The Ghost Of Evangeline-With Jolie Blon The Cajun Queen In Mind

 

 

 

By Lester Lannon

“Where is my Jolie blon, where is my Jolie blon,” the fading voice of the fading Rene Dubois cried out in the darkened night of his sad end hospital bed. That sad end Veterans Administration hospital bed courtesy of a wound he had suffered back in his Vietnam day when “Charlie,” the name that the U.S. troops had bestowed on North Vietnamese regular army soldiers and South Vietnamese civilian guerillas which had never really healed properly since he had been left out in the field too long before the necessary operation could be performed and now was the frontal cause of his final decline. Yeah, the frontal cause but the wound that was really laying him and which he received even earlier in his youth was the one that never healed.     

“I’m right here, here next to your side, Mon Cherie, my love, and will be forever,” Louise Perot whispered barely containing a mass of built-up tears as she wiped the sweat from his forehead with her clenched handkerchief. Those endless tears the result of not finding her beloved until the previous week after searching for almost forty years by various means including private detectives, long journeys and just misses and only by chance had she by the virtues of the Internet been able to find him.

But more on that eternal search and its results later. For now we have to go back something more than forty years, closer to fifty really, and the night when against all reason the two lovers, lovers who had declared from their respective childhoods their eternal knot, had a knockdown drag out fight over some supposed belief, supposed on Rene’s part, that Louise was responding to the advances of Ben Smith. Ben, a guy from New Orleans who had arrived shortly before that night to run the Lafayette part of a family business and who was not even a Cajun, not one drop of Cajun blood. Bloody British as Rene found out when he did the research and Rene as a true son of the diaspora held the plight of his, and Louise’ s forbears from ancient Arcadie up by Nova Scotia, against every son and daughter of that equally ancient enemy.

For the volatile Rene, known far and wide in the wilds of Southwest Louisiana, around Lafayette mostly, as a tough, as a guy who was as likely to wield a whipsaw chain against an adversary as listen to reason was in no mood to see his ancient stock diluted by some tryst between his woman (and down in that part of Louisiana that was the word, that was the stark term of relationship which every red-blooded Cajun man used to define his nest) and the bloody historic oppressor. Louise was the only one who could reason with him when he got in whipsaw chain mood but this night her entreaties would go for naught against the sacred blood. Grandpa Dubois had taught his grandson well the ancient sorrows and the ancient wounds meted out in olden times forcing his people southward to hardscrabble Louisiana.           

Of course that supposed tryst between Louise and Ben was all in Rene’s rather weak-willed imagination since as Louise tried to tell him repeatedly that night when he confronted her with the “evidence” on the basis of hearsay put up from Pierre LeBlanc, a so-called friend who in the end turned out to have had his own very serious un-British designs on Louise. Louise since she had graduated from Lafayette High the previous summer had worked in the business offices of the Lafayette branch of Smith, Johnson & Sons out of New Orleans. Ben had been sent there by his father to learn the business and so since Louise even in the short time that she had worked there being an extremely intelligent girl who in a later age and place would have been prime college material was assigned the task of filling young Smith in on what went on in the offices. That was the sum total of their exchanges. But Rene, a true Cajun in that way too would having formed his opinion bolstered by the lying Pierre, not believed her story, her very reasonable explanation. That night all hell had broken loose in Rene’s head and Louise would later tell friends she for a moment feared that he might if she had not been a women been subject to one of Rene’s notorious whipsaw chain beatings.     

That night several hours after their heated exchange, really early that next morning Rene Dubois who had loved Louise since childhood (and she him) in the dead of night packed up his small bag of belongings and headed out to the Greyhound bus station for the trip to Baton Rouge to join the Army. That previous night would be the last that either Rene or Louise would see each other for over forty almost fifty years. Although not for Louise’s lack of looking, looking everywhere after she had gone over the Dubois trailer on Montmartre Street that next morning and was told by Mama Dubois that Rene had not come downstairs for his usual breakfast and that when she went up to knock on the door not hearing any stirrings at the knock opened the door to find Rene gone.  

Rene’s story is simpler to tell so it can be told first. After getting off the bus in Baton Rouge Rene headed directly to the Army Recruitment Station on Lamar Street and signed up on the dotted line. Signed up in effect for hell since the year he signed up, 1965, all hell was breaking loose in Vietnam and Uncle Sam was looking without question for anybody who would don the uniform and fight the hated commies. Rene, a good if not practicing Catholic boy had been bought up, as many others had who were not necessarily Cajun or Catholic into that script, had bought into the need to fight the commies, to eliminate the dominoes or something like that. “Push their faces into the ground and make them eat dirt” was the way Rene had put it to Pierre when they discussed in passing the fate of the Vietnamese Catholics one night after hearing about a commie massacre of one Catholic village by the commie rats. An event that never happened and which had been the orchestrated result of the South Vietnamese government’s very deliberate media blitz, just one of a stockpile of lies and deceptions by all sides in that civil war. But mainly young Rene was interested in “kicking ass” from Ben Smith messing with his girl to some enlisted men one Saturday night in a brawl after too much to drink to Charlie and his evil ways.     

Rene it turned out once he got some discipline via boot camp and Advanced Infantry Training was a born soldier notwithstanding that Saturday night melee act of indiscipline just mentioned and so he rapidly became a member of the elite 82^nd Airborne Division, a division which would take serious beatings in the battles again Mister Charlie. Of course depending on the day the fight could go either way but somewhere down in the Delta, the Mekong Delta, the rice paddles that produced the bulk of the country’s food supplies one Sergeant Rene Dubois’ luck ran out and he was severely wounded in three places, the shoulder, the right leg and very close to the heart, the latter a wound that never properly healed because despite the advanced medical rescue operation which saved his life Rene had been out in the field too long to have the operation he needed right away to be effective. Several month later he was discharged to ultimately receive 60% disability compensation for his physical wounds and from there he disappeared from any radar. Everybody knew from the reports by the Army officer in charge of notifications that Rene had slipped away to the Army after the fight with Louise, had gone to Vietnam and had been wounded. But Rene never even went back to Lafayette to see Pierre, his family, and certainly not Louise, that latter continued stubbornness was a Cajun trait too despite his continual love for her.

Rene when he came back to the “real world” which is what more and more returning veterans back then called coming back from Vietnam after his recuperation landed and had stayed in California, stayed for no other reason at first that it was not wounded, never healed Lafayette but the direct wounds of war left him helpless, left him with a sea change of heart about what he had done to people with whom he had no quarrel. That angst left him drifting from small job to small job as a mechanic, a skill which he had picked up enough down home working on every one of Jerry Jeff’s super-duper car to get jobs at service stations and small garages up and down the coast until a few years later when his drug habit (and occasional binge drinking, a habit easily picked up in Vietnam although back in youth Lafayette he hated to even hear of anybody using drink) got the better of him, couldn’t put out the fire in his head he found himself in the “brothers under the bridge” railroad “jungle” encampment near Westminster and he stayed with his fellow drifting Vietnam War brothers.

What had happened along the way was that between ‘Nam, the recuperation hospital and then out on the streets Rene had picked up a drug habit, mostly cocaine but later heroin because it made whatever suffering he endured easier to handle. He was able to work and do his share of drugs together for a while but then he just lost whatever motivation he had to move on and moved down instead, moved down with guys who knew his pain and who had created a haphazard raggedly old world for themselves along the riverbeds, arroyos, and under railroad bridges of Southern California. It wasn’t a good life, wasn’t any life really but it got him by for a while, a few years before those encampments kind of fell in on themselves and he wound up heading north to San Francisco and the flops of the Embarcadero. There he stayed for many years doing “pearl-diver,” day labor, bracero kind of work to feed his new alcohol habit after sobering up from the heroin which almost killed him one night. As he aged he became a sad sight around Market and Third, places like that a little raggedy, mumbling, never having any real friends except the occasional stew-bums who gathered together to buy quarts of rotgut wine, Thunderbird and Ripple the bottom of the barrel and swig away. No woman, no woman after Louise and that would have been that, another lost soul out of the ashes of war. Then one morning he had the DTs so bad he could hardly stand and some kindly cop got him into the police van and instead of bringing him to the station after seeing he was a veteran through his VA card brought him over to the Smiley VA hospital over near Seal Rock. And that is where he was and in what condition when Louise Perot finally found him after her long search. 

We already know why Rene left, why his massive Cajun pride got the best of him when he thought, as we know erroneously, that Ben Smith was stealing his time, stealing his girl and she was letting him. When Rene left, left without a word, left for the Army was all she heard from that bastard Pierre she started to succumb to Ben’s advances for a while. But it was not to be because she was still in love with her Mon Cherie, her Rene. That love would take her many places and many wrong turns before she wound up at the Smiley VA hospital. Once she knew she could not love or marry Ben she left Lafayette, strangely enough left for Baton Rouge which seemed to be then the gateway out of Cajun country. She stayed there for a while but eventually headed for Chicago. Chicago one of the main points, Old Town anyway, of connection to the new cultural happenings which would become known as the”1960s,” the counter-culture, the hippies.

While in Baton Rouge she had met up with some “freaks” who were heading west and they turned her on to some drugs, not an uncommon occurrence then either in Vietnam or the streets of America. Not hard drugs like parents used to dread would come unto their children, morphine, opium, or heroin but stuff like grass, bennies and mescaline. “Trip” stuff, magical mystery tour trip stuff when all the non-military, non-square world was getting high on life, high on whatever was new in the world. In Baton Rouge she also lost her virginity one night to a Buffalo Bill kind of guy complete with buckskin jacket, moccasins and cowboy hat from Wyoming and they settled in together in a house, a commune they dubbed it as was the style then, with a revolving cast of residents, about par for the course then. But soon Baton Rouge and that life was not big enough for her and one night she split with just her knapsack and a small handbag and headed to the Greyhound bus station for up-river Chicago. A part, a big part of her leaving the communal scene and her buckskin cowboy who took her virtue although she was pleased to do have him do so, as it would be in the future was that she still couldn’t get Rene out of her mind, couldn’t get over the idea that she would never go to bed with him. And it would be in Chicago in the late 1960s where she would decide that she had to find Rene one way or another. Find out if he still cared for her, or was still holding that Cajun blood grudge.

Louise as the years passed by was mainly true to that idea, to that quest, but as with lots of things in life not everything goes onward and upward the way you like it. Louise, no question, ever since she first got “turned on” in Baton Rouge by those freaks and later by that doped-out silver glass cowboy loved her drugs, loved bennies best of all for they would give her a great deal of energy but after a while that intensity, those three day rushes, wore her down and that was when she, after meeting a girl at a bar on Division Street when she was looking for work as a waitress, got into cocaine, developed a serious attachment to the stuff (they said it was not addictive unlike heroin but don’t ever tell Louise that, not after she got sober). That cocaine madness took her pretty far down into the mean streets before she got up on her feet again. Obviously a young woman with a habit like that, no real resources, no real job skills, and no interest in men, men to be used as sugar daddies, or protectors until she found her Rene needed to find work that would pay the freight for getting high.

Once night she was sitting in Benny’s, the one off of Division, not the one up by the Loop wondering where she was going to get the money for rent from when this big brawny guy came up to her and whispered in her ear that he would give her one hundred dollars if she went with him to his hotel room. He said he had some coke too. Now a few years before she might had thought that advance was kind of raw, such talk she thought would have had Rene shooting from the hip if he had heard about it but just then she took about five seconds to grab her coat and go out the door with him. That first “trick” would not be the last as she thereafter used Benny’s (giving owner Benny his cut and his occasional piece of her which was nice, everybody agreed nice as she earned her dough the hard way) as her place of business for a number of years. Too many.

But the drugs, the hard life on the bed, the hard life on your back took a lot out of Louise, and she did not age well so her clientele since she could not be as choosy dropped down in class too. Some nights she would go down on guy out in Benny’s back alley for a few lines of coke, not much more. Then one day she heard a guy, a Vietnam veteran named Phil who had been through it all as he was willing to tell anybody who listened, talking about a bunch of guys down in Southern California who didn’t belong back in the “real world,” didn’t fit in after ‘Nam (she did not know what that meant then but she soon found out) and who were hanging under a railroad bridge. When Phil was out there, having sobered up himself beforehand, he had stopped by to see if he could help his brothers out, see if he could bring them back to the real world. He mentioned one guy, a crazy Cajun guy from Lafayette who was so surly that nobody wanted to mess with him. Something out of a Nelson Algren novel, a real bad boy especially when he got that cheapjack wine down his throat. While nobody wanted to mess with him nobody was going to throw him out either since he was a “brother.” Louise immediately thought Rene. After asking Phil what the Cajun looked like and finding the description could have been of Rene she asked where the encampment was and he told her Westminster down below Los Angeles.

Louise decided that very night to sober up and head out there to find her man. But like the man said not everything is forever onward and upward so sobering up was not easy for Louise and she fell down a few times before she kicked the jams out of the habit. Took a couple of years to get the kinks out. Stopped giving blow-jobs in back alleys and other indignities as well for lines of coke. But eventually after that couple of years she was ready to go to Westminster. Problem was when she got there the encampment had been busted up by the cops and most of the guys had headed north. So Louise headed north working her way slowly up the coast asking around for the local “railroad jungles” and wound up in San Francisco, working in a bar for tips and not much else. Along the way up the coast Louise would always when she hit a town check the VA hospitals to see if they might have a line on Rene. In Monterey near old run-down Cannery Row made famous by John Steinbeck she got a lead that a Cajun crazy speaking patois (although the person who gave that information did not know what that meant when she asked if he spoke corrupted French) had been there but had moved on a couple of months before.

By the time she got to Frisco town, got a room, got that bar job for tips she had an idea that she was close to the end of her journey. By chance she had stopped at the library off Market Street to check on various locations where a street guy might wind up in the town. She asked the librarian on duty to help her and that librarian directed her to a computer, the Internet and the wonders of Google. After showing Louise what to do she went to town getting a ton of information which she started to use the next day. There were, unfortunately a million places where bums, hoboes, tramps and crazy Cajuns might hang out. It was not until two weeks later that she found pay dirt, found that Rene had been staying at the Cider Inn, a place for homeless veterans no questions asked. Once there a staff social worker told her Rene was at the Smiley VA hospital near Seal Harbor. And that was how Louise wound up forty almost fifty years later sitting next to Rene in that fading hospital bed.