Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (21 page)

She opened another drawer and there lay a larger book, the words “Holy Bible” embossed in gold, and the corners of the thick skin of black leather frayed to brown.

She opened it. The leather was hardened but it was otherwise intact; corners of the onion-skin pages were water-rippled, stained the color of tea. She found the name page.

Ever since they moved to North America from Cuernavaca, her own family had kept such a Bible, where on the first page the births of each family member had been listed, from her grandparents to her own young children. There was clearly writing on the page, but dirt or stains had blurred the family name.

All she needed was a last name, just something to go by, anything at all would help. With a closer look at the faded ink, she could just make out the first three letters of the last name.

She took the Bible and placed it on the bed next to the old man. She leaned over to whisper in his ear, and took his hand in hers.

“Mr… ah…Foreman?” she tried. “Forrest? Mr. Forrest?”

He didn’t respond, of course. But she held on to his hand, squeezing and releasing in a rhythmic pattern…squeeze, release, two, three, four, squeeze, release…

After the fourth squeeze, she felt his hand gently closing around hers.

She sucked in a small sharp breath. She reached for the nurse’s call button and soon after she pressed it, the heart monitor droned in a loud, continuous beep. She looked up at the machine, the green numbers changing rapidly. Her own heart raced as she watched his begin to fail.

She rushed to the wall and pressed the alarm button for Code Blue.

In the next few minutes there was a flurry of activity as a team of three tried to revive him. His pressure was dropping, but there was still a pulse, still a chance.

The young nurse’s racing heart now stood still. She watched, frozen in a corner while they worked on him.
Please, Mister
, she thought.
Please. You can do it.

They went on working while she closed her eyes and crossed her heart. “Mother of God,” she whispered, then reached into her pocket to take out her rosary beads, and said a small prayer for the man with the angelic face and the rough, dry hands.

In Bobby Petit’s Shrimp and Oyster House just off Duck Creek Road, a mango-colored autumn sun glimmered through the windows between the branches of southern pines onto the dingy, bootscuffed cedar floor. Nine customers, all young or middle-aged men dressed in workshirts, workpants, or jeans, crowded the cigarettebutt charred counter or sat at booths of cracked vinyl while eggs and sausage patties sizzled on the long, grease-blackened griddle.

Near a window covered with yellowed Venetian blinds, Velmyra, Julian, and Kevin sat hunched over plates of sausage and crawfish omelets, their faces clouded with worry. A nearly empty carafe of coffee sat at the edge of the table.

“You mind moving your cup, sir?” The plump young waitress flicked auburn bangs from her eyes. She smiled at Kevin through silver braces.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Sure.”

He moved his coffee cup, and the waitress placed a saucer overrunning with crisp bacon near his plate.

“I’ll bring you some more coffee in a minute.”

The waitress took the carafe and left, and Kevin put a forkful of omelet in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully.

“I don’t know.” Kevin put down his fork. “It doesn’t sound right. Doesn’t sound like Nathan.”

Julian looked up from his plate. “So you think we imagined gunshots? Both of us?”

Kevin held up both palms, backing off his words. “I’m just sayin.’ There’s no point in jumping to conclusions. Folks around here love to shoot guns off. Didn’t have to mean somebody was after you, is all I’m sayin’.”

Velmyra looked over her shoulder toward the kitchen and the front of the restaurant. “Well, I’m going to find a bathroom,” she said. “I’ll be back.”

Julian watched her leave, giving nothing away in her easy glide, shoulders squared, head high. Like him, she’d been scared to death. So much happened, it seemed, in the seconds between the three shots. The distant first shot had left them as stunned as headlight-blinded deer—what had they actually heard? The snap of a tree branch finally giving way after the pounding of heavy rains? The backfire of a pickup? Or maybe just someone looking to bag a squirrel or rabbit for supper. The second shot, though, closer, ripped apart the innocent notion of morning hunters and snapping trees. Quick as a reflex, he grabbed Velmyra’s hand and hurried into the house, his breath racing like a dog’s while his bare feet pounded the porch floor. When the third shot fired, insistent, closer still, he flung her to the wood plank floor beside the bed, his back a curled shield over hers. For what seemed like an hour they had crouched like frightened animals, his heart thundering hoofbeats, her breath a rhythmic pulsing as audible as his own.

When their breathing settled into normal rhythms and they finally felt no imminent danger, they got up from the floor, only mildly relieved. The memory of just hours before, when they had stoked the fires of a long-extinguished love, had been riddled by gunshots; there was no thinking about that now. Fear clotted in both their minds; if not fear for their lives, then the strong realization that someone might want them gone badly enough to bring out a gun.

So they dressed nervously, hurried to the car and sped to the sheriff’s office in Local.

The sheriff was not in yet. They sat quietly in the Neon, hearts still pounding and hands silently fidgeting, each ruminating over the events of the night-into-morning: Julian’s tearful breakdown, the creaking complaint of Genevieve’s brass bed beneath their passion, the muted strains of trumpet over the gurgle of moonlit Silver Creek, and the quick reports of a gun that had sent them running into the house. With the pale sun climbing higher, they waited until the sheriff, a slim man with rounded shoulders and a thick, whitish, curly mane, pulled up in his two-tone Chevy truck. He stepped out holding a coffee cup, cell phone pressed to one ear, belly laughing at some joke told from the other end.

In his hot, airless office the sheriff, still smiling at the joke, leaned back into his swivel chair, chewed on a toothpick, and thumped absently at his brass belt buckle while Julian told him about the gunfire. The sheriff shrugged, took a sip from his steaming cup of gas-station brew. A hunter, probably, was his guess—somebody with a brand new piece, time on his hands, and fingers itching for the feel of steel. “This
is
the country, you know,” he’d advised, and assured them there was little likelihood of danger. “I’ll keep an eye out, though.” He’d reached for a nail clipper on his desk, a patronizing grin clearly reserved for city folks stretched beneath narrow, topaz eyes. “Oh, would y’all excuse me?” he said as his phone rang. He held it to his ear, and began laughing again.

They’d left and called Kevin, who also wasn’t fazed. Gunshots in the early morning? Didn’t they know they were in the Louisiana woods? And, wasn’t it already early October? A little too soon for quail, but rabbit and squirrel hunting season had started, let’s see, four days ago. Didn’t see any reason for alarm, but since he’d been awakened anyway, he was hungry for some of Bobby Petit’s strong, hot coffee and one of his big crawfish and sweet red pepper omelets.

Julian took a long, slow drink of ice water and looked toward the restroom door Velmyra had just entered. He glanced over at Kevin, who was deep into his eggs. Still pondering the morning, his appetite stunted by gunfire, Julian took his fork and absently lined his potatoes in neat rows on the side of his plate.

He was not convinced there was nothing to fear, but for now, he tried to set aside his worries. “I guess I was…we were, a little spooked.” He recalled Velmyra twisting the edge of her T-shirt in her fingers for the entire drive to the diner. Julian looked toward the window. “Where I come from, gunshots mean trouble.”

Kevin grinned through a mouthful of buttered wheat toast. “You mean up in New York, or down in New Orleans?”

“Both.”

Kevin nodded. “Ladies and guns don’t go too well together, do they?” He tipped his chin toward the restroom door, and gave Julian an inquisitive glance. “How long y’all been together?”

Julian cleared his throat, looked down at the plate and plucked a loose tomato from his omelet with his fork. “We’re not...” he started, then halted, sat back in his chair, remembering the moon through the blinds striping the bed in silver light, her thick hair brushing his cheek as her arm flung across his chest in the early hours before dawn.

“We, uh, had something going a few years ago.” He spoke quietly. “Now we…she’s just helping me find my father.”

He didn’t know what else to say.

Kevin blinked, his eyebrows flicking upward. “You mean, y’all don’t stay together?”

“I live in New York, like I said before. And she lives in New Orleans.”

Kevin shook his head. “You kidding? Damn. Y’all just look like, you know, a couple. She’s real pretty, that one.”

Julian tore off a piece of toast, looked thoughtfully at it, then put it in his mouth.

“Yeah. True.”

That morning, in the moments between lying with Velmyra, first as her lover and later as her shield, Julian had sensed something he hadn’t felt in a while—a soul-bonding with someone other than his father. As if after holding his breath without knowing it for years, he’d finally been introduced to the miracle of exhalation. As if returning from a landscape of chaos, he’d found a place of peace.

But the gunshots had rung out like an alarm thumping him out of a dream, bursting a hole in the afterglow. A warning, maybe?
Tread this ground carefully.
Velmyra had reawakened something in him—that was certain. But now he wasn’t sure what any of it had meant, and neither, he believed, was she. He thought of disaster movies where doomed lovers clung to each other while ships sank or buildings burned, and wondered if their passion, having bloomed from the muddle of chaos and fear and tasting slightly of desperation, was not to be trusted. Once, in the car, he had looked over at her, glimpsed her twisting her shirt in her fingers, her brows furrowed, her eyes somewhere between concern and fear. There was so much going on now, how could anything seem real?

So they had ridden together in silence to meet Kevin, each in their separate confused worlds, as distant and uncomfortable as they had been when they first left New Orleans.

Kevin was stabbing a lump of sausage on the edge of his plate. “I know that whole thing with old man Parette probably scared the hell out of both of you. I truly think they were just trying to scare him, running him off the road. It just went bad, the way it turned out. But guns? Nathan’s mean, but he ain’t no killer and that ain’t his style. He’s too clever for that. Believe me, I been following this a while.

“Truth is, it’s a whole lot more likely that those Thomas twins up by Swan River were out popping squirrels than that somebody was out to mess with y’all. But if you’re worried, you can stay with me and Raynelle until you head back to New Orleans.”

Julian told him thanks, but they were only staying until the evening and had plenty to keep them busy: after going back to Genevieve’s and calling the Fortiers in California, Julian would head back to New Orleans, deal with Simon’s property, and continue the effort to find out what had happened to him.

Julian looked up to see Velmyra returned from the restroom, sitting back down on the bench next to him, smelling faintly of citrus lotion. She gave Kevin and Julian a quick, uncertain smile.

She leaned her elbows onto the table and reached for the coffee carafe. “So have you got it all figured out? Are the bad guys after us?” She smiled a little broader as she poured coffee into her cup, making light of the tension that had settled between them like a mute visitor.

Kevin repeated his hunting season theory, trying his best to assure her there was no reason to be fearful. Velmyra, however, wasn’t convinced. Those shots had been awfully close.
And what about the padlock?
For that, Kevin also had an answer: the padlock and the gunfire didn’t have to be related. The “new owners,” Nathan or whoever he was working with, probably didn’t know anyone was living there, since the little bit of furniture lay under white sheets and Genevieve was never there.

Julian wasn’t sure whether Kevin really believed what he was saying, or if he was only trying to massage the battered nerves of his new friends. At any rate, it made some sense. Looking at his watch—had they really been there two and a half hours?—he asked for the check.

When the waitress came, Julian took the bill and reached for his wallet. Kevin complained, digging in his pockets for his own money, but Julian held up a hand. “No way. I owe you. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come along when you did.”

Before they left, a plan was laid out. Kevin would go back to Genevieve’s with them, and after she made initial phone contact with the relatives to determine whether they had sold their portion of Silver Creek, Kevin would introduce himself as the family’s lawyer and explain the situation. Once they had all the information they needed, Kevin would proceed with mounting a legal challenge to the sale of the land.