“I should go.”
“I bet you’d be even worse to work for than a white man.”
Charley grabbed her backpack and stuffed the pay stub in the front pocket, let herself out, and hurried down the steps. At the bottom, she paused. All she wanted was to find workers and get down to business. Jacques Landry was one thing — she should have expected that. But her own people? Who did they think she was? She looked back at the woman barring the doorway. “Sorry if I offended you or your grandmother.”
“I bet.” And with that, the woman slammed the door.
5
Four hundred miles to go. They were almost home. East of San Antonio, Ralph Angel saw a sign for Corpus Christi and got an idea. He merged off the interstate onto Highway 37. In the passenger seat, Blue continued his low, rumbling dialogue with Zach the Power Ranger, who was still imprisoned in the glove box. “’Cause we might get arrested,” Ralph Angel heard him say. “So you have to stay inside and be very, very quiet.”
Blue looked up and asked, “Are we there yet?”
“What did I say about that? Just wait. I have a surprise.”
Eventually, the woods yielded to marshland, the two-lane road cutting a straight line through an expanse of gray water peppered with reeds and tufts of low, wiry grass. Egrets, white as porcelain, took flight from their rookeries, while in the distance a house balanced on stilts, lording over its watery homestead, and seeing all this, Ralph Angel felt something within him begin to shift. Like a page being turned.
Farther south, the road ended abruptly at the Intracoastal Waterway, the narrow channel stretching from the mouth of the Mississippi to the Rio Grande. A short wood dock jutted out into the water. Ralph Angel could see where the road picked up on the other side — not even sixty feet; they could almost swim across.
“What now?” Blue said.
“We wait.”
It wasn’t long before a ferry cruised up the channel. Cracked black buoys dangled from its rusted bow, paint curled away from the wheelhouse, but otherwise, nothing had changed; it was the same ferry as when he was a kid, and Ralph Angel, suddenly breathless with an old excitement, thought back to the day his daddy brought him to this very spot. A summer trip to the beach, just the two of them; a vacation he waited months to take, his father having called from California that September to say they would go someplace special when school got out. Ralph Angel had marked the days off the calendar, slogged through the long months until June finally arrived and his father, dashing in slacks and loafers, knocked on the front door. And while his father steered the Buick LeSabre with one hand, the other arm propped in the open window, he sang along to the cassette tape — Al Green’s version of “People Get Ready”—as they cruised over the blacktop road. Ralph Angel bathed in the radiance of his dad’s presence, so happy he thought he would burst.
And now, belching smoke, the same ferry rumbled up to the dock and idled. Ralph Angel smelled creosote and diesel fuel.
Blue grinned. “Can we ride on that boat?”
“You, me, and Zach.”
Ralph Angel paid the one-dollar fare and steered the Impala onto the dock, then onto the ferry. For the few minutes it took to cross the channel, he and Blue stood on the creaky deck, Ralph Angel holding Blue’s waist as he leaned over the side and spat in the water.
“It’s a good boat, Pop,” Blue said. He held Zach over the side, making sound effects as he pretended Zach could fly.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Ralph Angel said, but really, he didn’t mind at all.
• • •
More miles of black road. A lone oil well seesawing. Then the marsh ended in a wavering wall of sea oats, and beyond it, a flat stretch of bone-colored sand, a sky the color of bleached driftwood washing out the horizon.
“Is this the surprise?”
Ralph Angel nodded as he killed the engine. “I came here with my daddy when I was a little boy,” he said, and watched a seabird, squat as a crab apple, its beak thin as a sewing needle, skitter across the sand. How odd it felt to be back here after so many years, almost a lifetime, and yet here he was. He had a vague sense of his boyhood self separating from him now, standing beside him like a specter, so that he saw the landscape through two sets of eyes; felt the pull of old memories as if someone were tugging on his sleeve. He put a hand on Blue’s shoulder. “You can get your feet wet if you want,” which was exactly what his father had said to him.
A briny wind sprayed sand as Ralph Angel, kneeling, rolled Blue’s pants up his spindly calves. “Not too far.” He sat on the Impala’s warm hood as Blue romped and galloped out to the pale brown surf, leaving a trail of flat-footed prints in the sand. The limp tide. A fringe of broken shells, froth, and plastic bottles left by the receding waves.
What he remembered most clearly was that they stayed at the beach all afternoon, that his father had set out a picnic with all his favorite things — salami between fluffy white slices of Evangeline Maid bread, Zapps potato chips, a can of Barq’s root beer for each of them, a package of Big 60 cookies with lemon crème filling bought special from Winn-Dixie — and that the wind worried the blanket so much they finally took off their shoes and used them to anchor the corners. While they ate, his father told him about California: how in a single day you could drive from the beach where the sand was as fine as cornmeal out to the desert where cacti and bright orange poppies with petals thin as tissue paper blanketed the ground; how, at the lighthouse just south of the airport, you could watch whales spout plumes of spray as they migrated through the channel, their enormous backs glistening like sea monsters as they rolled through the swells; and how, on a clear September weekend, you could drive down to the pier and order a whole boiled crab, then sit with a brown bag on your lap, pick meat from the crab’s body, and toss empty claws to the hovering gulls.
“When can I come live with you?” Ralph Angel had asked, flooded with longing. In those days, he lived with his mother, Emily, the girl his father had dated in high school, in a shabby little house in the back of town. But even then, at eight years old, while he didn’t have a name for it, Ralph Angel could see that his mother was fragile; sensed that something within her was always on the verge of breaking loose, like a handle from a teacup. It was never a question of intelligence. She’d been class valedictorian with a full scholarship to LSU and plans to go on to law school until her pregnancy made that impossible; had taught herself German, and read every Louisiana history book shelved at the local public library. But she never seemed able to keep a job. “The office manager doesn’t understand me,” she’d say when she was fired from another law office where she worked as a paralegal, or later, “The staff has it in for me,” after she cycled through every law firm from Saint Josephine to Baton Rouge, and worked as a file clerk.
“When you’re older,” his father had said.
“How much older?” The difference between months and years was still abstract and strange, but he had the sense that time was running out.
“We’ll see,” his father said. “Maybe next year. Right now I work all the time. I can’t take care of you. I know your mama’s a little different, but you’re still better off down here.” His father rolled over then, to nap in the sun, his legs crossed at the ankles, his flat feet dusted with sand.
But the next year, his father married a woman named Lorna, an ophthalmologist with her own practice, and a year after that, they had a baby girl named Charlotte, whom everyone called Charley for short, and who, merely by the fact of her presence, put an end to his father’s visits, so that by the time Ernest finally sent for him, three years had passed. Meanwhile, Ralph Angel’s mother, convinced the world was against her, stopped looking for work, grew paranoid (They don’t like me in that Winn-Dixie. They always make me wait. I’m not shopping there anymore.) and reclusive. She drank.