The Marauders (13 page)

Carrying a purple velvet Crown Royal bag full of trinket jewelry, Lindquist entered Trader John’s general store. He kept a dwindling cache in case of emergencies when he needed money for pills, for diesel, for bills. The original owner of the shop, John Theriot, was long dead, the place now run by his wife. Lindquist nodded hello at the old woman and started for the counter but saw a young couple browsing the jewelry display. He stuffed the bag into his camouflage cargo pants and beelined to the back of the store, where he stopped in front of the used tools hanging from the pegboard wall. He stood in the same spot with his hands clasped behind his back, gazing up at a sod cutter as if it were a Picasso.

When the couple left and Lindquist heard the little bell chime above the door, he came up to the counter. He removed the bag from his pocket and untied the cinch strings and spilled a cache of jewelry on the counter. “Wanting to sell all this,” Lindquist said. “One price for all.”

Watches, necklaces, rings, most of it cheap gold-plated stuff, fair trinkets you won for tossing a Ping-Pong ball into a goldfish bowl. But amid the junk were a few pieces that looked worthwhile, perhaps even valuable.

Mrs. Theriot’s narrow nose flared as she studied the jewelry. Lindquist knew that the woman disliked him, considered him no more principled than a looter. The bones of her face were hard and dour, out of keeping with her too-bright button-down pineapple shirt. While she picked among the rings and necklaces he studied the 2010–2011 New Orleans Saints schedule hung on the wall behind the counter. The season opener, against the Vikings, was coming up in early September.

“Where’d you find all this?” Mrs. Theriot finally asked.

Lindquist grinned a coy grin. “Oh, I can’t tell you that now.”

“This might be somebody’s, I mean.”

His grin quickly fell. “You saying I stole it?”

“Nobody’s saying that.”

“Never stolen a thing in my life, me. I ain’t no thief.”

“Nobody’s saying you’re a thief either.”

Now Lindquist’s face was flushed and his mouth was twitching.

“Lots of stuff went missing after the storm,” said Mrs. Theriot. “Lots of stuff folks are still looking for.”

Lindquist sighed through his nose and glanced at the floor. He leaned in closer and drummed his fingers on the glass, hatching some scheme in his head. “Tell you what. They come in and recognize it before it’s sold, they can have it.”

The woman shook her head. “Not sure if that’s a good idea either.”

“How come?”

“Well, people are going to line up straight to Mississippi claiming things are theirs that aren’t.”

“Hell, I’m not saying put a sign up saying free jewelry.”

The woman waited.

Lindquist said, “If somebody looks at the stuff funny, then you know something’s up and maybe he’s telling the truth.”

Mrs. Theriot picked through the pile on the counter. “Most of it’s worthless,” she said.

Lindquist pointed. “Look at that watch. Somebody’s gonna want that watch. And that ring. Look. Solid gold. Diamond’s not big, but it’s real. Solid gold around it.”

“I’ll give you one hundred dollars for all of it right now.”

Lindquist looked quickly away and then quickly back, a kind of vaudeville double-take. “One hundred dollars,” he said. “Come on now.”

“One hundred dollars.”

“Well, hell. That watch right there alone is worth a hundred.”

“I’ll be lucky to sell it for half that. People aren’t buying a lot of jewelry these days. They’re not buying a whole lot of anything.”

“Everybody needs a watch.”

“If I make more than a hundred dollars,” Mrs. Theriot said, “we split the profit fifty-fifty. This stuff, we’d be lucky, though.”

Next morning a kid was sitting atop his cooler on the deck in front of the
Jean Lafitte
. Black-haired with gray already peppering the sides, pale green eyes lighter than his dark skin. He asked Lindquist if he was the captain looking for deckhands.

Lindquist asked Wes how old he was and Wes said seventeen, eighteen very soon.

“Look a little small,” Lindquist said. “Can you work a winch?”

“Yessir. I can work everything on a shrimp boat.”

“You only seventeen but you got all that gray in your hair?”

Wes shrugged. “Yessir.”

Lindquist studied Wes. “I seen you around.”

“Lived here my whole life so I guess you probably have.”

“Yeah, I seen you,” Lindquist said. He nodded vaguely as if trying to recollect where. Something clicked behind his eyes. “Monsieur’s several days back.”

“I was there. Yessir.”

“Trench’s kid, ain’t you?”

Wes nodded.

“What’s wrong with his boat?”

“Nothing.”

“How come you two not working together is what I mean.”

Wes plunged hands in his pockets and kept silent.

“Oh boy, it’s like that now, huh?”

Wes shrugged.

“He gonna be pissed?”

“At me maybe. Not you.”

“I don’t need any more motherfuckers pissed at me. I got enough of those to last a lifetime.”

“I guarantee, sir.”

“You on drugs?”

“No sir,” he said.

“Blaze?” Lindquist asked.

“Do what?”

“Do you blaze?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Smoke reefer.”

“No, none of that.”

“You crazy?”

“No sir.”

“Can you work a wench?”

“Yeah. Yes sir.”

“You good at lifting trawls?”

“Yessir.”

“You ever been to Sing Sing?”

“Where, sir?”

“Congratufuckinglations,” Lindquist said. “You’re hired.”

The late afternoon was warm and cloudless, the sun a fat shivering coin of pewter, cicadas shrieking in the live oaks. Wes watched the bayou slide past, its sluggish currents pulsing with life. Who knew what gargantuan oddity lurked beneath. Wes imagined a catfish the size of a sofa, a turtle the size of a dune buggy. That was one of the things he still loved about the bayou. Its mystery.

They passed a chenier, above its tree line a circling coterie of buzzards. A carrion stench hung in the air. Something dead, a deer or a possum, was in the woods. Even after they passed the island the gray aftertaste lingered in Wes’s mouth like poison.

“Let one go?” Lindquist called down from the wheelhouse.

Wes looked up, visoring his eyes with his hand. “Say what now?”

“You let one rip?”

“We just passed something.”

“You passed something?”

“Something’s dead in those woods.”

“You uptight.”

Wes didn’t know what to say. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“You uptight. All that gray on your head. You uptight.”

Wes went back to untangling the nets. They were the sorriest he’d
ever seen, full of holes and clumsy patches. He supposed his nets would be in crappy shape too if he were missing an arm.

After a minute something struck Wes on the back of the head. Hard, like a rock. He grabbed his skull and whirled around and glared.

Lindquist grinned down from the wheelhouse.

“You throw something?” Wes asked.

Lindquist was laughing. “On the deck,” he said. “By your foot.”

Wes looked down at the tinfoiled roll of mints and picked them up.

“Suck a few of those,” Lindquist said. “Get that nastiness out of your head.”

Wes opened the roll with his thumbnail and popped a mint into his mouth. He was about to toss the mints back up when Lindquist said, “Keep them. I got plenty, me.”

Wes lowered the nets and let the water pass. Twenty minutes later he winched up the trawls and heaped the hauls on the sorting table. Then Lindquist came down the wheelhouse ladder and they put on gloves and together picked through the squirming heap of sea life.

“Look at these pissant shrimp,” Lindquist said.

Lindquist looked at Wes as though expecting him to argue otherwise. He grabbed a baby gaspergou and underhanded it off the boat. It flipped its tail and smacked the water.

“Knock knock,” Lindquist said.

“This a joke?” Wes asked.

“Yeah, a knock-knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Little Boy Blue.”

“Little Boy Blue Who?”

“Michael Jackson.”

Wes whistled a small laugh through his nose to make Lindquist think he was amused.

At sunup the shrimp were unloaded and weighed at Monsieur Montegut’s and then Lindquist piloted the boat back to the marina. In the parking lot Lindquist counted out Wes’s share and handed it to him.

Wes thanked Lindquist and put the money in his pocket without counting it.

“You don’t wanna count it?” Lindquist said.

“I trust you.”

“You’ll be here sundown?”

“If you want me,” Wes said.

“Well, hell. Why wouldn’t I? You a good worker.”

If Lemon ever suspected any devilment on their part, he didn’t show it. “Looking good, gentlemen,” he’d say, inspecting their work, or lack thereof, at the end of the day. “Looking real, real good, real good,” he drawled through his smirk. Somehow you knew he was fucking with you, knew he didn’t care if you were fucking with him. He grinned and thwacked their backs with his beefy hand. He seemed high or drunk or both. Cosgrove wouldn’t have been surprised. His front teeth looked purple, wine-stained, and Cosgrove could have sworn he caught some astringent medicinal odor, maybe spermicide or sex lubricant, wafting off him.

Hanson’s last day of community service was in late August. Cosgrove’s own was just a week or so off. For old times’ sake, Hanson wanted to loot the widow’s attic one last time.

“I think we’ve already pressed our luck,” Cosgrove said.

“Pressed? Like she pressed that button and blasted that shit in your face?”

That’s all the convincing it took. Just like old times, Hanson snuck through the kitchen window and let Cosgrove through the front door. While they were climbing the stairs they heard the old woman’s voice, frail and just-woken, from the living room.

“Turkey’s in the oven,” she said.

Cosgrove stopped on the stairs. Then Hanson stopped. Cosgrove looked over his shoulder: what the fuck?

“Boys?” the old widow said. “Turkey’s almost done.”

“No sweat,” Hanson called back.

“The fuck you doing?” Cosgrove whispered.

“Lady doesn’t know her ass from a hand grenade.”

“You boys put on the game if you want.”

“Yeah, good game. Watching it.”

From a far-flung room of the house a grandfather clock chimed one.

“Turkey good?” asked the woman.

“Turkey’s delicious, ma’am.”

“You boys go upstairs and play until dinner’s done.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Cosgrove said to Hanson.

“A minute,” Hanson said.

They ascended the pull-down stairs into the sweltering attic and started rummaging through cardboard boxes. At first Cosgrove didn’t find much. Photographs and daguerreotypes. Bronzed baby shoes. Corsages stuck inside scrapbooks. Then he came across an old brass-hinged leather portmanteau. Inside he found old letters written in calligraphy on parchment: some in French, others in Spanish, only a few in English. At the bottom of the trunk were more recent envelopes, return and forwarding addresses typewritten, ten- and fifteen-cent stamps, postmarks from the United States: Louisiana and Mississippi and Texas.

Cosgrove quickly perused the letters. Several were from the seventies and eighties, from doctors and professors with Creole-sounding names who claimed to be members of “The Lafitte Study Group.” After 1994, they started referring to themselves as part of “The Lafitte Society.” The letters were common in theme: addressed to Esther Prejean, wanting to know about her mother’s side of the family, the Boudreaux. Was Esther’s maiden name Boudreaux, and did she have any relation to Marie Boudreaux, née Butte, née Breaux, who received settlement checks from the Lafitte estate in Galveston? If so, she might be a living
part of the fabled Lafitte lineage, a sixth- or seventh-generation member of the famous privateer’s genealogy and an invaluable part of their historical research.

So on and so forth.