The Marauders (29 page)

No Lindquist, no boat.

By the time Wes reached the third island the bayou was fogless. Farther out the water looked strange, darker, but it was hard to tell because the windows were so dirty, the glass scummed over with salt rime and grease. Wes would never hear the end of his father’s bitching if he left a boat so filthy. He rubbed a patch in the glass with his palm but it did little good so he threw open the portside window. Yes, the water was darker, braided with ochre and red. And around the chenier was a black apron of crude.

“Mr. Lindquist,” Wes called.

His mind raced. Maybe Lindquist had pirogued back to Jeanette and was safe at home. If he knew where he lived he’d check. If he knew his number he’d call.

Wes told himself he was worried for no reason. The bayou was enormous, yes, but Lindquist was resourceful. And a man, even a one-armed man in his shoddy condition, could easily row back to Jeanette. Even a one-armed man with a head full of pills. Men twice as old as Lindquist had done the same in the old days. All the time.

Wes opened the window and shouted again. A covey of plovers burst out of the brush and winged away, their high calls somehow peevish, as if censuring yet another disturbance from man.

The G-Spot resembled a low-slung bingo hall, a dour-faced cinder-block building with a pink neon sign on the roof like a carnation in a widow’s hat. Even with the truck windows rolled up Wes could hear the mortar fire of music in the bar. Inside, the thumping bass was nearly deafening,
so loud Wes had to shout at the man behind the register, a shave-headed black Goliath, six foot and a half easy, whose muscled arms dangled in a way that seemed a threat.

“Twenty-one and over,” the man said.

“Yessir,” Wes said. “Don’t need to go in. Just need to talk to somebody.”

“Sure you do,” the man said. “Get out.”

“Lady named Reagan, sir. Lindquist.”

The guy paused and stared at his face. “What’re you, a stalker?”

Wes shifted nervously on his feet. His mouth was chalky. “No sir. It’s about her father.”

The man cleared his throat loudly and went out from behind the register and punched through the flapping double-doors. In the instant before the doors swung shut Wes glimpsed inside the bar proper. In the bathyspheric light a young blond woman in a skimpy bikini circled a pole, a dozen men huddled like vultures around the stage.

Wes waited, bass music thumping in his sternum. A peeling
SACK IRAQ
sticker was stuck on the face of the register.

Soon a long-necked redhead barged into the anteroom. She had on a string bikini and all the pretty chubby parts of her were bubbling out. It took every bit of Wes’s willpower to keep his eyes on her face. He explained why he was there as Reagan’s face knotted with worry.

“I’m sure he’s at home,” he told her. “I just want to make sure.”

“I don’t get it. Why take his boat?”

Behind the register the black guy was pretending not to listen, scratching with a ballpoint pen at a sudoku puzzle.

“I was sick and had to go back,” Wes explained. “But he wouldn’t. I must’ve asked him a thousand times. Really, ma’am, I did.”

Reagan was waiting, arms crossed over her chest, so Wes felt obligated to say more.

“We were out for a week,” he said. “But he wouldn’t turn back. Refused. I told him I’d take the pirogue. He made me take his boat.”

“How long ago was this?” She kneaded her bottom lip like a pill of dough between her fingers.

“Two days.”

“Two days in the bayou on that teeny-ass pirogue.”

“He had stuff. Supplies.” The more Wes spoke, the more aware he was of how ridiculous he sounded. “I just wanted his address and number if that’s okay.”

Reagan asked the black guy for paper and a pen. Then she scratched down her father’s address and number on the back of a receipt. She gave Wes the scrap of paper and then took it back and wrote down another number. Hers.

The black guy shook his head.

“Fuck off, Antoine.”

“Your life,” said the man. He went back to frowning at his puzzle.

“What’s your name again, baby?” Reagan asked.

He hadn’t told her. Every part of him felt like it was blushing. “Wes.”

“All right, Wes,” Reagan said, sighing out a long breath, patting her forehead.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” he said, but even to him it sounded a lie.

There she was again. Grimes’s mother in the café window, sitting alone in a booth. He wondered if he should get back in his car and drive away like last time. No: he could put this off no longer. And he was still buzzed from his visit with Trench. He got out of his rented Lincoln Town Car and stood in the steaming heat of the parking lot. He took a breath, tightened his gut, walked into Magnolia Café. It was eight o’ clock in the morning and there was no one else in the restaurant except the young gum-chewing waitress fiddling with her cell phone behind the counter. An old man on a corner stool drinking coffee, hunched over his paper.

Grimes wished them good morning.

Nothing. Not even a grunt.

Grimes had on his mirrored aviator sunglasses but his mother recognized him at once. The small muscles around her mouth twitched as he approached. She stood and Grimes pecked her on the cheek. She hugged him and he hugged her back and they held one another for a good five seconds. Then he sat across from her in the booth. “Take off those glasses,” she said. “Let me see you.”

Grimes took off and folded his sunglasses, setting them on the chrome napkin holder. His eyes pinched against the glare of sun. When they adjusted to the light he saw his mother up close for the first time in years.
Her face burled and beaten in the light. Her graying eyebrows. Her tea-stained teeth. But her eyes were lively and shiny and she seemed glad to see him. Nervous, as she always was around him, but glad.

“Oh, Brady,” she said, reaching across the table over her plate of scrambled eggs and wheat toast and clasping his hands in hers. “It’s been too long.”

Grimes said it had been. “How are you?” he asked.

She didn’t answer because the waitress was walking their way with a coffeepot and mug. She set the mug in front of Grimes and poured. Grimes’s mother looked up and smiled. “How you doin’, Grace? Okay?”

“Okay, Mrs. Grimes,” the girl said softly. She didn’t look at Grimes.

Grimes’s mother waited until the girl was out of earshot before she spoke again. “Notice that?”

Grimes asked what.

“Usually sweet as can be. Can’t get her to stop talking. Today?”

She was wearing an LSU baseball cap and now she removed it and set it beside her. Her hair was thinner, Grimes noticed. Grayer. Of course it was.

“What?” Grimes’s mother said. “You come here to show me that paperwork?” She grinned as if she were joking.

“You think that’s why I’m here? I wanted to see you.”

Her mother scoffed him with her eyes.

“I was going to visit you sooner,” he said.

“How long you been here?”

“A month about.”

“Longer than that from what I’ve heard.”

“I lose track of time,” Grimes said, feeling guilty.

His mother said nothing, eyeing his face intently. Maybe trying to unravel the mystery of how they were flesh and blood.

“I don’t know how things got this bad,” Grimes said.

His mother sipped her coffee. She put her hands on the table and looked at them. Grimes looked at them too. The crescents of blackened grime under the nails. She could never get rid of that dirt. His father
when he was alive could never get rid of it either. No matter how hard and how much he scrubbed with the Lava soap.

“One day passes and then the next,” said Grimes. He hadn’t meant to say what he was about to. There was a measured quality to what he spoke. As if he’d written the words beforehand and recited them in front of a mirror. “Before you know it, it’s a month. Then a season. Then it turns into this thing, you know? This awkward thing. You don’t want to call because it’s been so long. Too many things to catch up on. Those little day-to-day things make up a life. You don’t realize it, but they do.”

“I know,” his mother said.

“Well, there it is.”

Grimes’s mother sniffed, the wrinkles around her eyes deepening. She said, “Maybe we should talk at the house.”

The smell. That’s what hit Grimes first. The smell of old books and aged wood and hickory smoke, of moldering cardboard boxes in the attic and of pine-scented floor wax, of his long-dead father’s cigar smoke settled in the couch cushions and drapes. The nostalgic bouquet stirred in Grimes a muddle of feelings. Mostly a realization of how old he’d become, of how much time had passed, of how little had changed.

The house, Grimes’s childhood home, was a sturdy ranch of blond brick that had fared well in Katrina. Only the charcoal roof shingles were new, some of the south-facing windows. Grimes toured the rooms of the house. His father’s old study, with its bookcases full of
Farmer’s Almanac
s and Civil War books and John D. MacDonald paperbacks. The den, with the ancient wooden-framed tube television and the floral-print sofa and velour La-Z-Boy where his father had watched his Saints and LSU football. The kitchen, with the parquet floor and olive-green Formica cabinets. And of course his bedroom, where everything sat exactly where he’d left it. The Masters of the Universe and Star Wars figurines
on the shelves, the boxes upon boxes of comic books in the closet, the Kiss posters.

Kiss, how on earth had he loved that band so much? Now he couldn’t stand to listen to them.

“Nothing changed,” Grimes told his mother when he was back sitting at the kitchen table.

She was at the stove with a wooden spoon, stirring a pot of her red gravy, Grimes’s favorite. When he was growing up, Monday had been red-beans-and-rice day, Sunday red-gravy.

The smell of sautéing garlic and onion and green bell pepper filled the room.

“Why would I change it?” Grimes’s mother said. “Not expecting royalty anytime soon.” She used to say
rug rats
, but she stopped four or five years back when it got awkward. When it became clear that Grimes was, and wanted to remain, a bachelor.

“There’s this place Century Village I’ve been looking into,” Grimes said.

His mother knocked the wooden spoon loudly on the rim of the pot, startling him. “Century Village? What, you have to be a century old to live there?”

“It’s a nice retirement place in Boca, Ma.”

“Boca Raton,” she said, pronouncing it “Ray Tawn.” She turned back to the stove, stirred. “A bunch of old New Yorkers. Then me. Some crazy coon-ass lady. Can you imagine?”

“Let me get somebody to clean my old room out at least. Maybe you can sell some of that stuff. Let one of your friends rent a room.”

“Always had to have the toys first when they came out. The comic books and baseball cards.”

Grimes sipped from his bottle of Abita. “Easy with that Zatarain’s, Ma.”

After a time Grimes’s mother clanked the cover over the pot and got her own beer from the refrigerator. Then she sat across from Grimes at the time-scarred maple table. How long had it been since they sat together
here? He couldn’t even remember. Time was getting away from them both.

“Let’s see one of those forms,” his mother said with a heavy sigh. When he hesitated, she wagged her fingers. “Come on, let’s see what trouble you’re getting into.”

He took his satchel hanging by its strap from the back of his chair and rummaged inside. He handed one of the contracts to his mother. Frowning, she flipped through the papers. “Everyone on earth selling their souls down the river,” she said.

“Always so dramatic,” Grimes said.

“Of course people’ll sign anything if they’re desperate. Lots of desperate people out there.”

“They had a choice. I didn’t hold a gun to their heads.”

Her eyes settled on the table. She wouldn’t look at him now. Couldn’t look at him. “I just find it weird, is all.”

Grimes felt his face and neck burning. “Well, I miss you. I really do.”

“Of course I miss you. Very much. I’m your mother.”

“Let’s go to Commander’s Palace. A day trip to New Orleans.”