“Beatrice, wake up!” Harold was shaking her and laughing. Toni Jo sat up and pulled a compact from her purse. A large braided crease was impressed in her cheek, and her eyes were out of focus.
“Blah!” she said. “What a horrible taste in my mouth. And I was dreaming crazy. I hate that.”
Nevers headed the car south.
“We’ll stop in New Iberia. You can brush your teeth at the Take-Five Cafe. I have some business there.”
“What is it you do, anyway?”
“There’s some Juicy Fruit in the glove box. That should tide you over till then. Do? I deliver things. Haven’t you noticed?”
“Yeah, but what?”
“Bundles.” Harold laughed. “Restaurant stuff. Whatever they order.”
When Toni Jo opened the glove compartment and moved some papers aside to look for the gum, she saw a heavy silver pistol and her heart surged. She closed the metal door immediately.
Passing through the Lafayette neighborhoods, Toni Jo watched black men pushing mowers in ninety-degree heat. On the outskirts of town, guinea fowl roamed free on the roads.
“The feathery cattle of the poor,” Nevers said. As he eased his way through a large flock, dust rose, boiling sluggishly around the car. He sang along with the tune on the radio, “Why’d Ya Make Me Fall in Love?”
The two ate lunch at the Take-Five an hour later. Back on the highway, Toni Jo asked Harold if he ever picked up hitchhikers. He said he did, when the mood hit him.
They had been driving through sugar cane fields for a while. The monotony of the terrain was getting on Toni Jo’s nerves. She was glad when Nevers pulled over for a hitchhiker.
“Hi-ya Mack,” Harold called to the drifter through Toni Jo’s window. “Where ya headin’?”
The bristly-faced man took off his hat and peered inside.
“Anywhere but where I’m standing.” He opened the back door and threw in his bag.
“Not from these parts?” Harold asked, pulling onto the highway again.
“Nawp. Oklahoma. Little place called Stillwater.”
“Too still for you, huh?” Nevers quipped.
“Too still and too dry.”
“Shouldn’t put water in a dry town’s name.”
“It ain’t fair,” the man agreed.
The men talked for ten minutes. Their steady droning about land and weather, politics and sports—combined with the heat and a full stomach—lulled Toni Jo into an uncomfortable slumber as her mind borrowed their words and weaved them into her dreams.
When she awakened, the hitchhiker was gone.
“Well, if it ain’t Sleeping Beatrice.” Toni Jo raised up and looked around. She groaned at the rows of young sugar cane spoking by the window. “Being a new traveler like yourself, you shouldn’t fall asleep. No telling what kinds of interesting things you’re liable to miss.”
“Yeah?” she said. “Like what?”
“Well, let’s see. One armadillo, a family of raccoons, two snakes, and a rabbit. Almost hit the rabbit.”
“Exciting,” Toni Jo said.
“It was. Especially for the rabbit. You also missed Franklin.”
“I slept through the stop?”
“Yep. You don’t think I made old Mr. Austin jump out the car going sixty, do you?”
“That his name?”
“Uh-huh. Interesting man.”
“Lucky you.”
Nevers laughed. “I’m beginning to like you.”
A new song came on the radio and Harold sang along, making silly pantomime gestures to entertain Toni Jo—”Jeepers creepers, where’d ya get them peepers!”—bugging his eyes out at peepers.
The land went through a slow transformation between Franklin and Morgan City, the cane fields giving way to prairie, then a boggy-looking mass. Bayous, sloughs, coulees, and canals slashed the terrain into amorphous portions of marshland whose rancid emissions reminded Toni Jo of a pulp mill inside an outhouse.
“Before Huey Long,” Harold explained, “you had to get from Franklin to Morgan City by way of Philadelphia.”
Toni Jo started a laugh that died from lack of conviction.
Then, more fecund wasteland: roadkill that supported hordes of flying and footed scavengers, saw grass, tires, bicycle and automobile skeletons, half a boat up in a tree, the jettisoned detritus of the shiftless, the pests and vermin of the weed world, stagnant sloughs and ditches and more. Anything could grow from this land, and it did.
On her second ferry crossing, Toni Jo got the idea of throwing pieces of fried chicken skin to the squawking seagulls that trailed the barge begging for supper. As one bird caught a strip, the others chased it around the sky until it dropped the meal and there was a mad, fluttering, diving race for the morsel before it hit the water.
After Toni Jo had flensed the chicken parts of their crusty skin, she and Nevers leaned on the rails, gazing into the water. Suddenly at their feet a large grey fin rose and sank at the menacingly leisure pace of creatures afraid of no living thing.
“A shark!” Toni Jo screamed. She tugged at Harold’s sleeve, thrilled at the nearby danger. “Did you see that?”
Nevers grabbed Toni Jo and picked her up as if to throw her overboard. She screamed.
“Settle down,” he laughed. “It was just a porpoise.”
“A porpoise?! Ohhh,” Toni Jo said in a falling, disappointed voice. “Oh well, it was still scary.”
Near the opposite shore, the two were pestered into the car by one, two, a dozen, then a cloud of mosquitoes and deerflies. Toni Jo frantically rolled up her window, aimlessly swatting the air around her.
At sunset, the car rolled noisily onto the shell parking lot of the Red Barn Diner, an old railroad club car with a roof and paint job added to suggest a red barn. Beside it, a group of children was climbing a mountain of oyster shells that stank in the dying evening. As Nevers went about his business inside, Toni Jo sat in the car listening to the somber questionings of a bullfrog and wondered for the first time where she was and what she was doing there with a strange man.
When Nevers switched on the car beams to leave, Toni Jo sucked in her breath with fright.
“Look at the size of that rat!” Beside the oystershell mountain where the children had been playing, the animal was raised up on its hind legs, licking the front of its half-wet coat of shabby brown fur, a snakelike black tail looping about its webbed feet. The rodent halted its grooming to gaze indifferently into the headlights. “It looks like it could tear up a good-sized dog.”
“About like that shark could jump up and take you off the ferry,” Harold said. “That’s a nutria.”
“A nutria? What’s a nutria?”
“Good question. It’s sort of like a big rat that lives around the bayous and marshes. The locals trap them for their fur. The poor man’s mink, you might say. Louisiana’s excuse for a beaver.”
As they drove onto the highway atop a levee, a car ahead of them weaved erratically, speeding up and slowing down. Nevers flashed his high beams to get the driver’s attention. When he passed, Toni Jo looked into the car, its interior lit by a dome light. In the back seat, a woman was changing her baby’s diaper. Several unhappy children sat motionless while their father yelled at their mother, who was crying profusely.
Nevers said, “That’s why you don’t want to have kids.”
A cypress swamp rose from the morass and swallowed them as darkness drew on. Toni Jo was lazily happy, heavy with sleep as Harold turned the radio dial across uninspired nasal readings of farm prices—sugar cane, cotton, hog bellies, and rice; a commercial for Community Coffee; news about Hitler’s movements in Europe; a few notes of classical music; then a blues song. Toni Jo drifted away on the husky moaning of a saxophone.
At two in the morning Harold shook her awake. Toni Jo felt like she had been semiconscious during the latter part of the trip, never completely asleep, always aware of the tires rumbling on the roadway as if she were falling in slow motion down a noisy well. Ne
vers had already taken her luggage in.
As he coaxed her out of the front seat, Toni Jo was torn between staying there forever and escaping the thick, greasy smell of chicken engulfing her inside the car.
Harold was much too lively for her.
“Wait, now. Don’t move,” he said. “Stay right there and look up in that direction.”
Toni Jo looked to where Nevers pointed. She saw the dark rectangular outline of what she assumed was yet another restaurant in the interminably long line stretching from DeRidder to New Orleans. As Nevers vanished into the darkness, she heard the sound of waves washing ashore. A few seconds later, through a drifting banner of fog, a phosphorescent sign blinked to life on the roof of the building.
In a jazzy pink neon script, the name of the restaurant wrote itself across the sky:
TERRA INCOGNITA.
Toni Jo burst out laughing, only then realizing she had a splitting headache. In the purgatorial luminosity of the sign, she made out a red barrel-tile roof over arched windows covered by black grilles.
The radiant interior was furnished as simply as a hospital. Against a backdrop of light pink stucco was arranged an assortment of jade plants, burro’s tails, and ornamental cacti. The tables and countertop were made of imitation-marble Formica. Booth benches, separated by walls of thick-cubed bullseye glass, were upholstered in pillowy red leather. Against the wall by each table, circular blue mirrors were set in spider web frames of silver wire. Across the back wall leapt a giant blue marlin, his terrified eye staring unbelievably at the lure impaled in his gaping mouth.
What wasn’t glass was chrome or tile, and the entire effect was an airy, otherworldly atmosphere deserving of a place called Terra Incognita.
Nevers showed Toni Jo around, explaining that the restaurant was situated on the east bank of the mouth of Bayou St. John, which ran north into Lake Pontchartrain. In the spring of 1939, Pontchartrain Beach, an amusement park located on the west side of the bayou, would complete its move to the east side, just down the shore from the restaurant.
“And that’s how you and I will become rich,” Harold concluded. “Now let me show you your room.”
He walked Toni Jo to the back of the restaurant and led her through a door that opened onto an elegantly furnished room. The bed’s headboard was crafted of waterfall walnut. On the mahogany table beside it stood a lamp with a blue porcelain trophy-cup base with gold-leaf handles. Under the lavender ruffles bordering the bottom of a cream lampshade sat a bisque baby with outstretched arms. Next to the doll was a cut-glass jewelry box. An oval mirror hung behind a bench and vanity, on which sat a Crosley radio of molded plastic in a cathedral design. A full-length mirror occupied one door of an armoire, the other door fashioned of inlaid wood in angular designs.
Nevers took his leave of Toni Jo, telling her to sleep as late as she wanted. He said he’d check on her around noon.
Toni Jo pulled her diary from the large suitcase and, sitting in bed, spent thirty minutes on the longest entry she had ever written. In a single day, her world had changed dramatically. Drifting off to sleep under the cool sheets, she wondered what surprises the next day would bring.
Chapter 6
July 1938
Interesting drudgery. That’s what Toni Jo thought of the next week while Harold and Djurgis taught her New Orleans cuisine. They boiled big blue crabs, claws clacking furiously as Nevers dumped them into the seething caldron while Djurgis set aside the soft-shelled crabs for frying or barbecuing. Toni Jo had never seen anything as disgusting as a limp crab, but one sampling off the grill made her appreciate the local inhabitants’ craving for the rubbery creatures.
Nevers introduced Toni Jo to Djurgis as Annie Beatrice.
“Pleezed to meet you, Meez Beetrice,” he responded indifferently. Djurgis was a lean, sleepy-eyed chef of vague extraction, Mediterranean perhaps, and acted as if he had seen so much of this world that he was going through the motions of living just to have something to do on his way to the next. A black, downturned mustache entirely covering his mouth added to his dour expression.
“Never trust a skinny chef,” Harold said with a smile.
Djurgis rarely spoke, and he approached every task with the dolor of a professional mourner. His method of teaching involved a few choice gestures and phrases.
“Watch thees,” he would say as he dashed a precise amount of garlic onto catfish fillets or pulled tendons from a frogleg. Then he would peer at Annie as if over glasses, though he wore none, and say, “Zo. See dat? Now, you do de next one.”
Squeamish at first, Annie learned quickly and pulled tendons from the frogmeat with the alacrity of a schoolboy. Dangling a tendon in front of her like a tapeworm, Djurgis said, “‘Why?’ you say? Look. Zo.”
He took an unprepared frogleg and threw it into an iron skillet half-filled with sizzling grease. The leg contracted, ricocheted around the pan, then shot halfway across the kitchen and landed quivering on the floor in an eerie post-mortem death throe.
“Zo,” Djurgis said without expression. “Pull de teen-dons out de froglegs, no?”
By the afternoons, Annie was drenched to her skin with sweat. A paste of oils, spices, and flour glued the cotton dress to her body so that it made a sucking noise when she peeled it off in the early evening. Just looking out the raised windows at the breeze kicking up waves on Lake Pontchartrain seemed to intensify the cooling effect of the overhead fans as their blades stirred the humidity into an airy roux that eddied around the room, unable to escape through the grease-clogged mesh of the screens.
Annie had no idea shrimp could be prepared in so many ways: boiled and served hot or cold in half a dozen ways; fried, barbecued, or blackened; shrimp Creole, scampi, pilaf, casserole, salad, or cocktail. Djurgis prepared the other entrees with just as many ruses to tease their distinctive flavors in a variety of directions: redfish, speckled trout, flounder, snapper, swordfish, alligator, crawfish, oysters, andouille, calamari, and boudin.
* * *
Harold’s promise to take Annie to a picture show Friday night helped her through the week. All Annie had seen of the great city was a lake, a bayou, and, from a distance, two amusement parks.
“Wear your best,” Nevers said as he stepped out of the kitchen Friday afternoon. “I’ll pick you up at eight.”
Annie mistook the Imperial Theater for a modern church. Its monolithic front divided triptych-like, the middle panel in high relief topped by a discus with a Gothic crown centered over three stars. Fleurs-de-lis, in delicate or bold motifs, adorned the side panels, all of which came to rest on a cantilevered cement awning whose facade blinked red and blue neon chevrons-and-bars. Overall, the structure gave the impression that three architects—Egyptian, Navaho, and Third Reich—had argued the design to a hybrid conclusion. As they walked through the heavy double doors, Mr. Rene Brunet, the owner, greeted them with a toothy smile.
“Good to see you, Mr. Nevers,” he said, shaking his hand. “And another pretty lady, I see.” He bowed slightly to Annie.
In the lobby, a Tiffany lamp hovered over the candy counter, which the patrons approached like an altar. On either side, thick-glass cisterns percolated gurgling orange and purple liquids, and the simple smell of popcorn instantly vetoed the thousand odors of Annie’s week.
Annie’s jujubes and box of popcorn lasted her through the colored cartoon and almost to the intermission of Double or Nothing. As she touched up her rouge in the dressing room, Annie looked in the mirror at the other women, evidently of a higher breed than she, for they were helped by uniformed attendants as they took off gloves and hats to apply eye makeup, then fog the air with powder and perfumes.
After the lights went up at the end of the feature film, a little man Annie mistook for a boy scurried onto the stage and was knocked off his feet by the curtain’s heavy folds as they closed. This, she quickly surmised, was part of the entertainment. In a baritone voice out of proportion to his physique, the man announced the next night as Money Night.
“In case you weren’t listening, I didn’t say Saturday night was Monday night, I said Saturday night was Money Night. If Saturday night was Monday night, that would make Sunday Tuesday, right?”
The man went on with his routine as the two strolled up the plushly-carpeted, sloping aisle, Harold explaining to Annie how Money Night worked.
“It’s mainly to draw people who want something for nothing. You keep your ticket, which has a number on it, and if yours is one of the ten called, you get to go up and pick a paper bag off a clothesline stretched across the stage. Every bag is a guaranteed winner. Some hold a dollar or two. Some lucky suckers have escaped with twenty bucks. That’s a week’s wages to the working poor.” Nevers paused. “Luck. That’s the drug that’ll get us through this depression.”
Walking down the sidewalk, Annie took a final peek at the flashing neon facade of the Imperial Theater.
“That was swell, Harold. We’ll have to do that again next week. Can we?”
“That? You don’t want to go there again, doll. That’s a fleapit.”
“A fleapit?”
“A cheap movie house.” Annie looked at him with surprise. “Next week, I’ll take you downtown to the new Carrollton Theater or the Orpheum. If you were impressed by the Imperial, they’ll knock your eyes out.”
* * *
Saturday afternoon, Nevers and Annie picnicked in City Park. They sat on a bedspread by the large lagoon and watched snowball-eating children feed popcorn to the ducks and black swans.
When they finished eating, Nevers took Annie on a tour of the park. In several spots, they detoured around WPA workers digging new lagoons and sculpting statues in the art deco style. Annie admired the McFadden Mansion and could hardly believe the size of the park’s pool with its cascading falls, central raft, and numerous high and low diving boards. What struck her dumb in her tracks, however, was the Peristyle, which resembled the Parthenon floating somehow on marshland. Half the size of a football field, with entrances guarded by marble lions, its fifteen-foot Corinthian columns supported the granite roof. Walking hand in hand with Harold on the cool cement floor, Annie felt for the first time in her life the massive weight of history. Gawking at the ceiling, she thrilled at the idea that it could tumble down and crush her—that in a thousand years she could be found like a citizen of Pompei in the arms of her lover.
A Savage Wisdom Page 7