The Rougarou*
by Jacob Simmons
Art by Chad Carter
One night, when we were little, Mom heard a noise that woke her up. Naked and groggy, Dad went to the closet, unzipped the valise that held a nine-millimeter Glock pistol, and sleepily walked the obligatory husband-walk of a man who’d shoot an intruder to protect his family. The Glock was Mom’s. Dad bought it for her so she’d feel safe when he was away. This is the first time it was drawn in our house. Whether there was a noise is insignificant now.
Dad walked into my sleeping sister’s room and saw nothing but his daughter dreaming of New York—a poster of Leonardo DiCaprio staring back at him through an aquarium. He fumbled to her closet and looked inside—no Rougarou.
He crept into my room where I slept most nights wrapped in a crocheted blanket. Dad went around my bed and peered into the closet, my favorite quiet place for reading. Jack London lay leather-bound on the floor, but no Rougarou.
I woke up when he dropped the magazine out of the pistol grip. Forgetting about the bullet in the chamber, he aimed down at the floor five feet away from my bed and pulled the trigger. BOOM!
The lightning flash of the discharge illuminated his petrified face in the dark. When all the ringing in the ears and terrified expletives fell to silence, Dad grabbed me by the shoulders and made me swear to never speak a word to anyone about what just happened. I swore. Mom’s gun was put to bed, unloaded and hot, back on the shelf next to tighty-whities and “Life is Good” tee shirts. I didn’t sleep again; the Rougarou was coming. So I stayed on watch, and listened to Dad’s fevered apologies to Mom.
~~~
Outside of a house at the end of a cul-de-sac in a safe neighborhood full of square people who drive soberly and sleep soundly, a big man, porch over his belt, rings the doorbell late in the afternoon. An eight-year-old, without asking who it is, opens the door for his father.
DAD: (Crashing into the house, all arms and belly and bulldozer) Get back, motherfucker!
The man explodes and hurls his spittin’ image to the floor. Shocked from the smack of skin and bone on tile, the boy turns away in fearful defense.
SON: Dad!
The third-grader inches backward while his dad gets closer, bending to bring his mustached face down to that of his horrified son. This close, the Rougarou breathes fire.
DAD: Don’t you ever, (pointing to the front door) ever, (waggling his finger and growling) open that door without knowing who’s on the other side!
SON: (Bobble heading) I know, Dad! (I wish for another word for “whimper”) Why’d you do that?
A tinge of embarrassment darts across the man’s eyes, and he gives his son the space to stand up.
DAD: Your sister’s in the house, and anybody with any umpff at all could mow you over like you weren’t even there.
SON: That hurt. (Rubbing his back) You scared me.
DAD: (Shrugging with his hands open to heaven) Just showing you how easy it is that’s all. (With practicality) If I’m ever gone, and someone comes in the house, you do anything and everything you need to get up to our closet and grab your mom’s gun.
SON: (Checking his elbow for blood, nothing) Is it loaded?
DAD: (Bragging) Always. (He puts a finger in his son’s chest and hammers his cavity for a syncopated call to arms) Don’t…you…hesitate, son.
SON: (Pandering) I won’t, Dad. I know.
DAD: (Reveling in the lesson) Scream. Bite. Throw shit. But get your hands on that gun.
SON: (Deflecting) I will, Dad. I know.
DAD: (Turning his waggling finger inward, pointing at his heart) And when you do, you shoot that motherfucker right here.
~~~
The image above shows the guts of a moving truck full of 5,300 pounds of Dad’s things. It’s everything he wanted to bring with him on the move. Because the payload was so heavy, the truck could have turned turtle at any moment in the 40 mph crawl across the country. My palm was bruised from gripping the wheel, fishtailing, fighting the Rougarou’s rubber tires on a hot desert highway.
Possessions of interest are labeled. They’re not visible from here, but before we left his old house, I wedged a few bottles of liquor among the padded cases of his arsenal in the stern. The rollup door locked without an inch of real estate left in the payload. Dad told me soon after we left California that he wished I’d have secured the booze. He was certain the bottles had shattered by now, and bourbon was “sloshing all over my shit.”
Dad’s shadow case with Grandpa Ola’s branding iron was among the knickknacks piled on top of black and yellow plastic boxes. Ammunition, cast-iron skillets, dehydrated habaneros, a mouse pad, an unread Bible, ankle socks, and everything else he’s decided to bring with him on his move east. To reverse our familial exodus. Dad, a descendent of Okies who came to California a hundred years ago, is leaving the Golden State to backtrack. To plant his flag in the red clay of the last existing American place he believes a man can be free: Arkansas.
On the way, I imagine us unstuck in time, and Grandpa Ola passes us going the opposite direction in a wobbly-wheeled truck, putting Oklahoma behind him to pick oranges in California. We wave to him when he passes, but he doesn’t recognize us, and drives by like we aren’t even here. Away, always farther away from the dust of home.
Dad’s home is no longer mine. He feels the Rougarou lurking behind him in the Golden State, but I remember watching Dad love California since I was conscious enough to register a memory. I watched him love it, like when we watched wrestling together before we knew what would happen over the next thirty years to our family. I remember the Ultimate Warrior wore pink. Pink like the sky in Central Valley October. The Warrior flew like I flew from the kitchen counter, landing on a big stack of wool blankets Dad got in Kodiak. My feet mushing into them, leaving disappearing stamps next to the black lettering that screamed USCG. The Ultimate Warrior painted his face green like the money I made writing instructions for cybersecurity implementation and software installation. It’s time to fly again, way, way up through the constellations only seen in the Sierras. And my shadow, like the Warrior’s, is higher than Giant Sequoias. The shadow is mine, and we’re on our way. It’s coming with me to get lost on purpose—exiled in the abstract. One more big swing and I’ll let go of the chains that keep me safe. Watch me sail away, outward. Ascending. Far from the Rougarou and the tropospheric prison that held me still. Busting out now, baby. I’m free. Long gone. Finding a new home in a stratosphere called the elsewhere.
The winner, and champion of the world.
Dad’s elsewhere is Arkansas, and I’m going to help him get there.
The truck’s at least a thousand pounds overweight, and it’s trying to kill me. The slightest shift in direction could send me toppling under the force of whatever gravity falls when summer’s hottest. Down, down. Moving through Sierra junipers like an elephant’s ghost for seven thousand feet—another American dead on Donner Pass. If, for a moment, I lose focus, everything ends. Just me and the salt rash of my skidding. Energy, baby. One flick of my foot, and I’m a juiced and whirly-birding Wyoming ground squirrel. Watch me turn like a deli slicer, taking ham off the bone down to level one. I’m lumbering. Lumber: wood for the fireplace in Mom’s house that used to be Mom and Dad’s house. My eyes blur. The miracle eye, almost removed after the last time I flew (a hydroplaning stick-shift threw me and smashed my face), does what it can to keep open and fixed on the infinite Interstate.
Stay on the flat part of the earth. One mistake, and sweet corn will swallow me and the monster. I’d sink, entombed, down into silty Nebraska loam and disappear before anyone notices the circle I’ve made in the crop. At the wheel, I’m too wide to fit through the doors of Revelation Ministries near Wichita, so I’ll look for a bigger church. A place to fill when I roll this rig and pitch the Good Book and ammo all over Oklahoma, scattering everything Dad owns, everything he trusted me to drive across the country at a snail’s pace. If I lose traction somewhere between the kings and cottonmouths, I’ll lose my chance to pull up the rocky red dirt of Dad’s new driveway and show him that it takes a steady hand to keep bourbon in its bottle.
When it was all over, and I killed the engine in front of Dad’s new house, I threw open the slam lock. In a glorious moment, I showed him that not a box had shifted, not a bottle had been cracked. The Rougarou had been tamed. That felt good. That was sweet.
~~~
~~~
Actually, all those years ago, it was a phone call; I called the police to report that a gun had been stolen from Mom’s house. Dad denied it and blamed me. “Your precious baby probably took it to one of his buddy’s houses,” he told her. He also said that if anything happened with the gun, like a murder or anything, he wasn’t about to be blamed for it because he never took it, and again he called her a dead-eyed-psycho-paranoid-zombie-caged animal and hung up the phone.
When I talked to the police, I told the officer who answered that Dad took Mom’s gun, and that he was saying strange things about murder. When the officer asked me if I was sure, I asked him if John Wayne rode horses. Dad, I told the police, wasn’t going to kill anyone. Still, they wanted his contact information.
“He’s just caught up in bullshit,” I said.
“Well, sometimes,” the officer said to me, “people kill people even when they say they’re not going to kill anyone.”
It’s good to be insightful like that. Let me be insightful like that someday.
Dad called when the police got in touch with him to threaten me for calling the cops. He let me know that just because I was a “pussy about guns,” it didn’t mean I had to cry to the police. He called me a mama’s boy and said he’d whip my ass.
“I know you have it, Dad,” I said. “I know you have it,” I said again. Dad asked me how I dared to call him a liar after all we’d been through together.
Twelve years after the police report, Dad threw my guitar away. A Washburn, pretty busted up, but it wasn’t trash. It was the first guitar he ever bought me, and I taught myself how to play it a quarter century ago by strumming “Sunshine” in the room Mom calls the “brown room” now. I used to play that guitar for Dad while he was in the shower. I made him a tape, a recording of me playing Tom Petty tunes and the “Godfather” theme. He listened to it over and over again, journeying 6th Ave. headed to work at a power plant. Dad used to make electricity.
In a juvenile fit of embarrassment one day, riding with him, I ripped the cassette out of the deck and stripped the tape off the spools because the music sucked, I said. He acted crushed and asked me why I’d destroy something he loved like that.
Dad had his heart attack in 2021. A time when only patients were allowed to visit the hospital. I sat outside in the parking lot with my sister and told the person on the phone who asked about Dad’s religion that he was a Christian. I was assured that if he died, they’d have a Christian person do Christian things next to his body. We talked to Dad on speaker-phone after they hit him with the defibrillator. His heart was ready to explode the way the Rougarou does through the front door of a house. I told him we were in touch with the doctor and that we were right outside. I told him we loved him. Before he hung up, he said he loved us, too.
I didn’t speak to him again for five months. When by miracle he survived, and came home to recover, I didn’t visit him. The “Simmons” group-text erupted daily with prayer hands and red hearts and smiley faces. I wrote nothing, and I never called. Dad must’ve felt like I didn’t give a shit whether he was alive or dead the last couple of years he lived so close. He must have felt that way when he threw out that old six-string.
“It just fell apart,” he said of the guitar he trashed. “There was no fixing it.”
Soon after, I climbed inside a great white truck to move everything he couldn’t abandon, to drive a death-trap full of Dad’s guns all the way to Arkansas.
~~~
President Richard M. Nixon
℅ Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
18001 Yorba Linda Boulevard
Yorba Linda, California 92886
September 13th, 2023
Dear President Nixon,
Mr. President, I’d like to share a word on the point of my “Rougarou” draft. I know I want to say something about my experience with a 9mm handgun that’s central to memories of my childhood home though it never kept anyone or anything I love safe. I’m working on a metaphor involving a Louisiana “boogeyman” legend and working toward the idea that everything I’m supposed to be afraid of, as ordered by the reactionary fear factory (that’s your factory, sir) is nothing more than a projection of self. Progress, though, has been tangled.
I’ve seen the pictures, Mr. President, of you as a younger man, a Senator standing next to Joseph McCarthy while he waved lists around and exploited collective fear. I know you would have never been elected if you hadn’t served as an errand boy for the Rougarou. Legend has it that when the Rougarou bites, its victims become the monster themselves for a while, spreading psycho-metamorphic sickness to others. McCarthy bit you. You bit Dad. Dad bit me. And now we’re living in the gears of war machines and the throes of perpetual Southern strategies. Annihilating our way to peace. Shooting ourselves safe with pistols like Mom’s gun. The Rougarou is out for blood.
I write next to one of your campaign posters, authorized and paid for by the “National Youth for Nixon-Agnew” organization based out of the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. Ronald Reagan’s face is collaged in orange with Barry Goldwater, Clint Eastwood, Gerald Ford, Pat Nixon, William F. Buckley, and signs held by nobody say, “Vote for Daddy!” and “Champion of Forgotten America!” and “Dick Wants Voluntary Army!” A button on your jacket simply says, “Milhous.” The poster was a Christmas gift from Mom who knew I’d love it for ironic reasons. It’s framed but it hangs upside down.
Anyway, I’m having as much luck grappling with primal influence these days as you are with your piano playing.
All the best,
Jacob Simmons
Outside Agitator
P.S.
I read once that you told your staff that soup would no longer be served at White House dinners because soup is a “lady’s dish.” I read that you made this decree following a dinner with dignitaries at which you dribbled on your tie, slurping at your spoon like a baby. Is this story true? I hope it is.
~~~
The Rougarou will send me to hell if I fail
to fight, to firefight. “Fight like hell, son.”
“Fight like a man.” Ask Jesus for miracles.
Sweet salvation.
I’m not afraid
–anymore.
Not of you.
Hallelujah.
I will not be
fooled again.
~~~
Mom’s gun is in a helmet bag next to a can of chili and a fresh pack of cigarettes. It’s been a year since I helped Dad make his backward escape to the Natural State, and now we find ourselves together in a new summer. We’re road-tripping down to the swamps just outside of Monroe. The Rougarou is within arm’s reach.
On the road, we don’t talk about miracles. We don’t talk about hell either, though lakes of fire are all around us. Louisiana steams. And if we need to, says Dad because he’s a little spooked out here, we’ll put a nine-millimeter hole in something’s head. So in this way, silence is broken, and we talk of salvation.
No moon hangs over the Pelican State tonight. And while long-nose garfish surround rickety docks floating on Styrofoam, wolf and widow spiders dangle from tiki-torches. In the bayou’s darkness, alligator eyes shine red in the beam of a spotlight. Drift, dinosaurs. Drift like oil slicks in the current of the Ouachita River. Dad and I are here with you, soused in sweat and pickled in heart-disease.
Together, we’re walking on blackwater and fishing for channel cats. The Rougarou gives us a moment, far from home, to laugh about air conditioning and tree shakers. We want to get well, and to love more than we remember. But the moving truck doesn’t want it. My busted guitar doesn’t want it. Mom’s gun doesn’t want it, and neither do the police. The prayer warriors don’t want it. Dad’s defibrillator doesn’t want it. His hospital bed and his bypass zipper don’t want it. The country between us, the heartland, doesn’t want it.
The Rougarou gives us time to grow younger, to go back. But the bubbled voices of gators and gar say, “No, not yet.” And the spiders chime in and say, “No, not there.”
Jacob Simmons next to his upside down Nixon poster, by Sarah Simmons
*Bayou mythology carries an old French werewolf legend in the jungles of America. The Rougarou, as any typical boogeyman creature, terrorizes those who misbehave and, sometimes, even those who don’t.