"Did you have slaves?" Juliana wanted to know.
"Oh, yes, of course," Woodrow said. "The family's wealth was based entirely on slave labor." He said this with such openness that even Juliana couldn't think of a retort. "The original house was almost certainly built by slaves, and we've found traces of a whole village of slave cabins out in the cane fields. I'm having the site excavated by Louisiana State University, and we're going to re-create a slave village so visitors can see what life was like for them. We'll have actors in costume, a working blacksmith ..."
"A flogging and branding show at eleven o'clock every morning," Juliana suggested.
"I want to be honest about the way the South got rich," Woodrow said, "so we won't hide anything. You know, in the house we have a portrait of my great-great-grandfather in a blue uniform, and his brother in gray. We have a checkered past. That's why I put on these shows for the local community. I want to give something back. Ah, an alligator," he added matter-of-factly, as a log hoisted itself on to the back of a fellow log about twenty yards away. "A small female, I think. They come here to sunbathe." They'd be better off going to a solarium, I thought. Even out on the open water, the faint rays of sun were barely making it through the soupy atmosphere.
Woodrow started up the golf cart again and lurched deeper into the forest.
"I'll show you where you'll be staying tonight," he said. "We have a little guest cabin out here in the swamp."
11
"Toe bay oh natter bay. Thayut is the quiz Chan. Wither tis nobbier—"
"Nobler, Denzel, nobler. I told you before."
"Wither tis nobler in the man ..."
On a wooden stage at one end of a long, white party marquee on the plantation lawns, a teenage rap fan was doing his best to be a Danish prince, but it was a giant leap for a young man. He was frowning at his book as if he had to sight-read a secret code, which I suppose he did.
The teacher sitting in the front row, a fortysomething white guy in a tight white shirt and sky-blue tie, looked harassed but resigned to a career of stress.
"Did you read this at home, Denzel?" he asked when the boy ran into a word he couldn't work out. It sounded like "con-toom-lee."
"They're going to do a kind of Best of Shakespeare compilation," Woodrow whispered. "It's bound to be dreadful, but at least they're up there doing something. Katrina destroyed their homes and wrecked their school." He made the hurricane sound like a crazy neighbor. "Hey, maybe you should read a passage or two. They'd love it in your English accent."
"No chance," I objected. I didn't know what "con-toom-lee" was, either.
"Well, I'm sorry," Woodrow said. "I had great plans for the show, but they didn't work out. I hope we can salvage something for your campaign."
For once I was actually glad that the photos of my undercarriage were out there in the public domain. At least now a screwed-up event didn't matter as much. Woodrow had told me that TV cameras were coming out to film me and die car, and that the people from City Hall were delighted by all the coverage. It sounded as if their vote in the competition was mine for the taking.
"Tubby or not tubby. Vat is dee quess-tchun." The teacher was showing the schoolkid how Hamlet should be read in authentic British English, and a hideously wrong Cockney accent was floating up toward the roof of the marquee.
"Let's get out of here," Woodrow said.
He drove me back to the guest cabin, where Jake and Juliana were settling in. Or rather, where Juliana was cringing in a bedroom and Jake was on the porch overlooking a football-field-size lake, reading his Baudelaire translations to the alligators. They were doubtless lying in rows out there in the mist, arguing about which of them was going to have the pleasure of crawling up and silencing him for ever.
"I adore this place," he said.
"Yes, neat, isn't it?" Woodrow said. "My father built it. He's always preferred to keep away from all the visitors around the main house. Other people aren't really his dung." He stared across the lake as if looking for his dad out there in the forest.
"He doesn't mind us squatting here?" I asked.
"Oh no, he has his own place down by the river." Woodrow nodded into the rapidly growing darkness. "Hey, you know the movie Swamp Thing? Well, that was my father."
"He directed it?" I asked.
"No, he was it. He inspired it." Woodrow laughed affectionately. "I'll see you in the morning."
I hoped he was right.
"I'm not staying here," Juliana said, gripping a bright-red duvet with both fists. "Go in the bathroom, look in the drawers next to the mirror."
It was a tasteful, sauna-style room with a large oval tub— a Jacuzzi almost—and a mirror that stretched from floor to ceiling. The house might have been built by the Swamp Thing, but Mrs. Swamp Thing had evidently had a say in the decor.
I opened the top drawer of a plain wooden cabinet next to the mirror. Inside was a small pile of gun magazines. Sniper's Gazette, Drive-by Weekly, Firing Squad Newsletter. Standard stuff.
"So?" I called out to the next room. "Everyone in America reads these."
"Next drawer down," she said.
I pulled the second drawer, which rattled open to reveal a veritable scrap heap of spent bullets. There was a two-inch-thick layer of cartridge cases, ranging from tubes the size of my little fingertip to things that would make holes in armor plating.
"Wow," I said.
"There's the same stuff in a drawer in the kitchen. And go look in the refrigerator."
I walked along the low-ceilinged corridor and crossed the open kitchen to a man-size American fridge. A heave on the door handle showed me what she meant. In among the staple foods of a generously stocked guest cabin was a rough-edged hunk of raw meat, as deep red as beetroot and apparently well on its way to putrefaction.
I called Woodrow to explain the problem. He didn't sound put out.
"Oh, just dump it in the lake. The alligators will take care of it."
I did so, bowling it cricket-style to get the maximum distance between us and an imminent alligator feeding frenzy.
"It's OK," I told the still-cringing Juliana. "The meat's gone, and the bullets are just proof that whoever hunts out here clears up after himself. He's an ecologist." I tried to sound convincing.
"Oh yeah? Look in the bedroom across the hall." Her wide eyes pointed the way.
I found the light switch and nearly jumped backward through the wall. Hanging from the ceiling on lengths of string were two alligator heads, and a garland of small brown hands, severed at the wrist. I moved close enough to check that the hands weren't human. They had knobbly leather fingers tipped with long black claws. They were alligator paws.
"Throw it all in the lake," Juliana said.
"I can't. This isn't rotting meat—it's obviously part of the decor. Looks like he's just into alligator skin."
"No, it's voodoo," Juliana said. "There's blood and feathers out on the porch. I'm not staying here."
"Oh, you will march on foot through the maray?" Jake said. He had come in out of the tubercular night.
"Uh?"
"He says you're not going to walk through the marsh, are you?" I translated.
"OK, maybe not," she said. "But one of you guys is going to sleep in the same bed as me."
"Will it count as a date?" Jake could speak perfect English when he needed to.
12
I opened my eyes in the pitch darkness. The walls seemed to be shuddering.
"Paul? You hear that?" Juliana whispered from across die hall.
"What was it?"
"Don't know. Sounded like—"
With perfect timing, an explosion shattered the night. The blast rolled around the lake and shook the cabin's foundations. If it had any.
"Merde!" So Jake was awake too.
We listened, the only sounds our breathing and the frogs, who had calmed down and started singing again.
"Well, it seems to have stop—" I began, before a third explosion—much nearer, this time�
��lifted our beds off the floor. Someone was shelling us. And in the Deep South it was probably legal to fire missiles at foreigners.
"I'll call Woodrow," I whispered. "If I can find my phone."
"Don't turn the lights on!" Juliana gasped. "Listen!"
We all did so, and I heard. Or felt, rather. The floorboards were rocking slightly, as if we were on a boat. Above the noises of the night, I thought I detected a wooden squeak. Someone was creeping, very softly, along the porch.
"Did you lock the door?" Juliana sounded totally petrified now.
"No," Jake answered. "You, Paul?"
"No," I whispered. "It didn't seem neighborly."
"Neighborly!" Juliana didn't seem to care about insulting the locals.
There was a clearly identifiable floorboard squeak close by, and we all froze.
"Is there a gun in the cabin?" Juliana's question was barely audible. Neither Jake nor I answered. Quite frankly, I wished she hadn't even raised the subject. Until then, I'd just been imagining a mud-encrusted madman with access to heavy artillery. Now he had a shotgun, too. I'd already looked down one gun barrel on this trip, and that was more than enough.
I felt around the floor for my clothes. My phone was in a pocket somewhere. But it was no good in the pitch blackness—I was grabbing at thin air. I switched on the bedside lamp.
"Paul!" Juliana's anguished hiss greeted the false dawn.
"My phone," I explained. "Got it."
The front door scraped across the floor and then clunked shut. With an intruder inside or out, I didn't know. I speed-dialed Woodrow, and before he'd even answered, I said loudly, "Hi, Woodrow, it's your friend Paul, who's staying as a guest in the cabin at your invitation." I think I might have added something about being a hunter armed with a heavy machine gun.
At last, the ringing stopped and a bleary voice said, "Uh?"
"It's Paul," I repeated more quietly. "Woodrow, can you get over to the cabin, please? Now? There's someone trying to get in."
"Oh shit." He was suddenly wide awake. "I'll be there. Don't make any aggressive moves." And he was gone. Not the most reassuring conversation I'd ever had.
The floorboards creaked again. The stalker seemed to be pacing around, either on the porch or inside the kitchen— living area.
Oh, fuck this, I thought. If I was going to get shot, at least I wanted a chance to talk the guy out of doing it rather than passively getting plugged in my bed. I pulled on my trousers and stepped into the corridor.
"No!" Juliana squeaked like one of the floorboards.
"It's me," I told her.
"Wait, Paul," Jake said, and I heard his feet pad on to the floor.
We walked as loudly as possible toward the front door, switching on lights as we went. No one would think we were trying to pull an ambush. As we rounded the corner leading to the living area, I took a deep breath and said a breezy hi.
To an empty room.
"La, on the porch," Jake whispered.
There was a shadow moving back and forth across the mosquito-meshed window.
"Hello?" I called, and the shadow stopped pacing. "Is that Mr. Woodrow?" No answer. "I'll just come and open the door for you." I crossed the room in what I hoped was friendly haste, gripped the cold metal of the door handle and pulled.
"Good evening," I said, realizing as I did so that I had no evidence at all that this was Woodrow XIII. For all I knew, it was just an anonymous swamp-dwelling psycho whose hobby was high explosives.
We squinted at each other in the half-light.
He was standing on the porch, dressed in a hooded green hunter's jacket and jeans that were tucked into heavy working boots. His clothes looked bloodstained, and he held a black rifle in the crook of his arm, pointing—for the moment—at the floor. The predawn mist was rising up through the slats in the porch, making him look as if he had brought along a dry-ice machine. All I could see of his face was that his eyes were dark and blank, as if there was no one at home behind them.
"We're friends of Woodrow. Woodrow the Fourteenth, that is. He invited us to stay the night. Were you looking for him?"
"No." The guy's voice was hoarse, as if he didn't use it that often.
"Ah. Can we help you in any way?" Other than by dying, I thought.
"I need . .." He nodded toward the interior of the cabin, and raised his gun barrel a couple of inches.
"Need ... ?"
"Don't let him take Juliana," Jake whispered in my ear.
So that was it. He wanted Juliana as the centerpiece to some elaborate voodoo ritual involving severed alligator limbs and explosions.
"Vous parlez francais?" Jake asked.
"I'm not Creole," the gunman said, and tensed.
Oh no, I thought, Jake has insulted the purity of his bloodline. Now we're going to get a stick of dynamite where it hurts.
"Is this your house?" I asked. "It's a great house. Fantastic view." As gently as possible, I swept an arm across the horizon, embracing the whole vista of rotting vegetation.
"Yes. I lived here. Before ..."
Before he started lobbing mortars at visitors and sacrificing women, I thought. But at least we knew who he was.
"Perhaps you'd prefer us to leave?" I offered. "We can go and find a hotel."
"I need you to come outside."
"Outside?"
"Stand against the rail. Face the lake."
Oh fuck, I thought. It looked as though I'd talked my way out of getting murdered by the Miami carjacker only to be offed by a human form of pond life.
Jake and I did as we were told. Beneath my bare feet, the boards of the porch felt like fillets of wet fish. If I hadn't been about to get shot, I would have worried about catching pneumonia.
"The girl too. She needs to come outside."
"What girl?" I said.
"The black girl."
Suddenly she was between us, clinging on to our arms. She must have crept into the kitchen while we were talking. She was bare-legged, with a long jacket for a dressing gown.
"Face the lake," he said.
We turned and bowed our heads.
"We're friends of your son," I told him. "Woodrow invited us to stay."
"Don't shoot us, please," Juliana pleaded.
I listened for die sounds you hear in the movies when someone is getting ready to fire a gun, but all I could hear was frog song, female shivering, and various unidentifiable bloops and splashes out on die lake. I gazed into die fog, wondering if the shapeless nothingness would be the last image engraved in my memory before a bullet burned a hole in it.
"OK, you can turn around now."
Slowly, Jake and I did so. Juliana stayed facing the fog.
"What the fur," I said. Juliana whipped around to look, dien gave a stifled scream.
Woodrow Woodrow XIII was loping away down a trail that led into the woods. Swinging from each arm was an assortment of alligator parts. A grinning set of jaws seemed to be snapping at his backside as he ran.
As we stood watching the thirteenth generation of plantation owner bolting to his lair, the fourteenth came rolling into view, hunched aerodynamically over his steering wheel, aldiough his golf cart was doing no more than five miles an hour.
"Was it Dad?" he asked, dismounting, and apparendy seeing nothing strange in the fact that his guests were taking a barefoot midnight stroll in the freezing swamp. "He was dynamiting the drainage channels. He thinks it'll protect us from flooding."
"He held a gun on us so he could go and get his voodoo stuff," Juliana said.
"Voodoo?" Woodrow laughed. "No, he stuffs alligators to make souvenirs for the shop. He probably wants to finish mounting them so we can sell them at the show tomorrow."
"Well, he could have just asked to come in and fetch them," I pointed out.
"Yeah. He's great with dynamite and alligators, but he's not too hot on interpersonal skills. Apart from members of the family, not many people come out and stay here."
I could see why.
13
"I look like a petrol-pump attendant at the Highland Games," I said.
A second FedEx had arrived, containing a fluorescent-yellow anorak and matching baseball cap, both of which had large logos of Visitor Resources: Britain and my two new sponsors stuck in strategic places on the fabric. My forehead, shoulders, chest, and back had effectively become advertising space. The rest of me was presumably still open to offers. Not my legs, I hoped. Those stickers would be agony when I pulled them off.
The anorak, coupled with my kilt, was how I was contractually obliged to appear for all future media appointments. Including radio, it seemed. The order had come direct from Tyler.
I held out my arms in a crucifix pose and let Juliana take a photo of me with her phone. She and I were waiting for Woodrow XTV to pick us up from the cabin. Jake was already over at the marquee. A Cajun band was setting up, and he'd gone on ahead to try and get them to adapt Baudelaire to music, or something.
An alligator-shaped layer of pink cloud lay across the treetops. There had been a sunset of sorts, but it had given up in the face of unfair competition from my fluorescent outfit. A familiar chugging sound drifted through the twilight, and I made out two riders on the golf cart. A tall, thin one—Woodrow—accompanied by a smaller, female shape. It—or she—was waving.
When I finally recognized her, I didn't feel like waving back. My brain started to buzz with doubts and suspicions. Her presence here was one coincidence too many.
"Hi," she said as she kissed me on both cheeks.
"Hi, Elodie. This is a surprise."
"Yes, it is," she said. "You're famous, Paul. Or your legs are, anyway. That's wonderful!"
"Well, thanks for coming a thousand miles to see them."
"No problem. My pleasure."
It felt like one of those scenes in a swashbuckling film where two men with rapiers are circling around, swishing their blades and being over-polite before they try to kebab each other. "So, D'Artagnan, it gives me great pleasure to meet you." "Yes, Monseigneur, and it will give me equal pleasure to pluck out your kidneys with my trusty blade." I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that Elodie deserved a bit of kidney plucking.
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