Authors: Jonathan Raban
“Yes. So I heard.”
The afternoon sky was the texture of thick clotted cream. Ripe oranges were growing in the bartender’s garden. Behind us, a truck went by on the narrow road that ran in parallel with the bayou and formed the town’s outer limit. One could spit right over the top of the long straggle of Larose, yet it had the self-absorbed stir of a city. Oxy-acetylene torches lit the insides of small shipyards on the far bank, and the shrimp fleet was coming in from the Gulf to tie up along the town jetties. The masts and spars of the trawlers formed frames over which their rust-colored nets were spread like tents, The shrimp would be frozen and packaged in factories on the bayou. It was altogether a great deal busier and richer than the Main Streets of most small Southern towns.
A mile or so on from the bar, a two-faced gas station served both the highway and the bayou. I pulled in to refuel and parked behind a shrimp boat. I found the owner of the gas station by the sound of his singing. It came from somewhere under a jacked-up automobile: a cracked and happy warble which eventually turned into a man who looked like a wizened terrapin under his yellow plastic cap. I discovered that he had a whole collection of good reasons for singing. He had harvested his forty acres of sugar cane across the road; his first season with his own shrimp boat was just finishing, at a fine profit; his gas station was humming with business. He was a swamp plutocrat, with one foot on the land and one on the water.
“And I ain’t complaining none,” he said. His fortune had started with just a few acres of cane plantation. Then an oil company had paid him an annual rental on the land for its potential mineral rights. “So I built me a service station.” That had done well. “So I built me a shrimp boat.”
“They struck oil just over the other side of the bayou there … so I’m keeping my fingers crossed and hoping.”
“What’ll you do if they do find oil on your land?”
“Build me another shrimp boat. Hell, you make more money out of the shrimp than you can out of sugar, or gas, or any other damn thing around here. A man can live easy off a shrimp boat now.”
“When they do strike oil, you’ll be able to build a whole fleet of the things.”
“No,” he laughed. “You see how it is with me. I like to keep things small.”
He filled my gas tanks, still warbling when he wasn’t talking. I had imagined that this swampland would be desolate and impoverished; yet even the most tottering of its shacks on stilts was suspended over a fortune that was just waiting to be scooped out of the water and the mud. The trouble of the shack dwellers was that they had no capital to exploit these marvelous possibilities. They had to scrape hungrily by on a wooden skiff, a gun, a few catfish lines and traps, while the owner of the gas station was singing his way into being a millionaire. It was astonishingly easy to be rich here, and almost as hard to stop being poor.
It was nearly dark when I reached the jetty of Erjie’s Bar & Cafe at Lockport. There had been no sunset, but the torches in the shipyards had put on a sunset of their own, making the water of the bayou flare silver and carmine, and lighting the cypresses and willows so that they looked like showering Roman candles. My own pleasure at being afloat, and safely, unworriedly afloat, in this engaging world was slightly cankered by the fear that I wasn’t finding an ending so much as starting out on a fresh journey.
In the bar, a group of men were playing three-card skat and talking in French. At least, I supposed it was French. It certainly wasn’t English, and the occasional French word was just identifiable.
“
Excusez-moi
” I said, excusing myself, “
mais pouvez-vous me comprendre quand je parle comme ci?
”
There was a long and thoughtful pause.
“Er … yes. But what you talking in now is the French they speak in Paris, France.”
“I’m afraid that’s not quite true. I wish it were.”
“Here. Come see.” Or was it
comme ci?
But the man was gesturing to me to sit down.
“You say ‘I am’ in your French.”
“
Je suis.
”
“
Shoo.
”
“
Shoo?
”
“Yup. That’s the way we say it. Now you say to me ‘You are.’ ”
“
Tu es?
”
“
Tay
. ‘He is’ …”
“
Il est.
”
“
Lay
. We kind of shortened it all up, see?”
It was still spoken, but not read or written, and had drifted a long way from its parent root. One man at the table had served in France in World War II.
“Took me, oh, just a week, maybe two … then I got what they was saying. But with me, they wasn’t so quick. They didn’t reckon I was talking French at all.”
“What about your children? Do they speak French?”
“Ain’t many under forty that still can. The kids now, all they learn is this jive talk.
Like … like … like … like … man
. That’s all they know.”
It seemed a sad way for a language to peter out. The Cajuns had originally been the Acadians. They had come to Louisiana in 1758, when the governor of Canada expelled them from their territory in Nova Scotia. Where other immigrants had lost their national languages within a generation or two of their arrival in the United States, the Cajuns were still speaking in French after more than two hundred years. Very soon, Cajun French would be just another property of American folklore, gruesomely treasured because it was “historical,” like the Natchez mansions and the First Brick Houses West of the Mississippi. The Cajuns were not even Cajuns now; they were Coon-asses. They had happily adopted the name which Texan oilmen had bestowed on them as a jeer. As the sign that was pinned up over the bar said:
COONASSES LOVE BETTER BECAUSE THEY
EAT
ANYTHING!
“So where are you heading for?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe … Morgan City …”
If I didn’t stop at Morgan City, I would probably end up in Texas, heading for the Rio Grande. Perhaps I would meet up with Ed from Muscatine.
“
Morgan City?
Why you want to go there? Ain’t nothing in Morgan City.”
“Ain’t nothing” sounded distinctly promising.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. At all.”
“No tourists?”
“Tourists? In Morgan City? You got to be joking.”
“What you want, anyway? A job?”
“No, I don’t want a job. Just a place.”
“Hey,” called a fat man from his bar stool, “You want a place, I can show you a place. Out there in the bayous.…” He swiveled around. “Know what’s there? A cave. A cave full of froomids. You know what a froomid is?”
“No.”
“He’s shooting his mouth off. Keep quiet, Louis.”
“Froomids is … paradise. They is … men and women all mixed up together. They got these big titties … and the dongs on them …” He spread both hands a yard away from his enormous thighs. “That’s froomids. They’ll eat you alive. But with the froomids, it’s like heaven, know what I mean?”
“Hermaphrodites,” I said.
“
Froomids!
” he said. “Listen to what I’m saying to you!”
“Louis Beauregard,” said the man next to me, “after you come here, this place done go to the dogs.”
Louis Beauregard glittered contentedly. “Well … all
you
got to do is: barbecue them dogs.”
In the morning the air was so still that I could feel the ripples of turbulence I caused by passing through it. A fine salt mist had put the water towers out of focus. They had lost their supporting pillars and looked like silver dirigibles adrift in the sky.
The earth felt like powdered glass underfoot. It was a mixture of black dirt and the shells of millions of tiny white mollusks. With every step, it crunched and snapped. There were mangled stalks of sugar cane on the road and on the bayou, and isolated stands of uncut cane as high as houses in the fields.
I eased the boat out onto the bayou. A faint tidal drift made the water hyacinths and the cane stalks wander sluggishly away from the direction of the sea. Following their lead, I ran up to the end of Lock-port and turned left into Lake Fields: miles and miles of open water with the same veined, soapstony sheen. On the southern bank, someone had raised an improvised levee of crushed automobiles. The salt in the air had rusted them together so that they looked like an earthwork, oddly pasted about with spots and scraps of their old, gaudy Ford and General Motors livery.
A muffled fisherman in a pirogue raised his hand in a salute as I went past. It was the kind of morning and the kind of place where it was important to acknowledge the existence of other people. The sheer, motionless space of sky and water tempted one into the hallucination
that one had been given the world entirely to oneself. The intermittent reminders of human tenancy were unfailingly odd. There was a crumbling jetty sticking out of the mud. No road or track led to it. There wasn’t a house in sight. Yet on the jetty there was a waterlogged sofa, its stuffing leaking from its sides. It was a queer foreign exile; it looked as if it were badly in need of the company of a coffee table, a television set and a standing lamp. A mile farther on, a line of willows ran out across the water on a neck of land as narrow as a sidewalk. At the foot of the trees, three frame houses had been joined together and mounted on the hull of a barge. I rode up to the front door of one of them. The whole place was a ruin. The glass had gone from the windows; part of the roof had fallen in. I tied the boat to the porch and walked through the gutted rooms. Nothing had been left behind except for a few rags and some bits of old newspaper. The
New Orleans Times-Picayune
. June 1968. It had been preserved under a curling sheet of brown linoleum. I wondered what had driven the people from this ingenious and once beautiful house. The lonely vacancy of the view from its windows? Yet the hull of the barge alone must have been worth a fortune in scrap.
I made a long southwesterly loop and rejoined the Intracoastal Waterway, where towboats were busy stirring up the water and the morning. I was glad to see them. They were difficult companions to live with, but their general boisterousness came as a relief after the weird, evacuated stillness of the reach of swamp at my back.
At Houma, I turned up the arched Venetian canal of the Bayou Terrebonne and went to look for a bar. The one I found had the air of a place that scorned the daytime and had created its own perpetual night; it had a pool table and enough bare, dusty space to run several brawls in at once.
“Have you got anything to eat?” I asked the bartender.
“I can do you a shit on a shingle,” she said.
It sounded interesting and disgusting in equal parts. My curiosity narrowly beat my feelings of incipient revulsion.
“Okay, I’ll have a shit on a shingle,” I said, trying to sound as if I’d been shitting on shingles for years.
Waiting for this object to appear, I played pool with a man who’d arrived in Houma five days before. He had come down to Louisiana from Connecticut and was looking for a job as a roustabout on a Gulf oil rig. Houma had scared him half out of his wits.
“Ain’t this country something else, though? You should’ve been here last night. There was a guy came in the bar waving a three-five-seven
Magnum and yelling that he wanted to shoot some niggers. I’m telling you, man: if there’d have been a black sitting here he would have been a dead man. That guy wasn’t joking. I’ve only been here five days. It’s crazy. What I need most in this town is a gun. If you’re in Houma, you need a gun.”
“That’s pretty easy in Louisiana, isn’t it? You only have to show your driver’s license.”
“Yeah. That’s my problem. I don’t have a driver’s license.”
My shit on its shingle was put out for me on the bar. It was only corned-beef hash on toast, but its revolting name had somehow worked its way into the flavor of the thing; it tasted foul.
I was trying to rid my mouth of the memory of it by smoking a pipeful of tobacco when I found Houma in person standing behind me. He was short and skinny, in his twenties; but his face had the creased and yellowed look of someone well past fifty. He had the shakes.
“What you think you tryin’ to put over on me, man?”
“Me? Nothing.”
“Why you come in here?”
I shrugged. “A drink … a game of pool … something to eat.”
“What the fuck is
that?
”
He was pointing to the loose cellophane pouch in which my tobacco was wrapped.
“That’s my tobacco.”
“Tobacco—shit!”
My pool partner came over. “Hey, what’s the trouble?”
“And you keep
your
shit out of this, I’m warning you,” Houma said. Connecticut backed off. His alarmed eyes were telegraphing
What did I tell you?
at me.
Houma’s face was six inches away from mine. The top of his head came up to my nose. “I’m just asking you, polite, now, to get your fucking shit out of this bar.”
“Would you mind telling me why?”
“I don’t have to spell nothing out to you—Fed!”
“I’m not a Fed,” I said.
“You don’t fool nobody. You’re a fucking Fed narc. You and your shit
bait
”
“Look—” I said, and started to reach inside my pocket to find my passport. I could hardly be an accredited Englishman and a Fed narc. My hand had been stopped and gripped almost before it had begun to move. I could feel the fierce trembling in Houma’s wrist. He had a knife in his other hand.
“You pull your fuckin’ gun on me, man, I’ll cut you—”
“Look, please—” I said. The whole episode was so insane and sudden that I hadn’t yet had time to be frightened by it. “I haven’t got a gun. I was trying to show you my passport. I’m British. I’m not a policeman. I’m not an American. I’m not a Fed. I’m not a narc. Now, please … look inside my pocket. You’ll find my passport with my wallet.” I could see Connecticut at the far end of the bar. He had seen the knife and was watching shamefaced. I thought: If I were in his position, all I’d do would be watch too.
Houma’s knife came up and flipped the lapel of my jacket aside. He saw at least that I wasn’t armed. His fingers twitched at the contents of my pocket, and they scattered in front of me on the bar floor: checkbook, wallet, passport, pen and, as I saw with real alarm, the business card of Clarence Carter, superintendent of the Shelby County Penal Farm in Memphis. I had visited his jail. At this moment, he was the last person in the world with whom I wanted any visible connection.