The Levee: A Novel of Baton Rouge

by Malcolm Shuman

  “Let me go!” I cried but he only pulled me faster, up the slope.

  “You and your friend. You should a stayed at home. Damn, but you should a stayed at home. Now …”

  He stumbled on the uneven ground and that was when I jerked away, heading back downhill.

  “Hey, goddamn you …!” He screamed after me and I heard his steps a few feet behind. “Get your ass back here!”

  I leapt into the foliage and this time the briars weren’t as thick. I felt my feet sinking into the mud, as the wet earth pulled at my shoes.

  I had to make it across the borrow pit.

  “You can’t get away, damn you! You might as well quit now!” he yelled.

  I reached the edge of the water and plunged in, feeling the mud suck at my feet.

  Keep going. That was the key to not getting stuck. Keep up the forward motion or the gumbo will suck you down, hold you like the tarbaby …

  I willed my legs to rise, but the further I went the harder it was. The water was to my knees, now to my waist. I pushed hard with my left leg to propel myself forward and felt my left foot sinking deeper into the mud. Fear iced through me as I realized I was held fast, unable to go forward or back. The light flared on, pinning me in its glare.

  “I told you,” Sikes said, breathing heavily. “I told you, boy. You didn’t have to make it this hard. It coulda been easier, painless. Now look.”

  I heard one of his hands moving, sensed he was pulling something out of his belt.

  “Now I got to go in and make sure you sink.”

  “Please …” I begged.

  “I’m sorry, boy. But you got to see: I got no choice.”

  The light wavered and I caught movement, sensed his pistol being leveled, and tried to throw myself flat on the surface of the water, flailing with my arms like a drowning swimmer, but my legs refused to budge. A whimper of fear escaped from my throat and then the shot exploded the night.

  At first I thought the shock of the bullet had left me numb, and when the light dropped away, I sensed he’d seen the effect and was on his way to fish out my dying body. But then I heard a grunt, saw the light rake off at an angle, heard other steps behind him.

  A second light jabbed out, touching the trees over my head and then coming down to rest on my immobile body.

  “You all right, son?”

  I blinked in the glare.

  “Who?”

  “You don’t got to worry,” Bergeron’s voice said. “Sikes ain’t gonna bother nobody else never.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Now I stand on the cemetery road and look up at the levee. With the new golf course, I don’t know if I can remember where I crossed the fence that night. I think it was further north, but the fence is newer there, festooned with warning signs. I did not come this far to be deterred by signs and I tell myself that if I walk along the levee, maybe I will be able to find the place.

  It is a foolish hope. Blaize is almost certainly right. Everything will have changed. But it is something I have to do.

  I walk quickly across the tar surface to the fence, testing the strands with a foot. I am thicker now, sixty-three years old, and I don’t know if I can wedge my body between the middle and the top strands without catching my clothes. I put my foot on the middle strand and push down, testing whether it will hold my weight. For a second I sway in the sunlight, knowing that if I don’t make the effort it will all have been for nothing. Then I ease my other leg over the top strand and put it down on the middle strand, as well. Now I feel the top strand against my crotch, the barbs biting into my most tender parts. When I try to shift my left leg, bring it over to the other side, my weight bears down on my right foot and the barbs dig deeper into my testicles. I hope no one will pass and witness this slightly ridiculous figure of an aging man caught wavering atop a fence in a place he has no business to be.

  Maybe, I think, I will stay up here forever, in a frozen segment of time. Maybe I will not have to come down. Maybe, like a stylite, people will bring me food and drink. Maybe I do not really want to move.

  I finally push hard with my left leg, grit my teeth against the biting barbs, and feel the crotch of my trousers give. I grab the wooden post, waver for a moment, and then catch the middle strand with my left foot and lower myself to the ground, sensing a draft between my legs where the cloth has been torn. It is, I tell myself, a small price to pay.

  I pick my way up the slope, which seems steeper than I remember, the grass more slippery. I step over cow pods and around crawfish chimneys and finally pause at the top, breathing in the unique smell that I remember. It is redolent with decaying organics and stagnant water but there is another element I had forgotten—the pungent odor of diesel fuel, leaking from barges and ships.

  I look up, see a hawk gyring slowly above, and wonder what he sees. Nothing has changed for him, because his life is short. He will not remember beyond the last mouse or rabbit or squirrel, plucked from the underbrush below.

  It was upstream, I think, as I walk north along the levee top, in the little clump of trees at the foot of the levee: That is where I ran that night and I strain to make it out. But how can I be sure? It could be the clump a hundred yards north, by the next fence post. The truth is that Blaize was right: it has all changed and I have no idea where it was.

  The case against Dr. Benson Chandler was dropped a week after Sikes’ death at the hands of Alcide Bergeron. I only heard about it on TV because my father kept me inside the rest of the summer and I didn’t drive again for a year. But from what I gleaned from Toby—who called to ferret out information he could use to build up his credit with the same classmates who scorned him—the case against Chandler had begun to break down even before. Now, with Sikes dead—caught almost in the act of murder, though the local paper, in those days of managed news, was more discreet—the case was closed, because the probable murderer was dead. Stan was found in New Orleans, where he’d gone with money Darwin Drood had provided him. He had not been molested and nothing was done to Drood, who retreated even more into the isolation of his decaying estate. I never saw Stan Chandler again because he was sent to an out-of-state camp and his family moved to Ohio, where I was told his father got a job at a research institute. Blaize survived only because Bergeron, having been alerted by his daughter, had called the sheriff before he set out with his rifle in hand. My father and Blanche St. Martin talked several times on the phone and, though I could not hear what they said, it was clear that the tenor was that our little group should be dissolved. Accordingly, Blaize went to a private Catholic boarding school for the remainder of his high school years and I saw him only once. We had little to say to each other.

  I never saw Michelle Bergeron again because I was never again allowed to go near the levee. At first I had resented her fleeing, but later I realized that, had she stayed, her father would never have come to save us.

  The solution to the case seemed grudgingly satisfactory, because no one had trouble believing Rufus Sikes was a killer. Gloria Santana had gone to the cemetery to meet someone that night, though who was never known. Toby liked to say it was Mr. Cornwall but that was only his speculation. Everyone else thought it more likely that it was her lover, Dr. Chandler. But Sikes had seen her there and, with his insane need to protect his domain, had stabbed her to death. There was no corroboration of other women killed and I gradually realized that was only hearsay from the folk along the River Road, who were willing to attribute any villainy to the old overseer. But there would always be a lingering doubt as to whether the right man had died. You could see it in peoples’ eyes, the tone of their voices, when Dr. Chandler’s name was mentioned. What if he really had made it out there that night? What if Sikes had just been a crazy old man but had taken no part in the teacher’s murder? What if it had been a member of the Chandler family? Stan’s mother or his older brother or even Stan?

  Long after the family moved, people sometimes joked that Gloria’s spirit inhabited the old Chandler house on LSU
Avenue, even though the murder had occurred miles away and she had never been known to set foot on the place.

  It is an odd fact that a few months after the death of Sikes Windsong burned to the ground, leaving only its brick columns standing. At first, there was talk of a faulty electrical connection, but then someone said the place hadn’t had electricity for years, so it must have been lightning, though there was no storm at the time. But I had my own theory and that was that it was done by its owner, Darwin Drood, who wanted to blot out all the pain it had come to represent for him.

  I was told he stayed out there, in the outbuilding he had made his home, but some time after I went away to college in Colorado he disappeared.

  Now, a lifetime later, I have faced the demons, but I am still dissatisfied. I had foolishly expected to come back to something that was the way I’d left it, look it in the eye, and tell it I wasn’t afraid, and yet everything is changed.

  Even Sikes’ face, which I cannot remember, because it resembles that of a man I saw die two months ago.

  So maybe none of the memories are true.

  Or all of them.

  I hear my name and turn.

  Someone is coming down the levee, toward me, and I wonder if it is a caretaker, come to run me off, except that there is no one who would recognize me after all these years.

  Then I see Blaize.

  “I saw your car down there,” he says, smiling. “I thought you might be here.”

  “I thought you avoided the levee.”

  “I did. But seeing you after all this time …” He heaves a deep breath. “I didn’t ask you to come, Colin. I didn’t want you to. But you did. And once you did it all came back.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugs, the same little shrug I remember from the old days.

  “It’s okay.”

  I nod at the borrow pit, half-hidden by the trees. “You were right. I couldn’t find the place.”

  “What do you think about the golf course?” he asks. “I didn’t tell you about that.”

  “I wonder if the people there know.”

  “I doubt it.”

  I breathe in the moisture-laden air.

  “How’s the asthma these days?”

  “Under control.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I was thinking about Stan,” I tell him. “I wonder if he has bad dreams.”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “But to know people were whispering about him, his mom, his father.”

  “It sucked, as the kids say.”

  I nod, kick at the ground as if the clump of grass at the toe of my shoe is an obstacle that must be removed.

  “I’m sorry I left you that night,” I finally manage.

  “If you’d stayed Sikes would have killed us both.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself, but we both know the truth: I ran away.”

  He stares into the trees. “We all run away from something.”

  I glance at him from the corner of my eye. There is something off-key about his tone.

  “But there’s just so far you can go,” he continues.

  “You didn’t run,” I say. “You stayed right here.”

  “I didn’t run because my mother wouldn’t let me. I was a St. Martin. St. Martins don’t run. But I ran, Colin. I ran inside. I ran from me.”

  “Well, we all do some of that.”

  “No.” His voice is firm, in the way it was so many years ago when he’d insisted we should go find Stan. “You don’t understand. That’s why I didn’t want to see you again. But maybe I was wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “Remember when we used to go around with Toby? Remember all those names he used to call me? How he used to joke about fags and blow jobs and queers.”

  “I remember.” My voice trails off as I glimpse where he is going.

  “It was a big deal then,” he says. “Proving you were a man. If you couldn’t prove you were a man, you were a girl. You had to prove you had balls. To everybody. Your parents, your friends, your teachers, yourself.”

  “It was a tough time.” Even to me my voice sounds weak, unconvincing. “We didn’t know much then.”

  “Nobody did,” he says angrily. “There was a lot of pain. You had to be what they expected. You had to live for them.”

  I wait, knowing better than to interrupt.

  “Well, I did for a long time. I did what they wanted. I did what she wanted. What she expected. I’m not sure she ever really wanted me to marry, because that meant leaving her. But she wanted the respectability of everybody’s knowing I was like everybody else.”

  “Blaize, you don’t have to explain.”

  “So I did it. I married the first woman who made herself available and we had a son. He’s a fine boy, too. He deserves better. But I just couldn’t be what they all wanted. I couldn’t be a husband or a son. I had to be what I was.” He turns to look me in the eye. “And what I was, was queer.”

  “Hey, it doesn’t matter.”

  “It took me a long while to realize it. I fought it, I really did. But it was there all along. Even back when I was with you guys I knew I was different. I think Toby knew it, too. That’s why he said all those things.”

  “Toby was full of shit.”

  Blaize nods. “He was about a lot of things. But not this. On this, he was dead on. He knew it before I did.”

  “And that’s why you didn’t want to see me,” I say. “Jesus, man, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Sure it matters. You just don’t understand why.”

  “No.”

  He reaches out then, rests a hand on my shoulder, soft as a caress, then turns.

  “Let’s go back. I want to take you somewhere.”

  “What?”

  He smiles. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to put a move on you.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Blaize, I didn’t think …”

  “Didn’t you? Sorry, maybe I’m too sensitive. Anyhow, I have a friend. We’ve been together since the year after the divorce.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Yeah. He’s HIV but things seem to be under control, at least for now.”

  We stand for a moment in awkward silence and then he nods at the top of the levee.

  “Come on home. I’d like you to meet him. Then there’s somewhere else I want to take you.”

  “Sure.”

  Phillip Rowell is a muscular, gray-haired man with sharply-chiseled features and piercing blue eyes. As we sit on the patio drinking lattes he tells me he’s a tax attorney with a firm whose name I don’t recognize but he is thinking of retiring in a year or two so he and Blaize can travel. When Blaize vanishes into the house, Phillip and I watch the blue jays splash in the birdbath near the wooden fence. He tells me he designed and built the backyard, with its fountain, stone-bordered gravel walk, and flowerbeds. He says the squirrels are a nuisance because they rob the bird feeder but that you could have worse problems.

  I like him at once and I guess his mentioning that he likes my books doesn’t hurt.

  “You know, Blaize has talked about you a lot,” he says.

  “Really? I thought that was a part of his life he wanted to forget.”

  “There are things you can try to forget but you never can. Besides, I think you were one of the bright parts of that time.”

  “He may not feel that way since I came back.”

  Phillip smiles and fingers the handle of his cup.

  “Your call was a surprise, of course. But I’m not sure that afterwards he didn’t decide it was something God had arranged to bring everything to an end and close the book. He’s lived with it for a long time, just like you have. When he told me what you’d told him on the phone, I told him he couldn’t put it aside any more.”

  Blaize reappears then, holding a pair of pants.

  “I think these will fit,” he says, handing them to me. “I hope you don’t mind, Phillip. You haven’t worn them for years
and you and Colin are about the same size. Colin can’t go off in pants that have a hole in the crotch.”

  Phillip chuckles. “We wouldn’t want that.”

  “You can change inside,” Blaize says.

  I don’t question, just take the pants, head into the living room and change while the two companions sit on the patio, talking. When I am done I rejoin them.

  “See?” Colin says. “Perfect.” He rises.

  “I’ll be back in a while,” he tells the other man, who nods.

  Blaize turns to me. “Do you know where Victorian Manor is?”

  “No.”

  “You can follow me, then. It’s just a couple of miles.”

  I follow him to a busy boulevard and turn left. Half a mile further, at a blinking traffic signal, we go left again, this time onto the grounds of what looks like a series of condos. There are palm trees and lawns that resemble Astroturf, and a sign that says VICTORIAN MANOR ASSISTED LIVING CONDOMINIUMS.

  We creep down the boulevard, passing over three speed bumps, and slide into parking places in front of the main building.

  When I get out Blaize waits in front of the big glass doors and explains:

  “My mother’s ninety-three. She may not recognize you. Sometimes she doesn’t even recognize me. But I wanted you to see her before you left. Little things mean a lot to her.”

  We enter a lobby smelling of vanilla air freshener and Blaize talks to a woman at a desk and she smiles. Then we head right, down a hallway, past an old man in a kimono, who leans heavily on a walker while his colostomy bag dangles from an aluminum rod.

  “It can be pretty depressing,” Blaize whispers. “That’s why I hate coming sometimes. But I try to make it a couple of times a week.”

  Blaize, always the dutiful son …

  We come to a closed door and he takes a deep breath.

  “Let me go in first,” he says. “Make sure she’s in a condition to see people.”

  I nod while he opens the door and then closes it behind him.

  I think of the execution chamber and shudder. Executions are over quickly, but here people linger until they degenerate into a vegetative state. I don’t want to be here, but there is no graceful way to refuse. And, besides, I sense Blaize has some reason.