The Marauders

by Tom Cooper

  “I’m gonna ask you fellas right out,” Lindquist said. His face was red and shiny with sweat and his breathing was rough. “You seen my arm?”

  The brothers glanced at each other.

  “Matter of fact I have,” said Victor.

  Lindquist waited, mouth slack, eyes darting. He wore an oversized white T-shirt, a captain’s cap, camouflage cargo pants.

  “I saw it drinking at Sully’s,” Victor said. “Grabbing ass. Dancing around. Raising hell.”

  The brothers laughed the same neighing horsey laughter.

  Blood shot into Lindquist’s face. “I’ll call Villanova if I have to,” he said.

  The brothers stopped laughing.

  “You threatening us?” Reginald said.

  “I just want my arm. Give me my arm.”

  Victor crossed his arms over his chest. “You still going in the bayou?”

  “That’s government water.”

  “Ours.”

  “I ain’t poaching. If that’s what you think.”

  “What’re you doing out there?” Reginald asked.

  Lindquist kept quiet, the muscles in his face twitching.

  “What’re you doing out there, Lindquist?” Reginald asked again.

  “Treasure hunting.”

  The brothers neighed.

  “Holy shit,” Victor said. “You got any idea how crazy you are?”

  “Ain’t none your business.”

  “Every bit my business,” said Victor.

  “Well, hell. I find anything, I’ll give you some.”

  “There isn’t shit out there,” Reginald said.

  “That’s a thirty-thousand-dollar arm,” said Lindquist.

  “Thirty thousand dollars, my ass,” Victor said. “What’s it, Gucci?”

  “Screw you guys,” Lindquist said. He turned and began to waddle down the steps like a geriatric, again clutching the rail one-handed.

  “Got any jokes for us, Lindquist?” Victor said to his back. “Tell us a joke.”

  Yes, Reginald and Victor had taken the arm. At first they considered keeping the arm as leverage, possibly returning it if Lindquist forswore searching further in the Barataria. But then that nosy prick from the oil company saw the prosthetic. The look on his face when he returned from the bathroom to the den, no doubt about it. And a few hours later when Lindquist showed up demanding his arm and making threats about Villanova, they knew what had to be done. That night when they boated into the Barataria, Victor tossed the prosthetic into the bay where no one would ever find it.

  Next morning there was a knock on the door and Reginald looked out the peephole and saw Sheriff Villanova standing on the porch with his hat in his hands, his gourd-shaped face flushed from the heat.

  “Got a minute?” he asked when Reginald answered the door. Reginald knew from the grave steadiness of his eyes that he’d come about Lindquist. Reginald always suspected that Villanova knew exactly what he and his brother were up to in the Barataria, just as he suspected Villanova didn’t much care as long as it wasn’t meth or gun-related. As long as it didn’t get him into any trouble. Surprising, how a few thousand dollars dropped in the proverbial coffer could loosen a man’s mores. Especially if the man had a nasty video poker habit and a mistress in New Orleans.

  Reginald led the sheriff inside to the dining room table, where Victor was playing a game on his cell phone. “Heya, Sheriff,” he said, putting down his cell phone and standing. He shook Villanova’s hand and sat back with his arms folded across his chest.

  “Coffee?” Reginald said.

  Villanova shook his head and sat, leaned back with his hat balanced on his knee and his legs in chocolate ostrich-skinned boots crossed. With his thumb and forefinger he stroked his pencil mustache. “You two know I been okay to you.”

  “Sure,” said Reginald, sitting.

  “And you been okay to me.”

  “Hope.”

  “So, let’s have right out with this.”

  The twin brothers waited.

  “Lindquist,” Villanova said.

  “Yeah?” said Reginald.

  “Know him?”

  “Sure,” Victor said.

  “Somebody’s messing with him,” Villanova said.

  “Us, you think?” said Reginald.

  Villanova hesitated a judicious beat, peered about. Through the pristine windows was the shimmering jade of morning, the stout pines and oaks. The house was barren and tidy, African violets on the shelves and sills.

  “No, I don’t,” Villanova said, “but he thinks.”

  “Guy’s a basket case,” Victor said.

  “You know who he is,” Villanova said.

  “Yeah,” Victor said. “One-armed asshole. With the metal detector.”

  “You guys steal his arm?” Villanova asked.

  Victor brayed laughter.

  “I don’t even know what to say,” Reginald said.

  Villanova looked down at the table with his eyebrows raised. “It’s crazy, I know. But he thinks you two had something to do with it.”

  “Guy’s a pill head,” Victor said.

  “How you know that?” Villanova asked.

  “Everybody knows,” said Victor.

  “Stole his arm?” Reginald said incredulously.

  “Yeah,” Victor said. “Why’d we want to mess with a cripple?”

  “Maybe he was metal detecting in the wrong place.”

  “That’s what he does,” Victor said. “Digs holes in all the wrong places.”

  Villanova mulled this over.

  “He’s pissed off lots of people with that metal detector,” Reginald said. “Especially after the storm.”

  Villanova shunted his eyes back and forth between the brothers. “Maybe you’re right,” he allowed, “but I doubt they’d steal the guy’s arm.”

  “We didn’t either,” Reginald said.

  “Figured as much,” Villanova said, and stood. One-handed, he jammed his hat down on his head. “Favor, though? Best don’t even look at him the wrong way. Guy’s a little unhinged.”

  LINDQUIST

  Shrimping with one arm was harder than Lindquist recalled.

  When Dixon didn’t show up that afternoon Lindquist sailed alone on the Jean Lafitte into the Barataria. Every hour proved a greater farce than the last. Lindquist would lower the booms, scramble up the wheelhouse ladder, steer the boat, scramble down the ladder, lift the booms. Then he’d haul the catch from the nets to the sorting box.

  Sorting: that was the hardest part of all. Picking one-handed through the teeming hill of sea life, blinking the sting of sweat from his eyes. The catfish with their whipping whisker-barbs, the sting-a-rees with their switching razor-tails. Within minutes his fingers were raw and bloody and his hand felt like a block of wood. All for a measly twenty or thirty pounds of shrimp, hardly enough to pay for the diesel. Hardly enough left over for a pack of gum.

  Then he’d do it all over again like a Keystone Cop. Down with the booms, up the ladder, down the ladder, up with the booms.

  Every so often he looked at the sky imploringly, half hoping that lightning would strike him dead and put him out of his misery. If he stopped to think how tired he was he’d probably collapse. The endless sweatbox nights and afternoons. His shirt was glued with sweat to his back, and his legs and arm ached and his eyes stung with salt and fatigue. Worse, this hellish heat would not abate until October at the earliest. If he was lucky.

  Pills: he lost count of how many pills he took. They seemed to work less and less these days. It took two to feel only half as good as he used to feel after taking one.

  His second day alone in the Barataria he was sorting through his first haul when a giant blue crab seized the forefinger of his hand. Even through the glove he felt the angry bite of its claw. He flapped his hand and it clung onto his finger and he flapped his hand more and still it clung on. He chopped his arm down and slammed the crab against the gunwale and then he jackknifed his arm. The crab went flipping wi
ldly into the water.

  A tranquil rage possessed Lindquist. There was something liberating, almost soothing, about surrendering to the fact you were fucked.

  Carrying a purple velvet Crown Royal bag full of trinket jewelry, Lindquist entered Trader John’s general store. He kept a dwindling cache in case of emergencies when he needed money for pills, for diesel, for bills. The original owner of the shop, John Theriot, was long dead, the place now run by his wife. Lindquist nodded hello at the old woman and started for the counter but saw a young couple browsing the jewelry display. He stuffed the bag into his camouflage cargo pants and beelined to the back of the store, where he stopped in front of the used tools hanging from the pegboard wall. He stood in the same spot with his hands clasped behind his back, gazing up at a sod cutter as if it were a Picasso.

  When the couple left and Lindquist heard the little bell chime above the door, he came up to the counter. He removed the bag from his pocket and untied the cinch strings and spilled a cache of jewelry on the counter. “Wanting to sell all this,” Lindquist said. “One price for all.”

  Watches, necklaces, rings, most of it cheap gold-plated stuff, fair trinkets you won for tossing a Ping-Pong ball into a goldfish bowl. But amid the junk were a few pieces that looked worthwhile, perhaps even valuable.

  Mrs. Theriot’s narrow nose flared as she studied the jewelry. Lindquist knew that the woman disliked him, considered him no more principled than a looter. The bones of her face were hard and dour, out of keeping with her too-bright button-down pineapple shirt. While she picked among the rings and necklaces he studied the 2010–2011 New Orleans Saints schedule hung on the wall behind the counter. The season opener, against the Vikings, was coming up in early September.

  “Where’d you find all this?” Mrs. Theriot finally asked.

  Lindquist grinned a coy grin. “Oh, I can’t tell you that now.”

  “This might be somebody’s, I mean.”

  His grin quickly fell. “You saying I stole it?”

  “Nobody’s saying that.”

  “Never stolen a thing in my life, me. I ain’t no thief.”

  “Nobody’s saying you’re a thief either.”

  Now Lindquist’s face was flushed and his mouth was twitching.

  “Lots of stuff went missing after the storm,” said Mrs. Theriot. “Lots of stuff folks are still looking for.”

  Lindquist sighed through his nose and glanced at the floor. He leaned in closer and drummed his fingers on the glass, hatching some scheme in his head. “Tell you what. They come in and recognize it before it’s sold, they can have it.”

  The woman shook her head. “Not sure if that’s a good idea either.”

  “How come?”

  “Well, people are going to line up straight to Mississippi claiming things are theirs that aren’t.”

  “Hell, I’m not saying put a sign up saying free jewelry.”

  The woman waited.

  Lindquist said, “If somebody looks at the stuff funny, then you know something’s up and maybe he’s telling the truth.”

  Mrs. Theriot picked through the pile on the counter. “Most of it’s worthless,” she said.

  Lindquist pointed. “Look at that watch. Somebody’s gonna want that watch. And that ring. Look. Solid gold. Diamond’s not big, but it’s real. Solid gold around it.”

  “I’ll give you one hundred dollars for all of it right now.”

  Lindquist looked quickly away and then quickly back, a kind of vaudeville double-take. “One hundred dollars,” he said. “Come on now.”

  “One hundred dollars.”

  “Well, hell. That watch right there alone is worth a hundred.”

  “I’ll be lucky to sell it for half that. People aren’t buying a lot of jewelry these days. They’re not buying a whole lot of anything.”

  “Everybody needs a watch.”

  “If I make more than a hundred dollars,” Mrs. Theriot said, “we split the profit fifty-fifty. This stuff, we’d be lucky, though.”

  Next morning a kid was sitting atop his cooler on the deck in front of the Jean Lafitte. Black-haired with gray already peppering the sides, pale green eyes lighter than his dark skin. He asked Lindquist if he was the captain looking for deckhands.

  Lindquist asked Wes how old he was and Wes said seventeen, eighteen very soon.

  “Look a little small,” Lindquist said. “Can you work a winch?”

  “Yessir. I can work everything on a shrimp boat.”

  “You only seventeen but you got all that gray in your hair?”

  Wes shrugged. “Yessir.”

  Lindquist studied Wes. “I seen you around.”

  “Lived here my whole life so I guess you probably have.”

  “Yeah, I seen you,” Lindquist said. He nodded vaguely as if trying to recollect where. Something clicked behind his eyes. “Monsieur’s several days back.”

  “I was there. Yessir.”

  “Trench’s kid, ain’t you?”

  Wes nodded.

  “What’s wrong with his boat?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How come you two not working together is what I mean.”

  Wes plunged hands in his pockets and kept silent.

  “Oh boy, it’s like that now, huh?”

  Wes shrugged.

  “He gonna be pissed?”

  “At me maybe. Not you.”

  “I don’t need any more motherfuckers pissed at me. I got enough of those to last a lifetime.”

  “I guarantee, sir.”

  “You on drugs?”

  “No sir,” he said.

  “Blaze?” Lindquist asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Do you blaze?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Smoke reefer.”

  “No, none of that.”

  “You crazy?”

  “No sir.”

  “Can you work a wench?”

  “Yeah. Yes sir.”

  “You good at lifting trawls?”

  “Yessir.”

  “You ever been to Sing Sing?”

  “Where, sir?”

  “Congratufuckinglations,” Lindquist said. “You’re hired.”

  WES TRENCH

  The late afternoon was warm and cloudless, the sun a fat shivering coin of pewter, cicadas shrieking in the live oaks. Wes watched the bayou slide past, its sluggish currents pulsing with life. Who knew what gargantuan oddity lurked beneath. Wes imagined a catfish the size of a sofa, a turtle the size of a dune buggy. That was one of the things he still loved about the bayou. Its mystery.

  They passed a chenier, above its tree line a circling coterie of buzzards. A carrion stench hung in the air. Something dead, a deer or a possum, was in the woods. Even after they passed the island the gray aftertaste lingered in Wes’s mouth like poison.

  “Let one go?” Lindquist called down from the wheelhouse.

  Wes looked up, visoring his eyes with his hand. “Say what now?”

  “You let one rip?”

  “We just passed something.”

  “You passed something?”

  “Something’s dead in those woods.”

  “You uptight.”

  Wes didn’t know what to say. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “You uptight. All that gray on your head. You uptight.”

  Wes went back to untangling the nets. They were the sorriest he’d ever seen, full of holes and clumsy patches. He supposed his nets would be in crappy shape too if he were missing an arm.

  After a minute something struck Wes on the back of the head. Hard, like a rock. He grabbed his skull and whirled around and glared.

  Lindquist grinned down from the wheelhouse.

  “You throw something?” Wes asked.

  Lindquist was laughing. “On the deck,” he said. “By your foot.”

  Wes looked down at the tinfoiled roll of mints and picked them up.

  “Suck a few of those,” Lindquist said. “Get that nastiness o
ut of your head.”

  Wes opened the roll with his thumbnail and popped a mint into his mouth. He was about to toss the mints back up when Lindquist said, “Keep them. I got plenty, me.”

  Wes lowered the nets and let the water pass. Twenty minutes later he winched up the trawls and heaped the hauls on the sorting table. Then Lindquist came down the wheelhouse ladder and they put on gloves and together picked through the squirming heap of sea life.

  “Look at these pissant shrimp,” Lindquist said.

  Lindquist looked at Wes as though expecting him to argue otherwise. He grabbed a baby gaspergou and underhanded it off the boat. It flipped its tail and smacked the water.

  “Knock knock,” Lindquist said.

  “This a joke?” Wes asked.

  “Yeah, a knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Little Boy Blue.”

  “Little Boy Blue Who?”

  “Michael Jackson.”

  Wes whistled a small laugh through his nose to make Lindquist think he was amused.

  At sunup the shrimp were unloaded and weighed at Monsieur Montegut’s and then Lindquist piloted the boat back to the marina. In the parking lot Lindquist counted out Wes’s share and handed it to him.

  Wes thanked Lindquist and put the money in his pocket without counting it.

  “You don’t wanna count it?” Lindquist said.

  “I trust you.”

  “You’ll be here sundown?”

  “If you want me,” Wes said.

  “Well, hell. Why wouldn’t I? You a good worker.”

  COSGROVE AND HANSON

  If Lemon ever suspected any devilment on their part, he didn’t show it. “Looking good, gentlemen,” he’d say, inspecting their work, or lack thereof, at the end of the day. “Looking real, real good, real good,” he drawled through his smirk. Somehow you knew he was fucking with you, knew he didn’t care if you were fucking with him. He grinned and thwacked their backs with his beefy hand. He seemed high or drunk or both. Cosgrove wouldn’t have been surprised. His front teeth looked purple, wine-stained, and Cosgrove could have sworn he caught some astringent medicinal odor, maybe spermicide or sex lubricant, wafting off him.

  Hanson’s last day of community service was in late August. Cosgrove’s own was just a week or so off. For old times’ sake, Hanson wanted to loot the widow’s attic one last time.