The Marauders (36 page)

Victor scouted through the weeds and picked up a rock and hurled it. It whomped against the side of the shack as loud as a gunshot. A covey of mourning doves exploded out of a bush, scattering above the treetops.

The brothers waited.

Nothing.

Victor kicked again through the weeds and picked up a stick and hurled it like an Olympian. It twirled and whistled through the air and smacked the front door.

Faint rousing sounds came from inside the dwelling. Human. Then a man’s voiced, cracked with age. “What the fuck?”

Victor ran full-bore across the clearing. When he reached the shack he raised his leg without slowing and kicked the front in a kind of flying karate move. The shack listed and then froze crookedly still for a moment before collapsing like a magician’s house of cards. As if nothing more than illusion had held it together.

Someone stirred beneath the junk heap.

At the edge of the wood Reginald pocketed his hands and came warily across the clearing. Another pain in the ass to deal with, this.

“What the fuck,” said an ireful voice at the bottom of the pile.

“Get out,” Victor said.

“Out?” said the man. “There ain’t no in anymore.”

Victor kicked the pile.

There was stirring from within the mound. Pieces of wood scrap and corrugated metal tumbled. A bony hand shot out from the rubble and picked up a two-by-four and flung it aside. Another and another. Finally a figure rose like a junkyard Lazarus, pieces of scrap sloughing from his shoulders and back. The old man brushed off his filthy overalls with an oddly foppish show of propriety. In the dim purple daybreak he looked at Victor and then at Reginald. His babyish white hair was awry, his eyes beneath their wily brows still puffy with sleep.

“We’re looking for somebody,” Reginald said.

The man glared at Reginald. “Well, why the fuck didn’t you just knock?”

“Guy come through?” Reginald asked.

The man pointed to the ground, the junk pile. “Here?”

“No time for your shit,” Victor said.

“A man with one arm,” Reginald said.

Something in Victor’s face gave the man pause. His body swayed in panicked indecision, his hands squeezing in fists at his sides. As if part of him wanted to fight, as if the other part wanted to flee. At once his defiance vanished. “Yeah, a guy come,” he said.

“When?” Victor asked.

The man stared at the ground in bewilderment. As if waiting for the mud to tell him what to say. What to do.

“When,” Victor said.

“I’m trying to think,” the man said. “You woke me up from a deep fuckin’ sleep.”

The swamp had fallen eerily quiet, even the birds and crickets silent.
Maybe watching from their boweries and nooks, waiting to see how this scene would transpire. Meanwhile as daybreak grew brighter the swamp was seeping back into place, like an old oil painting revealed tint by tint by restorative solvent. Mushroom browns and moss greens and lichen grays.

“I guess it was four hours ago,” the old man said. “Five.”

“Which way?” Victor asked.

The man pointed east with a palsied finger. “Said he was going back to Jeanette. That he had something you guys wanted.”

“Let’s go,” Reginald said to his brother.

“Drugs,” the old man said.

Reginald’s shoulders sagged. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes.

“You drug dealers, right?”

“What makes you think that?” Victor asked.

“Shit, I don’t care.”

“What makes you think we’re drug dealers?”

“He told me so.”

“And you believe everything you hear?”

“Come on,” Reginald said.

Victor stayed in place. Arms folded over his chest, a professorial cant to his head. “What if I were to tell you your mother was a whore?” he said.

The man kept silent.

“Was your mother a whore?”

“Look. Just leave me alone. You already done destroyed my house.”

“I heard your mother is a whore. Is that true?”

The old man worked his mouth pensively. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s true.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Your ma was a whore?”

“Yeah.”

Reginald started to walk back toward the woods. At the edge of the clearing he stopped and looked around at his brother. “Come on,” he said.

“She was a whore,” the man went on. “Big ol’ one. So if that’s it.”

“I heard she gave blowjobs to strangers in bathrooms,” Victor said. “Is this true?”

“Come on, goddamn it,” Reginald said. “No time for this shit.”

“Probably,” the old man answered Victor.

“Who would sell his mother out like that?” Victor asked.

The man sat heavily on the rotted pile of scrap, liver-spotted forearms resting on his thighs, hands loose-wristed between his knees.

“Even if she were?” Victor went on. “Who would sell their mother out like that?”

The man shook his head. It was a moment before he spoke and when he did his voice was soft. “I don’t even remember my mother.”

“When did she die?”

“Long ago.”

“When?”

“I was eighteen, nineteen.”

“You have trouble with numbers.”

“I’m fuckin’ eighty-five.”

“Are you sure?”

“You the Toup brothers?” asked the old man.

The brothers exchanged a glance.

“How’d you know our name?” Victor asked.

“The guy told me.”

Silence.

“As long as you ain’t from the government I don’t care.”

Victor waited.

“You guys got any drugs?”

“You’re crazier than shit, aren’t you?” Victor asked, smiling a smile that looked sharpened on a whetstone.

The old man thought about this but didn’t answer.

“What’s your name?”

The man looked up at Victor. A woebegone supplicant. “You already destroyed my house.”

“That was a house?”

“I’m going to die out here anyway. I got no house now. And I sure as shit ain’t goin’ to Jeanette. So why not just leave me. Let the wolves have me.”

“Wolves. Stop being so fuckin’ dramatic.”

“You ruined my fuckin’ house.”

Victor stared down at the man and lifted his shirtfront and reached for the gun tucked in his waistband.

“Hey,” Reginald said from the edge of the wood.

Victor ignored him.

“My mother wasn’t a whore,” the man told Victor.

“So?” Victor said.

“Just for the record.”

Victor rested the muzzle of the Sig Sauer against the man’s forehead, pushing hard enough to make a divot in the flesh.

“Yours was,” the man said. “Your ma was a whore.”

Victor cocked the gun.

“She must have fucked a real piece of shit to squeeze out a turd like you.”

“Hey,” Reginald called.

Victor finally looked at his brother.

“Cut the shit,” Reginald said.

Victor uncocked the gun and tucked it back into his waistband and began to walk away. To his back the man spat quick French curses, his voice soft but full of fury. Without turning Victor called him a crazy son of a bitch. The old man reached into the pocket of his overalls and threw gray ash-like powder into the air. It silted softly down, sighing in the weeds and leaves.

Twig by twig, leaf by leaf, the tangled wood around him gathered shape in the pale gray dawn. He could hear water sounds, splashing baitfish, and he could see the bay’s smoky shimmer through the leaves. He stepped tentatively forward, eyes stinging with exhaustion, shoulder throbbing with every heartbeat.

There it was across the channel of foggy water. The island. A fucking miracle.

Cosgrove went running high-kneed in the water, a few times tripping in the mud. He rose and cast wild looks about because now he was out in the open and one of the twins could shoot him easily. When the water deepened and his shoes no longer touched bottom he paddled and kicked, a flailing swim. Then his shoes touched bottom again and he staggered dripping wet onto the island.

In the clearing what was left of Hanson lay belly-up in the mud. Cosgrove stared down at the body. There was blood, already drying dark, on the ground. Blood splattered on a cypress stump. Blood speckled on the leaves of a trumpet creeper.

Horseflies as big as grapes supped on the gore.

Cosgrove looked away from the mush of Hanson’s head and doubled over with his hands on his knees and retched into the underbrush.

Then he squatted over Hanson, averting his face, reached into one of his pockets. Nothing. He rooted through the other and felt the keys and pulled them out. Then he scrabbled backward, half expecting Hanson’s hand to shoot up and grab him. A crazy thought, he knew. He was half delirious.

It took him ten minutes to find the motorboat, moored in its bowery of bulrush and vine. Still convinced that a bullet might go through his head any second, he leapt into the boat. It rocked away from the shore, water splashing over the gunwale and puddling on the floor.

He pulled the choke and the engine grumbled and the boat shot into the water, the prow lifting and smacking back down. Cosgrove glanced back at the island, its shape blurred behind gray morning fog. His shoulder hurt, his chest, his heart.

He breathed deeply. The wind blowing off the bayou smelled like salt and crude and sun.
You’re not out of it yet
, he thought.

He judged it almost ten by the time he reached the harbor, the day already hot enough that the sun was burning on his shoulders. Parked in the lot among the other pickups was Hanson’s flatbed Dodge. No one else in sight. For this small mercy he was thankful. If anyone saw him, no doubt there would be suspicions. A man looking like he did, they’d make a point of remembering his face.

When he got to the motel he sat in the truck for several minutes with the engine idling and his hands gripped around the wheel. Trucks shunted by on the access road, slowing as they passed.

In his room he washed his face in the sink and cleaned his aching shoulder with a wet towel. Afterward he put on a new T-shirt and jeans and stuffed the dirty clothes in a plastic shopping bag and threw the bag in the garbage. Then he got his money out of the motel room safe. He thought about going into Hanson’s room and taking his money too, but he didn’t know the combination. Some maid was going to have the best week of her life.

After he shoved his clothes and sundries into his duffel bag he went to the window and pulled back the curtain and looked out. Across the way,
the motel maid pushed a cart from one room door to the next. In the lot, a man in gray slacks and a polo shirt locked the door of his Town Car and strode toward his room.

No one else.

It was eleven when Cosgrove walked out of the motel room and got into the truck. With the duffel bag on the passenger seat holding the several thousand dollars and everything else in the world he owned, he put the truck in first and turned onto the access road toward the highway.

This is happening
, he thought.
I’m getting away and I’m alive. Poor Hanson’s dead but I’m alive. This is happening
.

He didn’t know where he was headed except away. If a cop stopped him, he’d tell him the truck was a friend’s.

Lindquist was only asleep an hour when he heard the voices. It was just after dawn, light shafting in rusty smoking columns through the leaves. He jerked upright in the makeshift hammock of the hollow log. Listened. The brothers? It had to be. Who else would be out here? From twenty or thirty yards away, he heard the drawl of their voices. Stirring leaves and snapping twigs.

Lindquist shot to his feet and plunged through the bulrushes, saw briers lashing his arms and face. After a while it occurred to him that maybe there were no voices at all. That maybe he was in the middle of some mad dream.

Every part of him ached. His eyelids, his fingertips, his teeth.

He ducked under a lichen-furred hickory branch, gave wide berth to a black olive tree hung with a mud-daub nest boiling with wasps. Fat leeches clung to his skin. He felt one puckering on a rib, another on his kneecap, another on his forearm. He let them be. He had bigger worries. His gold. He kept frisking his pockets, making sure it was all still there.

A statue-still heron stood one-legged on a cypress stump, watching him. A stone’s throw away, where the bog deepened into a lagoon, an alligator sluiced through the water, the leathery bump of its head poking just above the surface. It changed its route and tailed away from Lindquist.

Further on he saw a brightly colored coral snake dangling from the low branch of a willow, its tongue flicking like an obscene party favor.

Lindquist jerked away and whimpered.

He sounded crazy. He knew he better keep his wits about him. Once you let one weird thought slide, then others quickly followed, an avalanche, and before you knew it you were stuck forever in the middle of the swamp, a ranting madman doomed to checking the gold in his pockets over and over again.

“A one-armed man staggers through the swamp,” Lindquist said. Or thought.

“Fake it till you feel it,” he said. Or thought.

He stopped and listened for sounds of pursuit. He could hear nothing now but buzzing locusts, the
wee-tee-tee
of a cowbird. It was full morning and white light blazed down on the bog. Cypress stumps and water lilies and purple-flowered hyacinths as far as he could see. Hundreds of hovering dragonflies. Halloween pennants and spangled pond hawks and roseate skimmers.

He felt feverish and dizzy. He’d had hardly any sleep for days, only rainwater from leaves to drink. Mosquito bites festered on his face and arm.

On the bright side—
bright side!
Lindquist let out a deranged titter—he had to be close to solid land. Jeanette might be just beyond that fringe of spicebush, that clump of loblollies. Surely he’d make it home by the end of the day. Take a long cold shower and make a lunch fit for a king. Count how many gold coins he had left. Then he’d drive to New Orleans and sell them. By the end of the day he’d be a rich man with a plane ticket to a new place, a new life.

He was passing a bush of swamp honeysuckle when he heard a sound in the water and looked down. A snake about two feet long sidewindered across the surface. Lindquist didn’t know what kind of snake it was, but it was black-and-orange-scaled and coming straight toward him. He told the snake to shoo.