Chapter TWENTY-SIX
Dax — October 26
I go out there at eleven in the morning.
Not in a few days. That was the plan at half past two standing in an open gate and it lasted until about half past nine, when Chief came into the shed and said Prejean had shut the office and gone home at ten with the phone off the hook, and I said what for, and Chief said he didn’t know,
he’d only heard it off Lorraine.
Her truck is not there.
That is not a thing. Her truck is never there at eleven on a working day, it is at Prejean’s or it is at the co-op or it is on the Ardeen road, and I sit at that gate on the bike for a minute with the engine running and tell myself all three of those.
Then I look at the carport.
The tarp is folded on the concrete where the welder was.
I have got a key to that house. Three years, on my own ring, and I have used it maybe eleven times because she is always home before me and because a man who lets himself into a woman’s house when she is not in it is a man who has decided something about the arrangement.
I use it.
The door sticks the way it always sticks and I put my shoulder to it the way you have to, and then I am standing in her kitchen at ten past eleven in the morning on the twenty-sixth of October.
The power is on.
That is the first thing and it is the thing that keeps me from understanding for about four minutes.
The clock on the stove is going. The window unit is off but it is October.
The refrigerator kicks on while I am standing there and runs and I hear it and think nothing of it at all, and that is the sound that keeps a man standing in a doorway telling himself a story.
There is no towel on the oven door.
The invoice book is gone off the table and the calculator is gone and the pencil is gone.
The cupboard by the sink is open about two inches and there is nothing in it but a tin of coffee and a bag of rice and four plates that do not match.
And on the rack there is one cup, upside down.
I stand there and look at that for a while.
Then I go through the house, which takes about ninety seconds because it is four rooms and there is nothing in any of them.
There are four rectangles on the wall in the front room where the paint is a different colour and there are picture frames still hanging in three of them with nothing in the frames.
The second bedroom has a box of her father’s shirts on the floor with the flaps folded closed, and I know it is his shirts because I put my hand on it and opened it, which I should not have done and did anyway.
The bathroom has got the green tile that does not exist anymore and the jug on the shelf.
She left the jug.
I stood in that bathroom with my hand on the edge of the tub for I do not know how long.
The bedroom is stripped. The bed is made. That is what gets me. The bed is made properly with the corners done and there is nothing on either side of it, and a woman leaving in a temper does not make a bed.
I go back to the kitchen and that is when I see the key.
It is on the counter by the sink, on its own, on the formica, not on a hook and not in a bowl and not on top of anything. One key on a short piece of chain with a red tag gone pink, and the tag says FONTENOT in her father’s hand in marker from years ago.
That is the dock gate.
That is the key to the chain on the gate at the end of that shell road, the one her grandfather set in the ground, and she has left it on a counter in an empty house for whoever comes.
Because the hall has got it from the first.
Six days. Chief put the papers in six days ago and it is covered from the first of the month, and Micah Aucoin holds it, and she has worked that out and put her one on the counter, and that is her answer to the whole thing and it did not cost her a word.
I sat down on the floor with my back against her cabinet.
I do not know why the floor. There were four chairs at that table and I have sat in them a hundred times, and I sat down on the linoleum by the sink and put my arms on my knees, and that is where I was when the refrigerator kicked on again.
I got up at some point and went out and got on the bike.
I rode the Ardeen road and at the junction there is left for Golden Meadow and right for the causeway, and I sat at that junction with my boot down.
She could have gone anywhere. That is the thing.
There is not one reason on earth to think east.
There is family on her mother’s side at Erath, which is west, and there is a woman she apprenticed under at Morgan City, which is west, and there is nothing at all to the east except the causeway and then Mississippi.
I went right.
I do not have a better reason than that it is the road she used to say she liked. She said it once in about the second year, that the causeway at first light was the only part of this parish that did not have anybody’s name on it.
The causeway is eleven miles.
I did it at about fifty with the water flat on both sides going grey to silver, and I was looking at every vehicle on that road, which is a thing I want written down because it is the last time in my life I ever did it without meaning to.
Every truck. Every set of taillights coming up out of the haze in front of me, and there are not many, and none of them is a green Ford with a welder in the bed.
At the far end of the causeway there is a fuel stop and I pulled in.
The man behind the counter is about sixty and he has been behind that counter since I was in my twenties.
“Green Ford,” I said. “Woman driving. Loaded, tools in the bed.”
“When?”
“This morning. Early.”
“Cher, I got about a hundred and forty trucks through here since six.”
“She’d have had a welder in it.”
He thought about it properly. He did not brush me off and he did not pretend, and he stood there and actually thought.
“No,” he said. “I’d have remembered a welder.”
I got back on the bike and rode east another nine miles.
Then eleven more.
The road goes up onto the high ground and away from the water and there start to be trees and then there are trees on both sides and you cannot see anything at all, and I came around a bend somewhere past the parish line and there was a straight stretch of about two miles with nothing on it.
And I pulled over on the grass and put my feet down.
Because I did the arithmetic.
She left at some point in the night or before light.
It is now past one in the afternoon. If she went at six she has got seven hours on me, and seven hours is four hundred miles, and four hundred miles from this road is Georgia or it is Tennessee or it is nothing, it is a number, it is not a place I can ride to.
And there is no reason to think east at all.
And even if I found her, even if I came up on that truck at a fuel stop in Alabama at four o’clock in the afternoon and she got out of it and stood in a parking lot and looked at me.
What.
That is the whole of it. That is where the road ran out, and it was not a road that ran out, it was the sentence. I sat on the grass verge on the shoulder of a highway two hours east of Port Ardeen with the engine running and could not find one single thing to say to her.
Not one. I have gone looking since and there is nothing in me and there never was.
There is no arrangement to offer and no number to name and no man to go and see, and every version of it I built, sitting there, ended with me standing in a parking lot saying I did not mean it, which is not true, or I will fix it, which she has already heard.
I turned around.
And I want to be exact about what turning around was, because for a long time I told myself it was a decision I made about her, that I was giving her something, that I was letting her go the way a man lets a thing go.
That is not what it was.
I turned around because I had nothing to bring.
I got back at about half past four.
I did not go to my house and I did not go to the tow yard. I went to the clubhouse and there were four vehicles on the shell and the lights were down off the awning and there was a boy with a rake going over the ground where the hog table had been.
The chapel was empty.
I went in and I shut the door and I sat down.
The hatch cover is eleven feet long and four inches thick and there is a place at the near side where the grain has gone black because hands have been on it for decades. Fry Hebert’s chair was still where it was. Chief was going to move everybody down one before November and he had not done it yet.
I sat in my seat.
Not the Road Captain’s. The other one. Micah Aucoin came off on the twenty-fifth and it was mine from that night, and the flash was on my chest, and I sat in the vice president’s chair of the Cottonmouth Motorcycle Club at half past four in the afternoon on the twenty-sixth of October in an empty
room.
And I did the arithmetic. All of it. Properly, for the first time, in order, with nothing left off the sheet.
Camille Doucet, twenty-two, on the end of the Ardeen dock on the twenty-fourth of July, who did not take anything and who asked me twice to speak to Deuce.
Alcide Poche in the wash bay on the twenty-ninth, and me laughing for one breath in a concrete room.
A telephone call at ten past seven in the morning on the seventh of September that cost eighty dollars extra.
A woman in a yard on the fourteenth with thirty-one pounds of pump on her hip, and eleven people who had already worked out what their faces would do.
Emile Hebert in the water at twenty past six in the morning on the twelfth of October, because I put a boat out on nine hours of pump.
A vote on the eighteenth, and a man on a bike outside a gate with the engine running, deciding not to knock.
And on the other side of the sheet, the whole of it, everything I bought.
Eleven percent flat for five years, which is real, and which is running.
A rocker on my chest, which is real, and which a hundred and sixty people saw go on.
And my father’s word out loud on a dock in the sun, which is November, and which is coming.
I got every single thing I costed. That is the part nobody believes when I say it. It worked. Every piece of the arithmetic came out exactly the way I ran it in a hallway on the sixth of September, and not one number was wrong.
I just had the wrong thing in the wrong column.
I sat in that chair a long time. It got dark in there and I did not put the light on.
Somewhere out in the yard a bike started up and went out the gate, and the boy with the rake finished and put it in the shed, and Nita’s car came in at about six for her pans and went again.
And at some point I put my hand flat on that hatch cover, on the black part, where the hands go.
I paid for this seat.
That was the sentence. That was all of it and it took me from the twenty-fourth of July to the twenty-sixth of October to get to it, and it is not a complicated thought and there is nothing in it a man could not have worked out at the start.
I paid for this seat, and I paid in her, and I have got the seat.