by Jimmy Fox
Tawpie spent big bucks on trendy clothes and accessories. He was a walking billboard of designer logos and personal monograms, all surface without substance. Nick suspected he spent more time studying men’s fashion magazines than the classics of literature his department was supposed to teaching. But for all Tawpie’s unseemly grasping for hipness, he always managed to be the before photo in every stylist’s nightmare. Even his newest affectation of round faux tortoise-shell glasses didn’t help him look the part of the scholar he never would be.
“Hello, Frederick,” Nick said, trying not very hard to mask his distaste. Una, Dion, and he called him “the Usurper.” “Don’t tell me the English department head no longer rates one of those plush offices over in the Fortress. You’re working late tonight.”
Gibbon Hall, a.k.a. the Fortress, was the center of Freret’s Arts & Sciences division.
“Oh!—” Tawpie put a hand over the place his heart should have been. “You startled me, Nick.” He fiddled with his glasses. His jowly neck flushed crimson. “I was just . . . just in a meeting with a—another staff member. What brings you here?”
“What else? Genealogy.”
By now Tawpie had rallied a bit. “I never got the chance to thank you properly for that marvelous work you did for me. I was certainly glad to get all that cleared up.”
A bit over a year before, during a scandal involving genealogical fraud and an eighteenth-century New Orleans immigrant ship, Tawpie had feared that one of his ancestors was a transported convict from England. Nick found that Tawpie’s true ancestor was in fact another person with a similar name who arrived in New Orleans on another boat decades later. Since then, the old animosity between the two former colleagues seemed to have cooled; but Nick would never think of him as anything else but a self-serving phony.
The intrinsic guile of the man returned to Tawpie’s beady eyes. “Pity that plagiarism thing lingers on in the collective memory. I rather think you’d be an asset to the faculty. But alas, we have the reputation of the department to consider.” He gave his gaudy watch a fake glance. “Must run. Toodle-oo!”
Tawpie took off at a brisk pace, taking the first turn he could.
Head of the English department. What a joke! They had to bump him up to full professor just for the desk job. Always a mediocre teacher, Tawpie had finally found his niche as a sycophantic, pompous bureaucrat.
Una had told Nick countless times that he held a grudge too long. He didn’t agree. The only thing he hoped to regret at death would be the necessity of giving up his grudges. Nick would never forgive Tawpie for his silence, or worse, during the controversy that lead to his dismissal. A word from Tawpie—then, as was Nick, an assistant professor, but also head of the departmental-affairs committee—might have tilted the scale in his favor. Time, the exigencies of his business, and a certain mellowness of middle age had assuaged the sharpness of Nick’s rancor, but the poison still burned deep within him.
He looked around, a feeling of contentment again settling over him in the midst of the collected wisdom of the ages. The Tawpies of the world leave behind them nothing more than outlines, in which they themselves are merely passive participants. Better men and women leave the elaborations of their souls.
A door opened . . . the same carrel. A young woman emerged. She registered momentary surprise, but collected herself immediately and approached Nick.
Now he knew the source of the thumping. It certainly hadn’t been someone protesting noise from Hawty’s carrel; Tawpie and this associate English professor had been much too busy for that!
“Have a good meeting, Brigitte?” Nick asked. She was new to the faculty. He’d met her once before over drinks with Una at the favorite student-faculty hangout, the Folio. At that brief encounter he’d admired her conversation, and, even more so, her looks. Brigitte was small and shapely, with chestnut hair and an almost-ripe red-apple complexion.
“Fair,” she said, flicking a corkscrew strand of hair back, returning Nick’s searching gaze. She brought a black crocodile Fendi portfolio to her chest and hugged it. “It’s so frustrating when a colleague doesn’t have, shall I say, the equipment to reach a certain satisfying conclusion to his argument.”
He pointed to the buttons of her sky-blue sweater vest. She gave him a blushing, thank-you smile as she re-buttoned them correctly.
“You know, Brigitte, I’ve found that a cross-disciplinary strategy sometimes works quite effectively in these nagging literary quandaries.”
“Really?” she said, in a tone that betrayed considerably more than professional interest.
“Whitman’s your area, isn’t he?”
“You’re familiar with my . . . area, Nick?”
“Not nearly as much as I’d like to be.” He recited a few favorite lines from the great nineteenth-century American poet who had captivated him as an undergraduate, and ever since.
“Very impressive,” she said. “Stanza five, ‘Song of Myself.’ It would be nice to have a real scholar’s input—for a change. Give me a call, why don’t you.”
She walked down the same aisle of books that Tawpie had used for his escape, paused, gave a frank, appraising backward glance, and continued walking straight.
Nick silently thanked her for the fine view of her swishing, short black dress that hugged her pert body underneath.
And then, behind him, fists pounded in unison on carrel doors Nick had assumed were surely empty. He preferred to think the fist bumps were applause for his method rather than protests of the noise.
He located the anti-theft strip in the binding of the little 1928 edition of Sheridan’s play, removed it deftly with his Swiss Army Knife, and dropped the book into his briefcase.
CHAPTER 10
Only six hundred acres of prime forest and cropland remained to the Tadbulls from their antebellum heyday, when the family’s empire sprawled across more than four thousand acres of central Louisiana.
Bayou Fostine ran through Tadbull land, a fact that in the past had guaranteed the family political and economic power. Before the modern era of flood plans and Corps of Engineer projects that robbed the bayou of much of its natural flow, steamboats plying the Sangfleuve River could still travel up Bayou Fostine as far as the landing at Tadbull Hall, enriching the brash Anglo-American Protestant families who’d barged into the French and Spanish Creoles’ territorial parlor.
From the old cypress-beam landing on the bayou the “great house” known as Tadbull Hall was visible, half a mile away down a long corridor of well-tended landscape. Once, bales of cotton, stacks of lumber, and barrels of sugar waited for loading here, to be exchanged for the products of the glittering industrial world of New Orleans and beyond. Now the still-solid landing on the atrophied stream was used only for fishing and crawfish boils.
The corridor connecting the landing to the house was bordered by a double windbreak of hundred-and-fifty-year-old live oaks, and between these venerable trees ran an oval road of bleached, crushed mollusk shells. Legend had it that during Mardi Gras season, the early Tadbulls and friends dressed up as Romans and conducted wagon and buggy races on the oval. These revels, for their time, allegedly reached shocking levels of debauchery.
Arthur Tadbull, the founder of the Louisiana dynasty, was a failed merchant from Virginia, who married a socially prominent young woman from New Orleans, Mignon Frusquin. In 1810, he managed to take part in the successful revolt in West Florida that resulted in the capture of Baton Rouge from the Spanish. Later he played an important role in Territory of Orleans Governor Claiborne’s occupation of the disputed land between the Mississippi and the Peal Rivers.
Arthur began accumulating property in what is now the center of the state, near the old French settlement of Post du Sang. The town that grew up around the colonial fort on the banks of “le fleuve Sang,” or Blood River, eventually became Port Sangfleuve, and finally the present-day city of Armageddon. At some point after the Louisiana Purchase—according to the perpetually aggrieved French C
reoles—the uncouth Americans, having taken everything and turned it on its head, began to refer to the muddy red waterway as the Sangfleuve, even adding the redundant “River” in their clumsy language. The Louisiana-born French couldn’t complain about fleuve being used instead of rivière, because it was their former countrymen, early French explorers, who mistakenly thought the river ran to the Gulf instead of into the Mississippi River.
Armageddon acquired its forbidding name as a result of a fiery Civil War skirmish that destroyed most of the original town. Though this battle was a tactical footnote in the greater conflict, it imbued the river’s accidentally appropriate name with a meaning that seemed, in the eyes of townsfolk then and now, fated.
How Arthur Tadbull ended up with so much property was a topic of debate by locals and historians. Most of land had been guaranteed through the Louisiana Purchase to various Indian tribes by the American government, the usual, ultimately empty, promise in territorial acquisitions. These tribes had bought the land from the French or the Spanish, who had persuaded them, through treaties and threats, that they were not entitled to claim the forests and lakeshores they’d occupied for millennia. Arthur Tadbull used his wife’s dwindling fortune and his political clout to acquire some of his land; but undoubtedly he tricked trusting local Indians, and conspired with some venal tribal leaders—unchecked power even in a Neolithic society corrupts—to amass a much larger portion.
The family home was an Anglo-American raised cottage of two-and-a-half generous stories, built primarily by slaves in 1821. Even though technically correct, the term “cottage” didn’t do the lovely house justice. It was white with green shutters and a chimney on either end, outside the walls, following the English building ways. The first story was of bricks made of clay and mud from Bayou Fostine; the second was of huge cypress and pine boards and beams from the vast property, a kind of lumber that became extinct with the old-growth forests that had provided it. Four simple square brick columns supported the second-story gallery, matched by four wooden colonettes below the gabled roof and the rambling attic. The strongest hurricanes merely glanced off Tadbull Hall.
Unlike many other great plantation houses of the era, Tadbull Hall was no classical temple of ostentation. It spoke of a family that loved life’s pleasures but knew the danger of overreaching, that believed the winner in the game of wealth and power was he who took his modest winnings and left the table to the double-or-nothing fools.
On the gracious front porch of Tadbull Hall, state Representative Rufus Girn impatiently hammered away with the arm-and-tomahawk brass doorknocker.
“Damn darky’s probably watchin’ that Oprah woman,” he muttered dyspeptically. “Shit. Darkies all over the state ’cept where you need one.”
Girn wiped sweat from his forehead with a stained handkerchief. Louisiana fall weather was as faithless as his campaign refrains. He wanted to blame the heat, too, on African Americans, but couldn’t come up with a satisfactory conspiracy theory at the moment.
Scowling, he looked around him at the signs of established affluence and removed the stubby cigar from his mouth. He stared at the cigar with loathing, as if it had spattered him with some of the spit he’d soaked it in all day. With a vindictive flick, he sent it tumbling into the nearby thick dwarf yaupon hedge hugging the perimeter of the porch. A disc of ash lay on the lapel of his shiny blue suit—one of several he’d purchased for a song from the widow of an old colleague who’d died sleeping in his chair on the House floor. He brushed off the ash, but succeeded merely in creating a silver smudge on the dark silk.
It had not been a good day. That lamentable state of affairs was about to change. He’d put in too much work on this project—which just might turn out to be the achievement of his corrupt career—to let such minor irritations distract him.
Representative Girn had just been re-elected to serve his sixth four-year term in the Louisiana House; two four-year Senate terms in the middle had allowed him to get around constitutional term limits. He was a bit past sixty-three, hard of hearing, with a touch of prostate cancer and gonorrhea, and due for another angioplasty. But Rufus Girn was still as mean and wily and determined as an old Blue Channel catfish. In fact, friends and enemies alike knew him as “Catfish.”
There was a certain facial resemblance to that ancient denizen of the state’s lakes and rivers: flat, broad nose that had been broken in fist-fights on the House floor during the desegregation era, bushy gray mustache, indignant goggle eyes, and irascible bulldog scowl. In behavior he earned his nickname by being a consummate bottom-feeder, eagerly foraging for personally enriching legislative deals that were too risky or too unprofitable for the flashier fish.
Girn had been the gofer for a rapacious, dictatorial governor, one of the great exemplars of the political tradition that feeds the image of Louisiana as a veritable banana republic. The young Girn had been adept on the ukulele and had composed a campaign song for the governor, which became quite popular. In the sad last years of the administration, Girn proved indispensable, even zipping the failing governor’s pants after his increasingly pitiful dalliances with Bourbon Street strippers. For this unwavering loyalty and cunning, the governor loved him as medieval kings loved their most ruthless bastard sons. Girn was one of the few parasites who narrowly escaped federal indictments and prison after the governor was committed to a psychiatric hospital.
Just before the governor lost his wits completely, he saw to it that Girn got his reward: the 120th District, drawn specifically through corridors of five parishes to include the poorest and most uninformed of Louisiana’s electorate. Except, of course, for the Tadbulls.
The secret of Girn’s strangle hold on power in his district was also the reason for his relative failure to be stinking rich. The soil of his garden was simply too played out. There were few wealthy constituents to offer juicy bribes for his influence in the legislature, and fewer industries he could hit up for plump rake-offs and silent partnerships on state-contracted business. At a time when most of his contemporaries in state government had already made fortunes through such strategies and were kicking back on their hunting camps in the coastal marshes or in their condos in Tahoe and Aspen, Rufus Catfish Girn was still sifting mud for his elusive big score.
A less bitter man would not have struck the Tadbull door so violently. Girn pounded away, as if desperately trying to break into a vault loaded with gold.
At length, a black woman in a white uniform opened the tall paneled door.
“Mr. Girn, come on in, sir,” she said cheerfully, moving with the sweep of the door out of Girn’s way as he charged in. “So good to see you again. Mr. Tadbull’s in the study. I’ll take you on back.”
But he was already striding down the cypress-lined main hall, his second-hand alligator Guccis thudding dully on the old Persian runner. “I know where it is,” Girn said sourly over his shoulder. “Don’t bother.”
CHAPTER 11
“Gotdamn, Catfish, where have you been?” Wooten Tadbull III sat at a graceful pearwood gaming table; new red baize covered the playing surface. He held a screwdriver in one hand, and a cheap plastic wristwatch in the other.
“We waited lunch on you as long as we could, boy,” Mr. Tadbull said. “Is it still hot as a horny whore out there?”
Mr. Tadbull was a stout, dapper man, with a horseshoe of gray hair around his shiny, healthy pate. Mischievous blue eyes hid a punch line, perhaps, but nothing much deeper. He favored the English country squire’s sporting look, augmented with lighter-weight fabrics for the Louisiana climate. His Norfolk jacket had suede elbow patches. A bright red silk handkerchief sprouted from a breast pocket and complemented the muted plaid of his coat. The toes of his velvet slippers, emblazoned with a golden-threaded fox, barely grazed the floor as he swung his legs.
Though stuffed game birds and other animals perched or snarled here and there about the room, Wooten Tadbull III didn’t seem to be the man who had left the comfort of Tadbull Hall to kill them.
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“You damn right it’s hot,” Girn said. “And I got lost, as many times as I been coming, here. Can you believe that? Had to stop at that Indian woman’s store, ask directions. There’s some kind of a meeting there tonight. Some of them Las Vegas boys’ll be there, I understand, pitchin’ a casino contract. We best be gettin’ our shit together.”
“That’d be Luevenia, you’re talking about,” Tadbull said, engrossed in tinkering with his wristwatch. “A good woman there, boy, let me tell you. Known her all my life. She been good to this family.” Mr. Tadbull squinted at the watch with new determination. He went to work with the screwdriver again, apparently trying to pry open the back cover. “Why don’t you get you a chauffeur, like you used to have? And one of these sale-you-lahr phone thingamajigs.”
Girn stood before a beautiful tall cabinet of pale and satiny pear-wood matching the table; lozenges of glass echoed the panes in the bay window behind Mr. Tadbull. Girn poured a heaping tumbler of fine bourbon. Then he used silver tongs to remove ice from a small silver bucket. One, two, three. The ice cubes tinkled musically.
Girn took a big swallow and smacked in pleasure for a moment. “Tadbull, them times is gone. I tell you, it just almost don’t pay to sacrifice for the public good no more. Nowadays, somebody’s forever gettin’ to the trough first or snappin’ at my butt. Cell phone? Shit! Last thing I need is some pain-in-the-ass constituent callin’ me while I’m on the crapper.”
“Say, Catfish, pour me one, will you, boy?”
As Girn ranted on about the myriad barriers in the path of today’s crooked politician, Mr. Tadbull again became absorbed in dissecting the watch. Suddenly, his screwdriver slipped and shot out of his hand, hitting a Tibetan gong that had arrived at Tadbull Hall in the baggage of a globe-trotting ancestor.
“Gotdamn! The gotdamn rice-eating bastards! Can’t even change the battery in the gotdamn thing,” Mr. Tadbull complained, as if the watch were a microphone to Asia. “You got to buy a whole new one. You know what these things cost? Fifteen dollars! Now that’s plenty smart of the slant-eyes, isn’t it? Lots more than a measly old battery, but not so much you’re gonna lose sleep over it. Say, I ever tell you that story about my daddy and the time he sold the scrap iron from our sugar house?”