Asked for a writing sample, she carefully fills the lines with her most disciplined schoolgirl script. If only Sister Mary Margaret, who taught her penmanship in second grade, were here to watch. Asked to write the numbers one through ten, Juliet neglects to include the number seven and her lazy nine is nearly identical to her exuberant six. “Are you dyslexic?” asks the graphoanalyst.
“I am, yes.” But after a pause she says, “Don’t hold me to that.”
An examiner collects her fingerprints as well, even though a set complete with a palm print already has been culled from a secondary source.
“What I should test is your blood alcohol level and throw you in the drunk tank,” Peroux tells her. “We’re going to have to do this all over again.”
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant.”
“Tell me what’s going on inside your head, Miss Beauvais. I don’t understand. You think this is a game?”
“No, Lieutenant. Last night I got depressed. It was Mother. I kept flashing to Son—” She stops to collect herself, shakes her head. “I kept seeing the killer beating her with that club. I know the terror she experienced. I was beaten myself, remember? Unable to sleep, I’m afraid I overindulged. I’m a nervous wreck this morning.”
The detective stares. “Go back to your hotel, Miss Beauvais.”
“He won’t come again for me, will he, Lieutenant?”
“Miss Beauvais? Go home. Just go home. And make sure somebody else drives.”
Later that day Leonard takes her to the Vieux Carré and they walk the streets drinking twenty-four-ounce go-cups topped with frozen margarita. Shopping the windows on Royal Street, Juliet lists the things she’ll soon come back to buy and Leonard blows riffs on an imaginary horn. On Bourbon Street they toss coins at black boys tap-dancing to jazz music spilling from a corner club and in Pirate’s Alley they pause to pet the hot, sweating necks of police saddlebreds standing unattended near the town house where William Faulkner once lived. At Jackson Square, hot and sweating themselves now, they lounge under the trees and watch the artists stationed along the great black fence. “I’m disappointed,” Juliet says, sprawled out in the grass. “The funniest thing in the world? It’s Sonny LaMott and his red cart, little pictures hanging everywhere.”
“He just stands there with a thumb up his ass,” Leonard adds.
“Looking stupid.”
“Looking real stupid.”
“Shut up, Leonard.”
She passes out finally in the ladies’ room at the Old Absinthe House, and yet half an hour later, after being carried out to the street, she manages to rally and follow Leonard all the way to the entrance to Saint Louis Cemetery Number 1 on Basin Street.
Here Juliet struggles to focus on a blurry and half-seen image from long ago. The picture, pulled from her own private gallery of things that went wrong, is in exceptionally poor shape today: what could be old varnish yellows the surface and soot and crazing obscure the details. She and Sonny and his father’s truck and the rain lashing the windshield. They were going to Gravier Street. The smell of oil and the windshield wipers refusing to work and feeling no different really than when she wasn’t pregnant. They stopped here on the side of the road, in this very spot. Right by the meter there. “Let’s turn back,” Sonny said then, pleading. And Juliet repeats these words now. Her voice is a whisper. “It’s not too late.”
“What?” Leonard looks at his watch. “After walking all the way over here?”
“It’s not too late,” she says again.
“Yes, it is, goddammit. It is too late.”
The party man shows up. He is a boy of perhaps thirteen. You can see the waistband of his boxers, small hearts impaled with arrows. His navel, also visible, looks like a maraschino cherry precisely centered in his lower belly. Clusters both of whiskers and acne mark his small, moon-shaped face and he has the wrecked voice of a three-pack-a-day smoker. When he isn’t watching the street, he’s watching the cemetery behind him. “Marie Laveau is in that tomb right there,” the boy explains. “She comes out at night and walks around putting curses on people.”
“Isn’t she a skeleton yet?” Juliet says.
“Hell no. She’s a voodoo queen.”
“What’s your name, little man?”
“What’s my name?”
“I only ask out of a genuine interest in your personal well-being,” Juliet says. “I was wondering if you might like to expand your horizons in the American workforce.”
“I know what you mean. You mean like a pizza route in one of them cars with a flag on the antenna.”
“This is better,” Juliet assures him. “I’ve got this particular item and I’m recruiting an individual to take it someplace and place it somewhere. You think you might be interested in a job like that?”
“No, I don’t.” He’s watching cars pass by. He doesn’t look at her.
“But you can fit this thing in the palm of your hand, it’s that small. And you won’t have to take it far, take you ten minutes. You take it to a parking garage in the Quarter and drop it off in this cart I’ll give you directions to. You do it late at night when no one’s around.”
“And it blows up because it’s a bomb, right? No, ma’am, none of that shit.”
“It’s an hourglass. ’Bout yay big.”
He thinks about it awhile. He shrugs.
“Twenty-five dollars,” Leonard tells him.
The boy doesn’t respond.
“Would you do it for fifty?” Juliet says. She looks at Leonard, whose money she’s spending, after all. “You could do it for fifty, right?”
The boy watches Leonard with the recognition that here is one motherfucker to be concerned about. “Fifty if that’s all I have to do. Drop it in a cart.”
Less than twenty minutes later they consume the powder in Leonard’s room with the aid of a rolled-up dollar bill and Juliet, after snorting more than is sensible, blows a gob of pink-stained mucus into the tail of a bedsheet. “Sonny was never right for me,” she says, “but I did like to kiss him. His breath was always nice. He kept his teeth immaculate.”
“You’ll have to include that in your memoirs.”
“I asked him once why he never had bad breath and he said the trick was to swallow a little mouthwash after you finished gargling in the morning. He said the taste stayed in your mouth.”
“That, too.”
At daybreak they turn off the television and Leonard surrenders to sleep on the shag rug while Juliet, who is naked but for a pair of pink socks, sits beside him with ocean sounds sloshing around in her head. Her hands shake and her mouth is so parched that her lips stick together. A trickle of something keeps emerging from her right nostril, while her left one merely burns. She removes the hourglass from a rumpled Schwegmann’s bag and turns it over, letting the sand run.
What is the good of time, she’d like to know, if it stays perpetually stuck in 1971, visiting again and again the year when her mother killed her father and her volvo was scarred forever?
“There is no forever,” Juliet says out loud to the room.
A stirring from Leonard but nothing more.
“There’s yesterday, though. Shit yeah. There’s always that.”
She and Leonard sleep until late afternoon. When they wake he goes to the bathroom and relieves himself in an erratic stream. “When Roland would piss it was like a horse.”
“Who’s Roland?”
“Who’s Roland?”
And in that instant she remembers. “Oh, okay. Was that his name?” Juliet, still on the floor, rolls over and looks for something to cover herself with. “I don’t think I ever went with any Rolands before. A Ronald, maybe. Maybe two or three Ronalds.” All she can find is newspaper, but that is fine. “Whatever happened to that boy?”
“Went back to the wife.”
“Know what I still don’t get? I still don’t understand how someone can be gay and straight both at the same time?”
“Yours is not to understand,” Leonar
d answers. “It’s love, baby.”
He returns to the room and in the imperfect light from the window she can see what kind of old man Leonard will turn out to be. Rings of blubber around his gut, scraps of frizz for hair, long nose with bumps, no penis to speak of, a feminine chest with spark plug nipples that could use training in a brassiere. Like Anthony, Leonard was just an underage boy then, but Juliet still can’t see what her father possibly could have liked about him.
Juliet stands and her brain seems to expand in her skull and the pain makes her wonder if maybe she wouldn’t be better off beaten and strangled to death herself. She takes the hourglass off the table and throws it from hand to hand, tossing it higher each time. “Knowing Sonny he finds this in his cart and takes it as a message I still love him.”
Leonard checks the top of the dresser for remnants of last night but there is none. A look of profound disappointment comes to his face.
“Don’t pout,” Juliet tells him. “It was mostly baby powder anyway.”
On the Chef Menteur Highway they make their usual stop for provisions, and today along with the shrimp bait and pork rinds Sonny buys a fifth of whiskey.
They take turns with the bottle and by the time they reach the Rigolets Sonny can barely keep the truck on the road and Mr. LaMott is sleeping with his back against the door, head lolling, neck bent like the stalk of a flower with too big a blossom. Whiskey stains the front of his shirt and a rope of drool hangs from his chin. It is early afternoon and the parking lot at Captain Bruce’s holds only a couple of pickups, a refrigerator truck and a late-model Cadillac Seville tattooed with Saints stickers on the rear bumper. Along with the beer neons, Christmas tree lights burn in the window of the building despite the fact that the holiday is more than seven months away. A cowbell clatters when Sonny pushes the door open.
“This ain’t your regular time,” Captain Bruce says from behind the bar.
“I had a day off. Daddy wanted to do something.”
The captain is peeling boiled shrimp piled high on a platter. He laughs and shows the pink ground meat on his tongue. “Other than just sit there looking like a retard, you mean?”
“What did you say?”
“The last time your daddy wanted to do something he did it in his pants.”
In the corner a kid is playing pinball, banging his groin against the machine. On one of the stools, bellied up to the counter, an old fart in a baseball cap drinks beer from a can. “Mind if we fish from your dock?” Sonny says.
Another look at the shrimp in his mouth. “Not so long as you pay me my fee.”
Sonny hands over five one-dollar bills and starts back outside.
“Next time it’ll be double,” says the captain, then drops a heavy fist on the counter. “He scares my fish away.”
The pinball player lets the machine go silent. The beer drinker, lowering his can, mutters, “Now that’s some ice cold shit, Cap’n.”
Sonny ties his father’s waist with the rope and gives him a couple of folding chairs to carry, then he collects the fishing gear and leads the way to the pier. If not for the breeze off the lake the heat would be too much to tolerate. Sonny gives his father the bottle of whiskey and tells him to drink up but his father is unable to do so. Mr. LaMott slumps in a chair, the straw hat on his head giving a latticed effect to the shadow on his face.
“We’d better catch something,” Sonny says. “This is it, our last time.”
Mr. LaMott doesn’t respond but to gurgle and nod and Sonny takes the bottle from his hands and puts it on the warped gray boards. He tears a shrimp in half and baits his father’s hook and casts about thirty yards out. “You hear me, Daddy? This is it. Let’s catch us some big ones.”
He fits the rod in his father’s hands but his father is sleeping.
“I never thought I’d live all that long anyway,” Sonny says. “I always had a feeling.” He could be talking to himself in an empty room at home. Talking to a barge on the river. Talking to a piece of raw canvas before he primes it and starts with the underpaint. “Maybe that’s why I wanted to make a mark when I was still young,” Sonny says. “After Juliet left I thought if I could do some nice paintings that would be enough. You think I was wrong?”
When his father doesn’t answer, Sonny unties the rope around his own waist and drops it to the boards. He kneels on the edge of the pier and bends over lowering his rod into the water until the water creeps up past his elbow and chops hard against his face. He still hasn’t touched bottom.
“That’s at least eight feet,” he says to Mr. LaMott.
Sonny takes a seat and drinks more whiskey and wonders why he never thought to paint the Rigolets. “I was good painting Juliet,” he says. “Just admit that. I could really paint that woman. Everything else might not’ve been so great, but my Juliets had something. Know what they had?” His father doesn’t respond and Sonny says, “It’s called immortality. Not to brag or anything, but that’s what they had. You looked at one and you knew you were seeing the big way a man can love a woman. Why am I talking like this, Daddy? These words I’m using, are you as embarrassed as I am? Jeez!” But Sonny doesn’t stop. “I guess I let her do all she did to me,” he says, “because I knew to let her go was to lose forever the one thing that made me any good.”
Sonny removes the old man’s hat and places his hand on top of his head. “Mama wouldn’t want you having to live out your days in the home without me, Daddy. Hey, you. Hey, Pops. You taking any of this down?”
The shrimp boats on the water, the men made old young by the sun and the sea, the shanty camps on stilts at the end of long weed-choked dirt roads. Why didn’t he paint any of it?
Mr. LaMott’s rod falls to the floor and Sonny places it next to his. He doesn’t bother to reel in the line. The restaurant behind them is quiet, the blinds closed. No one fishes from the piers nearby. Sonny spends a long time looking at his father, trying to recall how he was before the Alzheimer’s advanced to where he stopped being recognizable to anyone who knew him.
Sonny has his father’s nose and eyes. But his hair is like his mother’s was. He doesn’t know where his ears come from. They’re smaller and better formed than Mr. LaMott’s. The source of his big lantern jaw is also a mystery.
Sonny’s hands begin to shake and it’s hard for him to breathe for the tightening of his chest. You should be happy, he tells himself. It’s the right thing to do. The only thing. He pulls the old man out of the chair, surprised by the weight. He kicks the fishing gear out of the way and drags him over to the end of the pier where it’s deepest and lifts him to stand against a piling with his back to the water. Mr. LaMott mumbles. He seems to be coming to. His tongue is heavy in his mouth as he tries to speak. “No red pepper,” he seems to say.
“No red pepper?”
“I don’t want any.”
The wind is coming strong and wet now and it blows Sonny’s shirt flapping against his body and throws his hair back in a flutter. Mr. LaMott’s hat flies off his head and lands in the water and drifts in the ripples toward the shore.
In the end it isn’t necessary to give his father a push. Mr. LaMott starts to pitch forward, then he loses his balance and drops to the black water without any attempt to break his fall. There’s hardly a splash. The rope screams against the boards and goes slack and Sonny can see the blurred yellow shape that is his father growing smaller as it descends. Sonny sits on the pier and takes a swallow from the bottle and when he looks again the shape resembles an angel with wings fighting for purchase against the darkness all around. Sonny drinks and he feels he has to vomit and more rope pays out. He waits then scrambles to his feet and frantically yanks at the rope until the yellow shape comes back into view.
When his father reaches the surface he comes up gasping and flailing his arms and water balloons his clothes and his hair fans out white in a single wave.
“I’m sorry,” Sonny shouts in a panic. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”
He loops the rope
around a piling and reaches down sobbing and grabs his father by the belt and pulls him up fighting to the dock. Mr. LaMott coughs roughly and he is stronger than Sonny imagined. He lies on his side holding his arms at his chest and Sonny lies beside him and puts an arm around him pulling him close. A long time passes before his father’s body stops shaking and quiets and he seems to sleep. “I’m sorry,” Sonny says again, whispering. “I didn’t mean it.”
He decides to abandon the fishing supplies and the bottle. The chairs. He lifts Mr. LaMott in his arms and carries him to the truck. His father shakes as if from the cold and his scalp is pink past the ribbons of matted hair. More cars and pickups fill the lot now and a woman watches from the building, her face colored red and green by the lights in the window. “Is that a person?” she calls in a drunken voice. “Hey, what are you doing with that person?”
My Juliet: A Novel Page 27
