Dempsey grabbed my hand again, squeezing it tight as though he wanted me to not worry over the ‘might’s Aron laid out for us.
“Nah, I reckon it’s best you both clear out.” He glanced back toward the cottage, then looked at us again, lowering his voice as though he was sure someone was listening. “Can I trust you two to walk out to the fish shack and stay there?” We both nodded, not bothering to look at each other. “And can you promise me, Dempsey Simoneaux, on your honor you won’t be thinking of things you ought not think about with my niece in the same room?”
Dempsey widened his eyes, blushing a little before he nodded quick. “Good. You keep her safe and don’t get up to anything funny. I’ll be down to check up on you in the morning, but mind what you’re doing cause I won’t be telling you exactly how early I’ll come get you.”
“Of course. We’ll… it’ll be all fine,” Dempsey promised, then lifted back the thick brush hiding the small opening to the trail, motioning me to go ahead first. Luckily the moon was out, and though it was slow going, we could see the path to follow.
We walked in silence for a few long minutes until Dempsey didn’t seem to take the quiet and started up whistling “Black Water Blues,” likely because he knew how much I loved Bessie Smith. I’d just started in on a chorus, singing about having no place to go, when Dempsey stopped me, covering my mouth with his hand as he pressed right behind me. He leaned down and the scent of his breath, like peppermint, came softly against my cheek.
“There,” he whispered, nodding to our right beyond the cover of the trail. By then we had walked past my Mimi’s property line and crossed over back into the Simoneaux land that edged along the river. My heart pounded like a scared rabbit, and when Dempsey tried backing away, I grabbed his arm, pulling him tighter still just to keep myself from running or my fingers from shaking something awful.
The river was low this time of year when the hurricane season had yet to start. There would be heavy rains, and storms that would come—one was brewing in the gulf, coming in from Alabama. It had been on the radio and was all my Bastie could talk about and fret over for a week straight. But the boat passing around the riverbank right now had no problems cutting through the dark water.
There were voices and the trickle of water moving as a paddle dipped in and out of the water. I couldn’t make out who they were even as we sidled closer toward the river, staying beneath the heavy limbs of the cypress that skirted toward the end of the trail, but there was definitely more than one voice echoing quietly over the water.
“Poachers, looking for gators from the sound of it,” Dempsey whispered in my ear.
“They not in season?” I only asked to keep Dempsey leaning close to be heard. I did so like the way he smelled and how much heat his body made as he came close to me.
“No. I don’t reckon. If they were, those boys would be out during the day hunting.” The small boat floated further up the river and Dempsey took my hand, pulling me away from the trail and toward the small shack some fifty feet back off the water.
He nodded at the broken cinderblocks Aron had fashioned into a walkway and Dempsey helped me navigate it, stopping to offer me his hand and picking me up a little by my waist to make sure I made it from the path without slipping.
The small front door was made from three thick planks of pine with three smaller pieces nailed across, and as Dempsey grabbed the knotted twine of rope looped into a small hole in the wood that served as handle, the small hinges that had rusted from the weather and moisture in the air made what seemed to be an earth-shattering screech, but probably wasn't all that loud. .
“That Aron is clever.”
“Not so clever.” I nodded a thanks to Dempsey as he held open the door, but I didn’t step inside straight away; instead, we both leaned inward, looking over the small bucket in the corner, upturned, I reckoned, to act as a seat, and the two fishing poles leaned against one corner of the tiny shack. “He comes out here when he’s had too much whiskey and Mimi won’t let him in the house. Drunk fool will throw a line out that window at two in the morning thinking he’ll surprise the catfish when they’re half asleep.”
“Does it work?” There was a little laugh in Dempsey’s voice, like he already knew the answer to his question.
“Comes home with dozens, more than that when he’s good and drunk.”
“Then I won’t fault the man for his drink if it means your Mimi will fry up some catfish for us.”
Dempsey smiled at my shaking head then followed me away from the shack to sit near the bank. “There’s a purple sky tonight.” It was something Bastie liked the best about the spring. The sky on the Manchac was always clearest at night, but in the spring the weather was the brightest, like God settled the seas and calmed the wind so that we could have a clear sight of the most beautiful of his kingdom.
“What did your Bastie say about it? I forget.”
“Purple skies come when God is in court. He comes close to us and the purple we see is the hem of His royal cloak.”
Dempsey shook his head, smiling to himself as we both looked up into the dark sky. It wasn’t only purple, but blue with swirls of gray swimming in the darkness around us. If I looked away from Dempsey, I could only make out his silhouette from the corner of my eye. He looked dark as coal in that purple light.
“If God is visiting, He might not like to see what’s happening here.”
Dempsey was right. The way things were turning, how restless and mean folk had gotten—how our own lives had found the same restlessness, wouldn’t make any God happy looking down on it.
“Maybe He only sees the good among us.”
Dempsey went quiet, slipping his hand to mine to move his palm over the top of my fingers. “Then He only sees you, Sook.”
And then Dempsey who swore he loved me, leaned close, pulled my face toward his and showed me for a little while that I wasn’t the only good one in that small corner of our world.
Twelve
Nash
When I was young, my father wore a Bulls ball cap. It was red and black and had Jordan’s number twenty-three taking up much of the right side. He’d won it from a work raffle. Five bucks for a Bulls swag pack and a chance at airfare and two tickets to the Bulls/Celtics game that season. He’d spent twenty bucks that day; five on the ticket and fifteen on a case of Bud he’d polished off before his lunch break ended.
I only remembered that because he’d been fired for drinking the Bud and my mother threw the cap out the second-floor window when he came home that night. I’d found it the next morning on my way to the bus stop, stepping over my father, who’d passed out on the front porch and stayed there the whole night.
That morning I’d looked down at him, face pale and hollow, lips chapped and white and realized for the first time in my brief nine years, that my father was a loser. He wasn’t the cut-up he pretended to be when he and Mom drank during the Falcons games, laughing and teasing each other when the dirty birds won. He wasn’t the guy that would stay sober for a couple of weeks, meeting me and Nat at the bus stop, fixing our dinners when Mom worked late or took a night class. He was the guy who’d passed out on the porch with a brand-new Bulls cap twenty feet away from him near the garbage can. He was the asshole who made my mother cry when she thought we were asleep.