The Red-Hot Cajun (24 page)

Rene had made a joke one time when they were back in the bayou about Alice in Wonderland. Well, by early that afternoon, that’s exactly where Valerie felt she had landed.

Justin arrived first, looking all single guy studly in dark ponytail and tight jeans. After he’d told her that he was part Houma Indian, Valerie could have kicked herself—being a jury analyst and all—for not recognizing his heritage from his high cheekbones and coloring.

He was a handsome man—another thing she had failed to note before—and Rene disliked him on sight. Valerie took a warped delight in his blatant jealousy. To which, his aunt kept muttering, “The thunderbolt, fer sure.”

But Justin wasn’t the only visitor. J.B. and Maddie came uninvited—heck, no one in this crowd waited to be invited. They were overly enthusiastic about the documentary that she hadn’t sold and Rene” hadn’t yet agreed to.

Tee-John arrived last. He looked at Rene, looked at her, then let out a hoot of laughter. “Who’s been having wild monkey sex?” Then to Tante Lulu he inquired, “Got anything to eat, Auntie?”

Tante Lulu beamed. “Is the Pope Cath’lic?”

They sat around the living room now, taking voluminous notes on the documentary. Tante Lulu was in her glory in the kitchen, cooking up enough food to feed an army. She had sent Tee-John out for groceries soon after he arrived, and he was helping her prepare “a little snack.”

Rene was brilliant in giving a passionate description of the destruction of his beloved bayou. He had a way of reducing dry, complex ideas down to the ridiculous. That talent would be appealing on camera, if they were able to talk him into doing it. For example, he wouldn’t just say that it was a monumental problem involving the land in Southern Louisiana sinking or the massive erosion caused by oil company canals.

Nope. He would say, “Every twenty minutes a landmass the size of a football field is disappearing in Southern Louisiana.”

And surprisingly, J.B. and Maddie were equally eloquent in expressing their feelings about their beloved land.

“That writer Mike Tidwell said in his book that this was the greatest untold story in America, and it is, by God. But dammit we can’t get people to listen,” said J.B “Even the big environmental groups don’t join up with us. Partly because they think of us as backwards people, and partly because we ain’t got no cute animal that’s endangered, like a grizzly or a fox.”

“People get all het up over the rain forests in Brazil or the Everglades in Florida, but they jist don’t realize what effect Southern Loo-zee-anna has on the rest of the country,” Maddie added.

Even Tante Lulu threw her two cents in from the kitchen. “I cain’t hardly find haf the herbs I need for healing. They’s buried underwater now, or dead from the pollution.” As annoying as she could be, Valerie admired the tough old bird.

Justin went out to his truck for a minute to get some kind of camera equipment he wanted to show them. J.B. and Maddie went to the kitchen to test Tante Lulu’s gumbo, at her insistence. Rend leaned over on the couch and pinched Val’s thigh. “Wanna scoot upstairs for five minutes of hanky-panky?”

“Get real.”

“I don’t like that Justin.”

“You’ve made that obvious.”

“I think he’s gay.”

She laughed. “Where would you ever get that idea.”

“He wears a ponytail.”

“Ozzy Osbourne wears a ponytail and he has three kids.”

“Great example, toots.” He chided her.

“David Beckham then. He has a ponytail.”

“No, no. You already said Ozzy.”

“Ponytail does not equal homosexual,” she argued, even though he was probably kidding.

“He’s not your type,” he threw in, no doubt figuring new tactics were needed.

“What
is
my type?” she asked before she had a chance to bite her tongue.

He winked at her. “Me, baby. Me.”

That’s what I’m afraid of

After another hour of brainstorming, they decided on a rough plan for the documentary. Valerie would contact and interview various Louisiana conservationists, including members of the Coast 2050 committee, along with scientists and oil company employees and executives. Justin thought, and he was right, that they needed visuals of the bayou’s deterioration, and that meant that they needed to go deep into the bayou to get the real story. They decided they would take J.B. and Maddie’s shrimp boat and travel along various bayous that led out to the Gulf. It was impossible to make the whole journey in that one boat, however. Some parts would be over land, where they would pick up their journey in another vessel. J.B. and Maddie had numerous friends who worked or lived on the water. They would interview people along the way—the people most affected by the bayou’s deterioration: fishermen, farmers, storekeepers.

“Tante Lulu should come, too,” Justin said.

“What?”
Val and Rene said at the same time.

“Now, hear me out. You need color in this piece, and she is colorful to say the least. Plus, she’s a
traiteur.
More color. And she knows lots of people .. . the born-and-bred Cajuns who could tell us stories of the old days.”

Valerie whimpered. She thought she heard Rene’ whimper, as well.

She took a deep breath and said, “You’re right.”

“Well, if Tante Lulu is going, I am, too,” Tee-John interjected from the kitchen doorway. “I can do all the grunt work on the boat. And fish for our food, and stuff.”

“Dad would have a fit,” Rene pointed out. Their father owned a part of Cypress Oil, having sold them family lands about thirty years ago. He would, indeed, have a fit if not just one, but two, of his sons were working on a project that could affect him adversely.

“Pffff!
Half the time he doesn’t know or care where I am,” Tee-John contended.

“This documentary project is getting totally out of hand. It’s not at all what I envisioned,” Rene said.

That probably meant he would allow Tee-John to come along.

“That’s not the half of it,” Justin told Rene, then looked pointedly at Val.

“What now?” Rene asked, looking not at Justin, but at Val.

“You have to be the figurehead for this piece,” she pleaded. “You’re good-looking and charming, when you want to be, and...”

Rene waited for her to finish. When she didn’t, he prodded, “... and?”

“And virile,” Justin finished for her.

“Oh, no! Not that again!”

“Really, Rene, if we want big-time publicity, there has to be a hook. I’m talking
Oprah, Good
Morning America, Dateline, 60 Minutes,
if we hope to really nudge the politicians.”

“When Val told me about the Juju plant and male virility, I knew we had a hook,” Justin continued.

“And, let’s face it, Rene you exude male virility.”

Rene gave Valerie a look that said, “See? Gay to the bone.”

Which he was not. Valerie knew that for a fact. One of her co-workers at TTN had dated him at one time and had given glowing reports on his prowess.

“Get someone else. How about J.B.?”

Everyone turned to look at J.B. with his scruffy hair and scruffy beard and bleary eyes. He was eating a beignet at the moment and had sugar everywhere.

It was J.B.’s wife who exclaimed, “Get real!”

“I could do it,” Tee-John asserted, thrusting out his chest.

“You probably could, but you’re too young,” Justin said.

Attention came back to Rene. “No, no, no!” he reiterated.

“Were you lying about the plant?” Valerie asked Rene”.

“No. Not exactly. But I have no scientific proof that it really works. It’s probably just an old wives’ tale.”

“It works,” Tante Lulu yelled from the kitchen.

“Look, even the hint of such a plant will be enough,” Justin said. “It’s the old bait and switch of television. Pull them in with one thing and they’ll stay for the rest of the story.”

“A
I
on
Dieu!
We’ll have herds of people tramping through the swamps looking for the plant. So much for protecting the environment!” Rene could easily see this whole plan backfiring.

“We’ll find a way to get around that,” Valerie said. “In fact, maybe we can get my aunts Margo and Madeline on our side in the process. They could get the trademark on Juju herbal tea, or some such thing.

People won’t be out tramping through gator-riddled swamps if they can buy the same thing in town or by mail in a tea.”

“This is a freakin’ nightmare.”
Hmmm. Maybe it could work .

Valerie patted his hand. Rene cared too much about the bayou to put his personal concerns above the greater good, and so it was no surprise that he agreed to work with them in the end. But he didn’t like it.

Not one bit.

“I promise, everything will be done tastefully,” she assured him.

His only response was a grunt. When everyone headed out of the room for “a little snack,” which covered every inch of space in the kitchen, Rend pulled Val out of hearing, and said, “You are going to owe me big-time for this, babe. And I’m not talking a little hanky-panky. I’m talking a marathon of world-class, eyeballs-rolling, heart-stopping sex.”

She just smiled.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Ahoy, maties!

A week later, everyone boarded J.B. and Maddie’s fifty-foot, wooden shrimp trawler,
Swamp Sally,
on one of the smaller bayous that led out to the Gulf of Mexico. Rend wasn’t sure if he should pull out all his hair now or after this circus parade was over.

J.B. and Maddie wore matching Proud to be a Coonass T-shirts. “Coonass” is an affectionate, sometimes controversial, ethnic slur used among Cajuns. No one knows for sure the origins of the word.

Some say it came from the French
conasse,
slang for a diseased whore; others say it came from the presumed habit Cajuns had of eating raccoons. Many Cajuns employ the term as their own way of poking fun at their allegedly ignorant ways.

Lots of people thought J.B. and Maddie were a little bit wacko, but they were just eccentric. And, man, did they love each other! They couldn’t pass each other without touching—a squeeze of a shoulder, a pat on the butt, short kisses. And they had to be in their fifties, maybe late forties.

Tante Lulu arrived with enough food to sink the boat. A foot-high St. Jude statue, magnetized on the bottom, was also among her supplies; she put that in the wheelhouse. She was dressed in her version of what a shrimp fisherman would wear if he was modeling for
GQ.
A Bite Me Bayou Bait Company baseball cap covered her curly hair, which was jet-black today. A snow-white T-shirt, which wouldn’t be white for long on this boat, was tucked into a brand-new pair of jeans with a designer patch on the butt. The jeans were tucked into the rubber boots known as “Coonass Reeboks” among fishermen here.

Stepping on board, after her second trip back to her car for supplies, she announced, “I’ve decided what I’m gonna do on my birthday.”

That damn birthday party again!
“I thought we were throwing you a big birthday party. And Charmaine was getting you tickets to see Richard Simmons,” Rene said.

“Sure, but what am I gonna give myself? Well, remember how President Bush—the first President Bush—jumped out of an airplane on his eightieth birthday? Thass what I’m gonna do.”

Oh, God! What next?
“Tante Lulu, you are not going skydiving,” he said as gently as he could.

“Why? Are you afraid I’ll have a heart attack or sumpin’?”

“No, I’m afraid I would have a heart attack.”

She went off in a huff then to the below-deck kitchen galley.

Some little blonde chippie who looked sixteen going on thirty dropped Tee-John off, rock music blaring from her red convertible Trans Am. He leaned over the driver’s door and gave her a way-too-long kiss before waving good-bye. Then he picked up his duffel bag and started toward them, smiling like the tomcat he was. “Yo, Tante Lulu, my stomach, she’s agrowlin’. You got anything to eat?”

His aunt smiled as if the scamp had just told her she’d won a date with Richard Simmons.

Then there was Valerie. Lordy, Lordy! She wore a plain ol’ black tank top and shorts with white tennis shoes, but there was nothing “plain ol’“ about her. She wore a baseball cap like the rest of them with a ponytail sticking out the back. Her cap proclaimed: Women Rule. She could rule him looking like that, for sure.

“You better put on plenty of sunscreen and mosquito repellent,” he advised her, taking in all that exposed skin. The heat wave continued in Southern Louisiana, never going much below 110 degrees daytime. Sweat rolled off all of them, and it was only 9 a.m.

“Maybe you can put it on for me later,” she answered saucily.