The Marauders

by Tom Cooper

  He breathed deeply. The wind blowing off the bayou smelled like salt and crude and sun. You’re not out of it yet, he thought.

  He judged it almost ten by the time he reached the harbor, the day already hot enough that the sun was burning on his shoulders. Parked in the lot among the other pickups was Hanson’s flatbed Dodge. No one else in sight. For this small mercy he was thankful. If anyone saw him, no doubt there would be suspicions. A man looking like he did, they’d make a point of remembering his face.

  When he got to the motel he sat in the truck for several minutes with the engine idling and his hands gripped around the wheel. Trucks shunted by on the access road, slowing as they passed.

  In his room he washed his face in the sink and cleaned his aching shoulder with a wet towel. Afterward he put on a new T-shirt and jeans and stuffed the dirty clothes in a plastic shopping bag and threw the bag in the garbage. Then he got his money out of the motel room safe. He thought about going into Hanson’s room and taking his money too, but he didn’t know the combination. Some maid was going to have the best week of her life.

  After he shoved his clothes and sundries into his duffel bag he went to the window and pulled back the curtain and looked out. Across the way, the motel maid pushed a cart from one room door to the next. In the lot, a man in gray slacks and a polo shirt locked the door of his Town Car and strode toward his room.

  No one else.

  It was eleven when Cosgrove walked out of the motel room and got into the truck. With the duffel bag on the passenger seat holding the several thousand dollars and everything else in the world he owned, he put the truck in first and turned onto the access road toward the highway.

  This is happening, he thought. I’m getting away and I’m alive. Poor Hanson’s dead but I’m alive. This is happening.

  He didn’t know where he was headed except away. If a cop stopped him, he’d tell him the truck was a friend’s.

  LINDQUIST

  Lindquist was only asleep an hour when he heard the voices. It was just after dawn, light shafting in rusty smoking columns through the leaves. He jerked upright in the makeshift hammock of the hollow log. Listened. The brothers? It had to be. Who else would be out here? From twenty or thirty yards away, he heard the drawl of their voices. Stirring leaves and snapping twigs.

  Lindquist shot to his feet and plunged through the bulrushes, saw briers lashing his arms and face. After a while it occurred to him that maybe there were no voices at all. That maybe he was in the middle of some mad dream.

  Every part of him ached. His eyelids, his fingertips, his teeth.

  He ducked under a lichen-furred hickory branch, gave wide berth to a black olive tree hung with a mud-daub nest boiling with wasps. Fat leeches clung to his skin. He felt one puckering on a rib, another on his kneecap, another on his forearm. He let them be. He had bigger worries. His gold. He kept frisking his pockets, making sure it was all still there.

  A statue-still heron stood one-legged on a cypress stump, watching him. A stone’s throw away, where the bog deepened into a lagoon, an alligator sluiced through the water, the leathery bump of its head poking just above the surface. It changed its route and tailed away from Lindquist.

  Further on he saw a brightly colored coral snake dangling from the low branch of a willow, its tongue flicking like an obscene party favor.

  Lindquist jerked away and whimpered.

  He sounded crazy. He knew he better keep his wits about him. Once you let one weird thought slide, then others quickly followed, an avalanche, and before you knew it you were stuck forever in the middle of the swamp, a ranting madman doomed to checking the gold in his pockets over and over again.

  “A one-armed man staggers through the swamp,” Lindquist said. Or thought.

  “Fake it till you feel it,” he said. Or thought.

  He stopped and listened for sounds of pursuit. He could hear nothing now but buzzing locusts, the wee-tee-tee of a cowbird. It was full morning and white light blazed down on the bog. Cypress stumps and water lilies and purple-flowered hyacinths as far as he could see. Hundreds of hovering dragonflies. Halloween pennants and spangled pond hawks and roseate skimmers.

  He felt feverish and dizzy. He’d had hardly any sleep for days, only rainwater from leaves to drink. Mosquito bites festered on his face and arm.

  On the bright side—bright side! Lindquist let out a deranged titter—he had to be close to solid land. Jeanette might be just beyond that fringe of spicebush, that clump of loblollies. Surely he’d make it home by the end of the day. Take a long cold shower and make a lunch fit for a king. Count how many gold coins he had left. Then he’d drive to New Orleans and sell them. By the end of the day he’d be a rich man with a plane ticket to a new place, a new life.

  He was passing a bush of swamp honeysuckle when he heard a sound in the water and looked down. A snake about two feet long sidewindered across the surface. Lindquist didn’t know what kind of snake it was, but it was black-and-orange-scaled and coming straight toward him. He told the snake to shoo.

  The snake kept coming. Five feet away, now two.

  Lindquist yelled and took off running.

  He plowed through the jungly vegetation until pain like molten buckshot seared his torso. In a patch of lady ferns and swamp grass he lay on his back. His heart raced and his tongue was scorched with fever. He would wait here until the kid came back. If the kid came back in the next hour, in the next two, he could boat him to shore and take him to the doctor. He would even give the kid a few pieces of the gold, enough that it would make a big difference in his life.

  He shut his eyes and felt the deep strong suck of oblivion. In a panic he opened his eyes again. If he fell asleep, maybe he’d never wake.

  He tried to get up but couldn’t. He would lie here until the kid came along and took him to the doctor’s. He wondered if the doctor would accept Spanish pirate gold for payment.

  He reached for his pockets, felt their heaviness.

  His eyes shut, opened, shut, opened. Above him, morning sun pierced through the swimming jade leaves. The pieces of light looked like a thousand shimmering coins of gold.

  THE TOUP BROTHERS

  Midmorning it dawned on the Toup brothers that it would be insane to venture further. They turned around and headed back toward the boat. Whatever they planned on doing to Lindquist and the man named Cosgrove once they caught up with them the swamp had probably already done for them. No way could they have made it through this kind of wilderness back to Jeanette. Not when they themselves were on the edge of delirium.

  Reginald led and Victor plodded behind, the veins in his forehead popping, his face sheened with sweat. The vegetation, sweet bay magnolia and swamp cyrilla and black willows, enclosed around them like a dripping jade-green cave. Sometimes they had to stoop to make it through the tunnel of overarching branches and leaves. The ravenous swamp wanted to swallow them whole.

  After a while they passed the ruined shack, the old man already gone.

  They were skirting the edge of a reedy marsh when Victor tottered sideways and stumbled crazily through the muck. He clung to the trunk of a green ash tree. Reginald stopped and looked around. Victor’s face was flushed the color of a blood orange, his eyes a sickly hepatitis-yellow.

  It was around eleven and already the heat was stifling. Whenever the foliage thinned they could see the sky, hazy washed-out lavender.

  “That old guy cursed me,” Victor said.

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Motherfucker cursed me.”

  “You’re dehydrated. Exhausted. We both are.”

  “I still hear him in my head.”

  “Just keep your shit together.”

  Reginald took a few tentative steps forward but stopped and turned around when he didn’t hear his brother following.

  “Victor,” Reginald said.

  “How much longer?”

  “An hour. Two. I don’t know.”

  “He cursed me, Reggie.”

&n
bsp; “You’re having a panic attack.”

  “Bullshit.”

  They slogged through the bog for what Reginald judged about forty-five minutes and came again upon the collapsed swamp shack. The brothers looked around in confusion. Reginald slapped his cheek and wondered how they ended up here again when they’d been traveling straight in one direction.

  Was he losing his mind? Were they both?

  “Reggie,” Victor said.

  Reginald said nothing.

  “Reggie,” Victor said.

  “What?”

  “We’re back where we started.”

  “There’s no way.”

  “This is the shack. The same fuckin’ one. We went in a circle.”

  Reginald raked his fingers through his filthy hair and looked around. The noon sunlight pierced through the leaves ceiled overhead. A fat green katydid thrashed in the middle of a web stretched between two saw palmettos. A golden silk spider watched from the edge of the trembling skein.

  “We went in a circle, Reggie.”

  “Wiggin’ out’s not gonna help anything.”

  “Maybe a tick burrowed in my ear,” Victor said. “Maybe I got that Rocky Mountain fever.”

  “Vic? Shut up.”

  They sloshed along. Gnats and horseflies and pond striders. A yellow-throated vireo bird in a winterberry holly. Baby alligators by the dozen skimming away like rubber toys.

  Then Victor saw it. A nine-foot alligator, a behemoth, sunning atop a barge of floating logs and detritus. He pointed, his finger shaking. “Jesus Christ, look at that thing,” he said.

  “Keep moving,” Reginald said.

  “Fucker’s just staring at us.”

  “Stop screaming. Keep moving.”

  “Now he’s coming.”

  “More scared of us than we him.”

  Victor collapsed to his hands and knees, bright green water lapping to his chin. He struggled up, fell again. Reginald turned and went back and yanked his brother up by the arm. Leaning on his brother, Victor tottered forward a few steps before collapsing. This time he took Reginald down with him. Reginald rose and grabbed two fistfuls of his brother’s shirt and pulled him up. He felt Victor’s heart laboring beneath his hand. Felt his fever, palpable as heat wafting off a stove burner.

  “Another big gator right there,” Victor said.

  “Just keep going.”

  “I gotta sit.”

  “Move.”

  “Give me a piggyback.”

  “There’s no way.”

  “You go on then. I can’t.”

  Something was coming quickly toward them through the palmettos and brush, the water churning. A chevron of sparrows sounded a shrill one-note call of alarm and winged out of a red maple.

  Then Victor was ripped away from Reginald. He let loose a lunatic scream before he was pulled underwater. Reginald gaped in mute horror. He saw pink flesh. A flash, pebbly black, of alligator hide. Then Victor’s raised arm, grappling for something that wasn’t there.

  His hands quaking wildly, Reginald unholstered his Bearcat Ruger and took aim. He couldn’t get a bead on the alligator in the churning chaos, the water already a tumult of red and pink curd. When he saw another alligator swimming toward him he shouldered the rifle and turned, rushed for the nearest tree. He scrabbled monkey-like up the gnarled live oak, perched on a middle limb.

  He looked down at the calming water. Smaller alligators were now hemming in. A dozen of them swam off with glistening pink hunks of meat. Reginald glimpsed a floating length of organ, like a piece of raw sausage. He felt hot bile rise in his throat. He couldn’t believe what he saw. Refused to believe.

  He vomited down into the water.

  When the alligators scattered away, Reginald remained on the branch and wept. He waited to wake from the nightmare and when he didn’t wake he wept for a long while more.

  WES TRENCH

  Lindquist was missing almost a week when Villanova finally marshaled a search and rescue team: a few local trawlers, Deputy Melloncamp, another deputy from a neighboring parish, a coast guard ensign, a Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries agent. Midmorning a throng of boats dispersed in the bay, each assigned a parcel of the Barataria to canvas. Among the deputation were Wes on the Jean Lafitte and Wes’s father on the Bayou Sweetheart. It was his first time on the water since his heart attack. Wes told him to stay home and rest, but he said he was sick of sitting on his ass at home and joked there was nothing good on television anyway.

  It was a desolate windswept day, the sky and water the same dreary slate, the bay riled and whitecapped. Wes circled around the same islands he’d already circled, glassing shore and bracken with binoculars. Every time the radio box squawked, every time there was a blare of static before someone spoke, Wes’s heart kicked with dread. A body dredged up in a trawl, he was sure. A mangled corpse washed up on an islet shore.

  But no, the news was only more of the same: nothing. Nothing here, nothing there. Headed here, headed there.

  Come late afternoon the clouds busted open. The bay hissed and boiled and snakes of steam shimmied off the water. The wind kicked up and rattled the hundreds of little loose parts on Lindquist’s boat. Anything beyond ten yards of the Jean Lafitte was swallowed in murk. Over the radio the trawlers and the coast guard ensign said they were turning back. An hour later Wes was thinking about doing the same when Deputy Melloncamp came on the radio. A shrimper had found an abandoned pirogue near where the bayou met the bay.

  So Lindquist had wandered off course after all.

  Wes piloted fast, nauseous with dread. Soon distant boat lights glimmered in the gray murk. As he drew closer he saw smaller lights, flashlights and spotlights, skimming over the water. Then, through the hazy downpour, he could make out the deputy’s boat, then his father’s, then the LDWF’s, idling in a loose cluster. Wes drew up and joined the posse and cut the gas. He clambered down the wheelhouse ladder and peered over the gunwale, windy rain lashing his face.

  A pirogue bucked and spun in the heaving water. The little boat was like any other most people owned in the Barataria, but Wes spotted something on its floor, the toy-like colors among the scraps of trash.

  Lindquist’s Pez dispenser.

  The state of Louisiana, Wes’s father often remarked, would forever have egg on its face. Always had, always would. No place in the country crookeder, according to him. What else could you expect, an outpost improvised and jury-rigged by outlaws and gypsies out of the swamp? A place which, in its fledgling years, was tossed back and forth between countries like a bastard child? Look at the evidence. State representatives caught with federal money in their freezers and prostitutes in their beds. Gubernatorial candidates ending up in prison. Federal Emergency money spent on swimming pools and sports cars and palomino ponies.

  And the oil companies: God, the fucking oil companies.

  Sooner or later, said Wes’s father, they were all caught with their dicks in the cookie jar.

  So when Wes asked him if he should speak again to Sheriff Villanova about the Toup brothers and Lindquist’s disappearance, his father hissed out a bitter laugh. “You might as well write Santa Claus,” he said.

  Wes asked him what he meant.

  “Look, Villanova’s not a bad guy. Not compared with most. But you’re living in goddamn Lebanon, Wes.”

  Wes had no idea what his father meant by Lebanon. He waited for his father to explain. They were at the dinner table eating rice and beans for supper and outside it was already full dark. The black windows threw back only their own reflections, the dim amber light glowing throughout the house. As always the television droned in the background. All in the Family, one of the only sitcom shows his father could abide. Archie was calling Edith a dingbat.

  “Louisiana cops have their own way of running things,” Wes’s father said. “Like cops anywhere. They got to pick their battles.” He put down his fork and nudged his plate away with his thumb and patted his shirt pocket, about to pull out a cigar
ette, but he stopped himself and leaned back in his chair. “Villanova looks the other way when it suits his purposes. Marijuana? He’s not going to waste his time with marijuana. Not when his coffer’s full. He’s a laissez-faire guy. That’s the way it works around here.”

  Turned out his father was right. In the morning he drove to the sheriff’s office and spoke with Villanova about Lindquist and the Toup brothers. Villanova, sitting behind his desk, listened to Wes with avuncular forbearance, but impatience showed in his snapping eyes, the way he kept leaning back and nodding. At one point he rummaged in a drawer and took out a sachet of Earl Grey tea and dangled it in his coffee mug. The mug had a picture of a galloping racehorse on the side and said CHURCHILL DOWNS underneath. As Wes spoke, Villanova got up and went to the water cooler in the corner and twisted the red spigot, filling the mug with hot water. Then he sat back down, dunking the teabag.

  Finally, when Wes finished explaining why he thought the Toup brothers were involved with Lindquist’s disappearance, Villanova hunched his shoulders and spread his hands. “An abandoned pirogue,” he said. “A couple of threats.”

  Wes waited, picking at his eyebrow.

  “A threat,” Villanova said. “I can’t arrest someone based on a threat. The whole parish would be in lockup.”

  Wes thought about mentioning the marijuana, but Villanova knew he knew. Everybody knew. The subject seemed verboten, moot. And the sheriff probably wouldn’t brook kindly a teenage kid telling him his business. So all Wes said was, “But they’re known to stir trouble, right? They got a reputation is what I mean.”

  Villanova cleared his throat. Lifted and dipped the teabag. “Son, everybody has a reputation in a town small as this. Whether they like it or not. Usually half based on rumor.”

  Wes was trying to be polite and respectful but his patience with Villanova’s indifference was wearing thin. “Worth checking out though, sir. Maybe?”