James Eloi Trosdair - Jet - went to live at Trou Noir deep within the Atchafalaya Basin after his wife left him. He felt it was sudden, but she said it had been coming for a long time. She couldn't say what was wrong, except that it was nobody's fault. She was searching for her identity, trying to get rid of her sexist scripts. She took the baby with her on her search, and Jet was left alone.
It was agonizing. Once, he hallucinated on loneliness. It was not an apparition. Jet knew the difference. It was his trade to know the difference.
Finally, lost in a swirl of his own grief in the deep, dark pit of despair, feeling as though he were sinking into a murky vertigo, he fired a rifle in his bedroom. It was the only thing he could think of to pull himself out of the fearful depths of that black longing. He did not want to admit that, once again, life had proven fickle and unjust; among humans at least, without balance.
The muzzle flash lit the room in orange flame. An instant frozen as a photograph burned into his optic nerve. Then, the dark of the empty room closed about him as pupils retracted, his very eyes retreating.
His shadow on the wall in the gunshot strobe, rifle to shoulder, rooted him in reality. It frightened him, but fear was justified. It saved him temporarily, perversely, possibly against his own advantage, from skinny-dipping in despair to a depth irretrievable.
And it convinced him to give up his professorship and leave town. One could not fire rifles in their homes in the middle of the night and the middle of Baton Rouge. Not where Jet lived , surrounded by his ivy-encrusted colleagues. He had become more and more involved in administration, anyway, in the last years of his marriage. There had been increasingly less time out in the field.
He moved to Trou Noir.
Jet moored the hull at the wharf, unlocked the door, clunked down his bag of books and sat back in a chair. In a half-hour, he was absorbed in a Russian study of 'taste' found in the fingertips. In might be a help in exposing frauds, so-called psychics simply using another lost sensual awareness.
When the twilight faded gloom between the letters on each page, Jet put the book face-down on the rough-hewn oak table and started the generator. He had enough gasoline for two months. The camp stood suddenly electric-bright against the great swamp darkness. Jet cooked his food and ate while reading.
In bed at last, the night too neatly coincided with that sooty ache so near his heart. He rose again and lit a candle. From that first night, the dreams were thick and clinging, like the slippery, silken mud at the basin's bottom. Sucking, holding.
He sat up panting. Listening to the residue of his own scream die among the slumbering cypresses and gum. He pressed his hand upon his forehead, slippery against the cold sweat. Fingertips dug to numb his frontal lobes. Now weeping, face slick with tears and sweat, strangling in the mucosa of abandonment, he saw around him truth, bleak and not unkind but so unyielding.
Never knowing how he fell asleep again, he awoke to a sun-bright green, blue, flower-colored day. So it was. By day, now, he took the smaller boats, the boats for poling and for paddling and for rowing. All the boyhood points, he revisited. He came to know them again and new, secret, lovely coves and coulees, bayous and bays.
Sometimes he fished for bass. But he released all that he caught. He had stores enough to last him. And, though he loved the taste of bass, he could not bring himself to kill. Not even a fish. Now alone, where there was no question of hiding his grief from others, there remained only the question of not recognizing it himself. Therefore his own lonely agony was laid bare before him. He was too honest to know it and then not feel it to proper magnitude. It made him sick as a hangover. So he couldn't cause grief even to a fish.
And his nights remained locked in an abyss of want. Asleep, he was assaulted with erotic visions, wracked with needs unsatisfied, tortured by imagined infidelities, abandonment, broken vows. It took three weeks of dismal nights and bright, hopeful days for him to know that thing that always lies, appearing to slumber, like a shadow on the bottom of an opaque bayou, of which he was afraid.
It was mortality. At the root of his anguish for his wife's no longer loving him lurked his fear of death, his concept of mortality. Mortality was defined by birth and death. By woman, he was given birth. By the side of a woman, a good man lives. Now, by woman, a part of him had died. His wife's desertion was, to his central fabric, the thread of birth and death broken.
James Eloi Trosclair, parapsychologist and psychic and medium, was as afraid of being thrust into that great, unknown afterworld as a newborn babe resents the slap that clears the lungs allowing life. He had known specters, poltergeists, demons and ghosts. Yet he was as reluctant as a superstitious fishwife to step into the other side.
After that, he simply missed his wife. In fact, he loved her still. The bitterness subsided and the anguish, like a tide obeying a celestial bid. Jet found peace.
In peace one evening, he noticed the fragrance. It was the most enchanting scent. Mingled of many essences. The incense of his early fervor, for instance, and the fickle honeysuckle sweetness of the lush-minty, sultry summer days.
And other things, too, he thought. He stood. A soft wind through the screened front porch bore it stronger, more profound. It thickened as he followed. Against the screen, there was only the slowly oxidizing rusty smell like rain.
Absolutely black beyond the screen that caught the yellow light in dull, rusty orange, the night was thick with the buzzing, singing insect and mammal sounds and the humidity of mystery and mist. He was confused. Isolation. He reminded himself about isolation.
Jet rejected the possibility of a manifestation. This was not the time for a busman's holiday. Nor the place. He was hardly in condition to communicate with an entity from the other side, the so-called spirit world.
So he went out in a pirogue, on the water, in the night. He went out in search of reality, bravely denying the truth. So he found no honeysuckle-covered, incense-scented tree on fire to save his senses. He found only insects, a baby river otter and the inscrutable, primordial night.
All of it, he left outside when he came back to the camp. The night was warm, but there was a breeze. The camp was open all around to any movement on the air, encircled by open windows and porches, screened against the vampire-lust of the mosquitoes. Jet put out the light, surrendering the dwelling to the dusky curtain.
His body lay languid against the sheets. Muscles, skin, stretched luxuriously, as though in anticipation. A warm breeze against his cheek, like the palm of a soft, smooth hand testing the stubble of his beard.
Jet heard a sigh. It was his own. He turned partially on his side, one leg drawn up, the knee against the mattress. The way he slept as a child.
Jet's body still missed the round, cow-heat curves. The nightmares had stopped, but his body was still not comfortable sleeping. For too many years, sleeping with one woman was like sleeping in his own bed. Without the nightmares, he slept not uncomfortably but without complete relaxation. Somehow during the night he managed a padded position by pulling the pillows soft against him, simulating the round, soft body which had slumbered with him all those years. In the morning, he awoke more refreshed than ever since his return to Trou Noir.
He awoke to a changed universe. Smiling, he stretched and yawned. It felt like the first day of a hard-earned vacation. That scent of incense and honeysuckle was so strong streaming with the light through the window that it seemed to emanate from the pillow beside him.
Although he had slept soundly, he must have tossed greatly during the night. The bed was disheveled. Pillows at the foot, sheets pulled out at the corners. And the pillow beside him had been indented with a head, the imprint was clear.
Reading on the screened porch that afternoon, Jet saw a fisherman. The man was in a bass boat. In modern times, every part of the basin was open to anyone who could afford an aluminum flatboat and a small outboard motor. But Trou Noir was so distant from any landing and there were so many fish in between, that fishermen rarely made it that far.
When they did come that far and saw the Trosclair boats, they usually went on or turned back to the last likely place. This fisherman went on. Jet watched him go, the book held open in his lap. He couldn't remember how long he had been at Trou Noir. It was a moment many of his ancestors and kinsmen had reached before him, an unexpected instant of movement from one level of awareness to another.
The timelessness of Trou Noir rested in subtle cycles. The seasons were so subtle, fading into one another. A slower, gentler cycle. In other climes, the years build dramatically one upon the other, like a pyramid. But South Louisiana spins in a soft, slow, muddy circle.
The timelessness of Trou Noir was not a line nor a circle nor a helix moving forward in rotation. That spirit of timelessness was like a disk turning about the point of an individual turntable cemented in some quadrant of a gigantic gyroscope spinning many different ways. But the disk of Trou Noir had its own center of gravity. The center was that spot the two converging currents had scooped a hole to lodge the pin.
Sitting there on the porch, the fisherman long gone and the waves of his bass boat already settled silkily on the flat, still water, the light changed to yellow afternoon. Jet was lost in a reverie of purely emotional discovery. Finally, he moved to the western side of the house to watch the sunset.
At first, the sunset was promising. But, at the last moment, a bank of dark thunderheads rose on the horizon to obliterate the final, rich red beams. So night fell swiftly.
By the time Jet had eaten, the flashing clouds had moved to cover the western quadrant of the sky. He sat upon the porch and watched the lightning soundlessly explode beyond the borders of the clouds. The lightning lit the floating, bloated bulges from within, producing bright colors in transference through the high bulbous mists. Colors pink and orange, the undersides of the thickest clouds blue as bruises, pink as lips.
The porch had been built so that the windows of the camp could be left open in any weather, even wind and rain. The rain began to pelt the tin roof just as he finished. The initial, gentle drizzle on the metal like the tingle of awakening a newly straightened limb.
Jet turned off the lights and generator. Better to watch the approach of the storm. The rain remained a drizzle and the flashing clouds seemed to be hovering for him.
Jet took the storm to bed. Flashes of lightning woke him. Now a sultry rumble in the distance. Lightning streaks cragged from heaven to the waters of the basin. The mirror of their crackling, concentrated power flashed to him across the lake in the same instant. The night was darker between the flashes. The air was charged. He was not alone. Not alone in camp. Not alone in bed.
"So … I suppose you'll think I'm forward."
"What?" Jet said aloud. The echo of the word in the silent house between the thunder growls, an actual living human voice against the other he had heard.
"I mean, to come to bed with you when you don't even know my name."
"Who are you?"
Jet felt a movement in the sheets, a wet chuckle at his ear.
"Don't think I'll tell you right away. Suppose you don't like me? I'm sensitive to rejection, too, you know."
"What are you?"
Now what Jet felt was woman in a way he hadn't felt in a very long time, in a way that was unmistakable. "Hmmmmm," he sighed, he couldn't help it.
"Are you a succubus?"
The words came intermixed with a lusty humor. A woman aroused and unashamed.
"Am I a suck-your-what? Don't think ill of me for my poor humor, I'm nervous a trifle. You don't think I do this all the time, do you?"
"You're nervous?"
"Sure," she said. "What kind of girl do you think I am?"
"What kind are you?"
"At least I know your name," she teased. "James Eloi Trosclair, J.E.T. Jet. Fast by name, fast by nature."
Jet smiled. It was his old college routine.
"Did I know you at LSU? Were we students together, I mean?"
"Nooooo. I got it from a friend of yours. He died in a hurricane at Grand Isle when you were at university together."
"Yes," Jet said, remembering.
"He loves you very much," she said. Then her voice lowered an octave. "I love you, too."
"You ...?"
But she didn't give him a chance to continue. She spoke very swiftly, now, and in a higher and louder voice. The lightning flashes lit the cypresses and black waters of Trou Noir like bright footlights.
"Now. I know you'll think I'm forward, but considering the fact that I'm dead and you're actually finally divorced and with women's lib and all of that ...."
"Tell me your name."
"Eleanor."
The rumbling thunder seemed to try the name.
"Eleanor," Jet said. It rolled well on his tongue and the thunder reflected his thoughts in another rumbling Eleanor.
"But no more," she said. "That's it. You'll only waste our time by asking. I have waited for this for many years. Of course, waiting is not difficult for me. But these moments are still precious. Can we make love?"
"Can we?" Jet had never heard of quite this form of ghostly manifestation.
"Yes, if you will allow it."
"At least I won't have to worry about herpes."
She laughed with him.
"You regain your sense of humor quickly," she said.
Jet detected an accent of formality.
"Are you French? I mean Parisian French."
She ignored it.
"If you will but close your eyes," she said. "As a kiss is more intense when all other senses have been halted save touch. So close your eyes, rest the searching eyes within your soul, and come with me."
Jet closed his eyes, accepted Eleanor. It was like drifting on a slow, cool, spring-high bayou on a rubber raft, the water dry and cool against the skin. There, they embraced. The lightning lashed crimson against closed lids and the thunder and wind howled like fierce, gigantic dogs at guard.
Fury in their embrace bound all other passions, even anger and anguish and fear. But in the end, bathed in the ozone-electric, bright-sun charged reality of day, there was only peace, contentment, satiation and sleep. He was alone when he awoke.
Thereafter, he begged the sun to hurry through the sky. She came after twilight, left before dawn. Her scent was the incense and the honeysuckle and all the bittersweet fragrances of his life. It lingered around him, mingled with the bedclothes and his long day's thoughts. Each evening, he awaited her.
"Taking me for granted, aren't you?" she said one evening.
"Yes," Jet said.
"That's good and that's bad. It’s good because I like it and you like it, taking me for granted.
"How is it bad?"
"It's not time yet."
"Not time yet to take you for granted?"
"Not time yet to tell you."
"I see," Jet said, a tiny cold rock throbbing deep inside his belly. "Well, if you ...."
He felt her arms and legs around him, almost crushing him to her. Her mouth against his eyes was a desperate whisper sounding close to tears. "Wouldn't you rather make love than talk?"
Jet would, and now words were not necessary. It was only, after all, a matter of time.
"Couldn't you stay through the day?"
"That's like asking to see a lady without her makeup."
"Or asking to try out the sex before tying the knot."
"Ah, but we're not getting married," she said brightly.
"Why not? If we can ..."
"Because we're already married," she said, laughing so heartily that Jet laughed too, even though he didn't know the joke. "I'll leave you with that one. Don't ask for an explanation. It's one of those good and bad kinds."
Jet in the weeks that followed grew certain that the universe was out of kilter, like a wobbling Frisbee or a careening boomerang. Because at Trou Noir, which had come to be the center of existence for him, the days had become over-long, heavy, cumbersome and confused. The days were blobs of empty moments like great boulders he had to climb just to survive one minute. And night flew by swiftly. Like the flight of a teal. Beautiful, certain and unerring, it slipped crisply from dusk to dawn to leave him refreshed but empty and hungering to struggle through the day.
The supplies ran out but he would not take the boat to buy more. He fished and trapped waterfowl for flesh and gathered nuts and berries and wild onions on the islands. He used the boat's fuel in the generator until he ran that out, too. Resorted to the wood and the candles.
Now he was happy, happier than he had ever been. It was almost as though the depletion of the supplies and fuel had freed him. Each day, he grew stronger in ways he had not even realized he was weak. The days were filled, now, as completely as the nights. Each moment he was busy providing for himself or reading or being with his beloved.
He came to trust the evening, that it would come in its own course. And the sunset ceased to be just another yellow scourge of daylight before the bliss of the blue hour and the sweet darkness that lay beyond. Now, again, it was just a beacon, a lovely, golden display announcing nothing agonizing. Just the end of the day, the anticipation of pleasure.
In the sunset, when the wavelets flashed like molten ore sparkling in the smelter, Jet saw the fisherman. This time he crossed to the west, into the sunset. The prow of the flatboat skipped into the oval sun reflection on the water. It seemed both man and boat broke up, dematerialized in waves like heat rising from an August highway. But this fisherman and his boat entered the sun proper, went right into the liquid fire. So Jet was not surprised at the sadness in her voice.
"You know already," she said.
"Yes, I know. I've known since sunset."
"That is forever. If you've known since sunset, you've known forever."
"But I don't know why."
"Darling, you have to grow old and die."
"And you will be there?"
"I am with you always," she said.
"Then, why must you leave?"
"You must get on with living. That is the way … the way … just the way it works."
"At least then we'll be together."
Her humor rose through the sadness.
"Taking me for granted again?" she teased.
"Don't."
"I'm sorry. For me, it's just an instant. I am only sad because for you it will seem so long. My darling, life is but a fleeting ...."
"Wouldn't you rather make love than talk Shakespeare?"
She laughed her sultry laugh.
"That I would," she said.
"Irish? Are you an Irish ...."
His question was cut off with a kiss, yielding to probing of another kind. It was morning before he knew how well she had filled that structure. The whole camp was a vacuum. Without fuel for the big boat, Jet had to pole out of the basin in the pirogue. He left early that morning, knowing how long it would take.
He was still inside the basin when night overtook him. It was his first night without her and he was very weary, so the sorrow crept in very strong. But he recognized this sorrow as of a different sort, or perhaps he was reacting to the pain of separation differently. It was the sorrow felt at airplane terminals, not at gravesites or divorce court.
He reached Prairie Landing and the road to Rouen just before daybreak. Mooring his pirogue against the wharf of the marina in the silver-blue birth of day, he saw the fisherman. The outboard was silent and locked in the up-tilt position.
The fisherman was standing with a pushpole in his hand. He was looking right at Jet. Jet felt the chills, the gooseflesh frissons climbing along his arms and neck.
The fisherman lifted his free hand, as though to give a greeting or a salute. But, at that moment, the sun penetrated the membrane of the night and sent concentrated beams probing like a fan of glass-thread fingers. It startled Jet and he looked toward it. The tiny, crescent of pure, blood-red light borne on a tiny beam caught his retina and imprinted upon it a blue, glowing crescent which swept with his eye, his gaze, back to the bayou.
The fisherman was gone. He had disappeared as though he were just another shadow dispelled by the hot daylight of reality. All that was left to him was the scent of incense and honeysuckle that came on a breeze as soft as a hand stroking his cheek to test the stubble of his beard.
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