Snow on the Bayou: A Tante Lulu Adventure Read Online Free PDF

crazy woman and another who could be an old-time calendar girl. They were like aliens from another planet. He’d forgotten how eccentric Southerners could be.
    As they walked toward the dining hall, he remarked to Charmaine, “It’s been a long time.” He glanced down at her ring-clad finger. “So you’re married?”
    She nodded. “To Raoul Lanier. Do you remember him?”
    “I heard he was in prison.”
    “Not anymore. Rusty was wrongfully convicted.”
    Cage smiled. That was what they all said.
    “Really. His record was cleared.”
    “And you own some beauty salons?” he asked, looking at her breasts… well, at the logo over her breasts.
    She smiled, apparently considering his perusal a compliment. “Yep. Five at last count. And a spa out at Rusty’s ranch.”
    “Would you two stop flirtin’ with each other?” Tante Lulu griped as she huffed along next to them. “Charmaine is married.”
    “I wasn’t flirting,” they both said at the same time.
    “What’s wrong with yer leg? You’re limpin’ like Stumpy Benoit, who lost his toes in Vietnam.”
    “I fell and injured my knee.”
    “You always were clumsy.”
    “I was not! And for your information, I got hurt during a HALO jump.”
    “Well, thass what you get fer trying ta jump over someone’s halo.”
    He blinked at her, feeling as if he’d fallen into some alternate universe.
    “He means that he was hurt during a parachute jump,” Charmaine explained.
    “Well, why dint he say so? I hafta pee. Kin I go in that building over there?”
    “No, it’s the SEAL locker room.”
    “So?”
    “So men are naked in there.”
    “So?”
    He shook his head and continued walking.
    When they were almost to the officers’ building, henoticed Sylvester Sims, or Sly, supervising about a dozen heavily perspiring men and women in gig squad, a SEALs punishment for some infraction or other. At the moment they were doing walking, quacking duck squats. Humiliation was part of Navy discipline. Sly, a big black dude from Harlem, who had once modeled tightie whities for
GQ
, wore a shirt that said, in small enough print that it all fit over his wide chest, THE ONLY EASY DAY WAS YESTERDAY. FU… SCREW THAT! THERE ARE NO EASY DAYS!
    “Hey, Sly,” he said.
    “Hey, Cage,” Sly said back, but he was staring at Charmaine, waiting for an introduction, Cage supposed.
    Not a chance!
    Walking by, Charmaine asked him, “Is he who I think he is?”
    “Probably.”
    “We have an old underwear poster of him hung on the wall of my Houma spa.”
    “Hung” being the key word.
“Sly will love hearing about that,” he said, and it was the truth. His good buddy milked his long-ago cover boy career every which way he could, and it didn’t matter that he was a married man now. In fact, he would be hooting about it to Donita when he went home tonight.
    “I thought there were no female SEALs,” Charmaine remarked, watching the group that Sly was supervising.
    “There aren’t. Those are WEALS. Women on Earth, Air, Land, and Sea.” He shrugged. “You could say they’re female SEALs, sort of.”
    Tante Lulu sighed. “Wish I was younger. I woulda made a good female SEAL.”
    Cage gave her an arched eyebrow look.
    “What? You think jist ’cause I’m small, I ain’t got whatit takes ta fight bad guys? Hah! I been fightin’ bad guys all my life.”
    He didn’t doubt that for a minute.
    “I think you Navy bigwigs discriminate against us smaller folks.”
    “The Navy does not discriminate. And height is not a requirement for SEALs.”
    “Oh, yeah? How come I dint see no midgets back there?”
    Charmaine groaned. “I told you, Auntie, ‘midget’ is a politically incorrect word.”
    Tante Lulu glanced meaningfully at Cage’s politically incorrect T-shirt logo and grinned. The old bird was pulling his leg.
    Once they’d arrived at the dining hall and sat down with pastries and coffee, both of which Tante Lulu deemed inferior to good Creole chicory and beignets, she