Between Two Skies Read online

  Most of the crowd is under the boatshed now, and it’s getting loud. The band is from the part of Louisiana near where Mamere and Grandpere come from, what everyone calls Cajun country. They’re playing “Hot Tamale Baby,” and the accordion player is on fire. It’s all I can do to stop myself from dancing the way I would back at home alone in my room. Wild and out of control until I’m out of breath. Zydeco and Cajun music just does something to me. Mamere says it’s in my blood, even though what Grandpere played was traditional Cajun, much slower and sweeter than this. People are in that sort of trance they get in when they’re dancing, feet moving lightning fast, whirling around, sweaty, unaware of anything around them but the music. I circle the edge of the crowd looking for Danielle, and as soon as I see her, I know something’s wrong. And I can guess what it is.

  When she reaches me, I can see she’s holding back tears.

  “Desiree?” I ask. She calls her mom by her first name, so I do, too.

  She nods.

  “Where is she?”

  She points to the edge of the dance floor. Her mom, in too-short jean shorts and a bikini top, clearly wasted, is grinding up against some sketchy guy.

  “I tried to get her to leave a bunch of times, but she pushed me away. She’s probably going to puke any minute from all that spinning. Then he won’t be so into her. I need to get her home.”

  It’s always the same story with Danielle’s mom. She’s been to rehab a few times, but the recovery never seems to take. It’s not even the drinking so much as it is what Danielle calls “love addiction.” I’ve lost count of how many times Desiree moves in with some guy and drags Danielle with her. It always ends badly.

  “I’ll get Daddy,” I say. “Want to come with me?”

  She shakes her head. “I need to keep my eye on her.”

  I know I’ll find Daddy across the way at the marina, hanging out with men drinking Bud tallnecks, telling their fish tales. “You hear? Cap’n Al caught a two-hundred-pound swordfish!”

  Daddy’s never one to tell tales, but he never questions the ones other fishermen tell. He’s one of the guys. I find him with some of the charter captains. “What’s up, baby?” he asks when I approach. I guess it’s obvious something’s wrong.

  “Desiree. Can you help?” I know he will.

  He excuses himself and comes back with me to the boatshed, where Danielle is leaning against one of the corner walls, watching her mother make out with the total stranger as the band continues to get louder and the dance floor more crowded.

  Daddy comes up behind Danielle’s mom and taps her on the shoulder. “Hey, darlin’. How you doin’?”

  “John!” Desiree’s face lights up. They were in the same class at Bayou Perdu High, along with Mama. “You wanna dance? You sure Vangie’s OK with that?”

  “Sure, let’s dance,” he says, stepping between her and the roughneck. She flops her head on Daddy’s shoulder.

  “Hey! I’m dancin’ with her,” the guy slurs.

  “It’s all right,” Daddy says to the guy. “She’s going to take a little break.”

  The guy shoves Daddy, but he almost topples over himself. In less than a minute, a big burly security guard is on him, holding his arm back before he can throw a punch at Daddy.

  “Now, wait a second,” says Desiree. “We were having a good time.”

  Danielle steps in. “Mama, we’re going to go home now.”

  “I don’t want to go home. I was havin’ a good time.”

  Daddy puts his arm around her and starts to lead her out of the boatshed with Danielle trailing behind. “Let’s get some fresh air. I’m going to give you a ride home,” he says, and whispers to me, “Just let Mama know I’ll be back soon.”

  I grab Danielle’s hand and squeeze it as she pulls away, leaving me feeling low as the music lifts and spirals. The couples continue to spin across the floor. This is the flip side of this fairy-tale place. Some people drink, eat, dance, and drink some more to forget. And some of them, like Danielle’s mom, have a lot they want to forget.

  When the song comes to an end, an announcer comes out. “Hey, folks, here in Cavalier country football season starts next week! So we’d like to bring out some members of the team and the Lady Cavaliers to lead us in this next dance!”

  So this is why Mandy didn’t show up to clean the booth. And brought her pom-poms. She and her friends come out, doing jumps and bouncing around in front of the football players. OK, that’s it. Party officially ruined for me. She never had any intention of coming to help clean up. It was all going to fall to me as usual. I am out of here. I am going to the only place where I can calm down: on the water.

  Down at the docks, our family’s two boats float side by side: the Mandy is the big trawler, the source of our income and central to our existence; the Evangeline is the little skiff, too small to be named, really, but Daddy did so in an attempt at fairness. The Mandy can get out into the deep water, but the Evangeline has her advantages. She’s quick, nimble, and responsive. She can get in and out of the tightest spots. She’s the one to pick if you want to go deep into the back bayou, the hidden places. I’d choose her anytime over the Mandy. And I do now.

  The sun is a little softer as I head out. In front of me is the endless water, the channels leading into the back bayou where there is nothing but sky and air and water and wings, and peace comes over me. I feel like if I spend too much time off the water, I start to shrivel up. I remember trying to explain it one night at the dinner table when I was little, how I feel like the water is in me.

  “Of course the water is in you,” Mandy said in her know-it-all way. “Our bodies are, like, eighty percent water.”

  “Nah, it’s ’cause she’s a mermaid,” Daddy said. “I caught her in a net when she was just a little slip of a thing. Was gonna throw her back, but she was just so cute.”

  “I’m cuter,” Mandy sniffed.

  Thoughts come to me when I’m on the water. It’s clear who I am out here. Not who I am compared to anyone else. Out here feels like the truth to me, the simple truth. Earth, air, sky, water. A natural rhythm to life. This is our place in the world, and I know my place in it. The exact opposite of high school, where pretty much everything and everyone feels fake all the time.

  My sixteenth birthday is Friday, and school starts the Monday after that. Junior year. People keep telling me how important it is. Everyone says I can get into LSU, get a scholarship if I keep my grades up and do well on the SATs. Everything seems focused on getting out of here, and going forward means going away. And yet I feel this tug to stay, help Daddy on the boat. Shrimping is no way to make a living, he says. I can help more if I get an education and make money doing something else. What is the something else? The idea of sitting in an office all day feels like dying to me. I’ll never do that. But what’s the answer?

  I head to a place Daddy and I call Bayou Valse d’Oiseau — Bird’s Waltz Bayou. It’s hidden in the middle of a bunch of islands in the back bayou, and the birds from the flyway roost here in the spring. Most of them have moved on by now, but a few herons stay year-round. I’ve always been convinced that Daddy and I are the only ones who know this place and there’s never been anyone here before. But there’s a jon boat here now, close to one of the little islands.

  As I get closer, I can see a guy on the boat waving his arms over his head, like a distress signal. He didn’t cut the engine in time and ended up grounded in the skinny water. Lucky for him that I showed up.

  I glide in. I’ve never seen this guy before. I’ve actually never seen anyone quite like him.

  There are basically three types of guys at my school. There’s the jock type, the hip-hop guys who think they’re really street even though they live in rural Louisiana, and the church youth group guys who are nice but boring. Each category has black guys, white guys, and Asian guys. This guy is like none of them. I mean he is Asian, and about my age. But his hair is a little long and shaggy, and he’s wearing long plaid shorts, a white
T-shirt, and a hat. Not a baseball hat like the jocks or a knit cap like the hip-hop guys. It’s like something Grandpere would have worn in the ’50s. I’m not sure what it’s called — a porkpie hat?

  “Well, this is awkward,” he says. “I appear to be stuck. And I appear to be an idiot.”

  “Yep,” I say. “I mean about the being stuck part. Not the idiot part.”

  “That’s kind of you,” he says. “But I’m smart enough to know how stupid it is that I did this.”

  He’s right. Going out into unknown waters without any navigation equipment is pretty stupid.

  “I usually know how to find my way around the water,” he continues. “I thought I could figure out how to get back to the marina. I thought maybe there was a cut-through. But here I am. The water got skinny so quickly. I don’t think I sucked in any mud, I think I’m caught in the grass.”

  I pull alongside him and tie on. The water here probably wouldn’t come up to my waist. Our towline broke last week and I hadn’t gotten a chance to replace it yet, so that’s not an option. But the situation doesn’t look drastic.

  “I tried working the throttle in reverse but no luck,” he continues.

  “Why don’t you pass the cooler and anything else you’ve got over to me to lighten the load,” I say. “Then we can each take a side and see if we can rock it loose.”

  He passes over the cooler. And a guitar case. Interesting.

  The lighter load raises the boat a little, and I slip into the water. He looks surprised. “You’re not worried about the gators?”

  “They’re more afraid of us than we are of them,” I say, trying to make myself sound tough. But he’s not pretending to be tough around me, so maybe I don’t have to, either. “Actually, I’ve never seen one back here.”

  He heaves himself into the water.

  “Ready?” I ask. “Go gentle so you don’t damage the motor, but strong, too. You just have to feel your way through it. Go with the flow, no pun intended.”

  We both start rocking, creating gentle waves.

  “So you’re not from around here?” I ask over the side of the boat.

  “I came down for the festival. My cousins live here. The Trans, do you know them?”

  I know everyone in Bayou Perdu. Hip Tran is on the football team, so he’s more or less a minor deity. “Yeah, I know them,” I say. “Their boat slip is near ours. Where do you live?”

  “Up in St. Bernard,” he says.

  I can feel the weeds starting to loosen. We got the rhythm going easily. This is working.

  “How did you end up all the way out here?” I want to know how he found my unfindable place.

  “Kind of a long story. Let’s just say there was some drama and I wanted to get away for a while. I borrowed my cousin’s boat. Is it still borrowing if you don’t ask? I guess I kind of stole it. I mean, I’m going to bring it back if we can get it loose. How about you? How did you end up all the way out here?”

  We continue to rock.

  “My dad and I come here a lot. It’s a great place to catch reds. And it’s on the flyway. You should see it in the springtime. There must be ten thousand birds back here. And the way they move together, it looks like a dance.” I tell him our name for this place.

  A look comes over his face. A smile and a kind of dreamy look. “Bird’s Waltz Bayou,” he repeats. “That would be a great song name. ‘The Ballad of Bird’s Waltz Bayou.’”

  “So do you write songs?”

  “Very poorly.”

  “I noticed the guitar.”

  “I play better than I write. Do you play anything?”

  “I can play the accordion a little. And I sing. What kind of music do you play?”

  He tells me about the blues. John Lee Hooker. Howlin’ Wolf. Bukka White. We’re rocking the boat long enough for him to give me an abbreviated history of Creole music and Dixieland, swamp pop and zydeco, how each rhythm got mixed in with the others like the flavors in a gumbo pot. I’m watching him talk about it, get excited about it, show that he’s excited about it, which is not something that most guys do. Not something I do. Sometimes I think I spend so much time trying to avoid drama that I don’t let myself get excited about anything. But like Mamere always says, you’ve got to have some fight to you. The way I do when there’s a forty-pound yellowfin on the other end of the line.

  I feel the prop come loose from the weeds and the boat lurches free. “Yes!” he shouts. “We did it!” He starts laughing. A kind of uninhibited, overjoyed laugh. “You have no idea what was going through my head. I was picturing myself sleeping out here. And then the buzzards coming in the morning after I died of dehydration. I have a very active imagination.”

  We push the boat back a little to where I know the water is slightly deeper. He hurls himself over the side of the boat and pulls me up, and I’m suddenly very conscious of the fact that I look like a drowned rat.

  “I think I better be getting back now,” he says. “Then again, I have no idea how to get back, so . . .”

  “You can follow me. It’s not far. You just have to know where you’re going.”

  “This has been more fun than I thought getting lost and running a boat aground could be. So, this is kind of a weird question. But did I see you earlier today in a crown? With a pink rhinestone shrimp on it?”

  I can feel the color rising in my cheeks. “Uh, yeah. That was me. I mean, it’s not really me, me. The real queen got caught with an open container, so I had to step in. It’s complicated.”

  “You are just coming to the rescue all over the place today, aren’t you?” he jokes. “You’re like some kind of superhero. With a crown instead of a cape.”

  “Yeah, that’s me. Able to climb rigging and rescue stranded boaters. All without dropping my shrimp crown.”

  “Can you, like, breathe for extended periods of time underwater?”

  “No, but I do make a good gumbo.”

  “Gumbo Girl!” he says. “I’ve seen you in Marvel comics, right?”

  “Yes, I battle the evil Captain Crawfish.”

  “By biting his head off and boiling him in Zatarain’s.”

  “And that’s just in volume one. You should see what I do to Oyster Man in volume two.”

  “Tabasco. Right to the eyeballs,” he says, and pretends to squeeze a bottle of hot sauce. “Wait, do oysters even have eyes?”

  “Not when I’m done with them.”

  Then we say nothing. I feel myself relaxing in the silence between us like it’s cool water.

  “Seriously, though,” he says. “I really appreciate it. This whole embarrassing incident could have turned out so much worse.”

  “Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me.”

  He follows me up the channel as the sun is starting to set, and I turn around every once in a while to see if he’s still there. He’s still there.

  We get back to the marina, and he ties up at the Trans’ slip and comes over to ours. The music from the boatshed seems louder now. “Uh-oh,” he says. “I see Hip. It looks like he’s coming this way. He doesn’t look happy.” He hesitates. “I don’t even know your name. I’m pretty sure it’s not Gumbo Girl. I’m Tru.”

  “I’m Evangeline.”

  “Like in the poem.”

  Everyone in Louisiana knows about Evangeline, the heroine of the Longfellow poem about the Acadians who fled Canada and ended up here in Louisiana, becoming known as Cajuns. There’s a parish named after her, a state park, the Evangeline Oak in St. Martinville, songs, restaurants. My family has had at least one Evangeline in every generation for a hundred years, including me, Mama, and Mamere. Where Mamere grew up in St. Martin Parish, if you go to any graveyard, you’ll find about a hundred dead Evangelines. But the story is one of those boring history things that most kids just suffer through.

  “You remember the poem?” I hear my voice getting high and Mandy-ish, but I don’t know how to stop it.

  “‘The fairest of all the maidens was Evangeline.’�
�� He pauses. “Or something like that. Yeah, you know, Louisiana History in seventh grade? We take that in St. Bernard, too.”

  “I think a lot of people in my school catch up on their sleep during that class,” I say.

  “I come down here kind of a lot,” he says. “So maybe I’ll see you again?”

  “I’m not going anywhere. You know where to find me,” I say.

  “Just look for the girl in a shrimp crown?” he asks. “Thanks again, Evangeline,” he adds as he’s walking away, looking over his shoulder. He waves. Turns around. Turns back to me. Waves again. Picks up his pace as Hip gets closer. They meet and I can see from here that Hip is making angry hand gestures. He doesn’t turn around again.

  The next day is my idea of a perfect day. I leave home with Daddy at safe light, going out into the marsh in the Evangeline, gliding up the channels between the canebrakes. There’s no noise except the sound of the outboard and just a little rustle of the wind and the water through the tall grass. The light in the east filters up slowly, like the petals of a flower opening, and the shadows take shape. The first pelicans fly in formation above us, and closer, you can hear a wing flap or a swish in the water, see the sleek movement of a nutria or a gator just beneath the surface. We reach the mudflats and start reeling in reds effortlessly, and then head home before the sun gets too high, passing the guys by the side of the marsh in folding chairs with their rods propped up and their beer cans already popped open. When we get back home, Kendra comes over and we sit on opposite sides of the hammock between two satsuma trees in the orange grove that Grandpere planted when he retired. Our heads are on the ends and our feet are in the middle, doing what we do best, “visiting” as her mama calls it.

  “I’m actually glad I couldn’t get the day off work,” says Kendra. “Because you in a crown? That’s a sight you just can’t unsee.” She covers her eyes. “Agh! My eyes! They’re burning.”

  “Well, get ready, because the shrimp crown is coming your way. I don’t want it in my room. I’m going to hide it under your pillow,” I say.