“Whom what?” Pascal glared at her.
“Who the hell works for whom around here,” Gibby said satisfyingly.
“Whom,” Pascal repeated.
“Bobby Joe Bruce said that if any employee came in late they had to be docked,” Gibby said with malevolent glee.
Bobby Joe Bruce Lane was Sawdust City’s Chief Financial Officer, which was a whopping ludicrous title if Pascal had ever heard one, and the only man that Pascal knew with three first names that he liked other people to use. He was also the one slashing funds with a liberal red pen. Three people had been axed from the city government’s employment and Pascal was soon expecting to see any one or all of them sitting on his doorstep with a rusty, dull axe. “He didn’t mean me,” Pascal said darkly.
Gibby didn’t get it and set her jaw petulantly. “You have three messages from Hewitt Donally. The last one is urgent.”
Hewitt Donally was Pascal’s campaign manager and the owner of the only grocery store in town. Pascal wondered what Hewitt had heard about the previous night.
“One message from Doc Montague,” Gibby went on, with her nose getting longer all the time.
Doctor Titus Montague was Pascal’s family doctor and the only GP in town. Pascal had a physical performed the previous month and hadn’t thought much of his odds that the doctor had something positive to say.
“Jake from Accounting left a message that he wanted me to read to you when you got in,” Gibby continued. “I quote, ‘Three paychecks bounced yesterday. Please find some money someplace. Or we are fucked, fucked, fucked.’ The last ‘fucked’ was underlined four times. Jake told me to do that and to tell you that I had done that.”
“That word just doesn’t sound right coming out of your Baptist mouth, Gibby,” Pascal commented. “Do you even know what it means?”
“To fuck,” Gibby repeated thoughtfully. “It’s a taboo term meaning to have sexual intercourse. A verb. It also can mean to ruin, botch, or destroy something, or to treat someone unjustly or harshly.” She paused to consider her words. “Of course, it can also be used as a noun.”
Pascal decided he couldn’t have any fun anymore. “Any other messages?”
“Emergency town council meeting at 2 PM. Don Swancott said don’t be late or he’d head up the next recall movement and that would be well before the next election.” Gibby smiled maliciously. Don Swancott was the mayor pro tem and first councilmember, as well as the major contender to be the next mayor of Sawdust City. Don already had aspirations on the office. Apparently he was thinking about changing the carpet. Good luck finding some money for that, Don, Pascal thought. Good luck trying to find money to buy a pack of pencils, too.
When Gibby brought Pascal coffee and a newspaper a half-hour later, he checked the liquid for poison, and then disregarded the notion, thinking it would be better to die swiftly. The coffee wasn’t poisoned but the newspaper had a headline in it that made Pascal feel something that he hadn’t felt for years. It was an alien feeling, one that was similar to taking a breath of the freshest, best smelling air on the entire planet, or the moment after the best orgasm ever has started and there’s no way in heaven or in hell that it will ever be interrupted, or the feeling that one gets when optimism bursts fluidly open in a crippled man’s chest the moment he learns that he very well might be able to walk again.
Over Pascal’s shoulders was a broad, gabled window that overlooked Main and First Streets and was the only really good perk of his office and status. If he had looked there, his mirror image would have mockingly said, “That’s hope, buttmunch. Better get used to it before it chokes you.”
Instead, Pascal deliberately looked down at the newspaper and read the headline again. ‘Bayou Billy Dead at 110.’
Pascal could have cried and it surely wouldn’t have been from grief. “YIPPEE!” he yelled instead and outside his office, Gibby spilled her coffee all over her prune colored dress and viciously used the word she had looked up in the dictionary after Jake from Accounting had left his message for Pascal.
Chapter Three
From an interview with Bubba Wilkins, retired sheriff of Pegram County, Texas, dated August 12th, 1967. The material is stored in the University of Texas at Arlington’s special collections section. The interviewer is unknown:
Mr. Wilkins: Mr. Bill McCall came through Pegramville in the forties, not long after the depression was over. The Nazis and the Brits were fighting like coon-dogs over a pile of cow guts, and Pearl Harbor ain’t took place as of then. Later, I learned Mr. Bayou Billy, as he was commonly called, had taken a right-shine to Rosa Zamarrippa, and came to call on her quite oft. Miz Rosa was a lady of the evening, if you follow my meaning. She was also a companion to Pegramville’s mayor upon occasion. And I seem to recollect that she spent more than a few nights with the governor of Texas when he came calling to the area. A beautiful woman, too. Creamy skin the color of silk stockings that a man itches to run his fingers across. Black hair, blacker than the bottom of a well at midnight, and long, too. Down to her waist in a sooty plunge and it looked as if she brushed it a hundred times a night. Tell you what, if you don’t tell my wife, I’ll tell you I had dreams about that hair. The lady also had the greenest eyes. Green like freshly watered spring time grass. She came from Mexico, but I reckon she had more than her fair share of Spanish blood in her. Men loved Miz Rosa. Said she was about the best…um…lady of the evening that ever worked in Texas. My old granny used to call them box-house girls, something from where she grew up in, in San Francisco, I believe. But anyway, Bill, Bayou Billy, if you’d like, repeatedly came to call on Miz Rosa. Took a hankering for her. She told me once that Bill had asked her to marry him, but on account that he was already married, to a woman who ain’t what dead or divorced, she couldn’t marry him. Miz Rosa might have been a light-skirted woman, but she was Catholic deep down inside. Used to attend mass thrice a week at Our Lady of Guadalupe in Pegramville. Well, once Bill came rip-roaring through, and robbed a department store and two little old ladies in the park, although I tend to think those blue-hairs claimed that just for the attention. So they could go to the corner drug store and talk about how they were robbed by none other than Bayou Billy himself. So Bill stopped off to have a nice little visit with Miz Rosa, if you know what I’m talking about. He ain’t got his coat off before the federals came busting into her house. Mr. Eliot Ness was even interested in Mr. Bill McCall, once upon a time. I reckon that fellow was looking for another big arrest for his career and Bayou Billy was on the most wanted list for a long, long time. Well, someone done snitched on Bill and Miz Rosa, so Bill went out the back window. Dove right through it, broke the glass and all. The federals couldn’t prove that Bill had even been there, because they ain’t actually seen him, so they ended up letting Miz Rosa go. Bill escaped to the east driving Miz Rosa’s gardener’s Model-T, drove it across the Sabine River into Louisiana. I believe that’s where he got a soft spot for Sawdust City and the town just across the Sabine, Albie, Louisiana. Miz Rosa said the folks there helped him out, made sure he disappeared but good, and Bayou Billy never forgot when a fellow done helped him out.
The Present
Thursday, July 13th
Albie, Louisiana
Ophelia Rector was particularly happy. The sky outside was bluest blue. The wind was a lovely breeze that made bearable the wretched humidity that was omnipresent in the Sportsman’s Paradise state. Chicken was cooking in the kitchen that smelled like the Colonel’s, only better. She had her eight sons present and accounted for. Orrick, the eldest, was visiting from New Orleans, bringing with him his two sons, Josh and Jacob. Oakly was visiting from Dallas. The twins, Oliver and Obadiah, had driven in from Shreveport. The other four lived in the area but all were in the house at the moment. Oscar, Oren, Owen, and Oxford filled it up as if they had never left and moved out to their own respective homes and apartments.
It was a house filled with laughter and noise and all things good.
And most importantly,
William Douglas McCall was dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. As dead as a doornail. As dead as road kill. As dead as sliced lamb chops with mint jelly on top. As dead as George Washington’s bones. As dead as disco. Ophelia could have skipped around the living room punching the air. If she had heard Pascal Waterford yelling, “Yippee!” in his office from the approximate two mile difference in their locations, she would have understood him completely.
Oh, Ophelia wasn’t trying to be sacrilegious. She understood about death. When spoken about out loud death was to be respected. After all, her father had drilled the lesson into her at an early age. He’d been the owner and head mortician at Rector Mortuary when he had opened it shortly after the end of WWII. Ophelia had assisted in body preparation for as long as she could recall. She helped to insert the tubes that would drain the blood and introduce formaldehyde so that the recently deceased would be properly preserved. She helped her mother apply makeup to lifeless octogenarians as well as to twenty year old victims of car accidents. She had made sure that guests were directed to the appropriate mourning areas when more than one funeral was occurring at once. And she used to play under the coffins, hidden by a satin skirt, while the funerary music played in the bereavement lounge. In fact, hearing ‘Praise, my soul, the King of heaven,’ and ‘If death my friend and me divide,’ could bring a tear of definitive nostalgia to her eye.
Death had been the Rector family’s bread and butter and remained so. There were to be no jokes about the blessed state where one went to meet their ancestors or any trite comments about the way a poor tormented soul had passed. It was a family business and families who used Rector Mortuary came back when another family member had jettisoned their corporeal selves. When her father, Orville Rector, had joined the angels, it was Ophelia who took over the family business, and who had added other branches in three other Louisianan towns. After all, death was eternal. It was unlikely that folks would cease dying, and most folks had families who wished to grieve in a suitable manner.
In fact, the Rector name had such prestige in the area that in marriage Ophelia refused to take her husband’s last name. Mrs. Albert Johns didn’t hold the same promise as Ophelia Rector. Albert, who tended to acquiesce to Ophelia’s demands, didn’t care, or if he had, he hadn’t said so and kept any objections he had until he passed into the evermore due to diabetic complications.
And their children followed suit in the keeping of the maternal name and family business’s association. All eight sons were Rectors, not Johns’, and none seemed to mind in the least. If loose tongues waggled about the lapse in marital etiquette, then they didn’t waggle where a Rector could hear it. Even if they had waggled within hearing, Ophelia would have smiled politely and went about her business, making sure to make a black mark against that tattling loudmouth in her little red journal for future reference.
Ophelia’s father had long instructed his only daughter in the fine art of politicking. The common and up-to-date term was ‘networking,’ but Ophelia had known the technique since she was six years old and had been taught to ‘be very nice’ to both the Methodist preacher and the Catholic Priest in town, as well as the Baptist minister. One never knew from whom business would come. When her father had returned to the dust, she set about transforming the business into one that all were familiar with. She politicked in Albie until she was dog tired. She spent time in Sawdust City until she managed to put the funeral home there out of business. She volunteered to chair committees for the town government and the actions grew her on her.
One of Ophelia’s favorite pastimes was to tend to the Albie Cemetery. A labor of love that she long associated with her vocation, she chaired the committee to restore Albie Cemetery to its once noteworthy glory. She knew every section of the graveyard from the paupers’ acre to the section called Prominence Hill because of its formerly wealthy occupants. She knew every important monument. There were two angels carved by a prominent Italian sculptor. There were marble busts that dated to the middle 1800s. There was a congressman buried in Albie who had served under Woodrow Wilson and a senator who had spent time with JFK on Martha’s Vineyard. There was a man interred there who had nobly characterized himself by sacrificing his life to save his fellow soldiers, by throwing himself upon a German grenade in WWII and had been posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Every monument had a story full of rich history and that reflected distinction upon the town of Albie, Louisiana.
When Ophelia stepped through the marble gates with their ball shaped ornaments, she felt as though she were stepping into the resonant stratum of history itself, into a place that echoed Albie’s vibrant and diverse reminiscences through the memories of the much honored dead. The dead were Albie and let no one forget what they had meant in their momentous travails.
But, and Ophelia simply salivated with anticipation upon the wondrous word, ‘but,’ there was more to come. Much more. There were magnificent plans that would come to fruition under Ophelia’s devoted and ardent methodical perception. Oh, she would make Albie into a place people would visit for the next two centuries. She would make Albie into a historical counterpoint and people would come from all over the world to this part of Louisiana to see what she had accomplished. She would…
“Hey, Mama,” Orrick said, interrupting Ophelia’s blissful reverie into the past that had formed her and the future that would distinguish her memory. She cast a baleful eye upon her eldest child and wished his timing had been better. She looked him over for a moment, sizing up his appearance. He had his father’s height, standing a few inches over six feet, and his father’s pale blue eyes, but the rest of him was all Rector. His narrow face, long Roman nose, and high cheekbones spoke of the varied Rector ancestry. His fingers were long and elegant and his movements were deliberate and assured. A certain gesture or turn of phrase would remind his mother of Orville Rector and it was as if she were ten years old again. Finally, a lean wiry form was concealed under a black suit.
Ophelia herself wore jeans, but she hadn’t seen her eldest son out of a suit since he had graduated from high school. She thought he must have a closet full of black suits, bought off the rack at the Suit Warehouse, accompanied by another closet full of white, pressed, long sleeved shirts from Sears. Additionally, he had to own at least thirty of the narrow black ties that he habitually wore. If someone were said to have had the appearance of an undertaker, then Orrick would have fit the bill. He could walk into a building filled with strangers and nine out of ten of them would have accurately guessed his profession. After all, he ran the family business that was located in New Orleans, and was certainly profitable at the trade.
Sighing, Ophelia reached out to brush a lock of black hair away from Orrick’s forehead. “You look like an undertaker,” she said.
“You’ve got that certain glimmer in your eye,” Orrick commented. He brushed a bit of lint off his jacket. “And I am an undertaker.”
“Can’t you purchase, oh, a gray suit, or perhaps navy?”
“I like black,” Orrick smiled. “I don’t have to worry about clashing. Also the customers seem to expect it.”
Ophelia shrugged. She had a lot of black in her wardrobe and knew exactly what Orrick meant. “You’ve got the twins helping with body prep?”
“Jacob threw up when we drained the first one he helped with,” Orrick said proudly. “Josh hid in the attic for the whole day.”
“He’ll get used to it,” Ophelia said firmly. “Why, oh, why couldn’t you have named them something more familial? Like Orlando or Omar?”
Orrick didn’t say anything. There was a loud shout from the next room and Oren or Oxford, it was difficult to tell which brother was yelling, swore viciously at the game on the television. Ophelia frowned. She didn’t approve of coarse language.
“So what’s up, Mama?” Orrick asked. “You’re more excited than a cat in heat hanging out with ten assorted tomcats.”
Ophelia clapped her hands together with a secretive smile, pointedly ignoring her elde
st son’s vulgar comparison. “You’ve got no idea.”
“Let’s see,” Orrick concentrated to make his guess count. “Someone really cool died and you get to take care of the arrangements. Or you got a tax break on your latest venture. Or you won the lotto.”
“Died,” Ophelia repeated disdainfully, the word issuing forth from her lips as if it were dripping with exceedingly contagious germs. “You of all people should know better. They have departed, quit this world, gone the way of all flesh, passed, passed away, met one’s death, met one’s fate, met one’s end, yielded one’s breath, gone the way of all on earth, or perhaps returned to the dust. They have not died. They never merely die.”
Orrick stared at his mother. Peripherally, he saw a trim, tall woman in her late fifties with silver hair and brown eyes. She wore a T-shirt that said, ‘There will always be death and taxes.’ Underneath that line in a smaller font was, ‘However, death doesn’t get worse every year.’ She was still a fine looking woman. Age had emphasized her best qualities. Her cheekbones were cut glass and her lips were as full as a woman coming from getting a shot of collagen. If the wrinkles gave the show away, it wasn’t because they were ugly. They were badges of honor that Ophelia wore with pride. Certainly, it wasn’t the only thing that she was prideful about.
“Passed to the great beyond, then,” Orrick corrected himself condescendingly with an evident underlying tone of amusement. It should have not surprised him when his mother abruptly reached out with her right hand and grabbed hold of his nose in a bruising grip that made him want to squeal like Ned Beatty in Deliverance. She was pinching the cartilage between his nostrils so tightly that his eyes watered and black spots appeared at the corners of his vision.
Life and Death of Bayou Billy Page 3
