Copyboy, page 13
Chapter 19
“Rooster base to He-Gene. Come in.”
Shortwave dreams?
“He-Gene to Rooster base. Over.”
My sleep was deep and my head fuzzy. I had to blink my eyes a few times to remember where I was. Captain Moreau leaned in close to the radio speaker. He cupped the mic in his hand and talked softly.
“How’s Betsy tracking? Over.”
“On the move again and turning southwest toward the Keys, but she’s a little weaker. Over.”
“Think I’m okay on a half-day charter? Over.”
“Coast Guard is on full monitor. Lock VHF to channel sixteen. Over.”
“Check. Rooster out.”
Captain Moreau slipped the mic back on its hook. He looked over at me on the couch. “Sorry to wake you, son, but I’ve learned you can’t trust a hurricane named Betsy.”
I pulled on my khaki pants under the cover of the sheet. She-Gene snapped on the ceiling light in the kitchen and filled a kettle with water, placing it on the stove along with a black skillet as large as a tire on my car.
“Hard to get much rest round this bunch,” she said. “We’ll have some coffee soon. You drink coffee, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m learning to.”
Phil bounced into the kitchen wearing what looked to be one of her father’s old long-sleeved shirts. My eyes were clogged with the crud of a sound sleep, but Phil and her curls looked fresh and ready to dance all day again.
“He’s been learning a bunch of new things on his trip, Momma. Told me last night the General even took him to see the hoochie-coochie shows on Bourbon Street.”
“NO… we didn’t go in,” I blurted out, making me sound all the more guilty. “I t----old you they just opened the doors when we walked by.” I gave Phil a stern look that did no good. She laughed.
“Don’t pay that girl any mind,” She-Gene said. “Phil tries to embarrass a body anytime she can.”
Phil turned the flame up under the skillet.
“I’ll have us some sausage sandwiches soon,” she said. “And then Vic can tell us all about the hoochie-coochie girls at breakfast.”
Captain Moreau rescued me.
“We’ll take our coffee and sandwiches on the porch,” he said, putting a captain’s order in his voice. “I may have something worked out for you, Vic, if Betsy cooperates.”
We ate our sausage sandwiches, which were the size of hamburgers. The Captain told us that He-Gene wouldn’t be using his boat since he had to stay close to the radio all day to monitor the weather. Phil and I could take the Moreaus’ old outboard downriver the nine miles to Pilottown and then switch to He-Gene’s larger and more powerful boat.
“That’s a good plan, Daddy,” Phil said. “He-Gene’s boat can handle any spot on that river, sure. I knew you’d work out something for us.”
She grabbed my hand and raised it like I had won a boxing match. “Our man from Memphis is going to find that Mouth of the Mississippi River, once and for all.”
Phil’s excitement matched mine, but I had something else going for me. Not only was my destination close at hand, I had been promoted from “Sporty Boy” to “man from Memphis.”
Captain Moreau’s orders brought Phil and me back down to earth.
“Phil, I want you to go with me to dump the garbage and then on to the Rooster so I can show you some charts. Go get us a Thermos of coffee while I pull the truck round. She’ll be back in an hour, son.”
“I’d be g----lad to help with the garbage cans, and I’m pretty good at reading charts and maps,” I told the Captain. His quick glance in my direction let me know that my offer was a mistake.
“She’ll be back in an hour,” he repeated. He tugged at his cap and went down the stairs.
I glanced at Phil for some kind of explanation of why my suggestion to join them fell so flat with the Captain. She shrugged and went to the kitchen for the coffee.
* * *
Talking with She-Gene was almost as easy as talking with her daughter, plus the fact that embarrassing hoochie-coochie comments weren’t likely to show up later. The more I was around Genevieve Moreau, the more she reminded me of Phil and Adrienne. The three always seemed to move with a purpose.
After she fed her four youngest and sent them to their room to get dressed for school registration, we washed the breakfast dishes together. She-Gene asked what I would be doing when I got back home and I told her about my job at the newspaper and starting college.
“Are you having to work to pay your way through?”
“Not really, but working at the n----ewspaper is good for me seeing as how I spend too much time alone in my room.” When I was comfortable with someone, words came out of my mouth that I hadn’t planned on saying.
“Phil’s daddy is upset that she isn’t interested in college. The girl had good grades in high school without ever trying too hard.” It seemed no one in the Moreau family wasted words or had anything to do with talk that was small. “He’s afraid she’s going to get stuck her whole life in this little fish town.”
“Seems to me like a nice p----lace to get stuck.” I wasn’t making an excuse for Phil. I meant it.
“Maybe from the outside.” She swirled the water in the sink with her hands to find more dishes. “Rich folks come down here to fish, eat fresh seafood, throw around their money, and then they go back where they come from. Only thing new that’s going on down here is the oil drilling, and Henri says that will be the ruination of us all in the end.”
Her voice had changed to a more serious tone. She handed me the last plate to dry.
“We stay here and try to scratch out a living and worry about getting swept away by hurricanes. Henri has a good charter business, but we couldn’t make it without his pilot’s pension.”
“But last night everybody was having such a g----ood time.”
“We have our moments, but the old ways, the family ways, are dying.”
She wiped the kitchen sink with a rag. “Like that store-bought sausage we just had. Time was when all our family ate was boudain, that good Cajun sausage and ground rice. But nobody takes the time to make it anymore. Including me.”
She dried her hands on her apron. “Soon, everybody in South Louisiana will sound, eat, and act like everybody else in the whole of the country. Might not even be such a bad thing.”
“Phil likes it here,” I said. “I can t----ell that she likes who she is and where she comes from.”
“It’s not to like or dislike. It’s just who we are. But Henri thinks the time has come that the younger ones need to move on out of here. We’re never going to live the lives that the ones had who came before us. The old ways won’t survive.”
She put her hands on the sink and looked out to the river.
“The gulf is eating away at the delta that once was our protection. It may be time to pas la patate.”
She-Gene turned toward me quickly. “Sorry with my Cajun talk. That just means it may be time to let go of the potato.”
The two sisters came down the hall arguing over which one would wear a certain blouse.
“I best get back there and keep the peace,” She-Gene said. “Help yourself to more coffee or anything else you can find.”
“The Captain d----idn’t want me to go with him and Phil to look at his river charts,” I said. “D----o you think there’s some reason he might not like me?”
“He’s been wanting to talk to Phil alone, but she’s a hard one to set anchor on, as you probably can tell. I’d say that’s all it is. He told me last night he liked the way you were bent on keeping that promise you made to your friend. Keeping your word rates high with Henri Moreau.”
She hung her apron on the side of a cabinet and turned to me.
“Now don’t you pay any mind to all my poor-mouthing. There never was a Moreau went to bed hungry and without a good roof overhead. We count all dem blessings, sure.”
Mr. Spiro told me once that a lot of growing up had to do with “seeing with ancient eyes.” My eyes looked at the Moreau house and saw only a close family, good food, dancing, and fun. If I asked my friends in Memphis what they saw when they looked at my life, they probably would say a nice house, a new sports car, and the springiest diving board in Memphis. They couldn’t know how much my stutter wore on me. Or how much I wanted to know who my real father was.
* * *
Reading a book about the sea when I could smell and feel it all around me was better than reading about it surrounded by the four walls of my bedroom. I reread the part of the book I liked where the old man dreamed about the lions on the beach. I asked Mr. Spiro why the old man talked about the lions so much. My encyclopedia said there wasn’t a lion of any kind in Cuba. He gave me one of his one-word answers. “Juxtaposition, Messenger.” One-word answers from Mr. Spiro meant he wanted me to study that word and find out why it was important.
Juxtaposed was the way I felt when I was with Phil. Like I really wasn’t supposed to be close to her, but I was, and it all happened in such a short time and it all felt so right, juxtaposed or not.
Mr. Spiro also told me to pay attention in the book to how the old man read the sea around him. That was a lesson, he said, in how we should learn to read the world we live in and the people around us. Like knowing when to throw a change-up to a batter or learning when my father was likely to call to say he couldn’t make it home to see one of my ball games.
Learning to read Phil and her emotions was exciting. I told myself I was getting better at it, and that’s why I saw immediately that something was not right when she drove up to the house in the truck. She didn’t jump out on a dead run. She sat and stared through the windshield. I thought about going down to meet her, but decided to let her take her own time.
The driver’s door creaked open. She climbed the steps with her head down and her flip-flops in no danger of flying off.
I met her at the top of the stairs.
“Something t----ells me things didn’t go well.” She didn’t look at me. “Any p----roblems?”
She slid past me and plopped into a chair.
“Correct. Things did not go well.”
Another reading of Phil’s mood told me to let her find her starting place on her own, no matter how long it took.
“Have Momma and the kids already left for school?”
“Yes. She had t----rouble starting the truck, but it finally cranked for her.”
Phil nodded and scanned the river to find her words. “Daddy just laid a come-to-Jesus meeting on me.”
“What d----oes that mean, exactly?”
“Meaning — exactly — I should change my ways of thinking and ask myself why I’m still living at home and wanting to work on the Rooster. Not surprised he wanted to talk about it, but he hurt me with his words.”
The picture of Phil and her father dancing popped into my head, and how for a short time the night before I was jealous of the way they laughed and twirled each other across the plywood floor.
“You can b----e by yourself or I can listen if you want to talk about it.” I didn’t have a clue what she would choose.
She stood at the rail of the porch and kicked off her flip-flops. I had the feeling she was getting ready to let all of it out, like the way she opened up about her problems with Jimmy LaBue.
She started in with a flurry.
“So, to hear Daddy tell it, I’m Miss Queen Bee in my short shorts, flitting round town. ‘Miss Queen Bee in short shorts’ — that’s exactly what he called me.” A short pause. “You know what else? He says I’m mistaking what I think is popularity for folks just feeling sorry for me behind my back.”
As she stood at the railing, her disbelief tumbled over more to anger.
“Oh, and this is the best one. I’m like one of those bright-colored pinwheels that people get at the parish fair and then forget about as soon as they get home.”
“H----ard for me to h----ear your father saying those things to you.”
“Well, hear it… ’cause that was his words to me.”
If there was going to be any crying, this would be the time, but Phil didn’t seem to know about tears. She jerked open the screen door, went inside, and came back out with a bottle of Dixie Beer.
“Have one if you want,” she said. “They’re in the icebox.”
“D----id you say anything back to him?”
“Oh yeah, and I got bit good in the butt again. I told him I guess he didn’t appreciate me staying round to help with the kids, and you know what he said then?”
I shook my head.
“He said, ‘What makes you think your mother and I are not capable of raising our children without your help?’”
She dropped her head.
“I didn’t think he could hurt me any more than that, but then he stuck the gaff hook in me good.” The fire in her eyes was dying. “He told me the real reason I don’t leave home is because I’m too afraid that I can’t handle what’s out there.”
Phil opened the screen door.
“I need some time alone,” she said. “We’ll have to leave for Pilottown before too long. Everybody at the marina is getting their panties all in a twist listening to the weather radio about the storm.”
“Y----ou don’t have to b----other with taking me out on the river. I can find someone else at the marina,” I said, but I was talking to an empty room through the screen door.
I shook the porch railing in frustration, so hard that the almost-full bottle of Dixie Beer toppled off and shattered on the crushed shells on the ground. Phil needed some comforting words from me, and I had nothing to give her. Not only could I not make small talk, I couldn’t make big talk, the important words that someone needed to hear at crucial times.
Chapter 20
Phil lazily shifted through the gears of the truck. I had not ridden with her but had pegged her as someone who would drive as aggressively and as fast as she did everything else. I carefully worded my sentences to explain that I had put my extra money in the duffel bag with the urn and that I could pay someone at the marina to take me out on the river if she could tell me about the place where her father said I could find the Mouth of the Mississippi River.
Wrong approach. Wrong words.
“Oh sure. All I need now is for Henri Moreau to see his daughter run out on a rich boy from Memphis who drove all the way down here so he could keep a promise to a dead man.”
The combined look of frustration and fear on Phil’s face was the same kind I had when words spewed from my mouth twisted and confused, but I couldn’t let her mean words go unchallenged. Even sensing that she wanted to take back her words, I couldn’t stop myself from lashing back at her.
“And d----on’t forget… a s----puttering boy at that.”
My cruel words to her tasted bad in my mouth. When I threw my hardest fastball, it went to the outside of the plate, never inside. I was always afraid of hurting someone. Words were no different. I tried to use them carefully after being stung so many times myself. Phil didn’t intend for her words to come out the way they did. I knew that she was confused, but I also knew that self-pity didn’t fit her well. I wanted her to leave that way of thinking and come back to me in the way that was her nature.
She stomped on the brake pedal.
“Oh, Vic, I’m just talking out of my head. You know I didn’t mean that.”
I pretended to look in the truck’s side mirror. I couldn’t make myself face her.
“Please forgive me,” she said. “Truth is, the river is where I need to be. With you.”
I adjusted the mirror. Phil scooted toward me. I sensed her lean in and then snap herself back under the steering wheel.
“I have no right,” she whispered to herself. And then to me: “I’m so sorry for what I said.”
Roller coasters never suited me. The feelings at the bottom of the ride never matched the anticipation at the top, and the plunge in the middle was always too confusing to take in. My thoughts slammed into one another the rest of the way on the short drive to the marina. Phil parked the truck near the stairs that led up to the office. When she reached to turn off the ignition, the roller coaster plunged and I heard myself say, not in a whisper: “I have a right.”
I grabbed Phil’s face with both hands and kissed her on the mouth.
My speech therapist once showed me in her office a diagram that explained how it took more than one hundred small muscles in the area of the tongue and the mouth to produce a single vocalization. Every one of those muscles got a good workout when I kissed Phil. Then, she took over for me and seemed to do the kissing.
At some point, air became more of a problem than muscle fatigue. When we let go of each other, Phil fluffed out the curls on the side of her head where I had grabbed her. It was the first time I had seen her fuss with her hair. She seemed to have joined me on the roller-coaster ride.
She opened her door and stepped to the curb, hesitated, and returned to the window of the truck.
“Are you trying to convince me not to call you a ‘boy’ anymore?”
Phil slapped the top of the cab so hard that it made me jump. She headed up the stairs two at a time. I stayed in the truck a little longer to make certain my roller coaster was going to stay on its tracks.
* * *
Hurricane Betsy was the sole topic of conversation in the marina office. Buster fiddled with ribbons of tinfoil on a set of rabbit ears on a small television. Men standing at the counter repeated to one another what the weather forecasters had just said.
The storm was erratic and massive, six hundred miles from tip to tip with an eye that was forty miles wide. After stalling in the Atlantic, highly unusual for a hurricane on a northerly track the men said, Betsy had turned southwest. The Florida Keys braced for a major hit. Would it continue on its southwest course, as some predicted, and stall itself out in the lower gulf that had slightly cooler waters?
