Life and Death of Bayou Billy

by Bevill, C. L.

  “I don’t like that kind of attitude,” Ophelia said softly with a quick jerk of her hand, pinching her finger and thumb together in an agonizing motion. Orrick yipped loudly. The men in the other room suddenly quieted down. “We…don’t…joke… about…the…dead.”

  “Sorry, Mama,” Orrick said lamely, feeling like he was five years old instead of thirty five.

  Ophelia wrenched his nose once more for emphasis and let go with a determined nod. “I’ll be letting all you boys know what’s up at supper. We’ve had the best luck timing that we got together this week. We’re going to take advantage of it.” She tossed her head and left the room with all of the hauteur of a queen entering a royal ball.

  Oliver, one of her twins, stuck his head around the door jamb. He looked quickly from his mother’s departing back to his oldest brother’s reddened face and assessed the situation. “What did you say to her, Orrick?”

  “Shut up,” Orrick snarled, wiping a dribble of blood away from his upper lip with the back of his hand, and stalked off in the opposite direction that his mother had taken.

  •

  Hours later, chicken had been consumed and the consensus was that the Colonel hadn’t known squat and that in reality his secret blend of eleven herbs and spices was most likely rancid flour and tainted salt and pepper. Corn on the cob, freshly plucked from the stalks, had been buttered and devoured greedily. Aromatic corn bread had been chomped eagerly. Deep fried, breaded okra, a Rector family recipe, had been wolfed down as if it had been the last food left on the planet Earth. Sweet tea had been enthusiastically drunk by the gallon, as alcohol was not generally allowed at Ophelia’s supper table.

  Eight satisfied souls and two sleepy children waited for Ophelia to get to whatever was eating away at her to tell. The sleepy twins, Josh and Jacob, were sent into the den to watch television, while Oakly and Owen cleared the table. The two disgruntled men had drawn the short straws in the chore. “Okay if we bring some beer out now, Ma?” Owen called from the kitchen.

  Ophelia called back her permission, graciously allowing as how certain conventions had been observed and in the suitable order. Celebrations could be made. Orrick gazed upon his mother with a sour expression, pointedly rubbing the bridge of his nose.

  “Would you like a glass of wine, Mama?” Oakly asked from the door to the kitchen. His face was a rounded contrast to the other Rectors. Just a shade under six feet tall, Oakly had some weight on him, and his eyes were as brown as a Louisiana bayou under a black, unruly, mop head of hair. He was also a direct individual, preferring not to dance around the mulberry tree if it could be avoided.

  “The 1982 Mouton Rothschild if you don’t mind, Oakly,” Ophelia instructed in honeyed tones. Seven heads abruptly came completely upright and seven sets of eyes homed in on the Rector matriarch as if she was a Scud missile and they were a Patriot Missile Battalion. Inside the kitchen, Owen stopped clinking bottles with disquieting rapidity.

  “The 1982, you say,” Oakly said politely. He was Ophelia’s second oldest at 34 years of age. He was married and lived in Dallas with his wife, Pia. They ran a dry cleaning business. Ophelia had been disappointed at Oakly’s choice of profession but understood that not all of her children would enthusiastically follow in her footsteps. In many respects he was the antithesis of his mother, but he knew to whom his loyalty laid. After all, she had paid for his college and provided the seed money for his business. She also received quarterly dividends in the amount of 8% from the dry cleaning company. It was enough that he came home when she called and it would be enough that he would participate in her plans.

  “I saw one at auction a few months ago for $3000,” Oakly added expectantly.

  Ophelia smiled diabolically. “A happy state of affairs that I bought it for a $150 in 1983, then, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I might say that,” Oakly admitted slowly. But what he wouldn’t say out loud was that fine wine was an investment; a fine wine was something that should be stored in the cellar, not actually drunk on a muggy evening with a group of men whose tastes tended to be plebian at best.

  “Bring enough glasses for the wine as well as the bottles of beer,” Ophelia added as Oakly turned away.

  A few minutes later the bottle was breathing while nine crystal goblets sat in front of the immediate Rector family members. Eight beers were busily being imbibed by eight men who were somewhat alarmed at the turn of events of the evening.

  “So what’s got you so worked up, Mama?” Oakly finally broke the silence. “I haven’t seen you so animated since Senator Johansson died. I never saw a person so pleased that a congressman got shot by his wife”

  Ophelia pursed her lips unpleasantly at the comment, but merely gave Oakly an incisive stare. Deliberately, she poured a sparing glass of the Rothschild and passed the bottle to Orrick on her right. Beers were finished or discarded as the bottle made the rounds. And after Owen, on Ophelia’s immediate left, poured his glass, it was empty.

  “It’s good to have my boys at home,” she said finally and took a sip of the wine. “Superb, as I knew it would be.”

  “What are we celebrating?” Orrick asked politely, tired of the suspense building runabout. Ophelia adored drama. The more suspense there was, the more savory life became. It went hand in hand with the funerary business. Ceremony. Prestige. Standing. Rituals that observed death was inevitably and irreversibly intertwined with life. And the more interesting life was, the better it was to live it. His mother’s personal motto was, ‘Live life as if you might die on the morrow.’ Then he silently corrected himself. ‘Live life as if you might take the final sleep on the morrow.’ Right. Much better.

  “Death, of course,” Ophelia raised her glass. “To death.”

  Oakly shrugged and raised his glass. He obediently repeated her words. “To death.” The others followed suit, with Orrick going last, his lips twisting with an enigmatic smile.

  “You know, of course, of my interest in the Albie Cemetery,” she said precisely, calculatingly examining the pulsating color contained within the crystal goblet she held. Clearly, Ophelia wasn’t interested in an answer and the eight men knew that. They didn’t say a word. After a meaningful moment, she went on. “It has long been my intention to restore the graveyard to a state of eminence. The marble gates have been reconditioned to their original luster. The wrought iron fences have been meticulously refinished. The grounds have been carefully cultivated. Hedges have been shaped into appropriate figures denoting the respect of those who have passed beyond. Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, and Neoclassical architecture of the mausoleums have been cleverly emphasized by the groundskeeper. In the last two years the cemetery has been featured in The Southern Review as one of the South’s most detailed and striking memorial parks. We are on the brink of monumental success.”

  Oakly had to restrain a snort at his mother’s inadvertent pun. Her eyes narrowed at him briefly and then dismissed him just as quickly.

  “We only need one more thing,” Ophelia said with a note of finality. She took another sip of the Rothschild. Eight men followed suit, metaphorically sitting on the edges of their seats.

  “We need Bayou Billy,” Ophelia finished and then smiled as large as a Carcharodon Megalodon. That was considering that her children thought her smile was about a hundred times more dangerous than the prehistoric beast’s toothsome grin ever had been.

  Chapter Four

  Excerpt from I Married Bayou Billy!, written by Glenda Welsh McCall, published by Lonesome Dog Press: Houston, Texas, 1968, page 27:

  Bill would have married me in 1937 instead of 1939, if he hadn’t been still married to his second wife, Daphne. She, by the way, was a worthless soul, having no interest in her children or providing a family home for a man with wandering attentions such as Bill. Perhaps my continued and positive influence would have provided a nourishing environment for him, encouraging him to wean himself away from a life of crime and ill behavior. I was, after all, the only college educated and God
fearing wife that Bill had. I very much believe that if he hadn’t met another worthless soul, that carnivorous wanton wench, Rosa Zamarrippa, in Pegramville, Texas, that he might have become a law abiding citizen, a man of integrity who would never condone robbing another person. I could see the good in him. It was also true that his words could be coarse at times, and the physical intimacy of our wedded state was in constant flux. He could be a cruel man, using language to provide him with vicious amusement. But Bill could also be a kindness personified, bringing wild flowers plucked from the side of the road to be placed at my dining room table, and writing to me a poem, albeit crudely written, but springing forth from his heart with all of the hidden goodness of a man desperately crying out for the true love that would save his blackened heart. Here is the poem he wrote to me:

  Roses are red,

  Armadillos are gray.

  You look like a little monkey,

  I’ve got to say.

  In fact, Bill misspelled monkey and armadillos, and he wrote his ‘e’s backwards and sometimes upside-down, but the sentiment was all there. One only has to read between the lines to understand the deep passion and innate righteousness that Bill had secreted deep inside him.

  The Present

  Thursday, July 13th

  Sawdust City, Texas

  Gibby Ross, secretary and general dog’s body watched as her boss did what she thought was an improvised South American salsa that looked like a cross between an epileptic having a seizure and Lucille Ball stomping on grapes. Pascal Waterford was standing on top of her desk doing effortless movements with his arms and elbows and then ending with a butt wiggle. Then he would yell, “Hey, Macarena!” while clapping and then rotating to his right ninety degrees. Despite what Pascal had implied before, Gibby wasn’t a Southern Baptist or even a Baptist, and consequently did happen to know some dances. She might have even danced once at a middle school prom with a boy who wore glasses so thick that they could have been used to repair the Hubble Space telescope. But that was neither here nor there.

  Gibby tilted her head to the right as the popo-jiggle commenced not two feet from her nose. Pascal was a booze hound, a lecher, and occasionally a foul-tempered individual, but he had an adequately better-than-average and eminently squeezable tushy. The view, despite its unprovoked manifestation, was not objectionable.

  “Come on, baby,” Pascal said, now looking down at her with a full white grin while fluently continuing the movements. “Dance with me.”

  Glancing down at the still dripping and quite large coffee stain on her dress, Gibby shook her head. But she couldn’t help a slight smile from curving her lips at the suggestion. If the other secretaries came to see what the hub-bub was, then she didn’t dare get caught prancing around the top of the desk like a cheap hotel-hotsy with the mayor acting like Teddy Kennedy before he drove off Dike Bridge at Chappaquiddick Island.

  In fact, several council members popped their heads out into the hallway like prairie dogs checking for predators and the janitor gawped with his mouth opened so wide that Gibby could see his tonsils. Gibby would have rolled her eyes heavenward and shot them a glare that would have frozen their knickers except that she was somewhat embarrassed for the mayor’s sake.

  “Hey, Macarena!” Pascal yelled gleefully and turned 90 degrees to his right with a scandalous hop that would have made Bugs Bunny envious.

  Don Swancott stuck his head into the hall, did a double repeat look at what the mayor was doing and grinned broadly. He disappeared so quickly that it was questionable whether or not Gibby had actually seen him.

  Gibby suddenly frowned. There were many things in this world that she disliked. Telemarketers had been numero uno on her list. But then the No Call List had happened and they lost a lot of work, so sometimes she talked to them for a while, but not so long as to get their hopes up. Then, there were the deplorable department store return policies. NOT everyone remembers to keep their receipts for EVERYTHING they ever bought.

  Gibby didn’t even want to think about rebates. That was the biggest scheme of which she’d ever heard. The last time she’d bought software that offered a rebate she was required to send in 1) a proof of purchases, 2) the actual Universal Product Code snipped from the box, 3) proof in the form of receipts (refer to the dislike of department store return policies above) that she owned previous versions of the software that made her applicable for the latest version, and 4) her first born son. Even if she managed all of that, she knew that she wouldn’t get the rebate check for six months and it would come in an envelope that could very easily be mistaken for junk mail. Naturally, it would have a time limit on it of thirty days before it become void. Hah.

  But what really steamed her broccolis were rotten, dirty, no good, puppy-dog smelling politicians. Like Don Swancott. He hadn’t officially announced his candidacy for mayor of Sawdust City, but everyone knew he was going to run. He was also doing his wretched best to make Pascal Waterford look like a horse’s ass. Not that Pascal needed that much help in that area, especially while he was standing on her desk, shaking his tail feathers like Barry Manilow was singing about the Copacabana. The bona fide truth was that Pascal was a rotten, dirty, no good, puppy-dog smelling politician, too, but he was Gibby’s rotten, dirty, no good, puppy-dog smelling politician.

  What would I do if I saw the mayor acting like an exotic dancer on crack on top of his secretary’s desk and I was going to run against him in the fall? Gibby frowned harder as she looked at Don’s door. Camera. Don’s getting a camera out of his desk. She stood up immediately and said as loudly as she could, “Thanks, Your Honor!”

  Pascal abruptly stopped his shaking of his posterior, staring down at Gibby with surprise on his face. “That light has really been bothering me!” she yelled, pointing at the fluorescent light on the ceiling above her desk. “It’s really good of you to help me with it!”

  The mayor said, “Why are you yelling, Gibby?”

  Gibby jerked her head down the hallway toward Don Swancott, who was positioned in the center, waiting for the money shot, with his hands wrapped around a disposable camera. The camera’s lens was pointed in their direction and Don’s index finger was on the button. She didn’t know what was worse, that Don actually had a disposable camera in his desk awaiting such an occasion, or that the mayor’s previous behaviors warranted having the disposable camera about for posterity’s sake.

  Pascal waited for a moment as he digested the scene before him and then said graciously and loudly to Gibby, “Loose wire!”

  Several people made sounds of understanding and vanished into the nether regions from whence they had emerged. Don stared at the two of them and finally lowered the camera. He snarled half-heartedly under his breath and stomped back into his office.

  The mayor took a moment to examine Gibby’s face. Ultimately he came to a conclusion. “You’re not quite the ogre you pretend to be.”

  “You needn’t make it so easy for Mr. Swancott,” Gibby snapped. “After all, you could have taken off your pants and shirt and appeared on my desk in your underwear. A red silk thong, is it?”

  Pascal jumped off the desk with the ability of a man half his age. He came within a few inches of Gibby and attempted a little intimidation by his closeness and by his increased height. She didn’t take a step backward, although she wanted to do exactly that. Furthermore, it crossed her mind that this was the very first time the mayor had taken an interest in anything she did. Instead of giving Gibby any kind of civilized and respectable amount of space, he looked down at her thoughtfully.

  Gibby stared back, not exactly sure what else to say. The statement he’d made was essentially true. She had learned many years before to be as hard as nails. She wasn’t the swooning, blinky-eyed, southern beauty that was the homecoming queen in high school and the most popular sorority sister in college. Instead, she was practical. Life was remorseless. Gibby had to be brutal, too. Or else people like Don Swancott and Pascal Waterford would tromp all over her ego, leavin
g more collateral damage than a gulf war.

  But hey, Pascal had gray eyes the color of a mourning dove’s wings. Gibby fluttered her eyelashes and wished she had put more mascara on that morning. She caught herself. Hard, Gibby, m’girl. Hard as nails. Hard as a diamond. Hard as titanium. Hard as a rock. I wonder exactly what kind of underwear he is wearing.

  “A red silk thong,” he said, almost a whisper.

  “What?” Gibby muttered. Did I say that out loud? Brainless ninny.

  His eyes twinkled diabolically and suddenly Gibby knew why some of the secretaries in City Hall fawned over him. She had never seen it before, not in three and a half years of working for him. His crows’ feet multiplied as a slow, insidious smile split his face. When Pascal was in a good mood, it was so infectious that the CDC should have been called.

  “You said, ‘A red silk thong, is it?’” Pascal uttered slowly and carefully, letting the words drawl on his tongue. He leaned in to get a good look at her, appearing massive through her oversized eye glasses. “How did you know?”

  “Uh,” Gibby said helplessly. “It was sarcasm.”

  “Have you been peeking through a hole in the men’s room?” he went on, carefully examining every bit of her features.

  “Of course not!” Gibby yelled and finally stepped back, broken from her feeble reverie. “Of course I DO NOT know what color your underwear is! Have you lost your mind? Don’t you have any regard for your constituents? Do you know that Don Swancott is positively going to send Sawdust City into an unrecoverable tailspin?”

  Pascal stepped back himself. He pursed his lips and considered Gibby’s words. “I didn’t know that you cared,” he said presently.

  “You called up Jake from accounting,” she said. “After I gave you his message and told him to pay those salaries out of your pay first.”