by Tom Cooper
“I know,” his mother said.
“Well, there it is.”
Grimes’s mother sniffed, the wrinkles around her eyes deepening. She said, “Maybe we should talk at the house.”
The smell. That’s what hit Grimes first. The smell of old books and aged wood and hickory smoke, of moldering cardboard boxes in the attic and of pine-scented floor wax, of his long-dead father’s cigar smoke settled in the couch cushions and drapes. The nostalgic bouquet stirred in Grimes a muddle of feelings. Mostly a realization of how old he’d become, of how much time had passed, of how little had changed.
The house, Grimes’s childhood home, was a sturdy ranch of blond brick that had fared well in Katrina. Only the charcoal roof shingles were new, some of the south-facing windows. Grimes toured the rooms of the house. His father’s old study, with its bookcases full of Farmer’s Almanacs and Civil War books and John D. MacDonald paperbacks. The den, with the ancient wooden-framed tube television and the floral-print sofa and velour La-Z-Boy where his father had watched his Saints and LSU football. The kitchen, with the parquet floor and olive-green Formica cabinets. And of course his bedroom, where everything sat exactly where he’d left it. The Masters of the Universe and Star Wars figurines on the shelves, the boxes upon boxes of comic books in the closet, the Kiss posters.
Kiss, how on earth had he loved that band so much? Now he couldn’t stand to listen to them.
“Nothing changed,” Grimes told his mother when he was back sitting at the kitchen table.
She was at the stove with a wooden spoon, stirring a pot of her red gravy, Grimes’s favorite. When he was growing up, Monday had been red-beans-and-rice day, Sunday red-gravy.
The smell of sautéing garlic and onion and green bell pepper filled the room.
“Why would I change it?” Grimes’s mother said. “Not expecting royalty anytime soon.” She used to say rug rats, but she stopped four or five years back when it got awkward. When it became clear that Grimes was, and wanted to remain, a bachelor.
“There’s this place Century Village I’ve been looking into,” Grimes said.
His mother knocked the wooden spoon loudly on the rim of the pot, startling him. “Century Village? What, you have to be a century old to live there?”
“It’s a nice retirement place in Boca, Ma.”
“Boca Raton,” she said, pronouncing it “Ray Tawn.” She turned back to the stove, stirred. “A bunch of old New Yorkers. Then me. Some crazy coon-ass lady. Can you imagine?”
“Let me get somebody to clean my old room out at least. Maybe you can sell some of that stuff. Let one of your friends rent a room.”
“Always had to have the toys first when they came out. The comic books and baseball cards.”
Grimes sipped from his bottle of Abita. “Easy with that Zatarain’s, Ma.”
After a time Grimes’s mother clanked the cover over the pot and got her own beer from the refrigerator. Then she sat across from Grimes at the time-scarred maple table. How long had it been since they sat together here? He couldn’t even remember. Time was getting away from them both.
“Let’s see one of those forms,” his mother said with a heavy sigh. When he hesitated, she wagged her fingers. “Come on, let’s see what trouble you’re getting into.”
He took his satchel hanging by its strap from the back of his chair and rummaged inside. He handed one of the contracts to his mother. Frowning, she flipped through the papers. “Everyone on earth selling their souls down the river,” she said.
“Always so dramatic,” Grimes said.
“Of course people’ll sign anything if they’re desperate. Lots of desperate people out there.”
“They had a choice. I didn’t hold a gun to their heads.”
Her eyes settled on the table. She wouldn’t look at him now. Couldn’t look at him. “I just find it weird, is all.”
Grimes felt his face and neck burning. “Well, I miss you. I really do.”
“Of course I miss you. Very much. I’m your mother.”
“Let’s go to Commander’s Palace. A day trip to New Orleans.”
“Let me ask you a question,” said Grimes’s mother.
Grimes gestured quickly with his hand: go ahead, let’s get this over with.
“What’s in it for you?” she asked.
He shrugged. “It’s a job.” He took a quick swallow of beer, then another, so he wouldn’t have to say more. But she was still watching, waiting. “It’s a job. What do you want me to say?”
“They could have sent you anywhere.”
“Ma? They made me come here.”
“You could have refused.”
“They made me come here. Made. I’m up for a promotion.”
They fell silent, sipping their beers.
After a moment, “You know I never judged you for what you did.”
“Sometimes it felt that way.”
“But this?”
Grimes wondered what to say next. He closed his eyes and rubbed the lids with his thumb and forefinger and then he opened them and leaned with his arms folded over the table. “Did you ever stop to think that maybe all the things you believe aren’t true?”
Grimes’s mother was unnervingly silent. She gazed at his face now and an odd feeling swept through him. That his whole past was staring at him through his mother. His grandparents, their parents, their parents before them. Everyone, a legion.
“Maybe not everybody’s out there to get you. You know?”
His mother got up to check the pot of red sauce. She returned to the table with another beer for Grimes and sat again. Now her face was sagged with some troubled emotion, her eyes downcast and watery. She said she had something to tell him. Now was probably as good a time as any.
He asked what.
She looked up finally. “I’m sick, Brady.”
“What? Sick sick?”
She nodded slowly, looking Grimes straight in the face, wanting to make sure he understood.
“What? Tell me.” You’re scaring me, he wanted to say.
She told him. She went to the doctor a few weeks ago because her face was painful and swollen. Sinusitis, was the doctor’s initial diagnosis. He’d seen the same illness in many of his patients, especially those who worked on the water and who’d been exposed to all the oil and dispersants. Then Grimes’s mother told the doctor about her migraines. As a precaution the doctor ran a battery of head X-rays and discovered the tumors.
Grimes realized he’d been clutching his cold beer bottle all this time without drinking. He set the bottle on the table, his knuckles aching, his fingers chilly and pruned. “We’ll get you a doctor. I’ll get you the best doctor money can buy.”
“Brady.”
Grimes felt dizzy-headed, like he needed air. “Ma, I’ll pay for it. Don’t worry about money.”
“They can’t get to it. It’s in the membranes. Leptomeningeal carcinomatosis. Doesn’t sound like anything, does it? It sounds like Dr. Seuss.” She smiled stiffly, but then the expression quickly vanished.
He shook his head. “This was one doctor, right? We’ll get you another.”
“Brady. It was Oschner. New Orleans.”
He was still shaking his head, clutching his throat. “We’ll take you to Tulane, Ma.”
“Honey,” she said. She reached across the table and Grimes took her hand in his. His fingers were still chilly from holding the beer bottle so hers felt warm. Knuckly and work-roughened.
Absurdly, he wanted to flee. His mother’s sad slack face in the orange light of the kitchen, it was almost too much to bear. He wanted to flee, wanted to run away until this feeling of panic and doom like a gargoyle squatting on his shoulders lifted away.
Against his will he found himself thinking about all that oil, all those chemicals. Those couldn’t be the cause, could they? Surely not so soon.
His mother tightened her grip. Then she let go and patted his forearm. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’m more worried about you.”
Grimes didn’t trust himself to speak. His throat felt salty and hot and he sniffed. He reached for his mother’s arm but by then she’d already turned away and was rising from the table. She went back to stirring the red gravy, one of the very few things left on earth he allowed himself to feel nostalgia about.
After this, what would there be?
Before calling Ingram on his smartphone Grimes downed three quick fingers of bourbon. Then he sat on the edge of the bed in his trousers and starched white shirt and delivered the news to his boss. His mother had cancer. Inoperable.
“That’s awful,” said Ingram.
Grimes heard the snick of his cigarette lighter on the other end of the line.
“I don’t know how much longer she has,” Grimes said.
“I’m sorry, Grimes.”
“They say it might be all the chemicals in the bay.”
An edge came into Ingram’s smoke-thickened voice. “No, that can’t be right.”
“Well, the doctors.”
“The doctors are full of shit. There’s no way. Listen to me. No way.”
A long silence. Grimes couldn’t even hear Ingram’s breathing. He said, “Ingram? You there?”
“I’m here.”
“I think I want to go home. Take my mother. See what they can do.”
“Go home? Now? After all you’ve accomplished? Your numbers are through the roof, Grimes. You’re like fuckin’ Colonel Kurtz over there.”
Grimes was silent.
“Get it? Kurtz? You and your book references?”
“I get it, Ingram.”
Ingram blew out a long breath. “You can’t go home yet. We need you, buddy.”
In the corner of his vision Grimes saw a tiny flick of motion. He looked. A gray-green gecko scuttled across the wall, its pistachio-sized organs dark under its opaque skin. The lizard slithered up to the ceiling and stopped still in the corner, its black-seed eyes watching Grimes.
“Well, did you get her signature?” Ingram asked.
“Whose?”
“Your mother’s?”
On his way to the airport in his rental car Grimes passed the place where Donald Baker’s house once stood. The house had been right goddamn there, Grimes was sure. He wasn’t losing his mind. He had a pretty good memory despite the booze. He wasn’t superstitious and he didn’t believe in voodoo, but his mind kept returning to the old man. How he screamed garbled French curses as Grimes fled the house. How his luck had turned rotten ever since.
Grimes turned around, drove for a minute down the dirt road, turned around again. He remembered this willow the way you remembered a pretty face you saw in a crowd the day before. You never saw willows like that anymore, not that tall, not that wide around. A family of ten could picnic under the gangly shade of that willow.
He remembered this field of Louisiana iris, this grove of wind-sculpted pines standing in the fork in the dirt road. He hung a right and shuddered along. He passed the clearing again. Where there was once a roof peak the sky glowed softly purple between the trees, clouds like garlands of ochre smoke.
He pulled over on the side of the road and got out of the car and stood with his hands on his hips, wondering if he had the right place. He did. He wasn’t losing his mind. The first time he’d come here by accident, the second by memory. This was the third time and he knew. That tupelo. He remembered that tupelo. He’d leaned against it after running out of the old man’s house, shocked and gasping as he wiped the piss from his face.
Now he held down the top of the sagging barbed wire fence with the heel of his hand and swung one leg over and then the other. He began to wallow through the weeds. Insects burst in flight before him, landing on brittle stalks that sagged sideways under their weight.
Once in the clearing Grimes looked around. Nothing but chunky charcoal-gray dirt. He knelt and picked up a handful and let it hiss through his fingers. Here and there were scraps of metal, shards of glass, knots of shriveled and blistered plastic.
The frogs and crickets were piping up, and a bat helixed through the twilight and flitted off.
The house was right goddamn here. He knew it was. He wasn’t losing his mind.
WES TRENCH
The first thing Wes noticed at Lindquist’s house was the newspapers, several cellophane-wrapped Times-Picayunes scattered around the birdbath in the khaki grass. Then the dead potted flowers on the porch, the wad of envelopes in the mailbox. Overdue bills, their telltale pastel blue and pink. Attention, notice, urgent. He’d seen plenty of the same envelopes at his own place, always knew he was in store for a miserable night of his father’s bitching if he found them in the mailbox. As if his father believed wishful thinking would keep the creditors at bay. As if he harbored the delirious hope that somebody would make a mistake or show some mercy.
Wes knocked on the front door and rang the bell. Waited. Knocked and rang again.
No answer.
It was late in the day, the evening sun throwing the long shadows of the pines and magnolias across the yard. Night bugs were beginning to whine and whir in the woods.
He went through the side yard to the back where a sliding glass door looked into the kitchen. He rapped on the glass so hard his knuckles smarted. Waited. Then he tried the door but it was locked. He shaded his eyes and peered inside. Dirty dishes in the sink, a KFC chicken bucket on the counter. And beyond the kitchen doorway a darkly carpeted room with a dining room table strewn with papers and books. Wes saw what looked to be a metal detector snapped in half, the mangled innards of its circuitry box spilling out.
It was three days since he’d abandoned Lindquist in the Barataria.
That evening Wes went to the sheriff’s office and showed Villanova the place on the Barataria map where he’d left Lindquist. Wes told Villanova how he was treasure hunting with Lindquist in the bayou, how they’d stayed out for several days straight until he got sick and begged to go home. When he got to the part about leaving Lindquist in the Barataria with only a pirogue, he was embarrassed by how ridiculous it all sounded and looked down at the floor, scuffing the linoleum with his shoe.
Villanova contemplated the map. “That whole area right there,” he said.
“Yessir.”
“Big area.”
“There’s an island with a dead willow. Lots of white birds.”
“That narrows it down to about ten thousand places.”
The sheriff had a good-old-boy look about him, his beefy face, his pencil-thin mustache the kind guys wore in black and white movies from the 1930s. The ones Wes’s mother used to love. “Born in the wrong era,” she would joke. “Your dad’s.”
Villanova must have sensed Wes’s worry because he said, “Son, that man’s more stubborn than all my ex-wives combined.”
Wes didn’t know if he was supposed to laugh so he didn’t.
“This won’t be the first time,” the sheriff said. “Don’t know how many times his wife used to call because he went AWOL.” Villanova marked the place Wes showed him with a red felt-tip. Then, “Maybe you can go out with the deputy, show him now. If you can?”
“Yessir.”
Wes waited, picked at his eyebrow. “Something you might should know,” he said.
Villanova asked what.
“Those twins, the Toups. Mr. Lindquist said they’d been bothering him.”
Villanova sat back, his chair squeaking. He sucked in a deep tired breath and let it out slowly as he spoke. “Lots of people bother Lindquist and Lindquist bothers lots of people.”
“Well, I figured you know.”
A pause. “Lindquist’s got problems, son. And that’s all I’m at liberty to say.” Then, “Relax. He’ll turn up. Probably on his way back now.”
Wes went into the Barataria with one of the deputies, Melloncamp, on the sheriff’s motorboat. It was a humid night, the only wind their movement. A mile behind them the lights of Jeanette glimmered like an altar of votaries.
“Smell that oil?” the deput
y shouted to Wes.
Wes looked at him. Face as round as a pie tin, a red copstache and shock of hair.
“All my dad talks about,” Wes shouted back. The wind tore at his ears and whipped his hair. The sweat on his forehead was beginning to dry and his skin felt stiff.
“Those commercials,” the deputy said. “You seen them? BP oil, some actor playing a trawler. Guy looking like Sam Shepard or somebody saying yeah, oh yeah, come in, the water’s fine. Meanwhile birds and fish dying all over.” The deputy tutted. “Ask me, somebody should be drawn and quartered.”
“Dad says that all the time too,” Wes said. “Only with a lot more cuss words.”
The man smiled. A stubby row of hayseed teeth. “I worry that some son of a bitch will do just that. Some vigilante.”
When they reached the island with the willow, Melloncamp cut the motor. The sudden silence rang in Wes’s head. Astern, a fish shot out of the bayou, its fat body rolling in the moonlight. The white of its belly, the silver of its scales. Then it smacked back in the water and a cascade of wavelets slapped the sides of the boat.
“You sure it was here?”
Wes nodded.
The deputy got out his bullhorn and flipped the button and hello’d into it a few times.
“He ever find anything out here?” Melloncamp asked.
Wes wondered what he should say. “I’m not sure.”
The deputy shrugged like he didn’t care either way and called again into the bullhorn. He scratched his chin with his thumbnail. “Lindquist, always with that metal detector.”
“Yeah.”
“Always felt a little sorry for him growing up. Kids always pickin’ on him. Making fun because he acted funny. Then they’d dog him into lots of crazy stuff. Do this, do that. Like he was some kind of performing monkey. He thought they were laughing with him, you know. But they were laughing at him.”
They watched the island in silence until Melloncamp began to chuckle. “One time? This math teacher, Ms. Hooven? Lindquist put a condom full of tapioca pudding in her desk drawer. Oh boy, the look on her face. I’ll never forget. Like somebody threw a brick at her head.”
