Bacon sizzled in a frying pan, reminding me of Mam in our old kitchen in Memphis. When she fried bacon or chicken, the hot grease in the big iron skillet would pop and jump, but it never seemed to bother her. The early morning towboat traffic on the river had increased the gentle rocking of the barge. Sun filtered in at a low angle through the skylights.
I traced in my half-asleep brain the last 24 hours that had taken me from my quiet house in Memphis to a loud New Orleans French Quarter and now to a comfortable home floating on the Mississippi River. Four hundred miles could just as well have been four thousand.
I wondered if my mother had called my father after she read my note. I could imagine her having a hissy fit and then my father telling her to calm down while he looked into it. If there was ever a problem, he always would say he would “look into it.” Things didn’t upset him much on the outside, but I had a hunch that wasn’t true for his inside.
A woman’s voice.
“Shhhhh,” the General whispered. “Vic’s still sleeping.”
I snapped my eyes tight. Light footsteps padded across the barge floor. My shirt and pants were on the far end of the couch. I didn’t know how I was going to get dressed with a woman in the room.
More whispers and new smells came from the kitchen. The only thing to do was try to scoot down under the sheet and see if I could pull my clothes over to me with my foot. The cushions soon bunched up, leaving me stuck under the sheet in the middle of the couch in my undershorts.
“That’s a strange morning exercise,” the General said. “You ever seen an exercise like that, Adrienne?”
“Can’t say I have. Looks like fun, sure.”
I peeked over the back of the couch to see the General and a woman standing next to him smiling at me. She wore a loose-fitting piece of clothing that could have been either a robe or a dress. Her hair was dark with plenty of curls in it and then I saw that her eyes were just as dark as her hair. The woman was younger than the General, but maybe not by many years. The General turned the bacon in the frying pan with a long fork.
“Say good morning to Adrienne,” the General said.
I smiled, nodded, and pulled the sheet up around me.
“Bonjour, Vic. Hope I didn’t wake you. Welcome to New Orleans.”
She pronounced my name “Veek” and New Orleans somehow turned into “Gnaw-leans.” I liked the way the words came out of her mouth, like they had a bright coat of paint on them.
“Breakfast’ll be ready soon,” the General said. “Get your shower, Son Vic, and we’ll be waiting with your favorite dish… a dozen oysters on the half shell with my special hot sauce.” He laughed out loud. “Just kidding.”
With the sheet covering me, I gathered up my clothes and gym bag. Through the door on the wooden wall was an oversized bathroom with a claw-foot tub like the one in our old house in Memphis, except this tub had a curtain around it with a big shower head directly above. The ceiling had more skylights in this part of the barge. I took my shower with the morning Louisiana sun shining in on me.
Who was Adrienne? Where did she come from in the middle of the night? And why did the General keep calling me “Son Vic?” Good questions for the shower, where the warm water quickly washed off four hundred miles of Highway 51 South and a night in the French Quarter.
* * *
The big table in the middle of the kitchen had wooden bench seats like a picnic table, but the tabletop itself was gray metal. Strips of thick bacon surrounded a pile of scrambled eggs on a big plate. Another plate held pastries covered with powdered sugar.
The General, in gym shorts and an undershirt, twisted orange halves one by one on a juicer.
Adrienne came through the hatch and down the ladder with a bouquet of fresh flowers in her hand. She filled a glass jar with water, arranged the flowers in it, and put it in the middle of the table.
“How ’bout some café au lait, Vic?” Adrienne reached for a black pot on the stove.
“If you mean c----offee, I usually don’t drink it.”
The General wiped his hands on the towel on his shoulder and got out another mug.
“All right, Son Vic,” he said. “Now you know your way around raw oysters and Bourbon Street, so your next lesson is New Orleans coffee.”
The General poured steaming milk into the mug from a pan on the stove and an equal part of black coffee that looked like syrup.
“You don’t eat them beignet without New Orleans coffee,” Adrienne said.
“What’s a b----in-y----ey?” Words that I didn’t know how to spell gave me added trouble and I stuttered a little on both syllables, unusual even for me.
“A fried doughnut. French like. I pick ’em up on the way home from work.”
The three of us ate breakfast. I didn’t realize how hungry I was. The General gave Adrienne a condensed version of the quest that brought me to New Orleans. People who worked at newspapers told their stories the same way that they wrote them, using as few words as possible and leaving out details that didn’t add information that wasn’t needed for the story.
I had a second cup of coffee with a beignet. The hot milk made the strong coffee go down easier. It tasted more like hot chocolate. Adrienne leaned over the table more than once to brush the white powdered sugar from the beignets off my nose. She and the General kept up a steady conversation that I enjoyed listening to, especially the way Adrienne pronounced her words.
She told me she had met Charlie Roker and how much she liked him. She also referred to Charlie as Rocket. Before I could ask about the nickname, she started telling the General about her Friday night at Commander’s Palace and about how much she had made in tips.
“She makes more money waitressing than I do writing the world’s most exhilarating prose,” the General said.
“You write about fish and duck, and I serve them. We’re practically in the same entreprise.” I could tell she had said the word “enterprise,” but her accent made the simple word exciting.
“I’ll never be able to get one up on this lady.” The General gently squeezed the back of Adrienne’s neck.
“So, you’re starting college soon, and what about a cherie? I bet you have a steady girl in Memphis,” Adrienne said.
“N----ot really.”
My answer fell flat. It needed something more to prop it up. I could tell that Adrienne wanted to start a conversation.
“I have d----ates for proms and stuff, but I have a hard time talking to girls… b----ecause of the way I talk.”
Adrienne’s reaction was not what I expected. She smiled. I don’t know why I brought up the subject of my stuttering. Sometimes my mouth kept going when my brain was thinking something else, but I needed to end with some type of explanation.
“I think I try harder not to stutter around g----irls my age, and that’s when my words can get all messed up.”
“You just haven’t found the right jeune fille,” Adrienne said. “There’s one out there who will like every part of you, sure, including that cute stutter.”
Cute stutter? Two words I had never heard together.
Adrienne and the General chattered away. When my mother and father talked to each other, they seemed to have to work extra hard to think of things to say, but my new friends on the barge went back and forth like they were in a contest to see who was the cleverest.
“What do the people at the paper say about dat storm?” Adrienne asked the General as she poured herself another mug of coffee. When she wasn’t paying close attention to her words, she would substitute “dat” for “that.”
“Haven’t heard this morning, but it seems to be all in the Atlantic. I’m hoping it might even pull a high system in over us and bring us some less humid weather.”
The General cleared the table. He had cooked the meal and was going to wash dishes. I had never seen my father do those things.
“You have carved out a real aventure for yourself,” Adrienne said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
“I just want to keep my p----romise to my friend.”
Adrienne swung her legs up and over the bench seat. “I see my busboy is taking care of the dishes and I know you two men need to talk your river talk. I’ll get a quick shower and be gone.”
She walked over to my side of the table, rubbed some more powdered sugar off my nose and kissed me lightly on the cheek.
“Nice to be with you,” Adrienne said. “And I’m here to say, I would trust you with any promise, sure.”
Adrienne put the word “sure” at the end of a sentence like an exclamation mark. She went behind the bedroom curtain.
I went to the sink to help the General finish up with the dishes.
“I like the way Adrienne says her words,” I said.
“She comes from an Acadian heritage. You probably know it as Cajun.”
“She’s really easy to talk to,” I said.
“You’ll find most of the folks in South Louisiana are like that,” the General said, scrubbing his skillet. “I’m selfish. I wish I could wrap up this part of the country in a blanket and hide it. I’m afraid that television and the modern world will soon have us all talking and acting just alike and destroy all the different birthrights that make this country.”
The General joked most of the time, but his serious side could take over without warning.
Adrienne stepped from behind the bedroom curtain with her hair pinned up. “Tres bon. I have both my men doing the dishes.”
She stepped through the door to the bathroom. I heard the shower and then soft singing. I strained to hear the strange and exciting words.