Them Bones

Bessie XII

The motorcycles and the gleaming white cars pulled up onto the bluff. There was a break between storms. The waters of the bayou lapped against the coffer dam and its sandbags, eating at it.

Men in black suits with bulges under their arms jumped off the cars, eyed people with lizardlike gazes, moved some of the crowd back.

Perch and Kincaid went to the middle car of the five. A man in a white suit and hat lounged in the back of the car. He sat up on the folded convertible top, looking at the tents, the dam, the mounds, the bayou.

Bessie watched from her tent. She was tired; she wanted to sleep for weeks. She saw Kincaid and Perch point to the bayou waters, the mounds, the dam. They indicated the workers filling the sandbags, the mired tractor, the tarps and tents over the mounds.

Then they talked like she had never seen them do before; their hands shaped mounds, crowns, royalty, lost heritages, millennia, mysteries. They talked for ten full minutes.

Bessie came from her tent and walked to the knot of men. One of the bodyguards nodded to her. She walked up within a few feet of Kincaid as he finished his plea.

The man in the white suit pulled a long cigar from his left coat pocket, pulled off the cellophane but left the band on. He snipped off the end of the cigar with a penknife the size of a fingernail. He looked down at the mound, over at the bayou.

He lit the cigar.

‘Bodeaux?’ he said around it.

‘Yo, Kingfish!’

‘Call the highway department. Give these people what they want.’

‘Yes, Kingfish.’

Then the man in the white suit winked at Bessie. She blushed.

Men jumped on running boards up and down the line. Sirens started up. The motorcycles wheeled ahead. The cars bounced back to the road, the man in the white suit puffing on his cigar.

As the convertible turned its wire-spoked wheels out onto the road toward Baton Rouge, he flicked his cigar out onto the highway and put his hands behind his head.