Billy
Fontenot
They could have filmed It’s a Wonderful Life in my hometown.
Not that Old Creek was picturesque. Or even
quaint. But you knew Robert’s Barber Shop opened at five each morning. And
every farmer in town dropped by Bud Morel’s garage before sunrise to watch the
farm report and drink a free cup of coffee. School buses rolled at seven. Daily
Mass at seven-thirty. At noon, the fire siren wailed. Every day.
It was a solid little town. Constant.
Early fall evenings in Old Creek were peaceful,
orchestrated. Every home on every street staged a vignette so bucolic it could
have been scripted by Garrison Keillor. Dinner dishes were set, cleared, and
washed a good hour before sunset, a time adults spent rocking on front porches
with family and friends, discussing work that had been completed and plans for
work to be undertaken.
The rare conscientious children who’d already
finished their homework leapt off the wooden porches into a purple-orange Old
Creek sky to play hide and seek or to swing and slide in the park. Some raced
bikes in the dirt around green fields of corn and milo surrounding town. Night
would come soon enough, which meant forced bedtimes and tomorrow’s inevitable
school day.
The older children of Old Creek, teenagers who
long ago discovered ways around homework at night, spent the hours before sleep
on telephones or smoking behind the Community Grocery, intoxicated with the
youthful world they believed so foreign to parents’ knowledge and experience.
My own mother and father, who could pass for
Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart, still lived in the same tiny white house they’d
built in 1963 where Littel Street met Park Boulevard. They spent early fall
evenings in our wood porch swings with my Aunt Pat (Ida Lupino) and Uncle
Claude (Gabby Hayes), who would amble over from their red brick house after
dinner to discuss what they’d just eaten.
I fell into none of the common Old Creek
categories. Twenty-six years old, I’d been neither a child nor a teenager for
many years, and I was still single—no wife or child to occupy my evenings with
either the fun or tasks of family life. I was an oddity in such a farm town.
Most days, around six-thirty or seven, I walked to my parents’ home and ate
dinner with them. My one-room apartment was ten minutes away on foot.
Dinner was always a pleasant, quiet time at my
parents’ home—full of warm bread and gravy, spiced meats on white rice with
iced tea, my grandmother’s flowered bowls and heavy sighs of satisfaction—and I
did not mind my parents’ repetitive, uneventful table conversation:
“Did you poison the fire ant hills in the back
yard?”
“Yes, last week, I told you. More potatoes.”
“I can’t work in the garden if I’m slapping fire
ants off my ankles.”
It was after the meal that I didn’t know what to
do with myself. Sitting on the porch with my mother and father, talking and
watching others talking on other porches, seemed a pleasant but somewhat
embarrassing way to spend my evenings, as I was nowhere near their age and at
least forty years younger than my aunt and uncle. I was much too old to jump
off the porch to run and play or even to hang out with teenagers at the
Community Grocery, though I had done just that well into my twenties, stopping
only after it became too obviously creepy. And the thought of spending an
evening in my own apartment, alone, watching sit-coms, made me feel ashamed, as
did the fact that there was no one to call on the telephone. And that no one
was calling me.
My solution on such early fall evenings in Old
Creek was to assume the adult persona of a man whose needs and desires are so
unfulfilled his pain can only be endured through inebriation. Humphrey Bogart
in middle America.
“Going out?” my father asked each night as I
walked onto the porch from the kitchen, closing the screen door gently behind
me so it would not slam.
“For a bit,” I replied, flipping up the collar of
my peacoat. Bogart and Stewart in a scene from the new film Monotonous.
There were only two places to go in Old Creek
after nightfall. The “white” bar was closer to my parents’ house, but I simply
refused to be seen with other grown men in a place called Little Pete’s. The
“black” bar had the right name for my nightly mission: El Dorado. The gilded
one. It was owned by a friend of mine and stood at the bottom of Bank Hill, Old
Creek’s southern border.
From the top of Bank Hill, hidden by a few dozen
pine trees, I could view all the doings of an Old Creek evening. One by one
porch lights flicked on after sunset, throwing slim silhouettes onto lawns in
pools of yellow light. A last-ditch effort to keep the little town alive. A
battle against starlight.
I took no side in the fight. From my perch I
heard children calling to each other above squealing bicycle tires and scratching
skateboard wheels, rocks fired from slingshots pinging against the metal hull
of the lime green water tower. The church bells at St. Bridget’s chimed a hymn
every thirty minutes, while First Baptist across town sat tall and silent in
the twilight, too dignified to join in song. Once or twice a year, from the
east side of town, a window at Old Creek High would shatter in the darkness,
immediately followed by the sound of Principal Cassimer’s 1981 Monte Carlo
revving in his garage.
When it was dark enough to see the lights of
Santa Clara on the northern horizon, the mothers of Old Creek would fling open
their screen doors and, hands cupped to mouths, belt out a nightly call to
their children, who were scattered unseen across the countryside:
“Rick-eee!” “Ter-reee! “Cal-vin!” “Eman-yoo-el!”
I always cringed for that poor kid Emanuel, could
just see him stomping up the porch steps to his waiting mother: “Aw, Mom, how
many times do I have to tell you? Call me Manny—all
my friends call me Manny.”
“Manny? You call yourself Manny today and in ten
years you’ll be pumping gas for a living.”
Then all the screen doors across town would whack
shut like an unrehearsed drum corps, and Old Creek would turn itself over to
the chirping of crickets, which could become deafening if one sat still in the
darkness long enough. They would take up the battle against the night.
I would get a drink.
Zee-Zee, the owner of the El Dorado on Second
Street, once asked me why I spent most nights getting drunk at his place,
rather than going out with anybody. Any women. The bar—checkered tablecloths,
exposed brick walls, beamed ceilings—had been his father’s proud creation in
the late 1960's.
“You don’t get tired being alone all the time?”
Zee-Zee had asked in his quick, clipped delivery, polishing the wine-colored
tumblers stacked in pyramids behind the bar. Sidney Poitier with a change belt.
I didn’t want to lie to Zee-Zee, one of the few
people I could honestly call friend—we’d played together on the Old Creek High
basketball team. But I didn’t want to tell him the truth either. So I told him
I was waiting for someone special, which was somewhat deceptive but not
technically a lie, and he seemed content with the answer.
“I never knew you were so hard to satisfy, Dave,”
he’d said, snapping his bleached white rag in the air before grabbing another
tumbler. Zee-Zee, whose real name is Terence, got married five years ago and
has two children, a boy and a girl.
I slowly pushed an empty beer mug across the oak
bar toward him with my ring finger, which wore no ring. “Can I have another
beer. Please?”
In truth, I was waiting for Karyn Hernandez. I
was waiting for Karyn Hernandez to come home to Old Creek and marry me.
Yesterday, she came home. . . .
* * * * * * *
Go
to Creative Writing Home Page
Go to English
Department Home Page
This site designed and maintained by The Creative Writing
Concentration of the English Department of the University of Louisiana at
Lafayette.
To contact us by mail: Director of Creative Writing, English
Department, Box 44691, UL-Lafayette, Lafayette LA 70504-4691; by telephone,
337-482-5478;
by email, jlm8047@louisiana.edu.
Last updated: May 1, 2001.