Louisiana Loses Its Cricket Hum

Amanda Davis

We who were not there cannot possibly understand how they came like flies: swarming up all of a sudden and buzzing over the horizon, thickening the sky with their heavy shadows. We were playing poker at Jimmy's-beer sweating, fans going round and round, the sound of pool clicking the moments by. Everyone admits it: we all felt the dense Louisiana air disappear and an icy breeze slice through. Andy said Damn, threw his cards on the table and headed for the jukebox: full house and James Brown. I knew it like cold fingers crawling up the back of my neck. Something is happening old boy but I just folded quietly and waited to see how the chips lay.

We did not deny that something was happening, but we also didn't let it thwart our game. I was down $27 and Jerry was up at least twice that. My gut burned from bar food and the hair on the back of my neck prickled and danced. I wondered who or what we'd invoked, but I didn't see any of it-deep in my liquidy bubble the world warbled on in its usual uneven trajectory, leaning this way and that, odd as ever.

But out there. If you were out there you might have seen it. Luther Binge said he saw the livestock and children proceed single file: the cows and chickens marching in a straight line, the kids frozen in prayer. Too much television, I thought, but who was I to say? I wasn't out there. I was swimming in my own inebriated world, muddling things further with the smooth darkness of booze, losing at poker, down a hand in life. I was waiting to be swept away by something, but hiding in Jimmy's bar so it couldn't find me if it wanted to.

There was nothing unusual about that night. It started like they always did. We gathered one by one and bought each other drinks. Shots of bourbon and sweaty beer chasers. We swaggered and lurched around until we had enough for cards and then we gathered around the table in the back-like any night-and dealt ourselves a hand, tossing insults like they were pebbles that could bounce off any surface and be swept away.

I should have been home.

Later Mamie Dixon described them like insects, said she thought the sky was full of giant wasps. I can't imagine a more terrifying sight but she says No, says, They were beautiful, really.

But that was the summer of days I closed the restaurant early and came home late, afraid to look Ellie in the eyes if she was up. I wanted nothing to come between me and the inevitable fact of her departure, which I felt lurking on the horizon like the evening's dull hum. I drank until I had buried the soupiness of things: that the elements of my life had remained the same for as long as I could remember, that we made sense only up to a point, that something very wrong was happening all around me, something unnamable and steady. Rolling up on me with the unshakeable nature of time and history and the streaming generations, all coming one after the other like a rush of water, like a flood of humanity. And like this I was overcome.

At Jimmy's we didn't talk this way. Alan racked and I broke and the sound of me connecting, of me scattering balls to all the corners of that green felt earth was as satisfying as anything I knew. Icy cold beer and music that made our heads nod, our hips swing and grunt in agreement. I never knew then what I needed to know. I never knew that misery leaks like a terrible viscous thing. I never knew that I was able to poison and pollute, nor the stain my unhappiness could create. I never knew what left me lurching toward emptiness, a skeptic looking for proof of abandonment.

I remember coming home, after. Walking the path to my house, it was dark: all the streetlights blown out, though what worried me was not the blank night sky or the feeling that something had just been there, but the dark of my house. That's what worried me. Each step closer I got, the clench on my stomach tightened until at the porch steps I felt myself shaking, and knew if I went in I wouldn't like what I'd find: kitchen light out and Ellie not there.

I slept under pine trees out near Hubert Hall's yard. I always found I moved toward them when something went wrong. Found their lawn the best place to sleep off a drunk. It seemed to me they led a graced life, Hubert and Betsy and their four perfect children. Their plants flourished, their windows shined. I doubted they had cavities, or rashes, or any other side effects of life, any one of them.

We had no kids. We had tried everything, but what was wrong with us was less nature and more will. How could I bring a baby into a world I felt deteriorating? How could I say I loved someone if I believed that cataclysmic things would find us? Ellie tried to drag me to church with her but I wouldn't go. I don't believe, I told her, What's the point? She looked away then. out the window or up at the ceiling. Who you asking for help? I muttered, but when she asked what I'd said, I mumbled, Nothing.

I woke to ants crawling on my face and the peeping whispers of the twin Hall boys, blond and saucer-eyed, poking my legs. I rose and brushed myself free, creaking with the stiffness of a night spent on the ground. The air was light, the day warm. The open sunlight seemed like a redemption of everything, as if to prove something dark couldn't fly to a land as lovely as ours.

Blinking in the light, I made my slow way up the slope to my house. There were brass bands playing in the back of my head and there was Ellie, rocking on the porch. One look at her face told me everything was different than before, but I chose to ignore that. I smiled like any other day and sat beside her on the swing.

We tossed gently, back and forth, through the cacophony of living things calling to each other. If I could have held the moment in my palm it would have been a shiny bead, precious, carried everywhere for good luck. Off in the distance I saw Len Belton mowing his lawn. Ellie put her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes. We still hadn't spoken. I pushed off a little on the porch and we swung back and forth.

And I knew. Her whole body was tense, anxiety crackled in her like lightening. I could feel it coming off her in waves and it turned everything in me cold.

There's something I have to tell you, Ellie said.

I smiled, a stiff jerk of the lips, but held my breath and couldn't speak. Something is very very wrong, she said.

In front of us spread the landscape of our lives: the slope of the hill down our yard to the culdesac. The Hall's house to the left of us the Winterson's to the right. Off in the distance was the spire of the First Congregational Church of the Lord and beyond that Jimmy's bar. There was a school farther up the road, people, lives. There was the restaurant I managed, the pool we swam in, the library that lent me ideas. There were trees: pine, willow, oak, flowers, honeysuckle, bees. All of it spread from the axis of us into a swirl of life here on earth at that moment. All of it.

I know you know it, she said. You slept outside, seems like you're aware of something, but we have to talk now, Kenny, we have to.

It's funny how knowing everything is about to up and tumble away from you turns the world rich, nauseating colors. Background sounds rise up and roar at you, sink down and envelop you. I felt it all like a gasp for air.

UFOs, I said. What happened last night?

It's not what happened last night, she said. It's a lot bigger than that.

I still had my arm around her and her head rested on my shoulder. No, I whispered and kissed her on the forehead. We can work it out, El. We always do.

She sat up and curled herself into a little ball on the other end of the swing, which jerked from side to side.

I don't think so, she said, Really.

I couldn't look at her. The sky threatened to fall down. Trees tried to pull up their roots.  You're just confused.

I don't want to be your wife anymore, Kenny, she said and undid ten years like they were nothing more than ribbon.

You don't mean that, I said and stood up. The sky had darkened, the wind picked up.

But it tumbled out of her, black and thick: I don't want to wake up to hear you showering, don't want to find your hairs in the bathroom, your laundry mixed in with mine. I don't want to hear you late-night stumbling drunk or watch you reading book after book and still managing the stupid restaurant.

I couldn't breathe but I don't exactly remember what happened next. She was gone when I came to, lying on the porch. She must have stepped over me to leave. I heard the last thing she said, though: I'm in love with someone else.

I couldn't quite bear to go inside so I sat on the steps while the rain threatened to come. Nothing felt like it belonged to me. Jay Winterson came out his back door with a garbage bag. He waved and started up the hill.

Hear about the visitors? he hollered.

I nodded but my throat felt tiny.

Rona says the kids were frozen stiff. She wants them to draw me pictures, he yelled, scratching the place where his hair was thinning. Wants the kids to draw the whole thing. Keeps saying, show daddy! Show daddy what it's all about.

I didn't see a thing, Jay, I shouted back. My voice cracked.

He laughed and scratched his head again. Andy phoned earlier. Said Gloria was all packed and missing when he got up this morning.

He shifted from one foot to the other, took a deep breath before spitting it out. You think whatever it was is coming back?

I stared at him as wind began to whip at the trees of our neighborhood.

I'm at a loss here, I told him.

What? he called. It was getting harder to hear over the weather. He was fifteen feet away with a bag of trash hollering to me. I waited for fire to sweep through or the earth to open up like a bottomless cavern and swallow us all, but it just began, gently, to rain.

Ellie's left me, Jay, I called down. I think I'd better go inside.

I rose unsteadily and reached for the railing. Jay looked uneasy and took a step back.  Aw, Kenny, he said. Aw, and stood there rocking back and forth on his heels, hands stuffed in his pockets like a grade school kid.

Hey listen, you call us if you need anything, he finally shouted and turned to go.

None of it mattered, none of it. I could have been a better this or that, I could have spread myself through the world in a more generous manner. I could have loved Ellie with all of me but she still might have left. The silence of my life was thorough and deafening. I watched him walk away and wished for something in me to erupt.

I was in the wrong place when it happened, is all. They had to come back. I wanted them to sweep through our town again and freeze whoever they needed to get to me. I wanted them to shatter everything I knew so I would wake wherever I woke with my world new and pink and fresh. I sat in the dim gray kitchen while the rain beat down and wished, with all the hope and whiskey I had left, for the force of their anger, the size of their hate; for them to come back and land on my house.

I went back out on the porch. The rain had picked up and it blew in sheets now. Trees bent, the sky was the eerie yellow-gray of southern storms. I stood on the steps rocking back and forth. Return! I hollered into the whirling wind. Come back you cowardly bastards! I was weeping then, wet and empty. How I must look to them: a small drunk man sobbing on a tiny porch. You! I begged with everything I had, as loud as I could. How can you expect us to pray to you?

© 2001 by Amanda Davis

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