Louisiana Lament

breeders, have about a two-hour lifespan, between seven and nine p.m., usually. Unless, of course, they manage to mate, in which case they will start a nest. The largest nest found to date had a diameter of three hundred feet.
    Unlike other termites, these can build aerial nests, right in your walls. Brick or stucco houses are fine with them—they’ll eat the doorframes, window sills, picture frames, furniture, and telephone bills, plus your favorite hundred-year-old shade tree. Except for exterminators, who shake their heads and look grim, like oncologists delivering the bad news, they have no natural enemies. The alates, so shocking in their thick swirling clouds, are only a small percentage of the population, according to entomologists. A mature nest may contain five to ten million termites, though seventy million isn’t unheard of.
    Formosan termites now infest eleven Southern states, plus California, New Mexico, and Hawaii. Louisiana has the most severe infestation in the world (despite headway being made by state and federal baiting programs), and it is only natural that the bug has become, like the
loup-garou
(or Cajun were wolf), part of the local mythology.
    The stories are legion: An alfresco wedding attacked by something resembling a Biblical plague. A window shut just in time, as hundreds of tiny bodies, drawn by the light inside, smash as if on a windshield. An ordinary backyard, covered in minutes by a carpet of termites. Fat garbage bags of wings, as many as ten or twelve, shoveled from the floor of a house.
    Indeed, the month of May affords a brush with nature rarely seen by urban-dwellers. Those of a metaphorical bent try not to think about the Mother’s Day aspect.
    ***
    Detective Skip Langdon, a veteran of many Mays in New Orleans, was trying to help her beloved through his first, mostly with diversionary tactics. She had seen Steve Steinman’s face when he discovered the termite launching pads on his newly purchased, newly-painted, hundred-and-twenty-year-old ceiling. He looked as if someone had died.
    “Am I insured for this?” he said, and she desperately wished there were something she could do. The insurance companies weren’t that dumb.
    “Why didn’t they find them when they inspected?” he asked, outraged.
    “You can’t know they’re there unless you rip out the walls.”
    “Uh-oh. I’ve got a bad feeling that means I’ve got to do that now.”
    “Maybe you won’t. They can probably drill holes for the poison.” But she was lying. They might well have to rip out the walls.
    No exterminator would be available for weeks, of course, and it’s said the Formosans can go through a floor board in a month. The thing to do was keep his mind off it.
    JazzFest was over and the heaviness of summer was nearly upon them; Mother’s Day brunch at a fine old restaurant sounded like a prison sentence. Yet Skip was a mother of sorts, or at least an aunt to the adopted children of her landlord, Jimmy Dee Scoggin. Dee-Dee was gay, and his partner, Layne Bilderback, had recently joined the household shared by Jimmy Dee and young Kenny and Sheila Ritter, the offspring of his late sister.
    Dee-Dee wheedled. “We have to do something to remember their mother—keep the feminine spirit alive. Isn’t it the decent thing?”
    Steve said, “How about a hike?” and Dee-Dee countered, “Don’t you get enough wildlife at home?”
    But Skip pounced on it. If Steve wanted it, she wanted it. She wanted him in a good mood about Louisiana. He had moved there recently and restored a house (the one being gnawed), after months and years of thinking about it. A documentary filmmaker and film editor, he’d lived in California the entire time he and Skip had been dating. Their long distance relationship had deepened on proximity. Skip was getting comfortable; liking it a lot. Steve had come to New Orleans for her, and his being there had enriched her life so much more than she’d anticipated that she felt responsible now. And motivated; eager to make him happy. A walk in Jean Lafitte Park, over in Jefferson Parish, ought to be wonderfully therapeutic.
    There was almost a no-go when Jimmy Dee said they’d have to leave the dogs behind—Steve’s shepherd, Napoleon, and the kids’ mutt, Angel—because they couldn’t go in the park itself and it was too hot to leave them in the car.
    But in the end the three kids—Dee-Dee’s two and Steve—rose above it.
    They went in two cars, the uncles and