The Vanishing Half: A Novel (5 page)

She smiled, trying to sound cheerful, but her daughter glanced warily toward the schoolyard.

“How long we stayin out here?” she asked.

Desiree knelt in front of her. “I know it’s different,” she said. “But it’s just for a little bit. Just until Mama figures some things out, okay?”

“How long’s a little bit?”

“I don’t know, baby,” Desiree finally said. “I don’t know.”

T
HE
S
URLY
G
OAT
rose lazily on stilts, moss trees dripping onto the reddened roof. Desiree carefully picked around the muddy pathway just to find the first dilapidated step. A small town in the shadow of an oil refinery, with no picture show or nightclub or ballpark nearby meant one thing: an abundance of bored, rough men. Marie Vignes was the only person in Mallard who hadn’t seen a problem with this. Instead, she’d turned the farmhouse her parents left her into a bar, put her four sons to work cleaning glasses and hauling kegs, and on occasion breaking up fights. She’d planned to leave the bar someday to one of her sons, but by the time she died, they were all gone. The twins rarely saw her after their father’s funeral. Their mother had never wanted anything to do with that speakeasy or the unrefined woman it belonged to. The two women had been polite enough when Leon was there to smooth things over, but now that he was gone, there was no space for both of them and their grief.

So the twins only heard stories about how Marie Vignes used to serve whiskey to the roughest men in Mallard, how she kept a shotgun under the bar that she named Nat King Cole, and when the roughnecks started shoving over a game of poker or fighting about a woman, she’d pull out ol’ Nat and those angry men, normally
unmoved by a woman in a housedress, turned as docile as altar boys. But when Desiree stepped inside the Surly Goat for the first time, she felt almost disappointed. She’d always imagined the bar as a magical place that would, somehow, remind her more of her father. Instead, it was nothing but a country dive.

She was at a bar in the middle of the afternoon because she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. She’d spent the morning jostling in the front seat of Willie Lee’s truck all the way to Opelousas. She wanted to apply for a job, she told him when she’d spotted him outside his shop, loading his truck for deliveries. Could he give her a ride into town? As the meat truck pulled farther from Mallard, she was thinking still about her daughter, glancing back at her as she’d disappeared inside the schoolhouse. Those thin shoulders, hands clenched tight at her sides.

“Where you need me to drop you off?” Willie Lee had asked.

“Just at the sheriff’s.”

“The sheriff’s?” He turned to look at her. “What business you got down there?”

“Told you. A job.”

He grunted. “You can find cleanin work closer to Mallard.”

“Not to clean.”

“Then what you aim to do at the sheriff’s?”

“Apply to be a fingerprint examiner,” she said.

Willie Lee laughed. “So you just gonna walk in there and say what?”

“That I want a job application. I don’t know why you’re laughing, Willie Lee. I been examining fingerprints for over ten years now and if I can do it for the Bureau, I don’t know why I can’t do it here.”

“I can think of a few reasons,” Willie Lee told her.

But hadn’t the world changed a little since she’d been gone? And hadn’t she walked into the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Department with all the confidence in the world? She had stepped right inside that grimy tan building, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and told the
sheriff’s deputy, a portly man with sandy blond hair, that she wanted to apply for a job. “The Federal Bureau, did you say?” he’d asked, raising an eyebrow, and she allowed herself to feel hopeful. She sat in the corner of the waiting room, racing through the latent print examiner test, grateful for a thinking activity for once, not the type of thinking she had done lately—logistics, like how long her money would last—but real analytical thinking. She’d finished quick, the deputy said, laughing a bit in amazement, might have been a record. He pulled out the answer guide from a manila folder to check her work. But first, he glanced at her full application, and when he saw her address listed in Mallard, his gaze frosted over. He slid the answer key back in the folder, returned to his chair.

“Leave that there, gal,” he said. “No use wasting my time.”

Now she stepped inside the Surly Goat, passing under the welcome sign—
COLD WOMEN! HOT BEER!
—and pressed past a row of men in greasy coveralls to find an empty booth.

“Well, look what the cat drug in,” Lorna Hebert, the old barmaid, said. She dropped off a shot of whiskey that Desiree hadn’t even asked for.

“You don’t look too surprised to see me,” Desiree said. She’d been in town two days by now, of course everyone knew.

“Got to come home sometime,” Lorna said. “Now let me get a good look at you.”

In the darkness of the bar, she was still wearing her blue scarf. If Lorna noticed anything, she didn’t say so. She disappeared back behind the bar and Desiree downed the shot, comforted by the burn. She felt pathetic, drinking alone in the middle of the day, but what else could she do? She needed a job. Money. A plan. But those children staring at her daughter. The deputy dismissing her. Sam gripping her throat. She waved over Lorna again, wanting to forget it all.

One shot then another and she was already tipsy by the time she
saw him. He was sitting at the end of the bar wearing a worn brown leather jacket, a dirty boot kicked up on the stool. The man beside him said something that made him smile into his whiskey. Those high cheekbones pierced her. Even after all those years, she would know Early Jones anywhere.

H
ER LAST SUMMER
in Mallard, Desiree Vignes met the wrong sort of boy.

She’d spent her life, up until then, only meeting the right sort: Mallard boys, light and ambitious, boys tugging on her pigtails, boys sitting beside her in catechism, mumbling the Apostles’ Creed, boys begging her for kisses outside of school dances. She was supposed to marry one of these boys, and when Johnny Heroux left heart-shaped notes in her history book or Gil Dalcourt asked her to homecoming, she could practically feel her mother nudging her toward them. Pick one, pick one. It only made her want to dig her heels into the ground. Nothing made a boy less exciting than the fact that you were supposed to like him.

Mallard boys seemed as familiar and safe as cousins, but there were no other boys around except when someone’s nephew visited or when tenant farmers moved to the edge of town. She’d never spoken to one of these tenant boys—she only saw them when they passed through town, tall and sinewy and caked brown. They looked like men, these boys, so what could you talk to them about? Besides, you weren’t supposed to speak to dark boys. Once, one had tipped his hat at her and her mother tutted, gripping her arm tighter.

“Don’t even look his way,” her mother said. “Boys like that don’t want nothin good.”

Dark boys in Mallard only wanted to go girl hunting, her mother always said. They wanted to give it to a white girl but couldn’t, so they
thought a light girl was the next best thing. But Desiree had never met a dark boy until one June evening when she was washing the living-room windows and spotted, through the hazy glass, a boy standing on the front porch. A tall boy, shirtless in overalls, his skin caramelized into a deep brown. He held a paper bag in one arm and took a bite from a purplish fruit, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“You gonna let me in?” he said. He was gazing at her so directly, she blushed.

“No,” she said. “Who’re you?”

“Who you think?” he said. He turned the bag toward her so that she could see the Fontenot’s logo. “Open the door.”

“I don’t know you,” she said. “You could be an ax murderer.”

“Look like I got an ax on me?”

“Maybe I can’t see it from here.”

He could’ve left the bag on the porch. When he didn’t, she realized that they were flirting.

She dropped her rag on the windowsill, watching him chew.

“What you eatin anyway?” she asked.

“Come see.”

She finally unlatched the screen door and stepped barefoot onto the porch. Early eased toward her. He smelled like sandalwood and sweat, and as he neared, she thought, for one breathless second, that he might kiss her. But he didn’t. He lifted his fig to her lips. She bit where his mouth had been.

L
ATER
,
SHE LEARNED HIS NAME
, which wasn’t even a name at all, although it made her smile when she rolled it around her mouth. Early, Early, like she was calling out the time. All month, he left fruit like flowers. Each evening when the twins came home from the Duponts, she found a plum on the porch banister, or a peach, or a napkin filled
with blackberries. Nectarines and pears and rhubarb, more fruit than she could finish, fruit she hid in her apron to savor later or bake into pies. Sometimes he passed by in the evening on his way to deliver groceries, lingering on her porch steps. He told her that he made deliveries part time; the rest of his days were spent helping his aunt and uncle on a farm near the edge of town. But when the harvest ended, he planned to skip off and find himself in a real city like New Orleans.

“Don’t you think your folks’ll miss you?” Desiree said. “When you go?”

He scoffed. “The money,” he said. “They gonna miss that. That’s all they thinkin about.”

“Well, you got to think about money,” Desiree said. “That’s how all grown folks are.”

Who would her mother be if she wasn’t worried about money all the time? Like Mrs. Dupont, maybe, drifting around the house dreamily. But Early shook his head.

“It’s not the same,” he said. “Your mama got a house. All y’all got this whole dern town. We got nothin. That’s why I give this fruit away. Don’t belong to me nohow.”

She reached for a blueberry in his napkin. By now, she’d already eaten so many, her fingertips were stained purple.

“So if all this fruit belonged to you,” she said, “you wouldn’t give me nothin?”

“If it belonged to me,” he said, “I’d give you all of it.”

Then he kissed the inside of her wrist, and her palm, and slipped her pinky inside his mouth, tasting the fruit on her skin.

A
DARK BOY
stepping through the meadow behind the house to leave her fruit. She never knew when Early would come, if he would come at all, so she began waiting for him, sitting along the porch rail as the
sun faded. Stella warned her to be careful. Stella was always careful. “I know you don’t wanna hear it,” she said. “But you hardly know him and he sounds fresh.” But Desiree didn’t care. He was the first interesting boy she’d ever met, the only one who even imagined a life outside of Mallard. And maybe she liked that Stella distrusted him. She never wanted the two to meet. He would grin, glancing between the girls, searching for differences amongst their similarities. She hated that silent appraisal, watching someone compare her to a version that she might have been. A better version, even. What if he saw something in Stella that he liked more? It would have nothing to do with looks, and that, somehow, felt even worse.

She could never date him. He knew this too even though they never talked about it. He only came by the porch while her mother was still at work, always leaving as soon as the sky grew dark. Still, one evening her mother came home from work and caught her talking to Early. He leapt off the railing, the blackberries in his lap scattering to the deck like buckshot.

“Best be goin now,” her mother said. “I don’t have no courtin girls here.”

He raised his hands in surrender, as if he too felt that he had done something wrong.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. He shuffled off into the woods, not looking at Desiree. She miserably watched him disappear between the trees.

“Why’d you have to do that, Mama?” she said.

But her mother ushered her inside. “You’ll thank me someday,” she said. “You think you know everything? Girl, you don’t know how this world can be.”

And maybe her mother was right about the world’s immeasurable cruelties. She had already been dealt her portion; she could see that Desiree’s was on its way and did not want a dark boy to hasten it. Or
maybe her mother was just like everyone else who found dark skin ugly and strove to distance herself from it. Either way, Early Jones never visited again. Desiree wondered about him while she cleaned at the Duponts. She lingered in Fontenot’s on Saturday afternoons even though she had nothing to buy, hoping to catch a glimpse of him hauling groceries down the road. When she finally asked, Mr. Fontenot told her that the boy’s family had moved on to another farm.

And what would she have told Early if she knew how to reach him? That she was sorry for what her mother said? Or for what she hadn’t said in his defense? That she wasn’t like the folks she’d come from, although she wasn’t sure that was even true anymore. You couldn’t separate the shame from being caught doing something from the shame of the act itself. If she hadn’t believed, even a bit, that spending time with Early was wrong, why hadn’t she ever asked him to meet her at Lou’s for a malt? Or take a walk or sit out by the riverbank? She was probably no different from her mother in Early’s eyes. That’s why he’d left town without saying good-bye.

N
OW
E
ARLY
J
ONES
was back in Mallard, no longer a reedy boy carrying fruit in his tattered shirt but a grown man. Before she could think, she was pushing unsteadily to her feet and starting toward him. He glanced over his shoulder, his brown skin shining under the dull light. He didn’t seem surprised to see her, and for a second, he gave her a little smile. For a second, she felt like a girl again, unsure of what to say.

“I thought it was you,” she finally said.

“Course it’s me,” he said. “Who else would it be?”

He was, in a way, exactly how she’d remembered him, tall and leanly muscled like a wild cat. But even in the hazy bar, she could read hard years in his eyes, and his weariness startled her. He scratched
the scruff on his chin, waving over Lorna and pointing lazily to Desiree’s glass.