Cinnamon, Cayenne and Fire Read online



  Cinnamon, Cayenne, and Fire

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright 2012 Daniel Tyler Gooden

  This ebook is licensed for you, but may not be re-sold or given away without written permission from the author.

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for taking the time to read my short story Cinnamon, Cayenne, and Fire. This was supposed to be a story about fire, troublemaking, and alligators. It turned into something I did not expect, but am pleased with. I hope you like it, too.

  Daniel Tyler Gooden

  “At some point in the story, I found myself almost wishing to be burned, which must mean that this story is doing something remarkable.” –Matt Williamson, Unstuck Books.

  Other works by Daniel Tyler Gooden:

  The Unmade Man

  Cinnamon, Cayenne, and Fire

  Beau closed the screen door so it would not bang and set his grandpa falling out of his slumber and out of his chair. How he could sleep in this weather, Beau could not guess. The Louisiana sun had crept onto the back porch to sit in the old man’s lap like a hot skillet. Where it lay across the scarred skin below his shorts—a deep burn running hip to ankle like scorched nylon stockings—the sun seemed to be melting him on the spot.

  “Grandpa Leon, you want to go for a ride?” The old man’s snore answered. Beau gave his shoulder a little shake.

  “Ya heard me?” Leon said with a start before waking fully. Then he looked up and smiled, seeing Beau.

  “I said, do you want to go for a ride?” Beau asked again.

  “Too hot out,” Leon answered. Beau kneeled down beside the old man and tried the phrase Grandpa Leon had always used when he was the man and Beau was the boy.

  “Cher, let’s you and me go find something to do.” Beau pulled his Zippo out and gave the lid its sharp snap-snap—open and close. The sound drew a fierce grin from Leon’s face a bare second before the old man reined it in.

  “I don’t want to be getting you in trouble again, boy.”

  Beau tucked the Zippo into the man’s shirt pocket. “Don’t you worry that, Grandpa. I made some po-boys. Far as Mom knows, I’m just driving you down the river road.” Leon’s face brightened again.

  Grandpa Leon was a firebug for as long as Beau could remember. He was not one of those you see on TV, setting fires to abandoned homes and warehouses and accidently torching sleeping homeless. It was nothing like that—or maybe it was, just with a different style.

  For one, Grandpa was a seasonal firebug. When the spring rains tapered off and the swamps started heating up, bluegill turning circles in their shrinking pools, gator trails drying into mud tracks between the islands, Beau began listening for the antsy snap of that Zippo lid coming out of his grandpa’s trouser pocket. It was like the sun’s hot eye set something afire in the old man and he’d whisper in his thick Cajun, “Cher, let’s you and me go find something to do.” He would grab a canteen for himself, a splash of whiskey for the flavor, and one for Beau, a squirt of lemon juice out of those plastic refrigerator lemons.

  Beau had those canteens in the truck now, though both with the splash of whiskey. In a month he would be off to Tulane, downriver in New Orleans, and though his momma thought he was too young for drinking, he was definitely too old for a squirt of lemon.

  With Beau hauling up under Leon’s arms, the old man made it out of the chair.

  After a few shots of starter fluid, they got the old Chevy sputtering, then coughing regular enough. Beau pulled onto the river road before his mother, Lucienne, remembered to come out from the kitchen and wave them off.

  In Beau’s eyes, setting fires had never made Grandpa Leon seem crazy. Maybe it was because early on, nobody else knew about that. What they knew was Leon claimed to be Ponce de Leon, one-time Spanish explorer, and owner of The Fountain: Liquor and Fine Wines, on Texas Street.

  Setting fires then kind of seemed normal compared to Leon’s sly winks at jokes like “This vodka gonna make me younger?” or the shift from his Cajun drawl to aristocratic Spanish when advising young women which German Riesling goes best with their gumbo and crab cakes.

  Rowdier afternoon regulars would ask, once a week or better, “Leon, tell us where you get your looks.” Leon would start in with the Florida Indians—their healing springs and the glorious rebirth into youth. However long Leon would stretch the story out, it always ended with someone’s whisper. “Where is that fountain?”

  “Where all the best of Florida has gone—under a golf course,” Leon would answer with a chuckle.

  Maybe that bit of crazy was for business, though it continued on the street and to such a degree that Beau’s mother did not walk with her father if there was a sidewalk across the road. Beau thought later that the obvious crazy helped masked the other—the setting fires crazy. Regardless, when kids tease about your grandpa being friends with Columbus, and old coots offer courtly bows of greeting on the street, it is easy to see how Grandpa Ponce de Leon upstaged Grandpa Firebug.

  As they approached the east edge of St. James Parish, the Gramercy Bridge rose into view.

  “North or south?” Leon asked.

  “North, today,” Beau answered. When he was a boy, they almost always drove southbound over the high bridge. The two phone books Leon put on the passenger seat made sure Beau could see the waters of the brown lady below—a bright mirror in the sun.

  South was where Beau first watched his grandpa setting fires. They would cruise down the long alleyways of farmland, where men had drained the wetlands to grow their fields of sugarcane. The old Chevy carried them as deep under the cypress trees as the swamp would let them before the pirogue came out of the back to finish the job.

  They had headed into the swamps so many times through the years it was hard to think of the trips as separate occasions. They were a part of living like waking in the morning or growing hungry at dinner. They were not “one time this”, or “once when we were”. They were one single thing done starting from before he could remember.

  Grandpa Leon would pole the small boy through the shadows, water slipping noiselessly past the boat.

  “This is a lonely swamp, Cher. It mourns for the Mississippi. This here swamp used to be part of that big old river. All these waters used to come to be gathered up in the lady’s dark arms and together they’d dance out to sea. Now she’s bound around with a corset of high dirt walls and the swamps mourn in silence as she slips on past without them.”

  “It’s unnatural,” Beau would interject, too young to understand, but old enough to know this conversation and what was his part.

  “You are right, cher. You are right.”

  Sitting in the bottom of the flat skiff, listening to grandpa tell about the swamp as he found it so long ago, Beau skimmed waterbugs off the surface, or sent swirling the tiny duckweed that covered the shallow water in a jade carpet. He would slap the water, scaring small alligators off their sun-covered logs and back under the duckweed. At home, Beau unloaded his pockets and the kitchen floor bounced and skittered with jumping frogs and pinching crawdads. His mother, shrieking, would drive them out, onto the back porch, with her broom.

  “Lucienne, you’re ruining the nice dinner Beau scrounged up,” Grandpa would say and he and Beau would giggle.

  Somewhere in the day, Leon would ground the pirogue where the hot summer pulled the waterline back like a blanket to unveil a shore of muck drying to fine tinder.

  “What do you smell, Cher?” Leon would ask.

  Beau would tilt his small nose up and drag in a big breath of swamp.

  “Swamp,” he would answer.

  “Smart-ass. What else?”

  It was an expected joke, but being just a boy Beau also spoke it as t
ruth. Over the summers, though, he began to pull apart that swamp smell like unraveling a woven rope. The scent of flowers, blooming in the dim shadow, drifted in the air. Sometimes the thick, sweet smell of burning sugarcane blew in from the distant fields. The sun in the canopy, baking the cypress needles and their old beards of moss, sent down its own scent. All these swam on the surface of thick, warm rot and dank, inky water. Sometimes the rot was more pungent, the gas of some gator’s meal tucked under a root ball bubbling up.

  Where Leon put to shore, that swamp rot smell would hold a drier tinge. Clomping across the ground, the dust carried up a spice of compost and cooking earth. The old man would lead the way, one hand in his pocket with the Zippo lid going snap-snap, snap-snap, scouting for gators and thistles. They did not have to find a Le Conte’s thistle to start a fire, but if they found the thorny plant—its blossom a head covered in bright purple hair—you could bet money Leon would begin to burn.

  “That’s called a Cirsium lecontei,” Beau said in his third-grade year, with all the confidence of knowledge he assumed was only his own.

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Ms. Guidry took us to the botanical gardens in New Orleans on a field trip. They said it was an endangered species, that they were probably going to be extinguished.”

  “Extinct,” Leon corrected, then blew air out his lips. “Bullshit. You want something to grow, or something to heal, you burn it. Thistles come back ten-fold. That’s the circle of life, boy.” He snapped his fingers, making sure Beau was looking up at him. “I’ve spent more lifetimes in this swamp than most have decades on the earth. You want to know about the swamp, you come to me.” His wink said it was all right to smile, and Beau did.

  “We making more thistles then?”

  “Near enough. And if you’re lucky, we’ll cook up a sleeping salamander to fill your hungry belly. Sound good?”

  “I don’t want no samanlanders,” Beau answered, letting his tongue trip over the word like it had when he was still a baby. The expected chuckle floated down from his grandfather’s lips.

  “Maybe a baby alligator then,” Leon said with the laugh.

  Scraping away sticks and the mat of dry algae, Leon pulled up two handfuls of peat. Crushing it between his palms, he rubbed the dry compost fine between his fingers. The dust rose so thick, Beau could see it stream into Leon’s nose as he inhaled deep draughts into his lungs.

  “What do you smell, Grandpa?”

  “Swamp,” he answered with a smirk. Beau grasped his grandpa’s big hands and smelled them; the peat was dark and rich. He coughed, smiling up at his grandpa who was laughing down to him.

  They scraped up a pile of dry algae around the slender spiny thistle and Leon lit it. The flames ran up the tinder like small ribbons of light, then unfurled into banners swirling about the thistle until the purple hairs of its blossom shriveled and the flower collapsed.

  Squatting among the roots of a cypress, its knobby wood rising in little spurts like a frozen fountain, they ate their sandwiches and sipped from the canteens. The thistle turned to ash and took to the sky. After a while, Beau went to circling the fire, stamping out the flames where they crept too far from the center. Leon stood, as he always did, where the wind carried the smoke and returned to smelling, his chest rising and falling like bellows. He always seemed disheartened, like some scent in the peat was lost in the smoke.