A Trashy Affair (3 page)

“Nice blouse, Marshall,” Nadia sneered in her deep voice. “You get it at the thrift shop?”

“Thank you, a gift from my grandmother.” Because I have a grandmother, you spawn of Satan. But, Jane smiled sweetly. She hated the white nylon blouse with the ruffle down the front, and probably her grandmother
had
gotten it at a church sale to benefit the missionary fund. Gran did love ruffles and could never understand they were out of style along with nylon. The frill made her chest look huge, and being semi-transparent, the blouse showed her bra straps. At least, her jacket covered most of it, and if she spilled on herself at lunch, it repelled every substance known to man.

“I’ll be here waiting when you clock out, Marshall. Oh, pathetic performance in that 10K race the other week. You know I can run a half-marathon without breaking a sweat.”

“Impressive, Nadia. I did the best I could for charity. All my sponsors had to pay up because I finished the course. Now, I’d better get to my desk.”

“Yeah, complaints about the new trash haulers are piling up like—garbage.”

“Witty, very witty.” Jane strode away. Ever since that race, the henchwoman had been particularly vile to her. While Nadia finished first, boasting about shaving seconds off her personal best, she’d had only six sponsors, poor old Woof and a few councilmen. Jane, much more popular with the employees, had dozens sign her sheet and raised far more funds simply for finishing. “So there,” Jane mumbled under her breath. She must be careful.

Nadia had no friends, but she did have toadies who tattled to her on a regular basis. Mostly young women with limited skills and experience, they waited for Fridays when the axe woman would fire someone late in the day for a minor infraction and possibly open up a better position for them. While some were rewarded for turning in a co-worker over checking their personal e-mail or doing online shopping, most only got their workload doubled with no increase in pay. Cutting the payroll by attrition, Nadia called it.

Much as she wanted to, Jane could not afford to cross Ms. Nixon. She had a house note, renovation and car loans to repay. Employment opportunities for environmental project managers did not abound. The tighter the economy got, the less the public seemed to care about protecting the land and waterways. At her desk, Jane set to work trying to obtain a federal Super Fund grant to clean up an abandoned oil well site with a wastewater pond leaking into the bayou and fending off complaints about B.O. Waste Hauling. The morning slipped by as rapidly as spilled petroleum spread across the Gulf of Mexico.

On the stroke of twelve, Jane sprinted to the time clock. May Robin, the office receptionist and unofficial MawMaw of everyone, asked, “Not eating with us today?” The woman, a fixture since Langlois first took office, removed her own adorable insulated and reusable patchwork sack from a desk drawer. Jane encouraged everyone to use similar lunch bags rather than paper or plastic, and May had converted. The receptionist also sold the bags made by her sister-in-law to the other workers. Naturally, Jane bought one, but had left it at home this morning.

“No, I need to feed the guy who volunteered to do my yard work and then run out to the parish barn to see if I can get one of the old trashcans.”

“You still don’t have a trashcan? When I didn’t get mine I asked Bernard Freeman for help, and they delivered one right away.” May patted her bright red hair to make sure every strand remained lacquered into place. Believing no one knew her age to be seventy-three, she took personal leave time every two weeks to have her now white roots retouched.

“Evidently, B.O. is out of cans.” And she would not ask Bernard Freeman for a favor if he were the last political striver on earth. For sure, he wanted Langlois’ job.

“A guy is doing your lawn for free,” May continued, oblivious to Jane’s need to hurry. “A man in your life at last,
cher
heart.”

“No, only a friendly neighbor. I really have to leave.” She crossed the small lobby and pushed the elevator button. On most days, she would take the stairs from the fourth floor, but not now.

“I can still fix you up with my nephew. He’s an undertaker. They make great money.”

“Thanks, May, but you know I’m a career girl.”

The offered fix-up, Waldo Robin, age fifty-three, had been divorced recently by his second wife. Wife Number Two gave as her reasons for leaving Waldo that his hands were too cold and living over the mortuary freaked her out. In a town like Chapelle, Louisiana, where most people still married young or at least by the age of twenty-one, pickings remained pretty slim, but Jane had no time to hit the bars and bistros of the nearby city of Lafayette in search of love.

“Until the right man comes along,” May called after Jane as the elevator doors shut.

Now, to swing by the drive-up window at Tujacque’s, grab the pre-ordered po-boy, deliver it to Merlin, and then hit the long road to the parish barn to retrieve a trashcan. She left the elevator on the main floor, sprinted across the lofty main lobby, and exited between the huge Ionic columns of the antebellum courthouse. Doing a reverse Rocky move down the long flight of handicapped inaccessible marble steps, Jane dashed past the spot where Jefferson Davis once tried to recruit the French settlers to the Confederate cause, largely failing. She slipped on the bronze plaque inserted in the stone on a landing that noted Huey Long once stood here and won the local vote with great success, but regained her balance in time. Tourists liked to pose there, but not Jane. Finally, she reached the parking lot and raced for Tujacque’s.

The parking lot of the modest cement block building painted with a figure of a giant crawfish overflowed with trucks and SUVs. She swerved into the long line inching past the drive-up window before she realized she would have been better off going inside. By that time, a tractor pulled in behind her and cut off the possibility.

“Come on, come on.” Jane drummed her fingers on the steering wheel of her little Honda hybrid. Finally reaching the window where an old woman in a greasy apron sorted through the white paper bags one by one until she came to Jane’s order, Jane thrust a twenty-dollar bill at her.

“I’ll have to go up front for change, dear.”

“Keep it!” She peeled out for home only a mile away just across the city line. From the road, her yard looked much better already. No sign of Merlin, but a huge pile of leafy severed limbs sat on the curb. Jane drove to the back of the house and parked her car by the dilapidated garage still overwhelmed by trumpet creeper. Still no Merlin. Sack and keys clutched in her hands, she mounted the steps to the backdoor.

“It’s not locked,” a deep voice said from inside the kitchen.

Holding her keys in the defense position, she bumped the door open with her hip. Hunkered unhappily over a glass of her unsweetened iced tea, Merlin sat at the kitchen table. Sweat plastered his white T-shirt to his body. She could see his black chest hair and relaxed nipples through the fabric. Strangely, he didn’t stink but filled the room with a sort of manly aroma, not unpleasant at all.

“You got any real sugar for this? All I can find is the artificial stuff that gives you cancer,” he complained.

“Here…to go with your heart disease.” Jane thrust the grease-spotted bag at him. “How did you get inside?”

“I could have gotten in here any number of ways, broken a window, knocked down a door, but I used the key Granny always kept in the back of the garage under the old milking pail.” His black-whiskered face lit when he unloaded the sack onto her pretty, lemon-yellow tablecloth. “Their fresh steak-cut fries, too! I do love a woman who anticipates my desires. Wanna share? There’s plenty here for both of us.”

Merlin unraveled the sandwich from its white paper wrapping. Fried shrimp burst from the overstuffed walls of a small loaf of French bread. Sliced tomato, shredded lettuce, and thin-sliced onions spilled over the sides. Mayonnaise oozed from its bottom. “Fully dressed! Exactly the way I like my po-boys, but not my women.”

Jane considered lobbing the energy bar she rooted from among the apples in the fruit bowl on the table directly into his face. No time. She took her stainless steel water bottle from the refrigerator. “Enjoy your coronary and remind me to get the locks changed. I need to get to the parish barn to pick up a trashcan.”

“Hey, I’m harmless to women, children, and small, furry animals. Sugar?”

“What did you call me?” She turned to glare at him from halfway to the door.

“I asked for sugar for my tea. The only other drinks you have are diet sodas.”

Relenting, Jane set down her own lunch and returned to the cupboards. After moving some cereal boxes and packages of whole-wheat pasta around, she unearthed a sugar bowl painted with plump lemons. She took a spoon from a drawer, broke up the lumps inside the container, and handed it to Merlin. He shoveled sugar into his tea.

“You sure like lemons. Lemons on the dishware, lemons on the tiles over the sink, lemon border on the wallpaper. And some real nice lemons…” He ogled the absurd white ruffle on her blouse.

“So what!” Defiantly, she thrust her breasts out even farther.

“Coming along in the garden. My grandpa planted that tree.” He watched her chest deflate. “Yep, sour but sunny. We could make some real good lemonade in here.”

If his lips weren’t smiling, his blue eyes did. “Why don’t you sit down and eat a real meal. Plenty for both of us.”

“If I start eating Tujacques’ po-boys, I won’t fit on the kitchen chairs anymore. Gotta go. Trashcan. And by the way, the yard is really shaping up. You could do this kind of work for a living.”

“I did once when I was in high school. Dug holes, spread mulch, and worked my way up to pruning. Eat with me. Then, I’ll go along to the parish barn and help you get a can.”

“I can handle it.”

“Really. What kind of car do you drive?”

He looked out the window at her small, black Honda. She suspected he already knew.

“A Honda hybrid hatchback. It has plenty of room and gets fifty miles to the gallon, unlike the big-ass trucks most people drive around here. What do you drive?”

“A big-ass truck. Sure you don’t want my help?”

“I said no. Lock up when you finish, please. And help yourself to an apple for dessert.”

“Tempting.”

He didn’t show it, but she knew Merlin Tauzin smiled on the inside of that big body overwhelming her cozy kitchen. She was going, going, gone to the parish barn.

****

Merlin found some catsup in the refrigerator and baptized the fries with it before settling in to eat. Would have been nice to have her company for lunch right here in his granny’s kitchen, even though it looked a whole lot different now, better in fact. He suspected Jane had the ability to make lots of things better, maybe even him.

Chapter Three

The place might as well have been a ghost town in the southwest desert. Apparently, everyone at the parish barn had gone out to lunch except for a lone woman in the office who, using her ham sandwich as a pointer, gestured to the cache of used trashcans at the bottom of the small hill. “Help yourself, hon. With the shortage, they’re going fast.”

Jane threaded her way through a maze of heavy equipment dwarfing her small vehicle. Several of the machines looked as if they fed on subcompacts for snacks. She parked and began her search for the perfect receptacle. After a few minutes, she returned to the car to shuck off her jacket.

In the usual way of Louisiana weather, the pleasant autumn temperatures had given way to summertime again. Must be well over eighty degrees, she estimated. The nylon blouse stuck to her arms and back, pasted there by perspiration. Not a shade tree within a mile, but a few black vultures picked at an armadillo carcass near an earthmover and perched on its cab. They regarded Jane fearlessly as a possible next meal.

Keeping an eye on the birds, she ventured into the rows of abandoned trashcans, raising lids and slamming them as foul odors wafted into the air and maggots squirmed in their bottoms. Flies attracted to her sweat lit on her shoulders and buzzed her lips. She flailed them away. Finally at the end of the third row, she found a green container that appeared to have been washed and rinsed by some responsible citizen before they turned it in for the new B.O. model.

Joyously, she tried to drag it back to her car. Its wheels sunk into the sand pile where it had come to rest. Straining and cursing under her breath, she finally gave a good tug and got the can rolling across the lot. At her car where she’d already folded down the backseat to receive her prize, Jane popped the hatchback and prepared to lift her treasure for transport. Heavier than it looked, much, much heavier. After three tries and balancing it on her knees, she had the container at bumper level. Now to get the wheel end up and inside. The damned thing crashed to the ground again. But, she did know how to raise it again after those few abortive tries. Up and in! Not quite. No matter how hard she shoved, the wide mouth of the container refused to fit inside the hatchback. Its lid hung open over the bumper like a huge, laughing mouth. Cops were sure to stop her if she attempted to drive home this way. If she had rope, she could tie it on top of the Honda like a Christmas tree—if she could get it up there. Maybe when the men came back to work someone would help her out. One o’clock! She should have been at her office by now.

An electric blue, high-rise, double cab truck with a four by four bed and a full rack of spotlights splayed across its roof like glass antlers turned in at the gate of the razor wire-fenced compound, the first of the returning workers no doubt.

“Over here, over here!” she shouted and waved.

The truck roared like a lion about to devour a Christian in the arena and charged her way. The vultures ran awkwardly along the ground and took off for a safer realm. In a cloud of dust, the big rig came to a stop beside her hybrid, and out of that dust climbed Merlin Tauzin.

“Sure you don’t want any help with that?” he said.

“I will admit when I’m wrong. Yes, I would appreciate your help.” Better than relying on the kindness of strangers, she supposed.