over his head and grumbled, “You just decide.”
I’d made reservations at a cheap, pet-proof motel in Memphis so we could check out the historic Peabody Hotel and their Duckmaster parade. Every morning since the 1940s, a Duckmaster had marched his ducks to John Philip Sousa down an elevator onto a red carpet through the Grand Lobby to an indoor marble fountain. I pictured these ducks with a peacocking drum major like St. Augustine or some other raucous New Orleans high school marching band. I liked amazing animals and our basset hounds were rarely that amazing. One day at the mall when I was a kid, I peered into a fluorescent-lit glass box and played electric tic-tac-toe against a shitting chicken. I made good grades at Holy Ghost School, but I lost every quarter I had to this bird. It had made a lasting impression.
Chapter 2
expedition pants and hobnail milk glasses
Somewhere before Mississippi we gave up on Memphis. Jefferson Parish sheriff Harry Lee was blustering on the radio that he had canceled his big birthday blowout. A hefty Chinese-American-Louisianan in an even heftier cowboy hat, Lee was a big Willie Nelson fan and a robust singer. He often took the stage at his annual “Chinese Cajun Cowboy Fais Do Do” fundraiser to belt out crowd favorites like “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” or “Wind Beneath My Wings.” His gigantic plaster bust of himself was probably already down at Hilton Riverside, waiting to be showered with fortune cookies.
The way the storm was sucking the fun out of everybody scared me. If the storm missed us and hit Mississippi, the remnants would probably just blow all the way up to Tennessee and rain on our duck parade.
“Let’s just go to Gainesville,” Jake said.
Jake’s mother was a former cheerleader from Georgia who had recently retired from teaching middle school art in Florida. After decades of grimy clay hands and tempura paint, Brenda was a devotee of both swabbing and order. She met us in the front entryway and stood on her tiptoes, with a towel in one hand, hugging Jake.
“I brought this in case you want to wipe off their feet,” she said, pointing at Clo and Buster. “Good to see you.”
“They’re not dirty,” Jake protested, kicking off his own shoes. “They’ve just been riding in the car.”
I slid out of my sandals and put them in the designated shoe lineup. I handed Jake Buster’s leash.
“Hold him and I’ll do Clo first so she doesn’t run,” I said.
Clo hated having her feet touched and growled like a motorcycle whenever you approached them. I got down on my hands and knees to wrestle her with Brenda’s towel. For an arthritic skeleton, Clo was strong.
Jake’s stepfather crunched into the dog-decontamination chamber. Jack was an entomologist with a big white mustache who specialized in the sex lives of fruit flies. He was the only person I’d ever met who had a parasitoid that eats flies named after him.
“How was your trip?” Jack said.
“Ah, you know,” Jake shrugged.
“It’s a long booger,” Jack agreed, bending down to pet Buster. “Buster, how you doing, old boy? Looking regal as ever. Play your cards right and we’ll be going to TCBY.”
In his post-divorce days before he met Jake’s mom, Jack had lived wild and free with his two children, a cocker spaniel named Rex, and a free-roaming gecko on patrol for natural pest control. Now his two children were young adults. He was down to only an extensive collection of dead bugs on pins and Brenda’s obese and dying cat, Oreo. Dog-lonesome, he showered Buster and Clo with vanilla frozen yogurts and six-dollar dental bones whenever they visited.
“Did you move the potatoes?” I asked Jake’s mom.
“I remembered the potatoes, but Jack, I think you forgot the puffer fish,” Brenda said.
Clo’s paws were as antiseptic as they were going to be. I got up and handed off the towel to Jake to swab Buster. “I’ll move it,” I said.
No matter how long it was between visits, Buster and Clo remembered their favorite trouble spots. Buster would beeline for the bowl of potatoes on a cart in the kitchen. Clo favored the hairy, Southwestern fertility tchotckes and animal bones on display on some tables and low shelves. When they weren’t locked in the garage, the two would go around smearing their wet noses on things and Brenda would scramble to decontaminate the spots. I decided to attempt to keep at least Clo on her leash for the entire visit.
Jack stretched flat out on his back on the living room floor next to Buster.
“I don’t know why, but Buster reminds me of Winston Churchill,” Jack said.
Buster raised his chin slightly for Jack to scratch his soft throat. Still on her leash, Clo flattened herself next to my feet and grumbled, pouting.
“It’s all that skin on his neck,” I said. “It’s like an ascot.”
“You know you might be right. I always chalked it up to his bone structure,” Jack said. “I was reading this article about truffle pigs the other day and I thought, Buster could do that. Before you leave, Jake and Buster and I might need to go out Chicken-of-the-Woods mushroom hunting.”
Brenda wandered into the kitchen.
“Jake,” Brenda called over the counter. “What do you think you might feel like eating for supper? I could make spaghetti. You like that.”
“I’m not really that hungry,” Jake said. “But thanks.”
Jake’s mother was always saying some dish was his favorite and Jake was always saying the opposite behind her back, that some dish was so leaden with onions that it left him doubled over, clutching his stomach. This had been going on for at least the entire nine years that Jake and I had been together. I did not know why and I did not care to know why. We should have gone to Memphis. I wondered what those marching Peabody Hotel ducks were doing. Probably wearing hats, cruising that gilded travertine pond.
“I’m calling my mom to see if she’s going to evacuate,” I told Jake.
“I wonder if Flash left,” Jake said. “I wonder if Stan left.”
“Hopefully,” I said.
Mom’s a Super Doppler 6000 fan and possibly an addict. Sometimes when I’m on my way to visit her or she’s on her way to visit me, she’ll call at the last minute and reschedule.
“There’s a supercell over Manchac,” she’ll say. “You better wait.”
Jake got her a weather radio for Christmas. A few years before that we got her a spooky balsa wood Indian weather stick. You nail it to a tree or wall and it bends up for sunny weather and down for rain. When I was a teenager, I found her weather obsession maddening. Later, I attributed it to her friend’s husband who got killed in Mississippi trying to save his boat from Hurricane Camille. Lately, I wondered if it was from being a child on a farm in the forties, watching her father look up at a darkening sky and wonder if they were going to have any money that year.
“Are they evacuating Hammond or not?” I asked.
“Only up to the interstate where it’s low-lying,”
