The battered old truck slowed to a halt, suspension squeaking and bouncing over the uneven trail.
“Why we stopping, Johnny?” yawned Justine, shaken awake by the shuddering as the vehicle traversed the flattened flood debris, old and new, scattered thickly all over the trail, or half-buried in mud by recent storms and localized flooding.
“Gals’ve come to halt; looks like we on foot from here, Sugar-Pie; you-all feelin’ like a li’l hike, Minou? Don’ look me like that; y’all knew we not gonna be getting’ down to where we goin’ on no open roads, why you think I got you all that trail-gear? Come on, Minou, there’s city-folk willin’ to pay small fortune fo’ hikin’ trail like this, you ever stop to think that?”
Justine grinned and hefted her backpack from between her feet.
“Alright, alright, I get it, time to hit the woods, I hear you loud and clear, Daniel Boone, let’s go break a trail! Just lemme get changed first, huh?”
Johnny wandered over to have a few words with Odelie and Melette as they unloaded their packs and camp-gear from the bed of the nondescript old farm truck they’d borrowed from Lubin. Odelie flashed him a quick grin as she finished stuffing gear into her pack and shrugged on a military surplus tactical vest with a myriad of oddly-shaped pockets.
“You reckon she gon’ be OK trekkin’ through to the lake, Li’l Jean? I know she a spunky gal an’ all, an’ she smart, but it ain’t easy coming up from this way, lot o’ wild country to git through, she city gal, an’ she prolly gon’ be stretched, you reckon she up to it?”
Johnny spun his little cousin around and settled her pack square across her shoulders.
“Baby-girl, that li’l gal work hard, twelve hour nights, six, se’bm night a week, when the goin’ get tough, damn’ if’n she don’ jes’ keep right on goin’; she do that over a year, I reckon she plenty tough enough where it needed. I just wisht I was tough as her; she gon’ surprise us all, I guarantee you that. There, that comfortable now?”
Melette looked up from her packing and grinned, then gave a wolf-whistle. Johnny spun around, and smiled broadly at Justine dressed in a tight cut-off white T-shirt, with a plaid shirt over it with the sleeves rolled up and the front knotted just under her breasts, and a pair of the shortest, tightest Daisy Dukes he’d ever seen, making her long, creamy legs look even longer. Even with her trail boots and folded tube socks, she looked knock-down, drag out gorgeous, like an old-school Playboy centrefold, or what those California dudes imagined hot country girls looked like. Her long black hair, tied in sexy pigtails just added to the picture of hotly alluring young femininity.
“Will this do, kind sir?” she grinned, posing artlessly for him, making him grin even wider.
“Minou, there ain’t nothin’ I want to do right now ‘cept mebbe sit here an’ jes’ look at you, but you cain’t go trekkin’ this country dressed like that; come dusk, maringouin’s (mosquitoes) gon’ eat you alive ‘fore you gone ten feet! Them things the Louisiana state bird, they bigger’n buzzards out here, you-all surely don’ want them things on you! I ‘preciate the show an’ all, but you better go put them Dockers on, you gon’ thank me later.”
Justine grinned cheekily.
“I know, Johnny-Bear, I just wanted to show you these just once before I have to put on those hot old things!”
Johnny smiled as he nodded.
“If I had the time..! We got a long way to go, honey; we pretty much retracin’ our steps, Lubin and Audhemar reckoned we should be decoyin’ them fellers on into the Atchafalaya, not South into Ghost Lake; up inta th’ Atchafalaya the way they ‘spectin’ us to run, so we ain’t gonna dis’point them none. We gonna pick up boat an’ supplies the gals got stashed an’ head up ‘long the waterways, past Baton Rouge an’ west into the Atchafalaya reserve, comin’ in from the west, jus’ north o’ the Basin Bridge;.”
Justine looked puzzled, so Johnny explained the change in direction.
“I reckon they gon’ be watchin’ fo’us up along Whiskey Bay Pilot Channel, that the quickest way river traffic get up the Atchafalaya, so we gon’ go round them an’ cross the river over to the north bank, that where noncle Lubin, Audhemar, an’ Tante Amice’s boys, few frien’s waitin’ for us an’ loaded for b’ar; it’s a long way, so move it along, sugar-pie, we got places to be!”
Justine looked concerned.
“Johnny, won’t they be watching all the main routes into the Atchafalaya? Noncle Lubin said that Sheriff Broussard’s going to let the Orleans Sheriff’s office know where we’re going, that means those people will know right away, what if…?”
Johnny shook his head reassuringly, grinning at how easily she’d slipped into calling Lubin ‘noncle’.
“We gon’ use the Atchfalaya river, that’s true, but the river splits at Bayou Chene, we take the left branch, Bayou Chene itself, goin’ west an’ north, it’s longer, we gon’ be goin’ agin the current, an’ it go through some pretty wild country, you got to be local to know your way ’round there to get anywhere; ain’t no city-boy gonna be doin’ no trackin’ through that, an’ if me ‘n the gals don’t see them comin’ out there then we deserve to get caught. The plan is: we make sure they know which way we goin’, then we make sure they lose us out here, so if they smart, they go to plan b: get to where they know we goin’, an’ jump us there.”
Johnny grinned and rubbed his hands through his increasingly shaggy hair.
“An’ that when they plan B turn into my plan A, an’ me an’ the family an’ friends we got waitin’ for them idjits to show their hand gon’ have us a Twist ‘n’ Shout like th’ Isle never seen before; I reckon with what we got waitin’ fer them, we make them fellers jump an’ holler! They think they all that; all I c’n say is, they ain’t seen cousin Jean-Noel all het-up yet!”
Justine grinned and spun on her heel, heading back to change into something more suitable, while Johnny stared hungrily at her tight little bubble-butt twinkling enticingly at him under those skin-tight little jeans shorts. She reappeared a few minutes later with a new pair of khaki cotton Dockers tucked into her boot tops, looking like a movie star playing a jungle explorer; even the girls smiled and winked at her as she posed for her man.
“This do, you picky man, you?” she giggled, arms akimbo, her hip thrust out in an overdone catwalk pose. Johnny clutched his chest and pretended to swoon dead away, making her giggle again.
“Y’all look like the reason the war ended early, honey-chile! Just let me get some o’ this on your skin ‘fore we set out, Minou, ‘skeeters, chiggers, an’ no-see-um’s really hate this stuff, jes’ take that shirt off fo’ minute.
Johnny sprayed something on and under her arms, in her pits and all the way up to her shoulders, between her shoulder blades, and coated her hands, neck and upper chest, down the neck of her t-shirt, and puddled some in his hands and rubbed it into her face and inside and behind her ears.
“What is it Johnny-Bear, it smells lovely?” she asked and Johnny held up the bottle.
“Repel; lemon an’ eucalyptus, ‘skeeters really hate this, they gon’ keep away; it do smell nice though; you-all smell like one o’ Maw-Maw Lucianne’s lemon cough drops, but don’t try lickin’ it, it taste a whole heap different what it smell like!”
Johnny tossed the spray bottle over to Odelie so she could do Melette, hitched up his pack, and pointed west.
“We goin’ that way, not much open water to cross that way, an’ then we c’n strike north an’ get up to Lake Palourde; the gal’s got two pirogues stashed there, we cross the lake an’ change over to th’ boat gals got docked an’ waitin’ at the Atchafalaya river inlet north-west side o’ the lake.”
Justine looked puzzled, so Johnny explained.
“Pirogue flat-bottomed boat, fine for polin’ through swamps or across lakes where it don’t have much of a main current to fight agin, but ain’t no pirogue gonna make it far on the Bayou Chene this time o’ year, not with all the rain we bin havin’, need a boat with a keel for that, which is why we gonna change over to the gal’s charter-boat. Even if we had airboat it couldn’t get up there, airboat only good for swamps an’ flat water, current on Bayou Chene kinda unpredictable right now with the amount o’ water comin’ down from higher up the watershed, that why we need something’ little more robust. Way we are, I reckon it take us mebbe eight days to get to Lake Palourde, an’ mebbe three, four days to get up Bayou Chene ‘gainst the current, so mebbe twelve days all told, so when you ready…?”
“Sure thing, Johnny-Bear. What about the trucks, are we just gonna leave them here?”
Johnny shook his head.
“Lubin know which way we goin’, Minou, folks ‘roun’ here know who they b’long to; Lubin mos’ likely get someone to come on down to collect ’em and take ’em back tomorrow or next day, don’ pay them no mind. Now, let’s get movin’, we got a lot o’ ground to cover an’ not much time.”
*
Max Zeigler stared at the GPS locator and scratched his face, by now a mass of red and swollen mosquito bites.
“Problem, Ziggy?” asked his partner, Roberto Carvalho, who hadn’t seemed to be troubled by the biting insects one little bit.
Zeigler hitched up his belt and adjusted the SUNVP Molle Modular Tactical Holster strapped to his right thigh, running his thumb over the Glock 22 clipped in there as though checking it was still there. He was dressed in a weird array of military surplus camo gear, including an improvised body-armor vest made of a MOLLE tactical vest modified to take a front trauma plate, his insurance against taking a body-shot from one of the local hicks; Carvalho wondered how he managed to stand-up in this heat with all that crap strapped on him, but Zeigler was adamant; stories about how good Bastine was were beginning to circulate among the teams, and he wasn’t taking any chances.
Zeigler shook the locator again.
“This fucken thing says we’re on-top of Bayou La Boeuf; you see a bayou anywhere ’round here?”
Carvalho scanned their limited horizon, standing as they were in a sort of hollow, with low hills forming a bowl all around them.