The Black Book

‘Twas nigh eight thirty, and a shimmying razor of moon streaked ‘cross the black-tar stillness of the bayou. It was time for the kill. Killing was all Chad craved. And tonight, he would make a killing at killing.

In his mud caked hand, Chad Herbert (pronounced HEY BEAR) clutched a tattered book which once belonged to his hated foe, the numbskull Phillip Dessommes, (pronounced Numbskull!) his beautiful, fancy Moleskine notebook; that which should rightfully be Chad’s!

Well, not that precise Moleskine. The original journal was gifted to Phillip at his eleventh birthday party by the lovely and enchanting Katie Butts. She was ten. It was mere days before, she had asked Chad what would be the perfect gift for a smart boy. Chad’s birthday was coming up, and he had only recently been bitten by the writing virus, having already completed a short coming of age story about a young genius’s conquering of his compulsion for chocolate milk. Now he had big plans to expand upon J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, writing a three-part epic adventure involving the magic ring found by Bilbo. (imagine his surprise)

Imagine Chad’s surprise (this would be quite the running theme in his life) when Phillip was presented the Moleskine by a ravishing Katie Butts in blond pigtails. It was so beautiful. Shiny enough to see your reflection. It must have smelled of hickory sauce and puppy breath. It was too perfect to be handled! Besmirched with oily prints, its pages filled with driveling drivel!

Imagine Chad’s surprise when Phillip was awarded top honors in his class for a poem written in that sacred tablet about bubblegum. BUBBLEGUM!

Bubble Gum, Oh Double Yum.

My Mouth Is Having So Much Fun.

The infantile drivel! Drivel! Drivel! Drivel!

Of course, Chad Hebert would have ample opportunity over the years to acquire his own rodent bound ledger, but it was all ruined. He could not possibly put his pen to those pages without being reminded of that loathsome hack, strutting about with a pocket-sized version with which to endlessly chronical just how insulting one could be to one’s mother tongue, lopping it into miniscule bits and batting it about, instead of holding it aloft with dignity and grace.

Several years later, Chad Herbert would come to know of this firsthand, no longer being able to abide balmy afternoons, crouched low in the picker bushes, watching as Phillip would proudly offer his pages to Katie Butts. Oh, how she would giggle and blush and coo. What was in there that could possibly have so captured her admiration? After taking a glance inside the once perfect pad, Chad knew exactly what made her swoon. PORNOGRAPHY, that’s what!

Bubble Gum, Oh Double Yum.

My Mouth Is Having So Much Fun.

Only this putrid passage was preceded by a vile verse involving her legs and what layeth between. How could she fall for such a shameful exploitation! How crude! Only a few years beyond that, she would no longer be Katie Butts, but Katie Numbskull. And Phillip would go on to be Mayor Dessommes, running on a platform of ecological conservation and a promise to address the growing problem of people’s homes falling into rivers, which had become an increasing nuisance.

But that was much later. Numbskull’s rise to fame occurred via a book entitled “Poems from Bayou Black”, a sickeningly dull collection of musings in which he would compare the murky waters to the River Thames; or imagine himself an alligator lurking dangerously.

I see you there, your hubris on proud display,

But you could not hack it, your pier’s crumbled away.

Now, I could have you for dinner or a snack.

But you’re just not good eatin’ for the King of Bayou Black.

The little black book in which he “composed” the abysmal anthology, sold at auction for $20,000. Imagine Chad Herbert’s surprise when it would become his duty to further feed this raging fire of ego. He had become the junior assistant editor of the People and Culture Column in the Terrebonne Tribune, mostly covering outdoor gatherings of the social elite and sightings of Big-Foot. Sometimes both at the same time. His crowning achievement to date had been an in-depth investigative report following the drama between Thibodeaux Strip and Salvage and its striking workers (Both of them). Little by little, Chad was beginning to become a real contributor to the paper. He was now making almost $400 a week.

But now he was forced, under duress, to give a full-page interview with this oaf, the golden goose of the community, its ticket to the map.

“Well, Chad, I’m just lucky, I suppose. This writing thing’s always come natural to me. It seems like most people who really try can’t quite hack it. Know what I mean?”

Chad would be forced to suffer the indignity of yielding half his Sunday column to whatever suited this Nerd-Swallow’s fancy. Mayor Dessommes would often hold up the entire paper, waiting until the last moment to barge through the main office space into the back corner of Chad’s private storage closet to dictate endless nonsense before giving up and pulling some years old passage from his withered Moleskine, or recounting some tall tale of river-bank restoration which he claimed kept some person or other’s house from falling into the river. The great hero, poet, house-from-the-river saver!

This salvation became such his charge that the great mayor started a foundation, which at once became associated with his cutesy little backwater book of poems, and the fame piggybacked. Soon the Mission Dessommes was being mentioned on major news networks whenever the issue of wetlands conservation arose, and even Chad’s own tiny little paper was receiving broad attention.

But not for him. No, not for the hack who couldn’t hack it. It was Numbskull they wanted. And Numbskull they got, leaving Chad Herbert out in the cold. There wasn’t any other place he could use his talents. So he had to take a break from writing to do the work of men, in the earth, of the land, at Thibodeaux’s Strip and Salvage where apparent the strike continued.

The bullfrogs’ deafening croaks would have shaken the window panes of “HEY-BEAR’S” loggiac shack in the rear of the salvage yard, were there any. How long had he been here? Months? Years? No. Chad had always been here, a wretched creature of the mud, rending jagged spikes of metal from vehicles and appliances day in and day out. He no longer knew his name. He was called only “Hey Bear” by the English impaired stomach with index fingers in boots who barked orders at him from a porch chair. His life before had been a mere creation, a flight of fancy, scribbled in the back pages a Moleskine stolen from a nitwit years ago who’d filled the front pages with terrible rhymes of BUBBLEGUM and PORNOGRAPHY!

But now was his hour, his time to shine. Tonight, Bayou Black would be less Thames and more Styx. It was in his earliest nights fighting the mosquitoes from his red, ridged flesh that he’d seen them watching from the darkness. Their glowing eyes mocking him, judging, criticizing, waiting to take his book. It was the moles. THE MOLES! At first, he had been terrified of their tiny humanoid hands and the licking of their monstrous teeth. They smelled their dead on him, and they wanted revenge. But Herbert would not yield the flesh of their brethren, no. Herbert would fight back.

Careful not to jangle the shards of tin and steel which hung in easy reach from the belts wrapped around his body, Herbert crawled, inch by mud covered inch, towards the bayou, and STRUCK! Twist and writhe, the varmints do. Their hairy backs prick as thorny bramble, and they bite, oh how they bite, deep splattering gashes. They can’t be drowned, they seem to live water, but they can be dragged from it, dragged and swung, their necks no match for the mighty cypress. But, it’s the skinning takes time and precision. With stake and spike, club and hammer, Chad beats them raw, and takes the skin, ripping it in as large of chunks as will heed. The skin is vital. It is the skin will make the books.

Sheriff Butts strolled into the station much later than he’d have liked to. Never once in his thirty plus years with the department had he ever received a call this late that couldn’t wait until morning. But he had to see this.

“Yeah, that’s Chad Hebert, all right. What the hell’d you do to him?”

The Deputy looked up with a chagrin from where he’d been keeping guard in front of Chad’s cell. “All we did was give him a fist full of valium. Rest of that he did to himself.”

“My God.”

Chad lay asleep on the floor. His weapons had been stripped away, but they’d been unable to untie the weave of belts and pelts from his mud smeared body.

For a time, the two men watched him sleep, conjecturing as to how he came to be in such a state. After considering the options, they drew the only logical conclusion: he must be on the drugs. As they prepared to call it a night the deputy snapped his fingers with a smile.

“You know, I almost forgot to tell you the darndest part.”

“Oh yeah?” the Sheriff shuddered to imagine what could possibly be the darndest part.

“Well, you know how Mayor Dessommes’s been taking all kinds of credit for restorin’ the eco-whatnot, right? Ain’t had a house fall in the river for, oh, four or five months now.”

“Yeah?” Where was he going with this?

“Well, I figure that might have something to do with old Herbert out there wrestling the nutria to death.”

“Come on. There a million of those things out there.”

“Not anymore, there ain’t. Ol’ Chad, he must have been at it a while. And apparently, he can hack it as a hunter. These here pelts, they’re just the fresh ones. Roy Thibodeaux says he went back there in that shack where Chad was bunking, said he counted more than three thousand of ‘em.”

“Do what now?”

“Yeah, ain’t that the darndest? Makes me think of when Mayor Dessomes reinstituted the bounty on ‘em. Personally guaranteed six dollars for every pelt.”

“How much you figure that comes to?”

“Oh, I’d say that’s about twenty grand.”

“Wow. Looks like Desommes’s on the hook for twenty grand.” Sherriff Butts looked back at Chad Herbert, covered in mud and varmint blood, sleeping like a baby in the rarely utilized used jail cell. “Imagine his surprise.”