The Marauders (37 page)

The snake kept coming. Five feet away, now two.

Lindquist yelled and took off running.

He plowed through the jungly vegetation until pain like molten buckshot seared his torso. In a patch of lady ferns and swamp grass he lay on his back. His heart raced and his tongue was scorched with fever. He would wait here until the kid came back. If the kid came back in the next hour, in the next two, he could boat him to shore and take him to the doctor. He would even give the kid a few pieces of the gold, enough that it would make a big difference in his life.

He shut his eyes and felt the deep strong suck of oblivion. In a panic he opened his eyes again. If he fell asleep, maybe he’d never wake.

He tried to get up but couldn’t. He would lie here until the kid came along and took him to the doctor’s. He wondered if the doctor would accept Spanish pirate gold for payment.

He reached for his pockets, felt their heaviness.

His eyes shut, opened, shut, opened. Above him, morning sun pierced through the swimming jade leaves. The pieces of light looked like a thousand shimmering coins of gold.

Midmorning it dawned on the Toup brothers that it would be insane to venture further. They turned around and headed back toward the boat. Whatever they planned on doing to Lindquist and the man named Cosgrove once they caught up with them the swamp had probably already done for them. No way could they have made it through this kind of wilderness back to Jeanette. Not when they themselves were on the edge of delirium.

Reginald led and Victor plodded behind, the veins in his forehead popping, his face sheened with sweat. The vegetation, sweet bay magnolia and swamp cyrilla and black willows, enclosed around them like a dripping jade-green cave. Sometimes they had to stoop to make it through the tunnel of overarching branches and leaves. The ravenous swamp wanted to swallow them whole.

After a while they passed the ruined shack, the old man already gone.

They were skirting the edge of a reedy marsh when Victor tottered sideways and stumbled crazily through the muck. He clung to the trunk of a green ash tree. Reginald stopped and looked around. Victor’s face was flushed the color of a blood orange, his eyes a sickly hepatitis-yellow.

It was around eleven and already the heat was stifling. Whenever the foliage thinned they could see the sky, hazy washed-out lavender.

“That old guy cursed me,” Victor said.

“That’s crazy.”

“Motherfucker cursed me.”

“You’re dehydrated. Exhausted. We both are.”

“I still hear him in my head.”

“Just keep your shit together.”

Reginald took a few tentative steps forward but stopped and turned around when he didn’t hear his brother following.

“Victor,” Reginald said.

“How much longer?”

“An hour. Two. I don’t know.”

“He cursed me, Reggie.”

“You’re having a panic attack.”

“Bullshit.”

They slogged through the bog for what Reginald judged about forty-five minutes and came again upon the collapsed swamp shack. The brothers looked around in confusion. Reginald slapped his cheek and wondered how they ended up here again when they’d been traveling straight in one direction.

Was he losing his mind? Were they both?

“Reggie,” Victor said.

Reginald said nothing.

“Reggie,” Victor said.

“What?”

“We’re back where we started.”

“There’s no way.”

“This is the shack. The same fuckin’ one. We went in a circle.”

Reginald raked his fingers through his filthy hair and looked around. The noon sunlight pierced through the leaves ceiled overhead. A fat green katydid thrashed in the middle of a web stretched between two saw palmettos. A golden silk spider watched from the edge of the trembling skein.

“We went in a circle, Reggie.”

“Wiggin’ out’s not gonna help anything.”

“Maybe a tick burrowed in my ear,” Victor said. “Maybe I got that Rocky Mountain fever.”

“Vic? Shut up.”

They sloshed along. Gnats and horseflies and pond striders. A yellow-throated vireo bird in a winterberry holly. Baby alligators by the dozen skimming away like rubber toys.

Then Victor saw it. A nine-foot alligator, a behemoth, sunning atop a barge of floating logs and detritus. He pointed, his finger shaking. “Jesus Christ, look at that thing,” he said.

“Keep moving,” Reginald said.

“Fucker’s just staring at us.”

“Stop screaming. Keep moving.”

“Now he’s coming.”

“More scared of us than we him.”

Victor collapsed to his hands and knees, bright green water lapping to his chin. He struggled up, fell again. Reginald turned and went back and yanked his brother up by the arm. Leaning on his brother, Victor tottered forward a few steps before collapsing. This time he took Reginald down with him. Reginald rose and grabbed two fistfuls of his brother’s shirt and pulled him up. He felt Victor’s heart laboring beneath his hand. Felt his fever, palpable as heat wafting off a stove burner.

“Another big gator right there,” Victor said.

“Just keep going.”

“I gotta sit.”

“Move.”

“Give me a piggyback.”

“There’s no way.”

“You go on then. I can’t.”

Something was coming quickly toward them through the palmettos and brush, the water churning. A chevron of sparrows sounded a shrill one-note call of alarm and winged out of a red maple.

Then Victor was ripped away from Reginald. He let loose a lunatic
scream before he was pulled underwater. Reginald gaped in mute horror. He saw pink flesh. A flash, pebbly black, of alligator hide. Then Victor’s raised arm, grappling for something that wasn’t there.

His hands quaking wildly, Reginald unholstered his Bearcat Ruger and took aim. He couldn’t get a bead on the alligator in the churning chaos, the water already a tumult of red and pink curd. When he saw another alligator swimming toward him he shouldered the rifle and turned, rushed for the nearest tree. He scrabbled monkey-like up the gnarled live oak, perched on a middle limb.

He looked down at the calming water. Smaller alligators were now hemming in. A dozen of them swam off with glistening pink hunks of meat. Reginald glimpsed a floating length of organ, like a piece of raw sausage. He felt hot bile rise in his throat. He couldn’t believe what he saw. Refused to believe.

He vomited down into the water.

When the alligators scattered away, Reginald remained on the branch and wept. He waited to wake from the nightmare and when he didn’t wake he wept for a long while more.

Lindquist was missing almost a week when Villanova finally marshaled a search and rescue team: a few local trawlers, Deputy Melloncamp, another deputy from a neighboring parish, a coast guard ensign, a Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries agent. Midmorning a throng of boats dispersed in the bay, each assigned a parcel of the Barataria to canvas. Among the deputation were Wes on the
Jean Lafitte
and Wes’s father on the
Bayou Sweetheart
. It was his first time on the water since his heart attack. Wes told him to stay home and rest, but he said he was sick of sitting on his ass at home and joked there was nothing good on television anyway.

It was a desolate windswept day, the sky and water the same dreary slate, the bay riled and whitecapped. Wes circled around the same islands he’d already circled, glassing shore and bracken with binoculars. Every time the radio box squawked, every time there was a blare of static before someone spoke, Wes’s heart kicked with dread. A body dredged up in a trawl, he was sure. A mangled corpse washed up on an islet shore.

But no, the news was only more of the same: nothing. Nothing here, nothing there. Headed here, headed there.

Come late afternoon the clouds busted open. The bay hissed and boiled and snakes of steam shimmied off the water. The wind kicked up
and rattled the hundreds of little loose parts on Lindquist’s boat. Anything beyond ten yards of the
Jean Lafitte
was swallowed in murk. Over the radio the trawlers and the coast guard ensign said they were turning back. An hour later Wes was thinking about doing the same when Deputy Melloncamp came on the radio. A shrimper had found an abandoned pirogue near where the bayou met the bay.

So Lindquist had wandered off course after all.

Wes piloted fast, nauseous with dread. Soon distant boat lights glimmered in the gray murk. As he drew closer he saw smaller lights, flashlights and spotlights, skimming over the water. Then, through the hazy downpour, he could make out the deputy’s boat, then his father’s, then the LDWF’s, idling in a loose cluster. Wes drew up and joined the posse and cut the gas. He clambered down the wheelhouse ladder and peered over the gunwale, windy rain lashing his face.

A pirogue bucked and spun in the heaving water. The little boat was like any other most people owned in the Barataria, but Wes spotted something on its floor, the toy-like colors among the scraps of trash.

Lindquist’s Pez dispenser.

The state of Louisiana, Wes’s father often remarked, would forever have egg on its face. Always had, always would. No place in the country crookeder, according to him. What else could you expect, an outpost improvised and jury-rigged by outlaws and gypsies out of the swamp? A place which, in its fledgling years, was tossed back and forth between countries like a bastard child? Look at the evidence. State representatives caught with federal money in their freezers and prostitutes in their beds. Gubernatorial candidates ending up in prison. Federal Emergency money spent on swimming pools and sports cars and palomino ponies.

And the oil companies: God, the fucking oil companies.

Sooner or later, said Wes’s father, they were all caught with their dicks in the cookie jar.

So when Wes asked him if he should speak again to Sheriff Villanova about the Toup brothers and Lindquist’s disappearance, his father hissed out a bitter laugh. “You might as well write Santa Claus,” he said.

Wes asked him what he meant.

“Look, Villanova’s not a bad guy. Not compared with most. But you’re living in goddamn Lebanon, Wes.”

Wes had no idea what his father meant by
Lebanon
. He waited for his father to explain. They were at the dinner table eating rice and beans for supper and outside it was already full dark. The black windows threw back only their own reflections, the dim amber light glowing throughout the house. As always the television droned in the background.
All in the Family
, one of the only sitcom shows his father could abide. Archie was calling Edith a dingbat.

“Louisiana cops have their own way of running things,” Wes’s father said. “Like cops anywhere. They got to pick their battles.” He put down his fork and nudged his plate away with his thumb and patted his shirt pocket, about to pull out a cigarette, but he stopped himself and leaned back in his chair. “Villanova looks the other way when it suits his purposes. Marijuana? He’s not going to waste his time with marijuana. Not when his coffer’s full. He’s a laissez-faire guy. That’s the way it works around here.”

Turned out his father was right. In the morning he drove to the sheriff’s office and spoke with Villanova about Lindquist and the Toup brothers. Villanova, sitting behind his desk, listened to Wes with avuncular forbearance, but impatience showed in his snapping eyes, the way he kept leaning back and nodding. At one point he rummaged in a drawer and took out a sachet of Earl Grey tea and dangled it in his coffee mug. The mug had a picture of a galloping racehorse on the side and said
CHURCHILL DOWNS
underneath. As Wes spoke, Villanova got up and went to the water cooler in the corner and twisted the red spigot,
filling the mug with hot water. Then he sat back down, dunking the teabag.

Finally, when Wes finished explaining why he thought the Toup brothers were involved with Lindquist’s disappearance, Villanova hunched his shoulders and spread his hands. “An abandoned pirogue,” he said. “A couple of threats.”

Wes waited, picking at his eyebrow.