by Lon Frank
It is a time of physiological change; new muscles are given precedence, hair populates previously pristine areas of skin, limbs and stature are lengthened and in turn, enhanced. And it is a time of emotional change; when the young female is magically transformed from pest to mysterious siren, the hitherto unheard music in her voice conveying a terrifying allure.
But for young Robert Redford, puberty was little more than a cruel practical joke of genetic conspiracy. While it was true that he developed the natural sexual functions and desires, he was physically equipped with a somewhat vacant armory of attractiveness. When other lads grew clefts in their chins and rippling pectorals, Robert was rewarded with body hair which began at the level of his heavy and almost contiguous eyebrows and spilled in waves over his rounded shoulders. And while his friends grew taller and discovered athletic talents, Robert, as though governed by a private gravity, experienced only an ever-increasing girth.
But the greatest hurdle confronted by the young man was neither biological nor chemical in nature. It was purely coincidental.
The year was 1969, and a movie was produced which became a huge box office success. It was called Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and featured an incredibly handsome actor, who by the whim of laughing gods, was also named Robert Redford.
Ever since the day that Robert Redford, the actor, smiled into his first public relations interview, Robert Redford, the rotund unknown, had lived in a private hell of dreaded introductions. Every time he was put into the unavoidable position of stating his full name, he could hear the spoken, or mercifully unspoken, rebounding thought of, ‘Yeah, sure, and I’m Paul Newman/Richard Nixon/Mae West/Rin Tin Tin!’
But the scales of fortune did hold a balance for Robert. As he matured, he found a tenaciously secure self image, bolstered by a talent for cunning and an ability to justify almost any action, should it by chance benefit or protect him. After finishing an education characterized by flagrant use of divisive flattery, purloined sympathy and outright chicanery, he found a fertile field of endeavor for his cultivated talents. He applied for a job with the federal government.
Due to the increasing pressure to hire and promote individuals with normally nonstandard qualifications, he found himself in the training program for agents of the new and highly secretive Foundation for the Advancement of Charitable Trusts (FACT). Of course, FACT existed on hidden government funds, and had absolutely no connection with either charity or trusts. But the misleading pseudonym assured that it was seldom contacted by snooping reporters. What it actually had to do with were the rumors, the reports, the facts which simply did not fit anywhere else in the intelligence community.
Surprising everyone but him and the head instructor, to whom he casually mentioned the severe monetary and punitive penalties for discrimination against the physically challenged, Robert graduated once again in the top percentile of his class. But this time, the very regulations which he made the cornerstone of his ascending career would prove to be the latest in the line of pratfalls which dominated his life.
As he walked, ten minutes late, into the office of the invisible agency’s field operations director, the day after his completion of training, he was confronted by the back of a woman’s head. With its hair pulled back into a tight and humorless bun, the head was higher than his, even though the body to which it belonged was seated in a chair at the center of the room.
He hesitatingly walked in, far enough to peer around at a profile of tightly pursed lips below a long, thin nose surmounted by thick and black-framed glasses.
The field director rose and held out his hand as he lied smoothly to his tardy apprentice,
“Ah, Robert, so good to see you. I was beginning to worry that you had suffered some debilitating accident. But it is rare for me to have the opportunity to spend a little stolen time in the company of such a lovely young woman.”
He gave a profuse and patently phony smile in the direction of the unflinching head.
“I’d like you to meet your new partner, Miss Agnes Maggart.”
* * *
As the photographic images began to develop in the elaborately equipped darkroom in the back of the museum, Agent Maggart lifted them into the glare of the overhead red light bulb.
“Well, Redford, these are very substandard, as I suspected they would be, but they will have to do. However, I can read the ‘magic printing’, as you so eloquently put it; ‘Maison du Jet D’eau, Jeanerette’.”
“Yeah, well, you try hanging by your bloomers from a second story balcony and see how good you can take snapshots of some geezer tourists. And just what is all this about anyway? And who is this French babe, Mayonnaise Jeanie-rette?”
Agent Maggart paused to push her glasses higher on the bridge of her nose before she looked disgustedly at her diminutive partner.
“Not who, you minuscule moron, but where. This is obviously a rendering of a plantation house in Jeanerette, Louisiana. And what it’s about is Arthur Lemaire. And what Arthur Lemaire wants, we get. Got it?”
Agnes was careful to give the director’s name an almost reverently correct pronunciation—’La-mare-A’. Agent Redford was not compelled by such propriety.
“Yeah, yeah, whatever Artie wants. Just remember it’s my turn to drive.”
* * *
On Highway 70 leading west out of Roswell, New Mexico is a line of sun-washed and notoriously tacky tourist traps. Various signs implore the passing vacationer to see ‘Authentic Photos of the Aliens Taken to Area 51’ and perhaps buy ‘Flying Saucer Wreck Site Souvenirs’.
One such establishment was a small and venerable single-room restaurant. Painted light green with faux Swiss-cheese holes in the walls, it was crowned by a large round sign depicting the full moon face, with an oversized Buck-Rogers-era rocket ship sticking out of its brow. In Chinese-red letters across the sign was the name ‘Moon Wok-it Café’.
The current proprietor of the cheesy eatery was a third-generation Asian-American named Jimmy Moon, who inherited the business from his grandfather. The elder Moon, whose original first name proved to be unpronounceable to the lazy American tongue, was a slightly built gentleman of tremendous energy. His relentless enterprise earned him the respect of his adopted community and his stature earned him the local moniker of ‘Half Moon’.
Of course, in the manner of many members of minorities, Half Moon used the humor of his neighbors to his continued advantage and named his son and heir ‘New Moon’. Unfortunately, Corporal New Moon was one of the valiant casualties of the Tet Offensive and thereby passed his folded flag as well as his place in the hereditary line to his newborn son, James.
In a glass case by the checkout counter in the café was a small artifact which old Half Moon always swore he found at the authentic site where the now-famous flying saucer crashed in the desert near Roswell on a hot and windy day in July 1947. It was a small metallic disc, flame-stained and pockmarked. On one side it bore a little pattern of thin lines. On the other was a black, abstract silhouette of a bird’s head.
* * *
As Arthur Lemaire strode rapidly down the New Orleans airport VIP concourse, he was met by a stylishly dressed young woman, in a matching sleek red mini skirt and blazer. Her flowing white blouse was accessorized with a royal blue scarf, spilling in casual precision down an understated bodice. The tightness of her skirt dictated that she was forced to almost trot, in miniature steps, to keep up with the taller man.
She breathlessly handed him a small stack of loose-leaf papers.
“Mr. Lemaire, here’s the report you requested; the computer record search on the Anasazi bird fetish emblem.”
The director of FACT never broke stride as he snatched the papers and began scanning the pages. The young woman kept pace for the first two pages, but suddenly turned her right ankle and painfully landed in a sprawl of crimson silk as her three-inch heeled pump skidded on the marble flooring of the exit corridor. A dozen feet farther down the walkway, Arthur stopped, and drawing his M
onteblanc fountain pen from an inner coat pocket as though it were a lethal weapon, he circled an entry on page three.
He turned smartly, in the military style he still effected and faced the bruised and embarrassed young woman. As she struggled to rise to her hands and knees, he dropped the notated page on the floor by his feet.
“This one. This is the one I want. TODAY.”
He disappeared out the double doors to his waiting automobile and driver, leaving the glamorous underling to retrieve the rumpled report. As she crawled closer to the papers, she could see the circled entry:
“-ROSWELL, NM (tracking # 118786)—1951—Artifact reportedly found by local citizen at crash site #RC493—Medallion, with American Indian fetish on metal—black, stylized bird—displayed as curio in local café—category 6”
* * *
Jimmy Moon never knew what hit him. He saw the two tourists waiting when he arrived to open the café, and heard them walking up behind him as he unlocked the door. But now he was sitting against the wall in the still-dark restaurant, and he didn’t remember even coming in.
He rose and instinctively hit the button to open the cash register drawer, and saw in one glance that it contained the $100.00 in change he always kept to start each day. It would be hours later, when a lady from Tuttles Corner, New Jersey, asked about the empty case, that he would notice the theft of his grandfather’s flying saucer souvenir.
* * *
As Lucky attempted to have his posterior follow him once again into the rear seat of the little automobile, Elmo and Olive were discussing their plans over a roadmap spread on the car’s roof. Given to them by the hotel Concierge, it detailed the low, plantation country along the Bayou Teche, in southern Louisiana. There was no mention, nor any notation marking the location of any antebellum mansion called Maison du Jet D’eau, but the town of Jeanerette was plainly identified, just south of the Cajun Mecca of New Iberia.
When they agreed on the route Olive would take, they climbed in and the car’s soft purr pushed them out into the empty street in front of the hotel. As they rolled slowly down Alamo Plaza, Lucky realized that the strange transformation of personality was again coming over their normally sweet and reserved driver. The glamour sunglasses reappeared, as had the unending 8-track of surfer songs.
As Lucky hunkered down in the rear seat in anticipation of the wild ride he knew would ensue, Olive waited impatiently at the red light, behind what could have been her twin sister in a champagne Caddy. He glanced out the back side window, and a leashed Chihuahua waiting with a substantially proportioned woman at the bus stop suddenly morphed into a snarling circus lion.
Olive’s slight feathering of the clutch broke the spell and as Lucky opened his mouth to speak, he was cut off by Olive’s raucous screech. The traffic light turned green a full two seconds earlier, and the land yacht in front of her had yet to move.
“Come on, granny! This ain’t no PARKIN’ LOT, ya’ know!”
Before Lucky could compose his thoughts into comprehensible words, the Cadillac turned out of her way, and Olive demonstrated the little car’s ability to attain the speed of 60 miles per hour in just under eight seconds. Carroll Shelby would have been proud.
By the time Lucky recovered sufficiently from the imposed g-forces of their launch from the traffic light, and once again managed to draw air into his lungs, they were streaking up the entrance ramp of the nearby freeway.
“Hey! Hey, did you guys see that? That lady back there?”
Olive gave a lecherous wink to her copilot and purred in her Mr. Hyde-influenced sultry voice,
“Why, Lucky, shu-gar. Here I thought you only had eyes for me.”
“No, no, she had a dog, and...”
“Oooh, now, I certainly can’t compete with that, you frisky little devil.”
“No, listen. I, I thought that dog turned into a lion, a circus lion, you know.”
This time Elmo turned around in his seat and gave his friend a look of genuine concern.
“Now, bud, you know you were starin’ at them goldanged pictures all day. Why, you pro’lly gonna see them big old cats and elephants in your sleep. I know that consarned memory thing is weighin’ on you, but me and Olive will stick by you, and we know where it is we’re goin’ now.”
Lucky leaned forward and put one hand on each of their shoulders.
“Yeah, I know. And no matter what I was before, I couldn’t have any better friends than you two.”
As he sat back in the seat, Lucky tried to see in his mind the street and the dog and the bus stop sign. But his memory only contained one image—the center ring of a little circus and its snarling feline performers.
* * *
The little red car devoured the late afternoon hours, speeding towards Houston into gathering darkness and crossing the Sabine River and the petrochemical aromas of Lake Charles. Turning south onto a smaller route, marked ‘scenic’ on the map, Olive expressed her desire to find lodging at one of the little coastal towns of Creole or Grand Chenier. That way, she said, they could awake with the ‘great and wonderful ocean just lying at their feet like a shining blue carpet’. Like most people who were tied to the land for their existence, she never traveled more than a day away from her unending chores, and had never seen the ocean except on television or in magazines.
It was almost midnight by the time they were settled in a mom-and-pop motel, perched on the roadside just south of where the Mermentau Bayou drains Lake Misere into the untractable marshlands of Upper and Lower Mud Lake. Olive stood in the parking area with her arm looped through Elmo’s and titled her nose slightly upward.
“Oh, Elmo, dear. Just smell that aroma. It’s the scent of lilac perfume on Mother Nature’s bosom, the primordial odor of God’s wondrous creation.”
Elmo could only detect the unmistakable rotting vapor of swamp mud mixed with the acrid smell of salt grass. A thin line of perspiration ran from the tip of his nose.
“Well, I’m truly sorry darlin’, but that ‘primordial’ smell you’re smelling just might be me. They say it’s the humidity down here, not the heat, but I swear, this place seems to have a goldanged bumper crop of both.”
Lucky carried their bags from the trunk of the car and talked to himself.
“Damn, this place smells familiar. Reckon I used to be a frog or somethin’?”
* * *
The next morning they detoured slightly, so Olive could see the Gulf, and as she put it, ‘walk upon the shimmering sands’ of the nearby beach. When they pulled off the road and onto the hard packed sand, she just stared in horror for a moment, then raised a hand to her lips.
There on the narrow stretch of dirty gray sand was the jetsam of an unconscious society. Every unthinking act of litter was documented here; every careless toss of household trash, every abominable act of industrial dumping. As far as they could see in each direction the beach was covered by scattered pieces and piles of man’s garbage, collected by the waves, and deposited here like exhibits in some gallery of grotesque art.
Industrial-sized light bulbs mingled with glass jars of every description. Broken pieces of lumber resided alongside blackened work gloves and the occasional orange hardhat. Snarls of heavy fishing line and ripped pieces of nets laid in wait for the unwary shore bird. And throughout it all were scattered thousands of marble-sized globules of shiny black tar. The gift of leaky offshore oil platforms, they glistened along the undulating wave line, collecting odd bits of broken shells from the oyster and whelk and angel wing clam.
Their driver neither shut off the engine nor reached for the handle to open the door. The hand covering her mouth trembled slightly as a single tear emerged from behind the left lens of her dark glasses.
Elmo folded his arms and shook his head slowly.
“Gol-darn. Golllllll-darn!”
By midmorning Olive somewhat recovered from her shattered dream of pristine beaches and sparkling water. As she unerringly guided their car along the small roads of Louisiana’s Caj
un country, she was constantly rewarded by vistas of grassy wetland plains and shady private swamps hung with Spanish moss. The morning’s high point came when they had to stop at a tiny drawbridge to let a towboat pass, on its way to the locks at Vermillion Bay.
But the shock of the beach must have been still with her an hour later, when she did something she had never done before in her life. Olive took a wrong turn.
The trio of travelers found themselves on an ever-narrowing road through cypress and small bayous. When it abruptly came to an end at a crumbling crossroads, Olive leaned forward and looked down each of their two choices. No other vehicles or buildings were in sight, but a small sign pointed right that said, ‘Little Muddy Bayou 2 mi.’. Another sign, painted in soft pink and sky blue, pointed left and said, ‘Center for Peace and Light, Inc.’. Elmo looked up from studying the paper in his lap.
“Well, there ain’t no goldanged town on the map named Little Muddy Bayou, that’s fer sure.”
Olive nodded her agreement and started to turn the wheel left, when Lucky suddenly put a hand on her shoulder.
“Wait, Olive. Let’s, uh, let’s go down that way, they might have a place to eat lunch or something.”
* * *
Olive parked the car along the vacant street in front of the best restaurant in town. Actually, it was the only restaurant in town; Sheryl’s Bon Bon Café.
As they took a table in the back with a worn but clean yellow Formica top, a beautiful woman with the pale hair of California walked over, a small order tablet in hand.
“Hi, folks. Today we got some really good gumbo and cornbread, or fried...”
As Sheryl recited the menu, all three looked up expectantly and she in turn, acknowledged each face. But when she reached the round, gray-rimmed and smiling face of Lucky, she suddenly paused in shocked surprise. Like all the various inhabitants of the little backwater community, she had never seen LaFeet the Clown without his grease paint and rubber nose. But the news coverage was so intense when he disappeared that his gaudy face had been constantly displayed for several weeks. And the eyes were somehow the same.
