The One Eyed Jack of Hearts: Sea Paws (Part II)

Though laconic and somewhat inarticulate, Boudreaux revealed to me his story in bite-sized pieces, over several short trysts between our two houses. This was all under the watchful gaze of Pa, of course, who would be out smoking his pipe and clipping the shrubs to the low murmur of Perry Como or Bing Crosby. Ma was more encouraging. “Who’s your new boyfriend, Fancy?” she would tease in a tone that was as merry as a cricket’s, having spotted us in the shadows beside the house. Indeed, those first trysts were electric. So much so that my whispy white Maltese hair would hover above my head. But, as these things go, I have learned, electricity in love needs a source of energy, like a surfer needs the moon, as Pa would say, and without these, loses its charge.

Fleeing the scheming and unkind streets of the Big Easy, Boudreaux would become accustomed to life at sea. It was a second chance, and the sea seemed to beckon with hope and a lulling whisper. Stray and hungry on the docks at the Port of New Orleans, Boudreaux saw a chance, and he took it. It was a dark and steamy afternoon, hurricane weather. A freighter had come in, he noticed, and was being loaded with giant wooden boxes, hoisted by thick rope nets and hardened men. A line of crates waited in the shadow of an enormous, rusted hull. An open crate, an open door. A small hollow, like a miraculous portal, appeared among heaps of giant purple yams. “I jumped dat ship,” Boudreaux said. “Just dove into dat crate, Fancy, close my eyes, and waited, waited for some’in go down. ‘Give I strenth,’ I prayed. ‘Give-I-strenth.’” As he said this, Boudreaux scratched benignly at a patch of crab grass with his paw and seemed to look deep into it with his good eye, seeing something far off.

This first conversation was where I really noticed Boudreaux’s accent. It was a mellifluous ensemble of barks, accented with the sounds of the world, I imagined. Dreamy. When he said my name, he would stretch the ‘a’ in a way that would conjure the inebriated ping of steel drums. Each time I would hear him bark my name, I would bat my long-brown eyelashes like butterfly wings until his good eye would look away.

It wasn’t long before Boudreaux had his sea-paws. He had passed through an open door, and it had led him to a merciful new beginning. In short time he had gained the favor of a ship-hand, a man from the islands who had been with the Histria Agata for a couple of years. Red Decker was his name, and he had cut his teeth on the docks and in the back alleys of Veracruz, Port-Au-Prince and far off places like Macao and Colombo. The men, mostly Romanians, said he got the name Red after a knife fight in Phuket had left blood in his dreads that never washed out. He had won. “A good man, Fancy. Red was a good man.”

“So nice. He trit I so nice, “ said Boudreaux, his one eye glazed with longing. Life on the ship was safe and predictable, until the weather turned. Then it was awful. “But you git use to the ridim of the sea,” said Boudreaux. “It take time.” Red would always save a portion of his meals for Boudreaux, a few morsels of fried pork, curried in the flavors of the West Indies, scraps of bread soaked in pan drippings, a thimble or two of rum at nightfall. He was never hungry, he said, unless the men were. He would curl up at Red’s feet as the men laughed and drank and played Hearts. He was Red’s dog; he killed rats, and as far as the men were concerned, he had earned his passage.

While colorful and eventful and often exciting, life for Boudreaux, as he intimated it to me, took on a comfortable repetition--thanks to Red and the steady lumbering of the Histria Agata, and the peace of the open sea and its delectable promises. His needs were met. Life on the streets of the Big Easy was a torn up letter scattered along the Benguela Current, a once menacing reality now receding into the mist. Indeed, all was well. All was well until that steel gray day on St. Kitts two years after having hopped into that crate of yams at the Port of New Orleans.