Red Thunder (12 page)

I put the food just inside the door and went back. Best catfish I ever had.

"If you know Jubal won't eat it," Dak said at one point, "why have Manny take the food up there?"

"Because it's important to make the offer, meathead," Alicia said.

"Same reason that I, an atheist, had a prayer said over it," Travis said, nodding at Alicia. "If Jubal
did
take it, he'd want it blessed. I try not to lie to Jubal. He's had enough lies for three lifetimes."

Nobody pursued that one. We cleaned the plates. Hell... I mean,
whillikers,
we cleared the whole table, and topped it all off with a berry cobbler
Alicia made. I figured if I came out here much more I'd have to start
watching my waistline.

MY PHONE RANG at three A.M. the next morning. I almost
didn't answer it, but after eleven rings I figured whoever was on the
other end wasn't going to give up easily.

"Hello?" I said, and yawned.

"Manny? Travis. I wonder if you could do me a big favor?"

I was sitting up now, fully awake. "I'll sure try, Travis. What is it?"

"I wonder if you could come on out here to the ranch."

"Come out... what, you mean now?"

"If you could. It's pretty important."

"Gee, Travis, I don't know..."

"It's about Jubal."

"Is he all right? Did something—"

"Please, Manny, just come on out. I can explain when you get here. Take a taxi if you have to. I'll pay."

"No, Travis, I mean, sure, I'll come, but—"

"Thanks a million, pal." And he hung up. Kelly rolled over and sat up.

"Travis?"

"Yeah, he wants me to go out there. Tonight. Right now."

"That's what happens when you have weird friends," she said, and
bounced out of bed. "Let me wash my face and comb my hair, and we'll
both go."

WE STOPPED FOR two giant Starbucks espressos and a dozen Krispy Kremes, then hit the road.

The place looked a lot better in the dark this time. It's amazing
how much difference changing a few burned-out lightbulbs can make.

The tennis court, pool area, and paths to the barn and to the lake
were now lit by lights on poles. Moths and June bugs battered
themselves to death on them, and bug zappers hung all around the patio.

But the biggest difference was in the pool, all cleaned out and full
of beautiful blue water, lit from below. I wished I'd brought my
bathing suit.

Dak and Alicia arrived not far behind us. We went in through the
patio screen door and found Travis sitting in the sunken conversation
area, fully dressed. There was a bottle of Jim Beam on the table at his
side, and a tumbler half full. Alicia made a face when she saw the
bourbon, but she didn't say anything.

Sitting on the coffee table was Jubal's 7-Eleven jug of golf-ball-sized indestructible silver bubbles.

"So where's Jubal?" Dak asked at last.

"Jubal is out rowing on the lake. It's what Jubal always does when
he's upset. You probably noticed the size of his arms. Jubal rows a
lot,
and it's usually my fault. It certainly is tonight.

"I'd like to know everything y'all know about these things." He
looked from one of us to another, right down the line. "Unless you're
going to tell me you don't know anything about them."

I told him everything I had done with the bubble since finding it in
the tall grass not a hundred feet from where I was now sitting. It
didn't take too long. I deferred to Kelly, who had very little to add,
and then to Dak, who confirmed what Jubal had shown us of the nature of
the bubbles, and some attempt to report what Jubal had said.

Alicia was one of those females, like Mom and Maria, who can't stand
seeing people sitting around with nothing to eat or drink. She had been
listening to us from the kitchen and came out now with a big pot of
coffee and some cookies she had brought with her. There was oatmeal and
brown sugar covering up the taste of the other health store stuff I'm
sure was in there.

Travis took a deep drink of his bourbon, looked at the bottle, then
at Alicia, and reached for a coffee cup. Alicia filled it, looking
happy as a prohibitionist who's just set a barroom on fire.

"Okay, friends," Travis said. "Did I say friends? Well, Jubal likes
you. If it was up to me, I might just chase all y'all's asses back to
the beach where I found you—"

"You found
us?
" Alicia snorted.

"—where I found y'all, illegally rampaging up and down a
public beach that innocent citizens were sitting on, minding their own
business. But it happens I kind of like you, too, and I can't really
figure how any of you did anything wrong... except I wish you'd a told
me about this. I might have handled Jubal better."

"You really think so?" Kelly asked.

"...Probably not. Anyway, things would be so much simpler if none of
y'all had seen these things. But you have. And Jubal wants you to keep
coming around. That's one area I've failed Jubal miserably, not
bringing new folks around for him to visit with. Jubal's frightened of
other people, often as not, but both of us know if he doesn't socialize
now and then he's likely to grow a hide so tough he won't be able to
talk to anybody else, ever. And I've pretty much used up all the old
friends I used to have, which may be why I'm trying to be friends with
as unlikely a group as y'all. Anyway...

"I reckon I'd better tell you a little more about Jubal. About me
and Jubal. I've told this stuff to no one, nobody at all outside the
family, and I wouldn't be telling y'all if Jubal hadn't said he didn't
mind. So here goes.

"My friends, it ain't easy being Jubal..."

TRAVIS'S UNCLE AVERY Broussard was a few years older
than Travis's father. When Avery was young he had been Travis's
favorite of his six uncles. Of all the Broussard brothers and sisters,
Avery lived closest to the land. He taught his sons and nephews to get
along in the woods and swamps of Louisiana bayou country. It was Avery
who always found the time to take the kids out in the middle of the
night frog-gigging or jacklighting deer. Travis said he was nine before
he realized jacklighting—shooting deer frozen in car headlights
or powerful spotlights—was illegal. Avery just laughed at that,
and said it was okay because they intended to eat the meat. It was just
an easier way to put food on the table, and he wasn't surprised that
the city boys and girls who never in their lives killed for the table
would want country boys like him to hunt the hard way.

"Just think about it,
cher
," Avery said. "Dem city boys, what dey be cryin' 'bout is it ain't fair to de deer.
Ain't fair!
"
He had a good laugh at that one. "I tell you, I druther be shootin' at
dem deer not movin' dan jus' run all over God's miraculous creation
findin' a deer wasn't nothin' but just winged, and him hurtin' powerful
all dat time. No, sir, Avery Broussard hasn't
never
missed no deer caught in de headlights. What is dat, if it ain't 'perventin' cruelty' to animals, hah?"

So they jacklighted and dodged the game wardens through the tangled
bayou that Avery knew better than anyone else. And during the day,
Avery would take them hunting for coon, possum, and squirrel. They
raised their own rabbits. He would take them out on the water to run
the trotlines and crawdad traps, fish for catfish and trout and
alligator gar and just about anything else they could wrestle aboard a
rickety pirogue, including alligators when the game warden wasn't in
the parish. It was a Huck Finn life, and one that Travis and all his
brothers liked a hell of a lot more than their own situation in town,
in Lafayette, where their father, Emile Broussard, worked as a
pipe-fitter.

They could all see the differences in the two families, but for many
years it didn't seem to matter. Emile's family had enough money, a car,
good clothes and food, a great house, all courtesy of wages and
benefits negotiated for him by the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers
Union. Avery, on the other hand, had nothing. His children dressed in
rags and hand-me-downs from his brothers' families, and were lucky to
have one pair of shoes. But Avery didn't seem to mind, and neither did
his kids, who hardly ever wore shoes, anyway. In fact, any jealousy
went the other way. Even Emile admitted that sometimes he wished he'd
opted for the independent life, living off the land. Most of the time
the living was good out there in the bayous, and when it wasn't Avery
had a large family that would pull him through the tight spots. Avery
always repaid the help he got in fresh eggs, fish, rabbits, whatever
the bounty of nature was producing at the time.

During those golden years, Jubal was Travis's best friend. Travis
was three years older and it should have made a difference, except that
Jubal was the smartest person Travis had ever known, child or adult.
And Travis knew something about being smart, he was far and away the
best of his class in every subject he took.

Travis knew from bitter experience what the other kids did if they
learned you were intelligent. It could all be summed up, he felt, in
Moe Howard, the mean Stooge, sneering at Curly and saying, "Oh, a wise
guy, eh?" Then the fingers poked in the eyes. In the city schools a
wise guy was the worst thing you could be, except for being a faggot,
and Travis figured things wouldn't be any better out in the country.

They wouldn't have been, but none of the Avery branch of the
Broussard family had to worry about that, because none of them were
ever put in school. Though there may never have been worse candidates
for home schooling than the Avery Broussard family, the school boards
of Bayou Teche Parish were hard-pressed to educate even the children
who came in willingly. They didn't have the heart to fight very hard
about those whose parents would prefer their children to stay at home.
Their high school graduates often had trouble passing
seventh-grade-level tests. Could home schooling do much worse? They
washed their hands of Avery Broussard and his brood, preferring not to
notice that Avery's mildly retarded common-law wife, Evangeline, could
neither read nor write.

It turned out in the Broussard case that home schooling could do
substantially
worse than the public schools.

Avery had been an extremely religious man most of his life. He had
been raised Christian, of course, like everyone else in the parish, and
Catholic, like many of his neighbors. But it was a wild, charismatic
brand of Catholicism that just sort of naturally blended in with the
hard-shell Baptists all around them until you could hardly tell the
difference. Actually, the Broussard family church didn't have much
contact with either the Catholic or the Baptist mainstream. The First
Baptist Church in Lafayette, for instance, never released venomous
snakes in their immaculate sanctuary, nor did the congregation of Our
Lady of the Bayous drink poison. Avery's church did both of these
things, and more. The church started small, and stayed small, new
converts just about balancing out casualties.

In that part of Louisiana, it was common to be deeply religious yet
far from saintly. A lot went out and raised some hell on Saturday
night. Maybe that was the reason such extreme measures were thought
necessary the following day, as if simple prayers and pleas would not
be enough.

One night when he was twenty-two, dead drunk and coked to the
eyeballs, Avery had gone out to the parking lot of the Gables, a local
after-hours bucket of blood, to square off with Alphonse Hebert. Avery
thought the matter should be settled with fists, and Avery was the best
man with his fists for a good ten miles around. Hebert must have heard
that, because he drew a revolver and fired all six shots at Avery from
a distance of no more than six feet. Avery, suddenly cold sober but no
more able to move than a jacklighted deer, stood there and pissed
himself, then felt all over his body for bullet holes, then fell to his
knees and began to pray as three of his brothers worked Hebert over
with pool cues and boots, and the rest of the patrons of the Gables
stood around and watched, the general feeling being that Hebert was
getting no more than he deserved.

Now, while it was agreed that Hebert was easily plotzed enough to
miss at that range, he was unlikely to miss with all six. And examining
the bullet holes later, it surely did appear that most of that lead
ought to have been slowed down appreciably by various parts of Avery
before hitting the clapboard wall behind him, which would have been
good news for old Charlie Wilson, who soaked up two of the bullets
after they came through the wall, one with his chest and the other with
his head, and as a result gave up drinking and never quite walked right
for the rest of his life.

"It weren't no burnin' bush, no," Avery later told anyone who would
listen. "But I knows de hand a God when I sees it, oh yes." He swore
off liquor, fornication, and fighting, which left quite a gap in his
social life, as aside from sleeping, eating, and working as a roughneck
on an offshore drilling rig when he needed money, drinking, fighting,
and screwing other men's wives was about all he did.

He filled the gaps with marriage and praying and preaching. He
became even less employable than he had been before the miracle, as he
could seldom go through an entire day without getting into a heated
argument with his boss or a customer or fellow worker about religion.
He never hesitated to point out sin, which did not make him popular. He
moved deeper into the swamp and started in on a family.

Evangeline had been picked for the fertility of her lineage more
than beauty or brains, as she had little of either, but she was fertile
and prolific, and able to work like a horse even when eight and a half
months gone. And that was good, because she spent the next fifteen
years pregnant, giving birth usually in March or April, usually on a
Sunday, and three times on Easter Sunday itself. Avery and Evangeline
had seven sons: Veneration, Jubilation, Celebration, Sanctification,
Exaltation, Consecration, and Hallelujah. They had five daughters, all
named Gloria: Gloria Patri, Gloria Filly, Gloria Spiritusanctu, Gloria
Inexcelsis, and Gloria Monday. They lost three, a boy and two girls,
stillborn.