The Levee: A Novel of Baton Rouge

by Malcolm Shuman

  “And this is Carolyn,” I say. The picture is twenty-five years old, before there was any gray in her hair, but it is the one I have always loved.

  “How’s your mother?” I ask, assuming she has died long ago, but he surprises me:

  “She’s in an assisted-care place. She doesn’t remember things very well these days. I had her with me for a long time, but I couldn’t be there to watch her and …”

  “I understand.”

  Blaize plays with his glass, turning it around slowly, nervous.

  I bring up the dreams again and he looks down at the polished surface of the table.

  “I used to have them, too,” he says. “But not for a long time.”

  Now I understand his reluctance: he is afraid I will stir up what may be only slumbering.

  His head jerks up then and he stares at me with the same burning eyes I remember:

  “Colin, coming back here wasn’t a good idea. It isn’t going to do you any good. Believe me, it’ll only make things worse.” He leans forward. “It took me forever. I had a nervous breakdown. That’s what they used to call ’em. The fact is I got depressed and I saw it all happening again, whenever I went to bed. It got to where I was scared to close my eyes. My mother must have paid thousands to shrinks but do you know the only good advice I got? Get away for a while. Give myself and everybody else a chance to forget. So I did. I traveled for a year or so, went to the Coast, to New York, and the only reason I came back was because she got sick. I met this girl and got married and one night I woke up and realized I hadn’t had one of the dreams. After a while it got so I almost never had them. Not even when my marriage broke up. But you know what? In all that time I stayed away.”

  “Stayed away?”

  “From the levee.” He takes a deep breath. “I never went back there. The closest I ever got was once when some friends I was with took a ride down the River Road. I closed my eyes until we were past the place. When they asked why, I told them I was car sick.” His smile is weak, like sunshine beaten back by storm clouds. “I guess that makes me a coward. But you know what? I don’t care.”

  We eat in silence, two strangers who have nothing further to say to each other, but when we finish I know I can’t let it go. I’ve come too far.

  “I’m going to go try to find the old camping spot,” I say.

  He shakes his head, wadding his napkin.

  “It won’t be there. They’ve fenced the whole levee and the Corps of Engineers has put concrete matting on the batture. But the camp spot fell into the river a long time before that. And I’m glad it did.” The burning eyes again: “What we did was wrong, Colin. Please don’t rake it up.”

  I watch him walk away, his body a little less dense, it seems, than when he came in, as if by merely discussing the past he has lost some atoms, started to fade away into that imaginary time of memory.

  I can’t put my finger on when we began to distance ourselves from Stan. Maybe it was just the end of school and the fact that we no longer saw each other every day. Or maybe it was because on the last day of school when I tried to talk to him the words fumbled out like a loose football and I said something about how everything would be all right and he just looked at me as if he didn’t understand and walked away. Or maybe it was the stories everybody was hearing now about his father’s affairs.

  My own father must have noticed my moroseness and perhaps that’s why he let me take the driver’s test in early June. I’d taken the required Driver’s Ed in school that year and most of the others my age were already driving. I passed on the first try and one sunny day walked away with a fresh driver’s license and my father’s admonition to be careful ringing in my ears.

  I dropped him at his office, for he was teaching summer school, and drove around town for a while, wondering which of my friends to surprise. I went past Blaize’s apartment, but I remembered that his mother had taken him on a short trip to the Gulf Coast, to visit relatives. I thought of Toby, but he’d demand that I prove how fast I could go and I didn’t need a speeding ticket my first day. I even eased past Stan’s house, slow as a sigh, but when I saw that, while Mrs. Chandler’s car was gone, his father’s car was in the drive, I kept going. Stan might be in his little house to the rear. Or he might be with his mother. But to find out, I’d have to see his father, and what was I going to do, smile and ask how business was? Then it came to me how odd it was that at one in the afternoon, on what should have been a workday, a doctor should be at home. Did that mean his partners at the clinic had laid him off? That he’d lost his medical license? That he was down at the police station right now being grilled?

  Where I ended up was at Bergeron’s store.

  He was watching the little TV when I came in, some game show, and when he saw me alone he seemed surprised.

  “Where’s the friends?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Don’t know. I’m just out driving.”

  He chuckled. “Driving, huh?”

  “Yes, sir.” I went to the cooler and drew out a Coke.

  “Well, don’t drive past Sikes’ house. Little niggers threw rocks at his place again last night and he’s raising hell. Already had the sheriffs out here once.”

  “I don’t guess they found out any more about the murder.”

  “No, and they never will. It’ll go down like all the rest of ’em. Unsolved, even if it was a white lady.”

  “Mr. Bergeron, who are the Droods?”

  He rubbed a grizzled jaw.

  “The Droods? Hell, they own Windsong, them.” He shook his head. “They are a strange bunch of people, the Droods.”

  “How do you mean?”

  He cleared his throat and moved down the counter, away from the noise of the little television.

  “Don’t get the wrong idea: I always got along with ’em. When I saw ’em, that is. But Gaston Drood was a strange man.”

  “Gaston Drood?”

  “The father. See, when young Gaston was growing up, the place was going downhill. Not as bad as it is now, but still, they let the sugarhouse fall in and that meant they had to take their cane over to Ascension Parish to get milled. Bad business people, the Droods. But young Gaston managed to marry a rich girl, Annabelle Grayson. Put all her inheritance into the place. I remember that. I was a youngster then, your age. But they said Gaston only married her to get his hands on her money and when she figured that out she went crazy. But not before she had a son, young Darwin. When his momma got real bad, they sent him away to school up north. I don’t guess it was more than a year after that—toward the end of the War, I think—they found her floating in the river.”

  It sounded almost play for play like what Blaize’s maid had told him, only with the generations transposed and a few embellishments.

  But Bergeron wasn’t finished.

  “Now there were rumors she tried to stab Gaston and he killed her in self-defense and then he threw her body in the river, but there was also a story that Sikes did it. He hadn’t been there that long and if you ask me, well, she was a pretty woman and Gaston was gone a lot …”

  “The police didn’t investigate?”

  “Boy, ain’t you learned money talks? Besides, by the time her body washed up down near Donaldsonville, couldn’t nobody tell how she was killed.”

  “Was that when Darwin Drood came back? I mean, the first time?”

  “No. That wasn’t until six, seven years ago. Fifty-two, I think it was. I never saw him. He left again pretty quick. I think him and his daddy didn’t get along. Gaston was drunk most of the time by then. Boy went on back north and Gaston died the next year. Place ran down then worse than back before Gaston married Annabelle. Sikes was supposed to take care of it, but that fils putain …”

  “He’s back now, though, right?”

  “That’s right. But don’t ask me why. If it’s to fix the place up I haven’t seen much difference. Man keeps to himself. I haven’t seen him but once close up and he was nice enough, just shy, like he didn’t wan
t to talk. Sleeps in one of the outbuildings that he got Sikes to fix up. The big house ain’t fit for nobody to live in.”

  “You don’t think he killed her?” I asked.

  The storekeeper made a face. “If he had anything to do with it, he put Sikes up to it. You mark my words, if they ever find out, it’ll be Sikes they catch.”

  I finished my Dr. Pepper and set the bottle on the wooden counter.

  “Look, don’t be going over there,” Bergeron called after me. “There’s lights in the old house at night. Lights and sounds. Niggers think it’s haunted.”

  “Do you, Mr. Bergeron?”

  “I don’t know about that, but it may be something almost as bad, like devil worship. Craziness runs in that family.”

  I left and drove slowly down the River Road, passing the line of tenant shacks that faced the levee. A lone black boy on a red bike did figure eights in the gravel and I wondered if he was one of those who had pelted Sikes’ house with rocks. Somehow I felt a deep kinship with him and I almost thought I ought to stop and congratulate him for a job well done. But when our eyes met there was only blankness in his own, the kind I was used to, that told me he wasn’t letting a white man see any deeper than the surface.

  Ahead, visible across the shimmering fields, was the big house of Windsong, shadowed by pecans and oaks and I slowed. I wondered if Bergeron had been telling the truth about strange lights and sounds. Maybe he was just trying to scare us away, save us from getting into trouble with Sikes. But my mother had always described Cajuns as superstitious, as opposed to her own family, who’d come over from Alsace in the mid-1800s, and had always worked in middle-class professions.

  And, besides, Bergeron had always played straight with us before. I eased off the accelerator, let the car slow to a crawl and tried to imagine the sounds. What were they? Shrieks? Moans? Creakings? Bergeron hadn’t characterized them, so there was no way to say. And then I remembered that he hadn’t claimed to hear them himself—It was the Negroes who’d heard them and everybody knew they were notoriously superstitious.

  Then I eyed the outbuildings. One, closer to the big house than the others, might have at one time been a commissary or school building. Was that where Darwin Drood lived? I searched for a vehicle but there was none. Did that mean young Drood didn’t drive? Or just that he wasn’t there right now. The shutters of the big house still hung askew and it didn’t look as if anyone had done anything to try to clean up or repair the place. Why hadn’t he fired Sikes for letting the place get so run down? Did Sikes have something on him? Maybe young Drood was as much afraid of Sikes as were all of the blacks who lived along the River Road.

  I’d become so engrossed in my speculations that when I looked up my front wheel was inches from the ditch and I jerked the car back onto the gravel. Damn. That wouldn’t be so good, getting stuck and having to walk all the way back to the store to get Bergeron to pull me out with his truck.

  I kept my eyes on the road thereafter, checking Sikes’ place out of the corner of my eye.

  His truck wasn’t there and if the stone throwing of the night before had done any damage, you couldn’t tell from the general disrepair of the place. I sped up then, spewing dust behind me, and saw the little grove of trees in the center of the field. The cemetery. Maybe if I drove up there, got out and looked around, I could find something the cops had missed. They were through with the place, anyway. It wasn’t a crime scene any more. There was no sign saying I couldn’t go there. I turned in at the little road and stopped.

  All at once the hairs on the back of my neck started to prickle, as if someone—or something—were watching me. It was crazy, because it was mid-morning, the sun was bright in a cloudless sky, and in two hours the temperature would be in the nineties.

  I turned and looked over my shoulder.

  There was only a cow on the levee.

  Then, as I watched, I realized it was no cow, but a horse and rider, at the top of the levee, where I’d left Stan that night. A lone rider, looking down at me.

  I backed into the River Road without checking my mirror and then gunned the engine, heading back to town in a plume of dust.

  The next morning I slip into the campus chapel for the early Mass. It is where my parents used to go, and from which my mother was buried, even though we officially belonged to St. Agnes Parish. But everything is different. The Mass is in English and the priest faces the people. There is a part of the Mass where everyone greets his neighbor. I vaguely remember when the reforms came in, as the result of good Pope John XXIII but by then I’d stopped going to church. My father had grumbled about the changes, saying that Mass had been made into a social event rather than a communication between man and God. I don’t know why I came here this morning. I guess that I expected the incense smell and the sight of the flickering candles to evoke memories, to bore a tunnel through the dreams and reveal with the clarity of the beatific vision what happened after I left the cemetery that day.

  Blaize was Catholic but I seldom saw him at Mass, because his mother was strict about remaining within their own parish. Stan and his family were Episcopalian, and I’m not sure where they worshipped, but after morning Mass I go downtown to St. James, the ivy-covered, ancient brick church that is among the oldest in the city. There are no ghosts on the sidewalk.

  The day after I drove to the cemetery Dr. Benson Chandler was indicted for the murder of Gloria Santana.

  I was scheduled to attend enrichment classes during the summer session—a way of keeping me off the streets—but the session hadn’t started yet and so for the next few days I was being left alone while my father went to his office, usually for half a day. So he wasn’t there when the phone rang and I heard Toby triumphantly telling me the news:

  “But the evidence …” I said.

  “They’ve got the love letters he sent her,” Toby said. “And they’ve got one he wrote her just the day before he killed her that threatened her ass.”

  “Threatened her?” I asked.

  “Yeah. She was spreading it around and he was jealous. Said he wanted her to himself and he’d kill her and anybody else who tried to get in the way.”

  For a long time I was at a loss for words. Could it be true? I kept seeing her that day at school, when she’d bumped into me. I could believe she was hot-blooded, like everybody said Latins were, and that she was doing it with some guy, but with more than one?

  “She was a teacher,” I blurted.

  “She has it in the same place,” Toby said.

  “Well, do they know who the other guy is? Why don’t they arrest him?”

  “They’re investigating. Personally, I’d look at old Cornhole. But it doesn’t matter, see: Chandler said he’d see her dead before anybody else had her.”

  “I still don’t believe it,” I said, though I knew it was only loyalty to Stan that was talking.

  “You don’t have to, pussy. Chandler doesn’t have an alibi, and the neighbors said they always heard him and Stan’s mom arguing. Seems like everybody in the whole fucking neighborhood knew they didn’t get along. She even told one of her friends she was thinking about a divorce.”

  So what I’d seen hadn’t been unusual after all. I remembered that morning, Stan sitting on the edge of the overhang, with the river below:

  “You ever think about what it’s like to be dead?”

  “What?”

  “To be dead. Not to exist.”

  Then the overhang had “accidentally” given way, only my reaching out had kept him from falling into the current.

  Now I understood. He’d known about his parents and it was almost too much to bear …

  “What does Dr. Chandler’s lawyer say?” I asked Toby.

  “Same as any lawyer. He says the doc is innocent and they’ll wait till the trial to show what they’ve got.”

  “Have you seen Stan?” I asked.

  “No. Hey, he’s your asshole buddy, not mine.”

  “I was out there yesterday,” I blurt
ed.

  “Where?”

  “The cemetery.”

  “How the hell did you get there?”

  “I drove.”

  “Bullshit. You wouldn’t take your old man’s car without telling him.”

  “He let me. I got my license the other day.”

  Silence, this time from his end, as he realized his days as a necessary means of transportation were over.

  “And you know what?” I said before he could respond. “I’m going back out there now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean maybe whoever did it left something the cops didn’t find. Maybe if Senorita Gloria was screwing somebody else, they did it, and maybe they left something the cops didn’t find.”

  “You’re full of shit. The cops combed that whole area.”

  “You said your old man called the Sheriff’s Department a bunch of trained monkeys, that a Boy Scout could do just as good.”

  “Yeah, well, they found everything there was to find out there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just fucking do.”

  “And you’re just fucking full of shit. You’re scared to go out there and find out.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  And before I could stop myself I was saying it:

  “I’m going out there and I’m going to do my own damn search. Maybe I won’t find anything, maybe it’ll be a waste of time, but Stan’s our friend and if somebody else did this, then the least any of us can do is try to find out.”

  “You’re crazy as shit.”

  “Maybe so, but you’re the one always saying the cops around here just grab the first person they can and stop looking after that.”

  “So you’re just going to walk around out there in broad daylight, looking at the grass and under tombstones.”

  “No, fucker, I’m going to go out there tonight. I’m going to use a flashlight, okay?”

  “You’re so full of shit. Your old man ain’t about to give you his car.”

  I took a deep breath: “My old man will be sleeping.”

  “You’re lying.”