Ace Atkins - New Orleans Noir - The Classics

Lena wrinkled her nose. “I reckon you plain better see about getting ’em first.”

He just shrugged. “You think I can do it, Celia?”

“Sure,” I said. “Sure, sure you can.”

“That’s the girl for you,” the man behind the counter said. “Thinks you can do anything.”

“That my girl there all right.” Chris reached in his pocket to pay the man. I could feel my ears getting red.

He picked up the rifle and slowly knocked down the whole row of green and brown painted ducks. He kept right on until Lena and I each had a doll in a bright pink feather skirt and he had a purple wreath of flowers hung around his neck. By this time the man was scowling at him and a few people were standing around watching.

“That’s enough, soldier,” the man said. “This here is just for amateurs.”

Chris shrugged. We all turned and walked away.

“You did that mighty well,” Lena said, turning her baby doll around and around in her hands, staring at it.

“I see lots of fellows better.”

“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” I tugged on his sleeve.

“I didn’t learn—”

“Fibber!” Lena tossed her head.

“You got to let me finish. Up in Calcasieu parish, my daddy, he put a shotgun in my hand and give me a pocket of shells... I just keep shooting till I hit something or other.”

It was hard to think of Chris having a father. “Where’s he now?”

“My daddy? He been dead.”

“You got a family?”

“No,” Chris said. “Just me.”

We walked out along the strip of sand, and the wind began pulling the feathers out of the dolls’ skirts. I got out my handkerchief and tied it around my doll, but Lena just lifted hers up high in the air to see what the wind would do. Soon she just had a naked baby doll that was pink celluloid smeared with glue.

Lena and Chris found an old log and sat down. I went wading. I didn’t want to go back to where they were, because I knew that Chris wanted Lena alone. So I kept walking up and down in the water that came just a little over my ankles.

It was almost too cold for swimmers. I saw just one, about thirty yards out, swimming up and down slowly. I couldn’t really see him, just the regular white splashes from his arms. I looked out across the lake, the way I liked to do. It was all dark now; there was no telling where the lower part of the sky stopped and the water began. It was all the one color, all of it, out beyond the swimmer and the breakwater on the left where the waves hit a shallow spot and turned white and foamy. Except for that, it was all the same dark until you lifted your eyes high up in the sky and saw the stars.

I don’t know how long I stood there, with my head bent back far as it would go, looking at the stars, trying to remember the names for them that I had learned in school: names like Bear and Archer. I couldn’t tell which was which. All I could see were stars, bright like they always were at the end of the summer and close; and every now and then one of them would fall.

I stood watching them, feeling the water move gently around my legs and curling my toes in the soft lake sand that was rippled by the waves. And trying to think up ways to stay away from those two who were sitting back up the beach, on a piece of driftwood, talking together.

Once the wind shifted a little suddenly or Chris spoke too loud, because I heard one word: “Oregon.”

All of a sudden I knew that Lena was going to marry him. Just for that she was going to marry him; because she wanted so much to be white.

And I wanted to tell Chris again, the way I had wanted to in the bus, that he’d said just the right thing.

After a while Lena stood up and called to me, saying it was late; so we went home. By the time we got there, Ma had come. On the table was a bag of food she had brought. And so we all sat around and ate the remains of the party: little cakes, thin and crispy and spicy and in fancy shapes; and little patties full of oysters that Ma ran in the oven to heat up; and little crackers spread with fishy-tasting stuff, like sugar grains only bigger, that Ma called caviar; and all sorts of little sandwiches.

It was one nice thing about the place Ma worked. They never did check the food. And it was fun for us, tasting the strange things.

All of a sudden Lena turned to me and said: “I reckon I want to see where Oregon is.” She gave Chris a long look out of the corner of her eyes.

My mouth was full and for a moment I couldn’t answer.

“You plain got to have a map in your schoolbooks.”

I finally managed to swallow. “Sure I got one — if you want to see it.”

I got my history book and unfolded the map of the whole country and put my finger down on the spot that said Oregon in pink letters. “There,” I said. “That’s Portland there.”

Lena came and leaned over my shoulder; Pete didn’t move; he sat with his chin in his hand and his elbows propped on the table.

“I want to stay here and be the same as white,” he said, but we weren’t listening to him.

Chris got out of the icebox the bottles of beer he had brought.

“Don’t you want to see?” Lena asked him.

He grinned and took out his key chain, which had an opener on it, and began popping the caps off the bottles. “I looked at a map once. I know where it’s at.”

Ma was peering over my other shoulder. “It looks like it mighty far away.”

“It ain’t close,” Chris said.

“You plain want to go there—” Ma was frowning at the map, straining to see without her glasses.

“Yes,” Chris said, still popping the tops off bottles.

“And be white,” Lena added very softly.

“Sure,” Chris said. “No trouble at all to cross over.”

“And you going there,” Ma said again. She couldn’t quite believe that anybody she was looking at right now could ever go that far away.

“Yea,” Chris said, and put the last opened bottle with the others in a row on the table. “When I get out the army, we sure as hell going there.”

“Who’s we?” I asked.

“Lena and me.”

Ma looked up at him so quickly that a hairpin tumbled out of her head and clicked down on the table.

“When we get married,” he said.

Lena was looking at him, chewing her lower lip. “We going to do that?”

“Yea,” he said. “Leastways if that what you want to do.”

And Lena dropped her eyes down to the map again, though I’d swear this time she didn’t know what she was seeing. Or maybe everywhere she’d look she was seeing Chris. Maybe that was it. She was smiling very slightly to herself, with just the corners of her lips, and they were trembling.

They got married that week in St. Michel’s Church. It was in the morning — nine thirty, I remember — so the church was cold: biting empty cold. Even the two candles burning on the altar didn’t look like they’d be warm. Though it only took a couple of minutes, my teeth were chattering so that I could hardly talk. Ma cried and Pete scowled and grinned by turns and Lena and Chris didn’t seem to notice anything much.

The cold and the damp had made a bright strip of flush across Lena’s cheeks. Old Mrs. Roberts, who lived next door, bent forward — she was sitting in the pew behind us — and tapped Ma on the shoulder. “I never seen her look prettier.”

Lena had bought herself a new suit, with the money she’d earned over the summer: a cream-colored suit, with small black braiding on the cuffs and collar. She’d got a hat too, of the same color velvet. Cream was a good color for her; it was lighter than her skin somehow, so that it made her face stand out.

(“She ought to always have clothes like that,” Mayme Roberts said later, back at our house. She was old Mrs. Roberts’s daughter, and seven kids had broken her up so that she wasn’t even jealous of pretty girls anymore. “Maybe Chris’ll make enough money to let her have pretty clothes like that.”)