Chapter 2

I set the pail down, walked out without a word, and something that had held for thirty-one years started to give…

The shutter was still banging behind me.

I went down the hall and put my whole boot on the board that creaked.

Nobody called after me.

What gave wasn't much to look at.

My left hand had started to shake, and I'd never had a shaky hand in my life. You can't, ninety feet up a derrick.

I bought a pint of Four Roses at the store in Oak Grove and drove the shell road out to where it quits at the beach. I parked with my bumper to the Gulf.

I turned on the radio so there'd be something in the cab besides me.

The Lake Charles station was playing those Everly boys, Bye Bye Love, two brothers singing so close you couldn't have slid a playing card between them.

I left it on because the weather came on the hour.

The man said Hurricane Audrey would come ashore on Thursday, and people in the low places had time to leave in the morning.

He read it like the price of rice.

Around six Placide Hebert came along in his Ford, checking his fence. He was our neighbor up the ridge, sixty-some, and he taught me to run a trotline when I was nine.

He stopped and looked at me, and at the pint.

"You home early, Alcide."

"Company sent us in."

"You going out?"

"In the morning," I said.

"Me too, me. Zelie's got a roast in, and we got the grandbabies for the summer." He looked out at the water. "Mais, there's time. The man said."

Here is what I knew, sitting there.

I'd worked the Gulf ten years. A long slow swell with a lot of room between the waves comes from something big, and it gets where it's going ahead of whatever the radio says.

I knew that, and I was looking right at it.

"Kiss Zelie for me," I said, and I took a drink.

He tapped the roof of my truck twice and drove on.

By dark the swells were breaking across the low place in the shell road behind me. I watched it in the mirror.

It took me nine hours and that whole pint to think of something to say.

About one-thirty I turned the key.

The low place was hub deep, and I went through it without giving it a thought.

The whole ridge was dark, the power gone, except for a lamp in my kitchen window.

The Mercury hadn't moved. He hadn't even moved his car.

They were at the table.

Odile had put the blue dress on and pinned up her hair. Remy sat in my chair in his undershirt with a cup of my coffee.

The little blue bottle from my lunch pail stood on the oilcloth between them. Nobody had opened it.

Down the hall the fan had quit with the power, and you could hear the house working in the wind.

The Big Ben on the icebox said twenty to two.

I pulled out the other chair and sat down in my own kitchen like company.

"How long," I said.

Remy opened his mouth.

"I'm asking her."

"Since Ash Wednesday," she said, and she looked right at me to say it. I'll give her that.

I counted. I can't help it, I count. That was sixteen weeks, and I'd come home eight times in sixteen weeks and fixed the pump and the porch rail.

"Why?"

It came out like a man asking why his truck won't start.

Odile turned her cup a quarter turn on the saucer.

"You remember my mother's plate," she said. "With the blue rim."

"What about it?"

"Two Christmases ago. I stood right there and I looked at you and I opened my hand. On purpose, Alcide. It went all over that floor."

"I remember."

"You got the glue."

"It was your mother's plate," I said.

"That's what you said then, too."

Remy laughed through his nose. She didn't look at him.

"I told you I couldn't sleep nights with you gone," she said. "I told you I was lonesome out here. You know what you did? You put in a ceiling fan."

I had. It took me two days, and I was proud of how it ran.

"Six years I've been waiting for you to mind something. One thing. I don't care what."

We went around on it for an hour after that, the same few things, the way you do.

The lamp flame leaned over, in a shut kitchen.

The Big Ben said twenty to three when I turned to my brother, because that was easier.

"Get out of my house."

"Your house." He looked up at the ceiling like he was pricing it. "Whose land is this floor on, Cide?"

"Get out."

"Go on and tell Mama why, then. See who she says drove who to what."

He picked up the little blue bottle and turned it to the lamp, in no hurry at all.

"Evening in Paris," he said. "You know she pours that down the sink?"

"Remy," Odile said.

"Six years of it. She says it smells like a funeral parlor."

I looked at her. She was looking at the oilcloth, and she didn't say it wasn't so.

I don't remember getting up.

I had his undershirt in my left fist and I'd hauled him halfway across my own table, with the coffee going over, and my right arm had gone back all by itself.

It was the first time in my life.

His face was a foot from mine and he was still smiling, with that little jump going at the corner of his eye.

"There you go," he said, real soft. "There you go, Cide."

Something was scratching at the back door, low down.

I turned my head with my arm still back.

Personne stood on the top step, scratching at the screen, wet to the belly.