The Hard Blue Sky

by Shirley Ann Grau

  She could hear him swearing softly as he went climbing over the baggage. The cabin was littered, her stuff mostly. But there wasn’t room to put it away.

  Not my fault, she told herself. Not at all.

  “Got it,” he yelled. He did not come right up. She could hear him rattling things around up there.

  She sat holding the tiller, feeling the nervous vibration of the engine and the heavy dull pull of water on the rudder. If I put it over hard, she thought, and step up the motor, we’d be out of sight in no time, and there’d be just us, and the fog all around, nobody but us.

  Until we got stuck, she thought with a little laugh. Maybe she didn’t know her way around good as some, but she knew that much.

  “It’s a stupid boat to have,” she told Inky when his dark sleek head came out of the hatch.

  “For around here?” Inky said. “You’re telling me?”

  She caught the rubbery faintly sour odor of the pale blue coats he held on one arm. “They stink.”

  “So they stink. Put ’em on.” He handed one to her. “Just the tops.”

  She held out the blue jacket and shook it violently.

  “Put it on,” he said. “We want a wedding instead of a burying.”

  She pulled it over her head. And pulled up the hood.

  “Jesus,” he said, “we’re way off course.”

  “Well, come take it. I was putting on this stuff.”

  He took the tiller, and swung the bow around again. “You were really off.”

  “There’s enough water way out here.”

  “But if we lose them, what happens then?”

  “We could find them again.”

  “Sure we could,” Inky said. “Only I don’t want to have to do that.”

  She slid along the seat until her back touched the cabin. Then she swung up her feet and wrapped her arms around her knees. Mist condensed on the boom dripped steadily on her hood, with a kind of flat plopping sound, like batter hitting the sides of a bowl.

  “They’re wavin’,” Inky said once, and lifted his arm to wave back. “Everything’s okay!” he yelled.

  They were both quiet. Her legs went to sleep and she had to stretch them out and rub them, hard. The gearshift began to rattle in its slot; Inky got out his pocketknife and tightened the bolts on each side.

  The swell died. There was no wind and what you could see of the water was flat and glossy, except for the two wakes.

  After a while Inky said: “Look at me. Getting married and liking it, too. Man, man, how strong is that. …” He sounded nervous.

  “I was thinking,” Annie admitted, “about that.”

  “It sure is funny.”

  “I guess so.”

  Inky scratched behind his ear. “I’m sure glad to get off.”

  “Me too.”

  “It’s nice and all that,” he said, “but it’s not the most exciting place in the world, you know what I mean.”

  “I been living there, remember?”

  “Can I show you some living in New Orleans! Man … is it good.”

  “I want to,” Annie said.

  “Maybe I won’t go back to the boats for a while. There’s this guy I know has a place on Iberville, always can use a man at the bar.”

  “I can get a job too,” Annie said.

  “It’s going to be fine,” Inky said, “it’s going to be real fine.”

  That gull was still calling, somewhere overhead. She tried to see through the drizzle.

  “You won’t see him,” Inky said, “less he comes down and sits himself on the mast.”

  Annie stood up and stretched. “Not being able to see where you’re going always makes me kind of nervous.”

  “They using a compass, so we know.” …

  Annie walked up to the bow.

  “Stay on board,” Inky told her.

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  The decks were slippery and her sneaker bottoms were glassy, so she kept one hand on the lifelines until she could swing around the forestay and settle herself on the railing of the pulpit. The water was directly beneath her now and she stared into it for a while, watching the lines of the bow wave go curling up on the hull. She felt peculiar and she held on to the stay very tightly to keep from falling.

  It was not being able to see backward or forward. That was it.

  After a while she got up and went back to the cockpit.

  “I’m always glad when you make it back here,” Inky said.

  “Look,” she said after a little, “you don’t have to.”

  “To what?”

  She clicked her tongue. “Get married.”

  He lifted the tiller and scratched his chin on it. “Suppose I want to?”

  “You didn’t want to last week.”

  “That was last week.”

  “I meant … it’s all right with me if you just drop me off in New Orleans.”

  He was resting his chin on the polished wood tiller. “I don’t get it.”

  “I just don’t want you feeling you got to do anything.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  “Look,” Inky said, “if you don’t want to you can get off at Petit Prairie.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “So I don’t get it.”

  The shift began to rattle again. “Damn,” Inky said, and pulled out the handle. “Get up a minute,” he said. And lifted the seat to check the dial for the r.p.m.’s. “Okay.”

  “I guess I don’t get anything,” he said. “Maybe. I thought they’d make a lot more fuss over your leaving and all.”

  “Huh?” she had only half heard him.

  He lifted the cover again and pointed. She peered in: his automatic was there, on a carefully spread piece of canvas.

  “What for?”

  “I thought somebody’d object, with a shotgun maybe. A lot of shooting around the last couple of days.”

  She reached in and touched the cold steel of the handle and then the barrel. She straightened up and he closed the compartment. She stood looking at him.

  He shrugged and settled down cross-legged. “Look,” he said, “how was I to know? I thought maybe your father or what’s-his-name? Perique? They would go making trouble.”

  Annie just shook her head.

  “Well, it figures. … He was an old boyfriend of yours.”

  “Who?”

  “Perique.”

  “In a way,” she nodded.

  “He wanted to marry you.”

  “For a little while.” She rested her forehead against the cool wood of the boom and closed her eyes, remembering. Remembering, or trying to remember. There was something there, a feel maybe. She tried … a color, maybe, or a smell … the times when Perique had hung around the porch, shoving himself back and forth slowly in the swing. And when the swing had broke, when the hook had pulled clean out of the beam overhead, he had got a new hook down at the store, and then dragged up a ladder and put it back in, and when he saw that one of the slats had been broken falling, he fixed that too. That time then … there was more between it and now than just a couple of month. …

  There had been a feel to those days, for sure. … It wasn’t so much that she longed for it, as that she wanted to remember. … She was irritated, and she shifted restlessly from one foot to the other.

  “Maybe you are sorry,” Inky said softly.

  She looked down at him, surprised. “I never thought of that.”

  It was true. She hadn’t. It hadn’t once occurred to her that there was a way back. She thought about it now and shook her head: there wasn’t. And the reasons why were just as vague as her memories. … The happenings of last night, just last night, were as far away as those days before Inky had come.

  “I wanted to tell you …” But what? She wasn’t sure. Just last night. And it was the dinghy. “I had to.”

  “What?” Inky asked. “Get off the island?”

  T
hat too. That too.

  She would tell him someday. When she had gotten some sleep, and she knew more exactly what had happened. She would tell him that she had lost him part of his precious boat. Or maybe (she thought with a sudden burst of shrewd woman-thought) she just wouldn’t.

  And her mind went back to those days before Inky had come, trying to find them, trying to find some detail that she could hang a thread of memory on.

  There wasn’t any. She felt cheated. She didn’t want to go back. But she didn’t want to forget. She wanted to have Perique tucked away carefully in a corner of her memory. … And again woman-fashion, she recognized that this memory would be a comfort: when things did not go well with Inky: she could conjure up another image and hide behind it. And if things were ever really rough, she could tell the children about the man who nearly was their father.

  She’d remember more about him, she thought, when she wasn’t so tired, and when things stopped happening so fast.

  And there was Inky. She loved him and there wasn’t anybody else.

  Maybe, she found herself saying silently, she loved him because there wasn’t anybody else. Yet.

  She was surprising herself, this last half-hour. Thinking things that had never come to her before. She was surprised but she wasn’t shocked. Things were the way they were. And she was what she was.

  She stepped up on the seats, and stood leaning on the boom, her chin buried in the green canvas of its cover, and thinking. Thinking the way she had never done in her life before. The drizzle dripped down her forehead and ran in a little arch around her eyebrows.

  Things happened, she thought, and you did whatever it was you had to do to meet them. And they went on past you.

  And what you were came out in the way you handled them. And what you were changed from one month to the next and maybe even from one hour to the next. And no use quarreling with the way things were. Or the way you were.

  She wasn’t sorry she’d left the island. Not now. Maybe she would be some day. Maybe she’d even go back. You couldn’t tell. But right now was what mattered. She couldn’t remember the past very well. And she couldn’t imagine the future.

  So what did that leave her? she thought, and she almost smiled to herself. There wasn’t anything back there. Only there didn’t happen to be much here either. … The suitcases in the middle of the cabin, one of them with the fancy decanter that had been a present to her mother. And Inky.

  He was stretched out almost flat, listening to the motor. His hair was so wet now that it looked like he’d gone swimming. He straightened up and put the boat back on course and glanced up at her, a little puzzled, a little worried.

  She stepped over and tickled the top of his head with her fingers, the hair was greasy and wet to the touch. And even out here she could smell his hair oil.

  She wasn’t happy. But she certainly wasn’t sad either.

  She was waiting, waiting for things to happen to her. Things that could be handled and changed. And things that could just be handled. She felt herself grow great and passive in her waiting.

  Yes, she thought. It’s Inky now. We’ll go to New Orleans, and we’ll get married. I can get him to do that. He wants to now, but even if he doesn’t. … And we’ll live there, we can have an apartment or maybe even a house.

  It’s Inky now. And maybe it will go on being Inky. But maybe it won’t. And if I believed in cards or palms I’d say I could tell.

  Maybe it will stay. And maybe, she thought calmly, it won’t.

  “What you so busy thinking about?”

  “Way things go and change.”

  “Don’t you worry about it.”

  “I wasn’t,” Annie said.

  THE LOWER PART OF THE SKY

  IT RAINED FOR FOUR days.

  People wondered if a storm was coming. They listened to the weather broadcasts carefully and they squinted up into the sky and tried to tell. If it were going to be a big storm, the men would have to take the boats away. The harbor would not be protection enough.

  During the worst storms, there are very few men on the island: they have gone with the boats, the most valuable things. They take them as far inland, up Bayou Verde, as there is time. The old, old men remain but they are not much use, for they have to be looked after, and their brittle old bones are likely to snap. And the children. And the women. They stay and pull in the wood shutters tight. (Under the clouds the air turns cold and rain comes in swirling eddies, so that the littlest kids cry from cold as much as fright.) And they save what they can and lose what they must.

  They have been doing it that way for nearly two hundred years, ever since there were sailing-ships in the harbor, part of Jean Lafitte’s pirate fleet.

  But the rain stopped. And the lower clouds blew off and there were just the high black ones, smeared across the sky, like the wind had flattened them over. Every now and then the sun came out, a little weak maybe, and a sort of sick yellow. But whenever it appeared, the women grabbed up the loads of wet clothes they had hanging on their back porches and over the stoves in the kitchens. They hurried to spread the clothes out on the gallery railings in the sun, or they went rushing down to hang them on the lines, even if they had to wade in mud up to their ankles to get there. Everybody knew that clothes dried inside never did smell clean.

  Mamere Terrebonne came to the edge of her porch and squinted at the sun, held out her wrinkled old hand and looked at its shadow, and then turned it over and over, feeling the little warmth. Then she went back inside and got her rubber boots: she was going to the grocery and wet feet gave her rheumatism. She brought the boots back out to the porch and sat down in her rocking-chair. She had not had them on since the past spring. She shook each one carefully: a lot of dust and some dead roaches and beetles fell out. She bent down and looked at the shriveled shapes, grinning. “Nothing to eat in there,” she said aloud, “for a ravet, no?”

  They were not mates either, these boots, but they were both black and they were both about the same size. She had found them years ago on the beach: she was always finding things. She had a quick eye for an object half buried in the sand. She found the left one first, and people laughed when she came home one day carrying only one boot. But she’d just put it on a shelf in her back hall, along with a couple of old eel traps and a bottle of stuff that was supposed to keep the gars off the dragues, the trot lines. And she forgot about the boot. Until one day, nearly five years later, when she found another. It was a right one, this time. She brought it home, and took the left one down, and stood the pair behind her front door. She had used them ever since.

  She put them on this time, and, taking her cane, made her way carefully down the steps. She stood for a minute right in the middle of a puddle, the mud oozing over the tips of the boots, and she grinned a toothless smug grin to herself. Then she made her way to the grocery, the boots making plopping, sucking sounds each step.

  She stopped on the grocery porch and cleaned her feet carefully. Inside she could hear Julius laughing with some girl. She grinned to herself. That Julius now, he was some hand with the ladies, for sure. Coeur comme un artichode … leaf for everybody.

  She went inside. When he saw her Julius threw up his hand, and ran out from behind his counter to kiss her on both cheeks. Mo tante, he called her jokingly … they were related someway, vaguely, the way nearly everybody on the island was related.

  “You look so fine,” he said, and pinched her cheek.

  She took the muddy tip of her cane and poked at his chest. “You keep that for the young girls.” She looked around the room to see who else was there—Cecile Boudreau and over there, going through the piles of sweatshirts on the table, trying to find one for his kid, was Hector.

  “Look who’s here,” Cecile said to him.

  Hector turned and waved. “Hi, Mamere, what you say?”

  She grinned at both of them. “I got a check, no?”

  “Sure,” Julius said, “you been having a check ever since the fifteenth when they
always come for you.”

  “I didn’t need nothing,” Mamere said. “Why I should come get it?”

  Julius had got the welfare check out of the wire cage that was the post office. He put the envelope down on the counter. “There.”

  Mamere bent over until her nose was almost touching it. Then she straightened up. “Ah.”

  “For you, huh?” Cecile said.

  Mamere nodded.

  “People brought you so much you didn’t need it, huh?” Hector said.

  “Popular gal,” Julius said, “for sure.”

  Mamere sniffed at them, wriggling her nose like a rabbit. Then she began to make her rounds of the grocery. It was always the same. She would begin at one end of the shelf, and stand right in front of it, her nose almost touching the cans. Then can by can she would study the shelves. As she got lower and lower her knees kept bending until, for the last ones, she was crouched almost on the floor—then she would yell for help getting up. Julius would get behind her and put his hands under her armpits and lift her up: she was so light it was easy. Then Mamere would shake herself out and begin on the next section of shelf. When she found a can she wanted she’d take it off and hold it out behind her, not looking around, but clearing her throat loudly. And Julius would take the can and put it with the others on the counter.

  “You always was a great one for the women,” Mamere said suddenly.

  “Which one?” Cecile said.

  “Him. Julius,” Mamere half turned around. “You going to tell me, no?”

  “You say so,” Julius grinned, “and it’s so.”

  Mamere went back to her careful search of the shelves.

  “I can tell you what you was thinking,” Hector said. “Bet me?”

  “No,” Cecile said and tossed her head. “And let’s talk about something else.”

  “For sure,” Hector said. “Like what?”

  “We just had the biggest kind of excitement, and you don’t remember.”

  “I’m tired as hell talking about the fires and what we going to do to them,” Hector said, “and I’m sick and tired trying to figure what they going to do to us.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Cecile said impatiently. “I meant Annie going off with her guy.”