STEALING LIFE

“Thistle had been born with a cotton-top gone mostly brown and he was short for his age. An old Cajun woman in Bays Town once told him he’d live long enough for his hair to grow white again. She also told him that if he’d give her a dollar she could arrange for him to die a rich man. He watched her bury a duck egg and an onion under the full moon while mumbling something in French.”

“Bays is a really tiny place, Miss Sims. There were only fifteen of us in my graduating class, including the twins – who really should’ve really been in special-ed. But there is no special-ed in Bays. The starting football team, a girl named Leola, and myself rounded out the class of ’75. Leola got pregnant by an uncle and they almost didn’t let her walk. Valedictorian of Bays High wasn’t much of an accomplishment.”

“But I’m sure Thistle and Lou were proud,” Phyllis told him.

Fletcher Arceneaux, Jr. was born in a French Quarter tenement when the district was little more than a working-class slum. His mother worked in Storyville and she told him his daddy was the mayor of New Orleans. As a boy he frequently resorted to stealing in order to feed himself and one afternoon he made off with a Tiffany lampshade following a pitched chase down Magazine Street. When another antique dealer gave him ten dollars for it the next day Fletch hauled-ass to Texas.

The day after buying his new love that five-carat emerald the contractor was sitting in a jail cell in Greenville, Texas and Phyllis was in the back seat of her father’s Studebaker on the way back to Kansas. The cops caught up with them at an outdoor revival meeting following a tip from a motel clerk who’d refused to check the couple in. Moments before she was escorted from the big tent shivering and sobbing, Phyllis had gotten herself baptized in a full-immersion ceremony performed by an unordained preacher from Tenaha who was high on Jesus and Dexamyl tablets. (Her parents were Unitarians.)

“This must be your dream job, boy.”

The customer smiled and made a show of patting his own not inconsiderable belly. As Dough cleared his breakfast dishes the man nodded to a pie safe behind the counter.

“Best pies in town. Sometimes I buy a few for my men down at the dock. I like the blackberry. My name’s Cap.”

Dough eyed Cap warily. He’d never heard a German accent and wondered if the man was some kind of foreign queer. But he always took a moment to charm the more prosperous looking customers, who would occasionally toss him a nickel for his efforts.

This was only place in the world where Bill Stella felt really comfortable and he wandered around the French Quarter’s four hundred acres for hours, drinking and repeating the scabbed-over prayers of the doomed. He knew such appeals had little effect on an angry and neglected God. If little Billy Stella remembered one thing from all those Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights listening to the psychotic snake-handling preacher, it was this.

If you forget about Him, He’ll forget about you.

“There’s a little lake behind that stand of hemlocks you passed on the way in. I’ve got a house back there.”

“Do you own this place or something?”

“Or something.”

When they went riding that afternoon Annina accused him of being rich again and kept kept making fun of Lou’s gaudy Porsche. But she insisted on driving, she loved fast cars but Papa Boudreaux would never buy her one. They went back to the house behind the hemlocks after their drive and a few days later she rented his apartment to another student who knew how to work the system better than her new boyfriend.

On the evening of his three hundred and sixty-fourth day of incarceration Lou was milling around his bunk before lights-out when everything went quiet. The prisoners watched closely as two guards escorted a man onto the dormitory block. The guy was huge. He wore Sansabelts that rode the ankles of his cowboy boots and a polyester blazer topped off by a five-hundred-dollar Stetson. United States Marshals only showed up when an inmate was being transferred, and the Danbury Federal Correctional Facility was the very best place in the entire United States to be locked up. It had a salad bar.

“Hey Lou, the marshal needs you to gather up your things and head on over to the warden’s office with us.”

“Your ancestors worked on this plantation?”

“I suppose that would be one way of putting it.”

Her smile was instantly familiar to him.

“Clearly not the best way. I’m Royal Boudreaux, Miss...”

“Deshotel. Nettie Deshotel. I know who you are, Royal Boudreaux.”

The girl offered her hand. When Royal took it and looked into her striking dark eyes, it was clear the young woman was telling him the truth about who she was.

“Nettie. What a lovely name. You’re not from around here.”

Price reached over and popped the glove compartment and removed a small .22 caliber revolver. The gun wasn’t much bigger than a mouse and he tucked it in his inside coat pocket. He removed his service revolver and its quick-draw holster from a clip on his belt and stashed them in the glove compartment.

“Sometimes you want a gun-bulge, sometimes you don’t,” the policeman observed dryly.

“Absolutely,” Wendy agreed.

Bayou Lafourche (the fork) is named for the route it traces after branching off from the Mississippi River near Donaldsonville. At Port Fourchon (tine) the Lafourche stabs into the Gulf of Mexico a hundred miles due west of the Mississippi’s last chicken foot at Pilot Town. Royal Boudreaux’s people had been living along the banks of the bayou for a generation when Lafourche Parish was founded a couple of years after the Louisiana Purchase.

Forty-eight hours after arriving in the U.S., a CIA operative met Fitz at the Hialeah race track with an envelope containing an American passport, a U.S. social security card, ten thousand dollars in cash and a Florida driver’s license. Fitz loved cowboy movies as a kid and had always wanted to see Texas. He’d been disappointed when, after a full week in Houston, he hadn’t spotted a single horse.