The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

Emily Raboteau Smile

From The Gettysburg Review

“Row!” his père commands but Tee Paul’s arms are jelly. His père’s back at the prow of the pirogue is a trunk of muscle. “Row you peeshwank capon, row! “ Between them on the peeling pirogue floor lies Bowleg’s boy, Smile, with a broken head. “Row!” His père’s oar slides into the brack like a knife, deeper and darker down bayou they go, until the shore lights extinguish, until even the shadows have shadows. His throat is a knot. The bullfrogs croak, “Oh no, oh no.”

Tee Paul can’t work his oar for looking into his podna’s licorice face in the lantern light. Smile’s blood is mixing with the half-inch pool of swamp water down there. Smile’s eyes are two dead coins with a hold on him.

“Row!” Instead of sailing straight, the boat wig-wags like a lizard tail through the silent, bearded cypress. And slowly because only his père is doing the work. “Row!”

“Can’t, Pop,” Tee Paul says. He’s got those jelly arms. He hasn’t the strength to slap at a mosquito.

“What?” his père spits, spinning around. He’s got the whiskey smell and the mad dog look.

“I got the mal au coeur!” he says and vomits a slop as thick as the Atchafalaya itself over the side of his père’s pirogue.

Tawk! His père reaches his oar across and cracks him one good on the head, same way he did Smile with the doorstop rock for stealing his alligator money. Tee Paul’s afraid now. The shock freezes him. The fear moves him. Father and son cut the swamp like lard.

A smell rises. Smile must’ve shit his pants in a death spasm. “Pooyeye,” says Tee Paul’s père. When the flies come he ropes Smile’s middle to the anchor and dumps him by the roots of a strangler tree. The swamp swallows Smile up fast, bottom first, head last. The old man tips a bit and says, “Listen, couyon. He was a no-good burglar nigger, him. Dass all. Not of we and us.”

On the long way back, he’s thinking how the tooloulou must be fiddling over Smile’s face already, pinching out his eyes. Or maybe a gator would get him.

Back in their shack on stilts, Hermogine, in her stovepipe hat, squats, skinning a beaver from one of the traps. All Tee Paul meant was to save enough to steal her from harm, to stow away with her on a big river barge. He could have carried her off on his back. She’s a little wisp of a thing, sickly. Her nightgown is so thin. There’s a blue vein beating in her forehead.

“Why you wake, bebette?” their père grumbles, freeing his bunions from his boots. “Fais do-do.” She asks do they want coffee, but the old man’s already reaching for the other stuff.

Tuesday is her birthday. They wrap her in a quilt, set her in the buggy, and ride her to town to pick out a gift.

Do she want dat doll? Do she want a yard of dat yellow gingham to make a apron? Do she want dis pop-up picture book from France? No, she want de pair of chartreuse lovebirds in dat cage over de crawdaddy barrel. Can she have dem birds? Weh, she can.

The old man pays with a cut of his rescued money. Tee Paul had stole it one nickel at a time. All winter long he stashed the money in his podna’s tackle box, where his père was never meant to look. Smile kept count for him. They’d lay down their fishing poles in the muck to look at all the coins collecting in there. “Soon,” Smile would smile then draw his harmonica out from the bib of his overalls. “Mais, I’m gon miss ya podna.” When there was enough Tee Paul would run away. He would carry his little sister up the Bayou on his back. He would save her.

The coins clink on the counter now like chains. Hermogine’s kissing at the birds through the bars. Un p’tit bee. Their wings are clipped. Their beaks are coming off. They have reptilian eyes. They are not cheap.

“Don say I never did nothing nice, Gine-Gine,” their père says, not looking at her, but at Tee Paul. The old man’s eyes are possum pink.

“Look!” says Hermogine out on the groaning porch of the dry goods store. The sun is too bright. “Dass Mister Bowleg, de zydeco man! Where his accordion at?”

Bowleg’s in the street, dragging his potbelly mule. “Hey-o!” he calls. “Ya’all seen my boug?”

Tee Paul looks at the rusty cage in his sister’s arms. His finger twitches, but he knows if he unlatches the cage door to let them go, those birds won’t fly away. They’ll just drop like turds to the floorboards. He licks his dry lips, and his père grips his shoulder, hard.

“Ya seen my boug, Smile?”