Queen Sugar: A Novel (6 page)

The woman glanced at the stub, then appraised Charley with a steely gaze. “You ain’t from around here.”

“I’m from California.”

“California,” the woman said, as though California were a hostile nation.

“But I live here now, with
my
grandmother. Not too far, as a matter of fact.”

“Excuse me, but have you ever worked cane?”

“No.” Charley sighed. “I haven’t.”

The woman drew herself up. “Well, I have. And let me tell you, cane work is the hardest, dirtiest, most backbreakin’, thankless, low-paying work there is. My family’s worked cane for six generations, and after all that, we ain’t got nothin’ to show for it. Just look at my grandmama’s house.” She made a sweeping gesture. “She worked cane since she was
nine
years old, and
this
is all she’s got. Has she got any money saved? Has she got a pension? Health care? Does she own anything but this trailer and the little speck of sorry-ass ground it sits on?” Drops of sweat spangled her hairline. “Those big cane farmers cut corners with her every chance they got.”

Charley wanted to say that she was different, that she would offer medical benefits, a retirement plan, even a small life insurance policy. She wanted to look straight at the woman and ask,
How about you—can I hire you
? But she had the overwhelming sense that she’d be digging a hole for herself.

“If it wasn’t for social security,” the woman fumed, “and the little bit us grandkids scrape together each month, my grandmother would be out on the road.” The more she spoke, the thicker her accent grew. “And here you come, pecking around like a spring chicken. Talking like someone on the TV. Asking if she’ll
work
for you?”

“I should go.”

“I bet you’d be even worse to work for than a white man.”

Charley grabbed her backpack and stuffed the pay stub in the front pocket, let herself out, and hurried down the steps. At the bottom, she paused. All she wanted was to find workers and get down to business. Jacques Landry was one thing—she should have expected that. But her own people? Who did they think she was? She looked back at the woman barring the doorway. “Sorry if I offended you or your grandmother.”

“I bet.” And with that, the woman slammed the door.

Four hundred miles to go. They were almost home. East of San Antonio, Ralph Angel saw a sign for Corpus Christi and got an idea. He merged off the interstate onto Highway 37. In the passenger seat, Blue continued his low, rumbling dialogue with Zach the Power Ranger, who was still imprisoned in the glove box. “’Cause we might get arrested,” Ralph Angel heard him say. “So you have to stay inside and be very, very quiet.”

Blue looked up and asked, “Are we there yet?”

“What did I say about that? Just wait. I have a surprise.”

Eventually, the woods yielded to marshland, the two-lane road cutting a straight line through an expanse of gray water peppered with reeds and tufts of low, wiry grass. Egrets, white as porcelain, took flight from their rookeries, while in the distance a house balanced on stilts, lording over its watery homestead, and seeing all this, Ralph Angel felt something within him begin to shift. Like a page being turned.

Farther south, the road ended abruptly at the Intracoastal Waterway, the narrow channel stretching from the mouth of the Mississippi to the Rio Grande. A short wood dock jutted out into the water. Ralph Angel could see where the road picked up on the other side—not even sixty feet; they could almost swim across.

“What now?” Blue said.

“We wait.”

It wasn’t long before a ferry cruised up the channel. Cracked black buoys dangled from its rusted bow, paint curled away from the wheelhouse, but otherwise, nothing had changed; it was the same ferry as when he was a kid, and Ralph Angel, suddenly breathless with an old excitement, thought back to the day his daddy brought him to this very spot. A summer trip to the beach, just the two of them; a vacation he waited months to take, his father having called from California that September to say they would go someplace special when school got out. Ralph Angel had marked the days off the calendar, slogged through the long months until June finally arrived and his father, dashing in slacks and loafers, knocked on the front door. And while his father steered the Buick LeSabre with one hand, the other arm propped in the open window, he sang along to the cassette tape—Al Green’s version of “People Get Ready”—as they cruised over the blacktop road. Ralph Angel bathed in the radiance of his dad’s presence, so happy he thought he would burst.

And now, belching smoke, the same ferry rumbled up to the dock and idled. Ralph Angel smelled creosote and diesel fuel.

Blue grinned. “Can we ride on that boat?”

“You, me, and Zach.”

Ralph Angel paid the one-dollar fare and steered the Impala onto the dock, then onto the ferry. For the few minutes it took to cross the channel, he and Blue stood on the creaky deck, Ralph Angel holding Blue’s waist as he leaned over the side and spat in the water.

“It’s a good boat, Pop,” Blue said. He held Zach over the side, making sound effects as he pretended Zach could fly.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Ralph Angel said, but really, he didn’t mind at all.

•   •   •

More miles of black road. A lone oil well seesawing. Then the marsh ended in a wavering wall of sea oats, and beyond it, a flat stretch of bone-colored sand, a sky the color of bleached driftwood washing out the horizon.

“Is this the surprise?”

Ralph Angel nodded as he killed the engine. “I came here with my daddy when I was a little boy,” he said, and watched a seabird, squat as a crab apple, its beak thin as a sewing needle, skitter across the sand. How odd it felt to be back here after so many years, almost a lifetime, and yet here he was. He had a vague sense of his boyhood self separating from him now, standing beside him like a specter, so that he saw the landscape through two sets of eyes; felt the pull of old memories as if someone were tugging on his sleeve. He put a hand on Blue’s shoulder. “You can get your feet wet if you want,” which was exactly what his father had said to him.

A briny wind sprayed sand as Ralph Angel, kneeling, rolled Blue’s pants up his spindly calves. “Not too far.” He sat on the Impala’s warm hood as Blue romped and galloped out to the pale brown surf, leaving a trail of flat-footed prints in the sand. The limp tide. A fringe of broken shells, froth, and plastic bottles left by the receding waves.

What he remembered most clearly was that they stayed at the beach all afternoon, that his father had set out a picnic with all his favorite things—salami between fluffy white slices of Evangeline Maid bread, Zapps potato chips, a can of Barq’s root beer for each of them, a package of Big 60 cookies with lemon crème filling bought special from Winn-Dixie—and that the wind worried the blanket so much they finally took off their shoes and used them to anchor the corners. While they ate, his father told him about California: how in a single day you could drive from the beach where the sand was as fine as cornmeal out to the desert where cacti and bright orange poppies with petals thin as tissue paper blanketed the ground; how, at the lighthouse just south of the airport, you could watch whales spout plumes of spray as they migrated through the channel, their enormous backs glistening like sea monsters as they rolled through the swells; and how, on a clear September weekend, you could drive down to the pier and order a whole boiled crab, then sit with a brown bag on your lap, pick meat from the crab’s body, and toss empty claws to the hovering gulls.

“When can I come live with you?” Ralph Angel had asked, flooded with longing. In those days, he lived with his mother, Emily, the girl his father had dated in high school, in a shabby little house in the back of town. But even then, at eight years old, while he didn’t have a name for it, Ralph Angel could see that his mother was fragile; sensed that something within her was always on the verge of breaking loose, like a handle from a teacup. It was never a question of intelligence. She’d been class valedictorian with a full scholarship to LSU and plans to go on to law school until her pregnancy made that impossible; had taught herself German, and read every Louisiana history book shelved at the local public library. But she never seemed able to keep a job. “The office manager doesn’t understand me,” she’d say when she was fired from another law office where she worked as a paralegal, or later, “The staff has it in for me,” after she cycled through every law firm from Saint Josephine to Baton Rouge, and worked as a file clerk.

“When you’re older,” his father had said.

“How much older?” The difference between months and years was still abstract and strange, but he had the sense that time was running out.

“We’ll see,” his father said. “Maybe next year. Right now I work all the time. I can’t take care of you. I know your mama’s a little different, but you’re still better off down here.” His father rolled over then, to nap in the sun, his legs crossed at the ankles, his flat feet dusted with sand.

But the next year, his father married a woman named Lorna, an ophthalmologist with her own practice, and a year after that, they had a baby girl named Charlotte, whom everyone called Charley for short, and who, merely by the fact of her presence, put an end to his father’s visits, so that by the time Ernest finally sent for him, three years had passed. Meanwhile, Ralph Angel’s mother, convinced the world was against her, stopped looking for work, grew paranoid (
They don’t like me in that Winn-Dixie. They always make me wait. I’m not shopping there anymore.
) and reclusive. She drank.

•   •   •

The stick Blue found was as tall as he was. He dragged it over the sand, all the way back to the Impala. “Look. I can draw my name,” he said, and gouged large letters at Ralph Angel’s feet.

“It’s time to go,” Ralph Angel said, his thoughts turning to his trip to California. “Come on. Dry off.”

“Can I bring it with me?”

“What do you need a stick for? You’re going to poke your eye out.” But he’d had a hundred sticks just like it when he was a kid. Sticks and antique marbles, buttons and civil war bullets he found when they plowed up the cane fields. He’d come home with pockets bulging, and Miss Honey gave him old Kerns jars for his collections. “On second thought, why not. Just be careful with it. Let’s go.”

“I need to do one more thing.”

“Okay, but hurry up.”

Funny how much he still remembered: the airline ticket arriving in the mail with his father’s handwritten instructions telling him what to do when he got to the New Orleans airport—how to check his suitcase at the counter, how to find his gate on the big TV screen, how the meal served on the plane would come on a small oval plate covered with foil, and he could pick what he wanted, chicken or beef. And if he behaved himself, the stewardess might pin a set of wings, just like the pilot wore, to his shirt.

“I’ve never been to California,” his mother, Emily, had admitted, tearfully, as the attendant announced his flight was boarding. “I’ve never even been on an airplane.” She’d pulled herself together long enough to see him off. “You be good out there. Mind your manners.” Then she stood up, reached to hug him. And maybe it was because they were at the airport, where people were rushing to catch their flights, but for the first time, he saw how slowly she moved, how she had to concentrate on every step, how she seemed pained to raise her arms.

Excited as he was to be leaving he said, “I don’t have to go. I could stay here with you.” She was the best mother she could be.

Emily’s lips trembled. “Boy,” she said, finally, “stop talking nonsense and get on that plane.” Her hands shook as she handed him his ticket.

•   •   •

Los Angeles was just like his father described—the bright blue sky, more cars than he’d ever seen—and he’d pressed his face to the window while his father drove to his new house, where Lorna and baby Charley waited. For the first month, things were easy as pie. He had his own room with a brand-new bed, new clothes, and a shiny new bike. But being with his father in California was different from their time together in Saint Josephine. Jealousy sprouted quick as rye grass as Ralph Angel watched his father lavish attention on his new family, especially on baby Charley, just two and learning to talk. Charley, Charley, Charley. All anyone ever talked about was Charley. His plays for attention, minor offenses at first—his father’s wallet swiped from the nightstand and tucked between the couch cushions, Charley’s pacifier stuffed in the garbage disposal—became more serious: outbursts in class, schoolyard brawls, arguments with Lorna, until finally, claiming he was only trying to feed her, he filled a baby food jar with water and forced Charley to drink. The water flooded her mouth, bubbled from her little nose, and for a few terrifying seconds, even he was convinced she was drowning. “That’s it,” Lorna declared, and his father had no choice but to send him home. Back to the shabby house. Back to a mother whose condition had worsened.

Blue dropped to his knees, rolled in the sand, lay on his back and moved his arms and legs up and down like he was doing jumping jacks.

“What are you doing?” Ralph Angel said.

“Making an angel.”

“This isn’t snow.”

“That’s okay.”

“Well, get up. You’ve got sand in your hair.”

Blue stood and Ralph Angel brushed him off. Sand on Blue’s neck. Sand down his shirt and in the waistband of his briefs. Sand in the folds of his pant legs.

Back on the road now, the stick poking through the back window, Ralph Angel said, “Stop scratching.”

“But my hair itches.”

“That’s what I tried to tell you. We’ll wash it when we get there.”

“But it itches bad.”

The sign outside the roadside café read
LOST DOG: BLIND IN ONE EYE, MISSING RIGHT EAR. TAIL BROKEN. RECENTLY CASTRATED. ANSWERS TO THE NAME “LUCKY
.”

Ralph Angel laughed, thought:
I know the feeling
.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.”

In the bathroom, Ralph Angel turned on the faucet, lay Blue faceup on the counter so his head hung over the sink. He pressed the dispenser till a half-dollar-size dollop of soap filled his palm.

“Close your eyes.” A halo of lather surrounded Blue’s face, his hair like the burrs caught on one’s pant hem. Ralph Angel scrubbed till he felt the sand loosen.

“Ouch,” Blue said. “That hurts.”

Ralph Angel wiped soap away from Blue’s eyes, out of his ears, then cupped his hand under the faucet so the warm water ran over Blue’s scalp. “How’s that?”

Blue smiled. “Better.”

He dried Blue’s hair with a paper towel, then looked into his son’s face again, feeling the weight of Blue’s head in his hand as the boy relaxed.

“I like being on this trip with you, Pop,” Blue said. He yawned.

How
would
his life have been different if his father hadn’t sent him back? If Charley had never been born? He couldn’t say. How much of his mother was in him? He’d never know. But he could do everything he could think of for his boy. He could do that. “Thanks, buddy,” Ralph Angel said, and sat Blue up on the counter. He wiped a drop of water that snaked down the boy’s neck. “I do too. I like that it’s just you and me.”