Touchy Subjects (27 page)

"Are you fishermen?" one of them asked excitedly, and Bunch said, "No, ma'am. We're federal agents." They peered at his dark, serious face and twittered even more, and one of them asked if she could have her picture taken with him, and afterwards she tipped him ten dollars.

"I don't think the Bureau's gonna approve,
cher
commented Pitre as the tourists drove off waving through their shiny windows.

"I'll put it in the Poor Box on Sunday," said the younger man.

Pitre let out a sort of honk through his nose, got back in his boat, and said something about checking that alligator bait he'd left hanging off a tree.

"You marinade the chicken good?"

"It stinks worse than your wife," Pitre assured him, and drove off, the snarl of his engine ripping the blue lake like paper.

When the older man got to the other side of the cypress swamp, the shadows were lengthening. His gator bait dangled, untouched except by the hovering flies. Pitre cut the rope down and hung it from another tree at the south edge of the basin, where he'd seen a big fellow the year before, thirteen feet if he was an inch. Pitre wondered how much gators were going for an inch,

these days. You could sell the dried jaws to tourists, too. Tourists would buy turds if you labeled them
A
L
I
T
T
L
E
B
I
T
O
F
B
O
N
T
E
M
P
S
F
R
O
M
C
A
J
U
N
C
O
U
N
T
R
Y
.

It was cool, there under the trees, with the duckweed thick as guacamole, making the water look like ground you could stretch out on. All the other guys had gone home; Mudd Swamp was his own. Pitre leaned back against an empty crawfish cage and rested his eyes. The air was live with small sounds: a bullfrog, the tock-tock of a woodpecker, the whirr of wings.

He thought it had only been a minute or two, but when he opened his eyes they were crusted at the corners, and the evening was as dark as a snakeskin around him. He was somewhat ashamed of dozing off like that, like an infant or an old man. He couldn't read his watch by the faint light of the clouded moon. He supposed he was hungry, though he couldn't feel it; his appetite had shrunk with the years. Maybe he could fancy some fried oysters. The outboard motor started up with a cough, and Pitre maneuvered his way through the flooded forest. He veered right by the big cypress with the wood-duck box nailed onto it, then picked up some speed.

The stump reared up beneath his boat like a monster. Pitre flew free. The water swallowed him with a cool, silken gulp; it filled his eyes, his ears, plugged his nostrils, and got under his tongue. Pitre couldn't figure which way was up. He reared, shook the duckweed off his face, retched for breath. The water was no higher than his waist. You could drown in a couple of inches. He tried to take a step, but one of his legs wasn't working, damn the thing.

He told himself to stop splashing around. Gators were drawn to dogs, or to anything that moved like a dog. Pitre was shuddering with cold now; it sounded like he was sobbing. He turned his face up to the mottled sky.
Que Dieu me sauve.
A tag from a prayer his grandmother used to say.
Que Dieu me sauve.

The moon came out like the striking of a match. Vast and pearly, it slipped through the branches of a willow tree and lit up the whole swamp. Pitre looked round and saw exactly where he was. His boat was only the length of a man behind him, not even overturned. He crawled over, got himself in after a couple of tries. There was a water hyacinth caught in the bootlaces of his smashed leg. He heard himself muttering,
Merci merci merci.
The motor started on the first try.

Before Pitre was off his crutches he'd started putting up signs. The ones nailed to electricity poles along the Interstate said simply
S
W
A
M
P
T
O
U
R
S
E
X
I
T
NOW. Along the levee road they went into more detail:
E
X
P
L
O
R
E
T
H
E
W
O
N
D
E
R
S
O
F
M
U
D
D
S
W
A
M
P
2
+ ½
M
I
L
E
S
FARTHER, OR PITRE'
S
WILDLIFE TOURS TWICE DAILY NEXT LEFT.

Bunch rode the older man pretty hard for it. "What makes you think anybody want to get in your beat-up skiff and go round a little swamp no one's ever heard of? When they could be cruising in comfort in Atchafalaya Basin or Lake Martin?"

"If you build the signs, they will come." Pitre pursed his chapped lips and banged in another nail.

Bunch snorted. "And what's that marker you've hung up on the big willow that says 'Site of Miracle'?"

"You may mock," said Pitre, fixing Bunch with his small eyes, "but I know what I know."

"What do you know,
mon vieux?
"

"I know I was saved."

"Here we go." Nearly dying was a funny thing; Bunch had seen it take one of his aunts the same way: she kept her rosary knotted round her fingers like some voodoo charm.

"And now," said Pitre, wiping his forehead, "I've been called by the Spirit of the Lord to turn away from killing."

"Killing? Who've you been killing?" asked Bunch, pretending to be impressed.

"Crawfish, I mean."

The younger man let out a whoop of delight.

"I've been called to lead tours of the wonders of creation," said Pitre, thrusting a blurred photocopied leaflet into Bunch's hands.

Bunch read it over smothered chicken at his uncle's Cracklin' Café in Eunice. It made him snigger. Old Pitre couldn't spell, for one thing. "
I will tell you and show you also, a great variety of mammals, fish, and foul.
"

As he drove back to the Bourdreaux Landing that afternoon to check his cages, he noticed that
F
R
E
N
C
H
S
P
O
K
E
N
had been added in fresh paint to all the signs.

By the beginning of june there was a little queue of tourists at the landing, most mornings. They shaded their eyes and gawked at the glittering blue sky, the lushly bearded trees. They were from Belgium and Mississippi, Seattle and Quebec, all over the map. They giggled and flicked dragonflies out of each other's hair.

"Hey, Pitre," Bunch called, as he drove up in his truck one day.

The other man walked over, counting twenties.

"I've got to hand it to you, my friend, you've drummed up more trade than I ever thought you could. You or the Spirit of the Lord!"

Pitre nodded guardedly.

"How many tours a day you and your heavenly buddy doing now?"

"If you're going to mock—"

Religion was one of those points folks couldn't bear to be pricked on, but how could Bunch resist? He put his hand on his heart. "
Mon vieux,
you've known me since I was a child. You probably got liquored at my christening! Don't you know mocking's my nature? It's him upstairs that made me that way," he added, straight-faced.

"Or the other guy," said Pitre, turning on his heel.

"So how many tours?" Bunch called after him.

"Four. Maybe five."

Bunch whistled sweetly. "Five tours a day at two hours long? What say I give you a hand, before these tourists wear you out, your time of life?"

But age was another of those sensitive points. "I'll manage," growled Pitre, and walked back to his boat.

In the middle of the night Bunch had a bright idea. He picked up a five-dollar box of pecan pralines in Grand Coteau, scattered them over tissue paper in his wife's old sewing basket, and sold them to the Mudd Swamp Tour queue at two dollars a pop. When he turned up the following day with a tray of alligator jerky, a party was staggering off Pitre's boat, their eyes bright with wonder. "It's so green out there," said one of them, and her friend said, "I've never been anywhere so green."

Bunch had sold a fistful of jerky by the time Pitre came over, his burnt-brick arms tightly crossed. "Get away from my clientele."

"Your what?" laughed Bunch.

"You heard me. Parasite!" Pitre cleared his throat wetly. The next boat party, filing past, were all agog. "I'm trying to do the Spirit's work here, like I've been called to—"

"You've been called, all right, old man. Called to make a fast buck!"

Pitre turned his back and jumped in the boat, surprisingly lithe. It bobbed in the water, and the tourists squealed a little.

By the time he got them out under the cypresses, he'd recovered his temper. The sun was a dazzling strobe, and the sky was ice blue. Iridescent dragonflies skimmed the water, clustered in a mating frenzy. "Lookit there, folks," Pitre said quietly, pointing through the trees at a great white egret on a log, its body one slim brushstroke.

"Is that a swan?" shrieked one little girl. At the sound, the bird lifted off, its huge snowy wings pulling it into the sky.

Pitre's visitors knew nothing about the wonders of creation. He considered it the least he could do to teach them the names of things. He showed them anhinga and glossy ibis; "Go to the state prison, you'll find twenty guys serving time for shooting ibis, that's the tastiest meat," he said sorrowfully. He pointed out water hyacinths in purple bloom, a turtle craning its neck on a stump, and a baby nutria wiping its face with its paws.

"So where's the alligators?" asked a New Yorker with a huge camera round his neck.

"Well, as I told you the start of the tour, I can't guarantee one," said Pitre. "They mostly look like logs. Yesterday's tour we saw three, but it's colder today; they don't come up much till it's sixty degrees or thereabouts."

"There!" yelped a small boy, pointing at a log.

Just then Bunch roared by in his boat, which was ten years newer than Pitre's, with a fancy air-cooled outboard on the back. Cutting the motor, he floated within ten feet of the tour. "Morning, all."

"Crawfish biting?" asked Pitre, cold.

"Some," said Bunch with his gleaming smile. "You folks seen that big-fella gator over there by the houseboat?"

It sounded like bullshit to Pitre, but of course his party clam-oured to be taken over there right away, where the nice young man had said. Pitre spent fifteen minutes edging the boat round the shoreline, peering at dead wood and doing slow hand claps to attract any gators in the vicinity. "I'm sorry, folks, I try my best for you, but there's no guarantees in this life," he said at last. "We gotta learn to be grateful, you know?"

But the tourists were not grateful, especially when he admitted that no Louisiana alligators had ever been known to kill a
human being. They were not content with blue herons and water snakes, or a fifteen-hundred-year-old cypress, and even when he rounded up the tour by taking them to the
S
I
T
E
O
F
M
I
R
A
C
L
E
sign and narrating his rescue from drowning by the God-sent appearance of the full moon, they were unimpressed. When they had driven off in their various SUVs, Pitre saw that there was only seventy cents in his tip jar.

Monday was wet and chilly, but on Tuesday the sun came up strongly again. Pitre sat by his boat all morning, squinting into the distance. His throat was dry. At noon a group drove up in a Dodge Caravan.

"Over here," he called to them hoarsely, "Pitre's Tours, that's me."

"No, I think we're booked on the other one," a lady told him brightly.

He was about to tell her that there was no other one, when a motor started up behind him with a flamboyant roar and he turned and saw Bunch, wearing a fresh white T-shirt that said
B
U
N
C
H
'
S
E
N
C
H
A
N
T
E
D
S
W
A
M
P
T
O
U
R
S
,
C
H
I
E
F
G
U
I
D
E
V
I
R
G
I
L
B
U
N
C
H
.

"This way, ladies, gentlemen!" cried Bunch.

Pitre just stared.