by Joe Gores
Dain straightened up abruptly. For the first time in five years he had thought of Marie as Marie, not as icon. In his last nightmare, it had been Vangie blown away by the hitman’s shotgun. What the hell was happening to him?
Dain shivered in the warm dawn air, turned back to his car. He had a lot of miles to go and had no real idea of what he would do when he got there. Wherever there was going to be.
The bus stopped at the Lafayette depot with a hiss of air brakes. Vangie was first off, minus her blonde wig and slanty eyeglass frames. A few steps away from the bus she spun around in a series of uninhibited circles, attache case in hand, long raven hair flying out from her head. She was suddenly ravenous.
The Ragin’ Cajun was a workingman’s sort of cafe, big and boxy, the walls mostly bare except for beer ads. She chose a table near the back facing the door to see anybody coming at her. At the next table were two Cajun men in work clothes, with seamed outdoor faces and callused hands cut and scarred from trotlines. How many Sunday mornings as a little girl had she eaten in this very cafe with her papa and maman?
When a pudgy teenage waitress brought her the mandatory cup of fragrant chicory-rich coffee, Vangie didn’t even have to look at the menu. Ten minutes later she was tearing into eggs and sausage patties and grits and hot biscuits smothered in country gravy, washing it all down with her third cup of coffee.
A man about her own age, very husky, very Cajun, dressed in work clothes, put coins in the jukebox, punched buttons with the speed of long familiarity. He was thick and square, with laughing eyes and black curly hair and a wide shiny nose on which the pores were visible. Just as he started past Vangie’s table she leaned back from her cleaned plate and drew a big breath of contentment.
He glanced at her appreciatively, then did a double take as his eyes slid up across her face.
“Vangie?” he exclaimed. “Vangie Broussard?”
She looked up at him, tears sprang to her eyes. She said in a voice full of wonder, “You, Minus?”
“Dat’s me,” he admitted.
“How long has it been?”
“Dat mus’ be ten year. How your maman and papa?”
“I just got off the bus.”
“You ain’t seen ‘em yet?” He grabbed her arm, dragged her to her feet. “Den me, I tak off de morning work, drive you home to see dem…”
The beat-up old ‘75 Ford 250 pickup with the 4 x 4 option went along the dirt track on top of the high levee. There was pasture to the right, a narrow twisting bayou, well below flood stage now, to the left. When it reached an intersecting T-road of gravel, the pickup went down across the bayou on a one-way pontoon bridge, very narrow, its tires thumping, drumming on the bed of the bridge. On the far side it plunged into thick forest on a narrow road shaded by the hardwoods. Vangie was looking about in unalloyed delight, her face very open and innocent.
“I’d forgotten how much I love this old swamp!” She half turned toward Minus on the wide vinyl seat patched with long strips of silvery duct tape. “I’m goin’ back to the old camp on my papa’s fishing ground off Bayou Noire, and just fish and hunt and trap crabs…”
Half an hour later, the truck broke out of the forest. It went along the gravel road to a narrower dirt track coming up from the low slow brown reach of the Atchafalaya River to form a “T.” There was a little country store with a faded BROUSSARD’S sign on the front and a converted houseboat tacked to the rear as living quarters. Toward the road were rough dearhound kennels.
They bounced down the dirt track; it dead-ended at the riverbank, below which a couple of boats were pulled up on a narrow earth landing area. Minus stopped on the gravel apron in front of the store with a squeal of worn brake shoes.
Vangie got out with her attache case, stood looking up at Minus through the still-open doorway. “You come in, see Maman?”
Minus shook his head, tapped the watch on his wrist.
“Gotta work. Ce soir I be back, we all drink some beer.”
Vangie gave him a big grin. “Tu dis.”
She slammed the door of the pickup, stood waving as it made a U-turn and went back the way it had come. She hesitated a moment, then trudged across the gravel turnaround toward the store with an almost frightened look on her face.
21
Vangie climbed the rough unpainted wooden steps worn smooth by countless hunters’ boots, crossed the narrow plank galerie to press her nose against the screen door. No one was visible. She pulled it open, entered, it slammed three diminishing times behind her, tinkling the attached bell. She set down her attache case carelessly beside the cash register on the front counter as a woman called from somewhere in the rear of the store.
“You wait one little minute, non?”
Vangie started at the remembered voice. “Sure.”
Just as it had been during a thousand daydreams in a hundred strip joints over the past decade. Shotguns and rifles upright in a cabinet behind a front counter that held fishing lures, hooks, nets, line, rifle and shotgun shells. From the ceiling hung rows of muskrat and nutria traps. Below a small black-and-white TV blurrily showing a lively Creole talk show, a large screened box stood on four legs. It contained thousands of live crickets for sale as bait; a light inside kept them actively chirping and jumping against the screen sides.
“Not a single thing different,” muttered Vangie to herself.
She bent over the cricket box to wrinkle her nose at the remembered acrid smell. She straightened, belatedly went back for her attaché case, wandered down the aisle toward the rear where the voice had come from. There was a showcase with hard candies and tinned fancy cakes and a giant glass jar of pickled eggs on top. She sucked a piece of candy as she moved past another case filled with buckets, tubs, tinware, white-ash hoops for hoop nets, netting for gill nets and trammel nets, wire poultry netting for crawfish traps.
Through an open doorway in the right wall were three rough wooden steps down to a small damp room where a row of live-bait boxes took up the space except for a plank walkway around them.
Maman, in her mid-forties and blessed with remnants of Vangie’s same beauty, was bent over one of the bait boxes with a small scoop net in her hand. She was a warm, vital woman with a lined, bright, open face, wearing a cotton dress of no particular style. She glanced up at Vangie in the door frame at the head of the steps, then back at her work with a small wry welcoming smile.
“Too much tracas for little-little money, to dis?”
“Yeah, I know,” said Vangie softly. “Jesus, do I know.”
With a twirl almost like Vangie’s when she was dancing, Maman spun around at the sound of Vangie’s voice. A slow radiant smile illuminated her features. She dropped her little scoop net, darted toward her daughter with open arms.
“Vangie! So beautiful you have become!”
They met at the foot of the steps; Maman enfolded Vangie in her arms. Vangie felt a flush mantling her features, embarrassed and ashamed to be bringing her big-city trouble to this place.
“Ten years you gone,” exclaimed Maman, stepping back from their embrace. Her eyes twinkled. “You bring me some pretty little grandchildren, non?”
Vangie gave an uneasy laugh. “Um… not quite yet, Maman.”
Maman held her at arm’s length, impressed and pride-filled. She looked over Vangie’s shoulder, saw the attaché case.
“A secretary to an important man, my Vangie?”
“Ah… non, Maman. A… singer. And a… a dancer…”
“Singer? Dancer? Maybe I see you on the TV?”
“Uh… not quite yet, Maman.” She added uncomfortably, “I’d… like to stay for a while…”
“Stay? Of course you stay!” Maman gestured toward the front of the store. “Ten year ago you walk out dat door, you. Now you back, Maman gonna keep you, not let you go!”
She nodded happily to herself and bent again over the live-bait tank. She deftly scooped the dead shad from the surface with her little net and tossed them aside, casting sideway
s glances at Vangie and speaking with her eyes on her work.
“You think Maman not know how hard it is to make your way in dat outside world, dere? You got some trouble, Vangie, you tell your maman, we fix it up real quick, non?”
“Yeah, I got trouble, Maman…” She paused, added, “No trouble with the law, trouble with some men who want…” She paused again. “They don’t know where I am, so I just need a… place nobody outside the parish knows about, okay?”
Maman winked at her gaily. “Okay, you,” she said.
They both laughed. Vangie spoke in a new tone.
“Et Papa? Where’s he?”
Maman laid aside her scoop and straightened up. She looked at Vangie with great love and pride in her face. She took her daughter’s arm. “Out checkin’ de set lines, where else? Dat catfish, he been runnin’ real good, him.”
“Where?” demanded Vangie eagerly.
“Bayou Tremblant, by dat boscoyo knee of cypress where Dede catch de ten-poun’ bass on dat little-little perch hook.” They mounted the steps together. “We got time for one demitasse of café, non? Den you go surprise him, you.”
Vangie only nodded silently, her eyes blurred with tears of relief and love and release and safety. She was moved beyond anything she could have imagined. Arms around one another, they went toward the living quarters at the back of the store.
Dain stopped the car nose-up next to a couple of others on the steep grassy side of the levee above the Breaux Bridge boat landing. As he got out and locked it he could see, downslope beyond him, a concrete boat launching ramp and a U-shaped dock with a dozen outboard motorboats moored. On the galerie of the store a couple of loungers paused in their checker game to look at him and make comment with appropriate gestures.
He went down the bank on his slippery leather-soled oxfords to the edge of the water, moving warily, obviously out of his element. Stepping onto the dock, he stopped dead. Inverness was sitting in a flat-bottom scow moored to the dock, grinning at him like Brer Rabbit from the briar patch. Dain walked out with deliberation, seeking his stance.
Inverness was going to be a complicating factor, for sure. He was a cop, with a cop’s ways. On the other hand, maybe without him Dain would discover nothing at all in this unfamiliar world—he would be as competent in this environment as he was in any other. Dain stopped on the dock above him.
“Back to San Francisco, huh?” said Inverness ironically.
“Change of plans, but how about you? I thought you’d accepted Zimmer as a suicide, pure and simple.”
“We still need Broussard’s statement. Since she’s Cajun, I figured she’d hightailed it for home. Most of ‘em do when they think they’re in trouble. Course I’m not telling you anything new, since you’re here too.”
“A manhunter’s intuition,” said Dain, ironic in turn, then he had to chuckle. “It was her name. Broussard. Cajun. Originally, the Acadians. Run out of Nova Scotia by the British in the seventeen hundreds. French descent. Still speak a patois. Evangeline.”
“Yeah,” said Inverness. “Settled in the bayou country to farm, but they got flooded out every spring so they embraced the swamp—fishing and hunting and moss-gathering and fur-trapping. Very in-turned, family very big with them. For a city boy, you know a lot about Cajuns.”
“For a New Orleans cop, you know a lot about swamp folk.”
“I’m not married, got no family, so I fish and hunt. That means the bayou country. For damn near five years, every weekend and holiday and vacation I can wangle, I’m right out here.”
“Couldn’t the Lafayette parish police get her statement?”
Inverness grinned. “This gives me an excuse to get out into the swamp. That explains me, but what about you?”
“She’s worth money to me,” said Dain easily.
“Ah, yes. Money money money. The older I get…” He didn’t finish the thought. “Anyway, I think Broussard’s folks run a little general store somewhere out of Henderson. But since Broussard is one of the four most common Cajun names, don’t make book on it.”
“I don’t make book on anything,” said Dain, “not any more.”
“If I’m right, the easiest way to their store is by boat—almost all their trade is with swamp people working the bayous.” He jerked his head. “Get in. May as well look for her together—it’s a hell of a lot of backwoods out there.”
Dain started to unfasten the painter from the stanchion on the dock. “If we don’t find her?”
“I’ve got a motel room at Lafayette for the night.”
Dain jumped down lightly into the boat, shoved it away from the dock. A slow eddy caught the prow, swung it out into the river. Inverness was priming the motor.
“What if she takes off into the swamp instead of talking?”
“Then we’ll get to go in after her,” he grinned happily.
Maman’s old-fashioned iron cookstove and oven, once wood- burning, had been converted to butane gas. There was a chipped white enamel sink, and an ancient white enamel fridge with the cooling coils bare on top instead of being fitted in underneath.
Vangie and Maman sat at the minuscule table, finishing their coffee and fresh beignet. A gumbo already simmering on the stove filled the room with rich dark smells. Vangie leaned back, replete, licked the last of the powdered sugar off her fingers and half stifled a satisfied little belch.
“Oh, Maman, how many years since I’ve had your beignets!”
Maman drew a deep breath, sniffing. “Tonight, gumbo!”
“Guess I’d better go meet Papa before he starts back, him.” Vangie stood up. “But I have to see the dogs first!”
“And you gotta change your pretty city clothes, you,” said Maman. “Your old clothes still fit you, I bet!”
The stately blue and white bird stood motionless knee-deep on the fringe of the bayou. A far mosquito whine got steadily louder, but he ignored it to dart his head suddenly down into the water. He came up with a small wriggling silver fish speared on his bill just as the flat-bottom scow bearing Inverness and Dain appeared around a bend in the stream. He crouched, alarmed.
Dain was in the prow of the skiff, craning down the bayou at the spindly-legged bird bursting off the water on huge flapping wings, a doomed minnow wriggling in its bill. A heron? A crane? Inverness would know—Inverness probably knew as much about this swamp as any outsider ever would.
Which made him turn and start to yell a question, but his words were lost in the staccato beat of the motor. Inverness, in the stern, just pointed at the outboard motor and shrugged. Dain pantomimed turning it off. Inverness frowned, turned it down to trolling speed.
“For Chrissake, it’s a Louisiana heron,” he snapped.
But Dain said, “Why didn’t you ask the guy you rented the boat from just where the Broussard store was?”
“You had me stop for that? Cajuns are very big on minding their own business and everybody is first cousins. Unless you speak their patois, better just look, not ask.”
He speeded up the motor again. Every sunken log had its colony of turtles to either slide into the water with barely a ripple or do a sudden scrabbling noisy belly flop. One had a snow-white egret standing on its back; bird and turtle fled at their approach, one up into the air, the other down under the water. Bright-feathered ducks unknown to Dain zipped by on whistling wings. Fish swirled in the shallows when the boat’s waves touched their exposed backs. He glimpsed a lumbering black bear in the brush along the bayou, several small swamp white-tailed deer, and a little shambling ring-tailed fellow with a pointy nose he thought was a raccoon but actually was a coatimundi.
A thick-bodied snake Dain took for a water moccasin swam past with whipping sinuous motions. Beauty was edged with death here, which he realized was what he had come to seek in his own life. As if feeling his thoughts, Inverness suddenly flipped the motor into neutral. It popped and spluttered as they watched the life going on around them. There was a strange, almost luminous look on Inverness’s face.
“I tell you, Dain, come retirement, I’m right out here for good—living off the land. This is just about the last place a man can do it—be entirely on his own, trade what he catches or shoots or traps for whatever store-bought stuff he needs like hooks and lines and shells and flour…”
“You don’t like people very much, do you?” asked Dain.
“Show me a cop who does.”
Dain could think of one, Randy Solomon; but even with Randy, it was sort of despite himself.
Vangie had her fingers through the chicken wire at the deerhounds’ enclosure, scratching the long floppy ear of a sad-faced, dewlapped liver and white hound. She was dressed for the bayou, tight jeans and a cotton long-sleeved shirt with her hair tucked up under a billed gimme cap.
“This bluetick looks good,” she said as the floppy-eared hound crowded the wire for more hands.
“Your papa say he de bes’ deerhound we ever have.”
Vangie came erect. There was disbelief in her voice.
“Better than old Applehead?”
By mutual consent, they turned away toward the river. Maman almost giggled. “You know your papa. Every hound de bes’ one he ever had, him.”
The dogs pressed against the wire behind them, clamoring, tails wagging, heads alert, as they left to descend the switchback dirt path from the top of the riverbank. Near the boats was a big sunken live-box where the fish taken on the setlines were kept until they were sold.
“I look for you two soon after sunset,” said Maman.
Vangie hugged her, unwound the chain painter of the flat-bottom scow from around a tree, pushed it out, then with a final push jumped lightly into the prow. The ten-year lapse might never have been; she walked expertly back to the rear as the current moved the boat downstream and away from the bank. She sat down on the rear seat, primed the outboard, started it. Her mother stood watching on the shore. Vangie put the motor in gear, started off with mutual waves between the two women.