On Sunday, August 15th, they were out on Lake Nemihaha again. As the sun began to set, Lindley lit two torches she had brought aboard. She had tied colorful ribbons to each of the fire-bearing sticks, and she placed them in round metal slots angled outward at the row boat’s port and starboard gunwales. When they returned to shore, Lindley placed the torches on similar holders that protruded from a couple of trees near the dock. Their flames glinted on the water and danced above the ornate ribbons beneath them as Lindley explained that the torches were a family tradition her mom and dad loved. For Merlin, the torchlight made Lake Nemihaha all the more magical.
That night they watched a television weather report courtesy of the cabin’s exterior satellite dish. The news for the Upper Texas Gulf Coast—specifically the Houston-Galveston area—was not good. The depression traversing the Straits of Florida had become a tropical storm then a hurricane in the southeastern Gulf of Mexico and had merged with the system that had moved north through the Yucatan Channel west of Cuba. In just a few days, Hurricane Franklina had spun up all the way to a Category 5 as its predicted landfall cone continued to point toward the coast just below Houston. Lindley’s father called and said that they would need to extend their trip.
Merlin thought of his smashed instrument and felt a kind of momentary vindication that the storm bore a feminine version of the surname of the Founding Father who had invented the glass armonica. He checked this impulse toward taking revenge on Tite Dûche and traded it for concern for the people of his homeland.
After Galveston Island and Houston took a direct hit, the storm meandered around Southeast Texas and returned to dump record amounts of rain on the area. There were huge swaths of power outages and downed trees, and flooded roadways brought travel to a near standstill.
Lindley’s dad called again and said that they should stay until after Labor Day. He said the power was out all over Bayou Boughs, and it could take two weeks to restore service. He also reported there wasn’t any flooding in the Acheson or McNaughton residences and that Lindley’s garden had made it through the inundation with minimal damage. Lindley and Merlin were concerned for everyone at home but thrilled their vacation on the lake was becoming a sabbatical away from the hottest part of Houston’s tenacious summer.
• Sixty-eight
At six a.m. on the morning of Tuesday, August 17th, the FBI raided the offices of Dûche Ovens, Incorporated, and confiscated all computer hard drives on the premises. Additionally, they boxed and sealed all of the paper files from Tite Dûche’s executive office. Later that day, as the outer bands of Hurricane Franklina began to buffet the Upper Texas Gulf Coast, a plane took off from Houston for Dulles Airport containing all the hard drives and files now bound for bureau headquarters at Langley. It was one of the last jets out before the storm. Within an hour of its departure, all the area airports closed.
In Campania, the second leg of the five-day Ferrari rally was about to begin. Ferrari had arranged to clear the fabled Amalfi Coast highway for ninety minutes to accommodate its forty or so drivers who were scheduled to leave the starting point in Sorrento at thirty-second intervals. Tite was at the wheel of his bundle of Italian fire and cueing to pull up to the departure line. He noticed a voice mail on his phone and decided to listen to it in speaker mode. It was brief but arresting. The speaker sounded drunk.
“Hey, Tite, this is Mickey McNaughton. So, I just wanted to let you know that I didn’t realize you were so photogenic! Kudos and have a nice day!”
He knew Mickey was a Bayou Boughs member, but how could he have known about Nico van Rompaey’s photos? All of Tite Duche’s sphincters tightened as he inched toward the starting line.
With just a few minutes remaining before his departure flag wove with a gallant flourish, Tite’s phone rang. It was his attorney. Tite answered and listened as his lawyer spoke in the gravest tone he had ever heard from this unwaveringly serious man.
“Interpol has just issued a Red Notice on you,” his lawyer said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s their highest-level arrest warrant.”
There was a second or two of silence as Tite continued to creep toward the starting line.
“And, ah, it’s rumored there are some photographs,” his lawyer said.
“Photographs?”
“Of you in, shall we say, rather compromising circumstances.”
Tite was next in line to take the flag and pilot the bright yellow Pinin Farina past Positano, Amalfi, Praiano, and Maiori toward Salerno. His face was ashen, but a new determination focused his forward gaze.
“Sorry, Hedley, it’s my time on the line,” he said. “Gotta go.”
As a golfer, Tite Dûche considered himself—without a moment of reflection on the irony of it—a master of the short game. A component of his short game of which he was particularly proud—again with nary a thought for the irony of it—was the approach shot from what is known as a tight lie. A golfer contends with a tight lie when his ball ends up stopping where there is very little or no grass underneath it or on a very closely mown lip of a green. The term “tight lie” signifies the ground under the ball is either compact or even hard. Although he wasn’t on the links, he found himself in the tightest lie of his life, surrounded by the infamously steep rocky terrain of the Amalfi Coast.
He turned his phone off and rolled to the starting line. He and the flagman made eye contact, confirming the driver was ready. Tite released the clutch carefully to ensure a smooth, in no way embarrassing start and began to run through the gears as he negotiated the picture postcard beautiful but dangerously precipitous coastal drive. After several minutes, he entered a curve considerably faster than even the most cavalier or experienced of the other rally participants would have.
As he braked hard and skidded around it, he saw a huge ram jump from the almost sheer wall of rock to his left and stand in front of him. The ram’s eyes burned red in challenge as they stared directly at Dûche. Tite tried to avoid it, but the animal seemed to anticipate his next maneuver. It hopped to the left in front of the car’s evasive course and lowered its horns toward the Ferrari, never taking its eyes off the driver. Tite overcorrected to the right and his foot slipped from the brake to the accelerator.
The Ferrari hit the curb with such force that the vehicle’s rear rose in an arc and began a dramatic tail-first forward flip over the low wall delimiting the roadway. It turned again in another impressive rear over front midair flip that seemed to Tite like a very long moment as he saw the Mediterranean sky and sea come into view through the car’s windshield for the last time.
The Ferrari hit the rocks by the sea top-first and exploded into flames that complemented the color scheme of the legendary Italian sports car—a bouquet of yellows and reds. Behind the flames, the car’s twisted metal and rock that held it were charred coal black. At the center of the conflagration was a roiling and constantly changing kaleidoscope of orange feeding black smoke that snaked toward the blue firmament of the southern Italian summer.
• Sixty-nine
On Saturday, August 21st, the float plane arrived to resupply Lindley and Merlin at the cabin. In addition to groceries and household goods, there was a large crate marked “EXTREMELY FRAGILE” and “HANDLE WITH CARE.” Merlin was surprised and intrigued. To his even greater surprise, neither the pilot nor Lindley would offer a word about its contents. When they placed the crate by the window in the bedroom, Lindley asked Merlin to go fishing or take a walk through the woods for twenty or thirty minutes. Under no circumstances was he to look in through the window.
He complied, and Lindley and the pilot went to work unboxing the contents of the crate. When the job was done, Lindley draped a dark woolen blanket over the uncrated object by the window. She thanked the pilot for his help, tipped him, and bid him goodbye. The plane was gone when Merlin returned to the house, and as he was about to ask Lindley about the crate’s contents, she said simply, decisively, and maybe a little winsomely, “It’s a surpri
se.”
That night, Lindley and Merlin rowed out onto the lake a couple of hundred yards from the cabin and looked up into the sky. Unlike Houston’s sky, this sky was black with zillions of stars. Merlin pointed out constellations and shared with Lindley their significance in ancient mythology. He was surprised she already knew most of this information and then astonished as she pointed out even more star groupings and the significance of their Latin names. “Do you see that broad, cloudy sweep of distant light?” she asked.
“Yes, I do. What do you think it is?”
“I think it’s the arm of the Milky Way that our solar system is spinning on.”
Taking in this astounding revelation, Merlin looked in silence and uttered a single protracted “Wowwwwwwww!”
Before sunrise on Sunday, while Merlin was still asleep, Lindley tiptoed from the bed and removed the blanket from what it was covering by the cabin window. She plugged a cord at its base into a wall socket and returned to bed. Merlin stirred a little after sunrise and awakened.
He looked to his left, toward the cabin window, and saw his gift, the fresh sunlight glinting from its perfectly dustless crystalline disks. It was a brand-new glass armonica, and it was even more exquisite than the one the ninja of Bayou Boughs had destroyed. If a musical instrument could be pristine, like a glassy northern lake, that was how this new armonica looked to Merlin. For a second, he thought about waking Lindley to show her, the way a child wakes parents to alert them to what Santa Claus left behind, but just as quickly, he remembered it was Lindley who had arranged its purchase and special delivery. After a necessary stop to the facilities, he approached the instrument—now even more glimmering as the sun surmounted the eastern horizon. He turned on the switch and the discs spun. He dipped his fingertips in a saucer of water and began to play.
Lindley awakened to “Ode to Joy” by Ludwig van Beethoven. Before she opened her eyes to see Merlin playing, a broad smile of satisfaction dawned on her face as she listened to the unmistakable strains of the iconic classical piece. To her delight, Merlin played the armonica throughout the morning and even began a new composition, which when complete a couple of days later, he named in honor of their time at the Canadian lake: “The Idyll of the Loon.”
Hurricane Franklina devastated the Houston–Galveston area, with power outages lasting well over two weeks in many areas and floodwaters leaving tens of thousands of people without homes. Following her father’s suggestion, Lindley and Merlin remained at the lake until after Labor Day. Before their departure, they spoke often of how they could contribute to the relief effort on their return.
The reservoirs on the west side of town were like giant water-holding valves of Houston. As with the valves of Houston in Merlin’s formerly jammed and enervated lower gastrointestinal tract, they gave way under massive pressure and inundated more neighborhoods while sending a huge volume of water down Buffalo Bayou. The force of the water was sufficient to dislodge the sled containing the rapidly rusting Vortexan Cyclonic Reverser, Radio Flyer wagon, and extension cords from a downstream, mostly submerged tree and send it all flushing into the bay. The current created by the volume of water was so powerful these relics of a former life rode it all the way into the open Gulf of Mexico.
On Wednesday, September 8th, Merlin looked through a passenger seat window toward the lakeside cabin as the float plane sped across the water for takeoff. He saw two hairy bipedal creatures emerge from the woods near the fishing tackle shack. They were enormous, and he could tell that one was male and the other female. As a small version of the creatures scrambled around the female’s feet, the male looked right at Merlin’s face in the airplane window, smiled, and gave Merlin an unmistakable two thumbs up. The float plane bounced a bit as it broke free from the surface of the lake, causing Merlin to look away for an instant. When he looked back to get another glimpse of the big furry bipeds and their little one, they had vanished.
• After
• Seventy
On the morning of Tite Dûche’s fatal crash in Italy, a caddie at Bayou Boughs Country Club had brought around his presidential golf cart to have at the ready for Tite’s sons, Titey and Dukey, who wanted to get in an early round before the sun was too high in the sky. Before the boys arrived at the club, there was an electrical short in the cart’s wiring, and it burst into flames, burning to a black heap with four melted tires at its periphery. Later it was determined the golf cart self-immolated at the hour of Tite’s afternoon crash in Italy. After the incident, the club never again designated a special golf cart for the serving president’s use.
There was upheaval on the club’s board as well, and in a case of shame by association, Dûche’s cronies resigned from their service en masse, and new interim board members were voted into office. Although he hadn’t served on the board in many years, Dr. Mac Swearingen was called into duty as Bayou Boughs Country Club’s interim president. It was reported that his in-camera declaration of disgust at Tite Dûche’s activities spawned a stream of choice epithets that was unequaled in the good doctor’s long history of well-placed off-color phrasings and aphorisms, but when he got that out of his system, he got down to business and went to work. His first official communication was his letter as interim president on the cover of the monthly newsletter. For his part, Merlin read it with delight, as Dr. Swearingen called Merlin himself before its publication to inform him that his membership had been fully reinstated. The letter read:
School is back in session, and it seems like everyone is ready to return to a normal state of affairs in Houston. I am happy to report that the state of affairs at Bayou Boughs Country Club also appears poised to return to equilibrium. The board is in the process of rescinding or modifying some interdictions that have been instated over the past several months. The board believes that, true to the club’s history as a welcoming place for generations of families, we need to open our arms to embrace and accommodate all of our members and their loved ones. This doesn’t mean, by any means, that the club should be a free-for-all atmosphere. It is the board’s intention for the club to return to the baseline civility that has characterized it for generations, and that means some rules will need to be adhered to and respected to maintain the comfortable club environment so many of us have come to cherish.
In addition to being a stellar retreat for golf, tennis, swimming, and dining in the heart of the city, Bayou Boughs Country Club is a place that has fostered and nurtured lasting friendships and family ties since its founding a hundred years ago. The range of personalities among our membership is another aspect of what makes this club such a special place. We may not all be exactly straight-down-the-fairway conventional types—for my part, I damn sure have my quirks—but I think we can all agree that we are angling for a warm, genial, and welcoming atmosphere here at the club. I’m looking forward to keeping you updated on happenings over the coming months, and I look forward to seeing you around the club.
Yours very truly,
McLean Swearingen, M.D.
(The letter was signed “Mac.”)
In a fall ceremony on the front steps of City Hall in downtown Houston, Merlin and Mickey McNaughton were honored by the mayor, who cited the duo’s service to the community and the world for doing their part to help dismantle a major human smuggling and trafficking ring. Although Mickey and Merlin looked different in many ways, they both sported round-lensed glasses, and when excited, the eyes behind the lenses seemed similarly round and almost as large as the lenses through which they looked. During the photo op with the mayor, as Mickey and Merlin were holding the plaque commemorating the day, the nephew and uncle team were both wide-eyed, and their lips were in the signature McNaughton pursed O shape. Before ending his talk, the mayor said that the two were models of “if you see something, say something” civic vigilance.
Also in the fall, Dr. Mac Swearingen presided over the annual Coastal Sportsmen’s Association dinner during which the organization highlighted its strides toward better wildlife cons
ervation and gave awards to individuals who had made significant contributions to the organization’s mission during the year and to anglers who made record catches on the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coasts.
Junior Trust Officer Curtis Bumpers was in attendance, and when a slide showing Merlin McNaughton with his record trout appeared on the screen behind the podium, the bank employee’s face flushed bright red, and he clamped his jaw shut to contain the rage boiling inside his chest. He couldn’t take it, and as Dr. Swearingen began to talk about Merlin’s fish, Bumpers excused himself from the table and strode toward the venue’s exit, his unabated ire fueling his departure. Dr. Swearingen called Merlin to the podium and presented him with the annual golden trout award and the two were all smiles as the photographers’ flashes popped like little innocuous facsimiles of the menacing lightning bolts that followed Merlin’s momentous catch that July day in Acadiana.
The address of the compound Merlin discovered on Snuffmeister Road corresponded with that provided as a home address by a former kitchen employee at the club. It was later learned that this employee was Tite’s main henchman in the Houston smuggling and trafficking operation. He was taken into custody to await trial and there was some conjecture as to whether he and Tite had more than just a business relationship. Additionally, authorities apprehended complicit employees at the ports of Houston, Galveston, and New Orleans.
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