Touchy Subjects (28 page)

"What's enchanted about this swamp?" asked a fat man, looking up from his guidebook.

"Wait and see."

Once his party was on board, Bunch roared out into the middle of the lake as fast as the motor could go, then headed into the flooded woods and ducked in between the stumps. He bumped into a floating log to make the boat jump and the tourists yelp. Then he cut the engine and said, "My friends, welcome to paradise! This just happens to be the only Enchanted Swamp in all of Louisiana."

He had paid the older man's techniques the compliment of extensive study and had decided that the whole experience needed a little bit of personality and pizzazz. Bunch began the tour by claiming ancestry from every culture that made up the tasty gumbo of present-day Acadiana: the Cajuns; the Creoles, black and white; the
gens de couleur libre,
as well as slaves; even the Chitimacha Indians, "who took what they needed and left the balance at peace, you know?" He assured his party that the twenty-foot, flat-bottomed aluminum skiff they were sitting in had been personally designed by him to reach the parts of the swamp where other boats just couldn't go.

"Has this boat a name?" asked one Frenchwoman.

"Sure does," Bunch improvised; "it's called the
Zydeco.
"

Another of his tricks was to present everything in the best light. Instead of telling his tour party that blue herons were very common in this part of the river system, he instructed them to keep an eye out for any flash of blue in the trees, because they just might be lucky enough to spot the rare blue heron, who brought ten years' good luck to anyone who glimpsed him. Finally, catching sight of the head and shoulders of a little gator basking on some driftwood, Bunch made his eyes bulge with amazement and told the tourists that this fellow must be fifteen feet long.

"No!"

"No way!"

"Mr. Bunch? Virgil? Did you say fifteen?"

"They're just like icebergs, that way," he hissed, paddling the boat near enough for them to take photographs. "For every inch you see, there's a foot underneath the water. Not too close!" he told one little girl. Rolling up his jeans, he showed them an old scar on his shin from one time he'd had too much rum and fallen over someone's guitar case: "Gator bite."

One lady took a picture of his scar.

"The only sure way to keep them from attacking," said Bunch, taking out a squashy paper bag, "is to give them some snacks." And he started lobbing lumps of rancid chicken at the alligator, who snapped at one or two before sinking beneath the surface.

On the way back, he gave his happy party the rundown on good ole Cajun humor and
joie de vivre,
not to mention
laissez les bon temps rouler
on the bayou, winding up with a dirty joke about a priest. Finally, he produced his tip jar, which had an alligator jaw glued on top, and they crowed with delight and stuffed their notes through its wicked teeth.

That night Bunch was eating steak and listening to the Breaux Bridge Playboys at Mulate's when Pitre walked in. The older man took one look at him across a crowd of Canadian college kids, then turned and walked back out the door. So that's how it was now, Bunch thought. He wasn't hungry anymore; he pushed away his plate.

The summer turned hot, and there was more than enough business to keep both men busy. Old Pitre didn't alter his methods. He turned up at nine every morning and sat there in the sun waiting for custom, pretending his former friend was invisible. The sun cooked him to red leather; you could nearly hear him sizzle. That was the downside of being a hundred percent pure white Acadian, Bunch thought wryly, but a crack like that wasn't so funny unless you could say it out loud. Ah, to hell, this was none of Bunch's doing; blame the Spirit of the Lord.

He himself had bought a cheap cell phone so tourists could book their tours with him direct. He got his sixteen-year-old daughter to make him a Web site with ten pages of photographs of alligators, and linked it to every listing on Louisiana tourism. "
See local indigenous wildlife in its natural ecohabitat which makes it
a photographer's dream. Fishing also available.
" Bunch's real stroke of brilliance was finding a medium-sized gator with a stubby tail and feeding it meat scraps daily, until it would come when he called. After a few weeks he scrawled "
Performance of Live Cajun Music Included
" on his leaflets, threw a small accordion into his bag, and upped the fare from twenty dollars to twenty-five.

Whenever he felt his spiel was getting a little flat, he'd spice it up with a tall tale about a six-foot catfish or a ghost. He took great pleasure in transforming Pitre's near-death experience into a tale he called the Swamp Man. "My grandpere used to say the Swamp Man was a crawfisherman, stayed out too late one night, crashed his boat into a tree in the dark and drowned in no more than two feet of water. What's he look like? Well, kind of decayed, you know—holes for his eyes, and dripping weeds all over him..."

Pitre overheard that story, one day, as he was drifting along with his own tour. He listened in, but didn't look in Bunch's direction. As their boats floated past each other, the tourists waved in solidarity. Pitre pulled down a tangled clump of grey Spanish moss and explained in his hoarse monotone that this was an airborne plant that did no harm to the trees it hung from.

He kept on telling it how it was. He didn't think the Spirit wanted him soft-soaping things. He broke it to his tourists that the trees in Mudd Swamp were slowly dying because the government's levee kept the water at an artificially high level all year round. Yes, the birds were pretty, but their waste was poisoning the trees from the top down. And a nutria was no relation to a beaver; it was more of a rat.

What bugged him the most, as the first summer of his new saved life wore on, was that his customers were always asking him where the restroom was—as if an open skiff or a knot of trees could be hiding such a thing. He wrote at the top of his leaflets, "
NO RESTROOM FACILITIES,
" but the tourists didn't seem to take it literally. One of them, when Pitre had explained the situation at the landing, said to her husband, "Let's go, hon. I've never been anywhere that didn't have a restroom."

One July afternoon, after the dust of the departing cars had settled, Bunch walked over to Pitre. "I was thinking of renting a Port-o-Let," he remarked, as if resuming an interrupted conversation.

Pitre slowly shifted his gaze from the cypress forest to the man in front of him.

"But they cost a bit, you know, because the company has to drive all the way out here to empty it. What say we go halves?"

"What say nothing," said Pitre through his teeth.

"Oh well,
cher,
if you're going to be like that," said the younger man with a shrug. "Though I don't think your heavenly friend would like your attitude..."

Pitre's face never flickered, but the remark had got under his skin. He headed out to the swamp that evening, on his own, to see if it was any cooler than the land. When he got to the Site of Miracle, he cut the engine. He squinted up at the willow tree, but it looked much the same as all the others: a swollen base, tapering to a skinny top. He tried to feel again what it was that had touched him that moonlit night when he'd come within an inch of drowning. A sensation of being marked out, prodded awake, as distinct as a fingertip in the small of the back. He'd been so sure about his new calling at first, but now it seemed as if he'd mistaken some small but crucial marker a while back and gone astray.

A few days later there was a Port-o-Let standing in the shade of a live oak by Bourdreaux Landing. It looked like a grey plastic alien craft. Pitre pretended not to notice. At noon, he was emptying his boat of one group and filling it up with another when a girl ran over. "Uh, I wanted to use the restroom?"

"No restroom," said Pitre automatically.

"I tried the one over there, but it's, like, locked! It says, 'For use of Bunch's Enchanted Swamp Tours only.'"

Pitre's teeth clamped together, and his bad molar started to throb. "That's a mistake," he muttered. "Very sorry, ladies and gentlemen. You'll just have to wait."

"I can't wait two hours," wailed the girl.

"That's the trouble with you kids nowadays," Pitre told her. "Nobody's got any self-control of themselves."

Her family drove back to the hotel, and he didn't get any tips that day, either.

In August it was hitting a hundred by ten in the morning.

Bunch bought a cap with a visor to keep the glare out of his eyes. He took to claiming that his name was authentically Acadian. "Sure is, ma'am. Used to be Bonche, you know, back in Canada, but when the British kicked us out at gunpoint back in 1755, my ancestors had to change to Bunch to avoid persecution."

The young man varied his tall tales to keep himself from getting stale. He always took his tours past a duck blind in the middle of the lake, but sometimes he said it was a man-made nesting sanctuary for orphaned cormorants, and other times he called it a shelter for canoeists caught out on the lake in a lightning storm. Once—just to see if he could get away with it—he claimed it was a Dream Hut for young Chitimacha boys undergoing spiritual initiation.

"The Swamp Man? That's a terrible story," he said towards the end of all his tours, lowering his voice as if he was almost afraid to tell it. "This crawfisherman, back in old-time days, it was a long hard season, and he was desperate to know where the fish were biting, so he did voodoo. You know voodoo?"

Fervent nods all round.

"I bought a how-to book on it in New Orleans," confided one old lady.

Bunch darkened his tone. "So this guy, he conjured up this spirit, and he didn't know it, but it was the devil. This guy struck a bargain that his crawfish cages would always be full, you know? So now the devil had a hold of his soul. And the very first time the guy went out fishing, it was in the evening, getting dark, and he bent down to pull up his first cage, and it was so full, it was so heavy that it pulled him right down into the water."

The tourists looked into the oily sheen, shuddering.

"Did he drown?" asked a small girl.

Bunch nodded. "Only he never really died. The flesh rotted off his bones, that's all. And if you ever come out here in the evening, just when it's getting dark, well, all I'll say is, don't put your hand into the water, because the Swamp Man might grab hold of it and pull you in!"

Two women moaned theatrically. They weren't really afraid, Bunch knew; in this day and age it was hard to really scare anybody.

As trade fell off a little in the worst of the heat, he couldn't have done without his cell phone. It meant he could sit around in the shade at the Lobster Shack, drinking homemade root beer, till he got a call to say there was a group wanting a tour. Whereas old Pitre squatted in the dust at Bourdreaux Landing every day like some kind of scarlet lunatic, under a limp banner that said
P
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One morning Pitre turned up at Mudd Swamp at eight; he'd had a pain in his jaw all night that had kept him from sleeping. His stomach wasn't right, either. He sat down in his usual spot and tried to pray. The problem was that he'd never got the knack of it in his childhood. And now he was a man of the Spirit, he still didn't know quite what to say, once he'd got beyond
Oh Lord, here I am, like you told me.

By noon not a soul had turned up. Pitre's tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. He'd forgotten to bring any water. His jaw was hurting bad now; he blamed his molar. His boat floated motionless beside the landing, not ten feet from the other man's, which had a duck decoy glued on the prow and a freshly painted name:
Zydeco.
Pitre narrowed his eyes at the dirt track that led down from the road. There was no shade; the sun bored into his head through his eyelids, his ear holes, his cracked lips. In the long grass he saw a sledgehammer and recognized it as his own; he must have left it there after banging in a sign. He lurched to his feet at last, feeling the old break in his leg. His body was just a collection of bad memories. But there was something he could do, anyway.

He picked up the sledgehammer and staggered under the weight of it. He cradled it against his shoulder like an old friend. At the landing, he climbed down into the
Zydeco;
the skiff skittered under his feet. His heart was sounding strangely. He hoisted the hammer over his head and brought it down with all he had.

Pitre was lying in the bottom of the boat. He couldn't tell if he'd managed to hole it. The light was behaving like water. He seemed to have stopped breathing. He couldn't tell whether something had gone wrong with the whole world or whether it was just him; he felt like he was under some kind of dreadful enchantment.

At the hospital the nurse was a big black lady from Lafayette; she got pissy with him when he tried to pull the oxygen tube out of his nose. Kept saying, did he know he could have died?

"So could we all," said Pitre balefully. A phrase floated back to him, and he pointed one unsteady finger at her: "You know not the day nor the hour."

They let him out on the third morning, just to shut him up, according to the nurse. "You take it easy now," she growled, "because nobody gets three chances."

When he got back to the Landing, Bunch was sitting on the side of the
Zydeco.
The boat seemed unmarked, Pitre noticed with a slight pang, and the sledgehammer was nowhere to be seen.

He was obliged to speak. "Understand you called me an ambulance on that cell phone of yours."