by Robin Beeman
“Hold the light here,” he said and pointed to the last screw, in the top-left corner. I watched him take it out, then lower his large frame into a squat, the kind that people who know how to work get into when there’s something heavy to be lifted. He placed one hand on each side of the slab of marble. “I can do this by myself,” he said. “Just open the suitcase.”
The suitcase was the largest member of a set of three hard-sided Samsonite pieces that Liz had won in a raffle at Mater Dolorosa. Raymond was dead when she won it. It had never been used before. I opened the satiny lining to the night sky.
“Perhaps you’d better look away,” he said. “Put the flashlight down by the suitcase.”
I didn’t protest. I not only looked away but took several steps in a direction that led me away. From that position I heard scraping, banging, sliding, and finally a clattering, which was a dry sound like a whisper. “Nice bones,” Jean Felice said. “Tidy bones.”
Liz had fresh coffee and stale doughnuts waiting for us. It was clear to me as soon as I saw her face, its mixture of apprehension and expectation, that she’d had no idea what to hope for, that she’d been driven by a fear that as soon as Lucille died, Raymond, in some way only she could understand, would be lost to her. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” she said when she saw the suitcase. “Is he . . .?” She took a step forward and then stopped.
“He’s resting inside,” Jean Felice said and put the suitcase at her feet just as a porter at the depot would have.
She made no move to pick it up.
“Would you like me to shake it?” he asked.
“Oh no,” she said, backing away, her hand on her heart.
“Just where do you want it, Liz?” I asked. I wasn’t finding this much easier than she was, but Liz’s domain was, after all, the realm of the ordinary, and I wanted to call her back to it. She turned toward me, flustered but relieved.
“There’s space in my bedroom closet,” she said. Jean Felice picked up the suitcase and together we followed her into the cluttered room. She opened the door to the closet and took out a pile of blankets wrapped in a clear plastic bag. “Right there,” she said. Jean Felice slid the suitcase into the space and closed the door.
“I can’t thank you enough,” Liz said when he stood facing her, dusting his hands. “I’m afraid I was about to go crazy.”
“Not at all,” he said and bowed his head.
“What can I give you for your troubles?” she asked.
This question astonished me. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t talked about this before, but then I realized that she’d been in such a state of frantic anticipation that thoughts of money had just slipped away. I had a brief vision of Jean Felice retrieving the suitcase from the closet and holding it hostage to some extravagant demand.
“Whatever you’d like,” he said, eyes down.
Liz grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to the side of the room, pressing me against an armoire. “What do you have?” she said, and then followed me to the kitchen where I’d left my handbag. I had a ten, a five, and four ones.
“I have nineteen dollars.”
“That’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll take fifteen and leave you with the ones, and tell your aunt I’ll be looking for a suitable crypt for her.” He put the money away, then reached over and took my hand, examined it, then squeezed it. “You’re a good person. You’re going to make nice bones too someday.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Liz and I watched him walk down the porch stairs. The rising sun cast long shadows and Jean Felice’s slid along the ground after him. As soon as he turned the corner, Liz went back in and opened the refrigerator. “It’s too hot for coffee,” she said, dropping ice into two glasses, the smile on her face positively goofy with joy.
“It is.” I was tired suddenly, my eyes heavy.
“Could you stop at the grocery after work?” she asked, pouring in the Coke. “I’m all out of a few things.”
“Of course,” I said, watching her set the full glass on the table. She had begun to hum, something off-key and wheezy. As I reached for the glass, I took a look at my hand—at the scar on my middle finger from a cut when I was ten, at the pattern of freckles on the back, at the alphabet of tiny lines creasing my palm—at the clever skin. “Whatever you need.”
Three Rivers
THE MAN SIMONE D’QUESNAY had been engaged to marry was shot and killed on a Normandy beach. One year later, despite her grief—or because of it—she married Alex Oliver, a distant cousin from north Louisiana. For a while she seemed happy, but then she began to do things that were hard to understand.
People in town excused her at first. They said that she had tragedy on her side, that she wasn’t able to get over Jackie Hebert’s death, and they were inclined to feel sorry for her. But their pity started to wear thin. The sky blue Packard convertible that Jackie had given Simone as an engagement present was turning up in odd places, and Simone, as she drove daily, methodically, over the back roads of St. Athanatius Parish, grew more and more careless about whom she was seen with.
At first it had been Alex’s Aunt TaTa. Well, if a young and beautiful woman like Simone wanted to drive around with an old crone, who could find fault with that? TaTa obviously loved riding. She held her little black straw hat on with one white-gloved hand and used the other hand to point to things they passed as she named them. “Pussy cat. Post office. Little pissant.” Taking particular delight in each pop of a p and hiss of an s.
Sometimes, the cook’s half-wit daughter Ophelia occupied the front seat beside Simone. Ophelia rode with her head back and her mouth open, her upturned eyes like dark marbles in a bowl.
Later, the long-boned, gap-toothed adolescent Felton Mackay rode alongside Simone. Felton, who worked at the gas station, was known to be part of a inbred clan from up by the state line, a group rumored to make a living by supplying two-headed calves and hump-backed mules for traveling sideshows.
“She talks a streak,” Felton said to his boss after one ride. “She took me to some little church in Savannah Branch and made me sit there while she prayed—on her knees! I didn’t have no notion of what she was saying on the way out—or the way back.”
“Are you going to put gas in her car or am I?” asked Mole, the owner of the station. Simone was pacing in the shade of the awning. Her peach-colored linen dress, damp with sweat from sitting on the leather upholstery, clung to her legs as she followed a line between two slabs of concrete, placing one high-heeled shoe in front of the other like a tightrope walker.
“I’m only all right when I’m driving,” Simone said.
“Uhhuun,” Ophelia moaned.
“As soon as I leave a place there’s this sense of relief. And then, of course, there’s anticipation about what I’ll find at the next place. Then when I get there I can’t wait to get away and go somewhere else.”
Ophelia moaned again, bringing up two fingers to her lips. Simone reached into her bag and took out a pack of Herbert Taryinton’s, lit two cork-tipped cigarettes, and handed one to Ophelia. The Packard bounced over a wooden bridge and Ophelia giggled. “Your mother doesn’t like my giving you cigarettes,” Simone said and smiled when Ophelia grinned, the plume of smoke leaving the girl’s lips like a feathery substitute for a word.
Then someone new appeared on the seat of the Packard beside Simone. To her credit, Simone at first seemed to be trying to act with discretion, but Marigny was a small town and, at best, discretion could be only a holding action.
He fixed cars. There had been something wrong with the Packard and he was recommended to Simone. He raised the hood and bent over the world of metal and spark that the hood protected her from knowing. She watched as his grease-stained arms, ropy muscled and quick, moved in and out. A wrench here. Turning something there. His fingers prodded and probed. He sat on the creamy leather and touched the wheel that only she touched. He turned the key and listened.
“It was your carburator,” he said. “I think I’ve fixed
it. You shouldn’t have any more trouble.”
“No,” she said.
His name was Ruben Fouchet and his auto shop was under a raised house that sat among others like it—shabby buildings all—on a spit of dredged-up mud and shell on the other side of the bayou. In the rooms above, his wife had a business. The painted wooden sign at the end of the driveway read Francine’s Beauty Shoppe. A sign in the top half of the window advertised permanent waves. Pink cafe curtains hung over the bottom half.
Simone wrote him a check. He folded it without even glancing at it and then he placed his hand on her waist and looked at her.
“I’ll be out at Three Rivers on Friday night,” he said.
When Simone got home, she took off the lilac linen dress and saw that his fingers had made a black print at the waist. She folded the dress and placed it in a box with tissue paper and put it on a shelf.
Three Rivers Pavilion was a long, screened dance hall at the end of a road reached by crossing an arching white-timbered bridge. The pavilion overlooked a wide expanse of water, almost a small lake, created by the convergence of three slow-moving rivers. On one end were tables where people sat and drank and ate boiled shrimp and crab. At the other end was a dance floor and a band.
She and Ruben were like one body as they whirled around the floor. They were both tall and slender with dark hair and pale eyes—his blue, hers green. Simone wore a yellow dress and he a blue shirt and black slacks. Anyone watching—and there were many—could see how much Simone loved being held by him.
How soon Alex heard about this affair was open to question. Alex was aloof, something of a recluse—a snob, perhaps. He wasn’t the sort of person just anyone could go up to and say, “I saw your wife with a Cajun grease monkey at a dance hall the other night. She looked damp enough to pour in a glass and drink down straight.”
She had her life, and Alex had his studies. He read history, especially the history of battles. That summer he was reading about the Punic Wars. Simone was happy to point out to him, whenever the subject came up, that his interest in things seemed to be inversely proportional to their distance from him in time or space. As they receded from him, he became fascinated.
They ate lunch together most days at a round wicker table on the big front porch with a view through the trees of the lake. Sometimes Alex would bring a book to the table and sometimes he would also bring in a yellow legal pad on which he’d make sketches of some action or another. He’d eat a bit, take a sip of his iced tea, read, and then jot down some position. After each notation he’d raise his head and lift his farsighted eyes to Simone to let her know that conversation could take place.
“We could drive up to Vicksburg and visit a real battleground,” she’d say. “I realize it’s not Carthage or Rome, but we could sit on real ground that has almost recently been stained by real blood. It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump away. We could go to Chalmette—that’s almost next door—and look for cannonballs in the bushes.”
“You drive anywhere you want,” he’d say. “Leave me out of it.”
“We took this very drive the day before Jackie left for Europe,” Simone said to Ophelia. “We didn’t understand the smallest thing then.” They were driving over a white shell road through miles of shoulder-high marsh grass. “Of course, I’d be married to him, but would that make any real difference? Would I be doing what I’m doing if Jackie hadn’t been killed? Would I be restless like this?”
Ophelia took her chewing gum out of her mouth and examined it.
“Just remember not to stare at the sun,” Simone said. “You could go blind. That would just about do it for you.” She took a sip of Coke and passed the bottle to the girl. “I’m thinking strange thoughts, Ophelia. A friend of mine’s father jumped off the Huey P. Long Bridge and was swept down the river for miles before they dragged him out. He drowned, of course, and it has never ceased to distress his family. Hunting accidents are often suicide—when they aren’t murder. I can’t imagine a bullet piercing my skull, though, can you? I try to imagine it—the moment of impact. So sudden. Then what? A great big hole full of light?”
Ophelia passed her back the bottle and Simone took a swallow. “It’s just morbid, I know.”
Her visits to churches around the countryside continued. There probably wasn’t a single church, of any denomination, that Simone hadn’t prayed in. “If you go to Mass on the first Friday of each month for seven months, God has promised that he won’t let you die without a chance to confess,” Simone told Felton Mackay.
“We don’t hold with confession in my church.”
“Well, if you plan on sinning, it’s a good idea to have confession.”
“I have to get back to work now,” he said. “Besides, I don’t plan on sinning.”
“Good for you,” she said. “Maybe you should pray for me then.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said and looked out his side of the car. Later Felton told Mole that he didn’t think he’d ride with her anymore, even though she’d never been anything but nice and he did admire the car.
“You know, I don’t remember much about him. Mostly I remember the way he smelled. He smelled like expectation. He was killed in the war,” Simone said. She was standing by a window of a cabin that Ruben had brought her to. The river outside was pale in the moonlight. Ruben sat on a cot behind her smoking.
“So he’s dead and you aren’t?” he said.
“Maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe I feel I should be dead, too.”
“Maybe? What else could there be?
“I can’t believe it’s only that. When I was little I used to pray that I’d become a saint. Only I didn’t want to be a saint to be good. I wanted to be a saint to be lifted up off the earth when I prayed. I remember praying in chapel and expecting at any moment for at least an inch of airspace to appear between my knees and the wood.” She turned around to see if he was listening. The only light in the room besides the red stump of his cigarette came from a kerosene lamp on a chest of drawers. His eyes never left her. “There are words that make me crazy when I hear them,” she said. “There are words I almost can’t bear to hear—words like rapture, and frenzy, and transport.”
“What will you settle for?” he asked.
She poured some bourbon into a glass and took a sip. “That’s really it, isn’t it?”
“We don’t get many choices, cher.”
“We could be dead.”
“My father drowned,” he said. “Can you imagine that, a man from the bayou drowning? I mean, my people don’t drown. God gave us webbed feet like ducks, you know.”
“So what happened?”
“I guess he forgot how to swim.”
“What do you think of this place?” she asked. She had invited Ruben to come driving with her the next day. It was a day so hot that as soon as they turned off the highway and stopped, they were covered with a film of moisture. She had pulled onto a dirt road to park under an oak tree near a tiny house that had been turned into a church. Someone had crawled onto the roof and fashioned a steeple on the peak out of pieces of an old crate. The panes of the windows were painted in checkered patterns of purple and gold.
Simone pushed open the door and led the way. It was cool inside. There was a kitchen table covered with flowered oilcloth for the altar and seven pews. The light through the windows made the room look like a neon-lit aquarium.
“I think this is a crazy place,” he said, “but I like it.”
“Me too,” she said. She sat in a pew and bowed her head for a moment. “The minister here is just the holiest man—all gnarled and bent over,” she whispered after a bit. “I think he was born in slavery. He’s so old and his voice is just always about to break but I came one Sunday for the services and, let me tell you, when that wheezy organ in the corner there started, that little old man sang like he was expecting to be heard directly in heaven.”
“Did you sing too?” he asked.
“Oh no,” she said and crossed her legs
and straightened her skirt. “I was just a guest in a sacred place.”
Back outside, the day was even hotter than before. The sun boring through the branches of the oaks seared white smoky patches on the grass.
“I’d like to leave a little offering,” Simone said, opening her handbag and taking out her gold compact. She walked over to one of the brick foundation piers, picked up a twig, knelt, dug a hole next to the pier, and buried the compact. Ruben stood back and watched her. “There,” she said and dusted off her hands.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“For now,” she said.
“I’m tolerant, Simone, but I’m no fool,” Alex said the next day at lunch. He put aside his yellow pad and looked in her direction. She had been going through the personal section of the Times-Picayune circling ads that thanked St. Jude for favors received.
“St. Jude is the two-to-one favorite over all,” she said. “He even beats out the Blessed Mother. Hopeless cases, you understand. The city must be full of them.”
“I have heard talk from such disparate sources as Billy Friedrichs, my lawyer, and Mole Guidry, who services my car.”
“I’m trying to understand things, Alex.”
“I’m not thrilled about being on the apex of a triangle.”
“I’m truly sorry, Alex, to hurt you.” She pulled a shrimp from the crown of tomato on her plate and then put it back. “I know this isn’t what you need to hear, but, really, this doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“I’m going to try to be patient, Simone. I care for you. I worry.”
“I am praying, you know, Alex. I’m not happy either.”
The kerosene lamp on the end of the pier cast a flickering light on the water and they swam to it. Ruben crawled out first and squatted on the wood and pulled her up so they could lie like two silvery fish on the weathered boards.
“I don’t understand how a person could forget how to swim,” she said.
“No, me neither. When my mama heard about my daddy, she ran off the pier in front of the house and jumped in the water, but she bobbed to the top like a cork. Maybe she wanted to forget, but she couldn’t.”
