The Marauders (6 page)

A win-win situation; Grimes found that hard to believe. News of the oil spill, the Macondo blowout, grew grimmer by the day.
The end of the bayou as we know it
, people were saying. Rita, Gustav, Katrina, these seemed like the bell tolls of the apocalypse, but this was really it. The oil company officials said one thing, the news anchors another, and then marine biologists flown in from universities far and wide contradicted them all. No one was sure what to believe except that the numbers were startling. The amount of oil and poison in the water, the millions upon millions the shrimping and fishing industries lost. Grimes had even heard about
a trawler taking his own life, some poor bastard so broke and broken he shot himself through the temple at a Fourth of July barbeque.

Ecologists worried about the crude washing into the marsh. One tropical storm, one unlucky shift in the winds, would bring in a black tide that laid waste to the ecosystem. Herons, terns, cormorants, laughing gulls, frogs, lizards, alligators, redfish, mullet, oysters, crawfish, deer, muskrat.

And, yes: shrimp.

Last spring, a few months ago, as the desperation and confusion grew, there was mention from oil company executives of top kills and junk shots, talk from congressmen of setting fire to the sea. “Setting the sea on fire!” Baratarians marveled. Why not just bomb the goddamn town and get it over with?

Columnists opined in editorials that it was time to wean off the oil tit. Coastal Louisianans wrote letters back, saying that a drilling moratorium would be the final deathblow to the community.

People pointed fingers at British Petroleum, at Halliburton, even at the oil rig workers, of whom eleven were dead and over a hundred injured. Baratarians were certain of only one thing: none of the talking heads on television were telling the truth. BP said most of the oil was out of the water, that the cleanup operation was a success, but most of it was still there, deep down and out of sight.

And Baratarians didn’t need to hear the truth in order to know it. All they needed to do was look around. The truth was in the water and in the air and in the strange tides that washed ashore the dead birds and fishes, bone by blackened bone.

The company put Grimes up in a cracker-box motel in Jeanette, Louisiana, and by the end of the first week Grimes lost track of the hours he spent in living rooms and kitchens, in bayou shacks and shanties, listening to fishermen rail about the oil spill. Some of the men were old, others
young, but they all had in common a seemingly inexhaustible outrage. They hoisted themselves out of chairs and lifted their T-shirts, showing him the angry rashes on their chests and arms. They complained of mysterious afflictions of the eyes, ears, and throat they said they never had before the rig explosion or dispersants. They pounded tables with their fists and called him obscene names and made threats. A few even spat out curses in French.

They almost always ended up taking the money.

He spent countless hours poring over the settlement papers, painstakingly explaining every nuance of legalese while the men listened woodenly. Sometimes Grimes suspected the trawlers were acting thickheaded out of spite. A coon-ass wariness of outsiders. But Grimes wasn’t an outsider. He was from the Barataria, couldn’t recall a time when he didn’t want to leave it. One of his trademark refrains, when people asked him about his past, was that he was born wanting to leave the swamp. That he wanted to leave it while still in the womb.

He thought he’d blend in easily once he was up in New York or Boston or Chicago. But as time passed and he entered his thirties it began to dawn on him that he’d always be an outsider. He was an outsider in the Barataria when he was growing up, so it had been foolish of him to think he’d belong someplace else simply by virtue of wanting to be there. Sometimes Grimes suspected that no matter how far he distanced himself, no matter how much time he spent away, there was a certain stink of the South that would never wash off him.

Up north people heard the bayou in his mouth, those telltale cadences. Untraceable to his ears, but there. And hearing his accent, people wanted to know about his past. Where was he from?

“Down South,” he’d say. “Little place middle of nowhere. Long ago. Another life.”

“Oh wow,” they’d say, nodding, pretending to be more interested than they were, “no kidding.”

Knew this guy was a coon-ass
, Grimes was sure they were thinking.
Coon-ass
: one of those words like
nigger
. You could use it as a curse, a
belittlement, an endearment, a self-deprecation, a damnation. It could be a complex muddle of all these things, depending on who said the word. Context was everything, context and intention.

“Living down there must’ve been paradise,” they’d say, “all that seafood.”

And Grimes, “Sure, oh yeah.”

Grimes detested seafood. All of it. He’d inherited from some obscure tributary of his family’s gene pool an aversion to the stuff. Shrimp, crab, redfish, it all tasted the same. Like rotting garbage marinated in sulfur water. But when Grimes was growing up, his family was so poor they often had to catch their meals, which meant seafood. He’d smother the shrimp and crawfish in ketchup and Zatarain’s just to choke the garbage down.

And now here he was, years later, driving hour after hour through the Barataria in his rental car. Nothing changed; still hardly even a town. No superstores or megamalls, just a loose strew of markets and restaurants and go-go bars around the crossroads. The whitewashed spire of a Catholic church, the squat cinder block hulk of a correctional facility, a tin-roofed zydeco dancehall. Roadside stands run by trawlers and fishermen, Creoles and Cajuns and Isleños selling crawfish and satsumas, their craggy faces like sun-basking turtles.

Amazing the place was still standing. The clapboard houses on creosoted pilings, so jury-rigged they looked ready to topple into the oblivion of the swamp. Same with the makeshift piers, the mud boats and trawling skiffs. Now and then Grimes spotted signs for
SWAMP TOURS
, some enterprising local who’d slapped a magnetic sign on the side of his boat. Grimes went on these tours against his will during high school field trips. Twenty dollars a head, a guy would take you into the bayou. He’d point out the hummock where escaped slaves once hid from their owners. The man-made hill where a thirty-two-room antebellum mansion once stood before the hurricane of 1915. The place on the horizon where the treasure-laden ships of the pirate Jean Lafitte once sailed.

The state’s dearth of infrastructure was awe-inspiring. Third World
countries would deem the place an outpost of civilization. He passed through Lilliputian enclaves, most of them nameless, no more than a few clapboard houses and shanties scattered on pilings along the levees. He made countless wrong turns, followed single-lane roads until they turned to rutted dirt lanes that dead-ended in swamp.

“Recalculating,” the GPS said. A scolding woman’s voice.

He would tell the machine to shut the fuck up.

“Recalculating,” the GPS would say again.

“Fuckin’ murder you,” Grimes said, lambasting the dashboard with his fist.

“Up ahead make next left,” the GPS told him.

There was no left. No nothing. Only cattail and bladderwort and black puddles of mud as far as the eye could see. Trackless swamp.

Grimes executed a thirty-point turn like an old crone, engine straining and smoking, wheels spitting up gouts of slime.

How much longer would he be here? A month? A year? Maybe he’d died and gone to hell.

On the leather passenger seat of the Town Car was a printed-out list of names, fishermen and trawlers who’d filed complaints and claims with the oil company. So far he was halfway through the K’s. For a spell this heartened him. This epic clusterfuck would soon be over. But then he gave the list a closer look, noticed all the surnames beginning with T’s and S’s. And the Z’s. He’d never seen so many Z’s in his life. An orgy of Z’s.
Zatarain. Zimboni. Zane
.

Then the other names.
Trench
and
Toup
.
Lindquist
and
Larouche
. Names he knew, names that were carved on the tombstones in the picayune cemeteries dotted around Jeanette.

And among the names on the list was his own:
Grimes
. The only surname beginning with a G remaining.
Chris Grimes
.

His mother.

A visit he was dreading and putting off.

At night Grimes returned to his motel room on the verge of collapse. He poured three fingers of whiskey into a plastic motel cup, loosened
the knot of his tie, and threw himself onto the bed. He flicked aimlessly through the channels with the remote, the wash of pictures lulling him into a daze. President Obama delivering a sit-down news interview about the future drawdown of United States troops in Afghanistan. J. D. Salinger’s toilet for sale on eBay. A possible peace talk between Israel and Palestine in September. The Barataria was so small and smothering, it was easy to forget there was a whole other world going on out there.

Sometimes Grimes came across local news channels covering the oil spill and stared in revulsion at the horrific video footage. Seafowl and porpoises and fish, all dead in lagoons of muck. And in New Orleans, at an oil company press conference at the civic center, a trawler had thrown a lemon meringue pie in a lawyer’s face. The news showed someone’s cell phone footage. An old man in overalls who resembled a disheveled Ichabod Crane bum-rushed the stage and slung the pie at the lawyer’s head. The man’s face was all meringue with a screaming mouth in the middle. People clapped and hollered. The lawyer was wiping the goop from his face and flinging it off his fingers when a security officer Tasered the trawler. Then three more security guys dragged the man out of the building.

People were losing their bearings, for sure. He needed to be careful. Maybe he should buy a gun. A knife. Some mace, at least.

“This place is living hell,” Grimes would tell his boss, Ingram, on his smartphone.

“You’re the best guy we have.”

“Bullshit.”

“Sure you are.”

“I’m not.”

“Well.”

“Jesus. Then put somebody else on the case.”

“The case. You make it sound like a murder mystery.”

“The job, whatever. Get someone else.”

Ingram let out a long beleaguered breath that Grimes was supposed to hear. “Nobody else wants to go out there. Everybody’s got families and shit.”

“There’s got to be someone lower on the totem pole. How about Franklin?”

“Franklin’s wife has breast cancer.”

“How about Snyder? Get him on a plane.”

“He’s in Pittsburgh.”

“They have airports in Pittsburgh.”

“It’s his nephew’s bar mitzvah.”

“I’m beginning to hate these people.”

“See? That’s why you’re there.”

Grimes darkened many doors his first few weeks in the Barataria, and with each slight, with each obscenity and threat the trawlers hurled his way, his defiance and disdain grew. Before long he realized it wasn’t only some allegiance to his company, some craven fear of losing his job, that kept him here. He was compelled by a resentful brinkmanship. Some sense that all of this was a game played against a group of people whom he’d never liked and who had never liked him. A long-belated comeuppance.

Ingram wanted him to collect signatures? Well, Grimes would gather more signatures than Ingram dared dream, so many signatures they’d erect his statue in the corporate headquarters’ aviary. The trawlers and their families said they’d never sign? Well, Grimes would keep knocking on their doors and slick-talking on their porches until they relented, until they begged him to proffer his papers and pen.

Because Grimes was above all else a practical man. Numbers: life was a game of numbers. How much money you had in the bank, how much money you made, how many years you had left to live. Numbers murmured in his head throughout the day. Three more signatures today, three hundred signatures this month, two hundred thousand in the savings account, one hundred thousand in the stock portfolio. He did fifty push-ups in the morning, fifty sit-ups at night. He had three shots of bourbon on weekday nights, five on weekends. He ate red meat once a
week, chicken five, pasta and carbs only on Sundays, a green or red apple every day.