The Marauders (38 page)

“A threat,” Villanova said. “I can’t arrest someone based on a threat. The whole parish would be in lockup.”

Wes thought about mentioning the marijuana, but Villanova knew he knew. Everybody knew. The subject seemed verboten, moot. And the sheriff probably wouldn’t brook kindly a teenage kid telling him his business. So all Wes said was, “But they’re known to stir trouble, right? They got a reputation is what I mean.”

Villanova cleared his throat. Lifted and dipped the teabag. “Son, everybody has a reputation in a town small as this. Whether they like it or not. Usually half based on rumor.”

Wes was trying to be polite and respectful but his patience with Villanova’s indifference was wearing thin. “Worth checking out though, sir. Maybe?”

He knew even this much might have been pressing his luck.

Villanova stretched his arms and leaned back in his chair with his hands stitched behind his head. His face was pink and tight-mouthed. “Son, I’m sorry about your friend, but he’s got a lot more history than the Toup brothers. And you gotta let me do my job.”

Wes waited.

“How about you walk your side of the street and I’ll walk mine,” Villanova added, but then seemed to regret it, because he huffed a little laugh through his nose as if it were a joke. He picked up his mug and sipped his tea.

Some street
, Wes wanted to say, but he knew it would serve no purpose. And his parents had taught him not to smart-mouth his elders.

Wes stood and thanked the sheriff, who rose and shook Wes’s hand.
His fingers were fat and cold. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled,” he said, but somehow Wes doubted it.

One cool late-October night Wes was at the mini-mart out near the highway when Reginald Toup hunched into the store. By now everyone including Wes assumed Lindquist was dead. The police and game warden and coast guard were now looking for a body, not a survivor. And not really looking, just telling shrimping captains and crews to watch what they caught in their nets.

Wes was paying for a candy bar at the counter and did a double-take when he saw Toup. He watched Toup, and Toup noticed him watching. He looked away and started heading down one of the aisles but when he glanced over his shoulder Wes’s eyes were still on him.

He stopped. “Help you?”

Wes wondered if he should. Made himself before he chickened out. “You do it?” he asked.

Toup put his hand behind his ear and leaned toward Wes. “Say what?”

“Did you do it?”

An ionic change in the air, like white noise or electricity. The old black man behind the counter opened the till of the register and broke a roll of quarters on the counter edge. For something to do.

Toup stepped toward Wes, his ears reddening. His face looked like a spring-loaded trap ready to snap shut. “Do it? Do what?”

Wes said nothing.

“Trench’s kid, right?”

The man stood a full head taller and Wes had to tip his head back to look him in the eye. “Yeah,” Wes said quietly. So this Toup brother knew who he was. How, he didn’t know. Wes’s bravery, what little there was, deserted him at once.

“You on crack or what?” Toup asked him.

“Sorry, I thought you were someone else,” Wes said and turned.

He had his hand on the door handle when Toup said, “Hey.”

Wes halted, his heart beating hard. He turned and saw that Toup was holding out his candy bar. “Forgot this,” he said.

Wes thanked him and took the candy and stepped out of the store into humid night air. Before he reached his truck he was damning himself for thanking the son of a bitch.

Time ticked along. At last summer showed signs of ending, days growing shorter, nights cooler. Goldenrod bloomed yellow by the roadsides. Acorns fell from the live oaks and pinged on car hoods and toolshed roofs. Hurricane season wouldn’t end for another few weeks, but people were relaxed enough that talk in the barbershop and grocery store turned from tropical depressions to football. Whether LSU would beat Auburn, whether the Saints would make the playoffs, maybe the Super Bowl. Flags of purple and yellow and flags of black and gold hung over house garages. Halloween decorations began popping up throughout Jeanette, papier-mâché bats strung from front yard trees, jack-o’-lanterns grinning their jagged grins on porches.

And of course there was talk of oil. Oil-sodden turtles and pelicans and redfish. Many Baratarians swore that the water had a funny tint to it, that the bay was darker and greener than before. Others said the shrimp and redfish had a metallic aftertaste, but people were eating Jeanette’s seafood again and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reopened the water to shrimping and fishing.

For a while Wes clung onto hope that he’d hear from Lindquist. That maybe he’d run off with the treasure he found—if he ever found it. Wes half hoped one day to see Lindquist’s funky avocado-colored boat, the
Jean Lafitte
, sailing once more in the Barataria.

But the boat remained untouched and neglected in its harbor slip, nettles fallen on the wheelhouse roof, tea-colored puddles staining the deck. Wes made a halfhearted pass at cleaning it, hosing the deck and windows, scraping crud off the hull. He might have approached Lindquist’s daughter about it, told her that she should take care of the only thing of her father’s that remained in the world, but he heard she up and left for New York, for God knew what. And Lindquist’s ex-wife, a bank teller whom he’d met to express his condolences, seemed to have moved on.

The last time Wes had been to the hospital was in the summer after his father’s heart attack, and he hoped that he wouldn’t have to return anytime soon. But after the first frost of late October when the leaves were just beginning to turn he received a call from Sheriff Villanova. A body had been discovered, swept up by a trawler’s net in the Barataria, and it needed identification.

Wes knew what Villanova meant. He thought the corpse was Lindquist’s. Lindquist’s daughter was still in New York and his ex-wife at a banking convention in Captiva, Florida, and Villanova didn’t want to leave the matter a mystery until one of them returned.

The possibility—the probability—of Lindquist’s being dead had of course occurred to Wes. But there were times in the weeks after Lindquist’s disappearance when Wes believed that Lindquist had somehow made it, run off somewhere faraway without telling anyone.

A silly fantasy, perhaps. Like something from the movies. But wasn’t it possible?

Wes recalled his conversations with Lindquist—how long ago that seemed now, though it was just months past—and how Lindquist told him that there was nothing he desired more than to start his life over again. Lindquist knew he couldn’t reclaim the time he’d lost. The time had never seemed his to begin with. He’d begun trawling with his father just as soon as he was old enough to lift a champagne basket. And, like Wes, when the time came to decide whether to stay in the Barataria or
matriculate to college: well, there wasn’t much of a choice to make. His family needed the money and extra help.

And now Wes was driving to the hospital on a tranquil October morning, fine-spun sugar crystals of frost in the grass and in the trees, wispy autumn clouds like horsetails high in the sky, on his way to see a dead body that might be Lindquist’s.

In the hospital the familiar smell hit him right away, the mingled sickly odor of dirty linen and bandages and mopping wax. Wes’s breath stuck in his throat like hair in a drain. A pretty black girl with sapphire earrings sat behind the reception desk and Wes checked in. A few minutes later the coroner, Dr. Woodrell, met him in the lobby. A man with thick liver-colored lips and muddy eyes.

The morgue was on the fourth floor of the hospital, and as they rode the elevator alone the doctor tendered a fatigued smile at Wes.

“I warn you,” he said, “this is never pretty.”

Wes nodded.

“It’s not like the television shows. Even the worst ones.”

“I know.”

They got off the elevator and walked down the hall, their shoe heels ticking coolly on the linoleum floor. At the door of the mortuary the doctor paused.

“So how’d he die?” Wes said.

“He was shot. In the head.”

“Was he missing an arm?”

“He’s missing both.”

Wes blinked at the doctor.

“I should tell you this right now. To prepare you. The body’s been eaten. The arms and a leg.”

Now Wes was dizzy and his breath seemed not to be reaching as deep into his lungs as it needed. “Eaten by what?” he asked.

Dr. Woodrell rested his hand lightly on Wes’s shoulder. A gesture more bureaucratic than benevolent. “Alligators. Crabs. Snapping turtles. Just about everything that could get to him. After seventeen years of
doing this, I’m still not sure when to tell people. Or to even tell them period. That’s something they don’t tell you in medical school. I guess they decide you’ll figure it out yourself.”

Wes nodded.

The doctor opened the door and flicked a switch and the room flooded with antiseptic light. Several cot-like tables were lined up in a row, a few empty, a few with shrouded bodies on top. Wes followed the doctor across the room, noticing the declivities in the concrete floor, little craterlike places with drains in them. Wes couldn’t help it: he thought about all the blood and bile and vital juices running down those drains and wondered where it all went. Into the Barataria, he guessed. Where else?

At the table the doctor gave him a white eucalyptus-smelling cotton cloth and Wes held it over his mouth and nose. Then Dr. Woodrell threw back the sheet.

At first Wes looked at the body without seeing it. As if there was something in his brain that blocked the image from reaching where it needed to reach. Then when it did reach nausea swept through his stomach. Even with the cloth held over his face, the smell was incredible, life-defying. The body was black and purple, pulpy like waterlogged newspaper, and there were tattered places where the limbs had been torn away. The nose was missing, and the eyes, and in their place were dark wells. But the hair was still there, and it didn’t look like Lindquist’s. Lindquist didn’t have that much hair. Lindquist prayed he had this much hair. It was long enough to put up in a ponytail.

And Wes saw the T-shirt, a little faded and shredded but otherwise strangely intact despite the ruin of the body. Lindquist never wore a T-shirt like that.

TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS
, it said.

“No,” Wes said through the cloth. He would have never believed such a strange mixture of repulsion and relief possible if he wasn’t feeling it now. “No,” he said again. “This isn’t him.”

Come November, Wes realized that another year would likely pass without his making plans to leave Jeanette. Without his making plans to do anything but shrimp for the rest of his life. If people ever left the Barataria, ever did something else with their lives, they did it when they were his age, or never.

The only other states Wes had ever been were Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Florida. He’d never stepped foot on the East or West Coast and the only sea he’d ever swam was the Gulf of Mexico. It bothered him that he wasn’t troubled by this, that no part of him longed to see the Blue Ridge Mountains or the Pacific Northwest, that no part of him yearned to step inside a Tibetan monastery or spelunk the Carlsbad Caverns or behold up-close the Krakatoa.