Sailor & Lula (8 page)

“Thanks a lot,” the boy said as he settled into the car, stowing his pack on the floor between his feet. “I been standin' out there off and on for two hours, ha-ha! Since noon about, ha-ha! Cops catch ya hitchin' on a
interstate around here they throw ya on a county road crew for a week, 'less you can pay the ticket, ha-ha! Which I ain't got, ha-ha!”

“My name's Sailor, and this here's Lula. What's yours?”

“Marvin DeLoach,” said the boy. “But ever'body calls me Roach, ha-ha! Roach DeLoach, ha-ha!”

“You always make that strange little funny laugh when you talk?” asked Lula.

“Ain't laughin', ha-ha!” said Roach.

“What you got in the box?” asked Sailor.

“My dogs, ha-ha!”

Roach slid the top off and tilted the box slightly toward the front. Inside were six small husky pups that couldn't have been more than two weeks old.

“I'm headed to Alaska, ha-ha!” said Roach. “These dogs is gonna be my sled team, ha-ha!”

“This kid's crazy,” Lula said to Sailor.

“Where you from, Roach?” Sailor asked.

“If you mean where was I born, it was Belzoni, Missi'ppi, ha-ha! But I been brought up in Baton Rouge.”

“Why you goin' to Alaska?” said Lula. “And where'd you get them puppies? They look sick.”

Roach stared down into the box at the baby huskies and stroked each of them twice with a religiously unwashed hand. The dogs whimpered and licked his dirty fingers.

“I saw this movie on the TV, ha-ha!
The Call of the Wild.
I ain't never seen snow, ha-ha! I got these dogs at the pound. Nobody wanted 'em, ha-ha! Ever'body here got theirself pit bulls or some kinda hounds. I'm gonna feed these boys good so they'll be big and powerful and they can pull me real fast through the snow, ha-ha!”

Roach pulled a piece of raw cow's liver out of one of the pockets of the field jacket and began ripping little bits off it and feeding them to the dogs.

“Sailor!” Lula screeched when she saw this. “Stop! Stop the car now!” Sailor pulled off the road onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped. Lula opened her door and jumped out.

“I'm sorry, but I can't take this,” she said. “Roach, or whatever your name is, you come out of there with them dogs this instant!”

Roach stuck the liver back in his pocket and pulled his pack and the box of tiny canines after him. Once he and his belongings were deposited on the roadside, Lula hopped back into the car and slammed the door.

“I'm truly sorry? I'm truly sorry, Roach,” she said. “But you ain't gonna make it to Alaska? Least not any part of the way with us. You'd best find a party to take care of those dogs proper, before they all die? And, if you don't mind my sayin' so? You could most certainly use some serious lookin' after yourself, startin' with a bath! Bye!”

Lula took a pair of sunglasses off the dashboard and put them on.

“Drive,” she said to Sailor.

Once they were rolling again, Sailor said to Lula, “You don't feel you was a little hard on the boy, honey?”

“I know you're thinkin' that I got more'n some of my mama in me? Well, I couldn't help it, Sailor, I really couldn't. I'm sorry for that boy, but when he pulled that drippin' hunk of awful-smellin' meat out of his pocket? I near barfed. And them poor diseased puppies!”

Sailor laughed. “Just part of life on the road, peanut.”

“Do me a favor, Sailor? Don't pick up no more hitchers, okay?”

“Know what I like best, honey?” said Lula, as Sailor guided the Bonneville out of Lafayette toward Lake Charles.

“What's that, peanut?”

“When you talk pretty to me.”

Sailor laughed. “That's easy enough. I mean, it don't come hard. Back at Pee Dee all I had to do to cheer myself up was think about you. Your big grey eyes, of course, but mostly your skinny legs.”

“You think my legs is too skinny?”

“For some, maybe, but not for me they ain't.”

“A girl ain't perfect, you know, except in them magazines.”

“I been makin' do.”

“Can't see where it's harmed you none.”

“I ain't complainin', sweetheart, you know that.”

“I think most men, if not all, is missin' an element, anyways.”

“What's that mean?”

“Men got a kind of automatic shutoff valve in their head? Like, you're talkin' to one and just gettin' to the part where you're gonna say what you really been wantin' to say, and then you say it and you look at him and he ain't even heard it. Not like it's too complicated or somethin', just he ain't about to really listen. One might lie sometime and tell ya he knows just what you mean, but I ain't buyin'. 'Cause later you say somethin' else he woulda got if he'd understood you in the first place, only he don't, and you know you been talkin' for no good reason. It's frustratin'.”

“You think I been lyin' to you, Lula?”

Lula stayed quiet for a full minute, listening to the heavy hum of the V-8.

“Lula? You there?”

“Yeah, I'm here.”

“You upset with me?”

“No, Sailor, darlin', I ain't upset. Just it's shockin' sometimes when what you think turns out to not be what you think at all.”

“It's why I don't think no more'n necessary.”

“You know, I had this awful, long dream last night? Tell me what you think of it. I'm out walkin' and I come to this field. This is all in bright color? And there's all these bodies of dead horses and dead children lyin' all around. I'm sad, but I'm not really sad. It's like I know they're all gone to a better place. Then a old woman comes up to me and tells me I got to bleed the bodies so they can be made into mummies. She shows me how to make a cut at the sides of the mouths of the corpses to drain 'em. Then I'm supposed to carry the bodies over a bridge across a real beautiful river into an old barn.

“Everything's really peaceful and lovely where I am, with green grass and big trees at the edge of the field. I'm not sure I got the strength to drag the bodies of the horses all that way. I'm frightened but I'm ready to do it anyway. And I'm sorta cryin' but not really sad? I can't explain the feelin' exactly. So I walk to the rear of this huge grey horse. I go around to his mouth and start to cut him. As soon as I touch him with the knife he wakes up and attacks me. The horse is furious. He gets up and chases me across the bridge and into and through the old barn. Then I woke up. You were sleepin' hard. And I just laid there and thought about how even if you love someone it isn't always possible to have it change your life.”

“I don't know what your dream means, sweetheart,” said Sailor, “but once I heard my mama ask my daddy if he loved her. They were yellin' at each other, like usual, and he told her the only thing he ever loved was the movie
Bad Men of Missouri
, which he said he seen sixteen times.”

“What I mean about men,” said Lula.

“No, Marietta, I haven't found 'em.”

“Maybe they ain't
in
N.O., Johnnie. They could be dead in a ditch in Pascagoula, Missi'ppi, by now. Or possibly Lula's barefoot and pregnant in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and that horrible Sailor person's pumpin' gas in a fillin' station for two dollars an hour.”

“Calm down, Marietta. If there'd been an accident we woulda known about it by now. There ain't no use your gettin' exercised prematurely.”

“Prematurely! Don't toss feathers at me, Johnnie Farragut. My only child been kidnapped by a dangerous criminal and you keep tellin' me to be calm!”

“I'll handle it, Marietta. Like I told you, there ain't no evidence Lula done nothin' against her will.”

“Well, you better get a move on, Johnnie, before that boy got her holdin' down a Memphis street corner and shootin' dope up her arms.”

“Really, Marietta, you got more scenarios swimmin' around in your brain than Carter got pills. Try to take it easy. Go over to Myrtle Beach for a few days.”

“I'm stayin' right here by the phone until you find Lula, then I'm comin' to get her.”

“Just hold tight, woman. I'll call you again in a couple days whether I got a lead or not.”

“You just got to locate Lula, Johnnie. This is the kinda mistake can take a Hindu's lifetime to unfix. I got to attend a meetin' of the Daughters of the Confederacy from two to four tomorrow afternoon, otherwise I'll be at home. You call soon's you got somethin', even if it's three in the A.M.”

“I will, Marietta. Goodbye now.”

Johnnie hung up and sat in the telephone booth, thinking about Marietta Pace Fortune. She was still a goodlooking woman but she was getting more peculiar than ever. Marietta had always been nervous and demanding. Why he was still sweet on her after all these years Johnnie couldn't quite figure. Marrying her was out of the question, it just wasn't
something Marietta would do. She wasn't cut out for a December romance, she said. The woman wouldn't be fifty for two or three years yet and she acted like life forgot her address. Except when it came to Lula, that is.

At the far end of Inez's Fais-Dodo Bar on Toulouse Street, Reginald San Pedro Sula, wearing his porkpie hat and a green seersucker leisure suit, sat on a stool drinking a martini. He spotted Johnnie walking toward the door.

“
Hola!
Señor Farragut!” Reggie shouted. “We meet again.”

Johnnie went over to Reggie and shook hands.

“I thought you were in Austin, Texas. Or Takes-us, as they say in these parts.”

“I was. Now I am on my way back to Utila, in the morning. Would you like to enjoy a martini with me?”

“Why not?” said Johnnie, hoisting himself onto the stool to Reggie's right. “How was the fishin'?”

“I think they are too serious, these American fishermen. In Honduras we are not so concerned with the method.”

Reggie ordered a martini for Johnnie and another for himself.

“So,” said Johnnie, “it's back to the islands.”

“Yes. I spoke yesterday to my son, Archibald Leach San Pedro Sula, who is named after Cary Grant, and he told me there was a shooting. Teddy Roosevelt, one of the local shrimp boat captains, was on a picnic with King George Blanco and King George's wife, Colombia, and there was, apparently, a disagreement of some kind, during which King George and Colombia were killed. Teddy Roosevelt is in jail now. These people are all friends of mine, so I must return and find out what happened.”

“This island of yours sounds like a kind of unpredictable place.”

Reggie laughed. “It has its moments of uncertainty. But how are you finding New Orleans, Señor Farragut?”

“Call me Johnnie. N.O. always been a good town to sit around in.”

“I can tell you are an intelligent man, Johnnie. One difference between your country and mine is that in the islands it does not pay to reveal one's intelligence. I am reminded of the time I saw a blue heron walking next to a river. He looked like a Chinese gentleman in a blue coat wobbling along the rocks. He appeared extremely vulnerable and
defenseless, yet he was undoubtedly a survivor. That is our duty, Johnnie, as intelligent men, to survive.”

Reggie raised his glass to Johnnie's.
“Hasta siempre,”
he said.

“Hasta siempre,”
said Johnnie.

“Do you know how it came about that copper wire was invented in Scotland?” Reggie asked.

“How's that?”

“Two Scotsmen were fighting over a penny.”

Johnnie finished off his martini.

“I got to admit, Reggie,” he said, sliding off the stool, “you're one in a dozen.”

“You didn't raise a fool, Marietta. Lula got too much Pace in her to throw her life away on trash. My guess is she's havin' herself a time, is all.”

Marietta and Dalceda Delahoussaye were sitting on the side porch of Marietta's house drinking Martini & Rossi sweet vermouth over crushed ice with a lemon slice. Dalceda had been best friends with Marietta for close to thirty years, ever since they boarded together at Miss Cook's School in Beaufort. They'd never lived further apart in that period than a ten-minute walk.

“Remember Vernon Landis? The man owned a Hispano-Suiza he kept in Royce Womble's garage all those years before he sold it for twenty-five thousand dollars to the movie company in Wilmington? His wife, Althea, ran off with a wholesale butcher from Hayti, Missouri. The man gave her a diamond ring big enough to stuff a turkey and guess what? She was back with Vernon in six weeks.”

“Dal? Just
what,
you tell me, has Althea Landis's inability to control herself have to do with my baby Lula's bein' stole by this awful demented man?”

“Marietta! Sailor Ripley prob'ly ain't no more or less demented than anyone we know.”

“Oh, Dal, he's lowlife. He's what we been avoidin' all our lives, and now my only child's at his mercy.”

“You always been one to panic, Marietta. When Enos Dodge didn't ask you right off to go with him to the Beau Regard Country Club cotillion in 1959, you panicked. Threatened to kill yourself or accept an invitation from Biff Bethune. And what happened? Enos Dodge'd been in Fayetteville with his daddy and asked you soon as he got back two days later. This ain't a moment to panic, lovey. You're gonna have to quit spittin' and ride it on out.”

“You're always such a comfort to me, Dal.”