The Marauders (14 page)

As far as Cosgrove could tell, the letters went unanswered. The widow, it seemed, had no interest in entertaining genealogical queries. Maybe she didn’t know the answers. Or maybe she wanted to keep certain mysteries to herself. Whatever the reason for her silence, it would remain unknown, the woman was so far gone now. So far gone she didn’t notice strangers ransacking her attic for days on end.

“You find anything?” Hanson asked.

“You were right,” Cosgrove said, wiping his dusty hands on his ragged jeans. “The old lady, coming from pirates.”

Hanson grinned a monkey grin. “Told you, motherfucker.”

Cosgrove grunted.

“Find anything good?”

“Just letters.”

Hanson stood, ducking so he wouldn’t hit his head on the low slope of the ceiling. It was sweltering in the attic and his face was ruddy, his shirt stuck with sweat to his torso. “Maybe you’ll believe me next time,” he said. Then he jerked his head. “About having a heat stroke. Let’s get out of this dump.”

Before Lemon picked them up that afternoon they were lounging in the shade of the front porch taking turns sipping from Hanson’s plastic hip flask of tequila.

“You feel bad at all?” Hanson asked. “All the stealing we done?”

Cosgrove shrugged. “A little.”

“Bitch pepper-sprayed you.”

“Yeah, I keep reminding myself.”

They were silent for a minute.

“What you gonna do now?” Cosgrove asked.

“Fuck knows,” Hanson said. “You?”

“Oysters. Same shit.”

Hanson reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a joint and handed it to Cosgrove. “Goin’ away present,” he said. “Shit you liked so much.”

Cosgrove took the joint. “Sure appreciate it.”

“Maybe I’ll see you.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

In early September Cosgrove completed his community service sentence and soon afterward was laid off from Captain Larry’s Oyster House. Tourists were no longer buying Gulf Coast seafood. The restaurant, a neighborhood tradition for forty-five years, would close its doors in a week.

Cosgrove was perusing the job section in the
Times-Picayune
when he came across an oil-spill-related help-wanted ad. No references or background check required, immediate hire for American citizens of age. With one condition: “Must love birds!” the ad said.

Did Cosgrove love birds? Hell yes for fifteen dollars an hour.

He signed up in front of the public library on Tulane and that afternoon was bussed with thirty-odd volunteers to Jeanette, a bayou town forty-five minutes outside of New Orleans. An encampment had been built within shouting distance of the bayou: Quonset huts and doublewide trailers, port-a-potties and a low-slung mess hall, an impromptu barracks with rows of cots inside.

Cosgrove stepped off the bus and wandered the encampment, a black duffel bag containing almost everything he owned in the world hung over his shoulder. Volunteers in plainclothes milled about, some of them wizened vagabonds like himself, others moneyed-looking boys and girls—even their suntans looked rich, their teeth—here no doubt to fulfill another good deed they could tick off in their college application letters.

Television reporters stood here and there in front of cameras, imparting grave news about the oil spill. A young platinum-haired journalist in a blue silk blouse stopped Cosgrove and asked him what he thought about the catastrophe.

Cosgrove stood before the camera like a spooked animal.

“Think the situation’s getting better?” the woman asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just got here.”

“Is it as bad as you thought it would be?” the woman asked in a stiff clip.

Cosgrove shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Well,” he said, crossing his arms. “It’s pretty bad.”

The woman waited, the microphone in Cosgrove’s face like a rattlesnake.

“God-awful,” Cosgrove said.

“Well, good luck to you,” the woman told him. “We thank you for the important work you’re doing.”

Cosgrove nodded.

The woman turned away, searching for the next person to accost. As Cosgrove walked off, the woman’s words lingered with him. No one had ever told him that his work was important or thanked him for any job he did. The approbation, though misdirected, filled him with a warm buzz.

There was a certain satisfaction in the work, Cosgrove had to admit. Five days a week at eight in the morning he reported for duty in a hangarlike cleaning facility, where large plastic tubs like baby baths were rowed side by side along narrow tables. In each of the tubs was an oil-covered bird: a pelican or egret or heron. Volunteers in smocks and gloves sprayed down the birds and swabbed the black gunk from their wings. They shampooed them with dish detergent and rinsed their feathers with a nozzled hose and then they passed the bird on to the next tub, where the process was repeated. At the final cleaning station they were rinsed and toweled dry and then they were carried outside to the aviary, where they remained under observation until deemed healthy enough for release. Finally, if they were lucky, they were flown to Florida and set free in Tampa Bay.

The first bird Cosgrove cleaned, a pelican, keened like a tortured child
and wriggled from his grasp. Two other cleaners, crew-cut lesbians in overalls and brogans, came over and helped him pin down the bird.

Its eyes were swollen with clotted oil, its feathers ragged with grease.

Anger knotted in Cosgrove’s throat. The bird would live only a day or two longer if it was lucky. Or cursed.

Cosgrove rested a hand on the nape of the bird’s neck and dunked it baptismally under the water. Then he sprayed its feathers, and its wings began showing through the clots of oil.

“There you go,” said one of the women, “you’re a natural.”

Cosgrove, surprised to find himself blushing, thanked the pair.

Cosgrove was into his second week at the sanctuary when he heard someone coughing at a table behind him. The cough sounded like “Cos-grove! Cos-grove!” Cosgrove, cleaning the oil off a spoonbill’s wing, turned and spotted Hanson staring craftily across the room. Hanson put down the nozzle of his hose and wiped his hands on the front of his baggy jean shorts and ambled over, a rooster fish swagger out of proportion to his size. His gigantic rodeo belt buckle caught the light.

“You believe in fate, Cosgrove?” Hanson asked.

“Unfuckingbelievable.”

“Thought you’d never see me again.”

“What’re you, stalking me?” Cosgrove joked.

They fist-bumped. Cosgrove saw that the right side of Hanson’s face was blotched with a fading green-and-purple bruise. He asked Hanson what happened.

“At the bar some dude catches me lookin’ wrong at his lady,” Hanson said, hanging one thumb over his canvas belt. “Hell, I didn’t know she had a man. Wouldn’t’ve made the gesture I did. Tried apologizing, but the guy told me to get down on my hands and knees and beg. Some shit-for-brains Jackson, Mississippi, son-bitch. I told him, ‘Bitch, John Henry Hanson never got on his knees for no-goddamn-body.’ Then I says something about his mother and he punched me good.”

Cosgrove whistled through his teeth.

“Oh, I got in some good licks. Don’t you fuckin’ doubt it.” He nodded, eyes bulging. Then, as if Cosgrove had asked, “Saw an ad in the paper. Cleaning birds for fifteen an hour. No drug tests or other aspects. Fuck yeah.”

For a few minutes they only worked, Hanson pinning the spoonbill down, Cosgrove washing the oil from its neck feathers with the hose. After a while Cosgrove lifted the bird and brought it to the next station. Then he dumped the gunky water from the tub and filled it with fresh water from the hose. Finally he went to the neighboring station and took a pelican from the rubber-aproned man working there.

Hanson held the pelican down as Cosgrove sprayed.

“Got any of that shit?” Cosgrove whispered.

Hanson had to tip his head back to look him in the eyes. “Wish. You?”

Cosgrove shook his head.

“Kind of bird is this?” Hanson asked.

Cosgrove looked at Hanson for a second before answering. “A pelican, man.”

“Pelican my ass,” Hanson said. He looked over at one of the volunteer veterinarians three tubs down. “Hey, doc. Kind of bird is this?”

“Pelican,” the doctor said.

“Looks like a piece-of-shit bird to me.”

“What’s your name?”

“John Henry Hanson, sir.”

“Do your work, Hanson,” the doctor said.

Hanson lowered his voice. “Everybody’s making such a big deal about these birds,” he said. “They cure cancer? They good at blowjobs?”

“It’s ecology,” Cosgrove said.

“You’re a man of few words, Sasquatch. Anybody ever tell you that?”

Cosgrove grunted and for a while they worked in silence.

“Hey, remember that island Greenfoot was talking about?” Hanson said. “Right around the bend, ain’t it?”

The problem with these coon-ass swamp people, Grimes thought: they were too dumb to see an opportunity when you dropped it right in their laps. Year after year they tried to eke out a livelihood in the bayou—doggedly, stubbornly, willfully blind to reality—and every year it was more like squeezing blood out of stone.

Bob Trench. This man was particularly stubborn. Worse, perhaps, than the Lindquist lunatic.

Today, his third visit to Bob Trench’s house, Grimes knocked on the front door and when there was no answer he went through the side yard toward the back. Enormous brown grasshoppers took wing, clattering like broken party favors. Trench stood in the backyard under a trawling net stretched like a gigantic spiderweb between two persimmon trees. Untangling a knot, he looked up at Grimes. His thick fingers, working with insectoid agility, didn’t slow. “Jesus,” he said.

“Afternoon, Mr. Trench,” said Grimes.

Grimes put his hands on his hips and surveyed the yard. Mown grass, a trimmed chinaberry tree, a Weber grill with a wrought-iron table and some chairs around it. And on the far side of the yard, just before the lawn ceded to brush, was a boat-shaped hulk under a rain-puddled tarp.

“Beautiful place you got,” said Grimes, nodding in appreciation.

Trench said nothing. Cicadas droned in the far-off pines.

“Real beautiful yard. Hope I have a place like this someday. Peaceful.”

“This is trespassing. And harassment.”

Ignoring the remark, Grimes said, “Place looks older than the rest around here. Solid.” He stepped out of the sun into the persimmon shade. Just a fraction cooler. His white fitted shirt was sopping and stuck to his back and he could smell the onion ripeness of his underarms. He knew all too goddamn well the heat would last well into September, maybe mid-October.

“Only had a foot of water,” Trench said without looking up.

“Yeah?” Grimes said, not caring, but trying to seem like he did. Numbers were running through his head, how many people had signed, how many people still needed to. He could visit ten more houses today if he worked quickly enough.

“When I was standing on the roof,” said Trench.

Grimes laughed an exaggerated openmouthed laugh. Maybe he was making a little leeway with the bastard. Finally.