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Avery poured some of his coffee into LeBlanc’s cup.
“Drink the coffee,” he said.
LeBlanc tucked his shirt in and drank from the cup.
“You ain’t been in a war. Don’t ever go to one, even if they stand you up against a wall,” he said. “I went over in ’43. They sent us in at the Marianas. The Japs pasted us on the beach, but we done our share of killing too. That’s where I shot my first man. I forgot what the rest of them looked like, but Christ I remember that first one. He was buck naked except for a strip of rag around his loins, up in the top of a palm tree. I cut him down with my B.A.R. and he fell out and there was a rope tied around his middle and he was swinging in the air and I kept on shooting and the bullets turned him around like a stick spinning in the water.”
“I’m going to sleep for a while,” Avery said.
“You ain’t finished eating.”
“I was awake most of last night.”
He went through the open door of the tank and lay down on his mattress. He put his arm behind his head and looked up at the top of the tank. He thought of his brother Henri who had been killed at Normandy. Avery could remember the day he enlisted. Henri was seventeen at the time and would not have had to go into the service for another year, but he volunteered with the local National Guard outfit that had just been activated for training. It was his way of leaving, Avery thought. He was getting away from the house and Papa and all the rest of it.
Henri finished training and was shipped to England in February of 1944. They received one letter from him in the next three months. In late June a telegram arrived at the Broussard home. Mr. Broussard didn’t open it. He held the envelope in his hand a moment and dropped it on the table and went to the back part of the house. Henri had been attached to a rifle company as a medic. He was among the first American troops to invade the French coast. Many of the men in his company didn’t make the beach. He dragged a wounded man out of the surf and was giving him a shot of morphine when a mortar shell made a direct hit on his position. The burial detail put him in a pillowcase.
And that’s it, Avery thought. Somebody in Washington sends you a yellow square of paper with pasted words and your brother is dead. Just like that, dead. No more Martinique parish, no more Papa, no more fallen down house that somebody built a hundred years ago for a way of life that is as dead as Papa and Henri. And the last of the noble line of French and Spanish aristocracy is now lying on his back in the parish drunk tank on a mattress that smells of vomit, waiting to go to work camp where he will have prison letters stenciled on his back and they’ll give him a pick and shovel to work with at hard labor from one to three years, and he may be one of the few aristocrat convicts in the camp.
Avery remembered the things his father used to say to him when they sat on the veranda together during the long summer afternoons. Mr. Broussard spoke of the early American democracy and the agrarian dream of Thomas Jefferson, and how they had died and there was nothing left of them save a shell. The agrarian dream had been destroyed by an industrial revolution that pierced America to its heart. The republic was gone and had been replaced by another society which bore little semblance to its predecessor. Mr. Broussard had been raised to live in a society and age that no longer existed. By blood and by heritage he was bound to the past, which was as irreclaimable as those vanished summer days of heavy cane in the fields and the Negroes going to work with the hoes over their shoulders and the full cotton wagons on the way to the gin. Only an inborn memory remained, a nostalgia for something that had flowered and faded and died before he lived. Possibly in the mellow twilight of evening he could look out from the veranda and see the column of men in their worn butternut-brown uniforms, retreating from the Union army, and hear the jingle of the saber and the labor of the horses, the creak of the artillery carriages, as the column moved up the river road to make one last fight against General Banks’ advancing troops.
He should have lived back then, Avery thought. He should
have died when it died, and never had sons that end up torn to bits in France or serving time on a work gang.
Avery heard a metal object strike the side of the tank and rattle across the floor. There was angry swearing from the bullpen. He got up and walked to the door. The men were looking at LeBlanc, who sat on the floor. A tin cup lay by the wall of the tank. The men moved towards LeBlanc and circled about him. He stood up to face them with his fists clenched by his sides.
A stout, bull-chested man led the group. He walked with the clumsy motions of a wrestler, flat-footed, his thick legs slightly spread, his big hands awkward. He wore a crushed felt hat, which always remained on his head except when he slept. The men called him Johnny Big, because he was thought to be the toughest man in the tank, and the others did what he told them. He also acted as spokesman for the group. When the men needed something, they talked to Johnny Big, and he talked to Leander, and sometimes they got what they wanted. Each inmate contributed two cigarettes a day to Johnny Big. He was head man and no one questioned his authority.
Avery caught a man by the arm and pulled him aside.
“What happened?” he said.
“Let go.”
“Tell me.”
“LeBlanc slammed his cup against the tank and almost bust Sherry in the head.”
Avery released him. The man crowded into the group with the rest.
“How come you to try and hit Sherry?” Johnny Big asked.
“If I wanted to hit him he wouldn’t be walking around,” LeBlanc said. “I wouldn’t use no cup to do it with, neither.”
“You’re screwing things up for us. We got to teach you.”
“I’ll get toe-to-toe with anybody in here.”
“There ain’t going to be a fight,” Johnny Big said. “Leander said he don’t want no more. This is something else.”
“Take it easy,” an older inmate said. “Leander will put us in the tank.”
“He ain’t going to know. There ain’t anybody going to tell him.” He looked into each face. “There’s a way to do it that don’t leave any marks.”
He took a newspaper out of his back pocket and rolled it into a tight cylinder. He patted it in his open palm.
“You should know about this, LeBlanc,” he said. “It just leaves a few red marks on the ribs. It does all the work on the inside. Nobody can tell you been worked on except yourself.”
