The Neon Palm of Madame Melancon

by Will Clarke

  When I get to Mama’s house, I find Francesca from the praline shop standing in the foyer of the house. She is hiding behind Gucci sunglasses, but I can tell it is her. Her arms are folded, and she is carrying a big, fancy leather purse the color of a pat of butter.

  “Oh, it’s her baby boy!” Francesca smiles and sticks her pink tongue into the gap between her teeth. “Where you at?”

  “I’m good. How can I help you?”

  “Just coming in for a check-up with my girl, La La. Mind the purse.” She pushes me away a little. “Don’t scuff the leather. It’s expensive.”

  “Oh, wow. That is nice leather.”

  “Nice?” She smirks. “This shit is more than nice. This a $50,000 Birkin bag.”

  “Wow. The praline business must be booming.”

  “Oh, hell no. Fuck those pralines and all those goddamn tourist. Your mama gave me a tip on a horse over at the Fair Grounds. And now my ship has finally come in.”

  “Was it Walter White?” I ask.

  “Oh, you psychic too!” She pushes her palm in my face. “Tell me about my bae? I’ll pay you.”

  “I don’t read palms,” I say.

  Sobs echo from the parlor. La La’s client is having a breakdown. You can hear my sister saying over and over, “You are going to be alright, I promise.”

  “Damn,” Francesca says. “That sounds horrible.”

  “We probably shouldn’t be eavesdropping.”

  “Sure enough.” She steps away from the curtain with me and then points to the logo on my golf shirt. “Mandala.”

  I cover the logo with my hand.

  “Nuthin’ be ashamed of, sugar. We all got a boss. My daddy used to work for Shell back in the day.”

  “Look, give me just a couple of seconds, and I will get La La for you.” I slide past Francesca and her $50,000 purse, through the curtain and into the parlor.

  There, sitting next to Mama’s crystal ball and the fanned-out tarot cards, is Jean Babineaux. She is a snotty mess. She’s crying so hard, she doesn’t notice me. And standing next to her is La La, who is now Annie Lennox or Pink. Or whatever rock star dresses in a men’s black suit with a pink crew-cut. La La pats Jean Babineaux on the shoulder, trying to get this stranger to stop crying while not getting any of the unfortunate tears on her hands.

  “It’s going to be okay,” La La keeps saying. “Just tell me how I can help you.”

  I move La La to the side and kneel down at Jean’s feet.

  “Jean.” I touch her arm, and she looks up at me. “What happened?”

  “I wasn’t able to stop him.”

  “Stop what, Jean?”

  “He did it,” she says. “In the bathtub.”

  “Did what in the bathtub?” I regret those words almost as soon as I say them.

  Jean dissolves.

  I pull her to me. My Mandala Worldwide golf shirt is soaked through in a matter of seconds.

  * * *

  I have to call Gary. He’s the only person who will even come close to understanding how guilty I feel right now. I have to let him know what we did to the Babineauxes. That we have lost our way. That we are not good people. That we might very well be bad people.

  I lock myself in my old room upstairs, surrounded with Jean’s scattered past-due bills. I hold the letter that foretold all this in my hand.

  So I dial Gary. The phone rings three times, just like the rooster that crowed before Peter betrayed his Savior.

  He finally picks up. “What?”

  “Mark Babineaux killed himself,” I say.

  There’s a long pause. So long that I almost think Gary hung up.

  “You still there?”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  Another long pause.

  “These are people’s lives, Gary.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “So what do we do?”

  “That guy had problems before he ever met us,” Gary says. “Big problems.”

  “That doesn’t make what we did to him any more right.”

  “I can’t control what that guy decided to do, Duke. You can’t either.”

  “Gary. We did this to them.”

  “It was business. Nobody made that guy kill himself. Nobody made him be a shrimper either. He made choices.”

  “I realize that, but the choices we made affected him.”

  “Look, Duke, this is terrible. I’m not trying to say that it’s not. But you and I are not responsible for this guy killing himself.”

  “So I’m just supposed to act like this didn’t happen?”

  “Yep. That’s exactly what you’re going to do.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Look, let’s go to Superior after work to discuss this. We need to talk about this in person.”

  “Margaritas aren’t going to fix this, Gary.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. Geez.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I want to talk to you off-site about this.”

  * * *

  Up until today, I have been pretty confident that I was a good person.

  Even with all the shit Mandala has been pulling since the Spill, I was certain what we were doing was for the greater good mostly. And while this spill is a tragedy, it’s also an isolated accident. We drill wells all over the world without leaks or explosions. It’s like saying cars should be outlawed because of wrecks. The benefits so far have outweighed the downsides, as devastating as they can be at times. However, seeing Jean tonight, after holding her like that, I am not sure I can keep telling myself this.

  I have always believed that Mandala was, at its heart, a good company—that we had the noble and dangerous job of supplying the world with the energy it needed to run economies and bring wealth to nations. Even with all the downsides to petroleum, Mandala’s ability to literally fuel growth outweighed everything else.

  Hell, I know climate change is real. Everyone at Mandala does. It’s why I applied at Mandala Worldwide instead of BP or Exxon. Like most of my team, I earnestly believed that “MW” dreamcatcher logo stood for “More Ways” as much as it did Mandala Worldwide. I believed that finding oil in hard-to-find places was how Mandala was doing this. It was how Mandala was keeping everyone’s cars full of gas, so the world could go to work, pick up our kids from school, take road trips to the Grand Canyon until our engineers figured out solar, wind, bio, and geothermal. Something has to keep the lights on, to pay for all that innovation and fuel all those people making solo runs to the grocery store in their SUVs.

  But now, after watching what we just did to Jean and Mark Babineaux, I am not sure of who I am or what Mandala really is. I am not sure we are good people at all.

  * * *

  Gary refuses to talk about the Babineauxes at the office. He spends most of the day with his door closed, avoiding me. He’s spooked about this. So after work today, I drive into Uptown and grab a table on the patio at Superior. I am on my third Dos Equis and working on my second basket of chips and salsa when Gary finally walks into the bar. He’s talking into his Bluetooth headset, nodding and talking, nodding and talking. He holds up two fingers to our waitress and mouths, “Frozen. Extra salt.”

  “Sorry. I’m late.” Gary sits down at the table and pulls his earpiece out and plops it into the pocket of his dress shirt. “Been waiting long?”

  “About thirty minutes.”

  The waitress comes to the table, double-fisting Gary’s two frozen margaritas.

  “You guys gonna want any food?” she asks.

  “How about a Superior Salad? Trying to watch my figure.” Gary winks.

  “Beef or Chicken?”

  “Bistec,” he says with a Spanish accent and a smoldering look.

  She giggles. “Okay, I’ll have it right out. Do you want another beer, honey?”

  “Sure.” I give her my empty.

  The waitress picks up our menus and leaves us with a fresh basket of chips.


  “So, let’s talk about you,” Gary says. “What’s going on with Duke?”

  “What the fuck do you mean what’s going on with me? Mark Babineaux just killed himself because of us.”

  “Come on. It’s me.” He points to himself. “You don’t think I don’t feel like shit. I know this Babineaux thing has shaken you up, but there’s something else going on with you. Has been for a while.”

  Perhaps it’s the week I’ve had, maybe it’s the three-beer buzz, but I just say it:

  “My mom. She’s missing.”

  “Holy shit. Are you kidding me? No wonder you’ve been on the rag. When did this happen?”

  “About a month ago.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  “And the police haven’t found her?”

  “If they had she wouldn’t be missing.”

  “What happened?” He starts shoving chips and salsa into his face.

  “She ran out of her kitchen, chasing a cat and nobody has seen her since.”

  The waitress delivers our drinks: beer for me and two fishbowl margaritas for Gary.

  “Shit, I am so sorry, man.” Gary takes a long, deep draw from his straw and then rims the salt of his frozen margarita with his big, fat cow tongue. “Same thing happened to my dad. Alzheimer’s.”

  I just look at him and blink. We were talking about me and my problems, and now, as usual, we are talking about Gary and his problems.

  “About two years ago. He was sitting on his porch swing when my mom went out back to put the hedge clippers away. When she returned, he was gone. He’d taken his truck keys and driven off. Police found him all crashed up, up near Brenham, Texas—you know, where they make the ice cream. Had to put him in memory care after that. It was terrible. For my mom and him.”

  “So sorry to hear that. Is he okay?”

  “Doesn’t recognize me. Fit as a fiddle, but nobody’s home. It’s killing my mom. She promised she’d never put him in a nursing home, but we didn’t have a choice. Second time he’d run away like that.”

  “Not to change the subject,” I take a swig of my beer, “but I want to talk to you about this whole Mark Babineaux thing. We need to do something for his wife. Help her.”

  “Do they still have a Silver Alert going for your mom?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Honestly, the police haven’t been much help. But we need to stay on topic. What about Jean Babineaux? We have to do something for her.”

  “I wish you would have told me sooner.” Gary shakes his head.

  “I’m a private person, Gary.”

  “Yeah, well, at Mandala we’re family. We have to look after each other.” He exhales and looks up at the ceiling so that the tears won’t roll out of his eyes. “So hard watching a parent go through something like that.”

  “Thanks, man, but what about Jean Babineaux?”

  “You haven’t paid for that?” Gary points to my beer. “I’m getting this.”

  “Gary. Answer my question. What about Jean Babineaux?”

  “What can we do?” He shrugs. “Look, I wish there was something Mandala could do for her, but we can’t. We can’t just back up the Brinks truck to her house because her husband killed himself.”

  “I’m just asking you to call Houston. See what you can do.”

  “Look,” he says, “I’ll see what I can do, but I am not promising anything.”

  “Okay.”

  “Not to sound like a dick, but just be glad we didn’t shoot that commercial. Can you imagine the fallout if he had offed himself after being in one of our commercials? Talk about a shit show.”

  “How can you even say that? That guy is dead. We did this.”

  “I’m glad you feel comfortable being honest with how you feel with me, Duke, because it’s going to make this conversation easier on both of us. “

  “What conversation?”

  “You know I empowered you to manage our social media and it’s pretty much a disaster. The things people are saying about us on Facebook. The videos on YouTube. You seem to have done nothing to stop all this.”

  “Gary, I’m an attorney, not a magician. I don’t know how to stop people from using their First Amendment rights on social media about a disaster that everyone is outraged by.”

  “I can see, with your mom missing and everything, why you stopped trying.” He chomps on a tortilla chip and shakes his head. “But remember when I asked you to get that cake down off Reddit? Well, it’s still there with like over fifteen hundred comments in the thread, and now Doug Suttles is pissed. I hesitate to bring it up because of how crushed you are about the Babineaux deal not going through. But even if he hadn’t, you know, done that, you were supposed to sign his replacement immediately, and now we aren’t going to make the insertion date for The New York Times. We are just going to eat that full-page ad. That’s over a hundred grand Mandala is just going to eat. I mean I know it’s traumatizing, what happened. I’m traumatized, believe me. But everything about our job is traumatizing right now. We work in triage. This is war, Duke.”

  “This is war,” I parrot him and nod.

  “I just wish you would have told me that your mom was missing. Then I wouldn’t have maybe put so much on you,” he says. “You dropping the ball serves no one.”

  There’s an awkward silence as I watch Gary dip his napkin into his glass of water and try to wipe the spilled salsa off the front of his shirt.

  “Good news is I haven’t given up on you,” he says. “I still believe in you. So I’ve got a big job for you. I mean big.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “Constanze Bellingham, wants you to write all of Christopher Shelley’s speeches from here on out. She wants you to personally coach him before every media interview.”

  “Why me? The man flagrantly ignores everything I tell him to do.”

  “He’s got a man crush on you I guess.”

  “I’m not a speechwriter.”

  “Duke, this is some seriously high profile shit. Our department has had so many screw-ups with the media and now this suicide, my job is on the line. I need you to knock this out of the ballpark for me. For our department.”

  “Okay. Sure. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  “Okay, Sure?” Gary shakes his head. “Hell, do you know how many people on our team would kill for this?”

  “I’m honored Constanze thinks so highly of me.” I take a swig of my beer. “It’s just this Babineaux thing is still, I don’t know… I’ll be okay. Just need to process through it.”

  “Well, get your shit together. You got to stop calling in sick. Okay? I mean I know you’re worried about your mom and all, but we’ve all got problems outside of work. Like what if I called in sick every time my mom called me about my dad?”

  I just stare at him.

  “Look, you know what I mean.” Gary licks the rest of the salt from his other margarita. “I could be missing all sorts of work for my dad’s Alzheimer’s, but I can’t afford to do that and you can’t either. I am not trying to be a jerk here.”

  “You just called in sick for your cousin’s bachelor party,” I say.

  “That was my first day off in over three months,” he says. “It’s not the same as you calling in sick every other day.”

  “My mother is missing.”

  “I’m your friend, Duke. But I am also your boss. You’ve got to focus.”

  “I get it. Don’t worry about it. I’ll make sure everything Christopher Shelley says is golden from here on out, and I won’t miss any more work. Point taken.” I try to smile.

  30

  Lit Up

  May 28, 2010

  After Gary’s “coachable moment” with me over way too many margaritas and beers, I don’t drive home to Emily and the boys in Covington. I take a taxi back to The House of the Neon Palm to check on Daddy, to see if he’s heard something from Mary Glapion and her TED backpack. But as I drive up to the house, I am somewhat shocked to
see that Mama’s neon sign has been turned off. I cannot remember a time when that big red hand has ever not buzzed and glowed. Instead, there is a golden light emanating from the front windows of the house. I pay and get out of the cab and find Stevo smoking a wooden sailor’s pipe next to the VW van that he keeps parked on the street.

  He’s gazing up at the stars, pretty much ignoring me. The air around him smells like wet leather, baked apples, and amaretto.

  “Why’s the sign off?” I ask.

  “See that?” Stevo points to a star next to the moon. “That’s Venus.”

  “I know that, Stevo.”

  “You ever wake up before the sun comes up just to look at it? It’s so beautiful. Its light so pure.”

  “Are you high?”

  “Our bodies were designed to look up to heaven.” He tilts his head way back and rolls his shoulders. “Not always looking down at that phone of yours.”

  “Who turned off Mama’s sign?” I say.

  “I did. Didn’t want any customers knocking on the door tonight.” Stevo puts his palm on the barrel of his pipe and sucks in to extinguish the tobacco.

  “Why?”

  “You’ll see.” He gestures for me to follow him through the yard and to the porch. The crickets are chirping to the pulse of the stars. Stevo opens the front door for me. We step inside a house flickering with a galaxy of St. Anthony candles and a jungle of Easter lilies.

  “Where’s Daddy?” I look around.

  “Already went to bed.” La La walks into the foyer, holding an Easter lily with both hands.