Julian had no answers. Playing with Grady Casey had been encouraging, and every day he’d been practicing long tones for hours, but he was still a ways from being able to pick up and resume his career. There was too much going on here, and now—with the fate of Silver Creek still up in the air and no news of Simon—New York and Matthew Parmenter both jockeyed for space in the smallest corner of his mind.
Real life stared him dead in the face. Besides his mortgage, there were other bills to pay. His money was running low, and even though there was a paycheck coming from the Tokyo gig (a very small one, thanks to his early bail-out), he didn’t know how long he could live on the little savings he’d stashed away. Not long, probably. He’d have to decide something soon, figure out exactly where his life was heading, and what to do after he got there.
The First Bank building, on the southwest corner of the square in Local, sat like an old granite fortress next to the old courthouse, surrounded by giant magnolias and pines. The see-through elevator creaked as it levitated at a frightfully sluggish pace to the offices of N&L Associates on the second floor. In the windowless reception room, a dreary little fluorescent-lit space, a girl of about eighteen with iPod buds plugged in her ears sat at the one desk next to a large gray credenza. A huge potted plant leaned, thirsty and wilting, in an unlit corner.
The receptionist pointed the way to a conference room across a narrow hall. Inside, Kevin sat at a long, walnut table, dressed for the first time since Julian had met him in a long-sleeved white shirt and a red striped tie, his knuckles nervously tapping against a manila folder. The man sitting opposite him, around seventy years of age and wearing a cream-colored suit, got up to shake Julian’s hand.
“Pleased to meet you,” the man said. “Nathan Larouchette.”
“Uh…pleased to meet you. Julian Fortier.” Julian’s voice halted in surprise. Kevin had told him only Nathan’s lawyer was coming.
Grinning as if he were a dealer about to show him a used car, Nathan said, “I was about to send my attorney over here to meet with y’all, but I thought, what the hell? I’ll just drive over myself. Haven’t seen my grandson here in a while, and I’m sure we can settle this thing civilly so everybody benefits.”
The man seemed unduly jovial, considering the circumstances. Julian sat and looked over at Kevin, his wet, blond hair combed straight back off his face, his complexion pale, clouds of irritation shadowing his eyes. Clearly, he too had been surprised by Nathan’s appearance.
Nathan Larouchette was not the ogre Julian had pictured; he was slight of build, like Kevin, but where Kevin’s body was arrow straight, Nathan’s seemed locked in a 170 degree angle, with a slight bend starting at his back. His nervous smile, almost a grimace, spread thinly beneath the sad eyes of a basset hound. His skin was so lacking in color that his whiteness seemed to glow from within. His hair, receding inches back from his forehead, was feathery and white, and at intervals, Nathan would reach up with a hand and sweep the wispy comb-over back into place.
“I’m glad you could make it here, son,” he said, giving Julian a nod, drumming his fingers on the table top, his words rolling out in a broad southern accent. “Let’s not beat around the bush. You’ve got a beautiful spread of land, which my company has just purchased through auction. My grandson here tells me you’re not too happy with this deal.”
Julian almost laughed. Not too happy? How about pissed? How about mad as hell?
“The land has been in my family for over a century, sir. It belonged to my great-great-grandfather.”
“Well, now, I know it’s hard letting go of family property, but keep in mind you are getting a fair price for the land, almost one hundred and twenty thousand. I’ve seen much worse deals for families in these situations.” Nathan leaned back in his chair and crossed a long leg under the table. “Let me tell you what I have in mind.”
And Nathan laid out his plan. The Fortiers could continue to own the house, the storage shed, and the barn, and the land on which the three buildings sat. It amounted to about three and a half of the 240 acres. And the family would still get the $118,000 the land was auctioned for, minus the legal fees, to be divided amongst the heirs.
Nathan glanced at the paper in front of him; there were seven family members who shared ownership in the land, and with all the taxes, legal fees incurred by the auction, and the paperwork, every member of the Fortier clan would get about $11,000 each.
Again, Julian held his astonishment in check. This was the deal? According to Kevin’s research, the land was worth at least three times what Nathan paid. And the eleven thousand for each family member was an insult.
“Eleven thousand? That’s all?” he said.
“Well, as I say, the legal fees must be paid from the sum. But your auntie could still stay in the house,” Nathan said, grinning his nervous grimace more broadly now. “Everything would continue as usual. I’ll even throw in an extra $5,000 to sweeten the deal. All I ask is that you drop this ridiculous lawsuit idea or whatever you have in mind, which you will almost certainly lose.”
With his last sentence, Nathan’s tone, formerly a syrup-covered drawl, hardened into a metallic whine. Julian looked over at Kevin, who gave him a solemn look that did little to hide his disgust. There was surely no love lost between these two. But Kevin had painted an accurate picture of his grandfather; men like Nathan Larouchette cut themselves a slick path in the world while expecting others, without the hubris, gall and money to match them, to just step aside and let them pass.
Kevin had been right; this guy was a piece of work.
“And what about the creek?” Julian asked.
Nathan seemed puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“What if I told you that I wanted the creek to be part of our property?”
Nathan frowned. “Well, no, the creek would be essential to the retirement community we have planned for the…”
“And the cemetery?” Julian asked. “Where my family is buried?”
“Well, that would not be part of the…”
Julian looked at Kevin. “Let’s go,” he said. He got up and looked at Nathan. “Thank you for your time.”
Kevin had been quiet the whole time, his face shaded with what looked to Julian like an old, long-harbored hatred. But he said nothing until he reached the door of the office. With one hand on the doorknob, he turned to Nathan.
“One thing, sir. Tell me you didn’t hire some goons to padlock these nice folks out of their house, and that they didn’t shoot off rifles to try to scare the hell out of them.”
Nathan glowered at him. “Excuse me, but after the auction took place, the whole of Silver Creek became the property of N&L Associates. One certainly has a right to protect one’s own property. But as for shooting, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Kevin glared back at him. “You don’t.”
“No. Well, I did secure someone to guard the property after the auction, of course, to protect from trespassers and poachers, but I certainly never authorized anyone…”
“And I guess you didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Mr. Parette.”
A pause. “Who?”
“The Parette property on the other side of the creek? Mr. Parette? The old man whose car got run off the road.”
Nathan stared at him, his lips tight and brows furrowed, then blinked. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“Right.” Kevin smiled wryly, then shook his head. “You know Nathan, I owe you a real debt of gratitude.”
Nathan gave him a cautious look. “Why is that?”
“It was because of the likes of you that I decided I wanted to be a lawyer.”
As they both turned to walk out Nathan called them back.
“Now, wait a minute, boys. Mr. Fortier.” Nathan’s bushy eyebrows angled downward. He unbuttoned his jacket and put a hand in his pocket. “From what I understand you live in New York. And from what I also understand, you’ve enjoyed considerable success there. What coul
d this land possibly mean to you? All you will do is impede the progress of what I’m afraid is inevitable. Now, I have given you a generous offer. But why don’t you tell me what would be fair? What would it take to get you to drop this lawsuit? What’s your price?”
Price? Julian thought a moment. He’d never given a thought before to what it would take to give up his family’s land. Half a million dollars? A million? He smiled to himself, feeling power he didn’t realize he had.
What was his price? A few years ago, none of this would have mattered to him. But everything was different now.
“There’s no price, sir. The land’s not for sale.”
Nathan scoffed. “For sale? Have you forgotten? I’ve already bought the land. Quite legally.”
“For now.” Julian shrugged. “You may even wind up with it one day. But if I have to keep you in court for the next ten years to—what did you call it? ‘Impede the progress of the inevitable’—then that’s what I’ll do.”
Nathan’s eyes flamed, and his small mouth began to twitch. “All right. All right. Go ahead. I have tried to offer you some of your land back, through my own generosity”—his voice louder now—“but you will lose everything if you continue.” He glared at his grandson. “Both of you will lose.”
Julian glanced at Kevin, then back at Nathan, as he reached for the door. “Have a good day, sir.”
The creek on the Fortier land snaked along a winding path that went deep into the piney woods, then curved like a long S toward the open clearing at the south end of the property. The recent rains had extended the high water season, and the creek rushed along the deep bed, the water warbling in a trebly gurgle over the rocks and glimmering in the blinking light between the shading trees as if strewn with a million tiny mirrors.
Where Julian and Kevin sat, on a bank beneath the shade of an old live oak while their shoes sunned behind them on a distant, rocky rise, the water was clear enough to see the stones edging the bottom.
After the meeting with Nathan Larouchette, Kevin, turning to Julian in the parking lot, said, “Let’s go fishing.” Kevin’s eyes were glassy, his voice tight and curt, and Julian decided this was not the time to argue. He had a hundred things to do, including driving back to New Orleans to pin down a meeting at Simon’s house with the insurance agent, calling Sylvia to check in on the search for Simon, meeting with Parmenter’s attorney to get the details of the funeral, and so on. But in Kevin’s eyes he’d seen a need that, he guessed, could only be satisfied by fishing, and the idea of trespassing on what Nathan considered his land must have held a certain perverse appeal, too.
Julian knew it had been rough for Kevin in there; at the end of the meeting, his young friend had been visibly shaken by the encounter with his estranged grandfather. He was closemouthed on the way to the creek, but as he reached for a cigarette in his truck’s glove compartment and lit up (Julian didn’t know he smoked), his thin fingers twitched like a palsied old woman’s.
Kevin had pulled two brand-new graphite fishing rods from the bed of his truck and a tackle box full of plastic lures. Within a few minutes they were both sitting on rocks in the breezy shade near the first bend of the creek, Kevin with his shirt off and feet dangling in the water, and Julian, shirt unbuttoned to the breeze, sitting next to him.
They had been there for fifteen minutes, both lines in the water, an occasion zephyr rustling the high grasses, before either one of them mentioned the meeting.
“Well, now, that was something, huh?” Kevin scoffed a little, then looked across the creek as the rippling water lapped against the earthen bank. “Man, I hate him for what he’s putting y’all through.”
Julian said nothing. He was thinking about the last time his father had brought him here to fish. Or try too. It was his twelfth summer, and he’d come here only to humor Simon. To his surprise and his father’s delight, he’d caught a catfish, a huge one big as his arm. “You got Caesar!” Simon beamed, elated, but made him throw it back. “He’s as old as this creek, let him live a while longer.” But for the next few years, Simon bragged about how Julian had snagged “ol Caesar,” his first time out. It was the only fish he’d ever caught in his life.
Kevin stood up, reeled his line in, and cast it further across the water. When he sat back down, he blew out a long puff from his cigarette, his fourth since he’d gotten out of the truck. “You know, my mama’s a Creole woman, and her great-granddaddy was as black as the bottom of this creek at midnight, they tell me.” He paused, as if waiting for Julian to show surprise at his mixed ancestry. Julian nodded thoughtfully, and Kevin went on. “When my daddy took up with her, ol’ Nathan liked to had a fit. Not his son, by God. Never said more than two words to her the whole time Daddy and Mama were married. But then Nathan took up with a woman he’d been seeing on the sly, and guess what she was.”
Julian’s eyes widened. “A Creole?”
Kevin smirked, nodded. “Black and Creole. Ain’t that something? Hypocritical bastard.” He reached into his wallet and pulled out a photograph of a woman, black-eyed with long curly black hair and skin the color of cantaloupe rind. “That’s my mama. She lives in Montana now. Moved there when she married again after Daddy passed.”
“Beautiful lady,” Julian said.
Kevin nodded. “I grew up hating Nathan, the way he treated my daddy and my uncle, and then my mama. The way he’d run off sometimes and leave Daddy and his mama and brother when they were little, then come back the next month like nothin’ happened. He and my daddy hardly ever spoke the last few years of his life, before Daddy’s stroke. But sometimes whenever Nathan’s name came up, I’d see Daddy staring off into space, thinking. I always wanted to ask him what he was thinking about. But I knew.” Kevin picked up a smooth stone and skipped it across the water. It hopped four times before disappearing beneath the surface as Julian watched in awe. He had never gotten a stone to hop more than twice.
Kevin looked at Julian, his brows arched up in the middle of his forehead apologetically. “I have to tell you this. So far, we don’t have much. The truth is, after Prof died, I haven’t had much luck with these cases. I keep tryin’. But when they get this far along…” He let his sentence disappear into the sound of the water.
Julian looked out over the creek. “I know.”
“I was thinking about your cousin, Miss Genevieve? Didn’t she say your great-great granddaddy won Silver Creek on a bluff in a poker game?”
Julian nodded. “Right. That’s what she said.”
“And that your great-granddaddy, what was his name—Moses—that he got the land when his brother had to leave the state after almost getting shot?”
“Right.”
“Well, I hope that poker-face luck runs in the family, ’cause we’re looking at one lousy hand.”
“Yeah,” Julian said, feigning attention, still lost in thought. He was hot and the air was sticky, but the breeze of the oak that cooled his face and billowed the soft cotton of his shirt away from his skin was as pleasing as fine spring rain. And he realized he hadn’t had a headache in two days.
When Julian was in college after his mother died, Simon would take off for Silver Creek after a long week at the restaurant, just for a day or two, to “get his mind right.” He’d always return looking a little younger, Julian remembered, with a little more spring in his step. Now he knew why. As much as his father loved New Orleans, it was a city. And this was a place where a man could open his chest to the sweeping air, look across a field unhemmed by buildings and see a landscape of possibility.
Leaning back, his elbow on the rock, his head resting on his fist, he looked straight up through the leaves of the live oak at the gauzy glare of filtered sun. He closed his eyes to it, stared at the warming orangey glow behind his eyelids. For a moment, he had not a care in the world.
Kevin stood up and found a fist-sized rock to balance his rod while he reached in his pocket for another cigarette.
“Gotta quit this smoking thing before little Suzy,
that’s the baby’s name, before she comes.”
Julian sat up and took a drink from one of the beers in the six pack of Bud they’d gotten in Local. He tried to imagine a little girl looking like Kevin.
“So what do we do now?”
Kevin shrugged. He’d spent hours poring over the land dispute cases in Pointe Louree Parish. Not one case had been decided in favor of the plaintiff, the original landowners, in the last three years. For decades, families had lost acres and acres of land, gas, oil, and mineral rights, all through the shenanigans of companies like Nathan’s.
Even the case with the Parette family had quietly gone away, Kevin said. The accident had been officially determined as just that—an accident, despite the second set of tire tracks near the ditch that would have indicated Parette had swerved to avoid a collision. After he died, the family, who lived out of state, had sold the land to Nathan for a song.
“We can buy a little time maybe, but what we need is some kind of a will. I know you said before y’all don’t have one. But it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Just something written down somewhere saying who the land’s intended for. Judges can be pretty liberal in these kinds of cases.”
He explained that in Louisiana they had something called “olographic” wills. It could be hand written on a napkin for all the judge cared, but if it’s written by the decedent who owned the land, and dated, it could be binding in court.
Julian frowned. Nothing like that existed as far as he knew. Even Genevieve said so. His father hadn’t yet written a will (with only one son, he hadn’t seen the need), and Julian’s grandfather Jacob, as far as he knew, hadn’t either.
Kevin pulled his line in and recast it in deeper water. “Well, like you said, we’ll keep his lawyers busy as long as we can. Maybe something will come up.”
“Maybe so.” Julian had an odd feeling in his gut. It may have been the comforting sun, his easeful mood, but the fleeting assurance that in time, everything would work out as it should, warmed him like a gentle, steadying hand. He looked across the bank of the creek to the groves of pines and poplars and cypresses in the distance as far as his eyes could see. This could all be mine, he thought. Then he corrected himself. Is mine. And for a brief moment he felt as if the whole thing with Nathan Larouchette had never happened.
Wading Home Page 22
