The Rebel's Revenge Page 5

  If Chitimacha could be called a town, then Villeneuve was a city by comparison. The small settlement had grown up piecemeal along the east bank of a broad, glass-smooth waterway called Bayou Sainte-Marie. Access from the western side meant crossing a wooden bridge that straddled the bayou’s narrowest point and looked as though it had been there since Civil War days.

  It was only mid-morning and already the air was as hot and thick as caramel sauce. Clouds of insects drifted over the water like smoke. It made Ben think of the Amazon. The smell of the bayou hung heavy, fishy and stagnant like an aquarium left standing uncleaned. Beneath the bridge, the bank’s edge was a buzzing hive of industry, crowded with small jetties where stacks of lobster traps stood piled man-high, and moored flat-bottomed river boats bobbed gently on the almost imperceptible swell of the mud-brown water. Back from the jetties were store huts and bait and tackle shops advertising live worms and boat hire.

  Traffic entering and leaving Chitimacha was thin and sporadic. Like everywhere else in the region, two out of every three vehicles were pickup trucks. Once over the wooden bridge Ben passed a couple of roadside fish shacks selling wares such as gaspergou and gar balls, and other arcane specialities of Planet Louisiana at whose nature he could only guess. He slowed the Tahoe to gaze from his window at a huge fish that hung tail-up from a hook outside one of the shacks.

  Once, in the Cayman Islands, Ben had seen a man torn apart by tiger sharks. This thing was even more fearsome. Part giant pike, part alligator, its massive jaws bristling with fangs. He couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to eat it, but it was easy to imagine the creature taking a bite out of any unlucky fisherman who fell in the bayou.

  Ben drove on into the centre of Chitimacha, which made the Villeneuve town square look like New Orleans in the middle of Mardi Gras. If Ben had wanted quiet, he’d certainly found it here. Seemingly, if you wanted action in Chitimacha you needed to be on the bayou itself. Here in town the sidewalks were almost completely deserted. A solitary pickup truck rumbled past, heading the way Ben had come. A few parked vehicles, many of them older than he was, sat gathering dust in the sun. There was a hardware store displaying racks of everything from chainsaw oil to crawfish boilers, and a grocery store with sun-faded ad placards in the windows saying ‘Drink Coca-Cola in bottles’ and ‘If it ain’t Jerry Lee’s, it ain’t boudin’. Next door was an empty barber’s shop, and next door to that an equally empty café with chairs and tables spilling out into the deserted street for nobody to sit at.

  Possibly the liveliest spot in town was an ancient relic of a filling station that consisted of a weedy patch of blacktop, two pre-war gas pumps and an old man in oily dungarees outside on a dilapidated bench with a corncob pipe in his mouth, sunning himself in the burning heat like a reptile on a rock.

  Ben pulled up by the pumps and got the old man to fill up the Tahoe, which he set about doing without uttering a word, the pipe still stuck between his teeth. It was lit, but if the old man didn’t worry about going up in flames, Ben wasn’t going to worry about it either.

  ‘I’ll bet this place really comes alive in the high season, doesn’t it?’ Ben said by way of initiating a conversation. The old man just looked at him and muttered a response in what sounded like a weird version of French. Ben realised he was speaking the Cajun dialect handed down from the Acadian settlers way back. The historic language had been heavily altered by isolation and the passing of the centuries, but (or so Ben had read) was still basically intelligible to a modern French speaker. Which Ben was, and so he switched from English in the hope that they could communicate.

  ‘Don’t suppose you have anything resembling a hotel here in Chitimacha?’

  The old man plucked the pipe from his mouth with a moist sucking sound, and waved the wet end of its stem to point down the street while jabbering more of his dialect. Maybe it wasn’t that intelligible after all, at least not to anyone but a Cajun. Ben was stumped for a second or two, then understood he was being directed to a local pension, which was French for a guesthouse. Ben got the rest of the directions, paid up for the gas, said, ‘Merci, monsieur’ and drove on.

  The directions led him to a street quarter of a mile away on the edge of Chitimacha, which could have been lifted straight out of Villeneuve’s most down-at-heel neighbourhoods. Signs of neglect and poverty were all too obvious in most directions he looked.

  Except for one. The guesthouse stood out from the adjoining properties, spick and span and resplendent from a fresh coat of white paint that was almost blinding in the bright sunshine. The tiny green GMC hatchback outside the front gate looked new and clean and well maintained, unlike most of the beaters parked up and down the street. A flowery hand-crafted bilingual sign on the gate said, ‘Bienvenue à la pension de Lottie’ and underneath ‘Welcome to Lottie’s Guesthouse’.

  Ben parked up behind the miniature GMC, which could probably have fitted in the Tahoe’s rear cargo space. He climbed out into the hot sun and opened the gate and walked up a neat little path to the door to ring the bell. A minute later he heard movement inside.

  The inner door opened, then the screen door, and a large African-American lady with a smile that made the house’s dazzling pearl-white paintwork seem dull and faded greeted him with a vivacious ‘Well, hello there, sugah. I’m Lottie Landreneau, and how are you today?’

  Chapter 8

  Ben knew from the start that he’d struck lucky with Lottie. The warmth of her hospitality was as endearing as her smile and from the moment he walked into her house he felt right at home. The place was filled with flowers, light and Southern charm, like her personality. ‘Where y’all from, sugah? You sound English without soundin’ English, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I’ve moved around.’

  ‘Oh, I know all about that,’ she said mysteriously, and seemed to enjoy keeping him in suspense for now. ‘Come, let me show you your room.’

  He followed her from the richly carpeted entrance hall and up a switchback staircase with a thick gleaming mahogany banister rail that she clutched as she hauled her weight up the stairs. ‘That’s me,’ she said, motioning towards a glossy white door at the end of the galleried first-floor landing.

  Spaced out along the passage were two more doors, each adorned with a little brass number plaque. ‘Y’all are the only guest I got right now, so you get your pick of the rooms.’ She pointed at the door nearest to hers. ‘How ’bout this one?’

  ‘What’s up there?’ he asked, nodding towards a drop-down wooden staircase that led from the opposite end of the landing to an open hatch in the ceiling.

  ‘Rooms three and four. It’s an attic conversion. Ceilings are kinda low.’

  ‘I love attics.’

  ‘Okay, well then let me show you.’

  The attic conversion was a work of genius, executed with style and taste. The drop-down wooden staircase was a fine piece of carpentry that could be retracted from above by means of a rope pulley to create a cosy, isolated sanctuary at the top of the house. As for the bedrooms themselves, room three was nice, but room four was perfect. The inverted V of the sloped ceiling was all decked out in gleaming white tongue-and-groove panelling, and the floor was sanded and varnished bare boards with a furry rug. The single bed ran along the middle, where the ceiling was at its highest point. It had a simple iron frame and a patchwork quilt, and a small table with a reading lamp. The single dormer window looked out beyond the slope of the nearest neighbour’s roof to offer a view of Chitimacha as far as the winding brown snake of the bayou in the distance. The room reminded Ben a lot of his quarters in the old farmhouse back home in France.

  ‘This is the one I’d like.’

  ‘No problem at all. It’s yours, sugah.’

  Lottie led the way back down to a little salon on the ground floor, where she made a fuss of serving home-made iced tea with lemon in tall, slender glasses. Not too sweet, not too lemony, perfect and refreshing after the wilting heat. Then, wedging her not inconsiderable bulk into an
armchair, she began to talk. Which was something she loved to do, as Ben now discovered. But she did it so beautifully, mesmerising him with her accent and laughter, that he could have sat listening all day.

  He got the whole life story. Born and bred right here in Chitimacha, she’d moved to Villeneuve in her teens and ended up living there for twenty-plus years until a bad marriage had grown worse and she’d eventually escaped with the intention of doing something with her life. A goal that Lottie had taken extremely seriously, celebrating her fortieth birthday with the vow to waste not another single minute of whatever time God had provided for her. The last three years had been spent travelling and studying in Europe, from where she’d returned to Louisiana only a few months ago.

  ‘Studying how to run a guesthouse?’ Ben asked, to which she giggled and replied, ‘No, dearie, studying cookery. The guesthouse thing, that’s only temporary. What I’m gonna do, my real plan, is to set up my own restaurant, the best eatin’ house for a hundred miles around. It’s gonna put this little ol’ town back on the map and bring folks from all over.’

  Lottie’s travels had taken her to London, Paris and Rome, where she’d scrubbed pots and waitressed in all the top restaurants, while using her divorce settlement money to take classes in some of the most famous cookery schools in Europe. Now armed with the requisite skills and a clutch of diplomas, she had proudly returned to her roots in order to realise her grand ambition of bringing together the finer points of classical cuisine with the best of traditional Cajun cooking. ‘Because there ain’t nothin’ like it in the world,’ she assured him.

  ‘Everywhere I go around here, it’s all about food, food and more food,’ Ben observed with a smile. ‘Everything from Mickey’s crawfish to fresh coon meat to Creole jambalaya to boudin to gumbo to gar balls. I’ve done nothing but eat since I got here. Does anyone in Louisiana ever think about anything else?’

  She laughed. ‘We do worship our bellies, that’s a fact. Fattest state in America, and we’s only just gettin’ started.’

  ‘Whatever the heck gar balls are.’

  ‘Those are a kind of patty, made from alligator gar. That’s this ugly big ol’ fish the river folks catch. Might look like a livin’ nightmare, but sure tastes like heaven.’

  Ben remembered the fanged monster he’d seen displayed outside the fish shack on the way into town. He still didn’t fancy eating it. ‘And what on earth is gumbo? Where do you get these names?’

  Lottie’s big brown eyes opened wide. ‘Heavens, honey child, you mean to tell me you ain’t never eaten no Louisiana gumbo before?’

  ‘I can’t say I’ve had that pleasure yet.’

  ‘Then you sure came to the right place, sweetie. And I know just what to put on the menu for dinner tonight.’ Lowering her voice and turning on the accent even more strongly, she said, ‘Mm-hmm, you is in fo’ a treat!’

  But before the treat could happen, some preparations needed to be made, and so did a confession. Because she was still getting on her feet with her new guesthouse business, and because Ben was her only customer and had turned up out of the blue the way he had, Lottie had to admit the shocking truth that her larder was all but empty. Which to her was a major embarrassment, but to Ben was completely unimportant. All he wanted was a room for the night.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to feed me. I saw a café in town. I can eat there.’

  ‘You don’ want to eat there, trust me.’

  ‘How bad can it be?’ He could have offered plenty of examples to illustrate how used he was to roughing it, but there were already enough citizens of Clovis Parish with more insights into his past than they really needed to have.

  Despite his protests Lottie was resolute, her eyes already beginning to glaze as she visualised the feast she was going to cook up to mark the occasion of her first-ever customer.

  Hence, a serious shopping expedition was called for – and hence, as Ben had nothing else to do for the next few hours, nor for the rest of that day for that matter, he happily allowed himself to get roped in as a general aide and grocery carrier. And, as it turned out, he soon became the chauffeur for the occasion too, after pointing out that Lottie’s matchbox-sized bright green GMC, as cute as it was, couldn’t hold more than a couple of bags of shopping whereas his Tahoe could haul enough goods to stock a restaurant kitchen for a month.

  He gallantly escorted Lottie to the passenger side and opened her door for her. An elderly man painting his fence across the street paused to wave, and she smiled and waved back with a cheery ‘Afternoon, Mr Clapp’. Then Ben tossed a pile of empty shopping bags in the back, and they were off.

  Lottie eschewed the local grocery store and instead directed Ben a few miles further west of Chitimacha, to a tiny rural town called Pointe Blanche where, she explained to him with a conspiratorial wink, there existed a sensational food market that was destined to be the secret weapon in her quest to establish the best restaurant in Clovis Parish. ‘They got all the good stuff, real Cajun specialties you won’t find anywhere else.’

  Ben was happy to take her word for it, though privately he was thinking back to the weird and wonderful local dishes he’d seen on offer at the Cajun steakhouse and beginning to wonder what he was letting himself in for.

  Pointe Blanche was maybe half the size of Chitimacha, but a good deal busier. ‘Why not set up your restaurant here?’ he asked her as they searched for a parking space. ‘Closer to your suppliers, bigger clientele.’

  She shook her head. ‘I grew up in Chitimacha. That’s where I’ll die.’ Stubborn.

  Ben finally managed to park the Tahoe just three minutes’ walk from the food market, so they wouldn’t have too far to haul their goodies. They locked up the car and strolled down the street, her talking, him listening and enjoying the moment as he took in the local sights.

  On the same street as the food market was an auto repair yard called DUMPY’S RODS, with nobody in sight and a variety of custom cars in various stages of dismantlement behind a locked chain-link gate. Next door to Dumpy’s was the compulsory town gun shop, and finally the food market itself, a kind of Aladdin’s cave of esoteric gastronomy purveying such delights as bayou gator burger, blackened catfish and roast beef with ‘debris’. What kind of debris, Ben didn’t even want to know.

  Lottie invaded the place like a nine-year-old let loose in a toy store, and instantly began spending far more cash than Ben was paying her for a night’s board.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ he protested. ‘Not on my account.’ To which she replied, ‘Shush, now,’ and silenced him with one of her retina-searing smiles.

  Lugging multiple bags of Cajun delicacies back to the Tahoe half an hour later, they passed by the auto repair yard again. This time the chain-link gate was open and a cluster of young guys were gathered in the forecourt, five of them all drooling over a flame-painted lowrider with suspension so close to the ground that it wouldn’t have made it halfway up the track to Le Val without bottoming out. To Ben the car looked like a big chrome polishing headache, but the young guys all seemed entranced by it.

  One of them, a lean hairy individual with close-set eyes full of nastiness and a roll-up dangling from his mouth, managed to peel his gaze away from the absurd car long enough to cast a lurid glance Lottie’s way and crack a grin that showed off his rotten teeth. He yelled, ‘Yo, Mama!’ Then nudged the guy standing next to him and added loudly, shaking his head in mirth, ‘Damn, that’s the porkiest nigger bitch I seen all week.’

  The other one laughed and cupped his hands to his mouth to call to Ben, ‘Hey buddy! Don’t feed the gorilla!’

  Which was more than enough to make Ben want to set down his shopping bags, walk into the yard and lay the five out flat, in such a way that they wouldn’t be getting up again too quickly. But only after he’d made them watch him reduce the lowrider to a smoking pile of scrap metal.

  Lottie just stiffened a little and hastened her step past the open chain-link gateway, motioning f
or him to do the same. ‘Another reason for not livin’ in Pointe Blanche. Lot of trash round these parts.’

  ‘Maybe someone should clean it up,’ Ben said.

  ‘Forget it. That there’s Dwayne Skinner.’ She seemed too afraid to point out which one she meant, but Ben guessed it was the lean hairy one.

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘We was in middle school together. This is a small community. Ever’body knows ever’body around here.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So, you don’ go gettin’ into fights with Dwayne Skinner.’

  ‘I don’t like his language.’

  She looked at him. ‘Ben, if you’re fixin’ to go pickin’ quarrels with every redneck who says the N-word, y’all gonna have your hands full, believe me.’

  Ben thought, fuck it. He went ahead and set down the bags. Stood staring at the group and felt that familiar coldness coming over him as his body went into fight mode. Now all five were staring back and beginning to bristle like the real tough guys they were.

  The lean hairy one who might be Dwayne Skinner yelled, ‘You got a problem, asshole?’

  Ben didn’t have a problem, beyond the fact that he was mildly irritated by their behaviour. But they did, if he walked into that yard. Five against one. They probably thought they were in with a pretty good chance. Which constituted a serious error of judgement. Because in reality, the fight would be over before it even started.

  Lottie halted and turned, giving him an imploring look. ‘Come on, sugah. Let’s go.’

  ‘This won’t take long,’ Ben said.

  Now the five were moving away from the car and slowly walking towards him. They were putting on the whole display of menace. Fists thumping into cupped palms. Brows furrowing, jawlines tightening, eyes narrowing. Radiating total self-confidence, as though they’d done this a hundred times before. And maybe they had, too. Experience had taught them they had nothing to fear. But that just meant they’d been lucky, until today.