The Marauders (39 page)

It wasn’t that he felt destined to live the rest of his life in the Barataria. What eighteen-year-old kid knew something like that? But: where else would being a Trench mean what it did here? The Trenches had lived here since the first settlers in the bayou. Now there were fewer Trenches than ever. Fewer Lindquists, fewer Arcinaux, fewer Thibodaux. Driving through town, you saw the boarded storefronts, the slumping shanties ceding to the elements, the piers collapsing plank by plank into the bayou.

And you heard about it in the news and read about it in books: the Barataria was disappearing, crumbling into the Gulf. Old-timers in Jeanette were quick to point out the tip of an ancient power line that once stood fully aboveground. The top of a salt-blanched cypress tree that once sat on a hill. Before long, the town elders said, Jeanette would be an underwater ghost town. Your parents’ graves, your grandparents’ graves, maybe even your own grave, under ten feet of water. A thought that gave Wes the frissons, as his mother used to say.

Wes didn’t believe in ghosts, but he did believe that some part of his mother would always remain here. Not a spirit, per se, but an everlasting ineffable part that had no human name. This is where she’d lived. She’d looked at this cypress every day, this weeping willow, this patch of sky, this bay of water, and Wes was convinced that meant something.

In other places besides Jeanette, Wes felt like an outsider, a passer-through. The way he talked, the words he used, the dark mud color of his
skin. People told him he had the swamp in his mouth. Other people, less kind, said he sounded like a coon-ass. They didn’t know what a fais do-do was, a sac-a-lait. They didn’t know what it felt like to have Cajun blood.

For better or worse, the Barataria was his home. Whatever that meant. Home was the peaty odor of Spanish moss in the first spring rain. Home was the briny sweetness of fresh oysters thirty seconds out of the water. The termite swarms of early May. The cacophony of swamp frogs in the summer. The locusts in the day. The crickets at night. The lashing five-minute thunderstorms of late July. The sugarcane trucks rumbling through town in the autumn. The carnival giddiness of Mardi Gras. The blessing of the fleet. The petit bateaux clustered in the bay. The pinprick points of their pilot lamps like yuletide lights on the horizon. The strange green glow, supernaturally vivid, of cypress trees in spring gloaming. The earthy smell of crawfish boils. The pecan pralines and boudin and gumbo. The alligators and herons and redfish and shrimp. The Cajun voices, briny and gnarled. The old wrinkled faces as strange as thumbprints.

Wes felt the tug of his future here. Or maybe it was the gravity of the past. Maybe it was both. Whatever, more often than not the Barataria felt like the place he belonged.

One day in early December, just after the Christmas decorations were put up in Jeanette’s town square, Wes went to the harbor and found Lindquist’s boat vandalized. Someone, kids or vagrants, had broken the cabin door and ransacked the cabinets and drawers. Beer cans and cigarette stubs littered the floor. Wes doubted that it was one of the trawlers that used to hold a grudge against Lindquist. Now that he was gone, their ill will toward Lindquist had vanished overnight.

Some of the trawlers were even filled with phony nostalgia. “I bet he’s off metal detecting someplace,” they would say. Or, “Son of a bitch is probably in Barbados, someplace. Looking for his next treasure.”

Now and then Wes saw one of the Toup brothers around town.
According to the locals, the other had left the country. Thailand, was the rumor. Why, no one knew, and the brother who remained in the Barataria, Reginald, never provided an answer. He kept to himself and without his other half seemed far less formidable. Diminished somehow. His eyes were spooked and darting, a look Wes associated with wounded animals and terminally sick people.

Over the coming months Wes kept busy with his own boat. Hard to believe, but shrimping season was only four months away. Wes wanted his Lafitte skiff, years in the making, ready to sail by then. An arbitrary deadline, but one that he was determined to meet. He knew he was one of those guys who needed a bottom line in order to get anything done.

By Christmas the cypress keelson and ribs were laid in the backyard. By February, the hull sat full-bellied and sleek on top of eight black oil drums. By March, Wes started blowtorching one-hundred-pound pieces of steel, section by section. Before long, what had begun as a framework of sticks was beginning to look like a seaworthy vessel.

Every day Wes looked forward to his work. The good clean smell of the morning air, of earth in the shadows, of grass still wet with dew. He rose at dawn and worked until nightfall, breaking only for lunch and water. There were hours when he was so lost in his work that he didn’t think of his mother or his problems with his father or his future. He didn’t think about the oil spill or the next shrimping season or all the bills he and his father had to pay. He worked purely in the moment. The world seemed more focused, the edges sharper, this time of year. There was a satisfaction in standing back and looking at something that had not existed several hours before. Something that he’d brought into being with his own hands. He liked the way the wood dust moted the air, how one tongue of wood fitted into the groove of another. Sandpapering, hammering, drilling, he found them mysteriously fulfilling.

One mellow cloudless day in early April, Wes was painting the hull
gunmetal gray when he heard his father step up behind him. It was late afternoon, the sinking sun making golden fire in the house windows and trees.

“What a piece of shit,” his father said.

Wes turned. His father was smirking and stepped up to the boat and ran his hand along the hull. The whisper of his skin against the smooth grain of the wood. “I can’t feel a fuckin’ seam in this thing.”

Wes waited, expectation sparking in his chest.

“Some work, I gotta admit,” his father said. His face still looked ashen and slightly lopsided and he moved around more stiffly than he did before the heart attack. But he was down to three cigarettes a day, one after each meal, and his doctor said that his heart sounded healthier.

“Come on,” Wes’s father said. “I got something for you.”

“What?”

“A palomino pony.”

Wes followed his father to his truck, where a used engine waited in the bed. Wes’s father said he practically stole it, he found it for so cheap.

“It’s sweet,” Wes said.

“Right?”

They lifted the engine out of the truck and carried it through the side yard to the back, where they set it on the porch. Wes said he’d pay back the money as soon as he could but his father told him it was a gift.

Later it occurred to Wes that if he had opportunity to write again his short story for Mr. Banksey, he might choose this moment for a more truthful end. Knowing himself and knowing his father, it was probably as close to reconciliation as they would ever come. If his mother had been listening from her grave several yards away behind the pink-blooming mimosa tree, she probably would have considered it enough.

In early April the weather warmed and the bayou came alive again: the rain beat away the last trace of winter and the days grew longer and
warmer yet, and the cypress and oak trees looked like they were erupting in gray-green smoke. And the water too began to stir and burgeon, the alligators sunning on the muddy banks, the snakes whipsawing like ink across the shallows, the herons stalking on stilt-like legs through the bracken. Everywhere near the water was the muddy smell of humus, the electric calls of cicadas and frogs.

The township also came to life. In backyards skiffs were reared up on cinder blocks for repairs. Along dock pilings nets were stretched like colossal webs and shrimpers worked at mending them with spidery fingers. The talk in the Barataria buzzed about the imminent shrimping season: where the shrimp would be, how long the season would last, who would catch the biggest hauls. No matter what they said on television, no matter what crap BP said in their commercials, everyone knew the oil was still in the water and would be for a long time. But people were buying Louisiana shrimp and oysters again and it seemed that Jeanette had already weathered the worst.

Wes worked day and night to have the boat done by the end of April. Late one afternoon he’d just finished painting the boat’s name on the stern—
Cajun Gem
—when his father stepped up beside him and looked over the boat.

“I’ll trade you my boat for this one,” he said. He drank from a sweating bottle of Abita beer.

“I bet you would.”

“That cypress smells good.”

“It does.”

“What else you gotta do with it?”

Wes took a beat to respond. “I think it’s done.”

His father nodded, hands on his hips. “Then let’s take her out.”

“Now?”

“Sure.”

“Paint’s still drying.”

His father laid his palm on the hull. “Feels pretty dry to me.”

“I want to look it over.”

“You’ve been looking this thing over for three fuckin’ years.”

Wes picked at his eyebrow. “I don’t wanna rush.”

“Three years ain’t rushing.”

“It’s got no gas in it.”

His father fought back a grin, enjoying Wes’s unease. “I put gas in it last night.”

Wes shook his head and eyed the boat doubtfully. “We don’t even have a trailer big enough. How would we get it to the water?”

“Same way they used to back in the day.”

Wes’s father called Teddy Zeringue and Davey Morvant. Wes called his friends Archie and Donny. Soon there were twelve people in the backyard. Twenty. Forty. Faces Wes had known his whole life, friends and neighbors. Chuck Jones, George Ledet, Elmer Guidry. Several guys Wes knew from high school, and a few brought their brothers and sisters. Wes saw Lucy Arcinaux, the jolie blonde he’d dated for a few lucky weeks. Young mothers brought their screaming and giggling toddlers. Long-necked beers were passed around as the crowd gathered in the rusty light of the evening sun.

After a while Wes climbed the port ladder and everyone gathered under the boat and took its weight on their shoulders. Together they counted to three, their voices loud and roaring, one voice. With a mighty shove they heaved the
Cajun Gem
off the oil drums. Then the tide of people carried Wes and his boat. Across the yard, past the house, into the street and toward the bayou. They passed houses where people stared from their porches, and some of them crossed their yards and joined the crowd. The Thibodaux, the Joneses, the Theriots. Soon there were fifty people, then seventy-five, loud and laughing and joking, carrying the one-ton boat down the two-lane street.

It was almost gloaming when Wes standing on the bow could see the glowing mirror-gray water of the bayou. The crowd carried him across a field of bulrush and bright blue dayflowers. They crossed the narrow hem of shoreline and in their clothes waded into the water with the boat on their shoulders like venerators in a solemn rite. At first Wes was worried
that the boat would sink as soon as they let it go. He was filled with relief when the
Cajun Gem
floated sure and free on the water.