Same Place, Same Things Page 7

  * * *

  After the ten o’clock news, he drank a shot glass of strawberry wine. He fancied that the hot medicinal charge he felt in his stomach relaxed him enough to go to sleep at once. Two hours before, he had sung to his granddaughter so she would sleep. As far as he could remember, it was the first time he had sung anything. Maybe he had sung the National Anthem once, when he was in the service, but he wasn’t sure. Not knowing any lullabies, he had sung “Your Cheating Heart.” He lay down, and after he had drifted off, the telephone on his bed table rang out. He jumped for it, thinking at once of the sleeping baby.

  The voice on the phone had the sad, official sound of a state policeman. He told Merlin LeBlanc that at about four o’clock a small airplane his daughter was riding in had come down out of a cloud bank over the Gulf of Mexico and crashed next to a Monrovian freighter. The accident happened over a hundred miles from shore in a thousand feet of water.

  Merlin sat up in the dark and shook his head, thinking he was having a bad dream. “Where is my daughter?” he asked, his words husky with sleep.

  “The ship’s crew looked for survivors for two hours,” the voice said. “The plane fell straight down in a dive. The crewmen got the plane number, and we found a manifest for it from Lakefront Airport here in New Orleans.” The voice dragged on for several minutes, told Merlin he would be called again in the morning and hung up. He got out of bed, turned on his lamp, and walked over to where the baby was sleeping on a pallet. He could talk until he was blue, and the baby wouldn’t know that her mama was at the bottom of the Gulf at the side of some slicked-back lounge-lizard pilot who ran a plane so ratty it couldn’t even stay in the sky. He was not angry or sorry, just amazed. All of his children, all three of them, were now dead. Merlin junior had run off a bridge drunk, John T. was shot dead in a poker game, and now Lucy had fallen out of the sky like a bomb in a white trash’s airplane.

  The loss of his first two children had saddened him, but he had denied or concealed the sorrow in his life. Now he sensed an unavoidable change coming, as though he were being drafted by the army at his advanced age. He looked at the blond head on the blanket, and a powerful fear overcame him. What would he do with her? he wondered.

  He thought of the day before, when he had pulled his old tractor under the lean-to and had noticed his daughter waiting for him on the porch. He had shaken his head. Whenever she stood leaning on that post by the steps, he knew she was upset and wanted to unload on him before he got into the house. He looked away, over his fields. The strawberry harvest was finally over, the land stripped of black plastic, the played-out plants disked under, and he looked forward to a short glass of wine, an hour of TV, and the coolness of his little white wooden house. Probably not, he thought, looking over at his daughter.

  Even at this distance he could tell she’d been crying. He was fifty-two years old and had never once understood crying, or at least he failed to understand how people got themselves into predicaments that made them cry. He least understood his daughter, who was his oldest child, thirty-four, and who had been married twice, abandoned by both husbands, had been an alcoholic, a drug abuser, had been detoxified twice, and now had a seven-month-old daughter by a Belgian tourist she had met in a bar in New Orleans. Merlin was a man who assumed that the world was a logical place and that people were born into it with logical minds, the way they came with the ability to breathe and eat.

  He walked across the close-clipped St. Augustine that grew up to the porch and looked at her. His daughter’s dirty-blond hair was pulled back into a limp ponytail, and her eyes were baggy and pained. They were looking at him, but they had a faraway quality he had seen before and never tried to understand. “You comin’ by for lunch?” he asked.

  “No, Daddy. I had a cup of coffee and some toast late.” She put her hands in the pockets of her jeans, not work jeans, Merlin noticed, but what she called “preworn,” for people too lazy to wear out their own clothes. “The baby’s asleep inside on the sofa.”

  “Okay,” was all he said as he pushed past her and put his hand on the screen.

  “Daddy, the reason I came by was I have to get away for a couple days. I mean, I’m just going nuts hanging around Ponchatoula doing nothing.”

  He stopped, his hand on the screen door handle and looked at her. “And?” he asked. He couldn’t figure his children out, but he knew there was always an “and” in a conversation like this. He saw his daughter maybe five times a year even though she lived but three miles away in a little duplex built by the government for folks down on their luck. When she showed up, there was always an “and.”

  “And I want you to keep Susie for me while I’m gone,” she said, smiling fearfully.

  He looked inside at the infant on the sofa and back at her. “Get Mona to keep her.”

  “Mona’s husband couldn’t find work, so they’ve moved to Georgia.”

  “Get Doreen.”

  “Dorees wants money. I don’t have any money, Daddy. Look, I got all the baby food and Pampers you’ll need. It’ll only be two days, and I know you finished with the field today, so you’ll have lots of time.”

  “I can’t care for a little thing that size,” he protested. But his daughter began to cry and tell him how he never really helped her out and how she met this airplane pilot in La Place who wanted to fly her to Mexico for a couple of nights and half a dozen other things, until he ran his left hand through his silver hair and told her to take off and not tell him any more. He didn’t want to hear about yet another deadbeat she was going out with, and though he was tempted to tell her she was making a mistake, he held his tongue, as he always had with his children. He was a man who never offered his children advice yet always marveled at how stupidly they behaved.

  In the past he had watched over Susie for three hours at a time, so he figured he could fill her mouth and mop her bottom for a couple of days. Not much more trouble than a puppy, he thought. He went inside and his daughter put her face against the screen door and peered at him. “It’ll be all right, Daddy. When I get back I’ll fix you a big pot of shrimp okra gumbo like Momma used to make.”

  “Awright,” he told her. He thought briefly of his wife, dead now six years, standing at the stove stirring a pot.

  “Now don’t get mad if she cries,” she said. “Remember, it’ll only be a couple days.”

  “Awright,” he barked, walking into the dark kitchen to fix himself a lunch-meat sandwich.

  * * *

  The morning after the crash he got up with the baby, then fed and burped her. She smelled sour, so he put her in the big claw-footed bathtub and washed her down with Lifebuoy soap. She kept slipping out of his fingers, and he was glad finally to fish her out of the suds and rub her dry like a kitten. He dressed her in only a disposable diaper, since it was a warm day. The phone rang and it was the policeman’s voice again, telling him that they were searching, but after all it was over one thousand feet of water and they weren’t exactly sure where the plane had hit and other bits of unpromising news. Merlin sat in the rocker on the front porch, the baby in his lap playing with a Remington dove load, and tried to think about his daughter as a baby, but he couldn’t remember a thing. His wife had tended the children just as he had tended the pigs they used to have in back of the tractor shed. He wondered if what went wrong was that he had treated his children like animals. You don’t, after all, explain to an animal how to do what it’s supposed to do. It goes through the gates, eats where the food is put, lies where it’s proper to lie, and, when it’s time, lines up to be hit or shot. He put his hand over his eyes when he thought this. Why do you have to tell children things? Why don’t they do what’s logical?

  He was still rocking when his father pulled into the yard at ten o’clock. Etienne LeBlanc was seventy-five, feeble, and forgetful, but he had been that way for twenty years. He sat in the other porch rocker and Merlin told him about Lucy. The old man cried and mumbled into a bandanna he fished out of his overalls, and all the
time Merlin looked off at his tractor, trying to remember if the oil needed changing. After a while the baby reached for her great-grandfather, and he took her into his lap, where she pulled at the copper rivets on his bib, trying to pluck them like berries. The old man began to talk to her in French.

  “Daddy,” Merlin asked, “what am I going to do with that little thing?”

  His father, a balding, straight-backed man, sun-freckled and big-boned, made a face as the baby put her thumb up his great nose. “Only one thing to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You got to get married. We got no one to give Susie to.”

  Merlin blinked.

  “And she’s got to be a little younger than you.”

  “I could use someone to cook and clean up.”

  The old man tucked the baby into the crook of his left arm and looked at his son hard. “I’m not talking about a cleanin’ lady.” He said this very loudly. His upper plate fell down with a click. “You got to find someone you can care about.”

  “What?” Merlin gave his father a questioning look.

  Etienne looked into his son’s eyes for a while, then lay back against the rocker. “Aw hell,” he said, shaking his head. “I forgot who I was talking to.”

  “Du,” Susie said, pulling at a tobacco tag dangling from the old man’s overalls.

  * * *

  For two weeks, everywhere Merlin went, the baby went also, until he felt that he had somehow grown an extra uncooperative limb that he had to drag around at all times. He spoon-fed her, washed her few clothes by hand in the big bathtub, hung them out to dry, washed her, convinced her to sleep at naptime, dealt with her crying at five in the afternoon, set her on his stomach to watch the news and Wheel of Fortune, bought her a playpen and plastic things to chew on, and, in the evening, sang to her and bounced her on the edge of the bed to cajole her to sleep at bedtime. Only then, between eight and his own bedtime, could he read the paper, or change the air filter in the truck, or bathe himself. At six it started all over again. He thought of his dead wife and was ashamed of himself. On the fourteenth night, after he had thought long and hard on what his father had told him, he decided he would at least try to talk to a single woman. The next night was Saturday, and in the morning he called his father to come over and keep Susie. About five o’clock the old man was sprawled on the sofa, the child beating him on the head with a plastic hammer. Merlin steamed himself clean in the big tub, then dug around in the medicine cabinet for something to make himself smell good. He found a green bottle with no label and slapped on some of its contents. His face caught fire and then he remembered that the liquid was a foot liniment his wife had bought. He pictured her rubbing her white feet in the evenings after a day of working the packing shed and running the kitchen. He washed his face quickly and found an oval blue bottle, sniffed it carefully, and splashed the liquid on. There was a bottle of lard-colored hair oil plugged with a twisted piece of newspaper, and this he massaged into his hair until the silver in it shone. In his bedroom he stood in his boxer shorts before his closet and wondered what he owned that would attract the eye of a female. Other than khaki pants and shirts, he had only two pairs of green double-knit slacks, one white shirt, an orange knit shirt, and a yellow knit shirt with a little animal embroidered over the heart. Merlin pulled it off the hanger and examined it closely—the animal was a possum.

  He cleared the seed catalogs and fence staples off the seat of his truck and drove into Ponchatoula, where the dim neon sign of the Red Berry Lounge caught his eye. When he walked in, Aloysius Perrin, who owned the farm next to his, spotted him from across the dance floor and yelled over the pounding jukebox, “Hey, looka this. Clark Gable done come to the Red Berry.” Merlin grinned in spite of himself and looked down at his tight yellow shirt and green slacks. Several of his old friends were in the bar, and he settled in with them for an hour or so, keeping a weather eye out for any unattached ladies. Sure enough, around eight, two women, Gladys Boudreaux and her older sister, came in and took a table across from the jukebox. Gladys had lost her husband two years ago to heart trouble, and she was ten years younger than Merlin, so he thought that maybe she was out on the prowl. He played a slow song on the jukebox and walked over to ask her to dance. She said no, she didn’t believe she would. She told him she’d just come in to drink a beer, that she and her sister were taking a break from fixing a five-gallon pot of sausage gumbo for tomorrow night’s Knights of Columbus dance.

  “But you can come over to my place in the next block and help me and sis ladle out the stuff into the Tupperware if you want,” she said, giving him a cute little gumbo-ladling smile. He followed the two women to their house and discovered that what they really needed was a man to wrestle the five-gallon pot off the back burners of a huge Chambers range and over to a low table. After he helped them, they gave him a bowl of gumbo and he sat there in the kitchen eating, feeling like a stray dog enjoying a handout. The gumbo was made with cheap sausage, and his bowl had a quarter inch of grease floating on top.

  “’Scuse me, Gladys,” he said. “Did you fry this sausage before you put it in the gumbo?”

  “No. Why? There’s nothing wrong with it, is there?”

  He spooned up a tablespoon of clear oil and dumped it out on the plate. “Well, no. It’s just fine. I’m just wondering if it wouldn’t be quite so slick if you heated some of the fat out of the meat before you put it in the gumbo.”

  “Oh, that ain’t fat, Merlin. That’s just juice.”

  “Juice,” Merlin repeated.

  “Yeah. Kind of like clear sauce. Now, don’t stare at it like that. Just stick your spoon in and eat it up.” She smiled at him again in a way that made him wonder if she wanted him to scrub the big pot and put it on the top shelf in her kitchen, too.

  He stared at his gumbo and understood why her husband had died from a bad heart. He ate slowly, worrying about all his friends in the Knights of Columbus.

  He returned to the Red Berry Lounge, where Aloysius introduced him to a bleached blonde named Alice. They danced once or twice and sat at a table by the bar while she told him her life story, her dead husband’s life story, and the problems her four sons had with the law. It occurred to Merlin that marrying someone his own age would probably make him father of several young men and women who would soon be after him for hand tools and car-insurance payments. Despite this, he told Alice about his granddaughter. She made a face and said, “Well, let me tell you, I don’t want anything to do with a kid in that yellin’ and stinkin’ stage. I already done my time.” When he finished his beer, Merlin excused himself and walked to the bar, standing under the rotating Schlitz sign and surveying the twenty or so folks in the room, all more or less his age. The Red Berry was known as an old folks’ bar, what they called a tavern in other parts of the country. The crowd that was in here now was the same one that had started coming right after the Korean War. He spotted Gwen Ongeron, whose husband had been killed in a ferryboat collision, and she waved with one hand and adjusted the bottom of her permanent with the other. So he went over through the smoke and cowboy music to ask her to dance. They danced to two records, and in that time she asked him how much land he owned, how much he had saved up in the bank, and what year his tractor was made. He didn’t follow her back to her table.

  Out in the parking lot he sat in the grass-seed smell of his truck and wondered what the hell he was doing looking for a wife in a honky-tonk. It was like trying to find a good watch in a pawnshop. He tried to think back to when he had been nineteen and had asked his wife to marry him. What had he felt when he held her hand? What had he wanted thirty-three years before that he could still want now? He couldn’t remember how he’d felt the day he married, couldn’t remember one thing he had said to his wife. After all those years of marriage he hadn’t known much about her but that she was honest and a good cook. Now, for the first time in his life, he wondered what he should look for in a wife. Whatever it was, he had had it once, didn’t reali
ze it, and was now ashamed.

  He drove home and found his father asleep in an oak rocker next to the reading lamp, a photo album open in his lap. He walked up to him quietly and bent over to see what he had been studying. The old man’s pointing finger was resting on a picture of Merlin’s children and wife. They were all grinning like fools, Merlin thought, seated on the front bumper of a 1958 Chevrolet. He didn’t think he had taken the photograph. Where had he been? Why wasn’t he in it? He nudged his father and the gray eyes opened over a slow, wrinkled smile. “Hey, boy,” he said, straightening up a bit. “Have any luck with the ladies?”

  “Nah. What you looking at, Daddy?” He bent to study the album more closely.

  “It’s Merlin junior, John T., and Lucy,” he said.

  “And Bee.”

  The old head nodded. “And Bee. God, that woman could cook. Two minutes in the house with a fresh cut-up rabbit, and the onions and bell peppers would be a smokin’ in the skillet.”

  Merlin focused on the smiles in the picture. “Makes you wonder what went wrong.” He stood up, looked down on his father’s bald and spotted head. The statement hung in the air like an unanswered question. “I was never mean to them.”

  Etienne LeBlanc turned his head slowly and looked up toward the screen door as though someone was standing there. “Maybe you should have been,” he said. “At least that would’ve been something.”