Reverend America: A Journey of Redemption (18 page)

“Bird watching,” grinned the matador. “The Golden Needle Beak Woodpecker—supposedly extinct. She found one again in the bayou—which she has perhaps already wasted the remainder of her fortune on trying to turn into yet another Bird Sanctuary and Wildlife Reserve. It made the news, but nothing will come of it. She’d have done better to have moved into the basement and turned a blind eye to the fiesta. When the oil company’s legal department has dragged the case out so long the damned woodpecker has become extinct again, she’ll be sorry. That’s one of the things I learned in prison. There are times to roll over.”

Casper frowned.

“Yeah,” spat the little red fireball, and would’ve tried to stab her uncle in the gut had Hoptree Bark not found the matador’s flamenco guitar.

The old man, who hadn’t said a word since his frontal with Shelby, began with Fernando Sor, Opus 6, Number 11 in E Minor. From there he moved on to Francisco Tárrega’s “Recuerdos de la Alhambra,” fingering the rich 19th century Spanish guitar music like a virtuoso. It was amazing to hear the sounds he was able to produce with no apparent effort—but then he made a subtle shift into another stream of music altogether . . . and began to sing in a tired but compelling voice, as lost as old chestnut leaves down an empty street . . .

Behind a Western water tank a dying hobo lay

Inside an empty boxcar, one cold November day

His comrade sat beside him with low and drooping head

Listening to the final words the poor dying hobo said

I am going to a better land, where everything is bright

Where hand-outs grow on bushes, and you can sleep out every night

His voice grew weak, his head fell back, he’d sung his last refrain

His partner swiped his coat and hat and caught the eastbound train

The old man had been telling the truth, or a kind of truth, Casper thought. He could’ve been famous. Or should’ve been. Fool people well enough and maybe you are who you say. That’s what Poppy said.

He felt a warm rush of loyalty toward his fellow strangers and pilgrims. He glanced at Angelike and saw that she too was entranced. Even Shelby Verril III, whose parents would’ve hemorrhaged to have known he was in the same mirrored room as a gay Latino drug addict and an illiterate doll girl prostitute and unwed mother-to-be—let alone some superannuated hobo musician and a reedy albino with blood on his hands—was swaying back and forth in his nightgown playing air guitar along with Hoptree—who’d cut loose on a “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” romp. Then he stopped cold.

“He’s dead!” Shelby cried.

“Bravo!” Enrique clapped languidly, thinking the old man was joking.

“Hoptree . . . ?” Casper tried, reaching out . . .

“He ain’t dead!” Angie insisted, taking a deep breath. “He—he’s jes . . . Sheet! He 
is
 dead! Damn you!” she yelled at Shelby, reaching for the estoque.

She found the sword and came at him, filling the walls with distortions. The more Shelby scrambled, the more ferocious she became, chopping at the nudes with the steel blade, slashing the foam heads of the David’s and Adonis’ so that they bounced on the floor or bounded into the mirrors.

Shelby took off for the sewage and safety of the pool again, which he never reached because he tripped and found himself on the floor with a sprained ankle, his nightgown hiked up over his head, exposing his creamy pale bottom to the girl’s wrath. He would’ve been run clean through had not the old man whirred back into life and announced in a digitalized accent, “You’re now standing in the Fossil Fish Alcove, where we will find jawless fishes called ostracoderms, which appeared during the Ordovician.”

“Es más inteligente de lo que parece,” Enrique remarked (who while no one was watching had swallowed a capsule with the emblem of a toucan bird on it).

“That’s the self-guided tour voice!” Casper exclaimed. “From the Museum of Natural History. He’s gone kite flying.”

“Kite flying?” Enrique belched, think the drug was coming on especially fast.

“It’s a special kind of senior moment,” Casper answered.

“I think y’all are having a senior moment!” Shelby howled from the floor, struggling to cover and right himself at the same time. “I don’t know what that old coot’s saying, but it wasn’t my fault!”

“Naw,” sniffed Angelike, smacking him across the back with the blade so that he once again collapsed on all fours. “You didn’t even see him, ‘cause you had a mangy ole bull’s head on and yer dick strapped up in a fur thong. Wait ‘til your college buds hear ’bout that! I took some pictures on my cell phone when you was out,” the girl snickered. “You’ll be dragged by a pick-up down Guadalupe Street—and skinned alive under a pecan tree.”

“Welcome to the Osborn Memorial Hall dedicated to odd-toed ungulates or perissodactyls, which became the horses, rhinoceroses and tapirs . . . ”

“¡Por Dios!” Enrique cried, feeling a rush of colorful adrenalin.

“What the fuck’s he sayin’?” Angelike demanded, pricking Shelby’s ass.

“He’s having a flashback to those recordings he’d listen to,” Casper replied. Angelike looked poised to give a sword paddling. Fortunately for Shelby, the telephone the girl didn’t think the house had, rang.

The interruption allowed the sop to regain his feet, while it sent Enrique flurrying off into another part of the house. Angelike stood rock still. Hoptree Bark was now talking about the Warren Mastodon. It was left to Casper to answer the incessant phone, as if the call was for them. Which it almost was. Because even some very odd things are connected.

Roy’s Bait ‘n’ Tackle wasn’t called that for nothing—or maybe it was. There’d never been an actual “Roy” who owned the establishment—the name had been chosen because it inspired confidence. It was at least better than “Hosea’s Bait ‘n’ Tackle” or “Quimby’s Bait ‘n’ Tackle,” which is what it might’ve been if Ananda Rogere’s husband had named the business after himself.

Hosea Quimby was a white native Louisianan who’d grown up accepted by both his Cajun and black neighbors because he could do three things very well. He could fix any outboard motor made. He could pierce the eye of a baitfish with an Eagle Claw fish hook blind drunk in the dark without losing any of his own blood—and he could shoot—normally quite well (providing he wasn’t blind drunk and it wasn’t dark). Inside the modest residence (more of an old plywood trailer) that abutted the business, rising out of the saw grass and palmetto beside a sludge-colored marsh called the Bayou St. Jude, a prize pronghornantelope head taken in Texas stared down from the wall beside a huge tusker, and a steel gun rack which only a short while ago had secured a Franchi Falconet over-and-under and a Marlin 444 with a Leupold variable scope, one of the most powerful lever action rifles in the world.

On a workbench inside sat a reloading press and scales, cartridge cases, primers and tubs of powder. Ananda Rogere had left everything just as it was the day that her husband took his last shot and blew a considerable portion of his head off on a little island back in the swamp (which meant that the fire ants found him first). She even kept the name ROY’S and sometimes imagined there really was a Roy, who was one day going to return from Key Largo, grateful for how she’d minded the store in his absence. He’d save her from the cross she had to bear, which consisted of her sixteen year-old son Merrit, who two years before had been permanently brain-damaged by a bullet intended for some unknown swamp creature (which the locals referred to as the Murker). The bullet had been fired from her husband’s single shot bolt action rifle, which ended up being thrown by Ananda into the tea-colored slurp after Quimby had turned that same gun on himself (a year to the day following the accident with Merrit). Then there was Mrs. Nedd to consider, a desiccated black woman, who claimed to be 160 years old and had lived alone in a snakeskin and cypress wood cabin until a boating accident (involving Quimby, a bottle of alligator wine, and a Mercury 55 horsepower speedboat) had left her confined to a wheelchair, which isn’t easy living on a bayou—and so Ananda felt obliged to take the dear hag in, providing her with a small pointed rake to ward off the crawfish which she insisted were always coming to attack her.

It was this same beleaguered Ananda Rogere who was on the other end of the telephone when Casper answered, and in the background he could hear the sweaty night sound of frogs, as this woman, who was more than half-way through her third tumbler of Cutty Sark, not sure who she was speaking to and uncertain who it was she’d wanted to speak to, tried to make him understand that the reason she was calling was that the shotgun was gone from the rack.

Merrit, semi-vegetable that he’d turned into, had taken time off from what since the accident had become his all-consuming hobby, curating arguably the largest private collection of frogs (toy frogs, beanbag frogs, plastic frogs, glass frogs, plaster frogs, cement frogs, giant frogs, miniature frogs, real frogs) to help “Miss Hermione,” thinking that she wanted a gun for protection, living as she did, despite her money, out on that rusty barge in a Quonset hut made of timbers from an old slave cabin, with nothing in the way of comfort but an Irish linen pillowcase stuffed with Spanish moss.

Casper’s ears pricked up at the mention of 
Miss Hermione
, and five very confusing minutes later he was able to grasp that Angelike’s aunt had persuaded Merrit to remove the shotgun from the gun rack and to locate a box of shells. Hermione then took the weapon and the ammo and adjourned into what remained of the cypress, in her little aluminum fishing boat with the Evinrude motor.

The conversation grew even a bit more confusing then, as someone else at the other end, perhaps Merrit the Frog Boy, momentarily intervened. But eventually, Casper was able to fathom that after Miss Hermione’s disappearance, a letter had arrived for her from a medical clinic in New Iberia—which, since Ananda served as the local postmistress, she’d opened—to discover a grim oncology report and a warning that “Miss Hermione” was on the verge of becoming very ill.

So it was that Casper was finally able to piece together the reason that lay behind the call to what Ananda believed to be a former husband of the woman she’d known on and off for twenty years, and who she’d come to be very fond of. Hermione, while she’d never have demeaned the Quimby-Rogere’s by giving them any money outright, was the principal benefactor of the Little People’s Frog Museum (with the advertisements done with a paint roller in marine whitewash and Army surplus green, which read HOP IN AND HELP THE HANDICAPPED—an expression Ananda favored, as she reckoned phrases like “Intelligence-Challenged” were the sort of modern foolishness that had encouraged her to stay on the bayou all these years, where folks whether they be coonass, black or cracker, called a spade a shovel and a crappie a sacalait).

Hermione, not knowing that she had cancer when she left Austin, had come back to the bayou to fight the Evolution Oil Company, to turn all of St. Jude’s Parish into a wildlife reserve to protect the reemergence of American species thought to be extinct, specifically the Golden Needle Beak Woodpecker and secondarily, the Checkerboard Terrapin. What she hadn’t counted on was that the Evolution Oil Company had, at least in strategic commercial terms (in the wake of an unfortunate oil spill), decided it might be time to start living up to their name and look around for some ways of redefining themselves in the marketplace. The upshot was a dramatic shift in their regional business focus, whereby they proposed turning their drilling platforms into wetland observation towers with interactive multimedia displays dedicated to the rose spoonbill, the scarlet ibis, and the lost animals that had found their way back into the food chain.

Where once had been fishing huts, Army Corps of Engineer levees and Jax beer bars full of riggers, pipeline workers, fishermen, loggers, mudbuggers and mosspickers—the new Evolution vision called for ecotourism units to rival anything the Everglades or Okeefonokee could offer—filled with vacationing executives and their families (and the occasional celebrity)—buying toy crawdads, t-shirts, CD’s, cookbooks and barbecue aprons—while watching egrets regurgitating minnows through personally fitted stereovision helmets with real-time expert commentary in any of 10 languages. Hermione’s confirmed sighting of a Golden Needle Beak Woodpecker had been greeted with such enthusiasm there was even talk at board level of trying to replace the silhouetted chimpanzee with a graphic of the woodpecker as the company’s new logo.

Her real enemy it turned out was ENTERTAINMENT WORLD, a Disney subsidiary intent on turning southwest Louisiana into a giant theme park called ACADIA.

There’d be re-creation Cajun huts, serving sanitized Cajun food—playing sanitized zydeco music (not the sawdust and shells chankychank that mixes so well with boiled crawdads and beer). The black people would all be physically remarkable with exceptional singing voices and an easygoing graceful dignity (black guests could select an optional aura of wisteria and gumbo, while whites could choose bacon fat and Octagon soap). You could pole off with laconic crawfishermen in pseudo-cypress pirogues into the engineered mist. Visit Greenpeace-approved mink and nutria farms. See big-breasted, fiery-eyed Cajun beauties feeding raw meat to gators. At least that was the plan.

Now they thought they were sitting pretty because their most vocal opponent, in discovering that she had terminal cancer, had elected to bow out with the help of a great Southern icon, the 12 gauge shotgun, and the way looked clear to pay off the cash strapped fuel company and put the woodpeckers and terrapins on the payroll.

For Ananda it was a bitter development, although Hermione didn’t leave behind a brain-invalid son and a wheelchair-bound old black woman to be looked after. Still, it couldn’t help but conjure up dark memories of Quimby. But while his body had been found first by fire ants, Hermione’s corpse had been discovered by a Fish and Wildlife inspector out looking for turtle poachers—and had been returned to the dock at Roy’s Bait ‘n’ Tackle and was now wrapped in polyethylene in Ananda’s largest freezer, housed in the back of the barn-boat shed that served as the Little People’s Frog Museum - Admission $5 adults, $2 children, Handicapped (Any Kind) FREE.

Hence the Cutty Sark induced telephone call in the middle of the night. The only next of kin Ananda had any idea of was Enrique in Austin. Did he want to come and collect the body for proper burial? 
Would
 he come and collect the body—or at least remove it from the big freezer, normally dedicated to blue cats and lunker bass? It was a long shot, she knew. But out of respect for Hermione, she was bound to try. And she did have hopes of getting access to her freezer again soon. Was there someone else that she could call?

“No,” said Casper, once he’d finally grasped the complex state of affairs. He took down the details of where the little hamlet of Prophecy Creek could be found, and the woman’s telephone number, explaining that representatives of the family would be there late the following day. Then he hung up and the woman and the frogs were gone.

All the while this had been going on, Angelike had been braced with the sword, listening to the noises Enrique was making upstairs. It was late now and the well-to-do Austin suburb was quiet but for the occasional house alarm or barking guard dog, so that the crashing sounds seemed particularly loud—not to mention the rumba music. Shelby, not wanting to incite further anger from the girl, sat bleeding on his nightie trying to take in what Hoptree Bark was saying, which seemed to have something to do with the Ahnighito Meteorite, discovered centuries ago by the Eskimos in Greenland.

Despite the fact that he was being sucked into this imaginary guided tour, Shelby’s natural concern about further humiliation and possible impalement made it hard not to think of making a run for the front door. Angelike meanwhile, had one ear out for her ex-uncle and one on Casper’s elliptical conversation. She knew the subject of the call was Hermione, but that it wasn’t her aunt calling, so that meant something was wrong.

Casper saw that she suspected the worst and so decided not to beat around the bush. “I’m sorry to say your aunt died,” he said. “That was a friend of hers in Louisiana. She was calling Enrique because she didn’t know any other family. Your aunt found out she had cancer. Too late for treatment. She took her own life.”

“H-how?”

“Gun.”

“Really?” the girl swallowed, eyes widening. “What kine?”

“A Franchi Falconet 12 gauge. But she did make a confirmed sighting of a Golden Needle Beak Woodpecker. Just like the matador said.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I think it meant a great deal to her. The woman wanted to know if you wanted to claim the body for burial.”

“So, whair is she? The morgue?”

“The woman owns—a bait and tackle business.”

“My auntie’s in a fish locker?”

“The woman’s tried hard to do the right thing. She has a business to run and a brain-damaged son to look after—and an old woman who . . . ”

“How you fine out all that?”

“Never mind. I thought you’d want to go. I said we were coming.”

“Sheet. Everybody’s dyin’ on me.”

Casper sagged at this, but managed to say, “I’m still here.”

The girl gazed up at him just as Hoptree was introducing the Willamette Meteorite, weighing 31,000 lbs., discovered in 1902 by a Welsh miner named Ellis Hughes, who with the help of his son secretly excavated it and dragged it to their property.

Shelby decided this was the time to make a break—but he didn’t spot the David head lying on the floor, which he booted barefoot. It arced up straight at the hallway entrance just as Enrique reappeared—no longer dressed in his smoking jacket but wearing a faithful replica of the Glinda the Good Witch costume worn by Billie Burke in 
The Wizard of Oz
. Mind aflame with color and confusion—the kicked head hit him squarely on his own with such force he went over like a statue.

Shelby fared no better, pitching forward and falling heavily, breaking his aquiline polo family nose.

“So, do you want to go?” Casper asked, uncertain how these latest developments had changed things.

“Yeah,” Angelike answered, although she had no idea what to do with another dead body, especially since she didn’t have much money and was going to give birth any day. “I can’t let her lie in no fish freezer. But what we gonna do with ‘im?” she asked, pointing at Hoptree.

“We’ll have to take him with us,” Casper said. Did it matter if the old man was lost in the American Museum of Natural History? There was room in the Buick, and he was their responsibility. He’s my responsibility, Casper thought. No man left behind.

“Somebody help me!” wallowed the bloody Shelby Verril.

“Hush yer mouth!” Angelike ordered. “I’ll run that sword through yer butt yet.”

Shelby went quiet and they escorted him to the guest wing to be deposited on a lacy 4-poster bed for examination. Casper concluded that it would be unwise to take him to the hospital at this time of night. His injuries weren’t all that serious. For Enrique’s own good they decided to restrain him and were surprised to discover a soundproofed room with just such a purpose in mind. Manacles dangled from the walls—chains and a kind of high tech pillory designed to put the lower half of a person’s body in a compromised position.

With both their “hosts” accounted for, Casper suggested they try to get some sleep. It had been a long day’s drive and the trip to Louisiana would be more of the same. Their money was running low, time was running out on the pregnancy—and Hoptree Bark had meandered into a commentary about the skulls of Cenozoic equids.