The Hard Blue Sky

by Shirley Ann Grau

  “Jeez,” she said. “They sure fighting. …”

  Her mother looked up from the peas she was shelling, the last of the season’s peas. “What?”

  “I was coming home and what do I see?”

  “What?” her mother asked patiently.

  “Old Al just dragging Annie along like she was a sack of feed.”

  “That been coming for a long time,” her mother said.

  Therese scratched her ear. “It sure here now.”

  Her mother popped a couple more peas into the dish. “You hear what they was fighting about?”

  “Adele.”

  A few more pods emptied their scant loads.

  “Poor peas, for sure. But I can make a soup outa these.”

  “I was going to go closer to the house. So I could really tell what was up.” She hesitated. “You don’t have to look at me like that—you’d done the same thing.”

  Her mother shrugged. “So?”

  “Claudie was sitting on the front steps, big as life. And there wasn’t no way to get closer without him seeing me.”

  Her mother shook her head, a large head with a heavy mat of gray-streaked hair. “Second wife. …” she said. “It don’t ever work smooth.”

  Therese took a handful of the pods and began to shell them. “Do you reckon,” she said after a while, “she is going to go off with him?”

  “Who?”

  “You know who I’m talking about.”

  “Annie?”

  “And Inky what’s-his-name.”

  Her mother lifted her shoulders, high up, so that they almost reached her ears, and let them drop again. “You are asking me … and what should I know.”

  “Just wondered. That’s all.”

  “It come out,” her mother said. “In time. It all work out. The way it is going to work. Sooner or later.”

  “Still wish I’d heard,” Therese said.

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER ANNIE came hurrying out the front door. She gave the screen a hard swing behind her so that it almost jumped off its hinges. Her father yelled. She started to take the steps in one leap. Just at the top her ankle turned, and she fell down them, ducking her head under, bouncing once on her shoulder, landing on her hip and arm.

  She was up in a minute, half running, half hobbling, but moving. Claudie, who had had himself pulled up into a tiny corner of the steps when she came by, got down and trotted after her.

  She went to the tiny field of clover grass that was completely surrounded by thick oleander bushes. She pushed her way through, carelessly, hearing her blouse rip.

  When she got inside, she sat down, on her good hip. And she looked at her arm. There was a long brushburn from her elbow down to her hand: it was bleeding, slightly. She sat staring at it, until Claudie wiggled through the tangle and sat down beside her.

  “God,” she said, “get out of here.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Beat it,” she said and lifted her good arm.

  He moved out of reach, sliding along the grass on his rear. And waited.

  “Now I know what happen,” she said, spitting the words out as if each one tasted bitter. “You sitting up there at the top of the steps so innocent and quiet … and you trip me. Yessir, I’m getting to see it now.”

  “No,” Claudie said.

  “Jesus!” she lifted her eyebrows. “You can talk. … Maybe you human after all.”

  He watched her, a little uncertain, and staying well out of reach.

  “Trip me,” Annie muttered. She felt her hip carefully and then began rubbing it softly. It hurt—so much that her eyes began to water.

  “Don’t cry,” Claudie said.

  “God damn it … go away!”

  He pushed himself back a couple of feet.

  She stretched out on her back and doubled up her legs. And the little wires of pain ran all through her body.

  Maybe I’m going to die, right here, and the crows’ll come and eat me. … “You wouldn’t have the sense to go call anybody.”

  They’d never find me. It would be like Henry. Only right on the island.

  Even she did not quite believe that, so she gave up the thought.

  She rubbed her shoulder, in small circles. That made it feel better. She closed her eyes and felt the warmth of the sun on her face and the warmth of the ground at her back.

  Adele’s face passed in front of her closed eyes: the plain face, with its smooth olive skin and its smooth brushed hair.

  Annie put up a hand and rumpled her own hair fiercely. Bitch, she thought, bitch.

  If my real mother was alive. … She tried to remember her mother, but she couldn’t seem to remember very much. She couldn’t seem to find the details she wanted, the details that made the image real. … It was the sun. For sure.

  Somebody was whistling. They would be passing, and not too far away. She recognized the tune: “Tennis Shoes.” The sound faded and stopped. She wondered idly who it was.

  Her leg was burning, and she thought she could feel a little dripping. She had scraped that too—she was furious. Always did have weak ankles, she told herself, and you couldn’t expect anything else from them.

  She opened her eyes once: a brown rabbit was chewing nervously at the grass, not twenty feet away. She let her eyes slide closed again. Claudie giggled.

  “What?”

  “Gone.”

  She opened her left eye. The rabbit was gone. “Nothing I can do about it.”

  Her fingers patted the grass that the rabbit had been nervously chewing. It would be nice to live out here … in a tent or something like that, so you could be near to the ground. You could find some bricks and make a little fire and cook over them. Except when it began raining, in February.

  “I won’t go back there.” She could hear Claudie stir himself to listen.

  She peeped at him. He was bent forward so that his chin was almost on the grass, he was listening so hard.

  “Lots other places.”

  Claudie nodded, eagerly.

  She opened both eyes. “You don’t look much like her,” she said. “Maybe you’re not her son. Not really.”

  Claudie shuffled a little closer.

  “You going to have the greenest behind, moving around like that.”

  A crow circled way up in the white-blue sky. His gigantic shadow flicked over them.

  “Maybe she just found you someplace.”

  If you had a floor to your tent it wouldn’t be bad out here, even in February. But somebody owned it. Had to. Somebody owned all the land, even if it was only marsh and no solid spot on it, and even if it was only the state government. … If you just had your floor a little off the ground so the water would run under it. …

  “I’d live all alone. I wouldn’t have a soul with me.”

  You wouldn’t have to work, you wouldn’t have to have money to buy things. You could live on the things you could find.

  She rolled over on her side and squinted up at the sky through the blades of grass and weed. She stopped pretending. She wasn’t hurt. She didn’t feel anything. Even the little ache of her arm was gone and the anger that had been like a fist doubled inside her.

  I’ll go back, she thought. Maybe. No place else to go. Yet.

  She thought about Inky and she didn’t feel anything either. When she tried to imagine him, it was Perique’s face that formed instead.

  There were so many things going on inside her. She could feel them—tumbling around like clothes in a washing-machine, she thought.

  ANNIE HAD HER USUAL early supper that evening, only this time she hurried even more. She finished just as Adele and Al came back, and she ducked into her room without their seeing her. Then she climbed out the window. Claudie didn’t follow her. Adele had found him and was making him brush his teeth—which he never did and which were getting coated with a yellow-white film. As Annie swung herself over the side fence she could hear the yelling begin inside.

  And she went hunting for Inky. Without asking
anyone. First she went down to the docks and walked along them. There was not a single person there. She went and looked in the packing-plant, but it was just an empty room, with long tables and a black wet floor. A couple of cats wandered around, looking for bits of shrimp. As she walked away, she noticed a half-shrimp still in the drain chute. It was covered black with flies. She picked it up—it was warm from the sun—and walked back to the door and threw it to the cats.

  He was not on the Pixie. But then he wouldn’t be—he wouldn’t expect her this early.

  Next she walked along the back path to see if he wasn’t fishing from one of the little piers. She saw young Allen Cheramie, dozing there, with a pole in his hand, and two other poles wedged down and weighted with bricks. He had been asleep so long that a pair of sea gulls were roosting on a piling not ten feet away from him.

  She looked up at the sky, squinting. There was something in its color, something that told you it was September, though it was just as hot as midsummer. She’d often tried to figure that out: it wasn’t a change of color exactly, though that was close to it.

  She walked quickly back over to the grocery, the sweat running down her face. Ted Mitchaux was on the porch there, reading an old copy of Life. He looked at her over his cracked glasses. “Looking for somebody?”

  “No,” she said, and wiped the sweat off her face.

  “You sure want him quick, running on a day like this.”

  “No,” she said, “I just got energy, me.”

  “Running like Jean Sot with the wind. … You ever hear that story?”

  He took off his glasses and held them carefully between the fingers of his right hand. His little shriveled face stared at her. He looked like a prune, she thought, wrinkled up to nothing, and just about the same color. His papa must have been a Negro, for sure.

  “You told me all your stories.”

  “Now I know I ain’t done nothing like that.”

  But she had gone.

  Annie saw Mamere Terrebonne working in her garden, bent over, like a half-opened knife.

  Annie went over. Now she could see that it was not gardening at all. The old woman was carefully replanting the yellow lightbulbs that lined the garden beds.

  “How you?” Annie said.

  The old woman did not straighten up; dipping her head lower, she looked at Annie from under her arm. Like a chicken, like an old chicken whose feathers are torn and mostly gone, her petticoat, dress and sweater, apron and shawl flapped and hung around her.

  “How you doing?” Annie said.

  “You looking for the man, eh?”

  Annie shrugged. “No.”

  Mamere laughed and coughed at the same time. She began to straighten up. Annie went over and helped her pull the old stiff back into place.

  “I know you want him, me.” She shuffled her feet in their heavy men’s army boots, and she stepped on the drooping hem of her flannel petticoat that had once had a design but was now faded into a kind of yellow-gray color.

  “How you know?” Annie asked.

  Mamere patted the wide-brimmed gray hat that she had pinned on by her old long hatpin with its tarnished little silver knob. “One man gone, you go looking for the other.”

  “Lord,” Annie said, “how you talk.”

  “Shu … I talk true, maybe? No?”

  “Lord, Lord …” Annie said, “I got no man.”

  Mamere planted her thin hands with their heavy cords of veins on her hips. It was hard to tell if she were a man or a woman. The body had no shape, though it did wear skirts. The shriveled, wrinkled face with its little straggling gray mustache would give no clue.

  I’ll never get that old, Annie thought; hope to God I never get that old.

  Mamere said: “You got a man che’. Me, I know it. And everybody know it.”

  Annie swung her foot back and forth, knocking off the tops of the long raggedy grasses.

  “Me, I don’t know or not he was your first. …”

  They know everything so fast, Annie thought. And how do they find out. … There’s nothing they don’t know.

  She pushed the hair back from her forehead, noticing too that it had a little sour odor.

  Been so long since I washed it, she thought. And … I bet they know everything: how many times I been down to the boat. I bet they can count the just right number. And how many times we did it.

  Nothing to do but watch and figure out things, she thought. I bet they counted.

  Mamere giggled. “So small, che’ … but I know.”

  Annie walked away then. Mamere turned slowly, the iron heels of her boots digging in the soft mud, and watched her go.

  Annie slipped into the long thick line of bushes that grew in the shell ridge just to the back. She was still wearing shorts and the blackberry vines scratched her thighs. Damn, she thought, I oughta go back. But she just pushed her way through more carefully and a little more slowly. After a couple of dozen feet there was an oak. She climbed to one of the broken branches and looked around.

  She didn’t see Inky. She didn’t see much of anything. Just a couple of kids playing (tollhouse under a tent of palm leaves. She watched a few minutes before she picked her way out.

  She went on looking, up and down the tangle of the connecting shell paths, slower now and not hurrying, never hurrying, but moving just the same.

  The island seemed quiet and empty. Most of the boats were out working (the Mickey Mouse was the only one back early), and most of the men with them. And the women, they weren’t walking around. They’d be gathered in little groups of three or four in kitchens somewhere.

  Annie could have found them fast enough. If she’d wanted to. She kept strolling on, hands in the back pockets of her shorts. The only one, except for the kids and the animals, moving.

  She had covered most of the paths on the eastern end. Finally she headed out along the single straight path that went out to Point Caminada to the west. Minute she came out of the trees she saw him, sitting on top of the tumble of concrete blocks where the light had been once.

  “Hey!” she called. She was afraid to come on him by surprise. Afraid of what his face might look like, if he turned it on her suddenly. Stupid …

  He looked over his shoulder. And lifted his left hand slightly. There was a little breeze out here, even in the sun. The big old straw hat tugged at its strings under her chin as she scrambled up the blocks and squatted down by him. “Crabbing?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “You shouldn’t be out without a hat.”

  “Yea, I know,” he said.

  She felt the top of his head. “You get sunstroke.”

  “What are you doing down here?”

  “Looking about the crabs,” she lied. “I didn’t want to lug all the nets and bait down here for nothing.”

  “I been seeing some,” he said.

  “I see one right now.”

  “Where?”

  She pointed. Down almost directly below them, in the rocks and seaweed, a single big blue claw.

  “Man I knew in New Orleans could catch ’em with his bare hands.”

  “I wouldn’t try it, me.”

  “He could all right.”

  She half-closed her eyes against the glare from the water. “What were you doing?”

  “Going crazy.”

  “Huh?”

  “Look,” he said, “I got a sailboat that don’t belong to me. And I been on it how long? And it’s hot as hell there and there ain’t room enough. …”

  “It’s a beautiful boat.”

  “Sure,” he said, “only a sailboat’s no good unless it’s moving and there a breeze going through it.

  “A real unusual hot summer—they call ’em weather breeders.”

  “Yea?”

  “Say it’s a sign of hurricanes coming.”

  “Hell,” he said, “a hurricane would be cool.”

  “Don’t go joking.”

  “I mean it,” he said. “Where’s your shadow?”

>   “Who?”

  “Claudie.”

  “I got away from him.”

  A young gull—soft brown color—settled on the water and waited, watching them.

  “The boy they been looking for,” Inky said, “he a friend of yours?”

  “Who?”

  “The kid who didn’t come back—”

  “Henry?”

  “Yea.”

  “Sure I knew him,” she said. ‘You know everybody on this island or you’re blind, deaf and dumb.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Why?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “Wondering what?”

  “Nothing special.”

  A clump of seaweed with bright orange berries washed up and hung on a cement projection, gleaming under the sun.

  “You know,” Inky said, “place where I was last summer, had six-and eight-foot tides?”

  “No tide here,” Annie said.

  “Few inches,” Inky said.

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “You didn’t say that.”

  My head hurts, Annie thought. And my back too. Maybe I’m going to have a period.

  “The gal was from over there, huh?” Inky pointed ahead toward Terre Haute.

  I got no reason to feel bad, Annie thought, except maybe the heat. I ought to feel fine.

  “Over there?” Inky repeated.

  “Huh?”

  He pointed to the low rise of trees across the pass.

  “Oh,” she said, “yea.”

  Inky wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. And then he closed his eyes against the glare.

  She yawned, and hunching over settled her forehead in her hands. She tipped back the hat so that the sun did not burn her neck.

  “Look,” he said without opening his eyes, “haven’t you got anything else to do?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Don’t you have to wash the dishes or mop or something?”

  “Where?”

  “At your house.”

  “Hell,” she said, “Adele does all that. … Anyway, it’s her house.”

  “Oh.”

  “You want me to go away?”

  “Hell, no,” he said. “I was wondering if you wasn’t bored.”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  A kingfisher shot right over their heads, screaming.