The Hard Blue Sky (3 page)

Finally he stood up, blew a couple of bubbles very carefully, and started down the road. The other kids followed, first Didi, then Mercy and then Burt. Robby pretended not to notice them but every once in a while he turned and threw a handful of dust. And he swaggered so hard he wasn’t even walking a straight line.

Half an hour later he was perched up on the highest limb of the camphor tree behind the Arcenaux grocery, while the other kids climbed restlessly around in the lower branches. When they tried to come up with him, he kicked them away. Finally they all settled down and watched the white-hulled sloop that was beating toward the island.

T
EN MINUTES AFTER HE
had cast off from the sloop
Pixie
Inky D’Alfonso was approaching Isle aux Chiens. He throttled down the outboard and came in slowly.

Ahead of him was the island, a long low strip, perfectly straight on this side. He didn’t remember ever seeing such a straight line before. There was a sand-colored line and then a curving line of green, lifting up to a kind of point three quarters of the way to the east end. The trees looked glossy and heavy there.

He glanced over his shoulder. The sloop was moving east, on a reach now. And the main was luffing. A little. … Damn fool had no tiller hand. …

The dinghy swayed and quivered. All he’d need, he told himself, was a spill overboard. He was a fool to get himself in a crazy trip like this. Nothing about it was right.

And then he grinned. … Nothing was right, except that he couldn’t keep away from a sailboat.

He’d quit high school to crew on a West Indies job. And that was only the beginning. …

He got a splash of murky sour water in his mouth. He spat and wiped his lips and got back to business.

He came in around the eastern end of the island, through the narrow pass between it and Isle Cochon, where the charts said there should have been a line of reflectors. The sand fringe went around this side of the island too. It looked white and soft to lie on.

But there was nobody on it, not even kids. Maybe the afternoon sun was too much for them. He circled the end of the island and saw that it was a kind of point, jutting northward. Farther down in the circle, he could see the rigging of a lugger. And even at this distance he could smell the tar of the nets.

He swung the dinghy down into the circle. The edges of this side of the island were marshy: he could see the alligator grass and the cattails and the saw grass. A yellow and black ricebird whizzed over his head.

He saw a kind of rickety fishing-pier, and behind it a little path that ran straight into the trees. He eased the dinghy over and made it fast to the last pole. The pier was chest high and only two boards wide. He had to hoist and swing himself carefully sideways. The ragged edge of the board scraped his stomach. He sat for a minute, catching his breath, and staring into the heavy green shadows of the trees.

Somebody was watching him. He could feel it as plain as a hand on his shoulder. It was the sort of thing that made his spine prickle. He could feel himself begin to get angry, could feel it in a certain restless movement of his hands.

There wasn’t a thing he could see beyond the oaks and the oleanders and the vines and the low flat leaves of the palmettoes. The ricebird was sitting on the post nearest shore.

Almost as soon as he stepped ashore, he saw the houses, four of them, not a hundred yards from the water. In the fenced yard of the first was a dog, a fair-sized black and white animal who crouched quivering behind the gate, his teeth showing just slightly in a silent snarl.

Inky stopped and talked to him. “Hi, boy.” The dog hugged the ground tighter.

“Okay,” Inky said, “okay.” He looked at the house. Like the other four it was lifted off the ground on high foundations. The front porch was empty. “Hey,” he yelled, “anybody home?”

It was absolutely still. Inky waited a minute, scratching his ear. Then he walked to the second house. There was no dog this time and he went up to the front door. He pounded on the door frame. “Nobody here either?” He stuck his nose against the torn screen. He could see a center hall, with a dresser and some chairs in it—but nothing else.

“Nobody here?” He waited perched on the railing, picking the shells from the soles of his topsiders.

There was only the very faintest creak of a board inside. He got up and peered down the hall again. It was empty.

“Hell,” he said softly and went down the steps again. He lit a cigarette very slowly and flicked the match away in a high arc.

The other houses looked just as deserted, thin spidery houses with little threads of footpaths between them.

Take the one that goes west, Inky thought. There’s got to be somebody sooner or later.

“Somebody who won’t hide,” he said aloud. He felt better—let them hear him. And if he couldn’t get anybody to show them the channel—What did he care? Let Arthur keep sailing the god-damn boat up and down along the coast. God-damn fool who had to stop and wet his finger before he was sure where the wind was.

“You looking for somebody?”

He spun around. For a minute he did not see the woman. And when he did, he blinked and shook his head and looked again. Back under a tangle of bougainvillea and slung from the thick branches of a tough oak was a faded gray-black hammock. She was sitting on the edge, her bare feet dangling.

“It was you yelling down at the houses, no?”

“You heard me?”

She grinned. “You was making enough racket to wake the whole island.”

She slipped off the hammock. She was quite short, a stocky figure, wide shoulders and wide hips. But she had a very small waist—the sort you could put your two hands around, Inky thought.

“I’m Cecile Boudreau.”

“Ignatius D’Alfonso—call me Inky.”

“You come off the boat that’s running up and down along the coast?”

“We been trying to find the channel.”

“It ain’t marked,” she said.

“You’re telling me,” Inky said. “What’d they do? Use it for a shotgun target?”

She was a good-looking woman, he thought. Not more than twenty-five or so. She looked fine in the shorts—good legs and big breasts.

“The charts say it’s marked.”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t nothing but a reflector at night.”

She had brown skin—sunburned or not, he couldn’t tell—and black hair cut short, very short; and greenish eyes.

“Any sort a mark and we could come in.”

She grinned. Some of the teeth on the right side of her mouth—far back—were missing. “It ain’t hurt you being out there.”

“Depends how long we got to stay.”

“What you coming here for?”

“Look, honey,” he said, “I don’t know anything. It’s not my boat.”

She was staring at him directly. He’d never had a woman look at him quite that way.

This one now, she just stood staring right straight at him. Those light eyes began right at his shoes and went all the way up him. That should have meant just one thing. But this time he wasn’t sure. The way she was staring—appraisingly, interestedly but sexless too.

And then he knew where he’d seen that sort of look before. Back in the athletic club in New Orleans. (He’d worked there a couple of years, the time when he was crazy to be a fighter.) He’d seen wrestlers look at each other that way just before starting a match.

That was the way she was looking at him. …

“Do you know the channel?” he asked.

“Sort of.”

“Could you get us in?”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t take a chance with such a pretty boat, me.”

“Hell,” he said, “you want us to spend the rest of the year cruising up and down out there, waiting for the government to come put up new markers?”

She slapped at a mosquito on her arm. “You find somebody.”

“Where?”

“You tried the Rendezvous?”

“You been watching me ever since I set foot on the ground.”

“Not watching.”

“Okay … listening.”

“You was making so much noise, I couldn’t help it.”

A black and yellow ricebird came and sat on the tip of a swaying branch. “He’s following me too,” Inky said—and found that funny. “Don’t people ever come out when you knock on their front door?”

“They wasn’t home.”

“Hell, no,” he said, “I could hear somebody inside.”

She slapped the mosquitoes on her bare thighs. “That’s the Caillets.”

“They don’t answer?”

Her light eyes crinkled with laughter.

A door slammed, the sound muffled by the trees.

“That’s the Caillets’ now, for sure,” Cecile said.

“Look,” Inky said, “all I want to do is get in that channel.”

She clucked her tongue. “I keep telling you go try the Rendezvous.”

“Okay,” he said. “Where’s that?”

She was staring at him, as if she wanted to remember just exactly what he looked like. “I show you.”

“Which way?”

There was a rosebush growing at the side of the path, an old climber gone wild, with thorns like a rooster’s spur.

“Move,” she said, “or I get scratched up.”

He hesitated for a moment, not seeing what she meant. She put a hand in the center of his chest and pushed him back, hard.

He started to grab her hand and then stopped. She went on ahead.

“Back this way here.”

He found himself staring at the heavy back lines of her thighs. And he found himself thinking: That’s not fat, not one bit. That’s muscle. If you touched it, it would be hard.

“You find somebody at the Rendezvous, for sure.”

“Won’t they be out working, this time of day?”

She glanced over her shoulder. “Not all.”

They passed between the houses; their porches were still empty.

“You know,” he said, watching the way her shoulder blades moved through the thin shirt, “I thought the place’d be full of dogs.”

“There plenty of dogs all right,” Cecile said.

They crossed the little clearing where the houses were and took another path. There were hackberry bushes taller than a man’s head and clumps of thick heavy blueberries.

“They just ain’t around now,” Cecile said.

“What?”

“The dogs.” She turned around and stared at him. “You was the one was asking.”

“Oh,” he said, “sure.”

They came out of the bushes and the trees and were on the beach.

“This here is easy walking,” she said.

“The sand is yellow. It hadn’t looked that way.”

She looked up and down the beach, still not stopping her walk, and pursed her mouth. “Guess so.”

He kicked at a big piece of driftwood. “That looks like a telephone pole for sure.”

“All sorts of things come up.”

“I bet.”

“My old man found a rocking-chair, upholstered and all.”

“Dry it out?”

“He’s been sitting on it ever since I can remember.” She grinned, sharp, eager, boylike. (It was funny, Inky thought, with a shape like hers, how she could remind you of a boy.)

They passed a mass of seaweed drying and smelling in the sun. And a small dead starfish.

“Man,” she said, and stopped and stared out at the little surf. “I’m seeing things, maybe.”

Inky sat down on a half-buried piece of driftwood and rested his head on his hand.

Cecile watched for a few more seconds, then walked out into the surf. She bent forward, peering, and walked a few more feet down the beach. Then she reached forward and picked up something and dragged it back to shore.

Maybe it’s the short hair, Inky thought, or the way she moves, but how the hell can she look so much like a boy.

She had the object out on the dry sand now and was standing over it. “Sal au pri!”

Inky looked away. Bending over like that she didn’t look like a boy, for sure.

They’d been on the boat for a week now the three of them. And all that time there’d been Helen, in shorts and a halter, or sunning herself on the forward deck with nothing but a towel. Arthur hardly able to keep his hands off her.

It bothered a man after a while.

“Look here.”

He got up and walked over. “Looks like a hunk of wood.”

She clucked her tongue. “Talking about chairs, I come to seeing them. … This piece now, looked like a chair.”

“Yea,” Inky said.

“The kind with no back.”

“I saw it,” Inky said. “It looked just that way.”

She kicked at it. “Maybe it dry out and be good for firewood.” She curled her toes over the smooth round edges. “Ain’t good for nothing else.”

She grinned again, her bright hard animal grin. Her eyes crinkled up so that she looked more fierce than amused. Inky wondered what it would be like to have her in bed.

“Oh hell,” he said aloud. She probably wouldn’t be any good, just put her hands behind her head and let him. “Hell,” he said again, aloud.

She reached out and patted his shoulder. He almost jumped. “You find somebody to take your boat in, for sure.”

“I’m not so sure,” he said.

“I can get my husband do it.”

“You promising for him?”

“Pay him?”

“Sure,” Inky said, “it’s not my money.”

“He do it, if nobody else will.”

Inky stared off at the gray-blue Gulf. The
Pixie
was far down to the east now. You couldn’t make out the figures any more, just a hull and sails.

“The charts say there’s plenty water down there,” he said. “That right?”

“I guess so.”

“Jesus,” he said, “all we got to do is go aground.”

“Somebody would pull you out.”

“And pull the keel out too, I bet.”

She looked up, squinting her light eyes in the glare. Crinkling up her face made her look old, very old.

He thought: She going to make one of those round-faced old women, with round cheeks and a little round mouth all run together with wrinkles and folds, like a kewpie doll that’s been left too close to the fire.

A couple of kids passed them, walking down the beach, feet in the last edge of the surf. They were carrying crab nets, and they looked so much alike they might have twins.

“What you say?” Cecile said to them. A mosquito lit on her knee and she smashed it. “Look at that there,” she said, “he’s full of blood—been chewing on somebody else real hard.”