Cajun Nights

by Don Donaldson

  The tiny white cement-block building that housed the clerk at the vehicle impoundment station was empty. On the sliding glass window above a Formica counter worn through to where the black backing showed in spots was a sign that said, PRESS BUTTON FOR SERVICE. A large red arrow pointed to a shirt button that had been glued onto the side of the building.

  A sound started in Broussard’s throat as a rattle, then gained in volume like a siren. “aaaaaaaAAAATTENDANT!” he roared. “IS THERE AN ATTENDANT ON THESE PREMISES?”

  “Why you wanna make all dat noise?” a man dressed in coveralls and a greasy T-shirt said, stepping out from behind the little building. He had long black hair that billowed from under a green baseball cap that bore a decal of an ocean wave showing its teeth and carrying a football. Only his eyes and two fat cheeks showed through a bushy beard the same color as his hair. And he was even shorter than Shami Grossman.

  “WHAT’S THE MEANING OF THIS?” Broussard said sternly, pointing at the button.

  “You tryin’ to tell me dat someone as old as you don’t know what da word dis means. Dat’s criminal. It really is.” The little fellow looked at Kit. “You work wit dis man?” She nodded. “Well, you got mah sympat’y. Ah can tell by his small eyes, he a slow learner.”

  Kit was shocked by the diminutive Cajun’s sharp tongue.

  “What made them hire you for this job?” Broussard asked. “Did they want somebody who could disconnect tow bars without bendin’ over?”

  Now Broussard was doing it!

  Both men started to laugh. “How you doin’ dis mornin’, Andy?” the attendant asked warmly.

  “So far so good, Bubba. But then it’s early. Plenty of time yet for things to go wrong. Kit, this is Bubba Oustellette, the best crawdad fisherman and mechanic in Loosiana. Bubba, meet Kit Franklyn, our new suicide investigator.”

  Bubba looked at his hand, wiped it on his coveralls, and offered it up. As she bent to shake it, he jerked his head toward Broussard and said, “You too pretty a lady to be seen wit dis fella.” Turning to his friend, he said, “Whatsa mattah, Andy? One of da birds sick?”

  “Now that you mention it, the red one could use a new strap on the tail pipe. Anytime you can get to it will be okay. But that’s not why we’re here. We’d like to see the Escadrille that came in a week or so ago, and also the latest one.”

  “Ohhh dat last one was some squashed. How many die in dere?”

  “Two.”

  Bubba shook his head and made noises of sympathy. “Which one you wanna see first?”

  “The one that wasn’t wrecked.”

  Bubba led them through the main gate, past the front of a corrugated-metal barn with doorless openings at each end, and down a row of cars parked with their rear bumpers against the chain link that surrounded the place. The cars, the blacktop, and the sun conspired to push the temperature up near the hundred mark. When they reached the mud-encrusted Escadrille that had been pulled from the Mississippi, Broussard stepped up to it and ran his hand under the upper lip of the grill. There was a clunk and the hood popped up an inch. He felt around until he found the second release and raised the hood. To support himself as he looked into the engine, he put both hands on the hot fender but quickly pulled them back and shook them.

  “Here, use dis,” Bubba said, whipping an orange rag from the back pocket of his coveralls.

  Broussard spread the small rag on the fender, put both hands on it to keep his clothes off the mud, and leaned into the car’s engine. “Too dirty,” he said, straightening up. “Bubba, could you clean off the ID plate on the fire wall for me?”

  Bubba took the rag from the fender, worked it around in the engine’s depths, and carefully put it back on the fender, dirty side down.

  After a quick inspection of Bubba’s work, Broussard grunted with satisfaction and stood up.

  “What is it?” Kit asked.

  With a raised finger, Broussard solicited patience. “Now, where’s the other one?” he said.

  The wreck from the railroad crossing was behind the metal barn. “Bubba, can you get me into the engine on this one?” Broussard said.

  “Might take fifteen or twenty minutes. You got dat much time?”

  Broussard said they did, and Bubba set off for the rear entrance to the barn, reappearing a few minutes later wheeling an ancient welder’s torch and carrying a welder’s helmet. “You two might oughtta stand over dere,” he said, pointing to a narrow band of shade next to the barn.

  As soon as they were a safe distance away, Bubba fired up the torch and, in a white-hot shower of sparks, began cutting away the Escadrille’s hood, which had collapsed so tightly against the engine that the dim outline of the air cleaner could be seen among the sharp wrinkles that had been thrust up through the paint. The light from the torch was so intense Kit glanced in that direction only enough to check his progress.

  Finally, Bubba yanked off his helmet, pulled a large irregular piece of metal free, and threw it to the ground. He extinguished the torch and waved them over. His cheeks were the color of a clay pot and his hair lay in wet curls against his scalp.

  With the sun providing all the light he needed, Broussard knelt onto the crushed fender and peered into the hole Bubba had cut in the hood. He made the same sound as when he’d looked into the other engine, then stood up.

  “Now will you tell me what you’re looking for?” Kit asked.

  “There’s a rectangular silver tag on the fire wall down about eight inches. Take a look and read it to me.”

  She knelt as he had and found the tag. “NAM-NO-663-02…”

  “That’s enough.” Broussard said. “The rest is just a serial number. The letters are the important part.”

  When she stood up, a drop of sweat ran down her nose and hung on the end till she wiped it away with the back of her hand.

  “Let’s get back in the shade,” Broussard suggested.

  When they were out of the sun’s reach, he unbuttoned his shirt pocket, pulled out a lemon drop, and pushed it into his mouth. The heat and the waiting had worn Kit’s patience away, and she was on the verge of demanding he get on with his explanation when he said, “Bubba, you probably know this story better than I do, so you speak up if I go astray.

  “The NAM on the tag stands for ’North American Motors,’ the company that made the car. They went bankrupt practically before the ink was dry on their union contracts. Primarily because they set up assembly plants near all the major cities and bought as many of their supplies as possible from regional businesses, believin’ that by providin’ jobs for the locals, they’d build enough goodwill to give them a competitive edge in the marketplace. But the overhead of operatin’ all those plants proved to be prohibitive. They also found that even though gas prices had come down from what they were in the seventies, folks were still leery of cars that got poor mileage and Escadrilles were inefficient as all get out. The point in all this is that the ’NO’ on the tag I showed you means that particular car was assembled in the New Orleans plant, and so was the first one we looked at.”

  “And it’s possible that the one at the museum was not assembled in the New Orleans plant, and therefore would contain materials from different suppliers than New Orleans models would,” Kit said excitedly. “It’s all so right. That would also explain why the Boston ME hasn’t seen the same increase in murder-suicides we have. It’s only our Escadrilles that cause it.” Then she remembered what Shami Grossman had said, and her eyes grew even brighter. “The one in the car museum was previously owned by someone from Chicago!” She nearly laughed aloud. “It’s not a New Orleans model.”

  “Let’s do this,” Broussard said. “You go back to the car museum and check the tag on their car. If it’s not an NO edition, see if you can get hold of the one that was in the Hollins driveway. If you can, call Bubba, and he’ll tow it to my place.” He turned to his friend. “Bubba, you can tow a car without havin’ to get inside it, can’t you?”

  “If Ah use a dolly.”
<
br />   “Do that. We could be lookin’ down an empty burrow on this, but I don’t want you takin’ any chances. There may be a toxin of some sort in that car, so you stay out of it. Put it in the work bay and don’t hang around.” He turned to Kit. “I’ll be leavin’ for Dallas shortly and won’t be back till sometime Monday. If by the time I return you’ve got a car, we’ll set up some tests and see if we can get our theory on a factual basis.”

  It did not escape Kit’s notice that what had been her theory when they first arrived had now become our theory. It felt good.

  *

  An hour later, having just left the car museum, Kit was poorer by another $2.50. But Grossman’s car had been assembled in another state. After driving by the Hollins house and seeing that their Escadrille was no longer in the driveway, she set about tracking it down.

  *

  That night, while packing for his consultation in Dallas, Broussard got a phone call from Bubba.

  “Hey, Andy. You got time tonight to visit with Gramma O? I was tellin’ her about dose cars an’ she asked me to bring you by… tonight if possible.”

  Broussard hesitated. Bubba’s grandmother was a real kick and he always enjoyed their talks, but he didn’t particularly look forward to going out there at night.

  “She tol’ me to say dere’ll be a big piece of warm zucchini cake waitin’ for you.”

  That settled it. There was no way he could pass up Grandma O’s zucchini cake.

  Bubba lived alone, about twenty miles outside the city, in a log house he had built with his own hands on Goose Bayou. His grandmother lived two hundred wet yards away in a shanty perched on stilts. She was accessible only by boat, and it was this part of the trip that had made Broussard reluctant to pay a call at night.

  On the outskirts of the city, he stopped at a liquor store and bought Grandma O a fifth of her favorite whiskey. By the time he turned into the two dirt tracks that led to Bubba’s cabin, it was as dark as it was going to get.

  Aided by a floodlight at the top of a long cypress two-by-four nailed to the side of the cabin, Broussard eased his car between the bathtub Bubba grew his red worms in and the picnic table where he cleaned fish, coming to a stop a few feet from a pile of cypress planks. With hordes of insects around the floodlight casting eerie shadows on the ground, and frogs croaking so loud the sound seemed to come from inside his head, Broussard found the bayou at night an unsettling place.

  Bubba was waiting on the porch. In his outstretched hand was a can of Pearl River beer, its sides wet with condensation. Pearl River and zucchini cake. It was a combination that could get him drummed out of his gourmet society.

  Bubba watched approvingly as Broussard drained the can and tossed it into a wire wastebasket by the cabin door. “What’s in da bag?” Bubba asked. “Somethin’ for Gramma?”

  “She still partial to Cutty Sark?”

  “Won’t drink nothin’ else. C’mon, she’s anxious to see you.”

  Bubba flipped a switch on one of the posts supporting the porch roof and a string of light bulbs illuminated the path to the boat dock.

  “Been makin’ some improvements, I see,” Broussard said, following Bubba to the dock.

  “Wait, you can’t see it all yet.”

  Bubba’s pirogue was tied to the very end of the dock and when they reached it, Broussard saw what Bubba meant. The string of bulbs stretched from tree to tree way down the bayou, lighting it all the way to Grandma O’s.

  “She don’ wanna stay with me so Ah had to do somethin’ to make it easier to get to her at night in case she needs me in a hurry.”

  “I like it,” Broussard said, stepping carefully into the pirogue while Bubba held it steady. “Makes the swamp kind of festive.”

  Bubba stepped lightly into the bow and pushed off with his forked push pole. Glistening black water that came within two inches of sinking them slipped silently by. There was a loud splash a few yards ahead.

  Looking over his shoulder, Bubba said, “Ah been tryin’ to catch dat frog for two years. He got legs on him like a Tulane runnin’ back.”

  Water hyacinths now crowded both sides of the bayou, and Bubba grunted as he poled the pirogue through them. “Ah’m gonna have to get out here soon and do somethin’ about dis,” Bubba complained.

  “How’s Grandma O doin’ these days? She still runnin’ her traps?”

  “Oh, she sets ’em out, but most days she don’ put ’em where she’s likely to catch anything. That way she don’t have to skin ’em.”

  “Why does she want to see me?”

  “Dat’s somethin’ she’ll have to tell you. It’s kinda involved.”

  When they got to Grandma O’s dock, she was waiting for them, a huge woman with long black hair that hung down her back, and hips that made her look like a tree surrounded by a park bench. She was wearing enough black taffeta to clothe several lesser women. Broussard took her hand and was hauled onto the dock.

  “See you still got your grip,” he said.

  Her smile was enhanced by a gold star inlay on one front tooth. “Listen city boy, you skin as many nutria as Ah have, you boun’ to have strong hands. You gonna make me wrestle you for dat bag?”

  “No ma’am. I know when I’m overmatched.”

  She pulled the bottle out of the bag and looked at the label in the glare from one of Bubba’s light bulbs. A hoarse cackle rolled through the swamp and she patted the bottle. “Le’s go inside.”

  The dock jiggled ominously as the formidable woman tested its limits with her heavy step. Broussard let her get a few strides ahead so that his weight and hers would not stress the same timbers. In her wake, she left the sweet smell of gardenias, her favorite scent.

  The shanty she lived in had only one room, divided functionally into a kitchen and a sitting room. On the kitchen side, every horizontal surface was covered in the same white linoleum, embossed to suggest brickwork. It covered the floor, the countertops, and the kitchen table. On the sitting room side, there was a long sofa, a rocking chair, and two armchairs, all covered in a white chameleon print on a green ground.

  “You boys sit here at da table,” Grandma O said.

  From an old stove on legs, she brought out two foil packages, put their contents on plates, and set a huge piece of heaven in front of each man.

  “Aren’t you havin’ any?” Broussard asked.

  “You’re gonna eat, Ah’m gonna talk,” she replied, pouring each of them a cup of coffee in cups honeycombed with hairline cracks.

  If he had been allowed only that first forkful, the trip would have been worth it, Broussard thought as the moist cake melted in his mouth.

  “Bubba tells me you been seein’ an increase in murder-suicides in da city.”

  Caught with a mouthful, Broussard nodded and reached for his coffee. “Don’t know what it means yet, but somethin’ unusual seems to be happenin’.”

  “Ah’m gonna tell you a story that mah gramma tol’ me, an’ her gramma tol’ her ’bout somethin’ that happen a long time ago… when da city was jus’ gettin’ started with maybe two, three thousand folks in it. It’s da reason why no Oustellette has ever lived in da city an’ why Ah keep tryin’ to get dis bonehead here,” she nodded at Bubba, “to give up his job dere.

  “Long time back, a fella named Albair Fauquel was hanged right out where everybody could see it. It all start one day when Fauquel drink too much and drive his carriage fast an’ wild, down da main street. At a corner, he slide out of control and hit a man on a horse. Da horse go down with a broken leg, but da man all right. Da horse he have to be shot. An’ it wasn’t no ordinary horse, neither. Best racehorse for two, three hunnert miles around. A judge say Fauquel have to pay for da horse. But he won’t do it. So da judge take a piece of Fauquel’s land an’ sell it, givin’ some of da money to da man for his horse an’ give da rest to Fauquel.

  “Fauquel get mad an’ say he gonna get even with da judge. One night somebody see Fauquel an’ his slave creepin’ aroun’ da judge’
s house when ain’t nobody home. ’Bout nine o’clock da judge come home, an’ later dat same night, kill his wife an’ little girl, den himself. Da police, or whatever dey was called in dose days foun’ a slippery smooth black stone on da front porch of da judge’s house. An’ da stone had a cross inside a circle scratched on it. Well, somebody reconized that pattern as a voodoo symbol dat helps a spell take hold.”

  “Sort of a good luck charm in reverse,” Broussard suggested.

  Grandma O shook a finger across the table. “Tha’s a good description of it. Anyway, da person who saw Fauquel hangin’ around da judge’s house happen to mention it. Big crowd goes over to Fauquel’s place and runs all over it. In a little house where one of Fauquel’s slaves lives, dey foun’ a bag of smooth stones jus’ like da one foun’ on da judge’s porch.

  Nex’ thing you know, Fauquel and da slave are bein’ asked if dey have any las’ words. Da slave, he don’ say nothin’, but Fauquel, he say plenty. And if anybody dere didn’ think he was guilty, Fauquel set ’em straight when he say…”

  Grandma O closed her eyes and she seemed to go into an almost trancelike state. Her voice changed to that of a man. Oddly, she lost her Cajun accent.

  “When my land was taken, it was wrong. And today you wrong me again. But I tell you this, one day I will return and right this wrong as I did the other. And the streets of this city will run with blood as friend slays friend, fathers slay their children, and rampant suicide sends the souls of men by the hundreds to everlasting hell… Beware the songs you loved in youth.”

  A shiver ran through Bubba’s body and he sloshed some coffee onto the table. Self-consciously he looked into his cup. “Dis part always gets to me,” he explained.

  Even before she finished, Broussard had dismissed Grandma O’s tale as a quaint bit of Cajun folklore.

  “Dat’s all da story dere is,” she said.

  “And you think our increase in murder-suicides is related to your story?” Broussard asked politely, his eyes glinting with amusement.

  “Ah’m not sayin’ it is, an’ Ah’m not sayin’ it ain’t. Dat’s for you to decide. But Ah didn’ want you goin’ around ignorant of da possibility. An’ because you been such a good friend to Bubba an’ me, Ah’m gonna give you somethin’ to protec’ you jus’ in case. Stay right here.”