Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  “Then they go in the truck.”

  I could see that they’d bargained like this before.

  “Peacock on his own.”

  She nodded. “He fly up to the old house. Where he come from.”

  My father said quietly to me, “Victor must be sleep in that car.”

  Aunt Monie took the dogs, who’d been lying at the edge of the yard, down the street, her pale scarf floating and their dark forms swerving like fish around her.

  ———

  My father stood up and looked down the narrow road. “I take a ride. See he have a light on. Make him easy to see in the dark.”

  “He could be anywhere in fifty, sixty miles,” Emile said. “You ain’t got that much gas left, and ain’t no more.”

  “I find gas,” my father said. He started up the Corsica and went toward the highway.

  Emile shook his head slowly. “Ain’t no more wood left at the store, either, and we got two more house.”

  “We gotta get that old wood,” Freeman said. “Tomorrow.”

  Freeman and Philippe left in the blue truck, headed down to the dock to their boat. The phone rang inside my pocket, and I jumped. Tony. “Hey,” I said. “You made it.”

  “My flight was delayed. What time is it? I am so out of it.”

  “Almost nine.”

  “Shit. Where are you? I’m heading into the Quarter with a guy from CNN. Every reporter in the world is flying in.”

  “Tony. I’m not in the city. I had to go south. I’m where my dad was born.”

  “What? That boot of Louisiana thing? You’re in the fucking Naples of Louisiana?”

  “Yeah. But no mountains and rock.”

  Emile had turned off the gas ring. He was watching me in the darkness. “So what the hell?” Tony said. “You said everything was out of control.”

  “Oh, it is.” The fan hummed like a giant hive. “Can you get us a hotel in a safe place? Wherever these reporters are going? We’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “This is crazy,” Tony said. I heard a lot of noise. “Great shots, though—people are partying like hell. Their faces—this veneer of desperation under the alcohol.”

  “Tony!” I turned and whispered so Emile couldn’t hear me. “Victor’s hurt. He’s losing his mind. This isn’t an adventure. I’m scared.”

  Tony said, “You don’t get scared.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Okay. I’ll find a safe hotel.”

  When I turned back around, Emile said, “Your husband made it, huh?”

  “He’s somebody else’s husband,” I said. “He’s my best friend.”

  “What they call it? The kids. He your friend with something?”

  “Benefits,” I said. “Not those benefits.” He was pouring something dark as syrup from a blank bottle into a cup, and he handed it to me. Rum? He ran his hands through the loose brown-black curls at his neck.

  He leaned back in his chair. “You come all the way down here to find this hardhead? And he don’t want to be found?”

  Evening Devotion. But my love hadn’t been extraordinary. It had been bumbling and random and too late.

  The rum was sugar and fire. I drank another cup. The world was hot and black and shivering. There was no moon. Nothing. Only Emile’s hand on my elbow, guiding me down the oyster-shell road. The shells crunched like old white pistachios.

  “Isn’t your house boarded up?”

  “Mostly my house is the boat.” He grinned. “My first wife left me right before I came to California. She said I love my boat more than I love her. So she lit it on fire.”

  “On fire?”

  “Yeah. Burnt that lil boat up. Your papa’s old boat.”

  “The One—” I caught myself.

  “The Almoinette.” He laughed. “The name he paint over the other name. They sent me out by y’all cause they thought she would kill me next. But she took my boys and went to Lafayette.”

  “Then you got married again.”

  “Yeah. And I got this boat in ’92. But I got divorced in ’95.”

  “You loved the boat more.”

  “Nothin wrong with that.”

  “I need to stay here in case Victor shows up.”

  “Your papa find him.”

  The water was black, too, but with spokes of silver from the other boat. The bayou headed out to sea. The boat was tall, painted white with black trim, and named Lady Chance. “Cross between Bonne Chance and Lady Luck,” he said.

  “Why isn’t it named for your wife?”

  “Real funny,” he said, helping me onto the deck.

  There were nets, buckets, a huge empty ice chest, and winches that looked like tow-truck equipment. “In the morning, I gotta move the boat down to deeper water. This one spot where the cheniere protects from the wind. We gotta tie em down exactly right, but it’s better to be on the boat than in a house. Your daddy told Tante Monie. But she don’t like him.”

  “Why?”

  We sat in the cabin, in the two chairs, facing cypress trees swung with tangles of gray moss like hundreds of old women, and the onyx path of water. “I guess she never did,” he said. “They had some fight. He was runnin liquor, and then he went to Texas a few times. They say he come back and killed some dude from New Orleans tried to steal his money. He left and she had to hire somebody to help with the grove.”

  The third man. She’d said dead people were everywhere.

  He poured another drink. The rum was like sweet mesh inside my chest. Gold armor. Somewhere on this bayou, the first Marie-Therese had tried to drown herself.

  He kept the lights off in the cabin, but he turned the ship’s radio on. Static and voices and men talking. “Ain’t nobody came to California to get me that one time. I was twenty-four. I thought my wife would come after me.”

  “She was a Bordelon?”

  “Yeah. Bordelon come from one lady. Phrodite. She was here back then. Eighteen and some. She had ten boys. They marry girls from across the river—Nero and Harlem and Bohemia. Them white Bordelon dead—all of em. But the rest of em stay here. You got two, three Picard. Only Antoine left is Aunt Monie. Her sister die, her mother die. Only your daddy. And he gone.”

  “Aunt Monie’s mother—that was Anjanae. She was so old when we came.”

  He nodded.

  “But her mother was Marie-Therese, and her mother was Moinette Antoine.”

  “Yeah, her mother. But not blood. She came out the woods.”

  I paused, confused. “The woods? What are you talking about?”

  “Yeah. They say some white trader had them on a cart, camped in the woods. Up there by Opelousas. Marie-Therese was five when Moinette bought her. Moinette didn’t birth them two girls, she was already old when she got them. She was free.” He drank the rest of his rum. “Aunt Monie told me one time. I was a kid. Maybe she tried to scare me. Said somebody could sell me in the woods.”

  An animal screamed in the water. Then a night bird answered. My father and I were not descended from Moinette Antoine, the woman who got herself free, who learned to read. We were descended from a girl who came from the woods, who probably never knew her own parents.

  “And she told you about the pirates?” I said finally.

  “Pirates came by here all the time, yeah. Pirates just some dudes with guns and boats. Just gangsters, yeah?”

  If the first Marie-Therese, the one born in Senegal, had a child with the Picard pirate, then Victor was her blood. Not me.

  “Suppose to be treasure buried all over Louisiana, catin. Yeah, like people used to dynamite places up there around Bayou Teche. You look at tourist books, Lafitte stay everywhere. Everywhere they want to make some money.”

  Perfect tourist stories. Pirates, swords, jewels, buried chests of coins.

  Emile stood up and pulled on my hand. It was like being a teenager again. I stumbled into the steering wheel, and he caught me around the waist. “You look good,” he said into my neck. “How you look so good? Not a line on your face.�
��

  His lips were on my shoulder. I had no lines because I had no one to worry about. No frowns. I was no one.

  “Come on. Down below.”

  “What?” My own lips brushed his neck when he lifted his head. I could barely stand up.

  “You gon sleep in the hotel tonight?” He guided me toward the stairs. “You sure that ain’t your man?” His voice was an inch from my earlobe. His breath was warm. “Cause I checked you out way back in California. But you ain’t had time for me.”

  I put my arms around him quickly, spread out both my hands on his shoulder blades. Scapula. Angel wings. That’s what my mother called them. You too thin—I see them angel wings. I ran my fingers down the ladder of his ribs, and that made him shiver.

  He grinned, his dimple deep into that left cheek again. “Come on,” he said.

  We lay on the bed below deck. His hands were calloused, the palms lined with tiny hard pillows of skin. He pulled off my tank top, and then lifted off his own shirt. I held his arms in the air and ran my fingernails softly down the outside of his biceps, then along his ribs again, and he bent down like a wire had loosened.

  I started laughing, and he said, “Oh, you think you know everything?”

  He put his hands on either side of my face and traced my ears over and over, then my eyebrows, until I was nearly asleep. Then he circled my waist and lifted me up.

  He called at exactly midnight. The phone was in my jeans, on the floor, and I leaned out of the bunk to grab the sound. “I got my ticket right here. You got yours?”

  “What?” My eyes felt taped shut, and my hair fell around my face. Wait—Dave Matthews. The ticket that had fallen in the hallway. “Yeah.”

  He was crying. “It’s nine o’clock in LA. They’re warming up the crowd. I haven’t been this pissed since the SAT. I had a ticket for that, too.”

  I got up and held my hair off my face. Emile had tangled his fingers in it. He lay on his side, watching me. I put on his T-shirt and grabbed a sheet. Mosquitoes. I went up to the deck, but the utter darkness around the boat was scary, so I sat with my back against the metal door propped open.

  “Why’d you have to talk about Zelman?” His voice was mangled with anger and swallowed tears. “You had to bring it up.”

  “What?”

  “Class!” Then he was crying openly. “Zelman would be assigning that essay now. The one where you pick an instrument from your heritage. Something obscure. They just started fall session and he likes to tell you about it the first week so you can think about it all semester. But he’s in fuckin Brazil.”

  “Where are you?” Tears streamed down my face, too, into my mouth.

  “Some trees. A ditch.”

  “Can’t you see anything to tell me where you are?”

  “No.” He was quiet. “I loved school. When my moms would be passed out, I’d get my pack, my granola bar, and walk to school. First day after we moved, I’d follow some kids my age.” He sniffled and said quietly, “Once I followed a bus. I was like—seven. We had just packed up and we came to the Riviera. It was yellow. Like vanilla pudding yellow. And I saw a school bus stop at the corner and all these kids got on. I was scared to get on cause the driver wouldn’t know me, so I ran behind it. Ain’t like it was going that fast—not around there. But then it got on Palm Avenue and took off. I was runnin and then I didn’t know where I was.”

  “Oh, baby, those kids were getting bused across town?”

  “Yeah. So this cop stops. I thought he would just shoot me. Take me out. Cause that’s all I ever heard.”

  “A white guy?”

  “Brother. Real light. Said, Your mama Glorette, right, son? Like that. I said, Yeah, and he said, Where y’all stayin now? I told him we just moved to a yellow place. He took me to my old school. It was only six blocks.”

  “He did know her.”

  “Yeah.”

  I heard movement in the water. Something swimming. I pulled the sheet tight around me. The air was warm and wet as a tongue, but I wanted to be covered. “You charged the phone in the car lighter?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Nothing. I went to sleep. All those songs about the levee. It’s so quiet down here. In the woods. Water everywhere. I can’t see shit except the phone.”

  “Let me come get you.”

  “Nope. It’s my treasure. I’ma find it in the morning. I’m the pirate. Not you.”

  “I heard.”

  “I’m her blood. The one from Africa. With the pirate. All those years, you were the smart one, the famous writer, and you told me it was because of Moinette. The smart one. But I remembered my moms told me it was me.”

  “It is you.”

  “Aunt Monie told her your mama was like a foster kid.”

  “Well, my papa is looking for you right now. Maybe he’ll see your phone light. You’re the tribe.”

  “Yeah, don’t say it. He’d kill for you, boy! I hate when people say that. He’d lay down his life for you, boy!”

  “He would,” I said. “And all I can do is give you a ride. If you don’t believe it’s for you, believe it’s for your grandpère. They would die for each other.”

  “Except you live in LA. And I can’t go back to the tribe.”

  “You mean back to Sarrat?”

  “Rio Seco.”

  “Because of Jazen.”

  “Because of everything.”

  “You’re coming to LA with me.”

  “Jazen’s been to your place, remember?”

  “You think he’s gonna hunt you down in LA?”

  “I don’t know.” He hesitated.

  I said, “With what warriors? Not Alfonso.”

  But then he said, “He’ll get Tiquan or one of the younger dudes.”

  “They won’t come to LA. And you’ll be on the road with me.”

  “If I went to London or Paris with you, I’d still be a nigga. I’d have to keep it real and all that shit.”

  Before I could answer, he said, “What’s a poinciana?”

  “A flower? No. That’s poinsettia. I don’t know.” I squinted in the darkness. I couldn’t tell him how she died.

  “So you thought I wanted to be another version of you.”

  “I didn’t know what you wanted to be.”

  “Maybe last week. Now I’m done. I heard these little rappers between buildings in the Lafitte. They were singin, My time to leave out this earth. I like that.”

  “Stop exaggerating.”

  No music behind him. Nothing but water whispering against the boat.

  “So my pops was weak. He got killed by a trashman who wanted to be my daddy. But my moms taught me to be a writer.”

  “Oh—I thought—”

  “You thought I grew up reading your magazines and took some notes, huh? Yeah. But check it—my moms used to lay on the carpet with me when I was little, and we’d look at the pieces of, like, yarn. Imagine being small enough to walk in the forest of the carpet. We saw the crows in the branches and they had purple and gold under their feathers. She told me about the Mississippi when she gave me a bath. Like five freeways of chocolate milk all headed south. That’s how big she said it was. And she was right.”

  “So you’re by the river.”

  “No. I’m in a ditch. Don’t ask me where cause I don’t know.”

  We were quiet together for a moment. Then Victor said, “Tonight I was thinking expatriate. You. Like James Baldwin or somebody. You’re kinda sad. I wanted to go to college, but then I wanted to come back to Rio Seco. Be Zelman and Thompson at home.”

  “Why? Why would you want to stay there?”

  “Cause I like seein all the places where my moms was. I still sit on the balcony at the Riviera or the Villas. If somebody doesn’t look like they want to shoot me.”

  “But she left you there.”

  “Yeah. But I remember how it looked, when I sat there. The palm tree and the moon.”

  The full moon had to be c
lean, like winter, and trees had to be washed clean by rain, and when the moon rose behind the fronds, and when the breeze moved them, the silver light jumped and leapt from the fronds as if an invisible god held a sparkler.

  “I like to walk around and see what she saw. Jimsonweed in the alley. Where she got killed. Those flowers.”

  “They open up at night. Like a fairy tale.”

  “Yeah.”

  His voice was sleepy and faint now. “Your moms, and Auntie Clarette and Cerise, they would feed me, and give me a ride, and wash my clothes. But you were like—an idea. That was cool. But now I’m out.”

  I was pissed. “An idea? I’m down here the night before a goddamn hurricane chasing you, and you’re feeling sorry for yourself and being—fucking histrionic and calling me an idea when I’m right here?”

  I sounded like Clarette, and Cerise, and Michelle Meraux when she yelled at Danita.

  He was quiet. I imagined him lying in the front seat of the car. “When we were little and there was a freeze, we had to be out all night with the smudge pots. But one night, we couldn’t get enough oil so we had to wet down the fruit with hoses. I fell asleep in the truck, and I woke up out there just when the sun was coming up. The light was coming sideways, you know, hitting the ice. Like thousands of ornaments.” I saw it as vividly now. “You just carry scenes around in your head, and you try to make them into something. Music or stories or commercials or whatever. That’s what you do when you’re done with school.”

  “Yeah,” he said, after a long time. “Mine is the palm tree sparkler. But every time I try to see it, there’s no moon, or it’s cloudy. I see it, like, once a year, and then it just makes me sadder.” He wasn’t crying again, but his voice was thick with worse than tears. “Makes me want to just kill myself now. I didn’t have a gun before.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  He finally said, “You didn’t even try to stop me.”

  “At the Lafitte? You had the gun!”

  “The gun was for Jazen.”

  “A gun is for anyone it’s pointed at, even accidentally. After Dimples, you should know that. Did you get rid of it?”

  “No.” His breath rustled into the phone. “I was gonna throw it in the river. But I got it right here. If there’s no treasure, fuck it. I’m out.”