The Marauders (22 page)

No, not today. Tomorrow.

Today.

Grimes’s mind was still seesawing when the old man barged back into the kitchen, peacock feathers in his hair like a half-assed Indian headdress. Muttering gibberish, eyes rolling like a gutted sow’s, he clutched a glass brimming with amber liquid that looked like apple juice.

Grimes half stood, mouth agape, not knowing what to think. “Mr. Baker,” he said.

“Putain!”
the old man said.
“Nique ta mere!”

“Mr. Baker,” Grimes said. His eyes ticked between the man’s face and the glass.

The old man jerked his arm and doused Grimes with what was in the glass. Piss. Grimes knew right away from the smell. He let out a strangled
sound of shock and jerked upright. His chair tipped back and smacked the floor.

“What’s this?” he said, glowering. “This fuckin’ piss?”

“Nique ta mère!”

“Goddamn lunatic.”

“
Ta gueule!
”

Grimes shouldered his satchel and, still facing the man, scuttled backward like a crab out of the kitchen. He wiped furiously at his face with his shirtsleeve. In the den he turned around and flung the door open, cursing as he vaulted down the porch steps two at a time.

Working the motorboat’s tiller, Victor picked up speed where the canal opened into the bayou proper. Before long they passed an enormous dead willow, its branches full of slumbering egrets. Hundreds glowing like white ornaments in the dark. This was the place where people usually turned back, the point of no return. They’d have no reason to venture this far unless they were looking for trouble. Or trying to escape it.

Tonight the twins were out to check on their island. On the floor of the boat were gunnysacks full of tools and traps.

“You remember ‘Spy vs. Spy’?” Victor asked Reginald, shouting above the motor.

Neither of them had said a word in twenty minutes.

“Yeah,” Reginald said. They’d collected
Mad
magazines when they were boys and they’d especially liked “Spy vs. Spy.”

“I loved those books,” Victor said. “Bet they’re somewhere in the attic. I should find them.”

“They’d probably suck now.”

“I bet some of those booby traps would work. Medieval shit.”

For a while only the sound of the motor, the soft roar of wind in their ears.

“You feel sorry for this guy?” Reginald asked.

“Fuck him.”

“It’s obvious something’s wrong.”

“Fuck him.”

“You blunted the teeth on those traps?”

“You asked me a million times.”

“Did you blunt the teeth?”

“Yes, Mother Teresa.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want another body out here.”

“Well, I blunted them.”

They banked on the island and hopped from the boat, sweeping their flashlight beams. In the underbrush they stepped over the waist-tall barrier of fencing and slogged through the night-damp vines and brush, careful to avoid the traps they’d already set. In the middle of the island their crop, raised on wooden platforms and ceiled with camouflage shade cloth, was untouched. Thriving, rankly fecund. In their separate pots the plants sagged under the weight of their heavy buds and filled the night air with their skunkiness. Soon they’d be ready to harvest.

“See,” Reginald said. “Worried for no reason.”

“Fuck him,” Victor said.

They went back to the boat and hauled out the gunnysacks and began laying their traps. Victor set a bear trap with filed-down metal teeth on the ground. He prized open the jaws, raked leaves over the trap with his boot. Then he stepped backward and crouched on his heels and began to place another.

Meanwhile Reginald dug into the dirt with a garden trowel. He gouged a divot a foot deep, stabbed a shish-kebab skewer point-side up into the hole, covered over the trap with sleech.

The brothers worked this way for the better part of an hour until they’d set all the traps. Then they met at the boat, their faces sweaty and shining in the dark.

“Probably enough,” said Reginald.

“Fuck him,” said Victor.

Like a child counting down the days till Christmas, Lindquist waited a few days, all the time he could stand, before he resumed searching in the bayou. Any longer and he would have been too torqued up to function, like those tin windup toys his grandparents used to keep in their playroom for the kids. He remembered turning the toy’s butterfly key until it would go no farther, the tin dinosaur sputtering and jerking in fits as if it were possessed. Lindquist felt a clenching nerve in the very center of him, the tightening of an enormous screw. He worried he’d snap like one of those cheap tin toys, running amok in a grocery store with his limbs crazily aflail, knocking bottles and cans and boxes off the shelves until the clerk drew a gun from beneath the counter and took him down.

Lindquist left the harbor at half past twelve. A horror movie fog rose off the water and the air stank of oil. From the wheelhouse window Lindquist could see scores of floating dead fish, bellies flashing white in the boat’s perimeter of light.

He took out his Pez dispenser and flicked the plastic duck head and popped a pill in his mouth. Then another. A one-two punch of Oxycontin and Percoset. He chewed the pills into a fine powder and swallowed the narcotic dust. His body filled slowly with a warm pink euphoria.

Before long he passed the salt dome with the wooden cross wreathed
in plastic flowers. Then the islet with the enormous dead willow tree. Tonight its skeletal branches were empty. Sometimes the egrets were there, sometimes they weren’t. A mystery.

It was almost two when he reached the spit of land covered with marsh grass and cypress stumps and salt-stunted tupelo. He anchored his boat and got into his pirogue, lowered it into the bay, oared toward the island. He saw flickering movement in the corner of his eye and twisted around, but it was only his own shadow jerking along the illuminated water.

Before long he nosed the pirogue onto the thin ribbon of bracken that made up the shore, and got out of the boat and wallowed wide-legged over to a cypress stump. He set the lantern down and went back to the boat and retrieved the metal detector and shovel-scoop. He leaned the tool against the stump and switched on the metal detector and began to sweep the coil. Salamanders like squiggles of ink slithered away across the slimy leaves.

The metal detector blipped faintly. He put the machine aside and started spiritlessly but quickly digging. Like an automaton. Slime filled the hole like blood in a wound. Lindquist kept gouging away. A hook-armed silhouette, the only light for miles his lantern on the trampoline-sized hump of sediment.

After a half minute the shovel-scoop blade tinked against something small. Lindquist stooped and rooted through the mud and his fingers seized on something coin-shaped, heavy for its size. He stood and stuck the tool into the ground, and then he went to the lantern and crouched to inspect the coin-shaped piece of metal.

A washer
, he thought.
A lug nut
.

His heart quickened.

He spat on the object and rubbed the mud off on his pant leg and then looked again.

It was a coin.

It was.

And no ordinary coin. Embossed on one side was the bewigged profile of some royal personage. On the other side was a seal or coat of arms.

Lindquist leapt upright and looked absurdly around. No one. The plashing of tiny waves. The moon a milky blot behind a cloud.

He held the coin up to his eyes and stared. Kept staring, still not quite believing what he saw.

“Well, hell,” he said, a low whisper to himself. Then his voice raised in insane glee. “That’s right,” he said, “that’s goddamn right.”

The gold coin was the size of a half dollar, its weight satisfyingly heavy in Lindquist’s palm. He spent hours fondling the doubloon, worrying it between his fingers, flipping it across his knuckles like a street-corner magician. Mealtimes he placed the coin on the table and studied heads and tails. Printed on one side:
CAROL
.
IIII
.
D
.
G
.
HISP
.
ET IND
.
R
.
1798
. On the other:
IN
.
UTROQ
.
FELIX
.
AUSPICE
.
DEO
.
FM
.

Within a day Lindquist knew by heart every surface intricacy of the coin. The tiny chips along its edge. The palimpsest of scratches fine as spider silk along its face. He could spot the doubloon in a lineup of a hundred similar coins if he had to. With his eyes closed. By touch, by weight.

Lindquist knew the coin would fetch hundreds, maybe thousands, at a collectors’ auction. But he wouldn’t part with it, not this one.

Here was proof he was right. Right for the first time in his life.

Others? He’d part with other coins no problem. Why, there might be hundreds, thousands, in the Barataria. And he thought of this possibility hundreds, thousands, of times a day.

If he found other coins—he would, he knew it—he’d pay off his debts first thing. He wasn’t a ne’er-do-well. He was simply a man who’d fallen on hard times. Like most folks in the Barataria. The way these creditors had treated him: like he was an animal. Pretty soon they’d bust down the door with a medicine ball and drag him away in chains.

What was it the diesel guy at the wharf told him? “You’re not a check bouncer, Lindquist,” he said. “You’re a dribbler. A Harlem Globetrotter.”

Then the man dropped Lindquist’s check on the pine-plank floor of his office. He stared down at the check. Kept staring. Lindquist asked
what the hell he was doing. The man said waiting for the check to bounce back up and knock out one of his teeth.

The diesel guy: Lindquist would pay him off first thing.
Here’s a little something for you
, he’d say, handing the man an extra twenty.
Man of my word, me
.

The diesel guy would never make fun of him again.

And he would give some of the money to that Trench kid, for his boat. Good kid, Wes. If only his daughter were half as good. A horrible thought, he knew, but true. Maybe all Reagan needed was an opportunity, another chance. A lot like him, with Gwen. Well, he’d give his daughter another chance. With a little money she could go back to school—to University of New Orleans, to Nicholls State—and straighten herself out. “You’re still young, you still have a shot,” he’d tell his daughter. He pictured the two of them sitting at a window booth in Magnolia Café, a sunny afternoon, and he’d unpocket the check and push it across the table.

And Gwen. Of course Gwen. Hopefully she’d give him another chance too. With some money in the bank, things might be a little different this time around. Funny, the power of money. People said it couldn’t buy love, but it could keep people together, which was pretty much the same, wasn’t it?

He imagined Gwen and himself on a far-flung vacation in the near future. A Caribbean dusk, a beach with sand like confectioners’ sugar. Spindly palm trees, their wind-bent silhouettes against the tropical gloaming. What would he be doing? Metal detecting along the tide line, the quicksilver surf warming his toes. And nearby in her umbrellaed lounge chair Gwen would be sipping a coconut cocktail. He’d look over and she’d smile and then he’d smile. She’d lift her drink in a little toast, the light of love and admiration in her eyes once more.

The bank. Lindquist’s wife had told him not to come here, but the bank held two hundred and thirty dollars of his money. His only money. Well,
if his only money was in this place, didn’t that make the place partly his too? In his reasoning: yes.

When he walked into the bank ten minutes before closing on Friday afternoon, his wife’s coworkers looked up cold-eyed from their desks and carrels. At her teller window Gwen was counting out bills for an old Vietnamese woman in a foam neck brace. When she glanced up at the door and saw Lindquist her expression soured.