Lake Charles (5 page)
One grunt later, I teamed with him in the clear pool. “If she wrecked, we’d have caught the jet ski’s dead man switch cutting off.”
“Maybe. If her gas ran out, she’s marooned and waiting on us to bring her a can.”
“Siphoning gas makes me puke.”
He rolled his tense neck. “First we’ll go check out what’s what.”
Our engines cranking loud as a pair of blenders, we aimed at the target inlet, and pushed the throttles to scud over Lake Charles. The wind pasted my hair back into a ducktail, and my eyes canted to the dusk’s fireball sun. New fears rattled me. As nightfall swallowed us, Lake Charles grew in size, doubling our search efforts. I, then him, poured it on.
Will Thomas Mountain’s burnt purple shadows draped over three young fools who out piddling around had pushed things a little too far. I hated Lake Charles. I hated our trip here. I hated the smoke plumes smudging the twilit horizon. I hated the dozens of fires destroying wilderness. Yeah, I simmered in a hateful mood.
The earth dam’s drop-off edge sliced into sight. Tree stumps with gnarled roots, splintered stepladders, and a crimped kayak glutted the concrete spillway. The colder, deeper water close to the earth dam fell to a denser jade, almost opaque color. From the corner of my eye, I saw an arm motion, Cobb indicating to cut it back. I did and we glided closer. His jerky glances inspected the shorelines. Our hopes to spot a disabled jet ski or a stranded Edna were fading with the daylight.
“She may’ve taken a tumble.”
His headshake disagreed. “Can’t be. Look again. The water is just a riffle over the spillway.”
“But if the jet ski bucked, she’d hurtle over the spillway.”
He removed the sunshades and fitted them upside-down on his mesh cap’s beak. “Okie-dokie, Brendan. Check the spillway and make a liar out of me. Go ahead. But I’ll stick with saying she didn’t make it this far.”
“Show me your proof.”
“I see no sign of her or the crotch rocket. So, what’s left?”
“We search on the opposite side of the dam.”
“All right, lead us over.”
We skirted the rust-pitted overflow pipe sticking a foot above the waterline and pulled the bass boats up on the dam’s pebbly embankment. I saw how the water had undercut the earth wall, and I led us up its incline. Anxiety fluted his forehead. On the dry flank, a moonscape of limestone riprap prevented the erosion, but it had failed. I noticed seepage beyond the riprap near the dam’s base, a clue to the weakening dam material. He noted it, too.
“Didn’t I warn you this dike is set to blow?”
Goldenrod, asters, and jewelweed carpeted the spillover area. We canvassed the length of the dam’s crest but found nothing of Edna. Crouching like a pair of cowboys, we talked under an alder tree, him first.
“Other ideas?”
“Patrol the lake’s perimeter. She had to put in somewhere between here and Lang’s Teahouse.”
“It makes sense. We’ll split up. You go left, and I’ll patrol the right side.” He stood. “I can’t imagine what became of her.”
“She rammed a submerged log, wiped out, and dog-paddled to ground.”
He nodded. “At least she’d better sense than we did for not wearing our lifejackets.”
“She isn’t a big risk taker.”
“Only when she took the gamble on marrying yours truly.”
His quip fell limp after I said nothing, and we parted company. Perched on the edge of the bass boat’s seat, I cruised by the sunny banks not shedding any light on her whereabouts. I hugged the thicketed shore, and my glances darted landward. The shadows blotched out my sightlines, and I despaired.
Our fishing trip had degraded into a gold-plated pain in the ass. I had to mull over why. Then a nicotine fit chafed my nerves, but my cigarette machine sat in the other bass boat. A pang of nausea skewered me. Kicking this pot habit tested the limits of my resilience. Luckily, simple visual pleasures diverted me.
A blue heron on its spindly, yellow legs scooped silver minnows from the water trickling over a gravel bar under a sycamore tree. I laughed, and the heron took flight. Painted turtles piggyback on a fork of driftwood basked in the dying sunrays. At the next cove, my hand patted back a yawn when a slippery jerk flagged my eye, and my heart was a pogo stick leaping into my throat.
The stumpy moccasin sidewinding over the water charged at starboard. Adrenaline coiled the springs in my legs. My head snapped around. The fiberglass fly rod was a flimsy defense weapon. I saw the thermal sensors pitting the snake’s triangular snout detected me. Fear clawed up my spine.
Unable to recall if the moccasins bit their victims underwater, I didn’t abandon the bass boat. At the last second, the moccasin—unhinging its needlelike fangs and cottony throat in a defiant hiss—swerved. I blinked but then I saw no serpent. Was my hyperactive imagination duping me? This was too much. I reared upright, balanced my weight, and hollered out.
“Edna! Yo, Edna!”
My ears perked. Cobb’s faint shouts also met with no success. I wouldn’t put it past her to lay low and let us sweat. He loved messing with his victims on April Fools’ Day, and she’d the legitimate right to dish out any payback. The hide-and-seek theory, however, didn’t catch fire in me. I half-expected at the next inlet to spot her there snickering at us. Maybe she’d put in at a different landing and already returned to Lang’s Teahouse. The mosquitoes ate me raw as I neared my combustion point. The engine swished up water droplets as I took off to go rendezvous with Cobb.
Within ten minutes, I entered the shadows now draping the old pavilion in its golden nostalgia. The Chinese lanterns and boat lamps twinkling along the T-dock reflected off the inky water as I eavesdropped on the lovers’ conspiratorial murmurs.
“I could shake it all night. Me, too, honey.
More wine? No, I’m already lightheaded. That’s the idea. Why you lout, kiss me, again.
” By the next moment, I saw Cobb sitting on the T-dock puffing on a Marlboro and listening to the insects hum.
I killed the engine and slid until the push pole ferried me through the algae. My lips quirked in contempt. No simple water hosing could remove the green crud from the bass boat’s undersides. A stiff bristle brush, a can of Bon Ami, and elbow grease might work. The drudgery of tackling it depressed me. I’d heard the idea of running a bass boat on its trailer through a car wash.
“No Edna or jet ski?”
I wagged my head. “Nothing of either. You?”
“Ditto. She can’t be that far.”
“Is this her idea of a joke? Getting payback maybe?”
“A sick joke, I’d say.”
“Is the Yellow Snake sheriff on duty?” I hated asking it. Tasting the bile coating my tongue, I closed the final three paces where I leapt to the T-dock. The rotten timber crumbled but didn’t collapse under me. I spat out the bile and secured my dock line.
His flicked cigarette butt sizzled at striking the water. “Bonehead move.”
“Why? My arrest is separate from this.”
“Not from the sheriff’s point of view. Report her missing, and he’ll throw you some hinky looks. Three guesses where that leads.”
My dicey arrest for Ashleigh’s murder backed up Cobb’s claim. My trust in the Yellow Snake law enforcement ran low.
“Then I’m all ears.”
His voice turned earnest. “We can track down Edna.”
“By searching where?”
“We haven’t covered back in the laurel.”
“With just the two of us?”
“All the better reason to get started.”
“Do we separate again?”
“No, we stick together. She might be hurt, and we’ll need to portage her out.”
“I don’t like how that sounds.”
“Me either.”
Dank night dimmed the jungled shores of Lake Charles. Cobb’s rattles for breath was an attack of nerves, exhaustion, or smoker’s lungs. Our shouts ringing out to hail Edna fell hoarser. Soldiering on struck me as asinine, especially given our return trip still left back to Lang’s Teahouse.
“Wait up, Cobb. We better turn around.”
His grasp dropped from holding a tree branch. “We’ve barely made a dent.”
“What does slopping around in the pitch dark get us?”
“Try your flashlight.”
I already knew it was a dud. My flick of the switch sparked no light. “Dead batteries or else the bulb is fried.” I pitched the useless flashlight.
“Holy fuck, did she pull a D.B. Cooper on us?”
Kneading the kinks from my corded neck muscles, I appreciated Cobb’s sense of humor. “D.B. had some balls parachuting into the toolies, but the Feds will smoke him out. They never back off from a manhunt.”
“My money says he’s still on the lam.”
“My money says he’s a pile of bear scat,” I said, thinking life on the lam was anything but glamorous despite what the bad asses in the movies showed us.
He grinned. “My aim is to stay out of such a pile.”
“Then we better go back before the grizzlies and cougars go on night patrol.”
“Damn straight.”
After reversing our field, we hacked a portal through the alders enmeshed by clingy vines and prickly briars. A nasty peaches smell lifted off Lake Charles. We broke into the familiar clearing, and Lang’s Teahouse bore a malevolent aura before I startled to see the crescent moon’s bloody horn tips in the smoky sky, lowered as if to gore us.
He was feeling it, too. “This haunt gives a man the willies.”
My nod went to my cab truck. “If we go on, we can reach Yellow Snake inside of a half-hour.”
“No, I’m too damn beat. Let’s catch our breath a little.”
“Then help me start a fire.”
The dry chunks of plank came torn off the T-dock while the awning’s tin strips clattered in the breeze. He set a lit match to the wad of cedar bark he’d gathered for the tinder. Orange flames strummed up, smoke whiffed into our eyes, and soon Lang’s Teahouse stood less ghoulish. The strobes of heat lightning mimicking the paparazzi’s camera flashes behind Will Thomas Mountain heralded no promise of rain.
Our bass boats slotted on the trailer’s racks, and I drove my cab truck up from the boat ramp and parked. We claimed the fire’s upwind side and decked out on my blankets. I saw the bats knuckleball over our fire’s flickering radiance. A smattering of pale stars surrounded the crescent moon. His breathing grew heavy.
“Are you awake?” I asked, but I got no reply.
Also falling drowsy, I cast my lot with Hesperus, the dazzling evening star, and it towed me beyond Will Thomas Mountain into a violet haze. Voices spoke in my head, but I didn’t go ape shit. Then a wasp-waisted shape materialized—her approach nimble for her elegant tallness. Ashleigh’s hand beckoned, but as a reluctant conspirator, I didn’t reach for it.
“Brendan, are you there?”
“Yeah, down front.”
“Splendid. Time grows short, so listen carefully. I can help you, if you help me. Deal?”
“You see me at Lake Charles, don’t you?”
“Indeed.”
“I don’t like holding our talks like this.”
“Oh, do I make you jittery?”
“Right now, yeah, you do. So there.”
“Don’t be afraid. My voice rings clear and honest. Trust me.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“Didn’t I let you fuck me? Multiple orgasms rocked that night, in fact.”
“That’s supposed to inspire trust? We were stoned.”
She laughed and then sighed. “So much needs revealing . . .”
Cobb’s bark cut in on my rumination. “Are you tripping on me, dude?
I didn’t tell him how often I dreamed of dead folk or he’d freak. “Huh?”
“I said the sheriff won’t make Edna a missing person for another twenty-four hours.”
“They’ll also blow us off by saying she’s got a wild hair. Cops are assholes.”
“Easy, man. Not all cops are rotten apples. The state cops are pros.”
My head wagged. “Man, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. First it was Ashleigh and now this with Edna.”
“Don’t think bad things about Edna.”
I shifted over to sprawl out lying on a hip, and the fire’s heat felt like a balm on my sore back muscles. “Smoking a spliff would level me out.”