Jesus Out to Sea

“Bobby Joe says Magpie was fooling around and hanging off the rail taking a whiz. It’s just one of them things.”

“Nobody else seen hit.”

“Them ain’t good thoughts, Skeet.”

“Bobby Joe wasn’t watching his little boy when he drowned in that swimming pool. He blames them other people for not saving him. I was in that bouree game. That Mexican boy wasn’t cheating.”

At breakfast on the quarterboat we got anything we wanted; you just had to pass through the galley and tell the cook: pancakes, eggs, stacks of bacon and fried ham, grits, coffee, cereal, white bread and butter and jam. Dinner was even better: steaks, fried chicken, meat loaf, gumbo and catfish on Fridays, mashed potatoes, rice and milk gravy, sweating pitchers of Kool-Aid and iced tea, cake or ice cream for dessert.

Lunchtimes, though, we were out on the drill barge and usually cooked up something pretty putrid, like Viennas and rice, in the small galley behind the bridge and ate it in the lee of the pilothouse. The sky was the color of scorched brass when Bobby Joe sniffed at the air and said to Skeeter, “Is there something dead out where you keep your dynamite at?”

“Could be,” Skeeter said.

“It’s mighty strong. You ought to do something about it, Skeet, wash it off in the shallows, slap some deodorant on it.”

“I might have hit on my clothes. I ain’t got hit on my conscience.”

Bobby Joe puffed on a filter-tipped cigar without missing a beat. “I wish I was smart,” he said. He leaned forward and tipped ashes off the side of the deck. “Then I could figure out how come I like girls and I didn’t turn out to be a faggot. I’m here to tell you, boys, it’s a pure mystery.”

Skeeter stared at Bobby Joe and rolled a wood match back and forth across his false teeth. You could flat hear that match clicking it was so quiet.

At quitting time that day, the party chief said anybody who wanted could go into the levee on the crewboat as long as they were back in the galley sober at 0600 the next morning. The upper deck of the quarterboat was divided into two rows of tiny one-man cabins, with the showers and a can at one end of the gangway and a recreation room with a big window fan, where we played cards, at the other. The rain had just stopped and the air was cool and smelled like fish and wet trees, with yellow and purple clouds piled out on the Gulf, wind blowing through the willow islands and mullet jumping where the sunlight still shone above the dead cypress; everybody was in a good mood, whistling, combing their hair with Lucky Tiger and butch wax, putting on starched khakis, skintight jeans, snap-button shirts, and hand-tooled belts with chrome buckles as big as Cadillac bumpers and Indian stitching along the edges.

Bobby Joe was sitting on the edge of his bunk, buffing the points of his black cowboy boots till the leather was full of little lights. Skeeter leaned against the hatchway with his arms folded across his chest, crinkling his nose under his glasses.

“What you want, Skeeter?”

“You ain’t got to carry hit.”

“Carry what? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“What happened to your little boy.”

“I hate guys like you. You’re always feeding off somebody’s grief. You quit pestering me.”

“I don’t mean you no harm.”

You could hear Bobby Joe breathing. Another guy had just cut his hair for him out on deck, and there was a white stretch of skin half-mooned under the hairline on his neck. His hands opened and closed into rocks, his knuckles swelling up the size of quarters. Then he just about knocked Skeeter down tearing out the door into Skeeter’s cabin.

He ripped the mattress back off Skeeter’s bunk and grabbed the paper bag with all the little statues of Jesus in it, wadded it up in his hands, and pushed the screen out on the stick and flung the bag straight out into the willow and cypress trees. You could see it spinning in an eddy just before the paper turned dark with water and went under.

“Now you leave me alone,” Bobby Joe said, his hands trembling at his sides, the veins in his forearms purple and thick as soda straws.

“All right, Bobby Joe. I promise I won’t bother you no more,” Skeeter said.

He wasn’t expecting that.

I’d been to Claudette’s before and always thought the girls were pretty nice, no worse or better than us, anyway, people don’t always get to choose what they are, that’s the way I figured it. Most of them came from mill or farm towns in Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi, the kind of towns where people worked in ammunition or roach-paste factories, places where hanging out at the Dairy Queen or down at the filling station was the biggest thing going on Saturday night, which wasn’t the reason they got in the life, I think, although that’s what they tried to tell you when you asked how they ended up in a hundred-year-old two-story house next to colored town with a blue light over the door and the paint eaten off the wood by the salt and a pimp in the front room who once knocked the glass eye out of a girl for sassing him.

You want to get one of them mad? Ask her about her father, what kind of guy was he, did he ever take her to a kid’s show or a county fair, did he know what happened to her, did he care what happened to her, something like that, and tell me about it. I never thought they were bad girls, though. As long as you bought a beer, it was six bits for a little-bitty Schlitz, you could talk to them, or listen to the jukebox, and you didn’t have to take one of them upstairs, nobody’d bother you, really.

But I saw something that changed my thinking. It was a weekday afternoon and business was slow except for a roughneck who’d just been paid off his rig and three kids with boogies, flattops with ducktails on the sides, and black jeans and boots with steel taps and chains dripping off the leather, the kind of stomp-ass stuff juvenile delinquents wore back in those days. The roughneck was juiced to the eyes, by himself, no crew to take care of him, and kept splitting open his billfold and showing off his money to the girls, like this would have them lining up to glom his twanger.

One of the three kids said something about rolling the guy. Then a girl pulled the kid over by the jukebox, you could see them wreathed in cigarette smoke against the orange and purple light from the plastic casing, their heads bent together like two question marks, her hair like white gold, her mouth glossy and red, she was pretty enough to make you hurt. I’ll never forget what she said to him, because it wasn’t just the words, it was the smile on the kid’s face when she said it, like a twisted slit across bread dough, “Y’all take him somewhere else and do it, okay? Then come back and spend the money here.”

It was pretty depressing.

After most of the others took off for the levee, I went out on the jugboat with Skeeter to move his dynamite caps and primers to a new sandbar. The caps and primers were a lot more sensitive than the actual dynamite, and he kept them in a big steel lockbox on a sandbar and he had to move the box every week or so to keep up with the drill barge.