The Boy from County Hell Page 2

  He carved his initials into the tree with the knife’s sharp point. Later, he filled his belly at a soul food buffet and found a cheap room outside Shreveport near the Indian casino where he sat in bed and stared at the photograph all night. Papa Andre was dead, and Mama Evangeline had been on the run for twenty-five years. Her family name would keep the law’s hands off her, but they’d tip off her family, so she was always moving.

  After Jay got out of prison, he’d managed to track her to Bay St. Louis. Before he could find her, he had raised hell with people who wanted him dead and spent a month in the hospital before he could pick up her trail. Now she could be anywhere.

  Anywhere except the parish with her cursed family name.

  Jay wondered if he would recognize her.

  And if he had ever really known the woman named Evangeline.

  3: One-Eyed Evie

  The last place Jay wanted to go was a church. There was a lot of Jesus this and Allah that in the joint, and he’d had none of it.

  He nursed a fury for the Higher Power since he was five years old, when he’d been torn from Papa Andre and Mama Evangeline and returned to his birth mother, a track-marked night hag who pimped him to pay the man who killed her pain.

  It took months to learn the Witch’s tells, what would flip her from angel to devil. Others thanked the Good Lord and said “get behind me Satan,” but Jay knew whatever ruled this world was a singular, two-faced entity that could never be trusted.

  The Witch had crouched down and looked at him like he was a mirror, as he clenched his little fists in defiance.

  If you think I’m a bad mother, I wish you had mine. She’ll wrap you in barbed wire and feed you to the beast.

  Instead, his birth mother tied his ankle to the sofa leg like she always did after the Gator Man came to use him and paid her with a spike in her arm. But that morning, little Jay had hidden the carrot peeler between the cushions, and took out his rage on her sleeping face.

  He spent five days leashed beside to her rotting body, parched with thirst, before he woke to the face of Mama Evangeline. The face became that of his one true God.

  And She was a jealous God.

  One whose golden rules were to do unto others before they did unto you, and to keep your damn mouth shut.

  Like the gods of old, his true mother had many names. Up north, she was Angeline Desmarteaux. There, Jay had found a birth certificate that read Evangeline Antoinette Calvineau.

  But in Bay St. Louis, they knew her as One-Eyed Evie.

  When Jay had rolled in, everybody in the small Gulf town was in the church parking lot for a cochon du lait to help feed folks put out by the flooding of the Amite River.

  Jay found a priest in collar and jeans ladling out jambalaya. It was his nature to balk at authority, especially the heavenly variety, but this church had taken in needy families, and he wouldn’t sneer at faith expressed through deeds.

  The preacher-man walked the walk, and the jambalaya was righteous.

  The priest nodded at her name and pointed to a couple old-timers watching couples dance the two-step in the fais do-do. Jay left a ten-spot in their donation jar, then wandered their way, tapping a foot to the music, shoveling rice and andouille into his mouth with a plastic spoon.

  “One-Eyed Evie, we miss that gal. Hot damn she a pretty one.” An old Cajun smiled and stroked his sun-spotted skull. “Wish I had hair for her to cut, she!” His puffy-cheeked compatriot jiggled with laughter, his face hidden by a walrus mustache and a red trucker cap pulled down low.

  “Said she was lookin’ for a big ol’ man,” the walrus said, shaking his head with the memory. “Told her I right here. She kiss my cheek then slap it.”

  That sounded like Mama, all right.

  “How long she been gone?”

  “Few month now.”

  “Six weeks, no more.”

  He let them argue it out while he cleaned his plate.

  “Tol’ her I heard a man up in Henderson run a swamp tour boat, he real big. call ’em Ti’ Boy, like they do.”

  Short for petite. People liked calling giants “Tiny.” Daring them.

  “Him crack a six-foot gator’s mouth open like a crab shell, leave it to die. Mean sumbitch, that Ti’ Boy Garriss.”

  Jay spent the night in a church outbuilding on a cot with the flooded-out folks, and in the morning he tuned their generators and central air system. Mama Evangeline’s trail was cold anyway, and it felt good to work for good people.

  He left with a freezer bag of boudin balls that he ate like candy on the ride west.

  Henderson was Bayou country. Near the fishing camp in Catahoula where Mama Evangeline and Papa Andre had raised him. His hands tingled on the steering wheel.

  He was going home.

  4: Swinging Dick

  Avoiding New Orleans made the trip longer, but that was a mob city and they had a price on him for the hell he’d raised in New Jersey. His route took him through Iberia parish into the beauty of the Atchafalaya Basin.

  The road atlas had an ad for a joint called Margaux’s, so he gunned it up the gravel road over the levee to the bayou side, where a red slat building nested among trees shaggy with Spanish moss, jutting out on pilings over the shining waters of the swamp.

  He parked with the nose facing the exit and left Papa Andre’s war hatchet in the hideaway beneath the rear seats. Pitou knife’s hilt dug against his belly, but his work shirt concealed it well. He rubbed the wood handle like worry beads. A talisman that would bring him to his mother.

  Shiny trucks and minivans crowded the lot, parked haphazard. A pontoon boat full of tourists pulled away from the dock with a well-tanned man at the tiller, talking through a megaphone. His rich Cajun patois echoed off the water as the outboards gurgled. Inside, a young hostess led Jay to a seat by the window overlooking the bayou.

  His liver clenched like a bruised purple fist at the smell of liquor, but a cold beer always hit the spot when your ride’s climate control consisted of cranking down the windows. He ordered a schooner of Canebrake Ale and a plate of gator bites.

  He sipped on his translucent ruby red cup of ice water and studied the gator skins and heads decorating the rafters as he waited for his meal. The waitresses were warming up for the lunch crowd that would flood in when the swamp tour returned. Most, like the hostess, had their hair tied back and probably cut it themselves in the mirror, or knew someone who cut hair in her home. An older woman had big blonde curls that didn’t match her eyebrows. She’d know hairdressers.

  She wasn’t his server but came over when he gestured.

  “What can I get you, darlin’?”

  “Ma’am, if you don’t mind me asking, I’m looking for family. My Aunt Evie used to cut hair, real pretty like yours. Know where I could find a hairdresser who might know her?”

  “Evie,” she said. “I get mine done at Billy Hermann’s, but there’s no Evie there. Those girls all know each other. Billy’s is down on Jefferson.”

  His waitress brought him the beer and battered chunks of gator leg and tail. He dusted them liberally with the green can of Creole seasoning on the table.

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Jay watched the bayou and listened to zydeco and country on the speakers while he ate his gator and let half his beer go warm. He’d forgotten how his home state made battering and frying everything on this green earth into an art form. Even a prehistoric lizard became delicious in their hands.

  The head waitress stood by the kitchen. He left cash on the table and approached her on the way out.

  “Thanks for your help. Aunt Evie used to know this big fella they call Ti’ Boy. He live around here?”

  Her expression turned as severe as a prison matron’s. She jabbed his chest with a finger. “She sure as hell won’t be with him if she got any brains in her head. Had my way, I’d skin him like one of his gators and nail his head to the wall.”

  “She ain’t with him. And I’m no friend of his.” He palmed her a twenty.

  “The boat tour fellas deal with him. We don’t let him in here no more.” She tucked the bill in her brassiere. She caught him looking and gripped his biceps with an appreciative wink. “You be careful, now. Ti’ Boy eats bigger than you.”

  At the docks, men readied a pontoon boat for the next tour. Camo pants and caps to keep the sun off their lined faces. Hands horned with callus. Jay changed his gait to pure Jersey strut, like he had an iron sash weight swinging between his legs. Money wouldn’t work here. It would only disrespect them and make them silent to him forever.

  It was a job for a swinging dick.

  “Y’all seen Ti’ Boy?”

  No greeting, no sign of respect. In this country, only muscle for the goombahs or the Dixie Mafia would have the stones to treat a man that way. And that’s what he wanted them to think.

  They shook their heads.

  “Where he at?”

  They puffed a little to keep their pride. “Down the levee road, all the way to the end.”

  He nodded and walked to the Challenger. They laughed under their breath and joked about getting to get a truck to pull that fancy car out of the mud ruts on the back roads.

  5: Ti’ Boy

  The fishing camp roads were too small to be found on Jay’s atlas and could only be approached from one direction, so there would be no chance for surprise, nor a speedy exit if things went sour.

  He reversed and palmed the wheel, backed down a path overgrown with weeds, marked with a rusted oil company sign. Leaves shrouded the car. He dropped Andre’s war hatchet into the hammer loop in his jeans, slipped the knife in his boot for backup, and walked up the road along the canebrake. In summer, he remembered that these trees would smell like a fresh shot of jizzum as they spread their pollen, and the thought brought memories that he pushed away.

  He heard no boats on the water, only bird calls and the whine of insects. The path to the camp house was overgrown, and a rusted truck sagged in the ruts. The bed was dark with old bloodstains, and flies buzzed, sucking out its last sustenance.

  There was no porch or front door so he followed to the back, eyeing the windows for the mountain of a man.

  The butcher shop scent of blood hung in the air. He hefted the hatchet and peered around the sagging corner of the house. A swollen old gator tugged even larger prey toward the water.

  Ti’ Boy must’ve cleared four hundred pounds, even with one leg gone. A black hole of flies where his face had been.

  Mama Evangeline had been there and gone.

  Jay sensed her wake. Her fury burned hot, and her adopted boy was attuned to it. Why she’d killed her old partner, he did not know.

  He pulled the back door open with the hatchet’s spike. Inside, the place stank of rotten food and unwashed sheets. A single room centered around a wood stove. In one corner was a bed built for a giant.

  The wood was spalted maple, and Jay recognized the joints and finials. The headboard was carved with the face of a wild man, his hair and beard flowing out like sun rays. Papa Andre had built it. Jay ran his hand along the greasy, scarred wood. He pressed a catch on the right side, and a cubby opened. His father’s trademark.

  In his own bed, Papa Andre had hidden his war hatchet there. In this one sat a stack of Polaroids. Jay carefully dragged them with the hatchet’s head, and they spilled onto the floor.

  What they depicted made his insides churn.

  Back in the Challenger, he listened to the insects and birdsong on the bayou’s edge and thought of his next step. He had left the pictures of bruised and degraded Black girls on the dirty floor for the police to find and started a fire in the busted truck to bring them. Smoke rose in a cloud behind him.

  Shooter Boudreaux stared from the postcard in the ashtray, his aviator sunglasses like the eyes of a green bottle fly. The card had been on the kitchen table under a dirty plate.

  It read: Shooter Boudreaux’s Annual Second Amendment Expo.

  On it, a tight-faced white man wearing a rebel flag trucker cap held a black, heavily accessorized rifle in each hand. Celebrate your birthright. Tactical Gear and Training.

  Jay knew the name. A Marine sniper attached to Andre’s company in the war. They told stories about him that verged on the supernatural. He could disappear like a chameleon and pick off targets with iron sights that others could barely see with a scope. He’d built his own rifle from a Ma Deuce, and the .50-caliber rounds cut through the jungle like heart-seeking missiles.

  The expo was next month in New Orleans at the Superdome. The card had an address for Shooter’s Palace, his firearm depot in Baton Rouge. Jay put it in the glove box and eased out the rutted road back the way he came.

  He had no idea if Shooter was friendly, but he was the only lead. He had let thoughts cloud his head and nearly missed the black Tahoe following him six cars back, changing lanes, hugging the shoulder, trying to get an eye on his rear plate.

  The U.S. Marshals had a price on him, too.

  Jay signaled a right turn with the blinker. The truck pulled under a Waffle House sign. Nothing showed through the window tint. When the light changed, Jay smoked the tires and hopped the divider into oncoming traffic. Horns blared as he squealed up the onramp and shot off like a purple demon that had dunked its ass in holy water.

  The truck bounced after him then met a wall of traffic. Everyone paused until the shock and smoke faded. Jay put the pedal down and raced over the two-lane bridge toward Baton Rouge.

  6: Shooter’s Palace

  Jay picked up a pair of cheap sunglasses and a roll of bright yellow tape at a truck plaza and ran racing stripes down the purple Challenger’s road shark body from nose to tail. Louisiana State Tigers’ colors. Even in Ragin’ Cajuns country, big state purple and gold would serve as camouflage.

  He swapped his North Carolina plate for one off a late-model Challenger in a Walmart lot. He knew he should ditch the car, but whenever he tried, it pulled at him. They’d been through hell. Sentimentality was his weakness.

  Shooter Boudreaux had a TV show on cable where he built custom firearms for collectors and trophy hunters, and a store on Airline Highway with a sign you could likely see from space. His face was on the sign but his ass was nowhere to be found.

  Jay parked in a strip mall adjacent to the gun superstore and walked over. The store was a tactical Disneyland, full of paramilitary gear for wannabes and plastered with photos of the man himself posing with politicians and leathery old celebrities from action movies Jay remembered watching on stolen cable while his parents slept late.

  A display case enshrined a battered Remington M40 bolt-action rifle and a bronze plaque which listed seventy-one confirmed kills in the Vietnam War and mentioned a two-mile kill shot using a 20mm recoilless rifle that was “unverified, but unbroken.” A stack of books with Boudreaux on the cover aiming a .50-caliber Barrett at the camera, titled Evil in the Crosshairs, was for sale, signed, at forty bucks a pop.

  The thump and rattle of gunplay beat behind the soundproof glass separating the sales area from the pistol and rifle range. Men with sidearms holstered at their belts worked the counters. All you needed was a Louisiana driver’s license to buy, and sales were brisk.

  Jay studied Shooter’s personal firearms museum mounted on the walls. The infamous .50-caliber rifle hand-built from an M2 machine gun, a bullpup AK-47 engraved with a Crusader’s Cross, a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun that held three in the pipe and one in the chamber and could fit in a front jeans pocket. The Shooter Shorty, nine hundred dollars with a federal tax stamp, available in 10 gauge, .410 for youths and women, and custom anodized colors, including rose pink for the ladies.

  Jay smelled cop on two customers and at least one man behind the counter. Okie had always said some police could sniff outlaw, so he kept quiet and cool and let the customers do his asking for him.

  “Does the man himself ever stop in?” Father and son, buying matching camouflaged AR carbines.

  According to the staff, Shooter personally trained all the on-site gunsmiths and signed off on all firearms bearing his name. He did, on occasion, attend special events, such as the upcoming fundraiser to reelect Sheriff Kane LeFer Junior in Calvineau Parish.

  That name perked Jay’s ears.

  He pretended to admire a tricked-out Smith & Wesson .44 revolver until a salesman spun his spiel about its timing and accuracy, and how Shooter himself won several championships with that exact model.

  The seller took the wheelgun from the case, cleared the cylinder, and handed it to him.

  “Feel the balance. It’s not half as heavy as it looks.”

  Jay clicked the cylinder home and sighted on a zombie target hanging behind the counter.

  Mama Evangeline taught him to shoot her Colt Diamondback. Cross your thumbs over the backstrap. Don’t close an eye. Just focus one until the sights fade into what you want to hit. And don’t you ever point your gun at anything you don’t mean to kill.

  He hadn’t been much of a shot. Couldn’t catch a ball worth a damn, either. Doc said he had a wandering eye. Papa Andre played catch with him until they trained it out, but Jay’s eye still wandered when it felt like it. At the moment it turned his attention to a flyer on the wall.

  The Wildest Show in the South!

  The Angola Prison Rodeo. Every Sunday in April.

  Bronco Busting! Convict Poker! Crafts!

  The center photo depicted a mad bull plowing through a table of inmates holding playing cards. The photographer had captured a Black inmate suspended in midair above the two-ton beast’s horns.

  Jay’s eye settled lower.

  Under Crafts, a man with thick arms stood proudly beside a carved wooden rocking horse, glowing with varnish, alive with detail. The man’s gray-shot hair was tied back in a ponytail, and a dusting of beard covered his face.