The Marauders (26 page)

Lindquist allowed that maybe it was. He looked at the other man, who still hadn’t said a word. “How you doing,” he said.

“All right,” he said.

“You a trawler?” asked the little guy.

“Sometimes. You guys?”

“We’re from Missouri,” the bantam said. “Environmental work. Different aspects.”

“You guys wanna hear a joke?”

The two men exchanged a weary look. The small one shrugged.

“Ever hear about the gay guy on the patch?”

The men waited.

“He’s down to four butts a day,” Lindquist said.

“Ha,” the small one said. “All right.”

“Well,” Lindquist said.

“Well,” said the small one.

“We better get going,” the tall one said.

“You fellas wanna hear another?”

“We better get going,” the tall one said.

The bantam waved and started his engine and began to pilot away. Lindquist waved back. They watched one another as they drew apart and went their separate ways.

Two or three days? Lindquist would’ve guessed it had been that long since the kid left him. Maybe a little longer. It was true that he lost track of time easily when he was treasure hunting. But it couldn’t have been much longer than a few days because he still had a few bottled waters and protein bars left in the backpack.

It was four in the morning, Lindquist in the dim light of his lantern digging on the chenier, when the shovel blade struck something hard. A rock, he thought. Then he tapped the edge of the shovel against whatever it was and heard a hollow wooden knock. He hunkered down and swept aside grungy leaves and mud. Then he plunged his hand into the ground and ran his fingers along what felt like an old plank of wood, soft and splintered with rot.

A box, a very old wooden box.

Lindquist rose and picked up the shovel and shoved the blade under the box. He stepped on top of the blade and began prying it from the ground. At last something gave and Lindquist went toppling backward, ass in the muck.

He crawled quickly on his hands and knees to the hole. Inside it was an old dirt-stained wooden strongbox. He leapt to his feet and picked up the shovel and stabbed it into the wood, which cracked easily.

He was hallucinating, had to be. He’d been out in the Barataria for so long with so little sleep and food that he was simply seeing what he wanted to see. A fever dream. He’d run out of pills several hours ago and kept meaning to boat back to the harbor and return home for more.
One more hour
, he kept telling himself.
One more hole
.

Isn’t this what happened to men who wandered the desert for days on end? They began seeing dreams and visions. They began seeing the very things they most desired to see.

In the dim lantern light he saw a glimmering in the wood and dirt. He knelt and reached and picked up a coin. He held it up to his face in the light. Gold. He plunged his hand within the box and rooted around. He felt coin upon coin inside. No guessing how many there were. Hundreds, surely. He scooped up a handful and held them to his face and he kissed them. The slime dirtied his lips. He didn’t care. Exalted, he looked up at the sky.

The moment was so perfect that every accident, every misfortune, every heartbreak leading up to this seemed like blessed luck.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said. He emptied pockets of his cargo pants and began filling them with the coins. “Thank you,” he said.

Next time they checked the island, the Toup brothers discovered their crop ravaged, whole swathes gouged out of what was once a garden as big as a tennis court. A blizzard of dead stems and leaves littered the ground, and plant pots were knocked off the platforms into the dirt. Impossible to tell in the dark the extent of the damage. Here and there in the mud was a discarded candy bar wrapper, a potato chip bag, a crushed beer can.

Victor paced, frenzied disbelief in his eyes as he looked over the plants. He cupped his hand over his mouth and spat curses and paced some more. “Good God,” he said in a voiced strangled with anger.

Meanwhile Reginald surveyed the ruin from the edge of the clearing, his shoulders sagged with weariness. A dread of what would happen now.

“Look at this shit,” Victor cried, looking at Reginald in a way somehow accusatory, as if he expected Reginald to argue otherwise. As if he almost suspected him complicit in the theft. “Looks like somebody took a weed whacker to it.”

A night breeze, hot and tar-smelling, gently shook the leaves around them.

Reginald glanced around as if the marauder were hiding somewhere in the dark. His brother cursed and clenched his fists and kneeled in the dirt among the paw prints and bird tracks. He skimmed his flashlight
beam over the ground and studied the boot marks in the mud. Two different pairs crisscrossed back and forth, one big and the other small. They tracked away toward the shore, where there was a large drag from a skiff boat in the mud.

“I’m gonna kill him,” Victor said.

Reginald said nothing. Holding his lantern aloft, he squatted on his heels and picked up from the ground a joint stub as thick around as a 54-ring-gauge cigar.

“Lindquist, I told you,” said Victor. “You wouldn’t listen and here we are.”

“All right, goddamn it.”

“Right here. See.”

“What you want? I see.”

Victor’s face was twisted with rage in the lantern light. “I want you to stop being such a pussy is what I want.”

Reginald swatted his hand. He dropped the joint stub into the dirt and Victor came over and kicked it.

“Flagrant,” he said.

Though just a mile down the road, home had never seemed so far away. Every part of Wes’s body ached for his bed, but he couldn’t stand the thought of facing his father. Instead he slept in the harbor parking lot in the cab of his truck, a moldy-smelling packing blanket for bedding, a balled-up T-shirt for a pillow. Even with the windows open the humidity was smothering, like a sweaty rag shoved in his throat. It was a few weeks into football season and still there wasn’t the slightest hint of fall. There probably wouldn’t be for a few more months. Sometimes he woke in the middle of the night gasping and sometimes the voices of captains and crewmen woke him. Dark forms, faceless and eerie, flickered by his truck windows, their shadows thrown by the tangerine glow of the parking lot lights.

Half delirious with exhaustion, Wes stopped by an old high school friend’s house, Grant Robicheaux’s, and Grant and his family acted genuinely glad to see him. And, thankfully, they knew better than to ask him about his home life.

They fed him a dinner of crawfish gumbo and homemade cornbread, his first real meal in a while that wasn’t out of a can, and they made a bed for him on the sunroom sofa in the back of the house. By nine he was in a deep and dreamless sleep. But at midnight Grant’s three basset hounds padded into the sunroom with their scrabbling paws and kept licking
his face. In the morning his arms and legs were riddled with inflamed-looking flea bites and Wes wanted to cry, he felt so tired.

At breakfast Wes thanked Grant and his family for their hospitality and told them he’d better get home.

That morning Wes drove his truck to the harbor and climbed aboard his father’s boat. He was dizzy-headed and could hardly keep his eyes open. He knew his father would find him when he came at sundown and he didn’t care. Whatever wrath and humiliation he had in store for him, Wes was ready to face it.

Within minutes he fell asleep on the cabin cot.

When Wes woke it was full dark and he climbed onto the dock and waited. Half past nine. Usually his father would have been here by now. Most of the other slips were already empty.

Wes sat lotus-style on the worn wooden dock and watched the dirt road leading to the harbor. Stars and crickets, fish splashing in the bayou. After a few minutes headlights flickered through the trees and a truck came crunching into the gravel lot. Wes rose, braced himself. When he saw it wasn’t his father’s truck, the knot in his stomach loosened. The primer-spotted Ford stopped under one of the parking lot lights and Randy Preston, an old family friend, stepped out. He trudged toward the dock, lugging an Igloo cooler and smoking a cigarette.

“How you been, Wes,” Randy said as he stepped up to him. His huge dentures glowed in the dark.

“Good. You.”

“Good. Waitin’ for your pop?”

“Yeah.”

“He all right?”

“He’s good.”

“Good,” Randy said and kept walking toward his boat. “Keep a firm grip on yourself, Wes.”

“I will,” Wes said, and flipped him a bird. “You too.”

“Every night,” Randy said, shooting a bird over his shoulder but not turning back.

Wes waited until ten and then he got back into his truck and drove
to the house. The lights were off and the curtains of the front windows were open. Two newspapers,
Times-Picayune
, were still in their plastic bags in the driveway. Wes got out of his truck and picked them up and let himself into the house.

A rotting smell hit him immediately. He flipped on the light and went into the kitchen, where the stink was strongest. In the garbage bin on top of coffee grinds and newspapers were yellow curdles of chicken fat. Wes took the plastic bag out of the bin and knotted it and went to the backyard and threw it in the trash can. He glimpsed the heap of his boat, a forlorn sight under its moldy tarp.

He went back inside and checked the answering machine. The small illuminated screen said that there were twelve messages. Wes picked up the phone and scrolled through them. All unlisted numbers from the past three days, which probably meant creditors or some other bad news.

A drop of sweat ran down Wes’s cheek and he rubbed it away. Then he realized. The house was much hotter than his father liked to keep it, as if the air-conditioning hadn’t been turned on in a while.

He checked his father’s bedroom. The bed was unmade, but that wasn’t unusual. The bathroom was empty and so were the other bedrooms and bathrooms and the garage. Wes went back to the master bedroom and checked the closet. All his father’s clothes were there, his luggage.

The rotting meat. The missed calls. The boat still in the harbor.

Wes’s heart kicked like a frog leg.

He took out his cell phone and flipped it open and then remembered it was no longer working. He hadn’t paid the bill. Like an asshole.

Wes got back into his truck and drove to the neighbor’s house. Maybe Chuck knew something. He and his father were friendly.

Chuck, portly and pink-faced, answered the door. For a confused moment he stared at Wes, his white eyebrows moving up and down. Then, “You don’t know, do you?”

Wes stood there.

“Oh, son. I’m sorry.”

Full of dread and guilt, Wes rode the elevator to the third floor of the hospital where his father’s room was.

One of the doctors had come out to the lobby to tell Wes the story: his father, after two days’ working alone without rest, suffered a heart attack in the Barataria. In the wheelhouse he collapsed to his knees and crawled across the floor to the cabinet where he kept the emergency flares. He took one out and pulled himself up by the wheelhouse crankshaft and fired through the window. Another shrimper saw the flare and piloted to the
Bayou Sweetheart
, where he found Wes’s father collapsed on the wheelhouse floor.

“Lucky man,” the doctor told Wes.

Now Wes stepped out of the elevator and walked slowly down the hall. He kept his eyes carefully in front of him, trying not to look into any of the hospital rooms with the open doors. He felt the sickly, ill-omened stares of the patients from their beds.

When he entered the room his father lifted his head off the pillow and looked at the door. Then he laid his head back but his drug-clouded eyes stayed on him. Wes saw that there were tubes in his nose and on his arms and that his face was drawn and haggard.

He stepped to the bed, wondering if he should kiss him on the cheek like he used to when he was a kid. But he only rested his hand briefly on his father’s shoulder. Beneath the overstarched hospital gown his body felt thin and frail, on the verge of breaking.