SKIMMING THE
GUMBO NUCLEAR "Facilis Descensus Averni" Chapter Seven There was a grad student in biology and biochemistry who couldn't quite cut it in Medical school. She had gone into veterinary medicine and had several minors in etymology, reptile study and beer drinking with the boys at the Chimes Bar. That was where anyone from the seventies played once, to the latest coterie of punkers since Jesus played street ball and Caesar was slam-dance jerking down at the vomitorium. She was Kendra, who if she had not been endowed with a brain, would have had no trouble getting into the modeling business. She was of such beauty it made many a man build up his bollixed up sperm count beneath his belt. She had a face that launched a thousand ships. She was in danger of being perfect. She had a deep sultry voice. She had a beauteous blank face of pure charm and gorgeous eyes and a mouth that just plain was perfect. She was of aryan stature, tall, 5 foot ten. Her tanned skin covered every square inch of her radiant body. She was timeless, a classic. She had gone through undergraduate studies, going to rush parties, at the request of every heterosexual man and others. She was dated at LSU football games. She went out jamming and partying in legendary exploits unknown to modern civilization. Some of them were of mythic proportion. Getting so drunk at an LSU football game that she pissed in her pants. She went to the ladies room inside the bowels of the stadium and used a hand dryer blower to vaporize the affected area. Drunk many times. Would go to bed with any rock star on M-TV quicker than a possum eating a sweet potato or faster than you can spend 1000 bucks at Cortana or Bon Marche Mall. She went to Murphy's bar, home of the famed miniature Lolitas. Sorority babes, the noted Tri-Delts were smallish but perfectly beautiful, proportioned, and mature beyond their years. The place was covered with oily rosin of beer. There was many a nickel beer night there. She did have a talent in the biological and natural sciences. In high school she had a star in her notebook for every time her and her punk-rocker skull-ear-ring boyfriends partook of LSD and ecstasy! Many an boyfriend would call her using his one phone call from whatever jail they were calling from. She was a much chased byronic vision of splendor. An automaton of quality like a centerfold. But equipped with a brain that she just didn't apply. Instead she sought the wild side of life. Many a fraternity boy was after her; even Atkinson couldn't manage the miracle of getting into her fabled trousers. She had been to the White Horse Tavern, Fapps, Zacharies, after many a football game. The reason for her being made by the gods of muse above was to give men pleasure. She had gone to many a rock concert. She was queen of her high school once. Like Professor Moriarty, she spun her web of intrigue whose tendrils focused from a hub and spread to many intricate unseen corners. A celebrity on the night club scene during her Undergrad days. She had slapped many a frat rat for grabbing her breast. She puked up many a fifth of Jack Daniels. She learned not to take drugs anymore and went to graduate school to pursue biology. She could easily been on the cover of Vogue or sat in cattle calls in New York. And successfully made it in light theatrics and movies and television. The biology students didn't know what to think about this angel of lust and pouty, thick Kelly LeBrock lips glossed. And those eyelashes and that heaving bust. That tanned skin, the overall ambrosia of the gods embroiled in human form. Walking talking Jesus, she was fine off her ass. Many a frat rat would have liked to screw the dog crud out of her. She came waltzing in. The elderly professors took to her immediately. They saw her talent with nomenclature. She aced the biochemistry exams, the chemistry labs, all that good stuff. The students ogled her and loved every part of her. She was the stuff men dream of. And she made those grades. Her parents had split up during this time, but she took it well. Gone were the endless trips to New Orleans to Nick's Bar, where the theme from the Flintstones could be heard in 70 MM Dolby, and a 6'10" inch Tyrone, the bouncer took kindly to her and knocked the crud out of anyone pestering her. The plutonium shot, the abortion purple passion, the swamp fart shot were all her own, once. She had put in the long tedious hours, quite unlike her undergraduate days. Now she excelled in her studious application of bugs and lizards and crawfish and fishes and the dissection of the lot. She had to fight off her suitors, though pugilism with the frat rats enabled her to easily get along with the much more subtle graduate students. The professors loved her. She had a few various boyfriends off and on. Not ready to settle down into the real big LOVE thing yet. Chapter Eight Cornbread, the old black jailbird, wizened from the ages, had been sent down to the docks again to drill yet another hole in the concrete shipyard docks. Two days earlier some white boys had been asking Big john the mailman joint dealer football player about why Cornbread didn't have any teeth. Big John cracked a wrinkled curly-que grin from pot haze in his mind set, and said, "They don't give you no toothbrushes in Angola Prison." He had saintly eyes, brown as almonds and a gaze atop his perch fire watching. They didn't even know if he had the strength to turn on that firehouse and hold it if those welders did catch some gas line on fire. The black laborers rejoiced in this man and his image; he stood for peace and tranquility. They took care of him. He was their savior for some reason. He didn't say a word; he could have been mute. Those two teeth coming out of the top of this palette were all he had. Nobody ever saw him eat. They even joked that he had turned two loaves into two thousand oyster po-boys and fed the milling throng. Parables were created about this honorable ex-con; no one really knew why he had been in Angola. He was the kindest, happiest looking man. That old wrinkled countenance had seen the olden days. He soaked empathetically all the hypocrisy. He was still nothing to the white man. In the north end of town, in those tar paper shacks by the refineries, people were dropping like flies just like the in manicured suburbs. There were no strata or stratification of class and denture; Cancer hit you whether you had a fat checking account or none. But Cornbread was like the Second Coming. He was an illusion of kindly color. Ennobled by all, the welders seemed to shy away from him. He had some kind of mystical reverential power unseen. But they did send him along with a white laborer to the docks. About three months after Harrison was an Exxon laborer working for the scumbags at National Maintenance, Cornbread got sent over with a blond geek wigged out fool. He drilled the hole perfectly with his maligned style, punching bits and shards of concrete which popped into the river sixty feet below them. Some Norwegian sailors were making phone calls in the phone booth next to a supertanker smoking french cigarettes. Cornbread was trying to find out where Mr. blond geek was and went down into the descent of the rickety docks. In the nether underworld of Neptune and Poseidon, where his godlike fantasies were conjuring themselves. He smelled something fishy. He found the geek smoking reefer under the docks. The geek pointed out the nest of sinister eel-like activity, now proliferating. It was truly amazing the monstrous nest of slithering Medusa-like snakes with snarling glowing apertures weren't found before. And it wasn't the biologists, it was the old Second Coming for the Jim Crows, Cornbread, crawling up, balancing carefully on the beams to see that unnatural vision he thought was in his imagination. Like when he used to kind of pray and see the Holy Virgin come descend into his cell in Angola. Hovering above his bed, he thought, She had come. He was getting closer to the nest of the slithering things. Cornbread smiled and waved at these things. They were hissing and whining and seeping with insidiousness. He saw only the inner circle of hell, purgatory. He had seen this for forty years in Angola, staring at the graffiti and art on the walls of the prison. He decided to enter that world. He knew Jesus commanded him to walk and cure the snake sticks, he had heard the voices. He summarily walked and sat down in the nest of eel-things. Now horridly stygian-shaped and much more smelly, fungoid, algaed, smelly. Rotten and mutated with triple heads, teeth now snapping and chewing the flesh from him. Flaying the skin in their own evil way. He smiled as they chewed him up. Before he went unconscious he smiled to Jesus and told him to leave the gate swung wide open. Here he was coming in his momma's truckwagon through the dirt roads of Iberville Parish. She told him what a good little boy he was. That he had kilt his little baby brother with a rock and now he was feeling okay, as the flesh was ripped from his arms. He didn't waver; he was in shock, bloody and mutilated. It was like dipping some raw meat in piranha waters. He smiled up to Jesus and the blessed Virgin watched him go to purgatory where the counsel would decide where to send the old man now seen as a little boy with archaic smile grinning in wounded festering hopelessness. He was dead now, and with the angels on high. They questioned the geek and Cornbread's body was found. More of a skeleton with pieces of flesh still adhering to the frame. In the Water Treatment plant, the corpse had gotten caught in one of the main valves and it was flowing a bit with sanctimony. That's what the men had said, the grinning bodice was in a strange assuming posture of reverence, a clanky holy order vessel. They put the remains in a body bag, the decomposition after the body had been churning in the undercurrents of the river; they assumed that he had fallen in. They fired the blonde geek and his pot that Big John had given him was the reason. The black men mourned the death of their saintly old jailbird. Stories spun would be remembered. The pauper's grave near Devil's Swamp up north there between the Exxon fringe of the northern ridge. And he was forgotten by the leathernecked welders and pipefitters. They would mutter about that black man getting killed, and it was a good thing, one less. And continued to walk the pipes in steel-toed boots teen of feet in the air with a nonchalant air befitting circus acts of daring feats. But stubborn closed minds with a rebel flag draped around ignorance forever. Chapter Nine Mr. Wayne Langouis's brother-in-law was overtly pissed at the lack of attention them reporter fellahs were giving him about his relative. Mr. Langouis was found in a boat with weird non-non-fishy like thangs. Sher was paralyzed by the monster eels; it caused him heart failure. Dem things from outta space them scientists at the cawleege say. His own brudder-in-law, he done got kilt; all he did was go fishing like he had been fer sixty years. Since he was a little baby in Grand Coteau, him and Wayne were best friends. Mr. Boudreaux from Breaux Bridge done went and got himself a lawyerman. He was gonna file suit against somebody; somebody was in a wrong about dis. And his poor sister Madeliene, she had herself a nervous breakdown and got put in a mental help center. She ain't nevah had no problems in the mind before. She done missed her man, fine Wayne Langouis. Paw Langouis had so many grandchildren the funeral had been packed with people. And Boudreaux had tried to explain what he thought had happened, and what was gonna happen to more fishermen. He was talking to Thibadeaux and Bob Guidry and Henry Sillbeaux, and they had thought they all had seen some slithering type things, yeah. Those reporters wid dem television stations in Lafayette were all tryin to capitalize on the rumors of outer space creatures landing and festering in nests in the swamp. They had found dat one near Baton Rouge at the Exxon docks. Them LSU biologists were now taking dem in and dissecten dem all up. They still to this day cannot explain what kind of creature they were. It was a mystery like the Holy Trinity. They found double-headed snakes and even found some fishes with radiation contents dat would cause severe sickness of radiation. Poisoning to all dem folks who make their living on shrimp boats, and catfish farms, and crawfish ponds. Mudbugs a glowing like little penlight batteries. And now de whole world was eating Louisiana cooking, Blackened Redfish, Red Snapper, Crawfish etouffee, all dat stuff in dem bays yeah. Them fancy cajun restaurants were opening in Dallas, New York, and New Awlins. Dem city folks was gonna start hearing them reports about glowing in de dark. And them big-assed restaurants wouldn't take no catfish or crawfish or even dem big shrimp as big as your hand in the gulf. Boudreaux had got himself a lawyer and him and his neighbors were gonna try and go out there and catch them. But dem neighbors said, dem biologists already done dat. They know what they doing. But the old cajun people thought it was a sign of the devil. They said the rosary many times yeah. And went to Novenas on Tuesday nights at Church. Boudreaux had said his confession to Father Patin, and Father Patin toll him to go jump in the lake the way he was talkin. Ain't no satanic thing; it was about the environment. Father Patin's little brother was dying of cancer and he wasn't even thirty yet. he worked over at River Bend Nuclear facility for eight years as a security guard. And now his skin was so painful, hurting and Melanoma was what dey call it. Father Patin told Boudreaux to just keep on talkin to dem fancy lawyer types. They couldn't file suit about Wayne Langouis gettin eating or poisoned by dem outer space eels, but about all the neighbors that had been stricken with one form of cancer or another. It was a plague going round. The swamps were turning into freak shows. Two-headed deer, lizards and fishes with no eyes, two-headed calves. The environmental protection agency had several major suits pending against Dow Chemical, Exxon and River Bend nuclear plant. The thugs and wheels tried to grease their palms but they was good honest folks, poor, but none of em trashy! The plague had run like a dark carnival through the heart of the state. A boy with flippers born at Abbeville Hospital; two headed cats that didn't live too long. Fishes caught that glowed in the dark like their deep sea counterparts. Nests of eel-things found all over now, inundating the state with hyperactive talk. But the people were ignorant, the lot of them. They saw the eel-things as just another fish. They didn't have no radiation in them. There was plenty of deer, and nutria rats, and crow and choupique and alligator gar, just like these eel things. The people were so used to eating almost everything that came out of the swamps and marshlands that some eel-thing wasn't no different. It was a running joke with the people now. Cancer alley was a big lie. Every bit of people weren't scared about them eels. Eels was eels. Squid was squid. Some people ate it over rice; some people used it for bait. Chapter Ten Sophia, that television lady, oh how famous she was. She taped another segment about tryin to talk more about cancer incidence in the vicinity. She had some lady on there from Denham Springs. This was the place they were taping at; at a K-Mart parking lot with bleachers full of good country folks. River rats from Livingston Parish, and Port Vincent, all come to see the famous black lady do that talk show. "Ya know, for a black man she don't act like most of em . . ," one old stringy grandpa mused. "Crud man, she ain't no different." People sat in the bleachers watching all these gaffers and cue cards people and the star of the show, Sophia do her thing. Taping had commenced and the guests were just plain old folks. Sophia looked in the camera in that boiling hot sun in the K-Mart parking lot. "Cancer Alley is a stretch of land from St. Francisville, down through Baton Rouge and the Atchafalaya Swamp and Lafayette to New Orleans. It is packed stacked up closely with refineries. There's Georgia Pacific, and Dow Chemical, and Exxon, and Dupont, and Tenneco and Texaco, and Shell, and the list goes on and on. Many generations of Louisianians made their living working at those plants. On my show we are gonna prove that these refineries and the River Bend Nuclear Site are to blame for more than a 45 percent mortality rate of cancer. Fifteen to twenty points higher that any other area of the United States, with the exception of Utah and New Jersey. They showed a sign to clap and the spud heads clapped and gawked. They whooped when the warm up guy did some jokes to keep em occupied while the taping was off the air. It was sweating breasts off a boar hog it was so hot! The K-Mart was the mystical shrine of dwellers and smart shopping. And it didn't look like there were too many black manes around. "Our first guest, Mrs. Ida Mae Figg, is a resident of Springfield, Louisiana. Tell us a bit about yourself." The fat lady in double-knit polyester slacks and heaving stentorian breathing fidgeted and sucked in that massive gut and whooped away. "Well, me and my kinfolk done had words with the doctors at Seventh Ward Hospital. They said my husband and my two brothers all died of cancer because they lived near a creosote factory. And then they found out we was gonna sue them factory people in Ponchatoula, and they up and changed their minds!" She was on the verge of tears mixed with nervousness. "Our folks is just simple, we just go shopping and try to lead a normal life, and we go to Ponchatoula Pentecostal Church." "So what you are saying Mrs. Figg, widow of Leroy Figg of Springfield, is that too many people have died in your family alone?" She begged the question. "Yes, that is right." "And you agree that this place has a high incidence of cancer. Right?" "Yes ma'am." "And how do you come to think like this?" "Cause they found a malignant tumor on my breasts." (it was a wonder she didn't call that load of heaving bosom titties), she laughed. "Can I say it like that on Tee Vee?" "Yes ma'am, this is a serious subject. So you have a growth on your breasts." "That's right," and she went on. "And you say that is the biggest problem in this state, right?" "That's right, Sophia, except for the colored folks in them projects selling crack and killing." What better revelation than at a K-Mart in Denham Springs. Sophia walked trough the tiers of the bleachers, smiling and looking at the kinfolk of universal southern gothic nature. She said "Ida Mae, you do a lot of shopping at K-Mart, right?" The audience laughed. Ida Mae said proudly. "Nope. But I spend almost every weekend and half the week in Wal-Mart, they got better prices" The crowd roared with laughter in huckleberry biscuits of sound. She walked up to one old black man and put the mike in his wizened wise face. He resembled Stepin Fetchit aged sixty years. "I don't think crack and dope has anything to do with this issue. We are here to talk about cancer and monstrous new forms of life, not racial and crime stuff, you know" He looked at the whooping fat lady who could possibly have worked in a state fair to make a few extra bucks at the Guess Your Weight Booth. She looked away and started mumbling prayers. Sophia might have thought she was going to end up rattling around on the floor, not unlike a frat rat gatoring in the Tigerland water holes late into the night. Her tongue was almost babbling though in silence. Sophia addressed one of the biologists from the University. Some medical staff from Ochsner Medicine in New Orleans, LSU school of medicine, looked on. "So what percentage of these cancers are formed or come about?" Sophia pranced in her new designer jeans. "Are they because of River Bend nuclear facility? Because of plants like Dow, Exxon? All the refineries, all thirty or so of them up and down the river in this state?" The biologists and doctors talked. "Because of the lawsuits pending between the environmental protection agency and the Nuclear facility and the Waste Disposal plants around North Baton Rouge, near Devil's swamp, we cannot comment specifically on who is responsible." "Now. You, Kendra Horst. First of all, you look more like a model than a biologist. By the sound of this crowd you should consider going into acting or entertainment." Kendra laughed a deep sultry sweetness, quite unlike a whiskey tenor. Some hayseeds in the peanut gallery were whooping and hollering. Kendra had on a semi-sexy outfit (the grad students told her not to dress up too much, she was supposed to lend an air of modified authority and verisimilitude to the proceedings, which was now almost turning into a Tennessee Ernie Ford record spin in Tupelo). Kendra spoke, and immediately her professional attitude took hold. "Well, you want me to give you some information on these creatures. We had found two or three central nests or traces of them so far. We do not at this time know what these creatures have to do with nuclear spills or cancer. I am not a medical doctor, but I have dissected many of these things, they might belong to the family " ," genus " " and related to the family of muscular creatures found in the Florida everglades. We do know they are NOT from outer space, like so many tabloids have said. We find that to be irresponsible reporting and as part of the LSU research team, this just creates panic and havoc. We have found many of these creatures to have multiple heads coming forth from a ventricled split spine. We do not know whether radiation is the cause for this. We have found traces of radiation poisoning in these and several other creatures, in the Atchafalaya swamp, and in Devil's Swamp landfill, which are areas near several refineries, and Exxon petrochemical, specifically. "So these may be a result of, and the cancer deaths also, from a huge blend of caustic chemicals and nuclear radiation?" Kendra fidgeted in her chair, as one old boy was whispering how he'd like to do it with her, and it got caught on the audio mikes. "We simply do not have enough to go on at this point." There went Sophia, searching renderer of causality and precis' of armageddon. She walked over to Ida Mae Figg, now having regained her composure. She stopped praying for that old black man man in the front row in that K-Mart parking lot at four in the afternoon as the sun set over the interstate I-10 exit. "Ida Mae," She said patronizingly. "Do you think this is a result of just something to come? That we are going to experience something of a plague, a black death, like the middle ages or something?" "Well, ma'am, I just know that our minister said that dark times are acomin like the Mark of the Beast was a stamped on all of us. We just got to be paying for our sins, for the evil deeds we are a doing" Miss Sophia got a more relevant answer from Dr. Sorenson of New Orleans Pathology. "We believe that if some of these waste dumps are not cleaned up, and the nuclear facility is continuing to sporadically leak radiation and toxic waste is to continually be stored in bottomless salt domes, that we could experience something akin to the Black Death. It would be tantamount to the demise of all the folks in Louisiana. And all I can say is that the Environmental Agencies better folks in Louisiana. And all I can say is that the Environmental Agencies better crack down and win some of these lawsuits. There will be a major class action lawsuit from these hundreds of cancer victims, even though it will be hard to prove which would have died anyway from cancer. And which were as a direct result of chlorine spills, asbestos, toxic waste, radiation dispersal floating debris over various areas that the wind takes this dangerous stuff. It could be as bad as the AIDS epidemic." One old boy said something when they jammed the mike in his face. He had buck teeth all gnarly and rotted, and a trucker's cap on. He was gawking at Kendra on stage just a waiting to be poked real good-like. "This is worse than the AIDS epidemic. That just basically kilt off all the homersexual fruits. This is good people being kilt off. For no good reason. God didn't mean it his way" He paused. "God might a wanted to kill off the fruits, but it ain't right to kill off us people just trying to survive and raise a mess a kids in a crime free environment." "Have you checked yourself for cancer?"
"And where do you work?" "Well, I worked at Georgia Pacific waste treatment for ten years, and now I worked at River Bend Nuclear" Miss Sophia laughed. They went to commercial, and later the carnival taping finally concluded. In Grand Coteau, just outside of Lafayette, the creoles and cajuns watched Sophia do her thing.
"How can you be thinkin' a thing like that, man? Dey just said about them chemical petroleum plants causing Maw Maw's cancer. And Aunt Loyce's daughter's cancer, and all my friends cancer in der families!" "I was just watching that Biologist. She ain't only good looking but she got a lot a brains, yeah." "You gonna call that lawyer man?"
"Are you gonna set dem traps in Whiskey Bay dis weekend, Boudreaux?" "If I went out der, I might get kilt like Wayne Langouis." The paradise had dawned now as a caustic pit like Devil's swamp. With little monsters from outer space who knew who would be safe? Chapters 11 thru 14 will be up on the March 1st. Visit M.F. Korn's web site, February 1999 HofP |