The first thing that hit him was the humidity. It was so thick and cloying that for a moment he thought he must have fallen down a wormhole in the space-time continuum and found himself back in the tropical furnace of Brunei redoing his SAS jungle training.
He cleared security, strolled through the hellish heat over to the nearest car rental place with his new green canvas haversack on his shoulder and was happy to find that the near-blanket blacklist that bugged him in many other countries didn’t seem to apply here. For some reason, the likes of Europcar, Hertz and Avis objected to his custom on the grounds that their vehicles never came back in one piece, occasionally in several, and other times not at all. But the pleasant young lady at Enterprise breezed through the paperwork and handed him the keys to a gleaming new Chevy Tahoe SUV with a smile like warm honey and a ‘Y’all have a good day, now’ that was Ben’s first introduction to a real-life Southern accent.
The airport lay eleven miles west of downtown New Orleans, amid one of the flattest and most panoramic landscapes Ben had seen outside of the Sahara. He opened all the windows, lit a long-awaited Gauloise with his trusty Zippo lighter, which the airport security guys had scrutinised as though it were an M67 fragmentation grenade, and headed north-west for the South Central Plains with the wind blasting around him and a four-hour drive ahead. He intended to enjoy every minute of his freedom.
Ben Hope was an unusually skilled and capable man who claimed little credit for his many gifts. One he lacked, however, in common with most people, was the gift of prophecy. If by some strange intuition he’d been able to foretell what lay in store for him at the end of the long, hot road, he would have pulled a U-turn right across the highway and jumped straight onto the next plane bound for France.
Instead, he just kept on going.
But that’s what happens when you have a talent for trouble.
For the next few hours, Ben drove beneath a sky burned pale by the sun. Trying to dial up a jazz station on the radio, he found only country music of the croony, schmaltzy variety with pedal steel guitars that sounded like cats yowling. It was either that, or the radio evangelists fulminating against the state of the modern world, or silence.
He chose silence, and eased back in his seat, steering the big comfortable Tahoe with two fingers as he worked his way through a pack of Gauloises and drank in his surroundings. The highway carved relentlessly onwards through the flat landscape, passing cane fields and sugar processing plants and oil refineries. It didn’t take much travelling through Louisiana to tell what the big industries were around here.
Deeper into country, the terrain was crisscrossed with bayous, waterways so sluggish and rimed with green slime that they appeared stagnant. He passed various settlements, a lot of them nothing but rag-tag clusters of dilapidated shacks along the edges of the bayous, where river folks dwelled and scraped their living off the water and raggedy little kids helped their fathers man flat-bottomed boats heavy with nets and lobster traps.
Third World poverty in the richest country on the planet. Maybe Rae Lee should come down here and check it out.
To a visitor from overcrowded Europe, the most vivid impression this landscape conveyed was of the sheer scale of its hugeness. Not even Montana and Oklahoma had seemed so spread-out and vast. The city of Shreveport lay a hundred miles to the north of his destination. Highway 84 connected Villeneuve to faraway Natchez, Mississippi to the east and Lufkin, Texas to the west. A whole different America to the one he’d experienced before. Especially as nobody was trying to kill him this time around.
Ben had done a little reading ahead of his journey to try and get a sense of Woody McCoy’s birthplace, its geography, its history and culture. Where most other North American states had counties, Louisiana divided itself instead into sixty-seven parishes, of which Clovis Parish was one of the smallest with a population of just over nine thousand spread over six hundred square miles of land that comprised mostly lake and bayou, swamp and forest. Woody’s home town of Villeneuve was the parish seat, historically best known for having been burned to the ground by Union troops during the 1864 Red River campaign of the American Civil War.
Long before the fledgling nation had decided to start ripping itself apart, this area had passed through the hands of various European colonists. First the French had come, back in the 1500s, and laid claim to the territory of Louisiane as part of what they dubbed ‘New France’, a vast tract of land that stretched from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains and encompassed bits of Canada and fifteen modern-day US states. After a couple of centuries of imposing their language, repressing the ‘heathen savages’ from whom they had wrested the land and shipping in countless thousands of African slaves to work on their plantations in the South, the French rulers had suffered a drubbing in the bloody and brutal French and Indian War and, in 1763, King Louis XV had been forced to cede his prize to the Spanish and British, who promptly set about forcing their own ways on their newly acquired colonial subjects. Napoleon Bonaparte had snatched back Spain’s land possessions in 1800 with a beady eye on re-establishing a lucrative French North American Empire, only to sell it all off again to the recently established United States in 1803, who had just a few years earlier kicked their British masters back into the sea and had their own ideas about developing their young nation.
The so-called ‘Louisiana Purchase’, a deal worth an eye-popping $15 million at the time, had formally ended France’s colonial presence and, at a stroke, radically expanded US territory by almost a million square miles to make it the third largest country in the world. Whereupon, less than sixty years later, the brave and bright new nation descended into a tragic civil war that turned neighbour against neighbour, brother against brother, ravaged the land from coast to coast and top to bottom, left as many as 750,000 of its citizens lying dead on its scorched battlefields and among the ruins of its levelled cities, and scarred the identity of the United States more profoundly than any other conflict before or since.
Such was, and always would be, the nature of human civilisation.
As for modern-day Louisiana, the result of so many centuries of ever-changing colonial ownership was a colourful blend of French, Spanish, African, Creole and Indian influences. Acadian settlers who had landed here from France by way of Canada added to the mixture, their descendants later to become known as ‘Cajuns’, forming a core part of this rich, multi-faceted culture rooted in so much dramatic history. Predictably enough, a glance at the map showed French names popping up everywhere. Villeneuve being just one of them, within a parish named after an ancient Frankish king. Many older Cajun folks still spoke their own form of French as a first language, although that tradition was slowly dying out.
The more Ben had read up on the background, the more he could see that he was going to have to abandon whatever preconceptions he might have previously had about this part of the Deep South. Here was a fascinating and unique place, and he was looking forward to learning more about it – almost as much as the bittersweet prospect of attending the Woody McCoy Quintet’s farewell performance two days from now.
The highway thinned out to an arrow-straight blacktop that carried him between fields and tracts of swampland and forest, past rambling farmsteads and abandoned gas stations and along the banks of a bayou with a waterside shanty restaurant signposted Mickey’s Crawfish Cabin – come inside! Ben hadn’t eaten a bite since his early breakfast with Jude and Rae in Chicago. However hungry he might be feeling, the delights of Mickey’s Crawfish Cabin were something he could live without. The roadside banner advertising FRESH COON MEAT, ½ MILE didn’t do much for him, either.
At last, a sign flashed by: ENTER CLOVIS PARISH, as though it were a command. A few miles later, the Villeneuve town limits appeared ahead, and Ben had reached