The Floating World: A Novel Page 6
“But all the animals are okay?”
“The horses—” Monica sighed upwards into her bangs. “Well, they’re stressed out now with this back and forth, but they’re funny. The storm itself hardly phased them. They just turn their tails to the wind, put their heads down.”
“Yeah,” Sol said. “It’s just us human-folk can’t deal with this all.”
“Just us.” Monica nodded. “They don’t have mortgages.”
“True that.”
Sol gathered tobacco juice in his mouth and spat into the ditch.
“Listen, Joe,” Sol said, leaning over the center console. “You ever need anything, help with them trees or just someone to sit with Mr. Vincent, you just holler, hear? I don’t mind doing it. A night in 1957 might just be what the doctor ordered.”
Joe nodded. “I thank you, but we’re doing all right. Yesterday was a fluke. By the time I saw him, he was just fine, and he’s good today.”
Monica, a tight smile on her face, reached out her hand again, and he took it, a rough but slender paw.
“Whatever you say, son,” Sol said. “Whatever you say. But listen, y’all want to get out of the house Sunday you come on over to mine, alright? We’re going to have us a barbeque to welcome our new barnguests.” He turned and winked at Monica. “Ain’t that right.”
Joe could see himself there, beside the grill, the light coming down over the clover fields, pretending everything was fine. “Oh, I’m not sure,” he said.
“Being around the horses always helped my mom,” Monica said, looking at him from between her heavy lashes. “It was like—they didn’t care what year it was, so why should she worry about it.”
“I’ll think about it,” he said, backing away from the rig as Sol pulled down on the gearshift and hauled the huge machinery back onto the road. Above the trailer’s double doors, the horses’ tails swished, and their rumps rolled and tensed as they readied themselves for the ride.
A MAN AND a woman were walking up the front steps from Esplanade just as Del stepped out of the door. She had barely taken them in—sweat-stained T-shirts, the man’s wide cornrows, the green backpack slung over the woman’s left shoulder—when she realized that the Jeep parked at the curb was Cora’s.
In classic Cora fashion, she had given the car to Troy, the man she’d ridden out the storm with, so that he could use it to abandon her. Del glared at the man coming up the steps. She figured that someone who would allow himself to take a woman’s only means of transportation—Well, she had been fairly certain none of them would ever see the Jeep again, yet somehow here it was. Through the tinted glass, she could see that a child was sitting in the backseat. For a second, her face appeared then dropped back down again.
The couple had stopped halfway up the steps. She’d met Troy, apparently, that summer she worked at Eleusis, but the face didn’t ring any bells. The woman looked at her, then at the house number, looked back.
“He said straight hair, skinny,” she said to the man, who shook his head.
“Are you Cora?” he asked her. “Cora Boisdoré?”
She shook her head, feeling her curls spring around her face. “She’s my sister. You’re not Troy?”
“Cousin.” The man nodded, his upper lip held in his bottom teeth.
“She here?” the woman asked.
Del stepped out into the portico, letting the vestibule door slam, and put out her hand.
“I’m Adelaide.”
The women shook hands. She smelled like sweat and ketchup, long driving.
“I’m Kea, and this’s—”
“Anthony.” He grasped Del’s hand in both of his. “Cora’s here or no?”
Del shook her head.
Anthony nodded. “Her car—” He pointed. “We’re supposed to deliver it back.”
“To her,” Kea cut in. “Troy said, specific, ask for her. Make sure you see how she’s doing, he said.”
It was kind of Troy to be so concerned now, Del thought. She liked this suspicion too, the two of them looking at her like she was a thief.
“You’re his cousin, you said?”
Anthony nodded.
“You left the city with him?” Del asked.
“No,” Kea said. “We were up in St. Louis, and he came and got us from the Red Cross, offered us the Jeep to drive down in.”
Del nodded. On TV, she’d seen pictures of the shelters—cots lined up on concrete floors, people playing cards, being interviewed, eating salad out of tinfoil lasagna pans.
“Well, thank you,” she said, “for bringing it back. Cora will be happy to know the car was put to good use in getting you home safe.”
“Right,” Anthony said to himself, looking up, looking away.
“She’s here, then?” Kea asked.
Del shook her head and looked behind her at the broken door of her home. “Not here. Nobody’s here.” She put her hand on the fluted column at the corner of the portico and pushed against it, as if she expected it to fall over. “She’s out at the doctor. I was just going to pick her up.”
“She’s not doing well?”
Del pursed her lips.
“I’m sorry.” Kea nodded. “I can’t imagine—saving all of those people in the flood, and then what she did for those kids—”
Kea stopped abruptly. The back door to Cora’s Jeep had opened, and the little girl was running towards them, skipping on every third step.
“What kids?” Del asked.
“Tyrone and Willy?” Kea said, watching the little girl wrap her arms around one of Anthony’s legs. “Reyna’s little boys? You know Reyna—Troy’s batshit sister.”
Anthony placed a hand on the back of her neck.
“I’m sorry.” Kea peeled his hand from her, not sounding sorry. “I’m not going to not say it. You’ve got to acknowledge. It’s not like she don’t know, we know, everybody knows.”
“I’m sorry—what?” Del asked.
“Those kids were stranded out there in that water, and she and Troy saved them. Had to paddle them out in a goddamned boat.”
“Hush, Kea.” Anthony shook his head, looking down at the child.
“It’s the facts of life, Anthony, and no shame in it,” Kea said. “If you don’t think Neesa knows about it, after what we’ve been through—she’s the same age as Willy, you know.”
“Oof,” Del said. “I had no idea.”
“We’re going to see Tyrone and Willy?” Neesa said.
Anthony rolled his eyes.
“No, honey.” Kea reached down and scooped the little girl up into her arms. “They’re in Illinois with your Uncle Troy like you know. We’re going to see about staying by your granny’s.”
Del nodded at her. It was like how her mother taught her to deal with Cora and her anxieties—you didn’t dwell on them, you helped her move away from them to some new idea. No talking about the flood, then. Best not mention children stranded in the flood.
“You’re going to go see your granny?” Del asked the little girl.
“No,” Anthony said. “She’s in Georgia.”
Kea had started to tap her foot, the webbed jelly sandal making wet sounds as it hit the tile. “We’ve just got to go see about the house. See if we can stay there, because ours—”
Anthony was shaking his head. “There wasn’t any point even looking.”
“I’m sorry.” Del looked down at the mosaic on the floor of the portico. One brown tile had been dislodged from its place in the eye of a whale, and she ran the toe of her shoe over it, kicked it into the garden. “Bad?”
“It’s just not there,” Kea shrugged, and picked the little girl up in her arms. “I mean, there’s a house there, but it’s not a house for us anymore. The whole neighborhood’s just—”
Del nodded at her; even up here on high ground the neighborhood was empty, gone. The few who had come back ghosted around like dead Greeks who’d gotten on the wrong side of the gods, repairing windows so that they could be blown out again, draining basemen
ts so that they could flood again. She looked at Kea with what she hoped was compassion, but Kea had stopped talking.
“Bought it last year,” Anthony said. “Lots of third shifts in that deposit.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Kea nodded. Neesa’s chin cupped her shoulder, her nose nestled into the stretched blue neck of her mother’s tee.
“Do you want me to drive you to your mom’s house?” Del said, as gently as she could. “I’ve got to pick up Cora from the doctor first, but it would be no problem.”
Kea looked behind her at the car. “We’ve been on the road a long time now.”
“We’d appreciate it,” Anthony said.
As Del turned to pull the chain through the ripped screen, Anthony held out the keys on Cora’s pelican ring. She must have handed them over to Troy as he left, just reached out and put them in a clump in his palm—her own house key, the key to Esplanade, the key to the restaurant. Even as a child, she’d been like that—giving her tuna sandwich to a stray cat on the way to school, standing aside so the other, pushier children could take her turn on the slide at the playground. She always rushed to help, gave away what she needed without thinking, kept nothing for herself.
VINCENT KNELT AT the front window of the cabin. His knees ached, but he couldn’t go to sit on the furniture behind him. Strange furniture except for the rocking chair with the needlepoint seat that tasted of something—the sound of rocking, the smell of a wood fire, his mother humming as she held him tight to her deflated bosom. The tune she hummed was always the same but always different, because she made it up as she went along, pushing her toe into the carpet, holding his head against her with her large, rough hand. The light on the shell road was too bright, and there was a smell of oil burning with the wood. A motor kicked on again. To calm himself, Vincent tried to hum his mother’s song.
His humming seemed to splinter the cold air. The outside of the windowpane was beaded with condensate. He had to think: dew formed on the outside of a glass of ice tea, which meant water condensed on a surface colder than the air it was suspended in, and so the window must be colder than the air beyond it, which meant the whole house was like an icebox, this house that was familiar and yet unfamiliar, like a place visited in a dream.
He turned his head from the clouded window. His mother’s rocking chair stood still, like a captive, surrounded by the other, unfamiliar furniture he felt he should know, like the men at his father’s funeral who had reached out to shake his hand, like his own father laid out in the living room—this room—with his mother in her rocking chair beside him where it was warm from the heat of the fire and cold outside, where the wind blew the boughs of the tall pines. The pines should be shading the room, and yet it was sunlit. He scraped at the dew on the window, but it would not come off. Beside the shell road, the trees had been felled. Something terrible had happened. Something terrible—his father had died. He would have to go to work. That explained the trees; his mother was selling them for money. She said she wanted him to finish his schooling, as she held his head against her bosom, but he would have to go to work instead, though he was only fourteen. She had sent letters, and he would make things like his father had, and before that his father and his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father. He would press a chisel into pine and tap the handle with his mallet, so that the wood curled up like cold butter. That explained the smell of sawdust floating above the shell road, but it didn’t explain the strange furniture, the way the weather had been reversed—condensate on the outside of the glass.
He pressed himself to the wall, hair up on the back of his neck. They said a place goes cold when a spirit passes through, though he felt ashamed thinking that. Belief in ghosts wasn’t educated, his mama would say, wasn’t Christian neither, for we know unready souls wait patiently in Limbo until the gates are opened, but his mama would also say to trust your instincts, and his instincts told him something was wrong.
He imagined his papa coming home down the shell road, back the same way he’d gone after crouching to kiss him where he sat in his mama’s lap in front of the fire that was just getting going in the hearth. Catch me a nice big one, Louis, his mama said, and his papa had nodded out the door. But something was wrong about the day. He’d felt it the same way a dog does, getting his hair up before he sees the moccasin in the water. He’d woken before sunup, his father crouched at the grate to light the fire, and the sound of the match had been a paper-doll sound, vivid but thin. He fed the chickens, helped to put wax on a new-built table, did his school work. They sat down to supper, his father’s place empty at the head. His mama said grace in a voice thin as paper, but her words blew out of the open end of the day.
Something terrible had happened. She took him on her lap in the rocking chair though he was too old for it, his legs reaching almost to the floor. She held him tight to her so that he couldn’t drift away. He made up thoughts of his papa drinking, his papa with women, just to spite her. He knew about women, the way they could walk along a road like to lead you, a little dog on a chain. But his mama didn’t let him go, she just hummed louder, and the day wouldn’t close, not until they heard footsteps and she dropped him from her lap, standing up fast as she did. It was Willet at the door with a clutch of fish, but never mind them. The boat had flipped in the Rigolets, he said. Drenched, his papa had turned blue, died before they could make it in. That was all he said, so little that it barely seemed to mean what it meant—a paper story like an obituary that only says “passed” and not how. His mama cried anyway, hugging on Willet, didn’t ask for more.
Even once the rest of it came—his daddy laid out on the table he’d made—it was hard to believe it was true. Proving wasn’t possible, Father Renée said in science class, only disproving, which explained why he was kneeling at the window, watching the shell road, even after his mama had sold away the trees. He believed he heard footsteps in the shells, saw the shadow of a walking man, but only believed, like he believed the man they dressed in his father’s suit for the vigil couldn’t have been his father—so pale he was and waxy above the scarf tied around his throat—though his mama said that was just how a body looked after the soul had passed.
He believed he saw a man approaching the house up the shell road. He believed he heard his footsteps and that they would spare him—save him from the empty house, from the trunk his mama’d packed with the clothes to take into the city, from the city house of the German, Kastenhoff, who he’d been apprenticed to, and from that man’s squinting, steel-gray eyes. He believed he heard his father’s feet climb the porch steps, his father opening the cabin door.
“Pop?” the man called—he believed it was his father, but he couldn’t prove it. He couldn’t prove anything at all.
BETTER CHEDDAR. A Coke. A sleeve of saltines. It had been over forty years, but Tess could taste them already as she idled in the Langenstein’s parking lot waiting for a woman her mother’s age—big gold jewelry, good facelift, starched linen blouse—to push her cart across the lane. The woman smiled and nodded, and Tess was suddenly aware of her pilly cotton tank, her makeup-free face, her hair, gray at the roots and towel-dried, but she lifted a hand off the wheel anyway and gave the woman her best Uptown smile. As she always told Cora, you’ve got to project what it is you’d like to feel.
She could see her mother sitting barefoot on the back porch steps in pedal pushers and a loose shirt, her blonde hair newly set, digging her cracker straight into the tub. In her other hand, she’d be holding a menthol cigarette against the neck of the Coke bottle. There would be one for Tess in the icebox, the cold lip of the glass bottle like a boy’s lip. When her father was out, this was how they celebrated. Better Cheddar, bare feet. For once, no dinner at the damask-covered table. The Marleybone silver, her mother’s silver, arranged like chess pieces: salad fork, fish fork, dinner fork, meat knife, fish knife, soup spoon. Even if there was just a single course, her father insisted on a fully set table, so he could turn the unuse
d silver over, a silent protest that she did not serve a meal the way his mother’s help had served a meal. So, when he was gone, her mother put on her white gloves and little hat as usual, went down to Langenstein’s as usual, but only got Better Cheddar, Cokes, a box of saltines. When Tess was older, her mother would offer her the box of menthols too, and Tess would take one, practice holding it like her mother did at the very tips of her fingers, practice leaving lipstick prints on the filter in her mother’s favorite shade. They would laugh together, leaning back on their elbows on the top step; it made them so happy, to conspire.
And how did that make you feel, being left alone? Alice had asked Cora, on the other side of the door.
Beside her, the trunk of a Lexus popped open and the older lady began to transfer her groceries from her basket. Gone were the bag boys, the dime held out between gloved fingertips. Long gone, of course. Progress pushed them out of their old routines, and nowhere faster than where the routines were oldest. Whenever she went Uptown, she saw how the apocalypse would come. She heard the fish knives, salad forks, soup spoons clattering as the tide pulled them out into the Gulf, saw the net on her mother’s hats hung like Spanish moss from the trees of the frayed swamp, the menthol smoke rolling off like mist on water. Since she’d married Joe, she only came Uptown to get Better Cheddar and Popeye dip or maybe a prime porterhouse for special occasions, but she still kept an eye on the butcher, the way her mother had taught her. Buddy was infamous for putting his thumb on the scale.
Do you feel like your parents abandoned you? Of course, it was what she was paying Alice for, to ask that question. But she didn’t have to like it.
The older woman slammed her trunk shut and looked at Tess as if to say: What in God’s name are you looking at? Reasonable question. She popped down the makeup mirror and dabbed some concealer under her eyes while she waited for the parking spot to open.
As she put the car in park, she noticed a man, tall, a little salt-and-pepper, crossing Arabella towards the entrance of the store. Augie Randsell. Roused by the smell of menthol, something old in her made her thump her horn at him—hulla-ba-loo-hooray!—the way Madge used to do back in high school. Augie turned his head, and a thrill shot up her spine. His mouth moved to say her name. Getting out of the car, she felt faint, put her hand on the door to steady herself. An old Bonneville whisked by, fondling her skirt.