Authors: Tom Cooper
Trench’s mouth kept tight as he moved onto another knot. “Twelve foot of water,” he said. “Had to rebuild it.”
Grimes raised his eyebrows.
“You ever hear of the Road Home program?”
“No,” Grimes said.
“One of those government programs meant to help people after the storm,” Trench said. “Complete bullshit. Sent me a letter saying may we please offer you zero-point-zero-zero. May we please offer you nothing. A form note. Because I had insurance. Which covered a third of my losses.”
“Guess I’d be pissed too,” said Grimes, swatting away a horsefly. He wondered if telling Trench that he was Chris Grimes’s son would soften the man’s attitude. Probably. And probably this was a card best played later.
“Guess?” said Trench. He patted the front pocket of his orange polo shirt and fished out a cigarette. One of those svelte women’s cigarettes,
a Virginia Slim. He lit it and kept it smoldering between his clenched lips, squinting against the smoke, which was the same shade of white as his hair.
“Add insult to injury?” Trench went on. “I had a deckhand. A drunk. Worthless as tits on a tomato. Kept him on because he had a wife and kid. Had a boat before the storm. Piece-of-shit boat. Couldn’t’ve been worth more than a few grand. No insurance. Motherfucker never paid a bill on time in his life. Well, government pays him seventy thousand dollars for the thing. He buys a thirty-thousand-dollar boat, pockets the rest. Spent the rest in Harrah’s casino in New Orleans. Then, big surprise, he cracks the goddamn boat all to hell a month later. Fuckin’ drunk.”
Grimes was taken aback by Trench’s gregariousness. He was beginning to suspect that Trench might harangue anyone within earshot. The Antichrist.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Mr. Trench,” Grimes said, “but why are you telling me all this?”
“Leave if you want,” Trench said from one side of his mouth. The cigarette, long-ashed, still burned in the other. The ash dropped and flecked the front of his orange polo shirt and he flicked the smudge away.
“No, it’s interesting. But why? If you dislike me so much?”
Trench sidestepped to another knot. “I don’t dislike you.”
“No?”
“I hate you.” Trench didn’t look up.
Blood batting in his face, ears burning, Grimes said, “I understand you’re angry, Mr. Trench.”
Trench kept working, breathing roughly through his nose.
“I’m only trying to help.”
Silence.
“You think there’s some wild conspiracy against you?”
“Go away.”
“I’m not from the government.”
“You are the government.”
“I’m with the oil company.”
“No fuckin’ difference.”
“I’m not a political man, Mr. Trench.”
“The second you started working for that company you got political. Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour, fuckin’ Riley. One great big orgy. And you’re in the middle.”
Grimes sighed and shook his head. Trench’s cheeks and ears, he saw, were an unhealthy shade of red. If the man wasn’t careful he’d have a heart attack before he knew it. Would serve the bastard right. He imagined Trench collapsing to his knees, writhing on his back in the dirt, an upside-down bug. “Ready to sign?” Grimes would say, hovering above him with the Mont Blanc pen and papers like the Grim Reaper.
“I’m just going to flat-out ask,” said Grimes. “What will it take?”
“For what?”
“To sign.”
“Nothing.”
Grimes pinched the bridge of his nose and breathed deeply, as if patience was something he could draw from the air. “I don’t understand, Mr. Trench.”
“That’s fine. You don’t have to.”
“But I want to.”
“Where those folks going?” He pointed his chin to the side of the yard. As if there were someone there to see.
Grimes glanced. “Your neighbors?”
“Folks in my yard.”
“Folks in your yard?” Grimes looked again, shook his head in bafflement.
“My folks, buried in the ground.”
Now Grimes saw. Beyond a stand of oaks at the edge of the yard was a scattering of lichen-spotted tombstones, one much newer than the rest and glaring like a bright tooth in the sun.
“They can be reburied,” Grimes said.
Trench’s jaw dropped with parodic incredulity. “Dig them up?” he asked.
Grimes knew he had to proceed cautiously. “It’s done much more often than you would think.”
Trench looked down at the ground, scratched the side of his nose with his forefinger.
“These are licensed people. Consummate professionals. Your folks”—in Grimes’s ears the word came out with all the mellifluousness of a turd plopping into a tin bucket, so Lord only knew how Trench heard it—“they’d be treated with the greatest care and delicacy.”
“Guess it wouldn’t matter either way to them.”
After a moment Grimes allowed that maybe it didn’t.
“I’ll never sign,” said Trench. He took a final suck on his cigarette and spat it in the grass, heeling it out with his boot.
“I get that a lot.”
“Listen to me,” Trench said, pointing. “You can set me on fire and ask to piss out the flames and I’ll never sign.”
“One more question,” Grimes said.
Trench folded his arms over his chest and glared at the ground.
“Why here?” Grimes asked. “What’s so special?”
Trench said nothing. And his silence so infuriated Grimes that he spewed the venom that had been building up for weeks. “This is the middle of nowhere,” he said, “the end of the world.”
Trench smirked sardonically. “Is it, now?”
It was dark when Grimes returned to his motel room. He poured three fingers of bourbon into a plastic motel cup and sat on the edge of the creaking bed. He wrestled off his shoes and loosened the knot of his tie and called Ingram on his cell phone.
“I made a mistake,” he said.
“What now, Grimes?”
“I lost my temper.”
“What happened?”
“I couldn’t help it.”
On Ingram’s end of the line, a lighter snapped. Ingram was trying to kick his cigarette habit, but it seemed he smoked every time he was on the phone with Grimes.
Ingram asked what happened.
“I told this Trench guy that this place was a shithole.”
“No, Grimes. No.”
“I didn’t use those exact words. I said something like this is the end of the world.”
Ingram breathed slowly through his teeth. “And what did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. But he didn’t seem to like it.”
“Grimes. You just pissed away weeks of work. Months. Because you couldn’t keep your mouth shut. How many times do we have to go through this?”
“It hasn’t happened in a while.”
“It shouldn’t happen ever.”
“You don’t understand. This guy. This guy, he’s like Bartleby the fucking Scrivener.”
“I’m hanging up, Grimes.”
“The story. By Melville. The one about the file clerk? His boss keeps asking him to do the simplest things, the simplest most basic fucking common-sense things you can imagine, and the guy, no matter what, keeps on saying I’d rather not. You want some lemonade? I’d rather not. You want a raise? I’d rather not. You want a blowjob? I’d rather not. That’s this guy. Bob Trench.”
“Level with me, Grimes.”
“What?”
“Are you drinking again?”
“No,” Grimes lied. “Why?”
It was half past one when the black Suburban shuddered up the twin-rutted drive to Lindquist’s house, the only light from the moth-haloed porch globe throwing the long shadow of the birdbath, like a fedora’d man’s silhouette, across the yard.
The Toup brothers knew that Lindquist was now on his boat in the Barataria. That his wife had moved out months ago. That his kid, Reagan the redhead with the big tits, was grown up and living on her own. Small town like this, all you had to do was ask around. Sometimes you didn’t even have to do that much. They also knew that someone who spent so many nights metal detecting in the bayou had to be convinced he was chasing after something worthwhile.
Victor and Reginald stepped around the house, peering through the windows one by one. The night was silent save for the calling of crickets and frogs, their footfalls in the dead leaves and nettles. The stealthy rustling of an animal, possum or raccoon, creeping farther into the woods.
The front door lock was cheap and flimsy and it took Victor all of five seconds to jimmy it open with a snake-rake pick. They stepped inside and Victor fumbled for the wall switch and flicked it on.
Goodwill sofa. Green shag carpet from the seventies. Wood-paneled walls.
“Looks like a place you die in,” Victor said.
The stench of garbage wafted from the back of the house. The brothers turned to one another with wrinkled faces. They went past the littered dining room table to the kitchen, where they found three black trash bags heaped beside the back door. One of the bags was split and a tar-black puddle of slime had seeped onto the olive-green linoleum.
“Fuckin’ slob,” Victor said, holding the back of his hand against his nose.
The brothers walked again into the living room and went down the end of the hall to the master bedroom. Victor flicked on the light and went to a chest of drawers and riffled through socks and underwear and T-shirts. Reginald sat on the edge of the unmade bed and sorted through the junk in a nightstand drawer. A half-furled tube of ointment. A green pocket-sized Bible. A pair of drugstore reading glasses. Empty prescription bottles.
The brothers searched through another bedroom and then they returned to the kitchen, where they opened the cupboards and looked through coffee cans and cereal boxes.
Victor stood for a moment with his hands on his hips, staring up at the water-stained ceiling. He went to the refrigerator and opened it and peered inside at the barren shelves. A festering onion speckled with blue-gray mold. A six-pack of Abita beer. A bottle of Texas Pete hot sauce.
The brothers were back in the living room when Reginald called Victor over to the dining room table. They stood for a moment studying the array of old maps. Victor picked one of them up, a map of the Barataria waterways and islands, the complex maze of canals and cheniers. They owned such maps themselves. On this one Lindquist had marked with purple pen his meandering progress through the bayou, a stuttering line like a stitch. The path stopped at the small pear-shaped chenier where they’d seen him the other night. A scant half mile away was the dewdrop shape of their island.
“Look at this,” Victor said, pointing.
Reginald looked and huffed air through his nose.
“Goddamn if this guy ain’t crazy,” Victor said.
Lindquist was asleep on the couch when someone knocked on the front door and woke him. He sat upright and rubbed his stinging eyes and blinked down at his watch. Three o’clock in the afternoon. The night before he’d returned home and discovered his bedroom drawers opened and mussed, cans and boxes toppled over in the kitchen cabinets. At first he figured either Gwen or Reagan must have let herself in, but then he remembered they didn’t have the new keys. No, he must have fucked things up himself while somnambulating in a fog of beer and pills.
There was knocking again, this time more insistent. He rose from the couch and shuffled toward the door—quietly, in case it was a creditor. He held his breath and squinted through the peephole. On the doorstep stood his daughter, wearing a purple blouse printed with little cream-colored flowers, and a white chiffon scarf wrapped loosely around her neck. Her hair was done up with bobby pins and she looked bright-eyed and rested. A welcome change.
“I hear you in there, Daddy,” Reagan said through the door.
“Yeah, yeah,” Lindquist said. “Hold on.”
He turned around and glanced quickly about. The remnants of a ground-up pill on the coffee table, an incriminating streak of pharmaceutical dust. He went over and swept the powder onto the floor and heeled it into the carpet.
Lindquist smoothed the back of his hair and opened the door. Reagan stepped in and pecked him on the cheek and looked around the room. “Jesus, Daddy,” she said. “You been partying?”
“Me, naw,” he said. “Nothing like that now.”
She went to the couch and sat with her red leather purse in her lap. Lindquist sat in the faded plaid recliner across from her.
“Wasn’t expecting company,” he said.
“You look thinner.”
“I lost an arm.”
“Daddy. That’s not funny.”
Lindquist shrugged. “Hey, were you in here last night?” he asked. Lightly, because he didn’t want to sound accusatory.
“Here, the house?”
“Yeah, I came home this morning and a bunch of my papers were messed up. Stuff in my bedroom.”
“I don’t even have a key anymore. Remember? Mom changed the lock after you guys had that fight two or three years ago.”
Lindquist made an O with his mouth. Yes, the famous Fourth of July fight where he’d gotten drunk and high on pills at a party thrown by one of Gwen’s coworker friends. He’d told nasty Polish jokes and set off cherry bombs in his prosthesis and ended up accidentally burning some lawn furniture. Gwen threw him out of the house for that fiasco and he had to stay at the Econo Lodge in Houma for a week.
“Maybe it was Bosco,” Reagan said.
“Oh, baby. That cat’s been dead two years.”
Now it was Reagan’s turn to look surprised.
Finally Lindquist saw why his daughter was wearing the scarf. The raspberry medallion of a hickey showed over the edge of the fabric. He thought about asking Reagan if her boyfriend was a lamprey. If she was attacked by a plunger. But some jokes were verboten, a courtesy he tendered exclusively to his daughter.
He picked a nub of fabric off the tattered arm of the recliner and rolled it into a pill between his thumb and forefinger and flicked it booger-like across the room. It pinged off his daughter’s ear—Lindquist could see
the little gnat-sized thing in the sunlight—and landed somewhere in the carpet.
“Nice hickey,” Lindquist said. He couldn’t help himself.
Reagan ignored the comment. “Why you wearing that nasty old thing?” she asked.
“I like this shirt, me.”
“The hook arm.”