The Thanatos Syndrome

walking, is paying no attention.
    â€œNo, I don’t,” I say.
    â€œHe’s only got about a foot of room inside, right?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œYou know what he does—I saw him.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThat sucker flies right in and brakes in the one foot of room inside, like this,” says the uncle, suddenly flaring out his elbows like braking wings. “I’ve seen him! You want to see him? Let’s
    go.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œNot now, Uncle,” says Lucy.

2. LUCY AND I SIT on the gallery watching the sun go down across the levee through the oaks of the alley, making winks and gleams and casting long shafts of foggy yellow light. She smokes too much, long Picayunes, often plucks a tobacco grain from the tip of her tongue, looks at it.
    Lucy fixes toddies of nearly straight bourbon in crystal goblets the size of a mason jar. My nose is running. Perhaps the toddies will help. I haven’t had a toddy for years. An eighteenth-century traveler once wrote of Feliciana and Pantherburn: “There is always at one’s elbow a smiling retainer ready with a toddy or a comfit.” What’s a comfit?
    Beyond the oaks, the truncated cone of the Grand Mer facility rises as insubstantial as a cloud in the sunset. A pennant of vapor is fastened to its summit like the cloud on Everest.
    We sit in rocking chairs.
    â€œWell now,” I say after a long drink of the strong, sweet bourbon. My nose stops running.
    â€œYes indeed,” says Lucy.
    A duck is calling overhead.
    â€œIs that the uncle?”
    â€œYes.”
    Footsteps go back and forth on the upper gallery. The quacking is followed by a chuckling sound.
    â€œIs he talking to somebody?”
    â€œNo, he’s practicing his duck calls. He was runner-up in the Arkansas nationals last year. That’s the feeding call he’s doing now. He does it with his fingers. He’s been doing it six hours a day since January.
    â€œI see.” I take another long pull. The bourbon is so good it doesn’t need sugar. “I was wondering why you wanted me to come.”
    â€œI want you to stay here while Ellen’s gone. It’s all right with Ellen. I asked her.”
    I look at her quickly. Is she trying to tell me something? She is. She rocks forward in her chair to look back at me, shading her eyes against the sun. “What if I were to tell you that it is absolutely all right for you to be here? Would you take that on faith without further explanation?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œDo you want me to explain further?”
    â€œNo.”
    She looks at me along her cheek, eyes hooded.
    I take another drink. “I appreciate it, but I’m fine. Hudeen’s taking good care of me.”
    â€œNot as good as I could.”
    â€œI’m sure of that.”
    â€œNo, I’m also selfish. Just now I think I can help you with your syndrome. I have an idea about it. And just now I also need you. You’re my only relative besides him”—her eyes go up—“and he’s driving me nuts. He needs you too. It’s all right for you to stay. Vergil thought you were my father.”
    â€œVergil?”
    â€œYou remember Vergil. He’s my only help on the farm, he and Carrie, his mother. You remember him. He remembers you. He drives the tractor, does everything. Unfortunately, I have to pay him a fortune. Nobody gave him to me. Will you stay?”
    â€œYou mean tonight or—?”
    â€œSpeak of the devil.”
    Vergil has come onto the gallery behind us.
    I had known him as a child, but do not recognize him. His father, laid up in a mobile home by the gate and living on the Medicaid Lucy got him, I remember as a hale, golden-skinned Ezio Pinza, fisherman and trapper, hearty and big-chested, too big—he had emphysema even then. They, the Bons, are known hereabouts as freejacks, meaning free persons of color, freed, the story goes, by Andrew Jackson for services rendered in the Battle of New Orleans. More likely, they’re simply descendants of the quadroons and octoroons of New Orleans. A proud and reticent people, often blue-eyed and whiter than white, many could “pass” if they chose but mainly choose not to, choose, rather, to stay put in small contained bayou communities.
    Vergil Bon, Jr., is another cup of tea. He’s got the off-white skin, black eyes, and straight black Indian hair of his mother, but he wears, somewhat