“Sooner or later,” Lamotta said sadly, “you will have to link up with the rest; that is the way the times are going.”
The Old Man picked up his pipe and began methodically scraping the bowl. “You may be right, but we will see what Robert learns.” He emptied the black ash into the wastebasket. “It was Mason and Guidry and Sylvester—maybe they added somebody at the last minute. Find out if it’s widows or parents; tell them where to go, they’ll be wanting their money.”
For two days Robert tried to find out what happened. A dozen people had seen the flash, and the boat was gone. None of that made any sense to Robert. Boats exploded sometimes, the fuel lines or the bilge, but they didn’t usually disappear completely; no matter how deep the water, there was always a piece of charred hull, or a body—the sharks weren’t that bad. There had to be something left.
His first evening, Robert stood piously on the beach while the priest said a special prayer for the dead at sea, and blessed the waves and sprinkled them with holy water. The youngest children fixed candles to bits of board and set them to float off shore—their flickering course was supposed to lead to the bodies. But most of the lights went out, and the rest floated back and forth aimlessly, taking no particular direction.
Only one thing remained for Robert to do—to cruise over the bay himself, looking. Not that he expected to find anything, but he had to do a complete job for the Old Man. And that didn’t mean standing on shore with the crying women and the little children and their holy candles. That meant going out to look over the place for yourself.
He hired the biggest and the newest lugger, the Jolie, paying triple the price of a good day’s shrimping. Robert had not been on a boat since he left his cousin’s house years before, but the motion of the rough wood deck was still familiar to his feet. His stomach went tight and hard and he had to keep reminding himself that this time was different, this time he had money in his pocket and the boat worked for him.
They went out early in the morning: Robert and Aristide Landry, the boat’s owner, and his son Gus.
The wheelhouse reeked of fish and bait and gasoline and the tar of nets. Robert took a wood crate and set it up on the open deck.
I wouldn’t have even noticed that once, Robert thought. I wouldn’t have smelled it at all. But I’m not like that any more. Now I’d rather sit in a Havana casino and watch women pass by and admire the set of their ass and smell their perfume. I’ve forgotten the days on the boats when my back and shoulders ached and my hands always burned, and my eyes always stung with sun and wind and water.
He held out his hands and studied them.
The calluses didn’t last, he thought. And they didn’t leave a mark. His hands were dirty—boats were always dirty —but they were as smooth and clear as anybody’s. Nails trimmed and filed, cuticles clipped; sometimes I wear polish too.
The engine vibrated beneath the deck.
Once I wouldn’t have noticed that, Robert thought. And it’s better not to. Once you start to notice, you’re weaker. Me, for instance. I couldn’t go back to the boats. I couldn’t do it.
Robert was staring at his dirty smooth hands, holding them up so the sun fell on them, when he had a sudden thought. It was the Old Man who had changed him, who had made him the way he was. It was the Old Man who had blocked off his past behind him.
For a moment, the image of the Old Man danced in the sun, over the seaweed-littered bay. The Old Man sitting at his phone. The Old Man saying: “Nothing that hasn’t got a price. Nothing at all; only you’ve got to find it. Find it.” The Old Man who could order and arrange things, play God.
Robert began smacking his right fist into his left palm, hard, trying to think of something to hit in the sudden anger that ran over him. There was nothing. Nothing at all. Except Gus coming out of the wheelhouse.
“What the hell do you want?”
Gus looked startled. “He wants to ask you something.” He jerked a thin shoulder toward the wheelhouse.
“Then let him come out; it stinks like shit in there,” Robert said.
Gus scurried off. He was small and thin. Robert thought, Probably didn’t have enough to eat. Like me. I didn’t start to grow until the Old Man started feeding me. … God damn the Old Man. … They look so pathetic when they’re thin like that. Eyes too big for the faces, a kind of shrimp look, hunched and wary. … I looked like that once, until the Old Man took me over. Nothing money won’t do. Fill out a boy, turn a child into a man. Aching muscles stretched tight over thin bones—change them into smooth muscles flexing easily over heavy bones. Scrawny boy into powerful man. Feel the muscles under the shirt, lift the cloth; women love to feel muscles move like that: Oh, Robert. … Whole thing courtesy of the Old Man. He fed it, he grew it, and to hell with him.
Aristide came to the deck, leaving Gus at the wheel. “It stinks,” he said, “but what can I do about it? Where you want to go, cap?”
“I want to find some wreckage. Or something.”
“Everybody,” Aristide said, “they point to a different quarter. Some say here, some say there, and there is maybe twenty miles between. Which way do we go looking, cap?”
Robert stood up. “Yeah, I noticed how everybody saw something different. What about a channel out there? Any particular course a boat’d be likely to take?”
“She drew nothing. She needed no channel,” Aristide said quietly, “even loaded.”
“Yeah,” Robert said, “that’s right. She was made that way. … Well, let’s cruise back and forth for as much gas as you got.”
“You tell me which way, cap. You paying for the time.”
For a while Robert watched the water, dutifully. He saw endless bits of seaweed, loaded with bright orange berries, floating just under the water. Two sheets of newspaper. A couple of orange halves and a long ribbon of kelp, torn up from deep water. One of the candles the children had launched from the beach; the Jolie’s wake overturned and sank it. (Maybe, he thought, it would have better luck finding the wreck underwater; it hadn’t done too well on the surface.) He saw two porpoises, arcing and splashing; they seemed to be following the boat. And that was all.
His eyes got tired. He moved his crate into the small shade of the wheelhouse and propped his back against the wood.
All morning they crisscrossed back and forth, methodically searching. Finally Robert felt the bow come about and settle on what had to be the homeward course. He went into the wheelhouse.
Aristide said, “You noticed, huh, cap?”
“I been on boats before.”
“You have?” Gus said. “You have?”
“A long while ago.” Robert stared out the dirty glass at the level gray water. I did what I came for. I tried and I got nowhere. “Too bad,” he said, “nobody agrees where the explosion was. That would have been a help.”
“Me, I saw nothing,” Aristide said.
Too quick. …
He was too quick. Robert did not let a muscle change in his face. He waited, eyes following the low dipping flight of a sea gull just beyond the bow. “Even so, you’d think we’d find something.”
“You hired the boat, cap,” Aristide said. “You picked the spot.”
“Everybody said … only I’m beginning to wonder.”
“I didn’t see nothing,” Aristide said.
“I didn’t say you saw anything.” Robert leaned forward, rubbing his finger on the dirty glass. Smooth manicured finger moving up and down. “The boat’s gone, and the men, they’re dead. Those women crying back there are real enough, they got a death and they know it. I just don’t think we been anywhere near the boat. Maybe she didn’t get to the bay, maybe it happened outside, maybe almost anywhere. And maybe there wasn’t any flash. Seems to me like too many people saw it, too many people on the beach in the middle of the night, looking out to sea.”
“Me, I saw nothing,” Aristide repeated. “What the others say is their business.”
“Sure,” Robert said, “sure, sure.”
> “Cap,” Aristide said, “you can’t come to a place four days later and find stuff lying around. We got tides, we got winds.”
The boy’s head jerked aside, but he said nothing.
He’s brighter than his father, Robert thought. He spotted that slip.
Robert’s finger went on rubbing the glass. I’ll get a ring when I get back to town. With a diamond. That would look good. Wear it on the right hand or the left?
Robert said: “Four nights ago, when everybody was telling me three.”
Aristide turned to look at him. “I meant three nights, me.”
Robert shook his head. “No, you didn’t,” he said. “That boat was scheduled to pass here four nights ago. With everybody saying three, we figured it was just running a day late—that happens sometimes. But I don’t reckon this one was late. …” When the Old Man heard, the news was already twenty-four hours old.
Robert whistled softly through his teeth. “Twenty-four hours. Chance to clear the area before anybody came looking.”
“You gone out of your head,” Aristide said. “The sun, my mama said, does that sometimes.”
Robert said: “Everyone back there in Port Hébert, they know. And nobody’s talking, because they’re scared or paid off or both. They never would have said anything, just gone on lighting their candles and saying their prayers, except for one thing. They know those three families are entitled to some money from the Old Man.”
The Jolie slipped to the dock, rubbing against the line of old tires; the engine idled, reversed, coughed, and stopped. Robert stepped carefully from the toe rail to the wharf. He didn’t want to tear the seams of his pants. “Well,” he said, “you can tell everybody I’m not as stupid as they thought. Tell them I can smell a lie too—that’s what my mama said. She was a whore.” Aristide’s eyes flickered; Robert laughed again. “Enfant garce,” he said, “that’s me. Now I got those three women to see. They’ll get their money, they earned it.”
Robert walked up the wharf to the shell road where his car was parked. There were men on the other boats; they stared at him from behind the nets they were mending, from engine hatches where they worked. He ignored them all. He’d guessed the trick too late; he’d been a fool.
Now he had to see the women. There was one in particular, the only young one. Wife or sister—she had pale yellow eyes under black brows. She’d been crying so long that those eyes stuck out, glazed and swollen, so distended that there seemed no lid. The whites were all red veins, blended one into the other, into a milky pink, out of which tears formed, ran to the edge, and spilled over, steadily.
He wanted to leave Port Hébert, right now. He wanted to get away, to feel the road passing under his car. But he had to see the women. He had to go into the houses with their whitewashed fences and sit at oilcloth-covered kitchen tables and tell them how to collect their money. The Old Man paid well; that was why people worked for him.
He parked his car at the first house, walked down the narrow white shell path between the tall oleander trees, with their bright round flowers and long shiny leaves. When he was a boy, he’d heard stories of women who’d killed their husbands with the poisonous bark and leaves, mixed into a gumbo, where the heavy taste of red pepper covered everything.
Those three men lived in a poison grove and died on a boat.
That was the house. Behind its rusted porch screen, he saw many vague shapes moving; when he reached the steps, all talk stopped. There was only somebody crying deep inside the house. Oh God, he thought, how can she still be crying?
Smells from the house drifted out to him. Sweat and dirt and oil, and bad teeth rotting in their heads, the smell of beans and rice and fish and shrimp and poverty. … That had been familiar to him once but not any more. For a moment he hesitated, his hand on the screen door, his face properly solemn. Good God, he thought; good God, they stink.
Now the smell of tallow, of candles burning inside. On that little altar. He’d seen it the last time he was here—a six-inch shelf stuck up in a corner. In the center a small figure of the Star of the Sea. All around her, candles flickered in their red glasses, wicks swaying in their puddles of oil, shifting and uncertain.
He’d probably have to see the damn altar again. These people seemed to think there was something special about it. What good was the Star of the Sea when you were running liquor?
And they’d lied, every one of them. But it didn’t matter. He only had to tell the Old Man that it did look like somebody was moving in. Somebody who wouldn’t be bought off— the Old Man would have to send for the professionals now. And that meant a lot of trouble. …
He opened the screen door and stepped inside the porch. Jesus God, he thought, it’s her. He found himself staring into the tear-ruined yellow eyes.
ROBERT FINISHED as quickly as he could, hurrying through his expressions of sorrow. To each woman he gave the same address, the same explanation. “You understand,” he repeated over and over again. “You come to New Orleans, to this address, and the money will be there for you. I don’t carry any money with me. You come to the address right there on the paper.”
It was a butcher shop on Frenchmen Street. When they came, the butcher would telephone Miss Malonson: “The veal leg you ordered is ready and waiting.” Malonson would tell Lamotta, and Lamotta would send the cash by one of the boys in the office. The whole thing took less than half an hour, and the messenger always brought back a veal leg for the Old Man. He liked it roasted with garlic and rosemary.
The Old Man never went near the shop. He kept himself far away from the operation of his business.
Robert left Port Hébert in the early afternoon. The narrow shell road was rough and very dusty. He began sneezing, quick spasms. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand and glared at the sky. And in that stretch of sky he saw a huge eye. That woman’s eye, Jesus God I see it everywhere. It was big enough to fill the whole north, it was yellow and swollen. God damn woman crying like that. Sitting by her altar, crying like that. Because her man got killed running liquor. What did she think he got paid for? … Just that big eye. Grieving.
A flock of chickens in the road. He braked and slammed his hand on the horn. The flock scattered, screeching. A woman poked her head out the house window. He grinned at the frizzled gray head and toothless jaw. “Comment ça va?” he yelled.
She’d been washing dishes, she tipped the pan of water over the window sill into the yard. The chickens rushed over to peck for specks of food on the wet ground. The last skinny body flicked into the yard; Robert waved and drove off.
Looked like my cousin, the old bitch. If she knew I had a job, I’d be hearing from her soon enough. “Oh, cher, you got to give us a little something. We took you in when you maman die and we shelter you and we raise you like one of our own. …”
Now that, Robert admitted, staring down the white shell road, was absolutely true. They’d treated him no different from their own kids. Only he’d resented it. Maybe because of that nameless man who’d sired him.
The sharp sweet smell of a chinaball tree blew in the window. There it was, thick trunk and small round top. Almost every dooryard had one. They trimmed the limbs back sharply every year, for firewood. It wasn’t the best fuel, but it was cheaper than the charcoal they burned in the small grate at his cousin’s house, on winter nights when the mist came off the slick slimy glassy surface of the bayou.
He shivered and hunched his shoulders under his shirt. That was years past, why think of it now? He drove faster, deliberately closing his mind to everything but the stretch of white ahead of him and the dust rushing up behind his wheels. After an hour or so, he reached the state highway. The driving was easier now.
His wheel pulled strongly to the left. A flat. He stopped and got out. The cement of the road burned through the soles of his shoes. Son of a bitch, he thought slowly, son of a bitch. …
He took off his tie, tossed it on the seat. He rolled up his sleeves and he got the tire from the back. He kicked at
it; it seemed firm enough, so he got out the jack, fitted it together.
He worked furiously. I never did change a tire that fast; what the hell’s got into me?
Take a leak while I’m stopped anyway. … He climbed down the steep slope of the road and stood, waiting. Nothing. Why am I so edgy I can’t even piss?
He went back to the car. It wasn’t until he had shifted to second that he saw what he had instinctively felt—why he had been so nervous. A car behind him, quite far behind him, had stopped when he stopped.
He shifted to high, watching the rear-view mirror. They started with him. They were coming up very fast. He chewed the inside of his cheek, and wished he had a gun. He had nothing, except the speed in the Ford’s special engine. You can outrun anything, the Old Man insisted. But open up slowly. It’s a light car, you’ve got to remember that. Don’t race it off the road. …
Robert blew through his teeth in a soundless whistle.
He accelerated, fast as he dared, still watching behind him. The pursuing car swerved and stopped. Two men jumped out and ran to the side of the road. They stared at the hyacinth-littered water; one man edged his way down the slope.
Abruptly Robert understood. Around town, the Old Man had a reputation for dealing in drugs. Son of a bitch, I am a lucky son of a bitch. They thought I left something there. They thought it was a drop, when I went to piss. They thought I had it hidden in my tire. …
The Ford skittered on the road. Too fast. He released the accelerator. The other car was out of sight in the dusty heat haze. They were hunting very carefully. Again he accelerated, again the car shivered. Too much engine. The Old Man was wrong. Without a full load of liquor, this Ford didn’t have enough weight to hold it on the road.
He wanted to urinate, badly, the whole bottom of his belly was burning. He took one hand off the wheel and rubbed his stomach. That only made the pressure worse.
He concentrated on his driving, trying to see exactly how high he could push the speedometer needle before the car seemed ready to leave the road.
The Condor Passes Page 12
