by Richard Ford
“Shitass!” the old man grumbled, inspecting the sagging bird briefly before stuffing it in his coat and starting back. “Tried to savage my bird,” he said up through the trees, making his way to where Landrieu was standing, balefully fingering what was left of the bird he’d mangled.
“Yassuh,” Landrieu said glumly. “This’un a little tore up his-self.”
“You use that goddamned Peter Stuyvesant gun,” the old man complained, coming and standing beside Landrieu as if they were waiting to have their pictures taken. The light had become more generalized, and the yard took on a waxy appearance. Elinor crept blackly up from the bushes, made a berth of the hunters, and slunk back to her loll under the steps. She paid the old man a sorry look and disappeared out of his sight, “If you’d get you a little twenty like this here gun,” Mr. Lamb continued in a fatherly manner, looking at Landrieu’s bird, then hefting his little Remington and giving it a commanding look, “you wouldn’t blow your birds apart like you do, and you wouldn’t wear yourself out portaging it around.” Landrieu’s gun was lying on the ground in front of the two, and Mr. Lamb gave it a tap with his toe as if it were a serpent he had personally scourged.
“Yassuh,” Landrieu agreed, still looking lamentably at the bung of feathers in his hand.
Mr. Lamb stared down at the devastated bird another moment, then started back to the house, talking to Landrieu as if he were still beside him.
He walked back inside the Gin Den and relaxed on the edge of the cot and listened to the two men stamping up the stairs into the house, talking loudly. The door shut and he was left in the cool of the shed, staring at his toes and thinking how to work the day. It was the day to leave, without doubt. Get the bus to Memphis and be on the late train, and sometime tomorrow find a place to stay, since Beebe wouldn’t be home and he didn’t have a key. And later he could take the IC down to school and get signed up for the cram course, and get started in the way he felt fated, if for no other reason than that was the only way left. There was a squeamish serenity in that, of choosing the only thing left, when everything else was eliminated and not by any act, but just by the time and place. It was the compromise satisfaction a person got, he thought, when he is washed up on the beach of some country after spending weeks floating around on a tree limb, too far from home ever to hope to be deposited there, and satisfied to be on land, no matter really which land it happened to be.
The only impediment to leaving was going fishing. He felt obligated to cater to Mr. Lamb, except the idea of hazarding a boat with him seemed treacherous, since the old man liked to launch around and jump to his feet the moment things didn’t go to suit him and would probably be just as given to it in a boat as elsewhere.
He dressed and slipped out in the direction of the closest woods, keeping so that the hulk of the Gin Den stayed between him and the porch.
At the boundary of the trees he stepped in two dozen yards, so that the house was visible to him, but he was not visible from the house. He watched Landrieu come to the edge of the porch, sling off a pan of water, and disappear inside. He thought maybe the old man had decided on a nap and would forget fishing, and after a while he could just come in and say goodbye, and have himself ferried back across to the bus.
He walked parallel to the road, staying in the denser woods to the end of the airfield, where he switched back to the road out of sight of the house, and struck toward the lake. The sun had moved beneath some blotchy, dark-bellied clouds, and the imprints slid over the road, disclosing the sun directly, but quickly secluding it again. Beyond the woods was another open croft hemmed by trees, the coarse grass crowded by purple thistles that sprouted the tops of the weeds and swayed noisily, though there seemed to be no breeze. He thought he heard Robard’s jeep and listened, but the sound died, and he could only hear a faint windless sibilance in the woods. He looked toward the house, saw nothing on the road, and went ahead. In the next trace of timber a block of pink salt was roped to a wood feeder crib. The area was trampled and bark was scabbed off the trees, and the low branches nipped and munched at, though there were no animals to be seen.
He walked until he could smell the warm fishy smell of the lake, and reached the hump of overlook where the jeep had been, found a sandy patch and sat, prepared to stay as long as he could stand it.
He mooned across the lake at the camp five hundred yards away behind another tier of willows, identical to where he sat watching, though sparser. He could see movement in the lot, two figures unrecognizable, three-quarters of the way between the dock and Gaspareau’s business cottage. One of them he supposed was Gaspareau, and he made a guess which it was, having it be the broader figure in the light shirt who seemed to be pointing the other man in the direction of the island, more or less to where he was sitting, which produced a prickly feeling in him as though both the figures were talking over what they were going to do if they could ever get their hands on him. He thought about Gaspareau’s little red-crust speaking hole burping out sounds when he mashed on the little metal life preserver, and wondered what he was saying and to whom, and wondered if old man Lamb’s company had finally arrived a day late. The two figures came down onto the dock and walked out as if they were going to get in one of the boats. He made out that the man he had guessed to be Gaspareau was Gaspareau. He was pointing in the direction of the mud landing, waving his cane as a pointer, indicating for the other figure, who was taller and slightly slumped, precisely where he would have to go if he was going to the island. He wondered, then, if Gaspareau wasn’t directing a poacher to the island as the old man suspicioned all along, and in arrogance of all his specific proscriptions and threats. And it was comical to think of the old man having to employ one man to watch over another who was getting paid better. After a few moments, both figures walked back off the dock and disappeared toward Gaspareau’s cottage, where he lost them in the willow mesh.
In a while he saw a dark-colored car go back over the levee ahead of a funnel of dust, and disappear into the fields. In the camp activity halted. The bight of cottages and scatter of beached rowboats lay in the sun and in the creases of dingy shade looking defunct, the possibility of new movement remote. He wondered what sorts of squalid enterprises Gaspareau could master from the boat camp, stumping around with a big nickel pistol strapped to his belly and some sinister adolescent on his payroll.
Two mallards scooted up and out of the flats below the camp, winging smartly out over the reach of open water, scanning the lambent surface as they flew, each a vigil on his own quadrant of flight. As they angled up the corridor of the lake they seemed to lose lower and lower, as though they were searching for something specific that lay along the perimeter of the willows. As they reached even with the landing cut, they suddenly veered sharply in formation, as if they had spotted where they were going and intended to bend back and drop straight in onto the stobs and cleared timber. But at the unsuspected sight of his face alone and still, gazing up white and enthralled, they wheeled and broke up and to the right, backdrafting as if they were seeking to outdistance his very sight, tripling the space between them in a matter of microseconds, and scatting in opposite directions back up the open water, the steely pinging of their wings barely breaking the silence, making him feel like shrinking back into the woods and hiding.
Robard bumped down the road from the direction of the house with a cigarette sunk in his mouth, looking wizened. He steered the jeep out of the rut, up over the willow roots, and stopped, letting the motor idle.
“I just watched Gaspareau point us out to some guy,” he said. Robard looked at the dock, a stitch at the water line. “One of them football coaches,” he said, looking at his cigarette to see if it was burning. “What’d he look like?”
“Taller than Gaspareau,” he said.
“That wouldn’t be too hard.”
“Whoever it was went back over the levee,” he said, taking a look at the long levee revetment.
The jeep motor choked out and Robard watched the la
ke stippling light up through the willows. “I got something I want to ask you, Newel,” he said. He snapped his cigarette in the grass, produced another one, packed it against the steering wheel, and laid it on the side of his mouth. “What is it you’re doing down here?” Robard pushed his thumb knuckle in his eye socket and gave his eye a good kneading.
“I’m forgetting all about that,” he said, and got up and stood around to the front of the jeep, feeling ready to go back.
“Life ain’t that difficult.” Robard took a match from behind his ear and scratched it off his zipper.
“I just have to adopt a plainer view of things,” he said.
“That’s me.” Robard puffed luxuriously.
“I had all these ideas I couldn’t make sense of.” He came and slid over onto the back bench of the jeep and let his feet dangle. “People’s names, a lot of things at random.”
“But ain’t that just your memory?” Robard said.
“Yeah, but it started giving me the creeps! I couldn’t remember anything else, except what had happened the day before, and some little bits of law school. Didn’t that ever happen to you?”
“No,” Robard said, touching the ash with the nail of his little finger. “I ain’t been to law school.”
He frowned at Robard, who was admiring his cigarette. “Anyway, goddamn it, I got obsessed with what the hell I knew, and all I knew was just those things—bits of time, pictures of people in my mind, little places, my old man. You can’t attach yourself to a bunch of crap like that. I sat in my apartment a solid month trying to stitch it together into some reasonable train of thought, and none of it worked.”
“How come?” Robard said, turning around as if he really wanted to know the answer.
“I don’t know.”
“How come you to leave in the first place?” Robard twisted his legs so they stretched out across the seat next to him. The air off the lake turned a vaguely fishy smell that seemed to come from the boat camp.
“It was boring as shit in Mississippi. I would’ve stayed otherwise.”
“Wasn’t your mother there?”
“I didn’t think about that,” he said, and stared off. “She died one day. That’s the only time I’ve been there.”
Robard sighed as if he were looking at everything philosophically. “All right,” he said.
“I was just going nuts up there trying to figure out if that jumble amounted to enough to say I ought to go back and pick it up again.”
“You like Chicago better now, do you?”
“I don’t care,” he said.
“You come all the way down here and you’re going back without having done nothin?”
He tapped his heels, watching the dust settle on the grass. “I figured one thing out,” he said.
“And who’s that—me?” Robard said.
“I don’t give a shit anymore,” he said precisely, listening to the air wash up through the willows. “The old man cares more than I do. It’s right up in his face all the time “
“And he’s got both feet in the grave,” Robard said, and let his chin rest on his knuckles. A strippet of the wind raised his hair against the part. “What did you think you was doing down here in the first place?” His eyes seemed to get wider.
“It feels like I remember the South being,” he said. “It seemed like a good place.”
“But ain’t you the same up there as you are right here?”
“Yeah, but I was at the end of the fuckin rope with it.” He felt morose. “I thought if I could come down here and be part of something happening, not something I remembered, that would help.”
Robard stared at him as if he had crossed over a line beyond sanity. “What’d you have in mind?”
“Anything! Shit! I thought the old man would tell me something, except he’s crazy. I thought I might know if I could just get it all into the world.”
“And what happened?” Robard said.
“I’m sick of it,” he said gloomily. “And I’m getting the hell out. Every day I think of something new that’s exactly the same. If I could fly across that water right now, I would.”
Robard cleared his throat as if he were beginning to speak, then looked at the lake.
“I thought you might be in the same kind of fix,” he said.
Robard rocked his head slowly side to side. “I ain’t in no kind of fix at all,” he said slowly, “though if I was to try to pin together my past and make something intelligent out of it I’d damn sure be in one then. I’d either get bored to tears or scared to death.” He looked up significantly, as if he considered he’d said something worth repeating. He pinched his mouth. “Except as far as I’m concerned, things just happen. One minute don’t learn the next one nothin.”
“I don’t like that,” he said, beginning to be sulky.
“Shit! If the only thing you can bear is just coming back to this little cut-off tit of nothing, somebody ought to tell you something, then.” Robard raised his eyebrows to signify he was going to be the one to do it. “If you did really want to come down here to live, somewhere, you wouldn’t choose this place, cause everything’s trapped right here, and I’m positive you wouldn’t recognize nothin else. Down in Jackson there ain’t nothing but a bunch of empty lots and people flying around in Piper Comanches looking for some way to make theirselves rich. It wouldn’t feel like nothin at all anymore, to you. Just cause you think up some question don’t mean there’s an answer.”
“I heard that before,” he said, trying to prise himself out of the jeep.
“You ought to have paid better attention, then,” Robard said, and grabbed his arm and pushed him up and out.
“The old man’s granddaughter says I ought to get in bed with her and fuck everything else.” He walked a few feet down toward the lake.
“I ain’t got no delusions about that myself,” Robard said, and sucked his tooth. “You might just get accustomed to it. I never did think it was so bad, though.”
“Don’t you take some loss, then?”
“I don’t know,” Robard said. “I agree to cull what ain’t possible and take what’s left.” He fingered a match out from behind his ear and, snapping off the head, gave him a quizzical look.
“So are you taking your own advice?” he said.
Robard pulled on his ear and pushed around in it with the match and threw the stump away. “I always do that,” he said, and smiled. “I got somebody to kick then when it all turns to shit on me.” Robard pushed the snake pedal and let the jeep jerk and kick over with a grunt and motioned him to crawl back in.
4
In the summer they were in Lake Charles, and in the lobby of the Bentley Hotel his mother took him to the fish pond and told him that in 1923 General Pershing had come and given a speech standing on the gold mosaic border of the pond, with men teeming in the lobby, smoking dark cigars. And in the street, troopers from Camp Polk had formed up in their lines to listen and be led by him back down the highway to the camp limits. The general spoke for a long time, his words being carried outside by loudspeakers, and when he walked out under the porte-cochere to assume his command, the men were mostly passed out from the heat, and some were sitting on the hot asphalt crying because they had let him down, and because they were sick to be at home.
5
On the sea wall at New Orleans there was a picture that his father took of him sitting with his mother on the white concrete wall, with Lake Pontchartrain behind them. And when the picture was taken his father came up, and they all sat on the wall facing the water and ate pralines. He had worn his brown tennis shoes and when he began to take them off to wade in the water, one of them fell in and went out of sight immediately. And his mother got him and held him so tight in the hot sun that he thought he would stop breathing.
6
When they got to the house Landrieu was just before setting foot onto the seat of an old wire-back drugstore chair planted below one of the concrete pillars that held the house up. He was clut
ching a spindled Commercial Appeal in one hand and what looked like a silver cigarette lighter in the other. Mr. Lamb was taking in the entire enterprise from a considerable distance, standing behind the hood of the little Willys, so that there was plenty of metal and space between him and whatever Landrieu was doing.
When he noticed Robard’s jeep, the old man started waving his hands frantically. Robard cut it off and they got out and walked around until they could see Landrieu’s face rising into the air with a look of profound uncertainty forging big clefts into the middle of his forehead. Mr. Lamb, ramparted behind the little Willys, was focusing his intensest interest on Landrieu, murmuring something unintelligible for being practically inaudible. Elinor was sitting in the seat of the Willys watching Landrieu silently.
