Copyboy, page 8
“Not a problem,” the General said. “You might want to just call him Captain. Everybody else does.”
“T----ell Miss Adrienne goodbye for me.”
“You bet. Now I want you to promise me something.” The General gave me a stern look to let me know that he meant business. “On your way back through, I want you to give me a report on how you made out on the river. I checked with the newsroom and the U.S. Weather Service is keeping an eye on Hurricane Betsy even though it’s way over in the Atlantic.”
“I thought it was just a t----ropical storm.”
“They upgraded it to a hurricane early this morning.”
I had another thing to say to the General, but didn’t know if I should. Why not? I was trying all types of new things.
“I like how you call me Son Vic.”
“Old habit, giving people nicknames. Plus, Charlie told me I was to treat you like you were my son.”
“I used to give friends n----icknames, too.”
The General nodded.
“But m----ost of the time it was because I couldn’t say their real names.” I was blabbering but I had to keep going. “I also used to be afraid of putting c----ommas in my writing, but I learned from Mr. Spiro that commas are just another part of life you had to deal with.”
Words spilled out of me without making much sense. I realized I didn’t want to say goodbye to the General.
“Your Mr. Spiro was a wise friend,” the General said. “Remember now, give me a shout on the way back.” He pushed my door closed.
I had known Ray Patton for not even a full day, but waving goodbye was hard. There’s no way he could have understood what I meant by being afraid of commas or how much it bothered me that my father was not my birth father, but maybe friends, even 24-hour friends, could have good conversations without having to do a lot of explaining.
I headed out of the parking lot and south back across the bridge. The typewriter on the floorboard seemed out of place again. I still didn’t have a good answer why I thought I had to bring it, but there it was. Going with me to meet the man who finally could tell me where to find the Mouth of the Mississippi River for Mr. Spiro.
My promise seemed simple at first. Find the end of the river, the mouth. Spread the ashes. But the closer I got, the more complicated everything was getting. Mr. Spiro had never let me down and I was not going to let him down. He spent hours and hours answering my questions and teaching me all that I didn’t understand about myself. When Mr. Spiro went away, a big hole started following me around, and the only way to close it was to put his ashes exactly where they belonged. I didn’t have much time to do it, either, before I had to get back to Memphis and start my job. And college.
Chapter 13
The General had given me directions out of the city to State Highway 23, which would take me to Venice, 75 miles south of New Orleans and the last town on the Mississippi River accessible by road. He explained that I was going into a part of Louisiana that maybe was different than any other place in the world. The farther south I went, he explained, it would be more and more difficult to distinguish the river from the Gulf of Mexico.
Captain Henri Moreau lived in Venice and, according to the General, was a long-time river pilot whose job was to board ocean-going ships and guide them upriver to New Orleans and Baton Rouge. He had retired from that job and now was much in demand as a deep-sea fishing guide on his charter boat.
The names of the small towns on Highway 23 sounded even more exotic than the Mississippi towns from the day before. Jesuit Bend. Pointe a la Hache. Triumph. Bohemia. Port Sulphur.
A new language surrounded me as I followed the river south through this part of Louisiana. Small cafés at the side of the highway advertised jambalaya and étouffée. Names on signs ended with the mystery of the silent x. Boudreaux. Babineaux. Robicheaux. Fonteneaux.
Having to learn a foreign language was one of the things worrying me about going to college. My advisor already had warned me that if I didn’t take a foreign language my freshman year, it would be mandatory as a sophomore. How was I going to learn to speak a foreign language when I was having so much trouble speaking my own?
The air on Highway 23 was much like the thick air crossing Lake Pontchartrain. Memphis was humid enough in late summer, but the humidity in South Louisiana was another kind that covered you like a heavy blanket. The air conditioning would have been going full blast in my parents’ cars.
The tiny town of Happy Jack had one service station with a single pump. The attendant, unlike Fred in Mississippi, didn’t wear a uniform. Blotches of grease covered his undershirt.
“How far to… to the town… town of Venice?” I had to sneak up on the v sound carefully.
“Thirty minutes,” the attendant said, except he pronounced it “tirty” with a silent h.
“Do I keep on this highway?”
“Rat down dat way, sure.”
“How’s the fishing?” I asked, not that I was the least bit interested in fishing. I wanted to hear more of the language that made ordinary words sound like a new kind of poetry.
“Yallow fin been bite tres bon.”
“What are they b----iting?” I hoped the question sounded legitimate.
“Been lovin’ dem shiny jig wid skirt running up top, hear told.”
“Okay. Thanks for the info.”
“Bonne journée.”
I pulled away from the pump. All spoken language was foreign to me, some just more foreign than others. But I liked this new one I was hearing.
* * *
Green road signs the full length of Highway 23 declared it the “Official Evacuation Route.” Not only was it official, according to my Esso map, it was the only way in and the only way out. The river was on both sides of the road that cut through a narrow spit of land. Or was it the Gulf of Mexico now on both sides of the road? The General was right. I couldn’t tell.
A larger sign greeted me: “Venice, Louisiana — Fishing Capital of the World.”
I drove slowly as more traffic filled the highway. Almost every building in town sat high on stilts. The main floors of houses and businesses served as shelters for cars, trucks, and all manner of small boats. The space under the houses also contained, more often than not, outboard motors attached to saw horses, rows of gasoline cans, and rusty tanks of propane.
The Moreau home was on Jump Basin Road between the highway and the river. I followed the General’s hand-drawn map to a house of dull-gray weathered wood that was the largest one on the street, sitting about the width of a football field from the riverbank. Stairways on both ends led up to a porch that wrapped all the way around the house. Guy-wires anchored a tall antenna on the roof. A rusty pickup truck sat on the concrete pad under the house. Wooden picnic tables and odds and ends of fishing equipment covered the rest of the house’s foundation. Two barefoot girls sat on an old wooden boat overturned near the river. The older girl sang while she braided the younger one’s dark hair.
I parked on crushed shells at what I took to be the front of the house and climbed the long flight of stairs. A woman wiping her hands on her apron greeted me through the screen door.
“You dat Memphis boy name of Vic that the General called about?” she said with a big smile.
“Y----es, mam. I guess I found the right house.”
“I guess you rightly did. My name’s Genevieve Moreau. Gene for short. Henri’s my husband you came down to see. Come on in.” She said Henri the same way that the General did. The way I couldn’t.
Her accent was not as heavy as the gas station attendant’s, but there was no doubt she had the heritage of South Louisiana. A large table, again with bench seats, dominated the open room I walked into. On three sides, screened windows served as the top portion of the walls. Kitchen cabinets stretched all the way down one side of the room. An attic fan like the one in our old house in Memphis gently shook the house, perched on its tall legs. An assortment of chairs and worn couches filled other parts of the room. A tiny television sat on a desk along with a shortwave radio similar to the one at the newspaper.
“Thought you might bring the General with you,” Mrs. Moreau said.
“He had to work.”
She offered a quick laugh. “That’s a good ’un. The General likes to say he can’t even spell ‘work.’ Take a seat and I’ll get you a cold NuGrape if them kids left any.”
An athletic-looking woman in a purple dress, Mrs. Moreau appeared to be about the same age as my mother, but in much better shape, like she did a lot of physical outside work. She wiped the bottle of grape soda on her apron and handed it to me.
“Let me try to raise Henri and see how far out he is,” Mrs. Moreau said, before leaning over the desk and flipping switches on the radio. She clicked the button twice on the hand mic attached to the radio by a squiggly cord.
“She-Gene to Rooster Tale. Come in. Over.”
She spun a knob to a different frequency and clicked twice again.
“She-Gene to the Rooster. Do you read me?”
“Rooster to She-Gene. Over.”
“What’s your ETA? Over.”
“Fifteen hundred hours. Over.”
“See you low. Over.”
Mrs. Moreau returned the mic to its hook.
“Did you understand any of that jib-jabber?”
I shook my head.
“Henri says he’ll be in at three o’clock. The Rooster Tale is his charter boat. My radio name is She-Gene since my brother is also named Gene. He goes by ‘He-Gene’ so they can tell us apart on the radio. Clear as mud, huh?”
“What d----oes ‘see you low’ mean?”
“It’s an old shrimpers’ saying. A boat riding low in the water means it’s full of fresh catch. It now just means something like ‘see you when you get here.’”
Another language for me to learn.
I checked my wristwatch. It would be more than five hours until I could talk with Captain Henri Moreau, but there was nothing I could do about it. I had hoped to take care of my promise to Mr. Spiro and start back home, but I was depending on other people now. I thought again about what I was putting my mother and father through, but I erased it from my thinking as quickly as I could.
She-Gene busied herself in the kitchen while she told me more about her family. She and the Captain had five children — three girls, two boys. Her brother, He-Gene, lived downriver in a place called Pilottown where he was in charge of a station that supplied river pilots to ocean freighters coming into ports at New Orleans and Baton Rouge. All freighters, she explained, had to take a licensed river pilot on board to go anywhere above Pilottown. Her husband had been a pilot for 25 years before he retired and bought the Rooster Tale.
“Got his river license at twenty-two,” She-Gene said. “Youngest pilot ever on the river, sure. And the best.”
She-Gene opened the refrigerator and looked through its contents. “Did you meet Adrienne at the General’s place?”
“Y----es, ma’am. I liked her.”
“Even though she’s a far-cousin to me, I’ll have to say she’s some kind of good for the General. She knows just how much line to let out on him. I think they make a good paire.”
She-Gene pulled out all sizes of pots and pans from underneath the kitchen counter, talking all the while.
“Wish Adrienne was down here now to help me with this cooking for tonight. If that old storm will stay over in the Atlantic, we’re having us a fais do-do.”
“What’s a ‘f----ay doe-doe?’” The f sound was normally easy for me as it let out its own air, but when I couldn’t see a word in my head, it was harder to start the sound without a stutter.
“You’ll find out soon enough. We usually don’t do a fais do-do on a Tuesday night, but my Henri turns fifty today. You’re invited, sure.”
I didn’t know how to tell this nice woman I had just met that I didn’t have time to be going to a birthday party and that I needed to get back home as soon as possible to explain to my parents where I had been.
A radio on the kitchen counter played softly as She-Gene busied herself at the stove with her pots and pans. I looked around the room to see if there might be a picture of Captain Henri Moreau somewhere. I already had a sense in my head of what the river captain might look like and I wanted to see if they matched, but there was nothing on the walls except for a river chart.
Over the living room mantle in our house in Memphis was a painting of my mother and father that was done on one of their trips to New Orleans. I never liked the way my mother’s eyes would follow me from the painting anytime I walked through the room.
“D----o you… H----ave you ever heard the Captain talk about how to find the mouth of the river?”
“The river, the gulf, the tide, the fish… that’s all they talk about down here, but I can’t say I’ve heard any talk about the mouth. The General says that’s what you’re down here looking for.”
I nodded.
“Best thing I can tell you is that if there’s a mouth to be found, Henri Moreau is the one who can find it for you, sure.”
Chapter 14
A steaming mound of boiled shrimp covered the newspaper spread out in front of me.
The attic fan and the breeze coming off the river made the Moreau house comfortable in the South Louisiana heat, even with the eyes on the gas stove going full blast.
She-Gene had asked if I knew how to peel boiled shrimp. I said I did but soon found out that I didn’t.
She showed me how to snap off the head and legs, pop the meat out of the shell and use my fingernail to scrape off the black vein on the back of the shrimp that she explained was its digestive tract.
“You’re getting it now,” She-Gene said. “I don’t put no shrimp in my jambalaya that’s not been veined, sure.” She sounded like Adrienne with the way she used “sure” as a punctuation mark.
The yappy noise of a small motorbike came to a stop underneath the house and then footsteps of someone taking the stairs two at a time.
“Momma, who dat sporty car belong to?” a dark-haired girl asked as she flung open the screen door.
Her hair was short, but not short enough to discourage the head full of wayward curls. She wore a faded-green waitress uniform that anybody could see was too large for her. She took off the belt that had bunched up the uniform around her waist. She looked at me, flakes of shrimp shells covering the front of my shirt. I looked at her, barefoot and holding her white canvas shoes in one hand.
“This is Vic, come down from Memphis,” She-Gene said. “The General sent him down to talk with your daddy about going out on the river.”
Shrimp shells fluttered to the floor when I stood.
“Phil is our oldest,” She-Gene said. “Philomene is her given name, but she goes mostly by ‘Phil.’”
“That sporty car must belong to you,” the girl said.
I nodded.
Philomene Moreau walked to the table, picked a peeled shrimp out of the bowl in front of me and plopped it in her mouth.
“You best vein them shrimp good, Sporty Boy,” she said. “Momma don’t ’low no dirty shrimp in her gumbo.”
She crossed the room and headed down the back hall before I could come up with anything to say.
“Phil waitresses some at Maison’s down by the marina. She’d rather be out on the Rooster but her daddy won’t pay her nothing. You’ll see she can be something else, sure.”
Something else is exactly what she was. She moved like a shortstop but was as pretty as any cheerleader. Her dark eyes drilled into me when she looked at me. Her tan was not the swimming pool kind that disappeared a week after school started.
“H----ow old is your d----aughter?” I pretended still to be interested in the pile of shrimp in front of me.
“Eighteen, soon be nineteen. Been out of school for a year or so. We thought she might go on with her schooling, but she’d rather work on the boat even if her daddy won’t pay her nothin’.”
“I’m starting c----ollege next week, but some of my friends are taking a year off before they start.” I felt the urge to make an excuse for the girl named Phil even though I had just met her.
“Never seen a girl so crazy about boats. She’s not happy unless she’s on the river or out in the gulf.”
The pile of peeled and veined shrimp in the bowl grew larger. At first my thoughts while peeling had been on taking care of my promise and getting back to Memphis as soon as possible, but I couldn’t get my mind off the barefooted girl who had exploded into the house.
As fast as she had disappeared down the hall, the girl returned in quick strides across the room and over to the shortwave radio. The waitress uniform was gone, replaced by cutoff jeans and a faded red-plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up above her elbows. The jeans shorts were not the knee-length or even mid-thigh shorts that girls in Memphis wore. This girl wore the shortest of shorts. We learned about adjective case in sophomore English — short, shorter, shortest. These shorts were not comparative. They were superlative.
The girl clicked the hand mic twice.
“Phil to Rooster. Come in.”
“Rooster here. Over.”
“Say ETA,” she said in that quick, snappy radio voice that I envied. “Over.”
“I jes’ told your momma. Over.”
“So… told your daughter, too. Over.”
“Fifteen hundred hours. Over.”
“See you low. Out.”
Phil joined her mother at the kitchen counter. Concentrating on the pile of shrimp in front of me grew even more difficult. The mother and daughter chatted about seasonings and cooking times as they tasted and tended to the pots that simmered on the stove.
