The Marauders

by Tom Cooper

  Cosgrove looked at him. The O of his mouth, his filthy hair, the dried spit curdled in the corners of his mouth.

  “Make it worth your while,” Lindquist said. “Rich man now. Just got to get out of here. Once I do? Very, very rich man.”

  They kept moving. Cosgrove took the end of his T-shirt and pulled it to his face and wiped the sweat. He paused at an elephant ear and stooped and funneled a trickle of water into his parched mouth. Then he caught up with Lindquist.

  “You stole their dope?” Lindquist said.

  “How you know?”

  “They got an island full of it. Everybody knows. And everybody knows to stay away.”

  If only he’d spoken to this man before, Cosgrove thought. Then Hanson would be alive. Then he wouldn’t be out here in the middle of nowhere, probably about to die. He found himself pining for his days of community service. For the days he roofed in Austin in the miserable bone-baking heat, the sun like an iron searing down on his neck.

  What a paradise that now seemed.

  Early afternoon the terrain turned completely unfamiliar to Cosgrove. What once seemed half recognizable was now alien, an endless stretch of hyacinths and water flowers and lily pads. Hundreds of jewel-bright dragonflies hovered and darted.

  Lindquist was right: it all looked the same.

  Cosgrove halted. “This isn’t right,” he said.

  Lindquist hissed bitterly through his teeth.

  “We gotta turn around,” Cosgrove said.

  Lindquist stopped, looked at him. For some reason he kept patting his pockets with his hand. “That boat’s gone forever,” he said.

  “How far to land?”

  “Fuck, three miles. Four.”

  “We’ll never make that.”

  “Just come with me, mister. Better we stick together.”

  Cosgrove shook his head. “I’m turning. Finding my boat.”

  Determined, Lindquist waddled again through the muck. “Come on.”

  Cosgrove stayed put. “I can’t.”

  “You’re gonna die!” Lindquist called over his shoulder.

  “Shut up,” Cosgrove said. “They’ll hear.”

  “You’ll die,” Lindquist said. “Don’t be stupid.”

  Cosgrove turned and started back toward from where they came.

  “We’re gonna die!” he heard Lindquist shout, but he kept moving.

  LINDQUIST

  Nightfall Lindquist careered through sloughs of water and thickets of cane, flashlight held over his head in his hand. Most of the time he kept the flashlight off so the brothers wouldn’t see. This far into the swamp, the dark was incredible. Unlike any other darkness he’d seen. Behind a kerchief of cloud, the moon was only bright enough to make shadows out of other shadows, the gnarled silhouettes of bushes and trees and cypress cisterns.

  Sometimes the shapes looked human, as if his pursuers were suddenly in front of him. Like he’d taken a wrong turn in a fun-house maze. And sometimes the shapes were hulking and monstrous, gargoyle-faced figures loosed from the pages of a brothers Grimm book.

  His boots were full of sludge and his socks were sopping. How long before he started to lose his fingers and toes?

  Hours? Days? What then?

  Don’t think about that, he thought. Or said.

  He hoped he wasn’t losing his mind.

  Every so often from a distance he saw their flashlights Morsing in the brush, one second there, one second not.

  He wondered what would be worse: the Toup brothers catching him, or a wild animal attacking first. A cougar, a black bear, a wild dog. They were all out here.

  And alligators. There had to be hundreds, thousands, of alligator nests within the square mile, some of the alligators rumored to be a hundred years old and as big as sedans, creatures that could swallow a deer whole.

  And then there were coral snakes, copperheads, cottonmouths, rattlers, a few with venom so potent they could cripple you within seconds. What was it his father used to say? There were two kinds of snakes in the world: live ones and dead ones.

  Who knew what else lurked in the swamp. Some guys collected rare reptiles from the Amazon, guys with too much spare time on their hands, and they released the snakes and lizards in the wild when they grew too big for captivity. Lindquist bet there were pythons and cobras out here. Some fucked-up seven-foot thing from Borneo with teeth like a Great White shark’s.

  As he moved, Lindquist fell face-forward and he shot out his hook arm to break his fall. He screamed in anguish when the rim of the prosthesis bit into his flesh and jammed into his shoulder bone. He righted himself, and then he tottered over to a tree stump and sat, nearly sobbing from the pain in his arm. He patted his pockets to make sure the coins were still there. He felt their comforting ballast, heavy and cool, against his legs.

  What he wouldn’t give for one of those pills right now. Yes, even some of this gold.

  What he wouldn’t give for another arm.

  For a way out.

  It was a small swamp shack cobbled together of oddments and scraps: vinyl storm siding and piebald car tires and tangled chicken wire. Buoys—mint green, sherbet orange, pastel yellow—hung like fey ornaments on the sides. Otherwise, the shack looked so weather-warped and crooked with rot that Lindquist would have figured it abandoned if it weren’t for the yellow-orange lantern light glowing inside and showing through the cracks.

  Lindquist stood for a dumbfounded moment, half convinced he was hallucinating. He had only the faintest notion of where he was. He’d been using the moon and stars to guide him east through the swamp and he knew he still had a ways to go, far enough that he would have never expected to come across this place. Far enough that he hardly believed he was seeing it now.

  He staggered forward in the shin-deep water, hello’d. Waved his arm, not knowing why. Hello’d again.

  An old man in grimy overalls answered the door. Or, really, the pretense of a door: a piece of sheet metal hinged with rope. He opened it only wide enough to peer out, his eyes livid within his seamed face. “You government?” he asked.

  “Government?” Lindquist said. He might have laughed if he weren’t so scared and in so much pain. “No, sir,” Lindquist said. “I ain’t from the government.”

  The old man opened the door a little more. His hair stood awry, thin as corn silk. His eyes went to Lindquist’s hook arm and stayed there. Usually Lindquist would have told him to mind his business, but such proprieties now seemed a thing of the past.

  “You Lindquist?” asked the old man.

  Lindquist jerked back his chin, unsure if he should answer.

  “You Lindquist, ain’t you? The one with no arm.”

  Lindquist gaped silently.

  “Yeah, you Lindquist all right. Heard all kinds of stories about you over the years.”

  “Out here?” Lindquist asked, aware he sounded addled.

  “Oh, I ain’t always lived out here. Used to live in Jeanette. Before things went to shit.”

  Lindquist waited. Dirty and panting, face swollen with bug bites, hair caked with filth. He probably looked every bit as insane as this man did to him.

  “So what you want?” the man asked.

  “I’m lost.”

  “Figured that.” The man cast an apprehensive glance over Lindquist’s shoulder. “Anybody with you?”

  “Naw.”

  “Well,” he said. Then he gestured Lindquist forward.

  Inside a sterno stove burned in the middle of the plywood floor. Above it hung a small cast-iron kettle bubbling with navy beans and a livery gruel. In the corner was a water-stained mattress with a blue blanket and a pillow. A transistor radio, a stack of ten or twelve paperback books with creased spines. Lindquist saw a few of the authors’ names, Thoreau and Franklin.

  They sat on the floor facing one another across the guttering fire. A ribbon of smoke rose from the kettle like a charmed snake. A draft caught it and sucked it through a crack outside.

  “You pissed off a wh
ole lot of folks over there in Jeanette,” the man said. He stroked his stubbled chin, his look coy and punitive.

  Lindquist barely had the strength to shrug. “I guess,” he said.

  He wondered if he could ask the man to let him stay the night. If he could just slouch over there in the other corner and get an hour or two of sleep. But he knew he couldn’t do that even if the man agreed. The Toup brothers couldn’t be far away. Maybe they were outside right now with their guns, their knives. Maybe this old man was in cahoots and would shiv him in the heart the second he shut his eyes.

  “People say you dig through graveyards,” the old man said, matter-of-factly.

  “Graveyards? I never dug in any graveyard, me.”

  “Not what I heard.”

  “Well, hell. I didn’t.”

  “They say you been digging up bodies.”

  “Well, hell. I never dug up any damn bodies either.”

  The man stared.

  “Is that what people say? I dig up bodies?”

  The old man swatted. “Never mind all that,” he said.

  “Well, I didn’t. For the record.”

  The man reached for the ladle and stirred the pot.

  “Say your name was?” Lindquist said.

  “I never said.”

  Lindquist waited for the man to tell him but he didn’t. Lindquist looked uneasily about the dim hovel. Behind the paperbacks he saw three plastic jugs of drinking water. “Get some water?” he asked.

  The man flicked his hand, which Lindquist took to mean yes. He leaned over and hauled a jug by its handle. He flipped the cap with his thumb and tipped his head back. As soon as the liquid hit his mouth he gagged and spat. Stuff tasted like paint thinner, whatever it was. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  The old man slapped his overalled thigh and cackled, the few rotted stumps left in his lower jaw awry. “You got the wrong one,” he said. “Get you the other one.”

  He did and this time it was water. He gulped it down, swallowing eight or nine good swallows until he was breathless. Then he put the jug aside. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was.

  “Want something to eat?”

  Lindquist leaned and craned his head forward and peered into the pot: small yellow pellets of fat, stringy clumps of gray meat. He nodded.

  “Why you out here then?”

  “Somebody’s chasing me.”

  “Government?”

  “Some guys. Just some guys is all.”

  “Sure they not government?”

  “They’re some guys who think I stole their drugs.”

  The old man seemed greatly interested by this. “You got any?” he asked.

  “Drugs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No.”

  The man frowned. “That’s too bad.”

  Lindquist was unsure how to respond so he said nothing.

  The old man rose and rummaged through the scraps and junk behind him. He fetched up a blue plastic bowl into which he ladled five big scoops of stew, and then he handed the steaming bowl to Lindquist.

  “Thank you,” Lindquist said.

  “No utensils,” the man said.

  Lindquist nodded and scooped some of the stringy gruel out of the bowl with his fingers. He tasted Zatarain’s and sauce piquant. Cayenne pepper. He was surprised by how good it was. Just as fine as anything he tasted on those rare trips he’d taken with his ex-wife to New Orleans. Hell, better.

  “Good,” Lindquist said.

  The old man nodded, firelight flickering in his rheumy eyes.

  “You ever hear of the Toups?” Lindquist asked. “Twin brothers?”

  “Naw.”

  “Well, that’s who’s after me.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  This answer took Lindquist aback. “Well, I guess if anything happens to me. That’s who it was.”

  The man said nothing. Lindquist kept looking at the old man and the old man kept looking at Lindquist.

  “What you lookin’ at?” the man said.

  “Nothing.”

  “You think I look weird?”

  “Naw.”

  “If you can answer then you were lookin’.”

  Lindquist shook his head. “Well.”

  The man narrowed his eyes at Lindquist. “What you got in them pockets? You keep on touchin’ yourself.”

  “Nothing.”

  The man craned his neck forward. “Bullshit,” he said. “What you got? Drugs?”

  “I told you, I don’t got any drugs.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I’d just as soon not say.”

  “Then you must be in trouble,” the old man said.

  Lindquist finished his stew and placed the empty bowl aside. “I need to get back to Jeanette,” he said.

  “Good luck with that.”

  “How far away you think that is?”

  “Three miles exactly.”

  “Three miles?” Lindquist said. How in God’s green fucking earth would he make it three more miles?

  “Three miles exactly.”

  “How would you get there? What’s the best way?”

  “Boat’s the only way.” He anticipated Lindquist’s next question and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Little motorboat in back.”

  “Would you take me back to Jeanette?”

  “No,” the old man said.

  Lindquist waited.

  “I can’t see so good at night,” he explained.

  “How about I drive? You can spend the night and drive back in the morning.”

  “I’m not much for slumber parties.”

  “I got to get back to Jeanette, me.”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “Well, hell. I can give you money.”

  “Shit.”

  “I can give you a lot of money, me.”

  The man peered steadily at Lindquist over the fire. “How much?”

  “How much would it take?”

  The man shook his head. “I’m eighty-three years old and don’t need bullshit.”

  “I can give you gold.”

  The man let loose a wild yodeling laugh. “You really crazy, aren’t you?” He shook his head and kept shaking it. Or maybe it just shook on its own. “They always said I was kinda crazy myself. Never gave a shit, me.”

  “Sir. I’m begging you.”

  “Get to sleep if you want. Draw you up a blanket over there. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

  “Sir.”

  “I already answered you,” he said, his voice gone harder now.

  “Well,” Lindquist said. He got up and went to the door and waited for the man to change his mind. To show some mercy.

  Silence, only the soft crackling of the fire.

  “Well, I better get going I guess,” Lindquist said.

  “I guess you better be,” said the man.

  THE TOUP BROTHERS

  After midnight and the black-green swamp was swollen and dripping, moonstruck jewels of dew trembling on the leaves. The Toup twins came across a fallen oak, its trunk worm-bored and teeming with larvae. The log was too large to leap so they climbed on top, boots crackling in the rotten wood, and then they hopped down to the other side.

  For the better part of a day they’d been chasing after Cosgrove and Lindquist and every time they were about to turn back, figuring the men either lost or dead, they heard or saw a sign ahead. Something large crashing through the brush from a distance, a pinpoint twinkle of a roving light.

  Now they came upon a spiderweb as big as a shrimping trawl, stretched between the tumorous trunks of two alders. A hand-sized spider like a blown-glass objet d’art lazed in the middle, motionless in the beams of their flashlights.

  As they skirted the web a memory came to Reginald. At first he said nothing about it, only moved abstractedly along, his eyes someplace else. Or sometime else. Maybe the memory was a figment of his imagination, a neurological glitch caused by exhaustion and dehydration.

&n
bsp; No, this was a memory. Reginald had no doubt. It had that quality, indelible as a dream, etched in acid. Realer than the moment he was living now.

  “You remember being lost out here?” Reginald asked Victor. Even his whisper seemed loud in the dark.

  They were wallowing along side by side, their pants muddy to the waist.

  “We’re lost now,” Victor said.

  “I mean when we were kids.”

  Victor looked at Reginald, breath rasping from his nose. “You finding God over there?” he said. “If so, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “We were lost out here once. I swear it.”

  “Right here?”

  “Not exactly here. But a place like it.”

  Victor shook his head.

  “My God, I can’t believe I’m remembering this.”

  “You probably dreamt it.”

  “I didn’t either. You were beside me. Crying. I remember that now.”

  Victor swatted his hand. “Bullshit.”

  “We were young. Four or five. We were real little. I remember.”

  They treaded through the big slick-leaved plants, Reginald watching Victor for a reaction, some telltale flicker in his face, a subtle recalibration of the mouth or jaw. But his brother only scowled along.

  “You have to remember,” Reginald said.

  “What we’d be doing out here?”

  “Daddy dropped us off. Left us out here.”

  Victor forearmed the sweat from his brow. “You dreamt it.”

  “You can keep on saying that all you want but it’s true. Daddy left us out here.”

  “All right.”

  “He left us out here and we had to find our way home.”

  “All right,” Victor said.

  “You remember how we wandered and wandered? We wandered all day. You kept on saying we had to keep in one direction. You’d seen that in some movie. Some cartoon. We stepped through a big spiderweb and you ran away all crazy, slapping yourself all over. Then you stepped on something and it went through your shoe. A piece of metal or something. A nail. I had to carry you piggyback for like a mile.”

  Victor grunted and shook his head.

  “What?” Reginald said.

  “None of that shit ever happened.”

  “You sure you’re not just blocking it?”

  Victor looked at his brother rancidly. “You a psychiatrist now?”