Thrown-away Child

Violet would go off to work or shopping or visiting with her friends. Perry would straighten up the kitchen and do the dishes, and anything else that needed doing: dusting, sweeping, mopping, window washing, laundry—whatever. He would then take a long nap afterward, since he had been up all night watching television.
    Most often when Violet returned home in the afternoon, Perry would be gone out someplace with his TV set left running—like today, the day Ruby was coming home.
     

SIX

    He would sit for hours staring at the mud-brown Mississippi. He used to talk to the old-timers, but Hassie Pinkney had whispered it around that Perry was an escaped convict. And then everybody avoided Perry, leaving him to stare at the river alone. Nobody in the neighborhood needed additional troubles.
    It was true that he had been a convict. But not an escaped convict. In forty-seven years of life, Perry Duclat had yet to escape any of the calamities and sorrows that had come his way.
    On days not spent by the levee, Perry stopped by the little cottage in the no-name dirt lane where his Aunt Violet and his late Uncle Willis used to live. When he was a boy, his mother had left Perry in the cottage for days and weeks at a time. An old man with a wooden leg by the name of Newcombe was the tenant now. Perry would do a few chores for Newcombe in return for a little money and, more importantly to Perry, permission to sit out on the back steps of the house.
    Perry might spend a whole afternoon reading a book on the back steps, or writing. Always when he sat on those steps, he was reminded of the stories Uncle Willis and Aunt Violet had told the family about their losing title to the cottage to Minister Zebediah Tilton; he remembered happiness here as a little boy, tagging after his faltering uncle. Hassie Pinkney, who considered writing and book reading highly suspicious, would spy on him from her neighboring kitchen window. Perry sensed it. He would look up quickly every so often, and laugh when Miss Hassie ducked out of sight.
    This particular afternoon, Perry was at the levee, waiting for somebody who said he would be there at two o’clock. Only now it was ten past three. Not far away, at Edward H. Phillips Elementary School, the kids were letting out for the day. Their rambunctious voices were drawing nearer.
    Perry was smoking cigarettes and staring at the river as usual, figuring the meeting with Cletus Tyler was off. He sat in his customary place—a jetty of concrete as pocked and smoky yellow as the stone walls of the Louisiana State Penitentiary up at Angola, where he and Cletus had been cell mates. Nobody but us brothers caged up there in a prison town named for an African country. Coincidence?
    And was it coincidence that brought Cletus into Shug’s that one day about a month ago?
    Under the rules of parole, Perry was not supposed to knowingly fraternize with ex-convicts—definitely not with ex-cell mates. The same went for Cletus, of course. But the two ignored the rules that day. Up at Angola, they had also regularly ignored the rule about conversation in the cells after lights-out time. Inmates had one hour for chatting in the dark. But Perry and Cletus would go on whispering far longer than that. Usually, it would be Perry telling Cletus about the latest book he had read. Cletus was nearly illiterate, and so he was interested in hearing about most anything Perry had to say.
    Like many convicts, Perry was obsessed with the subject of luck. One night after their bunk talk had died down to whispers, Perry said to Cletus, “I bet nobody on the outside has a clue how close they are to lying right here in the dark with us.”
    “Don’t know as I follow that.”
    “A basketball player jumps higher than an insurance man.” Perry pronounced it insurance. “Am I right?”
    “You right.”
    “And one basketball player can jump higher than another one.”
    “That’s true.”
    “But there’s a certain height no man’s ever going to jump. When you think about it, that height’s pretty low, really.”
    Cletus thought about it. Perry could hear him scratching his head in the dark. “Yeah, I guess,” Cletus said, with a hitch of confusion in his voice. “You saying all luck is bad luck?”
    “Luck is probably an incomprehensible thing, that’s what I’m saying. I know for certain luck is an inconsequential thing. What I mean is... well, you know, Clete, I don’t have to tell you how bad and good have a way of