Christmas in Dogtown Read online

  Christmas in Dogtown

  Suzanne Johnson

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  CHRISTMAS IN DOGTOWN

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2012 by Suzanne Johnson

  http://www.suzanne-johnson.com

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  ~1~

  Resa Madere folded her raggiest pair of jeans, wedged them into her red suitcase, and slammed it shut. Rubbing a scuff off the leather, she wondered if she could sell the thing online. She’d already auctioned off the vintage cobalt Fiestaware collected over the past five years. The leather coat she rarely needed in New Orleans’ mild winters. The tennis bracelet of tiny diamonds Jules had presented six months before he dumped her.

  Stray Mardi Gras beads winked ironic glints of purple, green, and gold among past-due bills on the top of her desk, and she swept an arm across it, pushing the whole sorry mess into a white plastic garbage bag. A single photo remained: Jules. Julian her perfect guy. Julian who moved on when she lost her job.

  Julian the Jerk.

  She carefully tore off the outside edges of the photo so he became Julian the Earless Jerk. Then she ripped off his head and tossed Julian the Headless Jerk into the bag with the rest of the trash.

  Except he’d be spending the holidays with his rich uptown family while Resa did the white-trash shuffle. She was headed for Paulina, thirty miles upriver, carrying several hanks of pork casings from a local butcher in time to help Uncle Emile make sausages for the holiday rush. Two weeks until Christmas and the orders were piling in.

  No, correct that. She wasn’t even going to Paulina proper. Resa would be spending the next three weeks in a borrowed single-wide trailer in a barely-there community five miles from Paulina, right on the edge of Maurepas Swamp. On the maps, it had no name. Locally, it was called Dogtown. And she’d arrive in the backwater her family had lived in for seven generations hauling a trunkload of pig intestines.

  Resa didn’t know what life held for her, but she had a feeling this was not going down as a holiday season she’d remember, at least not for any of the right reasons. Family was family, however, as her mom had reminded her, and Uncle Emile had been under the weather. The only girl in a sprawling family of boys who had hunting and fishing and football to occupy their time, Resa had grown up helping Uncle Aim at Madere’s Meats, and she’s the one he’d asked for.

  It wasn’t like she had a real job to go to anymore, as Mom also had reminded her (like she’d had a brain fart and forgotten six months of unemployment). Plus, Uncle Aim had offered to pay her. The past couple of months, Resa had been holding onto her little shotgun house in uptown New Orleans by the tips of her fingernails. She wouldn’t turn down the chance to earn a couple of mortgage payments.

  On her way out of town, she stopped in front of Julian’s condo and taped a pig intestine to his mailbox. If she was revisiting her roots as the sausage princess of St. James Parish, she might as well start acting like it.

  ~2~

  Instead of taking the interstate, Resa drove along the narrow, winding Highway 44, the River Road, that led west out of New Orleans and twisted its way to Paulina. She’d hoped that concentrating on the treacherous curves would keep her from wallowing in self-pity, but it didn’t work.

  She’d fought so hard to leave Dogtown behind that even agreeing to go back for three weeks felt like failure. She’d gotten a scholarship to ULL, worked nights slinging pizzas in Lafayette to save money, and escaped to New Orleans before the ink on her diploma dried. Worked her way up to head of the copywriting department at Crescent City Advertising at age twenty-six. Got laid off at twenty-nine as her agency clients cut ad costs due to the trifecta of Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, and the economic crash. No one wanted to hire an overqualified ad executive to wait tables, so she’d cut back and stretched her retirement fund until it was gone.

  Things would get better after the holidays. They had to.

  She drove through “metro” Paulina, which spread north a few blocks from the river levee much like nearby Gramercy and Lutcher, only smaller. Neat brick houses, brown winter lawns, flat terrain, and a tang in the air to remind people that they lived on a fragile piece of ground tucked between the Mississippi River and the Maurepas Swamp.

  At the end of downtown Paulina, she drove north, slowing as the two-lane highway became narrower and the encroachment of swamp on either side grew closer. A rooster wandered across the road in front of her as she turned onto an unpaved, rutted path covered in oyster shells and gravel.

  Dogtown was literally a crossroads. At the center of the cross sat a twenty-foot statue of a bear carved a couple of centuries ago out of a cypress tree. She couldn’t explain why a place called Dogtown had been built around a bear totem. Uncle Aim claimed the statue was actually not a bear but the rougarou, a legendary swamp beast some of the older Cajun folk still believed in, and that a lot of people put more stock in their hunting dogs than their relatives. Resa figured that was as good an explanation as any.

  Just to the north of the crossroads sat Madere’s Meats, a small cinderblock building with a narrow room in front holding a display case and counter. The bulk of the building was devoted to the sausage- and boudin-making in the back. The smoker ate up a sizable piece of the backyard. Resa’s great-grandfather had begun the business in the 1920s, it passed to her grandfather in the 1940s, and Uncle Aim took it over in the 1980s, still using the old recipes. People from three parishes would drive in on Saturdays to buy boudin and andouille at Madere’s and eat catfish, gator, and crawfish at Caillou’s Fine Dining, on the south side of the crossroads.

  About fifty people lived in Dogtown, and Resa figured at least forty-nine of them were either related to the Maderes or the Caillous by blood or marriage.

  She spotted the single-wide trailer that lay behind the store but wasn’t yet ready to face the White Castle, as she and her cousins had named the place back when Uncle Aim lived there. She’d get the required visit to Mom done first.

  Her daddy had died in a hunting accident when Resa was eighteen and already at college. It made his death seem less real since she had already moved away; she could just pretend he was still around. But during the Christmas holidays, the one time each year she made herself return to Dogtown for a day or two, she still expected to see him in the yard, tinkering with his boat motor or hitching the trailer to his pickup for a day of hunting. It left an empty place in the landscape that her brain hadn’t yet incorporated.

  Mom met her at the front door of the little redbrick family home, the excitement on her face at seeing her only daughter making Resa feel both guilty and trapped.

  “Hey everybody, Theresa’s here!”

  Oh, Judas on a pony—a freaking welcoming committee.

  “Hey, Mom.” Resa let herself be enveloped in the ample arms of Jeanne Madere and herded into the living room, where a parade of cousins once-, twice-, and three-times removed patted, hugged, a
nd generally agreed that it was about time Theresa Ann Madere came home to take care of her mama.

  Resa didn’t say so, but God help the person who tried to take care of Jeanne. The woman was a category five force of nature.

  “Hey there, beautiful girl.”

  Resa turned to the only person who could’ve convinced her to return to Dogtown and stick her hands in a bowl of ground meat and rice. Jeanne might dole out guilt and persuasion, but it was for Emile Madere that Resa had come. He’d aged visibly since last Christmas. His silver hair was thinner and tired creases carved ruts down either side of his mouth above his heavy beard, but his brown eyes still danced with life and she’d bet the long, nimble fingers that pulled her into a tight embrace still played a fiddle so sweetly it could draw tears.

  Resa had loved her daddy with all her heart, but Uncle Aim held her soul.

  “I knew you’d come home. Let me look at you.” He pulled back and gave her a nodding appraisal. “That short hair’s a little citified, but reckon you still look like my favorite niece.”

  Resa smiled. “I’m your only niece. And what’s with this sick business? Maderes don’t get sick.” They really didn’t. She’d once made a list of everyone she knew who’d died. Among the alarmingly long tally of dead grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, none had succumbed to illness. They had accidents. A few flat-out disappeared, probably eaten by gators. Wild boars gored a few. Some drowned. A scary number of fatal snakebites.

  Resa figured the longer she stayed around Dogtown, the greater her chances of dying some horrific death by water or wildlife.

  “Emile, did you tell Resa the news?” Jeanne wore a long-sleeved tee covered in black sequins that reflected the Christmas tree lights in dizzying flashes. “About Chandler Caillou?”

  Resa groaned inwardly. She’d wondered how long it would take for someone to mention the guy her family had been foisting on her since she was a toddler, or at least as early as she could remember. There were honest-to-God pictures, which Jeanne liked to trot out at family gatherings, of Resa and Chan tumbling around in diapers and sleeping side-by-side in a crib. She’d hoped that once she left Dogtown and settled in New Orleans, Jeanne would give up on her conviction that a Resa-Chan union was inevitable. Apparently not.

  “I figured she’d hear about it soon enough.” Uncle Aim rested an arm on her shoulders as if to protect her from whatever earth-shattering news Jeanne was about to impart.

  “He moved home two months ago. Took over his cousin Mike’s job as the gator man for the parish.” Jeanne leaned toward her and said in an exaggerated whisper, “And he’s still single.”

  The subtext of that was: So are you, missy, and you’re creeping toward thirty.

  Terrific. “What happened to Mike?” Resa bet it wasn’t illness. The Caillous didn’t get sick, either.

  Jeanne’s brow wrinkled. “Think he drowned. Did Mike Caillou drown?” She addressed her question to the living room full of people and got several affirmatives. “Anyway, you know Chandler had been living in Baton Rouge, doing some kind of important work with the state fisheries office—been up there since before Katrina.”

  Resa wondered why, if Chandler Caillou had a good-paying state job, he’d come back to Dogtown to wrangle nuisance alligators. But if she asked, her relatives would assume she cared, which would fire up the rumors. Never mind that she hadn’t seen him since high school or held a meaningful conversation with him since they hit puberty. If she showed any interest whatsoever, the family would have her engaged to the man by sundown.

  ~3~

  The knock on the White Castle door jarred the walls enough to send a hideous photo of doe-eyed puppies bouncing across the bubblegum-pink carpet, cracking the glass in the frame. Resa kicked it out of the way. This trailer had been redecorated by her mother, without question. Puppies and lace and a dozen shades of of pink. It had Jeanne written all over it.

  “Sorry, Madere’s doesn’t open until nine and…” Damn. She recognized Chan Caillou immediately, but her memories were the “before” picture and the man at the foot of the trailer steps was definitely the “after.” If anyone had told her how he’d grown up and filled out she might have been more interested in Chandler Caillou’s return to Dogtown. Or not. She refused to get invested. Dogtown was like quicksand; unless one kept moving, getting stuck was inevitable, followed by sinking and suffocation.

  “Theresa Ann Madere. Heard you were back, but wasn’t sure I believed it.” He was taller than Resa remembered. The blond hair was longer and sun-streaked, curling over the collar of his flannel shirt. Way more muscled, in a good way. But the calm, moss-green eyes hadn’t changed, or his quiet way of speaking. “Nice to see you. You look like a city girl now.”

  Resa wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, but decided to take it as a compliment. “Heard you were back, too. Uncle Aim had a doctor’s appointment this morning over in Gramercy—you need something from the market?”

  “Got something for you in the truck.” Chan pointed over his shoulder at a weathered red pickup next to Madere’s back entrance. “The boys brought in a big haul of gar last night—more’n they can use at the restaurant. Thought Emile might want to smoke ’em.”

  Ugh. Resa hated dealing with gar. It ate okay, sort of like catfish, although you’d never find it on the menu of a respectable New Orleans restaurant. Cleaning and prepping it to smoke was another matter. It was one ugly monster of a fish.

  Folks around here loved it, though. “Sure. Give me a few minutes to get dressed.”

  Chan gave her an up-and-down examination, accompanied by a half-smile that looked way too good on him. “Why?”

  “Because…” He was right. St. James Parish existed on a different plane of reality than New Orleans. Resa Madere the ad executive had transformed back into a Cajun girl running a meat market. Ragged jeans and a long-sleeved Saints t-shirt constituted perfectly acceptable business casual.

  “Right.” She closed the trailer door behind her and descended the three wooden steps Uncle Aim had built a few years ago. She’d grown up going in and out of the White Castle via a concrete block, from which she’d regularly fall and scrape her knees. After Pawpaw got gored by the boar, Uncle Aim had moved in her grandparents’ small wooden house that backed onto Roundhead Bayou. Now, the White Castle housed a rotating crew of out-of-work and visiting relatives. Resa really hated that she’d joined the crew.

  She and Chan walked to the market side by side. After growing up joined at the hip, they had reached the awkward middle-school age where they didn’t know what to say to each other and never quite grew out of it.

  They were adults now and should at least be able to make small talk.

  “Why’d you come back to chase gators?” Resa asked. “I’m sorry to hear about Mike, but last I heard you were up in Baton Rouge doing something for the state.” Never mind she only heard it yesterday.

  Chan didn’t answer until they’d almost reached the truck. “I had to think about it for a while, but it was my responsibility, you know? Sometimes we’re born into a situation and we have to decide if we’re gonna be a part of it or if we’re gonna put an end to it.”

  That was too deep for Resa on a Monday morning. The Caillous and Maderes, like most old families in South Louisiana, harbored a broad streak of superstitions and back-bayou philosophies. She’d long ago learned to let the bulk of their mystic pronouncements pass without comment. It was probably a bad sign for Chan that he’d only been back in Dogtown a couple of months and was already talking the talk.

  Then again, maybe he always had. She didn’t really know him, at least not the adult version of him.

  Instead of answering, she helped him lug a long gator-sized cooler out of the pickup’s bed and drag it into the back door of Madere’s. A wash of memories hit her like a physical blow when the heavy screen door slammed behind her and she stood in the prep room. How many summer days had she spent with Uncle Aim back here, learning how to operate the smoker, filling sausag
e casings and twisting off the ends, committing to memory the different spices for boudin blanc versus crawfish boudin versus boudin noir, and the ratio of meat to rice? More than she could count.

  They hefted the cooler to the side of a large steel table in the middle of the prep room, and Chan opened it. They’d gotten it on ice fast; the fishy smell was faint.

  Resa poked at one. “Man, these things are huge.”

  “Yeah, and these are the smaller ones.” To free up the fish, Chan scooped handfuls of crushed ice and dropped them on the concrete floor near the drain. “We kept the big ones for steaks and gar balls at Caillou’s.”

  Uncle Aim had told her once that alligator gar, or “Gator Gar,” were an ancient breed of fish, and she believed it. Local fishermen had caught some as much as eight feet long and fifty years old. They had double rows of nasty-looking teeth along their needle noses—thus, the gator name—and were rumored to attack humans if provoked. Resa had no plans to provoke one.

  The gar in Chan’s cooler were of a modest size, only three or four feet. Making a mental note to drive to Gramercy and pick up some thrift-store t-shirts she didn’t mind getting ruined, Resa dug into the crushed ice and wrapped her arms around a fat fish. She managed to pull it out of the cooler before losing her balance and falling hard on the concrete with a lapful of gar.

  Chan’s face transformed when he laughed, even though he was laughing at her. His teeth were white and even in his tanned face, and his green eyes sparkled, forming laugh-crinkles at the edges that made Resa give in to the urge to laugh with him.

  She grinned. “I’ve been perfecting that move.”

  “I can tell. Let me take it—these babies probably weigh more than fifty pounds apiece.” He leaned over, lifted the big, ugly fish as if it weighed nothing, and set it on the prep table. By the time Resa climbed to her feet and wiped ice and gar juice off her t-shirt, Chan had already pulled the other three out of the cooler. The four monsters lined up like some primeval swamp feast in the making.