A Piece of My Heart (29 page)

The morning got exploded by shotgun fire coming five feet from the Gin Den door. Robard had gotten up before light, dressed, and disappeared into the darkness. He had been waked by Robard's jeep cranking and sputtering, and for an hour the house was still. Then somebody started firing a shotgun outside the door and whooping and making noises like the Fourth of July. He pulled himself up, holding his blanket, and looked out, leaning against the door facing. The sun hurt his eyes. It was working light down through the low limbs, making it painful to see more than a foot. Beyond the trees the airstrip was yellow and burning like wheat. A haze hung a foot over the bear flowers. The bicycle reflectors were twitching and snapping back to the far line of trees, and the whole business made seeing an ordeal.

Mr. Lamb was twenty yards from the door, facing the other direction down in the scrub brush between the larger trees and the airstrip apron, stalking down into the Crosshatch of chokeberries, a shotgun at order arms, wearing his old canvas coat and woodsman's cap with red flaps tied over the crown. Ahead of Mr. Lamb he could see Elinor's skinny tail curved up and around, quavering above the clutch of weeds, the rest of her body out of sight. Behind the old man, who was accosting Elinor with an awesome caution as if he expected a Cape buffalo to come swaying out of the thicket, stood Landrieu, apparently reconciled, standing nonchalantly in a pair of overalls smoking a limp cigarette, and balancing a big steel-gray double-barrel so that the barrel end rested on the flat of his foot.

He wondered how the old man and Landrieu had so promptly made up their differences, and decided it was because each one thought the other had picked up all the bottles, but didn't dare say anything about it.

Mr. Lamb began to croon, “Clooose, clooose, now, El'nr,” as if he were casting a spell over the ground in front of him. Elinor was getting more and more jittery with the old man closing on her with his shotgun, and was probably, he thought, watching whatever she was supposed to be watching and at the same time mapping out a quick place to hole up when the shooting started.

Landrieu took a last drag on his cigarette, snapped the stub in the grass, spit, and all at once everything commenced. Two birds went up out of the chokeberries, wing to wing, directly into a spear of light, and got by the old man's face with an unimpeded whir. The old man never had a chance and had to swing his gun up just to protect himself from the birds, who split at the very last second and fired by him in different directions, while the old man yelled, “Wuuuup, wuuuup,” at the dog, who had started barking. Six more birds rose then and went fanning through the trees in a line ahead of the old man, and he managed to get the stock to his shoulder and bust off two shots, which didn't draw a feather. Landrieu carefully got his big two-barrel to his shoulder in case any more of the covey started back toward him, and one promptly
did, getting up behind Mr. Lamb's feet, heading in the opposite direction, and Landrieu let go at the bird head-on and hit it in a way that reminded him of atomic attacks on sturdy brick houses. First the bird was there in flight, brown and black and white and crop-winged and intent on a lucky escape, then its physiognomy got changed and none of the original features were intact. It was as if Landrieu had thrown a mottled dishrag in the air and blown a knot in it.

“Da-umn,” Landrieu said, lowering the barrels and frowning at the welter of feathers that hung in the air without seeming to move.

Mr. Lamb gave him a pathetic look and went back to scrutinizing Elinor, who clearly believed there were more quail in the brush and hadn't much moved from where she'd been, though she had barked several times while the first birds were starting up and displeased Mr. Lamb considerably. He began crooning again and frowning at Elinor as if he thought she was stubbing at the birds and encouraging them to take flight before he was ready for them. He got behind her again, and almost even with her head, then began thrashing the brush with his foot and holding his gun up with the barrel pointed out from his waist in the direction he intended the birds should go when they went. All at once a single came up out of the cover and beat out toward the airstrip, its neck stretched and its wings reaching as far into the empty air as they could. The bird had chosen the ideal direction, and with incalculable calm the old man raised the muzzle in one smooth, articulated motion, sighted down the single barrel, paused a second while some ideal distance was attained, then squeezed off a shot that overtook the bird without seeming to displace a feather, dropping him on the skin edge of the airfield. The old man never bothered to see if Landrieu had observed the shot. He moved forward in a fell, workmanlike stride toward where the bird had hit, calling “Dead” to Elinor, who bounded out ahead of him, head high in the weeds, until she reached the short grass and pounced on the quail with her forepaws and began rending it wing from neck, anchoring it with her feet and drawing the flesh away
with her strong puppy's teeth. The old man hastened a step, arriving at the bird two seconds after Elinor, and delivered her an immense kick in the ribs that sent her head over forepaws back into the grass, losing all grip on the bird, and trying to force out a yelp at the same time she was trying to win enough air back into her lungs to keep from suffocating.

“Shitass!” the old man grumbled, inspecting the sagging bird briefly before stuffing it in his coat and starting back. “Tried to savage my bird,” he said up through the trees, making his way to where Landrieu was standing, balefully fingering what was left of the bird he'd mangled.

“Yassuh,” Landrieu said glumly. “This'un a little tore up his-self.”

“You use that goddamned Peter Stuyvesant gun,” the old man complained, coming and standing beside Landrieu as if they were waiting to have their pictures taken. The light had become more generalized, and the yard took on a waxy appearance. Elinor crept blackly up from the bushes, made a berth of the hunters, and slunk back to her loll under the steps. She paid the old man a sorry look and disappeared out of his sight, “If you'd get you a little twenty like this here gun,” Mr. Lamb continued in a fatherly manner, looking at Landrieu's bird, then hefting his little Remington and giving it a commanding look, “you wouldn't blow your birds apart like you do, and you wouldn't wear yourself out portaging it around.” Landrieu's gun was lying on the ground in front of the two, and Mr. Lamb gave it a tap with his toe as if it were a serpent he had personally scourged.

“Yassuh,” Landrieu agreed, still looking lamentably at the bung of feathers in his hand.

Mr. Lamb stared down at the devastated bird another moment, then started back to the house, talking to Landrieu as if he were still beside him.

He walked back
inside
the Gin Den and relaxed on the edge of the cot and listened to the two men stamping up the stairs into the house, talking loudly. The door shut and he was left in the cool of the shed, staring at his toes and thinking how to work the
day. It was the day to leave, without doubt. Get the bus to Memphis and be on the late train, and sometime tomorrow find a place to stay, since Beebe wouldn't be home and he didn't have a key. And later he could take the IC down to school and get signed up for the cram course, and get started in the way he felt fated, if for no other reason than that was the only way left. There was a squeamish serenity in that, of choosing the only thing left, when everything else was eliminated and not by any act, but just by the time and place. It was the compromise satisfaction a person got, he thought, when he is washed up on the beach of some country after spending weeks floating around on a tree limb, too far from home ever to hope to be deposited
there,
and satisfied to be on land, no matter really which land it happened to be.

The only impediment to leaving was going fishing. He felt obligated to cater to Mr. Lamb, except the idea of hazarding a boat with him seemed treacherous, since the old man liked to launch around and jump to his feet the moment things didn't go to suit him and would probably be just as given to it in a boat as elsewhere.

He dressed and slipped out in the direction of the closest woods, keeping so that the hulk of the Gin Den stayed between him and the porch.

At the boundary of the trees he stepped in two dozen yards, so that the house was visible to him, but he was not visible from the house. He watched Landrieu come to the edge of the porch, sling off a pan of water, and disappear inside. He thought maybe the old man had decided on a nap and would forget fishing, and after a while he could just come in and say goodbye, and have himself ferried back across to the bus.

He walked parallel to the road, staying in the denser woods to the end of the airfield, where he switched back to the road out of sight of the house, and struck toward the lake. The sun had moved beneath some blotchy, dark-bellied clouds, and the imprints slid over the road, disclosing the sun directly, but quickly secluding it again. Beyond the woods was another open croft hemmed by trees, the coarse grass crowded by purple thistles that
sprouted the tops of the weeds and swayed noisily, though there seemed to be no breeze. He thought he heard Robard's jeep and listened, but the sound died, and he could only hear a faint windless sibilance in the woods. He looked toward the house, saw nothing on the road, and went ahead. In the next trace of timber a block of pink salt was roped to a wood feeder crib. The area was trampled and bark was scabbed off the trees, and the low branches nipped and munched at, though there were no animals to be seen.

He walked until he could smell the warm fishy smell of the lake, and reached the hump of overlook where the jeep had been, found a sandy patch and sat, prepared to stay as long as he could stand it.

He mooned across the lake at the camp five hundred yards away behind another tier of willows, identical to where he sat watching, though sparser. He could see movement in the lot, two figures unrecognizable, three-quarters of the way between the dock and Gaspareau's business cottage. One of them he supposed was Gaspareau, and he made a guess which it was, having it be the broader figure in the light shirt who seemed to be pointing the other man in the direction of the island, more or less to where he was sitting, which produced a prickly feeling in him as though both the figures were talking over what they were going to do if they could ever get their hands on him. He thought about Gaspareau's little red-crust speaking hole burping out sounds when he mashed on the little metal life preserver, and wondered what he was saying and to whom, and wondered if old man Lamb's company had finally arrived a day late. The two figures came down onto the dock and walked out as if they were going to get in one of the boats. He made out that the man he had guessed to be Gaspareau
was
Gaspareau. He was pointing in the direction of the mud landing, waving his cane as a pointer, indicating for the other figure, who was taller and slightly slumped, precisely where he would have to go if he was going to the island. He wondered, then, if Gaspareau wasn't directing a poacher to the island as the old man suspicioned all along, and in arrogance of all his specific proscriptions and threats. And it was comical to think of the old
man having to employ one man to watch over another who was getting paid better. After a few moments, both figures walked back off the dock and disappeared toward Gaspareau's cottage, where he lost them in the willow mesh.

In a while he saw a dark-colored car go back over the levee ahead of a funnel of dust, and disappear into the fields. In the camp activity halted. The bight of cottages and scatter of beached rowboats lay in the sun and in the creases of dingy shade looking defunct, the possibility of new movement remote. He wondered what sorts of squalid enterprises Gaspareau could master from the boat camp, stumping around with a big nickel pistol strapped to his belly and some sinister adolescent on his payroll.

Two mallards scooted up and out of the flats below the camp, winging smartly out over the reach of open water, scanning the lambent surface as they flew, each a vigil on his own quadrant of flight. As they angled up the corridor of the lake they seemed to lose lower and lower, as though they were searching for something specific that lay along the perimeter of the willows. As they reached even with the landing cut, they suddenly veered sharply in formation, as if they had spotted where they were going and intended to bend back and drop straight in onto the stobs and cleared timber. But at the unsuspected sight of his face alone and still, gazing up white and enthralled, they wheeled and broke up and to the right, backdrafting as if they were seeking to outdistance his very sight, tripling the space between them in a matter of microseconds, and scatting in opposite directions back up the open water, the steely pinging of their wings barely breaking the silence, making him feel like shrinking back into the woods and hiding.

Robard bumped down the road from the direction of the house with a cigarette sunk in his mouth, looking wizened. He steered the jeep out of the rut, up over the willow roots, and stopped, letting the motor idle.

“I just watched Gaspareau point us out to some guy,” he said. Robard looked at the dock, a stitch at the water line. “One of
them football coaches,” he said, looking at his cigarette to see if it was burning. “What'd he look like?”

“Taller than Gaspareau,” he said.

“That wouldn't be too hard.”

“Whoever it was went back over the levee,” he said, taking a look at the long levee revetment.

The jeep motor choked out and Robard watched the lake stippling light up through the willows. “I got something I want to ask
you,
Newel,” he said. He snapped his cigarette in the grass, produced another one, packed it against the steering wheel, and laid it on the side of his mouth. “What is it
you're
doing down here?” Robard pushed his thumb knuckle in his eye socket and gave his eye a good kneading.