Green Eyes Page 0,62

bitch! Look there!' He pointed. 'I ain't seen that chinaberry for tree-four years. Oh, goddamn, jus' look at that!' He went a step forward, stumbled, and fell again, but crawled on all fours to the edge of the palmettos and pitched face downward beside a stubby, bluish-green shrub. 'Indigo,' he said wonderingly. 'I tink she's gone from here.'

'You can see?' Jocundra turned to Donnell, and mixed with the excitement, he thought he detected a new apprehension in her face. He looked down at his hands, shaken by the realization that he had done something material to Mr Brisbeau.

'Firs' I tink it's the drinkin' and mem'ries givin' me sight of you, girl.' The old man wiped his eyes. 'But I mus' be seein', 'cause I lose my good-time feelin' when I fall.' He pulled himself up and brushed the crust of mucky sand off his shirt; then, struck by a thought, he said, 'Me, I'm goin' to bring ol' man Bivalaqua so you can touch his migraine.'

'We can't have people coming here,' said Jocundra. 'We'll have the police...'

'The Cajun he's not goin' to give you away,' said Mr Brisbeau adamantly. 'You know better'n that, girl. And besides, the boy he jus' wither up if he try to hide his gift.' He walked over to the steps and stared up at Donnell; his eyes were still brimming. 'I thank you, boy, but how'm I goin' to thank you for true?' Then he grinned. 'Come on! We ask Le Bon Dieu! I'm taking you to see Him.' He started toward the boathouse, staggered, and fetched up against the cabin; he turned and went back to the bluish-green shrub. He plucked off a leaf.

'Goddamn,' he said, holding it up to the sun so the veins showed. 'Indigo.'

Mr Brisbeau poled the pirogue into a channel barely wider than the boat. Clouds of mosquitoes descended upon them, and thickly leaved bushes arched overhead, forming a buzzing green tunnel. The branches scratched their arms. They passed along the channel for what seemed to Donnell an inordinate length of time, and bent double to avoid the branches, breathing shallowly, he lost his sense of perspective. Up and down were no longer consistent with the colors of earth and sky. Whenever they passed beneath an opening in the brush, the water reflected a ragged oval of blue and the sun dazzled the droplets tipping the leaves; it was as if they were gliding through a mirrored abyss, one original likeness hidden among the myriad counterfeits. Fragments of dried wasp nest fell on his neck and stuck in the sweat; purplish-veined egg masses clung to holes in the bank, and the dark, web-spanned gaps between the roots of the bushes bristled with secretive movement. Just below the surface at the edge of the bank were fantastic turrets of slime tunnelled by black beetles.

Then they were gliding out into a vaulted chamber canopied by live oaks, pillared by an occasional cypress. Here the water forked in every direction, diverging around islands from which the oaks arose; their branches bridging between the islands, laden with stalactites of Spanish moss, some longer than a man, trailing into the water. The sun's beams withdrew, leaving them in a phantom world of grays and gray-greens so ill-defined that the branches appeared to be black veins of solidity wending through a mist of half-materialized forms. An egret flapped up, shrinking to a point of white space. Its flight was too swift to be a spirit's, too slow for a shooting star's, yet had the quality of both. Mr Brisbeau's pole sloshed, but otherwise there was a thick silence. The place seemed to have been grown from the silence, and the silence seemed the central attribute of the gray.

Mr Brisbeau beached the pirogue upon the bank of an island where three small crosses had been erected; a muskrat skin was nailed to each one. He climbed out and knelt before them. Kneeling, he was a head taller than the crosses: a giant come to his private Calvary. The skins were mouldering, scabbed with larval deposits, but the sight of him praying to this diseased trinity did not strike Donnell as being in any way grotesque. The silence and the great arching limbs abolished the idea of imperfection, and the decomposing skins were in keeping with the grand decomposition of the swamp.

Now and then Mr Brisbeau's voice carried to Donnell, and he realized it was more of a conversation than a prayer, a recounting of the day's events