Camille

Perry Dupree shot the driver of the laundry truck as soon as he exited the vehicle and offered to lend a hand. He was a devout Christian man named Elwood LaRoux from just down south in Saint Francisville, and he probably would have stopped to help even if the road hadn’t been blocked, but Perry shot him anyway.

It was the morning of August 17th, 1969 and his car was stalled out right there diagonally across the middle of the Tunica Trace along a narrow bend and there was no getting the truck around it with a deep drainage ditch close on either side of the road. Perry had the hood up and he was bent over it pretending to be busy working on repairs but when the laundry truck driver walked up and asked if he could help out Perry came up from under the hood holding the Smith & Wesson .38 revolver and said just two brief words – “Sorry, friend” – before shooting him once in the forehead at close range, trying to avoid getting too much blood on the uniform.

He quickly dragged the driver by the feet over towards the drainage ditch and pulled his ‘56 Chevy off to the side of the road (there was nothing mechanically wrong with it) to block the body from the view of any passing motorists. Then he disrobed and donned the laundry truck man’s dark blue uniform. There was a little blood running down the back of the collar but he washed it off as best he could with some water from his canteen and didn’t think it would be a problem. It would just look like sweat against the dark blue fabric on a hot day like this anyway. When he was done dressing, Perry used his foot to roll the man’s nearly-naked body down into the drainage ditch and then he covered it with an old gray blanket from the trunk of his car.

The two guards at the gate to the service entrance leading up to the loading docks at the Louisiana State Prison at Angola waved him through without a second thought. The laundry truck drivers from Gulf Coast Cleaners came in and out of there all week long and there were always new faces behind the wheel. He had the paperwork that the driver carried but he was glad he didn’t have to present it.

Once he had the truck backed up to the loading dock Perry saw the two guards waiting there. One he did not know but the other was his sister Becky’s ex-husband Junior Rydell, and Junior knew damn well what could happen to him, and maybe his dog Buster, if he was unhelpful here today. He was already on the outs with his former in-laws and he didn’t want to get any further out with those people. He and Becky never had any kids together, but he might have felt a little safer if they had.

Perry stepped down from the driver seat of the truck, opened the roll-up rear door and the trustees began wheeling the large bins of dirty laundry into the back. Anyone paying close attention might have noticed that their arms and legs were straining harder than usual to move three of these loads, but it was very hot out there in the direct sun and not a day for paying close attention to such things.

Everything went according to plan and there were no delays on the way off the prison grounds. Shortly after the truck departed the exit gates Perry let out a joyous hoot and the three men emerged from the laundry baskets in the rear of the truck, hooting even louder. Perry checked his side-view mirror.

“They ain’t comin’. I don’t see no one comin’, boys. We are in the clear, I do believe!” His voice was filled with elation and the three escapees in the back continued hooting and hollering for joy, hugging one another hard and smiling broadly.

**************

“Hey Beaumont, why don’t you check that bin right there. I got a little early parole gift for y’all in there.”

The oldest of the three men in the back, a tall, hard and wiry man with slicked-back salt and pepper hair, fished around inside the laundry bin for a few seconds and then came up with the whiskey bottle in his hand and a fresh round of cheers erupted from the back. In no time at all the bottle was opened, the cap was tossed carelessly aside and the men were passing the booze from hand to hand and taking long swigs, gasping with pleasure after each.

“Got y’all some smokes too.” Perry tossed a pack of Lucky Strikes and then a book of matches to the man named Beaumont and soon all of the men in the rear of the truck were seated with their backs against the inside walls of the truck, smoking their cigarettes and passing the bottle. They were talking among themselves and laughing, their spirits high. Even Jamie was talking in an animated fashion and he rarely said much at all.

“All right now. We’re coming up on the spot where I left the car that I stole this morning. You’re gonna like it, Big Tracy. She’s a ’57 Chevy with a V-8. Got her some balls, I tell you what. You can do the driving. I know you wanna…” Perry smiled back at the big man. The big man smiled back at him and winked.

“Anyways, I’m just gonna pull this truck up in front of the car and hop out real quick. I got a change of clothes and shoes for all of us in the trunk so I’m gonna grab that stuff and bring it back so we can get you changed out of them prison blues and we can all start lookin’ like model citizens again. I got some pistols for y’all too.” Soon the hijacked laundry truck was abandoned by the side of the road nearby its former driver’s body – now already swarming with flies beneath the old gray blanket in the summer heat - and the four men were cruising south on Tunica Trace with the windows down in the ’56 Chevy.

Beaumont had a cousin named Trevor who was serving a five-year stretch in Parchman and if it wasn’t for him this crew might have never known that the cash from the bank job in Baton Rouge three years ago was about to be snatched out from under them. Perry and the three who had just busted out of Angola, plus a fifth man named Guidry Stevenson, walked off with just over two hundred grand that day and they had just enough time to stash it in the basement of Guidry’s grandmother’s house in Bay Saint Louis – she had just died of lung cancer a few months earlier and left the house to Guidry and his brother, who was also doing time on a manslaughter charge and not set for release anytime soon - before they were all arrested for other crimes.

The five of them were out celebrating and drinking hard and heavy that night at a juke joint outside of Biloxi when they got into a pretty nasty scrap with some good old boys at the bar, several of whom just happened to be off-duty Mississippi State Police. They were all in cuffs pretty quick and while they cooled their heels in the county jail the cops pulled up open warrants on everyone but Perry McGill, who had just finished serving a three-year bid for aggravated assault less than a month earlier. (Still, he violated his parole in the bar brawl that night and went back inside for another eighteen months as a result.)

Beaumont, Big Tracy and Jamie were all wanted in Louisiana on a grand larceny warrant for a break-in job they did at an old plantation house in Saint Mary Parish, so they got sent up to Angola. Guidry was wanted for assaulting an officer in Jackson, Mississippi, so he ended up in Parchman. It all happened pretty fast.

Cousin Trevor got a message to Beaumont just a few days earlier that Guidry had turned snitch on another inmate who had shanked a guard at Parchman in exchange for early parole.

The boys had an agreement. If any of them was getting a jump before the others, they would let that be known to all. The money belonged to all of them equally, just over forty large apiece. But Guidry didn’t say anything to anyone about his early parole, and Beaumont was left to assume that could only mean one thing. Guidry was planning to take that money and run. (Well, two things actually. The second thing was that Beaumont was gonna have to run a sharp blade across Guidry’s throat the next time he saw him.)

Guidry was set for release that very same day and the boys were all trying to make it down to that house in Bay Saint Louis before he did. They figured they would get there first but it was hard to say. Did Guidry have a ride or was he taking the bus? Was he going straight there? They just wanted to get there fast and not worry about these things.

“Fuckin’ Guidry should have thought things through a little better. You aint walkin’ off with my money, son, you simple-minded peckerwood coonass. You aint never gonna see me comin', no..'.” He exhaled a long plume of smoke out the window. Jamie quietly did the same in the seat next to him.

It was roughly a three-hour drive down to Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi and about halfway there they started picking up the radio stations coming out of New Orleans on the car stereo. Perry was slowly scrolling through the FM frequencies with the dial on the right when he picked up the signal from WTIX, a rock and roll station. They were playing the new hit song by The Rolling Stones’ Honky Tonk Woman. Perry turned up the volume but Mick Jagger was unapologetically cut off before the song came to an end when a radio announcer came on with an emergency weather warning in a staccato tone:

We are interrupting this broadcast to bring you the following emergency report from the National Weather Service. As we have previously reported, please be advised that there is a severe hurricane warning in effect for the entire Gulf Coast from Galveston, Texas to Jacksonville, Florida in anticipation of Hurricane Camille making landfall somewhere in this area between tonight and tomorrow morning. Hurricane Camille is expected to bring dangerously high winds, heavy rainfall and a severe storm surge all along the Gulf Coast. Residents in these coastal areas should evacuate further inland immediately as severe flooding and loss of electrical power are expected. All residents of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama should prepare for this storm in every way possible, including the use of sandbags to mitigate flooding and plywood sheeting to board up windows. Residents are advised to stock up on fresh water and non-perishable food to get through any disruptions in the wake of this very serious and dangerous storm…

 Perry killed the radio. “Well shit. What do you make of that, Beaumont?”

The man sitting in the backseat behind Big Tracy looked down and scratched the stubble on his chin thoughtfully for a moment. "The man said this was 'previously reported'. Would have been good to know." Then he just lit another cigarette and silently stared out the window for a while as the ’57 Chevy continued south towards the coast. Perry had sufficient basic instincts to say nothing at all in response.

***************

The sky was an iron gray dome overhead when the boys arrived in Bay Saint Louis. The surf was steadily rising with the approach of the coming storm and all the seabirds seemed to understand the perils. They were long gone. Not a seagull nor a tern nor any other thing with a beak and wings could be spotted anywhere along the strand. The wind was starting to pick up as well. Big Tracy pulled the ’57 Chevy over to the curb a few doors down from the house, which was just three blocks off the beach. They all got out and walked around to the backyard, each of them silently praying that they weren’t too late.

When they got inside the house and down to the basement they pulled up the floorboards near the corner and erupted with shouts of joy when they found the two leather bowling bags full of cash right where they left them three years earlier. They brought the loot upstairs to the kitchen, found a few old bottles of booze in the liquor cabinet and sat down to celebrate for a while, watching as the wind picked up, blowing the trees outside back and forth.

The boys were all having a few drinks and listening to Elvis Presley on the radio when the signal cut out. Jamie scanned the dial and found nothing but static. Outside the sky had turned darker than any of them had ever seen it before sundown, and the winds were now thrashing the trees and power lines violently. Things were starting to fall from above and the old house was now making some disturbing groaning sounds from time to time.

When the eye of Hurricane Camille made landfall in nearby Pass Christian it came ashore with sustained winds of over 175 miles per hour and the second lowest barometric pressure reading ever recorded. Some of the men coming home on shrimp boats just before sundown, those who made it anyway, reported seeing lightning-like electrical columns rising up from the surface of the water into the sky. Beaumont stepped out onto the back porch a few hours before midnight and he could immediately feel and see the hair on his arms rising straight up from his skin. His tongue went dry with a metallic taste and he watched as a nutria came running across the yard and out towards the street. He had never seen one away from the water in all his life.

Then he heard the violent wrenching screech of steel on pavement just a few blocks away towards the beach but had no way of knowing then that it was a massive cargo tanker that had just washed up on Highway 90 in the twenty-five foot storm surge. The backyard was flooding rapidly, the waters pouring into the basement, and the house to the left, an old ramshackle place in disrepair, collapsed in on itself then and Beaumont went back inside just as several of the rear windows blew out all at once. Anyone caught there in that place at that time had to feel in one way or another that a wrathful God had finally decided to release his full arsenal of vengeance on this earth. The destruction was nothing short of Old Testament biblical in nature.

The street outside was flooded, the water already rising more than halfway up the doors of the ’57 Chevy. There was no leaving now, and they wouldn’t be seeing Guidry that night. That much was certain. They had recovered the money from the bank job, but as the roof of the house started to collapse above them they only had a second or two to reach the realization that they would never have the opportunity to spend so much as a dime of it.

***************

When the storm passed and the floodwaters receded and the roads were cleared a few days later, Guidry Stevenson pulled up in front of his grandmother’s old house in Bay Saint Louis. The roof had collapsed in the rear but the front was still mostly standing. He looked down the block and realized that it had actually weathered the storm better than most of its neighbors. The entire neighborhood looked like it had just sustained a nuclear blast.

As he entered the house, Guidry had serious doubts whether or not he could even get down to the basement, which was certainly flooded anyway, to retrieve the two bowling bags full of cash. He walked cautiously through the ruins of the house and made his way towards the kitchen in the rear, where the stairway led down to the basement. When he got there he saw the four dead bodies on the floor, covered in dust and debris. Then one of them moved and he realized that Beaumont wasn’t dead when he pointed the gun at him.

“Hey there, Guidry. Good to see ya’, old buddy. I was hoping we would catch up before it was too late. I cain’t feel my legs no more so I guess I broke my God damned back when the rafters came down on me. But I just been lying here, licking rainwater off the floor and starving to death these last few days, just tryin’ to hang on long enough to make your acquaintance this one last time. Looks like aint none of us is gonna live long enough to get a chance to spend any of that bank money. It’s a God damned shame is what it is. But at least I lived long enough to do this.”

He pointed his pistol at Guidry with a trembling wrist, but the distance was short and he fired four shots, hitting the man three times, twice in the head and once in the neck. He smiled at his handiwork through lips caked with dried blood and looked around the kitchen one last time as he quietly muttered a Hail Mary, then he just closed his eyes and drifted away.

The house groaned a short time later. Then it groaned again a bit louder. Not long after that, the whole structure collapsed in on its foundation and a week later, when the clean-up crews came through, the bodies were pulled out of the wreckage and unceremoniously buried in a potter’s field not far away. Everything else, including the two leather bowling bags full of cash, ended up buried somewhere down at the county dump.

THE END