Journeys

by Extra

Copyright to the author 2001

July 3, 1970

Dull day today Journal. If it weren't for the fact that Mrs. Boutte said a writer should keep a daily journal, I probably wouldn't have written anything. Just the usual, get up, go to school, go to work, come home, watch a little TV, go to bed. Even John hasn't called. I wonder if my life will be this dull when I've finished college, and I'm forced into the "real world", as daddy says.

Tomorrow I'm going fishing with Susan--my first trip this year. I'm looking forward to it. I've missed the peace and quiet of time spent with rod in hand, and with the schoolwork, part-time job, and all, I haven't spent much time with Sue. I've missed her.

I went to a party for Peter Norbert today. He leaves to go back to Ft. Polk tomorrow, and then he's shipping out to Viet Nam. I hope he survives this. God, I don't even like to think about it.

Chapter 1

It was sultry. The sun sulked briefly behind the only cloud in the sky, emerging to beam down on the one boat on the lake, its two occupants fishing beneath a shade giving canopy. A hawk drew lazy loops within its yellow dazzle, seemingly unconcerned with the egret searching for food in the shade of a tree. Moss hung limply from branches as though wilted by the sun, and the silence was broken by an occasional swish of water caused by some life form below it.

"Hear that?" Susan asked, giving her line a gentle pop with her wrist.

"What? I didn't hear anything," Andree grinned. Fishing was a sport the two had enjoyed from childhood, with parents, siblings, and friends willing participants; but even more than the tug at the end of the line, the two friends enjoyed the quiet commune with nature. This was a game they played, a verbal ritual connecting past and present, a value placed on these moments stolen from busy lives.

"Yes. Silence. It's wonderful."

"Yeah." Andree's word faded into the stillness, and it enveloped them. She closed her eyes, breathing in the serenity, and hearing the soft whir of Susan retrieving her line.

"They don't seem to like these shad much," complained Susan. "I think I'll try another bait."

"Mmmmm," agreed Andree, unwilling to break her reverie with the hassle of words. Her line had only an empty hook on its end, so unwilling was she to interrupt her peace to struggle with a fish. She could hear Susan rummaging in the tackle box, and then a loud crash cut through the quiet.

"Darn! I dropped the tackle box. Now everything's all tangled."

"SSSSHHHH!" hissed Andree. "You'll scare the fish."

"To hell with the fish! The tackle's a mess."

CRACK! THUMP!

The sound echoed across the lake and the birds flew into the warm, humid air. Andree jumped, startled by it.

"What the hell was that?" she said, turning around. Susan lay at Andree's feet, her short, blond hair red with blood from the cut her head received when she fell, her chest bleeding from a different type of wound just below her left breast.

"Sue!" Andree kneeled next to her, eyes scanning the shore. She thought she could smell gunpowder. Was someone shooting at them? Why? If she could smell it, how close were they?

"Susan!" To her untrained eye, blood seemed to be pouring rapidly from the wound. She tilted Susan gently. No blood on her back. If it was a shot, the bullet was still in her.

"Don't panic," Andree told herself aloud. She tried to think. It had been so long since that first aid course. She vaguely remembered something about pressure and moved quickly between the boat's storage compartments searching for bandages of some sort. Ripping open Susan's blouse, she covered the oozing circle with layers of clean gauze. In a corner near the motor, she saw an old but clean looking T-shirt. Using her teeth to tear a hole into the shirt, she ripped it into strips that she tied together until she could wrap one long strip around Susan's body.

"Think, Andree, think," she muttered as she searched for something to apply pressure. Her eyes fell on the copy of Shakespeare's Tragedies from which she had been reading. Placing the book over the gauze, she secured it tightly with the strip she had created. Susan's eyes opened.

"Sue, how do we get back home? I don't know this area. You've got to help me."

Susan could hear Andree's voice as though from some great distance. The glare of the sun alternated with a face whose lips moved but whose words were garbled. She could feel a sharp pain in her chest, and it was difficult to breathe. Closing her pale blue eyes to all of it, the bright sun, the face, the pain, she drifted again into the cool blackness.

"Sue! O, God!" Andree realized Susan would be of no help. She tried to remember the landmarks Susan had pointed out as they had traveled bayous, canals, and bays to the lake. If she could remember them and reverse the order, she might be able to get back to the dock. Okay. She had seen Sue start this motor a thousand times. Like a car. Turn the key and put in drive. Yes! The motor growled, and the boat lurched forward. Farther down the lake was a buoy, and near it was the bayou from which they entered the lake. The journey would begin there.

Andree, being an inexperienced driver, drove the boat recklessly at top speed, racing through the water, bumping over anything in her path. Soon she was there, the partially sunken shrimp boat a bookmark for readers of the lake. She turned into a canal. An abandoned camp, half destroyed by the last hurricane, appeared ten minutes later. This is the right direction. A fork. From which bayou had they come? Easing off the throttle, she studied them one by one. She saw no recognizable landmarks.

Blood had saturated the gauze and was seeping into the book cover and trickling down Susan's stomach. "Help me, God, help me," Andree whispered. If she didn't hurry, Susan might bleed to death. She put the boat in reverse and moved to where she could see both openings. She couldn't remember seeing a fork, so she may have been looking at the scenery to her right. Gunning the motor, she raced down the waterway on her left. She traveled several miles when a trawler entered from a canal on her right, and she sped to reach them, screaming for them to stop. The noise of the motors drowned the sound of her voice. Finally, a young man turned to get something and saw her frantically waving. He waved back, unconcerned, and she continued her signal when he again looked in her direction. Tapping the shoulder of an older man, and he pointed to Andree. The trawler stopped its engines, and Andree reciprocated, allowing her boat to drift slowly towards the fishermen.

"My friend's been hurt. I'm trying to get back to Cocodrie. Can you help me?"

"Cher, you need to go faster dan dat," the old man said in his flat, Cajun accent. He picked up a microphone and stared down at Susan. "Jerry here will get you dere, and I'll call to get ya some help."

Jerry jumped into the boat with the two young women. "Brace yourself," he said to Andree. The boat lurched forward with a thrust that almost landed her on the floor. Andree settled onto the deck, cradling Sue's head in her lap. Wind whipped past her head so quickly, Andree's eyes began to water. Except for the boat bouncing roughly over small ripples and wakes, she would have thought they were flying. True to the older man's words, Jerry got them quickly to the dock, and an ambulance was waiting for them.

Andree watched as the paramedics hovered over Susan, shoving I. V. needles into her arms and an oxygen mask over her face, "stabilizing her," as they said. Finally, lifting the stretcher, they placed her into the vehicle.

"Do you want to ride with her?" asked one of the men.

Yes, she did, but she couldn't leave the boat behind. "No, I'll meet you at the hospital."

The same man asked for information about Susan and then to see Andree's driver's license. He took that number and the number of the car license. She knew it was so they could find her just in case she didn't follow them. After all, this was a shooting.

Andree got into the car. Jerry had already loaded the boat onto the trailer and was waiting for her to return.

"Thanks. I don't think we'd have made it without your help."

Jerry looked briefly at his feet and nodded. "I hope your friend will be all right."

"Me too."

It was a long drive to the hospital. Andree wasn't used to pulling a boat, and she struggled to keep it on her side of the road. Her lack of experience and her shaking hands slowed her down. As she pulled up to the emergency room, she saw the police car. She knew it had to be for her. Bayou Point was a small town, and there simply wasn't much in the way of crime. She had just stopped the car when two policemen, a tall, mature sergeant, and a thin, young private, approached her.

"Aren't you Martin Chauvin's daughter?" the older officer questioned as she stood alongside the vehicle.

"Yes, sir. Hi, Claude," she said, turning to the private. The younger man was a former high school classmate.

"I know your upset right now, Andree. It is Andree, isn't it?"

She responded with a nod.

"I know you want to see your friend, but we really need to ask you a few questions first. The doctors are with her now, and you couldn't be in the room anyway."

The slender brunette ran her hand through her dark brown locks and nodded again. It was obvious to Andree that Sergeant Trosclair was trying to be gentle as he probed with questions and wrote the information she gave him on a small pad, and she could see the concern in his eyes as she stood wringing her hands. Claude, in the meantime, was doing an efficient examination of the car and boat.

"Sergeant, over here."

The other officer and Andree joined Claude. Tangled in the confusion of lures, weights, and fishing line in the tackle box was a thirty-eight caliber handgun. The leads from the lures had ensnared the gun and its trigger. The safety was off, and the gun smelled of powder.

"We'll talk to your friend later, Miss Chauvin. But I think we know what happened."

Andree looked into the box. While trying to untangle the tackle, Susan must have pulled on the ensnaring lines with enough force to fire the gun. It surprised her, as it would take more than a casual pull to move the trigger.

She felt incredibly small next to the tall figure dressed in the blue of Bayou Point's finest. The rim of his hat shaded his eyes, and she could smell the leather of his holster.

"Andree, I'll have to take the box and gun," he said, tearing off a piece of paper and giving it to her. "Here's a receipt. Your friend or her family will probably be able to pick them up at the station in a few days." He must have noticed her trembling hands. "If you'd like, Claude can park the car and boat for you, or he can drive it, and I'll follow you home."

Sometimes it was nice to live in a small town. "Thanks," she said, handing short, slender Claude the keys. He didn't look much older than she. "I'd like to check on Susan before I go home." Almost to herself she added, "Why would she have a gun in her tackle box?"

"Actually," said the sergeant, "it's pretty common around here to carry a hand gun or rifle on a boat. It's for protection. Out on the water, you're exposed. It's rare that anything happens, but you never know, and there are wild animals out there. Some human animals, too."

Andree nodded wearily. Even small towns had a criminal element, and in the outlying swamps, there were sometimes men who thought they owned the public lands and waterways. She watched as Claude parallel-parked car and boat in a large space between two other vehicles and returned her keys. The young woman thanked him, and he smiled, raising his hand briefly to the rim of his hat.

He'd have made a good Audie Murphy, she thought as she started to the emergency room door. When she asked for Susan, the staff put her through a second inquisition, until finally, she was sent to the waiting room. Waiting room was the proper terminology. Both she and the hospital were trying to contact Susan's parents; and in between trips to the pay phone, the hands on the clock seemed to be frozen in position. She waited, fear gnawing at her gut, the fear she should have felt hours ago, but which she willed in place trying to get Susan to safety. Not knowing how long she could hold it off, she longed to be home where she could fall apart in privacy.

"Andree!" A voice called from the other end of the hall. It was Mrs. McKeon, Susan's mother.

How long had it been? Andree looked at her watch. Almost an hour since she called and no one answered. The hospital must have finally reached the McKeon's. Exiting from the emergency treatment area, they were upon her, Mrs. McKeon hugging her, bombarding her with questions that she tried to answer while desperately clinging to her composure.

"Thank you. Thank you for saving Susan. If she'd have been out there alone…," the older woman's voice cracked. "She's so hard headed. That gun. I told her she didn't need a gun on the boat. She's so hard headed." She hugged Andree again. "Thank you."

Andree stepped back, allowing her eyes to rest on a pair of worried faces. Susan was a late in life baby arriving after two teenage brothers who played as roughly with their much younger sister as with they did with their buddies. The McKeons were older than her parents and those of her friends. Mrs. McKeon had artificially light blond hair with dark brows and eyes while Mr. McKeon's blue eyes peered out from beneath gray brows and a shock of white hair. Their faces, while not unusually lined, showed their 60 plus years, and at this moment, seemed much older.

"She's in surgery now," he said.

"Surgery? I didn't know she was in surgery."

"You can wait with us, Andree," offered Mrs. McKeon, "but you're pale. You really look like you need to go home."

The young woman nodded. "But please call me and let me know how she is when she gets out."

"Tom will bring you home." She signaled her husband.

"No. Mr. McKeon needs to be here. I'll walk. It's not far."

Mrs. McKeon studied Andree. "No, you won't walk. I'll get a cab for you."

Andree accepted with no argument. She wanted to go home, to be in the seclusion of her own room, waiting for the phone call. When she finally placed her key into her door lock, a sense of relief filled her, but her entire body began to quake.

'Just a little farther,' she told herself.

Voices emanated from the den.

"I'm home."

"Hi," her dad called, looking up from the television. "Mom and Kathleen are at the mall. How was the fishing?"

"Can we talk later?" she said half-heartedly, not wanting to go into the details. Tomorrow would be soon enough. "I…I really want to take a shower." She ran to her room, and opening the drawer for fresh clothing, noticed the picture on her dresser. Her fingers gently grazed the edge of the frame. It was of the four of them, she and her friends, young women filled with the promise of tomorrow. It was too soon for death to snatch one of them away.

Grabbing her radio and robe, she locked herself in the bathroom. Turning up the volume, she set the radio on the floor near the door, and stepped into the shower. Placing both hands on the cold tile wall, she stood under the flow of water, feeling it washing the sweat and stink of the bayou from her body. Easing herself to the shower floor, she wrapped her arms around her body and began to sob. At last she could purge the fear.