Mo & Curio & The C*** w/the Funny Hat 1

MOSES AND CURIO AND THE CUNT WITH THE FUNNY HAT





“The citizens of the great State of Mississippi,” Stuart Whitman loved the sound of that phrase each and every time he said it in front of a television camera, “must be certain that the gaming industry they have voted for is run cleanly, fairly, and transparently.  Beyond the reach of organized crime, answerable to the people.  And as Attorney General, it is my duty to ensure that is exactly how it shall be.  This task laid before me is one of my priorities and I assure all of you, just as I assured the Governor and the state Congressional leaders, this state's gambling will be run cleanly and profitably in this state.  Organized crime elements who may see this state as open for business will find themselves in a perp-walk faster than you can double down.  To those members of outside crime outfits who come here thinking they can cheat and beat our state and our children out of what is ours, I say this…”

He leaned forward and lowered his bass just a tad.  Squinting maliciously and jamming out the forefinger for effect, the Attorney General was pitch-perfect for the sound bite.

“…This is our house.  And our house always wins!”

The crowd consisted mostly of off-duty educators and students from Jackson State and Tougaloo who were bussed over to give the press a crowd to film.  They clapped uproariously to give the well-coifed and attractive young Attorney General a proper finish for his sound-bite.

In private moments of reflection, be they rooting for his beloved Ole Miss Rebels, putting for par on the seventh hole at Annandale or watching one on his fellow citizens gather her clothes embarrassed to have been fooled into thinking he must really have cared to select her out of the masses, he despised the citizens of Mississippi.  He was by far more interested in giving extemporaneous speeches on the floor of the U.S. Senate in a few years, after he whittled his political baby teeth into polished fangs, of course.

Whitman was new to the game after all.  Far too in debt to the big donors who funded his ride up from Biloxi to Jackson now; he would have to eat their shit for a while.  It was the process and as a prosecutor, he was superhumanly adroit at process.  But after he nailed a few big cases by the throat, the people would settle down and vote for him rather than his campaign posters so gratuitous jammed by the Party into their front yards.

If he played the cards correctly, they would vote for him for anything.

Maybe he would take over as Governor in a decade or two and ride someone else’s Presidential coattails as a VP up to Washington and live like a king for a while. 

Or maybe just an ambassadorship.  Ambassador to Sweden, Australia or Japan sounded nifty. 

Whitman frequently yearned fervently for such an august title.  To be the official instrument through which the full weight of American could be brought to bear, for better or worse, to a nation, be the face of America in the day-to-day foreign policy tête-à-têtes…it held an almost fantastic appeal for him.

He only threw one caveat to his fantasy. 

No Middle East postings! 

Glad-handing to the Saudis, with all their peculiarities and stringent measures necessary to keep their locals from having a shit-fit over some reference to minute U.S. dealings with the Muslim world was nowhere near as fun as a nice quiet tour of duty in Spain or Australia.

Maybe Brazil? 

A box seat for Carnival had to be a better perk than sitting on a floor eating camel with a bunch of oil-rich sand clansmen.  Hell, they were more racist than those shitpoke Klansmen back home out in Scott County.

All in all, though, Senator Stuart A. Whitman (D-MISS), he liked to imagine that name best.

Whitman concluded his remarks at the Capitol steps and took no questions.  It was November and by chance, Doreen, his press secretary, managed to get him outside on the stump on the nastiest, drizzly day possible.  Holding up the pilgrimage of the Democratic faithful back to the idling busses to take some of Bert Case’s sonorous questions was detrimental to the cause.  His nose was about to start running as he left the dais and made his way back inside.  The crowd was dissipated almost before he hit the door to his office.

Doreen, shrewish, sixty, but sharp as a tack, took his overcoat and the scarf she picked out for him off and primped his suit jacket.

“Man, it’s freezing out there.”  He sniffled and thanked her for a cup of coffee she seemed to pull from thin air.  “It look okay?  Hair good?”

“It’s prime rib for an otherwise meatless Wednesday news cycle, Stuart.”  Doreen backed away as he took up his position behind his desk.  “Should be a lead on JTV and LBT unless Melton gets uppity or something national happens.  It looked good.  The new haircut works.”

“Glad you think so.  Is Cynthia still coming by with that Fed?”

“Two o’clock.  The gambling has their attention.  I’m trying to get someone over there to liaise with this office so we can get whatever mileage we can from future prosecutions.  They aren’t the most friendly bunch over there.  Even the secretary’s look at me like they wanna’ spray Lysol in the air as soon as I leave.”

“Our fair Governor doesn’t share the same letter by his name as the President so you can expect some pushback.  But don’t sweat it,” the Attorney General yawned and leaned back in his chair.

He pressed his fingertips together as if he was making a decree.  “I’ll see what I can do about it with some of our friends on the Hill.  There’s gonna be plenty of meat on the bone when those boats get to docking up around here.  Some of that loot is gonna’ end up in some coffers for sure.  They are going to need me for sanctioning some of it, I’m sure.  A letter to the Director about bitchy members of the staff in the local field office in Jackson should get you some hugs soon enough.”  He shrugged at her as she moved files around on his desk.

“You think this casino business is really gonna help or hurt the state?  It seems an awful risk moving gaming into a state with so many idiots with no money looking for the golden arm to pull.  You really think the mob will try to move in here, too?”

“With that much money to be made it always brings out the carnivores looking for the easy pickings.  It always has.  Somebody will undoubtedly fuck up somewhere and an example will be made with all due expedience.”



         Curio Pheloie’s ears were burning as she lay on an army blanket spread out near Moses’ house.  For nearly two hours solid, the pair was target practicing with a myriad of weapons.  Her shoulder and elbows were sore.  Her nose was frozen.  She was half-drunk and not making her shots count to his satisfaction.

         When Moses bought the land well over a decade prior, he cleared off much of it the rear of the house.  Except for the various decorative shrubs and trees, the yard was opened all the way to the edges of Flechette Bayou, which meandered its way down to Bayou Provost and then eventually flushed itself out into the gulf.

He left a number of the older trees standing and marked their distances.  In the days when Grizzly was in an all-out turf war on the streets of New Orleans, Moses used the cabin as a hiding place.  Other men did the same in other places sprinkled across Acadiana.  Soon enough. Hunters began hunting and occasionally the shooting spilled out away from the city and into lonely cabins and hotel rooms as minions on both sides sought each other out.

In those days, Moses rigged a series of tripwires that ran to chimes in his home that would alert him to a waterborne attack.  If he was ever assaulted by Lavon Moncrief’s minions or got a dime dropped on him and had a swat team come slinking up from that side of the house, they were in for a rude welcome.  The tripwires would result in his firing off the claymore mines he loved to use so much in Vietnam.  Against unarmored targets, they were quite efficient.

         But that was long ago.  He often smiled to himself about how paranoid he had been back in those days.  Wired on speed or coke for days, certain that some detail was overlooked and thus sure to send Grizzly Fontenot’s abundant enemies in search of the man who dealt so many of their brethren a dose of finality, he would sit in the shadows of his house.  Hours he spent listening to the night, his eyes widened by shadows he imagined creeping under the moon.  Always with a finger on a trigger.

Many a varmint died in those days.  A shuffling opossum would send him into a fervent panic and end up shot to hell.  A deer hit a tripwire one evening when he was asleep.  The alarm went off in his ears, two days after he shot two of Fausto Lacombe’s cousins in the back outside of the Hog’s Breath Saloon.  He was certain in that moment Fausto and that pair of idiot sons of his were coming up his rear flank in the dark.  The tripwire was at the hundred-meter mark, close enough for any number of weapons to be brought to bear.  In a half-asleep panic, Moses reached over and clicked the firing trigger on the claymore mine set to blast on that tripwire’s location.

He felt like an idiot for that, but he ate well for a few days on what was left after the buckshot pellets were spat out from the meat.  His paranoia did not allow for many grocery runs.  Venison was a nice lagniappe.

The claymores and the tripwires were a distant memory now.  Age had tempered the paranoia somewhat.  He was after all, off the toot…mostly.  He rarely indulged without Curio to share the feeling.  There were stretches where she would start to snort out of boredom and he was quick to back her away from such things.  He spent a lot of time in a bottle because he grew bored.  It was not a good habit for either of them to start. 

The street war ended and the Atchafalaya Mudbugs were the victors.  There were the Feds and the local law dogs to occasionally deal with, but the days of being a foot soldier in a running series of street fights were long gone.  So where the claymores.

Moses considered himself special ops now.  Strike fast, strike hard. 

And then curl up next to his lover and forget all about it until next time.

At least until she started wanting to come along.  Training her was in itself, a new paranoia.  Things that needed to be known instinctively and done without pause were engraved into Moses’ skull.  Curio, on the other hand, had long ago decided moxie and viciousness could overcome her shortcomings in the mechanics of dealing death.  It was an attitude that Moses found impossible at times to overwhelm.  He loved her, but often scrolling across his mind was a far terser stream of words than he uttered as she trained alongside him.

“You’re still jerking the trigger, baby.”  Moses Holliday rolled over on his side and exhaled his breath slowly as Curio Phelonie rolled on her opposite side to face him.  She pouted and took a sip from an Abita Purple Haze bottle.

         “I’m cold.  I ain’t jerking the trigger.  My teeth are chattering.”

         “She says as she drinks a cold beer on her belly while lying prone on the ground.”  Moses smiled. 

         “You said I couldn’t have coffee.”

         “It makes you pee.”

         “And beer doesn’t?”

         “It doesn’t unless you have a ton of them.  And alcohol calms you.  Coffee churns you up in all kinds of ways.  Bowels, bladder, heart rate, mindset.  It makes you twitchy when you gotta’ be calm.  It’s just a thing that must be learned.  And the only way to learn it is to pull that trigger a thousand more times.  You’re still afraid of that pussy gun’s lil' kick?  One day, you won’t be.  Drink enough beers, you’ll get cocky.  Relaxed, calm.  Even pissed off is better than nervous when it comes to firing a weapon.”  He unscrewed his fifth of Rebel Yell and took a long pull from it.

Curio winced as she saw the bubbles rise from his lips and up the narrow neck of the bottle.  After a bottle of whiskey, it was her understanding that few men were calmed by it.  Moses was a mortal man in that respect.  He was not usually a mean drunk, but growing up as she had taught her there was always that one time waiting around the corner.  In the years they had been together, he never once raised a hand to her, rarely even raised his voice. 

Drunk and rowdy though, the swagger of a loose set of limbs and a drunken perception of insult had waylaid many an acquaintance in a hail of angry friendly fire the drunk may never recall but always regret.

         “You must be super anxious if you need that much calming down.”

         “Call it a lifetime of looking over my shoulder.  Now I gotta’ look over yours, too.”

         “I’ve been good about looking over my shoulder.  No one else volunteered until I met you, Moses Holliday.”  She rolled over on her belly and sighted in the .223 on the three hundred meter target.  “In fact, it’s one thing I think I’ve done a kickass job of doing.”  She inhaled and held her breath, squinting through the scope. 

Moses raised his binoculars to his eyes and watched the silhouette. 

         “Don’t squint.  Both eyes open.  You have to get used to seeing not only the target but also what else may be coming into the area.  Could be a sniper waiting to see your muzzle flash so he put a return round right back ‘atcha.”

         She fired.  Waited.  Fired again.  Slacked and took another breath and re-sighted.  On that exhale, she fired the third round.

         “You got a three-inch group.  Shit yeah!  Very good!”  Moses rubbed her on the small of her back.  “Six more now on the hundred meter.  Faster.  You gotta’ assume someone is running at you.  Might be three ex-track stars coming to stab you in a titty.  Drop ‘em!”

         She shimmied her legs to the left and drew a bead on the closer target.  When she adjusted the scope’s focus, she could see a hand-drawn note clearly written in black marker hanging, taped, beneath the silhouette.  The black target had three tiny hearts drawn in white paint centered on the heart.

         It read: “I LOVE YOU!”

         “You’re too sweet, baby.”  She chuckled and sighted in on the top heart.  Her shots were all dead center.

         “You see?”  Moses grinned at her and stood up to stretch.  “You weren’t thinking about the shot.  You was a-just-a tryin’ to hit the funny spot.” 

Quick as a whip, he drew his .45 and stitched a crooked smiley face in a ten-meter target.  She cursed and rolled away from his spent shell casings as they cascaded on her.

         “Smile, it makes people wonder what you’re up to.” 

He chuckled and removed the empty clip.  She lay on her back looking up at him, her arm a pillow.  Slipping a fresh magazine into the heavy pistol, he picked up the bottle and rapidly fired five shots one-handed into the same ten-meter target, making the single hole he shot for a nose into a wide-open ragged hole.  He downed the remainder of the whiskey and gave the bottle a heave into the air. 

Curio was fascinated to see him draw on the bottle and shatter it in the air.  She had seen that trick a hundred times.  What she was shocked by was after he shot and shattered the bottom of the bottle, he tracked the neck of it after it flew off and shot that as well, in less than two seconds…drunk.

         “You are way too good with guns, dear.”  She finished her Purple Haze and stood up with his long arm offering her assistance.  “You need another hobby. 

He pecked her on her cheek.  “I thought I had one.”  He winked lovingly at his little protégé.  Smiling, she snuggled up to his bare arm.  She was wearing a heavy wool pea coat and long pants but there he stood in a pair of thin jogging pants and a t-shirt.

Damn, you tough old bastard.

He never ceased to endear himself to her.  He was just Moses.  Strong, morally decent in his own perverse shootin-a-sumbitch-who-earned-it kind of way.  He never cried out when in pain, could handle anything thrown at him, had a solid upbringing out in the desert.  Music lover, book reader, playful, strong, indulgent, good fuck….

Many nights since they were thrown together on a crowded French Quarter day, she wondered how she could have found him and he found her.  The thought of what her life may have been had she gone over to Royal instead of Conti touched her from time to time when she was alone and thinking about such things.

All in all, Curio figured everyone often stood looking out of a window in some house they inhabited with someone they met and fell for and wondered, “What if?”  For many, it may bring a tear from the recognition that they damn sure should have zigged for someone else rather than zagged straight into the arms of the asshole they ended up with.  Shrugging that off, she would merely look around and see him smoking his Winston or maybe a joint.  He would be cooking her an omelet or filling up the Jacuzzi tub he bought for the two of them a few months before.  She had merely mentioned in passing she wished she had a bigger tub so he could massage her while she soaked in some bubbles.  It showed up within two weeks.  She was ecstatic.  He was just glad to have something to do.

She would think of him inside her, large and in charge, savoring every taste and instant of him deep within and she would swoon.  Curio never was so happy to have wanted a free cocktail from Cat’s Meow in her life until she realized how happy the days afterward had been for them.  And if she had only made one more block…none of it.

They stood and watched a distant wind sway the Spanish moss coating the trees across Flechette Bayou.

         “Gonna’ get cold as hell tonight.”  He holstered the .45 and laid it on the picnic table next to the small arsenal spread across the weathered planks.  Grunting a bit, he stifled a burp and let it slither rather than roar.

         “You gonna’ make me a fire?”  She laid the Bushmaster .223 on the only free part of the table and bent over to touch her toes.  Their jog up the winding driveway that led to the cabin was paying dues on her calves.

         “You gonna’ make sure I’m not lonely beside it?” 

Moses picked up a battered Marlin .30-.30 lever action and fired a few soft-nosed at the hundred-meter target.  “Damn, I forget how much those softies fall.”  He wrinkled his nose at his bad shots.

         Curio drilled a finger in her ears.  The old Marlin was loud as hell.  “I’m sure we can make an arrangement of mutual satisfaction.  What do you want for dinner tonight?”

         “I was thinkin about some Italian actually.  Would you like to go out for dinner with me?”

         He saw her mouth drop.  “What?”

         “Nothing.”  She waved her hand nonchalantly but her brow was incredulous.  “I just can’t remember the last time you suggested we go out to eat when we wasn’t on a job.  Hell-yeah-please I wanna’ go out to eat!”

         “I know you do.  It’s been a while.”  He kicked out the remaining shells from the Marlin and placed them back in their foam house.  “I think a little run into town sounds like fun.  I’ve been wanting some lasagna from Christiano’s.  Maybe let’s get dressed up and head out a while?  You gotta’ be goin' nuts sitting around out here.  Especially since it’s cold and we can’t sit outside without losing an extremity.” He chuckled.

         She was going nuts.  She was twenty, vivacious.  Stir crazy out in the deep obscurity of some desolate bayou.  No friends, with only a television and Moses to listen to.  She surfaced long enough to accompany her lover on some mission to kill people and then they skulked back to Flechette Bayou or her own place in Thibodeaux.  She often felt as if she had dropped from the world. 

Sure, Moses was good company and the pair had a whale of a good thing going together, but by God, she was twenty and sexy as hell.  Tucking all that away in some quiet house far from the prying eyes of the miniscule amount of neighbors, the closest of which lived a solid two miles away seemed like such a waste.

         “You asking me out on a date?  Fuck, that’s sweet, baby.”

         “If you’ll have me.”

         “Oh, I’ll have you.  I accept your offer, sweetie.  But that’s enough goddamned whiskey.  I ain’t having you shit-faced around me in Christiano’s throwing up on my bread sticks.  Capiche?”

         “Yes ma’am.  It’s a deal.  But before we do…”

         “Yes, I fucking know.” She ejected the magazine from the Bushmaster. “Clean the damned guns.”

         “That’s my girl.”

         They started collecting weapons and putting them into a trailer mounted to a riding lawnmower.

         “Shit, Moses.”  She shook her head as she laid the blanket over the rail to prevent scratches. “Did you have to shoot every gun in the damned house?  I’m fuckin’ hungry!”



         Bertrand Fontenot flipped off the television at 10:25 and snuggled under the heavy quilt and sheets of his bed.  He was a guest of the Fairview Inn in Jackson, Mississippi, an opulent bed and breakfast nestled close to Millsap’s College just north of the government district on State Street. 

After a day of meeting with folks with various degrees of stolid reputation and trying to get his head around where the money in casinos was, he was dead tired.  Trying to get a taste of the casino cash about to be pouring into the state consumed a great deal of his time lately.

         And for naught, he feared.  The men he met with over the last week were old hats at skimming cash on construction contracts.  Comptrollers, county commissioners, zoning committee hacks, state reps, construction contractor honchos…

But to the last man, none of them was much interested in trying to play around with rigging bids or skewing numbers.  Each of them was afraid of the new deputy U.S. Attorney Randall Jowanski and the new golden boy Mississippi Attorney General, Stu Whitman.  The way they figured it, the two of them were dying to catch an old school mobster skimming off of a bid.

There were always a few cuts to make here and there with resources and labor, but the riverboats were stuck on the water and that cut out a lot of real estate speculation cash.  The casinos themselves were run by tightwad entertainment consortiums who expected clean books and a pristine balance sheet.  The Vegas mob put such a bad taste in the mouths of the Feds back in their heyday, it was expected for someone down south to try, and fail miserably, to pocket an ill-gotten share.  Most figured Jowanski already had a RICO indictment written up, merely leaving the defendant’s name line blank until he had a name to pencil in.

         Jowanski was a particular thorn in Fontenot’s side.  He was eager to cut his teeth on someone like Fontenot.  His tendrils spread deep, far, and wide across his judicial domain and more than a few connected people were doing time across the land because of his tenacity.  He only needed to knock off a big fish and he was politically on his way somewhere into the stratosphere.

Jowanski was also bulletproof.  He was straight-laced, not prone to mistakes.  He kept his nose clean, a tough one to get to unless he got killed and that was too much heat for Bertrand Fontenot to wish to deal with.  Heat meant going underground, maybe getting busted when the FBI juggernaut got really down to business.  Those men played for keeps when one of their own went down.

         The Mississippi guy though…

Grizzly closed his eyes and recapped what he was told by a source in the Capitol’s carpool.  Whitman was vulnerable.  It was the women.

Ain’t it always?  Grizzly had chuckled when the driver said that.  Women, women, women.  He knew a thing or two about good men being swayed by womanly charms.

The women provided a crack in his armor.  Whitman was single.  Getting laid for a single good-looking politician in the south was no vice that could not be overlooked.  Sure, the Baptists blue hairs voted in great numbers and they would shun him, but they were already GOP devotees anyway unless they were state or union retirees.

Folks on the jackass side of the aisle just put an Arkansas shit-kicker and clit-licker in the Oval Office just because he played a sax and was down with brown.  One look at his scowling wife and people gave him a sympathy pass if he liked to step out ever now and again.

         Smiling as he flipped off the light and gave his nub leg a scratch, Bertrand Fontenot thought about one of Louisiana’s own shit-kicker and clit-licker governors, Edwin Edwards.  AKA “Fast Eddie” to his ever-loyal constituents and concubines. 

He was a chatty bastard, that Eddie, thought Fontenot. 

“What was that he said that time?” Grizzly asked himself aloud. “Oh yeah!  Funny sumbitch…”

Something about the only way he couldn’t get re-elected was if he found in bed with a dead woman or a live boy…

The thought put him to sleep a few hours later.