Snow on the Bayou: A Tante Lulu Adventure (3 page)

This was Cage’s second week of instructor duty, and he was ready to tear his hair out, what there was of it. Usually he let his hair grow shoulder length, an exception the
Navy granted to SEALs because they had to infiltrate foreign countries where they didn’t want to stand out. Good thing he had black hair; blonds or redheads had to dye it, even their eyebrows and eyelashes… and other places. But right now he was sporting a high and tight. By the time it grew out, he would hopefully be back on active rotation.

Today was PI Friday, and that didn’t stand for physical instruction. Nope, SEALs were notoriously politically incorrect, and once a month, on a Friday, the SEALs celebrated their political incorrectness. His T-shirt proclaimed:
IT’S GOD’S JOB TO FORGIVE BIN LADEN, IT WAS OUR JOB TO ARRANGE A MEETING
. Some of the other instructors’ shirts said:
STOP GLOBAL WHINING; DEATH SMILES AT EVERYONE, SEALS SMILE BACK; EXCEPT FOR ENDING SLAVERY, FASCISM, NAZISM, AND COMMUNISM, WAR HAS NEVER SOLVED ANYTHING; A DEAD ENEMY IS A PEACEFUL ENEMY; BLESSED BE THE PEACEMAKERS;
and his favorite,
PRAY TO GOD, BUT PASS THE AMMUNITION
. Each month they tried to outdo each other with crudity or extreme PI-ness.

He glanced over toward the grinder, the asphalt exercise area by the special forces building. Then he did a double take.

There were three people standing there. Two women and Petty Officer Farley, whom he recognized by his bright red hair, even in its short military cut. Farley was motioning for him to come over.

He told his men to stand at ease until he returned. When he got closer, he noticed in more detail the tall woman with big Texas hair, the likes of which he hadn’t seen since he’d been back in the Southland, tight leopard print pants, high heels, and an itty bitty T-shirt that announced,
CURL UP & DYE
, and underneath that in smaller letters, www.charmainesbeautyshops.com. Beside her stood a little elderly woman with more wrinkles than an elephant’s scrotum, wearing a lopsided wig. She was waving wildly. At him!

He recognized them, even after all these years. “Holy Sac-au-lait!” he muttered. It was Charmaine LeDeux and that batty Cajun folk healer, Tante Lulu Rivard. From freakin’ Loo-zee-anna bayou country.

His second reaction was a puzzled frown. Why would they be here in California… and staring at him as if he were in the crosshairs of their lethal weapons?

The fine hairs stood out on his body. It must have something to do with his MawMaw, the Cajun name for grandmother.

JAM, Lieutenant Jacob Alvarez Mendozo, walked by, heading toward the beach. He indicated with a motion of his thumb toward himself and the swabbies that he was taking over. He also winked at Cage after giving Charmaine a quick once-over. As if Cage would ever be interested in the bayou bimbo! And he didn’t mean that as an insult. Charmaine had always gone out of her way to celebrate her bimbo-ness.

No, it was because Charmaine was lots older than him… and married, last he’d heard. Of course, he’d known her only by reputation. But then, everyone in southern Louisiana knew Charmaine, and not just because she’d been Miss Louisiana when he was a freshman in high school. About forty years old, give or take, she still looked damn good. As for the old lady… who didn’t know the outrageous Tante Lulu? She was a friend of his grandmother’s, but everyone from one end of the bayou to the other had heard of her antics.

Once Cage reached the group, Petty Officer Farley saluted him and went back to the command center, leaving him with the two women.

“Hey, Charmaine,” he greeted her first since she was in front.

“Hey, Justin.”

“Tante Lulu,” he acknowledged as he got closer. “It’s great to see you.”
I hope.

Charmaine shook his extended hand, but Tante Lulu grabbed on to him and gave him a hug, which was kind of awkward since he was six foot two and she was about five foot zero. She actually hugged his abdomen, and he found himself patting her blond wig, even giving it a little nudge to center it more on her head.

But why was she hugging him so hard?

Holding her away from himself, he asked right off, “Is something wrong with MawMaw?”

Tante Lulu nodded.

He braced himself before asking, “Is it bad?”

She nodded again.

“Oh, God! She’s not dead, is she?”

Tante Lulu smacked his arm. “No, she’s not dead, you lunkhead.”

“Thank God!”

“No thanks to you.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Justin LeBlanc, when was the las’ time you was home?”

He stiffened. “That’s none of your business.”

“It is when my good friend needs her only gran’chile.”

“If she needed me, all she had to do was ask. And by the way, why isn’t she asking?”

“Mebbe she dint wanna be a bother to
her only gran’chile
.”

Cage bit the inside of his cheek to keep the irritation out of his voice. “Did she send you?”

“No. St. Jude did.”

“St. Jude?” he sputtered.

“Thass what I said. Did they nick yer ears when they shaved yer fool head? St. Jude tol’ me ta go find that rascally Cajun boy and drag him home by the scruff of his neck, iffen he’s too stubborn ta know what’s good for him.”

Cage briefly closed his eyes.
I wonder what the sentence would be for throttling a senior citizen? Better yet, we could probably use her as a secret weapon against the Taliban.
He returned his gaze to Tante Lulu. “What does St. Jude have to do with anything?”

“Don’t ask,” Charmaine warned.

But it was too late. Tante Lulu put her hands on her little hips and glared up at him. “St. Jude is the patron saint of hopeless cases, and I’m thinkin’ yer as hopeless as a woodpecker in a petrified forest.”

“Now settle down,” Charmaine told her aunt. Then to Cage, she said, “Is there somewhere we can go talk?”

He hesitated, then conceded, “The officers’ dining hall should be empty.” He pointed to a building beyond the special forces center and began to walk away. Rude, yeah, but he was in a rude mood. Something serious was wrong with his grandmother, and he was having to deal with two crazy women… well, one crazy woman and another who could be an old-time calendar girl. They were like aliens from another planet. He’d forgotten how eccentric Southerners could be.

As they walked toward the dining hall, he remarked to Charmaine, “It’s been a long time.” He glanced down at her ring-clad finger. “So you’re married?”

She nodded. “To Raoul Lanier. Do you remember him?”

“I heard he was in prison.”

“Not anymore. Rusty was wrongfully convicted.”

Cage smiled. That was what they all said.

“Really. His record was cleared.”

“And you own some beauty salons?” he asked, looking at her breasts… well, at the logo over her breasts.

She smiled, apparently considering his perusal a compliment. “Yep. Five at last count. And a spa out at Rusty’s ranch.”

“Would you two stop flirtin’ with each other?” Tante Lulu griped as she huffed along next to them. “Charmaine is married.”

“I wasn’t flirting,” they both said at the same time.

“What’s wrong with yer leg? You’re limpin’ like Stumpy Benoit, who lost his toes in Vietnam.”

“I fell and injured my knee.”

“You always were clumsy.”

“I was not! And for your information, I got hurt during a HALO jump.”

“Well, thass what you get fer trying ta jump over someone’s halo.”

He blinked at her, feeling as if he’d fallen into some alternate universe.

“He means that he was hurt during a parachute jump,” Charmaine explained.

“Well, why dint he say so? I hafta pee. Kin I go in that building over there?”

“No, it’s the SEAL locker room.”

“So?”

“So men are naked in there.”

“So?”

He shook his head and continued walking.

When they were almost to the officers’ building, he
noticed Sylvester Sims, or Sly, supervising about a dozen heavily perspiring men and women in gig squad, a SEALs punishment for some infraction or other. At the moment they were doing walking, quacking duck squats. Humiliation was part of Navy discipline. Sly, a big black dude from Harlem, who had once modeled tightie whities for
GQ
, wore a shirt that said, in small enough print that it all fit over his wide chest,
THE ONLY EASY DAY WAS YESTERDAY. FU… SCREW THAT! THERE ARE NO EASY DAYS!

“Hey, Sly,” he said.

“Hey, Cage,” Sly said back, but he was staring at Charmaine, waiting for an introduction, Cage supposed.

Not a chance!

Walking by, Charmaine asked him, “Is he who I think he is?”

“Probably.”

“We have an old underwear poster of him hung on the wall of my Houma spa.”

“Hung” being the key word.
“Sly will love hearing about that,” he said, and it was the truth. His good buddy milked his long-ago cover boy career every which way he could, and it didn’t matter that he was a married man now. In fact, he would be hooting about it to Donita when he went home tonight.

“I thought there were no female SEALs,” Charmaine remarked, watching the group that Sly was supervising.

“There aren’t. Those are WEALS. Women on Earth, Air, Land, and Sea.” He shrugged. “You could say they’re female SEALs, sort of.”

Tante Lulu sighed. “Wish I was younger. I woulda made a good female SEAL.”

Cage gave her an arched eyebrow look.

“What? You think jist ’cause I’m small, I ain’t got what
it takes ta fight bad guys? Hah! I been fightin’ bad guys all my life.”

He didn’t doubt that for a minute.

“I think you Navy bigwigs discriminate against us smaller folks.”

“The Navy does not discriminate. And height is not a requirement for SEALs.”

“Oh, yeah? How come I dint see no midgets back there?”

Charmaine groaned. “I told you, Auntie, ‘midget’ is a politically incorrect word.”

Tante Lulu glanced meaningfully at Cage’s politically incorrect T-shirt logo and grinned. The old bird was pulling his leg.

Once they’d arrived at the dining hall and sat down with pastries and coffee, both of which Tante Lulu deemed inferior to good Creole chicory and beignets, she looked him in the eye and said, “Your grandmother has lung cancer.”

He inhaled sharply. “Oh, my God! When… how… will she…” He inhaled again to catch a breath. “Tell me everything. I saw her last summer in New Orleans, and she seemed fine then.”

Tante Lulu took one of his big hands in two of her tiny, veined ones.

He tried, but couldn’t pull free, not without making a fuss.

“She was diagnosed last fall. She’s already been zapped with radiation and sez she’s in remission, but I doan believe it. She needs oxygen jist ta walk around. And she’s havin’ trouble carin’ fer all those animals.”

“All what animals?”

“
Tsk-tsk-tsk!
If you came home once in a while, you’d know which animals.”

He squared his shoulders and counted to ten so he wouldn’t say something particularly offensive to the old biddy, although he suspected that insults would bounce off her wrinkled Teflon skin.

“I doan know why you’re stayin’ away, an’ I doan care. You gotta come home now. Your grandma needs you.”

“I could probably get a liberty, especially with this bum knee. Yeah, I could probably come for a week or so.”

Tante Lulu frowned at his limit on the time he would stay, but she had the good sense to keep her opinion to herself this time.

When Tante Lulu went to the ladies’ room, Charmaine smiled at him and shrugged.

“How do you stand her?”

“She can be nerve-racking, but she’s got a heart of gold.”

“More like a lead sinker, if you ask me.”

“How many ninety-something-year-old women do you know who would travel all this way to reunite an ailing grandmother and her grandson?”

“I don’t know any other ninety-something-year-old women. What’s with the ninety-something crap anyhow? Why don’t you know her exact age?”

“She lies,” Charmaine said with a grin, as if that were a good thing. “Family is all important to Tante Lulu. Did you know her fiancé was your grandmother’s older brother, Phillipe Prudhomme, and he was one of the original Navy SEALs, a frogman? He died in the Big War.”

“The Civil War?” he asked, before thinking.

“Idjit!” she said, smacking his arm lightly. “World War Two.”

Feeling like an idjit, he defended himself lamely. “Hey, everyone in the South still thinks the Civil War was the Big War, don’t they?”

She just smiled. “Are you married, Cage? Engaged? Involved?”

When he answered negatively to each of her questions, she gave him a pitying look and asked the oddest thing, “Do you have a hope chest?”

Doing the horizontal boogie without the boogie…

E
melie was a list maker, and whoo-boy, this was some list!

She was sipping at a cup of
cafe au lait
and scanning her culled list of sperm donors. It felt almost like arranging a blind date without all the fuss of dressing
up and awkward initial meetings, usually followed by disappointment.

Inside her office, she had a folder with additional info on each of the candidates. Blood type. Three generations of family medical history. Facial features. Complexion. Sperm count.

It was Sunday, and Emelie was sitting at a table on her back, upper gallery, facing the fountain courtyard in the back. Her 150-year-old home was not large, but it was two-storied. In the old days, the living quarters were on the second floor, its shuttered, floor-to-ceiling windows open to catch every little breeze, the family in one section and the slaves out back.

She was soothed by the sounds of the trickling fountain and the bells of St. Louis Cathedral several blocks away calling parishioners to mass. The scent of the bougainvillea vines climbing the ornate, black iron lattice filled the air, along with that of potted roses that lined the gallery. She loved Sundays in New Orleans.

“Miss Em-el-ie!” someone called from down below, coming through the side passageway from Chartres Street onto her courtyard.

Oh, no! It was Bernard Landry, her ex-husband.

“Bernie, what are you doing here?”

“I knocked on the front door, sug-ah, but there was no answer,” he said in his deep Southern accent. He was already walking around up the outside staircase… without being invited. As many times as she’d told him he was not welcome to drop in without notice in the past sixteen or so years, since their divorce, he still showed up periodically without warning. Some men just didn’t take a hint that the welcome mat wasn’t out all the time. Sometimes not at all.

“What do you want, Bernie?” She sighed.

Already he was helping himself to a cup of black coffee from the carafe on the table. “What’s this?” he asked, picking up the paper before she had a chance to grab it back.

“Give that to me. Right now,” she demanded.

“Are you usin’ one of those Internet datin’ services?”

“Something like that,” she said, grabbing her list back.

“Dar-lin’!”
Bernie gave her his hangdog look. “You don’t hafta go to no matchmaker. I’m right here.”

“Thanks but no thanks.” Their divorce had been amicable, but that didn’t mean she wanted him back in her life. Not one bit.

He didn’t look as wounded as he might have at one time.

“Why are you here, Bernie?”

“Is it wrong for me ta worry about you? You live alone in a city. Anything could happen ta you. Just because I check up on you doesn’t make me a bad person.” He batted his eyelashes at her in an exaggerated fashion.

“I can take care of myself, and I never said you were a bad person.”

“Then why—”

She raised a hand, cutting him off. “We are not going to discuss our marriage and divorce again.” Every time he showed up, their conversation degenerated into the same old subject. “How’s business? Are you ready for Mardi Gras?”

Bernie owned a pyrotechnics factory, producing all kinds of fireworks for putting on light shows typical of the Fourth of July, and here in Louisiana, Mardi Gras. Everything from retail sparklers and Roman candles to elaborate choreographed sky events. His professionals traveled all over the world and were renowned for the spectacular shows they put on.

“Actually,
chère
, that’s why I stopped by t’day.”

Okay, here it comes. Every time he calls me chère, he wants something.

“Do you mind if I park a vehicle or two in yer drive under the porte cochere during Mardi Gras? Ya’ll know what a bitch parking kin be.”

And costly.
Truth was, Bernie was a world-class skinflint. In fact, she’d once heard a friend say he could squeeze a quarter so tight the eagle would scream.

“How many vehicles?”

“Uh, four.”

“No way! You’ll be all the way back here to the courtyard, crushing my flowers.”

“Three, then.”

“No! Two, and they better not be trucks or huge vans with your commercial signs on the side. And one day only.”

He flashed his hangdog look at her again. Did it ever work for him? “Okay.” He smiled. It was probably all he’d ever expected to begin with. “You’re the best!”

Yeah. More like sucker of the year. “Bernie, you need to find a girlfriend. Get married again.”
And stay away from me.

He wasn’t a bad-looking man. He was what they would have called a nerd when she was in school. A computer geek now. If he’d get himself some contact lens, instead of those thick bifocals that never seemed to fit—he was always pushing the frame up his nose—he could pass for handsome. Maybe work out in the gym to get some better muscle definition. And have someone help him shop for something other than khakis and loafers.

Luckily she wouldn’t be the one doing all that.

“Maybe I could join that same dating agency as you.”
He pointed to the sheet of paper she’d slipped under the Sunday edition of the
Times-Picayune
.

Her lips twitched with suppressed laughter. “I don’t think so.”

He rose to his feet and was about to leave when he tossed a bomb at her… the nonexplosive but equally deadly kind.

“Hey, Em, have you heard the latest gossip?” he asked. “Guess who’s coming back to the bayou?”

She did not like the glint in Bernie’s eyes; nor did she like gossip about anyone on Bayou Black. Not knowing was the only way she’d been able to survive for a long time. “I can’t imagine.”

“My cousin. His grandma’s sick, and he’s come ta visit.”

“Which cousin?” Bernie had at least a dozen in his big family.

“Justin Le-freakin’-Blanc.”

Without realizing what she was doing, Emelie tugged her list out from under the newspaper and crushed it into a tight ball.

You can go home again, but it’s damn hard…

Cage drove his rental car onto the crushed shell driveway at the side of his grandmother’s house, turned off the ignition, and just sat, taking it all in. Seventeen years, and everything looked the same!

The house was built in the quaint bayou stilt fashion. Being raised up high made sense when you considered the high water table in Southern Louisiana, where
no homes could have basements lest they wanted rustic indoor swimming pools, not to mention the proximity to the water, which occasionally rose to almost the first floor. Every tornado or hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast managed to change the course of the bayous in one way or another, eliminating some altogether and other times creating new ones. In fact, this house, when it was originally built about a hundred years ago by his trapper ancestors, had perched on stilts
in
the swamp water, and could only be reached by pirogue, a type of Cajun boat.

He’d tried to explain the concept once to a SEAL buddy, who just couldn’t fathom it. “Why not just build farther away from the stream on a higher incline?” JAM had asked. “Or build one of those flood-control-type houses that were put up in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina?” In other words, a glorified box. For some reason, his explanation of, “Because that’s the way it’s always been,” didn’t cut it. But then, Yankees were sometimes so dumb they needed a cue card to say “Duh?”

In front of him in the driveway was his grandfather’s old 1985 Pontiac Gran Prix, which he’d affectionately nicknamed Priscilla in honor of the “King,” of whom he’d been a huge fan. He wondered if the old gal still worked. The car probably hadn’t been driven since PawPaw died six years ago.

He had to smile when he recalled how proud PawPaw had been the day he brought Priscilla home, her red paint brighter than a hooker’s cheeks at Sunday mass—his grandfather’s exact words. Cage had been only six at the time, and one of his jobs had been to keep Priscilla sparkling clean. As a reward, PawPaw would pile him and MawMaw into Priscilla every Saturday night and head off to the Dairy Queen.

Later, his memories of Priscilla and Saturday nights were even sweeter. They involved the bench backseat and Emelie Gaudet. Lordy, Lordy! He could almost taste her strawberry lip gloss. And to this day he had an affection for day-of-the-week panties. Wednesday was especially memorable. For a long time, he hadn’t been able to think about Em without wild bursts of anger and, yeah, hurt. Funny how he didn’t feel even a twinge now. Okay, maybe a twinge, but that was all. Time really did heal, he supposed.

He sighed and resumed a scan of his surroundings. It was a SEAL habit. Always secure your perimeter, wherever you are.

No danger in that live oak tree down there by the bayou. He remembered when an old tire hung from one of its lower limbs. Many a hot summer day he’d cooled off by swinging out over the bayou waters, despite the threat of gators and snakes. Sometimes PawPaw would even take a dip with him. And later, MawMaw would have a pitcher of sweet tea and a plate of homemade beignets waiting to hold them off until dinner, which usually consisted of gumbo, or jambalaya, or red beans and rice.

If anyone had asked him yesterday, while he was still in Coronado, if he had any good memories of his bayou homeland, he would have said no. He would have been wrong.

When had everything started to go to hell? And why?

He shook his head like a shaggy dog. What-ifs were a waste of time and a road he didn’t want to travel today… if ever. Getting out of his rented vehicle, he started to walk toward the back of the house, and that was when he began to notice the differences.

First of all, there were animals everywhere. A dog
the size of a small horse with pure white fur and two different-colored eyes. A Great Pyrenees, he guessed. The wildly barking animal came bounding toward him like a hopped-up polar bear, then came to a skidding halt at his feet, where it sat on its rump and gazed up at Cage with its tongue lolling and a silly grin on its face that said,
Like me, like me, like me
.

And speaking of small horses, there was a small horse tied up in the lean-to where they used to store the lawn mower, which was now out in the yard, rusting away. No wonder the grass was about a foot high.

There were also two or three other dogs, a half-dozen cats, and a pot-bellied pig lazing about the yard. Not to mention about a zillion chickens, none of which were in the old chicken coop, where he could see that the wire fencing had long ago rotted away.

Two flamingos stood near the edge of the stream, and they weren’t artificial ones either.

In the midst of all this craziness, a three-foot-tall St. Jude statue held court in a little grotto. Tante Lulu had been in the building, so to speak. Apparently St. Jude was the patron saint of hopeless cases, and a notorious favorite of hers.

He had to watch where he walked as he began to make his way to the steep steps, moving slowly to accommodate his bum knee. Announcing his arrival were a cacophony of squawks, yips and yaps, meows, oinks, and neighs. And from inside the house, it sounded like birds. For chrissake, his grandmother had a regular zoo going on here.

And then it happened.

He was almost to the top of the steps, where a removable, expandable gate, like those used to protect small
kids, kept the yard animals from coming up onto the porch. After he opened and closed the gate, he glanced over and saw his grandmother, wearing a flowered housedress, step through the wooden screen door, alerted by all the noise. At first, she just cocked her head to the side before whispering, loud enough for him to hear, “Justin?”

“Who else would it be, MawMaw?” he asked in a suddenly raspy voice. He hadn’t expected to be so touched. “Didn’t you always say that bad pennies had a way of comin’ back?” Being careful to school his features to hide his shock, he limped over and grabbed his grandmother into a big hug that lifted her slippered feet off the porch floor. She didn’t weigh any more than a bag of Spanish moss.

And her hair! His grandmother had always been so proud of her thick, straight, black hair, which she’d never cut as far as he knew, even when it had turned gray. She’d worn it in a single braid down her back, or twisted into a knot atop her head with Great-Grandma Jeannette’s ivory combs on special occasions.

Once when he was about ten years old, he recalled waking in the middle of the night to hear his grandfather and grandmother on the other side of his bedroom wall. His grandfather had been murmuring something soft and mushy about what his grandmother’s hair did to him. At the time, he’d been mortified.