The Red-Hot Cajun

by Sandra Hill

  Justin went out to his truck for a minute to get some kind of camera equipment he wanted to show them. J.B. and Maddie went to the kitchen to test Tante Lulu’s gumbo, at her insistence. Rend leaned over on the couch and pinched Val’s thigh. “Wanna scoot upstairs for five minutes of hanky-panky?”

  “Get real.”

  “I don’t like that Justin.”

  “You’ve made that obvious.”

  “I think he’s gay.”

  She laughed. “Where would you ever get that idea.”

  “He wears a ponytail.”

  “Ozzy Osbourne wears a ponytail and he has three kids.”

  “Great example, toots.” He chided her.

  “David Beckham then. He has a ponytail.”

  “No, no. You already said Ozzy.”

  “Ponytail does not equal homosexual,” she argued, even though he was probably kidding.

  “He’s not your type,” he threw in, no doubt figuring new tactics were needed.

  “What is my type?” she asked before she had a chance to bite her tongue.

  He winked at her. “Me, baby. Me.”

  That’s what I’m afraid of

  After another hour of brainstorming, they decided on a rough plan for the documentary. Valerie would contact and interview various Louisiana conservationists, including members of the Coast 2050 committee, along with scientists and oil company employees and executives. Justin thought, and he was right, that they needed visuals of the bayou’s deterioration, and that meant that they needed to go deep into the bayou to get the real story. They decided they would take J.B. and Maddie’s shrimp boat and travel along various bayous that led out to the Gulf. It was impossible to make the whole journey in that one boat, however. Some parts would be over land, where they would pick up their journey in another vessel. J.B. and Maddie had numerous friends who worked or lived on the water. They would interview people along the way—the people most affected by the bayou’s deterioration: fishermen, farmers, storekeepers.

  “Tante Lulu should come, too,” Justin said.

  “What?” Val and Rene said at the same time.

  “Now, hear me out. You need color in this piece, and she is colorful to say the least. Plus, she’s a traiteur. More color. And she knows lots of people .. . the born-and-bred Cajuns who could tell us stories of the old days.”

  Valerie whimpered. She thought she heard Rene’ whimper, as well.

  She took a deep breath and said, “You’re right.”

  “Well, if Tante Lulu is going, I am, too,” Tee-John interjected from the kitchen doorway. “I can do all the grunt work on the boat. And fish for our food, and stuff.”

  “Dad would have a fit,” Rene pointed out. Their father owned a part of Cypress Oil, having sold them family lands about thirty years ago. He would, indeed, have a fit if not just one, but two, of his sons were working on a project that could affect him adversely.

  “Pffff! Half the time he doesn’t know or care where I am,” Tee-John contended.

  “This documentary project is getting totally out of hand. It’s not at all what I envisioned,” Rene said.

  That probably meant he would allow Tee-John to come along.

  “That’s not the half of it,” Justin told Rene, then looked pointedly at Val.

  “What now?” Rene asked, looking not at Justin, but at Val.

  “You have to be the figurehead for this piece,” she pleaded. “You’re good-looking and charming, when you want to be, and...”

  Rene waited for her to finish. When she didn’t, he prodded, “... and?”

  “And virile,” Justin finished for her.

  “Oh, no! Not that again!”

  “Really, Rene, if we want big-time publicity, there has to be a hook. I’m talking Oprah, Good Morning America, Dateline, 60 Minutes, if we hope to really nudge the politicians.”

  “When Val told me about the Juju plant and male virility, I knew we had a hook,” Justin continued.

  “And, let’s face it, Rene you exude male virility.”

  Rene gave Valerie a look that said, “See? Gay to the bone.”

  Which he was not. Valerie knew that for a fact. One of her co-workers at TTN had dated him at one time and had given glowing reports on his prowess.

  “Get someone else. How about J.B.?”

  Everyone turned to look at J.B. with his scruffy hair and scruffy beard and bleary eyes. He was eating a beignet at the moment and had sugar everywhere.

  It was J.B.’s wife who exclaimed, “Get real!”

  “I could do it,” Tee-John asserted, thrusting out his chest.

  “You probably could, but you’re too young,” Justin said.

  Attention came back to Rene. “No, no, no!” he reiterated.

  “Were you lying about the plant?” Valerie asked Rene”.

  “No. Not exactly. But I have no scientific proof that it really works. It’s probably just an old wives’ tale.”

  “It works,” Tante Lulu yelled from the kitchen.

  “Look, even the hint of such a plant will be enough,” Justin said. “It’s the old bait and switch of television. Pull them in with one thing and they’ll stay for the rest of the story.”

  “AIon Dieu! We’ll have herds of people tramping through the swamps looking for the plant. So much for protecting the environment!” Rene could easily see this whole plan backfiring.

  “We’ll find a way to get around that,” Valerie said. “In fact, maybe we can get my aunts Margo and Madeline on our side in the process. They could get the trademark on Juju herbal tea, or some such thing.

  People won’t be out tramping through gator-riddled swamps if they can buy the same thing in town or by mail in a tea.”

  “This is a freakin’ nightmare.” Hmmm. Maybe it could work .

  Valerie patted his hand. Rene cared too much about the bayou to put his personal concerns above the greater good, and so it was no surprise that he agreed to work with them in the end. But he didn’t like it.

  Not one bit.

  “I promise, everything will be done tastefully,” she assured him.

  His only response was a grunt. When everyone headed out of the room for “a little snack,” which covered every inch of space in the kitchen, Rend pulled Val out of hearing, and said, “You are going to owe me big-time for this, babe. And I’m not talking a little hanky-panky. I’m talking a marathon of world-class, eyeballs-rolling, heart-stopping sex.”

  She just smiled.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ahoy, maties!

  A week later, everyone boarded J.B. and Maddie’s fifty-foot, wooden shrimp trawler, Swamp Sally, on one of the smaller bayous that led out to the Gulf of Mexico. Rend wasn’t sure if he should pull out all his hair now or after this circus parade was over.

  J.B. and Maddie wore matching Proud to be a Coonass T-shirts. “Coonass” is an affectionate, sometimes controversial, ethnic slur used among Cajuns. No one knows for sure the origins of the word.

  Some say it came from the French conasse, slang for a diseased whore; others say it came from the presumed habit Cajuns had of eating raccoons. Many Cajuns employ the term as their own way of poking fun at their allegedly ignorant ways.

  Lots of people thought J.B. and Maddie were a little bit wacko, but they were just eccentric. And, man, did they love each other! They couldn’t pass each other without touching—a squeeze of a shoulder, a pat on the butt, short kisses. And they had to be in their fifties, maybe late forties.

  Tante Lulu arrived with enough food to sink the boat. A foot-high St. Jude statue, magnetized on the bottom, was also among her supplies; she put that in the wheelhouse. She was dressed in her version of what a shrimp fisherman would wear if he was modeling for GQ. A Bite Me Bayou Bait Company baseball cap covered her curly hair, which was jet-black today. A snow-white T-shirt, which wouldn’t be white for long on this boat, was tucked into a brand-new pair of jeans with a designer patch on the butt. The jeans were tucked into the rubber boots known as “Coon
ass Reeboks” among fishermen here.

  Stepping on board, after her second trip back to her car for supplies, she announced, “I’ve decided what I’m gonna do on my birthday.”

  That damn birthday party again! “I thought we were throwing you a big birthday party. And Charmaine was getting you tickets to see Richard Simmons,” Rene said.

  “Sure, but what am I gonna give myself? Well, remember how President Bush—the first President Bush—jumped out of an airplane on his eightieth birthday? Thass what I’m gonna do.”

  Oh, God! What next? “Tante Lulu, you are not going skydiving,” he said as gently as he could.

  “Why? Are you afraid I’ll have a heart attack or sumpin’?”

  “No, I’m afraid I would have a heart attack.”

  She went off in a huff then to the below-deck kitchen galley.

  Some little blonde chippie who looked sixteen going on thirty dropped Tee-John off, rock music blaring from her red convertible Trans Am. He leaned over the driver’s door and gave her a way-too-long kiss before waving good-bye. Then he picked up his duffel bag and started toward them, smiling like the tomcat he was. “Yo, Tante Lulu, my stomach, she’s agrowlin’. You got anything to eat?”

  His aunt smiled as if the scamp had just told her she’d won a date with Richard Simmons.

  Then there was Valerie. Lordy, Lordy! She wore a plain ol’ black tank top and shorts with white tennis shoes, but there was nothing “plain ol’“ about her. She wore a baseball cap like the rest of them with a ponytail sticking out the back. Her cap proclaimed: Women Rule. She could rule him looking like that, for sure.

  “You better put on plenty of sunscreen and mosquito repellent,” he advised her, taking in all that exposed skin. The heat wave continued in Southern Louisiana, never going much below 110 degrees daytime. Sweat rolled off all of them, and it was only 9 a.m.

  “Maybe you can put it on for me later,” she answered saucily.

  Guar-an-teed!

  Justin, meanwhile, was taping everyone and everything, Val at his side doing the interviews to go with the film. Rene was impressed with her professionalism... and, okay, with Justin’s expertise, too. Even the guy who owned the bait shed along the road, which also advertised alligator meat, got his chance to vent for nationwide TV. Rene noticed Justin doing a few close-ups of Val, which tempted him to do something foolish, such as knock out his perfect front teeth. But Justin also gave equal film coverage to him and other members of the crew. Rene was deliberately keeping his shirt on, just in case he found himself on some poster someday. He could see it now, himself as “The Very Virile Cajun.” Heck, they might even put such a picture on Juju tea. Yeah, that’s what he needed—his naked chest on tea bags around the world.

  They planned to spend a week or two filming the bayous, the marshland, and the barrier islands. Then Justin and Val would go off by themselves— which pleased him to no end. .. not! —while he took care of personal business, including some job interviews. It was time to think about what kind of work he wanted to do in the future. Justin and Val at this point would only be developing a proposal for the documentary to be shown to some big shot named Anderson in New York City. If he didn’t buy it, there were a few other cable channels that might be interested.

  It sounded well-organized and as if it were running according to plan. Not so. Not with seven people involved, all having strong opinions to express.

  Most of all, though, he worried about the danger. Not for him and J.B. and Maddie, but the others.

  They weren’t accustomed to the anti-environmentalist sentiments that abounded, even from their own people, who viewed their efforts as a potential trigger for a loss of jobs.

  Val, himself, J.B., and Maddie had all gotten voice mails threatening their lives if they proceeded with the documentary. Water had been poured into the gas tank on the boat, which caused delays. His bank called in the mortgage on his town house, which he already put on the market. But he had to have Luc file orders to “cease and desist” with their threats of a sheriff’s sale until the structure was sold. Val’s mother claimed she was disinheriting her daughter if she continued with this “foolishness.” The windshield of J.B.’s truck was shattered by what appeared to be a bullet.

  He’d discussed the danger with all of them. J.B. and Maddie would die for the cause so this latest threat didn’t faze them. Tante Lulu said, “I’m almos’ eighty years old. Let ‘em take me iffen they wants.”

  Tee-John considered it a great adventure. Justin said that he’d faced worse in Iraq. And Val, bless her heart, said she felt alive for the first time in five years. Let them try to stop her.

  Ihope I have something to do with her feeling alive, too. That’s what Rene thought, but he wasn’t about to say that to her, not with five sets of ears listening in.

  So now they were off, chugging down the bayou, heading slowly toward the Gulf. This was backcountry at its best. Along the way they saw fields of golden green marsh grass. Pink blooming mimosa trees added a bit of color. What habitation there was, outside the small towns, came in the form of fishing camps or clapboard cottages on pilings, always trying to escape the encroaching sea. Several times they saw gators in the water and on the banks, some of them as much as ten feet long, just staring at them with their googly eyes for daring to intrude into their world. There was even the occasional porpoise, romping playfully in the water; they came inland to feed on the crabs and fish.

  One of the problems was the saltwater intrusion that was being caused by the coastal erosion. In essence, as the saltwater moved farther and farther inland they were pickling the swamplands. As a result many animals were pushing north, like gators and oysters.

  Traffic was light on the bayou today, but still there were fishing boats going out and coming in. All the vessels were manned by deeply tanned fishermen who waved happily at them as they passed.

  Rene walked over to stand by Val, who was leaning on the rail. The moving boat created a slight breeze that offered some relief from the intense heat. She was watching the landscape pass by—a landscape he considered beautiful. But what did she think?

  There were things that could be done. Filling in oil company canals. Rebuilding barrier islands.

  Rerouting the Mississippi River for controlled flooding as a first step for dumping new sediment.

  In the meantime, a disaster of horrific magnitude that would affect the entire world was taking place here, but he didn’t know if he had the ability to show her and Justin how bad it was. The coastal wetlands were vanishing at such a shocking rate, there would eventually be no shield at all against the hurricanes that assaulted this area routinely, thus leaving two million people exposed. How do I get that point across? I could use a little help here, St. Jude.

  You’re doing just fine, that voice in his head said.

  “So what do you think so far?” he asked Val, looping an arm over her shoulder.

  “Some of these people are so poor, and yet they seem so happy,” she remarked.

  “They are happy. And why not?”

  “They barely eke out a living.”

  “True, but they’re continuing a family tradition of living off the water. They feel the same way about the bayou as farmers do about their land.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Many of their children have gone off to work in town, no longer willing to struggle so hard, always at the whim of the tides. But for those able to stay, it’s a good life. Perhaps not by Beverly Hills standards, but—”

  “Oh, don’t go getting your back up. I wasn’t criticizing or being condescending. One of the first things a jury analyst is taught is not to judge people by first impressions.”

  He wasn’t so sure about that. “How about that fisherman you interviewed yesterday in Houma? What did you think of him?”

  “The guy with one hand and crooked teeth?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, on first glance, I would have thought, why doesn’t he get a prosthesis and why didn
’t his parents put braces on him as a child?” She put up a hand to stop him when he was about to speak. “But immediately, I realized they both cost money, which they probably didn’t have. Nor medical insurance.”

  “What else?”

  “His name is Clarence Dubois. His nickname ‘Speedy’ was given to him for his ability to sort by-catch from shrimp so fast, before the accident. What sticks with me about him is his love for his family. Every other sentence he mentioned his wife, Rose, who works at a convenience store to supplement their income, and his three-year-old son Sam. I believe he is probably a hard drinker, but never at the expense of his family.”

  “Not bad, but what you don’t know is that Speedy was an All-American high school quarterback at one time. He was offered athletic scholarships to a number of colleges. He chose this, instead.”

  He could tell that she didn’t understand why a man would have made such a choice. Maybe by the end of this week she would.

  “Oh my God! Look at that... over there. What is it?”

  “A graveyard,” he said. “Those stones you see sticking out of the water are grave markers or sarcophagi.”

  “Look at that stone angel. It must have sat on top of a large tombstone at one time. And look at that marble cross.” Val was clearly astounded.

  “Holy shit!” Justin remarked from the other side. “Hey, J.B., can you stop this wreck so we can get a better look?” With his camera up to his eye he was already filming the marshland off to the right, and Val took out the small handheld recorder she used to take notes. “Talk to me while I do the filming, Rene,” said Justin. “And, Val, you’re recording, right?”

  Rene began, “All this used to be land, obviously. I keep telling you that the Louisiana coastline is being washed out to sea. This is clear evidence of that fact. Why else would you see telephone poles like those over there submerged in the water, not to mention giant oak trees? In Louisiana, because of the low water tables, we bury our dead above ground, but in this case the water caught up with the cemetery anyhow.