“Ch—et?”
On the other side was one of those canals they seemed to have out the yingyang in these parts. A bayou? Was I getting this right? Don’t count on it. Lining the near bank of the bayou was a long and narrow wooden boardwalk, with some piers extending out in the water. Boats, big and small, were tied to the piers. Across the bayou was a setup that looked pretty much the same—a little settlement with boats docked in front of it. Nothing seemed to be moving except for us and the chickens pecking at the dirt: not the air, not the water—a deep dark green, like no water I knew—not a branch or a flower. I sat up very straight, always best when coming into someplace new.
Bernie parked at the foot of one of the piers. “This is it, big guy,” he said, wiping sweat off his brow with the back of his arm. “Boutette family pier is third from the end.” We hopped out—me actually airborne, Bernie not—and walked out along the pier. Fish smells hung in the still air, and so did a scent that reminded me of frog or toad or snake, but more peppery, an odd kind of peppery mixed with poop. Other than that, this pier didn’t seem to have much going for it. No boats, for example. All the other piers had boats tied to them, but not this one. So therefore? That was Bernie’s department. I followed him to the end of the pier and got in a quick lick of the arm he’d used to wipe the sweat off his forehead.
Bernie gazed across the water for a bit, then looked up the bayou to where several little bayous seemed to flow into it, and finally down the bayou, shading his eyes from the sun. The bayou got wider in that direction, bent in a long curve, the water vanishing behind a wall of trees.
“Could hear a pin drop,” he said.
Kind of a puzzler. Bernie was saying he was capable of hearing a pin hit the floor? Like one of those pins Suzie used for sticking notes on the wall of her cubicle back when she was with the Valley Tribune? Or did he mean a bowling pin? I’d gone with him to the Police Athletic League Bowling Night once, probably wouldn’t be doing that again anytime soon. But I remembered the racket whenever the bowling ball blew those pins sky high. Bernie could hear that, no problem. I pointed my ears up. Not a peep from any type of pin I knew, but I did hear a low throb-throb coming from beyond the bend in the bayou.
Bernie turned and started walking back to the foot of the pier. I stayed where I was, eyes on that distant gleam of water where the bayou rounded the bend.
“Chet?” Bernie said. “Let’s go, big—” He paused, gave me a close look. “Something up?” He came and stood beside me. We’re partners, me and Bernie.
The nose of a boat came into view, and then the whole boat, small and metal, with a putt-putt motor at the back, the first putt always solid sounding, the second kind of sputtering. I had heard that kind of mismatch thing from the Porsche more than once; it always meant the tools would soon appear.
Sitting at the back with a relaxed grip on the motor’s stick-out handle was a big, gray-haired woman wearing a halter top and shorts. And what was this? A patch over one eye? That always worried me. As she came closer, a similar sort of boat but black instead of silver started up from one of the piers on the far side and headed down the bayou. A woman was driving that black boat, too, an even bigger gray-haired woman, also in a halter top and shorts, but without an eye patch. As the boats passed each other, not too far apart, both women did that middle-finger raising thing. The name for this is giving the finger. We have ways of doing something similar in the nation within, but no time to get into that now. With humans, I’d seen bloody scenes come next plenty of times and got ready for anything. But the boats went their separate ways, the women not making eye contact even once.
The silver boat came putt-putting toward us. I’d actually never been up close to a boat. The little waves it made were beautiful, and so were their sounds, a bit like the wind in the trees but thicker and somehow more satisfying. The woman cut the engine and the boat glided in a long slow curve, coming to a stop right beside the pier and rocking gently in the water.
The woman rose, picking up a coiled rope. Bernie held out his hand to take it from her, but she ignored him and whipped the rope around a rusty metal bar kind of thing sticking up from the pier and locked it down with a tight knot. I’d seen that knot before—Bernie is great at knots and had taught Charlie a whole bunch—but the name didn’t come to me. I was cool with that.
Some squarish cages lay in the bottom of the boat. The woman grabbed one and heaved it up on the dock.
“Help you with that?” Bernie said.
She paused, fixed her eye on him, and then on me: a big dark green eye, pretty much the same color as the bayou, and not at all friendly.
“You the detective?” she said.
“That’s right,” Bernie said.
“Then you might as well, long as I’m paying you anyways.”
Which I didn’t get. Wasn’t Vannah paying us? This . . . this pirate woman! Yes, I’d made a connection—a connection coming from a time after Leda left when Bernie and I watched a lot of pirate movies—one of my very best! For a moment, I actually couldn’t think of another. The moment passed. A welcome breeze sprang up in the still air, coming from somewhere behind me.
“Mrs. Boutette?” Bernie said.
“My friends call me Mami.” The dark green eye got a bit colder. “Are we gonna be friends?”
“Don’t see why not, Mami. I’m Bernie Little. And this is Chet.”
“He plannin’ to blow us all down with that tail of his?”
Bernie laughed. What was funny? Something about my tail? How could there be anything funn—I took a quick backward glance—not something that requires much head turning here in the nation within, by the way, and saw that my tail was in action, big-time. You might think it would be a snap to ramp it down to stillness in a matter of moments. You’d be wrong. No offense.
“How’s my idiot son?” Mami was saying.
Bernie licked his lips. That’s something I’m always on the lookout for with humans, but Bernie? We were in new territory. “Which of the, ah, um . . .” he began, and came to a halt.
Her dark green eye narrowed, seemed to get less green, more ice-cube colored. “I’m talkin’ ’bout Baron, of course.”
“Right, right,” said Bernie. “Frenchie.”
“Frenchie?”
“What we call him back home—just a friendly nickname.”
“Friendly.”
“He’s a likable guy.”
“If he’s so likable, how come you put him behind bars?”
“That was business.”
That bayou-colored eye of hers opened wider and warmed up. “You’re an homme serieux.”
“Huh?” Bernie said.
“Cajun talk,” said Mami. Her eye moistened, like she might be on the verge of tears. That would have been a stunner. It didn’t happen. “The truth is, Bernie, I’ve got three idiot sons. It’s like Ralph soaked up all the IQ points meant for the others.” She gazed over at the buildings on the other side of the bayou, and then into the trees beyond. From down in the boat, she reached up and grabbed Bernie’s hand, squeezed it so hard it bore a red mark when she let go. “Find him for me, please.”
“We’ll do our best,” Bernie said, flexing his hand. “Is there a Mr. Boutette in the picture?”
Mami felt in her pocket, took out a can of dip. “What picture would you be talkin’ ’bout?” she said.
Or something like that. I’d known plenty of dip chewers—take our mechanic, Nixon Panero, for example—but never a female one. She popped off the can top with her thumbnail, a short, thick thumbnail, black at the edge, and offered the can to Bernie.
“Maybe later,” he said.
Another stunner. What a case this was turning out to be, whatever it happened to be about! Had Bernie ever chewed dip before? Just once, when he was a kid, long before we got together, of course. He’d told Nixon that it had made him puke. Humans don’t like puking. In the nation within we don’t really like puking either, but it’s no big deal. And then sometimes you find
yourself scarfing up the very puke you just puked! What was that all about? Life is full of surprises. But forget all that, because just then I happened to catch a brightness in Bernie’s eyes, sure sign that he was having a bit of fun.
“Ain’t no Mr. Boutette, if that’s what you’re askin’,” Mami said popping a thick dip in her cheek. “He’s long gone.”
“Where?” said Bernie.
“On the bottom.” Mami waved one of her big strong hands down the bayou. “Fell off of a shrimper in a storm.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.” With a grunt, Mami hoisted another cage up onto the dock. Bernie stacked it on the first one. That was when I noticed what was inside those cages: crabs! Lots and lots of crabs, some blue, some yellow, all wriggling around. I knew crabs from the tank at Big Al C.’s Place for Crabs, a joint we used to hit in South Pedroia—don’t get me started on Big Al C., now breaking rocks in the hot sun—but I’d never seen them like this before, up close and—how would you put it? Kind of . . personal, that was it. The next thing I knew I had my front paws up against that top cage. All that wriggling and those little crab eyes! And the claws: What was with those wicked-looking claws? I only wanted to see better. Maybe I did end up seeing better and maybe I didn’t, but there wasn’t much time for any certainty, because just about right away both those cages somehow toppled off the pier and fell splash into the water, sinking out of sight.
Mami went bright red and turned on me, screaming in the loudest, screechiest voice I’d ever heard. The air around me shook with all these words I didn’t know, but they sounded not good.
“Chet!” Bernie said. “In the car! Now!”
I was already halfway there, needed no encouragement from anybody. I knew one thing for sure: Mami was the scariest human I’d ever met.
NINE
A dented old pickup with painted crabs and shrimp on the side appeared and drove to the end of the pier. The driver, a wiry dude with a bushy white mustache but no other hair on his head got out. The wiry dude and Mami did some talking. He counted out some money. They did some more talking. He called her a bad name. She called him a bad name back, one Leda had used on Bernie, right before the end. The wiry dude counted out more money and jammed it into her hand. Then he and Mami loaded crabs into a big steel tub in the truck bed. The wiry dude drove off, trailing crab smell that showed no sign of drifting away any time soon even though the crabs themselves were gone. I felt nice and calm inside. Was it possible I’d messed up in some way? I didn’t try to remember, just kept my eyes on Bernie. Any moment now he’d be calling me over. Chet! C’mere, big guy!
But that didn’t happen. I waited, partway out of my seat, front paws on the edge of the door. Meanwhile, Bernie and Mami were talking—some distance off, true, but I could hear them perfectly well.
“Ralph keeps the Zodiac right here, tied to this very cleat,” Mami said, pointing to the metal stick-up thing she’d roped her boat to. “He takes it places time to time, anchorages he’s interested in, but not without tellin’ somebody, and nobody got told. Night of the fifteenth she was floatin’ right here. Morning of the sixteenth—gone.”
“That a Saturday night?” Bernie said.
Mami nodded. “Relevant fact. I can see you have a head on your shoulders.”
Hard to miss: that was my first thought. But maybe it had something to do with Mami only having the one eye. That was as far as I could take it, but not too shabby, in my opinion.
“. . . Sunday mornings we get a lot of hung-over worshippers in the pews,” Mami was saying. “And up at the pulpit, too—sorry to bust your bubble.”
“That bubble got busted long ago,” Bernie said.
Mami spat a thin brown tobacco chew stream down off the pier and into the water. “We’re gonna get along good you and me, in what they call a like-minded way.”
Bernie tilted his head to one side the way he does sometimes. What does it mean? I didn’t know. But then came a surprise.
“What does that head tilt mean?” Mami said.
Wow! Mami and I were thinking along the same lines? Did I like that? Not one bit.
“Nothing,” Bernie said. “It means nothing.”
So now I knew. Today was shaping up nicely.
“Men,” Mami said.
I waited for more. Bernie seemed to be waiting, too. But when no more came, he finally said, “And no one saw or heard from Ralph since?”
“Nope.”
“Does he carry a phone on board?”
“Lotta good it does,” Mami said. “Reception in these parts is like bees in a bottle.”
Whatever that meant, I wanted no part of it. I’d had experiences with bees, unforgettable, even though I’d tried and tried.
“Did anyone check these places he liked to take the boat?”
“Do we all look stupid to you down here? Stands to reason we did that first thing.”
Bernie gazed at her. Was he trying to see if she looked stupid? And what did stupid even look like? I had no idea. “Still,” Bernie said, “that’s where I’d like to start.”
“Meanin’ you want me to waste my time babysittin’ you around the damn swamp?”
“Nope. I’ll just need you to draw me a map.”
Mami squinted at him till that one eye was just a slit of bayou green. “You can read a chart?”
“Yeah.”
“Ex-military by any chance?”
“Correct,” Bernie said. “And I’ll be wanting to rent a boat, if you can point me right.”
“Way ahead of you,” Mami said.
Way ahead of Bernie? That I’d have to see.
Mami had a pickup of her own, even more banged-up than the one that had driven off with the crabs. It made a clanging noise and also a scrape-scrape that bothered my ears the whole time we followed her down the main street, inland on a dirt road that grew more and more rutted—trees and bushes right up against us, the spongy-smelling fringes sometimes trailing on our hood—and came to an end at another bayou. This bayou was very narrow, the tops of the trees on both sides almost meeting in the middle. There was a dock with a tall squarish boat—kind of like a trailer—tied up to the end. A small motorboat drifted behind the big one, connected by a seaweedy rope that sagged in the water.
We parked behind Mami’s pickup and got out.
“Noticed the Stars and Bars bumper sticker on your truck,” Bernie said.
“Got a problem with that?” said Mami.
“I do.”
“My great-great-great fought with General Lee,” Mami said. Up to that point, I’d been following along pretty well.
“So did mine,” said Bernie. Now I was totally lost, but it didn’t matter because at that moment I picked up that new smell again, the one that reminded me of frog or toad or snake, but more peppery, a strange poop-peppery mix. I sniffed my way down to the water’s edge. There was snake, too—I’d been smelling snake constantly as soon as we’d entered bayou country—but this new one, so much more interesting, wasn’t snake. It got stronger and stronger as I came to the water. I gazed down into the dark stillness. Tiny insects skittered around on the surface here and there. I suppose I could have licked them up, maybe if the air hadn’t been so thick: I just wasn’t that hungry. I took a nice drink instead, which turned out to be not the best water I’d ever tasted—too warm, too flat, too muddy, too salty. But no complaints. I realized how thirsty I was—crazy how that happens sometimes when you start to drink—and lapped up some more. And what was this? I tasted a—what’s does Bernie say? Soupçon? That was it: a soupçon, which maybe means a bit of soup, chicken noodle being my favorite—surprising how often people leave soup in their bowls—but forget about that. The point is I tasted a soupçon of that interesting new smell they had in these parts. Hope that makes sense. It does where I come from.
“This is Little Jazz, Ralph’s houseboat,” Mami was saying. “You best bunk down here. Nearest motel’s a rat hole. I don’t recommend it.”
Made p
erfect sense. Shut-eye in a rat hole? I knew I wouldn’t get much.
“And any explorin’ you want to do, just take that there pirogue. Mix is fifty to one, and keep the goddamn prop offen the bottom. There’s a chart on the console inside—red X’s is where he likes to go.” She tossed him a set of keys.
Bernie caught them—real easy, the way Bernie catches stuff—and said, “One more thing.”
“What’s that?” said Mami, pausing with her hand on the open door of the pickup.
“Why didn’t you file a missing persons report?”
“Didn’t you go over all that with Duke and Lord? ’Cording to my information, you did.”
“Just confirming it,” Bernie said. “The cops here are aligned with or possibly members of this other family, the Robideaus. Does that sum it up?”
Mami didn’t reply. She got in the pickup, sitting sideways to us so we couldn’t see her good eye, only the patch. That was scary, if I happened to be the type who gets scared, which I’m not.
“I’m going to take a wild guess,” Bernie said.
There was a long silence. Then Mami said, “Go on if you’re gonna.”
“That fellow boater of yours back in town was Grannie Robideau,” Bernie said.
Mami snapped her head around, glared at Bernie with her good eye. The patch-only angle suddenly seemed better to me. “She’s no goddamn fellow of mine and you best watch your mouth, pretty boy.”
Pretty boy? No one had ever called Bernie pretty before. Bernie’s very good-looking, of course, certainly one the best-looking people in the whole Valley, but pretty? Pretty was all about Tulip and Autumn, for example, two very nice young women—and off-the-scale patters—who worked for our pal Livia Moon at her house of ill repute back in Pottsdale, and not about tough men like Bernie, and Bernie was a tough man, never forget that.
Bernie’s face didn’t change at all. He made no mention of the pretty boy thing. Instead, he said, “What’s the story on the load of shrimp Lord stole from her?”
The Sound and the Furry Page 7