The Marauders (28 page)

Hanson swallowed, mused. A vague wigwag of his hand. “Every other week.”

“You shouldn’t overfertilize.”

Hanson shrugged.

“How often you water?”

“About the same amount.”

“Tell me again. How long you been doing this?”

“Couple’a years.”

For a moment Benji only stared at Hanson, switching the sucker from one side of his mouth to the other, the hard candy clacking against his teeth. “Where’d you steal this shit?” he asked.

Cosgrove glanced at the door, wondered how long it would take to run out.

“Nobody ever said that now,” Hanson said.

“I’m saying it.”

“Does it matter?”

“If somebody machine-guns my place tonight? Yeah.”

“Nobody’s gonna do that now.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Nobody followed you.”

“I’m just gonna tell you the aspects straight. We found this place out in Barataria Bay.”

The kid waited.

“There’s an island out there full of this shit. So much, whoever grows it won’t notice anything. That’s how much.”

“Out in Barataria Bay.”

“Way out there. Middle of nowhere.”

From outside came the sound of little twittering birds.

“And nobody knows about this,” the kid said.

“You ask the people who called you. I’m a careful motherfucker.”

“You drove from the bayou with all this in the back of your truck. And you’re a careful motherfucker.”

Hanson clutched one-handed onto his belt buckle. “I know what I’m doing.”

The kid considered this, then looked at Cosgrove. “What’s your story?”

“Just standing here,” Cosgrove said.

“That’s not a story.”

“Look, man, I don’t want any trouble.”

“Neither do I. That’s why I’m asking.”

“He’s telling you like it is,” Cosgrove said.

“And I’m just supposed to believe you.”

“Kid,” Cosgrove said. “Stop talking to me like I’m your dog.”

Benji threw up his hands. “I’m asking what I gotta ask,” he said. “Put yourself in my shoes.”

Benji and Cosgrove stared at one another. Then the kid sighed and shook his head and squatted. He ripped open another bag and brought a fistful of the bright green leaves to his face and inhaled deeply. He picked off some drier leaves and rolled them into a nugget between his thumb and forefinger and then he went to the mantel where he opened a wooden box and took out a small one-hitter of varicolored glass. He stuffed the nugget in the bowl and lit it and held the smoke. He waited a beat, exhaled, looked at Hanson and then at Cosgrove.

“This belong to the twins?”

“Twins?” Hanson said.

“I’ve smoked this before. Real mellow high. Loud but mellow.”

“Maybe it’s from the same seed.”

“Five or six people in the country with this strain. If even that. Rest is mixed up with Green Crack and Agent Orange.”

“Don’t know anything about that.”

“Shit’s fertilized just the same. Same color. Same hairs. Same everything.”

“We don’t know any twins,” Cosgrove said.

“Let’s not shit each other,” Benji said.

Cosgrove and Hanson were silent.

“Two of the biggest assholes I’ve ever met. Rob them blind if I could.”

“Yeah, we don’t know any twins,” Hanson said.

“You sure?”

“Let’s leave,” Cosgrove told Hanson.

“Twenty cash,” Benji said.

“Twenty?” Hanson said. “That’s robbery. Should get a Lear jet for this shit.”

The kid stood. “Maybe. Probably. But where else you gonna sell all this?”

“Thirty.”

“Take the bags. Put them back in your truck.”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Take the bags.”

“Twenty-seven and that’s it.”

“Take the bags. Go ahead. No hard feelings.”

Several minutes later Cosgrove and Hanson were out on Royal Street, ten grand in hundred-dollar bills apiece stuffed in their pockets. Hanson wore a grin of dopey triumph. They hurried down the sidewalk, as if afraid that Benji might chase after them and renege on the deal.

A crowd of Friday revelers was already gathering. Two lumberjack-looking men passed, holding hands. A pretty black girl with a big afro pedaled a pedicab. A middle-aged woman wearing a leotard and what looked like a merkin made of neon feathers sauntered by.

From a few streets away came the brassy flourish of jazz horns. Farther off, the metronomic throb of 4/4 drums and bass.

“Raped,” Cosgrove told Hanson. “We just got raped in there.”

“Stuff wasn’t even ours,” Hanson said.

“Worst negotiator in the world.”

“Hell, you were the one almost got into a fight with the guy.”

Cosgrove was silent.

“What were we supposed to do? Sell it ourselves?”

Cosgrove knew that Hanson had a point. And he felt as if a weight had been lifted. Even his breathing felt lighter, unburdened. There were lots of things you could do with ten thousand dollars. People started over their whole lives with less.

They walked to Bourbon Street, into the pandemonium of a late-summer Friday night. Everyone was drunk. Canadian tourists, transsexuals, newlyweds, college kids, hucksters, erotic puppeteers, rednecks, cover band musicians. A cheesy stink hung in the air. Zydeco and funk and rap spilled out of barroom doorways, mad cries and laughter piercing through the music’s roar. Fake cobwebs and giant cardboard pumpkins and skulls—early Halloween decorations—hung in strip club windows.

Cosgrove and Hanson bought hard liquor shots with beer chasers and wandered up and down the Bourbon Street strip. Inebriated college girls were slumped on curbs, vomiting between their splayed knees. A walrus-sized man wearing countless beaded necklaces lay comatose on the sidewalk. Drunkards stepped over him and on top of him. One kid stuck a smoking cigarette between the man’s lips.

Hanson wandered into a souvenir shop and bought a black sateen jacket with a massive green appliqué marijuana leaf emblazoned on the back. He shrugged into it, strutted proudly. On the way out of the store a baseball cap, black with a fleur-de-lis and 2010 across the front, caught his eye. It said
LE BON TEMPS ROULE
in silver-stitched cursive across the bill. Hanson bought this too and chucked his filthy old camouflage cap in a trash can. In his new jacket and cap he sauntered pompously as a rooster, thumbs hooked on his belt. Walking beside him, Cosgrove noticed tourists smirking at the spectacle of Hanson. The nudging, the whispers: look at this guy. Something like pity and protectiveness sparked in Cosgrove’s chest.
Did you motherfuckers just make twenty grand?
he wanted to say.

At the Old Absinthe House they drank two shots of tequila apiece and when they were back on Bourbon Street Hanson went again into the tourist shop. He tried buying another black sateen jacket before the Indian clerk pointed out that he was already wearing an identical one. Bewildered, Hanson thanked the man. Then he angrily told him that he wanted to buy another jacket, was about to, anyway, before his smart-ass remark. He’d take his business somewhere else. Where a man might buy two identical jackets, twenty identical jackets, if he so pleased.

Sometime after two at Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop Bar they fell into conversation with two fortyish women in halter tops. One wore a straw
cowboy hat with puka shells on the band. The other wore a fedora cocked at such a rakish angle she had to be a tourist. On her forearm was a tattoo, the beatific face of her dead toddler son, the dates of the boy’s birth and death above,
SEE YOU IN HEAVEN, RUSTY
below. Less than three years on earth. Hanson and Cosgrove knew better than to ask.

The women were hell-bent on merrymaking, both of them laughing so wildly at Hanson’s jokes that Cosgrove suspected they were in some kind of contest or freshly escaped from a facility. Hanson moved two stools down so the women could sit between them. The one with the cowboy hat settled next to Cosgrove and he noticed the tan line on her ring finger. Like he gave a fuck.

The women said they were in town for a morticians’ convention and weren’t looking for trouble, only fun. Hanson told them they just won the lottery. Fun was his middle name. He bought everyone drinks.

Cosgrove told the women that he was the world’s first African American astronaut.

“Sasquatch made a joke,” slurred Hanson.

They all laughed for a long time at this.

At one point the cowgirl, Dixie, whispered to Cosgrove, “Got any other friends here tonight? I don’t think Mary Ann’s really into your friend.”

Cosgrove stroked his beard. “Well, we’re kind of a package deal,” he said.

The woman considered this.

“Don’t take this the wrong way?” Cosgrove whispered. “But the little fella? Hanson? Egyptian. Very well endowed. A camel. And oral sex, he’s kind of famous. A wizard.”

Jesus, he was beginning to sound like Hanson.

The cowgirl, to Cosgrove’s relief, guffawed at this. She and Mary Ann excused themselves and when they returned from the restroom they seemed enervated, perhaps drugged. Mary Ann’s face was flushed, her hat skewed more rakishly than before. “You guys have cocktails back at your place?” Dixie asked.

Cosgrove and Hanson brought the women back to the JW Marriott on Canal Street, where they had adjoining rooms on the twenty-first floor. Hanson took Mary Ann into his room, Cosgrove the cowgirl into his. When the woman got naked she seemed embarrassed of her C-section scar, but he told her he didn’t mind and really didn’t. Plus, she had tan lines and big puffy areola, which he especially liked. She asked him to turn off the light and close the drapes and when he did she thanked him and told him he was a gentleman. It had been a long time since a woman called him that.

Just before dawn, when the woman lay naked and asleep in his bed, Cosgrove went in his robe to the picture window and looked out at the city. Even from this high above the street he could hear the rat-a-tat of a second line, the blare of taxi horns. He watched the bustling expanse of Canal Street, its panoply of taxis and shuttles, of fast food restaurants and tourist junk shops. He saw the red-lit signs of the hotels nearby, the Roosevelt, the Astor. All the way to the right was green and yellow neon cursive that said Dickie Brennan’s Palace Café.

Standing there taking in the Gothic neon panorama of New Orleans, Cosgrove for the first time since he could remember felt something like hope.

Next morning they drove back to the Barataria and spent the day sleeping off their hangovers. In the evening Hanson went to check on Cosgrove and they lay silent in the separate twin beds watching television. They were both gray-faced and yellow-eyed and looked freshly dug from a graveyard.

“How much work we miss?” Cosgrove asked.

“What they gonna do?” Hanson said. “Fire us?”

Cosgrove grunted. Then, “What you got left?”

“Eight grand.”

He cut Hanson a look. “You’re kidding.”

“Closer to seven five.”

“Two and a half grand you spent,” Cosgrove said, convinced they were the dumbest fucks in the world.

“Easy spending money. All those drinks and tips. The strippers and drugs. The hotel rooms.”

Cosgrove closed his eyes and rubbed the stinging lids.

“How much you got?” Hanson asked him.

“Between the hotel room and drinks and shit? Spent a grand, about.”

Hanson chuckled hoarsely, coughed. “We sure know how to party. Must’ve bought shots for fifty bitches.”

They were quiet for a time.

“Hey, let me float something out.”

“No.”

“One more time.”

“Hell no.”

“We grab as much as we can.”

Cosgrove lay with his eyes shut and pretended to ignore Hanson.

“Going one more time,” Hanson said. “Choice is yours.”

It was dawn when Wes parked in the harbor lot and got out of his truck carrying a paper sack from the mini-mart. A few bottled waters, protein bars, a big bag of smoked jerky. Stuff for Lindquist, in case he’d run out. It had been stupid of him, so stupid, to leave him in the Barataria. But Lindquist had been out of his mind and deaf to reason, on some kind of vision quest. Still, how foolish to leave him out here. He should have forced him at knifepoint, called the cops. Or stayed with him, seasickness be damned.

Something, anything.

Wes piloted the
Jean Lafitte
toward the island with the dead willow and when he reached it brassy fog was still rising off the bayou. The egrets were already roused from the branches and mobbed the shore, some standing one-legged and preening, others beaking the mud. Wes steered the boat closer to the island and cut the motor and scanned the bank.

No Lindquist, no boat.

He picked up the binoculars from the dash and glassed across the gray and green trees.

No Lindquist, no boat.

He opened the wheelhouse window and cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted for Lindquist. His voice petered out flatly, sucked
into the immensity of the bayou. Then there was only the sound of purling water.

Sticking east, Lindquist had said, so Wes headed east and circled the next islet. He slowed the boat and opened the wheelhouse window and shouted hoarse-throated.