Between Heaven and Here

by Susan Straight

  Marie-Claire said in French, “I know you, Gustave. I won’t say it.”

  He nodded. She had been his wife’s best friend. Her cousin. She wouldn’t say, A blessing Anjolie don’t see this.

  But it wasn’t true. Anjolie had known the whole time, ever since Glorette had not wanted to go to school or walk to Rio Seco with the others. She was too beautiful, and no one would leave her alone.

  Enrique stood beside him. He could smell the cigar smoke. Gustave knew Enrique would try to kill whoever had done this. Ever since he fed him meat still smoking and half-raw on the levee, in the dark, Gustave had taken care of Enrique. Then, Enrique had taken care of Gustave.

  Now Enrique said, “Let Marie-Claire sit with her,” and he took Gustave’s arm as if they were married and led him toward the barn.

  LAFAYETTE AND REYNALDO had parked their truck under the big sycamore tree near the barn. Enrique and Gustave sat at the wooden table where they worked on engine parts. Gustave picked up a new air filter from the bench. Glorette had put one around her throat when she was small and said it looked like a queen collar she had seen in history class.

  “How you bring her?” he asked now.

  Lafayette was thirty-seven, two years older than Glorette. He said, “The truck.”

  “How you find her?”

  Lafayette nodded to the third man, the one Gustave didn’t recognize. He wasn’t from Sarrat.

  “I found her in the alley off Palm, Mr. Picard,” the man said. “I’m Sidney Chabert. My papa used to work on your refrigerators and washers.”

  Gustave looked at the man’s dark bare chest, his ribs, a name tattooed over his heart. “Who that?”

  “My daughter. Sarena.”

  Gustave said, “Who kill Glorette?”

  Sidney squatted before him, forearms on his knees, and said quietly, “Mr. Picard. I knew Glorette way back in school. I saw her around the alley before. You know. I’m sorry.” He paused for balance, and said, “I work at the video store, and I was walking home, and she was in the alley. First she was—she was waiting for some dude, looked like, near a shopping cart. Then her friend came by.”

  “Tall one?” Gustave said. Since his daughter had left home, she had always run with a tall, dark, scar-faced woman. Friends with that one and never the other girls from Sarrat.

  “Yeah,” Sidney said. “They were talking in the alley. I mean, that woman was talking, and Glorette didn’t say nothing. So maybe she was already—you know. When I went back out to the alley, no one was around, and Glorette was in a shopping cart.”

  “Who put her there?”

  Sidney shook his head. “Coulda been her friend. Sisia. But I know who didn’t do it. Them drug dealers didn’t do it—cause they would just shot her, from a distance. That’s how they do. They don’t get up close and touch nobody.”

  Enrique had been listening. He said, “Alfonso work that alley. He got a gun. He run with them.” Gustave remembered the boy—Bettina’s son.

  Sidney went on, “And I don’t think some—customer—did it, cause he woulda left a mark. Maybe Sisia. Maybe they had a fight. But the way Glorette looked—I think she smoked too much rock and had a heart attack.”

  Gustave watched Sidney rise and bend over as if he couldn’t breathe himself. “Chabert. From New Orleans?”

  Sidney sighed. “You know what? My papa was from New Orleans. But I’m from here. Rio Seco. We’re all from here.”

  Gustave stared at him. Not a boy. A man. It was hard to see that sometimes. “Why you ain’t call the police?”

  Sidney threw back his head like he was studying the stars. But these young men didn’t know the stars. Then he said, “I didn’t want them to disrespect her. The way they would talk about her, poke around. They wouldn’t care who killed her. So I took her to Lafayette and Reynaldo. They could take her home.” He folded his arms and his daughter’s tattooed name was gone. “But we could all get arrested. Me for sure. Moving a body. I need to get my ass home now.”

  “You touch her? Earlier?”

  “Mr. Picard,” Sidney said, “I always looked at Glorette. I ain’t gon lie. Every brotha in Rio Seco looked at her. But I never touched her. I ain’t had nothin she wanted.”

  Then he walked from the barnyard and headed out the narrow gravel road through the groves toward the canal, where Enrique had put a gate all those years ago. The canal bridge was the only way in or out of Sarrat, and the gate was locked. Only people who lived in Sarrat had a key.

  Lafayette watched him go. “He gon walk back to Rio Seco,” Lafayette said. “Man, that brotha was sprung on Glorette all his life, and he ain’t talked to her but three, four times, he told me.”

  “Sprung?” Gustave said, watching the small figure enter the tunnel of orange trees.

  “Serious love,” Reynaldo said behind him. “Like a disease.”

  Gustave drank some of the coffee from Enrique’s old silver thermos. Sprung. That’s what they called his daughter. Sprung for something that looked like nothing more than a pill of old Ajax, dried on the edge of a sink. Something that entered her throat and lungs and brain to make the world look like—like what? What had that smoke done, all those years? He tasted the coffee. Dark, roasted black every morning when Marie-Claire moved the pan over the flames. The same way his wife Anjolie had done, even the week before she died. He had smelled these beans all his life. His first memory—his mother roasting the beans and putting one in her mouth, and Gustave tasting one and nearly choking at the burnt bitterness.

  Enrique poured himself a cup and they waited. He could hear Enrique’s throat work.

  Coffee beans and rice and sugar cane. What they had lived on in Louisiana.

  Pig. Pig meat.

  Gustave put his head down on his arms like a child, on the smooth oily table. The smell of wood.

  The woman named Net. Her body floating down the water with trees and snakes and cows and foam.

  Enrique drank the last of the coffee and set his cup down so gently that Gustave heard the tap like a child’s finger on the wood. The men waited. Gustave lifted his head and said, “I come right back. I try to call her boy.”

  He walked unsteadily to his house. He could feel himself leaning to the left. He needed a Swisher Sweet. Then the smoke would gather tears onto his face and hold them until they dried like spiderwebs on his cheeks.

  The small cigar made the sounds of tiny coals glistening. Fire. The coyotes in the river bottom laughed their eerie song, so different from the night sounds of Louisiana.

  The Barbie dolls sat on the windowsill with their tiny shoes, heels pointing down like needles. He hadn’t wanted to live with anyone, to marry anyone, because then there would be a body someday. Enrique had known that. Gustave was forty when he went back to Louisiana to marry Anjolie. She was nineteen then, when he brought her here.

  Now Glorette’s body lay inside the house. The coyotes laughed again, maybe six or seven of them. What did they smell?

  Night was when he’d killed the pig. He could smell the blood. The people left on the levee were starving. Meat had floated past for days, but nobody would touch it. The big woman named Net watched the babies cry and cry until the sound was like a saw rasping in the wood she cut up for a fire, and then the cries faded while their eyes grew bigger and sunk into holes in their skulls.

  Skulls didn’t surface until months after the water had gone down. The memory was eighty years old, and yet at night he could smell the water, and the sickly sweetness of unwashed bodies and death, and the blood in the smoke near him and Enrique. Enrique’s eyes wide and flat and dull.

  The soldiers had come. They pointed their rifles at the men and herded them into their boats, told them they were headed to weak points in the levee overlooking Mr. McQuine’s plantation fields. They would fill sandbags all day and into the night, and then they could come back for Red Cross beans boiled with some oil and salt. That was what they left for the Negroes. It was marked on the boxes. Everyone knew what the N really m
eant.

  The soldiers stood up in the boats like tall herons, one pointing his gun at Gustave’s head. “That one ten or so. Worked in the field. He can work now.”

  The woman named Net pulled Gustave to her, next to her son Enrique. “Seven,” she said. “Only seven.”

  The one man left behind was old, his legs thin and shiny, the skin stretched too tight over his ankle bones. He slept without moving.

  The women broke up their chairs and lit the legs on fire under the one huge pot. They waited for the men, who never came back.

  The two soldiers who had stayed sat on the far end of the levee, smoking, talking to each other, their guns held loose and slanted. They’d told the women and old man not to touch the pigs, or any of the animals in the water.

  Those cows and pigs and horses—Gustave knew whose they were, and so did everyone else. The men had known, before the soldiers took them away. He’d heard them talking up on the levee, with chairs and blankets and children piled around them, waiting for a barge to move them to dry ground because someone had gone past in a small pirogue and said the steamboats took only white people. The men couldn’t pull out a cow still alive and bawling; they couldn’t shoot a pig from the small bunch that had gathered at the far end of the levee, couldn’t do the boucherie right there and feed all the people because that was stealing from Mr. McQuine or any of the other men who owned every tree and fence and horse. The soldiers would arrest them even if the animals had swum right out of their fences and would end up in the Gulf or die on the levee because no grass was left.

  But the men were gone, and then the beans had been eaten and the people were hungry again. The two soldiers looked bored and afraid, but they ate something from their bags. Then they slept, sitting up, their white chins like stone in the hard moonlight off the water.

  Gustave pulled the smoke deep into his lungs. The soft soft lungs that filled with smoke, or water, or air, or nothing. The old man died that night. When they rolled his body into a blanket and left it there near the boxes, Gustave found a hammer. He lay with it under his arm, and the next night, he crept down the levee to the place where the pigs had gathered, and with the hammer, he hit the small mud-covered skull of the one close to him. The pig was young, the size of a sack of rice, and it jerked and snuffled and squealed and then looked into his eyes. Black seeds. He hit and hit until the skull melted into the mud and the snuffling stopped and the other pigs screamed, but he dragged the small pig behind him into the shelter of the weeds. He ran back to the levee camp and shook the huge shoulder of Antoinette.

  Her apron had once been white and was now gray and brown and even red with blood, where Enrique had a nosebleed from crying for too long. She was not soft. Her shoulder was hard like the pig’s ham, the top of the leg.

  Gustave said, “I seen your knife. I got a pig.”

  Crouched in the weeds beside him, she slit the pig’s belly, and the entrails steamed until she threw them into the swaying water. Oil slicks washed past like islands of rainbow. Branches and roof shingles and sometimes a body, floating facedown, brought to the surface by the air trapped under the shirt, like pillows sewn under the cloth. Only the back and shoulders and thighs showed. Dress or coat stretched tight.

  Gustave watched the ribs. Net wrenched the knife into the side meat. “Them soldiers come back, they smell smoke. Hurry.”

  She chopped at the soft flesh and he held up the hams that were not ham yet. Ham was pink and feathery and salty. This meat was slippery, and somehow he could see through the thin parts to the bone.

  Net cradled more bloody meat in her apron and headed up the levee to the embers she had never let die since the boat had dropped them there, on the narrow rise of land that looked like a long road. Gustave had tried to walk it once when the soldiers first left, but when he looked back and couldn’t see any of the people, Net’s tignon like a puff of smoke rising from her head, the old man’s white handkerchief laid on his forehead, he stopped. Ahead was nothing, only the levee thin and green, drowned trees on one side, and brown water sliding past near his feet.

  He washed his face now, in his kitchen, and leaned over the sink. Then he got out the piece of paper from the top drawer. The ten numbers. He dialed carefully, his finger barely fitting inside the circle, the metal pinching his skin. The cricket trill of ringing. Then a voice. “Hey.”

  Gustave said, “Hello. Victor. This your grandpère.”

  Then the voice said, “Gotcha. If you gettin this message, you ain’t gettin me. Leave me the digits.”

  HE WALKED BACK toward Enrique’s house. The men were still at the table, waiting for him, their cigarettes red embers in the dark.

  Was his grandson sleeping? Hungry? Where was he? In a car? Wearing his headphones? If he woke up and his mother wasn’t there, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  Inside the house, Marie-Claire had tied something around Glorette’s jaw. Her mouth was closed now. “No purse? Nothing?” he asked, and Marie-Claire shook her head.

  Gustave didn’t even know where she lived. No address, no license on his daughter. He looked at her bare toes, her cracked heels. She’d walked enough miles, as if she lived in another time. The men had gathered around Lafayette’s truck now. They had to go get her son.

  Sidney Chabert might know where he was.

  THEY SAW HIM walking along the road that led back into Rio Seco. Dark back gleaming with sweat. Gustave was sitting in the truckbed, on a crate, his back to the cab. He said to Reynaldo, “Where his shirt?”

  Reynaldo said, “Back here. He wrapped her up in it, when he was carrying her.”

  When Lafayette’s truck came upon Sidney, he stopped and stared straight ahead, as if at a rabbit. He was afraid they didn’t believe his story. He was afraid they were going to kill him. Rio Seco people knew Sarrat was another world. Some of them maybe knew how Enrique and Gustave had gotten here, about the man Enrique had killed in Louisiana, from the stories Sarrat daughters had told to Rio Seco fools who thought the girls were country and pretty and light-skinned and dim-witted.

  “Where she live now?” Gustave called hoarsely to Sidney.

  “Jacaranda Gardens,” Sidney said.

  “Show me where,” Gustave said. “I want my grandson.”

  Sidney climbed into the truck bed and Gustave threw him his shirt.

  They were silent while the truck moved along the asphalt road toward the city. Only two miles. All the Sarrat children walked to school in Rio Seco along this road, and walked home, for years. Lafayette and Reynaldo had married Sarrat girls, but they lived in the city now. Only a few people were left in the ten bungalows along Gustave’s street.

  “You ever touch a dead body?” Sidney asked.

  Gustave listened to the tires popping over fallen palm fronds. “Oui,” he said. “Only one time. I was seven, me, and Enrique was three. Flood of 1927 come. Take my maman body and our house, and I never see her again. We stay on the levee. High ground. About a hundred people, wait for days for a boat. Them soldier come and take the men, say they have to work the crevasse. Where the water run into the farm. They point the gun for the men get in the boat, say, Time to work, nigger.”

  Sidney was silent.

  “No food. We wait for the food, or the boat. One baby die, and then an old man. I touch him. We wrap him in a blanket, and the baby. We can’t bury. Water everywhere. They sit right next to us.”

  Enrique’s head leaned against the glass of the cab window. His hair was flattened and gray. His son turned the wheel, and the truck moved onto Palm Avenue, the main street, past the packinghouse where they delivered the citrus, and then into the business district, where markets and dry cleaners and taco places had darkened windows.

  Sidney said, “What you all gonna do with Glorette?”

  Gustave didn’t answer. He wanted to see the alley. Back in Louisiana, they call it allee. A lane of oak trees that led to Seven Oaks, the white home with black shutters.

  “Tell Lafayette where you find her,” he s
aid, and Sidney said Spanish words to Lafayette through the cab window.

  “El Ojo de Agua.”

  “What that say?” Gustave asked.

  “The Eye of Water,” Sidney said. “I don’t know what it means. What they named the taqueria. Must be something from Mexico.”

  No shopping cart in the alley behind the taco place. The truck idled at the mouth of the dirt lane, the chainlink fence, the closed doors of buildings, the dumpster. Sidney said, “I took the cart to Sundown Liquor because I knew they’d be there.”

  His daughter’s body had floated in the cart, like a metal pirogue canoe, down the dusty alley. His mother’s body, floated from her bed to the Gulf. His father’s body, buried before anyone knew who he was. His daughter, lying on the couch with Marie-Claire humming beside her, as if she were only napping. His wife Anjolie, dead of a diabetic coma, lying in the cemetery at the edge of the orange groves. She’d never told anyone about her headaches, her dizziness, her fainting.

  Sidney had done the right thing. The empty alley—no police would care, and the men who drove around the alleys to look for Glorette would find other women—maybe her friend Sisia. Only that woman, and Victor, would know she was gone.

  Enrique said, “No place to die.” His eyes were red and muddy when he looked at Gustave. Enrique said to Sidney, “You find her here? You ain’t play with us? You ain’t touch her?”

  Sidney said, “I ain’t lying. I found her right there.” He pointed to a spot near some weeds, at the fence. “Her son came into the video store last month. Said they didn’t even have a TV at his place, but he had to watch some history movie at his friend’s house. I asked if he was okay, and he said you gave him a cell in case of emergency.”