You remember old newspaper serials?

by Pat Laster

How about a modern-day newspaper serial? My short story, "Swamp Tour," can be divided into four installments. I realize this week begins the new year with all its prognostications, but other bloggers will do that. Here goes.

SWAMP TOUR – by Pat Laster, lately published in CALLIOPE: A Writer’s Workshop by Mail based in Tucson. The story was a finalist in the latest fiction contest.

ON A PLEASANT DAY in September, Major Doke Amos of Major Doke’s Swamp Tours Inc. hosed the gray hull of his pontoon boat. Then he wiped down the wooden seats where his passengers would sit. He knew those benches weren’t as comfortable as pads, but they were cheaper. He built them himself. With any luck, the passengers’d be off their duffs most of the time gawking at eagles, herons––maybe even an ibis––or taking pictures of dead cypress skeletons, or blooms of the ubiquitous water hyacinths.

DOKE AMOS, A CAJUN born in a floating cabin at the bayou’s edge, had been around. His grandfather––when he was younger––could pick off an alligator quicker than any coon-ass Cajun in the parish. Doke learned the skill well. His rifle stood at the ready by the helm. Each
September during alligator season, he led daily trips up to the Haxawaxie River and back down the bayou Greeno.

AT NINE O’CLOCK SHARP, Major Doke helped one of the four passengers--and the only woman--down the steps of the boat. He smiled broadly at the redheaded beauty. He would check her ring finger later, as if that mattered. “Sorry for the hard benches,” he said.

RHODA CULLY, A BELLE from a Nebraska soybean family, had moved to south Louisiana with her Cajun husband after a whirlwind courtship. She found out afterwards that he couldn’t keep his hands off the Gullah girls, no matter how beautiful his Midwest missy. She ditched him, and her daddy wired her money to buy a house.

ALWAYS INTERESTED IN FOOD, she learned the native cuisine and studied under Chef Grella who hired her. When he died, she mortgaged her home, bought Grella’s Grill and soon ran a successful business.

HER GOAL FOR THIS TRIP was a harvest of crawfish. She had paid a dear price: her cost plus that of Timothy Creed, a storied local yokel who knew how to bring in the mudbugs.

TIMOTHY BOARDED NEXT. “My boots and gear,” he told Doke, who turned questioning eyes at the young man’s tow sack.

TIMOTHY CREED HAD BEEN a beverage-company driver who wore nothing but brown uniforms. He had come from the school yard of hard knocks. Short on book-learning, he knew every inch of the area around the bayou. He was known to his compatriots as “Duke of the Bush and Reed.” He had no fear of the native wildlife. He knew the plants and their uses and never had even a remotely close call involving a snake or alligator.

HIS BUDDIES TOLD HIM about the ad for a “mudbug harvester” and he applied. He knew how to collect crawfish all right, so Rhoda of the renamed Rhoda’s Restaurant hired him for this trip. His waders and jury-rigged tools lay in the sack that he pushed under the seat. © 2012

TO BE CONTINUED.