Copyboy, page 10
LaBue ignored Phil. He glanced down at my feet.
“Don’t college boys wear them kind of leather shoes now without no socks? You must be one of them college boys.”
“Starting soon.” I was glad for the two s-words in a row. I concentrated on maintaining good eye contact. LaBue was a couple of inches taller, but I was stockier. He moved closer.
“So, what you going out fishing for, college boy?”
I didn’t want to get into the fact that I wasn’t interested in fishing and didn’t know anything about it, but then recalled my conversation that morning at the service station in Happy Jack.
“Y----ellowfins. H----ear they’re b----iting well.”
The y sound was never a good starter sound for a sentence. I had to stretch it out or it would cause a hard block. I added the extra sentence to try to cover up the bad start but could get the extra words out only by taking some hard breaths and slurring my sounds. My stuttering usually went downhill fast during a challenge and there was no doubt that Jimmy LaBue had a challenge on his mind.
“What you gonna use on them y----ellowf----ins?” He mocked my stutter by drawing out the sound a lot more than I did.
“Shiny j----igs with skirt. T----op up.”
The s sound came out okay but I had to slur and draw out the j sound to get through the block and I wasn’t sure what the service station attendant had meant by “up top,” so those words got reversed. Trying to fool somebody when I didn’t know what I was talking about was another skill I lacked. I had gotten lucky on coming up with an answer on Jimmy LaBue’s fishing question, but my stuttering had put itself on parade. And maybe the worst thing I did was lose eye contact when my eyes dropped down to his red cowboy boots. I saw they were made out of alligator hide.
“We got to meet the Rooster now,” Phil said. She pulled me by the arm.
LaBue looked at her for the first time. “Why you fooling with this bégayer boy, cherie?”
“Je te préviens. Leave us be, Jimmy.” Phil pulled me toward the marina docks.
“Where you come off warning me, bitch?” LaBue said.
She didn’t look back as we walked toward the marina.
The truck’s tires screeched on the blacktop of the parking lot. Phil didn’t let go of my arm until we reached the boat slips.
“I never figured you for a sport fisherman.” Some of the tension had left her voice. “So, just what exactly do you know about yellowfin tuna?”
“N----ot much. I didn’t even know a y----ellowfin was a tuna.” I told her about my conversation at the filling station in Happy Jack.
She squeezed my arm and laughed, but I got serious.
“W----hat was that name he called me?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“It started with a b.”
“Forget it, I’m telling you. It’s nothing.”
I let it drop, but there was no way I was going to forget it. I could tell by its context exactly what it meant. I wasn’t good at saying words, but I was hard to beat when it came to understanding them.
* * *
The Rooster Tale was impressive with its sleek hull and tall extension on top of the cabin that had a duplicate set of controls. The boat eased into its large slip. Phil leaped aboard.
I watched her work from a bench on the wharf. She grabbed the heavy lines, tied quick knots, and heaved the lines to the dock. She hopped off the boat with a line in hand and made a figure eight with it around a dock cleat, wrapping it under itself on the last turn and then jerking it snug.
She shoved a gangplank from the dock onto the boat as Captain Henri Moreau backed down the flybridge ladder. Phil gave her father a hug. He had on khaki shorts like the ones I wore. His thick arms and legs were dark from the sun. The ball cap pulled down over his eyes was stained and ragged. Sunglasses hung from a cord around his neck. He didn’t look anything like I had imagined him. He was not much taller than I was, but if I were pitching to him, I certainly wouldn’t give him a good ball to hit. He looked like he could knock anything out of the park.
The Rooster’s three charter customers for the day, all on the chubby side with white sunblock slathered on their faces, stepped off the boat. Phil steadied them and their wobbly legs on the gangplank.
“How’d it go out there, fellas?” Phil asked.
“Pretty good,” said the one with the biggest belly. “See what the Captain thinks.”
Captain Moreau took inventory at the large ice chest that ran the length of the stern.
“Two nice yellowfins, a bunch of snapper, some nice grouper.”
“Not too bad for a bunch of old guys.” Phil’s wink cushioned her words. She could get by with saying anything to anybody with her wink and smile.
Captain Moreau began slinging the smaller fish one by one onto the dock. Phil put on a pair of cloth gloves and grabbed a fish in each hand by sticking her thumb in the mouths. She hooked them under their gills on metal spikes below a “Rooster Tale for Charter” sign.
“C----an I help?” I asked.
“I might need some help with those yellowfins you know so much about.” She winked at me.
“Too big to hang,” Captain Moreau said to his daughter. “See if the guys want their picture taken. I think one of them went to get a camera.”
Phil gathered the three men underneath the sign and instructed them on how to hold one of the big tunas in front of them.
“Now everybody smile and say ‘Rooster,’” Phil said.
“I’ll make sure everything is iced after I scrub down here,” Captain Moreau said to the three men. He jumped onto the dock to uncoil a water hose. Phil waved me over.
“This is Vic, the General’s friend from Memphis. He wants to talk with you about going out on the river.”
Captain Moreau stuck out his hand that felt like it might have even tougher skin than the bottom of Phil’s feet.
“Good to meet you, son. My wife radioed me after the General called this morning. I’ll be glad to try to help if I can.”
Phil uncoiled the rest of the hose for her father.
“You remember your party tonight, don’t you, Daddy?”
“I don’t know why we’re having it, much less on a Tuesday night,” the Captain said.
“Momma wanted to have it before school started, and, after all, today is your birthday.”
“I’ll be on home after I get the Rooster scrubbed and the catch iced down.” Captain Moreau turned to me. “We can talk tonight about exactly what you’re looking for.”
“If you don’t need me, Daddy, I’m going to show Vic around Venice some.”
“Afraid there’s not much to see here,” Captain Moreau said.
“I like it here, sir. All this is n----ew to me.”
“See you at the house, then.” The captain turned on the water and began washing down the Rooster Tale.
Phil scanned the marina parking lot in all directions as we walked back to my car. The concern on her face had turned into an excited twinkle in her eyes by the time she opened the car door.
“I have a secret spot for us to go if you’re up for it,” she said. “I bet you’re gonna like it.”
If the spot included Phil, I would like it. Earlier in the day I had hoped there would be enough time in the afternoon for Captain Moreau to take me out on the river and to my destination. I could finish my business and be back on the road home before the end of the day. After spending most of the afternoon with Philomene Moreau, I wasn’t in such a hurry anymore.
Chapter 16
Phil directed me around the bayous, canals, and bridges that chopped up the lower sliver of Louisiana on which Venice was located. My passenger’s odd posture caused by my out-of-place typewriter had begun to seem normal. Not only could she tie knots, she could tie herself in a knot and still look comfortable.
Unlike my few dates in Memphis who appeared to be concerned mainly about their hairdos when riding in my car with the top down, Phil never fussed with her hair or even so much as touched it. The only phrase I remembered from world history class was laissez faire, which was French for letting things take their natural course. That was Phil all the way. I wanted to look at her instead of the narrow roads that wound through the fields and swamps.
“Take that dirt road up there to the right. I’ll jump out and get the gate.”
She unhooked a chain wrapped around a fence post and waved me through. There was a gate, all right, but that was it. No fence on either side.
I expected Phil to settle back in the car, but she took off running in her bare feet through the knee-high grass that covered the flat land as far as I could see.
“Follow me,” she shouted.
She had me park at a dilapidated building with a rusted-through tin roof and pieces of its walls missing.
“Come on, Sporty Boy. See if you can catch you a swampy.”
I got out of the car and followed Phil into the field, unclear of exactly what she had called on me to do.
“What’s a swampy?”
“A swamp rabbit. First to catch one gets a prize.”
I struggled to keep up with Phil as she zigzagged through the tall grass, still not certain what we were up to.
“Go find your own swampy,” she said. “This is my territoire.” With her accent, Phil could turn a plain vanilla word into a chocolate sundae.
She was serious about catching a swamp rabbit, I decided, instead of running for the sake of running. Penny loafers with slick leather soles weren’t the best for meeting a Jimmy LaBue or chasing rabbits, but I gave it everything I had.
“Here, rabbit. Here, little rabbit,” I called out as I ran in circles and flapped my arms.
When I turned, Phil had her hands on her knees.
“Are you okay?”
She raised her head, but was laughing so hard she had trouble getting her breath. She took off again across the field, flattening the tall grass and stirring up dry clouds of seeds and husks.
“There’s a buck,” Phil shouted. “Circle round and run it over here.”
Ahead of me, an animal in full stride popped up above the grass. The rabbit was twice the size of the white bunnies in the Easter displays at Goldsmith’s department store in Memphis. With its long ears and legs, the animal looked more like a kangaroo than a rabbit.
“Don’t run to where it just landed,” Phil instructed. “You got to lead it some.”
If Phil wanted to catch a rabbit, no matter how unlikely it might seem, that’s what I wanted. I took up the chase all out. We stayed on the rabbit’s trail and then Phil, anticipating the rabbit’s next jump, launched herself in midair in a perfectly timed leap. She grabbed the rabbit’s hind legs before both she and the animal hit the ground. The rabbit jerked out of her grip and bounded off through the grass. I gave chase only to see it jump into a bayou and swim away.
“It’s swimming,” I shouted. “That crazy r----abbit is swimming.”
I looked back to see Phil on the ground and not moving. I hurried to her.
Her body was motionless and facedown in the grass. I knelt beside her. “Are you hurt?”
Phil flipped over.
“Here, rabbit. Here, little rabbit.” She again laughed so hard that her shoulders shook.
Phil sat up and ran her fingers through her tangle of curls to comb out the dried grass.
“That was one big swampy, sure,” she said.
“And you’re one wild…” The right word to finish the sentence didn’t come to me.
“One wild what?”
Phil wasn’t about to let me off the hook.
“One wild… chasieer of rabbeets.” My attempt at a French accent sounded ridiculous and should have embarrassed me, but it only made us both laugh.
We sat together in a circle of flattened grass and then leaned back on the ground and looked up at the late afternoon sky that was beginning to show streaks of red. I had a lot of feelings I wanted to express to Phil but holding hands seemed a better way to communicate.
* * *
The abandoned building where my car was parked had once been a mill that processed sugar and sorghum cane, Phil explained, but had not been used for decades. The family who owned it had gotten lucky in the oil business and the mill and acres of land around it were forgotten. She and her high school friends would camp out all night at the old mill and see how many fires they could count.
“Fires?”
“They have to burn the gas off the wellheads when they’re pumping oil,” she said. “Some nights we would count twenty or more wellhead fires. If we got brave enough, we’d go ride a pumpjack.”
“A what?”
“You’ve seen those oil well pumps that look like a horse bending up and down to drink water?”
I nodded.
“We’d climb on and ride ’em like horses until that day we saw one of our friends almost get his leg ripped off.”
Running down swamp rabbits. Riding oil-well pumps. My toughest baseball games seemed tame and ordinary.
“Take off your shirt and I’ll wipe the grass off you,” Phil said.
“Right here?”
“I don’t bite. That Louisiana salt grass we were rolling round in can sting. You’ll think you laid down in a bed of fire ants if I don’t wipe you off.”
Phil turned me around several times, brushing me with my cotton polo shirt turned inside out.
“I’m going to step in the mill and take off my shirt,” Phil said. “You best brush that grass out from your waistband if you don’t want to sit in a tub of Momma’s calamine lotion all night.”
Phil tugged at the tail of her plaid shirt inside her shorts and stepped behind what was left of one of the mill’s interior walls. I walked outside and continued to clean the grass out from the waistband of my shorts.
“Oo, ye, yi!” Phil cried. “I can’t get this grass off me and it’s stinging. You need to help me.”
“What should I do?”
“This flannel won’t shake out enough. Is there anything in your car to wipe me off with?”
I ran to the car. My gym bag was at the Moreau’s house and a girl couldn’t be brushed off with an Esso road map. I opened the trunk and removed the urn from Mr. Spiro’s duffel bag. Years of wear and many washings had left the canvas bag soft and pliable.
“Hurry,” Phil said. “It’s stinging some kind of bad.”
I raced to the wall and offered her the cloth bag through a missing plank.
“No, no, Vic,” she said, coming around the wall. “You start wiping my back and I mean every inch.”
Red welts had popped up on her skin. I wiped her back with gentle strokes. Every inch, as ordered. Only one of the three hooks on her bra was fastened. Should I mention this to her? No. I was already in way over my head.
When she pulled down the waistband of her shorts in back for me to brush out the grass, I saw what I first took to be a birthmark but then recognized it as a small tattoo. A gold fleur-de-lis. The same symbol was stamped on the spines of some of Mr. Spiro’s books. The French symbol with its three leaves, he once explained to me, stood for perfection, light, and life. I had never seen a tattoo on a girl, but nothing could have been more natural on the tanned back I gently brushed.
“You got any spit in you?” Phil asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean fill your hands with spit and rub it on my back. The sting’s not easing up much.”
When I ran out of saliva, Phil contributed hers into my hands. She spit like a catcher, aggressively and with volume.
“Dogs heal themselves with their spit,” she said. “What’s good enough for them is good enough for me.”
The final cleanup duty sent us to the nearby bayou so Phil could wash the grass nettles from her shirt. I rubbed her arms and back again with the duffel bag I dipped in the bayou. We would need to be back home in no more than an hour to help her mother, she said, which should give her shirt time to dry on a tree. I shook out Mr. Spiro’s duffel bag and hung it on a nearby branch.
“I do tend to get carried away and overdo it sometimes,” Phil said. “I should know better than to wallow round in ripe salt grass. I reckon I’m just a plus girl.”
“What’s that?”
“Plus is French for ‘more.’ I’m always wanting a little more than is good for me.”
We sat next to each other on the log, taking in the surroundings.
“I didn’t kn----ow rabbits could swim,” I said. “I’ve seen everything, now.”
“You ever seen a girl in her bra before?”
“N----ot really.”
“You got sisters?”
“O----nly child.”
“Don’t those Memphis girls wear bikinis? What’s the difference?”
“T----exture, maybe.” My answer sounded as ridiculous as my phony French accent. I needed to learn that some questions aren’t meant to be answered.
Phil laughed. “You’re one of a kind, Vic from Memphis. I don’t think I should call you ‘Sporty Boy’ anymore.”
Her eyes began another lockdown. She moved closer to me on the log.
“You might be forgetting something, but I’m not,” she said. “I didn’t catch a swampy, but at least I got hold of one, so I win the prize.”
“What’s the p----rize?”
She smiled and put her arms around my neck.
“You owe me a kiss. And I’m not talking about a sissy little Tennessee kiss. I’m talking about a bona fide Louisiana kiss.”
My eleventh-grade biology teacher taught us that when a person’s body does something without thinking about it, it’s called a “reflexive voluntary response.” My hands gripped the warm skin of Phil’s lower back near the fleur-de-lis.
In addition to never having seen a girl in a bra, I had never kissed a girl on the mouth. I had thought about it, but never had the confidence that my lips could manage an honest-to-goodness kiss given the fact that they couldn’t be counted on to make the simplest of sounds.
