Between Heaven and Here Page 3

  Chess opened his mouth and Sidney said, “Back up off me tonight, man, I ain’t in the mood. Just walk away. I gotta talk to Lafayette.”

  “What the fuck wrong with you?” Chess said. “You never come to Sundown cause you don’t want to make chit-chat with—”

  Sidney said, “I see Archuleta in there behind the counter, okay? I know—I burned up his leg. Now get in your Bronco with this fool and go. We got business.” Lafayette stood up and Sidney remembered his father speaking French to Enrique Antoine out in Sarrat, carrying the swamp cooler. Sidney said to Lafayette, “Li cousine. Mouri. Pas moi.” He shrugged to say he didn’t know who’d killed her.

  Chess said, “You just babblin.”

  “Lousana brothers crazy and shit,” the other man said, but he followed Chess to the Bronco. Sidney waited until it started up. Not the alley. Down Palm. Uh-huh.

  Sidney took the Antoine brothers to the alley. “Glorette,” he said. “I saw her in the alley when I came out the taco place. Then I heard her friend Sisia talkin to her.”

  “They fightin?” Lafayette said.

  “No, like—sad.” Sidney nodded. “Sisia had to been who put her in the cart. But I don’t know how she died. Maybe a heart attack. All that rock.”

  “Why you bring her here?” Reynaldo said, toothpick like a catfish barb at the side of his mouth. He looked like he didn’t believe Sidney hadn’t been the one, maybe, to kill her.

  Sidney folded his arms over his chest. The air brushed his collarbone. “What the cops gon do but laugh? What the morgue gon do but cut her up? Don’t y’all want her back in Sarrat? You got that cemetery.” He paused. “I heard her father wish she was home.”

  Lafayette nodded. “He keep her son sometime. Feed him.” He stared at Sidney, his eyes that strange green, like he was making up his mind. Lafayette loved to fight. He’d broken jaws and noses in high school. Sidney kept his eyes hard. He didn’t blink until Lafayette moved his hand to Reynaldo. “Get the truck.”

  The truck rumbled up the alley, and Lafayette said quickly, “Qui sais?” Who knows?

  Sidney said, “Only me. And Sisia. If she did it, she won’t say nothin. All she want is rock or money.” He looked down at Glorette’s hair, the wild strands he’d smoothed when he put her inside his shirt. “I never saw a purse or keys or nothin. Just this bag.”

  He handed Lafayette the bag of ramen and Lafayette said, “Glorette live on air. But she try to feed that boy.”

  They glanced around the alley and then lifted her into the truckbed, among the plastering tools and tarps. Lafayette covered her with a thick tarp, and when her face was gone Sidney leapt up into the truckbed beside her. “What you gon do?” Reynaldo said.

  “Cops see us, tell the truth. They don’t, tell her dad when we get out to your place.” And hope I don’t see your pops, he thought. Cause my pops made him sound like a stone cold killer—the way he did that white man.

  The truck swayed around the corner and headed down Palm. Sidney rested his head against the cab window. He didn’t want to see Sisia, or the Navigator, so he closed his eyes until he felt the dirt road that led to Sarrat. Then he reached down slowly, so Reynaldo wouldn’t see the movement, and uncovered her left foot.

  Marry me. He felt her toe cold and smooth as plastic.

  Her toenails had no polish. Her heels were cracked and dirty, like someone had drawn designs there with black pen. Puckered scar—as if from a cigarette burn—near her ankle, pink as gum.

  They crossed the canal bridge, the water sliding metallic beneath, and then in the tunnel of orange trees he slipped the toe ring into his pocket and breathed in the scent of white blossoms on the dark branches.

  EL OJO DE AGUA

  IT WASN’T DREAMING, because he wasn’t in his bed and he wasn’t asleep. He was in his chair, before the fire in winter, or before the screen door in summer, and it was always near midnight.

  He was sleeping on the levee, during the flood of 1927, the way they had all curled in on themselves to keep warm there on the mud—even the grown men and women, if they were small and flexible. The big woman called Net couldn’t sleep like that. She lay on her back, her stomach to the moon, three children tethered to her by strong fingers in their hair or an arm over their bodies. Gustave watched them in the moonlight, like animal babies angling for food.

  But there was no food, after three days. They had been working in the cane when the water came like a carpet unrolling before them. They carried only their hoes and lunch buckets.

  His mother had been stung by something in the field the day before. A spider? Her ankle was huge and swollen. She stayed in their room to sleep. The water erased all ten houses near Bayou Becasse, farthest from the fields.

  They waited for a boat. The water stopped rising about ten feet from the top of the levee. In the daytime, all they could see was the yellow-brown water, dirty and surging up near the people. The water slapped itself in wavelets and sucked on itself in circles. An entire world was under the water.

  Far away, near the edge of sight, he saw two roof spires. The church and the school. The rest of the scattered houses of Sarrat and Bayou Becasse were gone. Oak and pecan trees showed only their crowns, branches laid like veins atop the water. Snakes waited in the branches, measuring the distance to the levee.

  Gustave heard the voices: “I ain’t eat no snake, me. Ain’t no Indian. I want some meat but not no snake.”

  It was not a dream, but he was not awake. He slept in his chair, up-right, before the open screen door.

  On the levee, he had curled himself so hard against the cold he felt his backbone bend like wet willow. Dogs and cats covered their faces with their tails, but he had nothing. Just a shirt and pants dirty from cane. No lunch. He’d been hoping to share with someone. Two men sat on boxes, keeping watch. He didn’t know them. They were from another place.

  They were watching for a boat, for soldiers, for someone.

  Sometimes a dead pig or cow floated past. The ears so small. The hooves like gray plates.

  THE PHONE WAS a black cricket in the kitchen, but by the time he realized it was not a cricket and he’d gotten up from his chair and made his way to the back, the noise stopped. Gustave watched the phone’s circular dial. His daughter Glorette always made fun of the phone, when she was young and had gone to the houses of school friends in Rio Seco, away from where they lived in Sarrat, the place he and Enrique had made here in California. Princess phones were pink and gold, she said. Wall phones were like house slippers.

  Gustave leaned on the counter near the phone, in case it rang again. It would not be Glorette. His daughter had never called him, not in the five years since her mother died. He couldn’t give her anything but money, and she only wanted money to buy drugs. But her son Victor may have called. In the moving every three months from apartment to apartment, just ahead of eviction, and in the way Glorette lived with thieves and fools, now and then Victor was hungry and desperate. Gustave had bought him a cell phone for emergencies.

  He opened the lid on the pot of beans he’d made earlier. The beans breathed when he blew on them to see if they were soft. He thought of his mother, standing over the embers of the cook-fire, making cornbread.

  Victor used to stay for a week or so with Gustave and his wife back when he was six or seven, when things got bad. Gustave could still drive and he’d stop by the rented house and find the boy sitting in the kitchen with his schoolbooks and paper and a mask like Mardi Gras on his face, but not a smiling mask. Only his eyes moved. His mother had been gone all night. He’d eaten Corn Pops dry in a bowl, the yellow dust clinging to his lips.

  Anjolie made corn bread every night. Cush-cush in the morning, the corn mush laced with molasses. And on Saturday, beans and rice. Meat attached to a bone. Rib meat. Chicken backs. Neck bones floating like a puzzle on top of the water. His grandson would put the neck bones into his mouth and frown until Gustave said, “Fish them out with your finger, oui, they just the taste now. The meat cook down
.”

  Victor had called three months before. He had the flu, and his mother hadn’t been home in three days. He had tests in school. Gustave found the apartment called The Riviera and brought money and medicine. TheraFlu and Advil. That was what his grandson asked for. In the cup-boards there were packets of noodles that looked like clumsy lace, and in the refrigerator there was soda. Gustave said, “Come and stay with me. Eat some meat and oranges. We get you a ride to that school, there.”

  His grandson lay on a mattress and said, “I’ma graduate in June. I can walk now. I’m cool, Grandpère. Thanks.”

  Gustave heard voices now through the open kitchen window, someone talking up the road near Enrique’s house. The window was open to catch the cool night air. All the houses except Enrique’s were three rooms, shotgun style, like Louisiana. The scent of orange blossoms was stronger back here, closer to the trees. When Enrique had brought him here, in the winter of 1957, there were flowers and fruit on the trees at the same time. January. They picked the oranges the next morning and the flowers fell like white stars. Enrique said, “You can have that house, for when you bring Anjolie from Louisiana. When you marry her.”

  Gustave had eaten a plate of food on the porch that night, the way his own mother had at the end of a hot day when she couldn’t stand being inside the two small rooms, one taken up with a stove that radiated heat, one taken up by their beds.

  They used to eat their lunch in the cane field, because it was too far to walk home. They had bologna sandwiches on white bread, and his mother put seven drops of Louisiana Gold onto the pink moons of meat between the bread soggy from the heat. She put the tiny bottle back in the pocket of her work dress.

  Gustave heated up a tortilla over the burner. Blue crown of flame in the dark. Black spots in a circle on the tortilla.

  There were miles of groves—navel and Valencia oranges, lemons and grapefruit—around the city of Rio Seco when Enrique brought him here. The Mexicans had shown him the tortillas. When he first worked the groves, the Mexicans gave him burritos rolled tight like white pipes, hot from having lain on the truck dashboard all morning, baked by the windshield.

  He ate the dry soft tortilla, tasting the burned marks. The old gas stove smelled like iron. His mother had sat beside him in the cane the day before she was stung, giving him part of her cornbread softened with cane syrup. Anjolie cried the first time she saw the blue flames and knew she didn’t have to gauge firewood for cooking.

  Gustave took a sip of rum from the tiny glass on the counter. Then he carried a handful of pistachios and stood by the screen, cracking the nuts, holding the shells in his palm. Enrique’s boys were talking with some others, up at Enrique’s wide porch.

  The pistachios were green and pink and salty. Nothing else tasted like that. Gustave had refused to eat them the first time someone gave him a bag. A man grew them over in the next town.

  When Victor came to stay with him for a few days last year, when Glorette was in the hospital with pneumonia, he would poke at the foods on the counter and say, “How you gon live on tortillas and nuts and coffee and beans?”

  Gustave would say, “I made eighty, oui? I eat what I want. When you eighty, eat what you want. Cush-cush in the pot for your breakfast.”

  His grandson would pour sugar and milk on the hot mush and eat silently, his headphones buzzing as if insects were trapped inside his ears. When he was finished, he would say, “I ain’t drinkin no coffee.”

  Gustave would say, “Oranges on the table. Eat one call it juice. Then I take you to that school, there.” He threw the pistachio shells into a bowl. He had never seen the boy’s father. No one had.

  Until he was five, Gustave had known his own father, who was already dead by the time of the 1927 flood, shot in a bar fight in New Iberia. The men said his father had put his hand on a woman’s rump and another man shot him.

  He tried to imagine what had bitten his mother to make her ankle so swollen and red she couldn’t leave her bed that morning, of the water. Bee or wasp—snakebite would have left marks. Spider? All the things in the cane field, hiding in the forest of cane stalks.

  His own mother’s ankle. The pigs feet. Ham hocks. One ham hock could flavor a huge pot of beans, she said. Salted and dried and shriveled, and then floating swollen and revived on the surface of the simmering water. She’d get every bit of flesh from the cartilage and skin and gristle.

  He tried to imagine the buttocks of the woman in the bar. His father’s hand on the meat. The bullet in his father’s chest. His father had been twenty miles from the bayou, and no one had even known who he was. The body was kept in a morgue. A meat freezer. A man had told his mother two weeks later, but by then he’d been buried. So Gustave had to picture his father’s face, frozen in a smile or shout or frown, and his hand, frozen in the shape of rounded meat, and his chest, with a small hole or large.

  His own toes and tendons, when he took off the Army-issued boots and lay in the field with the others. His daughter’s legs, when they grew long and thin. Her dolls. The hair ornaments and beads and makeup and lotions and nail polish like spilled jewels on the dresser.

  The voices floated down the dirt road toward his door. Two of Enrique’s boys stood on the wooden steps. “Unc Gustave,” one said, the two words flowing into one, the name they had always called him though their father was not his blood brother.

  Pig blood on Enrique’s hands.

  “She’s here,” the son said. Lafayette, the older one, his forearms marked with white dried plaster. Gustave went out onto the steps.

  “Glorette?” he said. There was no one else.

  Lafayette lifted his chin. “Glorette. We brought her. She—”

  Gustave knew. He breathed the sharp dust raised by their feet. Dry and August. No rain. The dust went inside him.

  “Someone found her. Over there by the Launderland.”

  He closed the old screen door behind him, the hiss of the little pump latch, and they let him go first to see her body.

  SHE LAY ON the couch in Enrique’s big front room. Enrique’s wife, Marie-Claire, was waiting for him. She was smoothing the small hairs like lace plastered down on Glorette’s forehead.

  His daughter was on her back. Her mouth was open. Her eyes were closed. Her hair was a tangle like black moss on the couch cushion. Her stomach showed ribs under the bra she wore. Her skin was pale as raw pecans. She’d slept in the day and gone out in the night. She smoked the small rocks he’d seen. Like grit taken from a chicken’s throat.

  No blood, no marks, no cuts or bruises. Except two small black half-moons at her collarbone. Like she’d scratched herself.

  Gustave touched her collarbone. The knob of bone where it had healed, after she’d broken it falling from an orange tree. He couldn’t touch her hair. When she was fourteen, the flesh of her body had rearranged itself, and her eyes had grown watchful under the fur of eyebrows and eyelashes. Her hair had come out of the braids his wife made every morning, and she had coated her eyelashes with crankcase oil and painted her lips, and disappeared into her room. The fear of her beauty wound its way through his entrails. That was where he’d felt it. Inside the tubes that took food through his body.

  The collarbone somehow announced her beauty, and the hollow at the base of her throat.

  “Some man come up to her at the store ax again do she want to model,” his wife said, back when Glorette was in school. “Say she kind of small, but can he take her picture.” She would catch her lip between her teeth and hold it until it looked like a staple mark left there.

  His own wife, with skin the color of an old wedding dress hanging in her mother’s house, with her black hair braided high on her head in a crown, with a French grandfather from Bayou Becasse. His wife had been hidden in her own mother’s house for two years, after Mr. McQuine saw her at the Seven Oaks store. Mr. McQuine had raped three girls by then. He owned Seven Oaks and all the land around it, where they worked the canefields.

  That was how all the other
women of Sarrat, Louisiana had come to be here, on this land Enrique had bought in California. After the flood, when the cane was planted again and the houses cleaned of water trash and dead animals, and the people had come back to work, they’d had daughters. Six girls. Mr. McQuine had stalked them in the fields and dirt roads and woods. Like a dog who’d tasted chicken blood, Enrique said.

  So they sent the girls here, to California. Except Anjolie. Her mother refused to let her go. Her only child. Her father built an armoire with a lock—when Mr. McQuine’s car raised dust on the road, her mother would put her inside.

  Gustave went back for her, once he had this house.

  Mr. McQuine had nearly smothered Claudine with his huge belly, and he’d broken Mary’s wrist. Sometimes at night, even though he had never touched Anjolie, and she knew Enrique had killed him, that he’d burned in a car run off the road into a ditch, Anjolie would cry out beside Gustave and say he was crushing her.

  That day, he had asked his wife if she were afraid of Glorette’s beauty, and she nodded. He had asked her where she felt the fear, and she said inside the bones of her hips, where Glorette had rested so long.

  When Glorette left, after the man who fathered Victor disappeared, Gustave had gone inside her bedroom, the first one back from the front. Her Barbies sat on the windowsill, their legs dangling into the air. His wife had bought the dolls for years, saying, “All the girls have them doll. Barbie and all them clothes. Got her own closet. Got ’tite hangers inside, oui.”

  Now he knelt beside the couch and picked up his daughter’s hand. The skin was not soft. It was not hard. It felt smudged. She had broken her wrist, too, years ago, and he felt the healed bump of bone there. He had brought home from Kmart a long piece of plastic and attached a hose so that water ran in a stream. The boys called it slip-and-slide. All these children—all these grown men standing on the porch waiting for him—threw themselves down the blue furrow and screamed. The bones were so small. “Calcium collects at the site of a break,” the doctor had said, his eyes avoiding Gustave’s blackened hands, thick with citrus oil and dirt and rind from the navels he’d crated all day.