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ACADIANA, LIKE NEW Orleans, is filled with eccentrics, primarily because it has never been fully assimilated into the United States. It’s a fine place to be an artist, a writer, an iconoclast, a bohemian, or a drunk. Some Cajuns are virtually unintelligible to outsiders, yet nurse their accent and inverted sentence structure and forget the outside world. If you wish, anonymity is only a boat ride away. The Atchafalaya Basin is the largest wetland and swamp in the United States. With the purchase of a houseboat, you can live in places that have no name because they didn’t exist yesterday and can be gone tomorrow.
Modernity has always been our undoing. Our ancestors were farmers and fisher people expelled from Canada by the British in 1755. Unlettered and pacifist in nature and unable to understand the clash of empires, the Acadians wandered for years before they found a home on Bayou Teche. Maybe for that reason, we have a greater tolerance for others who are different or who have been collectively rejected. The disposition and mind-set of Acadiana is little different from those of San Francisco. Maybe that’s why Cato Carmouche lived on a houseboat on the bayou south of Jeanerette, in violation of any number of state and parish regulations.
Most Cajuns don’t like to travel. Many will admit they have never been out of the state. Not Cato. He hooked up with a circus and became a human cannonball, until the night the cannon was slanted too high and Cato was sent flying over the net into the audience.
When he came out of a six-week coma, he discovered that his brain had taken on a facility with numbers no one could explain. He could process percentages and numerical probabilities as fast as a computer. One week after he was released from the hospital, he flew to Atlantic City. Then to Reno and Vegas and Puerto Rico. Cato found paradise in the glitter and cheapness and garish mix of fountains splashing with colored lights and the air-conditioned stink of cigarette smoke. The dice jumping across the felt, the coins rattling in the slots, the snap of a card on the blackjack table, the women whose breasts bulged from their evening gowns, the smell of fine liquor, the ball bouncing inside the roulette wheel—where had these gifts been all his life? At four-feet-one, with a scar like a lightning bolt on his shaved head, he stood or sat at the gaming tables and let the blessings of a meretricious deity shower down on him.
For the first six months on the circuit, he kept his wins low. Then he got greedy at Harrah’s and went into the Griffin Book. Not to be undone, Cato hired on with the casinos and sat with the brass and monitored the eye in the sky and identified the grifters and card counters who thought they knew every hustle in the game. By anyone’s standards, Cato became well-to-do and could have lived anywhere. Instead he came back to Southwest Louisiana and lived by himself on a houseboat painted with the green and purple colors of Mardi Gras and bedecked with glass beads that tinkled in the breeze.
“How’s it hanging, Cato?” Clete said as we walked across the reinforced plank onto the houseboat.
“It’s hanging very nicely, t’anks,” Cato said. “How about yours?”
Cato always had a scrubbed look, and took meticulous care with his clothes and hair, the part as exact as a ruler, each oiled strand a gleaming piece of wire. His voice sounded like it came out of a tin box with gears and springs inside. His eyes were tiny lumps of coal. For some reason he reminded me of Desmond Cormier, as though they shared a similar loneliness, the kind that is usually the fate of the artistically talented.
“What can I do for youse gentlemen?”
“?‘Youse’?” Clete said.
“I spent a lot of time in Jersey.”
“We know your history with the casino industry, Mr. Cato,” I said. “We’re wondering about the funding for a motion picture group.”
“Go ahead and ax me your questions,” he said. “And you don’t got to call me mister, either.”
His houseboat was moored in the shade of an oak. A cheap rod and reel was propped against the deck rail, the bobber and line floating in an S next to the lily pads in the shallows.
“We hear Desmond Cormier is being financed by the gaming industry,” I said.
“Gaming it is not. Getting soaked it is,” Cato said.
“You got some information for us, sir?” I said.
“Jersey money is Jersey money. The tracks are full of it. Some of it is hot, some not. The track and the casino are the washeterias. I got to check my line. Then I got to shower and change. A lady friend is picking me up, if you know what I mean, no crudeness intended here.”
Clete looked at me, clearly trying not to laugh.
“Did you know a woman named Lucinda Arceneaux?” I asked.
“The name is not familiar.” Cato pulled his bobber and small lead weight and baited hook from the water and swung them to a different spot.
“She was murdered, Mr. Cato.”
“I call other people mister, but I don’t ax the same of them. Know why that is?”
“Afraid not,” I said.
“Because people who need titles need somebody else to tell them they’re worth something. No judgment intended.”
“You hear anything about Arab investments around here?” I said.
“I have to confess I haven’t seen no A-rabs of recent. You’re talking about people who ride camels?”
“That doesn’t really answer the question,” I said.
He looked at his watch. It was gold, the size of a half dollar, inlaid with jewels. “Can I get you gentlemen coffee or a drink before my lady friend comes? It’s fixing to rain. That means the goggle-eye perch gonna be biting soon.”
