“Where is she?” I asked aloud to no one in particular. Naturally no one answered. “But it’s my birthday and I have plans,” I protested. How do you make God laugh? Tell Him your plans. The fine November Saturday was exactly the kind poets write about. I composed a quick verse.

Blue November sky

I wonder why my wife is late?

Not my best, but wifey was keeping me waiting and I had an appointment with an eighty-five year-old sugar cane farmer down South Louisiana. I was researching a magazine article and didn’t want to miss my window of opportunity. Tempus fugit and all that crap. My last interview attempt with a 92-year-old farmer ended before it began. Apparently, he had a previous engagement with Death. Now I was down to the octogenarians.

I called the farmer’s house to arrange the rendezvous. A Cajun woman’s voice answered.

“Oh, he’s in the fields, but he’s got to come out by three ’cause he going to Mass at 5:30 to pray for his immortal soul.” Immortal soul indeed.

Ah, there it is–the familiar sound of the garage door opener. My wife drove up in the Ford Himalaya, the biggest SUV known to man. I winced as the vehicle entered the garage, missing the support pillar by millimeters. “Ok, cher, I’m ready.”

I groaned at her French pronunciation. Ever since we’d seen The Big Easy on a TNN rerun, my cracker wife from the Mississippi Delta had been calling me cher. Normally the French word for “dear” sounds like “sha,” but my sweet magnolia continually mispronounced it “share.”

“Mais, where you been at, eh?” I chided. When I get irritable I revert to my own boyhood Cajun accent.

She purred. “I been at the beautician’s. Don’t you like my new look?”

“Well, sure, baby. It looks great. It makes your face look thinner.” Actually, I couldn’t tell what she had done to her auburn curls, but I hadn’t been married three times without learning something. “We got to get on the road.”

A pouted parry. “How you talk. You know just what to say, cher. Them empty praises gonna be the death of you one day.”

Backed up the gas guzzler, narrowly missed the lawnmower, we headed west.

It was pushing two o’clock so we stopped at a generic fast food drive-thru just over the Mississippi River for a quick bite. I asked the girl at the window, “Are y’all’s hamburgers better than they are across the river?” I hitched my thumb over my shoulder to indicate back over the bridge toward Baton Rouge.

Shawana’s restaurant cap was pinned to her high-rise bouffant at an cocky angle but the girl’s wit did not match her hip-hop attitude. “Um, what?”

“Leave that gal alone,” my 50-year-old wife said. “You’ll scare her to death asking her something she’s not trained to answer. There ain’t no button on her register that tells her how to respond. She’ll probably tell her gangsta boyfriend to pop a cap in yo’ ass.”

Note to self: we gotta stop watching Ice-T and Law and Order: Special Victims on the tube.

Blissfully driving along I-10 West, green grass ahead, Lyle Lovett a smidgen below uncomfortable, I ventured a comment. “It looks like landowners have planted their rye grass and it’s already come up.”

“Her right breast did what?” my wife asked without looking up from her quilting.

“What?”

“Her right breast did what?” she repeated, as if this is normal conversation between us.

“Rye grass. I said rye grass!” realizing absurd conversation is rapidly becoming the norm with our middle-aged aural skills.

Approaching the Bayou Teche, I pointed the Ford Behemoth south into the heart of cane country, over the old wooden drawbridge, past the village of Parks and beyond St. John’s Plantation Company Store.

Company store–I think of the old Tennessee Ernie Ford song. Well, St. Peter can come and get me any time he wants because my soul is beholden to no one. Arriving in St. Martinville, I turn left onto Cemetery Road and proceed into the Deep, Deep South. We pass more cane fields and slow cane tractors hauling massive, wobbly loads of raw sugar on substandard, snaking roads without shoulders. Their destination is the old Iberia Sugar Mill.

“Be careful, honey.”

“Mmm hmmm.”

The sugar mill is ugly and the atmosphere smells like an old shoe dipped in dog mess. I have no personal communication system so I use a nasty pay phone at a convenience store across from the stink factory to call my farmer. He doesn’t answer and my wife suggests I ask inside the store. “They probably know him.”

I get lucky. The Asian woman behind the counter does know him and directs me back to Cemetery Road.

I turn into the farmer’s long clam shell driveway. A white Cadillac Gargantua approaches. It slows and the power window slides down. My farmer. I spot a highball in his cup holder.

“I’m going to Mass,” he said. “You can call me late at night. I tell you everything you want to know about old-timey sugar cane farming.”

“Okay,” I said. He drove off.

“Wait!” I yelled, chasing down the huge Caddy. “Define late at night.”

“After six, before eight,” he shouted and drove off again.

“What now, cher?” my wife asked.

“Plan B, babe. The ulterior motive of the trip. Louisiana State Highway 14 to Abbeville for oysters, chere bébé.”

We continue our descent south. I know LA. 14 in name only. I’ve seen the map, and I know it’s the great state’s southernmost east-west highway. We cross US 90.

“LA. 14 is here, somewhere, I know it is,” I said to myself. My cracker wife and her Cajun husband hurtle relentlessly southward and she appears to be amazed by the still flatness of the marshy land

“There ain’t a hill in sight. Where you taking me, boy?”

“A date with destiny.”

The pavement suddenly changes from good to bad as if the mayor of the marsh had opposed a vindictive Governor Huey Long withholding highway funds. But Huey is long gone. There is only me and my wife in the Ford Everest.

I saw him first from my command driving position. Standing in the middle of the southern road and dressed in black from head to toe, though not impeccably, he looked like a hipster bogeyman. As I slowed the SUV to walking speed the man performed a slow spinning jig. His pants were baggy in the seat and worn at the knees; the jacket frayed around the collar and sleeves. Bits of marsh grass protruded from every pocket. Duckweed seed was stuck in his shaggy coal-black hair and glued to his pale face. He stood on the road’s yellow line with arms wide open as if to greet me.

Nervous, my wife reverted to her comfortable redneck drawl.

“What in the name of Sam Hill is Johnny Cash doing in the middle of the swamp?”

“It’s marsh, baby, not swamp.”

I slow down and stop. My window glides down. Strange. I didn’t press the button.

“You look like hell, mister,” I say. “Can we take you somewhere?” There is an assaulting smell of rotting vegetation. Cottonmouths slither about his feet.

“It is I who has come to take you, Ervin.” His voice echoed.

“How do you know my name?”

“I know all, Ervin Pellerin. Come with me and we will continue our southern journey down to the burning ring of fire, your final destination.”

“Nope, sorry, je m’excuse. Who in the hell are you? Mais, how do you do that? Make your voice all reverby…?”

“Silence! Ervin Pellerin. I am your ultimate omega. Death comes to all and I have come for you. You will come with me, I comm….”

“Wait a minute, who’s Ervin Pellerin? My name is Irwin Pellerin,” People–and apparently demons from beyond–always have trouble with the name Irwin. They want to replace the w with a v. I’ve been called Irin, Irving, Earwig and Erwinkle. Never got used to it.

Swamp Breath shuffled his feet. “Irvin Pellerin, 516 Florida Street, Denham Springs?”

“No, Old Scratch,” I replied testily, Death or no Death. “I’m Irwin Pellerin, 615 Florida Boulevard, Baaa-tonnn Rouge, boy, and the only date I’ve got is with a dozen naked oysters on the half-shell and this fine, soon-to-be-naked Mississippi woman. Now crawl back into your swamp and let me be.”

“Marsh, cher, marsh,” my wife corrected.

I burned rubber and Johnny Death receded in the rearview mirror.

Seconds later the familiar green and white highway sign at the next crossroads indicated I have stumbled upon LA. 14.

“I knew it was here. You see, woman? We didn’t roll into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s right here. Raw oysters here we come.”

Two hours later and three dozen invertebrates and seafood platter digesting in my belly, my Mississippi woman and I check into Room 66 at a nearby Motel 6.

“I ate too much. I think I’m gonna die.”

My magnolia blossom lifted her blouse over her head to reveal the gorgeous milky skin of her bare breasts.

“Not tonight you ain’t, Irvin. Not tonight.”

##