Friday night has me on the back porch of the house I share with Z, halfway through a bottle of red wine, accompanied only by my three dogs and the lazy gusts of dirt-laden wind that billow up the tin lean-to, lifting it slightly off its rusted frame. When I lived off Livaudais Street in New Orleans, on Friday afternoons I’d walk up the street to a bar: a nondescript white house on the corner and ring the bell. With a satisfying buzz, Kevin, the owner, would push a button to welcome me into Pete’s Out in the Cold. He’d pull out a bottle of Miller High Life without instruction and ask me about my week. A few chairs down the bar, some poor bastard from the port, out of loneliness and lack of tact, would turn and say something like, “Smile for me, honey.” I’d acquiesce, hoping the small act brought a sense of optimism to the kind of man who needed to believe that the world couldn’t do to a woman the things it had done to him. I smiled at the sad men that frequented Pete’s because they reminded me of my father, who died on the highway driving — cataracts because he was too cheap and too suspicious of doctors to get them removed. An old man when I was still a young girl, he once admitted to me on a camping trip, “I’ll never understand women,” as though he’d realized a great sorrow too late. My own father, the poor bastard.
I never stayed long, just a beer or two and then walk the block home before dark. The bar itself doesn’t traffic in much these days, though supposedly there were nefarious dealings in the past. The buzzer is really just Kevin’s way of controlling the type of people inside, which some think is racist, as the bar is inhabited mostly by blue collar white men. A narrow and dimly lit space, it made me uneasy as more testosterone filed in, the afternoon turning into the night.
Kevin looked out for women, though, a tough little terrier of a man with a bushy white mustache and zippy eyes, the reason I chose Pete’s over the bars on Magazine Street full of people my own age. When I told Kevin I was leaving New Orleans, he gave me free High Lifes and I stayed all night. After everyone else had gone, and as he had clearly wanted to do so for some time, he left through a small door at the end of the bar and came right back with multiple drawings he had done himself.
One was titled “Einstein McSquared, a Relative” and it portrayed the face of a man whose beard covered almost his entire face, with in the center two eyes hooded in bushy brows.
“Sometimes, you know, I just have to get away, you know…from this.” He had motioned to the tiny bar, just emptied out.
“How did you come to make this Einstein?” I asked, too drunk to care how long the story was going to be.
“So one night, you know, after everyone went home, you know, I had an idea. I had this crazy idea to turn out all the lights and sit at the bar in the dark.” He reached down and picked up a rag from behind the bar top.
The image of a tough little guy sitting alone in the dark was comical to me. “Why?”
“No idea.” His eyes were dancing about in their sockets as they surveyed the bar while he talked. “And as I am sitting here in the dark, just listening to the quiet, all of a sudden, I think to myself, I think about how I need to draw something! So, I got up, turned on all the lights, found a random pen, found this paper, turned out all the lights again, and sat down here at this bar in the dark.” He paused for effect, making a few swipes over the already glistening wood.
“And while I was sitting there in the dark, I felt my hand move as though the Holy Ghost was inside me, and I drew, and I drew, and I drew. I never picked up my hand once, just kept it moving on and on and on, because something in my head told me that if I stopped, the whole thing would be ruined.” He wrung the rag out before continuing his wiping. Kevin’s story reminded me of Ray Carver’s “Cathedral,” but I didn’t tell him that.
“What about the title?” I asked. He shrugged. “No clue.”
I smile to myself with the memory of Kevin, his little bar, and that exchange. How did he know I liked art? Now I live in Central Louisiana. I find myself cutting our lawn, and planting lemongrass gardens to keep mosquitoes away. I paint shotgun houses on pre-framed canvases. I learn to cook gumbo and collards with fried pork chops and dirty rice. The wind has died down, and a late afternoon sun shines through the clouds. Even on sunny days, I can’t help but think of how in this town, a poor dog stays a poor dog.
*
When Z comes home we are going to drive to Toledo Bend for the weekend to catfish with his parents and brother. The weather being nice allows me the luxury of reflection outside, so I pour another glass, waiting for him. The neighbor still has his dogs tied up even though I told him once that the plastic barrels were not appropriate shelter and that all his dogs do is whine being tied like that. Once, one of them got free and ran for its life down the street to our house. After seeing those heavy chains around its neck like that, I told Z, “I am calling the police and they are going to do something about these dogs,” but Z had laughed and said, “Babe, no cop is going to care about those dogs that, under the law, are not neglected because they have shelter and food.”
“What if I have evidence that he fights those dogs,” I said. “Do you?”
“The chains.”
“That ain’t evidence, babe. If you do that, we’re going to have a pissed off neighbor and pissed off cops in our driveway and I don’t have time for that.”
And I think to myself as I watch the smaller one dig and pine, what a chained dog year.
*
When I lived in New Orleans, I went to an art museum with a friend of one of my roommates, I from New York. Bo Bartlett’s painting Young Life was on display. In it, a couple stands in front of a teal-colored fifties Ford pickup with a deer carcass lying atop the cab. The man holds an exaggerated hunting rifle to his right hip while the woman hugs herself into his left side. Her long, curly brown hair cascades down a white t-shirt and falls just above a pair of blue jeans. To the right, there is a child holding a stick. I was mesmerized by the colors, the largeness of the painting, and the expressions in the young couple’s eyes. If the child was their son, then she must have gotten pregnant in high school. Did they love each other because they were afraid to be alone? Was the child holding a stick because of his innocence? Why did they hold each other like that? I strolled by and commented, “She looks like you.” Before I could respond she floated off like a ghost.
I did see myself in Bartlett’s painting, I saw a life waiting for me if I gave into the needs of my family and went home. I wanted to be free to do art, free of my family’s dysfunction. Free to make my own way. It was a nagging fear, the fear of being tied down, especially to the kind of man with dark eyes and a gun. Ever since, I’ve carried that fear around with me like a smooth dark stone.
Later that year, at a party, Reconstruction was being discussed, and I said, “Just watch Gone with the Wind, that’s what it was like.” Someone blurted at her, “Is that what they taught you at Columbia?”, and the stranger’s jab confirmed that I was a generalizer, not a prophet. She simply saw a likeness between the woman in the painting and me — much like how she saw plantations and thought of Tara.
This is the year I’ve come home. I do the things that must be done. I call my little brother who is transitioning into a woman named Summer. I ask if she is adjusting to her hormone therapy without issues. I try to help her negotiate her changing form while suppressing nightmares of harm befalling her. I help my sister, who rents my ancient pier-and-beam in a neighborhood most folks don’t go to, by watching her kids on the weekends. I leave a voicemail for my other brother, who is working on transformers in West Texas. Once, at a store with Summer, the cashier exclaimed, “Oh no! It ain’t right! Is you a boy? Or a girl?” I told the cashier, “None of your damn business.”
I listen to my mother, M, describe how my stepfather is refusing chemo again and how his last surgery went. When M goes missing, I call the casinos to make sure they put a page out so she knows we know she’s there. Sometimes she calls in a rage afterwards, sometimes in tears. I call my distant sister, the one that lives in Utah, asking her what to do about Mom. We agree therapy, but with what cash? I talk to a friend who is a drug addiction therapist and she gives me a name, but M won’t go or even try to get herself some goddamn medical insurance.
Originally from Las Vegas, ten years ago, my family made a new home in rural Louisiana. Though we moved around a lot when I was a kid, we stayed put for the longest amount of time in Las Vegas. We lived in a white stucco house, a beautiful lie that my parents shouldn’t have been approved to own. When my stepdad lost his job, they decided to move to Louisiana—low cost of living and cheap land. I didn’t follow until years later. The entire time I was in other places, M pleaded that I just come “home.” A master orator and negotiator, M can persuade anyone to do her bidding. Her eyes fill with a deep desperation, like a trapped animal or little kid, and things just happen to rearrange themselves in your mind.
Now, I spend a lot of time thinking about how it all happened, how I find myself sitting in the backyard looking through a chained link fence to see if the neighbors fed those poor dogs. It is odd to gawk in the moonlight corridor of southern identity, to have placed myself on porches sipping sweet tea. It is strange to be a passive observer.
Some lean on the word ‘oppressive’ to describe the summer heat in Louisiana, a heat which in turn cradles other oppressives like class and race. I don’t know too much about that, but I do know embracing the weather here is like learning to forgive. My time in Louisiana is similar to feeling the world go by, similar to standing under a marked-up doorframe in a childhood home that is remembered fondly, or in despair. Someday I might find a comfortable familiarity with the Southernisms I must embody in order to place myself here. I could be a mother, a wife. Images of dilapidated country stores and sugarcane fields scorched black after harvest may hold a sense of familiarity in my mind. Boiling vats of crustaceans and corn, the new celebratory feast of choice, to be welcomed like the first spring. Louisiana, the slow-moving vortex, the wet cold and wet hot, the episodic cop siren or the pileated woodpecker, the neighbor mowing his grass in November, or a storm that will make you question the presence of God. The desperate song of a tied dog barking into the night.
*
The sound of Z’s truck pulling up in the driveway knocks me to my slightly inebriated senses. Z is a plumber and when he walks through the door, we conduct our little ceremony of a kiss and my exaggerated, “He is home!” He jumps in the shower and I pack our bags and load up the dogs in the truck. When he dresses, we pull away from the house which belonged to his grandmother before her death. Z’s father donated his inherited portion of the house to Z, and then Z bought out his aunt’s inherited share. Not many folks do things like that for each other, help each other like that. I guess one reason his dad gave the house to Z was because it needed to be renovated, it was not only a gift but also a burden, to suffer through, to be proud of once done, something worthy of respect. During the renovation I remember running into Mr. P, Z’s dad, at Home Depot, he was buying a new power tool. I was trying to find the right quarter round moulding to put along the floors we just stained a few days before. Mr. P smiled at my exhaustion and said, “These are the suffering years.”
Z grew up in this town, he spent all of his thirty years fishing the lake on weekend trips with his family. We go to Toledo Bend often; it is free, and it is far away from our sad subdivision just outside town where every space has a bit of trashiness to it: an old ice-cream truck mutilated with rust, a collection of cast iron sinks, untamed yards, lawnmowers without wheels, solemn fishing boats, and broken-down cars. While our house is lovely on the inside, we can’t change the outside much. Just last week our elderly neighbors had to call the cops on a man beating another in the middle of the street with a golf club, apparently over drugs. Z and I were working, we didn’t see.
“How was your day?” I ask him as we pass the Walmart, the last building for a hundred miles.
“Hard, I’ve been digging for three days,” he says.
“Digging for gold?” I say, trying to lighten the mood which can sometimes be tense depending on his energy. Outside the window, a cotton field blurs by as he speeds down the highway.
“We’re chasing water to get to the leak at Compton Ballpark,” he says not playing along, fatigued.
“Can’t you make the helpers dig?” Z allows a half smile.
“We all have to dig, to get it done. But I don’t mind, I like that stuff. It’s when I have to go to a stuck-up doctor’s house and he ain’t got no sense but still wants to argue with me like I don’t know what I’m doing, that’s the shit I hate,” he says looking at me momentarily before turning back to the highway.
“I know, babe,” I say and pat his arm, trying to be nice. I don’t want to fight with him today, but normally I would put in a little comment like, “That’s why you should go back to school.” But the truth is Z is not the type to go into debt when he can’t see a solid guarantee of employment. His grandparents didn’t believe in banks, they kept their money in a safe and they would hide hundred-dollar bills in books at random and place them covertly next to other minutia on shelves. We have a 700-pound Liberty Bertha in our living room, despite my protests. He rationalized the safe by citing home robbery, housefires, and the potential collapse of government. But we don’t use the safe for cash, we use it to store an embarrassing number of guns that have been handed down for generations. If he were to go back, to finish up his two years, he would want to pay for it in cash. But in all honesty, he makes double what I make as a high school teacher—breaking his back, waking up before dawn and coming home after dark, drinking a beer and catching a football game to decompress here and there. From the speakers, “Angel from Montgomery” plays, and John Prine sings, “How the hell can a person, go to work in the morning, and come home in the evening, and have nothing to say?”
For the rest of the ride we don’t talk much, just listen to the mix I made. When Z and I met, he talked a lot. Of course, I remembered the painting, the young couple. But I dropped that stone after peeling back the layers of Z’s personality only to be met with a stubbornness which prevented me from reaching the judgment I so easily reserved for others. Rednecks, I had thought, but then again, I might have thought the same of me. Z and his family make things easier, in their own steady way. He is the first one to explain how a particular person came to a particular sentence, how his daddy was just like that, how ignorance breeds itself. This circumlocution makes sense; Z grew up and works around old bastards and illiterate dropouts. He is working class, a blue-collar boy.
We met over a bottle of whiskey and a dog. For most of the party he said nothing, but rather watched me lovingly stroke the white retriever, cooing to it. Later in our inebriated state, we argued about Andrew Jackson. He claimed that Jackson was the best president because he won the War of 1812, saved New Orleans, and was the first president who wasn’t wealthy, educated, and from the east. I claimed that Jackson was a murderer, a symbol of the white patriarchy, responsible for the decimation of thousands of Native Americans through the Trail of Tears. I called Z a good ol’ boy. Insulted, but amused, Z let me rage my “white male hate,” and my friends apologized on my behalf and dragged me to bed, blaming the liquor.
When I flopped onto the bed, I realized how I would normally never argue with any other man I had just met like that. But something about Z’s masculinity was tender––not cunning like that one guy who had tried to follow me on my way home after our date in New Orleans. I had to walk into a coffee shop and sit down for thirty minutes until he left the area to continue on to my apartment. I thought about the fear that sprung through my legs each step I took when I was walking alone at night in New Orleans, hell, how I would often not even go out alone. I thought of Bartlett’s painting and the exaggerated rifle, the protection that came with it, the way she held him tight, and the hope of new love. Finally, I opened the bedroom door and asked Z to join me, telling him he could sleep at the foot of the bed. Later, he told me, “That night, I was the luckiest man in the world.”
The week I met him I was in the area up from New Orleans visiting family, but I spent all of Christmas break with him. I was a teacher and he had taken off two weeks from his job to work on his house. The stress and anxiety reserved for the holidays dissipated in his presence. He took me to the house I now live in, but at the time he was in the process of laying new tile down, as the renovation had started long before I came along. I recall standing there in the dilapidated kitchen, upon a pile of beige ceramic tile, almost tottering over like a toddler, laughing at the way I must have looked. Without thinking, I revealed a finger and pointed it at him. I shook my head and told him that I didn’t want to be nobody’s girlfriend. Painfully aware of my double negative, the action of pointing and bossing, his eyes grew amused, and he had me feeling as though I was driving down a dirt road on a hot day, and I didn’t know how I got there.
We stop at a little gas station and I buy some gum and chips. Allie, our Rottweiler, gazes through the window of the truck along with Willie, our lab, and Girtey, our beagle mix, the goon squad waiting for our return. After our break, we hop in and continue our silent drive onward to Toledo Bend. When we arrive at the camp it is already ten at night. We pull in and let the dogs run around the yard. The neighboring trailer has a dog too, tied to the porch. Mrs. C, Z’s mom, told the neighbor to keep it tied up because it’s covered in fleas and the last thing she wants is it passing them to our dogs and then riddling her doublewide ounce of heaven. Who could blame her? Allie goes over and whines at the edge of the lawn, her massive body outlined in the dark. The tied dog in the yard across the road goes berserk. Allie stands there and barks at it from across the dirt road, as though she understands the dog’s frustration. I just hate seeing a dog tied up, unable to act on natural instincts. Once M told me, “If you love something you set it free.” I call at Allie’s outline to come and we go into the trailer.
In the morning we are all up early. Z and his brother ready the boat and his dad putts around looking for things. I help Mrs. C with the ice chest and let the dogs out before we all get into a truck and drive down to the boat launch. On the way, we pass Y’ontu’s camp. Y’ontu received his nickname from asking a close friend’s wife if she would like to have a little fun. This was before his skin turned papery thin, before his eyes refuted the sun’s rays, before his overalls sagged around his hips and his arms looked like two knotted branches attached to a blighted trunk. He had said to the woman, after her refusal, “But I do believe y’ontu.”
We pass Crazy Mike’s house, two watermelons on spikes just outside his gate and a large Texas flag waving from his porch, his trash running down the gravel drive as though raccoons got into it. The front door to the trailer is open and leading to a deep darkness inside. His shop is open too, displaying a diverse array of car parts and tools left vulnerable to thieves. I remember getting up early once and driving to town because we were out of coffee and Crazy Mike’s yellow jeep was jammed between two trees. He waved me off when I asked him if he needed help. Rude, I thought. When I pressed him, telling him he didn’t look alright, he hollered, “I’m fine, go on now!” No one really liked Crazy Mike.
“Crazy Mike’s place has gone to shit,” I say.
“Poor bastard, his wife died and now he done drunk up all of Toledo. He don’t give a shit no more.” Z shakes his head. “He’s got himself holed up in that there trailer and he just drinks, he even broke into Tony’s shed for tools.”
“How sad,” I say, thinking about a line from an Emmylou Harris song, the album where she went from country to alt-country, “Some things they don’t tell you about the blues when you got ‘em, you keep on falling ‘cause there ain’t no bottom, there ain’t no end.”
“The guys tried to help him when his wife went, but he don’t want no help, just wants to drink himself to death,” Mr. P remarks.
“What about his dogs, the hounds he rescued? There must have been about ten of them,” I say.
“The day his wife died, Crazy Mike opened the gate and let them loose. Some hunters in the area said they saw them running as a pack through the woods,” Z says.
We continue our drive down to the boat launch and I think of Y’ontu and his departure from the porch one evening after visiting. That crazy old man said while walking away, “I’m gonna go watch the night, and the night is gonna watch me.” I think that when Crazy Mike lost the only thing keeping him from himself, when he swung open that gate and the hounds ran out––that he achieved Y’ontu’s strange incantation: for one brief pause he both saw and simultaneously was seen by something, and in this moment knew he wasn’t alone in his suffering.
On the boat, after we are situated, I look up to the sky, aware that this action may look out of place to Z’s family intent on lines, waiting for tugs to reveal movement below the surface of the water. I open my mouth but my jaw sticks like a rusted hinge. What would I say to make conversation anyway? These trips are like church to Z’s people. A white crane turns from a twisted stump and opens its wings for flight, sweat drips down my face and my breasts and puddles between my legs, my body is swollen, even my internal organs sweat under the pressure of the sun. This weather is hell on me.
Looking out at the lake dotted by withered tree stumps, I wonder how the land looked before the lake: A tangled forest with copperheads and boars, oak and cypress–– or maybe a trailer park littered with Keystone and Busch aluminum cans. Nonetheless, the area was cleared for electric power when the dam was built in the 60’s and then this lake was formed. Either way, this very location, where I bob gently up and down, was predetermined to be something else, was changed in an instant, transformed. Like me, I think. Five years ago, I would have laughed at my present self, sweating on a pontoon boat, catfishing. A good friend, Jason, called a few months back, humored when I told him I fish now.
“You go noodling now, T-bone?” Jason said.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking too much lately. When Jason got sick, he told me he was planning to fight the cancer naturally, with medicinal herbs from the Amazon. He had researched about an ancient ceremony and undergone it, claiming this practice purged him entirely of cancer. I told him that Western medicine might be extremely relevant to him now, but laughing, he changed the subject to art and how he was trying to get on at the Norton in Palm Beach.
“You awfully quiet today,” Mr. P teases. I wonder why he wants me to speak when no one ever speaks while fishing. I have a suspicion he knows I don’t like fishing all that much and is teasing me to admit it.
“Just taking in the scenery,” I try to say sweetly, painfully aware that no one has said a word for the last forty minutes.
“You felt anything?” Mr. P insists, drawing my attention back to the fishing line. A small Cajun with a round belly, Mr. P is certainly “all business.” His industrious nature never ceases to amaze me, but his practical mindset of reaching goals doesn’t match up with the fun Z and I try to achieve in his presence. For Mr. P, fishing means catching as many fish as possible; it doesn’t mean funny quirks, twinkling beer, or joking about the absence of bites. Fishing, to Mr. P, means knowing the depth of water beneath the boat, memorizing where the stumps are in order to avoid hitting them. It means silence only broken when a fish is caught or when contemplating out loud where the fish are. Most importantly, fishing means adherence to the rules of the lake and awareness of the clouds lingering in the sky that may bring rain and unexpected waves to the boat. And all of these things are good natured except for the feeling I get when I go fishing with them: that if I stay with Z I must become them, that I am already becoming them.
“Honestly, they are so light, I can’t figure.” My words float out over the water. Even my speech has changed over the years to reflect a Southern shorthand. I used to fight it, but now resigned, I play along.
“Should we move, Momma?” Mr. P asks his wife, but Mrs. C suggests we stay a bit longer tied to this particular stump because she already caught a few small ones and she wants to keep trying. Thankful no action is occurring, I turn to study the profile of Z. His features are rounded out at just the right moment, his beard wild. I want to talk to him, but something in the way he watches the line, sweat dripping from his temples, suggests not to. “Let the man fish,” M would admonish, a woman whose silence is only reserved for treatments.
The next few hours, a few fish are caught. I spend the majority of the time thinking about how in the hell I came to be here, the heat does that to me. All of this was M’s doing, her oddball desire to fulfill some agrarian fantasy, to return to a simpler life. That summer before I left for school, I worked a snow cone stand outside Durand’s Meat Market. I’d hand folks their mounds of flavored ice, drizzled with condensed milk, and they would be alarmed by my lack of accent. “Who’s your Daddy?” they would ask. I’d say “Dead” at first, but then, as it became clear that my family was indeed going to try to make Louisiana work out in ways the numerous other towns and cities hadn’t before Las Vegas, I began to look about and participate some by giving my stepfather’s name in such situations. Other times I would walk with the neighbor’s little son who always seemed to just hang about, sometimes with a .22 rifle in tow, down to the bayou behind the track houses off the highway and look for old bottles in the mud with him. M encouraged the search because the bottles were “authentic” dating back to the Civil War. Upon inspection of the bottles, and through internet research, no evidence could be gained that they were any exceptional kind of bottle. In time I realized that M needed everyone to believe the bottles were exceptional in some way, and whether this was achieved through a lie or a truth didn’t much matter. I came to believe that we, M’s children, were the bottles, the bottles us.
And though I tried to explain that the bottles were old, but in no way Civil War era, M would shake her head, her curls bouncing mischievously and say, “Cha, baby,” like the creole neighbor, Lolita.
M, the tragic hero. Thinking of her brings on a mood of awe, inexplicably tied to a sense of guilt. Though we live just an hour apart, I rarely make the trip to the neighboring parish to see her. At a time in my life when I am truly independent of my mother, I worry about her as though I still live states away. But I returned to this part of the Louisiana on my own volition. I wanted to grow up, to accept my family and mother. To love them, like a saint. For loving them is a sign of fortitude and strength, compassionate and kind, the mature thing to do. But the truth is, M wears her suffering like a shroud. When alone, or left to ponder, I find myself trying to figure it out, but like some obscure riddle, the answer never to be attained. Would I stay?
Looking at the line, I realize the bait must be gone. Moments before, it quivered, but I did nothing about it. Z assists by placing putrid bait on the line and, while he does this, I consider Mr. P’s gaze, which reflects his unease that nothing has been caught in the last hour. He so desperately wants me to enjoy fishing like them. Time passes. Z stands and peers over the edge of the boat. I maneuver over to tuck myself into the left side of him. I follow his gaze to the lake’s surface and see the backdrop of that deer draped over the cab of a teal-colored Ford, in front of the Ford, two young people look directly back at me, hoping for the best.
*
REBECCA HOLCOMB is a PhD fellow at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette studying Fiction. She has an MFA in creative writing from Florida State University, an MAT from Northwestern State University, and a BA in English from Louisiana State University at Alexandria. She is currently book reviews editor for the University of Louisiana’s literary magazine, Rougarou. Her fiction appears in Hard to Find, an Anthology of New Southern Gothic, published through Stephen F. Austin’s University Press.
The art that appears alongside this piece is by GRANT RAUN.
