“We do?” Aaron looked surprised, and pleased.
“And I could retire to Florida. Buy a condo. I’m sick of the cold.”
This was the first Daniel had heard of his aunt wanting to move.
“Looks like we both might be unemployed,” Aaron commented to him. “Synchronicity, that’s what it is.” Aaron looped an arm over his shoulder. “Here you are, in need of fun to cure your grumpiness, just when we’re both out of work.”
“Listen, Aunt Mel, if our father, Valcour LeDeux, wanted nothing to do with Mom, why should we want to know him? Or vice versa. As for the Doucets . . . they wouldn’t help a pregnant girl. If those are family ties, I don’t want them,” Daniel seethed.
As Barry segued into “Blue Velvet,” Aaron tried to lighten the mood. “Now that we’re Cajuns, we probably shouldn’t listen to any more cornball Barry Manilow songs.”
“Oh, you!” Aunt Mel laughed. Their opinion of Barry Manilow was a longtime joke in the family.
“In fact, we should probably adopt Cajun music,” Daniel added.
“You’re right. I’m gonna buy me some rowdy Cajun music right after we leave here. The kind that makes people have to stomp their feet.” Aaron glanced down at his low-heeled, urban cowboy boots, as if checking to see if they were stomp worthy. Actually, he would probably fit in perfectly, as he never had in Alaska where the normal attire was fur-lined parkas, flannel shirts, and clunky Timberland boots.
“The Cajuns use accordions and washboards, don’t they?” Daniel asked Aaron, continuing the jest.
Aaron nodded. “Yep, and they yell yee-haw a lot.”
“Would you two stop?”
“Who’s the midget in this picture?” Aaron asked, holding up one of the newspaper clippings. It carried the headline Oil Tycoon Hit by Cajun Traiteur.
“Aaron! People don’t say midget anymore. They say ‘little person’.” Aunt Mel smacked Aaron on the knuckles with the will.
Aaron rolled his eyes. “Who’s the little person rapping our dear ol’ dad with a folded umbrella? And what the hell’s a traiteur?”
“That’s Louise Rivard, honey. Tante Lulu, she’s called. A LeDeux family matriarch of some sort. Not a midget . . . um, little person, I don’t think. Just short.”
“What’s a traiteur?” Daniel asked.
“A folk healer,” Aunt Mel answered. “Some of these letters are from her.”
“Oh, that is just peachy. We’re not just swamp trailer park trash, we have voodoo in our genes.” Daniel shook his head, more with indifference than amusement or revulsion.
“In fact, as soon as your mother died, I notified her and told her to spread the word. She got back to me right away with condolences, but, most important, she has something to give you two. ‘Something important.’ You need to go there to pick it up, as soon as possible,” Aunt Mel told them.
“What does she want to give us?” Aaron asked. “Maybe it’s some kind of family inheritance.”
“Why can’t she just mail it to us?” Daniel wanted to know. “And isn’t it convenient that she waited until Mom was gone before offering it to us?” He, for one, had no desire to travel below the Mason-frickin’-Dixon line, on the whim of some old lady.
“Maybe it’s a plantation. Maybe we inherited a bleepin’ Tara,” Aaron teased.
“Frankly, I don’t give a damn,” Daniel said.
“Or it could be a trunk load of gold, too expensive to mail. Yeah, that’s it, pirate gold.”
“Pirates in Louisiana?” Daniel raised his brow with skepticism.
“Sure. Didn’t you ever hear of that pirate Lafitte? He had digs in Louisiana, didn’t he? Maybe we have pirate blood, too. That would be cool.”
“You two are demented,” Aunt Mel concluded. “The bottom line is, you have relatives in Louisiana. Your mother wanted you to know them. And one of them has ‘something important’ to give you.”
“It’s a Miracle,” Barry announced, jarring them all.
It would be a miracle if Daniel survived this Aunt Mel session without his head exploding. He counted off on his fingers. “So we’re Cajuns.” One finger. “Our maternal grandparents were bastards.” Two fingers. “We’re bastards.” Three fingers. “Our father was a bastard, for sure.” Four fingers. “An honorary aunt has a secret something for us.” Five fingers. “Big deal!” Six fingers. Daniel was not all that upset. He was never going to meet these people. What did it matter?
Aunt Mel slapped a hand on the desk. “You’re going! If you don’t go, how will your mother ever rest in peace?”
How could they refuse now?
Barry was thankfully silent.
Chapter Three
(two months later)
More LeDeux men? Hallelujah! The South will rise again! . . .
Daniel agreed to go to Louisiana with Aaron, provided they only stay long enough to get the mysterious “gift” Louise Rivard had for them. Then, they were off to the Bahamas for a week of bonefishing.
To everyone’s surprise, Daniel really had resigned from his medical practice. It had taken two months to tie up all the red tape. And Aunt Mel really was entertaining an offer for the air shipping business.
Now he and Aaron had decisions to make about the rest of their lives. Where better than out on a boat with a fishing rod in one hand, a cold beer in the other, basking in the warm sun?
Better that than the cold glacier he had been contemplating.
They boarded an Alaska Airlines flight headed for Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, and almost immediately began running into people who knew their Southern kinfolks. Especially the apparently notorious Louise Rivard, known to one and all as Tante Lulu, even though tante translated to “aunt” in Cajun.
Kinfolks? Did I say . . . uh, think kinfolks? See, already I’m talking like a redneck. Next I’ll be saying y’all and darlin’ and “pass me the grits.”
“I remember the time Tante Lulu entered a belly dancing contest when she was eighty years old. And won,” a Delta Airline attendant told Aaron at a stopover in Seattle. Aaron had been flirting nonstop with Vanessa between her hostessing duties while Daniel tried to sleep.
“My PawPaw swears by Tante Lulu’s rheumatiz potions,” Frank Guidry, the pilot, who was “born on the bayou,” confided to Daniel. “The old lady is a first class traiteur, y’know. A folk healer.”
Daniel knew, and barely restrained himself from rolling his eyes.
“If you ever need a lawyer, check out Lucien LeDeux,” a fellow passenger, a gray-haired businesswoman from Baton Rouge, advised from across the aisle. She had a silver pin that said “Proud to Be a Cajun” on the lapel of a neat, rose-colored suit. “He’s known as the Swamp Solicitor. Slicker than spit on a doorknob, he is. In a good way,” she’d added at the apparent expression of distaste on Daniel’s face.
Okaaay.
The desk clerk, Linda Jo Dupuis, at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel where they stayed that night, had taken one look at the register as they’d signed in and exclaimed, “LeDeuxs! I dint think there were any more of you stud muffins left. Are you two as wild as the rest of the LeDeux men?”
“Yes,” Aaron answered before Daniel could react.
No filters! People below the Mason-Dixon line appeared to have no filters on their mouths. And his brother was no better!
Linda Jo was six-foot tall. Although she wore a conservative black, belted dress, it was sleeveless, exposing the biceps of a linebacker and tattoos up one side and down the other of her muscular frame. She looked as if she could handle any old wild thing that came her way, man or animal.
Good thing I decided to quit medicine. I’d never be able to hang my shingle here, unless I want to be known as the Stud Muffin Doctor. Holy crap!
“Are you here fer the weddin’?”
“What wedding?” Aaron asked.
“Are you kiddin’? Half the wimmin in Dixie are cryin’ the blues, as we speak. Everyone knows that Tee-John LeDeux is gettin’ hitched t’morrow. He was t
he wildest of the LeDeux bunch, guar-an-teed. Unless . . .” Beulah eyed him and Aaron speculatively.
Daniel answered before Aaron could this time. “No! We’ll leave that distinction to our . . . um . . . to John LeDeux.” Daniel still couldn’t believe he had half brothers, let alone say it out loud. Including, presumably, this John person. And at least three others, besides! And those were only the “legitimate” ones.
The porter, who carried their luggage to the room, having overheard the conversation at the reception desk, surmised, out loud, that Valcour LeDeux might have fathered up to a dozen children in all. Once again, Daniel mused that people here in the South seemed to have no reservations about discussing personal matters, even with strangers.
But, really, hadn’t their father ever heard of condoms?
They drove their rental car into Houma late the next morning and got directions to Tante Lulu’s home at a beauty salon owned by their half sister Charmaine LeDeux Lanier. They’d tried calling Tante Lulu last night and this morning, but all they’d gotten so far was her answering machine: “Hi, y’all. This is Tante Lulu, as if ya dint know. Tee-hee-hee. Leave a message or call me back. Iffen this is an emergency, and ya need some herbs quick like, jist come on by and get ’em from mah pantry. Buh-bye!”
That is just great! Drive-by prescriptions!
Charmaine wasn’t in her shop, but a huge framed photograph of her hung in the foyer, taken a long time ago when she’d been Miss Louisiana. A good-looking woman, Daniel had to admit, especially in that skimpy white bathing suit, and despite all the big fluffy black hair, which must have been the style back then, at least for Southern belles. “Why did they wear high heels with bathing suits in competitions back then?” he asked Aaron as they returned to the rental car. “I mean, how many women do you see walking around the pool in high heels?”
“Because high heels make a woman’s butt stick out and her boobs arch up, kind of perky like,” Aaron answered with a grin. Aaron knew lots of interesting crap like that.
The drive down a two-lane road that ran parallel to a bayou was like a trip back in time to the 1950s. The only station they were able to get clearly on the radio played a weird kind of French music. Cajun, they presumed, with its unique twang. “Jolie Blon” or some such thing.
Old wooden signs planted in the ground must have been repainted over the years, otherwise they would have been rotted away. The jingle on these particular ones read:
“His cheek”
“Was Rough”
“His chick vamoosed”
“And now she won’t”
“Come home to roost”
“Burma-shave.”
There were old trailers with disabled appliances in the front yards, but bigass satellite dishes on the roofs and shiny new, expensive pickup trucks in the driveways. Here and there a general store advertised a mixed bag of goods and services, such as fresh okra, squirrel meat, haircuts, and live bait, all in one place. A taxidermist, who was also an undertaker, had a stuffed alligator hanging from a sign in front. But then there were quaint homes on stilts at the edge of the water, and the occasional old plantation, some restored to their former beauty, others falling prey to the encroaching jungle-like vegetation.
Because their rental car had a faulty air-conditioning system, they’d been driving with the windows open. Heat shimmered over the slow-moving, dark bayou waters. The high humidity seemed to magnify the vibrant colors of lush foliage and caused the white clouds overhead to writhe and swirl constantly, a phenomenon explained by Aaron who was somewhat of a weather authority, being a pilot. When Daniel got back to Alaska, he was never going to complain about the cold again.
Seen from the air yesterday, the Southern Louisiana bayou country had looked like one of Aunt Mel’s lace tablecloths. Better yet, like an illustration of the vascular system of the human body, veins and arteries going this way and that, except that here it was hundreds, maybe thousands, of different streams twisting and turning through the land. Up close, the landscape was even better. The scenery was an amazing assault on the senses, both visual and otherwise. Swarms of insects. Butterflies of every color and size imaginable. That fishy mud smell in the streams, along with decaying vegetation, offset by the almost overwhelmingly sweet aromas coming from flowers the size of saucers. A great blue egret stood, one-legged, on a partially submerged cypress log, its long neck and bill extended, waiting for its next meal to appear. A deceptive calm enveloped the area, deceptive because the area was teeming with all kinds of dangerous animals. The creepy live oak trees dripping gray moss helped to paint a picture of both peace and peril.
Daniel had to admit to being enthralled. He hadn’t expected to like the bayou country. He still wasn’t sure that he did. But a sense of coming home filled him the deeper they got into Cajun land. And Aaron felt it, too. He could tell by the way Aaron’s hands tightened on the steering wheel and the rapt look Aaron kept darting his way as if to say, “Can you believe this?” Maybe there was something to that genetic memory crap some folks claimed to exist.
They found Tante Lulu’s home on Bayou Black a short time later, and Daniel was pleasantly surprised as they pulled onto the crushed shell driveway. Instead of the trailer on concrete blocks he’d been halfway expecting (yeah, he was guilty of a little cultural bigotry, or maybe it was low expectations because of the way his mother had been treated), there was a trim little cottage covered with climbing roses, a penned-in vegetable garden, and a life-size statue of a saint standing in a circle of pansies. And a ten-foot, armor-plated alligator sunning itself in the backyard!
“Holy frickin’ Dixie!” Daniel exclaimed as they both rolled up their automatic windows, which immediately turned the inside of the car into a sauna. “What the hell is that?”
“An alligator,” Aaron answered.
“I know it’s an alligator. What’s it doing here?”
“Well, the bayou is only a hop, skip and a gator jump down the lawn,” Aaron pointed out.
“Don’t be a wiseass. What are we gonna do?”
Aaron laid on the horn. “We’ll see if Louise Rivard is home, first of all.”
“And let her come out and handle the alligator?” Daniel asked.
“You have a better idea?”
He didn’t.
Aaron laid on the horn a few more times, but there was no movement from within the house. Even though it was only eleven a.m., the old lady must already be at the wedding.
“Guess we should have asked at the beauty salon where this wedding was going to be held,” Aaron said.
“Or we could just go back to the hotel, relax by the pool, and come back tomorrow,” Daniel contributed.
“Nah. Since we’re already here . . .” Aaron pressed on the horn and didn’t let up for a couple of seconds. Aaron knew very well that he probably wouldn’t be able to talk Daniel into returning on this fool’s errand again, if they left now.
Meanwhile, they both watched with fascination as the huge reptile raised itself on short stubby legs and started ambling their way, faster than you would expect a creature of a thousand pounds, give or take, to move. When it got closer, it opened its mouth, displaying enormous piano-key size teeth, and let loose with a mighty bellow which caused them both to jump in their seats. By now, sweat was rolling down their foreheads and necks, and not just because of the humidity.
“Oh, shit! That gator roar was probably a broadcast to all his fellow gators up and down the bayou, ‘Hey, everyone, check out these two idiots in a metal coffin’,” Daniel pointed out.
“Don’t be such a killjoy. This is fun.”
“Are you nuts? Let’s get out of here.” Aaron had turned off the engine when they’d stopped because the vents were just blowing hot air. Did gators eat metal? This one looked as if it could devour a bus, let alone a little Camry.
Just then, there was a knock on the passenger window which about caused Daniel to have a heart attack. He turned, halfway expecting to see a herd of alligators, but instead
saw an old man wearing denim overalls, the kind with shoulder straps, and no shirt, but heavy work boots, trying to get his attention. He had a garden rake in one hand and a cigarette with a long ash in the other.
Daniel rolled his window down halfway. “Hurry up and get in the backseat before that alligator gets any closer.”
“Huh? Why would I do that? Thass jist Useless.” The guy sure was brave with only a yard tool for a weapon. You’d think he was carrying a rifle or something. Daniel would, if he lived here, which, God forbid, he ever would.
“It won’t seem useless when that creature gobbles you up,” Daniel said.
The old codger looked at him as if he was crazy, then cackled at some hidden joke. Hidden to Daniel, anyhow. He didn’t see anything funny in this situation.
The old guy took a long draw on his cigarette, blew out a smoke ring, then dropped the butt to the driveway, stomping it out with his boot. “Useless is the gator’s name. All he wants is some Cheez Doodles.”
Daniel and Aaron’s jaws dropped as the man went over to a metal garbage can beside the house, took out a handful of the cheese snack and tossed them toward the backyard. The gator immediately turned and trotted away, eating a row of the orange crunchies on its way.
“Have we landed in Wonderland yet, Alice?” Daniel asked his brother.
“I think so.”
“I get first dibs on being the Mad Hatter.”
“No kidding. You’re already a little bit mad.”
“And getting madder by the minute. This ranks up there with one of your top ten crazy-ass ideas, Aaron. Even worse than the time you talked me into zip-lining off that cliff during a hailstorm.”
“It wasn’t hailing when we started.”
“Honestly, let’s get out of Dodge. We came, the old lady wasn’t here, no reason why we should hang around. Let’s forget this whole thing.”
“And you think Aunt Mel will be satisfied with that explanation?” Aaron asked him.
They both knew the answer to that.