“Oh. I thought it might be yer hormone clock tickin’. Ya are gettin’ to that age, dearie.”
Val gritted her teeth and restrained herself from strangling the old lady, who shared a bed with her.
Two years without sex, and what do I get? Me and Grandma Moses in the sack together! An AARP sleepover! Can life get any better than this?
Rene was outside on a sleeping bag under the mosquito tent. Smart guy! Putting some distance between himself and the Matchmaker from Hell. Or even worse, the Match-breaker from Hell.
Every mosquito and flying bug in Louisiana appeared to be here tonight, drawn by their exceedingly warm human blood. The temperature felt like 110, and sleep was proving impossible. Thus, Val’s midnight chat with I-have-an-opinion-on-every-freakin’-thing-in-the-world Tante Lulu.
“Did it ever occur to you that not every woman yearns to be a baby machine?”
“Ya gots the hips fer it.”
Valerie bristled. “Are you saying I’m fat?”
“No. Jist that some wimmen try to deny whass obvious.”
“And that would be?”
“That they’s made fer bein’ mothers.”
“What makes you think I would be a good mother... not that I have any inclinations in that direction?”
“Best ya be careful, girlie, or yer time clock’s gonna explode in yer face one of these days.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“No need to be swearin’. St. Jude’s in the house, you know.”
Actually there were tacky St. Jude statues all over the place, inside and out. The old lady had a thing about decorating in a saintly style, and she imposed it on her nephews as well.
“What it means is that sometimes a body keeps sayin’ they doan want somethin’, over and over, almos’ like they’s tryin’ to convince themselves. Then, when they finally wake up and realize they really did want it after all, it’s too late.”
“Is that your long-winded way of saying I don’t know what I want?”
“Well, alls I’m sayin’ is doan wait till yer hormones is rusty afore gettin’ a lightbulb moment.”
Rusty hormones? That is just super. Now I’ll be picturing my body parts rusting out “Doan take it personal, though.”
Oh, no. There’s nothing personal about rusting femaleness. “Listen, I know you mean well”—actually, I don’t know that, but I can be diplomatic when I want to be—”but I’ve just never had an inclination to clone myself, or cuddle babies, or provide an heir for some man. My goals lie in other directions.”
“Like?”
“Like being the next Barbara Walters. Like having my own television show. Like being influential—the top of the heap.”
“Ya sound jist like yer mother. I see her real estate ads on TV all the time. Betcha she could sell a house to a turtle.”
“I am not like my mother,” Valerie said icily. “Not at all.”
Her tone must have seeped into the old biddy’s thick head because she patted her on the belly. Tante Lulu had probably been aiming for her arm and missed. “I know yer not like Simone. I jist meant yer ambitious like she is. Those developments that she put in outside Houma musta raked in millions fer her.
Bayou Paradise, she calls it.”
Valerie felt herself blush. “I can imagine what Rene and his tree-hugging cohorts must think of that.”
“They calls it Bayou Parasites.”
Valerie cringed. She didn’t have to be a rocket scientist or an environmentalist to know the effect those luxury homes with their swimming pools and man-made lagoons must be having on the bayou ecosystem. Not that her mother would care about that.
Hell, I don’t care, either. Well, hardly. Ok ay, I do care, but I prefer not to think about it.
“What I meant when I said you and yer mama were alike is that yer both ambitious,” Tante Lulu emphasized again.
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“I din’t say that. There’s good ambition and bad ambition. Besides, who says wimmen cain’t be ambitious and have a family? Even Barbara Walters had a bebe, dint she?”
“I think so, but if you can’t give a hundred percent to something, whether it’s a child or a career, you shouldn’t do it.”
“Hmmm. I wonder if you feel this way ‘cause yer an only child. Betcha if you’d had a brother or a sister, you’d feel different.”
“Hah! My mother and Joan Crawford were cut from the same mold. I shudder to think what she’d have done with more than one child.”
Tante Lulu reached over to pat her again, and this time she didn’t miss her forearm. “I heard stuff ‘bout how she treated you a long time ago, but it hardly seemed true.”
Oh, great! People had known about her abuse, or suspected it. That’s all she needed. Pity. Maybe back then, it might have helped. No... no, it wouldn’t have. It would have just angered her mother and made her take better care to hide her actions. Nothing would have changed, really.
“My mother never hit me,” she said. “It was never really abuse.” I cannot believe I am defending the witch.
“Hah!”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, iffen ya step in somethin’ soft, ya cain’t go callin’ it pudding.”
“That makes absolutely no sense.” The scary thing was that it did make some kind of warped sense to her. “I don’t want to talk about my mother anymore. And I don’t want to talk about having babies, either.”
“So what should we talk about?” Tante Lulu asked.
How about nothing?
“I know. We kin talk about sex.”
“No thanks.” That’s all I need. Sex advice from a Grandma Moses.
“I know stuff.”
Ican’t imagine what. “No thanks.”
“Betcha doan know the best way to make a man get down on his knees and beg.”
Oh—my—God!
Playing possum . . .
It was just past dawn when Rene saw Val walking toward him, a piece of toast in one hand, coffee in the other, and a wild glint in her dark eyes. Sharing a bed with Tante Lulu would do that to a person, he supposed.
Or more likely, the glint was for him. He braced himself for the onslaught.
The air was a little cooler this early in the morning, but the swirling clouds in a clear blue sky above and the steam rising on the water presaged another scorcher. The willows and cypresses that lined the banks provided little relief from the unrelenting sun. But the black and orange Monarch butterflies that flitted among the butterweed blossoms were having a field day.
He was sitting cross-legged near the bank, shirtless and shoeless, wearing the black boxers he’d slept in last night— a Christmas gift from his half-sister Charmaine. They were imprinted with red lips, but in the dark the lips glowed and became tongues. A real kidder, that Charmaine was.
For a second, he wondered if his boxers were decent attire, then shrugged, deciding that they were no more indecent than his running shorts on Vial’s curvy body.
Rene had been up for an hour. It was his favorite time of the day, watching the jet-black night explode suddenly, bayou style, with the brightness of a new day. All the wading birds came out then—herons, egrets, ibises— leaving their roosts to find food for their young. Laid out on the grass next to him were a green trout and several sac-a-lait, or crappies, which Tante Lulu would put to good use.
“You’re up early,” he remarked, trying to be friendly.
“You would be, too, if you shared a bed with a senior citizen version of Dear Abby.”
Uh-oh! He arched his eyebrows at her.
“She wants to tell me stuff about sex.”
“Uh-oh!” he said aloud.
“Stuff that would, and I quote, ‘make a man get down on his knees and beg’.”
He had to smile at that image, him down on his knees begging Val the Ice Princess for God-only-knows-what. On the other hand, he had a really good imagination. Two years.
“It’s not funny
.”
“I beg to differ.”
“Nice undies,” she said, eyeballing his shorts. “But I think I prefer your superhero ones.”
“They don’t fit anymore.” In more ways than one, baby.
She made a snorting sound of disgust, then she jerked backward as she got a closer look at him.
“What is that in your lap?” she demanded to know, scrunching up her nose with distaste as she sank down to the ground next to him.
Oh, good Lord, am I having a morning hard-on? Son-of-a-bitch! I can’t take me anywhere, he thought, his face heating with embarrassment. But then he realized that she referred to the baby possum all curled up and sleeping on his upper thigh.
“That has got to be the ugliest creature on the face of the earth. And, eeew, what a long tail! Is it a rat?”
“No, it’s a possum. Chester has a broken hind leg— probably the reason his mother tossed him out of her pouch. Possums are only about the size of a bee when they’re born. He’s probably about two months old.”
“Chester?”
“Remember that guy with a limp on those old Gunsmoke shows?”
She shook her head at his hopelessness. “Why are you holding it? Please don’t tell me your aunt is going to cook it up for breakfast along with those fish.” She glanced pointedly at his morning catch on his other side.
“We Cajuns do eat possum, but not baby possums,” he remarked with a grin. “I’m considering whether to put a splint on Chester’s leg and hope the mother takes him back. Or whether to just let him fend for himself.”
“Which would mean that some alligator or snake or even a heron would gobble him up,” she concluded.
He shrugged. “That’s the way of nature. Only the strong survive.”
“I’m beginning to see the dilemma here. The environmentalist in you doesn’t want to interfere with the natural order of things. It would be breaking the code or something, right?”
He grinned at her. “Yeah, but sometimes rules are made to be broken.” With those words, he tickled Chester behind the ears, then flipped him over on his back. The animal made a small squeaking noise and instinctively pretended to be dead, all four paws stuck comically up in the air, even the bent one. Sometimes possums, when cornered, pretend to be dead, as in “playing possum.”
He reached over to get a broken piece of paint stick and tape. Once he got the leg straight and braced with the makeshift splint, he told her, “Wrap that tape around this, please.” Chester was beginning to struggle and Rene couldn’t hold him in place and tape at the same time.
Val got up on her knees and did as he asked... without hesitation, to his surprise. When she was done and they both examined their work, he suddenly became aware of her closeness. And she became aware of him, too, in that moment when their eyes connected. He had to remind himself that she was not his kind of woman. Not even close. But two hot-damn years?
There was an odd laughter in his head then. Maybe it was St. Jude getting his jollies over his sad attempts at self-delusion. Who was he kidding? He was attracted to Val, all right, and always had been.
She blinked rapidly several times, stunned by the sizzle that had sparked between them. He was stunned, too. Then she frowned, as if blaming him for pulling that sexual current out of thin air, all by himself. “Don’t think you can catch me off guard and lure me in like one of your groupies.”
“Groupies?” He hooted with laughter, the connection broken—thank you, God, or St. Jude, or whomever. He put Chester in the palm of his hand and stood.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that you play in a rock band, and that women swarm all over you.” She stood, too, and dusted off her butt, which he was definitely not looking at. Definitely. Not. And he wasn’t thinking about two years, either.
“The Swamp Rats are a far cry from a rock band. Frankly I can’t remember the last time I was approached by a groupie, unless you count Wanda, the waitress at The Last Chance Saloon in Biloxi. And she only wanted change for the jukebox.”
“You are such a liar. I can tell by the way you blinked. People don’t realize that they give themselves away all the time by their body language. So don’t think you can fool me. Ever.”
He better make sure he didn’t have any impure thoughts about her. Which of course caused him to immediately have impure thoughts about her. I am so screwed! “Come on. Let’s see if Chester can find his way home.”
They walked to the edge of the clearing and set the possum down, aiming him toward the wooded area where Rene had found him whimpering earlier. Chester stumbled a few times, going down on his chubby tummy, but then he limped off slowly, hopefully toward home.
He and Val smiled at each other, the first genuine smile they had exchanged in probably forever. His heart constricted in the oddest way.
Tante Lulu came out on the porch then and called out, “Breakfas’ is ready. I gots grits ‘n cane syrup, boudin ‘n dippy eggs, beaten biscuits and white gravy. Come ‘n get it.”
“Holy crawfish! I’m the one gonna need Richard Simmons by the time she leaves,” Rene said.
“Does she cook this much food all the time?” Val asked him.
“All the time. And if you don’t eat, she acts as if you’ve put a spike through her heart.”
“Back to your passion for the bayou. Let’s make one thing perfectly clear. I am not going to help you.
But I’ll give you a bit of advice. You are not going to change people’s minds about the Louisiana environment with some dull documentary on saving the snail darter.”
“There are no snail darters in the bayou.”
“Whatever! Smaller coastline. Missing plants. A disappearing animal no one has ever heard of. People just don’t give a damn unless it hits them personally. Remember Bill Clinton’s campaign for president? His advisers kept harping, ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ Well, I’m telling you that you’ve got to find an issue that screams, ‘It’s about you, stupid!’“
She made a good point. The problem was, he had no clue what that issue could be. Unless.. . ? He smiled as an idea came to him. “That’s why I came home and gave up the fight. Even I know that plants are about as exciting as a lawnmower manual. But let me be the first to tell you, baby, there are going to be a whole lot of Cajun men, and their women, who are going to be unhappy campers come ten years or so down the line when they discover the Juju plant is no longer available.”
She waited for him to elaborate, but he was no fool. He knew how to play her strings. Well, some of them. He held his silence, like a regular Cool Hand Luke.
“All right, I’ll bite. What’s a Juju plant?”
Yeeees! He gave himself a mental high five. “It’s the substance that gives Cajun men that extra zip, if you know what I mean.”
“Puh-leeze.”
“Really. When the oil fields were going gangbusters over in Texas, lots of Cajun men went over there to work. The Texas women went ballistic, practically jumping their bones, because they were such great lovers.”
“Puh-leeze,” she said again.
But that didn’t deter him. She was listening, which he took as a good sign. “When the Texas men wanted to know what their secret was, the Cajun men told them that their mamas had been giving them Juju tea ever since they were old enough to get the notion.”
Val was shaking her head from side to side, as if he were a really hopeless case. “I’ve heard that story before, except they usually credit the fat in crawfish as the secret to their supposed virility.”
“Both of them work,” he continued with a wink.
“Nice try, Rene”.”
He put up both hands. “Hey, I’m only reporting what they say. I’m not saying it’s true or not.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I think you made up this whole story just to distract me. You like to tease me, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Because you’re so teaseable.”
“How immature!”
“That’s me.”
“Let’s go eat. I’ll probably gain twenty pounds before I emerge from this nightmare, for which you will be responsible.”
“Is that a crime, too?” He laughed. “A fat felony?” “If there isn’t a charge for that, I’ll create one.” “I know a real good exercise,” he offered. She sliced him with a glare. “Or maybe not.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Professor Doolittle, that’s who he was. As in do little . . .
One day later, and Valerie was still sitting not-so-pretty in the middle of bayou hell.
It was only mid-afternoon but the skies were dark and a high wind was rising, which had prompted all the bayou animals to run for cover. Humidity was hovering around the hundreds, if the perspiration pouring off her body was any indication. Hopefully they would get some welcome rain soon to relieve the sweltering heat. If nothing else, Valerie was hoping the cistern would finally be filled so she could take a shower instead of bathing in the stream.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor before Rene’s bookcase, she was trying to find something to read, but all she saw were nonfiction books, almost all of them dealing with the bayou, everything from simple swamp biology to Mike Tidwell’s Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast. Behind her, a humming Tante Lulu was cooking up another zillion-calorie Cajun feast for dinner, happily content to wait till someone in the freakin’ world came looking for them.
Rene also appeared happy with so little, which amazed Valerie.
He was outside on the porch, where a Baton Rouge country-western station blared on the satellite radio. A Toby Keith marathon was apparently going on, and he sang along with each good-ol’-boy song:
“How Do You Like Me Now?” “I Love This Bar.” “Who’s Your Daddy?” Rene had a really nice voice, she had to admit. She could see why the Swamp Rats, the musical group he played with on occasion, were so popular throughout Southern Louisiana. As he sanded the stair railing, he occasionally danced, too. Hands upraised. Fingers snapping. Hips rolling to the beat. Needless to say, he was a good dancer.
She wondered idly what else he did well.
No, I don’t. Definitely not.