very nice of you to ask, but I have other plans."
"How about if I sing ' Dixie '? Will that soften you up?"
She opened the door and held it for me. She tried not to smile, but some of it got through. "There are several fine Cajun restaurants listed in the folder. I think you'll like the food."
I stood in the door. "I'm sure I'll be fine. Maybe Paul Prudhomme will see me for dinner."
"Not even if you sing ' Dixie.' Paul Prudhomme lives in New Orleans."
"That makes two fantasies you've destroyed."
"I don't think I'll ask."
"Good night, Ms. Chenier."
"Good night, Mr. Cole."
I walked out singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and I could hear Lucy Chenier laughing even as I rode down in the elevator.
CHAPTER 3
I had a fine catfish dinner at a restaurant recommended by Lucy Chenier's office, and then I checked into a Ho-Jo built into the base of the levee. I asked them for a room with a view of the river and they were happy to oblige. Southern hospitality.
I ordered two bottles of Dixie beer from room service and sat drinking the beer and watching the tow-boats push great strings of barges upstream against the current. I thought that if I watched the river long enough I might see Tom and Huck and Jim working their raft down the shore. Of course, river traffic was different in the 1800s. In the old days, there were just the paddle wheelers and mule-drawn barges. Now, Huck and Jim would have to maneuver between oil tankers and Japanese container ships and an endless gauntlet of chemical waste vents. Still, I trusted that Huck and Jim were up to the job.
The next morning I checked out of the hotel, drove across the river, then turned north and followed the state highway across a wide, flat plain covered with cotton and sugarcane and towns with names like Livonia and Krotz Springs. Cotton gins and sugar-processing plants sprouted on the horizon, the sugar plants belching thin smoke plumes that gave the air a bitter smell. I turned on the radio and let the scanner seek stations. Two country outlets, a station where a man with a high-pitched voice was speaking French, and five religious stations, one of which boasted a woman proclaiming that all God's children were born evil, lived evil, and would die evil. She shrieked that evil must be fought with evil, and that the forces of evil were at her door this very moment, trying to silence the right-thinking Christian truths of her broadcasts and that the only way she might stave them off was with the Demon Dollar Bill, twenty-dollar minimum donation please, MasterCard or Visa accepted. Sorry, no American Express. I guess some evils are better than others.
I left the highway at Opelousas, then went north on a tiny two-lane state road following what the map said was Bayou Mamou. It was a muddy brown color and looked more like standing water than something that actually flowed. Cattails and cypress trees lined the far bank, and the near bank was mostly wild grass and crushed oyster shells. A couple in their early twenties poled a flat-bottomed boat along the cypress knees. The man stood in the stern, wearing an LSU T-shirt and baggy jeans and a greasy camouflage ball cap with a creased bill. He pushed the little boat with steady, molasses-slow strokes. The woman wore a pale sundress and a wide straw hat and heavy work gloves and, as the young man poled, she lifted a trotline from the water to see if they had caught fish. The young man was smiling. I wondered if John Fogerty had been thinking of Bayou Mamou when he wrote "Born on the Bayou."
I passed a wooden billboard that said THE KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS WELCOME YOU TO VILLE PLATTE, LA. "HOME OF THE COTTON FESTIVAL," and then the highway wasn't the highway any more. It was Main Street. I passed gas stations and an enormous Catholic church, but pretty soon there were banks and clothing and hardware stores and a pharmacy and a couple of restaurants and a record store and all the places of a small southern town. A lot of the stores had posters for something called the Cotton Festival. I turned off the air conditioner and rolled down the window and began to sweat. Hot, all right. Several people were standing around outside a little food place called the Pig Stand, and a couple of them