The Marauders (10 page)

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

Wes shook his head.

“What’s the last thing I said yesterday?”

Silence.

“I said get the ice.”

Wes picked at his eyebrow.

“Get the fucking ice. Nineteen thousand times. Might as well been in your ear with a megaphone.”

“Yeah.”

“Huh?”

“All right.”

“All right?” His father’s eyes seared on him. “What fuckin’ planet are you on? All right?”

“I’m sorry, okay?” Wes said.

“Are you on drugs?”

“No sir.”

“I hope you’re on drugs. I hope to sweet Jesus you’re on drugs. I hope you’re sky high on some fucked up thing right now.”

“All right,” Wes said.

“All right. All right. All right. Because if you’re not, we got a problem. We gotta go to the doctor. Fuckin’ tonight. Get your brain fuckin’ scanned. Because there’s a fuckin’ problem.”

“We’re wasting time.”

“Wastin’ time, he says. I’m wasting time. I hope you’re on drugs, man. I pray to God.”

Wes’s father stepped up to him and slapped him on the back of the head. Wes whirled around in disbelief. His father hadn’t hit him since he was a little kid, when he draped him over his knees and spanked him for using a dirty word in first grade.

“You just hit me,” Wes said.

“Lucky I don’t kick your ass in the water.”

Wes glared. “You never made a mistake? Never?” As soon as the words left his mouth he regretted saying them because his father no doubt knew what he meant.

His father’s face twisted and he gritted his teeth. He shook his head hard and quickly, as if to fling out what he just heard. “I hope to sweet holy shit you’re sky high on drugs. Because we can fix that. We can take you somewhere and fix that. If you’re not, I don’t know what we’re gonna do.”

They stood there facing one another on the swaying boat, the chortling engine the only sound. Half a mile away were the pilot lights of two or three other boats.

Wes’s father hissed through his teeth and climbed the wheelhouse ladder.

When they returned to the harbor, Wes couldn’t get off the
Bayou Sweetheart
fast enough. He jumped on the dock and went toward his truck, his father following close behind.

“Where’s the heart?” Wes’s father said to his back.

Wes looked over his shoulder at his father like he was crazy but kept moving.

“Where’s the heart, Wes? For the transplant? The heart transplant. Say what? You forgot it? Well, the little girl who needed the heart is dead now. Boy, you really fucked up this time.”

Wes turned. Surprised, his father stopped dead in his tracks.

“I quit,” Wes said.

“Quit?”

“Yeah. I’m through.”

“You quit? Bullshit. You’re fired. You get fired when you fuck up. You don’t quit.”

“I’m fired. Yeah. Whatever. I’m not doing this anymore.”

“You won’t be forgetting the ice for me anymore?”

Wes turned again and stalked toward his truck.

“Where you goin’ to work?” Wes’s father said to his back.

Wes said nothing.

“I don’t think I saw any help-wanted ads that said they were looking for guys who forget ice.”

Wes took the key ring from his pocket and unlocked his truck door. He could hear his father a few yards away from him, his steps slowing. Tentative, almost apologetic.

“Come on, we’re wasting time,” his father said, his voice softer now. “Let’s get the ice and get back out there.”

“I can’t,” Wes said, unable to look at his father.

“This is crazy. You’re the one who forgot the ice and you’re angry at me?”

Wes sat behind the wheel with the door still open and started the engine.

“Okay,” his father said. “We’ll see. I give you two days. Shit, a day. Bring the ice. You know what, forget it. I’ll get the ice. Because you probably won’t remember.”

Wes closed his door.

His father stood there staring. “Good luck,” he yelled. “You’ll need it.”

Cosgrove was sitting on the backyard stoop of the widow’s house during his lunch break when he sensed someone behind him. He turned and saw the widow glowering through the cracked door. Cosgrove had seen plenty of spiteful old women in his time, but this lady’s eyes were radioactive with scorn. He felt reproached for an offense he never committed. An offense that had never even occurred to him. All the offenses ever committed by man.

“Afternoon,” Cosgrove said. He stood and backed off the porch into the grass. He was supposed to keep his distance, one of Deputy Lemon’s rules.

“Go to hell,” the old woman said.

Cosgrove, speechless, looked down at the unbitten green apple in his palm.

“Who are you?” the woman asked.

“Community Service. Fixing your place up.”

“Your name.”

“Nate Cosgrove.”

“I never authorized this.”

“No need. The city did.”

The woman’s baleful gaze remained locked on his face. She seemed to
regard him as beneath her, a petty criminal. Cosgrove, for whatever reason, wanted to explain that he was a high school graduate. That he took three semesters of community college before his mother got sick. If life had gone a certain way, which it had not, he could have been a doctor or a lawyer or a college professor. He could have been anyone he wanted, or so he consoled himself.

One thing he was surer of every day: all you needed in life was a good start.

“I don’t like the looks of you,” said the old woman, the bitter wrinkles around her mouth tightening.

“Well, I’m sorry.”

“Are you mouthing off?”

It was still spring but the weather was already hot. A pendant of sweat hung from Cosgrove’s brow and dripped into his eye. He blinked against the sting of salt.

“Don’t you wink at me,” the woman said.

“I didn’t,” Cosgrove said.

The woman turned and slammed the door. Cosgrove heard the clocking of the deadbolt, the rattle of the burglar chain.
You’re a rapist
, the old woman was trying to say with the sound. He cursed the lady and chucked the apple into the blighted privet bushes and went back to painting the backyard picket fence.

Twenty minutes later the old woman emerged again from the house. Cosgrove ceased painting, the brush dripping butterscotch splats in the grass. He watched the woman cross the lawn with exaggerated caution, her steps slow and measured, as if she’d fall apart if she moved any faster.

When the woman finally reached Cosgrove, she fished in her robe pocket. By the time Cosgrove realized what she had taken out, it was too late to duck aside. She pressed the button of the little spray canister and a lethal mist clouded around his eyes.

Pepper spray.

The pain was instant and surreal. Cosgrove wailed and collapsed to his knees. The world was obliterated in an excruciating white haze. He
clenched his eyes and rubbed the lids, but the pain only spread like fire into his hands. He crawled blindly toward the house until his head knocked against something hard. He reached out. One of the crepe myrtles. He wrapped his arms around the trunk like a deckhand clinging to the mast of a tempest-tossed ship.

Cosgrove saw a figure approaching through the hot stinging fog. He cringed and blocked his face with his arm to fend off another attack from the old woman.

“What in blue fuck?” It was Hanson.

“Bitch pepper-sprayed me,” Cosgrove sobbed, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“Well, quit touchin’ your face. Shit.”

For a few minutes they sat in silence, Hanson lotus-style in the grass, Cosgrove slumped against the tree with tears and snot running down his face. In slow increments his vision began to return. The leaves of grass. The house with its scabrous clapboards and ugly purple shutters. Hanson’s pensive face. The sunlight glinting off his belt buckle.

“Kill that bitch,” Cosgrove said.

“You gonna tell Lemon?” Hanson asked.

“What you think?”

“Tell Lemon. See what happens. Crazy old bitch, she’ll accuse you of rape. God knows what aspects. And guess who they’ll believe first.”

“Why you give a shit?” Cosgrove asked.

Hanson’s eyes were grave with some secret knowledge. “I think you might not be seein’ at an opportunity right in your face.”

Hanson’s reasoning: The whole goddamn city was crooked anyway. Once the old lady died—this piece-of-shit old lady who, by the way, had pepper-sprayed Cosgrove for no reason—the junk would end up in a dump. Provided the city officials didn’t hawk the stuff themselves and line their pockets with lagniappe, more than they were already stealing. Besides,
what good was a bunch of old vinyl records going to do the woman? Antique rugs, silver candlestick holders, antebellum salt and pepper shakers? A 182-year-old obstetrics book?

Maybe Hanson was right. What had he done to deserve two hundred hours of community service during the ass-end of summer? How much would he have made shucking oysters all that time? And what had he done to deserve getting pepper-sprayed in the face?

A few days after the old woman pepper-sprayed Cosgrove, Hanson came up to him as he was finishing the last coat of paint on the backyard fence and asked him to check something out. Hanson’s eyes were wide, almost gleeful, and Cosgrove was curious despite himself. He put his paintbrush down on the lid in the grass and followed Hanson to one of the living room windows. Through it he could see Ms. Prejean, slumped on the living room sofa in her terrycloth bathrobe. Her eyes were shut, her underjaw unhinged.

“Now get a load of this,” Hanson said, grinning at Cosgrove. He slammed his palm on the glass, waited, slammed again. The woman remained inert as stone. “Lady must be on a thousand pain pills,” said Hanson.

“Don’t fuck with her,” Cosgrove said.

“Go on to the front door and wait a sec.”

“What’s this about?”

“Jesus, man, trust me for once.”

Pretending he was more put-upon than he was, Cosgrove went around the house to the front door and waited. Soon he heard someone on the other side unlocking the bolt and rattling the burglar chain. Expecting another attack from the old woman, he retreated a step and blocked his face with his forearm, but it was only Hanson, grinning.

“Come on. Check this shit out.”

Cosgrove stood there.

“Dead to the world, man. I’m telling you.”

Inside, the derelict Victorian was just as neglected as outside. Dim and dusty, redolent of old smells leeched into the blue rose wallpaper: cabbage and smoke, pesticide and moldering wood. Mouse leavings were
scattered like jimmies along the baseboards. And there in the den was old Ms. Prejean snoring softly on the sofa, a television tray across her knees, its top scattered with pill bottles and wadded tissues like soiled corsages. A thread of drool gleamed on her white-whiskered chin.

“How’d you get in here?” Cosgrove whispered.

“Kitchen window. Above the sink. No latch. Opened it and slipped right through.”

Now Hanson approached the old woman and stooped, raising his hands before her face. He clapped, a single sharp smack that echoed thinly through the house, but the woman didn’t stir.

Cosgrove told Hanson they should get the fuck out.

Hanson picked one of the pill bottles off the tray and inspected the label. He shook out a pill, palmed it into his mouth, swallowed it dry. Then he put the bottle back in its place. “Come on, all it’ll take is a second,” he told Cosgrove. “You want to see this, trust me.”

Upstairs, several rooms branched off from a dark hall, one of them a small office with a fixed ladder leading up to the attic. Hanson climbed the rungs and Cosgrove followed. Once Hanson was stooped in the crawlspace, Cosgrove poked his head up. Faint light fell through the small leaded-glass window, but it was bright enough to see the bounty spread before him.

There were antique porcelain dolls and mirrors, colored glass plates and perfume bottles, vintage quilts and cobalt crockery, Victorian chairs and curio cabinets. There were stained-glass lamps and old brass instruments in leather trunks with ornate hinges. Never mind the cardboard boxes stacked four and five tall, full of God knew what. The bounty seemed endless. You could have furnished three houses with what was up there. A sheik’s palace.