Jesus Out to Sea

“A man oughtn’t have to work with a queer.”

“You told Ray Skeeter came on to you?”

“How you know he didn’t?”

“’Cause I know you’re a damn liar, Bobby Joe. I know you lied about Magpie cheating, too.”

“You’re in my light.”

“Too bad. You’re going to hear this,” I said, and sat down on his bunk, right on top of his cards. His face twitched, like a rubber band snapping under the skin. Then I told him everything I knew about Skeeter, the coral rocks humming with the voices of Jap soldiers trapped down below, women with their babies dropping off the cliffs into the sea, all the guilt he was carrying around twelve years after we set fire to the air over their cities and had parades and got back down to making money.

“I ain’t got nothing to say to you, W.J.”

“I bet you ain’t.”

I was too hard on Bobby Joe, though. Two nights later he started acting weird, almost like Skeeter, paddling the pirogue out in the swamp, raking a pile of silt up on the paddle and staring at it, walking along the edge of a sandbar like he’d lost something while cicadas droned in the sky and the sun’s last light looked like electric blood painted on the trees.

“The hurricane blew them sloughs slick as spit,” I said to Bobby Joe.

“Where you figure Skeeter headed to?” he asked. He bit on his thumbnail and looked at it.

“Back to Wiggins, I expect.”

“You think?”

“They’d know where he’s at.”

Bobby Joe drug up the next day, told Ray to mail his check general delivery, New Iberia, Louisiana. I never saw him or Skeeter again. But I sure heard about them; they must have been looking for each other all over the oil patch, one man trying to forgive the other so he could lay his own burden down.

Sometimes when it’s hot and the barometer starts falling and the bottom of the sky turns green in the south, the way it does right before a storm, I start to think about Bobby Joe and Skeeter, or the girls in the hot-pillow joint who’d set up a drunk to get rolled, or the guys who didn’t speak up when the party chief ran Skeeter off, and I commence to get a terrible headache, just like when you’d breathe that awful cloud of yellow smoke boiling off the water when we’d zap the juice into the hole and blow carp and catfish belly-up to the surface, never worrying about it or asking a question, like it was all a natural part of our old war with the earth and whatever was down there.

Texas City, 1947

Right after WW II everybody in southern Louisiana thought he was going to get rich in the oil business. My father convinced himself that all his marginal jobs in the oil fields would one day give him the capital to become an independent wildcatter, perhaps even a legendary figure like Houston’s Glenn McCarthy, and he would successfully hammer together a drilling operation out of wooden towers and rusted junk, punch through the top of a geological dome, and blow salt water, sand, chains, pipe casing, and oil into the next parish.

So he worked on as a roughneck on drilling rigs and as a jug-hustler with a seismograph outfit, then began contracting to build board roads in the marsh for the Texaco company. By mid-1946, he was actually leasing land in the Atchafalaya Basin and over in East Texas. But that was also the year that I developed rheumatic fever and he drove my mother off and brought Mattie home to live with us.

I remember the terrible fight they had the day she left. My mother had come home angry from her waitress job in a beer garden on that burning July afternoon, and without changing out of her pink dress with the white piping on the collar and pockets, she had begun butchering chickens on the stump in the backyard and shucking off their feathers in a big iron cauldron of scalding water. My father came home later than he should have, parked his pickup truck by the barn, and walked naked to the waist through the gate with his wadded-up shirt hanging out the back pocket of his Levi’s. He was a dark Cajun, and his shoulders, chest, and back were streaked with black hair. He wore cowboy boots, a red sweat handkerchief tied around his neck, and a rakish straw hat that had an imitation snakeskin band around the crown.

Headless chickens were flopping all over the grass, and my mother’s forearms were covered with wet chicken feathers. “I know you been with her. They were talking at the beer joint,” she said, without looking up from where she sat with her knees apart on a wood chair in front of the steaming cauldron.

“I ain’t been with nobody,” he said, “except with them mosquitoes I been slapping out in that marsh.”

“You said you’d leave her alone.”

“You children go inside,” my father said.

“That gonna make your conscience right ’cause you send them kids off, you? She gonna cut your throat one day. She been in the crazy house in Mandeville. You gonna see, Verise.”

“I ain’t seen her.”

“You sonofabitch, I smell her on you,” my mother said, and she swung a headless chicken by its feet and whipped a diagonal line of blood across my father’s chest and Levi’s.

“You ain’t gonna act like that in front of my children, you,” he said, and started toward her. Then he stopped. “Y’all get inside. You ain’t got no business listening to this. This is between me and her.”

My two older brothers, Weldon and Lyle, were used to our parents’ quarrels, and they went inside sullenly and let the back screen slam behind them. But my little sister, Drew, whom my mother nicknamed “Little Britches,” stood mute and fearful and alone under the pecan tree, her cat pressed flat against her chest.

“Come on, Drew. Come see inside. We’re gonna play with the Monopoly game,” I said, and tried to pull her by the arm. But her body was rigid, her bare feet immobile in the dust.