The Neon Palm of Madame Melancon

by Will Clarke

  They are nothing like my family. They are not throwing bones on the kitchen counter or reading the entrails of a chicken to divine the future of crime bosses and their jealous wives.

  “Duke. Seriously.” Emily would say. “Whose family isn’t messed up?”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “So I’m just never going to meet them?”

  “It’s better this way. Trust me.”

  “You look so sad when you say that.”

  “Not sad. Just serious.”

  She’d then kiss me and we’d do what newlyweds were made to do, and for a couple of years that was as far as the conversation went, but then one Christmas, when Emily was pregnant with Stewart, she felt the need to disobey one of the most fundamental agreements of our marriage.

  “Surprise!” Emily ushered my family in from our kitchen, lining them up in front of our Christmas tree. My mother was squat and frowning with her hair parted into long, dark braids. Daddy was drunk off eggnog and teetering on his crutches. La La was in her Jennifer Lopez phase. My only unmarried brother, Yanko, had tagged along and was sporting a mustache and a newly minted gold tooth. Thankfully, the rest of my brothers were running various con jobs and psychic grifts or else they’d have been there as well, with their screaming kids and their fist-holding magical wives.

  To say the visit didn’t go well would be an understatement. To begin with, my mother refused to eat anything Emily and I prepared; she complained about the deadly “low vibrations” and the “lack of fêng shui” and the “inauspicious placement” of everything we owned. Instead of joining us for the family meals, Mama would hole up in the upstairs guest bathroom communing with her long-dead grandmother by candlelight, telling her loudly what a mistake her seventh son had made with his life.

  Christmas Eve, things only got worse. Daddy, who is notoriously lactose-intolerant, had drunk his weight in eggnog and kept unleashing these horrible farts that watered our eyes.

  “Traveling upsets my stomach,” Daddy would say and then fart loudly to prove just how upset his stomach really was. La La, who was dabbling in Santeria at the time, slit a live chicken’s neck in front of the fireplace to bless our unborn son. Blood splattered everywhere, and Emily started to hyperventilate. La La and Mama couldn’t understand why we were so upset, such nonbelievers. The arguing along with the screaming, shitting, bleeding chicken caused Emily to sort of faint, and I had to put her to bed, and then I spent most of the night cleaning blood, chicken shit, and feathers from our new shag carpet.

  I guess the final straw for Emily must have been Christmas morning. Daddy lost his glass eye, and, of course, Emily was the lucky one to find it in her bowl of oatmeal. This did nothing to help her morning sickness. And let’s not forget my brother Yanko, who chatted up our recently divorced next-door neighbor, Julie Carville. He spent three of the five nights of his stay boning Julie Carville in Emily’s craft room—loudly enough to make Emily want to call 911 because she thought for sure Julie was being murdered.

  In short, Emily extended the olive branch, and my family extended their middle fingers. When everyone finally loaded up in Mama’s black Mercedes to go back to New Orleans, Emily never asked to invite them again.

  “You were right” is all she said.

  She never complained about my secrecy or embarrassment or for that matter why I never planned trips to visit my family in New Orleans. When our boys were born, Emily was gracious and invited my mother to the hospital to see them, but Mama drove back the same day, calling me from her cell phone, crying, saying that I had chosen the pizda over my destiny. As the years passed, the distance between Houston and New Orleans became that of oceans, galaxies, universes.

  So moving back to New Orleans, even before Mama ran away, was hard for both of us as a couple. But Emily’s been a good sport. She’s shown up to all of Daddy’s Sunday meals with a smile and a salad. She makes sure that our boys hug their Babushka and she has ignored most of La La’s jabs.

  “They’re no weirder than most people in this city,” Emily said one night after Daddy had boiled crabs and Mama had accidentally smiled at her.

  “You’re just being nice,” I said.

  “They’re our family, Duke.”

  “You’re my family.”

  “Well, it’s important that the boys know where they came from,” Emily said, but Emily and I both knew that this is just what you say to be polite, decent, and respectable.

  Mama never put much stock in such things; she made a career of being just the opposite: rude, conniving, and despicable. She couldn’t care less about embarrassing me, or, for that matter, openly hating the woman who’s given birth to my two sons.

  “Ah, look. The pizda is here,” Mama said every time we showed up for Sunday dinner.

  “What’s a pizda?” Emily wanted to know.

  “A term of endearment.”

  “I’m not stupid, Duke. What does it mean?”

  “Cunt,” I confessed.

  “Nice. Real nice.”

  12

  May 10, 2010

  Five days since Mama chased that cat out the house

  “You’re going to work?” Emily walks into our bathroom, just as I am putting on my Mandala Worldwide polo shirt.

  “Christopher Shelley’s flying in.” I tuck in my shirt tail.

  “So?” she says.

  “So. I have to meet with Gary about what we’re going to say to him.”

  “Tell Gary you have a family emergency.”

  “I’m not telling Gary about any of this.”

  “You don’t have to tell him what the emergency is.” She holds her gaze.

  “You obviously don’t know Gary.” I grab my belt off the bed and thread it around the waist of my khakis.

  “Duke, we should be looking for her.”

  “Don’t start.” I buckle my belt.

  “You know, last time I checked, Mandala lawyers aren’t the ones trying to figure out how to plug that well.” She stands in the door to the bedroom.

  “Please.” I loom over her. “You’re going to make me late.”

  The boys’ laughter and SpongeBob’s deranged giggles echo from our family room downstairs.

  Emily drops her head, moves to the side, and lets me pass. “So you’re seriously going to work today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” She folds her arms. “Then let’s just pretend she’s not missing. Heck, let’s just go back to pretending you don’t even have a family at all. That’s healthy.”

  “Do not tell me how to deal with this.”

  “God, you’re being such a jerk.”

  As usual, Emily is right. I am being a complete jerk. This is shock or grief or whatever you call it when you know that your mother is as good as dead. The funny thing is, knowing that I am reeling from this does absolutely nothing to help me right myself. I am still an asshole. I still can’t admit to Emily that she is right. I can’t admit that I’d rather face the dying ocean and its devastated shrimpers today than find my mother’s body.

  So instead of going with Emily to canvass Uptown with more missing-person’s posters, or stopping into the police station to goad them into action, I let this Spill be more important than all of this. I get into my Prius, and I drive into the New Orleans emergency offices of Mandala Worldwide. I drive towards Mandala Worldwide’s orange, yellow, and pink dreamcatcher logo—a symbol born from Native Americans’ connection to the earth and sky—a symbol Mandala Worldwide repurposed to show our corporate commitment to both.

  I go to where the problems, as apocalyptic and impossible as they are, are problems that follow the Byzantine logic of geoscience, Napoleonic codes, and maritime law—problems so impossible that I can hide inside of them, problems that are given to me in emails and voice messages, tragedies that may not be solvable today, but can be argued, managed, filed, collated, deleted, put off until next week.

  * * *

  Gary Dubois is yelling. Raging, really.

  �
�Can we all just pretend that we have done this before? We cannot say the words, ‘We are sorry’ anywhere in this commercial.” Gary exhales and then looks up at the ceiling tiles. He’s counting them. That’s what his “coach” told him to do when he feels like he might want to throw something or pinch someone. Yes, pinch. My boss literally pinched his assistant’s arm last week. Hard. Left a nasty purple bruise. A friend of mine in HR emailed me the photos. Normally, Mandala would fire your ass for doing something crazy like that, but Gary’s the best we’ve got when it comes to spin doctoring. He’s the “master of disaster,” or so the C-suite likes to call him. So Gary’s assistant, Jill, got moved into exploration and drilling. She supposedly got a huge raise and Gary got a “coach.”

  In addition to being the master of disaster, Gary is also Earl of Over-sharing.

  “I’m peeing blood. This shit is killing me,” he told me over happy hour margaritas at Superior.

  “You sure you didn’t just eat some beets?”

  “I went to the doctor. It’s a bladder infection. Stress.”

  While I’m not so sure it’s the Sub-Ocean Brightside that’s put blood in Gary’s urine—more likely The Kitty Kitty Kitty, a Slidell strip bar that Gary likes to go to after work. However, the stress we are all under is murderous; that part Gary is not lying about. We’re all feeling it, and it is the kind of stress and anxiety that causes heart attacks, impotence, strokes, cancers, gnarled addictions to Ambien and Wild Turkey. The Spill has become this monster that haunts all our days and tracks us back to our homes. It slithers into our beds and chokes our dreams. It’s the pet python we’ve all let into our homes.

  “Get those ad agency people on the phone.” Gary has stopped counting and is now “consciously breathing.” Step two from his coach.

  “I’ve left five or six messages,” I say. “They aren’t calling me back.”

  “Then you take over our Facebook posts.”

  “You want me to run our social media?”

  “I just sent you all the login info.” He rolls his eyes. “Same user name and password for Twitter and Instagram.”

  “You need a social media manager for that. That’s not what I do.”

  “It is now,” Gary says. “You’re in crisis management. Manage this fucking crisis and get rid of all the negative comments on our page!”

  “That’s not a best practice,” I say.

  “Here, I just emailed you a picture of our guys cleaning up a greasy pelican. Post it.”

  “That’s a terrible image.” I look at my phone. “That bird is covered in oil because of us.”

  “Yeah, but our workers are saving its miserable life. Post it. We need to change the conversation.”

  “Not to this, we don’t.”

  “Just post the goddamned pelican!”

  Gary used to be a great boss, but now every day is like this: Panic attacks. Thrown staplers. Pinched assistants. Every day since the Sub-Ocean Brightside blew up and killed those poor roughnecks, and that subterranean monster began shitting oil into the Gulf of Mexico, I have been pulled deeper and deeper into the undertow of my mother’s Louisiana. If anyone should be pissing blood, it’s me.

  “I need you to make sure that the shrimping couple signs their contracts today. Marketing needed those yesterday.” Gary hands me a stack of papers, tagged with glowing neon Post-its.

  “I have them coming in today.” I place the contracts under my arm and leave Gary counting audibly.

  “Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five…”

  * * *

  Back in March, just eleven days before the Sub-Ocean Brightside exploded and everything went to shit, Pauline Sarin was in New Orleans to headline the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. Some of Pauline’s hosts thought it would be festive to throw her a New Orleans-style blowout complete with Mardi Gras Indians, a second line, and a small armada of kitschy fortune-tellers. And because many of Robby Wendall’s people consulted Mama on a regular basis, she was hired to entertain the crowd at Pauline’s “Taste of Louisiana” reception.

  “I was reading palms for all the bigwigs. Mary Matalin, Newt Gingrich, David Vitter’s pretty wife. They all come up to me, acting like I am silly joke lady. And when they open their palms, they know they are no longer looking at silly joke lady.” Mama told me this over the phone the night after Pauline Sarin’s reception.

  “Sad little girl named Krystal Sarin comes to me. She ask me if she will be movie star. And I say no! no! no! I have better news! I see babies! Lots of babies. Then Krystal begins to cry because American girl does not like lots of babies. She wants to be on TV like those big butt Kardashians. So Pauline Sarin comes at me with her fancy glasses, and she says the Bible to me, calling me a vitch—like I never hear that one before. So I grab Pauline Sarin’s hand and turn her palm over. She does not pull away. She does not do nothing except shut her mouth because what I tell her makes her so very, very happy. She cried too but because she’s so happy. She signed her autograph and kissed me on my cheek.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Exactly what she wanted to hear.”

  “Oh, come on, Mama.”

  “She calls me vitch. I fix her.”

  “Mama. Seriously?”

  “Best curse is granted vish, Duke, remember that.”

  So you can imagine the weird, uneasy feeling I have today when I get to work, and Jean Babineaux is already sitting here in the lobby, wearing a “Don’t Blame Me I Voted For Pauline!” t-shirt. She waits anxiously under the temporary vinyl banner that reads, “Mandala Worldwide Gulf Coast Restoration.” Jean is here without Mark.

  She is holding a six-inch stack of ratty papers—more than likely unpaid bills that were unpaid and late well before the Spill. I already know how this will go: She will follow me into my office, shut the door and then shove these bills in my face. She will demand that I pay her if she is going to sign anything today. There will be crying and begging and pleading. It will be enough Gulf Coast drama and sadness to momentarily eclipse my own.

  Jean Babineaux and her impossible situation are exactly why I came into work today.

  “We decided we ain’t gonna do it.” Jean Babineaux sits across from me. She holds her hands in her lap on top of her dog-eared papers.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Mark and I decided last night,” she says.

  “Ms. Babineaux, we’ve already hired the director and the crew.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Is this about the money?”

  There’s a long, awkward silence.

  Here Jean Babineaux sits, cool and composed, ready to take me to task for Mandala Worldwide’s greed and incompetence. I can tell by the way she is pursing her lips that she wants to tell me how we’re not doing enough to save the Gulf and that, in turn, we’re not paying her and her husband enough money to appear in our commercials to lie for us. Of course, this is about the money. Why else would she be here? It’s always about the money, especially when a claimant says…

  “It’s not about the money.” She looks me in the eye.

  “You know, they can cut you a check in accounting like right now. We can walk over there and get it.”

  “I’m good,” she says.

  “Have you thought about this?”

  “Thought about it. Talked about it. Prayed about it.” She smiles.

  “Okay.” I take a deep breath and massage my temples. “How about we just call Mark real quick?”

  “He’s out on the water.” She winks at me. “We won’t be able to reach him.”

  She then picks up my nameplate off my desk.

  I can feel my cheeks burning red.

  “You’re her son.” She nods.

  Jean Babineaux acts warmer, more familiar than she should.

  “Same last name. No relation,” I say.

  “I know who you are.”

  “Melançon’s a pretty common name around here,” I say. “Kind of like Babineaux.”

  This
makes Jean Babineaux laugh, but not hard enough to change the subject.

  “She said you’d need proof.” Jean hands me her stack of tattered bills and busted envelopes. “Every time I saw your mama, I wrote down every word. I mean every word.”

  I flip through page after page of scribbled-on electricity bills and credit card statements.

  “Your mama told me to save them.” Jean looks at me. Her eyes are wild with anticipation. She’s having a hard time not smiling.

  “She’s not my mother.” I glare at her.

  “She said this would happen.” Jean holds up a phone bill. “The Spill. This ad. Mark’s depression. His suicide attempts.” She pushes the phone bill in my face. “Look: ‘After the Spill, the TV deal will kill. Your husband will take his gun and put out the sun. To stop it, you must be the one.’”

  This is the exact kind of sing-songy, rhyme-y, pseudo-Nostradamus bullshit that Mama said to all her clients.

  “She was never wrong.” Jean sits across from me with this increasingly worried look on her face. “You okay, Mr. Melançon?”

  “Yeah. Fine.”

  “Ya mama came to me in a dream.” She stands up. “She asked me to show you these letters.” She waves her stack of busted envelopes and credit card statements at me.

  I jog a stack of paper on my desk and don’t give her eye contact.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Babineaux. I’ve got to find somebody to be in this commercial.”

  “That’s okay. She said you wouldn’t believe me at first, but you’d come around.” Jean Babineaux takes back her stack of crazy phone bills and walks out of my office.

  I wish I believed like Jean Babineaux, like La La and Stevo, or even Daddy and Yanko. La La and Stevo would say that Jean Babineaux’s sudden appearance in my life was Mama’s way of reaching out to me, and not just some cruel coincidence in an otherwise indifferent universe. Daddy would scold me for not realizing the power that the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son holds in this world. And just as I am getting revved up to feel really sorry for myself, I notice that Jean dropped one of her past due bills by my desk. I pick it up.