My Juliet (36 page)

Mr. LaMott's rod falls to the floor and Sonny places it next to his. He doesn't bother to reel in the line. The restaurant behind them is quiet, the blinds closed. No one fishes from the piers nearby. Sonny spends a long time looking at his father, trying to recall how he was before the Alzheimer's advanced to where he stopped being recognizable to anyone who knew him.

Sonny has his father's nose and eyes. But his hair is like his mother's was. He doesn't know where his ears come from. They're smaller and better formed than Mr. LaMott's. The source of his big lantern jaw is also a mystery.

Sonny's hands begin to shake and it's hard for him to breathe for the tightening of his chest. You should be happy, he tells himself. It's the right thing to do. The
only
thing. He pulls the old man out of the chair, surprised by the weight. He kicks the fishing gear out of the way and drags him over to the end of the pier where it's deepest and lifts him to stand against a piling with his back to the water. Mr. LaMott mumbles. He seems to be coming to. His tongue is heavy in his mouth as he tries to speak. “No red pepper,” he seems to say.

“No red pepper?”

“I don't want any.”

The wind is coming strong and wet now and it blows Sonny's shirt flapping against his body and throws his hair back in a flutter. Mr. LaMott's hat flies off his head and lands in the water and drifts in the ripples toward the shore.

In the end it isn't necessary to give his father a push. Mr. LaMott starts to pitch forward, then he loses his balance and drops to the black water without any attempt to break his fall. There's hardly a splash. The rope screams against the boards and goes slack and Sonny can see the blurred yellow shape that is his father growing smaller as it descends. Sonny sits on the pier and takes a swallow from the bottle and when he looks again the shape resembles an angel with wings fighting for purchase against the darkness all around. Sonny drinks and he feels he has to vomit and more rope pays out. He waits then scrambles to his feet and frantically yanks at the rope until the yellow shape comes back into view.

When his father reaches the surface he comes up gasping and flailing his arms and water balloons his clothes and his hair fans out white in a single wave.

“I'm sorry,” Sonny shouts in a panic. “I didn't mean it. I'm sorry.”

He loops the rope around a piling and reaches down sobbing and grabs his father by the belt and pulls him up fighting to the dock. Mr. LaMott coughs roughly and he is stronger than Sonny imagined. He lies on his side holding his arms at his chest and Sonny lies beside him and puts an arm around him pulling him close. A long time passes before his father's body stops shaking and quiets and he seems to sleep. “I'm sorry,” Sonny says again, whispering. “I didn't mean it.”

He decides to abandon the fishing supplies and the bottle. The chairs. He lifts Mr. LaMott in his arms and carries him to the truck. His father shakes as if from the cold and his scalp is pink past the ribbons of matted hair. More cars and pickups fill the lot now and a woman watches from the building, her face colored red and green by the lights in the window. “Is that a person?” she calls in a drunken voice. “Hey, what are you doing with that person?”

Sonny doesn't answer. He closes the door behind his father and walks past her and enters the lounge to the clank of the cowbell.

The same boy is playing pinball and the bar now is crowded with beer drinkers and Sonny can smell crab boil past the cigarette smoke. The captain is standing in the same place as before working on another platter of shrimp. Above him the TV shows news from the city and yet another story about an abandoned house torched by arsonists. The captain, gazing upward, absorbs it all as if with a superior understanding. “Your coloreds can't be trusted with kitchen matches,” he says. He talks in the direction of the set. “They're like children that way.”

“Bruce?” Sonny says.

He wishes he had the club. He wishes he had the captain alone in the room of a house in a bad neighborhood where drug dealers and gangbangers own the streets and anybody who lives there is asking for whatever they get. The story about the fire ends and one about a wreck on the Chef Highway begins. Two people were killed, one injured. The traffic delay lasted for hours while state police investigated the scene.

“Bruce?” Sonny says again, louder now. He waits and the captain slips under the shelf that serves as a door to the elevated run behind the bar. “What did you call my father when I came in here earlier? You called him something.”

“I called him something?” The captain wipes his hands on a dish towel and shrimp scales fall to the floor. He laughs and his open mouth shows more of the pink ground meat and dark spaces where teeth are missing. “Oh. You mean when I said he was a retard?”

Sonny walks closer. “He's got Alzheimer's. You don't know the difference between being sick and being retarded?” And before the captain can answer Sonny lunges at him and clutches his neck in his hands. The captain is slow to react and for a moment Sonny believes he has the strength to crush him. He shoves him against the bar and some of the beer drinkers scatter and a stool topples over and meets the floor with a heavy, metallic thud. Sonny chokes him until a jolt of pain radiates up from his groin and he falls to the floor clutching himself and bellowing for the pain.

Something forces the whiskey up into Sonny's mouth and he coughs it out.

“I'll show you sick,” says the captain, then spits his mouthful of shrimp at Sonny. “Jimmy, teach this boy some more about sick.”

The kid who was playing pinball walks over and brings his foot hard into Sonny's ribs.

“A little more,” says the captain. “He comes from town.” And Sonny absorbs another one.

Somebody pours beer on his head as they're dragging him outside. As they walk away Sonny can hear them laughing but no one says anything. He crawls to where he's parked and leans back against the front bumper needing to throw up again. His chest stings and he feels where he wet his pants and where the shells dug holes in his hands. When he looks up five or six of them are watching from the window. Someone waves and he recognizes the woman who wanted to know what he was carrying earlier. He doesn't return the gesture but it crosses his mind he should show he hasn't lost his humor.

He pulls himself up and gets behind the wheel and starts the engine.

“Did we catch anything?” asks a voice.

Sonny looks over and Mr. LaMott, pushed back against the door, waits with what is either a smile or a frown, depending on your point of view.

They are a long time down the road before Sonny answers.

Nathan Harvey's bristly white mustache, stained yellow in the middle from a forty-year nicotine addiction, tarnishes the shine on his otherwise high-polished demeanor. His outfit today is a light silk weave finished with a raspberry bow tie, argyle socks and wing tips buffed to a military shine. He is older, perhaps seventy. But he carries himself with the confidence of a blue-chip athlete with miles and miles left to run.

His office is a suite of rooms on a top floor of One Shell Square, an imposing tower of stone and glass in the Central Business District whose majority occupant is Shell Oil, the petroleum giant. Perhaps because her mother employed him, Juliet expected Harvey to keep a less modern workplace, something of the pile-of-bricks variety, say, with flaking plaster on the walls and badly scarred wood floors protesting wherever you walked. Harvey's office commands panoramic views of the Mississippi River and the French Quarter. That it is equipped with personal computers, and not Remington Noiseless, also impresses.

“Miss Beauvais, please meet Mr. Nathan Harvey,” the attorney's secretary says as the two come together. “Mr. Harvey, Miss Juliet Beauvais.”

“Ah, yes, the daughter,” Harvey says, giving Juliet's hand a strong, athletic shake.

Who can guess how many horror stories her mother confided to this man, most all of them casting Juliet as the villain and she the victim? Harvey, despite this secret knowledge, seems ready to pinch Juliet on the cheek and reward her with a Tootsie Pop for arriving on time.

“Maria will show you to the library,” he says, “and be sure to take in the view. You can almost see the state of Mississippi—the red of their already red necks broiling in the noonday sun.”

“The red of their already red . . . ?” She's playing dumb. “Oh, okay. They're rednecks!”

“Miss Beauvais?” The secretary is standing at the entrance to a hallway, waving in the fashion of a flight attendant to boarding passengers. “If you'll come with me, please.”

Juliet follows her into a large, book-filled conference room where Sonny sits with Anna Huey at a long mahogany table. Although he seems loath to acknowledge her, Juliet leans over and brushes her mouth against Sonny's face. It's the sort of half-felt gesture that college sorority girls, too sophisticated for handshakes, reward each other just for being wonderful. “Hello, sweetie. How are you?”

“Julie,” he allows with a note of formality.

Sonny doesn't look right. Something about his face suggests a recent trauma. He was always on the pale side, but today purple streaks mark the corners of his mouth and make his overall cast appear abnormally white. It's as if he talked too much and bruised his lips.

“Baby, are you okay? Did they beat you, too?”

“What?”

“You didn't hear about the other night? Somebody beat me with a club.”

Sonny starts to speak but the cleaning woman interrupts. “‘Somebody beat me with a club.' Juliet, I can't believe you just said that. What in the world is wrong with you? Juliet, you're mocking your mother's death. You're making fun, and of all times now!”

“Hey, Julie, why don't you have a seat?” Sonny says.

Juliet stares at Anna Huey even though she still seems to be addressing Sonny. “As I was saying, somebody came to my hotel and let me have it with a pipe. I put up a fight. I kept clawing at the sonofabitch, trying to rip his eyes out. The best I could do was get some skin off his arm.” Juliet, looking at Sonny finally, touches a spot on top of her head. “Come feel. It's as big as a goose egg. You believe me, don't you, sweetie?”

“Believe you? Why wouldn't I believe you, Julie? You've never lied to me.”

Anna Huey, pushing her chair back, laughs as she comes to her feet and walks over to the window. The vertical blinds are open and she brings her gaze to the rooftops of the French Quarter, the neighborhoods beyond.

“Oh, okay,” Juliet says. “I kept trying to figure out what was different about you today, Anna Huey, and it's the clothes. My heavens, you're actually wearing some. Hey, lady, where's the uniform?”

“I think I'm leaving,” Sonny says.

“Stay where you are,” Anna Huey tells him.

Nathan Harvey shuffles in carrying a stack of folders and sits at the head of the table. As he's sorting papers, Harvey's secretary passes out ink pens and yellow legal tablets. “For any notes you might want to take,” he explains. “And now a surprise. Or what I hope is a surprise.” Harvey waits, obviously enjoying the moment. He raises an eyebrow and screws up his face in a smile. “The great lady herself is going to be speaking to us this morning.”

“The great lady?” Juliet involuntarily comes up an inch in her chair.

“Well, she won't be here in the actual flesh,” Harvey says, “but your mother did elect to appear on video giving a loose reading of her will and we're going to watch that now. To avoid any confusion, I should tell you that recorded wills such as the one you are about to see have no validity in the state of Louisiana. They've become popular since the VCR revolution in recent years and their purpose is strictly as a companion to the statutory will, which we will discuss in detail as soon as the tape is over.” The lawyer glances back over his shoulder. “Maria?”

Harvey's secretary wheels a television and VCR hookup into the room. Harvey dims the lights and the screen flashes and a block of color fills Juliet's face. She shifts in her seat, and suddenly her mother appears seated in her favorite chair in the parlor at home.

“Hello everyone,” the dead woman begins, fingering a thicket of index cards in her lap. “As this is my last will and testament I'll try not to ramble and veer too far off course but that won't be easy with that camera in my face. Juliet, I must say, darling, I now have a new appreciation for what you do. My heavens. And, look, I've kept my clothes on.”

Only Harvey laughs. Miss Marcelle, in no hurry, pours herself a cup of coffee, and Juliet notes the antique silver service and dish of lady fingers on the butler's table. The showoff. Why didn't she use one of her regular cups? With a camera in the room, were the color-coded plastic mugs no longer good enough?

“Well,” Miss Marcelle continues, “I don't plan to die any time soon, but my dying will be made less a bother by this will and that's why Nathan has advised me to do it.