The Unraveling of Mercy Louis (13 page)

“Not out there modeling lipstick.”

“ . . . which is kind of a shame, because your lips are your best feature.”

A wave of feeling close to nausea in the pit of my stomach. I look up and meet his eyes.

“I'm good, so I do it,” I say. “All glory to Him for my gifts.”

“Fair enough,” he says. “But the best part of watching you play is the love you bring to the game, I think. That intensity. Like I said, not happiness or unhappiness. Just a look that says this is what you were born to do. It's not a game with you. It's an art.”

He looks at the ground as if nervous about how his words will land. Softly against my skin, I want to tell him. It takes a minute for me to absorb all these sweet things said at once. We walk without speaking for a few minutes, but I wouldn't call it silence; the night birds are chirruping the coming darkness. Travis slaps at mosquitoes and fingers a few lazy chords on his guitar. The frog noise is rich and rhythmic. At the edge of the park, he stops me.

“You didn't have that look on your face when you played the semis last year,” he says. “There was something different about you from the minute you took the court.”

“You were at the game?” I ask.

He laughs. “Whole town was at that game.” He waits, watching me, and I'm embarrassed. Here I was, bragging on myself and my “gift” when this boy's seen the semi. I wait for his leveling remark, something along the lines of
Well, you can't be perfect all the time
. Instead, he says: “You know the Longfellow poem about Evangeline and Gabriel?” The first answer that comes to mind is unkind—
Yes, you fool, I'm Cajun generations back, can trace my roots to Nova Scotia. I know that sap Longfellow's poem as well as I know the Lord's Prayer.
But I like walking close to him—the absent way he hums, the way he accepts my postgame need for quiet to calm my blood—so I quash that response and say instead: “The star-crossed lovers.”

“I know this isn't really their tree.” He gestures at a big oak, its branches like shadowy fingers reaching to the sky. “Even the one in Louisiana isn't theirs. They just say they're buried there to get the tourists to show up. But I like their story. All that wandering to find a single person.”

Maw Maw doesn't tell the story because she thinks it glorifies fluffy notions of romance.
Had to drag your mama kicking and screaming to the altar so you'd be born legitimate,
she says.
Wouldn't allow for that kind of burden on a child. I made her say her vows like a Christian woman so there'd be no taint of the bastard on you.
Charmaine and Witness split up after my birth, Witness disappearing onto an offshore rig, Charmaine wandering east in a haze of booze and dope. No, I don't suppose Maw Maw and I put much stock in stories about rosy-cheeked lovers.

“What about scary stories?” I say. “If you like scary ones, Maw Maw's got about fifty different versions of the Loup Garou. Probably why I never broke any rules as a kid. I was scared half to death of waking up with a werewolf at my bedside.”

He laughs, then looks up into the reaching boughs of the old oak tree. “Some corn ball at the Port Sabine tourist office wrote in the brochure that the wind through the tree makes the noise of the reunited lovers' laughter.”

“Oh, brother,” I say. “Isn't the wind through the trees nice enough all on its own?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I suppose it is.”

He stands too close, looks at me too long. Though the wind blows hard off the Gulf, I don't hear laughter in the trees, only Maw Maw's commandment:
No boys get the privilege of your flesh, not ever, until you're wearing white.

“Good night, Mercy,” he says. “I'll see you around.”

“'Night, Travis.”

THAT NIGHT I
write Annie a letter, again explaining that I knew nothing of her father's plan for the Purity Ball. Inside the envelope, I place my favorite snapshot of the two of us. It's seventh grade, and we're in a photo booth at the Beaumont mall, goofing for the camera. In the shot, Annie's face has an innocence to it I haven't seen in years. I drive to her house, ring the bell. The foyer's dark, but the light of the television flickers against the sliding glass doors of the living room. I knock, wait, then ring again, but nobody comes to the door. After a few more minutes, I prop the letter on the front step. “I miss you, Annie,” I say to the moon before getting back into the car.

AT THE PARK
the next night, Travis approaches me again. He moves with the jointy fluidity of a big cat. With his flip-flops and sun-streaked hair, he looks like he lives at the beach, and I wonder if he ever hangs out with the surfers down at the pier, smoking dope around bonfires and falling asleep in the sand. When you've lived in a small town your whole life, you start thinking you know everything about everyone, but all I really know about Travis is that he's got a gravelly singing voice that surprised me the first time I heard it. It seemed like such a
man's
voice coming out of that skinny boy. He invites me to hang out sometime, and I say no, I really can't, sorry.

I wanted so much to say yes. Because I want to know that feeling again, the one where my whole body is a butterfly wing.

THE SECOND AND
third time he asks me to hang out, I say no, and I feel good, strong. But his face. That face like a stick in the ribs, demanding attention. And the words. More than the looks, I can't get enough of the words. When I see him at the park, I try to will myself indifferent, but when he gets close, I go into a lather; this animal me doesn't listen very well, won't take her eyes off the boy. The fourth time he asks, I nod, eyes cast down, as if by not voicing my agreement, I can escape blame. “Is that a yes?” he asks. When I don't answer, he tells me to meet him at the boardwalk day after tomorrow.

Two days later, we stand out front of the Pleasure Pier, which closed up when Mama Charmaine was still a girl. Behind us, the rusting Ferris wheel rises, and the carousel, with its salt-bloated, decapitated horses, sits motionless. They are specters of a boom time that ended before we were born. The bay water murmurs, the gulls dive and peck along the shore. On the air, the rotted smell of decomposing seaweed, which sits on the beach behind curtains of gnats. We plop down on one of the sagging benches facing the water. He's brought along a plastic grocery bag, and from it, he pulls out a take-out clamshell.

“I thought we ought to have the right food for the boardwalk,” he says, handing me a still-warm funnel cake wrapped in a napkin. The smell of the fried dough gets my saliva going. “Fresh from Ed's.”

“Are you trying to bribe me with sweets?” I say.

“I'd say sweets for the sweet, only I've seen you on the court, and you aren't going for Miss Congeniality.”

Before taking a bite, I think of Coach's meal plan. I shouldn't eat this, but Travis looks so eager to please, and it smells delicious, so I take a big bite, the powdered sugar dusting my lips. “Oh, good grief,” I say between bites. “I'll say
please
and
thank you
on the court from now on if it means more of these.”

“You been playing hard to get for weeks, and all I had to do was buy you a donut? Could have saved me a few hard nights, girl.” He grins, tears a piece off his cake. “I haven't noticed your sidekick around much these days. You two have a fight?”

“Annie?” I smile at the idea of her as my sidekick; when we're together, I feel like the tagalong. “I guess she's mad at me.”

“What the heck for?”

I pause; I don't want to talk about the Purity Ball, not with Travis, who wouldn't understand. “I don't know,” I lie. “I miss her. Wrote her a letter and everything.”

“She didn't respond to a letter?” He whistles. “That's cold. But tell you the truth, I'm kinda glad. Y'all were pretty unapproachable as a tag team.”

“Really?”

“Annie Putnam, you kidding?” He grins. “When I saw you alone at the park, I thought I better make my move.”

“Because my bodyguard was off-duty?” I say playfully, but I know he's right. If Annie had been at Park Terrace, I wouldn't be here now.

“Here,” he says, suddenly bashful. He slides headphones over my ears. On his Discman, he plays a recording of a basketball poem from a CD he found at the library. It's by a Louisiana poet named Yusef Komunyakaa, a black man with a voice like Moses:

                                       
In the roundhouse

                                       
Labyrinth our bodies

                                       
Created, we could almost

                                       
Last forever, poised in midair

                                       
Like storybook sea monsters.

“I love it,” I say. “That's how it feels sometimes. Epic.” I tilt my head to one side. “So you just had this basketball poem tucked in your back pocket for a rainy day?”

“Mighta done a little sleuthing.” He smiles wide so I can see his wolfish incisors, which sets me keening for something I can't identify. Slipping his hand behind my neck, he starts at my left ear. At first he's polite, peckish. I watch the sea as the sun meets the horizon in a fiery line, throwing up rays like the arms of a drowning man. But then a shift, and he turns his whole body toward me, his pelvis pressed gently against my hip. I shiver somewhere deep.

He fits his mouth to the curve where my neck meets my shoulders. He smells insanely good, like I don't know what. Just good. I should tell him to stop, but I don't. When his lips overlap mine, it feels as if he is coaxing my heart out of my chest. When his hand brushes my nipple, though, a wave of shame overtakes me.
I am the daughter of a nothing whore.

“Stop,” I say, and he does.

“Sorry,” he says. “It's just, I really like you.”

I smile. “Me, too.”

I want to ask him:
Would you still like me if we were just two souls meeting, bodiless, in space?
That's how I imagine God loves. We pick our way to the end of a jetty, find a flat rock to sit on. Afterward, he drives me home in the dark, the air thick with insects. He idles at the corner, out of sight of the stilt house, gives me a peck of the cheek.

In the bathroom mirror, I notice that the skin around my mouth is pinkish from the friction of Travis's stubble. I brush my teeth, gargle twice. The taste of his tongue persists.

At the vanity, I sit down and draw out Charmaine's letter. I wonder if years ago she sat in this same room marveling over the tobacco taste of Witness's mouth. After she gave herself to him in sin, did she dampen this desk with her tears?

Striking a match from the box I keep for my candles, I hold the flame close to the paper, the curls of smoke sharp in my nostrils. The match burns so close to my fingers that I have to shake it out.