Page 21 of Lulu’s Recipe for Cajun Sass

He tried to be a gentleman. He really did. Was it fair for him to start something with Louise when there was a fairly good chance he wouldn’t be around for the long haul? But then, there was just as much chance that he was the one who’d be scorched in this play with fire.

With a grin, he decided all was fair in love and all that. And Louise was not so young that she needed a handicap in this contest of wills. He suspected she was not an innocent, especially having had a fiancé during the war. At least, that’s how he justified his upcoming all-out assault.

“Why are you smirking?” Louise asked as she dumped her canvas bag into the center of the pirogue which was beached up on her lawn that abutted the stream. She untied the mooring line attached to a nearby tree and shoved the vessel out onto the shallow water, holding onto the rope so it wouldn’t drift away until they were inside.

“I do not smirk,” he said, taking the long-handled paddle she poked him with and stepping into the stern of the narrow canoe, then sitting on the seat at the back.

She jumped into the pirogue, just front of center with an expertise born of years of practice, and dropped the rope. Still standing, she spread her legs for balance and used a long pole to punt them out onto deeper water. The canoe wobbled from side to side at first before righting itself.

“Holy shit!” he exclaimed, grabbing onto the sides of the pirogue, before using his oar to guide them with steady strokes in the traditional J-pattern. “You could have warned me.”

She eased down onto the front seat, setting her pole in brackets along the side, then looked back at him over her shoulder. She was grinning. “Sorry.”

“Sorry don’t make the gumbo boil,” he muttered. One of his mother’s old sayings. Damn! They hadn’t even started their trek, and Louise was making him feel like a namby-pamby idiot, almost falling out of the pirogue, and channeling his mother, for heaven’s sake! Was that her intention? Of course it was. Lure the city sucker into the swamp and make him look like a fool.

He narrowed his eyes at her back, and vowed to make her pay.

In a way he would enjoy.

“Are you smirking again?” she asked, without turning around.

“Just smilin’, sugar,” he lied.

They remained silent then. With him paddling, they streamed steadily eastward. The earlier balmy weather had turned blistering with humidity. Sweat streamed down his forehead and its saltiness stung his eyes. He blinked several times, then swiped at his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt, only then to be hit by a swarm of gnats.

He swore under his breath and blew outward so the little buggers wouldn’t enter his mouth or nose.

“Here,” Louise said, turning adeptly on her bench seat and handing a small jar back at him. “Smear on a little of my insect repellant. The no-see-ems hate its smell.”

No-see-ems was the name given in the South to the tiny midges or biting gnats because they were able to pass through screen doors with ease. Justin wasn’t sure if they had them in the North, too. He didn’t recall ever being bothered by them.

Another plus for the North.

Not that he was keeping count.

Not consciously anyhow.

He set his paddle down and opened the jar, taking a sniff. “Pee-yew! I can see why the bugs don’t like it,” he said with a grimace of distaste. But when he slathered a few fingerfuls on his face, it worked. “Thanks,” he offered begrudgingly. For some ridiculous reason, he was blaming her for the bugs, and the sweat. Probably because he wasn’t usually required to go to so much trouble to seduce a female.

Am I trying to seduce Louise?

Damn straight, I am.

Paddling and steering took all his concentration at first because of all the submerged or half-submerged trees, including the weed of the bayou, the loblolly, and the bell-shaped trunks of the bald cypresses with their roots jutting up out of the water here and there like knobby knees. Louise, who’d turned around again, called out directions, but it was still difficult to avoid the obstructions.

Just then, his focus was broken by a hiss and a loud roar, so loud he jumped on his seat and caused the pirogue to wobble again. It was a large gator, a female by its size; males could be up to twenty feet. Not that this creature wasn’t formidable at about ten feet long. The gator was guarding its nest…a huge mud mound three feet high and ten feet across made up of decaying vegetation and twigs which held its eggs, as many as fifty or so. They’d just rounded a bend in the stream, and the nesting spot hadn’t been visible to him right away. Otherwise, he would have stayed on the other side of the bayou stream. Which he immediately did, with him paddling and Louise standing and facing forward again, poling them forward.

“You knew that was there,” he accused.

“Well…” she said.

We could have gotten killed.”

“I would have saved you.”

“Hah!”

The gator followed after them for a distance, showing off a mouthful of piano-key teeth, roaring a message which was probably something like, “Humans…yum! Taste just like chicken.”