Excerpt from I Married Bayou Billy!, written by Glenda Welsh McCall, published by Lonesome Dog Press: Houston, Texas, 1968, page 27:
Bill would have married me in 1937 instead of 1939, if he hadn’t been still married to his second wife, Daphne. She, by the way, was a worthless soul, having no interest in her children or providing a family home for a man with wandering attentions such as Bill. Perhaps my continued and positive influence would have provided a nourishing environment for him, encouraging him to wean himself away from a life of crime and ill behavior. I was, after all, the only college educated and God fearing wife that Bill had. I very much believe that if he hadn’t met another worthless soul, that carnivorous wanton wench, Rosa Zamarrippa, in Pegramville, Texas, that he might have become a law abiding citizen, a man of integrity who would never condone robbing another person. I could see the good in him. It was also true that his words could be coarse at times, and the physical intimacy of our wedded state was in constant flux. He could be a cruel man, using language to provide him with vicious amusement. But Bill could also be a kindness personified, bringing wild flowers plucked from the side of the road to be placed at my dining room table, and writing to me a poem, albeit crudely written, but springing forth from his heart with all of the hidden goodness of a man desperately crying out for the true love that would save his blackened heart. Here is the poem he wrote to me:
Roses are red,
Armadillos are gray.
You look like a little monkey,
I’ve got to say.
In fact, Bill misspelled monkey and armadillos, and he wrote his ‘e’s backwards and sometimes upside-down, but the sentiment was all there. One only has to read between the lines to understand the deep passion and innate righteousness that Bill had secreted deep inside him.
The Present
Thursday, July 13th
Sawdust City, Texas
Gibby Ross, secretary and general dog’s body watched as her boss did what she thought was an improvised South American salsa that looked like a cross between an epileptic having a seizure and Lucille Ball stomping on grapes. Pascal Waterford was standing on top of her desk doing effortless movements with his arms and elbows and then ending with a butt wiggle. Then he would yell, “Hey, Macarena!” while clapping and then rotating to his right ninety degrees. Despite what Pascal had implied before, Gibby wasn’t a Southern Baptist or even a Baptist, and consequently did happen to know some dances. She might have even danced once at a middle school prom with a boy who wore glasses so thick that they could have been used to repair the Hubble Space telescope. But that was neither here nor there.
Gibby tilted her head to the right as the popo-jiggle commenced not two feet from her nose. Pascal was a booze hound, a lecher, and occasionally a foul-tempered individual, but he had an adequately better-than-average and eminently squeezable tushy. The view, despite its unprovoked manifestation, was not objectionable.
“Come on, baby,” Pascal said, now looking down at her with a full white grin while fluently continuing the movements. “Dance with me.”
Glancing down at the still dripping and quite large coffee stain on her dress, Gibby shook her head. But she couldn’t help a slight smile from curving her lips at the suggestion. If the other secretaries came to see what the hub-bub was, then she didn’t dare get caught prancing around the top of the desk like a cheap hotel-hotsy with the mayor acting like Teddy Kennedy before he drove off Dike Bridge at Chappaquiddick Island.
In fact, several council members popped their heads out into the hallway like prairie dogs checking for predators and the janitor gawped with his mouth opened so wide that Gibby could see his tonsils. Gibby would have rolled her eyes heavenward and shot them a glare that would have frozen their knickers except that she was somewhat embarrassed for the mayor’s sake.
“Hey, Macarena!” Pascal yelled gleefully and turned 90 degrees to his right with a scandalous hop that would have made Bugs Bunny envious.
Don Swancott stuck his head into the hall, did a double repeat look at what the mayor was doing and grinned broadly. He disappeared so quickly that it was questionable whether or not Gibby had actually seen him.
Gibby suddenly frowned. There were many things in this world that she disliked. Telemarketers had been numero uno on her list. But then the No Call List had happened and they lost a lot of work, so sometimes she talked to them for a while, but not so long as to get their hopes up. Then, there were the deplorable department store return policies. NOT everyone remembers to keep their receipts for EVERYTHING they ever bought.
Gibby didn’t even want to think about rebates. That was the biggest scheme of which she’d ever heard. The last time she’d bought software that offered a rebate she was required to send in 1) a proof of purchases, 2) the actual Universal Product Code snipped from the box, 3) proof in the form of receipts (refer to the dislike of department store return policies above) that she owned previous versions of the software that made her applicable for the latest version, and 4) her first born son. Even if she managed all of that, she knew that she wouldn’t get the rebate check for six months and it would come in an envelope that could very easily be mistaken for junk mail. Naturally, it would have a time limit on it of thirty days before it become void. Hah.
But what really steamed her broccolis were rotten, dirty, no good, puppy-dog smelling politicians. Like Don Swancott. He hadn’t officially announced his candidacy for mayor of Sawdust City, but everyone knew he was going to run. He was also doing his wretched best to make Pascal Waterford look like a horse’s ass. Not that Pascal needed that much help in that area, especially while he was standing on her desk, shaking his tail feathers like Barry Manilow was singing about the Copacabana. The bona fide truth was that Pascal was a rotten, dirty, no good, puppy-dog smelling politician, too, but he was Gibby’s rotten, dirty, no good, puppy-dog smelling politician.
What would I do if I saw the mayor acting like an exotic dancer on crack on top of his secretary’s desk and I was going to run against him in the fall? Gibby frowned harder as she looked at Don’s door. Camera. Don’s getting a camera out of his desk. She stood up immediately and said as loudly as she could, “Thanks, Your Honor!”
Pascal abruptly stopped his shaking of his posterior, staring down at Gibby with surprise on his face. “That light has really been bothering me!” she yelled, pointing at the fluorescent light on the ceiling above her desk. “It’s really good of you to help me with it!”
The mayor said, “Why are you yelling, Gibby?”
Gibby jerked her head down the hallway toward Don Swancott, who was positioned in the center, waiting for the money shot, with his hands wrapped around a disposable camera. The camera’s lens was pointed in their direction and Don’s index finger was on the button. She didn’t know what was worse, that Don actually had a disposable camera in his desk awaiting such an occasion, or that the mayor’s previous behaviors warranted having the disposable camera about for posterity’s sake.
Pascal waited for a moment as he digested the scene before him and then said graciously and loudly to Gibby, “Loose wire!”
Several people made sounds of understanding and vanished into the nether regions from whence they had emerged. Don stared at the two of them and finally lowered the camera. He snarled half-heartedly under his breath and stomped back into his office.
The mayor took a moment to examine Gibby’s face. Ultimately he came to a conclusion. “You’re not quite the ogre you pretend to be.”
“You needn’t make it so easy for Mr. Swancott,” Gibby snapped. “After all, you could have taken off your pants and shirt and appeared on my desk in your underwear. A red silk thong, is it?”
Pascal jumped off the desk with the ability of a man half his age. He came within a few inches of Gibby and attempted a little intimidation by his closeness and by his increased height. She didn’t take a step backward, although she wanted to do exactly that. Furthermore, it crossed her mind that this was the very first time the mayor had taken an interest in anything she did. Instead of giving Gibby any kind of civilized and respectable amount of space, he looked down at her thoughtfully.
Gibby stared back, not exactly sure what else to say. The statement he’d made was essentially true. She had learned many years before to be as hard as nails. She wasn’t the swooning, blinky-eyed, southern beauty that was the homecoming queen in high school and the most popular sorority sister in college. Instead, she was practical. Life was remorseless. Gibby had to be brutal, too. Or else people like Don Swancott and Pascal Waterford would tromp all over her ego, leaving more collateral damage than a gulf war.
But hey, Pascal had gray eyes the color of a mourning dove’s wings. Gibby fluttered her eyelashes and wished she had put more mascara on that morning. She caught herself. Hard, Gibby, m’girl. Hard as nails. Hard as a diamond. Hard as titanium. Hard as a rock. I wonder exactly what kind of underwear he is wearing.
“A red silk thong,” he said, almost a whisper.
“What?” Gibby muttered. Did I say that out loud? Brainless ninny.
His eyes twinkled diabolically and suddenly Gibby knew why some of the secretaries in City Hall fawned over him. She had never seen it before, not in three and a half years of working for him. His crows’ feet multiplied as a slow, insidious smile split his face. When Pascal was in a good mood, it was so infectious that the CDC should have been called.
“You said, ‘A red silk thong, is it?’” Pascal uttered slowly and carefully, letting the words drawl on his tongue. He leaned in to get a good look at her, appearing massive through her oversized eye glasses. “How did you know?”
“Uh,” Gibby said helplessly. “It was sarcasm.”
“Have you been peeking through a hole in the men’s room?” he went on, carefully examining every bit of her features.
“Of course not!” Gibby yelled and finally stepped back, broken from her feeble reverie. “Of course I DO NOT know what color your underwear is! Have you lost your mind? Don’t you have any regard for your constituents? Do you know that Don Swancott is positively going to send Sawdust City into an unrecoverable tailspin?”
Pascal stepped back himself. He pursed his lips and considered Gibby’s words. “I didn’t know that you cared,” he said presently.
“You called up Jake from accounting,” she said. “After I gave you his message and told him to pay those salaries out of your pay first.”
“I did not,” Pascal protested heatedly. “Like I would have done something like that. Everyone can just get eat at the soup kitchen this week, except me. I’m eating Alpo. They sell it half price at the Safeway when the can’s been dinged up. It tastes like corned hash, you know. If you mix it with week old eggs and a little stale cheese you get from behind the Taco Hut, then it’s really-”
“Jake called to confirm that he had the correct accounts to make the transfer,” Gibby said snidely. “You also told him to take as much out of your personal savings account as was necessary for the next month. He doesn’t think you’ve got enough in there to take care of business, by the way.”
Pascal swore. “Goddamnit all to hell. Well, motherfucker on a Popsicle stick. Son of a fuckfaced bitch.”
Gibby looked for her pencil. She was hearing some very new and very interesting phrases and words lately. She wanted to look them up in her dictionary. And if they weren’t defined in her dictionary, then they would be on the Internet. But Pascal was turning away. Was he angry that Jake from accounting had let the cat out of the bag or that there wasn’t enough money to cover the month?
“What were you so happy about?” Gibby asked instead, downright curious now. “You were dancing on my desk.”
Pascal cast a sideways glance at her and then looked down the hall. “You really want to know? I mean, you really want to know?”
“City’s going bankrupt, right?” Gibby said sourly. “I need to get my resume together. And when you’re out of a job, then you’re not going to have a savings account to fall back on, because of what you just did.” Her face twisted oddly. “Actually, I do want to know.”
Pascal looked both ways as if he were ascertaining security of the area and motioned her surreptitiously into his office. Gibby followed slowly. She wasn’t sure what to expect. His office looked much the same as it always did. Coffee cup on the desk without a coaster. Papers strewn across the broad wooden top. A framed oil portrait of the first mayor of Sawdust City dominated one wall. She didn’t see a half-drunk bottle of bourbon peeking out of a desk drawer and there wasn’t a single sex toy to be found anywhere.
Gibby was disappointed. The mayor shut the door behind them and indicated the newspaper on the desk. “Did you read The Sawdust City Journal this morning?”
“No,” Gibby answered plainly with distaste evident in her tone. “They covered a story when one of Old Lady Harrison’s twelve cats died last month. She had a Viking funeral for it. Floated a barge of tinder out on Toledo Bend Reservoir and set it on fire. She burned off her eyebrows lighting it.” She paused when she realized that Pascal was getting irritated. “I mean, what idiot would cover a story like that? And furthermore, what moron would print it?”
Running out of steam, Gibby looked the paper again. The headline was clear. ‘Bayou Billy Dead at 110.’ Okay, Bayou Billy is dead and he was a really old guy, too. Her eyebrows came together in a frown of concentration. Bayou Billy was a bank robber. Robbed banks and river boats, too. Oh, yes, he lived here. But I haven’t heard anything about him in years. Not since his last wife and his mistress got into a fight on Main Street, broke two plate glass windows and one fire hydrant. How does a pair of old women break a fire hydrant?
“The last time I heard anything about Billy was that he was in a home in…Shreveport, wasn’t it?” Gibby leaned over to look at the paper. “Yes. That is where he died. Peacefully, in his sleep, of old age. How about that? Hardly a surprise, considering his age. It’s not like he would have had a skydiving accident. It would have been more interesting if he’d been shot in his wheelchair trying to rob another bank.”
“And we get him,” Pascal said excitedly.
“We get him,” Gibby repeated dumbly. “But he’s dead.”
Pascal’s eyes rolled. “Of course he’s dead. But we get his body.”
Gibby’s head suddenly went blank. She really couldn’t understand why the mayor was so excited about a corpse, much less a 110 year old corpse. Good Lord above, that’s got to be one horrible smelling stiff. I mean, wicked yuck.
“And,” Pascal said slowly as if instructing a mentally deficient individual, “we get to bury him here, in Sawdust City.”
Gibby slowly nodded her head in time with Pascal’s words as if she was repeating them silently, but she still didn’t get the drift. The city didn’t have the money to pay the employees, there were old newspapers in the bathrooms because they’d run out of toilet paper last week, and forget about getting new toner for the printers, because everyone had been specifically instructed by the CFO, Bobby Joe Bruce, on the finer methods of shaking the last bit of toner loose from an depleted printer cartridge. So where was the money going to come from to bury a recently deceased reprobate?
“Do you have any idea how many people go to visit famous people’s graves?” Pascal asked carefully.
Having never visited a famous person’s grave, unless she counted Graceland, Gibby couldn’t begin to imagine. “More than one and less than a million?”
“Hundreds of thousands,” Pascal answered cautiously as if the number would dumbfound her.
Gibby sat down in the mayor’s leather chair and looked up at him expectantly. She couldn’t quite see where Pascal was going, but that he had a definitive plan was evident. “Maybe to see Marilyn Monroe’s grave,” she said warily. “Certainly, Elvis. Or the Pope. Lots of Catholics in the world. But not an old bank robber. Not hundreds of thousands, anyway.”
“The first annual Bayou Billy Festival,” Pascal exclaimed gleefully, motioning his hand in front of him as if he were pointing out a banner of significant size spread out before him. “A parade. Old town shootouts. Gift shops. Food vendors. Tours of the place the infamous Bayou Billy called home for the final years of his life.” His voice lowered into a shrewd undertone. “We could even have a…website. Bayou Billy t-shirts. Bayou Billy mugs. Bayou Billy handguns. Plastic, of course. Bayou Billy dolls. Perhaps even created from the Franklin Mint.”
“Ooo,” Gibby breathed appropriately.
“I’m going to talk to some bankers in Dallas this afternoon,” Pascal went on. “See if we can’t get a nice business plan approved and an appropriate loan for the start of the venture. But first, we’ve got to build Bayou Billy a suitable monument.”
“Something large and gaudy,” Gibby added. “The place where he will be buried has to catch folks’ attention. Really something eye-catchingly hideous.”
“Lots of marble and statues,” Pascal put in.
“Lights and ornate Japanese boxwoods,” Gibby said.
“Neon lights,” Pascal said.
“Too much,” Gibby interrupted.
“Yeah, that’s too much. But we could have a bar with neon lights. Bayou Billy’s Outlaw Inn. Barmaids in leather miniskirts and wearing six-guns. Plastic, of course.” Pascal rubbed his hands together.
Gibby shrugged. “How do you know we get his body?”
Pascal waved a hand casually. “His last wife is buried here. Two of his children are in Resurrection Cemetery. Where else would he be buried?”