Queen Sugar: A Novel (16 page)

Until the 1970s, the few square blocks of ravaged ground known as Tee Coteau were strictly Cajun—poor farmers from the backcountry and scruffy fishermen who, nightly, blew off steam in the dingy bucket-of-blood bars. In the last twenty years the population had changed. First blacks moved in, then Mexicans, followed by Vietnamese in the early nineties, and in the last ten years, Laotians had staked their claim. But Tee Coteau had never lost its lower-than-blue-collar roots or seedy reputation, which was probably why Ralph Angel was so fascinated with the place; something about the narrow streets, the dingy bars, and dilapidated houses with junk cars parked in the yard felt familiar, comforting. And so, when Miss Honey came into the kitchen where he sat reading the paper, he couldn’t help but mention the day’s headline.

“You see today’s paper?” Ralph Angel snapped the front page. “Some kid shot up that bar, Smitty’s, over in Tee Coteau.”

“That’s what Hollywood was trying to tell you.” Miss Honey, dressed like she was going to church, set her purse and three jars of blackberry jelly on the counter. “I’m dropping these off at Miss Ida’s for the church rummage sale,” she said. “Then I’m taking Micah to the garden show in Morgan City. We might swing by Bayou Chic on the way back. I saw a Crock-Pot over there last month but the lady wanted thirty dollars for it. If it’s still there, she might sell it to me for fifteen. You and Blue are welcome to come.”

“No, thanks.”

“Well, don’t sit around all day,” Miss Honey said. “Make yourself useful. Hollywood left eight big boxes of junk out back. Be a good friend and take them to the dump for him.” She opened the cabinet, pushed the glasses and tea cups aside, and brought out a Kerns jar stuffed with a fat roll of bills.

“I’ll think about it,” Ralph Angel said. What he really wanted to do was take a ride over to the crime scene, see what kind of memorial folks had put up. He liked to do that sometimes, drive around and look at the flowers and candles and stuffed animals people set out on the sidewalks. Sometimes they set out weird stuff—sneakers and bottles of liquor. He couldn’t say why, but the memorials always moved him, not making him want to cry exactly, it was deeper than that; he always felt as though something solid inside him clicked into place, like tumblers in a lock.

“Cut the TV off, Micah, it’s time to go,” Miss Honey said, and Ralph Angel watched as she counted out ten singles, licking her fingers before she touched each one, then pushed the jar back and closed the cabinet. “You and Blue need to get out of this house. It’s not good for that boy to spend so much time inside.”

“I said I’ll think about it.” Ralph Angel knew he was being short with her and felt guilty. She meant well, had always been in his corner, and when it came to kids, no one loved them like ’Da did. She was always giving things to the children in town—books and money for ice cream. Every Easter since he could remember, she bought cheap white washcloths from the discount store and folded them like origami into the shape of bunny rabbits, glued on those funny squiggly eyes and little pink pom-poms for noses. That was how she’d met Hollywood. She had been driving around delivering washcloth rabbits to every kid in the Quarter when she saw him on the side of the road. He’d fallen off his bike and she brought him home, cleaned him up, sewed his pants. Gave him something to eat before she put his bike in her car and drove him out to where his family lived.
My grandson’s about your age
, she’d said. But she had a way about her, a way of nagging when she got an idea in her head that got under his skin and he couldn’t help himself. She’d start in on him with that nagging and all he wanted to do was get away. That’s what happened the last time.

•   •   •

Charley left long before Ralph Angel had even considered waking, and with Micah and Miss Honey gone, now the house was quiet. He scanned the Tee Coteau article one last time, then folded the paper, grateful to have had something to occupy his thoughts, because the truth was he hated the mornings, hated to look out over the long hours of daylight with nothing to fill them. Charley still hadn’t gotten back to him about the farm. He was trying to be patient, but the wait was driving him crazy. Nothing to do but sit around the house with Blue, watching the paint dry. At least back in Phoenix he’d had his buddies at the bar to help him kill time after he lost his job, but down here it was different; walk into the wrong bar and you could get your throat cut.

In the back room, Blue, in his undies and T-shirt, sat on the floor beside an enormous glass jar. “Look what I found,” he said, and tipped the jar forward.

Ralph Angel recognized the marbles, Civil War bullets, old brass buttons, miniature porcelain teacups and saucers, crudely carved wooden toy blocks, and antique porcelain baby dolls’ parts—tiny legs, heads, torsos, and arms—as the ones he collected when he was a kid and wandered out in the cane fields after the harvest. The fields were barren then, and the winter rains would have washed away the top layer of dirt so that all the objects left over from the 1800s, before the fields were planted in cane and farmhouses stood on the land, would just be lying there in the dirt. He’d take the objects home and wash each piece in the kitchen sink, then line them up on the windowsill. And when the windowsill was too cluttered, Miss Honey gave him the old jar.

“Where’d you get that?” Ralph Angel said.

“An old box,” Blue said, vaguely.

“An old box
where
?”

“Outside,” Blue said. “Am I in trouble?” He’d already sorted half the relics into piles.

Blue must be referring to the boxes Hollywood moved when he cleaned up, Ralph Angel thought, the ones Miss Honey wanted him to take to the dump. “No, buddy. You’re not in trouble.”

“Okay, good, because I really like this stuff. I think it’s treasure,” Blue said.

“Oh yeah?”

“From a pirate ship.” Blue held up a cat’s eye marble big as a golf ball and an ancient bullet. “Can I keep these?”

“Sure,” Ralph Angel said. “Finders keepers. Keep all of it if you want. But that bullet’s got lead on it, so don’t put it in your mouth. It’ll make you sick. Stay here. I’m going outside.”

The boxes were leaning against the back of the house just where Miss Honey said they’d be, but as for the contents, Blue had found the best of it. Nothing left but old shoes and wire hangers. But his fishing poles stood beside the boxes, the hooks still on the lines, and his old tackle box, which gave Ralph Angel an idea.

“What are you going to do with those sticks?” Blue asked when Ralph Angel came back inside. Blue had set all the teacups on their saucers, arranged the doll torsos from largest to smallest, arranged the marbles by color.

“Sticks?” Ralph Angel had to laugh. “Boy, these are my old fishing poles. By the time I was your age, I was catching tons of fish—catfish, speckled trout, red fish—and I was cleaning ’em too.” Thinking back on those old days, an excitement Ralph Angel hadn’t felt in years washed over him; some of the best days of his life. He set the tackle box on the bed. “Tell you what. We’re going to have some good ol’-fashioned fun. Get dressed.” ’Da was right. They need to get out more. But more than that, he’d show Charley he could contribute, that he wasn’t just sitting around with his hand out.

“Can I bring my treasure?”

“Sure. And grab Zach. I know he won’t want to miss this.”

•   •   •

It took Ralph Angel a while to find the ruins of the old sugar mill just outside town. When he was a boy, cane fields covered the acres, but since then they’d been subdivided, the cane cleared, and now, sprawling ranch-style homes dotted that stretch of the snaking bayou. But he found the spot eventually, and led Blue through a narrow stand of cherry trees and water oaks, cypress, wax myrtles, pecans and hackberries, until he found the barge slip, an inlet cut deep into the bank, where all through the 1800s, workers loaded barrels of molasses onto barges headed to New Orleans. Ralph Angel set down his tackle box. Across the bayou, the woods of Camperdown Plantation, just as dark and menacing as he remembered, inched right up to the bank, nudged the saw grass and elephant ears and water lilies deeper into the murky water. He was glad remnants of the old wooden Civil War bridge were still there, and as he baited the hooks, Ralph Angel tried to recall the details of the Battle of Irish Bend he’d learned in school; how Union troops had crossed over that bridge as they pursued General Taylor’s rebels; how in just over a day, three hundred fifty Union soldiers were killed and buried in a trench somewhere nearby.

“Now watch me.” Ralph Angel held the rod over his shoulder then whipped it forward and the line sailed out over the water. The red bobber made a small splash and sent a chain of ripples through the water hyacinths. “Like that,” he said, and reeled in the line. “Now you try.” He handed a pole to Blue.

•   •   •

Sitting on an overturned bucket, watching clumps of water hyacinths drift down the bayou, Ralph Angel had to acknowledge that he’d forgotten how good it felt to be outside. He liked the way the sun shone on the water and made everything look soft and sort of hazy, the way the water looked like it was sliding by in one long piece, like the whole bayou was on a conveyor belt. An egret landed on the old bridge and stood for a few seconds, perfectly still, looking for fish, before it launched itself back into the air.

From his seat on the tackle box, Blue looked up and said, “Did you come here when you were a little kid?” He took Zach out of his pocket and laid him in the dirt.

“All the time,” Ralph Angel said. “Me and Hollywood. We were best friends.” In his mind’s eye, he saw the two of them as boys standing on the bank. The vision came to him as though through a telescope, their distant silhouettes hazy and dark. Still, it was enough to inspire a pang of longing for his old friend. Ralph Angel looked out over the water. Down the bank, a frog hurled itself into of the shallows.

“I’m hungry,” Blue said.

“I figured that was coming,” Ralph Angel said. He’d packed sandwiches—peanut butter on both sides, just the way Blue liked it, and salami for himself—and while they ate, they watched an alligator, a juvenile, Ralph Angel guessed, judging from the size of its head, drift toward Blue’s bobber.

“Watch this,” Ralph Angel said. He grabbed Blue’s pole and reeled in the line fast as he could. The alligator gave chase, cutting through the water with alarming speed, its mouth open slightly, its snub nose almost touching the bobber until it was a few feet from them and Ralph Angel lifted the line out of the water.

“Pop!” Blue yelled. He fell backward off the tackle box and scrambled toward the woods.

Ralph Angel laughed. “Come back. Don’t be scared. Long as you’re up here and he’s down there in the water, you’re safe.” He looked for the alligator and saw that it had dipped under the surface, and when Blue finally came back to stand at his side, still whimpering a little, Ralph Angel pulled his son next to him. “Pretty cool, huh? I used to do that all the time when I was a kid.”

•   •   •

Way down in the curve of the bayou, a barge slowly approached. It sat low in the water and Ralph Angel guessed it was filled with sugar from Saint Mary’s Co-op, heading to one of the refineries in Grammercy or Arabi where they turned raw sugar into white.

“Zach and I don’t want to fish anymore,” Blue said. “It’s boring.”

“Okay,” Ralph Angel said. “Bring your pole over here, then y’all can go play.” They should probably head back, but he wasn’t ready to leave; not yet. Not when the air was so warm and the sky was all blue like that. Even the heat wasn’t so bad. No, he wasn’t ready to go.

When Ralph Angel looked up, he saw that the barge was still a ways down the bayou, but moving at a steady clip. He felt the vibration from its engine, like an approaching train, under his feet. He looked around for Blue and saw him standing at the head of the barge slip. He seemed to be talking to Zach as he held him over the water.

Amazing how quickly the barge moved. It was closer now. The engine rumble sent larger ripples, and across the water, Ralph Angel could see the captain high up in the towboat’s wheelhouse, his small white face like a speck of white sugar behind the big glass window. As it approached, the barge sucked water into its enormous hull so that the current up where Ralph Angel sat seemed to flow in reverse and the water level actually dropped. Water hyacinths and lilies clumped together in the backwards flow and even up ahead, in the barge slip, the water seemed to be draining away. Blue still peered into the water. He leaned down, seemed to be looking at something.

“Not too close,” Ralph Angel yelled.

Blue looked up, waved, yelled something back, but the barge was closer still, its rumbling engine louder, the vibration strong enough that Ralph Angel felt it in his bones, in his eardrums, and he couldn’t hear what Blue was saying. He turned back to look at the barge, thinking he wanted to get the captain’s attention, signal for him to blow the horn. Blue would get a kick out of that.

The front of the barge was directly before him now, and Ralph Angel walked to the edge of the bank, right up to where the saw grass and lilies were thickest. The vessel was even more imposing than he remembered from his youth; one hundred seventy-five feet of burnt-orange steel pushing through the water, the two-story wheelhouse glowing white against the tree line, the windows reflecting the sun’s glare, the engine churning up the mud as it sucked the water in, turning the bayou from murky green to dark brown as it pushed water out behind it in a massive wave that washed over the banks. Ralph Angel could see the captain’s face. He waved and the captain waved back. Ralph Angel signaled by balling his fist and pumping his arm up and down that he wanted the captain to blow his horn, and the man gave him the thumbs-up that he understood. Ralph Angel turned to look for Blue, to call him over so they could stand together. But Blue was not there.