Courir De Mardi Gras (17 page)

Why was it, George pondered, that women always wanted the bad boys, not a kind, intelligent guy who would treat them well and remain faithful? LaDonna and Cherry wanted the sports star, the big house, the presumed fortune. No chance he would ever be a star again. He neared losing the big house, and the fortune vanished a long time ago. Not much of a chance of being desired for himself. Chances. George decided to take this one, even with his brain and another good friend telling him, “No, no, no!”

The day he bought the costume and hung it up in his rented office space in Lafayette, he had a meeting with a long-term client, Robert LeBlanc, a cattleman from Chapelle, south of the city. Bob eyed the black plume, the red-lined cape, the whole shebang not yet concealed in the garment bag as they pored over his account in preparation for tax season.

“You wearing that for Mardi Gras? I just rent a tuxedo for the ball. Of course, I have to dress like a clown to ride on the floats in Chapelle, but I really, really don’t do costumes unless I must. Besides, I thought you hated Mardi Gras.”

Fine for Bob to say. His elopement with his second wife on Mardi Gras eve came pretty damn close to being a local legend, and George told him so.

“Oh, I see. You want to impress a woman. With that. I’d stick to a tuxedo. That’s what I had on when Laura and I got hitched at Broussard’s Barn. Of course, we’d both been drinking.”

“There’s more—a white horse, a pirogue ride.” George laid out the whole scheme along with the spreadsheets they studied.

Much shorter than George, solid of build, and dark of hair and eye like most people having French ancestry, Bob shook his head. “Too elaborate. Lots can go wrong. Would be easier to get her drunk, and even then you have to face what you’ve done in the morning.”

Sage advice he did not take. He felt he had to do more to impress Suzanne than wear a tuxedo. Those first fumbling attempts at spontaneity nearly ruined any chance he had with her. The lunch, a terrible idea, the dinner even worse, and that sideshow he put on at Joe’s Lounge, a disaster.

He heard more about the fight around town on Monday than he could remember about it himself. Lonnie complimented him on showing some spine and putting the Patout boys in their place. He couldn’t look his own secretary in the eye for most the day. But, the most troubling part, deep inside George enjoyed acting like an alpha male, like Linc, like his father. He had to go farther, be bolder if he wanted Suzanne to pay attention.

The only good coming out of that John Wayne episode—he won Suzanne’s sympathy. She made it easier to tell about his trouble with Magnolia Hill than he thought possible. Suzanne liked to touch a person to give comfort. Her warm hands covered his. She touched his shoulders lightly. He hadn’t felt a touch like that since Birdie said good-bye the day he left for St. Mark’s Academy. His dad shook hands. His mother cried in her room. George went on to fantasize how Suzanne might touch a man in other ways. She had no idea what a brush of her fingers could do to him.

He wanted to be more than a person she could pity and pat on the hand. Linc’s plan looked better every time she smiled his way. Mardi Gras is just a centuries-old excuse to do things a man would not ordinarily do, to be someone he is not while hiding behind a mask. The plan took his mind off the fake silver and what mayhem he wanted to commit on Randy Royal in real life. Randy could be dealt with after the Courir.

Mardi Gras day started out better than expected. Suzanne didn’t seem to notice George sweated like a pig in August under the flannel shirt and baggy pants covering the Devil’s Horseman costume and all but the toes of his boots. Pig sweat, didn’t some experiment show women found the scent so attractive manufacturers used it as a base for cologne? Good, he needed all the help he could get.

Excited as a child waiting for the riders to come, Suzanne easily accepted his suggestion to watch their approach from his mother’s room. She was like that about a lot of things, full of enthusiasm for robins and drawbridges and early flowers, ordinary, everyday things. He enjoyed that about her, but why went beyond male comprehension. Maybe, Randy Royal would have understood her better.

Still, her excitement about the Courir gave him the opportunity to slip out and check on Alcide Porrier’s horse staked out of sight. Puffy cleaned up better than expected. With fifty dollars worth of oats and a good rest under his girth, he looked fairly spry. Another piece of good luck—the saddle, the very one once owned by his father, Jacques St. Julien, silver mounting and all. Old Alcide must have bought it when his mother sold off the horses and tack. Virginia Lee deemed silver saddles tasteless and probably sold it for a song. Its shiny rosettes sparkled now. Putting on his cape and plumed hat, George used them for a mirror, pleased with what he saw.

Finding a vicious rooster in Port Jefferson—no problem. Suzanne felt sorry for the one-eyed bird that would end up in a gumbo pot, but George had collected enough rents in backyards and around the Hollow to recognize a retired gamecock when he saw one. The granny who sold the cock figured the rooster’s breeding days were over, but fed up on corn, he would give those riders one hell of a fight. He did, too.

They still hadn’t caught the bird when the Devil’s Horseman charged up the hill. Hippo and two of the Patout boys crossed themselves. The Devil’s Horseman! Aiii-eeee! George threw back his head and laughed at the expression on their faces.

Not such a joke when he put his arms around Suzanne. He didn’t want to hurt her or scare her, but could see she got into playing a part, too, joining in the game. They cantered away while the cowboys still said their Hail Marys.

They just about reached the boat when the saddle slipped an inch because of Suzanne’s wiggling. George pulled her up and kissed her simply to be in character. Seemed like what his father would have done. The kiss grew harder along with another other part of his anatomy. He hurt her a little, but that’s the way the Devil’s Horseman would have kissed. Then, Linc said to hurry. For once, he wished Linc had let him take the lead. If he had been alone with Suzanne, they could have ended the farce right there or gone into the shady, private clump of basswood and made love on top of the satin cloak, the fantasy he really desired. But Linc gestured toward the boat and insisted on that damn rope and gag to “heighten the experience,” he said.

Shit! That boat turned out to be the dumbest part of the plan, free or not. When the pirogue capsized, he was the first with his head above the water. George hung on to the hull and scanned the river for Suzanne. Screaming his lungs out for help, Linc thrashed about five feet away in the slower water by the bank. George let him swallow one more mouthful of dirty brown water, then kicked the pirogue over to him and reached out a hand. Terrified, Linc just kept flailing and went under again. He pulled the master planner across the bow and kicked them to shore, all the while calling “Suzanne! Suzanne!”

Stripping off the cape, boots, and gloves, the mask and the sodden hat dragging at his neck by its cord, he threw the garments into the righted pirogue and began diving while Linc coughed up water on his own. The turgid bayou ran heavy with silt. He dove six times looking for her white blouse or fair hair, but no sign of Suzanne. George sat down in the mud next to where Linc still breathed hard and put his face in his hands.

“My God, Linc, we killed her. We drowned Suzanne.”

Chapter Ten

Suzanne’s story

Suzanne went into the water feet first, kicking off her shoes and surging upward, the loose bonds practically falling off her wrists. Surfacing briefly, she pulled the gag down around her neck, took a deep breath, and dove for the bottom, letting the current help her downstream. Nothing hurt except her pride.

She surfaced in the shadow of the bridge and looked back toward the boat where the masked man heaved the pirate aboard. Good. No one needed her senior lifesaving skills upstream. On one breath, she should have been able to go farther. Out of shape, definitely out of shape, even though she’d swum laps at the university pool whenever she could work the exercise into her schedule. Suzanne trod water in the little eddy beneath the bridge and watched the two maskers make it safely to shore. Judging by their postures, this attempted adventure had gotten a little hairy near the end, even for them.

She thought she heard her name being called, but with ears full of bayou water and a Cajun band pumping away nearby on Main Street, she couldn’t quite tell. The tall man in black dove in, searching for her body. Well, they deserved the same kind of scare she got when they put her in that unstable craft with her hands tied. She took another deep breath and came up by the knotted rope dangling from the oak that she’d noticed on her walk back from the great-aunts’ house. Crawling up on the gnarled roots of the tree, she huddled into its hollow bole. The day was mild, but the water chilly.

Shivering, Suzanne debated whether to go to the nearby house for help or boldly march over the bridge to join the party on Main Street and announce her miraculous resurrection. Her abductors would probably be there raising volunteers to dredge the river for her body, explaining their guts out about a joke gone wrong. What a great entrance—barefooted, a good pair of shoes lost kicking them off in the water in the best lifeguard tradition, and wearing a wet, white silk blouse now practically transparent and probably ruined. Her snug jeans, required dress for Mardi Gras in Port Jefferson she’d been told, clung even more tightly around her bottom.

The silver Navajo necklace, an expensive souvenir from her artsy-craftsy days, still dangled between her breasts. She’d toted it along to Port Jefferson, why? Because she thought the dashing, imaginary Georges St. Julien would have preferred it to pearls. The necklace with its turquoise pendant was the only bit of western wear in her wardrobe, so she’d trotted it out to display in this strangely cowboy oriented town. If it had fallen off, she would have demanded they dredge the bayou for
that
.

Suzanne tried the house first, thinking she might find a kind lady like Odette St. Julien who would dry her clothes and give her a hot cup of tea. No such luck, no one at home on Mardi Gras. She took another deep breath and started across the bridge. Her kidnappers had vanished, but their boat was drawn up on the bank. The loud band played on a platform erected on the lawn of the Farmer’s Bank. People danced in the street, no undue commotion at all, no search parties being formed to look for her drowned corpse. Those two rats hadn’t told anyone they’d killed her. In fact, all eyes suddenly turned in the opposite direction from the bayou.

Capitaine in the lead, the Courir riders bolted into town to the accompaniment of accordion and triangle and the squawk of doomed chickens. Hippo Huval’s voice rose above the racket of wagon wheels rolling on the pitted macadam road.

“We seen a ghost, us! We seen a ghost!” he bellowed.

The Capitaine, a man named Jules Badeaux, put the cow horn to his lips and blew. Unmelodious but loud, it quieted the crowd. “No such t’ing, Hypolite. Dismount men. Get dose chickens to da cooks. Tap a keg and unmask!”

A small cheer went up, but almost everyone eyed Hypolite Huval, who took an enormous swig directly from the flowing tap and splashed more beer on his face and belly as a form of revival.

“We seen da ghost of Jacques St. Julien,” Hippo swore. “Jacques, he come riding up da hill from da bayou, him. Had his same white horse and silver saddle, only his cape was black an’ red, and his horn turned all gold.”

“Shit, old man,” interrupted Billy Patout, who shed his clown suit after delivering the chickens, and now appeared in his jeans and sweat-stained, black T-shirt with a skull logo stretched across his belly. “Jacques St. Julien couldn’t have been more than five-eight, and he’s been dead ten years or more. That rider was plenty alive and at least six feet tall.”

“You don’t know no’ting ’bout Jacques, Billy. You just a kid. He looked six feet tall in da saddle.”

“So why’s he come back now after ten years? Tell me that, Mr. Hypolite.”

“’Cause dis is Mardi Gras day, an’ a blonde woman he want is living in his house. Dat’s why.”

“His wife died over a year. How come he don’t know that if he’s a ghost?”

“I suspect dey didn’t go to da same place, Billy.”

Their audience tittered. No one noticed Suzanne, dripping wet, on the edge of the crowd.

“Blue eyes. That rider had the weirdest blue eyes. I never seen eyes so bright. They bored right into me when he went by,” the youngest Patout chimed in.

“Jacques always say he wished he had da blue eyes what da ladies likes so much. Maybe da Devil give him some.”

“And a shiny new horn and a black cape. Shoot, Hippo, any minute now that rider is going to show up in town carrying Miss College Graduate on his saddle. I bet she was in on it.”

“No, she wasn’t!”

Suzanne hated to interrupt this really entertaining argument and draw attention to myself. She fluffed the blouse clinging to her pink bra away from her body, but the heavy necklace pushed the wet fabric back against her breasts again. A slight breeze ruffled across the crowd, and her nipples puckered up even harder. Billy Patout showed his appreciation by leering.

“What that ghost do to you, Suzanne, honey? Drop you in the bayou?”

“Not exactly. Another man dressed like a pirate stood by with a pirogue. It capsized above the bridge.”

“Well, you still look good to me, sugar. I like that sexy pink bra you got on.” Coming up from behind her, Rodney Patout, put his large paws on Suzanne’s shoulders and ground his solid belly against her back.

She turned to shake him off and saw George pushing into the crowd and gesturing to get the attention of the man with the Stetson hat and gold badge who was doing crowd control. So frantic, he didn’t see her. She had to shout, “George, over here!”

He diverted from the straight line he was making toward the sheriff by shoving people out of his way. “Suzanne!” His big hands swept aside Rodney’s clutch on her shoulders. Even less eloquent than usual, he said, “Suzanne, Suzanne”, over and over again.