Queen Sugar: A Novel (2 page)

“I thought this Frasier fella was managing the place,” Miss Honey said, raising her hand to shield against the glare.

“He was.” Charley twisted her wedding ring absentmindedly. “Last time we talked, he said something about replacing a tractor belt.”

“Well, I’d say he’s got some explaining to do.”

Charley consulted her watch. They were five minutes late. “You think he’s been here and left already?”

“I couldn’t tell you what he might do,” Miss Honey said. “I don’t know this Frasier from Adam’s housecat.”

“I know where we should put the cows,” Micah declared, peering through her camera’s viewfinder. “They can live out by those trees.”

“This isn’t that kind of farm,” Charley said.

“But we can’t have a farm without cows,” Micah pressed. “What about goats?”

“No goats.”

“Well, what then?”

Charley glanced at her watch again, then squeezed the bridge of her nose. “Sweetheart, why don’t you walk around and take some pictures.” White clouds, thick as mashed potatoes, drifted across the sky. Something that looked like a flat-winged bee bounced between the blossoming vines as hot air rose from the dirt.

“My feet are starting to swell,” Miss Honey said. “I’ll be in the car.”

•   •   •

It was almost ten o’clock before an old Ford F-150 with a “Jesus is my co-pilot” license plate rambled down the road ahead of a long contrail of dust. George Strait’s crooning voice wafted through the truck’s open window. A white man sat behind the wheel.

“Thank God.” Charley waved. She had imagined Frasier as older, early sixties perhaps, and stocky as a lumberjack. She had imagined a man wearing embossed cowboy boots and a cowboy hat with a cane leaf braided around the band. But the man who climbed down from the truck looked much younger. Years of physical labor had worn any possibility of fat from his frame. His NASCAR jersey had Dale Earnhardt’s picture on the front and sun gilded his brown hair, which, at that moment, was wet. She walked over to greet him. “Mr. Frasier?”

“Miss Bordelon,” Frasier said, in the same flat tone she recognized from the phone. “Sorry about the time. Some accident on the road.”

“No, no, that’s okay,” Charley said, extending her hand. “It’s nice to finally meet you. In person, I mean.”

“Likewise.” Frasier gave her hand a firm shake but didn’t say anything more.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for this day.” Charley gestured toward the fields. “It’s good to see everything for myself. I’d have come down sooner, but I had to wait for my daughter to finish school. Now that I’m here, though, I’m ready to get down to business.” She waited for Frasier to respond, but he didn’t, so Charley, growing increasingly uneasy, plunged in deeper. “I know we talked about all the work to be done, but I have more questions. For starters, and I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, I was looking at the fields and I noticed . . . Well, they don’t look exactly like I thought they would.” Like they
should.

“Yeah, well.” Frasier threaded his thumbs through his belt loops. He was hard-core Nashville and Grand Ole Opry. Jim Beam straight from the bottle.

“I don’t mean to question your work,” Charley said. “It’s just that I passed plenty of other fields on my drive into town and they were so neat, so orderly, and I—”

“Thought yours would look better,” Frasier said.

“Well, yes. But I don’t want you to think I’m criticizing—”

“Actually, Miss Bordelon.” Frasier looked at Charley with a pained expression, then straightened as though he’d practiced what he was about to say. “I won’t be working for you.”

“You won’t be what?”

“I took another job.”

“You
what
?”

Frasier fell silent. He looked down at the ground, then out over the fields.

“But when?” Charley said. “Why didn’t you tell me?” She stared at Frasier. He had an honest face, the kind you’d want to see if you were stranded along the roadside with a flat tire late at night. “Are you working for someone else? Because if it’s money, I don’t have much, but I’m sure we can work something out.” Without thinking, she touched her wedding ring again, a platinum band that had been pounded thin in back where the jeweler made it larger. Six angled prongs framed an enormous diamond that had belonged to Davis’s mother before it became her engagement ring.

“My brother-in-law pulled some strings,” Frasier said. “Got me a job on a rig.”

“Rig?”

“Oil rig,” Frasier said. “Out in the Gulf.”

Charley twisted her ring so that the diamond pressed into her palm. “But I just talked to you two weeks ago. You didn’t say anything about another job.”

“I know. I wanted to try it out first.”

“You’re kidding, right? This is a joke. We’re supposed to harvest this cane in October. We only have five months.”

Frasier batted at the closest cane plant, then ripped a withering leaf from the stalk. “I’ve been working cane since I was sixteen, Miss Bordelon. I’m shamed to admit it, but I don’t have a penny saved. If I bust a knee, what’ll I do? Couple years back, Mr. LeJeune took—”

“Who?”

“Mr. LeJeune. The man who owned this farm before your daddy. When he got too sick to run this place himself, his kids stepped in. But they weren’t really interested. They were off in New Orleans, riding on floats, going to balls, drinking Pimm’s Cups at the Columns Hotel.”

“I won’t be riding on floats,” Charley said. “And I’ve never heard of a Pimm’s Cup. Mr. Frasier, please.”

Frasier crumpled the cane leaf in his palm. “I had to beg ’em to plant enough cane last year and they hardly took care of the cane that was here. When LeJeune died, they scraped by until they sold. Your daddy convinced me we could bring this place back. But now he’s gone too.”

“But I’m here,” Charley said. “Give me a chance.”

Frasier shredded another cane leaf. “If I don’t do something now, I’ll run out of money before I run out of air. I don’t want to be greeting folks at Walmart when I’m sixty-five.”

“But I was counting on you. I’ve been
paying
you.”

Frasier pulled two checks from his breast pocket, handed them to Charley, and she saw that they were the ones she’d mailed weeks ago. “I’ve asked around. Problem is, this time of year, anyone worth hiring has already signed on for a job.”

Charley touched Frasier’s jersey as if it were the hem of his royal robe. If he wore a ring she would have kissed it. She would have knelt if he’d asked her to. “Please, Mr. Frasier. Wait one season. You’ve put me in a terrible bind.”

Frasier looked at her with great sympathy. “Your daddy was a good man,” he said. “I never met him in person, but I could tell. And I can tell you’re a good person too.” He brushed his hands on his pants. “But two more months and I get my union card. I’ll have benefits.”

“We both know I can’t run this place by myself. Please. I’m begging you.”

“It only seemed right to tell you in person.”

Charley looked out at her fields. The cane seemed to have withered even more in the hour since she arrived. Birds, whose chipper singing she hadn’t noticed until now, seemed to mock her with their chatter. “All this time and you never said a word.” A tremendous lump thickened in her throat and she turned away, willing herself not to cry. She fully expected Frasier to leave, but he waited patiently, hands wedged deep in his back pockets.

“If you’d like to go over things,” he offered.

Somehow, Charley managed to write down the instructions he gave her: how to start the tractor; where to buy replacement parts, diesel, and fertilizer; what tools were in the shop; directions to the Ag station. She took notes, but had no idea what to do with them.

At last, Frasier looked openly at his watch. “I guess that does it.” He turned to leave, stepping sure-footedly over the ruts and clumps of soil. At his truck, he paused. “It’s good land. I hope you know that. Good luck to you, Miss Bordelon.”

And then he was gone.

•   •   •

Once Frasier’s truck disappeared, Charley walked unsteadily back to the car, where Miss Honey fanned herself with an envelope.

“How’d it go?”

“Fabulous,” Charley said, sliding in. “He’s a gem. A real man of his word.” She held herself together long enough to slip her keys into the ignition. The engine turned over. But as she shifted into reverse, Charley thought about how much her life had slipped. Six hours ago, she felt like a girl getting ready for a dance, with lights and music and a new life stretched out before her like a red silk carpet. Now she was a girl who kept losing things: she lost her husband in a holdup he just had to resist and she almost lost her daughter. She lost her father to cancer, and now she was about to lose his strange and unexplained legacy, this sugarcane farm. She had a pad of notes she could barely read, her manager had quit, and she was out in the middle of God knew where. Charley stopped the car. She took a long, deep breath. Then she hid her face in her hands and sobbed.

“When you stood there for so long, I had a feeling,” Miss Honey said. She rubbed Charley’s back.

At the feel of Miss Honey’s touch, Charley cried harder. “I’m sorry.”

Miss Honey pressed a damp napkin from the cooler into Charley’s hands. “That’s okay,
chère.
Let it out,” she said. “’Cause you got a big job ahead of you. And in a minute, you’re gonna have to pull yourself together.”

At the far edge of the field, Micah’s yellow T-shirt and orange shorts flashed like banners against the brown earth as she started to run.

“Who’d Ernest buy this place from?” Miss Honey asked.

Charley wiped her eyes, watching her daughter approach. “Some family named LeJeune.”

Miss Honey looked surprised. For a moment, it seemed as though she might say something, but she just nodded and let Charley collect herself.

“Look at these,” Micah said, panting, as she reached the car. She handed four Polaroids through the window before she saw Charley’s face. “Mom? Why are you crying? Miss Honey, what’s wrong with my mom?”

Miss Honey opened a bottle of water and offered it to Micah. “Quiet,
chère.
You mamma’s having a bad day.”

In twenty-four hours he would be a fugitive; twenty-four hours, and the Chevy Impala would appear on the Phoenix Police Department’s list of stolen vehicles. Ralph Angel considered his new identity as the car glided over the highway. He tugged at his collar, remembering the crisp white dress shirts he wore as a college student all those years ago; white shirts with natural shell buttons that cost most of his monthly allowance. But fingering his collar now, all Ralph Angel felt was the frayed cotton of his thrift-store button-down.

Behind Ralph Angel, his son, Blue, six years old, kicked the seat. “Can we go to the plaza on Sunday?”

“Why?”

“I want a churro,” Blue said. “I didn’t get one last time.”

“So?” Ralph Angel stuck his arm through the window. How many times in the last four months had he and Blue walked to the plaza on a Sunday morning? He’d scrape together enough money for four warm churros wrapped in newspaper and a six-pack of Dos Equis, and they’d sit on the shaded grass listening to the mariachis play. They stayed all day and into the evening sometimes, Ralph Angel nursing his beer, Blue nibbling the long ropes of fried dough, the two of them watching red-lipped women dance with men in cowboy hats and boots. Those trips always ended the same way: back in the rented room, Blue asleep in his street clothes, the two of them sharing the soft mattress while Ralph Angel stared at the TV, waiting for sleep that rarely came. By midnight, he’d give in to the craving, slip out for a drink at the Piccolo Club or cruise Fifty-ninth Avenue to score some junk.

“When we get to Billings, maybe we can find a new treat,” Ralph Angel said. “Something better than churros.” But Blue was absorbed with Zach, the Power Rangers action figured he treated in mysterious and punishing ways. Ralph Angel heard Blue say, “Once a Power Ranger, always a Power Ranger,” and make exploding sounds as he smashed Zach against the door hardware.

“Easy there, buddy,” Ralph Angel said. “Maybe we’ll get you a buffalo burger.” Cowboys and buffalos, wasn’t that what they had out there in Big Sky country? He imagined frontier towns, white men dressed in flannel and spurs. He imagined life in Billings: he’d stick out like a fleck of pepper in the salt.

Blue unfastened his seat belt, sat forward, and walked Zach across Ralph Angel’s headrest. “Mystic source, mystic force,” he said.

Ralph Angel heard clicking noises near his ear as Blue pressed the light on Zach’s Dino Fire; heard Blue say, “Power ax,” as he pressed the tiny weapon into Ralph Angel’s cheek.

“Zach wants to know what else we’ll eat,” Blue said.

Ralph Angel thought for a moment. “How about huckleberry pie?” Cowboys always ate huckleberry pie.

Blue laughed. “Zach says we can eat huckleberry pie every day when you come home from work. We can have huckleberry pie for breakfast if we want.”

“Sure, buddy. Whatever you say.”

Billings, Montana, according to the article in
Money
magazine that Ralph Angel read in the emergency room last month when Blue jumped off a wall and sprained his ankle, was the seventh-best place in the country to live. In the accompanying photo, a man and a boy paddled a canoe. Their backs were turned, but you understood from the way they leaned forward in their matching life vests, the way they raised their oars in unison, with water like chips of crystal spilling back into the lake, that they were father and son. White, of course, rugged and sturdy, but still. Staring at the picture, Ralph Angel had been overcome. He could be that father. Blue could be that boy. They just needed to get to Billings.

But something felt wrong, which was why he was procrastinating; why it had been three days since they left Phoenix and he’d driven only as far as Flagstaff. If he turned around now, they would be back in Phoenix by midnight, no later than two. He could put Blue to bed, get Mrs. Abernathy across the hall to babysit while he returned the car. Only there was no home to go home to. Six months ago, the sheriff nailed an eviction notice on the door, set their clothes on the street. For the last four months, they had lived at the Wagon Wheel, a motel at the end of East Van Buren, where he paid for their room by the week. There was no job to wake up for, because he got fired.

“I’m hungry,” Blue said. “What do we have to eat?”

Ralph Angel looked at the empty passenger seat. If Gwenna were here, she’d have thought ahead, packed sandwiches, drinks, and something sweet as a surprise. That was one of the things he loved about her; she always thought ahead, always scanned the horizon for problems, like a ship’s captain stationed at the bow. “We’ll stop soon,” Ralph Angel said. “Just hold on.” He glanced at the passenger seat again and braced himself against the twist of longing. There was no Gwenna to pack sandwiches or encourage him to look for another job; no Gwenna to reassure him everything would be okay because Gwenna was dead.

“Are we there yet?”

“Those four words,” Ralph Angel said, “I don’t want to hear them. Now sit back.” He let his eye wander across the landscape, the sloping golden foothills dotted with ponderosa, and tried again to picture them in Montana. He’d rent a small house with a yard that opened onto a meadow. Blue and his friends would build a fort in the woods or by a lake if there was one close by, and when the boys got older, they’d stay out all weekend, camping and fishing the way boys liked to. He’d go to all of Blue’s games—baseball and basketball—and sit in the bleachers with the other parents. “That’s my kid,” he’d say when Blue scored the winning basket. “That’s my kid.”

Ralph Angel glanced at the sudden movement in the rearview mirror. Zach wagged back and forth while Blue chanted, “Are-we-there-yet-Are-we-there-yet,” like a drumbeat. He tried to ignore it, tried to focus on the road and their life in Billings, until finally he reached back, grabbed Zach, and held him out the window. He felt the sun warm his hand, smelled the clean scent of pine. “You done?” Except for the wind, the car was silent. After five long seconds he said, “Thought so,” and passed the action figure back.

•   •   •

At Tuba City, Ralph Angel took a break. He pulled off the road and into the rest stop parking lot, wedging the Impala between two semis.

“Pop?”

Tourists on their way to or from the Grand Canyon filed through the double doors, headed toward the restaurant. Ralph Angel imagined them bent over burgers and fries.

“Stay in the car. I’ll be back.”

“But I’m hungry and Zach has to pee,” Blue said.

“Tell him to hold it. Let me see what they’ve got in there. I’ll be back in a second.” Ralph Angel tucked in his shirt and zipped his jacket halfway. He scanned for Highway Patrol, then fell in line with people entering the building.

Inside, the air was heavy and smelled like doughnuts. There was a restaurant, a minimart, and beyond, a row of fast-food counters. His stomach seized at the thought of day-old grease, of plates smeared with ketchup, cigarette butts tucked into wadded napkins. The summer before he went off to college, he’d worked briefly as a dishwasher at the Waffle House just outside town, and had been surprised and horrified by what people did with their food. “People are animals,” Eddie the busboy said, stacking dishes on the stainless steel sink, and Ralph Angel had agreed. Now he closed his eyes as the nausea swelled, then passed. When it was gone, he watched the swirl of people moving through the lobby: women in capri pants and visors, men in cargo shorts and fanny packs, kids Blue’s age, running giddily across the tiled floor.

Surprisingly, the minimart was empty, peaceful as a library. As Ralph Angel entered, the young woman behind the counter looked up from her magazine. She wore bright pink lipstick and her mouth reminded Ralph Angel of the wax lips he chewed as a kid. He flashed a smile.

“Water?” he asked.

She pointed to a bank of refrigerators on the far wall, then went back to her reading.

Ralph Angel gave a cheerful thumbs-up, then made his way down the aisle, being sure to walk deliberately. He wanted the girl to see he had a goal, he was a man who wanted water. When he reached the back wall, he slid the glass doors open and felt the rush of cold air, like a light slap in the face, looked for the cheapest bottled water and took two. Glancing toward the front of the store, he saw that the girl’s head was down, still reading. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear in the slow, unconscious way women did when they were preoccupied.

Beside him, the refrigerators hummed steadily, and Steely Dan’s breezy hit “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” wafted in from the food court, over the echoes of families chattering, and coins jingling, and cashiers calling out people’s orders. They were the sounds of summer. For a few seconds, as Ralph Angel stood listening, it seemed to him that the day was filled with possibility, as if a yolky, glowing ball hovering over the rest stop was suddenly cracked open, spilling warmth and light down on all those inside. For a moment he felt it, like a faint pulsing: the lightness that came with a few lazy summer months, the quiet joy in being connected to people you loved and who loved you. But then it faded, and he was flooded with the awesome knowledge that he was all alone—no mother, no father, no Gwenna. Just him and Blue.

And so, as he walked up the aisle toward the register, Ralph Angel plucked items off the shelf: Tiger’s Milk bars, Snickers, Slim Jims—whatever he touched—and dropped them into his sweatpants, because he had to feed his boy, because raising his son was the only thing he was good at, and he would do whatever it took. The wrappers crackled as they slid down his leg and came to rest above the ankle elastic. The urge to take inventory, like a trick-or-treater, surged within him.

At the counter, his heart pounding, Ralph Angel managed to hold up the bottles of water. “You got a bathroom in here?” he asked, tossing two crumpled dollars on the counter.

The girl’s mangy blond hair was swept up in a giant butterfly clip. She was like the young, fast white girls in Phoenix who hung out at the park; girls who laughed in his face, cussed him out just for fun.

“Down the hall next to Roasters.” She scanned the bottles, dropped them into a plastic bag, and held it out to him.

“Cool. Thanks.”

As Ralph Angel turned to leave, the corner of the Tiger Milk bar slipped out of his pants leg, dragged on the floor with a
sushing
sound.

“What’s that?” the girl asked, pointing. She leaned across the counter.

Ralph Angel glanced down at the triangle of shimmery gold foil. He looked at the girl.

“Dude,” she said, her face darkening, “are you fucking boosting?” She looked right at him, not through him or past him the way so many people did, but right into his eyes, her gaze direct, searing.

Ralph Angel opened his mouth, but before any words could come, the girl stepped backward, felt for the phone mounted on the wall.

“It was an accident,” Ralph Angel managed. “I don’t know what I was thinking.” He approached the counter, his hands out where she could see them, then reached in his pocket and pulled out a small roll of bills. “Jesus, just give me a minute.” His hand trembled as he unfolded a twenty and a wad of singles. “This is all I’ve got. I swear.”

The girl stared at the money.

“I was saving it for gas,” he continued. “I’ve got my kid with me, see? Just let me pay. I got my kid. He’s in the car.”

The girl eyed him, then glanced up at the video equipment mounted on the ceiling.

Ralph Angel saw his pixilated self on the monitor. “I swear it’s true.” He pointed at the big picture window behind her, to one of the minivans at the edge of the lot rather than the Impala. “There, that green van. The one with the kid behind the wheel.”

A couple walked in. Matching shirts, matching sneakers. Ralph Angel heard the woman say, in a nasally midwestern tone, “We should buy some of these garlic chips for the kids.”

Ralph Angel let his hands fall to his sides. “What’s gonna happen to him if I get hauled off to jail? His mama’s dead. Just let me pay up. You won’t ever see me again.”

He knew the girl was weighing her choices, marked the moment, by the blink of her eyes, when she decided against him.

And in that next moment, Ralph Angel made his own decision. No use trying to convince some thick-necked security guard he actually
had
enough cash to buy the food he stole, that his kid really
was
in the car, even if it wasn’t the car he pointed out to the girl. And what about the car? How would he explain that he rented it for a couple days, just to get around town, but that somehow those couple days had turned into a couple weeks? That the rental place had sent a dozen demand letters threatening to alert the police if he didn’t bring the car back? That his grace period expired
today
, and that by this time tomorrow he’d be wanted for grand theft auto?

Ralph Angel lunged forward. He swept the money off the counter, bolted from the store, back through the crowded lobby, the plastic bag with the water bottles in it swinging at his side, the stolen food shaking up and down against his leg, the girl’s cry “Stop that guy” echoing behind him. He pushed through the glass doors, stumbled out into the heat and the blinding sunlight. At the Impala, he dived behind the wheel, jammed the key into the ignition, and tore out of the lot.