Let it be recorded that the exit from Chacahoula Parish of Thomas Ervil Huff, former executive vice president of Standard Oil of Texas Company, Southeast Louisiana/Gulf of Mexico Region (aka Li'l Huff-'n’-Puff), was neither as serene nor as contrite as the accord fashioned by Julie Galjour seemed to indicate.
Two nights after his arrest, Huff found himself out on bail and smoldering with anger. For it had now been made clear to him that the company to which he had dedicated his life had abandoned him—nay, not merely abandoned him but was actually colluding with the authorities on these overblown pollution charges. Not to mention that they had sold him out, with nary a peep, to his arch nemesis, Randy Penwell.
But Huff, though realizing the enormity of his problems, blundered yet again. For the first time since his inaugural encounter with Daisy Ledet, he drank too much George Dickel, this after a conversation with his lawyer, Croc Turnage, that revealed that among the people in line to sell him out was his former guy Friday, Juke Charpentier.
Juke, too, had gotten his pink slip, not to mention a scary visit from the authorities. Being an accessory to these various environmental crimes was no laughing matter, he had been assured. Juke was no martyr; while proclaiming his total innocence in these unfortunate affairs, he certainly knew the basic details of the Huff-Duplessis scheme. So he expressed a ready interest in sharing them, particularly if he were to be granted immunity should other unpleasant matters rear their heads.
It was with this knowledge that Huff made his way to the Alibi, a place he would not have gone sober. There he found his quarry; Juke was in the process of blowing his last Big Tex expense wad on a bender. Huff confronted him; they immediately quarreled.
Huff took a swing at Juke and managed to land a surprisingly decent right to his gut. But the much taller man recovered and, and with his superior reach, walloped his former boss in the nose, knocking him flat and drawing a prodigious amount of blood.
Juke—half drunk and ecstatic that he had finally given Huff the revenge punch he'd always dreamed of—threw his hands up like Rocky. But Huff, though down, was not out. As Juke turned his back to celebrate his first-round knockout, Huff got up and charged—an impressive linebacker-like charge, it must be noted, for a man who had suffered such a cruel blow. He managed to knock Juke over, and the two wrestled violently on the floor, upsetting a table and some stools and spilling several bottles of Miller Lite.
By this time, Laurent Prosperie, the Alibi's no-nonsense proprietor, heard the ruckus and leapt over the bar with a can of Mace to subdue the combatants. In induced tears, they were soon roughly arrested by two of Go-Boy Geaux's deputies, who were extremely aggravated at being dragged from their high-stakes poker game in the back room (where one was holding a full house and the other three of a kind).
Huff and Juke were handcuffed and hauled out of the bar for a short trip to jail. En route to the patrol car, Huff had the additional misfortune of encountering his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Gertie, who had actually planned to sympathize with her husband's job and legal problems—until she learned, from sources she would never reveal, that Huff was carrying on a torrid affair with Daisy Ledet. She had tailed him from home seeking vengeance.
A light rain was falling, and Gertie, spying Huff in his degraded and encumbered state, attacked him viciously with an umbrella. A big (and now furious) woman, she got in a couple of decent blows about the head before the deputies intervened.
Gertie's renewed interest in the Baptist church notwithstanding, she lashed her husband with an expletive-laced diatribe that even embarrassed the cops who hustled her away. (Still, since one of the deputies completely agreed with Gertie's assessment, they let her go with just a warning.)
Wanda Dugas, on duty at the Alibi, witnessed the Tom and Juke bout and later provided a detailed and comical description of the whole affair to her new friends, the Pitres. But more important, she'd phoned this development in immediately to her cousin Julie Galjour. Julie, having promised the governor to do all she could to clear up the misunderstanding involving Huff, recognized an opening.
It turned out that Huff, smarting in jail from his numerous blows, did indeed shout out angry threats to expose the bribe taking of Governor Evangeline if he were not immediately released. This outburst was duly reported to Sheriff Geaux by the night-shift guards.
Not coincidentally, the next morning the sheriff was intrigued, and much charmed, by a visit from the Guv's good friend, Ms. Galjour, who brought warm greetings from the state's chief executive and explained the predicament. She even allowed that Mr. Huff—though he seemed to have been a lavish contributor to the sheriff 's political campaigns in the past—was casting aspersions on the sheriff 's good name. (She knew this because, by this time, she'd gotten full access, through Wanda, to the documents spirited away by Louella LeBoeuf.)
Thus Huff, upon making bail for the second time, got summoned into the sheriff 's office, where Go-Boy explained in his backslapping way that the fight at the bar was being upgraded to a felony assault on the person of Juke Charpentier. Witnesses had come forward to clearly paint Huff as the aggressor. A knife had even been found on his person.
It could be arranged that he would be tried before the Honorable Judge Theodule Dupont III—who happened to be the Guv's third cousin and a real law-and-order hardass. Imagine, the sheriff went on, a jury pool of anti-oil Cajuns carefully selected from that very bastion of shrimper radicalism from which people like Roulin Lasseine hailed. Upon conviction there might be a special cell awaiting Huff in Angola State Penitentiary, next door to the cell of the dreaded Richard “Power Dick” Billiot, a notorious bisexual cop-killer.
A terrible man, Go-Boy said sadly.
An evil man.
A man with the power to enter any cell he chose, day or night.
On the other hand, this might all be avoided if Huff promised not to ex press his future anger by making baseless bribery accusations. And, while no promises could be made, the sheriff had heard that there was an envoy, quite close to Governor Evangeline, who might be willing to seek the Guv's mercy for Mr. Huff in other matters that had to do with toxic-waste dumping. (This assuming Tom had a lawyer clever enough to get the criminal portion of the case moved to state court.)
Huff had listened to these persuasive suggestions in a quite sobered state; he had not been treated sympathetically in jail and did not care to spend even another hour there. He did, of course, run this all by his very expensive lawyer. Turnage mulled it over only briefly before counseling that, all things considered, it seemed like a helluva deal.
As it was, Huff had other things to occupy his time, energy, and money.
Driving home from jail, he found Gertie gone, the locks on his house changed, all of his earthly possessions thrown out in a heap on his manicured lawn, and a man waiting to serve him divorce papers. This he at least expected. He waited for the man to leave, and in an act that even he knew was childish (but hugely satisfying) he took out a can of pink spray paint from the trunk of his car and sprayed gertie blows randy penwell on the oversized butts of the horrid concrete Greek yard statues that Gertie was so fond of.
Fate, though, is sometimes kind to those who deserve it least. For the one thing Huff didn't expect was the conduct of Daisy Ledet.
Daisy, true to her word, adamantly refused to give up her man—a development that complicated the authorities’ pollution case against Huff and herded them toward accepting his plea bargain, though popular opinion wanted him tried.
Daisy, too, was taken into custody, arrested as a material witness as she sat waiting for Tom as promised, with two tickets to Cancun, at the Mexicana Air terminal at George Bush International Airport in Houston. But she stonewalled her interrogators, got herself a lawyer, and (egged on by Huff) began making noises that she'd been coerced and harassed into snitching. She was jailed briefly for contempt of court but released, after a scolding by the judge, when Huff cut his plea bargain, thus rendering her testimony no longer vital to his case.
Huff turned out to be surprisingly moved by Daisy's loyalty and determined to rescue his paramour from her other set of troubles. These involved certain accusations that before her breakup with her former boyfriend she had embezzled sixteen thousand dollars from his catering service (accusa tions that the authorities had used against Daisy to convince her to fink on her Tom in the first place).
Had Huff bothered to do his usual due diligence, he would have found that the handwriting on sixteen thousand dollars in forged checks—drawn on the catering company's account and deposited in four separate Daisy out-ofstate bank accounts—did look an awful lot like Daisy's ornate scrawl. Still, Huff believed in his woman and in act of great generosity dipped into his own secret stash of cash. Daisy's lawyer then approached Daisy's ex with an offer to make restitution of the sixteen grand, with interest, if the man would withdraw his support of the criminal case hanging over her head. Haggling ensued. But Huff was able to buy his beauty's freedom for thirty thousand dollars—a bargain considering what happened later.
Stealth was important in this case. For Huff was now not only being sued by his wife for divorce, alimony, and every penny he possessed; he also faced potentially crushing civil suits in the waste-dumping fiasco. The state was after him, as was his former best friend, B.J. Duplessis, who had learned that Tom had sold him down the river, cutting a sweet deal with prosecutors in exchange for his later testimony against B.J. (The Guv's pardon on top of this would then completely exonerate him!)
Huff, though busted, had not lost certain of his instincts. Confident that his hoards of secret cash would never be discovered, he changed his mind about a battle to the death with Gertie over his assets. In a great show of what seemed like contrition, he ceded all of his traceable wealth to her without a fight—knowing full well the litigants would then go after her to lay claim to money they now thought was owed to them. His hope was that she would be driven mad or broke trying to defend against these raids on her fortune by hordes of zealous litigants.
Then Huff declared himself unemployed, broke, and unable to pay even his lawyer—and promptly filed for bankruptcy protection from his creditors.
On the day of Daisy's liberation—the pair's last day in South Louisiana— they drove to the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans, the destination that fate had so unkindly kept them from before. That night, after a fabulous dinner at Commander's Palace (where Daisy took a chance on the choupique caviar), Daisy not only shed her girdle but burned it ceremoniously, setting off the Monteleone's sprinkler system and dousing their bed. But all the pounding on the door in the world by the hotel's security apparatus couldn't keep Tom Huff from consummating his long-delayed fantasy—spurs, chaps, cowboy hat, and all. A happier cowboy could not be found anywhere on earth (though Tom and Daisy were then booted from the hotel).
The happy couple relocated to Borger, Texas, Huff 's hometown, where they bought a modest brick ranch house and moved in together. There, using a dummy corporation and Huff 's hidden money, they bought a controlling stake in a waste-oil-disposal company, collecting spent lube and the like from service stations in a three-county area.
This turned out to be a surprisingly lucrative business. The profit margins were improved considerably by bypassing the certified dumping centers and their extortionate fees. This was made possible owing to certain financial favors paid to certain night watchmen at certain county dumps, where pumper trucks of toxin-filled spent oil showed up at very odd times and sprayed their gunk into pits that got bulldozed over before inspectors ever arrived. Daisy, brandishing her spectrum of charms, proved particularly adept at making these arrangements.
B.J. Duplessis was another matter. He was arrested in a raid on his corporate office the same day as Huff. He immediately made bail and pledged to spend his entire considerable fortune defending himself against what he told the Black Bayou Bugle was “a plot by liberals and the government to destroy the small businessman.” He sicced his notoriously vicious lawyer on the prosecutors and on that traitor Tom Huff, then went about trying to hide as much money he could in secret offshore accounts.
His lawyer made one small blunder, however. He offered the trial judge assigned to the case a very large gift to the judge's favorite charity in exchange for a favorable ruling on a motion to move B.J.'s trial out of Chacahoula Parish. The judge took this as a bribe offer and wore a wire to the next conversation, where, in fact, the terms were made far more explicit. Duplessis's lawyer was arrested, and B.J. was rearrested.
By last reckoning, Duplessis had been forced to sell his last three racehorses to finance his growing legal team. He'd joined one of those far-right, antitax Internet militias and was often seen walking around the Black Bayou town square buttonholing a diminishing number of friends—or anyone who would listen—to rail about the government's conspiracy against him.
Juke Charpentier, though quite happy with the outcome of his scuffle with Huff, nonetheless had reason to regret the loss of his lavish Big Tex sinecure. He spent weeks and weeks offering his valuable and aggressive services to other Oil Patch concerns (even stooping to secretly using Louella LeBoeuf as a reference, hoping no one would actually call her, till someone actually did). With no takers, Juke finally settled on a job befitting his skills: he went to work for Crawdad Financial Services, an extortionate lender to the poor, repossessing used cars, boats, TVs, sofas, and double-wide trailers. His base salary was thirty-one thousand dollars a year.
Other matters got resolved in happier ways.
Gary Harmon's civil suit on behalf of Roulin Lasseine against Big Tex and Duplessis Marine for being run down by the Duplessis crewboat doing Tom Huff 's dirty work got settled rather quickly. The Big Tex lawyers immediately saw the lay of the land and clearly did not want such a case to go to a local jury; Duplessis (as usual) wanted to fight, but his insurance companies forced him to settle—then promptly sued him, under state fraud statutes, to recover their money.
The amount awarded to Roulin was sealed by the court, a requirement of the insurance lawyers for settlement. But Lasseine not only replaced his sunken shrimp boat with a forty-two-foot beauty sporting twin diesels and onboard refrigerated storage; he was also able to build himself a proper house on stilts down at Bayou Go-to-Hell. He also gave a surprisingly large donation to Dr. Duck's chapter of Audubon and to a coastal-restoration trust fund.
Meanwhile, cleanup of the Belle Chaoui Marsh began immediately, owing in part to the shrewd negotiating tactics of the Oka-Tex lawyers in the midst of the Big Tex acquisition. The money—$30 million—officially got labeled the “Belle Chaoui Marsh Mitigation Account,” but inside a restructured Big Tex, where Tom Huff now suffered a loser's derision, it was known as “Huff 's Fuckup Fund.” The feds and the state also threw in matching amounts. Fortuitously, hundreds of barrels of toxins (not to mention a fully loaded barge) were recovered unbroken from the wetlands; the rest had to be sopped up and excavated using slow, expensive biohazard techniques.
The marsh, the best minds of science believe, will recover, though it will take years and years.
Perhaps the most surprising turn of events was the startling reinvigoration of Wilson Pitre following the ugly Patin affair. Wilson not only quit Patin for good; he landed a far superior job, managing the accounting office of the respected local hospital corporation. Meanwhile, the Tax Assessor's Office fell into almost immediate disorganization and, Wilson soon found himself being urged, by unhappy Patin employees and a goodly number of reform-minded citizens, to run for the assessor's job at the next election.
Should Wilson decide to run, Alphonse Patin would most certainly be surprised to learn that Pitre's top backer would be…Governor Joe T. Evangeline.
Given the strange unwinding of events, it took Governor Evangeline a while to finally make good on his swap with Myo Galjour—the family crawfish-boiling recipe for his opposition to the Chacahoula Parish shipping channel. Not only did he come out against the CHAPASS; he first directly appealed to the Corps of Engineers to delay the project pending what the Guv called an “honest environmental assessment.” When the Corps balked, he flew to Washington to personally lobby for cutting off funding for the project.
The Guv's strenuous objections caused quite a ruckus, and it also caused the state and national press to cover the issue with a depth and skepticism they hadn't shown before. Soon the Corps found itself on the defensive, and within six months it was embarrassed into accepting Governor Evangeline's appeal for a delay while yet another environmental-impact study was launched.
Even the Guv knew that life is long and the Corps never met a dredging project that it couldn't love (or would ever give up on). Still, his actions not only derailed the channel for a while, it won him a newfound and honest admiration from the Cajun rank and file. It also galvanized the state's environmental and coastal-restoration groups into coalescing in a single-minded campaign to repair and restore the state's rapidly eroding coast.
The leader of this front was Julie Galjour, who launched, from her pulpit at the Audubon Society, the Save the Cajunglades Foundation in an effort to bring the plight of the invaluable Louisiana estuary to a national audience. She argued that the fight to save this national treasure could not be won unless a wider constituency understood what was at stake for the nation as well as Louisiana.
In a speech to the National Audubon Society, she flipped through a slide show—of a hauntingly beautiful swath of wetlands photographed entirely within the Crawfish Mountain compound—and at the end said: “Surely, if I told you this was Everglades National Park, and surely if I said that everything you've just seen might be wiped out in twenty to fifty years by implacable forces of erosion and subsidence, you would rise up in arms and demand that the president and Congress do whatever was in their power to save such a place. This place, however, is unprotected by a park, but as you've seen, its flora, fauna, and scenic wonders are every bit as important and astonishing as anything that lies in the Everglades. Yet it, and hundreds of thousands of acres just like it, are under real peril from a chain of events and forces set in motion many decades ago that, if left unchecked, will sound the death knell to one of the most productive, culturally rich, environmentally important ecoscapes on the planet. To sit by and watch this happen—to declare that this is Louisiana's problem alone—is not just morally unconscionable but shows an ignorance of the interdependency of our natural systems and our place in them.”
Ms. Galjour received a thunderous standing ovation, and soon thereafter the state of Louisiana and its entire congressional delegation renewed its calls to Congress andthe president for the $13 billion that the state's best minds estimated it would take to carry out a meaningful coastal-restoration program. But as of this writing, only about a billion dollars has been allocated, while every hour, Louisiana continues to lose the equivalent of a football-fieldsized patch of marsh to subsidence, erosion, and saltwater intrusion.