Free My Juliet by John Ed Bradley Page A

would be able to fish him out. You can never be too safe with people sick like his father. In the news they are constantly drifting off, heading for the woods or the interstate, too lost to know they’re lost. By the time the bloodhounds find them it’s too late but for the undertaker.
    â€œHey, Daddy. What say we go catch us some fish?”
    After a few hours the lake breeze dies and the air starts to heat up and Sonny and Mr. LaMott drink the beers and suck on chunks of ice as the sun broils their arms and necks. As usual the fish aren’t biting so Sonny crowds the time with stories about when he was a kid and his mother was alive and Mr. LaMott was the top shrimp salesman for Paul Piazza & Son. The more Sonny talks the more he is able to recall. He describes the Ninth Ward as it was twenty years ago before most of the old families moved to the suburbs and you stopped feeling safe to walk the streets at night. He names the neighbors, the Irish and the Italians who worked the riverfront, the blacks who played music and staffed the kitchens in the bars and restaurants of the Vieux Carré. He names the coaches who coached him in summer-league baseball at the Saint Roch playground. He talks about Otto’s Pharmacy, now a grocery store, and about the year it snowed and how school closed and everybody ran in the streets biting at the flakes in the cold air. He names the meals his mother used to cook: crawfish étouffée, shrimp surprise, ground meat casserole, round steak with rice and gravy, stuffed bell peppers, mirliton dressing, bread pudding made with fruit cocktail, raisins and whiskey or “hard” sauce. Sonny talks about waking up before dawn and walking with his mother to Saint Cecilia and Father Michael saying Mass in Latin and Sonny, an altar boy then, ringing the bells whenever Father Michael lifted the blood or the body of Christ. He talks about how sometimes afterward he and Mrs. LaMott took a bus to the French Quarter for beignets and café au lait and the water trucks washing down the streets and on Mondays the smell of red beans cooking and how his mother would still be in her church veil and carrying a missal. Sonny talks and it comes back and he feels a deep, swimming sadness for all that will never be again.
    â€œWhere is Mama?” Mr. LaMott says when Sonny seems to have finished.
    â€œMama died in 1982, Daddy. She had that stroke, remember?”
    Mr. LaMott seems to take this as a surprise. He reels in his line and sits for a long time staring at his artificial lure.
    â€œI been meaning to tell you something, Daddy,” Sonny says, “and I hope you can grab ahold of this.” Mr. LaMott doesn’t respond, and Sonny continues, “I been wanting to tell you you were right about most everything you ever said to me. You were a real good father to me.”
    Mr. LaMott just stares—not at Sonny, but at his lure.
    â€œAfter high school when the government didn’t draft me I should’ve been a man about it and enlisted and gone on to Vietnam or else enrolled at LSU like you wanted me to. You were right about me being just a so-so bartender and an even worse painter. I’m sure that wasn’t easy for you to say, and I’m sorry I didn’t listen. Because I realize it now, I realize all you said was meant to help me. Sometimes I think that that war, crazy as it was, might’ve helped me. Korea helped you, right?” Sonny reaches over and takes the lure from his father’s hands. “I wish you’d said something about Juliet, though. That time I brought her to the house for dinner? You should’ve talked to me about her then—you and Mama, both. Not that I’d have listened, understand? But at least now you could be saying ‘I told you so.’ ”
    â€œI told you so,” says Mr. LaMott.
    â€œNo, you didn’t. That’s the point I’m trying to make. You didn’t tell me