Touchy Subjects: Stories

  No one in the tiny kitchen. George's armpits were damp. If you were running a pensione or whatever, you just couldn't behave that way, even if it was off-season. It would serve the old bag right if he walked off without paying. Then it occurred to him to leave the money beside the radio with a note, but he'd packed his pen away with his journal. He put his head into the bedroom to see was there any sign of a ballpoint. It was very dim in there, with the curtains shut, but when George's eyes got used to it, he saw her on the bed.

  He dropped some of the money on the floor, and when he bent down to pick it up he thought he might keel over. The Signora could have been asleep; she could have taken a pill or something. But it didn't look like sleep, the way she was lying quite straight on top of the bedspread with her shoes turned up. And he couldn't be sure in the bad light but he thought her eyes were open; he saw some kind of glimmer that had to be an eye. He ran back out to the room with the frescoes and sat on his case to catch his breath. He put the money back in his pocket; one of the notes had stuck to his hand and he had to peel it off.

  George knew he should probably go back to check. He hadn't smelled anything, but it was pretty cold in her room. It could have been days she'd been lying there.

  In the end, he crept back into the apartment, just as far as the phone. He had to turn the radio off. He rang 999, but of course that was the British number; what a moron! There wasn't a phone book that he could see, so he had to go back out to his room to find the guidebook. The Italian emergency number turned out to be 113, not very memorable at all, he thought. George didn't make much sense on the phone; all he could say was "Signora vecchio morte!", which was partly French, but the woman on the other end spoke some English and in the end she managed to get the address from him.

  After he'd opened all the doors upstairs and downstairs in the lobby, too—he dreaded that he mightn't hear the bell—George waited in the hall with the stucco, and he tried to pass the time by figuring out what all the little putti in the frescos were doing. He felt sick. If he never saw another picture again as long as he lived it would be soon enough for him.

  When the ambulance guys walked in, George jumped up and started crying, more out of embarrassment than anything else. They didn't seem bothered by this; after all, he told himself, Continental men cried more anyway. There were policemen, too, but not swaggering and fierce, as George had been imagining. He realized that he'd been afraid they'd suspect him of killing the Signora for her heirlooms (the frescoes? the stucco? it was absurd). But it hardly counted as an interrogation; they only took down his name and address from his passport and asked him in English when he had last seen the Signora. "About twenty minutes ago," he said stupidly, and then realized they meant alive. "Monday," he told them, "and since then there's only been the radio." Then he thought they might ask him, Did you not wonder, boy, did you not think it was strange that an old lady would play her radio all day and all night for three days?

  As soon as the draped stretcher had been carried out, George was told that he could go.

  At the train station he queued up at the ticket office to explain, but the girl behind the counter seemed bored; she said, "Next train to Paris, 16:22," and he gathered that his old ticket would still work. They were very casual about these things here. Of course he didn't have a couchette on the next train, so he had to sit up all night.

  It got cold. About three in the morning, George realized that what was digging into his leg was his rent money. He took it out and felt like a criminal. It occurred to him to post it back from London, marked For the heirs and assigns of the Signora of Hotel Annunziata, Florence. But what would be the point of that? They were about to inherit a prime bit of Florentine property even though they clearly never gave enough of a shit about their grandmother (or whatever she was) to come round and see her, once in a while. She could have been eaten by dogs, if she'd had dogs!

  George wondered why he was getting so angry. For all he knew, the Signora didn't have any heirs and assigns. He'd been the last person to see her, and for three days, all he'd done was wish she'd turn the bloody music off.

  He put the money back in his pocket. He took out his notebook.

  Left Florence, night train.

  He couldn't think what else to put. He thought he should probably get some sleep, and he put his head back against the cracked leather of his seat and shut his eyes, but he didn't feel sleepy, not at all.

  Enchantment

  Pitre and Bunch knew each other from the old time. They were Louisiana crawfishermen, at least as long as the crawfish were biting. These days, what with global warming and so forth, the cages were mostly empty, and it was hardly worth the trouble of heading out to Mudd Swamp every morning.

  The two men were having a smoke at the Bourdreaux Landing one May evening, and discussing whether there was any such thing as a coloured Cajun, which is what Bunch claimed to be. Pitre mentioned, not for the first time, that what flowed in his own veins was one hundred percent French wine. "Every ancestor I ever have was a full-blood Acadian. Cast out of Nova Scotia back in 1755 at the point of a British gun."

  "Maybe so," said Bunch, grinning, "but you were born in the state of Texas."

  "About one inch over the border," growled Pitre. He was twenty years older than Bunch, and his reddened scalp was grizzled like a mouldy loaf.

  "Well, whatever, you know, I'm a live-and-let-live sort of Cajun, my friend," said Bunch, sucking the last from his Marlboro. "I was born and reared in these swamps, but I'm willing to call you brother."

  "Brother!" snorted Pitre. "You're a black Creole with a few Sonniers for cousins; that's not the same thing at all."

  Just then a candy-apple red Jeep came down the dirt road. Four old ladies spilled out and started taking photographs of the boats. Pitre asked them in French if they wanted to buy some crawfish, then mumbled it again in English; he hauled a cage out of his boat and held it up, with a few red creatures waving inside. The ladies just lengthened their zoom lenses for close-ups.

  "Are you fishermen?" one of them asked excitedly, and Bunch said, "No, ma'am. We're federal agents." They peered at his dark, serious face and twittered even more, and one of them asked if she could have her picture taken with him, and afterwards she tipped him ten dollars.

  "I don't think the Bureau's gonna approve, chercommented Pitre as the tourists drove off waving through their shiny windows.

  "I'll put it in the Poor Box on Sunday," said the younger man.

  Pitre let out a sort of honk through his nose, got back in his boat, and said something about checking that alligator bait he'd left hanging off a tree.

  "You marinade the chicken good?"

  "It stinks worse than your wife," Pitre assured him, and drove off, the snarl of his engine ripping the blue lake like paper.

  When the older man got to the other side of the cypress swamp, the shadows were lengthening. His gator bait dangled, untouched except by the hovering flies. Pitre cut the rope down and hung it from another tree at the south edge of the basin, where he'd seen a big fellow the year before, thirteen feet if he was an inch. Pitre wondered how much gators were going for an inch,

  these days. You could sell the dried jaws to tourists, too. Tourists would buy turds if you labeled them A LITTLE BIT OF BON TEMPS FROM CAJUN COUNTRY.

  It was cool, there under the trees, with the duckweed thick as guacamole, making the water look like ground you could stretch out on. All the other guys had gone home; Mudd Swamp was his own. Pitre leaned back against an empty crawfish cage and rested his eyes. The air was live with small sounds: a bullfrog, the tock-tock of a woodpecker, the whirr of wings.

  He thought it had only been a minute or two, but when he opened his eyes they were crusted at the corners, and the evening was as dark as a snakeskin around him. He was somewhat ashamed of dozing off like that, like an infant or an old man. He couldn't read his watch by the faint light of the clouded moon. He supposed he was hungry, though he couldn't feel it; his appetite had shrun
k with the years. Maybe he could fancy some fried oysters. The outboard motor started up with a cough, and Pitre maneuvered his way through the flooded forest. He veered right by the big cypress with the wood-duck box nailed onto it, then picked up some speed.

  The stump reared up beneath his boat like a monster. Pitre flew free. The water swallowed him with a cool, silken gulp; it filled his eyes, his ears, plugged his nostrils, and got under his tongue. Pitre couldn't figure which way was up. He reared, shook the duckweed off his face, retched for breath. The water was no higher than his waist. You could drown in a couple of inches. He tried to take a step, but one of his legs wasn't working, damn the thing.

  He told himself to stop splashing around. Gators were drawn to dogs, or to anything that moved like a dog. Pitre was shuddering with cold now; it sounded like he was sobbing. He turned his face up to the mottled sky. Que Dieu me sauve. A tag from a prayer his grandmother used to say. Que Dieu me sauve.

  The moon came out like the striking of a match. Vast and pearly, it slipped through the branches of a willow tree and lit up the whole swamp. Pitre looked round and saw exactly where he was. His boat was only the length of a man behind him, not even overturned. He crawled over, got himself in after a couple of tries. There was a water hyacinth caught in the bootlaces of his smashed leg. He heard himself muttering, Merci merci merci. The motor started on the first try.

  Before Pitre was off his crutches he'd started putting up signs. The ones nailed to electricity poles along the Interstate said simply SWAMP TOURS EXIT NOW. Along the levee road they went into more detail: EXPLORE THE WONDERS OF MUDD SWAMP 2 + ½MILES FARTHER, OR PITRE'S WILDLIFE TOURS TWICE DAILY NEXT LEFT.

  Bunch rode the older man pretty hard for it. "What makes you think anybody want to get in your beat-up skiff and go round a little swamp no one's ever heard of? When they could be cruising in comfort in Atchafalaya Basin or Lake Martin?"

  "If you build the signs, they will come." Pitre pursed his chapped lips and banged in another nail.

  Bunch snorted. "And what's that marker you've hung up on the big willow that says 'Site of Miracle'?"

  "You may mock," said Pitre, fixing Bunch with his small eyes, "but I know what I know."

  "What do you know, mon vieux?"

  "I know I was saved."

  "Here we go." Nearly dying was a funny thing; Bunch had seen it take one of his aunts the same way: she kept her rosary knotted round her fingers like some voodoo charm.

  "And now," said Pitre, wiping his forehead, "I've been called by the Spirit of the Lord to turn away from killing."

  "Killing? Who've you been killing?" asked Bunch, pretending to be impressed.

  "Crawfish, I mean."

  The younger man let out a whoop of delight.

  "I've been called to lead tours of the wonders of creation," said Pitre, thrusting a blurred photocopied leaflet into Bunch's hands.

  Bunch read it over smothered chicken at his uncle's Cracklin' Café in Eunice. It made him snigger. Old Pitre couldn't spell, for one thing. "I will tell you and show you also, a great variety of mammals, fish, and foul."

  As he drove back to the Bourdreaux Landing that afternoon to check his cages, he noticed that FRENCH SPOKEN had been added in fresh paint to all the signs.

  By the beginning of june there was a little queue of tourists at the landing, most mornings. They shaded their eyes and gawked at the glittering blue sky, the lushly bearded trees. They were from Belgium and Mississippi, Seattle and Quebec, all over the map. They giggled and flicked dragonflies out of each other's hair.

  "Hey, Pitre," Bunch called, as he drove up in his truck one day.

  The other man walked over, counting twenties.

  "I've got to hand it to you, my friend, you've drummed up more trade than I ever thought you could. You or the Spirit of the Lord!"

  Pitre nodded guardedly.

  "How many tours a day you and your heavenly buddy doing now?"

  "If you're going to mock—"

  Religion was one of those points folks couldn't bear to be pricked on, but how could Bunch resist? He put his hand on his heart. "Mon vieux, you've known me since I was a child. You probably got liquored at my christening! Don't you know mocking's my nature? It's him upstairs that made me that way," he added, straight-faced.

  "Or the other guy," said Pitre, turning on his heel.

  "So how many tours?" Bunch called after him.

  "Four. Maybe five."

  Bunch whistled sweetly. "Five tours a day at two hours long? What say I give you a hand, before these tourists wear you out, your time of life?"

  But age was another of those sensitive points. "I'll manage," growled Pitre, and walked back to his boat.

  In the middle of the night Bunch had a bright idea. He picked up a five-dollar box of pecan pralines in Grand Coteau, scattered them over tissue paper in his wife's old sewing basket, and sold them to the Mudd Swamp Tour queue at two dollars a pop. When he turned up the following day with a tray of alligator jerky, a party was staggering off Pitre's boat, their eyes bright with wonder. "It's so green out there," said one of them, and her friend said, "I've never been anywhere so green."

  Bunch had sold a fistful of jerky by the time Pitre came over, his burnt-brick arms tightly crossed. "Get away from my clientele."

  "Your what?" laughed Bunch.

  "You heard me. Parasite!" Pitre cleared his throat wetly. The next boat party, filing past, were all agog. "I'm trying to do the Spirit's work here, like I've been called to—"

  "You've been called, all right, old man. Called to make a fast buck!"

  Pitre turned his back and jumped in the boat, surprisingly lithe. It bobbed in the water, and the tourists squealed a little.

  By the time he got them out under the cypresses, he'd recovered his temper. The sun was a dazzling strobe, and the sky was ice blue. Iridescent dragonflies skimmed the water, clustered in a mating frenzy. "Lookit there, folks," Pitre said quietly, pointing through the trees at a great white egret on a log, its body one slim brushstroke.

  "Is that a swan?" shrieked one little girl. At the sound, the bird lifted off, its huge snowy wings pulling it into the sky.

  Pitre's visitors knew nothing about the wonders of creation. He considered it the least he could do to teach them the names of things. He showed them anhinga and glossy ibis; "Go to the state prison, you'll find twenty guys serving time for shooting ibis, that's the tastiest meat," he said sorrowfully. He pointed out water hyacinths in purple bloom, a turtle craning its neck on a stump, and a baby nutria wiping its face with its paws.

  "So where's the alligators?" asked a New Yorker with a huge camera round his neck.

  "Well, as I told you the start of the tour, I can't guarantee one," said Pitre. "They mostly look like logs. Yesterday's tour we saw three, but it's colder today; they don't come up much till it's sixty degrees or thereabouts."

  "There!" yelped a small boy, pointing at a log.

  Just then Bunch roared by in his boat, which was ten years newer than Pitre's, with a fancy air-cooled outboard on the back. Cutting the motor, he floated within ten feet of the tour. "Morning, all."

  "Crawfish biting?" asked Pitre, cold.

  "Some," said Bunch with his gleaming smile. "You folks seen that big-fella gator over there by the houseboat?"

  It sounded like bullshit to Pitre, but of course his party clam-oured to be taken over there right away, where the nice young man had said. Pitre spent fifteen minutes edging the boat round the shoreline, peering at dead wood and doing slow hand claps to attract any gators in the vicinity. "I'm sorry, folks, I try my best for you, but there's no guarantees in this life," he said at last. "We gotta learn to be grateful, you know?"

  But the tourists were not grateful, especially when he admitted that no Louisiana alligators had ever been known to kill a human being. They were not content with blue herons and water snakes, or a fifteen-hundred-year-old cypress, and even when he rounded up the tour by taking them to the SITE OF MIRACLE sign and n
arrating his rescue from drowning by the God-sent appearance of the full moon, they were unimpressed. When they had driven off in their various SUVs, Pitre saw that there was only seventy cents in his tip jar.

  Monday was wet and chilly, but on Tuesday the sun came up strongly again. Pitre sat by his boat all morning, squinting into the distance. His throat was dry. At noon a group drove up in a Dodge Caravan.

  "Over here," he called to them hoarsely, "Pitre's Tours, that's me."

  "No, I think we're booked on the other one," a lady told him brightly.

  He was about to tell her that there was no other one, when a motor started up behind him with a flamboyant roar and he turned and saw Bunch, wearing a fresh white T-shirt that said BUNCH'S ENCHANTED SWAMP TOURS, CHIEF GUIDE VIRGIL BUNCH.

  "This way, ladies, gentlemen!" cried Bunch.

  Pitre just stared.

  "What's enchanted about this swamp?" asked a fat man, looking up from his guidebook.

  "Wait and see."

  Once his party was on board, Bunch roared out into the middle of the lake as fast as the motor could go, then headed into the flooded woods and ducked in between the stumps. He bumped into a floating log to make the boat jump and the tourists yelp. Then he cut the engine and said, "My friends, welcome to paradise! This just happens to be the only Enchanted Swamp in all of Louisiana."

  He had paid the older man's techniques the compliment of extensive study and had decided that the whole experience needed a little bit of personality and pizzazz. Bunch began the tour by claiming ancestry from every culture that made up the tasty gumbo of present-day Acadiana: the Cajuns; the Creoles, black and white; the gens de couleur libre, as well as slaves; even the Chitimacha Indians, "who took what they needed and left the balance at peace, you know?" He assured his party that the twenty-foot, flat-bottomed aluminum skiff they were sitting in had been personally designed by him to reach the parts of the swamp where other boats just couldn't go.

  "Has this boat a name?" asked one Frenchwoman.