The Life and Death of Bayou Billy
By
C.L. Bevill
For Crescencia Rose, who should not read this particular book until she is thirty-five because of the subject matter, the foul language, and the willingness to believe that her parent is a pristine saint. I hope it doesn’t spoil your image of me, dear.
The Life and Death of Bayou Billy
Published by C.L. Bevill at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Caren L. Bevill
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Epilogue
Author’s Note
About the Author
Other Novels by C.L. Bevill
Chapter One
From a transcript of an interview with Wanda Jean Pritchett, dated January 1996. It is noted that the interview was for background material for a magazine article on Bayou Billy AKA William Douglas McCall. The interviewer was Stillman Floyd, a biographer interested in William Douglas McCall and who consequently published a tome on McCall’s life through a university press in limited edition. Mr. Floyd indicates that Mrs. Pritchett was eighty-one years old at the time and living at the Sunnyvale Retirement Community Hospital in Gilbert, Arizona. She has since passed away via natural causes and Mr. Floyd’s papers were donated to the University of Arizona’s library and historical archive:
Floyd: Mrs. Pritchett, what I’d really like to do is talk about Bayou Billy. Just like I told you on the telephone and in my letter.
Pritchett: I need a drink, boy. These folks here won’t let a lady have a sip of whiskey now and again.
Floyd: Whiskey? Perhaps I could, ah, would they let, would they allow you to?
Pritchett: I’m 81 years old, pup. Whiskey ain’t gonna hurt my liver no more than it done hurt me already. I had part of it out in ’89. The big ‘C.’ And I don’t mean chocolate. (Laughter.)
Floyd: When I come back tomorrow, I’ll bring a pint.
Pritchett: Make it Jim Beam. I like my Jim. He’s a manly man. In the meantime, let me have one of them cancer sticks I see peeking out of your coattails.
Floyd: Uh, but this is a hospital.
Pritchett: Yes, and I’m the Queen of England. Lordy, you must be the runt of the litter. You don’t got no spark in you attall. (Clicking and a deep sigh.) Oh, dear Jesus in heaven above, that’s almost as good as sex. (Pause.) And you blush, too, boy. What you don’t think old women ever had sex? You’re gonna have an eye-opener. Them peepers will prolly pop right on out when you hear the real story.
Floyd: (Sigh. Another click and another sigh.) I need one too. About Bayou Billy, Mrs. Pritchett. I’d like you to tell me how you met him and in what context.
Pritchett: Context? My daughter read that article ‘bout you, said you was looking into Mr. William Douglas McCall, also called Bayou Billy. I knowed she called you ‘cause she told me she did. Told ya that ya should talk to her old mama. On account that I knew Bayou Billy.
Floyd: Yes, ma’am. Your daughter, Ida.
Pritchett: Ida’s a no account daughter of a whore. (Laughter.) That’s a joke, boy. I guess when Ida called ya, maybe ya thought I was Billy’s neighbor or some such nonsense.
Floyd: Uh, ma’am…
Pritchett: Oh, don’t mind me, pup. Talking about Billy’s got my blood pounding again. Ain’t had so much fun since Mrs. Tarrant broke her hip down the hall. She said she slipped in the shower but Mr. Papadopolis said he had her bent up against the wall and pushed a little too hard. If you know what I mean.
Floyd: I, I, I’m not quite…
Pritchett: Slipping her the sausage. Having a wild ride on the baloney pony. The old in and out and in and out. Oh, for Christ’s sake. He was fucking her. She was lying on the floor screaming. He was standing there with his pants around his ankles with his pecker deflated as the Hindenburg, with this look on his face that said as much as Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. The nurse came in and seeing as how she’s a Mormon with a vengeance, she thought that Apocalypse had done come, instead of something else, that is. Lord Almighty, what a fuss over two people doing what comes naturally. (Long pause.) Not that breaking a lady’s hip in the process is quite natural.
Floyd: I, I, uh.
Pritchett: And I would know.
Floyd: You would know?
Pritchett: Let’s see. You want to know in what context I knew Bayou Billy?
Floyd: Yes, ma’am.
Pritchett: In the context that I was a whore and he was a john. That’s some kind of context, ain’t it?
Floyd: Yes, ma’am.
Pritchett: Oh, Billy was the kind of fella that all the girls used to dream about. Tall, dark haired, eyes that bore into you like Texas oil drills, and that weren’t the only penetrating he did. I worked at a cathouse in Shreveport, Louisiana, down on the Red River. Twenty girls there, all with titties bigger than Dolly Parton’s. And don’t your eyes be headed south, pup. Them titties are all out of air now and hanging down to my belly. Ain’t a thing that’s apt to improve with age.
Floyd: (Indistinguishable.)
Pritchett: Oh, now, son. You didn’t really want the whitewashed version, did you?
Floyd: No, ma’am.
Pritchett: Later on I was a madam, but then I was just a whore. I thought fucking for money was just the finest thing since sliced bread. Ifin a gal like me from rural Texas could make three hots and a cot for some cash and flash, then that was a right able way to make a living. Weren’t ‘til later that I realized that I could make a lot more bucks if I managed all them girls myself.
Floyd: You were a…prostitute.
Pritchett: Oh, hell no, pup. I was a whore. A prostitute is a fancy word that Christians call us when they been to church with their wives just before they arrested us or fucked us themselves. Usually, in a real nasty manner too, I might add. I recall one minister, a so-called man of God, who liked to do the chocolate cha-cha while the gal was giving a butterfly flick to his brother. But I do digress, don’t I?
Floyd: Yes, ma’am. I mean, no, ma’am.
Pritchett: Never you mind, pup. I recollect that I was about 20 years old the first time I saw Billy. And he was already a legend. Robbing banks all along the Gulf Coast. He robbed a train once, too. But the most famous thing he ever done was to rob a riverboat right on the Mississippi River. Even stole the solid gold ring right off the riverboat captain’s pinkie finger. Yep, he was a daring man. Papers couldn’t write enough about him and that riverboat job. (Laughter. Pause.) Of course, us girls knew about him for that. Also because he had a ten inch long dick.
The Present
Wednesday, July 12th
Good Parish Hospital,
Shreveport, Louisiana
“I believe that I’m going to chop off each and every one of his fingers if he touches me again,” Margo Ballard resolutely informed the nursing supervisor.
The unwavering eyes of Pru Burr, the nursing super
visor, peered over the top of her gold rimmed reading glasses. “It isn’t his fingers that you should be chopping off,” she commented. She lifted her index finger to her mouth, wetted it with the tip of her tongue, returned it to the file she was reading, and carefully flipped a page, all without looking away from Margo’s reddened face. It was Pru’s subjective opinion that on most days Margo resembled Winnie the Pooh in scrubs. Today Winnie had two enflamed cheeks the exact color of a well-spanked baby’s ass. Additionally, there was a determined expression on her typically kindly face that foretold of a line that had already been crossed.
“I’d cut that off, too,” Margo snarled back. “If he had one that was longer than my pinkie.”
Pru tut-tutted mildly. “He’s 110 years old, how het-up could he be?”
Margo’s lips came together tighter than a child proofed prescription bottle. Under a battle worn coat of glossy red lipstick, her flesh became white. Finally, just as Pru was thinking that the younger woman would turn blue before she composed herself, the mouth snapped open and spewed forth vitriol. “He grabs my ass and pinches every time I turn my back. So I stopped turning my back. Then he started waiting to call me until his little weenie gets hard so I could personally witness his Wicked Willy. Then today seeing how I didn’t have my back to him, he decided to fight dirty.” The woman paused to gather breath and then finished with a rapid denouement, “It was a purple nurple.”
Pru wet another finger and the moistened digit paused dramatically at the corner of the file. “A purple nurple,” she repeated thoughtfully, as if she hadn’t ever heard that particular term before.
“A titty-twister,” Margo howled. She demonstrated on air with one hand, putting her thumb and index finger together and turning the entire hand viciously to the right. “Pinched and rotated.”
Pru protectively covered her breasts with her hands, wincing all the while.
“Now I’ve got to explain to my husband that the oldest, horniest felon on this side of the Mississippi groped me and left marks,” Margo hissed vehemently. “You think Allen is going to understand?”
Groaning Pru uncovered her breasts. “Margo, honey, what do you want me to do about it? Have him arrested? File a sexual harassment charge? He’ll probably croak before an officer gets the cuffs around his wrists.”
“Tell you what,” Margo said after a moment, sounding remarkably composed for a woman who had just dry-swallowed three 800mg pills of ibuprofen. “You go deal with him for the rest of the evening while I find a bullet proof vest for my chest, and maybe one for my ass. too.”
Pru grudgingly agreed and watched as Margo stalked her teddy bear like figure down the white halls. Pru had heard from the other nurses about the resident of room 512. He was a lustful lecher with a potty mouth that could make a company of sailors blush, wandering hands that were faster than a speeding super villain, and an unpleasant disposition that could make a bull in a ring seem like Mary Tyler Moore on uppers.
Twenty feet away from room 512 and Pru could hear a loud discussion in what was supposed to be a quiet hallway. As she stepped closer she realized the conversation was one-sided and directed at someone who did not answer. When she peeped around the corner of the door to the room, she saw that the occupant was having a heated dialogue with a large potted plant.
The plant in question was a leafy banana palm tree that sat benignly in a corner, neither contributing in nor disregarding the active conversation of its roommate.
Pru stopped to stare.
The elderly man in the bed was hooked up to an IV, a catheter, a heart monitor, an oxygen tube, and a blood pressure monitor. None of which stopped him from waving his arms about as he spoke vehemently. “…Father in nineteen ought six drove my mama and my six brothers and sisters across the plains in a covered wagon. And after that ride I had so many blisters my ass was on fire for a month. I told my father that if I got on another wagon in my life it would be too fucking soon. And goddammit if I didn’t. I rode horses, trains, even flew on a plane in 1946, but I ain’t never got back on a sumbitching wagon. In fact, I made sure I burned three of ‘em on the ferry landing where I hijacked a boat to get to the Northern Belle.” He snorted and a snot bubble came out of the tubeless nostril, expanded to the size of nickel and acrimoniously popped. “The Northern Belle was the last river boat that was ever robbed. And me and my gang done cleaned it out. Boat was chock fucking full of rich Yankees with cash to spare. Playing roulette and black jack and drinking la-de-dah brandy and smoking fancy cigars. One feller like to faint when I pointed my pistol in his face.” He chuckled and waited expectantly as if the plant would chuckle back.
Pru had heard the story before. Often the details varied. Occasionally it was two burned wagons and the name of the river boat became the Northern Belle Queen. Sometimes, room 512’s vociferous dweller had done the tube-snake boogie with the river boat captain’s pretty wife in the course of the robbery. Or in his lewder moments it had been rape involving no less than three members of his gang.
Since the robbery had taken place some seventy years previously, the details were blurred in the elderly man’s mind and it was probably affirmable that he was the last living witness and participant in the crime. No one was about dispute particulars and accuracy. No CNN on the job, Pru lamented wryly.
Once Pru had read an article on the iniquitous event. Perhaps the occupant of the room would have withered away and died after a long life of bragging and criminal behavior, except that the media had been starved for an attention grabbing news event. Prohibition had been on its death legs and Hoover had still been in office. People had slowly begun to acclimatize to the poverty of the Great Depression. But the lack of money and jobs, and the rash of foreclosures had caused the common man to distrust the official figure. Heroes were far and few. When the presently elderly man had led his gang in a brazen robbery of a river boat filled with wealthy northerners, had burned wagons, a post office, and a barn during their escape in order to distract the authorities, and had stopped to bribe two poor farmers in Louisiana to give them food and water, he became a hero. Until Bonnie and Clyde blazed their way through five states a few years later, he was the hottest thing since Moses had parted the Red Sea.
And adding to his infamy was the fact that the cops hadn’t caught him until the 1950s. They wouldn’t have ever caught him if his then most recent wife hadn’t turned him in. She had seen a reward for his capture and decided the money was too good to pass up. Room 512’s inhabitant had destroyed a federal building and committed a felony that didn’t have a statute of limitation. So into prison he went, where he promptly escaped, and remained free for another ten years. It turned out that the common man had a long memory and the occupant was still a hero. Sightings were frequent but most folks waited days before reporting it. Recaptured in 1964, the occupant was living in the deep bayous of Louisiana with his sixth wife and three children, making a living hunting alligators and shrimping. He was imprisoned for another twelve years and eventually became very ill with kidney disease. An outgoing President of the United States had been a particular fan of history and had taken pity on him by pardoning him in the final days of the President’s administration. Prison officials were grateful. Apparently there wasn’t a lot of extra money to provide dialysis for convicts.
In his later years room 512’s resident lived alternately in two towns on either side of the Sabine River. One was Sawdust City, Texas and the other was Albie, Louisiana. He remained on the Texas/Louisiana border for the last ten years of his life, firmly of the belief that he could escape across the state line a little easier from the two towns, regardless of which side he spent the night and regardless of the fact that he hadn’t committed any felonies for the previous twenty years. He owned two homes, each in the respective towns. His seventh wife had occupied one and a fifty year old girlfriend occupied the other.
“The hell you looking at, girly?” the elderly man demanded belligerently. White hair barely covered a spotted dome. Faded blue ey
es sparkled with mischief not yet past. He rattled the IV pole with one hand and stuck his chin out as threateningly as he could. “I done pushed my buzzer going on five minutes ago and that other silly wench showed up and got all upset on account of my little titty touch.”
Pru grimaced and resisted the urge to cover up her sweater puppies. “I know what you did,” she said firmly. “And if one little minute particle of your flesh comes in contact with any part of my flesh, you’re not going to be known by your outlaw name anymore.”
“No?” room 512’s occupant challenged.
Pru approached the bed and pulled the sheet off with a quick tug. Then she yanked up his hospital gown and exposed his shriveled privates. The resident of the room didn’t appear to be particularly deterred by the action. As a matter of fact, and despite the catheter, the wrinkled penis twitched. “I’ll have a new one for you,” she declared with a scowl. She unhesitatingly extracted the catheter, tape and all, listening to his howl of pain with no small satisfaction.
Waiting for the elderly man to finish a long string of explicit profanity, Pru picked up a carrot that the man had left from lunch. She demonstrated with a disposable scalpel, produced out of her smock’s front pocket. She swiftly sliced it in half and let the two pieces drop on the bed just on either side of the man’s desiccated Jolly Roger. “You won’t be Bayou Billy anymore, Mr. McCall,” she said positively and cheerfully. She expertly sliced the air with the scalpel in her gun hand. “You’ll be Bayou Betty.”
William Douglas McCall, once popularly known as Bayou Billy, swallowed convulsively. His eyes jerked downward, leading Pru’s gaze to what had caught his attention. His tiny tally-whacker was getting a full on chubby. The scalpel in Pru’s hand drooped accordingly and she groaned. Quickly her eyes came back to meet Bayou Billy’s and he grinned, showing that his dentures were still in the container on the nightstand. Her eyes unconsciously dropped again.
Life and Death of Bayou Billy Page 1
