The Marauders (9 page)

In retrospect, maybe the story he’d written for Mr. Banksey was more a memoir. Except that wasn’t exactly right either, because wasn’t a memoir supposed to be pure truth? In the story, or whatever Wes had written for Mr. Banksey, truth and fact bled together, a muddle of confabulation.

Everything Wes wrote in the story about the hours before the storm was picture-perfect true. Wes’s father boarding up the downstairs windows. The vans and trucks loaded with suitcases and children lurching
past their house. The way the tree shadows in the yard grew tensely still and the way the air outside tightened like a held breath.

And Wes’s mother, begging his father to leave.

The storm would peter out and turn away at the last minute, Wes’s father insisted. Just like the rest of them.

“You’ve gone
braque
,” Wes’s mother said.

Anger brought out my mother’s French
, Wes had written in his story.

In the margin, Mr. Banksey wrote,
Good stuff
.

When the storm hit, it didn’t sound like a freight train, the way Wes often heard it described in other hurricane stories. It sounded like nothing he’d ever heard.
A kraken’s roar
, was what he wrote. A cannonade of debris hammered the house while a deluge slashed down from the sky, rain filling the street and yard, rising so deep it topped the rosebushes and hydrangeas. Soon the water lapped up the porch steps and seeped under the front door. At first it was only an inch or two, but within an hour a foot of muddy swirling water filled the the bottom story and Wes and his parents were sloshing through the house. Somewhere a levee had broken and Jeanette was swallowed in a rolling storm surge.

When the power blacked out Wes and his parents went upstairs with flashlights and gallon water jugs. They sat on pillows on the floor and played Scrabble by lantern light while Max, head on forepaws, cowered under the bed.

They played Scrabble: Wes would later marvel at this.

At one point during the game Wes’s mother used the word
STUBBORN
.

Wes’s father told her that she had quite a wit. He was trying to act calm, but Wes could tell from the hard set of his shoulders that he was scared.

A few minutes after, his mother spelled
DUMB
with her tiles.

“Okay,” his father said. “I get it.”

Sometime after midnight the wind wrenched a piece of plywood from one of the downstairs windows and the glass shattered, wave after wave of water surging into the house.

That was when they stopped playing Scrabble and started praying.

Dawn found them on the roof of the house. All Baratarians kept axes in their attics in fear of storms like this, and Wes’s father busted a hole through the ceiling so they could climb through. Max paced back and forth along the roof peak, whimpering and wagging his tail and staring down into the tumultuous water. The hurricane had turned the streets into swift canals full of spinning debris. Scraps of lumber and rags of plastic, trash can lids and window shutters. Cars and trucks were completely underwater, but the sky was oddly tranquil, gray like an old nickel.

Before the storm, Wes’s father had roped his pirogue to the frontyard oak tree. The only smart thing he did. The little boat jounced in the water, but it was intact and afloat. Wes’s father got a hundred feet of nylon anchoring rope out of the attic and tossed the line like a lasso, trying to snag the pirogue. He missed the first time and the second. On Wes’s father’s third toss Max scrambled down the roof, tail wagging, and launched into the water.

Instantly the wild current sucked him away and under.

Wes would never know if what happened next was an accident, or if his mother meant to go after the dog. She went skidding down the slope of the roof on her behind and caught herself on the gutter with her tennis shoes. The pipe gave, twisting away from the house with a great metallic shriek, and then she went tumbling into the water.

“Oh shit,” she said while airborne. Those were Wes’s mother’s last words. The ones he heard.

Wes and his father watched the raging water, bodies poised as if they were about to fling themselves into the flood. Then Wes’s eyes met his father’s. Pure animal panic. An awful look Wes knew right away he’d never forget.

For a second, ten or twelve yards away, Wes’s mother’s head popped up like a bobber. That was what Wes would always remember the clearest. Her crazed and twisted face, the terrified look in her eyes. Her open mouth making no sound. Then the water sucking her back under.

His father screamed Wes’s mother’s name. “Sandy,” he shouted again and again, as if this would bring her back.

From this point onward in his story for Mr. Banksey’s class, everything Wes wrote was pure fiction.

For instance: weeks later, when he and his father were living in Baton Rouge, they were eating dinner in a fried chicken restaurant and Wes’s father, drunk on whiskey, asked, “Do you blame me?”

In the story, Wes said,
Of course not
.

In the story, Wes and his father said they were lucky to have each other.

In real life, Wes had said, “Yes.”

That was five years ago and, even half a decade on, nothing felt healed. No, the wound of his mother’s death still felt as big as the hurricane itself.

The next evening when Wes showed up on time at the marina, his father was nowhere to be found. It was twilight, quiet save for the gibbering of frogs and insects. At the end of the dock the
Bayou Sweetheart
was unlit in her slip. Wes got out of his truck and paced in the bleached-shell parking lot. Another trawler got out of his truck and waved at Wes before trudging down the dock to his boat.

As he paced, Wes had a nagging sense that he was forgetting something. He chalked it up to the perpetual unease that he felt around his father these days. Lately they argued about everything. About how much money should be spent on a lightbulb, about how to set the house thermostat, about what kind of gas Wes put in his truck.

His father gave him the most hell about two things: Wes’s boat and the BP settlement money.

Wes started building the boat in the backyard when he turned fifteen, just as Wes’s father and grandfather had done when they were the same age. Now the keel of the boat, reared on cinder blocks under a gunny-roped tarp in the backyard, sat untouched for months. Wes’s father used to poke fun at his shoddy craftsmanship and welding, eyeing the ragged seaming, running the flat of his hand along the hull like a cattle baron. “See this?” he’d say. “This wood, you’ll have to throw it out, this whole
section. And this metal, look. See how it’s bent? No way a boat’s going to float if it’s built like this. It’ll fall apart like a Polish submarine. One mistake leads to another. Listen to me.”

Wes would stand back, burning with the impulse to tell his father that he never asked for his advice. That the boat was a work in progress. That he’d prove his father wrong and the boat would turn out to be the most beautiful he’d ever seen, whether it took three months or three years.

But Wes hadn’t touched the boat in months and now it languished in the backyard under a moldering vinyl tarp. Like a dead elephant. Wes’s father stopped mentioning the boat, which was somehow worse than the shit-talking. Maybe his father was right. Maybe he’d given up without knowing it. Scared to move forward, scared that the more he built the more he’d prove his father right. The first Trench in generations not to build his own craft.

“You seem glad,” Wes said one day, surprised he’d said it, let alone thought it.

They were lugging their toolboxes home from the harbor when they passed the boat in the backyard. The evening sky was plum and scarlet above the treetops, a muggy spring night.

“Glad about what?” his father asked.

“That I stopped building the boat.”

They walked on a moment before his father said, “Why’d I be glad?”

“Because you were right,” Wes said. “That I wouldn’t finish.”

His father cut him a look. “I don’t think about the boat.”

“Because you never took it seriously.”

“If you don’t take it serious, how you expect me to?”

“What’s that mean?”

“Forget it.”

They stopped and faced one another.

“Where’s your time go? Your money?” his father said. “I’ll tell you. Screwing around.”

“I’m working all the time. For you.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“If I had more time, the boat would have been finished a long time ago.”

“With what?” his father asked. “Popsicle sticks?”

“You want me to steal the wood?” Wes asked. “Go in the shipyard and steal the parts?”

“Why you getting so nasty? You brought it up.”

“Loan me the money.”

“Crazy talk.”

“Loan me the money and I’ll have this boat done in three months. You’ll see.”

“What money, Wes? I don’t have a nickel to piss on.”

“Well, neither do I. When I do, I’m going to finish the boat.”

Wes’s father only looked at him rankly and shook his head.

And then the other night at dinner, when Wes mentioned the BP money. He and his father were eating supper when a news story about the oil spill came on the television. The pretty reporter woman was talking about the settlement checks the trawlers and fishermen were getting for their cleanup work and business losses in the spring.

“That guy come by to talk about the settlement again?” Wes asked.

“Comes nearly every day, little dapper dickhead,” his father said.

Wes looked at his father and waited.

“Why?” his father asked.

“Why not just take the money?” Wes said. “It’s free.”

“Free? Is that how you look at it?”

Wes shrugged.

“Somebody burns down your house and offers you five dollars. That’s free?”

Wes kept quiet, already regretting mentioning the subject.

“Let’s get this straight. It’s not free. Not when they destroy the place you’ve lived all your life. That’s about as far from free as you can get.”

All of these things were on Wes’s mind when his father drove his truck into the gravel lot at half past nine. Wes was sitting on the dock
with his feet dangling over the side and rose as his father hobbled across the lot and down the dock. His white hair was mashed on one side, like he’d slept on it, and his cranberry polo shirt with the white chest-stripe looked rumpled. He passed Wes without a look or word.

He spoke only once they were aboard the
Bayou Sweetheart
and he had the engine running. “Your friend came over,” he said.

Wes looked at him quizzically.

“The oil guy. Guy you want me to go to prom with.”

Was said nothing. It was going to be one of those nights.

“Guy wouldn’t let me go. Real slickster. On and on and on. Try to be polite, people’ll fuck you ten ways to the altar.”

Wes stooped to untie a mooring rope from a dock cleat.

“What’s that?” his father said from the wheelhouse.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“All right then. It’s already late.”

Wes checked the nets and trawls as his father piloted across the languorous purple bayou. Wes couldn’t see any oil in the water, not yet. A good sign.

Once they reached the pass Wes lowered the trawls and Wes’s father steered the boat against the current. Twenty minutes later he shifted the boat into idle and Wes lifted the swollen nets. The haul looked considerable, much better than the night before. His father climbed down from the wheelhouse and put on gloves and helped Wes load the catch onto the sorting table.

As they picked through the shrimp, a realization struck Wes like lightning. The ice. “Remember the ice,” his father had said.

He picked through the teeming haul, dread clenching his gut. He braced himself for the inevitable moment, wondered what he could do. He decided he’d play dumb. Pretend that it was his father who was supposed to bring the ice.

When the time came to ice down the shrimp, Wes’s father looked around the deck. He put both hands on his hips and glanced about with his mouth open.

“Where’s the ice?” Wes’s father said.

“Huh?”

“The ice. Where is it?”