The Marauders (16 page)

“You don’t like it?”

“Where’s your other?”

“I kinda like this old hook arm, me. Wait until the first guy screws with me. Wham! Right in his face with this thing. Word’ll be all over town. Don’t screw with Lindquist. He’ll mess you up with his hook arm.”

His daughter was watching him. Waiting.

“It was stolen,” Lindquist said.

Reagan’s jaw dropped and her bottom teeth showed, the same expression his wife got when she was distressed. Getting more like her mother every day, his girl.

“Oh God, Daddy,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What good would it do? You gonna get a search team together?”

“I would’ve come over. To cook. To whatever.”

“To cook?” Lindquist asked.

“Why you gotta say it like that?”

“I’m just playing.”

“You’re playing rough today.” She filched a box of cigarettes from her purse and shook one out and lit it. She inhaled and blew out smoke and leaned forward to tap the ash of the cigarette in the beanbag ashtray on the coffee table.

Lindquist glanced at his watch. Five hours from now he’d have to be back in the bayou if he wanted to get any decent shrimping done. The prospect of nearly killing himself out there with the mosquitoes, all for forty or fifty dollars, made him nauseous.

“What kind of sick dickhead would steal an arm?” Reagan asked.

Lindquist shrugged. “How’s your mother?”

Reagan turned her face and looked at him sideways.

“I can’t ask?”

“I’m not gonna be a go-between.”

They were quiet for a while, Reagan surveying the cluttered room, the dining room table strewn with tide charts and boating maps and pirate books.

“Still at it with the metal detecting?” Reagan said.

“You think it’s weird?”

“A little.”

“Well, hell. You used to think it was cool.”

“Yeah. When I was little.”

Lindquist slapped his thigh and got up. “Almost forgot,” he said. “Got you something.”

“What?”

“A surprise.”

“I didn’t come for anything,” Reagan said to Lindquist’s back as he went down the hall.

In the bedroom he opened the bureau drawer and rummaged among the loose change and receipts and Mardi Gras trinkets. He picked out a heart locket hung on a wisp-thin gold-plated chain and blew off the lint and dust. He glimpsed his daughter in the bureau mirror. She was standing at the dining room table and she picked up one of his pill bottles and opened it. She shook out a couple pills and slipped them in her purse and set the pill bottle back in its place.

In the den Lindquist held out the necklace to his daughter. Her smile faltered. She was expecting more, something else. Money, no doubt.

“Found that metal detecting.”

She dangled the necklace from her fingers so it caught the light. “It’s pretty,” she said.

“Tell your mother. Tell her I’m finding treasure.”

“You’re something else,” Reagan said. She hugged him and Lindquist hugged her back, his hook arm angled awkwardly.

There was something about her posture, an expectant air, that told
him she was waiting for something. Lindquist dug into his pocket and took out a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to her.

“You sure?”

He reached out and held her fingers and closed them around the bill. “Only money,” he said.

After Lindquist left him at the harbor, Wes opened all the windows of his rickety Toyota truck and made a makeshift bed in the truck cab. A dusty-smelling moving blanket for a mattress, an old T-shirt for a pillow, a beach towel for a top sheet. He was filthy and hot and exhausted but had trouble falling asleep because it was the fifth anniversary of his mother’s death. Somewhere, right now, his father was no doubt grief-stricken over the fact. Like him. Well, he’d have to suffer on his own. They both had to suffer on their own now. Wes thought of his mother’s voice, tried to fill his head with its sweet soft cadence—
it’s okay, Wessy
—and he wept himself to sleep. Every so often the calls of trawlers woke him, their raucous voices carrying across the bayou, but he turned on his side and sunk back under.

Come sundown he was startled awake when someone rapped his knuckles on the window glass. Lindquist. Only faint orange light remained above the treetops, like the torn edge of pumpkin-colored construction paper, birds flitting through the gloaming.

Wes opened the rear cab door and slid out.

Holding a metal detector in his good hand, Lindquist winced at the sight of Wes. “Christ, kid. You die?”

“Sorry.”

“Well, hell. Change your clothes at least. Closet’s in the cabin. Grab any old thing. Just so I don’t have to smell you.”

Wes went aboard and Lindquist followed. From the cabin closet Wes dug out an old pair of jean shorts, so big around the waist that he had to belt them tight with a length of nylon rope. Then Wes found an old T-shirt that said
THE BAHAMAS
on the front and put it on.

When Wes climbed onto the deck in his new clothes, Lindquist was peering down from the wheelhouse as he coasted through the twilit bayou.

“I wanna tell you something,” Lindquist said.

“What’s that.”

“You look like an asshole.”

“They’re your clothes,” Wes said.

“You’re wearing them wrong.”

After a while they were out in the bay and Wes put the starboard net in the water and let out one hundred feet of cable and locked down the winch. He did the same with the port side and then he waited with his arms crossed over the gunwale. A chemical stink hung in the air, like he imagined napalm might smell in those Vietnam movies his Dad liked to watch. His Dad: he tried to push him out of his head. He spat into the water and looked out over the dark and muggy bay. From a distance came a whining grumble, which grew louder until a two-prop plane passed about five hundred feet overhead, its roar so loud Wes covered his ears.

Soon Lindquist slowed the boat to quarter speed and Wes hoisted up the nets, watching the cables and grates as they swung aboard. He dumped the haul on the deck and took the wooden paddle from its peg on the wall and began to poke through the pile of wriggling sea life.

Lindquist idled the
Jean Lafitte
and climbed down the wheelhouse ladder and squatted on the deck, sorting through the fingerling fish and puny shrimp with the hook of his prosthetic arm. Several of the fish were dead. So were a few blue crabs.

Lindquist picked one up, turned it over and looked at its gills, which were supposed to be pinkish white but were dirty gray. “Ever wonder why we’re doing this?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” Wes said. His eyes were watery and stinging from the chemical fumes. He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.

“No matter how hard you work, comes to nothing.”

“My dad says that a lot.”

“Your old man’s right.”

They were quiet for a time. Lindquist tossed a croaker back into the water, Wes a baby redfish cankered with lesions the size of hot pepper flakes.

“You smell that?” Lindquist asked.

Wes nodded, made a face.

“Suppose this stuff is poisoned?”

“They say it’s okay on the news. The Environmental whatever.”

“EPA?”

“Yessir.”

“You believe them?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve seen shrimp with no eyes, me,” Lindquist said.

“I saw a three-eyed redfish one time.”

“Saw a three-tittied mermaid, me.”

They chuckled.

“Just you and your pop?” Lindquist asked.

“Yessir.”

“Ma split?”

“She’s gone.”

“Indiana?”

“What?”

“She go to Indiana?”

“No, she’s passed.”

Lindquist’s eyes fell somberly on Wes. “Well, hell,” he said. “Sorry to hear that, kid.” Then, just a few seconds later, “Knock knock.”

At first Wes thought he misheard Lindquist. Surely he wasn’t telling a joke now.

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?” Wes asked grudgingly.

“Asshole.”

Wes waited. “Good one.”

“No, you gotta say ‘Asshole who.’ ”

“Asshole who?”

“Asshole wearing my clothes fell asleep in the back of his truck.”

Wes shook his head.

At dawn they dropped off their haul and Lindquist paid Wes in the harbor parking lot. Already the air was beginning to burn and simmer, steam rising in a thick fog off the bayou. They were walking to their trucks in the marina when Lindquist asked, “You gonna sleep in your truck again?”

“I guess so,” Wes said.

Lindquist grunted and walked over to Wes. He rooted in one of the sagged-down pockets of his cargo pants and took out a key ring and tossed it to him. Wes caught it one-handed against his chest and Lindquist told him to take the small silver key on the end.

Wes asked if he was sure.

Lindquist nodded and said, “Just don’t burn the fuckin’ boat down, all right?”

For the next several days in early September, after he and Lindquist returned at sunup from shrimping, Wes stayed behind on the
Jean Lafitte
. He hosed the bycatch slime from the deck and bathed in the boat’s tiny standing shower and then he lay down in the single bed with the lumpy mattress and pillow. The cabin was small and wood-paneled, on the walls an antique brass barometer, a rusted Louisiana license plate, a sun-faded poster from the 1970s of Farrah Fawcett in a red swimsuit. The shelves were crammed with treasure books and magazines and Wes flipped through them when he was trying to get to sleep. He came across a bunch of stuff about Civil War sites and shipwrecks, about pirate treasure in Louisiana and Alabama and Florida. The pages of these were always dog-eared
and finger-smudged. Wes had to admit the pictures and stories were interesting, if far-fetched and crazy.

Then there were a few books about the pirate Jean Lafitte. Wes read one of them straight through. He already knew some of the background from school. Louisiana was once the back of beyond, the book said, passed back and forth between France and Spain like a bastard child. Then Thomas Jefferson bought the territory from Napoleon for less than three cents an acre. But Louisiana stayed an outpost. A backwater way station along the route of westward expansion. Especially the Barataria, its labyrinthine expanse of waterways and barrier islands an ideal haven for runaway slaves and refugees.

And pirates, according to the book, which was why Jean Lafitte chose the Barataria as his base of operation. Here Lafitte and his privateers staged raids on cargo ships, ferried the booty via pirogue to New Orleans. The French and Spanish in the city didn’t care where their goods came from as long as they got them. The whores got their perfumes and silks, the Creoles their spices and tobacco, the bourgeoisie their booze and slaves.

For some time Lafitte’s enterprise and infamy only grew. Gunners and shipbuilders and carpenters—outcasts from all over the globe—joined Jean Lafitte’s crew. They reared families, grew crops, built stockades and brothels. The Barataria became a home away from home for pirates and outlaws and bastards. And Lafitte himself was rumored to have sired a bastard child or two. The author’s word:
sired
. Wes didn’t know what it meant and didn’t have a dictionary but figured it must have meant fathered.

When Governor Claiborne issued a reward for Lafitte’s capture, the pirate did what a pirate does. He hid his riches far and wide across the bayou. His fellow brigands, knowing their heyday was over, probably did the same.

There weren’t many passages about lost gold in the book, but they were all highlighted. Maybe Lindquist was onto something after all, Wes thought. He didn’t see the harm in Lindquist’s treasure hunting. And he
didn’t think it was crazy. If he never found anything, so what? He wasn’t hurting anybody.

And who didn’t like a treasure hunt? Wes suspected everybody was chasing after treasure in a way. A lottery ticket, a baseball card, a long-lost photo of a high school sweetheart.

A boat.

Wes and Lindquist kept shrimping, one dismal outing after the next. They left at dusk and returned at dawn, dragging themselves off the boat like mannequins. Montegut’s payout was always far less than they hoped. Almost insulting. Every day restaurants were canceling their shipments and ordering freeze-dried shrimp imported from China, Montegut explained. Even bragging about the fact on their signs and menus.