PeePaw Riverter

In Louisiana, a man I had known for four hours invited me to eat at his home. In Japan, this would require two years of restaurant dinners and a formal discussion about scheduling. He drove me to his backyard. There was no table set. There were no plates. There was a folding table covered in newspaper. I assumed the dishes were still inside. I waited politely by the door. He walked past me carrying a pot the size of a bathtub, tilted it over the table, and poured. What came out was a red mountain. Crawfish, hundreds of them, tumbling across the newspaper with corn and potatoes and sausage and a spice so strong my eyes watered from six feet away. I looked around for forks. Nobody else was looking for forks. A woman reached in with her bare hand. She picked up a crawfish, twisted off its head with one clean motion, and sucked the inside of it. I need you to understand something. She was not performing. She was not being dared. This was Tuesday. Everyone was doing it. Grandmothers. Children. A man in a dress shirt who had come straight from church and had not changed because the boil would not wait for a man to change. He twisted. He sucked. He reached for the next one without pausing his sentence. I have held a sword. I have trained to show nothing on my face. I picked one up. The spice burned my fingers. I twisted the head. Something inside it looked back at me. I sucked it anyway. The flavor hit my whole mouth at once, and it was so good I forgot I was horrified. I ate thirty. Then forty. The spice destroyed my lips by the tenth one and I kept going because the man next to me was still reaching and I refused to be the first to stop. Then I noticed the boy across the table. He was five. Maybe six. He had a pile of empty shells in front of him twice the size of mine. He was not concentrating. He was peeling crawfish the way other children breathe. Without effort. Without looking down. A child was beating me at dinner in front of his entire family. His grandmother saw my face. She said, "You doin' just fine, baby." She handed me a beer. I understood the beer was not a reward. It was medical. By the end I was sitting in a plastic chair with newspaper ink on my elbows and spice under my fingernails. I had no plate. I had no fork. I had not used a single utensil in two hours. In Japan, a formal meal takes fourteen steps. The angle of the chopsticks. The order of the courses. A bow before the first bite. A bow after the last. In Louisiana, the instructions are: boil it, pour it on the news, stand around it with the people you love. I have eaten kaiseki prepared by a man who trained for thirty years. He never once served it on a newspaper. He never once served it this well. I asked the man when they do this again. He said Saturday. I asked which Saturday. He said every Saturday.