Snow on the Bayou: A Tante Lulu Adventure (17 page)

Even if he wanted a future with Em, and he wasn’t sure either of them did want that, he lived in California and she lived in Louisiana. He had no intention of leaving the military, and there wasn’t any big market for Mardi Gras masks in the Golden State.

He was jumping ahead of himself; he knew he was.
But his body and his mind and his emotions were overflowing with joy at having been with the woman he loved, even for only a few hours. He wanted more. He yearned for more. He had to have more.

The question was: What would that “more” entail? Seeing her and making love when they could grab some spare time between them? Would that be enough? He feared that wouldn’t be nearly enough. But it was what he’d signed up for with Em last night. Her conditions.

Cage stopped at Tante Lulu’s cottage on his way home. Luckily, Useless was nowhere to be seen, probably off cruising the bayou for a female Useless, or looking for Cheez Doodles from some other brain-dead softie. Without knocking, not wanting to awaken anyone if they were still asleep, he opened the unlocked door and went inside.

It was only 7 a.m., but JAM was already up, tapping with one hand at a laptop on the kitchen table and cradling a cup of coffee in the other. He glanced up at Cage, then did a double take. “Someone’s been laying pipe.”

Cage actually felt a blush heat his face, and he never blushed. “Why do you say that?”

“
Pfff!
You look like every cell in your body is relaxed, for one thing. Besides, you smell like lemons. Not sure what that means, but since you didn’t smell like fruit yesterday, I figure it must have something to do with sex. The boy’s been fruited!”

“That’s some leap of logic. And there’s no such word.”

“Did someone say somethin’ ’bout lemonade?” Tante Lulu asked. She came into the kitchen wearing pink foam rollers in her gray hair, a housecoat with purple and orange flowers, and fluffy slippers. A St. Jude medal the size of a hubcap hung around her neck. “I ain’t got no lemons ta make lemonade.”

“That’s okay,” JAM said. “We can just dip Cage upside down in a water barrel.”

Tante Lulu sniffed the air. “You do smell lak lemons, boy. Whadja do, take a bath in lemonade?”

“No,” he said, but that was an idea he might consider later.

Tante Lulu began to putter around the kitchen, so he and JAM went out on the back porch with coffees and sat down in the rockers. It was chilly, but not uncomfortable.

“So what’s the plan?” Cage asked.

“I’m gonna pick up Slick, Magnusson, and K-4 at the airport in Baton Rouge this afternoon,” JAM said. “After you go home, Geek will go into Lafayette to open the two apartments. The feds are sending in special agents, as well. They’re setting up a command center as we speak, as well as the two apartments for temporary quarters. Geek and I are going to continue to come back here every night as much as possible so we won’t raise any suspicions about why we’ve been staying here so far.”

“Right. If you cut off your visit with Tante Lulu abruptly, it will just reinforce those suspicions about why you were staying here to begin with.”

“How about you talk to John LeDeux, the Lafayette cop? The commander gave permission for that.”

Cage agreed. Once he made sure his grandmother was all right, he’d give the cop a call.

Unfortunately, other matters took precedence.

When Cage got to his grandmother’s house, he found her up in the attic with Geek, bringing down thirty-to forty-year-old-mementos. Of his father. Including his old guitar.

Cage’s heart, which had been aching for Em, now began to ache for an entirely different reason.

A mother’s work… rather, a grandmother’s work… is never done…

Mary Mae LeBlanc was no fool. Yes, she had lung cancer. Yes, she was dying. But her brain was still fine, and she knew that Justin needed to confront the past, the past being his father. Since he wasn’t doing it himself, she was going to have to jump-start his motor.

She was already up in the attic, which was accessed by a drop-down ladder in the ceiling of the hallway outside her bedroom, by the time Justin’s friend Darryl woke up. She had to giggle at the expression on the boy’s face when he’d found her peering down at him. Nigh had a heart attack, he did. Or a hissy fit.

“Are you crazy?” Geek had yelled at her. “Cage is gonna kill me if he finds out I let you go up in an attic by yourself. It can’t be good for your breathing with all that dust up there. You could have fallen and broke your fool neck.”

“Then no one would hafta wait fer the cancer ta take me,” she’d replied, not at all apologetic.

So he’d climbed up there with her and begun to carry down boxes at her direction. Some she indicated could go to Goodwill. Some to the trash. And some to Justin’s bedroom, where she could sort the contents with him.

“Don’t you need your oxygen?”

“I’ll let ya know when I need my oxygen.”

“How about breakfast? Let’s go have breakfast.”

“I’ve already had toast and coffee. Oh, ya mus’ think I’m a terrible hostess. I shoulda made ya some sausages and eggs and such. Let’s go down right now. Lordy, Lordy, what was ah thinkin’?”

“I don’t need breakfast yet,” he’d grumbled. “Let’s finish while we’re up here. Who does that guitar belong to?”

“Beau. Justin’s daddy. Be careful. It’s sort of an heirloom.”

They were still up in the attic when Justin arrived. She assumed it was him by the sounds of the animals getting riled up. The dog and cats, and the birds, each of which was squawking, “Hoo-yah! Hoo-yah! Hoo-yah!” and “Hubba Hubba Ding Ding” and “Cage is a hottie,” and most recent, “Seal the deal, baby! Seal the deal!”

She heard him calling out for her, “MawMaw? Where are you?” Then, “Geek? Hey, buddy, what’s goin’ on?”

When he came into the hallway, she and Geek both peered down through the opening.

Justin’s eyes went wide, his mouth gaped open, and then he said a bad word before snarling, “Get down here. Right this minute.”

She stiffened. “Yer not my momma. Ya doan give me orders. And ’specially ya doan yell at me.”

“Sorry for yellin’, but son of a brick, MawMaw, you ’bout made me pee my pants I was so scared.”

“No need ta be swearin’!”

She thought she heard him mutter, “Ya ain’t heard nuthin’ yet.”

Darryl went down the steps before her and he talked in a low voice to Justin.

“Doan ya be blamin’ yer friend fer nuthin’,” she hollered down through the opening. “I got an itch ta take care of bizniz up here t’day, and no one was gonna stop me. Not even you.”

“Okay, okay,” Justin said, raising his hands in surrender. He helped her come down the steps, then told her, “Go put on your oxygen and start breakfast, if you’re up
for it. Geek and I will bring everything else down. Is there anything that you want to keep in the attic?”

“I won’t know ’til I look it over,” she sniped, but she
was
feeling short of breath.

Darryl commented to Justin, “Call me crazy, Cage, but you smell like a lemon.”

It was true, Justin did smell lemony.

“It’s shampoo, if you must know,” Justin told Darryl.

“We ain’t got no lemony shampoo here,” she said. “Why was you washin’ yer hair someplace else? Ya ain’t got much hair ta wash anyhow.”

Justin gulped several times like he wasn’t sure what to say, but Darryl came to his rescue. “Must be that lemon air freshener I put in your Jeep. The car smelled like dirty socks before.”

Mary Mae nodded, although she suspected Justin had been up to no good. He’d been out all night, after all. “Mebbe I will go lie down for a bit with mah oxygen tank.”

Justin and Darryl exchanged glances.

“You want me ta help?” Justin asked.

“No! I doan need no help walkin’ ten feet.”

By the time Justin came in to check on her… it might have been five minutes or an hour later… she was half asleep. Time was she coulda worked from dawn to dusk and had energy left over for other things. Now the least thing tuckered her out.

“MawMaw, are you all right?” Justin asked, leaning over the bed.

“Jist fine. Lemme take a little nap. Then I’ll come out and make some breakfast fer you and yer friend.”

“That’s okay. Geek already left, and I had something to eat at Tante Lulu’s house.”

“Good. Musta been lemon meringue pie, by the smell of ya. Which wouldn’t surprise me, with Tante Lulu,” she murmured when his head almost touched hers as he studied her,
probably to see if I’m dead or somethin’. Not yet!
She adjusted her cannula as she burrowed into her pillow. “One thing, Justin. Promise me you’ll look through the boxes I put in yer bedroom.”

The boy had to know that the boxes contained papers and photographs and items that had belonged to his father. For too many years, Justin had avoided the painful subject.

There was a long pause, then, “I promise.”

When she fell into a deep sleep now, she was at peace. Rufus was there in her dreams, smiling at her. More and more, her beloved husband was in her thoughts and in her dreams. It was a sign, she believed, that her time was winding down.

But first, she had to get Justin settled.

Fishing works better than any psychiatrist’s couch…

F
irst, Cage tackled the oldest boxes, figuring they would be safest for his well-being. These were picture albums of Mary Mae and Rufus as they were courting, then marrying, and the early years of their only child, Beau LeBlanc, Justin’s father.

Rufus had been a soldier in World War II when he married Mary Mae Prudhomme. The sepia-toned photograph showed his grandfather wearing a jaunty cap on his head and a dress uniform, standing next to his grandmother in a floaty white dress. They looked so young and so happy as they stared at each other, and actually, they had always looked at each other like that. Yes, there had been hard times and soul-deep grief, like the day they buried their only son, but mainly he remembered the joy of life…
joie de vivre
… that was a part of their everyday lives.

How had they done that?

The one big grief of his life—the loss of Em—had
pretty much destroyed him. And he had to admit, he’d handled it poorly. On the outside, he’d pretended a happy attitude, but inside, he had been bitter, and his resentment had eaten away at him, as poisonous as the cancer that was destroying his grandmother. He was a living, walking cliché. The crying clown.

But no, who was he kidding? It was his father to blame for the self-destructive path his life had taken. A common criminal who died in prison. What kid wanted a father like that? What father wanted his daughter to marry into that family? No wonder Claude Gaudet had been so against Cage as a partner for his only daughter!

Oddly, Cage had never pointed an accusing finger at his mother. She’d never been around after he was born, except for sporadic drug-induced phone calls, her addictions going back even before Cage’s birth. The only clean period had been during her pregnancy and then only because of the close supervision of Beau and the grandparents. Maybe that was it. He’d never had her; so it was hard to blame her for doing nothing. But his dad had seemed to try. There had been the promise of a good father-son relationship. Beau LeBlanc had let his son down in the most primal way.

His grandmother walked in now slowly, her hair standing up in sleep-mussed disarray from her one-hour nap. Sinking painfully down onto the opposite twin bed, she adjusted her cannula and portable oxygen tank, before staring at him dolefully.

She looked like hell, and Cage felt fear grip his heart like a claw.
Not so soon. Please, God, not so soon.

“Hand me that one over there, hon,” she said, pointing to the shoe box labeled with a black marker,
BEAU’S LAST LETTERS
.

“MawMaw, please, it makes no sense to stir up old miseries.”

“It does when those miseries have never had a chance to be put away proper. Jist ’cause a chicken has wings doan mean it kin fly.”

“What the hell—I mean, heck—does that mean?”

“Appearances doan mean diddly. Fer all yer life, ya been judging yer daddy by appearances,” MawMaw declared.

“Huh?”

“Justin, yer daddy loved ya more than anythin’ in the world.”

“Bullshit!” he said, even though he knew his grandmother hated bad language. “If he loved me, even a little, as a father should, he wouldn’t have been robbin’ gas stations, or gettin’ into bar brawls, or gettin’ himself killed in prison.”

MawMaw shook her head sadly. “Yer daddy was a good-hearted man. When yer Momma got pregnant, he gave up all his dreams of Nashville and stood by her. He knew we would take care of ya, me and Rufus, but Marie dint have no one ta catch her when she fell. And she fell lots.”

“Are you sayin’ my father picked his wife over his child?”

“He saved the one that needed savin’ most. You.”

“As far as I kin tell, he didn’t succeed.”

“I’m shamed ta hear ya talk lak that. He did his best, and he loved ya, doan ever doubt that.” She opened the box and handed him the letter on top. It was addressed to Rufus and Mary Mae LeBlanc, and it had the Angola Prison stamp across the front, warning the receiver that this was mail from an inmate, in the event they didn’t know that already. “Read it ta me,” she ordered.

“MawMaw,” he protested.

“Read it,” she insisted. “I doan ask fer much.”

She didn’t. That was true.

He glanced at the date on the envelope. December 1993. One month before Beau LeBlanc was killed, when Cage was fourteen years old. He hadn’t seen his father for four years before that. With a sigh, Cage opened the envelope and began to read:

He glanced over at his grandmother with question. “This is the first I’ve heard about my father gettin’ royalties and that there was any account fer me.”

“I told ya that yer father had talent as a musician. He sang an’ he played the guitar, but he also wrote songs, and some of ’em got sung by some important people.”

“Like?” Cage asked skeptically.

“That George person. Smith, or some such common name.”

“Do you mean George Jones?”

“Yeah, thass the one.”

“Holy shit!” he muttered.

His grandmother gave him a dirty look.

“A bank account?”

“All gone now. Well, ’ceptin’ fer some what come in recently. I ain’t checked the past year or so. How do ya think me and Rufus was able to support ya durin’ the lean years when the shrimp weren’t comin’ in?”

Truth to tell, he’d never wondered. Shame on him!

“The papers on Beau’s songs are in a safe at Lucien LeDeux’s office. I tol’ ya that ya need ta go in one day and look things over.”

He put a hand to his forehead. “I could swear that the only thing you mentioned was a will and
your
bank account info.”

“Papers is papers,” his grandmother said, as if he was thickheaded for not having understood that.

“Luc has been real helpful, y’know. He made sure the songs got copyrighted or whatever they call it when no one kin use yer songs without payin’ fer the privilege. Yer papa had an agent who usta call here sometimes. Luc will have his name and number and all.”

An agent? My father had an agent? Holy shit!

He’d once dated a well-known romance writer. She’d told him it was harder to get an agent than it was to get a publisher. “You never mentioned songs at the lawyer’s office. I thought you meant wills and stuff like that. Just out of curiosity, would I recognize any of the songs my father wrote?”

“Mebbe.” His grandmother tapped her chin thoughtfully. “How ’bout ‘Prison Is a State of Mind’?”

Cage’s jaw dropped. “Are you kiddin’? I know that song. It was one of the last ones recorded by Johnny Cash. And it was just included in an album by Jason Aldean. I heard about it on some country music radio station.”

His grandmother shrugged. “That box over there has lots of songs he wrote while in prison. He never got a chance ta do anythin’ with them.”

Un-be-fucking-liev-able!

It struck Cage then that his grandmother and grandfather must have been suffering intensely having a son in prison and then later a son dying in prison. And all that time, he’d
been more concerned with his own hurts and had been running wild, causing his grandparents even more grief.

“Keep on readin’.” His grandmother had rearranged some pillows and she propped herself up against the headboard to be more comfortable.

Cage glanced at his grandmother. “What does he mean about Marie fouling up his life?”

“He was sent to Angola for armed robbery, but the gun wasn’t his. It was Marie’s. She talked him inta burglarizing some lady’s apartment in the French Quarter fer some expensive jewelry. Oh, doan get me wrong. Beau made mistakes, but so many of ’em stemmed from tryin’ ta help Marie.”

“Did he love her that much?”

“I’m not sure he ever loved her. When she got pregnant, he married her, and after that, he felt responsible fer her. As he should have.”

“That’s just great! Now
I’m
the cause for daddy’s downfall. If not for me, none of the rest would’ve happened. Talk about!”

“Doan be an ass,” his grandmother said. “You were the best thing that ever happened ta yer daddy, and he said so many a time.”

Cage felt like he was being bombarded with conflicting emotions. His father had clearly been a criminal. He
had not been there for Cage on numerous occasions when he was growing up. Never having a steady job, he hadn’t supported his family. A loser, that was what Cage had always thought.

But maybe his father hadn’t been a loser. He’d clearly had talent, and he had been trying to rise above his mistakes. Kids couldn’t see beyond their own wants and needs, but Cage was an adult now—he should be able to understand that people were human, and they didn’t always do the right thing.

“You have ta understand, MawMaw, that I grew up believin’ I was from bad seed, and that I would never amount to anythin’.”

She gasped. “Who tol’ ya such a thing?”

Claude Guadet, for one.
“Lots of folks. Sometimes ta mah face, but mostly behind mah back, loud enough fer me ta hear.”

“Ignorant folks! Good Lord, boy, surely ya dint believe them.”

He nodded his head. Yeah, he did.

“If you was bad seed, what did that make me, or your grandfather? Do ya really think I’m a bad apple?”

“Of course not.”

“I’m glad ta hear that ’cause I’m gonna be meetin’ mah Maker soon, and I wouldn’t want ta be showing up as a bad apple.”

It was a lousy joke, but Cage attempted to smile anyhow.

“Justin, honey, we were all created by God. No one is born bad. Thass not the way the Lord works.” She shimmied herself off the bed and came over to the other bed, where he sat. Leaning down, she gave him a hug. “I need ya to make peace with yer daddy afore I kin go. Mebbe ya cain’t ever fergit the pain, but ya kin forgive. I hope so.”

He read the rest of the letter before she left.

As he finished reading aloud, his grandmother began to weep and walked slowly from the room, saying nothing. What could she say? Cage felt crushed, and he wasn’t sure why. Secrets and misunderstandings, that was what killed families.

Now that he was alone, he stared around him with dismay at all the boxes to go through. He had to smile on seeing his father’s guitar case and in two other boxes an old cowboy hat and well-worn boots, which were incidentally his precise size twelve, because, of course, he was remembering Em’s fantasy. Did he dare? Hah! Did he dare not?

There were boxes of clothing, which he put on a Goodwill pile, along with a collection of early
Playboy
magazines, which he figured Geek might be able to sell on eBay. Little boys throughout time had learned where to look for their first forays into the forbidden world of sex. His father’s hiding place had been under the floorboard beneath the bathroom sink. The skin mags brought a smile, too.

Any paperwork, whether letters, or legal documents, or handwritten song lyrics, were set aside for later study. There was only so much of an emotional kick in the gut he could take in one day.

By noon he had his Jeep packed to the roof with Goodwill items, some boxes put back in the attic, and only a few boxes left for him to handle. “I think I’m gonna go out and try my hand with Daddy’s ol’ rod and reel,” he told his grandmother, who was sitting on the couch reading the daily newspaper with Elvis crooning a soft ballad in the background and the scent of fresh-baked bread wafting from the kitchen. It was like time standing still. Could have been 1954 or 2014. What would happen to this house once his grandmother was gone? Oh, he knew that all her
worldy goods, including the house, would go to him, but would he keep it or sell it? Hard decisions. He used to have a handle on his life. Now the handle was broken, and so was he. He felt lost and confused. Clearing his throat, he said, “I’ll see if I can catch us somethin’ good fer dinner.”

“It’s kinda chilly. Better put on a jacket.”

He grabbed a hoodie hanging on a peg near the door and went down under the house to the storage area where he’d seen his father’s old fishing supplies the day they’d cleaned the yard. He grabbed the rod and reel, along with a bait bucket. Soon he had minnows captured and one of them hooked on his line. Thad was sitting beside him on the bank, looking forlorn. “I’m workin’ on her fer ya, buddy,” he promised, and the dog actually appeared to nod its big head in thanks.