Mrs. Bouget was winding down her household, pulling her kitchen together efficiently and turning off lights from room to room. There was an inside staircase to the guest room, almost an attic room. Frank said good night to Gracie and her mother and followed Mr. Bouget upstairs. Mr. Bouget showed Frank his bed and turned back the covers for him. He told Frank he needed a little air and slid up the one window, letting the rich dampness of the bayou come inside. Frank was drunk enough to be able to abandon himself to this smell, filling his lungs with the fine air as though trying to store it for the year. Mr. Bouget watched him and then he began to do the same. Then they laughed and stuck their heads out the window. “Here’s where it’s comin’ from,” cried Fatso Bouget. They both took deep breaths.
“Antoine,” came the voice of Mrs. Bouget.
“Yes, Maman,” said Mr. Bouget, facing down the stairs with his thumbs in his ears and his fingers wiggling madly. “Here I come.”
All the lights were out and the house was silent. It was a still night outside and Frank could hear fish jumping in the bayou. Many songs have fish jumping in the bayou, he thought. Frank loved to fish so much that even their sounds in the dark made his heart pound. By rolling onto his stomach, Frank could gaze out his window to the dim yellow light at the end of the pier and see the whirling moths that attracted the fish, the moist air, the light and water running together.
He awoke from a deep sleep. Something was happening inside his stomach. He rested his right hand on his swollen middle and looked at his watch on his left wrist: almost three in the morning. Years later, when Gracie left, he still had the watch but could no longer read the dial. He’d been asleep for over four hours and his stomach was getting ready to explode. He was thoroughly sober now and had a mild headache. He was going to have to relieve himself fairly quickly. The house was dark and for the life of him he couldn’t remember where the bathroom was. He had great misgivings about going downstairs into the darkened house anyway. This family didn’t know him well enough for him to go prowling at three A.M. One of these goofy Cajuns is liable to blow my ass off, he thought in his new hangover.
Then it was upon him. He jumped from the bed with only moments to spare. Unable to come to a decision, he threw off the shorts he had been sleeping in. He looked frantically around the room. He had but one choice. He thrust himself backward through the window, hanging on to the frame with both hands, and let loose. There was a prolonged stormy moment, and then it was over. He wiped himself with his shorts and then threw them as far as he could from the window.
He found he could sleep again. When he awoke in the morning, he immediately remembered what had happened and felt anxious and miserable. He got dressed and went downstairs for breakfast. The family was already eating, more or less in silence, and they scarcely greeted him. Remembering the high spirits of the previous night, the heavy eating, their enthusiasm over the slide show, he just took it to be a spell of recovery. Still, he tried to remember if he had said something awkward. His feeling of unease was exaggerated by his hangover.
When breakfast was finished, Gracie announced she was taking him back to Thibodaux so that he could be on his way. He escaped into his plan for work. He was supposed to meet a colleague in Nacogdoches, Texas, in another day anyway; and it was easier to think about that than this lack of friendliness and silence, especially from Fatso, who had been so voluble.
Nevertheless, Mr. and Mrs. Bouget got to their feet to see Frank off. Gracie walked out with him to the front yard. She bade her parents goodbye and got in to drive. Frank opened the door on the passenger’s side, and turning to get in and to thank the Bougets, or even amusingly say “au revoir,” he chanced to see the streak down the front of the house under the upstairs window, the shorts dangling from a tree branch. A mop and pail rested next to the wall. But Frank thought that he would say goodbye as simply and quickly as possible and use his limited French on another occasion.
3
Frank sat in the bleachers at the sale yard reading the Wall Street Journal and ignoring a bunch of black baldie heifers being steered under the auctioneer’s gavel. Bush’s heartbeat was back to normal, Croats attacked soldiers at Split and high winds diverted the space shuttle Discovery from California to Kennedy Space Center. It’s a bitch. Desperate new immigrants. Seventy-two percent of 3,500 police officers polled at John Jay College of Criminal Justice said they wear bulletproof vests. Image of Dan Quayle remains “bumbling.” Worker stress was climbing toward widespread burnout and Japanese auto towers were under construction in Detroit. Out at the ranch the sage buttercups were blooming, supplying the blue grouse with spring forage; and the great horned owl had a nestful of gold-eyed downy young. And this just in — a point of pride for all Americans — the first AIDS patient, it would seem, was a Frenchman identified by the initials LAI, placing the American HTLV–IIIB in the situation of being little more than a “contaminant” of LAI. In landing the Sony account, the Burnett advertising firm announced it wanted to “communicate not only our products, but the lifestyles and emotions that surround us as a company.” What sincerity there is out there in the business community, thought Frank, what personnel and marketing resources. Burnett claimed that its paternalistic and excellence-oriented approach to business helped land the thirty-five-million-dollar deal, that and changing the slogan “It’s a Sony” to “Be Sony.” Jesus fucking Christ.
Frank looked up. They were bidding on a group of steers. He raised his hand at seventy-eight dollars a hundredweight and went back out at eighty-six. Then immediately he thought, I should have bought them; it was scarcely a highly leveraged transaction for the dumb shit in the overalls who got them at eighty-eight. Bush’s heartbeat back to normal and the dollar up. How could you sleep knowing that? Home oxygen tanks all the rage among the elite of polluted Mexico City. Fuck. I can’t look at this.
This had been the year for Deadrock to lose its accustomed obscurity. It broke several winter weather records and got on national weather reports between the T-shirts, the giant cookies, the fire hall restorations and the jokes. Then in March, the weirdest of all months in the Rocky Mountains, a hijacker brought his shiny 747 to rest at the airport north of town. He didn’t trivialize his visit with negotiations or threats but simply refueled, resumed his voyage into the West, then over the Pacific where he jumped from the airplane without a comment or statement or, more to the point, a parachute: a Caucasian male around forty. The stewardesses liked him so much, and said so on TV, that the mayor of Deadrock told the press it was a shame to lose a fellow who was “more sensitive than a five-dollar rubber.” The plane went back to Seattle, but the big silver outlaw bird had brushed this small city with the wings of immortality.
There was plenty to be interested in but, living alone, Frank had found it hard to be interested in anything. He had set so many things in motion in his business that he could tap into that as he wished. He had several income properties scattered around the town, including the very remunerative clinic. He dabbled in yearling cattle and even owned a set of royally bred show pigs, though he never found time to go see them. The farmer who managed them, Jerry Drivjnicki, had sent him several postcards asking when he was coming to see the pigs.
He had a daughter, Holly, in college at Missoula and they went on liking each other tremendously; but the oddness of his house without Gracie made it a strangely formal place for them to spend time together. They did go fishing, but the season for that was closed eight months of the year, which left restaurants. He knew that Holly and Gracie often spoke, but Holly found it best not to discuss those conversations, a numbing artifice.