CHAPTER ONE
When I was fifteen we used to drive down to the levee to camp. We would go on Saturdays, as soon as the weather got wa.rm, and we would build a fire, set up a tent, and twist biscuit dough around sticks and cook beans. There was Stan Chandler, who was my best friend and Toby Hobbs, who was nobody’s best friend hut was the only one of us who, at fifteen, had a car, and sometimes there was Blaize St. Martin, who was skinny and asthmatic, and whose mother was afraid for his health, so that he often had to sneak away.
The place where we camped was five miles south of the city, across the levee from an abandoned plantation called Windsong. We would sit cross-legged on the grassy top of the levee at dusk and stare across the gravel river road at the hulk of the big house, with the slave cabins behind it in the distance and tell stories about Civil War battles and slave revolts and the ghosts who were reputed to still walk the fields at night. When it grew dark we would turn on our flashlights and make our way down the other side of the dike to the borrow pit. If it was spring or early summer we would launch Stan’s aluminum canoe to cross the fifty feet of murky water. If it was late in the summer or in the early fall, we would walk across the dry surface of the pit until we reached the high ground on the other side. Then, near the tent we’d pitched in a clearing hacked free of blackberry vines and grasses, we would build a fire.
It was a time before cell phones, and nearly all televisions were black and white. We would sit beside the leaping flames, even on the warmest nights, and look upstream at the lights of the city, as we breathed in the hot, rich smell of the river that stretched for a mile in front of us all the way to the thin line of willows on the other side. We would bring frozen biscuits to bake in the fire, and frozen pot pies and sometimes beans. I had a bolt action .22 Marlin rifle, which my poet— father had purchased for me because a rifle was what a man gave to his son, but other than the first time he had driven me to the levee with it, when I was ten, he’d never taken me to shoot it again. Toby brought his father’s .32 Colt, spirited away from the desk drawer where it was kept. Toby’s father was an assistant attorney general for the State of Louisiana and Toby bragged that his old man could fix any problems with the law.
Sometimes we shot snakes in the borrow pit and sometimes just tin cans at the base of the levee and once I shot at crows, flying high over the river and when I saw one drop out of formation, wounded, I felt ashamed.
But mostly we sat around the fire and told stories.
Since we were fifteen years old we talked about girls a lot because in that day we were all virgins though Toby would have had us believe otherwise. He told us of the girls he’d had (no one believed him, because he was overweight and exuded insincerity) and of the women he’d glimpsed coming and going from his home when his mother was away, and that we did believe. He told us about the big parties at the Heidelberg Hotel, downtown, when the legislature was in session, and about the high-class whores who attended, and we wondered how he knew so much.
We also talked about religion. Toby, who liked to shock, declared there was no God and cited Nietzsche. I said the world could not have come into existence by accident and, though I was coming to doubt the tenets of my Catholic upbringing, I could not deny the necessity for a prime mover. And Stanley, too small for sports and therefore devoted to his books, declared that the question was unanswerable but that faith was necessary for man’s survival.
And, finally, we talked about Rufus Sikes.
On Sikes we were in total agreement, He was the meanest white trash son-of-a-bitch who’d ever lived and if there was a God, Sikes had been put on earth to test men’s faith.
Of course, all white trash were mean but Sikes was special. He was the overseer of Windsong, and he lived in a tumble—down shack a quarter mile downriver from the place where we camped, with his wife and more children than anyone could count, and rumor had it he hated Negroes worse than Willy Rainach and his pin—heads in the legislature who’d just butted heads with crazy Governor Earl Long.
It was well known that some years hack Sikes had knifed a man in front of Bergeron’s Store, a country grocery on the River Road that was our source of provisions. He’d gotten a year for assault with a deadly weapon. After that, people steered clear of Sikes, which was easy because of where he lived: He seldom went into the city during the day time and subsisted on a house garden, some chickens and, rumor had it, whatever he could get by burglary. The black children who lived in the line of shotgun houses along the River Road kept off his property, but sometimes, at night, they rode past his house on their bikes and threw firecrackers in his yard. He usually replied with his shotgun and it was, everyone thought, a miracle that nobody was killed.
The killings were all of grownups. Women, to be accurate.
That’s what we talked about that May night.
I said I thought it was bullshit, that no one could kill a bunch of people in this day and age and not be caught.
Toby said not everything made the newspapers and that his father, who used to be an assistant D.A,, had once had a cabinet full of unsolved murder cases. They were the ones where either the victims were too poor to merit much investigation, or the accused was rich enough to hire a high-priced lawyer, or where the victim was black.
If it’s a white man killed a nigger, they don’t anything usually, and if it’s one niggar killed another one, nobody cares, either, unless they catch the nigger did it. Then they fry him.” Toby grinned, an evil jack-o-lantern whose leer flickered in the flames of the campfire.
“My old man saw ‘em electrocute a nigger once,” he went on. “Said it smelled just like pork frying. White man smells different, more like beef.”
I got up feeling sick and went to stand on the riverbank.
“Toby, you’re full of shit,” Stan said, turning the stick with the biscuit dough. “You told us Chinese women have sideways pussies.”
“They do.”
“Like I said, you’re full of shit. I checked in one of my dad’s medical books.”
Toby roused himself. “I don’t have to stay here and listen to that, shithead. I could’ve spent tonight getting some instead of hauling your ass to the levee. For all I know, you wanted to come here because you’re queer like Blaize and want to give me and Cohn a blow job.”
“Blaize isn’t queer,” Stan said. “And you’re a fat, lying asshole.”
“Maybe I will go get some ass, then,” Toby said. “You wanna come, Cohn? Manna leave fairy boy here by himself while we go punch a pussy?”
“I came to camp,” I said.
“Then you’re both fairies,” Toby snorted. “Have fun together.” He gave the round mouth, mimicking what we imagined a homosexual must look like giving fellatio.
“You’re leaving?” Stan asked.
“Goddamn right. I got a woman waiting for me. Don’t worry—I’ll come back tomorrow morning to get you little girls.”
“Don’t take the fucking canoe,” Stan told him.
“I don’t need your goddamn canoe. I can get across the borrow pit. Only cunts need a canoe.”
We watched him go, crashing through the high grass like an elephant.
“You think he’s really got a woman?” I asked.
“He’s a lying sack of shit.” Stan turned the biscuits again. “He’ll be back by midnight. If his fat ass doesn’t fall into the water.”
Minutes later the car started and then we heard it slip into gear. A few seconds later the engine sounds died away. We were alone.
“We’re better off without him,” Stan said. “His fat ass is gonna get us in trouble anyway.
“Yeah.” I leaned back and watched him peel the cooked biscuits off the stick, burning his fingers and sticking them in his mouth.
“You think Sikes really killed a bunch of women?” I asked.
“You think my old man and yours would let us come down here if he had?” Stan asked. “That’s just some of Toby’s bullshit.”
We ate the biscuits and our beans and a cinnamon twist that Stan had brought and drank water from our canteens and watched the shadows of the big ships gliding down the river in the darkness, their running lights red and green like Christmas ornaments. We talked about what it must be like to he the captain of an oil tanker, and how tricky the river was, and Stan said that once, a long time ago, when his father was a medical student, he and some others had swum it, up near St. Francisville. Then we looked up at the stars and talked about life in outer space and whether there might be some advanced race, with a Klatu and a giant robot, looking down at us, like in The Day the Earth Stood Still. And when it was midnight Toby still hadn’t come back.
“So he decided to sleep at his own house,” Stan said. “If he doesn’t coma hack by morning we’ll go down to Bergeron’ s and call my mom to come get us.
“Maybe something happened to him,” I said.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Sikes got him.”
“Shit. What does Sikes want with that fat bastard?”
“Maybe his car got stuck or broke down.”
“Good. We don’t need him. You’re the one said he had a car, let’s invite him. I knew his fat ass wouldn’t stay out here all night."
“I’m serious, Stan. Maybe we ought to go up on the levee and look, just to make sure.”
He sighed and finally gave a little shrug. “All right.”
You can’t take anything back. But if I could, I would take back that moment.
211 p. Academy Chicago, paperback, $16.95.
ISBN: 9780897335836