“North of here.”
“You sure picked
a bad place to catch a ride. Most people is afraid they’ll get one of them convicts in their car.”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“I pick up boys along here all the time. Sometimes they’re just getting out of prison. I ain’t afraid of them.”
They drove down the highway for fifteen miles. The heat waves looked like pools of water on the road. The grass was tall and green in the fields. The clouds moved across the sun and made places of shadow over the countryside. The river was off to the left, curving through the slow-rolling hills of cotton and corn.
“You look like you been working outdoors a lot,” the farmer said.
“I have.”
“What doing?”
“I worked for the state. You can put me down at the crossroads.”
“Look, it don’t matter to me where you come from.”
“It doesn’t? You seem to want to know pretty bad.”
“I was talking to pass the time. I don’t grudge a man his past,” the farmer said.
“This is where I get off, anyway.”
The coup stopped where the road intersected with the federal highway. Avery got out and watched the car pull away. There was a country store on the corner under two big shade trees. Some old men sat on a bench under a Hadacol sign chewing tobacco and spitting in the dust. They watched him walk up the sandy drive past the broken gasoline pump into the store. It was cool inside. A clerk came from the back and stood behind the counter. Avery bought some lunch meat, a loaf of bread, and a can of sardines. He looked up at the package shelf behind the clerk.
“How much for a pint?” he said.
“Two dollars.”
“You don’t have any that comes in glass jars, do you?”
“We only sell bonded whiskey here,” the clerk said.
“Give me the pint.”
The clerk put the bottle in a paper bag. Avery stuck it in his back pocket and picked up his groceries and went out to the highway.
He sat under a pine tree and ate lunch. There were brown pine needles spread over the grass. He opened the sardines and picked them out with his pocketknife and ate them with bread. He was still hungry and he wanted to eat the lunch meat, but he would have to save that for supper. The sun was very hot now. He threw the empty can to the side of the road and wiped his knife clean on the grass. He took the pint bottle out of his pocket and cut the seal off. He unscrewed the cap and drank; he felt the whiskey hot in his stomach. It tasted good after so long. He took another swallow and put the cap back on and replaced the bottle in his pocket. He wrapped the rest of his groceries in the paper sack and got up and stood by the shoulder of the highway to hitch another ride. Three cars passed him by, and then he caught a lift with a salesman who was going all the way to New Orleans.
He got into the city late that night. The salesman gave him directions to an inexpensive rooming house and dropped him off on the lower end of Magazine. Avery walked through the dark streets of a Negro area until he found St. Charles. He caught the streetcar and rode downtown to Canal. He stood on the corner and looked at the white sweep of the boulevard with its grass esplanade and palm trees and streetcar tracks, and the glitter like hard candy of the lighted storefronts. The sidewalks were still crowded, and he could hear the tinny music from the bars and strip places. He walked down to Liberty Street and found the rooming house the salesman had told him of. It was an old wood building that had a big front porch with a swing. It was one block off Canal and three blocks from Bourbon, and the Frenchwoman who owned it kept it very clean and she served coffee and rolls to her tenants every morning.
He took a room for the night, and in the morning the woman brought in his coffee on a tray. She poured the coffee and hot milk into his cup from two copper pots with long tapered spouts. She wore a housecoat, and her hair was loose and uncombed.
“Will you keep the room for another night?” she said.
“I’m looking for a job. I’ll stay if I find one,” Avery said.
“Your name is French. Tu parles français?”
“I understand it.”
“D’où tu viens?”
“Martinique parish.”