Lulu's Recipe for Cajun Sass - Sandra Hill Page 0,24

given in the South to the tiny midges or biting gnats because they were able to pass through screen doors with ease. Justin wasn’t sure if they had them in the North, too. He didn’t recall ever being bothered by them.

Another plus for the North.

Not that he was keeping count.

Not consciously anyhow.

He set his paddle down and opened the jar, taking a sniff. “Pee-yew! I can see why the bugs don’t like it,” he said with a grimace of distaste. But when he slathered a few fingerfuls on his face, it worked. “Thanks,” he offered begrudgingly. For some ridiculous reason, he was blaming her for the bugs, and the sweat. Probably because he wasn’t usually required to go to so much trouble to seduce a female.

Am I trying to seduce Louise?

Damn straight, I am.

Paddling and steering took all his concentration at first because of all the submerged or half-submerged trees, including the weed of the bayou, the loblolly, and the bell-shaped trunks of the bald cypresses with their roots jutting up out of the water here and there like knobby knees. Louise, who’d turned around again, called out directions, but it was still difficult to avoid the obstructions.

Just then, his focus was broken by a hiss and a loud roar, so loud he jumped on his seat and caused the pirogue to wobble again. It was a large gator, a female by its size; males could be up to twenty feet. Not that this creature wasn’t formidable at about ten feet long. The gator was guarding its nest…a huge mud mound three feet high and ten feet across made up of decaying vegetation and twigs which held its eggs, as many as fifty or so. They’d just rounded a bend in the stream, and the nesting spot hadn’t been visible to him right away. Otherwise, he would have stayed on the other side of the bayou stream. Which he immediately did, with him paddling and Louise standing and facing forward again, poling them forward.

“You knew that was there,” he accused.

“Well…” she said.

We could have gotten killed.”

“I would have saved you.”

“Hah!”

The gator followed after them for a distance, showing off a mouthful of piano-key teeth, roaring a message which was probably something like, “Humans…yum! Taste just like chicken.”

Louise sat down again and faced his way, with her back to the front of the boat. Some people couldn’t stand that backward position and got motion sickness. Apparently, it didn’t bother his over-confident Louise. She was, incidentally, laughing her pretty ass off. At him, no doubt.

“You know, I remember when I was a kid, we would try to steal some eggs from the gator nests. Don’t have any idea what we would have done with them if we’d succeeded. Never heard of anyone eating scrambled gator eggs.”

“Dumb,” she remarked.

“You’re telling me! Louie Mouton almost lost a leg one time when he tripped over a stump as we were running away.”

“Like I said, dumb.”

“Just for the record, Lou wrestled alligators for a living for a few years until he ran for the state senate.” He swatted at another swarm of gnats that surrounded him as he continued to paddle, first on one side, then the other. Then he got swatted across his face by a low-hanging swath of moss hanging from of a live oak tree. “I forgot why I hate the bayou.”

“You hate the bayou?” she asked, obviously shocked. Or was it disappointed? Or both?

“I love it, and I hate it.”

She made a snorting sound. “Make up yer mind, cher. You cain’t speak out of both sides of yer mouth.”

Speaking of mouths, Louise had one smart mouth on her, which was beginning to irritate him. He wondered if she was worth the effort. He gave her a quick survey and decided that, yes, she was. But she was going to pay for all this aggravation. Eventually.

“I’m bayou born, same as you, chère,” he said, putting extra emphasis on the Cajun word for dear or darling, just to show he wasn’t a total traitor to his roots. “But I’ve traveled more, seen other places,” he tried to explain.

She made another snorting sound, which really annoyed him.

He went on anyhow. “I love the beauty of the bayous. The slow-moving water the color of fresh-brewed tea, which I know is the result of centuries of tannin seeping in from the bark of stream-side trees, but seem almost like some heavenly concoction.” He cupped a handful of the translucent water and let it seep through his fingers.