Heller and Shannon: Big-Daddy's Crawdad Scent

 

Two of LR’s new friends wanted to be introduced to the girls in LR’s party.

The party from Tennessee was “stag” and the two guys, Slider and Snek, thought meeting some girls from Michigan might be interesting.

LR didn’t think they were going to get lucky with them but he was more than willing to introduce them to the group sitting around the Michigan campfire.

“Hello Ladies and Gentlemen” LR started out. “I wanna introduce you to a couple of my new, best friends in the whole world: Slider and Snek.”

“Slider is an interesting nickname. Do you play baseball?” Shannon asked.

Snek snorted and then politely spit into the campfire where nobody could step into it. “Nope. He don’t. He's named after the turtle.”

“How does somebody get named after a turtle?” Shannon asked. 

Snek volunteered “He blushes easy and his ears turn red. That, and the way he stretches out his head and bends it to talk to you. Damned ringer for a slider-turtle.”

“OK, I can see that” Shannon said with a chuckle. Even as Snek was explaining, Shannon could see Slider’s ears turning red in the dim light of the fire. It was clear that Slider was shy and that Snek was the more talkative of the two.

“So how did you get named “Snick”?” Shannon asked.

“Its not “Snick”. My name is “Snek”, like a Copperhead” Snek elaborated.

“Why would anybody want to be named after a snake?” Ce’Diff* sneared. She could not abide conversations that were not centered on the topics SHE chose as being suitable.

“Ma-am, most folks in the South don’t get to pick their nicknames. They are given to us after we earn them” Snek informed her.

“Folks don’t know I am around unless I want them to know” Snek said. “Just like a Copperhead in a pile of leaves.”

Reptiles gave Ce’Diff the heebee-jeebies and she was anxious to have them leave. The last thing she wanted were more distractions when she was holding-court.

The other thing was that Ce’Diff was tipping into a monumental migraine. Unbeknownst to her, she had become dehydrated on the trip and the flickering of the fire's flames were lighting her up. She was also dealing with roller-coaster ‘sugar’ issues. Ce'Diff was not having a good night and it was making her even meaner than was her habit.

The best thing to do would be to give the rubes an assignment and send them back to their own campsite. They needed a clear message that they were not welcome here. 

Somehow, between the headache and the wooziness from the dehydration, Ce'Diff had missed the fact that LR was one of her own party.

“Why don’t you three trot back to your own campsite and turn down your stupid, racist music” Ce’Diff said to them in her command voice.

All three young men bristled.

“Ma-am. That ‘racist music’ you're referring to is Darius Rucker” Slider informed her.

“I don’t care if he is George Washington. His music stinks and I shouldn’t have to listen to that racist shit” Ce’Diff said.

“How can you say that music is racist?” LR asked, astounded.

“All that talk about wagon-wheels. It is a racist dog-whistle that celebrates the genocide of the Native-Americans” Ce’Diff explained.

Slider and Snek looked at each other in consternation.

“Where did you get that?” LR asked.

“America is the most racist nation in the history of the world. EVERYTHING in white culture, especially southern, white culture is rooted in racism” Ce’Diff said, looking pointedly at the three young men. If that didn’t make them leave then she would have to get more direct.

“That is total bull-shit and even a total idiot like you knows that” LR said

“You will NOT use those words on me” Ce’Diff said. Shooting pains stabbed down, between her eyes and she felt rage flare up.

“Or whaddya gonna do? Report me to Human Resources?” LR mocked her.

“I WORK in Human Resources” Ce’Diff shouted at him. “I will find out where you work and I. Will. Get. You. Fired.” 

LR's voice was high and nasal. It pushed her buttons. She knew she had to crush the little-shit quickly because she only had so much stamina.

“Knock yourself out” LR dared her. “You are still either an idiot or a liar….and probably both. You have to know the shit you are peddling is a total pack of lies.” 

And that is when the fight started.

“From what I read, most Indians were killed by diseases and not white people” LR said.

Ce’Diff snarled back “THEY ARE NATIVE-AMERICANS, not Indians. And those diseases were given to the Native-Americans by the white people!”

“Well, I always heard that the Native-Americans who came from Asia gave the Native-Americans whose ancestors migrated from Europe syphilis. Seems like a fair trade in both directions to me” LR said.

“What the hell are you talking about” Ce’Diff demanded.

“The ancestors of the Indians came from Asia. India is in Asia. It seems more honest to call them “Indians” than to call them Native-Americans because they did not evolve in North America. They came from someplace else, just like the people of European ancestry who were born in America” LR said. “They are either both ‘Native Americans’ or they are Indians and White people.” 

"White people got syphilis because they raped the Native Americans" Ce'Diff ground out between clenched teeth.

"Listen, honey. This may come as a news to you, but some women LIKE having sex with men" LR told her. "And some women will have sex with men to get trinkets. You cannot assume it was rape because you weren't there."

“You are twisting my words” Ce’Diff said. LR's calling her "honey" goaded her beyond human endurance.

Reading Ce'Diff's body language and seeing that being called "honey" torqued her up, LR doubled down.

“The words coming out of your mouth are twisted, babe. I am just pointing it out” LR said in, what he perceived as, a perfectly reasonably voice.

One of the guys sitting by the fire snorted and Budweiser came out his nose. That caused the other guys to burst out laughing.

Ce’Diff was enraged. She assumed the guys were laughing at HER. Her voice got louder and more strident. She would not give an inch.

The fight reminded Slider of the time he landed a 28 pound Blue Cat on 4 pound line. He had been fishing in the reservoir and the fish had pulled him all around the impoundment.

Ce’Diff’s voice was exactly like the screaming of his reel’s drag. 

LR let her run before patiently reeling her back in, one rod-length at a time.  Unlike Slider's catfish, every time LR got Ce'Diff up close to the boat LR beat her like a retard hitting a piñata. Mercilessly. Time-after-time-after-time.

*

Shannon remembered from the pre-trip briefing that the valley had very spotty cell signal further down the river and was taking advantage of the antenna-repeater in the park. 

She was "fact-checking" both Ce'Diff and LR's statements as they argued back-and-forth. To her surprise, much of what LR said was at least partially true. Not every statement was totally solid but he nearly always got a little bit of the bat on the horsehide.

And much of what Ce'Diff contended was incomplete or slanted or just plain wrong.

For instance, Ce'Diff said "Fannie Lou Hamer testified in Congress that sixty-percent of all Black women were sterilized in the south in the 1950s and 60s."

LR called "BULLSHIT. She might have said that but it didn't happen. There would be hardly any Blacks in Mississippi if it were true. That number has to be WAY high."

Shannon's flying fingers found the actual, documented sterilization rates. "It says here" she said without preamble or invitation "that one Black woman in three-thousand was sterilized for mental illness in the 1950s. The only women they sterilized had mental illnesses that were hereditary and could not be treated...at least by the technology of the day."

Performing a few, quick calculations Shannon added "The number Ce'Diff quoted is too high by a factor of 2000."

That earned her murderous glances from Ce'Diff.

Undeterred, Shannon continued to fact-check and comment as the fight's duration became epic. Ce'Diff was a pain-in-the-ass and it didn't bother Shannon to see her have to defend her overbearing and outrageous assertions.

The fight was wide-ranging and neither Slider or Snek could remember the whole thing when they talked about it later that night. Nevertheless, a few ripostes stood out.

Ce’Diff said that America still engaged in genocide against people-of-color and she pointed the huge number of black people in prison as proof.

LR casually dismissed the claim. “You know that is because they commit more crimes than white people, right?” It wasn't a question. It was posed as a simple statement of fact.

Ce’Diff went on another drag-smoking run and LR calmly turned her run and pumped her back toward the boat.

“Where do you live?” LR asked. “Okemos? Williamston?”

“Dewitt” Ce’Diff spat out.

“Why is that?” LR asked. “The house you paid a million dollars for in Dewitt you could-a bought for $200k or maybe $250k in Lansing.”

“It is because of the amenities” Ce’Diff said. "Dewitt is a very nice town."

“Nobody is stupid enough to spend five-times as much for 'amenities'. Nobody! Not even you."

"You would've stuck that extra $800k in your pocket and DRIVEN to Dewitt to your favorite coffee-shop” LR said. “Total bullshit."

"You bought a house in Dewitt because of the crime. And another thing, the reason those ‘amenities’ don’t exist in Lansing is because of that same crime” LR said.

The only time LR showed empathy was when Ce'Diff brought up the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment. "Yeah. That totally sucked. That never should have happened."

But then he took off at a tangent that Ce'Diff never saw coming "But why am I accused of racism one hundred years** after the study started at a BLACK UNIVERSITY? I wasn't there. It was being run by a Black University. Why are you blaming me? Why are you even calling it racism? Tuskegee was a BLACK University with Black administrators running a study on Black people."

Ce’Diff was exhausted, bedraggled and blinded by her head-ache when LR finally went back to Snek and Slider’s campfire to listen to country music. She dragged herself back to her tent.

Ignoring the warnings of the guides, she opened a bag of fried potato-skins and ate the enter contents of the bag, scattering crumbs over her sleeping bag and among the clothes she had scattered in her haste to get to the bags of munchies.

At 4 in the morning a family of raccoons decided to tear through the flimsy mosquito netting and join Ce’Diff and her tent-mate.

It could have been the fried potato-skins.

Or maybe it was because Snek made a minor detour past Ce’Diff’s tent on his way to check his catfish lines. He may have felt compelled to squirt a couple shots of Big Daddy’s Crawdad scent into Ce’Diff’s tent a half-hour before the raccoons paid their call. 

Or maybe it was because of the fried 'tater-skins. History will never be sure.

*This name was selected solely to entertain CederQ. It will be interesting to see if anybody else gets the inside-joke.

**The Tuskegee Syphilis study started in 1932 (90 years ago, not 100 years ago) and ended in the early 1972. Some Black men who had syphilis were not treated to act as a control in the study.