A Multitude of Sins (7 page)

Naturally, I was thrilled to be there—even in my hated military school clothes, with my drunk father dressed in his tuxedo and the little monkey that Renard was, operating our boat. I believed, though, that this had to be some version of what the real thing felt like—hunting ducks with your father
and a guide—and that anytime you went, even under the most perfect circumstances, there would always be something imperfect that would leave you feeling not exactly good. The trick was to get used to that feeling, or risk missing what little happiness there really was.

At a certain point when we were buzzing along the dark slick surface of the lake, Renard Junior abruptly backed off on the motor, cut his beam light, turned the motor hard left, and let the wake carry us straight into an island of marsh grass I hadn’t made out. Though I immediately saw it wasn’t simply an island but was also a grass-fronted blind built of wood palings driven into the mud, with peach crates lined up inside where hunters would sit and not be seen by flying ducks. As the boat nosed into the grass bank, Renard, now in a pair of hip waders, was out heeling us farther up onto the solider mud. “It’s duck heaven out here,” my father said, then densely coughed, his young man’s smooth face becoming stymied by a gasp, so that he had to shake his head and turn away.

“He means it’s the place where ducks
go
to heaven,” Renard said. It was the first thing he’d said to me, and I noticed now how much his voice didn’t sound much like the
yat
voices I’d heard and that supposedly sound like citizens of New York or Boston—cities of the North. Renard’s voice was cultivated and mellow and inflected, I thought, like some uptown funeral director’s, or a florist. It seemed to be a voice better suited to a different body than the muscular, gnarly little man up to his thighs just then in filmy, strong-smelling water, and wearing a long wavy white-trash hairstyle.

“When do the ducks come?” I said, only to have something to say back to him. My father was recovering himself, spitting in the water and taking another drink off his bottle.

Renard laughed a little private laugh he must’ve thought my father would hear. “When they ready to come. Just like you and me,” he said, then began dragging out the big canvas decoy sacks and seemed to quit noticing me entirely.

. . .

Renard had a wooden pirogue hidden back in the thick grass, and when he had covered our skiff with a blanket made of straw mats, he used the pirogue to set out decoys as the sky lightened, though where we were was still dark. My father and I sat side by side on the peach boxes and watched him tossing out the weighted duck bodies to make two groups in front of our blind with a space of open water in between. I could begin to see now that what I’d imagined the marsh to look like was different from how it was. For one thing, the expanse of water around us was smaller than I had thought. Other grass islands gradually came into view a quarter mile off, and a line of green trees appeared in the distance, closer than I’d expected. I heard a siren, and then music that must’ve come from a car at the Reggio dock, and eventually there was the sun, a white disk burning behind the mist, and from a part of the marsh opposite from where I expected it. In truth, though, all of these things—these confusing and disorienting and reversing features of where I was—seemed good, since they made me feel placed, so that in time I forgot the ways I was feeling about the day and about life and about my future, none of which had seemed so good.

Inside the blind, which was only ten feet long and four feet wide and had spent shells and candy wrappers and cigarette butts on the planks, my father displayed the pint bottle of whiskey, which was three-quarters empty. He sat for a time, once we were arranged on our crates, and said nothing to me or to Renard when he had finished distributing the decoys and had climbed into the blind to await the ducks. Something seemed to have come over my father, a great fatigue or ill feeling or a preoccupying thought that removed him from the moment and from what we were supposed to be doing there. Renard unsheathed the guns from their cases. Mine was the old A. H. Fox twenty-gauge double gun, that was heavy as lead and that I had seen in my grandmother’s house many times and had handled enough to know the particulars of without ever shooting it. My grandmother had called it her “ladies gun,” and she had shot it when she was young and had gone hunting with my father’s father. Renard
gave me six cartridges, and I loaded the chambers and kept the gun muzzle pointed up from between my knees as we watched the silver sky and waited for the ducks to try our decoys.

My father did not load up, but sat slumped against the wooden laths, with his shotgun leaned on the matted front of the blind. After a while of sitting and watching the sky and seeing only a pair of ducks operating far out of range, we heard the other hunters on the marsh begin to take their shots, sometimes several at a terrible burst. I could then see that two other blinds were across the pond we were set down on—three hundred yards from us, but visible when my eyes adjusted to the light and the distinguishing irregularities of the horizon. A single duck I’d watched fly across the sky, at first flared when the other hunters shot, but then abruptly collapsed and fell straight down, and I heard a dog bark and a man’s voice, high-pitched and laughing through the soft air. “Hoo, hoo, hoo, lawd oooh lawdy,” the man’s voice said very distinctly in spite of the distance. “Dat mutha-scootcha was all the way to Terre Bonne Parish when I popped him.” Another man laughed. It all seemed very close to us, even though we hadn’t shot and were merely scanning the milky skies.

“Coon-ass bastards,” my father said. “Jumpin’ the shooting time. They have to do that. It’s genetic.” He seemed to be addressing no one, just sitting leaned against the blind’s sides, waiting.

“Already
been
shootin’ time,” Renard Junior said, his gaze fixed upwards. He was wearing two wooden duck calls looped to his neck on leather thongs. He had yet to blow one of the calls, but I wanted him to, wanted to see a V of ducks turn and veer and come into our decoy-set, the way I felt they were supposed to.

“Now is that so, Mr. Grease-Fabrice, Mr. Fabree-chay.” My father wiped the back of his hand across his nose and up into his blond hair, then closed his eyes and opened them wide, as if he was trying to fasten his attention to what we
were doing, but did not find it easy. The blind smelled sour but also smelled of his whiskey, and of whatever ointment Renard Junior used on his thick hair. My father had already gotten his black-and-white shoes muddy and scratched, and mud on his tuxedo pants and his pink shirt and even onto his forehead. He was an unusual-looking figure to be where he was. He seemed to have been dropped out of an airplane on the way to a party.

Renard Junior did not answer back to my father calling him “Grease-Fabrice,” but it was clear he couldn’t have liked a name like that. I wondered why he would even be here to be talked to that way. Though of course there was a reason. Few things in the world are actually mysterious. Most things have disappointing explanations somewhere behind them, no matter how strange they seem at first.

After a while, Renard produced a package of cigarettes, put one in his mouth, but did not light it—just held it between his damp lips, which were big and sensuous. He was already an odd-looking man, with his star shirt, his head too big for his body—a man who was probably in his forties and had just missed being a dwarf.

“Now there’s the true sign of the
yat
,” my father said. He was leaning on his shotgun, concentrating on Renard Junior. “Notice the unlit cigarette pooched out the front of the too expressive mouth. If you drive the streets of Chalmette, Louisiana, sonny, you’ll see men and women and children who’re all actually blood-related to Mr. Fabrice, standing in their little postage-stamp yards wearing hip boots with unlighted Picayunes in their mouths just like you see now.
Ecce Homo
.”

Renard Junior unexpectedly opened his mouth with his cigarette somehow stuck to the top of his big ugly purple tongue. He cast an eye at my father, leaning forward against his shotgun, smirking, then flicked the cigarette backward into his mouth and swallowed it without changing his expression. Then he looked at me, sitting between him and my father, and smiled. His teeth were big and brown-stained. It
was a lewd act. I didn’t know how it was lewd, but I was sure that it was.

“Pay no attention to him,” my father said. “These are people we have to deal with. French acts, carny types, brutes. Now I want you to tell me about yourself, Buck. Are there any impossible situations you find yourself in these days? I’ve become expert in impossible situations lately.” My father shifted his spectator shoes on the muddy floor boards, so that suddenly his shotgun, which was a beautiful Beretta over-under with silver inlays, slipped and fell right across my feet with a loud clatter—the barrels ending up pointed right at Renard Junior’s ankles. My father did not even try to grab the gun as it fell.

“Pick that up right now,” he said to me in an angry voice, as if I’d dropped his gun. But I did. I picked the gun up and handed it back to him, and he pinned it to the side of the blind with his knee. Something about this almost violent act of putting his gun where he wanted it reminded me of my father before a year ago. He had always been a man for abrupt moves and changes of attitude, unexpected laughter and strong emotion. I had not always liked it, but I’d decided that was what men did and accepted it.

“Do you ever hope to travel?” my father said, ignoring his other question, looking up at the sky as if he’d just realized he was in a duck blind and for a second at least was involved in the things we were doing. His topcoat had sagged open again, and his tuxedo front was visible, smudged with mud. “You should,” he said before I could answer.

Renard Junior began to blow on his duck call then, and crouched forward in front of his peach crate. And because he did, I crouched in front of mine, and my father—noticing us—squatted on his knees too and averted his face downwards. And after a few moments of Renard calling, I peered over the top of the straw wall and could see two black-colored ducks flying right in front of our blind, low and over our decoys. Renard Junior changed his calling sound to a broken-up cackle, and when he did the ducks swerved to the
side and began winging hard away from us, almost as if they could fly backwards.

“You let ’em see you,” Renard said in a hoarse whisper. “They seen that white face.”

Crouched beside him, I could smell his breath—a smell of cigarettes and sour meat that must’ve tasted terrible in his mouth.

“Call, goddamn it, Fabrice,” my father said then— shouted, really. I twisted around to see him, and he was right up on his two feet, his gun to his shoulder, his topcoat lying on the floor so that he was just in his tuxedo. I looked out at our decoys and saw four small ducks just cupping their wings and gliding toward the water where Renard had left it open. Their wings made a pinging sound.

Renard Junior immediately started his cackle call again, still crouched, his face down, in front of his peach crate. “Shoot ’em, Buck, shoot ’em,” my father shouted, and I stood up and got my heavy gun to my shoulder and, without meaning to, fired both barrels, pulled both triggers at once, just as my father (who at some moment had loaded his gun) also fired one then the other of his barrels at the ducks, which had briefly touched the water but were already heading off, climbing up and up as the others had, going backwards away from us, their necks outstretched, their eyes—or so it seemed to me who had never shot at a duck—wide and frightened.

My two barrels, fired together, had hit one of Renard’s decoys and shattered it to several pieces. My father’s two shots had hit, it seemed, nothing at all, though one of the gray paper wads drifted back toward the water while the four ducks grew small in the distance until they were shot at by the other hunters across the pond and two of them dropped.

“That was completely terrible,” my father said, standing at the end of the blind in his tuxedo, his blond hair slicked close down on his head in a way to make him resemble a child. He instantly broke his gun open and replaced the spent shells with new ones out of his tuxedo-coat pocket. He
seemed no longer drunk, but completely engaged and sharp-minded, except for having missed everything.

“Y’all shot like a coupla ’ole grandmas,” Renard said, disgusted, shaking his head.

“Fuck you,” my father said calmly, and snapped his beautiful Italian gun shut in a menacing way. His blue eyes widened, then narrowed, and I believed he might point his gun at Renard Junior. White spit had collected in the corners of his mouth, and his face had gone quickly from looking engaged to looking pale and damp and outraged. “If I need your services for other than calling, I’ll speak to your owner,” he said.

“Speak to yo’ own owner, snooky,” Renard Junior said, and when he said this he looked at me, raised his eyebrows and smiled in a way that pushed his heavy lips forward in a cruel, simian way.

“That’s
enough
,” my father said loudly. “That
is
absolutely enough.” I thought he might reach past me and strike Renard in the mouth he was smiling through. But he didn’t. He just slumped back on his peach crate, faced forward and held his newly reloaded shotgun between his knees. His white-and-black shoes were on top of his overcoat and ruined. His little pink carnation lay smudged in the greasy mud.

I could hear my father’s hard breathing. Something had happened that wasn’t good, but I didn’t know what. Something had risen up in him, some force of sudden rebellion, but it had been defeated before it could come out and act. Or so it seemed to me. Silent events, of course, always occur between our urges and our actions. But I didn’t know what event had occurred, only that one had, and I could feel it. My father seemed tired now, and to be considering something. Renard Junior was no longer calling ducks, but was just sitting at his end staring at the misty sky, which was turning a dense, warm luminous red at the horizon, as if a fire was burning at the far edge of the marsh. Shooting in the other blinds had stopped. A small plane inched across the sky. I heard a dog bark. I saw a fish roll in the water in front of
the blind. I thought I saw an alligator. Mosquitoes appeared, which is never unusual in Louisiana.