The Barn Caper: A New Orleans Story

Louise was a sturdy, pop-eyed white woman with a white Ford F100 pickup truck. She had a vague hustle going where people paid her $25 to clean out their attics. They pretended to think she was going to a cheap dump on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain. For what they paid, they had to assume she was dumping illegally, something they didn't have the nerve to do themselves.

Instead, she took out classified ads to sell her haul out of her own house. In those days, the New Orleans newspaper of record let you advertise any item for free as long as you were selling it for under $100. Some things didn't sell, and she'd give them away or try to. No dump fees for our Louise. No fees of any kind. She probably had a hustle for free gas, but if so, she never shared it with us.

One day, she called to ask me to help her clean some stuff out of a barn.

“A barn. Why the heck you take a job involving a barn?” I tried to keep my language clean in front of Louise since she was a mature woman who considered herself spiritual and all.

“Got a message in my morning meditation. There's something good in that barn.”

“Uh-huh. The message say what the something good was?”

A pause. “Money.” It was obvious she didn't like to say so. Could be a good sign. If she thought I'd ask for some of it, she must believe it actually existed.

“Confederate money.”

“How would you know, Missy?”

“Crystal ball told me.” The problem was she'd given me a three-story parrot playpen she couldn't sell, and my parrot had already chewed it up. So I owed her.

At least it was winter. I could wear gloves. Long sleeves. Jeans. Too bad it wasn't Chicago or Alaska. I wanted to wear a freakin' ski mask and goggles. A barn. Seriously? What if there were bats? Or that black mold that was just beginning to get famous?

The farther she drove, the more uneasy I felt. Halfway to Mississippi, and I couldn't figure the profit in this job. Louise wasn't strong enough to do barns. Quite frankly, neither was I, but she really wasn't. The pop-eyes were because of a long story from before I was born that involved atomic testing, radiation poisoning, and the Pentagon. Everybody else died but she'd somehow survived because of some experimental therapy. Also because of coffee enemas-- another message she'd received from her meditations.

Yeah, I know. Trouble was, the more ridiculous her stories, the more likely they were to incorporate a small kernel of truth. The coffee enema stuff was definitely true because her best friend used to walk around in the morning saying, “What difference does it make what end the coffee goes in?” A question I for one always pretended not to hear.

“This better not be about an alien spaceship,” I finally said.

We'd already road-tripped once all the way to Hot Springs Village, Arkansas to run down one of those. Also because she'd hustled a free three-day vacation stay. Meals and gas not included.

“The Pentagon's still watching me,” she said. “I shoulda known they'd get to an alien craft first. That's an object of concern to the national defense.” I had some thoughts about that, but she kept talking so they were destined to remain forever unvoiced. “Those boys don't need barn money, they're not gonna try to beat us out of that. They got Congress.”

There's no zone except The Twilight Zone with some people.

We were on a one-lane rural route by now. Keep driving long enough, you get there.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I said.

We sat in the truck a minute. Louise hand-cranked her window down in case the place looked better that way. It didn't. The roof hadn't merely slumped into a photogenic sag. It had collapsed and mostly rotted away.

The last person to leave the building had thoughtfully left the barn door open. This having occurred sometime during the Ford administration, a passing hurricane had picked it up and blown it off years ago. The gaping mouth made it easy to see the vine-choked interior.

At least we don't have to go inside, I thought. There isn't any inside.

“I think we're good to go,” I said out loud. “You'd need a Bobcat to dig any hidden treasure out of that forest.”

“Hush,” she said. “Spirit is talking.”

I was talking. Probably best not to point that out.

“It's in the walls,” she said suddenly.

“You've got to be kidding me,” I repeated.

“We have to take down the walls.”

“Come back in six months, and they'll have taken down themselves.”

She glared at me. There's nothing quite like atomic-radiation-induced pop eyes to shoot a glare into people.

“Louise,” I said. “Be reasonable. We don't know how to take down walls.”

“The boys can do it this weekend.”

“They'll be thrilled.”

“They'll be thrilled with their cut of the money. Bonnie Parker herself hid some of that bank robbery cash here. She was thinking about getting away from Clyde. He was a bad influence.”

Ya think? “Confederate money," I repeated. "That's why she never came back for it.”

“Oh, ye of little faith." Louise breathed out in a dramatic way meant to suggest patience. "She never came back for it because they were gunned down by the Bienville Parish sheriff's department.”

“I've seen the movie,” I said.

On Saturday, Jimmy drove me out in our white Ford F100. Louise and Eugene were already there in hers. Over the course of a few hours, the men made the barn into salvage. There was no money, confederate or otherwise, hidden in the walls, but we did pile the truck beds high with plenty of old silver boards.

There isn't much left to tell. In those days, Jimmy liked nothing better than long country drives, and he kept stopping at every flea market we passed. Which, in 1988, was a lot of flea markets. It was dark before we got home, in part because we had to detour by Louise's to drop off our load of wood.

A day or two later, she took out a classified ad: “Seasoned boards $99.” It ran a couple of weeks, and then she told me she had an artist coming to do a pick-up. This I had to see. He turned out to be a college-looking guy with finger-smeary glasses. Paint flecks on the jeans and flannel shirt.

On the pretense of helping out, I hung around while he came and went. He didn't want to overload his truck, so he bounced back three or four times before he managed to take it all away.

“Sucker born every minute.” Louise spoke with considerable satisfaction as the artist's truck vanished around the corner for the last time. She'd gotten $100 instead of $99 by pretending not to have any change.

A couple of months went by. I was cutting across Jackson Square in dark mirrorshades to avoid catching the eye of any hustlers. And what do you know, and who do you think I see? Three guesses. First two don't count.

Yeah. It was the artist, big as life and twice as paint-spattered. He'd cut up the barn board to make these rustic picture frames around postcard-sized sketches that I strongly suspected of being actual postcards.

Art saw me looking. “Painted these myself with colors mixed from genuine Mississippi clay. Then I framed them by hand with vintage board. Twenty bucks. Two for thirty.”

“Made in Taiwan,” I said.

He recognized me then and laughed. “The tourists love that country-fried...” He realized several of said tourists were walking by and adjusted his tone. “Stuff. They love that stuff.” Dropping to a near-whisper, he added, “Seriously. Y'all get any more of that silver barn board, call me. You got my number.”

“Sure,” I said. A little white lie, and not just because I never kept his number.

I knew Louise and me wouldn't be doing any more barn jobs. See, I never asked her for my cut of the $100. She thought I forgot, but it was strategic. As long as she owed me money, we were even.

***

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