CHUK

“Welcome to Bayou Bonhomme,” the thin man said with a toothy but debonair grin as he stood at the door, with perfect posture, ushering his guests into the small dining room that was never empty, rain or shine. “Welcome to Leroy’s Grill, home of Louisiana’s best barbecue.”

He’d almost look like a gentleman if he weren’t wearing an apron that was constantly smeared in barbecue sauce and grease. Leroy’s beloved mother had always told him that there was no excuse for poor manners, whether you were speaking in church or serving up barbecue, it didn’t matter. Do it all as unto Jesus, she’d say, and even though Leroy had seen things – some horrible, some incredible – since then that had made him question the whole Jesus thing, old habits die hard, and so Leroy honored his mère’s memory and her Creole heritage by always being polite to his guests.

Outwardly, Leroy was polite and courteous to the dozens of tourists that flooded through his doors each day, because that’s what his mère would want. But oh, if his mama only knew what he had to put up with each and every day, how he had to smile and laugh at the outsiders’ jokes – most of them at the expense of Leroy himself – or folks Leroy liked. They found the Cajun lingo some folks around the bayou spoke charming or quaint, and treated the people of Bonhomme like curiosities, which was really just city folk’s way of looking down their noses at the Creoles and the Cajuns. City folk watched too many movies, and seemed to have a picture of what the bayou should be like, and Leroy was happy to oblige them so long as they had money to spend. Leroy could put on the heavy Cajun accent when he needed to, and could even drop in a smattering of French words for authenticity – after all, his grand-mère had been Creole, and not one word in three that came out of her mouth was English.

The tourists came from all over – some folks from as far away as Texas or Florida – heck, there was even one couple made it all the way down from Kentucky last summer – drawn by the legend of the green man – Ol’ Remy LeVert as he was known around these parts. Things had been slow for the past few months, but then that little boy and his dog had gone missing, a couple of weeks back. While the proper newspapers were writing it up as a likely gator attack, The Bonhomme Gazette had run the headline Legendary Swamp Monster Returned? This had infuriated Oscar Blanchette, the Chief of police, but Amie LeBeau insisted that the presence of a question mark indicated that she was merely speculating on what she thought was a viable possibility, and Oscar only scowled at her and prepared himself for the tourist invasion. As expected, the monster hunters and gawkers had swarmed into Bonhomme like flies to shit, and Bonhomme welcomed them with open, hungry arms. The people of Bonhomme were, as a rule, flat broke. Remy LeVert was the town’s meal ticket, and so the coals of the legend needed to be turned from time to time to keep the fire burning.

There were Remy LeVert t-shirts and bumper stickers to be sold, and anyone with a boat was hiring it out for tours of the bayou. Tourists lined up for hours to take one of these tours with old Jean-Baptiste Levesque – not a tooth left in the old man’s head, but he made himself understood well enough when he gave a tour of the swamp and told the story of the angry old swamp god that the first peoples called C’thuN’Chuk, which, he said, meant “The Good Man” – hence the name of the town. The truth is, ol’ Jean-Baptiste was one hell of a yarn-spinner, and if any of the tourists recognized that his stories were basically a jambalaya of H.P. Lovecraft, Len Wein, Ramsey Campbell and Stephen King, well, they never let on. After all, that kind of melangerie was all part of the Creole tradition.

There was even a sign as you entered the town proclaiming Bonhomme as the home of the legendary swamp monster, and some local kid had drawn a picture of Remy, though it was really just a drawing taken from an old Swamp Thing comic. If Bernie Wrightson, the man who had actually helped create the comic book character, ever came to town, well, the folks of Bonhomme could only hope he’d be flattered and not litigious.

Leroy passed that sign every day and shook his head every time and laughed, because Leroy knew first hand that Ol’ Remy didn’t look anything like that.