Niccolene did not come until nearly twelve o’clock. By then the wind was up, and there were small flat pieces of cloud scudding low across the sky. Henry was just beginning to wonder when he heard the distinct crisp sound of a paddle in water. He kept perfectly still until the girl came into the mouth of the bayou. The first thing he recognized was her eyes—they were very large and close-set, and the shiny irises looked always as if they were full of tears.
She had stopped in the center of the little open space and was turning her pirogue in a slow circle, looking. She was panting; he could hear that even from where he was. Hard going in the wind out there in the bay, he thought. He pushed his way out of the grass.
She swung her pirogue over to meet him. “I didn’t see nothing.”
“You have trouble out there?”
She nodded. “I been thinking the wind was coming up.”
“Yea,” he said.
There was a small sloping bank, a tiny beach not more than four feet wide. They pulled the pirogues up there and put the bundle and the two brown paper bags from hers into Henry’s. Then, together they lifted her pirogue and ran it even higher up the shells.
“That ain’t going nowhere,” Henry said.
“My old man be fit to tie, and something happen to it.”
It don’t matter any more what he do, Henry started to say. But didn’t.”
His pirogue, now that Niccolene was in it, rode low in the water. He paddled it about a bit, testing. Finally he shook his head. “We ain’t going out in this.” The mouth of Bayou Verde was a mile north on the circle of the open bay.
“So we go the other way,” she said quietly.
Up Rabbit Bayou to Timbalier and then along its snaking route until it reached Bayou Verde.
“Longer.”
“We ain’t that hurried.”
“We better not be.”
“My old man going to think I gone out fishing when he don’t see me there in the morning.”
He nodded and headed the pirogue up Rabbit Bayou.
Later that night, when it began to storm they had to stop, and cut back some grass and push the pirogue into the empty spot to steady it a little because the wind was very high. They pulled a tarpaulin over their heads and waited a couple of hours, holding to the heaviest of the reeds to steady the canoe against the stiff wind.
“It getting cold,” Niccolene said once.
“Bottle whisky there.”
She got it and offered it to him first. He took it, surprised as he always was. Girls on Isle aux Chiens, he thought, would have taken a swallow first. But on the other island they didn’t. The women didn’t even eat with the men. Niccolene had told him that.
He took one gulp and handed it back. “Take it easy.”
“So cold my insides shivering.”
“Scared?”
She screwed the top back on the bottle and put it carefully away. “Nothing to be scared of,” she said.
The lightning rolled in around them. Even under the heavy tarpaulin they saw each other’s faces clearly in the bluish light.
“Don’t worry about it hitting you none,” Henry said. “I’m feeling real lucky, me.”
“I seen lightning before,” she said.
They were both silent, only shifting their weight slightly to balance the pirogue.
Finally she said: “Tell me what it like in New Orleans.”
“I told you,” he said, “all I got to know.”
It was daylight when they reached the end of Timbalier and turned up Bayou Verde. The sun was just barely up, but it was burning hot already and there were little steaming dazzles of heat mirages on the water ahead.
They were both paddling now and the heavy pirogue moved rapidly. The water ran smoothly past a half-inch below its gunwales.
They heard the lugger nearly half an hour before it appeared, heard the thump and bang of its gas engine echo out over the marsh grass.
To the right, maybe thirty feet back in the grass away from the bayou, was a little chênière, a shell ridge, covered with salt-burned slanting oaks, and vines, and palmettos. Without looking behind, without once saying anything, they swung the pirogue’s bow over and threaded through the little passes in the grass until they were behind the chênière. Then still without saying anything, Henry left the pirogue and, with his cane knife, cut his way to the top of the chênière.
Henry looked back over his shoulder once to be sure the pirogue was hidden in the grass and saw that Niccolene had come up silently too and was standing at his elbow. He motioned her back. She shook her head. They both peered out at the bayou from under the fringed leaf of a latanier.
The lugger went past so close they could read the name on the pack of cigarettes that a man squatting on the deck was holding. The lugger was going full ahead and the grasses on each side shook and quivered with its wake.
“So,” Henry said finally when it had disappeared around a turn of the bayou and all you could see was the very top of its wheelhouse above the reeds. “You know who that was?”
“I seen that boat before.”
“And whose it is?”
“My uncle.”
They were silent for a while. And she said: “Maybe they just gone up to sell something.”
“They was six,” Henry said. “And all of them ain’t happening to go in selling something.”
She went back to the pirogue and sat down. Henry followed.
“Let’s us eat breakfast,” he said. “No use starving.”
They had some sausage and bread and a jar filled with coffee.
“She told,” Niccolene said finally, thinking of Loretta.
Henry just shrugged.
“They going wait in town.”
“Yea,” Henry said.
If they’d made the early bus, he thought, the way they planned. If that wind hadn’t made Niccolene so long coming. If the storm hadn’t held them up in Bayou Timbalier. If the wind hadn’t been so high they had to come the long way. …
“They’s always winds coming up from nowhere this near to September,” he said aloud.
“We can sneak in town,” she said.
“Sure,” he said, “and then where we are?”
She finished with the sausage and wiped her hands on her shirt. “Then we get the bus like we planned.”
“Hell,” he said, “they just going to be sitting where that bus stops.”
She hesitated a minute and then nodded, sadly. They would.
Another lugger went by in the bayou. Henry did not bother getting up this time to look. “More,” he said.
Niccolene went up to the top of the chênière and watched. When she climbed down, she didn’t say a word.
“We ain’t never going to get in there,” he said.
She had picked up a bit of oyster shell and scratched with it on the rough gunwale of the pirogue.
“You want to go back?”
“Where?”
He jerked his finger south.
She looked down at the old oyster shell her fingers held. And she shook her head. “No.”
“You can all right.”
“No,” she said, “no, I can’t.”
It was so quiet they could hear the stir of the grasses and the little animals out in the marsh and the steady rubbing of the hyacinth bulbs.
“We could go to Port Ronquille,” Henry said. “We could wait till dark and go down the bayou again and be across the bay by daylight. And they wouldn’t never think to look for us over on that side. And we just go on up Bayou Maringouin to Port Ronquille pretty as we please.”
Niccolene tossed the shell from hand to hand. “Except for the wind, maybe.”
He squinted up into the clear sky. The wind was still high. “Blow for three or four days, times.”
She nodded.
The heavily laden pirogue would never make it. Even the lightest one would be too risky now. The onshore wind would have kicked up little breakers. And they would have to cross the bay and
skirt along the edge of the open Gulf, broadside to the wind, for a good many miles before they came to the place where Bayou Maringouin emptied into the Gulf.
“We don’t got to go out in the open,” he said finally, “we go up through the marsh just behind the bay.”
She still played with the shell. “They’s oyster beds back in there,” she reminded him, “and nothing but grass around. Somebody’s sure to be working around and we going to get seen.”
“Jesus God,” he said and got the bottle of whisky. This time he did not offer her any.
“I ain’t going back,” she said.
“Maybe at night …” He took another swallow and then shook his head. “Me, I couldn’t find my way through back in there in the dark too,” he said. “You could?”
“I could, for sure. But only one way I know in the dark.”
“So?”
“It go all the way around, past six or seven beds, almost far up as we are right now, before it come out at the bayou.”
“Yea,” he said. “I get it.”
“Going that way, only one I know, we ain’t going to be through by light either, account of we can’t leave here before dark.”
“And they see us that way, like nothing so easy.”
A couple of gulls circled overhead, curiously.
“And they don’t go away,” she said nervously, looking up at the gulls, “and they going to look suspicious to somebody coming along.”
“They go away all right, soon they see we ain’t something for them to eat.”
After maybe ten minutes, the gulls tired of their watching and spiraled away on an updraft.
“Maybe,” he said, “we just walk right into town. Got a couple shotguns.” But he knew he didn’t stand a chance. One man against so many.
“You got family there,” she said. And waited.
He did. Sure he did. And they had cars too, some of them. All you would have to do would be sneak into town at night and get one of them to drive you up as far as Millaudon or maybe even a little farther to Colyell City.
If they would.
He shook his head. “They wouldn’t do nothing like that.”
“Account of me.”
“Hell,” he said, “we don’t got to have them.”
She tossed the shell away into the alligator grass.
“Now look,” he said, “we can go straight on through, right straight on to Port Ronquille.”
She had folded her hands on her lap and was staring down at them.
“We go straight across.” Through the marsh. “And then we go right straight on through the swamp.”
She jerked her head up.
“If you ain’t scared.”
“I never been in there,” she said.
“I been hunting there. Lots, me. I been way up in it. One whole day long.”
She was watching him with her large eyes that always seemed full of tears.
“One whole day I spent going in,” he said. “Another day and maybe a little more and we come out back of Port Ronquille.”
“We got the food,” she said slowly.
“There bayous big as anything back in there, wide as nothing you seen, two, three times wide as the road at Petit Prairie.”
“You find the way?”
“Sure,” he said.
After a minute she stood up and retied the cotton scarf that covered her hair. “You find the way?”
“Hell,” he said, “I been telling you.”
“Nothing else to do,” she said.
Old Tortorich sat with a hand on each knee and stared straight ahead. Hector began to make little lines in the dusty ground with the tip of his finger. Belle walked away.
“So,” Eddie said. “Like that.”
Tortorich said, “Nick gets some of his brothers and they go to Petit Prairie. And they ask around and they find out Niccolene ain’t been there. And they sit down waiting.”
Eddie nodded. Belle had begun to sweep the side yard clear of twigs and grass, the way she did every day. She had a special broom of rushes tied to a long handle. The ground was dusty and cracked and hard as a floor.
“And we see you take the priest. And we see the candles you burn in Catfish Bay.” Tortorich smiled. In his brown face his teeth were long and pointed and yellow. Rounded teeth, like an animal’s.
“We did that,” Hector said.
“Only us, we find something.”
“What?” Eddie asked.
“Where they camp that first night—over by Muscat Lake.” Tortorich stopped, waited for them to understand.
“Ain’t in direction to Petit Prairie at all,” Eddie said.
Tortorich nodded.
“So they was heading for Port Ronquille,” Eddie said very slowly.
“Son of a bitch,” Hector said.
“They try,” Tortorich said, “straight through the swamp. Three, four days. With luck.”
“While you looking for them in Petit Prairie.” Out of the corner of his eye Hector had seen Pete Livaudais come to the front door, and stand there, half hidden by the black screen. He thought he saw something else too, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t move his head, or give any sign, but he kept watching.
“Don’t believe that, me,” Eddie said.
Tortorich sighed and scratched the side of his brown crinkled cheek. “We find.” And he took out of his back pocket a folded paper box, and held it out on his palm.
Eddie took it. The paper box from a tube of Squibb sunburn cream, on it a little red-and-white sticker that said Arcenaux Grocery.
Eddie held the crushed pieces of cardboard between his fingers, staring at them.
“He buy that, all right,” Hector said. “Julius tell me how he couldn’t figure out why.”
“You believe now?” Tortorich said.
The screen door slammed shut and Pete came running down into the yard, shotgun in his hand. Eddie did not move, but Hector stepped out to meet the boy.
It was over in a few seconds, so fast that the gun did not even go off. The boy’s body, tense and muscular as it was, went down under Hector’s weight.
Tortorich looked over and grinned. Eddie did not turn his head.
Hector held the boy down with his knees, and punched him a couple of times, not too hard, but enough to make him grunt. Then Hector got up, nudged the boy with his toe. “Get away from here.”
Pete disappeared at once. Belle was standing at the corner of the house, her broom still in her hand. Hector avoided looking at her.
“They ain’t there now,” Eddie said in a half question.
“We ask and we look,” Tortorich said, “and they ain’t there now.”
“They coulda left. They coulda take a bus or hitchhike.”
“They ain’t left,” Tortorich said.
He stretched his baseball cap on his knee, carefully working around the band. “The road,” he said, “five mile out the town, the rain that come wash out the little bridge. So they got to ferry the cars across.” He put the cap back on his head. “And the man there, he marry my wife’s cousin’s girl. So he tell us. And he say there ain’t nobody come along.”
Eddie said nothing.
“They don’t even get there,” Tortorich said. “We know.”
They went back to the dock, the three of them. The old man first. He had taken off his cap again and was fanning his half-bald head with it. Four or five feet behind was Eddie. He had rolled his undershirt up under his arms now and he was scratching at the prickly heat that peppered his body. Half-a-dozen yards away, Hector followed, still holding the shotgun.
Tortorich freed his line and dropped it into the bow of his skiff. The water was still, and the hull sat on it almost without moving, while he fiddled with the outboard. Eddie came and sat on the edge of the dock, looking down. Hector stood with his head tilted back, looking at the gulls and the single brown pelican that circled in the white sky.
“They was intending to go right straight through the swamp,” Tortorich sa
id. “Maybe you could make the way through?”
Eddie shook his head slowly.
Tortorich slapped the motor with the flat of his hand, and then began to wrap the cord tightly around the starter. The skiff moved slightly under the dock; he gave it a shove out into the open. “Crazy,” he said. “Nobody find the way through.”
“I don’t get this,” Hector said. “Why you come all the way over here to tell us when you know all about it?”
“You go back to looking one day,” Tortorich said. “Maybe you find.”
“I don’t reckon we be looking,” Hector said.
Tortorich went on. “You find something of her, you give it to us.” He yanked at the starter rope. The motor sputtered and died. “If we find, we give him back.”
Eddie just nodded.
After a few more tries, he got the motor started. He adjusted the throttle and then swung out. The pelicans splashed up, beating the air with their clumsy wings.
They stood watching until he disappeared around the point. The pelicans came back and settled on the water, swimming their tight circles.
“Waiting for their fish guts,” Hector said softly.
Eddie was looking out across the bay, across the still sun-polished water to the line of saw grass. “Two out there.” His head was hurting; he rubbed it slowly. “I plain crazy to come out in this sun with no cap.”
Out in the bay four or five mullet broke water in a series of frantic leaps and disappeared.
“They really chased, them,” Eddie said. He felt himself begin to shiver, even in the hot sun, and he rubbed his hands up and down his arms.
Hector put the shotgun down on the wharf and lit a cigarette.
“A crazy kid,” Eddie said, “from the time he could walk.”
“Some born like that.”
“He didn’t say how old she was.”
“No,” Hector said.
“Maybe she was pretty.” Sometimes those girls were, with their black hair and their big black eyes. But it wouldn’t matter any more with the fishes and the insects working at her.
Hector was cracking his knuckles gently.
Eddie sat down on the top of a piling which was covered by a hammered sheet of galvanized tin. He felt peculiar, sick at his stomach sort of. He stared down at the water. It was thick and heavy, almost oily. It was that way in the bayous sometimes.
The Hard Blue Sky Page 32
