The Marauders (2 page)

“And you’re sure you didn’t leave it home,” Villanova said.

Lindquist narrowed his eyes. “You leave your arms at home?”

Your thirty-thousand-dollar arm
, he wanted to say. Without his wife’s insurance from her job at the bank, Lindquist could have never afforded the prosthetic or the months of physical therapy after his accident. And even with Gwen’s insurance, Lindquist had to pay fifteen grand out of pocket, money he put on a high-interest credit card he paid only the minimum on every month. A debt he’d take to his grave, but he couldn’t exactly shrimp with a five-dollar hook arm from Kmart.

Villanova wrote something down. “You have the serial number?”

“The serial number?”

Villanova pinched the bridge of his nose. “The serial number for the arm, Lindquist.”

Lindquist shook his head.

“Well, you can always call the doctor. Call wherever you got it. That might make sense.”

The men scattered their separate ways, Dixon and Sully back into the bar, LaGarde and Prejean off to their trucks. Lindquist stood beside his truck door, jangling through a wad of keys. A full minute passed before he found the right one. Then for another half minute Lindquist jabbed the key around the lock, scraping metal. Finally he scrunched one eye closed and slipped the key inside.

Villanova watched from across the lot. “What you doing?” he asked.

“Driving home.”

“Like hell. You’re drunk.”

Lindquist squinted at Villanova, head listing as if to music only he could hear. “Just a little,” he said.

“It’s late, Lindquist. Get in the car.”

For a time the men were silent as Villanova drove along the trafficless two-way. They passed a palmetto grove, a field of saw grass. A nighthawk winged across the moon, its silhouette like an emblem on a coin.

“Knock knock,” Lindquist said.

“Still at it with your jokes, Lindquist.”

“Knock knock.”

“Loses an arm and tells knock-knock jokes.”

“Anita.”

“Anita who?”

“Anita big ol’ pair of titties in front of me.”

Villanova shook his head. The police radio popped and hissed with static.

“So you all were playing poker,” Villanova said.

“Yeah.”

“For money?”

“What you think?”

“That’s illegal.”

Villanova kept both hands tight on the wheel, both eyes on the road.

“Knock knock.”

“It’s late, Lindquist.”

Villanova didn’t need to ask him for directions because he knew the way. He’d driven Lindquist home from the bar a few times because he was too wrecked to drive himself.

“You worried about the oil?” Villanova asked.

Lindquist said he was. Everybody in Jeanette was. Hell, folks were in a shithouse panic.

“Could be better than they’re saying,” Villanova said. “But I got a feeling it might be worse.”

Soon Villanova bumped onto a gravel driveway that cut through wild privet to a brick ranch house with a gray-shake roof and satellite dish. A birdbath, its basin filled with scummy water and leaves, stood in a dead flowerbed.

Awkwardly, Lindquist reached his left arm across his lap and opened the door.

“You okay, Lindquist?” Villanova asked.

Lindquist stooped and looked into the car. “Yeah. You?”

“Yeah. Favor? No crusades just yet.”

Lindquist nodded.

“Got your keys?”

“Yeah.”

“Check for me.”

Lindquist took his keys out of his jeans pocket, jangled them, gave Villanova a thumbs-up.

“Still know how to use them?”

“So long, Villanova,” Lindquist said. He shut the door and stepped aside as Villanova turned the car around. He watched the taillights jitter like fireflies down the driveway, one pair and then two and then one again when he squinted an eye.

Lindquist opened the front door, flicked on the light, sniffed. A sweet-sour stink, of rancid bacon grease and chicken fat, wafted from the kitchen. And the den was littered with grease-mottled takeout bags, empty beer cans, month-old newspapers still in their cellophane bags. Lindquist wondered what his daughter, Reagan, would think if she dropped by for a visit, what his wife would think if she came back.

Like that was going to happen.

He moved to pick up one of the bags but his arm wasn’t there. He went to the kitchen and got an Abita out of the refrigerator and then he sat at the cluttered dining room table. Bills, all months overdue. Mortgage, credit cards, diesel, insurance. And books stacked four and five high:
The Story of the American Merchant Marine. The Pirates Lafitte. The Journal of Jean Lafitte. The Pirate Lafitte and the Battle of New Orleans. Biogeochemistry of the Wetlands: Science and Applications
.

Among the books were time-yellowed maritime maps as stiff as parchment, marked with red felt-tip pen in Lindquist’s hieroglyphic hand. A metal detector lay across the table with its circuitry box open and its wiring sticking out. Gwen used to bitch when he left these things on the table, but now he could keep them where he goddamn well pleased.

Lindquist leaned on one ass cheek and took out a Pez dispenser from
his pants pocket and flicked the head. Donald Duck spat out an oblong white pill: Oxycontin, whittled by Lindquist with a pocketknife so it fit perfectly into the dispenser. With the bottom of his Abita bottle he pummeled the pill on the dining room table until it was crushed to dust. Then he plugged a nostril with his forefinger and leaned over and snorted the powder, tipping his head back and rubbing the dust off his upper lip.

Lindquist unfolded one of the maps over the table, a fraying map in hachured black and blue ink of the Barataria, its serpentine waterways and archipelagos of barrier islands. Over time Lindquist had made his own adjustments to the cartography, crossed out cheniers succumbed to time and tempest, drawn new islands and hummocks sprung up overnight. One was shaped like a tadpole, another like a paw track, another like an Egyptian udjat. Over some of the islands he’d drawn X’s, over others question marks.

He uncapped a purple felt-tip pen with his teeth, studying the map, marking over one of the islands. He reached for his beer, but his right arm still wasn’t there. He dropped the pen and clutched the bottle, thinking of the last thing Gwen had told him before she left.

You’re in a bad place
, she’d said.
You need help
.

Lindquist finished his beer, went to the refrigerator and got another, sat back down at the dining room table and opened his laptop. In Google he typed
Jean Lafitte
and pulled up more than a million results. Then he typed in
Lafitte
and
Barataria
and got nearly two hundred and fifty. He typed in the words
treasure
and
gold
and
pirate
and then he typed in other search terms until he stumbled upon a treasure-hunting board where men—only men—had posted their metal detecting stories. One of the posts showed pictures of brass mushroom buttons and musket balls and doubloons, another a War of 1812 artillery button, another yet an 1851 Officer’s Eagle Sword belt plate.

He was still at the kitchen table drinking his beer and browsing through the treasure pictures when his e-mail pinged. He opened up the new message and read it.

Midnight. Wes and his father followed the trail from their house toward the harbor. Even from a quarter mile distant, through the palmetto brakes and waist-tall swamp grass, they could hear singing voices carrying through the marsh, the faint quick-tempo strains of zydeco music: the blessing of the shrimping fleet. For the past five years Wes and his father had forgone the ritual, waiting until Father Neely was done blessing the boats until they journeyed to the docks. Wes’s father was still angry at God about what happened to his mother. They both were.

One of many things they never spoke about.

It was dark except for the beams of their flashlights skeltering across the ground, the cherry of Wes’s father’s cigarette. His cotton-white hair, high and tight. Above them a cloud-dimmed quarter moon gleamed through a lacework of live oak branches. They followed a bend in the trail around a stand of sand pine and crossed a rough-board footbridge over a creek. A black snake sidewindered across the water and slipped inklike into the bracken.

Now Wes could hear the grumbling of boat engines, the wheezing stutter of an accordion. The clickety-clack of a washboard, a boat captain shouting orders at his crew. “Don’t lay them nets there,” said a man with a salt-cured voice. “Starboard, asshole, starboard.”

One of Wes’s earliest memories was of making this trip through these
same woods. On an August night like this, breezeless and heavy with the scent of loam. His father was sprightlier then because this was before his chronic backaches, before the shrimping hauls got smaller and smaller, before all his hair turned white.

Wes’s mother held his damp hand in hers as they followed his father in the dark. He could feel the cold metal kiss of her wedding ring.

“How many shrimp you gonna catch, Daddy?” Wes asked.

“Know Mount St. Helens?” his father said.

“Naw, sir.”

“Mount Rushmore?”

“Naw, sir.”

“You know Miss Hamby, your math teacher with the big ass?”

Wes’s mother told him to hush.

He was happier then, Wes’s father. Hopeful. They all were.

It was around this time, maybe a year or two later, when Wes came home from school and found a midnight-blue Schwinn waiting for him in the driveway. His father had hauled in a three-ton catch, ridiculously lucky, and bought the bike, new, on a whim.

And later that night while his mother washed the dishes Wes saw his father come up to her from behind and put his hands on her hips. She turned around and they kissed with their eyes closed, something he saw only once or twice before and once or twice after.

Wes didn’t know this then, but he knew it now: whoever said that money didn’t buy happiness was a damn fool. A damn fool who’d never been poor.

On the other side of the bridge Wes and his father followed the trail up a slippery rise. They stepped over a lichened footlog and saw the harbor lights glimmering through the pines. About thirty or forty people stood on the docks, their silhouettes against the amber lights of the pier. Ship captains and crewmen stood aboard skiffs and oyster luggers, filling bait wells with ice, untangling trawling nets. A few of the boats were already entering the bay, their Christmassy red and green pilot lights glinting on the horizon.

Wes’s father flicked his cigarette into the bushes and they stepped
onto the dock. In the harbor parking lot a few folding tables were set up with crockpots of gumbo, paper plates, plastic spoons. Transistor radios droned in competition, one playing a pop station out of New Orleans, another an AM talk show out of Baton Rouge. A big-bellied old woman was boiling crabs in a gas-lit kettle. A hunchbacked man fingered the mother-of-pearl buttons of his wheezing accordion. Another man scraped his vest frottoir with rusty spoons.

Wes had known these faces his whole life. They were captains and crewmen, crabbers and trappers. In May they shrimped for pinks and in August for whites. In the fall some of them went after alligators and oysters. And they were the sons and daughters of captains and crewmembers, still too young to help on the boats. The heavyset wives with harried faces and graying hair. The grandmothers and grandfathers with rueful eyes and worried toothless jaws.

“Hey, Bobby,” a man said to Wes’s father. He had on yellow waders and pulled a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket and tapped the bottom with his gnarled forefinger. He lipped the cigarette.

“Where the hell you been, Davey?” Wes’s father said.

“Daytona,” Davey said. “Workin’ on one of those charter boats for a bunch of rich Florida fucks.”

A few years ago Davey had worked for Wes’s father, but he quit and joined the crew of a bigger boat when the hauls got smaller and smaller and when the price of shrimp went down. A bigger boat meant a bigger paycheck. Wes’s father didn’t begrudge him the fact. He knew how hard it was scraping by in the Barataria and probably would have done the same.

“You like it over there?” Wes’s father asked.

“Yeah, it was paradise,” Davey said. He lit his cigarette and scrunched one side of his face against the smoke. “Just about gave all this up,” he said, gesturing across the bayou at the boats shambling out of the harbor, at the bent trees brooding over the water.

At the end of the dock a bare-chested little boy pissed gleefully into the bayou. When he finished he zipped up his camouflage shorts and
hopped barefoot like a monkey back to his mother. Wes was about this boy’s age when he started coming out here to the harbor. Young enough to remember the air of festivity that once presided over these first nights of the shrimping season. The fais-do-dos, the Cajun dances. Those were better times for everyone in the Barataria. Before the bayou started grubbing out smaller and smaller hauls of shrimp. Before the oil spill. Before Katrina.

Before Wes’s mother died.

“Any word yet?” Wes’s father asked.