Jean-Bastienne Deaucette, known around town as John Bastine, but to those who knew him best, as just Big John B, stretched out happily, a long, satisfying, jaw-cracking yawn making his eyes water even as his joints crackled pleasantly.
Another night like that, he thought, and he’d seriously consider just chucking it all in and going back to Bayou Petit Gaillou and hunting bullfrogs, sucking up maw-maw Eulalie’s red-hot Jambalaya, poling through the swamps in noncle Papite’s pirogue, cooking corn mash likker, and never, ever opening a newspaper or owning a TV ever again; there were nights when, as far as he was concerned, New York was rank as a six-day dead hog, and the previous night had been one of them.
Even living in a rent-free loft in West Village sometimes just wasn’t enough return for some of the surreal, extreme, or just plain fucked-up shit his clients pulled.
He was deeply asleep, dreaming of hooking ‘gators with Edard and Jean-Noel when they were boys, and it took a while for the tapping at his door to break into his dream and rouse him. He looked groggily at the clock slowly orbiting the computer screen; damn, he’d only been asleep three hours. Who the hell was waking him at nine in the morning?
The tapping intensified, further fuelling his wake-up grouch.
“OK, I’m comin’, don’t break down the goddamn door!” he yelled, stumbling to his feet and tripping over his boots where he’d kicked them off before collapsing on the bed.
“Ow! Goddamned fucken things…!” he grumbled, hopping and kicking them across the partitioned sleeping area of the wide loft as he hobbled to the door. Whoever was there never let up for one second, tapping constantly, irritating him even further.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m comin’, hold it down, Goddammit…!” he yelled, yanking the door open ready to give whoever was knocking a faceful of attitude, but it died in his throat as he saw who was there.
“Hey Country-Boy, you look terrible!” grinned Justine Pellini, his pretty, elfin little half-sister. She looked a lot like her father; she had his black hair and brown eyes and his fine, straight nose and small, neat ears, but not his creamy, Neapolitan skin tone; rather, she had inherited their mother’s ‘English Rose’ complexion, her fine, arched eyebrows, and her full, smiling lips. She even had the same slender, petite, shapely figure, and looked more like a college freshman than an old married lady of twenty-three years.
In John’s eyes, she was just about the loveliest thing he’d ever seen, and, just like every time he saw her, his heart did a quick one-two before settling down again; every time he saw her, for that first few perilous seconds, his memories and suppressed feelings threatened to rise up and choke him off, turning him into a shambling, tongue-tied idiot as he gaped at the girl he knew, with a hopeless, terrible certainty, he loved and was in love with, and had been since what seemed like forever, but could never, ever have.
John writhed in guilty despair in the privacy and deepest recesses of his mind at the knowledge that he wanted something so wrong, so unattainable, but he never let a hint escape to trouble Justine, the only person in the world that he loved selflessly, hopelessly.
Hard as it was, still he managed to keep that one thing from her, hiding that pain down deep where it could never be found or suspected. Justine was his baby sister, only twenty-three but already five years married, she had a husband, and John respected that union, even if he privately considered Giancarlo Pellini to be a pointless, pudgy waste of skin; the law and her own vows put her forever out of reach, no matter how he longed or yearned for her.
So John kept his peace, and kept his distance from her; nothing good could ever come of the kind of relationship he wouldn’t let himself even fantasize about having with her, no matter how much he longed for it. Somehow, when she was around him, near him, close enough to touch her, smell her perfume, and hear with agonizing clarity every breath she drew, he still managed to keep temptation at bay and firmly at arm’s length.
But he was still intrigued as to what she could want at that time of the morning, knowing as she did the kind of hours he worked.
“Well hello to you too, Minou (Kitty-Cat), what y’all want this time of day, or did y’all just come here to make fun a’ me?” he smiled, playing up his down-bayou accent, knowing it would make her smile, even as he pushed his surging feelings back down, letting no hint of his inner turmoil show in his eyes or his smile. Justine had a beautiful smile, it lit up the room, and when she used it on him, John melted like butter under a blowtorch.
Justine stared up at her big brother, noting the tiredness in his eyes and his generally rumpled state.
“Oh gosh, did I get you out of bed, Johnny? I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t think… look, we can talk later, just get some sleep, honey, you look like crap!”
John smiled and gestured her into the hall.
“Why thank you, Princess, you-all don’t look so bad neither! Day I’m too tired to talk to my baby sister’s the day they put me to bed with a shovel. Come on in, baby-girl, and tell me what’s on your mind.”
Justine took his arm and piloted him over to the couch, then pushed him in the chest to make him sit.
“Sit there while I get some you coffee, you look like you need it. Don’t you-all move, boy!”she smiled, mimicking his accent.
John grinned to himself as he listened to Justine clanging and clinking in the galley kitchen along the north side of his loft, then smiled in return as she came back to the couch.
“Coffee’ll be ready in five. When are you gonna furnish this place, Country-Boy?” she grinned, poking his arm. John responded by gently shoving her on the upper arm, getting a playful slap on his bicep in return.
“I got everything I need, baby-girl; I got bed, I got couch, I got ice-box, TV, computer, ‘phone, an’ a stereo; what else I need?”
Justine looked around critically.
“This place is the size of a parking lot and you live in the center of it; the rest is just a great big echoing space. It’s just beggin’ you to fill it with, I don’t know, things, maybe?”
John finger combed a stray wisp of ebony hair away from her heart-shaped face.
“Always the home-maker, baby, even when it ain’t yo’ home! Don’t you-all worry ’bout me none, honey-chile, I likes it fine jest way it is,” he drawled, his exaggerated ‘good ole boy’ accent putting a mischievous smile on her face.
“Hah! If it wasn’t for me you’d be sleeping under a pile of leaves like a bear or an old skunk. You’re in the big city now, swamp-boy; embrace it!” she grinned as she punctuated each word with a poke on his upper arm, making him grin anew.
“Ow, ow, ow, OK, y’all made yo’ point li’l girl, now where this coffee you been promisin’ me?”
Justine smiled and went to get the coffees. While she clinked and clattered in the galley, John leaned back, a small smile playing on his lips as memory once more took him back to when she’d been born.
*