The Hard Blue Sky (23 page)

“By nighttime we going to have a full house here.”

Way far off some kids were shouting, and an acorn fell off and rolled down the tin roof.

“Don’t you want to see the rest of the house, che’?”

“Sure,” she said. “Most certainly I do.” She pushed Claudie off her lap.

“That’s the kitchen, right there,” he said, “and the back door. And the rest is over here.”

They crossed the little hall. When Claudie tried to follow them, they closed the door.

So he went and looked out the back door, then he turned and walked the length of the house, scuffing his heels as hard as he could. He stopped at the door, staring out, rubbing the tip of his nose against the screen, sniffing in the sharp odor of dust. Then he kicked it wide open, so hard that it banged against the wall of the house, and went outside.

There was a girl on the porch. She was sitting in one of the cane rocking-chairs with her bare feet propped up on the railing. Claudie was so surprised that he just stood and stared at her for a minute. Then he turned to run inside, but the screen had slammed shut again. He kicked at it and jumped for the handle, and though he had it between his fingers once, he could not open the door. So he turned around and, with his back and both hands pressed against the screen, watched the girl.

She did not take her feet down, or move her body in the slightest. She turned her head very slowly. “You want to get back in, huh?”

He kept staring at her, not moving, just watching her large very pale blue eyes.

“I’ll open the door when I come to getting up.” She turned her head back and stared straight ahead. Her right hand patted the side of her chair. “Come on over here.”

A big mockingbird came down and perched on the porch steps, his long thin tail jabbing the air. She hissed at him and he was gone in a second.

Claudie tiptoed across the porch until he stood by the chair.

“Want some gum?” He nodded. She took a yellow package of Chiclets out of her shirt pocket, shook out one and handed it to him. He popped it in his mouth. “Don’t swallow it, idiot. Just chew it, see?”

He noticed that the shell path went by right in front of the house, just outside the little wire fence. And that on the other side of the path was a thick clump of oleanders, their leaves shining and green.

“You’re her boy, huh?”

He was so busy watching the grove of oleanders that he hardly listened as she went on talking to him. “They put you out? Are they in bed now? Are they?”

He looked at her quickly and looked away, shaking his head.

“No,” she said, “I guess you wouldn’t know.”

Another girl passed, peddling slowly on a bike, the dust rising in little low white tracks after her. And in the top of the oak tree two mockingbirds began to fight. Claudie bent back his head far as he could and tried to spot them.

She said: “If you keep on looking straight up for birds, like that with your mouth open, they going to drop right square down your throat.”

He closed his mouth with a gulp and looked down at his feet.

She laughed. “Frog eyes! … What’s your name?”

He was still staring at his feet. “Claudie.”

“Oh sure,” she said, and scratched her knee.

He went back to watching the small things that moved in front of him: a green grasshopper, with legs thin as wire; a couple of big red ants.

A young woman passed, a short stocky woman with black hair that had blue tints in the sun. Annie called: “Hey, we got a wedding here, come on over.”

The woman waved, but kept walking.

Annie ran down the steps calling: “Cecile, come on … they’re beating those old bedsprings to pieces.”

Cecile turned and walked to meet her then, shaking her head. Claudie could hear the angry murmur of the voice, but they were too far off for him to get the words. Then Annie turned and walked back to the porch, swinging her shoulders with her steps. She sat down again and jammed her feet back up on the railing.

Claudie watched her; for a moment he’d thought she was crying, the way she passed the back of her hand across her eyes.

“What are you staring at, idiot?”

He looked away quickly.

Perique came back. He was just opening the front gate when she shouted out to him: “My old man got married again, did you know? Must be some widow from Port Ronquille.”

Perique came up the walk and stood with a foot on the first step. “I was down at the dock, me, when they come in.”

“That’s her boy there.”

“Yea,” Perique said, “I know.”

“Man,” Annie said, “you can hear those old bed slats creaking.”

Perique did not answer. He looked down at the tips of his shoes.

“What’s the matter,” Annie said, “you don’t think I got any reason to talk like that?”

“Oh hell,” Perique said.

Annie hissed under her breath.

“Picking a wife’s his own business.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, mister jackass.”

Perique sat on the top step, beside Claudie. “I don’t know, me,” he said. “She look all right to me.”

Her bare toes stretched and curled. The mockingbird came back to the far rail.

“Come on,” Perique said. “Come on have a beer with me.”

Claudie looked up eagerly. He liked the taste of beer. He’d always drunk the warm liquid that was left over in the bottles.

“Go away,” Annie said.

“You come with me.”

“I want to stay here, right here,” Annie said, “until him and that scrawny woman come out.”

“The kid’s right here,” Perique said in a whisper.

“What do I care?”

Perique got up and left without a word. Claudie watched his faded tight jeans walk away. There was a knife hanging from his belt, a thick red knife. Claudie wished he had one.

He looked over at the girl but she was staring straight ahead, her face not moving. He sighed lightly. It was very quiet in the whole afternoon with just the faint burring of crickets and a tiny stirring in the leaves.

He was tired. He stretched out on his side, his back against the railing, his head on his arm, and went to sleep.

He woke up when the glass broke. He heard the crash and then the little ripple of the pieces falling. And people laughing. And one woman screaming almost: “Eh, là-bas!”

He sat up and looked around. He was in a room, a small room, he could see the walls dimly. The door was there, straight ahead, with a little thread of light around it. He was in a bed, a narrow, rather hard bed—he could feel it shake with the stomping. He got up and went to the door. First he tried peeping through the crack, but there was just a blur of light. Standing on his tiptoes, he stretched up to feel for the knob. It was an old-fashioned latch—jumping at it a couple of times, he pushed up the little metal bar. Then he pulled the door toward him and slipped out. He was in the narrow hall that went down the center of the house. The hall was empty: there were only a half-dozen empty beer bottles lined up very neatly on the little half-table under the picture of the Sacred Heart. Down to the right was the door to the living-room: there were people in there. And somebody was playing a piano: he stopped and listened carefully: he had not noticed one in there before. He walked down, very slowly, along the wall, his head twisting to right and left as he went. There were lots more people out on the porch; he could hear them talking. He went first and peeped out the screen, but he couldn’t see very much. So he went into the living-room instead.

He stood just inside the door, and a little to one side, and watched. His eyes found the piano, over in the corner with a bunch of straw flowers on top. He couldn’t see who was playing it. There was a girl, in a tight-fitting green silk dress, singing. Her hair was very black and short and brushed straight up with a green flower right on top. And in the little clear space in the middle of the floor some people were dancing. He couldn’t see them, just their feet moving between the legs of the people standing in front of him. The room was so noisy that his ears hurt a little. But he got as close to the people as he could and then squatted down and peered between their legs.

He stayed that way for quite a while. Then the couple standing directly in front of him, a short stocky man with a short, almost fat girl, turned and stumbled over him. Claudie yelped.

“Jesus,” the girl said.

The man picked him up and held him high over his head. “Here one boy who come to a party in his drawers!”

Claudie looked down: there was nothing but nubs of faces. He kicked and screamed.

The man held him tightly. “Anybody want him, before I throw him out the window?”

Everybody laughed. Claudie bent his head trying to bite the hands that held him around the middle, but he couldn’t reach.

“He’s a painter, him.”

He could see the teeth in all the open mouths and the faces tilted up to him.

“He’s mine. Give him here.”

“You want him, man? You sure you want him?”

“Sure I do. Give him here.”

“Okay.”

The arm brought him down. Claudie thought that he was going to be put back on the ground, and he stretched out his legs to be ready. But instead, the man shifted his grip to one arm and one leg.

Claudie felt himself swing back and forth a couple of times and then the hands were gone and he was falling backwards through the air. He arched his back and his legs began running, but he couldn’t even get himself straight up. He did not even have time to cry.

Somebody caught him, caught him so hard that for one minute he couldn’t breathe. He felt like his stomach had been flattened. Then there were floorboards under his feet, and his papa was shouting in his ear: “Scared you, boy?” And his mother was hugging him. She looked tired; there were dark shadows under her eyes. She’d been drinking too; he could smell that on her breath as she hugged him. Her eyes were very bright and her cheeks had a high red smudge to them.

“What the matter, bébé?” she asked. “Why you pull back from m??”

The piano started again.

“Hey, look,” his papa said.

One of the dancers, a short thin man with a tumbled mass of black hair, a little black mustache, and a receding chin had put a drink on his head and was waltzing his partner in tight fast circles. The girl was giggling so that she could hardly keep step with him. “Watch it, che’,” he told her, “or you make me waste this here good whisky.”

The girl only doubled up more with laughter. But she did not once lose the beat. And the level in the glass hardly moved. They ended with a tight whirl; the music stopped. He carefully finished the glass at a single gulp. The girl sat down right where she was on the floor.

Claudie pulled away from his mother and backed up until he felt the wall behind him. Then he let himself slide along it until he was sitting down on the floor too.

They had forgot about him. So he sat there, his knees drawn up under his chin, and watched.

Once his mother came over and stooped down beside him and said: “You got to go to bed.”

He shook his head and flattened himself even more against the wall. “No,” he said and pulled away.

“Al,” she said, “I can’t do nothing with the boy.”

“Let him be.”

She stood up. “He ought to be in bed.”

“Us too,” he said. And everybody howled. Even the piano stopped for a minute when the player took time out to laugh.

Claudie pushed himself along the wall until he had wedged himself against a big red plush upholstered chair. There was a man sitting in it with a girl in his lap. Her legs hung over the arm. She had nearly kicked off her shoes: they dangled from her toes. Claudie stared at the dirt-streaked inside of the shoe.

Somebody put a half-empty beer bottle down right along side him, and patted the top of his head. He did not look up. Carefully, his left hand reached out and got the bottle and put it to his lips. He rolled the warm bitterish liquid around on his tongue before he swallowed it. After that he drained all the bottles he could reach.

When he got so sleepy that he knew he could not hold his head up any longer, he crawled behind the chair, between it and the wall.

The lights were all out. For a minute he couldn’t tell whether his eyes were open or shut, so he fluttered them to make sure. He still could not see a thing. He felt the chair on one side and the wall on the other pressing him, catching him. He scrambled out as quick as he could, scuffing his knuckles against the rough plaster of the wall. He saw light then, the soft blue light of a night sky beyond the opened window.

He stopped and stood very still, catching his breath, both hands holding his stomach, to try and stop its twitching.

There was a soft rustle on the floor over in the corner: too light for a rat. A couple of big roaches must be running there.

He stood on a chair and put his head out the window. The porch was black shadow, deep and thick. Only one of the ladder backs of the chairs stuck out against the moonlight. You couldn’t see very far, not much beyond the white shell path which was so bright that you could tell when a rabbit flashed across it.

Claudie took a deep breath of the sour-sweet swampy air. The rabbit set his body tingling, even down to his fingers. If he had a gun, he could go get the rabbit or maybe two or three and then he would have them for dinner tomorrow. If he had a gun … he would have to get one soon, one of his own. His fingers tingled even more when he thought of touching the barrel, so smooth and cold. This man now, maybe he would let him have one tomorrow.

A mockingbird stirred sleepily in one of the bushes and a sudden light breeze blew the curtains out around his head.

He got down and, walking carefully, made his way to the hall. Once he tripped over a glass or a bottle: he couldn’t tell which, and he didn’t stop to see.

The first door he tried was locked. He pushed and jiggled the latch hard as he could. Then he stopped and listened: heavy slow breathing.

The next door was ajar. He went in. The moon was coming in through both windows and he stared around. It was the same room he’d wakened in. There, hanging by its string from the footpost of the bed was his model boat. He turned it carefully over and over, to be sure that it was all right. He ran his fingers along the hull. Somebody had whittled it for him, a long time ago; he’d forgot just who. He unwrapped the string from the post and carried the boat over to the window sill. He put it in the exact center, very carefully, and climbed into bed.