by Lon Frank
“Well, then, come on and get in. The FBI and CIA and Gawd knows who all else have already beat you to all the rooms at Miss Guilbeau’s boarding house, but I guess y’all can stay in them old circus trailers out in the bayou meadow.”
Glances of silent apprehension passed among the little group as they dutifully gathered overnight bags and cardboard boxes of equipment, and took seats for the ride out to the once-silent field that some local newshounds were already calling “massacre meadow”.
* * *
Late February is late winter in the low country of the bayou, and some mornings, the sun is reluctant to rise. Like a still-sleepy child it lingers behind the mists rising from the dark surface of the waters, and hides among the ocean clouds blown up from the great salty warm gulf just beyond the horizon.
It was the diffused light of such a morning that found the little band of CSA investigators walking and slowly waking along the edges of the bayou meadow. Reluctant to disturb the comfortable homes established by the field mice and night birds in the tiny circus trailers, they spent the night in fitful slumber inside the abandoned big top. Of course, they were each once members of the great circus family, and as the night wind gave life to the tattered and moaning canvas, each found fond remembrances stirred by the calliope-like hoots and trills of night birds along the bayou. Andy, Leska and the others imagined the face of the old clown at some time during the night and smiled in their dreams.
Perhaps it was these half-remembered dreams or the open-fire breakfast of Spam and grits, but the searchers found themselves unaccountably optimistic and determined to uncover evidence that the clown still walked among the living. They fanned out and began crisscrossing the meadow, as if looking for a contact lens in a green and dew-soaked shag carpet.
Two pickup trucks arrived, radios blaring with Cajun music, and four carpenters began to construct the souvenir and refreshment booth; fountain drinks, $2.00 each. A handsome young woman, wearing shorts much too brief for the earliness of the season, began to rope off the far end of the meadow with small signs, ‘Light and Peace Crusade Parking, $12.00’.
Leska placed her hands in the small of her back and stretched out the gathering tightness. Suddenly, her eyes focused on an object both foreign and intimately familiar, and, dropping to her knees without regard for the sodden grass staining her woolen frock, she tenderly plucked it from its hiding place.
Her knees pressed on the living soil of the meadow, and with the murmuring of the dark and ancient bayou filling the air, she silently knelt while the reluctant sun began to warm the mists under the oaks. Her tears began to fall on her half-open trembling hand and on the faded, red rubber nose it cradled.
* * *
Big Bubba Babineaux was not a happy man. He hated mornings like this.
“Why the hell don’t it just make up its mind? Either be winter or spring, for cryin’ out loud.”
While the investigators from the CSA began to crisscross the meadow, the sheriff began crisscrossing the pine floor of the old jail building. Junie Lejeaune watched him make the little circuit for the seventh time this morning: check the coffee pot, scan the bulletin board, stare out the front windows for nine seconds, drop heavily into the chair, bitch about the fog and start again. She came in early this morning because she knew how the fog affected her hulking boss. Actually, any morning she came in to answer the phone was early, since Junie had never been paid for helping out in the ‘Office of Protection and Safety’, as she liked to call it.
The lack of remuneration didn’t particularly bother Junie, since she always considered herself a career girl and enjoyed the status afforded by her position in law enforcement. Two years earlier, Big Bubba surprised her with a small sign lettered carefully with her name on it, in front of one of the three parking spaces beside the jail building. And even though Junie normally walked the four blocks to work, she always looked at her sign and carefully read her name, as if it might have magically become misspelled during the night.
She always smiled a secret smile with the memory of the morning Big Bubba unveiled it, with a little party attended by Sheryl, from the café across the road, and Inez, the girl over at Percy Premeaux’s law office. Sheryl brought some of her famous handmade bonbons, and the sheriff had driven all the way to New Iberia the day before, just to buy some special gourmet coffee to replace their normal Seaport with chicory.
Besides, she had the settlement money from the Jeanerette Seafood Company; from another foggy morning when one of their drivers missed the curve and parked his rig right in Junie’s bedroom, and right on top of Junie’s late husband, Leroy.
So, this morning, she quietly performed her practiced routine and tried not to add to the big man’s aggravation. Her duties primarily consisted of keeping a sharp pencil and clean paper pad in order to keep track of the sheriff’s whereabouts at any given moment. She was fully aware of the old axiom that law enforcement was a business of months of boredom and moments of panic. She was ready, therefore, when the sheriff picked up his Jeanerette Seafood ‘gimme’ hat, and headed for the door.
Although, in the fourteen years that he had been sheriff almost no one had come looking for him, Big Bubba Babineaux was sensitive enough to Junie’s image of self-worth that he always left her presence with the same preamble:
“If anyone comes looking for me, I’ll be over at the café talking to the geezers.”
He paused, his hand on the knob. He knew it was coming.
“You mean talking to the other geezers, don’tcha?”
As he stepped out into the lifting mist, they both knew the punch line was his to be had.
“I hear they got a job openin’ over to the gas station. Fixin’ them big ol’ dirty truck tires, don’t ya’ know. You might oughta look into it, huh?”
Big Bubba had never married. He told himself, and others when necessary, that a professional peace officer had no business with the liabilities of the heart. Still, he knew that someday, perhaps on one of these mornings when the silence clung to him like the damp fog around a great dead swamp oak, he would have to take Junie’s hands in his and try to tell her what the sound of her laughter always did to him.
But not that morning. That morning he was going to run his trap lines. He would find the pulse of the bayou, and finger it as adroitly as a New York brain surgeon. Like any good sheriff, Big Bubba knew that there was an information data center available to him which was more powerful than the buildings filled with computers the Washington boys depended on; an investigative body more prying than the IRS, more cunning than the CIA, more ruthless than the Mafia.
It was then 8:17 in the morning. The geezer table at Sheryl’s café should be full.
Sheryl was not a bayou girl. She came from one of those exotic and decadent pools of affluent population on the west coast. It was common knowledge that when she arrived, the bus tags on her luggage were labeled ‘CARMEL/CAL’. Although her lack of bayou progeny would forever hold her apart, the bayou folks, being descendants of outcasts themselves, soon welcomed her into their makeshift community. She arrived with the surname of Banban, which proved to be an irresistible challenge in this country where ‘Achefalaya’ was pronounced ‘shaff-fly’, and ‘boudain’ became ‘boo-daa.’ So it was only natural that, when Sheryl Banban exhibited her talent for the handmade confections she was to become famous for, her name should morph into Sheryl Bon-bon.
As any twelve-year-old boy on the bayou can tell you, a nickname is a sure sign of acceptance, and that morning as he pushed open the café door, Big Bubba gave a little nod towards the blonde and still-tanned beauty:
“Mornin’, Bon.”
She acknowledged the sheriff’s greeting with a smile that made the table of out-of-town newsmen lapse into the silence of testosterone dementia, as they each held their cup and gently blew on the surface of their coffee.
It is a peculiarity of human communities that they all function according to routine of their own creation. From the most restrictive and formal protocol r
equired for greeting royalty to the mundane behavior expected of morning traffic, man is a creature defined by procedure. The little café in the bayou low country was no exception, and as he approached the table of elderly men nursing cups of black coffee, Big Bubba rehearsed in his mind the expected repartee.
“‘Morning, Lester. ‘Morning, Wilbert, Charley, Melvin, boys. How you all be today?”
He was greeted in return with nodding heads and a collection of gappy grins which exhibited the fact that the average age of those assembled about the table far exceeded the aggregate number of teeth.
One of the old men signaled acceptance by kicking out an empty chair and opening with the obligatory mild jab.
“The crim’nal catchin’ bidness kinda slow today, is it Bubba?”
“Naw, I just came over because we got a report that Bon-bon had gone mental, and poisoned a whole table full of old coots over here.”
Of course, it was about the four-hundredth time they all heard that joke, but it didn’t matter; old men know never to pass up a chance for a laugh, and actually, it was fresher than some of the stories they had been telling already this morning. The geezer assembly honored him with wheezing laughs and stomping feet. And of course, the routine:
“Hot damn, I did wonder why the coffee was actual good this mornin’,” and,
“Well, Sheriff, so long as she be killin’ only the old coots, it don’t bother us none!”
The ritual satisfactorily completed, Big Bubba eased his sizable frame into the proffered chair and picked up the cup, which had magically appeared at his elbow. Bon-bon knew the routine.
“Well, you boys solved the world’s problems yet this mornin’?”
“You mean, I reckon, do we know who did in the old clown out at that circus dump?”
“Well, that, uh, that had crossed my mind of late.”
“Ah shoot, Bubby, lookie here, now.”
Lester Lebeau voted for Big Bubba for each of the fourteen years he was elected to the office of sheriff, and it was accepted that the old man could use a term of endearment in public. Besides, Lester was his uncle, and had given the not-yet-big Bubby his first store-bought fishing pole on his seventh birthday.
“It’s like you is alla time tellin’ us: follow the money, son. You know, some people are gettin’ plum rich offa that old clown now that he’s gone. I mean, chargin’ folks big money just to park their cars in some muddy field? Or puttin’ on some high-falutin’ ‘crusade’ out there in the swamp?”
Melvin leaned slightly over the table and lowered his voice, which was the accepted sign that he was about to divulge sensitive and hitherto classified information.
“Yessir. Now I don’t know nuthin’ for sure, but Gezelle over at the boardin’ house was sayin’ how them FBI boys found fresh tire tracks back there, an’ how they matched up perfect-like with that loudmouthed preacher’s fancy car an’ all.”
“Yeah boy, an’ I heard that he had some girl singer already signed up for his big shindig. Barbara Strys-land, or something like that. Shoot, I cain’t see why, what with his kinda money an’ all, he don’t get somebody famous like Wayne Toups or somethin’.”
Suddenly the sheriff’s debriefing session with the geezer intelligence agency was interrupted when an agitated young man rushed in the café door and yelled across at the table of newshounds.
“Mike, come get the camera and set up. Hurry!”
Outside, a new Ford cargo van was parked with its motor still running. Emblazoned in artistic lettering of green and gold on a purple background it implored the onlooker to ‘Watch KRAP, Channel 13, Your Bayou Country News Leader!’ and ‘When News Happens, the Bayou Country Turns to KRAP.’
By the time Big Bubba fished a quarter out of his chino uniform trousers, laid it on the table for his coffee and followed the sound of sidewalk commotion, a sincere looking announcer was rehearsing his soon-to-be live, man-on-the-scene report:
“And the breaking news here at the bayou meadow, or ‘massacre meadow’, as it has been known in whispered local folklore for generations, is that investigators have recovered a body part believed to belong to LaFeet the Clown. I repeat, a body part has been found in the meadow where old LaFeet the Clown was reported to be missing yesterday. Sadly, this news must weigh heavily upon the hearts of our millions of viewers.”
Sheriff Big Bubba Babineaux had the unmistakable feeling as he walked to his patrol vehicle that his day, like the millions of viewers out there in TV land, had just turned to KRAP.
* * *
Gezelle Guilbeau was not what one would readily classify as a delicate creature. Although her mother romantically envisioned the newly born girl to be as lithe and mystical as the small antelope that was her namesake, by the time she finished high school, Gezelle enjoyed a hard-earned and well-deserved reputation more closely suited to a Cape buffalo. And her name had been irreversibly established as ‘G-sell!’ followed with a permanent exclamation point, as in ‘G-sell! Why’d you do that for?’ or ‘Oh Lawd, that sounds like G-sell!’
This is not to say, of course, that Gezelle Guilbeau was bereft of either beauty or admirers. Down in the low country a woman is often valued according to her ability to push a stalled pickup truck, while her mate steers and awaits the perfect, magical moment to pop the clutch; the accurate determination of which is a gift, inborn, as anyone knows, only to those of masculine gender. And a woman who knew when to guffaw over a few dead long-necks was more treasured than she who coyly giggled behind an upraised hand.
Besides, Gezelle Guilbeau could not escape the inheritance of her Acadian genes; the black hair that fell in long waves about her shoulders, the almost-large and ever-so-slightly aquiline nose, the straight and gleaming teeth. Indeed, she could have been a down-home beauty, safely and respectfully wed and bred by this stage of her life, had she given any attention whatsoever to such matters. But her disinterest in social appearance, coupled with a coarse and sometimes brutal outlook on life, had so far failed to attract an abundance of would-be suitors.
And then there was the rumor. It was the same rumor that had its roots in a thousand small towns. Mean-spirited and spiteful, it was repeated in whispers by a million old gossips, over a million cups of tepid tea, on a million parlor afternoons. On her seventeenth birthday, Gezelle went to visit her maiden aunt in the sophisticated, and therefore suspect, urban center of Mamou, Louisiana. Returning a year and a half later, she brought enough cash to buy the boarding house from old Mrs. Doiron, who had developed ‘the rheumatism’ and could no longer climb the stairs to surreptitiously violate the privacy of her guests, under the guise of tidying the rooms. The rumor was an open secret in the low country of the bayou, and it would have occasionally given her pause, had she given any attention to such matters whatsoever.
But on that particular afternoon, Gazelle had business on her mind. And she needed transportation. Walking as fast as the tightness of her blue jeans and four-inch-heeled demi-boots would allow, she targeted a lone figure struggling to repair an oversized engine part with an undersized pipe wrench. Alongside, a shabby shrimp boat rested in the greasy liquid ooze of the town’s single dock.
“Well, well, if it isn’t little Antoine Hebert.”
Down here on the bayou, they still pronounced his family name as ‘A-bear’, and Gezelle contemplated the oily sheen of the dark water as though she incorporated its viscosity into the smooth huskiness of her voice.
“Oh Gawd, G-sell! Whatever it is, the answer is no.”
“I just need your ol’ truck for a while... Antoine Hebert.”
“Aw, G-sell! I don’t want you drivin’ my truck all over the place. What if you was to hit somethin’?”
“Now, don’t be that way, Antoine Hebert, dawlin’. I bet you don’t want your little wife knowin’ what you was doin’ with that Robena Domangue, over behin’ the boardin’ house last Friday night, either. What if SHE was to hit somethin’? Exactly what was that, anyway? Did you accidentally drop your watch down the fr
ont of Robena’s dress? Sure was a lot of handiwork goin’ on... Antoine Hebert, dawlin’.”
As she slipped behind the wheel of the pickup, she yelled out in a voice now made of barbed wire and broken glass,
“Hey, Hebert, you dead-ass, give me some money. You need gas.”
* * *
As she strode into the pink and sky-blue reception area of the Center for Peace and Light, Inc., Gezelle was met by the same girl who earlier had been putting up parking signs in the bayou meadow. She was now attired in a sky-blue jumper over a flowing, pure white, silk blouse. Her white-stockinged ankles barely showed above modest, low-heeled sky-blue pumps. Miss Mary Kay Goodbody was the personal assistant and public liaison to the Reverend Dr. Driver. She expertly feigned ignorance of the identity of her guest, whom she immediately recognized as the woman of the rumor.
“Hello, I’m Mary Kay. May I help you?”
Gezelle recognized the fashionable young woman as well, and intuitively questioned the ‘administrative talents’ which were required of her position.
“Yeah, honey, you bet your sky-blue butt you can. I wanna see the preacher.”
“I...I’m sorry, but the Reverend Dr. Driver is secluded in meditation, preparing for the upcoming Crusade of Peace and Light and Bayou Extravaganza. Surely you know, the memorial service for dear old LaFeet the Clown.”
“Yeah, well, Tinkerbell, you just tell him that somebody just might have seen his pukey-green limo down at that meadow, day before yesterday. See how long he meditates on that, why don’tcha?”
* * *
The office of the Reverend Dr. Driver was painted a muted sea-foam green and adorned with a massive, carved wood, 15th-century altar, stolen fifty years earlier by industrious American GIs from a church in the Spanish countryside. Only he and Miss Goodbody were aware of the fireproof safe and small liquor cabinet discreetly concealed within.
The heavily ringed fingers of the caller-of-men slowly pushed the buttons of an almost-forgotten phone number.
