Red Thunder

10

MY PHONE RANG at three A.M. the next morning. I almost didn’t answer it, but after eleven rings I figured whoever was on the other end wasn’t going to give up easily.

“Hello?” I said, and yawned.

“Manny? Travis. I wonder if you could do me a big favor?”

I was sitting up now, fully awake. “I’ll sure try, Travis. What is it?”

“I wonder if you could come on out here to the ranch.”

“Come out… what, you mean now?”

“If you could. It’s pretty important.”

“Gee, Travis, I don’t know…”

“It’s about Jubal.”

“Is he all right? Did something-”

“Please, Manny, just come on out. I can explain when you get here. Take a taxi if you have to. I’ll pay.”

“No, Travis, I mean, sure, I’ll come, but-”

“Thanks a million, pal.” And he hung up. Kelly rolled over and sat up.

“Travis?”

“Yeah, he wants me to go out there. Tonight. Right now.”

[88] “That’s what happens when you have weird friends,” she said, and bounced out of bed. “Let me wash my face and comb my hair, and we’ll both go.”

WE STOPPED FOR two giant Starbucks espressos and a dozen Krispy Kremes, then hit the road.

The place looked a lot better in the dark this time. It’s amazing how much difference changing a few burned-out lightbulbs can make.

The tennis court, pool area, and paths to the barn and to the lake were now lit by lights on poles. Moths and June bugs battered themselves to death on them, and bug zappers hung all around the patio.

But the biggest difference was in the pool, all cleaned out and full of beautiful blue water, lit from below. I wished I’d brought my bathing suit.

Dak and Alicia arrived not far behind us. We went in through the patio screen door and found Travis sitting in the sunken conversation area, fully dressed. There was a bottle of Jim Beam on the table at his side, and a tumbler half full. Alicia made a face when she saw the bourbon, but she didn’t say anything.

Sitting on the coffee table was Jubal’s 7-Eleven jug of golf-ball-sized indestructible silver bubbles.

“So where’s Jubal?” Dak asked at last.

“Jubal is out rowing on the lake. It’s what Jubal always does when he’s upset. You probably noticed the size of his arms. Jubal rows a lot, and it’s usually my fault. It certainly is tonight.

“I’d like to know everything y’all know about these things.” He looked from one of us to another, right down the line. “Unless you’re going to tell me you don’t know anything about them.”

I told him everything I had done with the bubble since finding it in the tall grass not a hundred feet from where I was now sitting. It didn’t take too long. I deferred to Kelly, who had very little to add, and then to Dak, who confirmed what Jubal had shown us of the nature of the bubbles, and some attempt to report what Jubal had said.

Alicia was one of those females, like Mom and Maria, who can’t [89] stand seeing people sitting around with nothing to eat or drink. She had been listening to us from the kitchen and came out now with a big pot of coffee and some cookies she had brought with her. There was oatmeal and brown sugar covering up the taste of the other health store stuff I’m sure was in there.

Travis took a deep drink of his bourbon, looked at the bottle, then at Alicia, and reached for a coffee cup. Alicia filled it, looking happy as a prohibitionist who’s just set a barroom on fire.

“Okay, friends,” Travis said. “Did I say friends? Well, Jubal likes you. If it was up to me, I might just chase all y’all’s asses back to the beach where I found you-”

“You found us?” Alicia snorted.

“-where I found y’all, illegally rampaging up and down a public beach that innocent citizens were sitting on, minding their own business. But it happens I kind of like you, too, and I can’t really figure how any of you did anything wrong… except I wish you’d a told me about this. I might have handled Jubal better.”

“You really think so?” Kelly asked.

“… Probably not. Anyway, things would be so much simpler if none of y’all had seen these things. But you have. And Jubal wants you to keep coming around. That’s one area I’ve failed Jubal miserably, not bringing new folks around for him to visit with. Jubal’s frightened of other people, often as not, but both of us know if he doesn’t socialize now and then he’s likely to grow a hide so tough he won’t be able to talk to anybody else, ever. And I’ve pretty much used up all the old friends I used to have, which may be why I’m trying to be friends with as unlikely a group as y’all. Anyway…

“I reckon I’d better tell you a little more about Jubal. About me and Jubal. I’ve told this stuff to no one, nobody at all outside the family, and I wouldn’t be telling y’all if Jubal hadn’t said he didn’t mind. So here goes.

“My friends, it ain’t easy being Jubal…”

[90] TRAVIS’S UNCLE AVERY Broussard was a few years older than Travis’s father. When Avery was young he had been Travis’s favorite of his six uncles. Of all the Broussard brothers and sisters, Avery lived closest to the land. He taught his sons and nephews to get along in the woods and swamps of Louisiana bayou country. It was Avery who always found the time to take the kids out in the middle of the night frog-gigging or jacklighting deer. Travis said he was nine before he realized jacklighting-shooting deer frozen in car headlights or powerful spotlights-was illegal. Avery just laughed at that, and said it was okay because they intended to eat the meat. It was just an easier way to put food on the table, and he wasn’t surprised that the city boys and girls who never in their lives killed for the table would want country boys like him to hunt the hard way.

“Just think about it, cher,” Avery said. “Dem city boys, what dey be cryin’ ’bout is it ain’t fair to de deer. Ain’t fair!” He had a good laugh at that one. “I tell you, I druther be shootin’ at dem deer not movin’ dan jus’ run all over God’s miraculous creation findin’ a deer wasn’t nothin’ but just winged, and him hurtin’ powerful all dat time. No, sir, Avery Broussard hasn’t never missed no deer caught in de headlights. What is dat, if it ain’t ‘perventin’ cruelty’ to animals, hah?”

So they jacklighted and dodged the game wardens through the tangled bayou that Avery knew better than anyone else. And during the day, Avery would take them hunting for coon, possum, and squirrel. They raised their own rabbits. He would take them out on the water to run the trotlines and crawdad traps, fish for catfish and trout and alligator gar and just about anything else they could wrestle aboard a rickety pirogue, including alligators when the game warden wasn’t in the parish. It was a Huck Finn life, and one that Travis and all his brothers liked a hell of a lot more than their own situation in town, in Lafayette, where their father, Emile Broussard, worked as a pipe-fitter.

They could all see the differences in the two families, but for many years it didn’t seem to matter. Emile’s family had enough money, a car, good clothes and food, a great house, all courtesy of wages and benefits negotiated for him by the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union. Avery, on the other hand, had nothing. His children dressed in rags [91] and hand-me-downs from his brothers’ families, and were lucky to have one pair of shoes. But Avery didn’t seem to mind, and neither did his kids, who hardly ever wore shoes, anyway. In fact, any jealousy went the other way. Even Emile admitted that sometimes he wished he’d opted for the independent life, living off the land. Most of the time the living was good out there in the bayous, and when it wasn’t Avery had a large family that would pull him through the tight spots. Avery always repaid the help he got in fresh eggs, fish, rabbits, whatever the bounty of nature was producing at the time.

During those golden years, Jubal was Travis’s best friend. Travis was three years older and it should have made a difference, except that Jubal was the smartest person Travis had ever known, child or adult. And Travis knew something about being smart, he was far and away the best of his class in every subject he took.

Travis knew from bitter experience what the other kids did if they learned you were intelligent. It could all be summed up, he felt, in Moe Howard, the mean Stooge, sneering at Curly and saying, “Oh, a wise guy, eh?” Then the fingers poked in the eyes. In the city schools a wise guy was the worst thing you could be, except for being a faggot, and Travis figured things wouldn’t be any better out in the country.

They wouldn’t have been, but none of the Avery branch of the Broussard family had to worry about that, because none of them were ever put in school. Though there may never have been worse candidates for home schooling than the Avery Broussard family, the school boards of Bayou Teche Parish were hard-pressed to educate even the children who came in willingly. They didn’t have the heart to fight very hard about those whose parents would prefer their children to stay at home. Their high school graduates often had trouble passing seventh-grade-level tests. Could home schooling do much worse? They washed their hands of Avery Broussard and his brood, preferring not to notice that Avery’s mildly retarded common-law wife, Evangeline, could neither read nor write.

It turned out in the Broussard case that home schooling could do substantially worse than the public schools.

Avery had been an extremely religious man most of his life. He had [92] been raised Christian, of course, like everyone else in the parish, and Catholic, like many of his neighbors. But it was a wild, charismatic brand of Catholicism that just sort of naturally blended in with the hard-shell Baptists all around them until you could hardly tell the difference. Actually, the Broussard family church didn’t have much contact with either the Catholic or the Baptist mainstream. The First Baptist Church in Lafayette, for instance, never released venomous snakes in their immaculate sanctuary, nor did the congregation of Our Lady of the Bayous drink poison. Avery’s church did both of these things, and more. The church started small, and stayed small, new converts just about balancing out casualties.

In that part of Louisiana, it was common to be deeply religious yet far from saintly. A lot went out and raised some hell on Saturday night. Maybe that was the reason such extreme measures were thought necessary the following day, as if simple prayers and pleas would not be enough.

One night when he was twenty-two, dead drunk and coked to the eyeballs, Avery had gone out to the parking lot of the Gables, a local after-hours bucket of blood, to square off with Alphonse Hebert. Avery thought the matter should be settled with fists, and Avery was the best man with his fists for a good ten miles around. Hebert must have heard that, because he drew a revolver and fired all six shots at Avery from a distance of no more than six feet. Avery, suddenly cold sober but no more able to move than a jacklighted deer, stood there and pissed himself, then felt all over his body for bullet holes, then fell to his knees and began to pray as three of his brothers worked Hebert over with pool cues and boots, and the rest of the patrons of the Gables stood around and watched, the general feeling being that Hebert was getting no more than he deserved.

Now, while it was agreed that Hebert was easily plotzed enough to miss at that range, he was unlikely to miss with all six. And examining the bullet holes later, it surely did appear that most of that lead ought to have been slowed down appreciably by various parts of Avery before hitting the clapboard wall behind him, which would have been good [93] news for old Charlie Wilson, who soaked up two of the bullets after they came through the wall, one with his chest and the other with his head, and as a result gave up drinking and never quite walked right for the rest of his life.

“It weren’t no burnin’ bush, no,” Avery later told anyone who would listen. “But I knows de hand a God when I sees it, oh yes.” He swore off liquor, fornication, and fighting, which left quite a gap in his social life, as aside from sleeping, eating, and working as a roughneck on an offshore drilling rig when he needed money, drinking, fighting, and screwing other men’s wives was about all he did.

He filled the gaps with marriage and praying and preaching. He became even less employable than he had been before the miracle, as he could seldom go through an entire day without getting into a heated argument with his boss or a customer or fellow worker about religion. He never hesitated to point out sin, which did not make him popular. He moved deeper into the swamp and started in on a family.

Evangeline had been picked for the fertility of her lineage more than beauty or brains, as she had little of either, but she was fertile and prolific, and able to work like a horse even when eight and a half months gone. And that was good, because she spent the next fifteen years pregnant, giving birth usually in March or April, usually on a Sunday, and three times on Easter Sunday itself. Avery and Evangeline had seven sons: Veneration, Jubilation, Celebration, Sanctification, Exaltation, Consecration, and Hallelujah. They had five daughters, all named Gloria: Gloria Patri, Gloria Filly, Gloria Spiritusanctu, Gloria Inexcelsis, and Gloria Monday. They lost three, a boy and two girls, stillborn.

Most people in town knew the legend of how their youngest, Hallelujah, got his name. There had been complications in his birth and, against his better judgment, Avery had taken Evangeline into town, where Hallelujah had been delivered by C-section. When the doctor told her she would not be able to have any more children, Evangeline had shouted out the infant’s name on the spot.

Jubilation, known to everyone but his father as Jubal, was six the [94] first time Avery saw Jesus. From that moment the lives of the Avery Broussard clan became a race to see if any would grow large enough to fend off their father before his increasing insanity killed them all.

Avery was called to the pastorship of the Holy Bible Church of the Redeemed when the previous preacher succumbed to multiple spider bites from a brown recluse he was attempting to swallow. He had become allergic to the spider’s venom, and expired on the altar from anaphylactic shock.

Being called to lead the flock of the Redeemed didn’t require a certificate from any seminary. It was mostly a matter of stepping forward and taking the microphone from the cooling hand of the previous shepherd and starting to preach. Avery bellowed for two hours that night, without notes, quoting long passages from the Bible, and when the last hymn of the night had been sung it was clear there would be no challenge to his leadership.

From the first Avery was never shy about his meetings with Jesus. A small number of his parishioners left the church, feeling his descriptions of the Son of God to be blasphemous, but about twice their number heard of Avery’s wonderful stories about what it was like to literally walk with Jesus, and joined up. So in the early years, Avery’s church thrived.

And the stories were wonderful. Avery didn’t just walk with Jesus, he fished with him and hunted with him, too. He declared Jesus to be the best shot he’d ever seen with a.22, and he’d hunted with hundreds of men, in pretty near every parish in southern Louisiana. If Jesus saw a squirrel a hundred yards away, that squirrel was doomed. And Jesus didn’t look much like that sad sack fairy-boy all y’all seen nailed to a cross or praying in Gethsemane looking like he needed a good dose of Ex-lax, either, Avery told his congregation, nor did he wear hippie robes and beatnik sandals. Jesus walked the bayous in good, sturdy work boots. He wore J. C. Penney overhauls and made-in-America red-and-black-checked flannel shirts or T-shirts with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. Jesus chewed Red Man, Avery said, and smoked Luckies.

[95] Avery’s idea of education was fairly simple. He believed in the three R’s, but not too much of any of them.

He figured a person had to know how to read the Bible or he would be at a severe disadvantage in life. To that end he laboriously taught his three eldest children their ABC’s and had them play an old “Hooked on Phonics” tape over and over again on a thrift-store Walkman. It was all he could do. His own reading skills were not the best, though his memory was phenomenal.

He knew how to sign his name, so his children learned, too. Any efforts beyond that, he felt, were strictly advanced classes for special credit.

He felt a person had to be able to count money, to not get shortchanged and to render unto Caesar all that you can’t hide from Caesar. So his children played counting games with real coins and Monopoly money.

Teaching them to read brought up a special problem, though, to Avery’s way of thinking. Like many of his neighbors, he did not allow his children to go to the picture shows or watch the television set. Avery, as he so often did, took things a little further. The only thing in the world worth reading, and therefore the only book his children would read, was the Holy Bible.

Jubal taught himself to read at the age of three by watching over his father’s shoulder as he took them through their daily Bible lesson. His father was delighted at first. He began letting Jubal do most of the reading.

But when he heard his son had started to hang around with his cousin Travis, Avery became suspicious. Everybody knew Travis was too smart for his own britches, and in Avery’s experience, that smartass attitude could be catching.

Once Jubal realized that his ability to read the Bible carried over to hundreds of other books and magazines and newspapers, he was lost. He set out to read every book in Louisiana.

Travis got him off to a good start by loaning Jubal his textbooks, which the boy read in a night, and by checking books out of the junior [96] high school library. Jubal had to stash them in a secret hideout he built, and read them by the light of a kerosene lamp in the middle of the night. Sometimes Travis joined him. It was the best time of Jubal’s life.

One message Jesus kept repeating to Avery was “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Avery’s punishments of his children for the slightest infractions of his rules and the Lord’s grew increasingly harsh.

He began chastising them with an ordinary oar, cut down to a useful size, an implement virtually all of his neighbors approved of, and used on their own children’s behinds. “Time-outs” and withholding of favors as ways to discipline a child had never made much headway in Avery’s neck of the woods. There were frowns, though, when he began hitting them on other parts of the body. But people didn’t see Avery’s brood for weeks, even months at a time. Who was to know, when one of them was sighted with black eyes, bruises, or a broken arm, that their story of having had an accident was a lie? The kids all stuck by their daddy, as they’d been taught.

Avery graduated to a chopped-off pool cue, which he carried with him everywhere.

Not long after that, fifteen-year-old Veneration “Vinnie” Broussard fell fifty feet from a live oak he had climbed to get a dead possum his father had shot, which had become lodged in a branch. Or so Avery said. He explained the bruises on the boy’s body as having been caused by hitting branches on the way down.

The parish coroner said that was hogwash. He counted forty-eight bruises about eight inches long, and two straight, deep depressions in his skull. The sheriff looked at the tree Veneration had allegedly fallen from and concluded there was no possible way to fall through it and receive forty-eight bruises unless those limbs were batting him back and forth, up and down, like the ball in a pinball machine.

Vinnie had lived for three days in a coma, according to Avery’s testimony. Avery had sworn off hospitals since the day that “abortion doctor” ruined his Evangeline’s womb before the two of them had truly started to be fruitful and multiply.

The parish prosecutor brought him to trial on a charge of second-degree murder and lesser offenses.

[97] One of Avery’s congregation was a pretty good backwoods lawyer. He concentrated on the religious freedom aspect of the case, tried to get the jury to look away from the pool cue and stand up for the right of a man not to seek conventional healing but to pray to the Almighty. It worked fairly well. Avery was sentenced to one year for manslaughter.

Jesus Christ shared his cell. From then on, Jesus was his constant companion. When Avery was brought to trial the next time, for almost killing his son Jubilation, Avery’s defense lawyer sat to his left and Jesus sat on his right. Christ must have had some awfully funny stories to tell, from the way Avery would incline his head as if listening, then roar with laughter.