The Marauders (25 page)

“Wait a second,” Cosgrove told Hanson.

Hanson halted, threw an impatient look over his shoulder.

“If somebody set up that fence, they probably set other stuff.”

Hanson gaped at the dirt as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him.

Cosgrove looked about and went to a sapling cypress and snapped off a stick from one of the low limbs. Then he moved slowly deeper into the underbrush, stabbing the ground like a blind man with a cane.

Salamanders like squiggles of ink slithered away across the slimy leaves.

When something seized the stick with a loud metallic snap, Cosgrove leapt back. In the moonlight he saw the dull glint of metal. A trap, its jagged jaws locked around the end of the wood.

“Well son of a bitch,” Hanson said.

Cosgrove’s heart whomped in his ears, a sound like a cotton-wrapped hammer striking tin. He crept along, Hanson following close behind.
As they drew closer to the center of the island the familiar smell grew stronger.

“It can’t be,” Cosgrove said.

“Would be the perfect place,” Hanson said.

“I’ll saw off both of my feet,” Cosgrove said.

Once in the clearing Hanson let out a high-decibel sound of jubilation. A tent-revival cry. In awe they stood side by side and swept their flashlights. Before them was nothing less than a miracle of ingenuity. Posts stood up from the mire and on them were raised wooden platforms teeming with marijuana plants, a kind of elevated hydroponic garden. Canopied two feet above the plants were sections of camouflage shade cloth strewn here and there with clumps of leaves. The marijuana plants sprouted from two-gallon containers filled with some kind of pale fertilizer that looked like aquarium gravel. Among the containers was a network of snaking tubes running out of rain-harnessing buckets.

Impossible to tell how much marijuana there was because it was so dark. Certainly enough weed to get the whole state of Louisiana high for weeks on end. Cosgrove vacillated wildly from doubting what he saw to believing it. He wondered if there was some herbal equivalent of fool’s gold. The raised garden had to be as big as a tennis court. The smell was thick and dizzying.

“Look at this Willy Wonka shit,” Hanson said. He flung himself giggling into the plants, hugging a great thatch of them to his chest and burying his face in the leaves.

“Careful,” Cosgrove said. A strange mixture of jubilation and dread swept through him. How could they be this lucky? Nobody was this fucking lucky.

Hanson tore at the leaves, stuffing wads into the pockets of his jean shorts. His hands were shaking and his face was sweaty and wild.

“Hanson,” Cosgrove said, a heaviness in his gut like a premonition. “Place is rigged. Gotta be.”

“Best goddamn day of my life,” Hanson said in a voice tremulous with joy.

Cosgrove waited and took a breath and then stepped into the plants. He pulled a handful of leaves, then another. Soon, his fingers were sticky and his head was spinning and he pulled at the plants with abandon.

The next night they boated again to the island, Cosgrove manning the engine, Hanson smoking a fifteen-gram blunt the size of a banana. Ordinarily Cosgrove would have scoffed at such waste, but they already had more marijuana than they knew what to do with.

As they yawed toward the island of marijuana Hanson offered Cosgrove the blunt.

Cosgrove waved it away. “One of us gotta stay sober,” he said.

“That’s your problem,” Hanson said. “Too goddamn sober.”

Cosgrove pshawed. He marveled at Hanson’s state, his eyes scarlet-webbed, his mouth slack and spittled. An overgrown idiot child at the tail end of a three-day party. If the coast guard or game warden stopped them, he’d shoot Hanson on sight for looking the way he did.

They ventured farther into the swamp, the reedy banks receding, the water whitecapping. Soon they passed barrier islands studded with dead cypress and water tupelo, shorelines corseted with crude-blackened boom.

Behind them the lights of Jeanette diminished, an orange glow under-staining the sky. And ahead on the horizon were towering oil rigs, their hazard lights blinking far out in the Gulf.

“A spaceship,” Hanson said, pointing.

“Have another toke,” Cosgrove said.

“Shit’s so wet it won’t stay lit.”

They passed an occasional oyster lugger or Boston Whaler sailing under an orange triangular flag:
VESSELS OF OPPORTUNITY
, private boats hired by BP to patrol the waters for oil and fallen boom. The boats slalomed through the water with no seeming coordination, paths crisscrossing, booms almost colliding. Rumor was, BP paid them a thousand dollars
a day. Sign the check-in sheet in the morning, sign out at night. Simple as that. No supervision.

A shrimp boat grumbled near, a flat-capped captain in the wheelhouse, two young deckhands staring at Cosgrove and Hanson, their faces ghoulish in the red and green glow of the pilot lights. One of them had a cigarette hanging from his lopsided grin, the other a plaid rip-sleeved shirt unbuttoned all the way down.

“Heya, fellas,” Hanson called.

“Heya, ace-hole,” said the one with the cigarette.

The two men cackled and rumbled away into the night.

On the island of marijuana they stuffed garbage bags with fistfuls of sticky leaves. Every time Cosgrove heard a snapping in the wood, a rustling in the bracken, he froze and listened.

Within an hour they had trash bags full of the stuff, the smell of the plants so potent that even triple-bagged their scent was unmistakable. Resin stuck to their fingers like pinesap and their hands reeked even after scouring them with mud and swamp water.

When they returned to the motel they stacked the bags in Hanson’s bathroom, shut the door, shoved a motel towel in the bottom crack, sprayed the room with evergreen air freshener. But still the stink of the marijuana was smothering, a hallucinogenic miasma fogging the room. Cosgrove felt high off the fumes alone. Anyone passing their door would have caught a whiff and known right away. The maid, the manager. Cosgrove imagined looking out the window and finding squad cars surrounding the lot.

They stuffed the bags back into Hanson’s flatbed and drove down the access road. Four in the morning, a scimitar moon. In a glade a half mile away from the motel they came across a windowless scrap-wood toolshed. Ivy-covered, it stood behind thick-trunked oaks, almost invisible from the road.

Hanson parked on the road’s shoulder and they carried the bags through the weeds and to the shed. Hanson set his Coleman lantern down on the floor of hard-packed dirt. Tacked to the walls were
Penthouse
centerfolds from years long gone. And the shed was full of cobwebs and dead wasps’ nests, but it was dry and shady, as good a place as any they were going to find for drying and curing the marijuana.

They left the bags there and the next afternoon returned by foot and began to hang the branches from the ceiling rafters with packing cord. Scheming all the while how much money they would make and all the improbable ways they might spend it.

One of the first men in the Barataria to sign the settlement, Trench’s neighbor George, told Grimes the news: Trench had suffered a heart attack while trawling and was now in stable condition at Mercy General. Grimes drove straightaway to the hospital and at the reception desk signed under the name “Peter Lorre” in the visitors’ ledger.

Trench’s room was half dark, the curtains open but a sheer window-hanging drawn against the overcast day. Half propped in bed, Trench was in a sea-foam-green crepe gown, plastic tubes snaking out of his nose and arms. The bed next to Trench’s was empty. A small television mounted in the corner of the ceiling played soundlessly. One of those angry-judge shows.

Grimes was standing in the doorway when Trench’s eyes settled on him. They reminded Grimes of a wounded animal’s. Bleary and ill-omened, the defiance snuffed out.

Grimes unshouldered his satchel and held it by the handle, stepped into the room. When he drew closer to Trench he noticed the waxy color of his face, his hair as white as the pillow of the hospital bed.

“Came as soon as I heard, Mr. Trench,” Grimes said.

In the hall a young black nurse wearing scrubs passed and Grimes smiled at her. She smiled back and then was gone.

“Got insurance, I hope?” Grimes asked Trench.

Trench blinked at the ceiling.

“No insurance? That’s terrible.”

Silence. A murmuring television from one or two rooms down the hall. From another room someone sneezing. Someone else, a young-sounding woman, saying, “Bless you, Mr. Lafourche.”

Grimes studied one of the blipping monitors and pointed. “What’s that thing?” he asked. “This jumpy line? Your heart?”

Trench’s rasping breath.

“I hope you had insurance.”

Finally Trench looked at Grimes. “Just give me the papers,” he said.

Grimes widened his eyes theatrically. “You sure?”

After a pause Grimes took the papers from his case and lay them on Trench’s chest. Then he handed Trench the orange Mont Blanc pen. Trench signed the paper quickly, a squiggled slash.

Grimes took the paper and studied it at arm’s length.
Six
, he thought. Six signatures so far today. Then he tucked the contract in his satchel and took his pen.

“You tough?” Grimes asked Trench.

Silence.

“You tough?”

Trench kept tight-mouthed.

“Fuck you, Trench,” said Grimes. He turned and sauntered out of the hospital room.

Lindquist remembered observing his father’s tics when he was a kid, compulsive habits he never considered strange until he noticed his friends’ fathers didn’t touch doorknobs and toilet handles over and over, didn’t look out the front door peephole twenty or thirty times a day. He supposed he inherited obsession from his father, the same way you’re born with a sunken chest or harelip. It was in his blood.

“What if you’re wrong?” Gwen used to ask him about the treasure. Her way of telling him that he was wasting his time. That he was losing his mind. Near the end, she wasn’t even this polite, telling him his treasure hunting was sad and pathetic. “Thirty years and you still don’t think you’re wrong?” she said.

No, he wasn’t wrong. Lindquist knew it in his blood. He knew it with providential certainty, the same way a dowser knew there was water in the ground, the same way a diviner knew a ghost was in the room. And as long as he kept searching, as long as he kept digging holes in the ground, he’d never be wrong.

Lindquist hadn’t seen anyone in this part of the bayou for how long? Days. And now here was a boat, its small light moving slowly toward him
and he toward it. In the haze of evening heat it glimmered on the horizon like a dim and dying star. As it neared, Lindquist could tell the light belonged to a small boat. A trawling skiff. He knew this not by sight—the boat was still too far away to tell—but by the tinny insect-like whine of its motor.

The twins? His heart pumped hard and he felt an electric surge of adrenaline through his limbs. If it was the twins, he was probably as good as dead.

It wasn’t the twins, but there were two men on the boat. One short and with a ponytail and filthy camouflage cap, the other tall and stoop-shouldered with a bearded face as grave as an undertaker’s. They lifted their chins at Lindquist and Lindquist waved.

“What’s up, fellas,” Lindquist called from his little pirogue.

“What’s up,” the smaller man, a bantamweight, said. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt that said
TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS
on the front.

“Fishin’?” Lindquist said.

“Naw,” the bantam said.

Lindquist could see now that there was a big black Hefty bag full of something on the boat. Trappers, Lindquist thought. Not that he gave a fuck.

“Was gonna say, wouldn’t eat the fish out here.”

“We ain’t fishin’,” the little man said. “You?”

“No. Just out here.”

“Yeah. Same here. Enjoying the sights.”

“Don’t see too many folks out here,” Lindquist said.

“Naw,” said the small guy. He looked over Lindquist’s boat. “Damn, this is quite a ways to row out.”