Volume Three: In Moonlight and Memories, #3

by Julie Ann Walker

Heard the news from Broussard right around the time Luc and I were calling it a day. When the DA first told me Rick was gone, I expected something dramatic. Rick was always a larger-than-life character, so I figured he’d lost his life in a blaze of glory. Shanked in the shower by a fellow prisoner who’d been on the bad end of one of his shady deals. Or hung himself from a water pipe by his shoelaces because he couldn’t stand the thought of a couple decades behind bars.

  In the end, however, it was simple. Almost peaceful, if the accounts from the other inmates are to be believed.

  Happened at dinnertime in the prison cafeteria. One minute, Rick was sitting down at a table with his tray piled high with food. The next, he let out a breathy sigh and slumped forward into his mashed potatoes. Dead in an instant of a massive coronary—or at least that’s the theory Broussard is working on, pending an autopsy.

  Luc was listening to my end of the conversation and easily surmised what’d happened. I told him to head on home. Said I was fine.

  He was having none of it. He had me pack a bag and loaded me into Smurf, insisting I spend the night with him. And then on the drive out to the swamp, he called Maggie and told her to meet us.

  “I don’t give a shit if you don’t care if he’s gone,” he said when I protested for the twentieth time that I didn’t need to be fussed over since, after all, it was only Rick. “Your father is dead, and the occasion deserves to be properly observed.”

  Apparently, in Luc’s book, properly observing Rick’s death consisted of a meal, which I didn’t eat much of, and a case of beer, which I’m steadily working my way through.

  By the way, I’m wise to his game when it comes to the beer. Instead of coming out and telling me to lay off the whiskey, he keeps finding reasons to substitute it for beer since beer has less alcohol and a greater water content. In the grand scheme of alcoholic beverages, he figures beer is the lesser of two evils.

  I’m fine to play along. To a point.

  Got to throw the guy a bone every now and then, right?

  Besides, if the beer stops working, I’ve always got my handy-dandy flask.

  Now the three of us are sitting on Luc’s front porch, watching the moon peek over the tops of the trees. It spotlights the bats as they swoop and wheel on the hunt for flying insects, and glimmers across the top of the swamp.

  Silent, wounded waters is how Luc described the bayou in one of his poems.

  I’ve never thought of this place as particularly silent or wounded. But it does have the disjointed air of a dream. Everything here seems softer. Fuzzier. Like reality has only a tenuous hold.

  “There’s magic in the moonlight, isn’t there?” Maggie says, as if she’s reading my mind. Her feet are propped on the wooden railing. “I mean, think back to all the fun we’ve had after dark. Like how we used to meet in Audubon Park at night to listen to music until I had to run home to make curfew. Or that time y’all helped me catch lightning bugs for my freshman science project. Or all those winter nights when we roasted marshmallows over Aunt Bea’s fire pit. When I think back on it, some of my fondest memories happened under the moonlight.”

  My head aches at the recollections. At their innocence and sweetness.

  If I knew then what I know now, would I have done things differently? Acted more honorably?

  I wish I could say yes. But those times she’s talking about? They’re the best of my life. So, no. I wouldn’t change a damn thing.

  Luc is sitting on the other side of me, softly strumming his guitar. He doesn’t miss a note when he says, “I recollect the time we were riding bikes down Washington Avenue after dark and a raccoon ran out in front of you. You ended up in someone’s hydrangeas. How magical was that?”

  She frowns around me at him, but there’s no real heat in her expression. “What about the night we sat down by the river watching the moon rise while you taught us chords on the guitar?” she counters.

  His chin bobs. “Okay. You got me. There’s magic in the moonlight.”

  “Thank you.” She dusts off her hands and sits back, looking pleased with herself. “What about you, Cash? Any fond moonlight memories?”

  She’s trying to take my mind off Rick.

  Should I tell her she needn’t bother? It’s weird, but I don’t feel much of anything now that he’s gone, except for maybe a smidge of disappointment that, in the end, he took the easy way out, never facing trial or serving time for his crimes.

  Could be I don’t feel anything because I’d already written him off. Or perhaps forgiving him for being a true-blue bastard actually did give me closure. Or shit, who knows, maybe this thing with my head is fucking with my ability to fully process emotions.

  Instead of saying any of this, however, I reply, “I remember the time we sat on the seawall at Lake Pontchartrain and tried to count the stars.”

  I also remember dragging Maggie under a nearby willow tree to make out with her in the cool, leafy dark. I can still taste the sweetness of her breathy sighs. Hear the sound of her giggle when I accidentally tickled her ribs while trying to cop a feel.

  She laughs now. “I made it to around three hundred before I gave up. I think you only got to fifty or so.”

  “Patience has never been one of my virtues.” I take a sip of beer, being careful to grip it in my right hand since, most days, my left is completely numb.

  Told Luc I think I have something wrong with my neck, a nerve or disc injury from the suicide bomber that’s just now making its presence known. I’ve assured him I’ll bring it up with Beckett the next time I’m at the VA, but I’m not sure he believes me. He’s been giving me the side-eye a lot recently, like he’s starting to clue in that something is up.

  “How many did you count, Luc?” Maggie asks.

  “I stopped at six hundred,” he says.

  “Now he has patience coming out of his ears.” I point the neck of my beer in his direction.

  “More like I was aiming to distract myself from the kissy noises coming from under the willow tree.”

  “Yes.” Maggie clears her throat. “Well.” The moonlight can’t hide her rosy cheeks.

  I chuckle. She may be twenty-six, but she still blushes like a schoolgirl.

  Taking pity on her, I say, “I think my favorite moonlight memory is the one when we sat out on your aunts’ veranda while Luc recited Walt Whitman’s ‘I Sing the Body Electric.’”

  I know this has got to be one of her favorite moonlight memories, too, because she managed to find an old copy of Leaves of Grass to give Luc for Christmas. It wasn’t a first edition, but it was close, with an aged leather cover and embossed gold leaf lettering. Luc has the book proudly displayed on a shelf above his bed.

  “And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?” he eloquently quotes, still strumming.

  Maggie sighs. “I remember the bugs were buzzing. The bullfrogs were croaking. And the night breeze was sweet with the smell of bougainvillea. And I remember understanding for the first time why Luc was so into poetry.”

  For a moment, we slip into silence, each of us lost in the past. Then she says, “And now we can add tonight to our list of memories and moonlight. When we’re eighty, we’ll remember the time we sat on Luc’s porch and said farewell to Richard Armstrong in a way that would probably make him crazy. By not talking about him.”

  “Hear, hear.” Luc lifts his beer and taps it against the neck of my own. I lean over and tap Maggie’s coffee cup. She’ll be driving home later, so after one glass of wine with dinner, she moved on to café au lait. Made with chicory, of course, because she’s a heathen.

  “You know how everything in the universe is made up of stardust?” she says after taking a sip.

  I slant her a glance, wondering where she’s going with this.

  “I was thinking about that question you asked,” she tells me. “About how long you’ll be remembered after you die? And I was thinking that maybe your memory isn’t bound by the lives of those you loved or those who loved you. Maybe your
memory is actually boundless because you are boundless. Energy doesn’t die, right? It simply changes. Our bodies decay, but we’re still in the ground. In the air.” She points to the moon. “We’re even in the moonlight. We are. Forever.”

  I smile. “It’s a nice thought.”

  The forlorn hoot of an owl and the gentle sigh of the bayou licking at its banks seem to say they agree with me. Luc switches over to an old Louis Armstrong tune and quietly starts to sing, his voice melding with the hum of the guitar and the tinkle of the wind chimes.

  My limbs are drowsy with beer and physical exhaustion. These days, my stamina is shit. My eyelids, weighed down by anchors, begin to drift shut. Then a flash of light in the distance has them flying wide. I blink, searching for the glowing blue sphere, but it’s gone.

  Or was it ever there? Are my eyes playing tricks on me again?

  “Did y’all see that?” Maggie sits forward and points.

  I release a covert sigh.

  “It’s only a little ol’ fifolet,” Luc assures her, setting his guitar aside and lacing his hands behind his head. The picture of health and ease. If I didn’t love him so much, I’d hate him.

  “What’s that?” Maggie wrinkles her nose.

  He frowns at her. “You’ve never heard of fifolet?” When she shakes her head, he makes a disparaging sound. “And you call yourself a Louisianan?”

  “Now you’ve got me interested,” I tell him, searching the darkness for another glimpse of the strange blue light.

  “According to legend”—his voice drops an octave, reminding me how much he loves a good fireside, or in this case, porch-side tale. From all accounts, his father was quite the storyteller, and Luc claims he learned the craft at the man’s knee—“when pirates buried their treasure, they would execute a member of their crew and stuff the body down in the hole with the booty.”

  “That sounds unnecessarily cruel,” Maggie mutters, her mouth screwed around a moue of distaste. But I can see by the spark in her eye, she’s already caught up in his tale.

  “The soul of the dead man was said to bind itself to the treasure,” Luc goes on, “forcing the spirit to guard the haul from would-be thieves. It often takes on the form of a glowing ball of light called a fifolet. I reckon we just saw one wandering the swamp.”

  Maggie shivers, making me grin. She’s always been susceptible to ghost stories. And not that Luc doesn’t know what lies in the deep, dark heart of the bayou. He does. He most certainly does. But I’m catching an unmistakable whiff of bullshit.

  As if on cue, we hear muffled voices followed by a splash. Then the light flashes again.

  Maggie scowls around me at Luc. He tries to hide his smile, but can’t quite manage it.

  “Hunters out gigging frogs,” he explains.

  “Dang it, Luc!” She reaches across me to punch his arm. “You had me going with that whole fifolet thing. Did you make that up on the fly?”

  “No, ma’am.” He shakes his head. “It’s a real legend. Been passed down through the generations of folks who’ve called the swamp home.”

  “But you’ve never seen one.”

  “Not in all my years.”

  “And you don’t believe in them.”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  She makes an indignant noise. But the look in her eyes as she stares at Luc is anything but indignant.

  It sends something hard and sharp stabbing through my chest. That used to be my look. The one she saved for me.

  “Got to hit the head.” I stand, suddenly needing to be somewhere, anywhere, else.

  Holy fuck. I know I keep saying the same thing over and over. But it bears repeating. This shit is hard.

  I hurry to the bathroom and lean against the door after I’ve shut it behind me. Staring into the mirror, there’s no mistaking the deep bruises beneath my eyes, the hollows in my cheeks, or the Frankenstein’s monster look of my forehead now that the surgical glue is gone. To put it mildly, I look like hell. My heart certainly hurts like hell.

  Except…it shouldn’t.

  Splashing water on my face, I take a quick hit of Gentleman Jack before exiting the bathroom. My eyes land on the travel trunk Luc uses as a coffee table and the three-prong binder sitting atop it. I recognize the binder. I have one that looks exactly like it. Maggie’s letters. Only, these are the ones she wrote to Luc.

  Curiosity has me walking over. Temptation makes me reach down. But I don’t open it. Instead, I’m distracted by the notebook lying beside it. It’s one of the many journals Luc keeps for writing down his lyrics and poems and thoughts.

  Thumbing through it, I smile at the loose scrawl. I know his handwriting as well as I know my own. How his uppercase Ms always have a tail on them. How his lowercase As look more like a backward uppercase D. He used to love to write out mission parameters on a whiteboard. The guys in our unit teased him by calling him Professor Master Sergeant.

  Stopping on the last page, I read the short poem he’s titled: Bayou Baby.

  Where the black water rolls and the muskrat strolls

  That’s where you’ll find my baby

  She’s a Cajun queen with a young girl’s dream

  Yeah, that’s my baby

  She can cast a spell, make your life heaven or hell

  Ain’t no one quite like my baby

  She hides her secrets in her soul, loving her has made me a fool

  Time to let go of my baby.

  The last line has my breath hitching. What the fuck?

  Am I missing something? Did I misread that look in Maggie’s eye? Are they screwing up The Goddamned Plan?

  I stare through the window at the backs of their heads, in silhouette thanks to the starlight, and try to catch a snippet of conversation or read their body language. But they’re aggravatingly silent. Which isn’t like them. Not at all.

  They are screwing up The Plan. And the vibes I’ve been picking up all night, the ones that gave me hope they’d finally figured out their shit, were obviously all off. They’ve just been putting on a good face for my sake.

  Fuck! Damn! Piss! And shit!

  Then again…maybe things have gone sideways because Maggie doesn’t know how Luc feels. Maybe she should be told, or…

  No. Coming out and telling her would be too overt. And, of course, it would reveal too much about my ultimate goal. What to do? What to do?

  An idea suddenly occurs, proving my brain isn’t completely broken. At least not yet.

  Placing the notebook on top of the binder, I leave it open to the poem and quickly rejoin them on the porch.

  “I saw Luc’s binder full of letters in there,” I say casually as I resume my seat. “Why don’t you grab it and read us a few, Maggie? You don’t mind, do you, Luc?”

  He slides me a curious glance. “I don’t mind. They’re Maggie May’s words. If she wants to share ’em, she can.”

  “What do you say?” I ask her. “It’ll be like a blast from the past.”

  She shakes her head. “I wrote those to Luc, and I—”

  “If they’re anything like mine, they’re not all personal,” I interrupt. “Some are like journal entries, just an accounting of your day. You can choose which ones to read aloud.” When she continues to hesitate, I pull out the big guns. “Come on. It’ll take my mind off Rick.”

  “You don’t play fair,” she accuses with a frown.

  I make sure my smile is devilish, hoping she doesn’t notice that it’s brittle around the edges and never reaches my eyes. “You’re only now realizing this?” I ask.

  Wind whistles through her lips like air being released from a balloon. Then she capitulates by saying, “Fine.”

  When she disappears inside, it takes everything I have not to turn and watch her through the window. Turn to see if she reads the poem or simply shoves the journal aside.

  I count the seconds inside my head. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three. Four. Five. All the way up to twenty. And then she’s back with the binder in hand. Was
twenty seconds enough time for her to read it?

  I study her face, but it’s too dark to see what’s in her eyes. And before she has a chance to sit down, her phone rings.

  “Pardon me.” She digs in her pocket for her cell, walking to the corner of the porch to answer her call.

  Luc picks up his guitar and plays the opening bars to Steve Earle’s “Sparkle and Shine,” and I’m instantly gripped by a wistful kind of sorrow. In my mind, that song will always be the anthem for the love Maggie and I shared. Not only that, for the friendship the three of us shared. It’s a tribute to our young, burgeoning lives. A tribute to days long gone.

  I suppose, when you get right down to it, that’s what melancholy is. An admission that time goes by and it never comes back.

  “I hate to do this,” Maggie says after ending her call. “But that was Chrissy. Her husband broke his ankle. I need to go cover her shift so she can meet him at the hospital.”

  She comes to hug my neck. “Sorry,” she whispers in my ear. “I know this is a terrible time to leave, but Gus can’t cover since his kid is in a basketball tournament and—”

  “Don’t worry about it.” I pat her back. “Go take care of your business.”

  She kisses my cheek, and her lips are soft and warm. I close my eyes and drag in the smell of her. Despite The Plan, I still have the urge to pull her into my lap and hold her against me so the night doesn’t feel so long and lonely.

  Handing the binder full of letters to Luc, she goes to touch him on the shoulder and then quickly pulls her hand away. The muscles in Luc’s jaw tick, but he manages a smile and tells her to drive safe.

  “Oh, I almost forgot.” She snaps her fingers at the doorway. “You were right about needing a reservation to get into the back room at M.S. Rau Antiques. I made one for us this Friday. I assume y’all are in?” After we both tell her we are, her brow wrinkles. “It’s the last excursion on the list,” she says. “For some reason, that makes me sad.”

  “All good things must come to an end,” I tell her, trying not to let it show that the thought depresses the hell out of me too.