The Southern Cross

by Skip Horack

  I take a few more sips before I realize that the man is crying. Not bawling or anything, just a quiet sucking of air that I’m sure nobody would hear but me. It’s not my business but I glance over at him again. The man looks fine to the eye but I know better. He has his beer bottle cradled in his big hands, and he’s picking at the red and white label with a blunt finger. There’s a gold band wedged tight up against his knuckle. That doesn’t really mean anything, though. This place is full of martyrs. Not me. Selby wears my ring.

  “Are you all right?” I didn’t think I wanted to talk but I guess maybe I do.

  The man looks up at me. “What do you mean?” he asks. “I’m doing fine.”

  He has a country drawl that reminds me of Daddy’s. “Where you from?” I ask him.

  “Haughton,” he says. “Up in north Louisiana” He swaps the s in Louisiana for a z and drops the second syllable, and again I’m reminded of my dead father. I can hear him at the train station seeing me and Margaret off. “Y’all girls be careful in Looziana,” he’d told us.

  “My name’s June,” I say. “I grew up in Mississippi myself.” I don’t know why I tell him that. I haven’t volunteered that information in ages.

  “I’m Bud Long,” says the man.

  I think again of the Roosevelt, of Earl Long sweeping through the lobby in seersucker. He pinched me on my bottom once and Jack tried to fight him. I ask Bud Long if he’s any relation.

  “Nope,” he says. “None.”

  “I bet you get that a lot.”

  “I used to. That’s true enough.”

  He doesn’t seem too keen to talk so I focus back on my drink. There are Audubon prints on the walls in here. Paintings of weasels and panthers and deer. I never knew till I came to Witness Oaks that Audubon had painted anything but birds. A chair drags on the hardwood floor and I see Bud Long stand up.

  “Good night, June,” he says. “It was very nice to have met you, and I thank you for saying hello.”

  I say goodbye myself and watch him leave. I’m thinking, Good heavens, that man drinks fasts, when I look closer at his beer bottle and see that he never took the first sip. That makes me so mad that I holler at him same as I did Jeanette Kleinpeter. “Hey, you,” I say. “Bud.”

  Bud Long turns around. With his gray crewcut he looks like a retired astronaut—and a broken one at that, one who’s just been told that he’s too old to make the moon shot. “Yes?” he says.

  “You got something against sitting next to me and drinking your beer? Do I bother you?” I see Lionel spin around behind the bar when I say that. His back is facing us now, and I guess that’s the best he can do to give us some privacy in this tiny place.

  Bud looks from me to his beer and back again. The confusion leaves his face and he smiles. “No,” he says. “It’s not that at all.”

  “Something funny, Mr. Long?”

  “No,” he says again. “It’s just that I haven’t had a drink in thirty years.” He scratches his head and looks down at his feet. My old astronaut has turned into a shy paperboy. “So when I thanked you for saying hello,” he says, “I really, really meant it.”

  Bud Long leaves after he says that. Lionel turns back around, and the way he looks at me makes me think he can tell that I feel as small as one of those Audubon squirrels running circles on the wall. I don’t know when I started being this mean.

  In the morning Patience comes for her measurements. I’m sitting in my sunroom armchair, and she settles onto a little stool beside me. She reminds me that this is the day of the picnic, then sticks the stethoscope in her ears. I don’t need to be reminded but people don’t seem willing to believe that. Selby called twice last night to tell me one last time that she was coming. She does that now as well—tells me things over and over and over. She wanted me to go to St. Joseph’s with her this morning but I begged off. Truth is, I don’t believe in a God anymore, Catholic or otherwise. I just woke up the other day and stopped, decided that I wouldn’t be saying my morning prayers for once. I thought I’d be sad, but to be honest, it felt delicious. Like that was the last decision I had left that I could make for myself. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow I’ll go on back to believing.

  Patience writes my blood pressure down on her clipboard and clucks her tongue.

  “Well?” I ask.

  “You keep on surprising me,” she says.

  She pulls the cuff from my arm and clips the stethoscope around her slender neck. I’m in a playful mood because my daughter is coming. “You should see me fish” I tell her.

  Patience’s head snaps up and I give her a wink. She laughs long and hard and I can see on her face a sort of shifting, a look not so different from the one Jack gave me when he saw me helping his mother polish her Dresden china his first Easter back from the war. It’s a look that says, Why, Junebelle, maybe I’ve had you figured all wrong. Patience puts her hand on my arm. “I’m so sorry I ever asked you about fishing,” she says.

  “Don’t be sorry at all,” I say. “There was actually a time when I liked to fish very, very much”

  Patience is laughing again. “Okay,” she says. “I know you’re fooling with me.” She slaps at my armchair with the limp cuff, then starts to get up.

  “Wait one second. There’s somebody I want to ask you about.”

  “All right,” says Patience.

  “Bud Long.”

  “Oh, that poor man,” says Patience. “They just moved Mrs. Long into Health and Wellness last week.”

  The picnic begins at eleven o’clock, but by fifteen after Selby still hasn’t come and so I leave my apartment without her. I’ve got on white shoes and a pretty blue dress, and both are altogether silly to wear to a picnic in July. Annie had a hundred different names for the color blue. She would have called this dress cornflower.

  The picnic is on a flat lawn set apart from the main buildings. I walk past the pond to the sidewalk, and a bass swirls off from the shallows and heads for deeper waters. A staff member in a golf cart sees me walking and asks if I would like a ride. My knees are throbbing but I tell him no, that I believe I can make it on my own. My shoes sound like goat hooves on the concrete.

  When I come around the corner I realize pretty quickly that this picnic is a much larger operation than I had imagined it would be. A big white shade tent went up sometime during the night, and in every corner there’s a tall box fan blowing on an enormous block of ice. In the distance I can hear the faint hum of the generators fighting to keep everyone cool.

  Already the tent is crowded. There are ten rows of tables, but no seats where I can go off and be by myself. Everybody is sitting but me, and since no food’s been served yet they look like they all just came here to wait for something. I can feel everyone watching me in my blue dress and so I keep walking. I walk in one end of that circus tent and out the other. I hear the professor calling my name as I go by. “Sit with us, June,” he says. A hand touches my arm but I don’t break my stride. I squeeze past a fan and make it outside. Free.

  There’s a smaller tent set up in the corner of the clipped-grass lawn, just a little red tarp to beat back the sun. Smoke is pouring out from a stacked pile of cinder blocks, and four of the black men from the kitchen are standing under the tarp shooting the breeze. I can smell the hog cooking. The men catch me sniffing and they all four wave. They look tired and I’m guessing that they’ve been at this since yesterday. One of them takes a step toward me. His skin is shiny with sweat. “You wanna come and see, ma’am?” he asks. “It’s near about done.”

  I’m curious but I shake my head. Right now I only want to go to a place where people can’t stare at me. I walk across the lawn toward the big live oak looming at the far end. Its lower branches have grown so thick and heavy and tired that they lie along the ground like fat snakes. This is one of the witness trees that gave this place its name. The retirement home’s literature claims that the old oaks sprinkled across these fifty acres have seen French soldiers and Spanish soldiers and British sold
iers, Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs. I get what they’re suggesting—that us old folks are like these dying trees. Bravo.

  My eyes haven’t kept quite like my ears, and I don’t see Bud Long until I’m already standing beneath the canopy of the oak. It’s dim under here, and wide limbs are twisting this way and that. The ground all around me has not seen good sun in a hundred years, and instead of grass there’s only dust-fine dirt. Bud Long is sitting by himself on one of the earthbound tree limbs. He has a green can of soda in his hand and is watching me.

  “Hello” he says.

  “Hey there,” I say.

  He’s wearing a brown suit but I think it’s a different one today. His jacket is folded beside him, and his wide striped tie and short-sleeve shirt match his NASA hair. He looks like he just walked here straight from Mission Control. He pats the jacket with his hand. “Wanna sit down?” he asks.

  “I’m not really up for talking,” I tell him.

  “That’s fine,” he says. “I ain’t neither.”

  And so with that understanding between us I do go ahead and sit beside him. His jacket protects my cornflower dress from the dirty bark and I’m comfortable here. Bud Long has another cold drink sweating beside him, and he pops it open and hands it to me. I thank him and we shut up.

  It’s nice and cool beneath the tree, and I can hear all different things at once with my uncommon ears: the droning of the generators and the murmur of the old folks, the laughter of the cooks with their hog. Sitting beneath that tree I feel like Bud and me can watch the world but it can’t watch us. Through the tangle of the oak branches I spot Patience come walking out of the tent with my family. I see Selby with her husband and remember when that man was just a boy on my doorstep. And then my grandson comes slouching out behind them. Eddie and his gold chain have made it after all. Patience hollers to the cooks and they point toward us and holler back. Before long they’ll have found me, and so I sit with Bud and we wait, watching them all come on.

  Bluebonnet Swamp

  Bluebonnet swamp is a swamp in miniature. Sixty, seventy acres of cypress and tupelo set aside within the city. Baton Rouge drains into the swamp, and the swamp seeps into the earth.

  A trail leads from the nature center into the low, wet hardwoods, then gives way to a boardwalk that skirts the refuge and dead-ends at the library. Here an office park borders the swamp. At night raccoons scale the hog-wire fence separating the two worlds; they thieve and plunder trash.

  His law office looks out over the petite swamp, and the first time he sees her is on a Tuesday, strolling the boardwalk in a pale blue dress.

  Wednesday afternoon, he sees her again. He is staring out his window when she appears. She catches him watching and gives a low half wave. She is light-haired, small, and pretty. She smiles and then she is gone.

  Thursday, she comes. Friday, she comes. Always alone, always in that robin’s egg dress.

  How odd, he thinks, how sad—this woman who walks alone in a steaming summer swamp. If he sees her on Monday, he will speak with her.

  Bluebonnet Swamp is too small for deer, though on rare occasions there are tracks that cannot be explained other than to say deer sometimes travel great distances with a full moon.

  A queen bobcat lives in the hollow base of a dead cypress; every spring a male finds her and they become a pair, then she bears a litter that the tom picks off one by one because he is always hungry and because the thin city swamp could never support more than two bobcats.

  In the fall, wood ducks swim among the water oaks and dabble-dive for acorns, but now it is summer, and the swamp is drought-dry, save for occasional puddles into which the moccasins have retreated, as well as a couple of chicken gators that are like tiny earthbound dragons dreaming of rich saltwater marshes they will never see.

  Two of his law partners visit over the weekend, dropping by unannounced on their way home from the golf course. They drink gin and tonics on his back patio, then get to the point.

  Don’t take this wrong, we’re one hundred percent behind you—but it’s been six months now and your hours are still slacking.

  He winces, but they continue.

  Look, we know losing her is something you will never really get over—God knows, we all just loved her—but we’re also running a business. You need to pick up the pace.

  I understand, he says. He shows them to the door then, later, buries his face in the nightgown that still smells of her and falls asleep crying.

  He goes into work on Sunday morning and tries to ignore the woman in blue who has been watching him from the end of the boardwalk since dawn. An hour and he gives up. He slips out the back door of his office and moves toward her.

  She smiles as he climbs the briar-choked fence and then helps pull him up onto the boardwalk. He says hello and she turns and leads him back the way she came, into the swamp.

  They leave the boardwalk and the first thing she shows him is a Burmese python, an escaped pet gone feral. The thick, mottled snake is stretched ten feet across a sun-dappled clearing. It senses their approach with a tongue flick.

  The great trick to a snake’s life, she tells him, is to absorb enough daylight to survive the night. The python will last the summer—hunt bullfrogs and rabbits and eat well, live well—but in the end it will die because fall always comes and a jungle snake just can’t tolerate more than a few cool nights.

  They quit the sleeping, doomed python, and she takes him to a place where the swamp rises into magnolia-beech upland. The small hillside is crumbling, and a cave has formed beneath the undercut base of a live oak. I know this place, he tells her. When I was a boy, we lived not too far away. I was alone a lot and so I roamed this swamp. The mud cave was here even then. He kneels and peers into the darkness. I wanted to explore it so badly, he says, just knew it would lead to some other world.

  So why didn’t you? she asks.

  I was afraid, he says, figured the earth would collapse behind me and trap me, bury me alive.

  She touches him, takes his hand. He gives himself to her and though it is dark at first, a few steps more and he can’t believe what he is seeing, what he has been missing this whole time, these worlds within worlds.

  The Final Conner

  A train crowded with summer tourists takes Ellis from the airport into Amsterdam. He finds a hotel near the main station and checks his small bag. He’s dead tired but fights to stay awake until dark. Keep moving, he tells himself. That’s the only way he knows to beat the jet lag.

  Tomorrow he will drive into Germany and start making his way to Volkstadt, home of his grandfather’s grave. But first this lonely and out-of-the-way stop—not in Bremen or Hamburg or Hanover, but here. He’s been in Amsterdam once before, passed through with Amy on their honeymoon a decade ago. His marriage might very well be over but he’s right back where they started, albeit alone. All he can figure is that he is here now because he is a poet, and it is in the nature of poets to torture themselves.

  Amsterdam seems pretty much the same as he left it—low-slung, watery, and gray. The air is cool and moist, sea air that he drinks in great gulps as he wanders toward the red-light district. At a McDonald’s he stops and buys a cup of weak coffee. A block down, a bridge passes over a nice stretch of water. He’s halfway across when he realizes whores are watching him from either side of the canal. Ellis catches a déjà vu feeling. He and Amy once had a little argument over him calling these window girls whores. “You have a misogynist streak you need to work on,” she had told him, smiling but serious.

  “What would you have me call them?”

  “Prostituted women”

  “But that’s such a cold term” Ellis laughed. “You’re every ounce the lawyer.”

  “So sorry if it’s not poetic enough for you”

  “Well, it’s not”

  “Forget it. I wasn’t trying to start a fight”

  And this had been their honeymoon.

  The closest of the women taps at her window as Ellis daydreams.
He glances over and regards the big African. Her eyes roll back like a feeding shark’s and she bobs her head, her mouth an empty cave as she signs for his business. Ellis watches her. It’s bright day, barely past lunchtime. Her head moves faster and faster, up and down, up and down. She thinks she has him on the hook, just needs to reel him on in. Maybe she does, he admits. He really hasn’t been himself lately.

  The African rises from her stool and presses herself flat against the glass. She is dancing for him when an older man steps between them. The man pushes on her door and enters the tiny room. Ellis winces and the woman gives him a maybe-later shrug of her shoulders. She snaps the red curtain shut, and he stands there drinking his McDonald’s coffee. Ellis imagines the two of them behind that dirty pane of glass, that thin red curtain. Christ, the things that go on behind closed doors.

  In 1945, Ellis’s grandfather was shot down over northern Germany and his body was never recovered. The hero pilot’s young son grew up to become an aloof, distant father to Ellis, then took his own life when Ellis was five years old. The only vivid memory Ellis has of him is from the night he died, an evening spent fishing the bay bridge near their home in Pensacola. They brought home a sand shark that the sad man butchered in the garage. He told Ellis to bury the head in a backyard ant pile and promised that later, together, they would bleach out the jaws.

  His mother dressed him just like a little man for the funeral. Afterward, his house packed full of strangers, Ellis remembered the sand shark and slipped out the door. He wandered the yard in his new clothes only to find the nest raided and the head missing, stolen by neighborhood coons. Their thin-fingered tracks led off a few yards before disappearing into the thick, dry Bermuda.

  Thirty-one summers later, Ellis had been night-fishing his father’s favorite spot on the old Highway 98 bridge when Amy surprised him at his setup. She said she couldn’t sleep. She could never sleep after they fought. Neither one of them could.