The Flechettte Bayou Pact pt 2

Moses stared hard at the blank page in front of him, drawing a smiley face every now and again to keep up the appearance of some clandestine planning ritual.  In reality, all he had was a name and an exact current location, nothing more than that.  The details would be given to him when Pete Fontenot was more certain about the specifics, if he could be.  If not, the name and the location would suffice.  Moses would go there, figure up a way to earn his keep and go home.

In the meantime, he stared at the paper and not her.

It was hard enough on her to see him leave without him facing her.  Their eyes’ meeting would bring forth her usual outbursts and there was no point in having those.  Her emotions were buoyed by her words when she got cranked up.  It would surely only lead to her breaking down in front of him again.  She was young and impetuous that way. 

Moses had seen the trait in women of all ages when their men left them, either out of contempt or from a call to duty.  Some men even cried like children when their women stomped out of the door but he figured it was all for show for most of them.  Men did not cry, at least not real men, from west Texas.  It was a woman’s place to cry for their men when they left for the perilous world beyond their homes.  Women throughout recorded history sent their men away to war or other peril and were often only rewarded with the news of their beloved’s falling.  Her actions were expected and appreciated.  Had she waved him frivolously away knowing what may come to pass for him, he would have been hurt.  That she missed him and wished him well was touching. 

He could feel her eyes peering at him intensely.  Tears building in them gave them a peculiar reflectivity in the light around her, almost casting them in a demonic glow he could see from the corner of his own.  The heat of those eyes was a salve for him, in a queer way.  It was a cold business for Moses and until he met Curio, a cold life.  Hatred for the job had never entered his mind; it was simply what he did and had always done.

Growing up in Texas, he worked at the slaughterhouse in Midland.  Back in those days, it was the good ole sledgehammer laid solid to the forehead that put down the critter.  It was the first job a man got when they got on with the packing company.  The owners wanted to make sure every man understood he was getting into.  There was even a sign that read, “You cain’t a-grill it ‘til ya’ kill it!” It hung, the words carved large in a sheet of old mesquite wood, over the exit gate at the downing stall where the next cow to be sent down the line would be brought in for dispatching.

He developed a strong back and a dispassionate shrugging off of the deed after the first day.  He processed a hundred head a day in his stall back then.  And his stall was only one of ten in the line.  During a drought year when hay and grain was scarce, the plant had to work overtime to grind up all the downers bought cheap when LBJ sent his home state a nice subsidy package to handle the cattlemen’s “dire” situation.

In Vietnam, seeing men die and in fact being trained to hunt them and kill them by any means available and to varying degrees depending on the message to be sent tempered him further.  Moses took no delight in the hunt and felt no relish for the deed.  It simply was what it was.  He was paid well for it.  Someone had to do it.  It was all he knew to do.

Until I met her!

Moses smiled and cut his eyes to her for a split second, more than enough for his keen vision to absorb her pretty self sitting so sadly on his old couch.

He went from drawing smiley faces to idly sketching hearts on the paper.  Now he did feel an actual want for the jobs.  Before, he spent little of his earnings on himself.  A great deal of it was buried in Zip-locked bundles sprinkled across the South; some were larger than others.  It was escape money in case he was caught away from the tenuous embrace of his employers.  Dug up together with a plan in mind, their sum would provide a permanent out if it ever came to that.

The home on Flechette Bayou was listed in an anonymous name, as were the utilities that were paid in a lump sum annually by his employer’s nefarious attorney.  He drew a disability check as his only verifiable income.  It was sent to the lawyer’s office and he had no idea what was done with it. 

No bills came to the home and only the unceasing flow of the usual junk mail all Americans receive was ever delivered by the postman.  He shopped for food in surrounding towns, rarely used a phone for anything.  If it broke, he fixed it or replaced it. 

Aside from the eyes of passing pilots, the home and Moses Holiday did not much exist in the murmur of day-to-day Houma, Louisiana.

Now she was with him, though.  Having never had many things of her own in her life, he sought to make sure she had things.  Things kept a person sentimental.  There was always that smidgen of underlying concern that he would come home and find her gone.  His life was easy enough for him to lead.  Asking it of her was probably unfair but she of all people accepted that life was unfair.  Her youthful and emotional approach to things always left that indiscriminate possibility that may misjudge her intensity and find her unable to stay with him any longer.  It was a calculation he made, as most men make, that things will glue a bond.  He was a man who understood miscalculations happen all the time.

He loved her, so the piles of money kept in his buried accounts were now dwindling as he set about making sure she had things and was to be taken care of should he not return from the job.  Plus he loved to spoil her.  She was young and it was easy to do so.  It was a joy for him as she oohed and ahhed over spontaneous gifts.  But the big ones, she really went all out for the big ones.

He occasionally felt more like a doting father than her lover when she squealed in delight and bounced in place upon laying eyes on some trinket he would surprise her with after a run to town for business with the boss.  The age difference became most apparent when she giggled in that way.  When they were alone in various modes couples find themselves, she was far worldlier than her youthful beauty and speech mannerisms would have implied.

She had a car, a snazzy red Mazda Miata that she adored and drove around unceasingly.  He fretted over her driving away alone at first.  She had little experience doing so.  New Orleans was a pedestrian city for most and she had not the first driving lesson other than one guy’s feeble attempts to teach her the wonders of a stolen Camry’s standard transmission in a parking lot when she was sixteen. 

It took several weeks of training before Moses was satisfied she could handle a car well enough to let her leave in it.  She traveled with a false identification.  Even a rudimentary fender bender could be catastrophic for her and possibly for him.  Curio Phelonie did not exist and he took great pains to make sure she understood the rules to keep that knowledge usable.  A traffic stop that led to the arrest of Lemarie Leblanc would have repercussions the scope of which he could not be certain.

The attorney was looking into finding her a cottage, unbeknownst to the attorney who thought Moses was hunting a second hideaway out of understandable paranoia.  He would have just bought her a place, but hunting around through sales papers and scouting locations with some realtor tagging along was tedious and in fact impossible for him to do as a surprise since she was nearly always with him.  Putting his name on a legal paper was not a thing he wished to do anyway so he put the attorney on it.  Perhaps sensing Moses was in fact seeking a love shack, the lawyer delegated the task to a young paralegal from Tulane with some taste.

After taking out a man nicknamed “Crankshaft” up in Baton Rouge at some point in the next few days, he figured he would have enough money to buy her a place outright.  He could have just told the boss he needed the place for operational purposes and he would buy it for him.  But that meant the house would be on the ledger somewhere.  It would then be potentially subject to visits by members of the Atchafalaya Mudbugs outfit.  She was his secret and he had to keep it that way.

As far as he knew, only Bertrand Fontenot, the boss, Pete Fontenot his brother, and the lawyer knew of his house on Flechette Bayou.  It was a rarity for any of them to visit him for obvious reasons.  The brothers were gangsters and watched like hawks by unmarked cargo vans, black SUV’s and large sedans.  Given his peculiar employment, his being seen with them was a frivolous risk for all involved.  They could not know about her for sure.

She was his, a secret muse, adoring lover and devoted audience.  The Fontenots were not great admirers of women, beyond their carnal charms up for rent in the gangsters’ clubs nightly.  They would not appreciate a man who killed their problems for them giggling with a teenaged temptress and spilling tidbits that could be used in court one day.  That was just fine with Moses.  He was a man who kept a great many of their secrets and now he had a special one of his own.

But she was so young!  Even at eighteen now the absurdity gnawed at him as he tried to rehearse his explanation to the bosses if they knew.

He shook his head as if contemplating a glitch in a plan but in fact castigated himself internally for the millionth time for the risking the danger of their coupling.  She was a fresh minted, legal, woman.  A beautiful one, used to being in public and admired.  Garrulous and chatty in her bubbly teenaged way.  Bawdy, loose, free.  A blissful walker of garrulous French Quarter sidewalks with strangers enchanted with her.  Keeping her cooped up at his cabin was akin to chaining a stud dog or caging a migratory zebra.  It was patently unfair and not an act of affection, only possession.

Moses did not want to possess Curio in that sense.  He wanted her happy.  True, she was happy with him.  But only because she accepted the atypical life he led for both its danger and its unusual unfettered freedom from the daily grind with which so many “normal” people had to deal.  With the exception of the six times he left for work, they were not separated for more than a few hours at a time.  Few couples could say that or, he a-reckoned, tolerate that.  They never tired of their cozy company, however.  He hoped they never would but knew he had to take measures to help that happen.

He knew she could not be kept sitting at home all the time.  Surprised, he was, that she tolerated being so insulated from the world as much as she had been since they met.  She was after all, a teenager.  Not exactly a typical ditsy girl from some suburb who went to prom and church lock-ins or who sneaked a cigarette now and again to rebel.  Curio had meandered the anonymous French Quarter streets most of her young life without supervision, often not knowing where her next meal might come from.  There were loose friends and ambiguous acquaintances scattered throughout that life.  She had no phone numbers for them and few last names to look them up.  Moses did not think himself as good a company for her as even a single girlfriend, but he tried to keep her occupied as best he could.  Setting her up with a car and her own place would allow her the ability to meet people that his locale and lifestyle dared not allow.  It was unfair and stifling for her to be only his and he knew it. 

An older woman may have tolerated it better.  Curio Phelonie could not.  There was too much spitfire, oodles of garrulous Cajun in her to not socialize.  At times, she would forget their situation and brood around the house.  She would be staring at herself in mirrors while pulling her neck skin taunt and looking at herself from various angles.  Then a frown would appear and he would await the inevitable questions.  The ridiculous ones for which few men had a ready and convincing answer, the little simpering innocently feminine snares, the interrogative tripwires dotting the minefield of inadvertent affronts to their psyche that men have hated walking across for eons.

“Are you ashamed of me, Moses?”  Slumped over in the passenger seat, she had asked him once after peering at her sweaty face in a rearview mirror.  They were in the Bronco, sans its hard top, soaking wet with sweat in the late September sun.  She noticed him turn his head away from the gaze of a pair of old ladies eyeballing them at a traffic light one day and misinterpreted this as a slight.  She was in one of her moods that day, wanting to go someplace, smile at somebody.

“For Chrissake, can we just do lunch!  Like normal couples do?  Drive somewhere?  Do some shit?” 

He indulged her with lunch at the Lafayette Bennigan’s and a quiet matinee viewing of JFK, which left her perplexed.

“I’m confused.  A coonass fairy shot Kennedy?  Or was it that twitchy fella, Patsy?”

Despite laying out his reasons, at least a dozen times, as to why he could not be seen and remembered, for any reason, something about her tone, that moping, clinging tone, rubbed him the wrong way at the stop light.  It was just wrong to see her mope.  She was glaringly awesome.  Such people had no right or reason to mope so.

He glared at the two women as they cut their faces, but not their eyes, away from him and her.  Then he reached over and pulled her to him, kissing her fiercely, lustfully, and extra spirit put into a wet mouth and dashing tongue.  Putting on a spectacle for all to see at the busy intersection of Pinhook and Kaliste Saloom Road.  He rubbed her voraciously across the bosom, digging his hands into them, cupping them before latching his mouth onto her neck and driving his teeth into a breast while sucking up a bruise.  Shocked, at first and then respondent, she pushed him back, eyes wide as she saw the plethora of faces watching them in the glare of a wide-open sun.  Suddenly she was paranoid.

A full-sized GMC laid on the horn behind him, impatient as the light stayed green.  The ladies turned red in the face and made their polite left turn.  Moses stood up on the seat, stripped off his polo and yelled, “I fucking love this eighteen year old girl!  So fucking what!”

“Way to go, dickhead!  You want a fucking medal?”  The impatient driver yelled from his window.  “Move your fucking ass!  I’m late for work!”

Moses slapped the Bronco into drive and peeled out onto Pinhook, a bemused glare leveled at her as he drove.

“That was different.”  Curio looked and smiled at him before swiveling her head around for someone following here.  It was a New Orleans street habit.

“That could have been a fender bender.  That old bitch sittin’ on the right could have been a lady who thought she remembered me running by her that one day over in Marrero for some reason.  You know…me running by her right after I shot Bill Handley point blank in the chest three times?  No, you don't know that.  Those two girls you probably never noticed three cars behind me could have been some old friends of yours…maybe from out in Kenner or something.  And as fate would have it, there they are, ridin’ around over here in Lafayette for some Nichols kegger thing or some baptism and boom!  Hey, ain’t that Curio!  Heeeey Curio!”  He waved wildly. “The thing is,”  He patted her softly on her thigh.  “You never know what it could be, Curio.  Chance favors the prepared mind.  You ever heard that before?”

“No.”  She wiped her mouth with a Kleenex and immediately began repainting her smeared lips.  “Damn, I’m horny after that.”

“I don’t like leaving some things to chance.  I’ve seen chance knock down some fine folks in my day.  Of course in the grand scheme of things, it's all chance.  I got enough marks on me from being your average dumbass and taking risks.  After a while, I realized most evahthang is a risk when you do what I do.  At home, I can manage the risk of having you with me.  Out here, though,” he looked her up and down, “You are simply too damn fine for an old coot like me to be totin’ around with an arm around her waist.  We stand out, which makes people stare and wonder.  Their wondering gets all tainted up by their various upbringings and then we raise suspicion due to their biases.”

“Fuck ‘em.” She glared.  “It ain’t illegal to be seen with me.”

“It is in my circles, baby.  It ain’t against the law, but it’s against chance.  That may sound paranoid to you, but you ain’t in my shoes, you’re in my heart.  I ain't no ways near ashamed of you, Curio.  I goddamned adore you.  For that reason alone, I’m tryin' real damned hard to stay out of prison, you know?  Or out of the way of bullets.  I do what I do to live.  For us to live.  The way I have to look at it is this.  When people see you, us, together, they just think, ‘that poor girl, how tragic it must be for her if that’s all she thinks she rates.  Some wore-out mangy drunk that don’t look too right.  Must be a dope thing or somethin’.  Poor girl.  She could do better.  And they don’t know the half of it, either.  They just think I’m scum.  They ain’t got no idea I’m worse than that.”

“You don’t look tragic, baby.  You look rough.  You look sexy.”

“I look like I’ve been in jail a lot.  I look like I been a drunk a lot.  And I probably look like I been killing people for twenty years.  That’s what I look like.  But look at you.  God-awful gorgeous.  Gotta’ smile on your face that would make Julia Roberts slap her mama for not giving her the genes for it.  Just gorgeous.  I cheapen you just being with you.  Don’t you get that?”

Curio cocked her head and smirked at him.

For months she thought he was just about the coolest fucking man she may have ever met.  And here he sat, forty-one, fairly wealthy, (“I can get by a while on what I got stashed,” he often replied when she asked how much he thought he had buried) with that chiseled chin and come-hither eyes.  Lithe, sinewy, physically powerful, explosive in a coiled package, a little gamey with the scars and tats.  With that sultry west Texas drawl, tempered by his self-taught education of literature and music, that made him self-conscious of sounding too hayseed yet still leaked into his speech at the most charming of moments.  Scarred physically by war and an oft-violent lifestyle, the inked-up images dotted across his back and chest only hinted to his dark persona when his shirt was taken off. 

Otherwise, he was merely Moses, his own man.  An amiably smiling fella whose accent told folks around their parts he was not a coonass immediately.  There were enough Texans working the gas wells for his oddity to not arouse questions.

He could handle nearly any situation thrown at him.  He was kind to her, polite, endlessly doting and eager to share as much of the world at large as he felt he could safely do without undue official scrutiny.  And yet he did not think himself worthy of meager her, a runaway who slept more times than she cared to recall on the river levee next to Jax Brewery Mall when the weather was good.

“You don’t cheapen me, Moses Holliday.”  She cradled his arm in her lap, holding hands and smiling at him. Her eyes were smiling at him in the glare of the Atchafalaya sun, devoted, admiring.  He knew it tickled her when he declared how thought so highly of her without any pretense of just making nice for nice’ sake.

“You make me the richest woman in the world.  You make me have a love for life and trust me, it’s fuckin’ rare.  I love you, you big lug!”  She smiled and slapped him playfully.  “No more poor mouthing my boyfriend, you sexy asshole.  Or I’ll beat you the fuck down, okay?”  She leaned forward and kissed his cheek.  “And you owe me some big time sex for getting me all hot and bothered in public like that.  Damn, that got the motor running.”

He sat at the table, idly touching his cheek softly where she had kissed him without realizing it, he thought of that day as he sat at his table, doodling hearts and smiley faces before leaving.  That kiss in the Lafayette sun was so tender.  The next time he could recall her kissing that place was after Gary Parker’s boy hummed a Rawlings at him.  It busted his cheekbone and liked to knocked him out.  The kid was far faster on the draw with the ball than Gary was with the .38 and that was Moses’ good fortune and their purely bad meeting with chance.

At nine sharp, he stood up, gripping his black duffle bag, walked over to her and kissed her.  She said nothing, just sucked his lips softly and nodded as she turned away, a single tear running down her pale cheek.  Throwing a Stetson on his flat-topped dark hair, he winked at her at the doorway.

“Shouldn’t take too long or be too hard a job, darlin’.  Bring you home a surprise, I promise.”

“I love you.”  She simpered, her battle with the runny nose lost.

“I love you too, Curio.”  He closed the door, disappearing into the night.