So he looked at her, looked at the thin little lines that ran from the edge of her eyes up toward her eyebrows and down toward her cheeks.
“I didn’t tell you before, because I never had chance.”
“Let’s us just take these bags here,” the man said, “and we can come back for the other stuff later.”
“When we got some extra help,” Perique said. “Sure.”
“Adele,” he called, “come on!”
“Moment,” she said over her shoulder. “I am busy.”
Claudie was watching a big fat green fly that circled around the door, landed on the deck. He jumped after it, with his foot raised, and missed.
“Listen at me, macac.” His mother took his shoulder and turned him around. “That man there, the one who just called. You know which one I mean?” Claudie nodded. “He is your papa.”
Claudie shook his head.
His mother sighed. “I got no time to play with you … You got to call him Papa.”
Claudie scuffed the toe of his shoe along the deck.
“Say it now. Say Papa.”
He hesitated, opening his mouth. And he remembered. Gene, the boy who lived next door, and had a big mole on his upper lip, used to point out a field, full of low whitewashed brick vaults and stones with names and dates on them, and say: “There’s your papa, boy. Out there he is.” And once he’d gone over just inside the gate and squatted down, almost hidden by the long grass. He’d looked all around him carefully, but the grass was just grass and the mud was just mud like it was around his back doorstep. There were a couple of big black crickets but they got away before he could catch them. So he left, without seeing his papa.
“Go ahead,” his mother said. “What you going to call him?”
He looked at her.
She stepped back away from him and sighed with annoyance. “Mary Mother, I got no time to be playing games with you. … Tell me or we leave you right here on the boat and don’t take you with us. We leave you here alone and don’t come back for you. … Tell me!”
He looked down at the toes of his shoes, white shoes that she had polished just yesterday. There were scuff marks on each toe.
“Tell me what you going to call him!”
“Papa,” he said. Hesitated a minute because it was so easy to say, like any other word that came out of his mouth. And then began to cry.
“What the matter with him?” Perique said.
“Completely ga-ga,” his mother said.
The two men carried the bags; his mother tucked a brown paper parcel under her left arm and with her right took hold of his hand. For the first few steps she had to drag him, crying. But then he forgot about that, and looked around him, at the strange new place.
They left the dock and walked along a white shell road. Claudie picked up one of the shells and tossed it at a palmetto leaf.
“Come on,” his mother said and pulled him to his feet.
Perique glanced over his shoulder. “Come on, boy. Pick up your feet and move. This ain’t feathers we’re carrying.”
They turned off the shell road to a narrow path. There were trees now, short thick trunk oaks and under them scrawny oleander bushes. In the open places the oleanders grew heavy and full, tall almost as the oaks.
Claudie wanted to look around, but his mother kept dragging him so fast that he would stumble sometimes and fall but she had such tight hold that he just swung along in the air until his feet hit ground again.
His mother slowed down, so that he had chance to see. There were houses, a couple of hundred feet apart on each side of the path, houses built high off the ground on brick foundations. And there were people sitting on the front porches, sitting with their chairs tilted back against the wall, or sitting and rocking. His mother was looking at these people. He could see a smile beginning at the corners of her mouth.
The man slowed his pace and dropped into step alongside her. “You getting tired out, honey?”
She looked from him to the people on the porches. “You know them there?”
“Sure,” he said without looking. “Ain’t so many people on this island you can’t know them.”
“You don’t want to stop?”
“No,” he said, “let’s us get on home.”
“If they friends of yours …”
“No,” he said, “Perique tell them.”
“You didn’t tell them we was getting married?”
“It wasn’t none of their business. … Let’s us get on home.”
“You ain’t even going to wave to them?”
“No,” he said. “Let’s us get on home.”
“What they going to think?”
“Don’t tell me how to do things, che’.”
Claudie had found a black dog on one of the porches. A small dog with shiny hair—it was lying right on the edge of the porch with its muzzle sticking out. He was just about to whistle to it when he felt his feet fly off the ground and he had to start running to keep up with his mother. He didn’t have breath to whistle but he did wave, hard as he could.
The dog did not lift its head.
When his mother let go his hand, they were on the porch of one of the houses. Claudie walked over to the edge and peered down and around the corner. There was a big oak there, growing close to the house. And an old tire on a heavy rope swung from one of the low branches. A big fat green caterpillar walked along the edge of the railing. He flipped it down with his finger and squashed it with his foot. Then he crossed the porch to peer around the other side. There was just a cistern there and a small pile of lumber, neatly stacked up on sawhorses. With his hands behind his back, he walked up and down the porch a couple of times. Inside he could hear the voices—his mother was laughing. He had never heard her laugh quite like that before: high-pitched and giggling. He went to the screen door, but the handle was too high for him to reach. He stepped back and thought for a minute, then began to kick the frame of the door hard as he could with his left foot, yelling all the time.
Perique came to the door. “Quit that, dogaree, before you smash in the screen and fill the house up with mosquitoes.”
He opened the door and Claudie ran in, brushing past his legs.
The smells of the strange house confused him. He followed the voices to a room on the right of the hall. His mother was there, all right, sitting on the man’s lap. Claudie could see his drooping heavy black mustache over her shoulder. He went up to her and tugged on her dress.
She tickled him under the chin. He jerked his head away. He hated that; she knew it.
“Look him jump,” she said. “Fraidy cat.”
He stepped back and looked at both of them.
“What you staring at, boy?” the man said.
“Come sit here,” his mother said.
She put both arms around him and hugged him. Rubbing softly he tucked his head in the familiar place under her chin and stretched out his legs. Then he looked down. The man’s other hand was patting his mother’s thigh in a nice steady rhythm. Claudie caught at one of the fingers. The hand turned up and grabbed.
“Want to play catch, no … I got you.”
He pulled on his hand to free it. The man just laughed. “I got you.
He pulled harder, whimpering a little. “Al, let him go,” his mother said.
The hand did not loosen. “I ain’t hurting him.”
“He want to get loose.”
“I ain’t stopping him,” the man said.
Perique came to the door. He was such a tall thin boy that he never stood straight if he could lean on anything. Now he braced his feet on one side of the door and put his shoulder on the other so that he stood criss-crossed.
“You want to go get the rest of the stuff, man?”
“No,” Al said. “Let’s us wait until it is cooler, tonight.”
“Okay,” Perique said. “I got nothing better to do.” He pulled himself to a standing position and disappeared.
“So,” the man whistled softly
, “we get everything done. He go to see about the truck and he tells everybody we are married. It is that simple and easy.”
His mother tried to smooth down the hair on top of Claudie’s head. “And will they come back, do you think?”
“By nighttime we going to have a full house here.”
Way far off some kids were shouting, and an acorn fell off and rolled down the tin roof.
“Don’t you want to see the rest of the house, che’?”
“Sure,” she said. “Most certainly I do.” She pushed Claudie off her lap.
“That’s the kitchen, right there,” he said, “and the back door. And the rest is over here.”
They crossed the little hall. When Claudie tried to follow them, they closed the door.
So he went and looked out the back door, then he turned and walked the length of the house, scuffing his heels as hard as he could. He stopped at the door, staring out, rubbing the tip of his nose against the screen, sniffing in the sharp odor of dust. Then he kicked it wide open, so hard that it banged against the wall of the house, and went outside.
There was a girl on the porch. She was sitting in one of the cane rocking-chairs with her bare feet propped up on the railing. Claudie was so surprised that he just stood and stared at her for a minute. Then he turned to run inside, but the screen had slammed shut again. He kicked at it and jumped for the handle, and though he had it between his fingers once, he could not open the door. So he turned around and, with his back and both hands pressed against the screen, watched the girl.
She did not take her feet down, or move her body in the slightest. She turned her head very slowly. “You want to get back in, huh?”
He kept staring at her, not moving, just watching her large very pale blue eyes.
“I’ll open the door when I come to getting up.” She turned her head back and stared straight ahead. Her right hand patted the side of her chair. “Come on over here.”
A big mockingbird came down and perched on the porch steps, his long thin tail jabbing the air. She hissed at him and he was gone in a second.
Claudie tiptoed across the porch until he stood by the chair.
“Want some gum?” He nodded. She took a yellow package of Chiclets out of her shirt pocket, shook out one and handed it to him. He popped it in his mouth. “Don’t swallow it, idiot. Just chew it, see?”
He noticed that the shell path went by right in front of the house, just outside the little wire fence. And that on the other side of the path was a thick clump of oleanders, their leaves shining and green.
“You’re her boy, huh?”
He was so busy watching the grove of oleanders that he hardly listened as she went on talking to him. “They put you out? Are they in bed now? Are they?”
He looked at her quickly and looked away, shaking his head.
“No,” she said, “I guess you wouldn’t know.”
Another girl passed, peddling slowly on a bike, the dust rising in little low white tracks after her. And in the top of the oak tree two mockingbirds began to fight. Claudie bent back his head far as he could and tried to spot them.
She said: “If you keep on looking straight up for birds, like that with your mouth open, they going to drop right square down your throat.”
He closed his mouth with a gulp and looked down at his feet.
She laughed. “Frog eyes! … What’s your name?”
He was still staring at his feet. “Claudie.”
“Oh sure,” she said, and scratched her knee.
He went back to watching the small things that moved in front of him: a green grasshopper, with legs thin as wire; a couple of big red ants.
A young woman passed, a short stocky woman with black hair that had blue tints in the sun. Annie called: “Hey, we got a wedding here, come on over.”
The woman waved, but kept walking.
Annie ran down the steps calling: “Cecile, come on … they’re beating those old bedsprings to pieces.”
Cecile turned and walked to meet her then, shaking her head. Claudie could hear the angry murmur of the voice, but they were too far off for him to get the words. Then Annie turned and walked back to the porch, swinging her shoulders with her steps. She sat down again and jammed her feet back up on the railing.
Claudie watched her; for a moment he’d thought she was crying, the way she passed the back of her hand across her eyes.
“What are you staring at, idiot?”
He looked away quickly.
Perique came back. He was just opening the front gate when she shouted out to him: “My old man got married again, did you know? Must be some widow from Port Ronquille.”
Perique came up the walk and stood with a foot on the first step. “I was down at the dock, me, when they come in.”
“That’s her boy there.”
“Yea,” Perique said, “I know.”
“Man,” Annie said, “you can hear those old bed slats creaking.”
Perique did not answer. He looked down at the tips of his shoes.
“What’s the matter,” Annie said, “you don’t think I got any reason to talk like that?”
“Oh hell,” Perique said.
Annie hissed under her breath.
“Picking a wife’s his own business.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay, mister jackass.”
Perique sat on the top step, beside Claudie. “I don’t know, me,” he said. “She look all right to me.”
Her bare toes stretched and curled. The mockingbird came back to the far rail.
“Come on,” Perique said. “Come on have a beer with me.”
Claudie looked up eagerly. He liked the taste of beer. He’d always drunk the warm liquid that was left over in the bottles.
“Go away,” Annie said.
“You come with me.”
“I want to stay here, right here,” Annie said, “until him and that scrawny woman come out.”
“The kid’s right here,” Perique said in a whisper.
“What do I care?”
Perique got up and left without a word. Claudie watched his faded tight jeans walk away. There was a knife hanging from his belt, a thick red knife. Claudie wished he had one.
He looked over at the girl but she was staring straight ahead, her face not moving. He sighed lightly. It was very quiet in the whole afternoon with just the faint burring of crickets and a tiny stirring in the leaves.
He was tired. He stretched out on his side, his back against the railing, his head on his arm, and went to sleep.
He woke up when the glass broke. He heard the crash and then the little ripple of the pieces falling. And people laughing. And one woman screaming almost: “Eh, là-bas!”
He sat up and looked around. He was in a room, a small room, he could see the walls dimly. The door was there, straight ahead, with a little thread of light around it. He was in a bed, a narrow, rather hard bed—he could feel it shake with the stomping. He got up and went to the door. First he tried peeping through the crack, but there was just a blur of light. Standing on his tiptoes, he stretched up to feel for the knob. It was an old-fashioned latch—jumping at it a couple of times, he pushed up the little metal bar. Then he pulled the door toward him and slipped out. He was in the narrow hall that went down the center of the house. The hall was empty: there were only a half-dozen empty beer bottles lined up very neatly on the little half-table under the picture of the Sacred Heart. Down to the right was the door to the living-room: there were people in there. And somebody was playing a piano: he stopped and listened carefully: he had not noticed one in there before. He walked down, very slowly, along the wall, his head twisting to right and left as he went. There were lots more people out on the porch; he could hear them talking. He went first and peeped out the screen, but he couldn’t see very much. So he went into the living-room instead.
He stood just inside the door, and a little to one side, and watched. His eyes found the piano, over in the corner with a bunch of straw flowers
on top. He couldn’t see who was playing it. There was a girl, in a tight-fitting green silk dress, singing. Her hair was very black and short and brushed straight up with a green flower right on top. And in the little clear space in the middle of the floor some people were dancing. He couldn’t see them, just their feet moving between the legs of the people standing in front of him. The room was so noisy that his ears hurt a little. But he got as close to the people as he could and then squatted down and peered between their legs.
He stayed that way for quite a while. Then the couple standing directly in front of him, a short stocky man with a short, almost fat girl, turned and stumbled over him. Claudie yelped.
“Jesus,” the girl said.
The man picked him up and held him high over his head. “Here one boy who come to a party in his drawers!”
Claudie looked down: there was nothing but nubs of faces. He kicked and screamed.
The man held him tightly. “Anybody want him, before I throw him out the window?”
Everybody laughed. Claudie bent his head trying to bite the hands that held him around the middle, but he couldn’t reach.
“He’s a painter, him.”
He could see the teeth in all the open mouths and the faces tilted up to him.
“He’s mine. Give him here.”
“You want him, man? You sure you want him?”
“Sure I do. Give him here.”
“Okay.”
The arm brought him down. Claudie thought that he was going to be put back on the ground, and he stretched out his legs to be ready. But instead, the man shifted his grip to one arm and one leg.
Claudie felt himself swing back and forth a couple of times and then the hands were gone and he was falling backwards through the air. He arched his back and his legs began running, but he couldn’t even get himself straight up. He did not even have time to cry.
Somebody caught him, caught him so hard that for one minute he couldn’t breathe. He felt like his stomach had been flattened. Then there were floorboards under his feet, and his papa was shouting in his ear: “Scared you, boy?” And his mother was hugging him. She looked tired; there were dark shadows under her eyes. She’d been drinking too; he could smell that on her breath as she hugged him. Her eyes were very bright and her cheeks had a high red smudge to them.
The Hard Blue Sky Page 18
