The Buck Stops Here

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “Slow down, Beth,” I laughed. “That’s getting a little ahead of things.”

  “But is it serious between you two? I know that’s none of my business, but we’re all dying to know.”

  I could feel my face flush, and I was glad the car was dark. We were back in the French Quarter now, and I looked out at the unique buildings, the clusters of tourists, the lights. I could hear music playing in the distance and smell the spices of the local cooking, and for a moment I wished Tom would simply come into town and sweep me off my feet. We could forget the past. We could forget the things that had come between us.

  We could make a life here, together. A fresh start for us both.

  Beth slowed the car, and I realized we had reached my hotel. She pulled to a stop under the awning.

  “Let’s just say we have discussed the future,” I told her evenly, reaching for the door handle. “What will become of us, though, I’m just not sure.”

  Thirty-Five

  The next morning dawned hot and sticky. I was disappointed, as this was the day I was headed into the swamp with Armand. I made conversation with the garage attendant while waiting for my car, and he said that the heat and humidity were the norm here, that the last few days—cool and dry—had been the exception.

  Still, I was eager to get some time out in the fresh air and was nearly desperate to hold a paddle in my hands and feel the strong pull of the water against my muscles. I didn’t care if the temperature reached a hundred by noontime, I was going.

  Following Armand’s directions, I made my way across New Orleans and then south toward the city of Houma. Once the interstate extension dropped me onto Highway 90, I had about 45 minutes to go. After a while I pulled out Armand’s hand-drawn map to find the exit that would lead me into the swamp area he called home. Judging from a few billboards I passed, this was also the way to several plantation homes, including Grande Terre, the location for the upcoming Family HEARTS ball.

  It was a fascinating drive. The farther I went, the more exotic the scenery grew. By the time I finally turned at the “dead oak by the deserted strawberry stand,” I felt as though I were in a foreign land. The flora and fauna were distinctly swampy. A faded sign announcing “Gator Eggs for Sale” had a big red arrow pointing the way I was going.

  The road was made of dirt somewhat “paved” with white shells. Though it was rutted, my trusty SUV handled the bumps well. I had an odd feeling of isolation, and to be safe I called Beth just to tell her where I was. I left a casual-sounding message on her voice mail, saying I wouldn’t be coming into Family HEARTS today because I was getting a swamp tour from Armand. I said I hoped that would give her and Veronica more time for pulling the records I needed for my charity investigation, and I would see them in the morning.

  I ended the call as I rounded the final curve, which brought me to a grouping of homes out in the middle of nowhere. I slowed to a stop and looked around. I was on a finger of land, and there were homes at about five points around that finger. On Armand’s map, he had drawn an “X” on the one to the far left, so I pulled in there. As I came to a stop, the front door opened, and Armand gave me a wave.

  I had just opened my car door when a pack of dogs came rushing up from down the street, barking and yelping toward me. I jerked my legs back into the car and slammed the door.

  Armand came down the stairs and stepped toward my car, and suddenly I realized where the dogs were headed. They weren’t coming after me, they just wanted to greet him. They all jumped up on him, and he fought them off, laughing and finally producing what looked like beef jerky strips from his pocket. He handed the strips out to the dogs, and then they stopped jumping and slowly loped over toward the house.

  “I’m so sorry, Callie,” he said, opening my car door for me. “I didn’t mean for my dogs to scare you like that. I should’ve thought to tie them up.”

  “I’m okay,” I said, feeling rather embarrassed.

  “Anyway, after that terrible beginning, thanks for coming. Did you have any trouble finding the place?”

  “No, your directions were great,” I said as I pulled my tote bag from the car. “I hope I brought everything I’ll need.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be fine. I’ve got a lunch packed for us.”

  “Good.”

  “This is my home,” he said, gesturing toward a modest wood house up on stilts and nestled among the trees. There was a pair of sawhorses in the front yard with an oddly shaped boat propped across the top, upside down with several tools littering the top. It looked like a canoe, but the sides were low and the bottom was completely flat.

  He pointed to the other stilt-top homes and identified them as well. “Next door, that’s Ton Ton—my aunt—and on the end there is the Breaux family. By them is my Big Nanan—my godmother—and Big Parain—my godfather. Their daughter and her husband live next door to them, and they got three kids, them.”

  Except for the sawhorses, Armand’s yard was neat and clean. The other homes here, by contrast, looked like junkyards. Underneath each house was all sorts of detritus among the weeds, most of it water related: crab traps, buoys, floaters, shrimp trawls, broken-down boats. From what I could see, it looked as though behind each house was a dock, with at least two boats tied up. In one yard sat a faded political sign from an election long past. In another, a rope hung down from a massive tree with a dusty black tire hanging at the end.

  “I know this might be different than you’re used to,” Armand said. “But this is home to us.”

  He led me around the side of his house to his wide back yard and dock. From there, I had a perfect view of the bayou, as striking as any picture postcard.

  “That’s my view,” he said proudly, “every single ding-dong day of the year.”

  “I live on water too,” I told him, smiling. “I can’t ever get enough of it.”

  “A girl after my own heart!” he cried, his blue eyes sparkling in the sun. For a moment, I could see what the women at Family HEARTS had been talking about—this guy was definitely a Bayou Babe.

  “So what did I see driving in here?” I asked. “Do you really sell alligator eggs?”

  “Yeah, cher. We got a breeding pit. You wanna see it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Armand threw his head back and laughed.

  “Come on,” he said, taking my hand. “It’s safe.”

  He held onto my hand as he led me toward a path in the brush, but then once the path widened and we could walk side by side, he didn’t let go. I pulled my hand loose myself, thinking I had better set him straight right away.

  “Listen, Armand, no offense, but I hope you didn’t take this day as a date or anything.”

  He simply smiled.

  “Oh, cher, I am never presumptuous. I jus’ take every good thing how it comes to me, like the gift of a good sunrise or a bait line filled with catfish.”

  “Good.”

  The moment passed, and I was glad I had brought it up. We rounded a curve and came upon a huge wire fence. It was about ten feet tall, with barbed wire along on the top, surrounding a pond that was maybe a quarter of an acre in size. Along the sides of the pond, three gigantic alligators were sunning themselves, and two more were lurking in the shallows.

  “Oh my gosh,” I whispered. Armand just laughed.

  “You wanna go in and feed ’em?” he asked, reaching for the lock on the metal gate.

  “No!” I said quickly, stepping back.

  “I’m just kidding, cher,” he said. “You do it over here.”

  He led me to a set of wooden stairs. Next to them was an old ice chest, and when he opened it up, it stank of spoiled meat. Without hesitating, he reached inside and pulled out a package of chicken from the grocery store, one that was obviously well beyond its sale date.

  “Gators like their food rotted,” he explained as he opened the package and mounted the steps. Once he was at the top, he walked forward on the wide platform and began tossing the chicken into the shallo
ws of the pond.

  Surprisingly, the alligators were slow to respond, but one by one they approached the meat and begin to snap it up.

  “We can buy past-date chicken from the grocery store for ’bout five cent a pound,” he said. “That’s cheaper than raising chickens and killing them ourselves.”

  Once he had distributed all of the meat, he came down the steps and washed his hands with soap at a nearby faucet. As we walked back up the path toward his home, he explained the whole breeding process, how he harvested the alligator eggs and sold them to a local wholesaler.

  “Gator meat is really big in some countries,” he said. “I think it’s a delicacy in China.”

  “Aren’t you afraid to have that pit so close to your home, though? Don’t you worry that the alligators will break loose sometime and go there and eat you?”

  Again, he laughed at me.

  “Alligators are territorial,” he said. “So much so that I bet if you tore that fence down tomorrow, they’d all still be right where they are six months from now. That’s their territory now. They don’t have a desire to go anywhere else.”

  As we reached Armand’s dock, I put the frightening sight out of my mind and focused on the day ahead.

  “Now,” he said, all business as we walked out onto the dock, “I wanna take you out in the bayou and show you around, so we got two choices—either my little motorboat, or a pair of pirogues. Pirogues won’t take us as far, but it’ll get us places the motorboat won’t go.”

  “That’s my preference, by far.”

  “Let’s do it, then.”

  One pirogue was already in the water, so we retrieved a second one from where it was propped up against the house. Together we got in place to lift it: I took the back, and much to my surprise, I realized that the fiberglass craft couldn’t have weighed more than 50 pounds.

  “It’s so light!”

  “One of the advantages over a canoe,” he said. “Because of its flat bottom, it’s a little less stable, but you can take this baby anywhere, even where it’s super shallow. As some folk like to say, you can paddle a pirogue on a heavy dew.”

  We put it into the water next to the other one, and then I told him I needed to make a pit stop before we set off on our journey.

  “Oh, of course, I’m sorry. Go up the steps to the back door, there, and down the hall to your left. Second door on the left.”

  “Thanks.”

  I really did need to use the bathroom, but I also wanted to get a peek inside of his home as well. While he loaded supplies into the pirogues, I went up the back stairs into the elevated house, my eyes adjusting from the brightness outside to the darkness within.

  From what I could tell, the place looked like a typical bachelor’s home, with a small stack of dirty dishes in the sink and some books and magazines spread on a cheap wood coffee table next to a comfortable chair in the living room. I found the bathroom easily enough, directly across the hall from what looked like a home office. I was sorely tempted to rifle through his papers just to see if I could find any evidence of contact with Les Watts or James Sparks. But as at Veronica’s house, I doubted that anyone would be so careless as to leave such proof lying around.

  I heard voices outside, so I peeked from the bathroom window to see that Armand was standing on his little dock and talking to a woman, a spry-looking slender lady in her fifties or sixties. After they finished talking, he came into the house. She, on the other hand, walked to a small shed nearly hidden by the brush at the back of the property next door. When she reached the shed, she did the oddest thing: She carefully looked both ways—as if to make sure she wasn’t being observed—before she pushed open the door and quickly slipped inside. Strange.

  I could hear Armand in the kitchen, so I washed my hands and then walked up the hall to find him.

  “Hey, cher, I was just thinking that you need yourself a hat. It’s a hot one out there today.”

  He didn’t seem suspicious, so I relaxed a bit. He chose a hat for me from a few that hung on the wall, and then we left.

  Getting used to the pirogue wasn’t hard. It didn’t feel as stable as a canoe, but he was right—it skimmed over the surface of water that couldn’t have been more than six inches deep. Incredible!

  I sat and used a paddle with my pirogue, but he stood in his, using a pole instead, pushing himself along by pressing it into the muck of the bottom. As we went, he told me about what we were seeing, the grasses and trees that were unique to the swamp. All along the way he stopped to run tests, either gathering water samples or measuring distances between landmarks. I asked what that was about, and he said he was tracking the rising water of the swamp, and the encroachment of salt water from the gulf.

  Except for the mosquitoes, the morning spent paddling among the marshy wetlands was one of the most thrilling I had had in a long time. Everything was so lush, so green, so alive. We saw birds and nutria and fish. We passed a great blue heron and a number of snakes—some several feet long!—and, finally, an alligator. This time, however, there was no ten-foot fence between us.

  But, just like the ones back at the pit, it was perfectly still, resting in the shallows and watching us go by. Armand didn’t seem worried, even though the only thing between us and him was a thin layer of fiberglass.

  “He’s just catching some rays, takin’ his time,” Armand said.

  I asked him about the day before, when he spoke of “polin’” alligators, and he described the process to me, the old Cajun way of finding a gator in its underwater den and fishing him out.

  “Big Parain, he taught me how to do it,” he said. “He’s the best at it I’ve ever seen.”

  Armand spoke with pride, but the thought of a man wrestling an alligator until he could get to the soft part of its head and stick a knife in it gave me the shivers.

  Despite my best attempts at manipulating the conversation, I found it impossible to engage him in a discussion about the past and his old computer work with the Cipher Five or James Sparks. Not wanting to seem too transparent, I finally gave up, determined to try again later.

  We stopped for lunch at a fishing camp, a little shack on stilts that looked abandoned but had a wide front deck for sitting. We climbed up onto the wood and made ourselves comfortable. Armand opened the cooler that had been in his pirogue and took out the lunch he had prepared for us, thick fried oyster sandwiches on French bread with mayonnaise and lettuce—something I would have called a submarine sandwich but he called a “po-boy.” Delicious.

  As we ate, he told me about his work, about the quest that drove him, day and night, to save the Louisiana coast.

  “It’s disappearing, you know,” he said. “At a rate of about thirty square miles per year.”

  “Per year? ”

  He nodded.

  “We’re losing an area the size of Manhattan every ten months. It’s the fastest disappearing landmass on earth. Three million acres, just washing out to sea.”

  Living in the Chesapeake Bay area myself, I knew of the problems that could beset a coastal area—and I had heard that Louisiana had some big issues—but I had no idea it was that bad. According to Armand, it was caused by the routing and leveeing of the Mississippi River, which prevented the silt and sediment from flowing naturally into these areas and continuously building them up. The oil companies hadn’t helped matters by cutting a number of artificial canals directly through the swamp.

  “The solution I’m working toward involves artificially diverting the Mississippi through conveyance channels all along the way. It’s not ideal, but if we don’t do something soon, the consequences will be disastrous.”

  He went on to list the problems that were presented by the disappearing coast. He talked about the losses of seafood, the oil infrastructure, migratory resting grounds. Most startling of all was the news about hurricanes.

  “You know, the marsh acts like a hurricane buffer. Every two point seven miles of marsh can dampen storm surge by a foot.”

 
“I don’t understand.”

  He said that when Hurricane Katrina struck, the category-three storm killed nearly two thousand people and became the costliest natural disaster ever to hit the United States.

  “The more the marsh recedes,” he continued, “the worse the next hurricane will be. As bad as Katrina was, can you imagine a category-five storm coming here? That would create a flood wall reaching twenty-two feet high! The devastation would be biblical in proportion.”

  I asked Armand why nothing significant in the way of storm preparation had been done before Katrina, and in reply received a long, involved overview of dirty Louisiana politics. In his opinion, the rebuilding of the city was taking first priority, but swamp restoration had to be done too. Unless the government sent an additional fourteen billions dollars for the project, the problems of the disappearing swamp would continue to compound exponentially.

  He also talked about the computer modeling program he had created, which enabled him to manipulate satellite images and project exactly what would happen if they did or didn’t do anything to stop the erosion. His jargon became a bit technical, but I was extremely impressed by his intelligence.

  After lunch he showed me a canal that had been dug by the oil companies to provide a more direct route to deliver supplies down to the oil rigs in the gulf.

  “Nothing wrong with these canals in the beginning,” he said, lifting his pole as the current slowly carried us down it, “but now they findin’ that the canals are widening all by themselves. One canal, when they dug it, was fifty feet wide. Now it’s two thousand. See them dead trees? They used to be on the bank of the canal!”

  I looked where he was pointing to see a row of dead trees in the water, a good 30 feet from the current canal bank, stark skeletons against the blue Louisiana sky.

  The more we saw, the more despair I felt—and I was new to this swamp. I could only imagine how deeply it hurt the ones who lived here to watch their precious land simply wash away, helpless to do anything about it.