She shook her head. “Nope, this birthday is a biggie. I’m ‘spectin’ biggie gifts.” She gave him another of her pointed looks.
“No!”
“Of course, I might be dead. Then you won’t hafta give me anythin’, I reckon.”
He had to laugh at the sly old bird. She would try anything to get her own way.
“I’m only thirty-six years old. I got plenty of time.”
“Thirty-six!” she exclaimed, as if it were an ancient age. “All yer juices is gonna dry up iffen ya wait too long.”
“My juices are just fine, thank you very much.” Jeesh! Next, she’ll be asking me if I can still get it up.
“You can still do it, cain’t you?”
He refused to answer.
“I want to rock one of yer bébés afore I die.”
“No. No, no, no!”
“We’ll see.” Tante Lulu smiled and saluted the St. Jude statue. “Remember, sweetie, when the thunderbolt hits, there ain’t no help fer it.”
René had been hearing about the thunderbolt ever since he was a little boy and needed to hide out from his alcoholic father. He and his brothers Luc and Remy would hot-tail it for Tante Lulu’s welcoming cottage. The thunderbolt pretty much represented love in the old lady’s book.
He had news for her. This piece of land was all the love he needed. In truth, it was all the love—meaning trouble—he could handle at the moment. To say his life was in chaos was a world-class understatement.
He’d recently quit his job in Washington as an environmental lobbyist. Burned out after years of hitting his head against the brick wall, which was comprised of the oil industry, developers, and sport fishermen who were destroying the bayou he was so passionate about. For every battle he’d won in his fight to protect the Louisiana coastal wetlands, he’d lost the war.
Before he had become an environmental advocate, he’d been a shrimp fisherman, every type of blue-collar worker imaginable, and a musician (he played a mean accordion). Hell, if he ever finished his doctoral thesis, he could probably be a college professor, as well.
But there was no point to any of it. He was a failure in his most important work: the bayou. The fire in his belly had turned to cold ashes. For sure, the joie de vivre was gone from his life.
So he’d hung tail and come back to southern Louisiana and resumed work on this cabin in one of the most remote regions of Bayou Black. He loved this piece of property, which he’d purchased ten years ago. It included a wide section of the slow-moving stream at a point where it forked off in two directions, separated by a small island that was home to every imaginable bird in the world, including the wonderful stilt-legged egret. The only access to the land was by hydroplane or a three-day grueling pirogue ride from Houma. No Wal-Marts. No super highways. No look-alike housing developments. No wonder he’d been able to buy it for a song. No one else had wanted it. “I think I hear a plane.” Tante Lulu interrupted his reverie. “Help me offa this thing. I’m stuck.”
He went over and lifted her off the hammock and onto her feet. The top of her head barely reached his chest.
“It mus’ be Remy,” she said, peering upward.
His brother Remy was a pilot. He’d brought Tante Lulu here earlier that day for a visit, promising to return for her before evening.
But, no, it wasn’t Remy, they soon discovered. It was his friends Joe Bob and Madeline Doucet. J.B. and Maddie could best be described as overage hippies. Both of them had long hair hanging down their backs, black with strands of gray. At fifty and childless, they were devoted to each other and the bayou where generations of both their families had lived and “farmed” for shrimp. They were quintessential tree huggers and they couldn’t seem to accept that René had dropped out of the fight.
“Lordy-a-mercy! It’s those wacky friends of yers,” Tante Lulu said as they watched the couple climb out of the rusty old hydroplane and anchor it to the shore by tying ropes around a nearby oak tree.