Christmas in Dogtown

Christmas in Dogtown

Suzanne Johnson

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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CHRISTMAS IN DOGTOWN

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2012
by Suzanne Johnson

http://www.suzanne-johnson.com

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

~1~

Resa Madere folded her raggiest pair of jeans, wedged them into her red suitcase, and slammed it shut. Rubbing a scuff off the leather, she wondered if she could sell the thing online. She’d already auctioned off the vintage cobalt Fiestaware collected over the past five years. The leather coat she rarely needed in
New Orleans
’ mild winters. The tennis bracelet of tiny diamonds Jules had presented six months before he dumped her.

Stray Mardi Gras beads winked ironic glints of purple, green, and gold among past-due bills on the top of her desk, and she swept an arm across it, pushing the whole sorry mess into a white plastic garbage bag. A single photo remained: Jules. Julian her perfect guy. Julian who
moved on when she lost her job.

Jul
ian the Jerk.

She carefully tore off the outside edges of the photo so he became Julian the Earless Jerk. Then she ripped off his head and tossed Julian the Headless Jerk into the bag with the rest of the trash.

Except he’d be spending the holidays with his rich uptown family while Resa did the white-trash shuffle. She was headed for Paulina, thirty miles upriver, carrying
several hanks
of pork casings from a local butcher in time to help Uncle Emile make sausages for the holiday rush. Two weeks until Christmas and the orders were piling in.

No, correct that. She wasn’t even going to Paulina proper. Resa would be spending the next three weeks in a borrowed single-wide trailer in a barely-there community five miles from Paulina, right on the edge of Maurepas Swamp. On the maps, it had no name. Locally, it was called Dogtown. And she’d arrive in the backwater her family had lived in for seven generations hauling
a trunkload of pig intestines.

Resa didn’t know what life held for her, but she had a feeling this was not going down as a holiday season she’d remember, at least not for any of the right reasons. Family was family, however, as her mom had reminded her, and Uncle Emile had been under the weather. The only girl in a sprawling family of boys who had hunting and fishing and football to occupy their time, Resa had grown up helping Uncle Aim at Madere’s Meats, an
d she’s the one he’d asked for.

It wasn’t like she had a real job to go to anymore, as Mom also had reminded her (like she’d had a brain fart and forgotten six months of unemployment). Plus, Uncle Aim had offered to pay her. The past couple of months, Resa had been holding onto her little shotgun house in uptown
New Orleans
by the tips of her fingernails. She wouldn’t turn down the chance to earn a couple of mortgage payments.

On her way out of town, she stopped in front of Julian’s condo and taped a pig intestine to his mailbox. If she was revisiting her roots as the sausage princess of St. James Parish, she might as well start acting like it.

~2~

Instead of taking the interstate, Resa drove along the narrow, winding Highway 44, the
River Road
, that led west out of
New Orleans
and twisted its way to Paulina. She’d hoped that concentrating on the treacherous curves would keep her from wallowing in self-pit
y, but it didn’t work.

She’d fought so hard to leave Dogtown behind that even agreeing to go back for three weeks felt like failure. She’d gotten a scholarship to ULL, worked nights slinging pizzas in
Lafayette
to save money, and escaped to
New Orleans
before the ink on her diploma dried. Worked her way up to head of the copywriting department at Crescent City Advertising at age twenty-six. Got laid off at twenty-nine as her agency clients cut ad costs due to the trifecta of Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, and the economic crash. No one wanted to hire an overqualified ad executive to wait tables, so she’d cut back and stretched her retirement fund until it was gone.

Things would get better after the holidays. They had to.

She drove through “metro” Paulina, which spread north a few blocks from the river levee much like nearby Gramercy and Lutcher, only smaller. Neat brick houses, brown winter lawns, flat terrain, and a tang in the air to remind people that they lived on a fragile piece of ground tucked between the Mississippi River and the
Maurepas
Swamp
.

At the end of downtown Paulina, she drove north, slowing as the two-lane highway became narrower and the encroachment of swamp on either side grew closer. A rooster wandered across the road in front of her as she turned onto an unpaved, rutted path cover
ed in oyster shells and gravel.

Dogtown was literally a crossroads. At the center of the cross sat a twenty-foot statue of a bear carved a couple of centuries ago out of a cypress tree. She couldn’t explain why a place called Dogtown had been built around a bear totem. Uncle Aim claimed the statue was actually not a bear but the rougarou, a legendary swamp beast some of the older Cajun folk still believed in, and that a lot of people put more stock in their hunting dogs than their relatives. Resa figured that was as good an explanation as any.

Just to the north of the crossroads sat Madere’s Meats, a small cinderblock building with a narrow room in front holding a display case and counter. The bulk of the building was devoted to the sausage- and boudin-making in the back. The smoker ate up a sizable piece of the backyard. Resa’s great-grandfather had begun the business in the 1920s, it passed to her grandfather in the 1940s, and Uncle Aim took it over in the 1980s, still using the old recipes. People from three parishes would drive in on Saturdays to buy boudin and andouille at Madere’s and eat catfish, gator, and crawfish at Caillou’s Fine Dining, on the south side of the crossroads.

About fifty people lived in Dogtown, and Resa figured at least forty-nine of them were either related to the Maderes or the
Caillous by blood or marriage.

She spotted the single-wide trailer that lay behind the store but wasn’t yet ready to face the
White
Castle
, as she and her cousins had named the place back when Uncle Aim lived there. She’d get the required visit to Mom done first.

Her daddy had died in a hunting accident when Resa was eighteen and already at college. It made his death seem less real since she had already moved away; she could just pretend he was still around. But during the Christmas holidays, the one time each year she made herself return to Dogtown for a day or two, she still expected to see him in the yard, tinkering with his boat motor or hitching the trailer to his pickup for a day of hunting. It left an empty place in the landscape that her brain hadn’t yet incorporated.

Mom met her at the front door of the little redbrick family home, the excitement on her face at seeing her only daughter making Resa fe
el both guilty and trapped.

“
Hey everybody, Theresa’s here!”

Oh, Judas on a pony—
a freaking welcoming committee.

“Hey, Mom.” Resa let herself be enveloped in the ample arms of Jeanne Madere and herded into the living room, where a parade of cousins once-, twice-, and three-times removed patted, hugged, and generally agreed that it was about time Theresa Ann Madere came
home to take care of her mama.

Resa didn’t say so, but God help the person who tried to take care of Jeanne. The woman was a category five force of nature.

“Hey there, beautiful girl.”

Resa turned to the only person who could’ve convinced her to return to Dogtown and stick her hands in a bowl of ground meat and rice. Jeanne might dole out guilt and persuasion, but it was for Emile Madere that Resa had come. He’d aged visibly since last Christmas. His silver hair was thinner and tired creases carved ruts down either side of his mouth above his heavy beard, but his brown eyes still danced with life and she’d bet the long, nimble fingers that
pulled
her into a tight embrace still played a fiddle
so sweetly it could draw tears.

Resa had loved her daddy with all her hear
t, but Uncle Aim held her soul.

“I knew you’d come home. Let me look at you.” He pulled back and gave her a nodding appraisal. “That short hair’s a little citified, but reckon you still look like my favorite niece.”

Resa smiled. “I’m your only niece. And what’s with this sick business? Maderes don’t get sick.” They really didn’t. She’d once made a list of everyone she knew who’d died. Among the alarming
ly
long tally of dead grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, none had succumbed to illness. They had accidents. A few flat-out disappeared, probably eaten by gators. Wild boars gored a few. Some drowned. A scary number of fatal snake
bites.

Resa figured the longer she stayed around Dogtown, the greater her chances of dying some horrific death by water or wildlife.

“Emile, did you tell Resa the news?” Jeanne wore a long-sleeved tee covered in black sequins that reflected the Christmas tree lights in dizzying flashes. “About
Chandler
Caillou?”

Resa gro
a
ned inwardly. She’d wondered how long it would take for someone to mention the guy her family had been foisting on her since she was a toddler, or at least as early as she could remember. There were honest-to-God pictures, which Jeanne liked to trot out at family gatherings, of Resa and Chan tumbling around in diapers and sleeping side-by-side in a crib. She’d hoped that once she left Dogtown and settled in
New Orleans
, Jeanne would give up on her conviction that a Resa-Chan union
was inevitable. Apparently not.

“I figured she’d hear about it soon enough.” Uncle Aim rested an arm on her shoulders as if to protect her from whatever earth-shattering news Jeanne was about to impart.

“He moved home two months ago. Took over his cousin Mike’s job as the gator man for the parish.” Jean
ne
leaned toward her and said in an exaggerated whisper, “And he’s still single.”

The subtext of that was:
So are you, missy, and you’re creeping toward thirty
.

Terrific. “What happened to Mike?” Resa bet it wasn’t illness. The Caillous didn’t get sick, either.

Jeanne’s brow wrinkled. “Think he drowned. Did Mike Caillou drown?” She addressed her question to the living room full of people and got several affirmatives. “Anyway, you know Chandler had been living in Baton Rouge, doing some kind of important work with the state fisheries office—been up there since before Katrina.”

Resa wondered why, if Chandler Caillou had a good-paying state job, he’d come back to Dogtown to wrangle nuisance alligators. But if she asked, her relatives would assume she cared, which would fire up the rumors. Never mind that she hadn’t seen him since high school or held a meaningful conversation with him since they hit puberty. If she showed any interest whatsoever, the family would have her engaged to the man by sundown.