Free The Hard Blue Sky by Shirley Ann Grau Page A

because the girl had reached over the pirogue and pulled a handful of crawfish from under a big fallen branch. He’d taken one look at the grayish things and motioned her to throw them overboard, they were that small.
    He’d gone on, paddling the pirogue slowly, until there were too many vines to see the bright sun overhead and the water was still and gleaming with slime and the cypress knees were covered with green mold. He felt a prickling down his back, and out along his fingers, right to their tips. He’d always felt that way about the swamp.
    The narrow strip of water passed between mounds covered with thick green bushes and splotches of colored flowers.
    He saw the small low hibiscus bush with a single flower, big and yellow as the sun through a Gulf mist. And he wanted it, though he knew it was a silly thing for a grown man to be picking flowers. With one quick flick of his paddle he drove the sharp bow of the pirogue up on the land—it was a shell mound: he could tell by the sound—and started for the flower. The growth was denser than he’d thought. He put his arms up to shield his face and let the weight of his body push through. He took two steps and was considering giving up the whole idea, when something made him shift his arms slightly and look through them.
    The painter was right there, not ten yards away, on a low branch about level with his head.
    He’d never been so close to a live one before, so close he could see the flecks of color in the eyes and the fringe of tiny burrs on the left ear. And the muscles along the flanks rippling.
    The shotgun was back at the pirogue. And the girl was too small to use it.
    Because of the god-damn flower, he thought. And because he was so stupid as to leave the gun in the boat.
    It hadn’t been more than three seconds, all of it. Then Julius found himself staring at an empty branch. He squinched his eyes and looked harder, not quite believing. The painter had disappeared, so quietly that not a single leaf shook.
    His eyes still fastened on the place where the animal had been, Julius began backing to the pirogue. Slowly, carefully, his body stiff and erect, he moved back, his eyes jumping around in the leaves and the branches and the vines, looking.
    And when he dropped his arm, the girl had the gun ready for his hand.
    He let her paddle the pirogue back, while he sat with the shotgun ready and watched.
    He hadn’t been scared then, though he had been close to getting killed and the girl with him. He didn’t even bother telling about it when he got home. It would just scare his wife and make her argue every time he wanted to go out. And as for his brothers, he didn’t care what they thought, not any more.
    He had once. When he was still a kid. He’d tried his hand at fishing with them. Only, with the slightest bit of weather, with just a little wind, and just the smallest roll to the boat, he couldn’t work anymore. The smell of the nets and the fish and the water and the taste of the brackish spray—these made him sick. So sick that there was nothing to do but sit on the deck, hold to the wood rail with both hands and hang his head over the side, while his father and his brothers stood around laughing.
    After a couple of trips he gave up fishing and took a job in the grocery.
    His brothers thought he was a coward. When he was young, he was almost afraid to go home when they were there. He was that afraid of their joking. Until he thought of a way to stop them.
    “You got nothing to laugh at,” he told them. “All those days you looking at fish and shrimp, me, I’m looking at all the girls what come down to the store.”
    That hushed them for a minute. Then Pierre, his second oldest brother, said: “Nobody but a dogaree like you be satisfied with just looking at the girls.”
    “Me, I ain’t said nothing like that.” Julius lit a cigarette and slanted his eyes down. “While you all gone they don’t just come down to the store to talk,