A Piece of My Heart (24 page)

“I think I understand,” he said grimly.

She looked at him curiously and composed her hands on the edge of the oilcloth. “We're very much tied to the river stages here,” she said scrupulously. “Much more than to the clock and the calendar. Though the river doesn't change so often since they've finished the T.V.A. and stopped the Tennessee adding its part.”

Landrieu popped his head around the corner, looked strangely, and disappeared.

“Mark put the house on concrete so we wouldn't have to worry with being washed away, but the ground is porous and very moist. I wouldn't be surprised if the pilings were beginning to deteriorate, nineteen and a quarter feet in the ground, fat end down.”

He lifted his eyes to the old woman's shiny face. Her eyes seemed larger and darker, reading his face vigorously.

He wanted to render a private gesture of recognition and absolute submission, but the old lady unexpectedly got on her feet.

“It's hedonistic of us to suppose we should perplex the world by lasting on it forever—don't you think that's a true fact?” She tended her smile forthrightly.

“Yes ma'am,” he whispered.

“Good,” she said, and walked straight out the gallery door, pausing a moment at the window to inspect her radio, then disappearing into the dark where Mr. Lamb was sleeping.

He wandered out through the kitchen and down the steps, past Landrieu straddling a nail keg savoring a cigarette. The sky still looked as if it might turn and rain. The moon was visible very high, but there were scabs of ash cloud sliding by it, growing denser as they went, as though they had detached from some large, lightless vault out over Arkansas.

Elinor uncoiled under the steps, slapping her tail on the risers, and trotted off into the dark, where he could hear her collar tink in the stillness.

He touched the closest column that held up the house, and made a flat echoless slap on the girth. He shoved up into the dingy shadows where the air got colder and limey all at once. He could see strung to the joists several cane poles, a few broken and rusting garden implements, and something that filled half the length of one entire joist board, and looked in the oily darkness like small three-finger garden trowels, but on better looking turned out to be small cartilaginous birds' feet, turkey feet, he guessed, maybe a hundred nailed to the wood with roof studs, hardly noticeable above the darkness. He reached through the cobwebs and fingered one set of toes so that it cracked against the rafter and threatened to break loose in his hand. It seemed perfectly plausible for these feet to be
here
, bolted to the house, waiting for their bodies to come pluck them off and go hurrying back down in the woods. He couldn't quite sense the necromancy, but he thought highly of the idea and felt certified somehow just by standing in the province.

He heard Landrieu step down the steps unaware of him and walk out across the wet yard toward his house, the glow of his cigarette marking him down into the dark. The lime smell seemed to be growing intenser toward the middle of the house, and he thought quickly about breaking down one foot for himself and
having off with it, but the idea seemed like some vague mistake, and he bent over instead and backed out of the cold shadows, trying to stay clear of the pipe courses and keep from getting gashed. He stood up clear in the moonlight, and watched the door go closed to Landrieu's house and the light paint over the shade. A queasy light was still burning in the Gin Den, seeped between the joints, making the shed its own skeleton in the dark. Elinor moseyed back across the dooryard and looked at him sullenly and disappeared back under the steps. He thought wistfully that if he could just arrange a good enough subject he could go present himself to Landrieu and make the evening out to talk. Except he couldn't arrange anything Landrieu was likely to want to talk over as much as he wanted just to be left alone, and he gave up the thought.

A number of paths similar to the one they'd driven in on all converged on the house, and in a complicated way, through several shunting tracks, reconnected and provided a transport to anyplace on the island. He had traced during breakfast an itinerary to the river using the aerial map, tracking the roads as they coiled back toward the house, and intersected other lanes that led nearer and nearer the outside of the island. He traced what seemed like the simplest path, and with it in mind struck out past Landrieu's house through the oak, across a queer patch of burnt ground he hadn't seen before, and made to the edge of the woods, where he could smell the sweet milfoil and the privet deep down in the brake.

He could see a gray dog trail down into the dark, leading east away from the house clearing. He felt confident he was walking faithful to the river.

When he had walked fifty yards, the bush path ended in one of the two-track jeep roads, and he took that toward what seemed south. He looked back up toward the clearing where the three buildings had blossomed in lights, and there was nothing now but the gray path eclipsed into the privets and cotton bush.

Water stood in both axle paths, and he walked on the hump, where it was soft but less saturated. He could see in the trees
shadows where the land appeared to back low into larger oaks and separate clusters of shrubbery and briers, though nothing past that. He supposed there were bays trapped parallel to the river, and past that a raised sand barren, and then the river. The road, according to the estimate, canted closer to the river as it swung round the first thick lobe of the island, and passed finally within twenty yards of the main river channel, necessitating no pathway through the bottom. He thought he was almost where Mr. Lamb had stood his salt lick.

The crickets had begun and the clouds that had been threatening had dissipated. The moon hung out at the end of the road so that the light illuminated the path and into the first trees on both sides.

He thought he felt fitter than he had since August, when he and Beebe had taken the ferry across from Waukegan and spent Labor Day on the dunes. He remembered feeling dazzling. Beebe had gone to Bangkok, and he had taken her apartment and gone off to school twice a week and hung around the
Law Review
basement reading headlines in the
Washington Post
In the evenings he ate dinner out and strolled up the cement beach to North Avenue and finished the day watching television.

In a month classes began and he moved back on Kenwood with strangers trafficking through the park all night, and things began to get suspicious. At Halloween his knee ligatures had begun to crepitate, and little launching pains began popping around his ear and burying themselves in his head. All that had seemed nicely parsed out began muddling into obsessions about starting the future with the past completely settled.

By Christmas he had an inventory of afflictions, and spent a lot of time worrying about them, forgetting his essay for the
Review
, which was late. He made conciliatory phone calls to the editor, who accused him of sitting in the lounge drinking coffee and skimming prestige while the staff burrowed in the stacks running down case notes they hoped would land them a job clerking on somebody's court. He eventually developed a dislike for the editor, a Jew from Ohio named Ira Lubitsch, and made loud inflaming
remarks over the phone, agreeing to finish the article by May. In February the afflictions divided and became virulent. He detected a yellowing in the sclera of both eyes, though there were no conforming symptoms. His ligaments were tight. In March he stopped going to school and spent every day glowering out the window at the Negro women walking children in the park and the winos pissing in the bushes. At the end of the month he had an uproar with Mrs. Antonopoulos, who accosted him on the stairwell with two nephews lingering around the newel post like shoplifters. She said she had not received the rent for February and that if he did not remit she would not be responsible for the consequences. She cast a long and darkly prophetic look at her nephews. The next day he found a cloth bag of carpenter's tools in the hall and screw holes in the door and tiny mounds of sawdust on the carpet. The carpenters had gone down to the deli, where he had seen them drinking milk and eating cheese blintzes. He entered the room, locked the door, and when the carpenters arrived, flung it open and threatened to call the police and charge them with detainment. The carpenters were bewildered, packed their drills, and left. He had closed the door then and not come out for a month, pestered by a return of the little pinching pains behind his ear, a stiffening in his knees, and an inability to yawn properly, as though a governor had been gauged to his yawning mechanism, leaving him with a growing anxiety like wanting to sneeze but lacking the pent-up strength to bring it off.

The median path bent perpendicularly to the left, and a new dog trail drove straight into the cluster of weeds beyond which was a break of scrubs that seemed completely to absorb the track. He heard the crickets behind him in the direction of the house, and in the opposite direction a sound like a low deep-mouthed hissing, more like the absence of sounds than the emanation, as though the hissing were a constriction in his mind to account for the silence. It was like the sound of wind, though not the wind, but the sound a great empty place makes in the distance. He concluded it was the river, beyond the next tier of trees and over the hummock where the sand would give out onto a clay shingle
that sloped straight to the water, and he would be there.

He stepped into the path toward the hissing, the ground becoming quavery as if it were suspended over jelly. His feet made a sucking percussion back into the swamp. With one hand to guard his eyes, he poked into the grove, which seemed to be beech saplings and plum bush, until in front of him he could no longer see how the trail parted the brush, and he could smell the sweet plums, and his next step was a long one down into the water.

The breath caught in his throat and no sound got out. He realized he was sinking and sprawled forward in the direction of his momentum toward the closest tree trunk, so that he floundered farther into the water to keep from going under. He hugged the tree while the cold water waffled around his waist and trickled by his stomach, tugging at him stiffly. He let one gasp free, trapped another one and held it, and smelled the sweet fertile river aroma on his tongue. His weight seemed not to affect the tree, and he had the thought that he was not going to drown at that instant. The fact that he had been floating on the same water thirty-six hours ago fetched up and seemed mildly irrelevant since the situation now was all out of control and there was no one there to see if he stayed down for good.

He gripped more tightly to the beech bark, and with his foot felt along the bottom roots. He experimented letting go of the tree by degrees and extending one foot in the direction of what seemed like the ground, but the water persuaded his foot easily downstream, and he had a bad sense about the depth of the water a foot below where he was holding on.

His teeth began to chatter and he tried to see upstream. There seemed to be other trees between himself and the step-off, and he felt maybe that by reaching trunk-to-trunk and root-to-root in a cumbersome, Tarzan-like way, he could tack back up the river and get nearer to land.

He realigned his hands on the bark and faced precariously against the river. The stinking water sagged against him, and he began to feel giddy and not in complete control of what he might do.

From the first beech trunk he made a roundabout extension to the next closest upstream grip, which was an oak husk that he had to slip past, standing on roots, toward where trees were more thickly disposed, and where he could bend out more in the direction of the bank. A little at a time, he waded in the tufts of foam over the roots and disintegrating bottom to the semiknee of land he had stepped off several yards down the stream.

He bellied out of the water, and somewhere up the bank he heard the water whacked loudly, and the commotion of something frothing in the water, then the sound of limbs popping and sediment rolling onto the surface, and the lesser noise of some beast wheezing and snorting and trotting into the break. He wondered, shivering with his legs caved under him and his shoes full of silt and draining, whether some animal had swum the river, and if so, which didn't seem likely, what could have driven it. He filled his cheeks and let it slowly out and thought about Beebe's theory that animals remained faithful to their own wretched unpromising territory—past when the food had depleted and they were impoverished and falling over to predators. “It's the strongest urge they have,” she said, nibbling a piece of her thumb in the manner he'd seen her grandfather munch his own after breakfast. “And the stupidest,” she said.

In New Orleans his mother took the train to Jackson, and he went with his father up Canal Street in the sun to the Monteleone, where they had oysters and root beer and took a long nap in the shady room. At six o'clock his father was asleep, and he dressed in the shadows and put on his shoes and took a walk down the long silent hallway that smelled like hot bread and clean laundry. At the end of the hall underneath the exit triangle he stood and looked down into the deep well of Royal Street, where the people looked small and silent, until the breeze through the long green corridor
blew ajar the door beside him and he could see two women on the bed side by side smiling into the narrow angle of the doorway. They were lying on the fresh white sheets, naked, with a pint of whiskey half finished between them, and their hair wet and dripping as if they had just come out of the tub and chosen the bed as a place to dry off. He stood looking at the women for a long time, while they looked at him and made smiling buzzing remarks that he could not hear. In a little while a fat man came with white hair and a shiny blue suit, and looked in the open room and saw the women and told them to go back where they belonged because he was going to call someone. He went back to his room, where his father was still asleep. And after a while he got in the bed and slept until it was dark. When his father woke up he said he had seen two women naked in their bed drinking whiskey. His father said he would ask, and in the lobby he approached the fat man and asked about the women, and the fat man said they were women whose husbands owned plantations east of Baton Rouge, and who had sons in the state legislature and daughters who were state debutantes, and who had reputations to consider where they lived. He said that the women had come to the city to buy clothes for a trip to Los Angeles, and after spending one day in Godchaux's had spent the next two getting drunk and raising cain, and that he had been sorry but had called the police just the same and had them taken away to the station on Broad Street
.