I dabbed more rum on the bullet wound, and then started looking in the cabinets for bandages. When I turned back to the bed, he was reaching with his good hand deep into his pocket. He pulled out a bullet, and a bracelet, and put them into my hand.
The bullet was small and heavy. Dull gold. On the butt, the word Super imposed over an X.
The bracelet was dull and gold, too. A heavy cuff, inlaid along the center with five large rubies. Old rubies, dark red as claret, not the bright created jewels you find in stores now. These rubies had come from somewhere far away, on a ship.
“Tuition,” he whispered.
“How are you not my child?” I said.
“I want to be that dude wandering around the library with a beat-up old briefcase, workin on my third Ph.D.”
“I had a present for you. Messenger bag. Leather. Soft as butter, from Zurich.” I looked up at the sky in the open galley door. “It’s in the Gulf now. With my car. And our laptops.” That sounded so selfish. “And everything Aunt Monie owned.”
“That dude’s pissed about his wife’s car, huh?” he said, lifting his chin toward Emile.
“Nobody’s pissed about a car right now. And it’s his second wife’s sister.” Then I said, “We’re only alive because of Emile. And my papa, and the other guys.”
“ ‘Out here in the fields,’ ” he sang softly, eyes closed.
“Those bandannas saved you,” I said. Claudine’s bandanna, and Michelle’s.
“Maybe.”
“Your father was watching you.”
“From the ocean? Yeah. Right.”
Emile came downstairs again. He sat on the other bed.
I said, “Come on, Victor. It’s amazing that you lived. Your maman was here all the time, too. She made you come down here to look for the bracelet. If not, you’d be in New Orleans. It might be worse there.”
“Worse than here?”
Emile said, “On the radio, they said it’s bad.”
“Well, I’d rather have her alive and—”
I grabbed his face. Made him look at me. “Cooking elaborate meals for you? Taking you to the library? Who put you up into that tree?”
“Some dude.”
“What?” Emile said. “The other guy you talking about when we found you?”
“Some dude was up in the tree. I had dug up this metal box next to the grave. There was a circle carved into the side of her—her little house.”
“Crypt.”
“Yeah. Aunt Almoinette told my mama about some circle that meant a bracelet. There was only one crypt—wait, tomb, right? There were a lot of old wooden crosses and little graves. But I found the circle, so I dug right there, and I found a box. Inside the box was another box, and the bracelet was inside. With some kinda stuffing. Like moss. And it was already getting dark, so I sat there on top of the—tomb.”
“Where was the Thunderbird?”
“I wrecked it in a ditch. That first night. I was trying to find the cemetery and I went off the road. I slept all day in the car.” He put his arm over his eyes. “I was layin on her tomb. I figured she wouldn’t be mad. It was hot as hell.”
He was so thin that his cheekbones were right there, sharp under the scratched skin. “I fell asleep, and then the wind came up, and the water. It wasn’t even like a tidal wave, like in the movies. It just, like, came up outta the earth. Like—bad magic. It got up to her name, and I heard a noise, and this dude was in the big old tree. He was, like, waving at me to come up. I jumped into the water, and it was up to my chest, and the wind was trying to kill me. I climbed up on the trunk and there was a hole for my foot, and then a branch. Like the tree in your yard.”
The three sycamore leaves on my table at home. Big as hands.
“I didn’t look up till I got a branch, and he was up there. He waved for me to come up higher. Then big-time wind. I had the belt. And the bandannas.”
“Saint Joseph,” Emile said. “He likes oak trees. My grandmère told me about him. He saved her cousin during Camille.”
“What did the guy look like?” I said.
Victor said slowly, “It was dark. But he whistled for a while. He sounded really far away. And then he musta fell.”
“Or flew.” Emile nodded.
He rolled his eyes. “You mean some angel? You believe in that stuff?”
I opened the box of bandages. Emile turned on the battery-powered CD player. Some old song came on. “Maybe it was some guy loved your moms and never could have her. Maybe it was some guy loved Marie-Therese.” I put the first bandage on his arm, and then looked again at his back. The burn scars, the cuts, the scapula just under the skin. “Maybe it was your imagination.”
I dabbed rum once more on the two deep cuts, and lightly touched the pink rosettes of burn on his shoulder blade—long healed. “You can see the palm tree sparkler in my courtyard, too,” I said, to the side of his neck. “It’s never as bright, though.” His head dropped to his chest, and I ran my hand over the faint soft down of hair growing back.
“Cool,” he whispered, and then he lay with his face against the wall.
When I went back up to the deck, I saw pecan trees lying drowned, satsumas’ top leaves barely showing, but the biggest oaks were implacable, strung with marsh grass and old Mardi Gras beads and tangles of cloth. The music drifted over us. We are people of the mighty—mighty people of the sun. My brothers used to play that song in the barn.
Emile was heating beans on the gas stove. He said, “Them kids hate the old stuff we listen to. They always telling me turn it off.”
I called back, “Not Victor. The Dread Prince. He’ll give anything a chance.”
He was below us. Maybe he was listening.
Emile said, “Look like a knucklehead.”
“He’s my knucklehead now.” In the nearest oak, I could see animals huddled inside the branches, their eyes glittering like black sequins, and in the distance I could hear faint laughter, and I truly didn’t know who had saved him.
EAST OF THE SUN, WEST OF THE MOON
FOR THREE DAYS, we were alone in the sweltering heat and complete darkness, Emile’s generator humming instead of a thousand crickets and frogs and night birds. Only mosquitoes, so hungry for our blood we had to smear dark mud on our faces to keep them away.
Alone except for the dead. The animals that floated nearby. A baby whose handmade wooden casket had whirled into the stagnant water of the satsuma grove, her skin not black, or white, or brown but lavender. She could have come from anywhere—the water had pushed north and south, the wind east and west.
East of the sun, and west of the moon, we’ll build a dream house of love.
My father retreated into himself and said nothing. He lived inside his forehead. I lived right here, on the boat, for once.
Victor sat on the deck, staring at the trees and sky, his arm somehow slowly healing despite the gasoline and oil and bacteria in the storm water. He spent the days writing in my tiny notebook, whose pages had dried into dimpled blank sheets like ancient papyrus.
I had nothing to write.
On Emile’s small television, hooked up to the generator, we saw New Orleans. We looked for Albert and Claudine, Juanita and Inez. But in the crush of thousands inside and outside the Superdome, everyone looked like a stranger.
Then Victor said suddenly, pointing to the screen, “Look! Raiders jersey—that looks like Jazen!” He floated facedown near a freeway off-ramp barely visible amid the flooding in the Ninth Ward. The jersey bubbled huge with bloat. Someone had tied his arm to a street sign.
Somewhere in the water and the people was Tony, who would tell me later about taking hundreds of shots of women holding up their babies to the thropping downdraft of helicopters, of men holding up their hands to try and catch food thrown from the sky by soldiers, of everyone holding up their clothes and radios and children to keep them out of the black water up to their chests.
Alfonso called Victor on the third day. Jail was safe—three hots and a c
ot—so Alfonso had gone to a cop the night before the storm and said he had a warrant in California. The cop laughed, so he broke a window. When the prisoners were evacuated to a freeway bridge, he sat in the hot sun for two days. A bus took them away long before any came for those in the Superdome or Convention Center, because as Alfonso would say later, “People make money off you when you in jail.” The bus left them in Baton Rouge, but in the confusion of the holding area, Alfonso slipped through a chain-link gate and walked all the way to Sarrat, to Uncle Henri’s house.
On the fourth day, the New Mexico National Guard came up the Mississippi River, their airboats so loud we heard them long before they slowed at Bayou Azure. We knew what we looked like. Aunt Monie and I had washed clothes in buckets of rainwater and scrubbed them with Lifebuoy soap. I wore Michelle’s bandanna around my head, and Victor wore Claudine’s. In the nervous gaze of the guardsmen, my father and Aunt Monie were impassive, their faces closed as always around strangers, but Victor whispered to me, “Yo, ho, yo, ho.”
They took us to a shelter in Lafayette. My brothers and Gustave drove in from California with food and clothing and supplies, and Tony came in the rental car. As soon as we were allowed to return to Azure, we caravanned south.
Aunt Monie’s house had lodged against the three pecan trees, off the foundation, and we had to wrestle it back on. But we had plenty of men. Tony, Lafayette and Reynaldo, Emile and Freeman and Philippe, my father and Gustave, and Victor, whose arm was healed. A tattoo of dark satin rope to mark him forever.
We took down the wooden boards of Azure and lay them in a pile. The cypress felled by slaves, notched and pegged, with markings made by Senegalese men. Aunt Monie showed us the ends of the beams, where we saw carved symbols, blackened with age, that her own grandmother had showed her when they went under the house, where people used to store oil and barrels of sugar because it stayed cool.
At dusk we sat on packing crates from the satsumas, near the boards, and Emile made a small fire. Victor lay on his back, looking up at the branches where dresses dangled like moss. My father laid a metal rack over the flames, Aunt Monie made fish and rice in a pot from the boat, and we all ate. The old house was gone, had finally fallen this time, but we were still here.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Deepest thanks to Richard Parks, Katie Freeman, Toni Scott, Denise Hamilton, Holly Robinson, Marisa Silver, Stewart O’Nan, Nicole Vines, Tanya Jones, John Sims and Robert Sims and Loretta Preston, Teri Andrews and Karen Lark, all our Sims family; Revia Chandler and the Aubert family; Jay Neugeboren, Mike Davis, and Monique Verdin; and Rickerby and Paulette Hinds, and the Buckworld One crew.
Mes trois filles: Gaila, Delphine, and Rosette Sims.
Grateful appreciation to the Lannan Foundation and to the people I met in Louisiana.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Straight is the author of six previous novels, including A Million Nightingales and Highwire Moon, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the California Book Award. She is a regular commentator on NPR, and her fiction and essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, Salon, Zoetrope, McSweeney’s, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. She has received a Lannan Prize, an Edgar Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Riverside, California, with her three daughters and teaches creative writing at the University of California.
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