STEALING LIFE

“Thistle was born with a cotton-top that had gone mostly brown and he was short for his age. Before the war started an old Cajun woman in Bays Town predicted he’d live so long that his hair would turn white again. For a dollar, she told him, she could arrange for him to die a rich man.”

“Royal Boudreaux named his boats for the bays and bayous of the Gulf Coast until he’d run out of those. Back when he was wrangling pirogues in the Atchafalaya basin, Papa dubbed his outfit Minnow Carriers and the name stuck. In 1970 the incongruously named company became one of the twenty stocks in the Dow Jones Transportation Average.”

“Dough taught son as he’d taught father and before Wendy was old enough to vote he could steal with the best of them. Lou even exposed the boy to the rudiments of money laundering and tax evasion. While the other kids took jobs at Burger Chef and saved up for used cars, Wendy drove a red Corvette to high school and was more or less a bona fide member of the gang.”

“Stella whispered the scabbed-over prayers of the doomed but knew his appeals would not be heard by an angry and neglected God. If little Billy Stella remembered anything from that psychotic snake-handler waving a bible at him it was that if you forget about Him, He’s gonna forget about you.”

“He’d been born in a French Quarter tenement when the district was little more than a slum. His mother worked in Storyville and the other whores told him his daddy was the mayor of New Orleans, something his mother never really cleared up before she disappeared.”

“Dough always said any booze more complicated or stronger than an ice-cold can of Schlitz beer could make a man feel more complicated and stronger than he actually was. A feeling, his uncle warned, that could lead to serious trouble.”

“When the fifties ended, Lou graduated from law school and cut a beeline from New Haven to Wall Street where he joined the young Turks who were making 3-M, Xerox and Polaroid household names. When they got older and wiser, and the Go-Go Sixties fizzled, Lou’s generation of swells would bring the world NASDAQ, junk-bonds and mountains of criminal case-law.”

“The cops found Phyllis and the contractor at an outdoor revival meeting following a tip from a motel clerk who refused to check them in. Moments before being escorted out of the big tent, shivering and sobbing, Phyllis had gotten herself baptized in a full-immersion ceremony. The sacrament was delivered by an unordained preacher from Tenaha who was high on Jesus and Dexamyl tablets.”