From an article in The Louisiana Sparrow Press, dated August 7th, 1931:
Bayou Billy Strikes Again!
Brazen Louisianan Titillates Townspeople!
Southern Express Robbed at Gunpoint!
Thousands Stolen by Gentleman Thief!
William McCall, called “Bayou Billy” by locals, has robbed the Southern Express train on Monday, August 3rd as it stopped for water and offloading of cattle at Monroe, Louisiana. Called unabashed and gallant by Mrs. Myra Renee Teasdale of Natchitoches, she states, ‘He is the boldest man I have ever met. So audacious and daring. If I were twenty years younger I would set my cap for him.’ Mr. Wayne Gibson of Winnsboro says this of the intrepid champion from Texas, ‘Billy was as cool as ice cubes in Alaska at December.’ The train engineer of the Southern Express, Mr. Samuel Cutler of Houma, declares, ‘I was right proud to have been robbed by Bayou Billy. He’s a right genuine man and a true Southerner.’
Mr. McCall is known to have taken as much as ten thousand dollars from a bank shipment being transferred on the Southern Express. Bank official Mr. Elliot French says, ‘We will tender a reward for the capture of Bayou Billy in the amount of five hundred dollars. We are unconcerned if this treacherous villain is bestowed to the bank or to the authorities dead or alive.’
In his escape, Mr. McCall was reported to have saved a dog from being run over by a careless milkman. Miss Ella Louisa Burke reports, ‘He stopped the milk truck by pointing his pistol directly at Milkman Kincade’s head and delivered the Birch’s dog from getting run over. That poor animal would have been ground into hamburger if not for “Bayou Billy’s” brave rescue. He’s a proper hero.’ Sightings of the legendary “Bayou Billy” continue in the Monroe area.
The Present
Thursday, July 13th
Sawdust City, Texas
Pascal Waterford woke up with a sour taste in his mouth. If the truth were told it was more than a sour taste. His eyes remained closed while he mentally catalogued to what the taste could be attributed and to what it might be compared. Eating cottage cheese left in the fridge for a month? Definitely not. Swallowing an ashtray full of cigarette butts? No. Licking the bottom of a sewer grate after a rainstorm washed up everything dead? Maybe. Having drunk too many bottles of Corona and smoking five cheap cigars while playing poker with the guys down at the Gray Goose? Probably.
Pascal did a quick check while keeping his eyes shut. He patted this body. Naked, all the parts seemed to be present and accounted for. He patted the bed. Not only did the bed feel like his bed, but there was the right amount of firmness with a butt shaped depression where his ass normally lay. Also there wasn’t a woman lying next to him whom he would have to identify from drunken fits and starts that could only remotely be called memories. Unpleasant taste and pounding headache aside, he thought that maybe he came out this time all right. That was considering that he couldn’t recall half of the previous night.
Alert and sober, with good intentions he’d stopped in at the Gray Goose Inn. There had been a brief conversation with Mrs. August about the Race for Lymphoma the next month down Sawdust City’s main drag. Bob Cumberland, Bryant Mansfield, and George Hiram were playing poker at the back table, giggling like teenage boys at an ‘R’ rated movie. Bob had called Pascal back and asked him if he wanted to sit in for a few hands. Pascal had thought that playing a little friendly game of poker was good political acumen. After all Bryant had given Pascal one of his biggest donations in the last race. Then George had bought Pascal a drink, a Corona long neck with a slice of lime quaintly parked in the mouth of the bottle.
Pascal clearly remembered the thought that had occurred following the arrival of the drink. Just one. That was inevitably the thought that always gotten him in trouble. Just one, cowboy. Just one little ol’ drink and then you can go home and get humping on all those things you need to do. You know, like do some cold-calls, work out some more strategy with the campaign manager, work on the website, call the council members and get cracking, you tired old drunken fool.
That had been pretty much the end of that. ‘Just one’ had turned into ‘One more.’ ‘One more’ had changed into ‘Well, one more won’t hurt.’ ‘Well, one more won’t hurt’ had become ‘It ain’t like I can’t stop anytime I wanna.’ Then Bryant had passed him one of those stogies that smelt like the ass end of a wino after a bout of diarrhea. And who can smoke one of those things without washing out their mouth with the taste of bottomless alcohol, preferably from a bottle that had a foreign label on it?
After that, Pascal didn’t remember anything in particular. There was a faint notion of filling an inside royal straight against George’s full house, eights on top of threes, and a foggy recollection of an amicable agreement that Bob would trade his wife for Lindsay Lohan in spite of the whole her-life-is-a-train-wreck-and-I-can’t-look-away thing. But as to the remainder of the evening, Pascal reckoned that only God and the police might know how he got home.
His eyes finally opened and he stared upward at the familiar water stain of his ceiling. The stain was in the shape of Elvis in the early years and Pascal figured if he got desperate for money he could cut the piece out and auction it off on eBay. Definitely home, he thought gratefully. Not in one of the pits that were alleged to be motel rooms at the Happy Go Lucky Motel on route 6. Not under the freeway bridge sharing body warmth with two pigeons. Not in bed with a woman who Pascal wasn’t quite certain had in fact been born a woman.
Turning his head, Pascal surveyed the immediate area. The side of his bed that he was not in was still reasonably made and empty. The door to the bathroom was wide open and shower-like, cleaning-up-after-horny-hose-monkey sex noises were not ominously emanating from within. He couldn’t smell bacon and eggs being fried in the kitchen. It was a safe conclusion that he hadn’t dragged home the fat barmaid from the Goose for a round of drunken soggy sex. She’d probably turned him down like the last time. Apparently, the time before that Pascal had failed to perform adequately. Adequately defined as being able to last longer than a beer-filled belch and a little tickle.
What day of the week is it? Pascal ran a hand through his graying hair and debated moving from the bed. Pressing matters included the fact that he had to piss like a Russian racehorse and that if it were a weekday then he needed to be at City Hall before 9 AM in order to keep certain members of City Council off his back.
One eye rolled to the left and checked out the clock on the nightstand. It said 8:20 AM and a little red dot denoted that it was Thursday. If the clock was accurate and he thought that it was, seeing as though it was one of those atomic dealies that reset itself through a satellite connection every time the power went off and then came on again. That was good, also. It meant that Pascal had time to shower and get to the office before people started pounding angrily on his front door.
Lifting his head carefully, Pascal considered his next option. He could brush his teeth, then shower, and then puke his guts up. Or he could puke, brush his teeth, and then shower. Or he could simply stick his head in the toilet and pray for a strike of lightning to take him away from everything.
For certain lightning did not strike, but Pascal had forgotten about it as he didn’t quite make it to the bathroom.
•
Wondering if the lady who came to clean his house once a week would up and quit on him once she had seen what he had left on the bedroom floor, Pascal found himself in front of his bathroom mirror. With an extended examination, Pascal saw a man in his forties. His hair had once been dark brown but now resembled a mix of salt and pepper. Then, there were the marks that indicated he had lived his life hard. Crow’s feet like a Google Earth’s map, jowls dropping around a square jaw, bleary reddened eyes with some baggage on bottoms and they weren’t Samsonite’s, and the pale, wizened skin of agoraphobic in the springtime.
If Pascal had looked down he would have seen the beginning of an abdominal bulge that said everything about how much he liked beer and nothing about the way he occasionally used his rowing machine. He knew his ass hadn’t exploded with the blitz of middle age. Lifting an arm, he flexed a bicep and was mildly amused to see a muscle pop up instead of flopping south. The ladies still liked him when he was cleaned up. He had a good set of teeth, recently whitened by a dentist three towns over.
Pascal looked closer at the reflection and was startled when it sneered back at him. “What you say, P.? You look like the man? Or maybe you look like a sun-fried dog turd in high summer?” The answer, left unspoken, wasn’t the one he wanted to hear.
Instead Pascal said, “I never slept with another man’s wife. I never hit a man when he was down. And I never, ever cheated on my taxes.”
The reflection sneered again, one lip curling like a rock star. “You slept with Johnny Robert Smith’s wife.”
Pascal protested, “He was dead.”
“Only two days before.”
“Still dead.”
The reflection sneered harder. “And you hit James Leroy Baker in the kidneys when he was on his knees, puking from you slugging him in the guts.”
“James Leroy is a dirty rotten cheating sonuvabitch and deserved to be hit while he was down,” Pascal said vehemently.
“And in 1999 you claimed you had three children on your taxes, instead of one,” the reflection went on as if Pascal hadn’t spoken.
“A typo,” Pascal defended himself. “Merely a typo. It seemed like a shame to have to make the fine, outstanding folks at the IRS do all their paperwork again. It ain’t like the government is going to miss that thousand or so dollars. And I could have three children, someplace. I have broken rubbers before.”
“What about how the town is going to take a header into a shit hole? How long has it been since the financial officer used a black marker instead of a red one?” The reflection raised an angry fist as if it would come through the glass just like Alice. Then the curled lip wavered and the reflection’s anger melted away in an expression of abject disgust. “Take a shower, asshole, before you’re really late.”
As Pascal turned away from the mirror, he thought he heard, “How in the name of Holy Jesus Christ did the town of Sawdust City ever elect you to be the mayor?”
And even though Pascal wasn’t supposed to answer what he thought he might have heard, he did so anyway. Also, he wanted the last word. “The other guy got caught wearing Victoria’s Secret lingerie and lipstick two days before the election. It didn’t photograph well in the local papers.”
•
As Pascal headed out the door to his 2004 Ford Expedition the first thing he noticed was that it was parked reasonably straight in his driveway, and didn’t have a large bloody and human-sized dent in the grill. The second thing that he noticed was that his neighbor, Thaddeus Worth, was in his front yard pulling dandelions. Thaddeus yelled across the disorderly row of azaleas. “Hey, Waterford!”
Pascal checked out the shine on his loafers. His head was pounding like the pipes at a Blue Man Group concert and he wasn’t sure if he had finished barfing yet. He was also pretty sure that ralphing on the flowers wouldn’t be good for them. Speaking to his crabby neighbor, Thaddeus, wasn’t high on his priorities. The eighty-seven year old Korean War veteran found little in life that was positive, and politicians were comparable to a particularly troublesome dingleberry on a day that he was all out of toilet paper.
“Thaddeus,” Pascal said cordially.
Thaddeus stepped closer to the azaleas and his antique blue eyes pierced Pascal. “You look hung over, boy.”
Pascal chuckled good-humoredly, even while he was certain the vein in his forehead was about to rupture. He could play the good old boy when he felt like it. “A couple of beers with the boys at the Goose. You should come down, Thaddeus. We need a man like you to show us the ropes.”
The elderly man wasn’t complimented. His eyes sparkled with mischief. Pascal caught the look and interpreted it to mean, ‘I know something you don’t know and when you find out you are going to shit bricks…boy.’ But what Thaddeus said was, “Trash was late again yesterday. Dogs got into the Parker’s can and spread chicken bones from here to eternity.”
“I’ll talk to the Sanitation Department,” Pascal replied obediently.
Thaddeus smiled thinly and waited.
Then Pascal added, “And the Animal Control Officer.”
The backbiting look on Thaddeus’s face revealed the inner workings of the man’s mind. He might have been eighty-seven years old but he had a brain like a bear trap, and not the nice, animal safe kind, either. It was the kind of trap an animal would have to succumb to in abject agony or chew its leg off in an effort to escape. Pascal sighed and waited for the other bomb to drop, but Thaddeus continued to smile with an icy veneer, until the younger man said, “Got to get to City Hall, Thaddeus. Things need doing that ain’t going to be done standing here.”
Thaddeus nodded shortly and watched Pascal back out of his drive way and leave. Pascal glanced in his rear view mirror once and saw the elderly man still watching him. Pascal checked his visor’s mirror to make sure he didn’t have a great, gooey green booger flying out one nostril and wondered what the old man was contemplating. Thaddeus Worth’s signature had been first on the last recall effort. On the recall drive before that, Thaddeus’s signature had been second. His eighty-eight year old sister, Thomasina, who lived with him, and despite suffering from Alzheimer’s, had beaten him to the punch.
Pascal was pretty sure the aged pair sat on Thaddeus’s porch on Friday and Saturday nights with a video camera and a pitcher of pink lemonade so they might catch Pascal in the act of doing something. They probably didn’t know what they were looking for, except perhaps a golden opportunity. Something interesting to sell to America’s Funniest Videos or maybe a new show like America’s Most Idiotic Public Figures.
Whatever it was, Pascal hoped he was making their decade. After all, they would probably keel over any minute due to their advanced ages. He could only hope that one of his drunken naked chases after imaginary pink elephants down the cul-de-sac wasn’t the cause of their passing. Or if it was, they got a really good kick out of it and mentioned it to St. Peter at the pearly gates. Allegedly, there was no such thing as bad press.
Parking his Expedition in the mayor’s spot at City Hall was usually the biggest thrill of Pascal’s day. The spot had his name on it emblazoned in Day-Glo orange so no one else would make the heinous error of parking there. The orange paint was chipping somewhat and the black paint that had covered up previous mayor’s names was coming up in patches bigger than polar bear’s paws, but Pascal T. Waterford could still be read. Until November, he thought.
As Pascal turned into the City Hall’s parking lot, he saw that he could not see his name on his spot, because a garbage truck had been parked there. He let the Expedition idle for about thirty seconds while he decided whether he should just park elsewhere and let it go or block in the garbage truck and go inside to rip Dexter Phillip a new butt-hole.
No, no, no, Pascal finally determined. A candid photo of the mayor performing a much needed butt-hole ripping wouldn’t look good on the cover of The Sawdust City Journal. So he parked in the Sanitation Department Administrator’s spot and allowed as how shit was apt to roll downhill. Let Larry Browder, the SD administrator, deal with Dexter, one of two garbage men in Sawdust City.
As Pascal collected his briefcase, which was empty because he couldn’t remember to put anything in it, he gathered his thoughts and took a brief glance in the rearview mirror. That smart-assed reflection was there as always. “You the man, P.?”
“Oh, screw you,” Pascal answered and left before the reflection could get into an argument that would have Pascal looking for an unopened bottle of Two Fingers Tequila. On his way into City Hall, he saw Dexter the garbage man talking with the cute twenty-something receptionist at the information desk and gave him a dirty and extended look.
“Your honor,” said the twenty-something. Pascal nodded pleasantly at her while trying to keep his eyes off her double ‘D’ cleavage, and that wasn’t an easy task.
Dexter brushed off his overalls and glanced over his shoulder expecting to see a judge, but instead he saw Pascal. “Uh, uh, Deanna, got to go. Think I forgot to put a dime in the meter,” he mumbled.
Pascal watched Dexter scuttle out of the building with all the alacrity of a lizard on a hot piece of freeway. When he reached his office a minute later, his secretary, Gibby Ross, said, “It’s two minutes after, and I have to dock your pay.”
“Who the hell works for who around here?” Pascal demanded. “And any way, I’m on a salary.”
Through huge glasses, Gibby looked down her long beaked nose at him, despite the fact that she was sitting at her desk and he was looming above her. Similar in age, he had inherited her with the victory of becoming mayor of Sawdust City. She disliked everyone on general principle. No one spoke to her unless they were forced to do so. She also had feet that smelled like the Dallas Cowboy’s locker room after the third quarter. “Whom,” she said.
“Whom what?” Pascal glared at her.
“Who the hell works for whom around here,” Gibby said satisfyingly.
“Whom,” Pascal repeated.
“Bobby Joe Bruce said that if any employee came in late they had to be docked,” Gibby said with malevolent glee.
Bobby Joe Bruce Lane was Sawdust City’s Chief Financial Officer, which was a whopping ludicrous title if Pascal had ever heard one, and the only man that Pascal knew with three first names that he liked other people to use. He was also the one slashing funds with a liberal red pen. Three people had been axed from the city government’s employment and Pascal was soon expecting to see any one or all of them sitting on his doorstep with a rusty, dull axe. “He didn’t mean me,” Pascal said darkly.
Gibby didn’t get it and set her jaw petulantly. “You have three messages from Hewitt Donally. The last one is urgent.”
Hewitt Donally was Pascal’s campaign manager and the owner of the only grocery store in town. Pascal wondered what Hewitt had heard about the previous night.
“One message from Doc Montague,” Gibby went on, with her nose getting longer all the time.
Doctor Titus Montague was Pascal’s family doctor and the only GP in town. Pascal had a physical performed the previous month and hadn’t thought much of his odds that the doctor had something positive to say.
“Jake from Accounting left a message that he wanted me to read to you when you got in,” Gibby continued. “I quote, ‘Three paychecks bounced yesterday. Please find some money someplace. Or we are fucked, fucked, fucked.’ The last ‘fucked’ was underlined four times. Jake told me to do that and to tell you that I had done that.”
“That word just doesn’t sound right coming out of your Baptist mouth, Gibby,” Pascal commented. “Do you even know what it means?”
“To fuck,” Gibby repeated thoughtfully. “It’s a taboo term meaning to have sexual intercourse. A verb. It also can mean to ruin, botch, or destroy something, or to treat someone unjustly or harshly.” She paused to consider her words. “Of course, it can also be used as a noun.”
Pascal decided he couldn’t have any fun anymore. “Any other messages?”
“Emergency town council meeting at 2 PM. Don Swancott said don’t be late or he’d head up the next recall movement and that would be well before the next election.” Gibby smiled maliciously. Don Swancott was the mayor pro tem and first councilmember, as well as the major contender to be the next mayor of Sawdust City. Don already had aspirations on the office. Apparently he was thinking about changing the carpet. Good luck finding some money for that, Don, Pascal thought. Good luck trying to find money to buy a pack of pencils, too.
When Gibby brought Pascal coffee and a newspaper a half-hour later, he checked the liquid for poison, and then disregarded the notion, thinking it would be better to die swiftly. The coffee wasn’t poisoned but the newspaper had a headline in it that made Pascal feel something that he hadn’t felt for years. It was an alien feeling, one that was similar to taking a breath of the freshest, best smelling air on the entire planet, or the moment after the best orgasm ever has started and there’s no way in heaven or in hell that it will ever be interrupted, or the feeling that one gets when optimism bursts fluidly open in a crippled man’s chest the moment he learns that he very well might be able to walk again.
Over Pascal’s shoulders was a broad, gabled window that overlooked Main and First Streets and was the only really good perk of his office and status. If he had looked there, his mirror image would have mockingly said, “That’s hope, buttmunch. Better get used to it before it chokes you.”
Instead, Pascal deliberately looked down at the newspaper and read the headline again. ‘Bayou Billy Dead at 110.’
Pascal could have cried and it surely wouldn’t have been from grief. “YIPPEE!” he yelled instead and outside his office, Gibby spilled her coffee all over her prune colored dress and viciously used the word she had looked up in the dictionary after Jake from Accounting had left his message for Pascal.