Red Thunder

I told him everything I had done with the bubble since finding it in the tall grass not a hundred feet from where I was now sitting. It didn’t take too long. I deferred to Kelly, who had very little to add, and then to Dak, who confirmed what Jubal had shown us of the nature of the bubbles, and some attempt to report what Jubal had said.

Alicia was one of those females, like Mom and Maria, who can’t [89] stand seeing people sitting around with nothing to eat or drink. She had been listening to us from the kitchen and came out now with a big pot of coffee and some cookies she had brought with her. There was oatmeal and brown sugar covering up the taste of the other health store stuff I’m sure was in there.

Travis took a deep drink of his bourbon, looked at the bottle, then at Alicia, and reached for a coffee cup. Alicia filled it, looking happy as a prohibitionist who’s just set a barroom on fire.

“Okay, friends,” Travis said. “Did I say friends? Well, Jubal likes you. If it was up to me, I might just chase all y’all’s asses back to the beach where I found you-”

“You found us?” Alicia snorted.

“-where I found y’all, illegally rampaging up and down a public beach that i

“You really think so?” Kelly asked.

“… Probably not. Anyway, things would be so much simpler if none of y’all had seen these things. But you have. And Jubal wants you to keep coming around. That’s one area I’ve failed Jubal miserably, not bringing new folks around for him to visit with. Jubal’s frightened of other people, often as not, but both of us know if he doesn’t socialize now and then he’s likely to grow a hide so tough he won’t be able to talk to anybody else, ever. And I’ve pretty much used up all the old friends I used to have, which may be why I’m trying to be friends with as unlikely a group as y’all. Anyway…

“I reckon I’d better tell you a little more about Jubal. About me and Jubal. I’ve told this stuff to no one, nobody at all outside the family, and I wouldn’t be telling y’all if Jubal hadn’t said he didn’t mind. So here goes.

“My friends, it ain’t easy being Jubal…”

[90] TRAVIS’S UNCLE AVERY Broussard was a few years older than Travis’s father. When Avery was young he had been Travis’s favorite of his six uncles. Of all the Broussard brothers and sisters, Avery lived closest to the land. He taught his sons and nephews to get along in the woods and swamps of Louisiana bayou country. It was Avery who always found the time to take the kids out in the middle of the night frog-gigging or jacklighting deer. Travis said he was nine before he realized jacklighting-shooting deer frozen in car headlights or powerful spotlights-was illegal. Avery just laughed at that, and said it was okay because they intended to eat the meat. It was just an easier way to put food on the table, and he wasn’t surprised that the city boys and girls who never in their lives killed for the table would want country boys like him to hunt the hard way.

“Just think about it, cher,” Avery said. “Dem city boys, what dey be cryin’ ’bout is it ain’t fair to de deer. Ain’t fair!” He had a good laugh at that one. “I tell you, I druther be shootin’ at dem deer not movin’ dan jus’ run all over God’s miraculous creation findin’ a deer wasn’t nothin’ but just winged, and him hurtin’ powerful all dat time. No, sir, Avery Broussard hasn’t never missed no deer caught in de headlights. What is dat, if it ain’t ‘perventin’ cruelty’ to animals, hah?”

So they jacklighted and dodged the game wardens through the tangled bayou that Avery knew better than anyone else. And during the day, Avery would take them hunting for coon, possum, and squirrel. They raised their own rabbits. He would take them out on the water to run the trotlines and crawdad traps, fish for catfish and trout and alligator gar and just about anything else they could wrestle aboard a rickety pirogue, including alligators when the game warden wasn’t in the parish. It was a Huck Fi

They could all see the differences in the two families, but for many years it didn’t seem to matter. Emile’s family had enough money, a car, good clothes and food, a great house, all courtesy of wages and benefits negotiated for him by the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union. Avery, on the other hand, had nothing. His children dressed in rags [91] and hand-me-downs from his brothers’ families, and were lucky to have one pair of shoes. But Avery didn’t seem to mind, and neither did his kids, who hardly ever wore shoes, anyway. In fact, any jealousy went the other way. Even Emile admitted that sometimes he wished he’d opted for the independent life, living off the land. Most of the time the living was good out there in the bayous, and when it wasn’t Avery had a large family that would pull him through the tight spots. Avery always repaid the help he got in fresh eggs, fish, rabbits, whatever the bounty of nature was producing at the time.

During those golden years, Jubal was Travis’s best friend. Travis was three years older and it should have made a difference, except that Jubal was the smartest person Travis had ever known, child or adult. And Travis knew something about being smart, he was far and away the best of his class in every subject he took.

Travis knew from bitter experience what the other kids did if they learned you were intelligent. It could all be summed up, he felt, in Moe Howard, the mean Stooge, sneering at Curly and saying, “Oh, a wise guy, eh?” Then the fingers poked in the eyes. In the city schools a wise guy was the worst thing you could be, except for being a faggot, and Travis figured things wouldn’t be any better out in the country.

They wouldn’t have been, but none of the Avery branch of the Broussard family had to worry about that, because none of them were ever put in school. Though there may never have been worse candidates for home schooling than the Avery Broussard family, the school boards of Bayou Teche Parish were hard-pressed to educate even the children who came in willingly. They didn’t have the heart to fight very hard about those whose parents would prefer their children to stay at home. Their high school graduates often had trouble passing seventh-grade-level tests. Could home schooling do much worse? They washed their hands of Avery Broussard and his brood, preferring not to notice that Avery’s mildly retarded common-law wife, Evangeline, could neither read nor write.

It turned out in the Broussard case that home schooling could do substantially worse than the public schools.

Avery had been an extremely religious man most of his life. He had [92] been raised Christian, of course, like everyone else in the parish, and Catholic, like many of his neighbors. But it was a wild, charismatic brand of Catholicism that just sort of naturally blended in with the hard-shell Baptists all around them until you could hardly tell the difference. Actually, the Broussard family church didn’t have much contact with either the Catholic or the Baptist mainstream. The First Baptist Church in Lafayette, for instance, never released venomous snakes in their immaculate sanctuary, nor did the congregation of Our Lady of the Bayous drink poison. Avery’s church did both of these things, and more. The church started small, and stayed small, new converts just about balancing out casualties.