Something of Constancy

By Louis Bourdon

Something of Constancy presents an episodic insight into Carter Millers attempt to create his own fiction. The book also features, as its second part, Carters reading of Eliza Beths An Accidental Evacuation, a story about youth, love, decay, and death. Set in Kemah, Texas, Something of Constancy wanders through multiple stories, discussions on process, environment, and experience, which by and by illustrates how Carters multiple modes of interpretation reveal a soft, if not tragic, confusion between the person Carter imagines himself to be and the character he seems to present himself as.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524523664

Louis Bourdon

Louis Bourdon (1993–) works as a local author concerned with conditional lives presented in contemporary places. With Something of Constancy, his debut novel, now behind him, Bourdon plans to continue his literary interests while pursuing a career in law. When not in the office, he enjoys actively living and eating well.

Book preview

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

All my life I’ve listened to stories that began all my life. I’ve listened to stories that build up and up and end in the same anti climatic blurbs. And these mutterings, these yaps and these yelps started to synchronize, so I figured I’d better test out my sound too just to see if I couldn’t reverberate as well. Do I dare?

Took some getting used to, the heat, the humidity. Coming off a cooler winter, it’d take longer this spring to back in the groove, to get comfortable being uncomfortable. The heat didn’t bother me much. The cool did. The cool meant a windier, rainier, spring and by this time of the year I liked to sit out on the porch and work outside and be comfortable and I couldn’t do that with all this rain. Even when I wasn’t working, I liked to sit on the porch without getting my feet wet. Not complicated.

She didn’t hear me, but she would’ve asked me to repeat myself if she cared. She was still in her head, wrestling, messing with something. No matter. She’d be out of it by the time we pulled in. She’s disciplined like that.

I look where she looked. We saw the saw grass move, saw it ruffle. White caps tumbled and reemerged beyond the grass. It’d rain later. We’d be gone by then.

Want to share anything?

No. Not tonight. Tonight I’m pretty hungry. Maybe I’ll do the grouper. That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

Sure and now you have me thinking about the snapper.

We’re real asses making each other hungry like this, she laughed.

I’m excited to see Leslie.

We haven’t seen her in a while. When was the last time we saw her and what’s-his-name, Jack, Jacky?

Last October.

What a shame.

Jacky’s a big timer now. No room in the schedule.

She grinned. It’ll be good to see Leslie.

And Bill. It’ll be great to see Bill too.

I forgot he was coming.

Oh yah.

We’ve got a real triple A reunion going on. Farm team back together.

I nodded.

Yah, I’ll do the snapper. Blackened, green beans, hush puppies. Yah. That’s what I’ll do, I said after a while. She didn’t care.

We pulled into the parking lot, gravel under-tire. Most of the cars were already here. No matter. All things considered, we were early. I spotted them inside. They’d already pulled two tables together. We’d sit next to Sam and Kylie.

She checked the mirror a last time.

We walked in and flowed through the hellos.

We sat next to Sam and Kylie.

We talked for some time. The talking wore me down quickly. It always does. I’m not a talker, a conversationalist. I’m not sure any of us ever were. We liked to cut up and harass one another, but we didn’t get down to the nitty-gritty. Jacky couldn’t help himself but get down to that, poor guy. Leslie got nice and drunk and started getting personal, making personal cuts at Jacky. She got him real good once. Eliza nudged me to say she caught it too. We’d cut up about her and them later when they weren’t around. Jacky wasn’t one of us, but I had to give it to him for not trying to be either. Left fielder as he is, he sure was a good sport, I’ll give him that, I’ve always given him that. Amy looked great tonight, nothing unusual. Matt too. He was alright.

We all wondered who would have thought this was how it all turned out? None of us. None of us did and I think a big part of that is we didn’t take much too seriously. I think that’s what really did us in as a people, or at least a generation, that we didn’t take much too seriously. It’s what made Jacky an outsider. It’s also what let Eliza become an insider. And other than them, those two, the rest of us grew up here. This was home. We shared that.

Donny came over like he said he would. He’d been a role model of mine for some time. I doubted he actually knew that. Maybe he did. Sure, he probably did. He knew lots of things people told themselves and sometimes even what they didn’t. He was kooky like that.

He’d opened this place, The Admiral’s, thirty years ago with his father. His father was the actual admiral, a rank he’d earned in the service. He retired to Kemah so he could open this place. We were sure glad he did. When he died, young Donny took over. He ran the place well, and for those who knew his father, they looked a lot alike.

We said bye to Leslie and to Jacky first. I expected we would. Matt, Amy, Bill, Kylie, Donny, Eliza and I sat around the table now.

Donny opened the windows and the salt blew through the screens. It filled our noses. We heard the gulls and saw a couple pelicans hanging around the corners. After a while the gulls became obnoxious. Routine.

We kept talking for a couple more hours. Eliza finally relaxed. I was glad to see this. It was something else to see her relaxed, enjoying herself.

We talked about Perkins, about how he should have skipped town when he had the chance. Talked about how he’d gotten himself in a hole, a real good hole this time. He’d fallen in with a twenty five year old blonde about a year ago. She came to live with him, fiddle around with him, and in the end to rob him clean. She did it one morning while he’d been out fishing the rigs. She even had the nerve to take his dog. When he talked about her taking his shit he could stomach everything but the dog. Said when he was in the service something similar happened to one of his friends. Said one of his friends told him about a woman he ran with before he went off. A real broad, that woman, he said. Said while he’d been on tour she’d taken it up with someone else and told him about it one day. Said she was going to get all her stuff and move out. He told her to go ahead. Well, she took all his shit too, including the dog.

When he found out about that, about her taking the dog, he hung himself in one of the tents. Damn shame. Perkins said he’d seen death before but not that kind. Said what really got to him about that whole deal was how the broad and her new boy flew over to collect the life insurance. Perkins said she got that too. Perkins said that’s all he knew about that story and that whenever he thought about the blonde taking his dog, he thought about his friend hanging himself and about the woman showing up in cheap sunglasses for the life insurance.

Perkins lived a couple houses down from us. He’d gotten his stuff back, at least some of it, and she was still out there somewhere doing whatever it was she did. He liked to laugh her off now. He had a real good, gnarly story about her that he whipped out when he got real toasted. Guess it made him feel better to share things she trusted to him, to betray her in his own private way. But he always ended up back on his dog and whenever he did, he made a damned mess of himself.

CHAPTER TWO

The morning storm passed an hour ago. It’d woken me, the rumblings had, but I wouldn’t have slept well even if the night rolled through soundlessly. The rumblings woke her too but she went back to sleep. Then I had to lay alone in the dark, which I did, at least until I got up and went in the kitchen. I watched another storm move in from the gulf and knew it’d be an hour or so before that one landed, I could tell from the lighting.

I walked out on to the pier, went all the way down and sat at the edge with my legs hanging off. Whenever the water moved up the pillars, it got on my feet, on my ankles and on my knees. But the waves wouldn’t reach that high now, not between storms.

I looked at the vanishing points. I stared at the grayness, at the formless shapes so far from me. I watched them move steadily closer and I felt myself concede to the gray and it felt good and calm and scary not to oppose what loomed before anymore.

I thought about shadows and about the colors painters used to represent them. For me, what made a good painter from a bad one was how the painter treated shadows, how the painter treated differences and brightness. But there was no need to cycle through this. I already knew my preferences.

The good news was that whenever I thought about painters in the morning I could work later. I wouldn’t work long but if I could think about painters before she woke up, it meant I could work at least for an hour.

But I wouldn’t work today. No, today I knew I’d sit here until it started to rain and would stay until it stopped. Maybe once the rain started I’d move under the cover and sit on the swing and wait for the storm to pass. Who knows. All I knew was that I needed to come to terms with how fallible I’d become and although I still wasn’t sure why I needed the rain and the storms around me to think about this, it felt necessary, so thus I sat exposed.

Breathing out my nose, I wheezed subtly. The pollen did that to me. It’d washed out of the trees with the rain. It’d gotten on the cars and in the gutters, on the streets and in the dirt, on my feet and in my lungs.

My body croaked as I moved. I’d been exercising recently. I needed to get my body back in shape. Needed to get my lungs healthy again. I knew these next two weeks would gas me pretty good so I needed to come in quick and healthy. For me, health started with the lungs. She thought I overemphasized my lungs, but they were no laughing matter. I’d had asthma my whole life and knew just how important a good set of lungs are. Yes, I thought, if I could get the lungs right, I’d be okay, I’d be alright.

My insides felt okay this morning. I knew I was still empty from the last one but knew I got stronger every day. Between my running and my waiting, it wouldn’t be long before I could really thump again. I knew my capillaries needed to be open before I could really thump again. I knew it wasn’t the veins or the arteries that needed to open up but the capillaries. That’s where the real action took place, in the capillaries. I’d always known that and now I was on the move.

Eliot weighed on me this morning but I never minded his influence. I could spend a morning with him, his thoughts, any day. I thought about his character J. Alfred Prufrock and about his observations. Eliza couldn’t stand poetry. Sometimes I couldn’t blame her.

When Eliza came out and watched the gulf in the morning, she liked to watch for riffles in the waves. She liked how the riffles came in the afternoon and how she could count on them to show up then and how sometimes they came in the morning. She liked how there could be small waves contained in larger ones and she liked to watch the energy transfer as the water fell. She knew how to appreciate moments I still couldn’t. She was tender like that.

I thought about the projects I’d done and what I hoped to do. I thought that all I needed now was one more story. If I could get through one more story, things would be alright. They would be okay.

I thought about the stories I avoided working on and why I did. I knew I avoided certain ones because they scared me. A lot of stories scared me. And I knew they would continue to. But I knew I avoided other ones because I knew I couldn’t get them right even if I tried my very hardest. But it wasn’t ever about being the best for me. It was about fidelity and it was time I came to terms with my fear of using