Possums in Seersucker

Chapter One: The Roof Situation

Alright, so first thing you gotta understand is where we're from, dawg. Whistle, Louisiana. You ever heard of it? No, you haven't. Don't lie. Whistle is a town so small the welcome sign and the "Come Back Soon" sign are on the same post. You just gotta walk around it, man. It's a town where the Dollar General is also kind of the courthouse, you know, like if you got a dispute with a man over a boat trailer, you settle it in the seasonal aisle. By the citronella candles. That's just law, brother.

Whistle's got one flashing light, a church, a different church that hates the first church, a bait stand, and my Uncle Dewey's pawn shop, which is called Dewey's Pawn & Gun & Notary, because in Whistle a man's gotta be at least three things or he starves.

That's where I worked. Pawn shop kid. My whole life, man. You learn things in a pawn shop they don't teach you nowhere else. You learn what a man's voice does when he's lying about a watch. You learn that everybody's grandmother had a ring "worth at least nine hundred dollars" and it's always worth forty. You learn that desperation has a smell, dawg, and it smells like menthols and WD-40. I could look at a gold chain from across the room and tell you the karat, the weight, and whether the dude wearing it had ever paid child support. That's not a skill they got at Harvard. That's a Whistle degree, baby.

My buddy was Dale LeBlanc, but nobody on God's earth called him Dale. Everybody called him Biscuit, on account of when he was seven he got his head stuck in a mailbox trying to get a biscuit somebody had mailed him. I know what you're thinking — who mails a biscuit? His aunt Reenie did, that's who, because she didn't trust the postal service with anything important but she'd test 'em with baked goods. Like a canary in a coal mine, except it's a biscuit in a mailbox. And little Dale climbed up there after it like a raccoon going after a frisbee, and the fire department had to come, and the picture made the Whistle Bugle, and that was it, man. You're Biscuit forever. That's how names work down here. You do one thing at seven years old and it's on your tombstone.

Biscuit was the best person I ever knew, and I'm including some dogs in that. Big ol' boy, gentle as a church fan, listened to this one podcast called Brain Snacks every single night, so his head was full of the most random facts you ever heard. He couldn't tell you what day rent was due but he could tell you that a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance and that honey never goes bad. He'd hit you with that stuff at funerals, man. Just lean over at the worst moment and go, "Hey. Wombats poop cubes." And you know what? Sometimes that's exactly what a grieving person needs to hear. Wombat facts. That's ministry, dude.

Now here's the situation that started everything. Biscuit's Mamaw Pearl — who half raised me too, because my mama worked nights at the chicken plant in Ruston and my daddy was, let's say, a rumor — Mamaw Pearl's roof got tore up in the spring storms. Big ol' water oak limb came down on it like the Lord was playing Jenga and lost. And the roofer man, Crowley, came out, sucked his teeth for about forty-five minutes, which is how roofers charge you, by the teeth-suck, and he said it'd be thirty-eight hundred dollars to fix it right.

Thirty-eight hundred dollars, man. You might as well have said thirty-eight million. We had, between us, at that moment, I believe, eleven dollars and a coupon for a free car wash that had expired during the Obama administration.

And here's the thing — if the roof didn't get fixed, Mamaw Pearl was gonna have to move to Slidell and live with Biscuit's Aunt Trish, who is a fine woman if you enjoy being narrated at. Aunt Trish narrates, dawg. She'll watch you eat a sandwich and go, "He's picking it up. He's biting it. He likes it. He's chewing on the left side, that's 'cause of his teeth." Like a nature documentary about you, and you're trapped in it. Mamaw Pearl said she'd rather sleep under a tarp in her own kitchen than be a wildlife special in Slidell, and honestly, respect.

So me and Biscuit needed thirty-eight hundred dollars, and we needed it before the rains came back in three weeks. That was the whole mission. That was the prayer request. Roof money.

And that, brother, is how we ended up at Sweetbay.

Chapter Two: Four Hundred Pounds of Bugs

My cousin Renata does catering out of Baton Rouge — well, she does catering the way Whistle does anything, which is mostly with confidence — and she calls me one Tuesday and says she's got a job for two boys with a truck and a clean shirt. Says there's some big estate up past St. Francisville, old plantation house called Sweetbay Hall, and they're throwing a weekend thing — the Azalea Ball, big charity deal, richest people in three states — and they need four hundred pounds of live crawfish and a mess of ice delivered Friday afternoon. Two hundred dollars each, cash.

Now, four hundred dollars don't fix a roof, but it's a start, and also we didn't have nothing else going except a vague plan Biscuit had about breeding crickets, which I had vetoed twice already. So Friday morning we loaded up Charlene.

I gotta tell you about Charlene. Charlene was my truck, a '94 F-150 the color of an old nickel, and she ran great as long as you respected her boundaries. Charlene had two rules. One, you had to hold the radio knob while you cranked her, with your left hand, like you were taking her pulse. Nobody knew why. Mechanic didn't know why. Mechanic said, and I quote, "Some trucks is haunted, and that's between her and God." Rule two, no eating bananas in the cab. That one was my rule, actually, that's got nothing to do with the truck, I just think it's weird when a grown man eats a banana next to you in an enclosed space. It's too patient a fruit, man. Anyway.

We loaded four hundred pounds of crawfish in sacks, and let me tell you, four hundred pounds of live crawfish in the bed of a truck is a SOUND, dude. It's like driving around with a thousand tiny men slowly clapping. The whole way up Highway 61 it's just tick-tick-tick-tick behind your head, like applause from hell. Biscuit named a few of the ones near the top. There was one big one he called Gerald. I said, "Biscuit, don't name 'em, they're gonna get boiled," and he said, "Everything that's ever been boiled had a name," and you know, I've thought about that sentence probably nine hundred times since. He'd just say stuff like that and then go back to drinking his Rooster Fuel like he hadn't just rearranged my whole spiritual furniture.

Rooster Fuel, by the way, that was Biscuit's energy drink. Local brand, came in a camo can, tasted like if a battery had a citrus dream. Biscuit drank like three a day. The can said "NOT FOR CHILDREN, THE ELDERLY, OR THE FAINT OF HEART" and Biscuit treated that like a personal endorsement.

The drive up to St. Francisville, man, it changes on you. You start out in regular Louisiana — gas stations, churches, a man selling shrimp out of a cooler with a sign that says GOOD SHRIMP, which I respect because it answers the only question — and then the road narrows and the oaks start leaning over the top of you like nosy aunts, all that Spanish moss hanging down, and the houses start backing away from the road. That's how you know you're getting into money, dawg. Poor people's houses sit right up on the road, friendly, like they want to know what's going on. Rich people's houses back away from the road like you owe them an apology.

And then we found the gate for Sweetbay Hall, and brother, the GATE had columns. The gate. The thing whose whole job is to not be the house yet had columns and a fountain and a little brass plaque, and Biscuit looked at it and said, "This gate's nicer than the school we went to," and that wasn't a joke, that was journalism.

There was a man at the gate with a clipboard and one of them earpieces, dressed like a funeral that golfs, and he looked at Charlene — tick-tick-tick of the doomed crawfish behind us — and he looked at me holding the radio knob, because Charlene had stalled out of pure intimidation and I had to crank her in front of this man, and he said, "Deliveries are around back."

And I said, "Yes sir, we figured."

And he said, "Follow the service road past the chapel."

Past the CHAPEL. They had their own chapel, dude. These people had a private building just to apologize to God in. We didn't know it yet, but everything was about to go completely sideways, and looking back, the chapel was probably watching us drive past, going, "Oh, y'all have NO idea."

Chapter Three: Sweetbay

Okay so Sweetbay Hall. Let me try to describe this place to you in a way that's honest.

You know how a wedding cake looks? Now make it a building. Now make the building somehow look down on you, like architecturally, like the house itself has read your bank statement. Big white columns, galleries wrapping all the way around, three hundred years of oak trees standing out front like security. There were peacocks, dawg. Loose peacocks. Just walking around screaming, because that's what peacocks do, they're beautiful and they scream, they're like if a sunset was also having a custody dispute.

We pulled around back to the kitchen wing and it was a whole operation back there — tents going up, a man unloading flowers like the flowers had insurance, a woman shouting into a headset about "the quartet." And bossing the whole back end of it was a woman named Miss Odile, who ran that kitchen like a battleship, and within four minutes she had me and Biscuit hauling sacks and ice like we were born there. Biscuit fit into a kitchen instantly, that's a thing about him. Big boys are always welcome in kitchens. It's like watching a Labrador get hired.

Now while we're unloading, I notice this old lady on the back gallery, sitting in a rocker with a glass of something brown, watching everything. Little woman, maybe eighty-something, white hair set like a meringue, dressed sharp — and she had them EYES, man. You ever see an old person whose eyes are still doing forty over the limit while the rest of them is parked? That kind. She was watching the whole backyard like a poker player watches a table, and at some point I realized she was specifically watching us.

That was Miss Birdie LaSalle. Sweetbay was hers. Everything we could see was hers, and a good amount of stuff we couldn't see, and — we'd find out later — about half the parish, two banks, and a senator's conscience.

She waved me up to the gallery. Me specifically. Pointed at me like she was picking a puppy out of a box.

I went up there wiping crawfish water on my jeans, and she looked at me a long second and said, "What's your name, child?"

"Vernon Tatum, ma'am. Folks call me Possum."

"Why."

Not "why?" like a question, man. "Why." like a sentence. Rich old ladies can do that, they can take the curl out of a question mark, just iron it flat.

"When I was a baby I'd play dead when my mama tried to give me medicine, ma'am. Limp and everything. She said I had a gift."

And this old woman looked at me, and something happened around her mouth that wasn't a smile but was related to one, like a cousin of a smile, and she said, "Playing dead is an underrated talent. Most people can't even play alive." And then she rattled her ice at me like that was a normal thing to say to a stranger, and said, "Tell Odile I said feed you two before you go."

And lord, did Odile feed us. Brisket ends and dirty rice, standing up at the steel counter, and that should have been the end of the story right there. Two hundred each, full bellies, home by dark, tick-tick-tick, goodbye Gerald.

But then it started raining.

And I don't mean rain, dude. I mean the sky filed for divorce. I mean rain like the Lord had four hundred pounds of His own crawfish to keep alive. We sat in that kitchen watching it come down sideways, and Miss Odile's radio started talking, and the talk was that Thompson Creek had jumped its banks and the low bridge on the parish road — the only way back to the highway, unless you wanted to drive an hour north — was under two feet of moving water. And Charlene, God love her, does not swim. Charlene barely drives.

So we're standing there in the kitchen doorway, watching the storm eat the evening, doing that poor-boy math — gas money versus the long way, whether the rain would let up, whether we could sleep in the cab — and Miss Birdie appears behind us. Old people can teleport, especially in their own houses. She'd come down to the kitchen with a flashlight in her hand like she was the one in charge of the weather too.

She looked at us. She looked out at the rain. And she said the sentence that ruined and saved our whole lives:

"Well. You boys can't leave, so you might as well be somebody."

And I said, "Ma'am?"

And she said, "Odile, take them up the back stairs to the blue rooms. Burn those shirts." And then to us: "Supper's at eight. You're my godsons from Shreveport. The Boudreaux boys. Beau and..." she looked at Biscuit, taking inventory of him, all six-foot-three and crawfish-water of him, "...Beauregard."

And Biscuit said, "We're both named Beau?"

And Miss Birdie said, "Rich families do that," and walked off, and the terrifying thing, the thing we learned that whole weekend, is that she was right. Rich families absolutely do that. We met a family later with three Winstons in it. Three, dude. Alive at the same time. Like they're saving the name in case one gets recalled.

Chapter Four: Seersucker Witness Protection

So Odile takes us up the back stairs — and a house like that has back stairs the way a magician has a fake thumb, it's a whole hidden system — and puts us in two bedrooms that were nicer than any place either of us had ever slept, including the hospital. The beds had so many pillows, man. Like nine pillows a bed. Poor people have two pillows, and one of them is the bad pillow, you know what I'm saying? Everybody I grew up with had a bad pillow they kept out of loyalty. These beds had nine good ones, stacked up like the pillows were also guests.

And laid out on the beds were CLOTHES. Miss Birdie's late husband, Mr. Walton LaSalle, had apparently been built long like me, and there must've been a bigger LaSalle at some point in history because they found Biscuit things too. Seersucker, dawg. Real seersucker, them blue-and-white stripes, soft as a sigh. White bucks. A belt with little mallards on it. I put that suit on and looked in the mirror, and I'm not gonna lie to you, I got a little emotional. Not because I looked rich. Because I looked like the version of me my Mamaw Pearl probably saw the whole time, you know? Clothes are a spell, man. That's the whole secret rich people have. It ain't the money. It's that they get to wear the spell every day.

Biscuit came out of his room in a navy blazer and khakis, looking like a sheriff in a Hallmark movie, and he goes, "Possum. There's a man in my bathroom whose whole job is little soaps." There was not a man, he just meant the soaps were so numerous and so small that he assumed staffing. But I understood.

Now. Supper.

You walk into a dining room like that, with the candles going and the silver out and a chandelier overhead like a frozen firework, and the first thing your body wants to do is apologize. That's the poor-boy reflex, you want to find whoever's in charge and say sorry, I'll wait outside. You gotta fight that, dude. Miss Birdie had coached us for exactly ninety seconds beforehand in the hall, and her whole coaching was this: "Speak slow, ask questions, and never explain yourself. Rich is mostly volume control."

And dawg... she was so right it was scary. Volume control and questions. Rich people LOVE a question, because their favorite subject is themselves and their second favorite subject is their stuff.

At that table we met the whole crew of them. The young ones, I mean — the 20-something high-society types, in town for the Azalea Ball, all of them orbiting Miss Birdie's money like well-dressed satellites.

There was Mims, a girl whose actual legal name we never did learn, who said "heavenly" about everything — the soup was heavenly, the rain was heavenly, somebody's dead grandmother was heavenly. There was Harlan Brashear, a big jaw in a polo shirt, who told us within one minute that he had played lacrosse at Sewanee, and then told us again later like it was new information, like the lacrosse was ongoing, like he was playing it right then under the table. There was a whole row of others — a Winston, a different Winston, a girl named Catty Lou who was sweet but laughed like a screen door.

There was Frankie. Frances LaSalle, Miss Birdie's granddaughter. I'm gonna get to Frankie, hold on.

And there was Tripp. Tripp Calloway the Third. And listen — I've met a lot of men in a pawn shop. I've met men mid-divorce, men mid-scheme, men trying to sell me a chainsaw that was visibly still warm from whoever owned it. And the second Tripp Calloway shook my hand, every alarm I got went off quiet. He had that handshake that's doing a sales pitch, you know? Two seconds too long, one squeeze too sincere. He was handsome the way a billboard is handsome. Did something in "wealth management." Was engaged — sort of, it was complicated, everybody said "practically engaged" — to Frankie. And he was wearing a gold Rolex that he made sure you saw, the way a man holds a fishing photo at an angle.

He looked at me and Biscuit and goes, "Boudreaux... from the Shreveport Boudreauxs? What is it y'all's family does again?"

And the table went a little quiet, and Miss Birdie watched me over her wine glass with them forty-over-the-limit eyes, and I heard my Uncle Dewey's voice in my head, the thing he says when somebody walks in trying to pawn something they can't explain: son, don't ever out-talk a lie, under-talk it.

So I took a slow sip of water, set the glass down, and said, "Acquisitions. Estate liquidity, mostly."

Dude. DUDE. You'd have thought I said the password at a speakeasy. Heads nodding all down the table. Harlan goes "tough market for it" and I go "always is," and that was IT, man, that was the whole exam. Acquisitions and estate liquidity. Which, by the way, was not even a lie. That is literally what a pawn shop does, brother. A man brings in his late daddy's estate, we acquire it, he gets liquid. I just said it in their accent. That's the thing nobody tells you about high society, man — it's the same dirt, just different shovels.

The forks though. I gotta be honest about the forks. There were so many forks, dawg. Each plate had like a fork committee. And the trick I figured out — Biscuit figured it out actually, he leaned over and whispered it like state secrets — is you just go outside-in, and if you ever panic, you look at the oldest woman at the table and copy her, because she has never been wrong about a fork in her life. Mamaw Pearl would've known that. Old women is old women, man, the money just changes what the forks are pointing at.

The food came in courses the size of haikus. There was a soup that tasted heavenly — dang it, Mims got in my head — and a fish course, and at some point they brought out quail, a whole tiny bird each, and Biscuit looked down at his like it was a coworker. I watched him have a moment with it. He ate it though. Biscuit's got a tender heart but he's also got a body that runs on protein and Rooster Fuel, and the heart don't always win.

And through that whole dinner, Tripp kept coming back at us. Little hooks. "Y'all prep at Jesuit or...?" — Biscuit, without blinking: "Homeschooled. Mama didn't trust the Jesuits." Which got an actual laugh, because the rich think distrusting institutions is charming when you can afford it. "Y'all hunt?" — me: "Some." "Where do y'all summer?" — and listen, that question right there, "where do you summer," that's when I knew we were in a foreign country, because where I'm from, summer isn't a verb you do somewhere, summer is a thing that happens TO you, like weather or grief. And I said, "On the water, mostly," which made everybody nod, and which meant: in an above-ground pool, holding a hose.

Miss Birdie didn't say much all dinner. But every time one of us landed one, I'd see it — that cousin-of-a-smile, behind her glass. Like a woman watching a horse she already bet on.

Chapter Five: Lawn Games for the Emotionally Unavailable

Saturday morning the storm had passed through, but the creek was still up and the bridge was still drowned, so the whole house party was stuck on the grounds together — which for them was the plan anyway, because Saturday was Games Day before the Sunday ball. Rich people, when they're bored, they don't watch TV, man. They go outside and do violence to lawn equipment.

First it was croquet. You ever played croquet? It's golf for people who hold grudges. Little hoops in the grass, mallets, white clothes. Sounds gentle. It is NOT gentle, dude. There's a rule in croquet where you can knock the other man's ball into the next parish, just absolutely send it, and they call that "taking croquet," and when Harlan did it to Biscuit's ball the first time he smiled like a alligator at a duck pond. And Biscuit — big, sweet Biscuit, who I have seen apologize to a door — got real quiet, and looked down the lawn at where his ball went, and said, "Okay. So it's like that."

And brother, what Harlan didn't know is that croquet is just yard pool, and me and Biscuit grew up playing pool at the VFW against men with anger issues and prescription sunglasses, men who would absolutely take money from a teenager and call it a lesson. Angles is angles, dawg. By the end Biscuit was doing geometry on them boys that had Mims fanning herself, knocking Harlan's ball under the azaleas, into the fountain, one time directly into a peacock's personal space, which the peacock took as a declaration of war, which is its own story. Catty Lou laughed her screen-door laugh so hard she had to sit down in the grass.

Harlan didn't love it. Tripp watched it all from the side, sipping a Bloody Mary, doing that thing where a man claps without his eyes joining in.

Then in the afternoon it was skeet shooting, down past the chapel, and this is where it almost got beautiful, man.

They had a fella throwing clays, and all the boys took turns with these engraved shotguns that cost more than Mamaw Pearl's whole roof — I had to stop converting things into roofs in my head, by the way, that's a poverty habit, everything you see costs some number of roofs — and Harlan was decent, and the Winstons were terrible, and Tripp was pretty good and made sure everybody metabolized that fact.

And then they handed the gun to Biscuit.

Now. What none of these boys knew is that Biscuit LeBlanc has been feeding his family squirrel and dove since he was nine years old. And squirrel hunting, dude, that's not sport shooting. That's shooting at a furry nervous breakdown moving through a tree at forty miles an hour while your stomach's growling. A clay pigeon? A clay pigeon flies in a STRAIGHT LINE, man. A clay pigeon has no survival instinct, no family to get home to, nothing. To Biscuit it must've looked like the thing was mailed to him.

He hit twenty-five straight. Twenty-five, dawg. By the end the man throwing clays was trying to trick him, sending two at once, sending 'em low, and Biscuit's just — pow — "pull" — pow — calm as a man feeding ducks. And the whole crowd of them went from polite to actually hollering, because rich people are starved for the real thing, man, that's the secret sadness in them, they pay all that money to stand near anything authentic. And here's this big boy in a borrowed blazer just performing a miracle of poverty right in front of them, and they thought it was Shreveport money. They thought excellence was just another thing we'd inherited.

Tripp came up after, smiling that billboard smile, and said, "Beauregard. Where'd you say you learned to shoot?"

And Biscuit looked at him, and there was this little pause where I got nervous, and then Biscuit said, "Church camp," and walked off to get a lemonade. Church camp. He told me later he panicked and it was the first place he thought of where he'd ever seen a gun, which — that's a different story too, Pentecostals are wild, we'll get to nothing about it.

But that was the day Tripp went from sniffing around us to digging. I saw him that evening on the side gallery with his phone out, typing, scrolling, typing. And see, here's our problem: the Shreveport Boudreauxs don't exist, dude. You can fake a handshake and a quail fork, but you can't fake the internet. I told Biscuit that night, I said, "He's googling us. We got maybe a day before he finds out we're nobody."

And Biscuit, laying in his nine pillows like a king in witness protection, drinking the one warm Rooster Fuel he'd smuggled in from Charlene, said the thing that I think about all the time now. He said:

"Possum. Everybody here is googling everybody. We're just the only ones whose nothing comes up."

And then he fell asleep like a man with no debts, which is a skill I do not have, and I lay there in the blue room listening to a private chapel's worth of crickets, thinking about roofs.

Chapter Six: The Kitchen at Midnight

I couldn't sleep, so I did what any reasonable animal does in a strange place at night — I went looking for the kitchen. That's the most honest room in any house, man. The living room is the house's resume, but the kitchen is its diary.

And the light was already on. And sitting up on the steel counter, in an old LSU t-shirt and pajama pants, eating cold quail straight out of the icebox with her fingers, was Frankie LaSalle.

Now I told you I'd get to Frankie. Frankie was the only one of the young crowd who'd been normal to us from the jump — and not nice-normal, normal-normal, which is rarer. At dinner the first night, when Mims asked me if I'd "done the season" in Charleston and I said I mostly did my seasons in Louisiana, everybody chuckled at the joke they thought I made, and Frankie was the only one who looked at me like she'd heard the actual sentence underneath. She had her grandmother's forty-over-the-limit eyes, but younger, and sadder around the edges, like the speed limit had been getting to her.

She didn't even startle when I came in. She just held the container out and went, "Quail?"

So now I'm sitting up on a counter at midnight in a borrowed dead man's pajamas, eating cold tiny birds with the heir to all of it, and we got to talking. And dawg, you want to know what rich girls talk about at midnight? The same thing poor boys talk about. Whether the life they got is the one they'd have picked.

She told me about Sweetbay, how it eats people. How her daddy ran off to Montana and her mama ran off to a marriage, and how Birdie raised her here the same way Mamaw Pearl half raised me, except with peacocks. She told me everybody at this party wanted something from her grandmother and nobody wanted her grandmother, and she said it real flat, like a fact off Biscuit's podcast. And she said Tripp had been "handling things" for Birdie for two years now — the accounts, the insurance, the estate stuff — and that everybody said she ought to marry him because he was "sound."

And I said, "Sound like what?"

And she stopped chewing and looked at me. And she said, "What?"

And I said, "Sound's a noise, ain't it. What's the noise."

I don't even fully know what I meant, man, that's just the pawn shop in me. When a man's whole reputation is one word, you gotta shake the word and listen to it rattle. And Frankie laughed — the first real laugh I'd heard out of her, a quiet one, a kitchen laugh, not a dining room laugh — and she said, "You're not from Shreveport."

And I said, "No ma'am, I am not."

And she said, "I know. Birdie doesn't have godsons." And then she handed me another quail like that settled it, and we just sat there. Didn't out us. Didn't ask. You know what that is? That's class, dude. Actual class. Class ain't the forks, man. Class is what you choose not to make people explain.

It was when I was putting the container back in that icebox that I saw the thing.

Sideboard through the butler's pantry door was open, and the silver service was sitting out for tomorrow — the big famous LaSalle silver, this tea service everybody'd been mentioning all weekend like it was a relative, "you'll see the Calhoun service at the ball," made in New Orleans before the Civil War, blah blah. And y'all. I grew up with my hands in silver. Uncle Dewey can smell sterling through a pillowcase. And I'm looking at this teapot through the pantry door, and the light's hitting the belly of it, and something in my animal brain goes: that's wrong.

Sterling don't shine like that, man. Old sterling has a soul to it, a soft gray light, like moonlight that learned manners. This thing had that bright, eager, look-at-me shine. Plate. Silver plate. New plate, pretending.

I didn't say nothing to Frankie. I said goodnight, and went up the back stairs, and lay in them nine pillows with my heart doing a drum solo, because here's what I knew that nobody in that house knew: somebody had swapped the famous LaSalle silver for a reproduction. And it was good — good enough to fool everybody who'd ever owned silver. Just not good enough to fool somebody who'd ever counted it.

Chapter Seven: Pawn Shop Eyes

Sunday morning, the day of the Azalea Ball, I woke Biscuit up early and laid it out. And I want you to understand the position we were in, dude. Two boys with fake names, in borrowed clothes, in a rich woman's house, about to start asking questions about missing silver. That's not a good look, man. That's the first twenty minutes of a Dateline. They got a whole genre about boys like us in houses like that.

Biscuit sat up in bed, did some thinking with his eyes closed — that's how he does it, looks like he's buffering — and then said, "Okay. Who sold it."

Not who STOLE it. Who SOLD it. And that's why Biscuit's smarter than people clock him for, man, because that's the actual pawn shop question. Amateurs ask who took a thing. Professionals ask where it had to go next, because stolen stuff is like floodwater — it can only run downhill, toward cash.

So we spent that whole morning being the friendliest two boys at the party — which nobody questions, because rich people assume charm is a credential — and we did inventory. That's all. We walked that house complimenting things, and every time I complimented something, I looked at it with my eyes from work.

And dawg, the house was leaking. Once you saw it, you couldn't unsee it. There was a painting in the hall, big oil painting of ducks — Frankie said it was "the Audubon-school piece, Walton's favorite" — and the frame was period, sure, but the canvas, man... I got up close, like real close, on the excuse of admiring it, and the surface was flat. Old oil paint sits up off the canvas, brother, it's got topography, you can read it like braille. This had a printed texture, them little uniform bumps. A giclée, they call it. A fancy photocopy in a real frame. And here's the kicker — Biscuit's standing next to me and he goes, quiet, "Possum. Brain Snacks did a episode on art fraud. You know what they said the number one place fakes get found is?" And I said what, and he said, "Estates of rich old widows. 'Cause the buyers fly in but the widow never looks close. The painting just has to fool the insurance photo."

The little soaps man. The podcast paid off, dude. Eleven hundred nights of wombat facts and it pays off in a hallway in St. Francisville.

By noon we had a list. The silver: swapped. The duck painting: swapped. A coin cabinet in the study: half the slots had the right coins and half had coins so cleaned they squeaked — and cleaned coins, man, that's a flipper's mistake, no collector cleans a coin, that's like washing a fossil. Everything portable, documented, and insured was slowly getting hollowed out of that house and replaced with its own school photo.

And who has access, who has the documentation, who knows the insurance schedule, who "handles things"? Sound. Sound like what. Sound like a man with a hole in his bucket, that's what.

So then we did the thing I'm actually proud of. We called Uncle Dewey.

I got Charlene's spare key, sat in the cab — held the radio knob out of pure habit, even though I wasn't cranking her, that's just a prayer position at this point — and called the shop. And I said, "Dewey. You ever had a fella in, late twenties, good-looking like a billboard, gold Daytona, drives a—" and I looked across the lot at Tripp's car, "—a green Range Rover."

And there's this pause, and I hear Dewey set down whatever he was eating, and he goes, "Buffed Daytona? Engraving taken off the back?"

And my whole spine filled up with cold Rooster Fuel, dude. Because I KNEW that watch. I'd been looking at it all weekend thinking it looked familiar the way a dog looks familiar, and it finally landed. Two years back, a man pawned a gold Daytona at our shop, and Dewey bought it out, and I — me, Possum, with my own two hands — buffed the engraving off the case-back before we sold it on, because the engraving killed the resale. And I will never forget what that engraving said, because me and Biscuit laughed about it for a week. It said:

"TO GARY — 25 YEARS — COPY HUT FAMILY FOREVER."

The heirloom Rolex, dawg. The one Tripp told Harlan came down from his grandfather Calloway, "through the Citadel, through two wars." That watch had been through ZERO wars. That watch had been through a RETIREMENT PARTY AT A COPY HUT. And we sold it eighteen months ago to a buyer out of Baton Rouge for cash — a young guy, Dewey checked the book while I sat there, because Dewey's books are the one thing in his life that's immaculate — a young guy who signed the ledger T. Calloway.

A man who buys his own heirlooms, man. That's all you need to know about a person. That's the whole psalm. And a man who'll fake the watch on his wrist will absolutely drain a widow's house out the back door one teapot at a time, and marry the granddaughter so the leak never gets audited.

"Dewey," I said, "I'm gonna need you to keep your phone on tonight."

And Dewey, who has never once asked me a clarifying question in my life, which is either trust or negligence, said, "Boy, where ARE you?" and I looked up through Charlene's windshield at Sweetbay Hall, all them columns going gold in the afternoon light, peacock screaming somewhere like a haunted trumpet, and I said:

"Acquisitions, baby."

Chapter Eight: The Azalea Ball

The Azalea Ball, man. I wish I could make y'all see it.

They strung the whole back lawn in lights, the oaks all lit from underneath so the moss glowed like the trees had chandeliers in their armpits. Three hundred people in dinner clothes. A band in white jackets playing the kind of music that sounds like money cooling off. They had a champagne tower, dude — a TOWER, like liquid Jenga — and waiters coming through with trays of one-bite foods, and I ate maybe forty of them, because poor-boy rule number one is you never let a free shrimp walk past you twice. That rule's older than the constitution.

And the centerpiece of the whole night was the charity auction, up on a little stage by the fountain. For the children's hospital in Baton Rouge — and that part was real, I want to say that, them folks raised real money for them kids, rich people will genuinely launder their guilt into miracles and you know what, the kids don't care, a hospital wing don't ask about motives.

Now the way Miss Birdie ran her auction, there was a printed program of lots — weekends at people's beach houses, a hunting lease, somebody's wine cellar — and then at the end, every year, "Lot Zero." Miss Birdie's mystery lot. Tradition was she'd auction off something personal of hers, no preview, sight unseen, and folks bid stupid money on it just because it came from her. Keep Lot Zero in your mind, alright? Put it in your shirt pocket. We're coming back for it.

So me and Biscuit are working the crowd in our borrowed seersucker, and the plan — we had a plan, dawg, a real one — the plan was simple: get Miss Birdie alone before the auction, tell her everything, names included ours, and let her decide what to do in her own house. That's it. We weren't gonna be heroes. Pawn shop kids don't do heroics, man, we do disclosures.

We never got the chance, because Tripp Calloway had spent his Saturday digging, and Sunday night, in front of the champagne tower, he hit water.

Man came walking up on us with two big boys from the gate crew flanking him, holding his phone up like a little torch, with that smile, that billboard smile with the eyes not participating, and he said it loud enough to draw a circle of quiet:

"Hey, everybody — y'all want to hear something FUNNY?"

And dude, I knew the tone. It's the tone a man gets in a pawn shop when he's about to call something a scam because the appraisal hurt his feelings. The crowd folded in around us. Mims. Harlan. The Winstons, both units. Frankie, going still. The band even came down soft, because bands can smell drama, that's part of being a band.

"The Shreveport Boudreauxs," Tripp says, turning his phone around like a lawyer on TV. "Except there ARE no Shreveport Boudreauxs. No school records, no club records, no NOTHING. But you know what I did find? Whistle, Louisiana." He swung the phone toward Biscuit. "Dale LeBlanc. Seven years old. Head stuck in a mailbox. The fire department came."

And the crowd did that rich-people gasp-chuckle, that sound like silk tearing, and I felt Biscuit go red from the collar up, and something in my chest got real old and real calm.

"These two," Tripp announced, "are the CRAWFISH DELIVERY. Eunice LaSalle is being taken advantage of, in her own home, by two—" and he said some words I won't repeat, but the cleanest one was "grifters," and he was enjoying it SO much, man, that's the thing I keep coming back to. The cruelty wasn't even the point for him. The applause was.

And the crowd's turning to look at us the way a jury looks, and a couple of the gate boys got their hands loose and ready like they did a stretch routine for this, and Frankie stepped forward saying "Tripp, stop it—" and I looked across that beautiful lawn, all them lights, the chandelier armpits, and I found Miss Birdie. Sitting up by the stage in her good chair. Watching. Not moving. Not surprised.

Hold the radio knob, Possum. Crank it.

"He's right," I said. Loud. And the crowd stopped because confession wasn't on the program. "My name is Vernon Tatum. They call me Possum. This here's Dale LeBlanc, finest shot and best man in this parish or yours. We are from Whistle, Louisiana, and Friday we delivered four hundred pounds of crawfish to that kitchen right there, and y'all ate it, and we never lied about a thing in our lives till Miss Birdie told us to."

Murmurs, dawg. The good kind and the bad kind, mixed.

"And I work at a pawn shop," I said. "Dewey's Pawn and Gun and Notary, since I was eleven years old. And see — Mr. Calloway just told you what that means about me. But he didn't think about what it means about HIM." And I reached in my pocket and pulled out my keychain, and I held up my little brass jeweler's loupe — never leaves me, dude, it's a pawn shop kid's rosary — and I said, "Tripp. That's a beautiful watch. Mind if I look at it?"

And THERE it was, y'all. There it was. One flicker. Half a second of weather moving across that billboard face. Because a man with a real watch hands it over like a baby photo. A man with a story watch looks at the exit first.

"I'm not letting some pawn shop—"

"Then I'll just tell 'em," I said, "and you can take it off and prove me a liar after. Gold Daytona. On the case-back, about two o'clock from the center, there's a soft spot in the brushing where an engraving got buffed off. I know it's there because I buffed it. With my own hands, at Dewey's, two years ago. And before I buffed it, that case-back said TO GARY, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, COPY HUT FAMILY FOREVER."

Silence, dude. Champagne-tower silence. Somewhere in the dark a peacock screamed, and honestly? Correct.

"And our ledger," I said, "which my uncle Dewey keeps better than the Bible, says that watch sold for cash, eighteen months back, to a signature that reads T. CALLOWAY. So before y'all decide what a grifter looks like — Harlan, you might ask your boy here why his Citadel heirloom retired from a copy store in Baton Rouge."

And Harlan — God bless Harlan, lacrosse and all, he earned his keep right here — Harlan turned to Tripp with his big jaw hanging and said, "...You said it went through two wars, bro."

"And while we're doing show and tell," I said, and now I turned to where Miss Birdie sat, because this part belonged to her, "ma'am, I'm sorry to do it like this. But your Calhoun silver setting in the pantry is electroplate, made about last year. The duck painting in the long hall is a print in your husband's real frame. And about half the coin cabinet in the study's been swapped and flipped. Whoever did it had your insurance schedule, your appraisal photos, and your keys, and he sold the real things quiet and married the paperwork." I let that sit one beat. "And ma'am — we'd have told you private. That was the plan. He just got to the microphone first."

And everything turned, the whole lawn, three hundred dinner jackets, like a school of fish — toward Tripp Calloway the Third. Who was sweating now, dude. Sweating like a sinner doing math. And he started up with "this is INSANE, y'all know me, you know my FAMILY—" and that's when Miss Birdie LaSalle stood up out of her chair.

You ever seen an old woman stop weather? She didn't even raise her voice. She came down through that crowd with her glass of brown in her hand, parting dinner jackets like a airboat through hyacinth, and she walked right up to Tripp, looked up at him — she was about chest-high to the man — and she said:

"Sugar. I've known for seven months."

Chapter Nine: Lot Zero

SEVEN MONTHS, DAWG.

Whole lawn's frozen. Tripp's face is doing a slideshow. And Miss Birdie takes a little sip and keeps going, conversational, like she's discussing azaleas:

"The silver came back wrong from the polisher's in October — Odile caught the weight, she's hefted that teapot fifty years, you can't fool the hands that carry a thing. So I had Hollis at the bank start pulling threads in November. We found your accounts, sugar. We found the casino markers in Biloxi. We found the storage unit in Gonzales." Sip. "What we could NOT find was where the pieces went, because you sold them clean and quiet, and lawyers are slow, and I am eighty-six years old and do not have time for slow."

And then she turned around, to me and Biscuit, in front of everybody. And the cousin-of-a-smile finally introduced itself as the real thing.

"So when the Bordelon girl's catering list came across my desk with two names from Whistle on it," she said, "I confess I improved the situation. I needed somebody in this house with shopkeeper's eyes who didn't owe a soul on this lawn one thing. The storm, I'll allow, was the Lord overdoing it. But I was never gonna let you boys drive home Friday." And she looked at me, dead level, and said, "Eunice Broussard. Before I was a LaSalle. My daddy ran the bait stand on the Whistle landing till 1962."

And dude. DUDE. The BAIT STAND. The bait stand was still there, man, it's where we bought our crickets — actual crickets, not Biscuit's business plan — and I'm standing there with my mouth open, and she goes:

"I took first at the Whistle Parish Fair in 1959, chess pie division. And second in 1960 and '61, both times to a little hellcat named Pearl Aucoin. Tell me, child." And her voice did a thing right here, just a small thing, like a hand smoothing a tablecloth. "Is Pearl still living?"

And Biscuit — Biscuit, man — says, "Yes ma'am. She's my Mamaw. She'd still take first if her ROOF wasn't—" and I stomped his foot, because you don't pitch a roof at a gala, dawg, but it was already out, hanging in the air with the moss and the lights.

And Miss Birdie said, "Her roof?" And looked at us a long second, doing math of her own. And then she turned to the stage and said the four words that changed our whole entire lives:

"Bring out Lot Zero."

Now y'all kept it in your shirt pocket, right? Lot Zero. Mystery lot. Every year, something personal, sight unseen. Odile carried it out on a velvet pillow, like a crown, and set it on the auction table, and Miss Birdie pulled the cloth off, and brother, I heard my own heartbeat in my EARS.

It was a duck, dawg.

A carved wooden duck. A cypress mallard hen, old paint gone soft as a hymn, and I knew that duck the way you know your mama's cough in a dark room, because I had grown up under a shelf of its brothers and sisters. My Papaw, Ferd Tatum, carved decoys at the Whistle landing his whole life and sold them for two dollars to anybody with a boat. He died when I was six. We got three of his birds left in the family. I check 'em like other people check the weather.

"Walton bought this from Ferdinand Tatum in 1968, off the tailgate of his truck," Miss Birdie said, to the whole lawn, but really to me, "for two dollars and a beer. It has sat in his study for fifty-eight years. Last fall a dealer from New Orleans offered me a number for it that embarrassed us both, because it turns out the art world finally noticed what a bait-stand girl could've told them for free." Then she looked dead at me, them eyes, forty over the limit, and said, "It's a fine thing when the world catches up to Whistle. Lot Zero. Do I hear an opening bid?"

Dude, what happened next I can only describe as rich-people church. Frankie bid first — Frankie, with her chin up, looking right at me, like a dare to all of them. Then Harlan, who I think was apologizing in the only language he had. Then people we'd never even MET, dawg, bidding on my Papaw's two-dollar duck, that whole lawn full of guilt and champagne and them kids' hospital wing on the line, the numbers going up like the creek that stranded us. It went, and I'm not gonna tell you the final number, because Mamaw Pearl raised us that money talk is trashy. But I'll tell you what it rhymed with. It rhymed with witty-six mousand bollars. For the hospital. For the kids. Off my Papaw's whittling knife, fifty-eight years after the man took a beer for it.

And when the hammer came down and the lawn was going crazy, Miss Birdie held up her hand, and got quiet, and said, "One condition of sale." And she picked that duck up off the pillow with both hands, careful, like it might still fly, and she walked it over to me, and she put it in my hands, and she said:

"It goes home first. It's been on loan."

Man, I don't cry. I want to be clear. Pawn shop kids don't cry, we depreciate. But I stood on that lawn holding my Papaw's duck with three hundred strangers cheering and a peacock screaming and Biscuit absolutely SOBBING next to me — Biscuit cried instantly, zero resistance, like a fire sprinkler — and something got fixed in me that I didn't know had a tarp on it. You know what I mean? Everybody's got a roof somewhere in 'em that's been waiting on the money.

The winning bidder got a replica, by the way, hand-arranged by Miss Birdie with the carver in Lafayette and full disclosure, and was THRILLED, because what they were really buying was the story, and the story was better this way. Rich people pay for stories, man, that's the whole economy up there. We been rich in stories my whole life and nobody ever told us it converted.

Tripp tried to slip off during the bidding. He made it as far as the gate. Turned out the men flanking him earlier worked for Miss Birdie's lawyer, not for him, and they'd been flanking HIM all night, and also — this is my favorite part, dude — Thompson Creek was still up over the bridge. The same flood that trapped us trapped him. The Lord is funny like that, man. Same water, two different boys, one of 'em it's a moat and one of 'em it's a door.

Chapter Ten: Whistle

So here's how it all landed, because I know y'all are doing the math on the roof.

Miss Birdie's lawyer — slow no more, suddenly them lawyers moved like scalded cats — clawed back most of what Tripp sold, out of the storage unit in Gonzales and a couple embarrassed galleries in New Orleans. And it turns out there's a customary thing in the recovery world called a finder's fee, ten percent, and Miss Birdie was not interested in our opinion about whether crawfish boys qualified. "You found it," she said. "I have a cancelled check's worth of patience for false modesty." I about fell over when I saw the number, dude. I held the radio knob for no reason. Just stood in her study holding an imaginary radio knob, cranking myself.

Crowley fixed Mamaw Pearl's roof the following Tuesday. New decking, architectural shingles, the works — and Mamaw Pearl stood in the yard the whole time supervising, narrating the roofers, dawg, doing full Aunt Trish, "he's nailing it, he likes that nail, he's chewing on the left side," and I realized it runs in the family and Slidell was never the threat, Slidell was a MIRROR. We don't talk about that.

Biscuit put his share in three places: half saved, a chunk to his mama, and yes, brother, the crickets. Bayou Biscuit's Premium Bait Crickets. I voted no a third time and got outvoted by a man with capital, and I'll be dadgum if he isn't supplying four bait shops already, including the Whistle landing — the same bait stand, still standing, where a girl named Eunice Broussard used to count out shiners in 1959. She holds a stake, by the way. Miss Birdie insisted on investing. She said, and I quote, "I have done business with worse animals than crickets," and looked off at nothing, and we did not pursue it.

Frankie didn't marry anybody. Frankie moved to New Orleans and started doing estate appraisals — real ones, honest ones — and about once a month she drives up to Whistle and eats at Tillie's catfish shack with us, and the first time she walked in she ducked her head under the doorframe like the building might charge her, and now she's got her own table and Tillie hollers at her about her posture like kin. Her and Biscuit will talk crickets for an hour, man. An HOUR. I've timed it. Two of the smartest people I know and the topic is bugs and they're HAPPY, and you know what, that's all any of us want, somebody who'll meet us at our bug level.

Mamaw Pearl and Miss Birdie? Pen pals, dude. Real letters, stamps and all. Except they're not sweet letters, they're a sixty-five-year pie rivalry conducted by mail. Mamaw Pearl sent a chess pie up to Sweetbay with Renata's van, and Miss Birdie sent back a card that said "Crust was forward." FORWARD, dawg. Eighty-six years old, sniping at a crust through the US Postal Service like it's the Whistle Parish Fair semifinals. They're gonna outlive all of us out of spite for each other, and I think that's beautiful.

And the duck — Papaw's mallard hen — she sits on a shelf at Dewey's Pawn & Gun & Notary, behind the counter, above the ledger. Little brass plate under her that Dewey got made at, swear to God, a Copy Hut. It says: NOT FOR SALE. ASK US WHY. And people ask, man. People come in to pawn a weed eater and stay forty-five minutes for the story, and they leave lighter than they came, even the ones who didn't get the number they wanted, and Dewey says the duck is the best appraiser we got, because she reminds folks the stuff ain't the value. The story's the value. The stuff is just the receipt.

Here's the thing I took from all of it, and then I'll let y'all go.

That whole weekend, I thought we were the fakes. Two possums in seersucker, playing dead in the nice rooms, waiting to get found out. But man, everybody up there was in a costume. Tripp was wearing a watch that belonged to a Copy Hut man named Gary, who I hope is doing great, by the way, Gary if you're out there, your boys clearly loved you, twenty-five years is a long time. Harlan was wearing lacrosse from a decade ago. Half that lawn was wearing somebody's old money and the other half was wearing somebody's new debt. The only people at Sweetbay all weekend who were exactly what they said they were, were a bait-stand girl who'd married up so far she circled back around, and two crawfish boys from Whistle who told one lie and it wasn't even ours.

Rich people and poor people are scared of the exact same thing, dude — somebody finding out what they're really worth. The difference is, poor folks are scared the number's too low, and rich folks are scared the number's got nothing to do with money at all.

Anyway. If you're ever out Highway 61 past St. Francisville and the creek's up, don't fight it, man. Let the water decide. Some bridges flood you OUT and some flood you IN, and you can't always tell which one you're on till an old lady hands you a duck.

Gang gang.

THE END.

---

P.S. — Gerald made it. The big crawfish. Biscuit slipped him in a stock pond behind the chapel Friday night while we were unloading and never told me till the drive home. Four hundred pounds went in the boil and one walked, because he had a name. Everything that's ever been boiled had a name, but it works the other way too, dawg — sometimes a name is a raft. Somewhere on the grounds of Sweetbay Hall there is a crawfish the size of a work boot living under a private chapel, and brother, if that ain't the South, I don't know what is.