The Hard Blue Sky Read Online Free PDF

the north side. Only one of the little fleet there was in, on its high white bow the red-lettered name, Hula Girl, the Boudreau boat. Hector Boudreau and his father, Archange, got it cheap ten years before over at Mobile. And when an accident crippled the old man’s hip, Hector bought him out too. That made the Hula Girl the biggest boat on the island to belong to a single man. So Hector was proud of her, kept her cleaner than most of the other boats, even scrubbed out the wheelhouse every month or so.
    When they worked, the Old Boudreau still went out with them. For a cripple he could move fast—and there were those who hadn’t given him much of a chance to walk again. It was two years ago now that he’d got caught between hull and dock. They hadn’t thought he’d live when they took him over to the hospital at Petit Prairie, him conscious all the way, but not making a sound, not answering anybody, not seeming to hear, but all wrapped up in a tight little cocoon, just him and the pain.
    He was tough and he could still work, but only the light stuff. Perique was the regular crew. He was just twenty, taller already than any man on the island, and very thin, with a long thin face, close-set brown eyes, and a heavy black beard that showed through shaving.
    The engine hatch was open now. Hector was squatting in the little patch of shade from the wheelhouse, splashing his face and neck with water from the bucket he had set there.
    “Where the hell you been at?”
    Perique shrugged. “You shoulda wait for me.”
    “I can’t wait around all day.”
    “Lets us see what you got.”
    “Man,” Hector said, “not me.”
    “You don’t want to do nothing more this evening?”
    Hector’s face was streaked with oil and his eyes were bloodshot. “I been at it an hour, and I’m ready to quit.”
    They put the cover back on the engine hatch. Hector emptied the bucket of water over the side. “Here it come—look out, you fish!”
    “Bet the heat don’t bother them,” Perique said.
    “How Annie doing?” Hector winked.
    “I don’t know, me.”
    “Hell, man,” Hector said, “don’t let it get you down none.”
    “It ain’t bothering me.”
    “They get like that sometime.”
    “Yea,” Perique said.
    “Only thing you can be sure of, it ain’t going to stay that way. They never stay one way.”
    “You don’t see me crying none.”
    Two small brown pelicans were swimming in a wide circle around the boat. Perique whistled at them.
    Hector said: “I seen you over there one day, day before yesterday maybe.”
    “Lay off,” Perique said flatly. And after a pause: “You sure you want to leave them nets like that?”
    “Yea,” Hector said, and rubbed the back of his neck. “You see the kids down by the cleaning-shed?”
    The shed was right on the end of the wharf—just some two-by-fours and a low roof built onto the side of the icehouse. Fish were gutted there, at a big long wood table. And there was a hand pump and a hose that went into the bay about fifty feet away—so the place could be washed clean in a minute, even if it only was with salt water.
    There was a bunch down there, in their mid-teens, most of them. Some were cleaning fish, the rest were watching and giggling and slapping each other on the back or trying to get a hand on a girl’s breast or thigh.
    “Look at the bucket there,” Hector said. “They got some croakers they don’t want. And they been putting lye in ’em and throwing it to the pelicans.”
    “Fi d’poutain,” Perique said softly.
    “I ain’t right fond of it neither.”
    “That plain make me sick,” Perique said, “when he swallows it and goes flopping around in those big old circles.”
    “You did it when you was a kid.”
    “Don’t make me like it more now.”
    The giggling got louder and the group crowded around the table.
    “Fi d’poutain,” Perique said again.
    “Sound like Charlie Alain,” Hector said, “and I bet he stuffing that fish right now.
    They