The Marauders

by Tom Cooper

  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.

  So far in his life, the numbers were working in Grimes’s favor.

  Recounting Grimes’s conquests someday in the not-too-distant future, Ingram would say, “This son of a bitch,” and from the head of a baronial country-club table would raise his snifter of cognac in Grimes’s honor. Beefy-faced businessmen with sharp grins and golf tans would follow suit as Grimes sat back trying to seem humble, inwardly basking in his glory. “Story?” Ingram would continue. “This son of a bitch? Right here? Goes down there, to whatever the fuck town, fucking town he was born and raised in. They spit on his face and shit on his shoes. But Grimes? ‘Sign right here on the dotted line.’ This guy right here. To his own mother. How’s that for balls? Sign here on the dotted line. Saved my life going down there. They would’ve had my grandson’s nuts in a Mason jar. Would’ve crucified me just for the fun of it.”

  LINDQUIST

  A headache slamming in his temples, Lindquist woke wearing the same T-shirt and jeans he wore the day before. He went to the bathroom and stuck his head under the running faucet and raked his fingers through his hair, a deranged tangle because he’d cut it himself—left-handed, as if there were another option—in the mirror.

  Then Lindquist rummaged in the attic for his old hook arm. It was a half hour before he found it in a cardboard box full of Christmas decorations. The thing was ugly and too small but he supposed it was better than walking around with his nub making everyone embarrassed and sick.

  In the kitchen he filled a ten-gallon Igloo cooler with ice water and then went to the living room and picked among the pill bottles crowded on the television tray: Oxycontin, Xanax, Percoset. He unscrewed the plastic twist-tops with his teeth, shook six or seven pills out of each bottle, swept them one-handed into his zippered hip pack.

  Outside Lindquist looked around the empty driveway and yard for his truck. It wasn’t until he searched the garage and walked out to the street and glanced around that he remembered the night before. He couldn’t find his truck because his truck wasn’t there to find. Villanova had driven him home from the bar and his truck was still in Sully’s lot.

  Lindquist shook his head. Even this little movement lit white fire behind his eyes, stirred a green wave of nausea in his gut.

  He went back inside and called the taxi service from the kitchen phone. Despite his daughter’s insistence, he still didn’t own a cell phone and didn’t care to. Who would call him anyway? Bill collectors. His daughter, looking for money. Certainly not his wife.

  He walked out to the access road and stood waiting in the chaffweed, insects chattering in the grass, swallows shrilling in the trees. Not yet nine and already the heat was like plaster of Paris settling in his lungs. It wouldn’t be for another few months, late October, before the weather began to cool.

  Soon a taxi pulled up, a root-beer-colored Buick with a hand-painted escutcheon on the side door. TAXI, it said.

  Lindquist got in and the driver eyed him in the mirror.

  “Sully’s.”

  “Sully’s?” A little shake of his head. “Sully’s won’t be open yet.”

  “My truck’s there.”

  “Ten dollars,” the driver said.

  Lindquist waved the driver on.

  They passed a marshy field thick with cattail in the middle of it a cabin raised on stilts, rusted generators and oil drums in the mucky yard. For three generations a family named Robicheaux had lived here, but they left for Florida once the oldest, Larry, sold his shrimping business after Katrina.

  The driver was watching Lindquist in the rearview mirror. His face looked familiar. Those foxlike eyes, the bitter curl of his lip. As if he believed something owed him was looking increasingly unlikely he’d ever see. An aggrieved man-child.

  Suddenly the name came back to him: Naquin. Jeremy Naquin, once a rising-star wide receiver from Lindquist’s high school. That was then and this was now and here the motherfucker was. Driving a cab.

  “Naquin?” Lindquist said.

  The cabdriver’s eyes seized on him in the rearview mirror.

  “Gus Lindquist. Jeanette High.”

  The man’s eyes grinned. “Shit, Lindquist. Thought that was you. How you been?”

  He wigwagged his hand. Then he realized Naquin couldn’t see this, so he said, “Eh.”

  “Story of my life,” Naquin said. “Fair to middling. Ever write a book about myself, that’s what I’m going to call it. Fair to Fucking Middling.”

  One time in gym class, decades ago, Naquin had gripped Lindquist by the middle like a squealing pig and held him upside-down over a locker room toilet. He dunked his head over and over again as a dozen other boys egged him on. T
his was when Lindquist weighed all of a hundred and fifteen pounds with change in his pockets. Now, half his life past, Lindquist found himself strangely grudgeless. Here was Naquin now, gone to fat, driving a cab that smelled like foot rot and fried onions.

  “Never see you around,” Naquin said. “Thought you’d split.”

  “Don’t get out much, me.”

  The car rattled over the potholed road. Next to Lindquist the ice chattered in the cooler.

  “Hey, I’m just going to say it. Some fucking luck. Your arm.”

  “Yeah,” Lindquist said.

  “Know what I remember about you?”

  Lindquist thought: Dunking my head in a fucking toilet? But he asked what.

  “The pirate books. Always had your nose buried in them pirate books. Still into that shit?”

  “Kinda.”

  “Ever find anything?”

  Now all Lindquist could see of Naquin was his grin in the rearview mirror. “Not much, me.”

  “I might need to get me into that,” Naquin said. “Metal detecting. Wife says I need a hobby besides shitting on her hopes and dreams.”

  Lindquist laughed a wry laugh through his nose and the two of them fell quiet for a minute.

  “Hey,” Lindquist said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Why don’t blind men skydive?”

  “The who the what?”

  “Because it scares the shit out of the dog.”

  Naquin’s eyes were puzzled in the mirror.

  “Joke,” Lindquist said.

  “Oh, all right,” Naquin said. He gave Lindquist a delayed smile. “Yeah, I’m gonna remember that one. People’ll like that.”

  In Sully’s oyster-shell lot Lindquist got out of the cab and pulled out a twenty. He held out the bill but Naquin waved the money away through the open driver’s window.

  “Shit, I feel kind of bad about everything, Lindquist,” Naquin said.

  Squinting in the sun, Lindquist shoved his hand in his pocket, unsure what to say. “People don’t change,” his wife often told him in their last days together. This, of course, after Lindquist promising he would.

  Well, here was someone right here to disprove her theory.

  “Hey,” Naquin said, shaking his head as if jarring himself from a trance. “You ever find any treasure and need a guy to dig? Way it’s looking, doesn’t seem like I’m gonna win the lottery anytime soon.”

  Lindquist said sure thing. Naquin waved and then Lindquist. He watched the cab bounce away in the churning dust.

  Lindquist was an hour late when he got to the marina. One of the men, King, was already gone. Only Dixon, sitting shirtless on top of a blue plastic cooler, remained on the dock. His eyes were raw and bloodshot and he winced when he rose, rubbing his lower back with the heel of his hand. Not yet thirty, Lindquist thought, and the poor son of a bitch’s body was already falling apart like a Taiwanese can opener. Before he knew it he’d be gobbling painkillers by the fistful, crushing them with a mortar and pestle and snorting the powder.

  Like himself.

  “Where’s King?” Lindquist asked.

  “Indiana,” Dixon said.

  Lindquist was expecting Dixon to say in his bed. In the hospital. At the bar. Not Indiana. Not somewhere half the fucking country away.

  “Hell’s he doing in Indiana?”

  “He’s through. Ain’t coming back.”

  “Through?”

  Dixon nodded, eyes ticking everywhere but the one place he wanted to look. Where Lindquist’s prosthetic arm should have been.

  “That’s what he told you? I’m through? I’m through and I’m going to Indiana?”

  “He said tell Lindquist I’m going to Indiana. I’m through.”

  “Well,” Lindquist said with a weary sigh, “the day ain’t getting any younger.”

  They hopped on the Jean Lafitte, a fifty-foot round-bottomed shrimper with avocado-green trim and a pirate flag hung from an outrigger. Before long they nudged into the bayou, the water shimmering like foil under the sun, the oak-studded cheniers and cypress cisterns sliding past.

  After prepping the nets Dixon climbed up to the wheelhouse and stood behind Lindquist. He fished a toothpick from his jeans pocket. Leaning against the wheelhouse wall, he jabbed between his teeth.

  “See the way the water’s moving,” Lindquist said. “Strong tide’ll flush those shrimp out of the marsh real good.”

  Dixon was busy with his toothpick.

  Lindquist took the Donald Duck Pez dispenser from his pocket and flicked the head. A pill popped out and he smashed it between his molars, jaw working in a slow bovine rhythm. Over the years he’d grown to like the bitter taste of the pills.

  Dixon was watching him.

  “You staring at my nub?” Lindquist asked.

  “Naw.”

  “You can stare.”

  Dixon looked at the wheelhouse floor, the boards worn smooth and silvery, grime heeled so deeply into the grain of the wood that no amount of scrubbing would ever remove it.

  “Looks like the end of a sausage, don’t it?”

  Dixon considered Lindquist’s nub.

  “Like an elephant’s asshole,” Lindquist said.

  Dixon grinned uneasily. “Naw.”

  “What kind of son-bitch would steal an arm?” said Lindquist.

  “What you gonna do?”

  “Not much I can.”

  “You gonna get another, I mean.”

  “I got that old hook arm over there.” Lindquist pointed his chin at the corner of the wheelhouse, where the battered old thing was propped next to a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. “Just hate wearing it.”

  They were quiet for a time, the only sounds the grumbling engine, the sloshing waves.

  “Maybe it was a guy missin’ an arm hisself,” Dixon said.

  Lindquist couldn’t tell whether Dixon was joking. “Whoever’s probably halfway to Missouri by now.”

  Dixon was sheepishly watching Lindquist. “Something I gotta tell you,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  He switched the toothpick in his mouth from one corner to the other. “This’s tough.”

  “Well, hell. Just say it, Dixon.”

  “Today’s probably my last.”

  “Last what.”

  “Shrimpin’.”

  Lindquist took off his yacht cap and raked his fingers through his thinning hair. He turned to the wheelhouse window and steered. The bayou was opening up now, small white-topped breakers buffeting the hull of the boat, a covey of pelicans flying in V-formation over the water. “Well, let’s just see how it goes,” Lindquist said.

  Dixon pushed off the wheelhouse wall and took a step toward the ladder as if about to leave but then he stopped. “Well. No probably about it,” he said. “Wife wants me to take that BP money. Puttin’ up booms. They handing out cash left and right. Bills like they’s coupons.”

  Lindquist waited.

  “You think that’s bad?” Dixon asked.

  Yes, he wanted to say, but he told Dixon no.

  “You’re judging me.”

  “Shit, money’s money. Especially when you got kids.”

  Lindquist meant what he said. His own daughter he rarely saw or spoke with though she lived only two miles away in the new trailer park on the edge of town. Once a month, twice if he was lucky, she dropped by the house to see how he was. That was the pretense at least. Lindquist often suspected that her mother dispatched her. Go see if your father hasn’t OD’d on those pills. Go see if your father’s taking care of himself. Go say hello to your father, he’s probably lonely.

  Other times Lindquist reckoned that Reagan only visited for the money. Not that he had any to spare, but he always forked some over anyway. Twenty here, fifty there. Lindquist knew damn well where the money was going. Drugs. Only marijuana, he hoped, but he knew there was probably some coke mixed in there too. Some pills, knowing Reagan. Meth: he prayed to Jesus not.

  It wrenched Lindquist’s heart to thi
nk how distant he’d become from his daughter. He tried not to think of how pretty she’d once been. How her once milk-smooth skin was already wrinkled with bitter lines around the eyes and mouth. She patched her face with makeup, but anybody could look and know she was in trouble.

  “You should do it yourself,” Dixon said now.

  “Work for the oil company?”

  Dixon nodded.

  Lindquist scowled. “Don’t care for that, me.”

  “Well, you don’t have to marry ’em.”

  “Let’s see what happens.”

  “Lindquist. Listen to what they’re sayin’ on the news. They were showing some restaurant in New York. The owner hung a sign on the door. Braggin’ about how their shrimp are from China. ‘No Gulf shrimp served here,’ it said.”

  “Fuck New York.”

  “All you gotta do is put up some booms,” Dixon said. “Shouldn’t be too hard.” He opened his mouth as if about to say more but then he stopped himself. Even with one arm, he was going to say.

  “You think those booms’re helping?”

  “They say it stopped about eighty percent of the oil in Alabama.”

  “ ’Course they did,” Lindquist said.

  “What?” Dixon said.

  “Don’t be stupid, Dixon.” He didn’t mean it unkindly, and it didn’t sound so the way it came out.

  “I ain’t bein’ stupid. I’m bein’ optimistic. There’s a difference.”

  Dixon opened the wheelhouse window and flicked his mangled toothpick into the water. He dug into his pocket for a new one and stuck it in his mouth. Then he leaned back with his boot heel cocked against the wall.

  Lindquist steered, craning his neck so he could see into the green-black water. Through the port window was a hawk, small as a drifting piece of ash, circling over a locust-bowered islet. Herons with stilt-like legs stalked in the marsh grass. Only a few other boats were out this far, oyster luggers and Lafitte skiffs.