“B.J., where the hell you been? We gotta talk about our little project, partner.”
“Aw, Tom, I'm sorry. I got the message from your gal the other day that you'd called, but, man, I've been busier than a one-legged Cajun runnin’ from a hurricane.”
“Oh, yeah,” Tom Huff replied. “Anything interesting?”
Tom Huff actually wished he didn't have to wade into small talk with his pal B.J. Duplessis, but he knew B.J. liked to talk. So this was a minor indulgence to the man Huff regarded as his only kindred spirit in town.
“Hell yeah, Tom,” said B.J. “I had a chance to buy me a damned racehorse out in Kentucky, but the man wanted $250,000 for that sumbitch. For that kinda money, I wanted to go out there and see the nag for myself. Guess what? I went out there and bought me a doggone six-pack of hosses— plunked down a doggone million and a half. But, hey, man, buyin’ hosses is like buyin’ pussy—not only is it fun, but you get what you pay for.” Duplessis laughed uproariously.
Tom Huff, while he himself was uninterested in racehorses and didn't buy pussy, believing that a man of his elevated position, power, and intellect should never have to pay for sex, could still appreciate B.J.'s financial derringdo and his earthy sense of humor. So he chuckled along in solidarity.
“Well, I guess I'll have to come out to your ranch and take a look at those horses,” said Huff, intending to do no such thing.
“Anytime, podnah,” replied Duplessis, who had invited Huff at least fifty times to his ranch but never seemed to remember (or care) that Huff had never come.
Anyway, in Huff 's view, theirs wasn't a relationship built on frivolous social outings. They were philosophical soul brothers. That's because to Huff,
B.J. seemed to be the one friggin’ guy in all of Chacahoula Parish who (besides himself) seemed to actually divine what business was really all about: power, control, and gettin’ the friggin’ job done.
B.J. was the anti–Randy Penwell, forchristsakes!
See, Duplessis was a man grounded in principle, his major principle being that a man's property was his property, and a man's business was his business. Hell to pay for any bureaucrat, regulator, procrastinator, or instigator who got in the way of a man trying to manage his property or business to maximum capitalistic advantage.
Huff, never solely guided by instincts when it came to choosing his friends and business associates, had gotten Juke to do a thorough background check on B.J. He knew he had made the lion's part of his fortune from Duplessis Marine Inc., a burgeoning crewboat, supply boat, and tugboat leasing operation that had been founded by Duplessis's semiliterate, workaholic father in the late 1930s to serve the up-and-coming South Louisiana Oil Patch. From one leaky tug, Duplessis had grown into a company with more than 1,000 employees and 100 boats, including some specialty supply ships, 200 feet in length, that cost $40 million each to fabricate but made vast profits ferrying huge and complicated machinery to super-deep-water drilling platforms 150 miles off the Gulf coast.
After his father had died, B.J. had begun to diversify—into racehorses, which he kept at a sprawling farm outside of town; six or seven shopping centers of a kind that critical people might disparage as strip malls; a cluster of saloons and strip clubs of profitable though dubious reputation; two or three of those “payday loan” places that lent drunks, hardlegs, and welfare recipients their paychecks a week or two in advance at extortionate interest rates; and an astonishing number of trailer parks, which Duplessis either bought or developed on the cheap, having figured out how to squeeze tidy sums out of the rental needs of the lower class of person come to wrangle drilling pipe and whatnot in this area of the Oil Patch.
As far as Huff could tell, the racehorses were about the only classy part of the Duplessis diversification strategy, but Huff greatly admired how B.J. had found a lucrative vein into the collective paychecks of the working poor. The man was a gifted niche entrepreneur!
What Huff most admired was how B.J. was a take-no-prisoners kind of guy who did what he had to do to keep his businesses humming, even if it meant getting into a public brawl with the do-gooders. For example, a few years back, in an effort to expand his trailer-park empire, Duplessis had trumped the bid of a duck-conservation outfit and bought twelve hundred acres of willow swamp on the eastern edge of Black Bayou fronting the main and, some thought, most pastoral entrance into town. He then commenced a clandestine landfill operation (since permits to fill the wetlands would've proved problematic), with a goal to convert the entire parcel into a trailer park upon which he planned to plunk down and rent out 150 trailers he acquired at a bargain price. (The bargain was explained when it turned out that they were rusting, mold-ridden insurance losses from a hurricane a few years earlier.) B.J., erecting a garish neon sign proclaiming the beau acres trailer court, actually got a few of these wrecks hooked up. He proceeded to rent them out—at extortionate prices, cash only—to an even more desperate demographic than inhabited his run-of-the-mill trailer parks before the dogooders came after him in a lawsuit.
Of course, the dreaded Dr. Duck did manage a nice satirical pun in the Bugle, the local rag, when he denounced the project as “Beau-Zo Acres” (though this was lost on Duplessis, a man who did not divine satire). But never mind: B.J. had quickly sicced his fierce lawyer on the anticapitalist zealots, and as far as Huff knew, the case was still mired in the courts.
Huff had moved to Chacahoula Parish toward the end of this little saga, but he had followed it gleefully in the press, calling B.J. to congratulate him every time he stuck it to the shithead do-gooders. They had further solidified their friendship in their mutual support of the controversial shipping channel—indeed, Huff 's forceful arguments seemed mild compared with B.J.'s. The man had put up pro-channel signs at all of his trailer parks and various businesses, including his strip joints, that said, opposition to the chanel is un-american! (That he had misspelled “channel” didn't faze Duplessis, since he was certain the public got the gist of his message.)
Since making B.J.'s acquaintance, Huff had shifted a considerable amount of Big Tex's contract boat business to Duplessis Marine but had no reason— until recently—to tap into the libertarian side of Duplessis's entrepreneurial spirit. Then Huff had been utterly aggravated to learn, via e-mail from his Amarillo headquarters, that he was facing a stiff increase in the cost of doing business owing to some new and expensive (and, in his opinion, utterly unnecessary) pollution regulations being passed down by the feds, having to do with waste disposal. He'd gotten his chief number cruncher to run some estimates on these costs and came away appalled.
So, Huff had enlisted B.J. in discussions on how Duplessis Marine might help him ameliorate some of the pain. B.J. had so quickly and deftly concocted and launched a plan—not just a plan but a plan that covered sensitive issues such as offering plausible deniability if such a plan ever came to the attention of the wrong people—that Huff had to concede that the man might be not just his equal but in certain matters his superior.
It had been a while since Duplessis had launched the plan, and Huff, after a reasonable period of silence, thought an update was in order.
Duplessis spoke up again. “So, what can I do for you, Tom?”
“Ah, well, I'm just wonderin’ how we're doin’ on our joint venture? Now, I'd rather not talk shop over the phone, so, listen, why don't you join me at the Oaks over on the bayouside around five-thirty. We'll sip a good whisky and catch up.”
“Aw, hell, I cain't tonight, Tom—I've got a vet comin’ over to look at my new hosses. But any other day this week is okay. And listen, I'll give you the headline—our little plan's workin’ slick as an eel's ass. I'll fill you in when I see you.”
“Not a problem, B.J. I'll get Louella to phone your gal and we'll make a plan. Hell, let's do an early dinner. I'll buy the steaks and the whisky.”
“Okay, Tom. Laissez les bon temps rouler, podnah!”
Huff found himself frequently annoyed at B.J.'s insistence on using these Cajunisms, which he couldn't begin to understand, but he let it slide.
“Great, B.J., see you soon.”