Natchitoches

by J.L. Mackey

The fog was coming in heavy, heavier than usual for Natchitoches that time of year. Slim watched it coalesce and hang, make specters of man and machine. Blinking neon turned to dull drunk haze. Ragged steel and dirt and bare trees and watery ditches given a vague smoothness. The dull roar of the highway and jake brakes pushing through the gray. The cold breeze came with it and made Slim turn his collar up.
As it was and perhaps always would be. A pine forever falling in the dark with no one to hear its swampy crash. Slim took a drag of his Marlboro and tried to walk back through time. New Orleans was the star, a prized whore who danced on command, bought and paid for by Yankees, but Natchitoches was the eldest sister of them all, sitting in the corner in her quiet, tattered state, gaining an inch but losing a foot against the rust and rot, humid time creeping into everything. Maybe even since the French Canadians three hundred years ago, who met only muddy cypress knees and unblinking horrors in the dark water, but who stayed, anyhow. And now Slim was waiting to be picked up by Bobby in his piece of shit car that had also been dying since forever.
Bobby who was always yelling at someone over the phone in Creole over top of the local zydeco station. Slim didn’t know the language. His grandmother used to speak it to him in endless streams when he was a child, but it was lost to the many years, washed down the Red River like so many other things. Bobby who had worked at the paper mill for twenty years, but fancied himself a shrimp boat captain at heart, always rambling about “getting back on the water” while being covered in lime dust and pulp shavings accumulated from second shift. Slim told him he ought to, that he wasn’t getting any younger. Bobby always had something to say about money and kids. As though the union pay wasn’t good and his wife wasn’t tending the house and children all day.
The sun began to appear through the trees as diffuse gold, giving things perhaps more gleam than they deserved. A moment of El Dorado before it evaporated back to the mythic. The day felt right. The cosmos might align and the tides might come favorably. It was December 17th. Slim wasn’t a vodouisant, but he was willing to borrow a little luck.
The cold diesels and bleary eyes, cloaked in camouflage and neon, receded with their coffee and donuts and crawdad meatpies to job sites and jon boats. In their wake hung thick fumes and the piss stench of exhaust fluid. Slim was about to bring a dying flame to another cigarette when Bobby pulled in. His car, old enough to have antique plates but which Bobby “didn’t give a shit about”, was burning oil, puffing blue smoke from the tailpipe. On the back floorboard was a perennial quart of oil. Slim waves, gets in, and has to slam the door several times in order for the latch to hold.
“What’s it like, driving around a deathtrap?”
“Familiar.”
“Uh.”