The Marauders (32 page)

The first twin said, “Well, he sure as shit didn’t fly away.”

“The fuck you hit him.”

“He’s dead around here someplace. How much you wanna bet?”

“How does he just disappear?”

“I hit him, I’m telling you.”

“What the fuck, just shooting the guy like that?”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“Bullshit. You’ll hear it for the rest of your life.”

To Cosgrove it seemed an eternity before the brothers retreated, their quarreling voices diminishing and merging with the susurrus of the night. Cosgrove could no longer see the flashlight but kept still. After a while he leaned into a patch of moonlight and examined his shoulder. In the dull blue light the gash looked black, but the blood was already congealing. A deep nick, nothing that would kill him.

He took off his filthy white T-shirt and cinched a tourniquet around his shoulder, drawing the knot with his teeth. He spat out the taste of blood and swamp water. Then he sat still, listening. The faraway caw of some bird. The hysterical prattling of insects.

Hanson was dead, he thought. Hanson was dead. He sat there for a long time with his head reeling, not believing it. He tried to remember who Hanson had in the way of friends and family. A macaw breeder, Hanson had told him. That was all Cosgrove could recall. Had he known Hanson’s life would end like this, he would have paid more attention. Strange, how after a few months he knew so little about him, except this, the most important detail: the end. Now there were probably people out there who’d go to their graves never knowing what happened to him. And if Cosgrove didn’t make it out of this alive, the same might be said for him.

It was a while before Cosgrove heard the brothers speaking again. Still far away, so distant that he couldn’t make out what they were saying. “Lee’s Quest,” it sounded like. But the voices were rough, threatening. Then Cosgrove heard a quick volley of gunshots.

He sat still and listened. When he heard rustling in the wood, he stared into darkness, waiting for one of the brothers to emerge from the brush.
There you are, motherfucker
, the twin would say. He’d take a swift step forward, gun aimed, and then Cosgrove’s world would end before he even heard the sound.

What then? Nothing. A body in the swamp, just like Hanson. A secret known only by scavenging reptiles and birds. Not a soul left on earth to remember him.

Cosgrove felt like crying, but his eyes stayed dry, grainy with exhaustion. The end of his life and he couldn’t even muster tears.

Was this it: the end of his life? Would a stranger deem it even worthy of being called a life? He had no other life to compare it with, only lives shown in movies and television shows, lives recounted in bars by sentimental drunkards probably lying as much to themselves as to him. What floated up in memory now seemed random, flotsam and jetsam stirred up from the depths of his brain. He recalled a hand job from a wall-eyed girl with braces—he didn’t even remember her name—in his beater Tercel after the high school prom. Recalled his father in the backyard one Fourth of July, lighting skyrockets from a bottle of Pabst beer. Recalled falling from a friend’s tree house when he was nine or ten, walking half a mile home afterward, sobbing, with two broken ribs.

Just before dawn the Toup brothers were scouting the far end of the island for Cosgrove when they saw a pirogue moving swiftly toward the neighboring island. A lantern glowed aboard it and a hunched figure was rowing violently. Victor looked through the reticle scope of his rifle and saw that it was Lindquist. He must have heard the gunfire and now he was fleeing, a hundred yards away from this island and about ten away from the neighboring.

“Lindquist,” said Victor.

“This is what I’m saying,” Reginald said. “One thing leads to another.”

“Kill his ass,” Victor said. He had the rifle aimed and was peering through the scope.

“No.” Reginald seized the barrel of the rifle and jerked it upward.

Victor tore the rifle away from his brother and fixed his aim, his finger tense on the trigger. “He saw us. Shit, asshole’s probably got a cell phone.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Either do you.”

“Wouldn’t work this far out anyway,” Reginald said. Then, “Villanova. He’ll know right away it’s us if something happens.”

“Not if they don’t find him he won’t.”

“Lindquist!” Reginald shouted.

“What’re you doing? He’s just gonna stop?”

“Lindquist!”

“He’s a fucking dog?” Victor said. “He’s just gonna come?” He fired three times in quick succession. The boat capsized and the lantern sputtered. He fired two more shots but from this distance it was hard to tell what he was hitting. If he was hitting anything at all.

He watched through the glass and waited. Nothing but the overturned skiff, the disturbance of waves. Then he saw Lindquist climbing onto the shore of the neighboring chenier, launching into the dark vines and branches. He fired three more times.

“Motherfucker,” Victor said.

“Did you hit him?”

Victor gritted his teeth, said nothing.

Reginald asked again and this time when his brother didn’t answer, he said, “Biggest clusterfuck I’ve ever seen.”

He heard one of the twins call his name. Then one of them fired a few quick shots. A few more when he was capsized and thrashing in the water. His boots hit the bayou bottom and he half slogged, half flailed to the chenier. Once he climbed ashore one of the brothers shot again and he plowed into the bulrushes.

A hundred yards or so into the woods, he grabbed at his pockets. Most of the gold, if not all, was still there.

In a blind panic he staggered onward.

Soon daylight broke and the wildnerness gathered shape around him. The moss-hung oaks as big around as water towers. Cypresses as tall as obelisks.

Just beyond a deadfall of pine Lindquist came upon an old gray-faced bobcat. It scrabbled up a laurel tree and stared at him with enraged yellow eyes. Lindquist saw that the animal was missing one of its ears. Only a tattered nub remained. He felt a pang of kinship, but the animal didn’t seem to feel similarly.

Muskrat and opossum and nutria: Lindquist lost count of how many of these he saw. He would hear rustling in the bracken and pause. The animals halted too, studying Lindquist with a distinct air of peevishness. Maybe they’d never seen a man before. Maybe some animalistic sixth sense picked up a whiff of doom.

The mantric drone of insects. Anoles with red flags flaring from their necks. Horseflies the size of plums. Beetles like potatoes with wings.

At noon he was passing through a glade of eelgrass when a shadow flitted across his face. He looked up. A buzzard hovered above him, huge and ragged, its face like a wad of spat-out gum.

When he looked up again a second bird had joined the first. A minute later, a third. They wheeled above him like a sinister mobile.

“Pieces’a shit,” Lindquist said. He dropped to his knees and rooted one-handed in the mud and found a fist-sized stone. He stood and hurled it. It wobbled pathetically in the air, shooting five or six feet wide of the birds, and then it plopped down in the mud. Lindquist went after the rock and threw it again. This time a stitch of pain seared along his side and he groaned, grabbing at his lower back.

“Pieces’a shit,” Lindquist said, glowering at the sky.

He gave up and moved on. Soon the buzzards gave up too, maybe figuring him not worth the trouble.

The swamp was a hellish obstacle course. There was no such thing as walking straight in the swamp. There were quagmires of mud, impassable brambles, murky lagoons, sloughs deeper than he was tall. Lindquist figured that for every three miles he wandered and zigzagged, he made it one mile north toward land.

One wrong move and Lindquist knew he was fucked. He imagined stumbling into a pit of quicksand. A vine dangling just beyond his grasp. His hook arm flailing uselessly as he sank deeper and deeper. The gold falling piece by precious piece out of his pockets, irretrievably lost in the mud.

Wes’s father was released from Mercy General on a sunny Tuesday morning. The hospital had a strict policy: outgoing patients, no matter their condition, had to be wheelchaired out of the building. No exceptions, even for the mule-headed likes of Bob Trench. In the same cranberry polo shirt and faded jeans he was wearing when he was admitted—laundered, courtesy of the hospital—his father slouched in the chair as Wes shoved him through the automatic glass doors. As soon as they were out in the sun, he leapt to his feet like a pardoned prisoner and patted his pockets for cigarettes that weren’t there.

“Feelin’ okay?” Wes asked his father once they were in the truck and rolling out of the lot.

“Like a hundred bucks,” Wes’s father said.

One arm curled around the wheel, the other dangling out the open window in the sun, Wes kept his eyes on the road. He knew that one concerned look, one split-second glance of worry or doubt, would be enough to set his father off. He’d take it as an insult, a lack of faith in his powers of recuperation.

It was a warm breezy day, the sky that deep cerulean it wore this time of year after a good rain. The road, rutted and tar-patched, took them past a small cemetery, ten or twelve lichened tombstones leaning in a
clearing dotted with wildflowers. In the corner of his eye Wes noticed his father fidgeting. He fiddled with the air vents, opened and shut the glove compartment, eyed the floor mat. He was looking for something to criticize, one stupid little thing he could bitch about to break the silence.
Look at this dashboard, look at these fucking windows
. But the windows were scrubbed spotless and the trash picked off the floorboards. If anything, his father could only point out the truck’s myriad tiny creakings as they moved along, but those were no fault of Wes’s. The Toyota, a hand-me-down from his father, had a hundred and seventy-five thousand miles on it. And the road was as bumpy as a spoon vest.

“Fuckin’ penal colony in there,” said Wes’s father, as if continuing a conversation that was already underway.

Wes grunted.

“Say what?”

“I bet.”

Ahead was a tin-roofed mini-mart of weather-slumped scrap wood. They were close enough now that Wes could read the metal A-frame sign in the crushed-shell lot.
MILK
.
BRED
.
CIGS
.
ICE COLD BEER
.
GEAUX TIGERS
.
WHO DAT
.

“Pull up,” said Wes’s father.

“Cigarettes?”

“Pull up. Gotta grab something.”

Wes waited in the idling truck, watched two blackbirds chase one another around a dusty mulberry bush. A stub-tailed tabby, pregnant from the looks of her swag belly, crept up to observe the fray and after a moment it lunged at the bush. In unison the birds winged and swerved away, as if tied together with invisible string.

Wes’s father climbed back in, tearing the cellophane wrapper off a pack of Virginia Slims cigarettes.

“Don’t smoke in here,” Wes said.

Wes’s father lit a cigarette with a cheap plastic lighter that said
FLICK THIS BIC
in festive party-time lettering over an American flag.

Wes snapped a look at his father.

“One isn’t going to kill me.”

“How ’bout the one after that?”

“Aw, shut up. Let me feel good for a second.”

Wes leaned his head out the window and breathed the clean outdoors air and didn’t say another word.

The doctors ordered Wes’s father off his boat for a month but his first day out of the hospital he kept himself busy around the house. He picked weeds in the front and backyard, cleaned scrap lumber out of the garage. His father didn’t know he was watching, and through the kitchen window Wes saw him leaning his back against one of the backyard persimmon trees and resting an apprehensive hand over his chest. The same way you might touch a sick puppy to check its breathing.

That night they were at the dining room table eating a takeout casserole when Wes’s father asked, “What’s your problem?”