THE RUSE BOMBS
PRELIMINARY JACKET COVER
Marie Gautier acquires an early racial hatred
when her mother is killed by a drunk Mexican
in Corpus Christi, Texas during WW II. Twenty
years later she returns to her birthplace,
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as the principle in a
convoluted plot to discredit all Mexicans and
avenge her childhood loss. Her lover and friend
orchestrates the plan from a distance, tuning
her talents in a performance whose outcome is
known only to a sinister group called "The
Consilium". Caught in a maelstrom of love,
racial hatred, revenge, and fear, Marie grasps
for reasons that crest and drag her beneath a
family secret she is unable to accept.
THE RUSE BOMBS
Jon Thörngren
Within the smoke a motive smolders.
Richard Carl Harkins, 1962
CHAPTER 1
"A pipe bridge?" Marie asked. "Is that something like a pipe
dream?" An April wind through the half-open, passenger side window
crisscrossed long strands of lustrous black hair over her face
partially hiding her smile toward the driver: Billy, her lover, her
friend, her focus, and - she hoped - her last. His ten year old,
1953 Ford lunged to the left after sinking into a pothole,
interrupting his reply.
"No ... you big pill, a pipe bridge is just what it says: a
bridge across a road for pipe to lay on."
"And that's what you want me to blow up, correct?"
"Right, Mother Mary Guterrez," he chuckled.
"You can stop with the 'Mother Mary Guterrez' crap. That's a
name I told you in secret, a name someone stuck on me in high
school. I resent it. I'm not Mez'can. I'm second generation
French, 'Marie de le Jardin Gautier'. And I especially resent the
'Mother Mary' part. It's offensive. It's sacrilegious."
"But you're not Catholic."
"I was ... at one time, perhaps still am. But that's beside the
point. It's a painful name. I told you that. Please, Billy, don't
use it again."
"O.K., but, no, you're missing the point. You're supposed
to be Mexican. You've got the dark skin, dark hair and dark
eyes - eyes so dark you can't tell the pupils from the irises.
You're perfect for the part. You promised me you'd do this - for the
Consilium, for our country." She thought back to last year,
looking up this word in her high school Latin book and now almost
laughing at his tight frown - a Roman centurion with Gallic-style
helmet sporting a red plume ready to battle the "Mexican" Visigoths
swarming across their borders. And then her anger returned.
"I thought I was going to be 'Mary Gonzales'," she snipped.
"Are you changing my name?"
"You still are 'Mary Gonzales'. Don't get your bowels in an
uproar."
"I don't understand you. Sometimes it seems as if you go out of
your way to aggravate me," she replied turning to look out the
window into the evening's darkness.
"For our country," he said with emphasis. "For our country,"
she said in a monotone.
Gradually the walls of their flat, tree-lined highway funneled
outward, and the roadbed angled upward on an ever-increasing incline
like the first hill of a roller coaster. The Ford's straight six
cylinders clattered, and Billy shifted into second gear. As they
strained to reach the top of the bridge, the Mississippi River
spread out beneath them, its night-black water glistening in random
ripples beneath a myriad of lights near the eastern shore and the
gate to Baton Rouge, Louisiana - lights that cast scary shadows on
industrial behemoths clinging to piers and landings, belching smoke
and steam as if daring each other to cross the unseen boundary
between them. She glanced back at Billy's profile as he looked
straight ahead with both hands clenching the steering wheel
preparing to descend the apex of the bridge into the capitol of
Louisiana.
Billy Boyd Davis was not as he appeared. She was sure.
He was not the well bred college graduate he portrayed. He was
country, country as the flatter-than-flat dirt of west Texas around
Odessa, on which he was born and nurtured. Billy was his birth name,
not William, the cognomen of his father's brother. Just plain Billy.
The surname Boyd, sounding somewhat more respectable - that which he
should have chosen as his first name - came from his mother's side.
But it was the little items she saw blister his thin veneer and mar
his "refined" image: fingernails seldom cleaned, a mouth never closed
while eating, and grammar filled with error whenever he became
excited. And the crude, the west Texas crude, not the sweet West
Texas Intermediate crude oil, the oil royalties that paid for his
education, but the crudest of jokes and quips, most delving in the
potty region, but some, when he felt more sophisticated, beginning
respectfully enough but always degenerating into the female groin
area. And tough - she shivered when she remembered the night he
removed a rotten wisdom tooth. Anesthetized his mouth with a rinse
of straight burbon, reached into his jeans for a pocketknife and dug
it out. Took several gougings; came out in two pieces. And bled, as
he so aptly put it, "like a stuck hog." The he rinsed his mouth with
another shot and continue partying for the rest of the evening.
Tough, raw, and west Texas crude: characteristics that, from her
experience, seem to brand more than half the males residing on the
west side on an imaginary line running north and south through Texas
from her northern border on the Red River, south through Fort Worth,
San Antonio and Corpus Christi, down to the Gulf of Mexico.
My Charming Billy Boy, she mused. His broad nose isn't too
attractive, but the other features are crisp and sexy. Oh, and the
eyes - always half-closed and dreamy as if he were just waking from
a night's sleep, eyes drugged with an overdose of romantic endeavors
before rising. And the long, curled eyelashes were like the
underside of breaker waves over ocean-green irises. She felt a
familiar warm moisture and turned to look straight along the white
highway-dashes that gleamed and faded under the car's low beams.
Turning back to her right, she noticed the Kaiser Aluminum
Sign on an acre sized, rust colored giant that roared and puffed a
dingy gray smoke, a dragon standing in the juncture between the
bridge and the water's edge. The wind and tire noise disappeared
as Billy braked smoothly at the point where bridge and land melted
together.
"The brilliant denizens of Baton Rouge call this stretch of
US 190, Airline Highway, even though the airport is miles to the
north." Before he finished speaking, they exited right, headed south
parallel to the aluminum plant. "Here's another paradox from the
city's good fathers," he continued. "Scenic Drive? What in the hell
could anyone ever find scenic about this? Miles of refinery
and chemical plants on one side and clapboard houses on the other.
You can't even see the Mississippi. But I guess 'beauty is in the
eyes of the beholder', and if you're a big-wig living out by
University Lake managing a plant that made you a hundred thou' a
year, this would look pretty-damn-pretty."
"How do you know so much about Baton Rouge?" she asked.
"I lived here for a year after I graduated from North Texas;
worked for du Pont in their freon plant.
"Graduated?" she asked with a smile.
"Well ... almost. Anyway we'll go straight to the pipe bridge,
and then we'll go eat." In a moment he turned right onto Gulf States
Road, a one lane black top heading east toward the river. "That's
Esso Refining's tank farm on your left behind the cyclone fence. They
stretch from here all the way, about a mile, down to the Mississippi.
Crude oil is stored in those giant tanks and processed in that area
farther south where you see those tall columns and flares burning."
"Flares? You mean those big, dark candles sticking up in
the air? ... Oh, look, one of them is really shooting up a flame.
Why is that?"
"Could be a lot of reasons. Could be an emergency vent from a
vessel before it explodes or just a plant startup, dumping reactor
gas into the flare lines until the rest of the plant is ready for
it. ... This is it."
He braked as they approached a giant, two story high structure
straddling the road and rolled to a stop on a narrow shoulder under
its shadow. A chemical gremlin whispered through the open windows
in a breath slightly laden with the pungent odor of olefins and
chlorinated hydrocarbons, something akin to a mixture of turpentine
and cleaning fluid. Small white steam clouds spewed upward from
bleeder valves in a continuous low level hiss. A wispy film of fog
gathered above stagnant pools in a bar ditch along the side of a
large concrete pillar. A never ending line of such pillars ran deep
into the Esso complex. On the their top lay a regular series of
horizontal beams that carried a roadbed of pipe. Pipe - she
noted - in a ribboned jungle, pipes of all sizes, some no larger
than a garden hose to those as big around as a human torso. Gray and
black snakes whose stomachs whistled within from fast moving vapor.
She was frightened; the bridge was a foreboding animal that spoke
in shrill whistles and "sss's".
"This is it," he repeated. "This is your stage, the third act,
the climax. We'll go over the script again later. It will be
awhile till you perform, but essentially all you do is place a
suitcase behind one of those stanchions - their gaze met - behind one
of those big pillars ..." "I know what a stanchion is, college boy,"
she grumbled. "I've almost got my associates degree at Del Mar. That's
in Corpus, in case you were unaware, and they're every bit as good
as, where did you say you got your 'almost' degree ..."
"Then," he continued, "set the timer, and you have exactly,
give or take a few minutes, one hour to leave before it explodes."
Her chest muscles relaxed as the car moved forward. Was it
the act they planned or the location itself that transformed
excitement into terror? Her thoughts vanished as he spoke,
"That big building down at the end of the road sits on the Mississippi.
That's Gulf States Utilities, this road's namesake. They generate the
steam and electricity to power all the chemical plants on this side
of the road," and he waved his right hand toward her side of the car.
"And Esso provides the raw material for these plants: ethane,
ethylene, methane, all sorts of hydrocarbon gases, and they come
through those pipes across that bridge. You see, refineries make
more than just gasoline and motor oil," he said with a pedantic grin.
Billy turned the sputtering Ford around in the two acre sized,
Ethyl Corporation parking lot in front of the guard gate and headed
east back toward Scenic Drive. "I forgot to mention that after you
place the suitcase, be sure to turn around - just like we did - in
front of that guard gate. Make yourself seen. Drive down here at
least once every other week. Do it with the top down."
"What top?" she asked.
"A 1960 Ford Fairlane convertible, bright blue, registered
in you new name, Mary Gonzales. It'll be at the airport when you come
in. I'll mail you a key to your apartment in Corpus along with a
city map. You should drive with the top down as often as weather
permits. You are to be seen, noticed, a single, Mexican senorita
living in Baton Rouge. Comprendes?" "Si, Si." she replied with a
smile. "Very good, and speak that Mexican stuff in public whenever
you can. We want everyone to suspect that Mexico was behind this."
At the traffic light, he turned right heading toward downtown.
"Where did you live when you were here?" he asked.
"I don't know. I was only six when we moved to Ingleside,
Texas, near Corpus Christi. I do know we weren't too far from
Istrumo High School 'cause brother David had just started there.
I remember the house. It was chalky white with black trim around the
windows, around the doors. The sides were small wooden slats that
rubbed dust on your hands whenever you touched them ... like from
a blackboard. And there was a large catalpa tree near the back door
with little orchid looking flowers about this time of year. They were
so delicate, so pretty that they should have filled the air with
a heavenly perfume, but they didn't. In early summer, big, white,
ugly caterpillars would crawl all over it and eat the leaves. Father
loved those catalpa worms; used them to catch fish out of Bayou
Pigeon. We ate a lot of fish, and my father downed a lot of Dixie
beer in the process - that s.o.b., and that stands for 'selfish old
bastard'... Do you know why I remember the catalpa tree?"
"Tell me," he replied.
"Because it was connected with an emotional event. Didn't you
say that memories are embedded to a depth of the emotion behind them?
That we can remember things even as far back as when we were in the
crib if there's enough emotion involved?"
"True. That's what I learned in one of my psychology courses,"
he said as he traversed a bend in the road. "That's where I worked,"
he pointed to his right. She glanced toward several acres of tanks
and building where a dozen tubular columns, three and four stories
high with lamps along their sides, rose like limbless, dead Christmas
trees.
"Interesting," she cut him off and continued, "A year after we
moved, I was drawing a picture of our old house and the catalpa
tree. It was in November when it became covered in long, slender
mahogany colored beans, thin as your little finger and long as your
forearm. I drew it on a sheet of Big Chief Tablet paper, and I used
only two Crayons - black and white. The leafless tree had long,
black lines for the beans, and her trunk was black. Even the steps
on the back porch were black. When my mother saw it, she said,
'Ah, ma Marie, le monde n'est pas tout noir et blanc (... the world
is not all black and white).' My mother always spoke French to
me ... I hate November. Do you know why?"
"I know; your mother was killed in a car accident by a drunk
Mexican."
"And there are other reasons. It was in 1942, Thanksgiving
dinner, when Father announced that we would be moving at the
beginning of spring semester to Ingleside where he had a new job as
a shift supervisor at Humble Oil. Brother David cried because of the
friends he would miss at his high school. And I cried too; I thought
I would no longer be able to go to first grade. Father kept trying
to console us with: 'But the money is good.' Big deal. As if money
means a lot to the young ... Selfish Old Bastard."
The odor of roasting coffee beans overwhelmed them as they
passed the Community Club Coffee plant, a smell similar to burning
wood and old tires.
"An interesting smell," he said. "dark-roast coffee, and it
doesn't taste anything like that stink. I love Community Club; got
addicted to it when I worked here."
"You're talking about that chicory stuff they serve in New
Orleans, right?" she asked.
"Naw, that's for tourists. I mean real coffee, what the locals
drink, a deep dark roasted bean. That's what your smelling, the
roasting process. A good meal, a good cigar, and a cup of Community
Club. Doesn't get any better than that. Speaking of which, I'm
getting hungry. What do you want to eat?"
"Whatever tickles your tummy."
"That would be the locks of your hair while you do what I like
most," he said with a leering giggle.
She smiled, pinched his leg through his tight, black denims and
said, "I'd rather have something nutritional."
"Let's go native. The crawfish are running. How 'bout Giamanco's
for some boiled ones?"
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