Crawfish Mountain: A Novel

Prologue

Walking slowly on delicate legs, the bird that the Cajuns call the bec croche peered into the murky salt shallows. As it moved, looking for a late supper, it barely left a footprint in the black bank of quaking peat that would bog down any heavier creature. Even the ragged, salt-reddened raccoons that often padded their way in and out of these briny marshes, looking for trapped minnows or a rambling crab, wouldn't venture out onto these flats at low tide.

A man would be up to his thighs in no time.

The ibis stopped, craning its head at an odd angle, as a school of foraging cocahoe minnows sculpted the shallows with their riffles. They had been spooked toward the false safety of the bank a few minutes before by a marauding school of redfish—so many thrashing, coppery fish that they swam atop one another, fins carving turmoil on the windless surface.

The sun moved toward the bottom of an azure sky, its fading rays dappling the marshes and painting sprawling rainbows on the water. A light breezed served up the warm-muck aroma of the nearby Gulf. A stream of light caught the bird's downy white feathers and, for a moment, turned them golden.

The bec croche stood as still as the day moon, its curved yellow beak poised like a dagger. Then, in a ritual almost as old as the bayou itself, a minnow ventured too close and the bird struck with whimsical fury.

The fish was still squirming as it slid down the ibis's long, refined throat.

Into this tranquil scene came a sound, a far-off thrum that grew louder and louder until it soon filled the ebbing day. It came from an oil-field work-boat with a black hull, gray cabin, and huge twin diesels capable of pushing it along at close to forty mph. But this one didn't move nearly that fast, for it carried a heavy cargo—a load of fifty-five-gallon steel drums lashed together on its open rear deck. On a normal run, workmen might have stood on the aft deck to watch the scenic marshes slide by en route to a drilling rig or production platform out in the nearby Gulf of Mexico.

But this was no normal run.

On this stretch of marsh, a loose collection of cheniers, bays, and meandering bayous known as Belle Chaoui, the denizens didn't immediately scatter at the invading noise. Most, used to its frequent intrusions, stayed put until the boat rounded a nearby curve and came roaring toward them, throwing a massive wake in its trail—an alarming wall of water about four feet high that swept over the marshy banks with the force of a miniature tidal wave.

As the boat neared and slowed, the bec croche rose easily and wheeled marshward. Gaining altitude, it banked toward the bayou and flew over the boat, inspecting it warily, then flapped off and settled in a high patch of grass a hundred yards deep into the watery prairie. By this time, the boat was nosing up the narrow bayou, its engine at a low throb, pushing up a stew of muddy, black water behind it. At the intersection of the bayou and a small half-moon bay, the boat backed as close as possible to the shallows and cut its engines.

Two men began uncoupling the chains that lashed the barrels together. Then, to the sound of steel scraping across the deck, they began with haste to shove the barrels off the boat. As the barrels piled up, some clanged into one another, breaking open and spilling their contents. They joined a dilapidated ring of drums, many also broken and leaking, that had been wasting in the marsh for some time already. A half hour later the boat had disgorged its load, and its engines throbbed back to life.

As if on cue, the ibis rose from its hiding place, then canted back toward the bayou, hoping to reclaim its feeding spot before the sun quit the sky altogether. It spied its former perch and settled back down into the soft muck of the mudflats just as the boat throttled up into a plane. The wake the boat created rose swiftly and began driving toward the bank.

The mudflats and the cast-off barrels couldn't absorb all of the wake's fury, and the last of it came lapping up the bank and into the marshes like a fast-moving tide—a rusty-red tide of spilled chemicals and noxious fumes smelling faintly of diesel.

The bec croche, having sated itself on another minnow, didn't stir as the water lapped around its feet. But after a long moment it rose up, as if startled, and tried to flap away, driving itself up at a sharp angle. It didn't get far before it banked violently, splashing down into a section of the marsh soiled by the boat's poisonous wake. It gave a sharp cry as it landed, tried to rise again and failed. Soon its flapping wings were covered in the stinging, noxious stew. In a moment, it was overwhelmed as it tried to waddle and flap its way to safety.

And in the bayou, the redfish and the cocahoe minnows and the bottom-feeding black drum; the laconic alligator gar and the wily hardhead catfish; the goggle-eyed flounder that cruised the shallows and the vast scrums of mullet that wandered the surface—they all did what the sedentary oysters lying in their reefs could not do. They began schooling quickly up the bayou in the direction that the boat had come, away from a tide that had turned suddenly sour.

As night fell and an impressive yellow moon rose over the marshy plain, the rancid tide crept farther and farther up the bayou and into the shallow bays, pushed by a real tide fanning out from the Gulf. A few hours later, when schools of mullet began rising erratically, mouths gasping for air, their white bellies to the moon, it became clear that the bec croche had not been the only creature harmed.

1

THE ORIGINS OF PARADISE

A HAND-SCRAWLED LETTER DATED OCTOBER 4, 1990

To my Grandson Justin Pitre,

I'm sory that I don't write or spell so good but this is something I wanted to put down on paper.

Yor PawPaw is getting to old to fish but I appreciate how you still try to get me to the camp. I still like to go out there and sit in my rocking chair on my front porch. I guess I don't mind my beer neither. You know that porch got to have the pertiest view in South Louisiana. We've had us some good times out there and caught us some fish. You keep on catching them because yor Daddy and Momma like them red fish and speckle trouts. Me to.

Can you believe I will be 89? When I was 79 I didn't feel like an old man. But now I feel old as the swamp and I don't remember everything good as I used to. So before I get to old to write clear I wanted to let you know I'm giving you the camp and all the land around it. I've talked it over with yor Daddy and he thinks this is right. He likes going to the camp ever so often but he wulnd't know what to do with it. Nobody loves the place more than you and me. You were perty much raised out there.

You know when I bought the place 62 years ago from the sugar company I gave pennies an acre for it because people then didn't think the marsh and swamp was worth nothing. But swamp rats like us know that's not true. That cypress grove we got on the north side got trees older than me and you put together. You ever seen more spider lilies in the spring than what we got out there? That bird fellow who come out long ago told me that he went all over the country down in Florda to that place called the Everyglades and didn't see nothing there that we don't have at Crawfish Mountain. In the old days, I trapped so many muskrats in our marsh that people thought I had me a muskrat ranch hid someplace. Not too many places have muskrats left but we still got some and some otters to. And more gators than you can count. Funny I spent my life trapping and hunting and skinning them critters but now I just get a kick out of watching them.

I only have a few things to ask you. I know the little shack is not the pertiest but I built it good with my own hands. If it burns down or if the hurricane comes and knocks it down I want you to build it back facing like it was, with the front porch toward the Gulf and the back porch facing our swamp. I don't know about heaven but if there is a heaven that's where yor Mawmaw Myrsa is. So that's where I'm planning to go when I die (though maybe I'm not in charge of that.) Its nice to think me and her could be sitting up there together and see you looking out at the same things we saw.

I know I don't probly need to say this but don't let nobody mess with our marsh and our swamp. A lot of that prairie out around us is going to hell and sinking but our land is good because we always kept it just the way God made it. Don't sell the camp to nobody, neither, no matter what they say they will give you. I never told you but I had more offers to sell the place than crawfish got legs. I know a lot of those rich sports up in Black Bayou town would pay an arm and a leg to put a fancy hunting camp on our land. But when I first paddled around our island all them years ago I knew there were things about that place that money can't buy. And you won't find a chenier that's higher nowhere. Twenty five foot isn't much to people who live in hills or such. But out in that flat country, where hurricanes can bring a lot of water, its as close to a mountain as you going to find.

I don't have the spring in my step I used to but maybe we can go to the camp on my birthday if it don't turn to cold. One day you probly going to have to put me in that old wheel barrow and push me up the ramp from the dock. That's going to be a sight, huh Justin?

Yor PawPaw who loves you,

Jack Pitre

2

TEN YEARS LATER:

THE PLEASURES OF PARADISE

Justin Jack Pitre, come back here.

Justin Pitre, a lanky man dressed in faded Levi's, a rust-and-gold checked flannel shirt, and white rubber knee boots of the kind favored by Cajun shrimpers, stood poised at the doorway. He held an ultralight fishing rod in his right hand, a grease-stained ball cap in his left. The sun would soon make its way into the imposing cypresses that stood northwestward of his cabin. Justin, like his grandfather before him, whom he greatly resembled, liked to be on the water at first light.

He turned to the voice, trying to be forceful. Aw, babe. I gotta go. They're out there. They're waitin’ for me.

His wife, Adeline Grace Cheramie, replied with equal determination. Like many modern Cajuns, Grace could speak English without the signature accent of her parents’ generation, but she could use the accent, and certain Cajun idioms, when it suited her. It was a playful affectation that Justin knew all too well.

Justin, cher, I'm not axin’ for an hour. Just a few minutes.

Justin declined to quit the doorway. Grace, stop it, he said. Why don't you just come with me? Get your beautiful ass outta bed. You gonna be sorry when I come back with a boat full of big redfish.

The reply, sweetly plaintive, came from the dark. "Justin, you gonna be sorry if you don't come here for just a second. I got somethin’ I wanna show you, cher. Vien ici, mon cher tit’ choux."

Justin tried to suppress a grin, but failed miserably. He did manage some exasperation in his voice: "What, Grace? What?"

Grace reached toward a nightstand and pulled the chain of a small bedside lamp. She slowly drew back a patchwork quilt and shrugged out of an oversized T-shirt.

Then she did something exceptionally cruel. In barely a whisper, she said, Monkey love, Justin.

Grace! Justin replied. C'mon, baby, don't say that. You know I cain't fight monkey love.

Grace whispered back. Monkey love, Justin. Right here and right now.

Justin tried to muster every ounce of self-control, struggled to keep his distance. But he knew he had already been defeated.

Adeline Grace, he said in mock exasperation. Does your momma know you do things like this to torment your husband?

Grace laughed her easy laugh. "Torment my husband? Justin, a lotta husbands would give three bass boats to be tormented the way I'm about to torment you. And, baby, it's six in the mornin’. It ain't daylight till at least seven. We got plenty of time to have some monkey love and still get you to the redfish hole. I promise I won't keep you any longer than I have to. Anyway, you have work to do—unless you've already forgotten."

Justin practically pleaded. No, I haven't forgotten. But Grace, you know how I feel about bein’ out there by first light. That's when them really big reds are stirrin’. It's when—

Grace was suddenly out of bed and snuggling into her husband's embrace. I know it's killin’ you that I've caught a bigger redfish than you, she whispered, biting on his ear, but there ain't no redfish in the bayou gonna give you the thrill that I've got in mind. None, baby.

She paused, then whispered again, Anyway, you're supposed to be trying to knock me up, remember? Maybe today's the day.

Justin looked into his wife's kind, mischievous eyes. He smiled at her, shook his head, and took her back into his arms. You are just too much, Adeline Grace. Okay, a quickie. Awright? Just a quickie and then—

A wet kiss on the mouth, and an exploring hand, quieted him.

Why Justin, Grace said playfully, I believe you do love your wife.

Sometime later, in the lemon light of the new morning, Justin Jack Pitre stood on a low bank of oyster shells, one hand on his fishing rod, eyes scanning the water. A handsome saltwater marsh fanned out behind him, an endless river of grass. The bayou stretched before him, a smooth, black ribbon just rendered from the night sky. In a far meander, where the bayou broadened slightly, the first hints of sun were painting the marsh grasses. The air was still but fresh—early October had finally brought cool weather and an end to a sweltering South Louisiana summer that seemed as if it had begun in May.

It was a fisherman's morning: a cool front moving in overnight; the tide just beginning to ebb—a redfish tide, Justin called it. The water lay as still as the sky, save for a gentle eddy at the mouth of the slough where he had come to fish.

C'mon, redfish, he said under his breath. Show yourself.

A few minutes into the stillness, Justin got the sign he was hoping for. The telltale wake of a fish sped toward the opposite bank, sending a school of foraging minnows into a frantic collective scramble. Suddenly, a second fish noisily took breakfast at the surface in a coppery leap.

Justin was a modern, even experimental fisherman; he mostly used ultralight tackle and artificial baits. But on morning excursions, he paid homage to his grandfather, fishing with the old man's favorite, a minnow locals called the cocahoe.

He reached down to a bucket at his feet, plucked out a squirming minnow, and drove a hook through its upper lip. He flipped the bail of his spinning reel and made a long, looping cast. Minnow and sinker plunked down into the ebbing ripples of the fish's commotion.

Justin felt the minnow bump bottom, then: thwuck!

The redfish slammed the bait with such ferocity that Justin was lucky to hold on to the rod. The reel shrieked as it surrendered line; Justin's yell was just as loud. Run, you big mother! Run!

The red obliged, stripping off fifty yards of eight-pound test by the time it slowed and made its first wide turn. Justin reeled in line furiously, keeping his rod tip up and moving quickly along the shell bank toward the fish. The exposed reef ended only twenty yards up-bayou—beyond that a man would bog down thigh-deep in marsh—but it gave Justin a chance to gain line and brace for the red's second run.

Nearing the bank, not fifteen yards downstream, the red suddenly dove deep and seemed to stop moving. Justin pumped the rod, reeling hard, hoping to move the fish away from the bottom. An oyster reef lay below, he knew, and a big red, bumping over the reef, could easily cut the line on an oyster shell.

Justin's prodding did the trick. The red boiled up off the reef like a torpedo. Justin's reel shrieked again, this time louder and longer. Drag me off the bank, big momma! he whooped.

He almost regretted saying it. By the time the fish slowed and began another turn, Justin didn't have more than ten yards of line left on the reel.

Aw, man, what a fish! he said, herding the red slowly back toward him with firm, steady pressure.

Two hours later, three reds, coppery in the crystal light, lay beached on the shell bank. He'd caught and released six others. He did a rough calculation. The smallest keeper was about seven pounds; the largest maybe twelve. They were perfect sizes for making a courtbouillon, that spicy tomato-based stew that Cajuns so prized, or filleting and throwing on a charcoal grill. Not a bad morning's catch.

He walked to his pirogue beached nearby, fetched a sturdy rope, and strung the reds through the gills. He dragged the fish to the small boat and nudged them into the water. He tied the rope to the rear of the pirogue, deftly stepped in, and, with the reds in tow, paddled off with some effort toward the camp at Crawfish Mountain.

A half-dozen slow bends in the bayou later, Justin caught the first glimpse of his camp in the distance. A tidy, weathered cypress cottage, ringed by dwarf oaks, stood jauntily at the pinnacle of an ancient marsh island—an island known in these parts as a chenier. In this implacably flat wetland prairie that sprawled all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, cheniers provided the only high ground around, some of them forming alluvial mounds well above the floodplain. On the day that Justin's wry grandfather had discovered this chenier, it was the island's elevation—and the random appearance of an itinerant crawfish in a puddle at the chenier's crest—that had prompted him to give the place its unusual name: Crawfish Mountain.

Justin quit paddling and let the boat drift to a stop. This was a ritual, a pause of thanks learned from his grandfather and now repeated in memory of his grandfather. That these scenic, watery surrounds belonged to him still astonished Justin.

He surveyed the blue skies and the mist on the water, the bearded cypresses in the far distance and the mossy, salt-tolerant hackberries on the bank nearby. He marveled at the sun as it stabbed through fog to illuminate dense stands of palmetto. He closed his eyes to drink in the delicious, wild silence.

Justin loved fishing; he loved beer; he loved, on most days, the work that he did with his hands as a diesel mechanic. He loved his parents and his numerous friends. But he loved most fiercely of all two things—loved them in a way that sometimes scared him for the ferocious passions they stirred.

One was this land with its marshy expanses, its serpentine sloughs, its meandering and mystery-tinged hardwood swamps, a place both handsome and unusual for its prospect, wedged in the wildlife- and fish-rich mixing zone between the salt- and freshwater estuaries of one of the great wetlands of the world, a place where a person could catch redfish in the brackish bayous in the morning and black bass in tea-dark waters of a cypress cove in the afternoon.

The other thing Justin loved fiercely was his wife/best friend/fishing partner (and sometimes fishing rival), Adeline Grace Cheramie.

Two thoughts, both pleasurable, stirred in him: one, flash-forwarding to the evening, was contemplating a steaming, spicy pot of redfish courtbouillon casting aromas from the kitchen table; the other, more immediate, was trying to guess whether Grace would be up and awaiting his return, cup of coffee in hand, on the camp's front porch, or still snuggled (warm, naked, and dreamy) beneath the covers of their bed.

3

TROUBLEMAKER IN PARADISE

Okay, we're gonna take this puppy right through here. Whadaya think about that, Louella? Hell, it'll cost a pretty penny more to do it that way, but we've been jerked around too long on this pipeline project already. We've got oil to move, dammit!

The voice, carrying with it a fair amount of West Texas twang, belonged to Tom Huff as he sat at his western-style, overstuffed cowhide couch in his spacious office, an intricate map of several large tracts of wetlands spread before him on a coffee table. With a Sharpie, he'd drawn a reckless line across the map indicating where the last leg of an ambitious pipeline project would go. Whoever owned this property would be a lucky fellow, because Tom Huff was a man who didn't brook delays; in his mind, he'd already moved this project up to urgent, and he'd spend whatever it took to get it done fast.

Huff 's secretary, Louella LeBoeuf, recognized Huff 's question as a rhetorical one. Huff often badgered and berated Louella, but he never seriously wanted her opinion. He wanted lots of other things PDQ: his coffee, his Wall Street Journal, his Black Bayou Bugle (though he detested the feisty local paper), his Oil & Gas Journal, his field reports, phone numbers for this and that person, and, when he needed him, his fixer, enforcer, and guy Friday, Juke Charpentier.

Louella, however, decided to respond anyway. Completion of a pipeline is not on my life list, she replied. But I can see how satisfying it would be if it were.

Huff looked over the reading glasses, staring at Louella. He'd noticed something creeping into his secretary's attitude of late that he didn't like—attitude. He'd hired Louella because she was a calm, soft-spoken, subservient middle-aged woman whose efficiency and work ethic were stellar. She spoke proper English without the kind of thick Cajun accent that so bothered Huff about many of the locals. He had not hired her to give him guff.

So, Louella, where is the background report for this project? Huff snapped.

Sorry, Mr. Huff. I just got it from the field and I had to reorganize it. The spreadsheet they e-mailed me was all wrong. It, uh—

Huff cut her off. Shoulda been here a week ago.

I know, Louella replied, but the field—

"I don't want any excuses, Louella. Now go get me some coffee, would you? Puh-leez."

Yes sir. And I'll bring that report shortly.

Louella turned and left the room, making a face that Huff couldn't see.

That's better, Huff said to himself as his office door clicked closed.

Order restored.

Huff had churned through three secretaries before Louella hired on a year ago, and he actually didn't want to lose her, though he would never say such a thing. Better to keep the help on edge and guessing, if you wanted to maximize your exploitation of them.

Huff stood and stretched, looking at his watch so that he could complain should Louella return tardily with his coffee. Surveying his surroundings, he liked what he saw. Huff hated desks and almost never worked at his, though he loved its impressive presence. Carved from a massive plank of dark tropical hardwood, it held a six-inch-high gilded nameplate reading thomas e. huff, the E. standing for Ervil (a name that Huff did not readily share with anyone, though it was in fact his paternal great-grandfather's first name). On the wall behind the desk was the stuffed head of a black bear, bagged by Huff himself on a hunt three years before. Flanking the bear were two floor lamps fashioned from the tanned hides and polished horns of two pronghorn antelope that Huff had shot on the same expedition.

Though no one who knew Tom Huff would tell him directly, the bear head was on the smallish side. It did, however, thanks to some inventive taxidermy, show a lot of fang.

Other walls sported manly, western-style frames holding prints of rodeo and cowboy art—the kind of indigenous art that could only be acquired at some of the better malls in Dallas or Houston. On the wall opposite the bear head, the massive horns of a Texas longhorn steer sat mounted on a sturdy but stylish stainless steel plaque. This treasure was particularly dear to Huff because it had been given to him by his boss, Rodeo Perkins, the gruff octogenarian who ran Standard of Texas Oil Company. Being chairman of Big Tex, as it was known hereabouts, was a job that Huff himself aspired to.

As the lapsed minutes ticked to four (Huff was giving Louella five before a reprimand), his secretary appeared with both the coffee and the overdue report on a large silver platter. She placed the tray down on the coffee table and exited without a word.

Huff returned to his couch, propping his feet up on the coffee table. He began glancing at the report but stopped, gazing out the window instead.

For Huff, his opulent desk and its trappings were nothing but show, to impress local big shots or visiting company dignitaries who flew down from Amarillo on the company jet from time to time. He dreaded such visits but knew them to be a necessary annoyance of management. A person who really wanted to get ahead had to learn the treacherous waters of management—no way around it. And Tom Huff was itching to get ahead, for getting ahead would mean he could one day, and fairly soon, he hoped, leave this godforsaken Cajun bog that tried to pass itself off as a town.

It wasn't so much the glad-handing and late-night steak-and-whisky romps that Huff dreaded; he was, when he put his mind to it, pretty damned good at the schmooze game and could talk that Awl Patch bullshit all night long.

No, what Huff dreaded was having to occasionally explain himself and even kowtow to some of the nervous Nelly accounting or HR or legal types who came to pepper him with questions about the books, or his management style, or whether his operations were keeping up with this or that government regulation regarding money-losing propositions like pollution control and anti-sexual-harassment programs and the like. These people were of the same ilk as the town do-gooders and local conservationists— people who sought to make Huff 's life complicated and irksome, people who sought to throw obstacles in the way of his holy obligation to the com pany to find oil and gas, pump it out of the ground, and sell it for enormous profits.

Huff liked his couch because it sat before a picture window seven stories above the Black Bayou, Louisiana, town square. The view, from his office in an unseemly concrete high-rise that was jarringly out of character with the rest of the community, pleased him in part because it was the uppermost in town. It thus reminded him of the one thing that did give him a measure of satisfaction: his title and stature.

Huff was regional vice president of Big Tex, Southeast Louisiana/Gulf of Mexico Region, a drilling, production, and refining empire that stretched to the Texas border and into the deepwater canyons of the nearby Gulf. Since the post–World War II Louisiana oil boom, Big Tex had been far and away the town's largest employer and, as Huff was always reminding the locals, lest they forget, its biggest taxpayer. Huff 's favorite admonition, in fact (especially after his second George Dickel, served neat in a brandy tumbler), was that he carried the big stick for the town's big-stick company and folks shouldn't forget it.

Huff 's constant reminders of Big Tex's importance, and his own, had earned him a local nickname, too—Li'l Huff-'n’-Puff.

Not that many people ever called him that to his face. Huff, like the stuffed bear's head on his wall, was on the smallish side, but prone to show a lot of fang when provoked.

Particularly satisfying to Huff was that the company had built this building where he now sat, with its salutary view, three years ago after a protracted fight with some of the very same do-gooder and preservationist types who conspired to make his life difficult, people who, rather than being grateful the company was investing substantially in their backwater of 32,000 people, actually had taken umbrage over the architecture! And, true, Big Tex had torn down a 150-year-old, historically significant Victorian owned by the now dissolute family of Black Bayou's founder; and true, it had also chain-sawed a cluster of two-hundred-year-old Spanish oaks to make way for its seven-story concrete-and-glass tower.

But so what? Huff had nothing against old houses or old trees; the trees in the town square below him were old, moss-draped, and extremely pleasant to look at. He was hardly a man without feelings or even an aesthetic sensibility—in fact, he might enjoy these things a lot more than he ever let on. But the company had bought the property fair and square. Company lawyers had figured out a loophole in the town-planning law that let Big Tex put up a high-rise in a place where nothing else topped three stories.

It wasn't his fault that the town's zoning code was full of loopholes, or that the town's lawyer was no match for the squad of razor-sharp company attorneys that had been sent down to steamroll the poor man in a lawsuit that successfully challenged the zoning law. It also wasn't his fault that the lawsuit might have yet been thwarted had not the chairman of the town's zoning commission, called to the stand to give a critical interpretation of the very same law, shocked the town's lawyer when he came down on Big Tex's side. Huff knew this was not so shocking, as the man had certain vices that had been underwritten by Big Tex's generosity. Moreover, the man had been swayed by the fact that should his vices ever become public (which Tom Huff could arrange) he would be horribly humiliated and perhaps even jailed.

But this was not Tom Huff 's fault, either. Free men made choices, and sad as it was, some men were slaves to their vices. A businessman, in Huff 's opinion, need never apologize for using his wits and power to finesse the system to maximum advantage—this was, last time he checked, America.

The only thing that had rubbed Huff the wrong way in the office-tower battle was when the most obnoxious of all the local do-gooders had taken a pretty good swipe at Huff in the Black Bayou Bugle, the aggravating local paper. The man—Dr. P. Donald Landrieu, an obstetrician who, forchristsakes, had actually founded a local chapter of the Audubon Society!—had ridiculed the tower as Tom's Thumb and a sharp poke in the eye to Black Bayou's sense of community and aesthetics.

Tom's Thumb!

Huff had gone into an apoplectic rage when he'd first read that comment. But after hurling—not for the first time—a phone against a wall, he'd calmed down when Big Tex's lawyers reassured him that, an annoying, card-carrying member of the Audubon Society aside, neither hell nor high water would prevent the company from building its tower. And thinking about it in calmer circumstances, Huff had to admit that the comment was pretty fucking clever—pretty fucking clever, indeed! Huff, in allowing himself to see that fact, realized that he possessed a kind of steely magnanimousness that his adversaries would never grant him, but which nonetheless served him well.

See, Huff 's life was propelled by two seemingly contradictory metaphors: football and chess. In the football metaphor, Huff was a linebacker. He smashed through lines and ran people (and rival companies) down; he made the big plays. Mostly, he just loved knocking heads. Loved it!

As for the chess metaphor, of course life was a chess game. Of course only the most agile of minds prevailed. But here was the secret of the true chess master: you need a worthy opponent to keep you sharp, to keep your wits cocked and at the ready, to keep you intrigued by the game.

Now, the second secret was: You never lose to your worthy opponent. Ever! Moreover, you never let on that your worthy opponent is actually worthy. In fact, you make it seem, at the end of your match, that your victory was absolutely preordained.

Huff knew he'd found just such an adversary in Dr. P. Donald Landrieu. Even in his deepest bouts of loathing for the man's simpering do-goodism, Huff could see the Darwinian role—as wily prey—that Landrieu played quite well. The guy even had the right nickname for prey—all his bird-loving, ecoworshipping pals called him Dr. Duck, forgodsakes!

Huff secretly called him Dr. Sitting Duck.

Now, here was the great thing: he and Duck Landrieu were at it again, and, oh, this time the stakes were actually much higher than in the fight over the office tower. The good doctor and the conservation rabble were in a total froth over plans by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to dredge, at a cost of about a million dollars a mile, a forty-five-mile-long, forty-foot-deep, beeline channel from the Port of Black Bayou to the Gulf of Mexico. The idea was to use dredges to straighten out and deepen the godforsaken, hard-to-navigate, fuel-consuming crooks that God, for perverse reasons, had seen fit to put in the sixty-five-mile-long natural bayou that for eight thousand years had wriggled its way to the Gulf. This improvement upon nature's design would allow oil-field work and cargo vessels up to three hundred feet long to navigate a bayou that now couldn't accommodate vessels more than about ninety feet long. (The Corps, in a tactic that had even Huff scratching his head, had given the project a name that had utterly no bearing on its actual intent, dubbing it the Chacahoula Parish Alluvial Sediment Reduction System.)

The Dr. Duck–led opposition was claiming that this channel plan was crony capitalism at its worst; that it was going to wreck the marsh and wreck traditional fishing grounds, not to mention contaminate Black Bayou's drinking-water supply by sucking salt water far up into the freshwater ecosystem (where, by the way, they insisted, it would also poison freshwater marshes and cypress groves that, besides being scenic havens for wildlife, served as a protective buffer against hurricanes).

Huff believed this to be mostly balderdash, and anyway, the Corps of Engineers—the one federal agency that he believed performed an actual service for America—had declared that the project would have only minimal environmental impacts while being supergood for the local economy. It would save the oil-field shipping industry about a hundred million dollars in fuel costs over the twenty-five years the project was to be amortized, not to mention easing all those bottlenecks that the natural bayou posed to navigation. A hundred million dollars!

It was hardly surprising, then, that the drilling and shipping industries, not to mention the rig-fabrication people, were one hundred percent— well, almost one hundred percent—behind it. Thus, Tom Huff, as the most powerful oil executive in these parts, knew that he just had to lead the fight in favor of the channel as a matter of Oil Patch solidarity. Beyond that, a great Huffian principle was involved here: if Dr. Duck and his band of ecoriffraff were so vociferously opposed to the channel, Huff was required to be in favor of it!

Huff, in fact, was in the process of trying to apply what he considered his prodigious persuasive skills toward convincing Louisiana's governor, Joe T. Evangeline, to throw the state's weight behind the project, thereby most likely clinching the deal. The governor for now seemed to be an annoying fence-sitter of the kind that Huff detested. But he also was a man, based on his past record, who had hardly been unfriendly to the interests of the oil industry, which had pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the state's tax coffers over the past few decades. And anyway, the governor sort of owed Huff a favor, or so Huff had concluded, although relations with the Guv were rather…strange…at the moment. In fact, Huff believed the Guv to be in total denial about one aspect of their relationship. Still, he believed Governor Evangeline could be won over.

And the bottom line for Huff: he just wanted out of this rain-soaked, muggy, incorrigibly flat place where far too many people insisted on conversing in a foreign tongue—Cajun French—and where even the food had names you couldn't pronounce. Étouffée, sauce piquante, courtbouillon!

Forchristsakes!

Now, here was the other totally hilarious thing to Huff: his nemesis, Dr. Duck, was, not to mince words, a sawed-off little bastard not a half-inch taller than Huff, who had more than once in his life been called a sawed-off little bastard himself.

Did Huff not