was still muttering in French; he looked up at her.

  "Don't worry, you," the old woman said. "They make big mistake about you mama. I know her for a good woman, she. You come on in my house, help me clean out them parrot cage this morning. Give you a quarter, yes." Both of her hands were on his head, fingers moving slowly through his hair, which was as short and bristly as the fuzz on a caterpillar. She might have been reading his fortune from the contours of his skull. The back of his neck prickled, which felt good. Tante Berthe read his bones, she read tea leaves, she read the strange-looking old cards with hanged men and royalty on them, like the royalty on the floats of Mardi Gras. She dipped snuff and kept parrots who talked back to her and made Joe laugh, and she did him small kindnesses his mother had little time for, in spite of her good intentions.

  For once true to her word, his mother was home by suppertime. She looked drawn, distressed. She said the cyst in her ovary was acting up. He didn't know what she meant by that, guessing when she pointed to where it hurt that it was probably like a stomach ache. His mother took him out to eat. They had po'boys at the Express, half a block from the cathedral on Jackson Square. She barely touched her sandwich, or sat with him for very long at the sidewalk table; she was busy making phone calls. After the last phone call she smoked a cigarette and sat looking at him with a tense smile.

  "We have to leave," she said finally.

  "You didn't finish your po'boy."

  She shoved the neglected fried-oyster sandwich across the tin table.

  "You eat it. Want another soda?"

  "No'm." Joe smiled at one of the street artists he knew, who saluted him as he walked by with his folded easel and paint box. Pigeons waddled along the curb of the cobbled street, alert for crumbs, their eyes like coals in the long shadows of a summer evening.

  "I mean, we have to leave New Orleans."

  He sat there, with a lump of oyster in his throat that wouldn't go down, and heard the hoot of a tourist sternwheeler on the river, which was uphill behind the levee on one side of the square. He loved New Orleans and loved his school. He loved his mother, even when she disappointed him.

  "What for?" he said, after he swallowed the oyster with some Coke.

  "Well—I may have a chance to be in the movies, like in California. Hollywood. You know."

  "Don't you like working here?"

  "Yeah. It's okay. I mean, it beats hell out of Buffalo. Remember all that snow?"

  He did. Vaguely.

  "I don't want to go to California."

  "Joely—it's kind of a question of—self-preservation."

  "What?" His face began to hurt from the strain of not showing how much he wanted to cry. "Did you—do something bad here?"

  "Oh, Joely. Now look, I didn't do nothing! That's a promise. But I—may have stepped in something, like, by accident, and there are these people who don't believe me."

  "The police?"

  "Yeah, them. But some other guys too, strictly lowlifes. I had—something to do with one of them once." She made a bitter face. "You wouldn't remember him. His nickname's 'Checkout' and believe me there's a good reason why they call him— The fact is, I hear the guy's making noises about me. Like I don't know how to keep shut about stuff even when, I swear to the Lord Jesus—" She crossed herself. "—I don't know anything to talk about! It's all a big mistake, but this guy—he could definitely hurt me, just to be mean. Which you don't ever want to happen to your mom, right?"

  "No'm." Then the tears started rolling. He wiped them away, leaving grease tracks on his cheeks.

  "You know, you'll like California. There's this guy, he lives right on the beach. Redondo Beach, I think it's called. He says I should come out, that I'm wasting time in New Orleans when I could get into the movies." She leaned toward him with a determined, winsome smile. "He could help me out, Joely. He drives movie stars around. He could introduce me to Debbie Reynolds. He knows her personally. Wouldn't that be terrific?"

  Terrific or not, she didn't solicit his opinion again. They were packed up and on their way within three hours, his mother driving all night deep into Texas, as if she was anxious to put New Orleans well behind them.

  At every stop she left him for a few minutes to make phone calls, thin and tall and leaning like a mantis in ajar inside the phone booths at the lighted peripheries of gas stations, holding her free hand over one ear, staring out at the whizzing headlights of traffic on the Interstate, turning her back and lowering her head whenever a car approached the station. He ate fruit and cookies packed for him by Tante Berthe, and had diarrhea twice by the side of the road until his mother gave up and rented them a motel room. There was a thunderstorm before dawn, the glare of lightning through venetian blinds. His mother tossed in her panties and bra on top of one of the narrow beds, moaning in her sleep.

  In the morning his bowels had dried up, so his mother let him have pancakes for breakfast. She was tired and uncommunicative in the café across the street from the motel. She drank black coffee and ate Tums, but her stomach still hurt her, he could tell. It was the sips that she was always complaining about.

  The men in the café all wore Levi's and cowboy boots, and kept their straw rancher hats on while they ate at the counter. A couple of them would look from time to time at his mother. She never looked back, just picked at some flaking polish on a couple of her nails.

  "I don't know," she said, gazing out the window at the wide street at the tag end of the small Texas town, "maybe we should've gone home to Buffalo instead." There were two mud-splattered cattle trucks parked in front of the café. Joe could see the tufted white muzzles of steers pressed against the slats that made up the sides of the trucks. A fly buzzed their table. He tried to bring it down by spitting milk through a soda straw. Usually he got a stinging slap on the back of his hand for such behavior, but his mother was oblivious this morning.

  "Is Daddy back yet?" he asked, feeling as if another fly was buzzing in his heart.

  She said impatiently, "Joe, I have told you too many times already. Your daddy took off two weeks after you were born, and hasn't been heard of since."

  "Well, maybe he's back there, how do you know he's not?" The buzzing had turned to sharp little stings. He felt short of breath, as he almost always did when he dared to bring up the matter of a father he'd never known. His mouth turned down. He bent his straw into a pretzel shape.

  "Take my word for it."

  "Wasn't he a nice man?"

  "Joe, look at me." She had to say it again, until his eyes rose reluctantly. "Your father was a very nice man. I wouldn't never say a word against him. But he—couldn't stand any kind of obligation. I know you don't know what I mean by that. I can't explain it any better. That's just the way people are sometimes. Let me tell you—wherever he is, Pete don't know what he's missing, having a smart, good-looking little boy like you."

  "Pete," Joe said, hearing the penned-up lowing of cattle in the trucks outside the restaurant. He wondered where they were taking the cattle. He wondered if he would ever see anybody he knew from school again. And if his grandmother in Buffalo would know where to send her Christmas card and the five-dollar check for him which his mother had cashed at the bar on Bourbon Street where she used to work. He still had three dollars left from last Christmas, plus quarters Tante Berthe had given him when she was in the mood. He was thrifty. When he got older he would go and find his father and give Pete all the money he had saved to stay with them and never go away again. Joe was six years old, but already he understood that you had to have money so that people would do what you wanted them to do.

  "Gila Bend," Joe said, reading the name of the town from the gas-station map. He pronounced "Gila" with a hard g He had made up with his mother because he never could stay mad about anything for very long.

  "How far? Look at the little numbers between that last excuse for a town we came through, and Gila Bend."

  "Okay.
There's a three and a two."

  "Thirty-two miles. Are you squinting? I hope you don't need glasses."

  "Something's in my eye. I wish we could close the windows."

  "We'd roast, boil and bake."

  "Can't we get the air disher fixed?"

  "Maybe. Anyway, we'll stop in Gila Bend for a cold drink and a sandwich, and I'll make a phone call. It's air con-dition-er."

  "That's what I said," Joe muttered, rubbing both eyes. "Who are you calling all the time?"

  "Just people I know. I've been trying for two days to get hold of Keg. He's the one I told you about, in Redondo Beach."

  "What's he like?"

  "Keg? Well, he played two years for the Saints. Isn't that something?"

  "I don't know. We don't have to stay with him, do we?"

  "Maybe for a couple of weeks, until I get on my feet and find a job."

  "In the movies?"

  "Yeah, in the movies. Or maybe, like, I might have to wait tables for a while until the movie thing happens. We'll see. Stop rubbing your eye; you'll just make it worse. Blink, a lot and make tears, wash the grit out."

  He sat on his hands and for the most part kept his eyes closed until they reached Gila Bend. What he saw when they got there wasn't impressive. They stopped at a garage that looked busy. Next to the garage a man with long black hair who looked like an Indian to Joe was throwing old tires into the back of a pickup truck. His mother parked their red-and-black Studebaker beside the café and stared bleakly at the garage while Joe stared at the first real Indian he'd seen.

  "What's the matter?" Joe asked her. "Are you going to get the air disher fixed?"

  "Later," she said. "Let's grab a bite first."

  The café was big and crowded. Their waitress was a skinny girl with lively eyes and large uneven teeth in a small mouth. She smiled at Joe and said, "Hi, handsome. Where did you come from today?"