by catt dahman
Virgil was born from a one-night stand, and the man was dead drunk when he picked her up in Pecker’s Bar, but he had chosen her. He was a tall, handsome man with class and intelligence; he spoke perfect English and had a pretty white smile. He drank some fancy imported beer that the bartender had wiped dust from.
He was some writer fellow driving across the United States and seeing small towns and experiencing the real America. Leonie wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly, but it was interesting to her since he was about the most famous, coolest person she had ever met. She felt as if she had met a movie star.
In a bar full of rednecks, bayou boys, and old ‘gator hunters, the strange man was like a diamond gleaming among rough, ugly pieces of granite. Granite is strong, but it stays granite; it never shines with facets and fire.
Leonie remembered that night with the handsome man who picked her up in the bar and blushed inside her mind, recollecting how she had worn cut off, denim shorts that night, and a blue, shiny halter top made from slick, soft material (borrowed from a friend) and platform sandals (she bought with money she saved from picking and selling berries on the ride of the road). She had thought herself very fancy and leaned on the bar, flipping her platinum hair dramatically.
Her feet ached from the high heels that she wobbled on as she walked, but she thought they were very classy and very sexy. She saw a calendar not long before, and the girl on the calendar had on short-shorts and high-heeled sandals and leaned on a fancy car with her breasts thrust towards the camera. Based on the picture, Leonie felt sexy.
The man, his name was David, watched her and then started laughing and walked over, asking why she was trying to get herself picked up and did she get paid.
“Get paid? I am not a cheap whore, Mister fancy pants,” she muttered indignantly.
“Oh, pardon me. I thought with the costume, perhaps you were une star de cine̕ma.”
“A what?” Her curiosity was stronger than her anger.
“A movie star. You’re all dressed up as if you wish to be discovered by an agent, like one of the pin-up girls of the 1940s.”
His way of speaking fascinated her. Leonie had never heard anyone talk this way, “Say something else…can you? In another language?”
“Sei bella means you are beautiful in Italian.”
“Awe…that’s pretty. I just fancied myself up to come to the bar. This is a bar outfit.”
The man, David, laughed, but sweetly, “It’s a bar outfit for a girl looking to be approached by a man for sexual favors. You’re showing too much skin. With those shoes…maybe a medium length skirt and blouse. Or if you wear short-shorts, you’d do better in sneakers or flat shoes, see? No halter.”
“Why do you care?” She flushed with anger, realizing how silly she was. She wanted attention but was dressed like a common hooker, it seemed.
“It’s just an observation. I like to talk to people and to see what drives them…motivates them.”
Mota…what?”
“What makes people do what they do,” he explained, “why did you dress sexy to come here?”
Leonie shrugged, “I thought I was supposed to. Men like sexy.”
“Are you looking for a man? For sex?”
She flushed. He spoke so openly that it embarrassed her. More than anything, she wanted to trade the halter for a long, button-up, comfortable shirt and a pair of sneakers, to pin her hair in a ponytail, and wash the make-up from her face. She muttered that to the man, somehow ashamed.
“I can imagine that. It’s much better, really.”
She was thirteen but passed for twenty-one without a blink. The bartender knew she and her friend were way too young, but the men liked watching them so their ages were over-looked. She asked for a whiskey and Coke, the only drink she knew to say. The man paid for her drink, and she grimaced as she sipped the drink. She wished she knew another drink to order, one that would have amused the man less and tasted better.
“Can you make a margarita for her?” the man asked. The bartender used a blender and made a pale greenish-yellow, icy drink with salt on the rim of the glass.
Leonie was skeptical, but took a sip, licking away the salt off her lips.
“Ummm, this is good. What is it called?” She repeated the word several times until she was positive she could remember it. It was bitter, sweet, sour, and had a funny under taste that made her mouth feel puckered, but the salt balanced the taste, and she loved the cold, refreshing taste.
“You are a tabula rasa,” David said, “You could, like a book, have a story and develop. You could be written.”
He explained, allowing her to enjoy the way he spoke, but even if he were going on about her mind and her possibilities, he was still looking over her body.
Her butt (what Amadee called a zinzin) was plump and tight, encased in cut off shorts that were so short the pockets peeked out. Her bosom had filled out, so it looked as if she carried big, ripe apples in her halter. Blonde naturally, she had lightened her hair with bleach and loaded on make-up. He spoke of her being natural and unadorned, but he was looking, just like every other man was.
Her friend whom she had come to the bar with was entertaining a whole table of boys across the room and giggling, but Leonie felt ridiculous now and wished she had dressed normally. In the man’s eyes, she saw a little girl pretending to be grown and thinking that grown meant dressing and acting like a slut. David was seeing both sides of her at once; she felt both sides.
David was tipsy. He kept drinking as she sipped only two margaritas. He was more than drunk, almost to the stage of being a slobbering drunk, but after some talk and a few soft drinks that they switched to, he said he wanted to get back to his motel and asked if Leonie would drive him back in his Porsche? He would call a cab then and have her taken home where she belonged.
“Can you drive me, sei bella? Would you do me that favor? I am way too drunk to drive.”
A Porsche? It was as if she were Cinderella and had found the magic pumpkin carriage. She hid her glee and played it off calm and cool, but she was thrilled to drive a fancy car. She had previously driven their old, red truck on the back roads, and that was her sum experience with driving. The idea of going back to the swamp in a cab was equally as exciting. Everyone would be green with envy.
But while she drove the Porsche (not well, but he was too drunk to notice) and although the handsome man was thirty (ancient, really), Leonie didn’t just drive him back, she spent most of the night. (He never knew she was thirteen).
“Do you wish to come inside, Leonie?” he asked.
“Tell me more Italian,” she demanded, but she said it as I-Tally-on.
David was a gentle, considerate lover, and they made love several times. He was far more polite about the whole thing than she was used to. For the first time, she felt powerful and pretty and well, a part of the whole act.
Leonie figured if he awoke and were sober, they’d have to talk, and she didn’t know what to say. She liked to hear him speak, but she knew she didn’t understand half of what he talked about and hated to keep asking. If she stayed, he would wake, they would shower and eat breakfast; then, he’d hand her some money to help her, and she’d get into a cab and leave. He outlined the plan, actually. She would sit in the cab all the way home and feel sullied because of the money, as if she had prostituted herself.
It wasn’t as if he’d call on her for a date down in the swamp at her shack; her face flamed.
She liked David, and this was like a dream; she wanted to keep it that way. She dressed and left the money (two hundred dollars which was literally a fortune to her) sitting untouched on the dresser.
She slipped out of the room before dawn and hitched a ride home with a boy she knew who drove a raggedy blue pick-up truck, and all it cost her was oral sex, which really wasn’t a big deal to her since she’d been doing oral and having sex since she was ten. Her step daddy took a liking to her. Sometimes sex was just like a scary bug, a bebette, which she had to en
dure, scratch at, wish to stomp, and live with.
Bedbugs. They crept out when it was dark and drew blood; they infested, and after a while, you could forget what it was like before they were there.
But that day, she didn’t even care.
Virgil was the result of the night with David, the handsome stranger who was in her life for only a few hours. Virgil was a beautiful baby. He was her mouche a mielle, her honeybee, the summation of her dreams and what might have been. He was what was for a few hours.
The day, her stepfather remarked that he wished Leonie had a little girl and winked was the day her life really changed.
She had just given birth to Buford, her own step dad’s son, which scared her to death for fear he would be just like his sire. She was only fifteen then and had two babies, three little sisters, an abusive stepfather, and a drunk, drugged out mother who was a hooker in the Vieux Carre.
Like a true girl bred of the bayou, Leonie bided her time in the run-down shack among the cypress knees and Spanish moss, and sure enough soon, her step daddy bought a jug of rot-gut, stilled whiskey from someone across the bayou and drank himself unconscious after messing with Leonie’s younger sister. Leonie steeled herself as she heard her little sister weeping and begging to be left alone, but she had to let the man get comfortable so he let his guard down.
Leonie wept silently for her sister, hatred building beside her fear. She prayed that her second son wouldn’t be like her abhorrent stepfather, but she felt he would be. What she planned, she would do for herself, yes, and her sisters, and for her precious son, Virgil, who should never endure seeing his mama abused.
When her stepfather was satiated, he stretched out in a ratty, mildewed lawn chair that barely held his weight, and Leonie sliced his throat wide open while he was napping on the porch. She, using his big gator knife, plunged the blade in deeply and sliced and sawed and bathed her hands and face in the warm, slick blood. He awoke and gurgled, and Leonie giggled with repugnance. All the years of his abuse, and this was the first time she enjoyed his bodily fluid pouring out; the red was beautiful.
She had no fear at all. It was nothing to her.
That was her first taste of blood, and she liked it. She wouldn’t actively pursue the kill, but she knew it was deep inside her soul: the hunger.
Leonie dragged him down the stoop, across the dirt yard, into a little boat, and out into the swamp for the ‘gators: Her back ached like a rotten tooth as she dragged the fat man; she had to stop several times and rest her muscles. He was too heavy, and she wished for something to tote him in with wheels.
Realizing that she couldn’t do that, she got the axe. It was razor sharp; she had chopped wood before, so she pretended that was what she was doing. She removed his big legs and his arm, leaving one arm to drag him by; that was hard work. She tossed each of his limbs into the boat, noting how heavy each was, even his head.
He was still heavy to pull along. Leonie stopped and had a glass of purple Kool-Aid, wishing she had sugar to sweeten it. Wiping away sweat with a dish- cloth, she went back to her task and finally had the whole body, albeit in pieces, in the boat. The blood and mess didn’t bother her in the least.
She rowed out among the trees and let the sounds and scents calm her. Birds chirped, a frog, and a turtle left a floating log and splashed; it was familiar and pleasant.
The boat was easily cleaned once she dumped him over the side and rowed back home. She over turned it and used the water to scrub away the blood. It was dirty and mildewed anyway, and the stains hardly showed. The yard only needed to be raked a little to cover the tracks and blood from where she had dragged him along. In addition, she had to care for two babies.
It took her hours to scour the boards of the porch clean of the vile man’s blood, and she cursed him for leaking on the wood. On her hands and knees, she washed the wooden porch, erasing years of misery, almost sad to see the beautiful red wash away as pink water. She wore the scrub brush down.
She cried with the pain of her back and her raw hands, but it was a good cry, a healing release of years of misery and fear. She let the tears wash away her problems.
She hoped the reptiles enjoyed their meal.
The money her mother brought home went a little further now, and Leonie took in washing and mending to make a little money. She went back to the bar as often as her mother was sober enough to watch over the babies, hoping David might be there again, or maybe she would meet someone like him.
She never did.
She met other men and drank too many margaritas, and her other two children, Ghislaine and Belle were condom failures or drunken mistakes that happened later because for some reason, she hadn’t learned her lesson yet, but she loved her kids. She just didn’t love them as much as she loved Virgil.
Belle was a little slow but a good girl; Ghislaine was a braillard child, always complaining and overly emotional. Buford. Buford sometimes felt like a cross to bear, and Leonie had slapped him stupid several times for touching his sisters and step sisters; Amadee didn’t care about the touching and feeling-up and said it was a natural thing among children raised in the swamp, but Leonie knew that was bullshit, and she fought that part. Her girls would not be abused the way she was.
Amadee’s daughter, Candy Lynn had married the Theriot boy, partially because she thought she loved him and partially to get away before Buford could lay hands on her. He tried often enough and always managed to get a hand on Candy Lynn’s butt or hip.
Now Leonie watched handsome Virgil argue.
“It isn’t a catfish. It’s a shark. There’s a bunch of ‘em,” Virgil said.
“Sharks? Now boy….”
“It’s true. We saw dem sharks, Daddy,” Buford said, “dey ain’t up too far yet, but dey’s out there looking around and getting the scents. One of dem up and ate Daisy.”
“Ate her?” Amedee said, “dit mon la verite, Boy.”
Virgil held a hand up as if swearing on a Bible, “It’s true. It snapped her up and tossed its head, and she broke apart. One of the others ate half, and the first one ate the rest.” Daisy was a four-foot gator they had been watching and hoping she was breeding. The sharks, after breaking her into halves, snapped and jerked about until they ate all the largest pieces. Bits of the gator sank and would be scooped up later by fish in the bayou, but even the biggest gar and catfish hid from the sharks.
“Dey came in from the Gulf,” Amadee said, but he said it as guff.
“Dis ain’t a good thing this shark, no.”
Belle and Ghislaine carried a big pot of the second course of the meal and filled bowls while Lougenia and Tammany cared for the smallest of the brood. Belle handed Maude a bone to gnaw.
This was more filling: meat, carrots, peppers with rice, and a side dish of sweet yams. Amadee smacked his lips as he inhaled the aroma and praised Leonie, “You done made us dis fine dinner, Leonie. My God A’mighty, I recall when we married and I found out you was de best cook in the bayou. Childrens, you take note now about yer momma. She can take dis and cook it and make it like fine cuisine,” he said it as co- zine.
Leonie smiled and accepted the praise. It was always better when Amadee was happy and passing out compliments. She knew how to cook, yes, and she did it well. She couldn’t imagine what would happen if she were a burning-the-cornbread-kind of woman. Yes, she could; he would have beaten her to death and cut a baby out of her, too.
Virgil watched the sky, “We don’t have much time. The other side is gonna be worse.”
Amadee nodded, “We gonna finish this dinner and grab dat that I told ye to pack earlier and get to de boat. I told ye all along I was right in spending all dat money on en bateau.”
Every penny they had went to the boat. Every pelt and gator, every pay check Amadee, Buford, and Virgil made went to that boat. Sometimes they almost went hungry because Amadee wouldn’t spend money on anything but what they couldn’t find, grow, catch, or make.
He thought the boat was most important
.
“Eat up, and den we goin,’” Amadee said, “hurry, allons.”
Leonie took small bites and grinned through her discomfort to appease Amadee, “Ummm,” she said, nodding to him, implying she thought her dinner was delicious. She smiled thinly.
Buford wiped grease off his chin with the back of his hand, “Dis is some good cookin’.”
Leonie smiled again, like a robot. She got a spoonful of the carrots and rice and chewed them up and swallowed. The dish was slightly sweet with the carrots, smoky and spicy because of the red peppers she grew, picked, washed, and seared over a cedar fire. There was little fat, and it had a sweet, smoky, taste, too; it tasted like well-cured pork. With her spoon, she delved into the dish, moving aside a thin, small bone that Leonie recognized as a delicate finger bone.
It was a human’s pinky.
That was the Audette way.
Hitchhikers and runaways ended up in the stew pots or smoked into jerky, serving many purposes, according to Amadee. It thinned the low class herd (because every class has a lower class to look down upon and denigrate), and Amadee vilified what he called roaches, or en ravet, the drigaille. It also provided much needed food for the family.
And it was a family tradition.
“Audettes have always eaten long pig,” Amadee said, as he reminisced. His father, grandpa, great grandpa all trapped, killed, and ate the other pig. They saw their victims as meat, no more and no less. Meat for the pot.
Amadee dropped his bowl and spoon beside his chair and stood, motioning the children to get up and get their small packs and the packs they had filled with food and supplies for the boat. Everyone would carry things needed. The wind picked up, and clouds rushed back; a drizzle of rain reminded them a barrage of rain was coming.
Amadee smiled, “We go. Tout le monde.” He grabbed Ghislaine by the back of the neck like a wayward kitten when she tried to take her pet raccoon with them; he laughed and dragged her along, leaving the baby creature to drown in its cage. Ghislaine cried and wailed until Amadee hit her across the head.
