Fish Story

Virgil had been mud-bugging in the fecund cypress swamp of the Atchefalayan Basin. City folk may think the dank swamps of Louisiana are no place for a boy of nine, but he was as bold and carefree as only nine-year-olds can afford, and he knew that swamp. It was his hunting ground, so to speak; his Own Private Universe. He was the great stalker of every living thing that scuttled, swam or slithered. Some of those beasties ended up as bait for bigger beasties, and some in turn ended up at the family dinner table. Tonight there would be Moman's étouffée spéciale.

A battered bucket of squirming crawdads sloshed about as he plunked it down dramatically on the floating pier of their home for the family's new guest to see. Lila peered squeamishly into the pail, both curious and repelled. She was slightly older than Virgil, pale and city-clean. He found her glowing hygiene conversely enticing and impractical. Plunging a fist into the chaos for effect, Virgil extracted a large snapping and convulsing specimen for her closer inspection. Until recently she'd been complaining that her cell phone "wasn't getting any bars out here," but the boy's bravado and the miniature lobster were suddenly more interesting.

"You have to boil them alive, don't you?" she asked tentatively.

"Oui," he replied proudly. "Ma moman, she make da best mudbugs you ever taste. You wan ta help me catch more? Moman already tell me dis mess won suffice."

Moman's Mugbugs

1. Put 3 gallons water in a large pot, 2 whole cloves garlic, chopped fresh parsley, crushed cloves, crushed and ground red pepper, black pepper, mustard, salt, chopped green onion, 2 lemons, all in great quantity.

2. Stir in 10 pounds crawfish and light the fire.

3. When water comes to a rolling boil, time 5 minutes and turn off flame.

4. Let soak 5 minutes, then serve.

Lila stepped gingerly into the floating pirogue, her equilibrium askew in complete unfamiliarity with watercraft. A reassuring lapping sounded rhythmically off of the flat bottom boat and she settled herself in the middle. Virgil, standing,  dipped a long pole into the dark water and pushed away from his floating home. She wondered at the stoic ease with which he maneuvered the little boat through the maze-like bayou. Grey-green Spanish moss dripped everywhere from cypress stands that reached right up out of the swampy depths, giving the landscape a soft alien essence; alien to her world anyway. Virgil, edging nearer to the big river than he was allowed, he hoped his sight seeing efforts would not go unnoticed. Dipping her fingers into the cool water to leave swirling trails behind, Lila considered how everything she'd known was about to change with her father's military transfer; how the present would fade into the past like the trails on the surface of the water. Virgil broke her trance, snapping at her, "Don be coo-yon"!

"English, please," she snapped back.

"Foolish! Don be a fool. Keep your hands in the boat or you'll lose one to a gator, or a snapper, or a great big mashwarhon kittyfish."

Indignant, she slapped her hand on the top of the water before retracting it. Virgil took a step toward Lila, swinging the pole mockingly toward her head and she instinctively jerked to the side. In slow motion she watched in amusement, and then horror, as Virgil lost his footing went careening over the side of the boat.

Water surrounded him like mercury, like molasses, like a fist. Hair lilted around his face, gently framing the panic masque that had possessed him. He was pulled below for what felt like an eternity of desperately, definitively, NOT breathing in swamp water. As gravity, fate and undercurrent decreed, he was swept into an eddy of debris ridden watery sludge and whirled upright and gangling into a slowly turning pillar of flotsam and jetsam topped with a peaked meringue cap of sodden foam. He silently cursed Lila and his bravado and his proximity to the river. He could feel his heart pulsing in his ears, in his eyes, he started to swoon, and then... Then he felt its presence. Through the soupy river water he could see it recessed in the darkness of a huge and root tangled opening as he cycled round, and round. By quickening degree he sensed a great hunkering presence. With each revolution a new and improved appreciation for the word panic manifested itself in his every firing synapse. He knew he was trapped. Predator was now prey. His complete attention was utterly focused on two eyes the size of saucers; milky and clouded baubles that were tiny in ratio to the whole, and were most unquestionably not focused back at him or anything else. Whatever they belonged to was enormous and was nonetheless sizing him up. He saw the massive head now as it eased minutely in and out of the depths of the dark hole, a shadow moving within a shadow. It was amazing. It held a great grimacing mouth with whiskers the size of a grown man's leg. They twitched delicately, intimately, against the silty riverbed.