Free Queen Sugar: A Novel by Natalie Baszile Page A

Angel, suddenly breathless with an old excitement, thought back to the day his daddy brought him to this very spot. A summer trip to the beach, just the two of them; a vacation he waited months to take, his father having called from California that September to say they would go someplace special when school got out. Ralph Angel had marked the days off the calendar, slogged through the long months until June finally arrived and his father, dashing in slacks and loafers, knocked on the front door. And while his father steered the Buick LeSabre with one hand, the other arm propped in the open window, he sang along to the cassette tape—Al Green’s version of “People Get Ready”—as they cruised over the blacktop road. Ralph Angel bathed in the radiance of his dad’s presence, so happy he thought he would burst.
    And now, belching smoke, the same ferry rumbled up to the dock and idled. Ralph Angel smelled creosote and diesel fuel.
    Blue grinned. “Can we ride on that boat?”
    “You, me, and Zach.”
    Ralph Angel paid the one-dollar fare and steered the Impala onto the dock, then onto the ferry. For the few minutes it took to cross the channel, he and Blue stood on the creaky deck, Ralph Angel holding Blue’s waist as he leaned over the side and spat in the water.
    “It’s a good boat, Pop,” Blue said. He held Zach over the side, making sound effects as he pretended Zach could fly.
    “Okay, that’s enough,” Ralph Angel said, but really, he didn’t mind at all.
    •   •   •
    More miles of black road. A lone oil well seesawing. Then the marsh ended in a wavering wall of sea oats, and beyond it, a flat stretch of bone-colored sand, a sky the color of bleached driftwood washing out the horizon.
    “Is this the surprise?”
    Ralph Angel nodded as he killed the engine. “I came here with my daddy when I was a little boy,” he said, and watched a seabird, squat as a crab apple, its beak thin as a sewing needle, skitter across the sand. How odd it felt to be back here after so many years, almost a lifetime, and yet here he was. He had a vague sense of his boyhood self separating from him now, standing beside him like a specter, so that he saw the landscape through two sets of eyes; felt the pull of old memories as if someone were tugging on his sleeve. He put a hand on Blue’s shoulder. “You can get your feet wet if you want,” which was exactly what his father had said to him.
    A briny wind sprayed sand as Ralph Angel, kneeling, rolled Blue’s pants up his spindly calves. “Not too far.” He sat on the Impala’s warm hood as Blue romped and galloped out to the pale brown surf, leaving a trail of flat-footed prints in the sand. The limp tide. A fringe of broken shells, froth, and plastic bottles left by the receding waves.
    What he remembered most clearly was that they stayed at the beach all afternoon, that his father had set out a picnic with all his favorite things—salami between fluffy white slices of Evangeline Maid bread, Zapps potato chips, a can of Barq’s root beer for each of them, a package of Big 60 cookies with lemon crème filling bought special from Winn-Dixie—and that the wind worried the blanket so much they finally took off their shoes and used them to anchor the corners. While they ate, his father told him about California: how in a single day you could drive from the beach where the sand was as fine as cornmeal out to the desert where cacti and bright orange poppies with petals thin as tissue paper blanketed the ground; how, at the lighthouse just south of the airport, you could watch whales spout plumes of spray as they migrated through the channel, their enormous backs glistening like sea monsters as they rolled through the swells; and how, on a clear September weekend, you could drive down to the pier and order a whole boiled crab, then sit with a brown bag on your lap, pick meat from the crab’s body, and toss empty claws to the hovering gulls.
    “When can I come live