The Neon Palm of Madame Melancon

by Will Clarke

  “No, can’t say that I have.”

  “A Tralfamadorian.” He points to the sky. “An alien. You want to know why you’ve never met one?”

  “Because they’re not real,” I say.

  “Actually, it’s because of The Great Filter Theory.” He chuckles. “That’s why you’ve never met an alien or a time traveler for that matter. Humans always filter themselves out before they can reach that future. Homo sapiens always destroy themselves before they achieve that level of technology. At least that was until this mystical child from the Ukraine showed up.” He points to the umbrella girl on the wall.

  “Your mother changed everything.”

  “I have a lot of fliers to post,” I say.

  “No, wait.” Vonnegut grabs my shoulder. His fingernails are surprisingly well-manicured—shiny, pink.

  I shake him off and step away.

  “I need to ask you something,” he says.

  I just stare at him, not sure how my face should look, trying to hold a smile, so he will let me post my fliers.

  “Could I trouble you for a cigarette?” Vonnegut bites his bottom lip. “I could use some combustible energy right about now.”

  “Don’t smoke.”

  “What about a couple of bucks so I can buy a pack?”

  “Didn’t Kurt Vonnegut die from smoking?” I ask.

  “That would have been a much classier way to go. What I did was fall down my stairs. Terrible mess. But let’s not talk about the past,” Vonnegut says.

  “I’m not buying you cigarettes.”

  “You better hope some vandal doesn’t come by and tear down your posters,” Vonnegut says. “I’d be willing to watch them for you. Even ask people if they’ve seen your mom.”

  “How much?” I say.

  “Pack of cigarettes, a beer, a po’boy would buy you a couple of days.”

  “It was just two bucks a few seconds ago.”

  “Inflation sucks,” he says. “But that’s capitalism.”

  “Here.” I pull out two tens from my wallet and hand them to him. “You better not tear down my posters.”

  “Oh, thank you.” He takes the crumpled bills and crams them into his pants pocket. “My batteries are running low, and I desperately need to refuel.”

  “No worries,” I say.

  “If this isn’t wonderful, I don’t know what is!” He nods at me, and then crosses the street to the Rampart Food Store, almost skipping.

  May 8, 2010

  Fifty days after the Explosion

  Sergeant Mark Babineaux’s a muscly guy who uses a little too much hair gel. He’s the proud owner of a Kung-Fu tiger tattoo roaring up his left calf and a Purple Heart from being injured by an IED while on patrol in Afghanistan.

  Mark and his wife, Jean, are why I came in to work today. Despite the fact my own wife blew a gasket when I told her I was coming in to close this deal. With a spill like this, timing is everything, and I have to get these two locked into a contract so our ad agency can start shooting the commercials in which the Babineauxes are slated to star.

  So Mark and Jean Babineaux sit here in their flip-flops and jean shorts, across from me while I try to explain to them how commercials work.

  “It’s about two days of shooting.” I point to that exact line on the document. “We’ll then run the commercials, and the good news is every time we do that, we’ll pay you what’s called a talent residual.”

  The Babineauxes own a shrimping boat named the “Coon Ass[1] III,” which is why our ad agency handpicked them to work with our restoration effort. It’s a great boat with a funny name. It will show the humor and resilience of the people down here, just how plucky these poor Cajuns are. This kind of narrative is essential for Mandala to get into the “lame-stream media” to counter all the news stories about how Mandala has wrecked the economy down here. Once our engineers kill this well, it will be important to change the conversation: make it about how Mandala is working with the community, cleaning up the coast, saving shrimpers like the Babineauxes.

  “That’s in addition to the ten grand talent fee?” Jean Babineaux asks.

  “That’s correct,” I say.

  “How much in addition to?” Sgt. Mark Babineaux picks up the 150-page contract and flips through it.

  “Really depends on how often we run the commercials,” I say. “We pay union scale.”

  “What does that mean?” Jean looks me in the eyes for just a beat too long.

  “It means you could make another twenty grand this month, easy, if we run it at the flight we have scheduled.”

  Jean’s skeptical, and it’s bleeding over to Mark.

  In all actuality, this is a really good deal for the Babineauxes. They will make more money in two days of shooting than they will in a month of shrimping.

  “What if we don’t like what the commercials say?” Jean asks.

  “I don’t know why you wouldn’t. All we are going to do is show how Mandala Worldwide is helping you rebuild your business.”

  “How are you going to do that when all the shrimp are dead?” Mark asks.

  “They aren’t all dead,” I say. “At least that’s what our marine biologists are telling me.”

  “You been out on the water lately?” Mark raises an eyebrow. “Cause I have. They all dead and the ones that aren’t are full of poison.”

  “They’ll come back, and Mandala Restoration will help you until then.”

  “How much?” Mark asks.

  “That’s really between you and our restoration group,” I say. “But if you’re in our commercial, I can promise that you and Jean will move to the front of the line with them.”

  “Can we see the script first?” Jean asks.

  “There’s no script,” I lie. “It’s docu-style.”

  “Docu-style?” she says.

  “We ask you questions and use your answers in the film,” I explain.

  Why is she killing this? They need to do this. They have to do this. They are perfect casting. Mark is the strong silent type, and Jean is pretty in that hardscrabble, hair-in-a-chip-clip Cajun sort of way. They both have strong, earnest faces of people who have weathered the storm.

  “So ten grand and all we have to do is stand around on our boat, answer some questions, and let you take pictures of us?” Mark takes the contract from me.

  “Pretty much,” I say.

  Jean takes the contract from Mark. “It’s a lot of pages.”

  “It’s standard,” I say.

  “We’re going to need to let our lawyer look at this before we sign anything.” Mark finally makes eye contact with me.

  “By all means,” I say. “I just need everything signed and notarized by early next Monday.”

  “We can’t do next Monday,” Jean says. “Mark’s got group.”

  “I can skip group,” Mark shrugs her off and then looks directly at me again. “I want to be paid in cash.”

  Jean makes another bad face like she is biting her tongue.

  “Sure. If that’s what you want,” I say.

  “Yeah, that’s what I want.”

  “Just let me know when you can bring the contract back signed, and I’ll have the cash ready.”

  “Make it all twenties,” he says.

  “Twenties it is.”

  “In a suitcase. One of those silver ones you see in movies.”

  “We can do that.” I shake Mark’s hand again. His grip is light. I notice the burn scar that covers his hand and crawls up his arm.

  Mark nods at me without smiling, and then guides his wife by the elbow out of my office.

  * * *

  Coonass is an ethnic slur regarding Americans of Cajun decent. Many Cajuns have proudly reappropriated this word to describe themselves and their culture. The word can be found all over Acadiana on bumper stickers, coffee mugs, trucker hats, bass boats, and t-shirts. No one really knows where the term was first used or where it comes from. Some people will tell you that it refers to a Cajun’s habit of e
ating raccoons and other game, while others claim the term goes back to when the Cajuns wore coonskin caps while fighting in the Battle of New Orleans. ↵

  Mother's Day

  Where are you?

  I wake up Emily with a vase of peonies, along with her definition of a perfect cup of coffee—PJ’s Southern Pecan with two splashes of coconut creamer and half a packet of stevia. Stewart and Jo-Jo bring her pancakes smeared with Nutella and strawberries, dropping the fork and napkin on the floor a couple of times before they get it to her.

  Emily feeds her pancakes to the boys while they smear chocolate and strawberries all over our white sheets. It’s a morning full of hugs and Eskimo kisses, duvet covers, and laughter. I take a picture of this fleeting, sunlit moment, a moment so sweet I grieve its loss before it’s even over. It’s an image that I will need to refer to in the coming weeks, especially the longer this thing with my mother drags on, and the more this spill contaminates everything in my life.

  “Oh, wow!” Emily opens the card that Jo-Jo made for her at school. A couple of uncooked pieces of macaroni fall into her lap. “What is it, baby?”

  “It’s a big hand like the one on Mamaw’s house.” Jo-Jo holds his chubby palm up to Emily’s face.

  The card is a folded piece of pink construction paper, an outline of Jo-Jo’s hand in red crayon, glued pasta all around it.

  “The wed hand will po-tect you,” he says.

  The teapot is whistling in the kitchen for the second French press that I forgot.

  “How will it protect me, sweetheart?” Emily looks at me.

  “It will smush the monsta-hand that wants to disappea-us!” Jo-Jo claps his hands together.

  “No such things as monsters,” Stewart says. “You’re just a baby.”

  Emily smiles at me as if to telepathically say, that’s a little weird. This son of yours is a little weird.

  I shrug.

  “Come on, boys.” Emily picks up Jo-Jo and gets out of bed. “Let’s hop into the shower. Pappy’s making lunch at his house, and Mommy needs to get ready.”

  “I’m not a baby.” Jo-Jo hits his brother.

  “Mom!” Stewart yells. “Jo-Jo’s hitting me again.”

  * * *

  After Emily and I get the boys bathed and dressed, we load them up in their car seats and drive across the Pontchartrain to my parents’ house for Sunday jambalaya. By the time we hit Magazine Street, my phone is blowing up.

  It’s work.

  I park the car under the flickering neon sign and make a mad dash upstairs, past my crazy family, to jump on a conference call.

  I dial in and put my phone on mute.

  Christopher Shelley’s Chief of Staff, Constanze Bellingham, downloads the PR team in her lilting British accent. “At zero-six-hundred, we lowered the containment dome over the Sub-Ocean Brightside. Unfortunately, this attempt to kill the well was not successful. At zero-seven-thirty-two, engineers reported that the temperatures were too cold at those depths for this particular dome to be successful. In short, the methane from the well keeps freezing inside the dome, preventing the kill. Mr. Shelley is regrouping with our engineers as we speak, and I will update you as soon as we have more information. But at this time, we are aborting this attempt.”

  The conference call explodes with questions that Constanze can’t answer, so I hang up. There’s nothing more to learn or to say. The well is too far at the bottom of the ocean to kill. The press is going to eat us alive today.

  And therefore, Gary will be leaving me a pissy voicemail to come and solve this, even though I worked sixty-eight hours straight, even though I lied and told him that I am down with the flu, even though it’s Mother’s Day, even though I respond to every email with deliberate and precise counsel, even though I made Christopher Shelley look like a rock star just two nights ago on Wolf Blitzer.

  And now the deluge of texts:

  *The AP and Reuters both need another statement.*

  *Call me.*

  *Why aren’t you answering your phone?*

  *Need another press release to CBS. The last one we sent had incomplete details about the dome failure.*

  *NPR wants to interview Wilkers. Email him the answers you prepared for Christopher.*

  *Constanze claims she never got your last email. Resend ASAP.*

  Of course, I could tell Gary the truth, that my psychic mother is missing, that the police refuse to look for her, that we think she was likely kidnapped by a rival fortune-teller or maybe a crazy client, that she is probably rotting under an overpass somewhere south of I-10, but honestly, he would be all, “Oh, wow. So sorry to hear that. I hope they find her. That’s terrible. Jeez… Give my regards to your family… Yeah, I hate to even ask this in light of all you’re going through, but did you get a chance to look at that press release I sent you?”

  I fire off a volley of emails, and while I am waiting for responses, I go back downstairs to see how Emily is dealing with my family. I walk past all the framed photos that hang along the walls. I stop and stare at the one with all of us at Olan Mills in the ’80s hanging in the middle of the stairway. I passed it a million times growing up and never gave it much thought. It’s all eight of us kids, towering over Daddy, who is holding Mama from behind. She was so young—her curly hair pulled tight into long, black braids, her big hazel eyes are incandescent just like her diabolical grandmother’s were in old photos.

  Where are you?

  The smell of frying bacon pulls me away from my sad thoughts, down the stairs, and outside to the back porch where Daddy and Uncle Father are getting lunch ready. The two of them have the ten-gallon, gas-powered Cajun Cooker burning. Uncle Father is standing behind a card table piled high with the holy trinity: onions, celery, and bell peppers. Daddy’s got his fake leg on. He only uses it when he cooks: “Frees up my hands. Ya heard me?”

  “Where you at, T’boy?” Uncle Father grabs me around the neck and hugs me. “Where you at?”

  “What it is, Uncle Father. What it is.” I pat him hard on the back.

  “Yeah, boy. We gonna find her,” Uncle Father says. “The police got the Silver Alert going.”

  “We heard anything from the police?”

  “Notta word.” Daddy looks up from his cauldron of frying bacon and shakes his head. “Dinner will be ready ’round eleven.” Uncle Father takes a swig from his Dixie Beer and holds it up to me. “Want one?”

  “Sure.”

  Uncle Father reaches down in his green Igloo and pulls out a beer. He pops the cap off, and the brown bottle swells with suds.

  “Ah, now dat one’s gonna be a little moist.” My uncle laughs as he hands me the gushing beer. This beer geyser won’t stop. It just keeps going like the CNN footage of the Sub-Ocean Brightside bleeding 65,000 barrels a day, like the gushing blood from my mother’s slit neck.

  “Why you look so sad, son?” Daddy asks.

  “I’m not,” I smile.

  “Ah T’boy, you gonna find her. You my seventh,” Daddy says.

  Uncle Father harrumphs and takes a long swig off his beer.

  My daddy, Vinny Melançon, was my family’s original seventh son, and his superstitions are perhaps easier to explain than my mother’s. That’s because he’s not a Russian. He’s Cajun — which comes with its own mixed bag of oddities and customs, but it’s nowhere close to Mama’s walls full of old books and bizarre family legends.

  Daddy was born here in New Orleans to a sprawling Catholic family, the seventh son of his perpetually arguing yet somehow still sexually active parents. He grew up in this fancy white house on the corner of Magazine and Napoleon in the Faubourg Bouligny. His immediate family wasn’t rich, but my mémère, my dad’s mother, had inherited the place from a spinster aunt. So here was my dad’s big, poor family living in this big, rich house that over time became a big, fat mess like much of the city.

  My dad’s childhood was pretty much a Crescent City cliché—a muddy swirl of life and decay, fried foods and hard liquors, hurricanes and hu
midity. My dad’s family spoke French at home and English on the streets. They all played some sort of musical instrument, and by play, I mean mastered. My dad was given his uncle’s clarinet at the tender age of six, and to this day, he can toot that thing like no one I have ever met. The Melançons ate red beans and rice on Mondays because everyone knows that Monday is washday. They ate fish on Fridays because the Pope said so. And for Lent, they gave up liquor, but not wine, because wine is not liquor. My dad, like every one of his brothers and sisters, grew up knowing exactly how dark to cook a roux to make a good gumbo—about as long as it takes to kill two cold beers, by the way. Like I said, they were your typical New Orleans family who may seem exotic to people not from here, but pretty normal, maybe even a little boring, to the rest of the city.

  However, Mama will tell you that Vinny Melançon was special, and not because he was my mémère’s favorite son or because he could make people forget their worries with just a clarinet. She will tell you that Vinny Melançon was chosen by the Three Bee Maidens of Fate to be her husband and my father. She will tell you that Vinny Melançon was destined to sire a New Age savior: me.

  “Your daddy’s home address at Magazine and Napoleon divined his destiny.” My mother loved to tell this same story over and over as we grew up. “Daddy went to war like Napoleon, and it was a magazine launcher that almost killed him. See how that works?”

  “It was an M79,” Daddy would then specify. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  In short, the magazine launcher backfired and ignited a gasoline tank, sending Daddy home to New Orleans with one Purple Heart, one glass eye, a fake left leg, and a burn scar that covered more than half his torso and resembled the state of Florida.

  When my father shipped out in 1967, he was just an unlucky University of New Orleans student who failed out of college at a time when Uncle Sam drew his draft card. I can attest that my father’s a good, brave man, but he will also tell you straight up that he never had any dreams of fighting for his country.