Gibby glanced around. Her hands returned to rest on her waist, flurried pigeons looking for a place to rest and to possibly take a birdly poop. They landed and the fingers proceeded to twitter like an epileptic who had drunk ten Caramel Frappuccino Blended Coffees.
They had returned to City Hall and attempted to act normally. Questions from employees were thankfully limited, although there was a barrage of news media camped out on the front of City Hall who wanted a statement from the mayor on the ‘Bayou Billy’ situation. Entrenched in Pascal’s office, repelling all boarders like an abandoned ship full of young nubile virgins, they attempted to gather their facts and figure out exactly what had happened. But what was even worse was that they had to figure out what was going to happen.
“I didn’t have a gerbil named Gladys,” Pascal said defensively and rather abruptly.
“What?”
“You heard me,” he said. “I didn’t have a gerbil. I really did have a basset hound named Precious. Best dog I ever had. She would have taken a bullet for me. Well, she would have if she could have run faster than a slow trot, anyway. And I never would have flushed an animal down the toilet. Not even a goldfish.”
Gibby was momentarily flustered. Pascal Waterford, mayor of Sawdust City, Texas, and vivacious player who never met a leer he couldn’t master in seconds flat, was standing not far from her with a conspicuously wounded expression on his handsome face. It was as if someone had honestly hurt his feelings. It was as if Gibby had actually hurt his feelings. I mean, he really, really, really looks like I did. Dammit.
I slept with him, she thought unexpectedly. I slept with him. I actually slept with him. Well, I didn’t sleep with him, I fucked him. He fucked me. Very nicely, if I do say so myself. He came twice. I came four times. Maybe five if I count the time he put his…uh…way off the matter here. Is the look on his face an act, or is it the real thing? Am I supposed to rush over and hug the hurt off him? Am I supposed to cow-tow to him? Why doesn’t Cosmo ever write an article about something like this? I think I’m in big trouble.
“Well, fuck,” she said. Pascal’s eyes went bigger and rounder. “Are you messing around with me, Pascal? Do you actually…oh, say…like me?” The last two words held a hint of pleading that Gibby wanted to cut out of her voice with the same knife that Jack the Ripper had used.
His mouth dropped open as if his jaw had a hinge in it. Finally, it closed with an audible crack and he said with an intent glitter in his eyes, “Of course I like you. You’re the sexiest secretary I’ve ever met. You have the smartest mouth west of the Mississippi. You don’t pull punches, even when you should. You have the loveliest breasts I’ve ever seen. And I have a strange yearning to suck on your big toes just for the fun of it. You think I sleep with all the employees of City Hall? Hah. I don’t usually…” His mouth snapped shut.
Gibby was entranced with his tone of voice. No hidden agenda there. There wasn’t any hesitation or shifting eyes or any indicator that Pascal was being anything but truthful. “You don’t usually…what?” she prompted quietly.
Pascal’s face contorted into uncomfortable annoyance. He said something she couldn’t understand.
“Didn’t hear you there, Your Honor,” she said.
“I said, I don’t usually sleep with just anyone,” he muttered a little louder and his both of his cheeks turned the exact color of ripe Red Delicious apples. “And don’t call me Your Honor.”
“You don’t,” she repeated numbly. Gibby scrambled for a coherent thought. “You don’t? You really don’t?” She paused to swallow the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat. “Well, when was the last time you…uh…”
“Shagged? Played hide the hamster? Fidgeted the midget in Bridget? Furgled? Californicated? Sank the sausage? Ploughed the back forty?” Pascal’s discomfort disappeared as if it had never been. It became clear to Gibby that he had dredged up a tried and true method of self-defense: counter-attack with shock tactics covered with a generous helping of smirking debauchery.
Gibby eyed him warily and then looked around for a pen and a spare piece of paper. “I’ve got to write some of that down,” she murmured. At the sound he made she added helpfully, “To look it up on the Internet. I’m pretty sure it’s not in the dictionary.”
“Look,” he said, catching her hands and holding them within his own. “I know. I act like a tomcat on the prowl. The voters like that happy-crappy. East Texas good old boys love to hear the stories down at the Gray Goose, just as long as the books are balanced and they don’t have to worry about where the next customers are coming from. They don’t want to see that the tax coffers are plunging like a Hollywood neckline. They don’t want to see the mayor yanking out gray hairs because he can’t figure out where to cut the budget without making people go on welfare. They don’t like to see the mayor chugging Pepto Bismo like it was warm milk at bedtime. I don’t know exactly when it got easier to perform like a horny cracker, but it just seemed to make things…easier.”
Gibby stared into those gray eyes. The color of a dove’s wing. The color that could make me want to take a peek into his dress trousers to see if he put that red silk thong on yet. Oh, God, I’m in big, big trouble. It was time to switch gears before she helplessly started into a vapid repeat of Sally Fields’ Oscar speech. “What are we going to do about Billy?”
Pascal blinked uncertainly. His hesitation was full of hope and then the bubble popped, just like a big wad of cheap gum. Another expression passed over his face and Gibby thought that maybe it was regret, but then it was gone and she wasn’t really sure if she had seen it at all. Worse was that she wanted to know what the brief expression had meant. Certainly, he didn’t want me to throw myself at him and express my undying love? No. Not that. Maybe my undying lust?
Pascal’s face hardened and he shifted gears as well. “I’m getting the old soap dropping, boil-chewing, slimy, putrid, granny-groping jizzmopper back but I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to do it.”
•
While Pascal was in the midst of formulating a die-hard, merciless, fail proof method of Bayou Billy retrieval, Deanna stuck her head into the outer office and said, “Did you hear about Don Swancott?”
Gibby was nibbling on the end of a wretched tasting pencil and contemplating that God was the type of Supreme Being that liked to play tricks on the unwary. Even worse was that He seemed to be having such a good time that He was hesitant to quit with the jokes. Somewhere God was rolling on the floor, laughing until peas shot out of His nose. She looked up at Deanna and said, “What about Don?”
“Slipped three disks in his back,” Deanna said with a grin. “Emergency surgery in Dallas late yesterday. I don’t know what the jerkface did but he did it good. His wife said there was internal bleeding.”
I know what he was doing, Gibby thought. Wonder what he told the doctor? ‘Yo, Doc, I was hauling a chest freezer with a corpse in it, trying to steal it from the competition who stole it from the other competition.’ Naw, he won’t cop to that. It would make him some sort of…accessory after the fact. Or something. I hope his stitches get infected. Then she recanted. She really was not being a good Christian lately. Rather she was being a very bad Christian lately. I hope he gets mildly irritating bedsores.
“I guess he’s going to be out of work for a while,” Gibby commented, not being able to think of anything else to say. That was another of her mother’s rules: if you don’t have anything good to say about someone, then don’t say anything at all. When Gibby remembered to follow it, it made for a mighty short conversation.
“His wife says three months. Maybe as long as six months.” Deanna clenched a fist and yanked her bent arm backwards in a congratulatory manner. “Yes! Good things to happen to good people.”
Then Deanna vanished and Gibby swore by the quivering walls that the younger woman was skipping down the hallway.
“Did you hear that, Pascal?” she asked through the open doorway.
“I heard,” he said mildl
y. “Don didn’t look very happy when he dumped the freezer off at his house.”
Gibby chewed on the pencil some more. Something was bothering her and she wanted to put her finger on it. “You know,” she said hurriedly. “Billy’s whole house was kind of, cleaned out, wasn’t it? There were non-dusty spots where things had been removed.”
“Yeah?” Pascal came to their connecting door and stared down at her.
“If someone followed you to Billy’s house, waited for you to leave, and then got the body, why bother with the rest of the house?”
Pascal’s lips twitched. “Who would want his crap?”
“Exactly,” Gibby sat up straight and dropped the maliciously chewed writing instrument. “It wasn’t like he had good stuff in there. The floor was dirty. The walls were stained. The couch looked like a repository for every infestation since locusts flew across Egypt. I bet he didn’t have much in the way of anything good anyway. I mean, if there was anything half-way decent there, it’s gone now.”
“Who would want to take his collection of dentures?” Pascal asked curiously. “I could see the dusty outline on a shelf in the bathroom. What do you do with dentures?”
“Dentures that belonged to Bayou Billy?” Gibby very nearly cringed with disdain. “Somebody probably would buy them. Gross, but plausible.”
“But if Don Swancott is in a hospital room right now and Ophelia Rector is the only one who wants Billy as much as I do, then why would she clean out his place?” Pascal scratched the side of his nose.
“She wouldn’t,” they both said at the same time.
Then Deanna stuck her head back into the open door. “Did you hear about Ophelia Rector? You all know that woman who thinks you stole Bayou Billy’s body, Your Honor?”
Gibby and Pascal stared.
“She’s in jail in Albie,” Deanna cackled. “Mean old bitch thinks her shit don’t stink. They arrested her for assaulting one of her sons. They said his balls are ruptured and he had to have surgery. Can you believe that? Did she hit him with a ten pound mallet?” She vanished again and the building seemed to shake in time with her prancing footsteps.
“Deanna really shouldn’t do that,” Gibby said. “It makes the building vibrate.”
Pascal appeared meditative. “Her boobs aren’t that big. So who would take Bayou Billy’s junk?”
“Some who is still pissed at him,” Gibby offered.
“Someone who hated his guts,” Pascal added.
“Someone who threatened to disembowel him with a rusty pick axe and nail the entrails on the welcome to Sawdust City sign,” Gibby mentioned.
“Someone he owed money to,” Pascal contributed.
Together they said, “His relatives.”
“Which one?” Gibby asked. Billy had a bunch, not including Tamara Danley, who had sworn she wouldn’t come to Sawdust City unless she was towed by, what had she said, a thousand flaming queens wearing sequins and boas and doing the can-can? There were great grandchildren scattered to the four winds. There were supposed to be a dozen girlfriends and who knew how many illegitimate children and their descendants.
“The question is not which one is it, but which one has the biggest grudge against Billy?” Pascal folded his arms across his chest and breathed deeply. He stared down at Gibby and said seriously, “I do like you, you know.”
Gibby flushed. It felt as if her entire body had rapidly turned pink. The moment was holding like a timeless classic. His eyes were locked on hers and she could feel the heat of his gaze as if she had swallowed a double shot of Bacardi 151.
Pascal took a tentative step toward her and Bobby Joe Bruce Lane, Chief Financial Officer of Sawdust City, stepped through the door. Pascal’s eyes rolled like window shutters and he viciously grunted with irritation.
“Wind’s blowing like a motherwhore outside. Making the windows rattle like a baby with a full-on mad,” Bobby Joe Bruce said animatedly. Then he asked cagily, “did ya hear?”
Gibby wished she had cold water to pour over her head and down her cleavage, and maybe a couple of gallons with extra ice for the area in between her thighs. “Hear what, Bobby Joe Bruce?” she gritted out, hoping that Bobby Joe Bruce couldn’t read the look of utter frustration in her eyes.
“About Don,” Bobby Joe Bruce said.
“Heard that,” Pascal said shortly.
“About Ophelia?”
“That, too,” Pascal snapped.
“Well, jeez, then I know I don’t have to tell you about-” Bobby Joe Bruce stopped and waved expressively at the exterior wall of City Hall.
“Nope,” Pascal snarled. He took a step toward Bobby Joe Bruce as if he were going to throw the man bodily from Gibby’s office.
Bobby Joe Bruce took a hasty step backward, having begun to perceive the level of the mayor’s discontent, and said quickly, “Edith McTavish cancelled most of the events for Friday and Saturday. Said most people will have the sense to figure out why.”
“Cancelled?” Gibby repeated. Then she remembered the body was not under their immediate control and they wouldn’t be able to produce it for the planned ceremonies. Cancellation was just as well.
“Well, sure,” Bobby Joe Bruce said. “Have you taken a look outside lately? I mean, Christ on a Popsicle stick.”
“Don’t you have something to do?” Pascal roared and Bobby Joe Bruce fled for the hills.
Pascal bent toward Gibby, halfway over her desk, ready to yank her across to him when her phone unexpectedly peeled. “Don’t answer it,” he said.
Gibby twitched. “There are people watching,” she muttered and reached for the phone. She could see two secretaries and one council member sticking their heads out of the doors to see what The Honorable Mayor was presently doing and why it involved yelling. She answered and a muffled voice demanded to speak to Pascal.
“Who’s calling?” she asked, not so politely.
“John…uh…Holmes,” said the voice.
“What is this in reference to?” Gibby put herself in full secretary mode. Not just anyone got to speak to the mayor or he’d be on the phone twenty-four/seven. Besides which, when people called the mayor who didn’t give their real names, it was usually to curse at him and threaten to cut off his testicles.
“It’s personal,” John said.
Gibby covered the phone and said to Pascal, “John Holmes on the line. Says it’s personal.”
“Who?” Pascal shifted and glared over his shoulder at the onlookers. Three-quarters of them disappeared promptly. “I don’t know a John Holmes.”
“Mr. Holmes,” Gibby said firmly, “you’ll need to state your business before the mayor will speak with you.”
“It’s…uh…it’s, ah, well,” the voice sputtered uncertainly. Then he said in harsh whisper, “Tell him it’s to do with Bayou Billy’s body.”
Gibby froze. Her eyes met Pascal’s and she tentatively offered the phone to him. “I think you should speak to Johnny, Pascal. I think one of Billy’s relatives might be on the line.” Then she whispered, “About you-know-who’s whatsit.”
“Huh?” Pascal said, grabbed the phone and barked into it. “Mayor Waterford, here. Who the hell is this?” There was a pause while he listened. “I don’t know any freaking John Holmes, unless you happen to be the ghost of a dead porno star. Not that I ever watched porn.” Another long pause followed and Gibby saw the change that went over Pascal’s face as he listened. An aggravated expression became one of irritated confusion and then transformed into dazed comprehension. Pascal slowly handed the phone back to her.
Gibby listened to the receiver and ascertained that the other party had hung up. “I guess his name isn’t really John Holmes.”
Pascal groaned. “That was a ransom demand.”
“A ransom demand,” she repeated stupidly. “For what?”
Pascal looked her in the eyes and said, “They want fifty thousand for the return of Bayou Billy’s corpse or they’ll chop it up with a Cuisinart and throw it in Toledo Bend for the catf
ish to eat.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
From Milestones, pg 29, Time Magazine, December 4, 1978:
Died. William ‘Bayou Billy’ McCall, 78, infamous outlaw and federal fugitive of over thirty-five years, last known individual to rob a riverboat in the United States, ‘The Northern Belle Queen,’; of natural causes in Sawdust City, Texas. He was pardoned from a federal penitentiary at the age of 77 by President Gerald Ford.
From Milestones, pg 21, Time Magazine, December 11, 1978:
Correction. William ‘Bayou Billy’ McCall, 78, was incorrectly reported as having died. He is still alive.
The Present
Thursday, July 20th
Albie, Louisiana
Ophelia Rector stepped through to the good side of the doors of Albie’s city jail and took a long look around her. Like her mood the day was stormy and despite the uplifting appeal of freedom, it didn’t seem as though it would improve. Wind blustered through nearby trees and wailed through the downtown’s buildings like maddened harpies stalking their next victim.
The comparison was particularly apt. Ophelia felt exactly like a ravenous, filthy monster and she had numerous quarries yet to pursue.
Six of her sons waited for her. They stood in a loose semi-circle, silently expectant, ready for the harsh words that would wretchedly cascade from her fatigued and angered mouth. Orrick, the eldest, had hauled his ass from New Orleans. Oakly had driven like a demon from Dallas. Oliver and Obadiah had rushed down from Shreveport. And Owen and Oxford had scurried from their Albie residences to show their support. Their expressions varied from worried to positively frightened. Two sons were conspicuously absent.
Oscar and Orem. Them. I spit on them. I curse them. I no longer have eight sons. I have six. May they rot in eternal hellfire while having their intestines yanked from their still-living selves by demonic imps with thorns attached to their limbs.
Life and Death of Bayou Billy Page 29
