by Tom Cooper
He knew even this much might have been pressing his luck.
Villanova stretched his arms and leaned back in his chair with his hands stitched behind his head. His face was pink and tight-mouthed. “Son, I’m sorry about your friend, but he’s got a lot more history than the Toup brothers. And you gotta let me do my job.”
Wes waited.
“How about you walk your side of the street and I’ll walk mine,” Villanova added, but then seemed to regret it, because he huffed a little laugh through his nose as if it were a joke. He picked up his mug and sipped his tea.
Some street, Wes wanted to say, but he knew it would serve no purpose. And his parents had taught him not to smart-mouth his elders.
Wes stood and thanked the sheriff, who rose and shook Wes’s hand. His fingers were fat and cold. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled,” he said, but somehow Wes doubted it.
One cool late-October night Wes was at the mini-mart out near the highway when Reginald Toup hunched into the store. By now everyone including Wes assumed Lindquist was dead. The police and game warden and coast guard were now looking for a body, not a survivor. And not really looking, just telling shrimping captains and crews to watch what they caught in their nets.
Wes was paying for a candy bar at the counter and did a double-take when he saw Toup. He watched Toup, and Toup noticed him watching. He looked away and started heading down one of the aisles but when he glanced over his shoulder Wes’s eyes were still on him.
He stopped. “Help you?”
Wes wondered if he should. Made himself before he chickened out. “You do it?” he asked.
Toup put his hand behind his ear and leaned toward Wes. “Say what?”
“Did you do it?”
An ionic change in the air, like white noise or electricity. The old black man behind the counter opened the till of the register and broke a roll of quarters on the counter edge. For something to do.
Toup stepped toward Wes, his ears reddening. His face looked like a spring-loaded trap ready to snap shut. “Do it? Do what?”
Wes said nothing.
“Trench’s kid, right?”
The man stood a full head taller and Wes had to tip his head back to look him in the eye. “Yeah,” Wes said quietly. So this Toup brother knew who he was. How, he didn’t know. Wes’s bravery, what little there was, deserted him at once.
“You on crack or what?” Toup asked him.
“Sorry, I thought you were someone else,” Wes said and turned.
He had his hand on the door handle when Toup said, “Hey.”
Wes halted, his heart beating hard. He turned and saw that Toup was holding out his candy bar. “Forgot this,” he said.
Wes thanked him and took the candy and stepped out of the store into humid night air. Before he reached his truck he was damning himself for thanking the son of a bitch.
CODA
Time ticked along. At last summer showed signs of ending, days growing shorter, nights cooler. Goldenrod bloomed yellow by the roadsides. Acorns fell from the live oaks and pinged on car hoods and toolshed roofs. Hurricane season wouldn’t end for another few weeks, but people were relaxed enough that talk in the barbershop and grocery store turned from tropical depressions to football. Whether LSU would beat Auburn, whether the Saints would make the playoffs, maybe the Super Bowl. Flags of purple and yellow and flags of black and gold hung over house garages. Halloween decorations began popping up throughout Jeanette, papier-mâché bats strung from front yard trees, jack-o’-lanterns grinning their jagged grins on porches.
And of course there was talk of oil. Oil-sodden turtles and pelicans and redfish. Many Baratarians swore that the water had a funny tint to it, that the bay was darker and greener than before. Others said the shrimp and redfish had a metallic aftertaste, but people were eating Jeanette’s seafood again and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reopened the water to shrimping and fishing.
For a while Wes clung onto hope that he’d hear from Lindquist. That maybe he’d run off with the treasure he found—if he ever found it. Wes half hoped one day to see Lindquist’s funky avocado-colored boat, the Jean Lafitte, sailing once more in the Barataria.
But the boat remained untouched and neglected in its harbor slip, nettles fallen on the wheelhouse roof, tea-colored puddles staining the deck. Wes made a halfhearted pass at cleaning it, hosing the deck and windows, scraping crud off the hull. He might have approached Lindquist’s daughter about it, told her that she should take care of the only thing of her father’s that remained in the world, but he heard she up and left for New York, for God knew what. And Lindquist’s ex-wife, a bank teller whom he’d met to express his condolences, seemed to have moved on.
The last time Wes had been to the hospital was in the summer after his father’s heart attack, and he hoped that he wouldn’t have to return anytime soon. But after the first frost of late October when the leaves were just beginning to turn he received a call from Sheriff Villanova. A body had been discovered, swept up by a trawler’s net in the Barataria, and it needed identification.
Wes knew what Villanova meant. He thought the corpse was Lindquist’s. Lindquist’s daughter was still in New York and his ex-wife at a banking convention in Captiva, Florida, and Villanova didn’t want to leave the matter a mystery until one of them returned.
The possibility—the probability—of Lindquist’s being dead had of course occurred to Wes. But there were times in the weeks after Lindquist’s disappearance when Wes believed that Lindquist had somehow made it, run off somewhere faraway without telling anyone.
A silly fantasy, perhaps. Like something from the movies. But wasn’t it possible?
Wes recalled his conversations with Lindquist—how long ago that seemed now, though it was just months past—and how Lindquist told him that there was nothing he desired more than to start his life over again. Lindquist knew he couldn’t reclaim the time he’d lost. The time had never seemed his to begin with. He’d begun trawling with his father just as soon as he was old enough to lift a champagne basket. And, like Wes, when the time came to decide whether to stay in the Barataria or matriculate to college: well, there wasn’t much of a choice to make. His family needed the money and extra help.
And now Wes was driving to the hospital on a tranquil October morning, fine-spun sugar crystals of frost in the grass and in the trees, wispy autumn clouds like horsetails high in the sky, on his way to see a dead body that might be Lindquist’s.
In the hospital the familiar smell hit him right away, the mingled sickly odor of dirty linen and bandages and mopping wax. Wes’s breath stuck in his throat like hair in a drain. A pretty black girl with sapphire earrings sat behind the reception desk and Wes checked in. A few minutes later the coroner, Dr. Woodrell, met him in the lobby. A man with thick liver-colored lips and muddy eyes.
The morgue was on the fourth floor of the hospital, and as they rode the elevator alone the doctor tendered a fatigued smile at Wes.
“I warn you,” he said, “this is never pretty.”
Wes nodded.
“It’s not like the television shows. Even the worst ones.”
“I know.”
They got off the elevator and walked down the hall, their shoe heels ticking coolly on the linoleum floor. At the door of the mortuary the doctor paused.
“So how’d he die?” Wes said.
“He was shot. In the head.”
“Was he missing an arm?”
“He’s missing both.”
Wes blinked at the doctor.
“I should tell you this right now. To prepare you. The body’s been eaten. The arms and a leg.”
Now Wes was dizzy and his breath seemed not to be reaching as deep into his lungs as it needed. “Eaten by what?” he asked.
Dr. Woodrell rested his hand lightly on Wes’s shoulder. A gesture more bureaucratic than benevolent. “Alligators. Crabs. Snapping turtles. Just about everything that could get to him. After seventeen years of doing this
, I’m still not sure when to tell people. Or to even tell them period. That’s something they don’t tell you in medical school. I guess they decide you’ll figure it out yourself.”
Wes nodded.
The doctor opened the door and flicked a switch and the room flooded with antiseptic light. Several cot-like tables were lined up in a row, a few empty, a few with shrouded bodies on top. Wes followed the doctor across the room, noticing the declivities in the concrete floor, little craterlike places with drains in them. Wes couldn’t help it: he thought about all the blood and bile and vital juices running down those drains and wondered where it all went. Into the Barataria, he guessed. Where else?
At the table the doctor gave him a white eucalyptus-smelling cotton cloth and Wes held it over his mouth and nose. Then Dr. Woodrell threw back the sheet.
At first Wes looked at the body without seeing it. As if there was something in his brain that blocked the image from reaching where it needed to reach. Then when it did reach nausea swept through his stomach. Even with the cloth held over his face, the smell was incredible, life-defying. The body was black and purple, pulpy like waterlogged newspaper, and there were tattered places where the limbs had been torn away. The nose was missing, and the eyes, and in their place were dark wells. But the hair was still there, and it didn’t look like Lindquist’s. Lindquist didn’t have that much hair. Lindquist prayed he had this much hair. It was long enough to put up in a ponytail.
And Wes saw the T-shirt, a little faded and shredded but otherwise strangely intact despite the ruin of the body. Lindquist never wore a T-shirt like that.
TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS, it said.
“No,” Wes said through the cloth. He would have never believed such a strange mixture of repulsion and relief possible if he wasn’t feeling it now. “No,” he said again. “This isn’t him.”
Come November, Wes realized that another year would likely pass without his making plans to leave Jeanette. Without his making plans to do anything but shrimp for the rest of his life. If people ever left the Barataria, ever did something else with their lives, they did it when they were his age, or never.
The only other states Wes had ever been were Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Florida. He’d never stepped foot on the East or West Coast and the only sea he’d ever swam was the Gulf of Mexico. It bothered him that he wasn’t troubled by this, that no part of him longed to see the Blue Ridge Mountains or the Pacific Northwest, that no part of him yearned to step inside a Tibetan monastery or spelunk the Carlsbad Caverns or behold up-close the Krakatoa.
It wasn’t that he felt destined to live the rest of his life in the Barataria. What eighteen-year-old kid knew something like that? But: where else would being a Trench mean what it did here? The Trenches had lived here since the first settlers in the bayou. Now there were fewer Trenches than ever. Fewer Lindquists, fewer Arcinaux, fewer Thibodaux. Driving through town, you saw the boarded storefronts, the slumping shanties ceding to the elements, the piers collapsing plank by plank into the bayou.
And you heard about it in the news and read about it in books: the Barataria was disappearing, crumbling into the Gulf. Old-timers in Jeanette were quick to point out the tip of an ancient power line that once stood fully aboveground. The top of a salt-blanched cypress tree that once sat on a hill. Before long, the town elders said, Jeanette would be an underwater ghost town. Your parents’ graves, your grandparents’ graves, maybe even your own grave, under ten feet of water. A thought that gave Wes the frissons, as his mother used to say.
Wes didn’t believe in ghosts, but he did believe that some part of his mother would always remain here. Not a spirit, per se, but an everlasting ineffable part that had no human name. This is where she’d lived. She’d looked at this cypress every day, this weeping willow, this patch of sky, this bay of water, and Wes was convinced that meant something.
In other places besides Jeanette, Wes felt like an outsider, a passer-through. The way he talked, the words he used, the dark mud color of his skin. People told him he had the swamp in his mouth. Other people, less kind, said he sounded like a coon-ass. They didn’t know what a fais do-do was, a sac-a-lait. They didn’t know what it felt like to have Cajun blood.
For better or worse, the Barataria was his home. Whatever that meant. Home was the peaty odor of Spanish moss in the first spring rain. Home was the briny sweetness of fresh oysters thirty seconds out of the water. The termite swarms of early May. The cacophony of swamp frogs in the summer. The locusts in the day. The crickets at night. The lashing five-minute thunderstorms of late July. The sugarcane trucks rumbling through town in the autumn. The carnival giddiness of Mardi Gras. The blessing of the fleet. The petit bateaux clustered in the bay. The pinprick points of their pilot lamps like yuletide lights on the horizon. The strange green glow, supernaturally vivid, of cypress trees in spring gloaming. The earthy smell of crawfish boils. The pecan pralines and boudin and gumbo. The alligators and herons and redfish and shrimp. The Cajun voices, briny and gnarled. The old wrinkled faces as strange as thumbprints.
Wes felt the tug of his future here. Or maybe it was the gravity of the past. Maybe it was both. Whatever, more often than not the Barataria felt like the place he belonged.
One day in early December, just after the Christmas decorations were put up in Jeanette’s town square, Wes went to the harbor and found Lindquist’s boat vandalized. Someone, kids or vagrants, had broken the cabin door and ransacked the cabinets and drawers. Beer cans and cigarette stubs littered the floor. Wes doubted that it was one of the trawlers that used to hold a grudge against Lindquist. Now that he was gone, their ill will toward Lindquist had vanished overnight.
Some of the trawlers were even filled with phony nostalgia. “I bet he’s off metal detecting someplace,” they would say. Or, “Son of a bitch is probably in Barbados, someplace. Looking for his next treasure.”
Now and then Wes saw one of the Toup brothers around town. According to the locals, the other had left the country. Thailand, was the rumor. Why, no one knew, and the brother who remained in the Barataria, Reginald, never provided an answer. He kept to himself and without his other half seemed far less formidable. Diminished somehow. His eyes were spooked and darting, a look Wes associated with wounded animals and terminally sick people.
Over the coming months Wes kept busy with his own boat. Hard to believe, but shrimping season was only four months away. Wes wanted his Lafitte skiff, years in the making, ready to sail by then. An arbitrary deadline, but one that he was determined to meet. He knew he was one of those guys who needed a bottom line in order to get anything done.
By Christmas the cypress keelson and ribs were laid in the backyard. By February, the hull sat full-bellied and sleek on top of eight black oil drums. By March, Wes started blowtorching one-hundred-pound pieces of steel, section by section. Before long, what had begun as a framework of sticks was beginning to look like a seaworthy vessel.
Every day Wes looked forward to his work. The good clean smell of the morning air, of earth in the shadows, of grass still wet with dew. He rose at dawn and worked until nightfall, breaking only for lunch and water. There were hours when he was so lost in his work that he didn’t think of his mother or his problems with his father or his future. He didn’t think about the oil spill or the next shrimping season or all the bills he and his father had to pay. He worked purely in the moment. The world seemed more focused, the edges sharper, this time of year. There was a satisfaction in standing back and looking at something that had not existed several hours before. Something that he’d brought into being with his own hands. He liked the way the wood dust moted the air, how one tongue of wood fitted into the groove of another. Sandpapering, hammering, drilling, he found them mysteriously fulfilling.
One mellow cloudless day in early April, Wes was painting the hull gunmetal gray when he heard his father step up behind him. It was late afternoon, the sinking sun making golden fire in the house windows and trees.
“What a piece of shit,” his father said.
Wes turned. His father was smirking and stepped up to the boat and ran his hand along the hull. The whisper of his skin against the smooth grain of the wood. “I can’t feel a fuckin’ seam in this thing.”
Wes waited, expectation sparking in his chest.
“Some work, I gotta admit,” his father said. His face still looked ashen and slightly lopsided and he moved around more stiffly than he did before the heart attack. But he was down to three cigarettes a day, one after each meal, and his doctor said that his heart sounded healthier.
“Come on,” Wes’s father said. “I got something for you.”
“What?”
“A palomino pony.”
Wes followed his father to his truck, where a used engine waited in the bed. Wes’s father said he practically stole it, he found it for so cheap.
“It’s sweet,” Wes said.
“Right?”
They lifted the engine out of the truck and carried it through the side yard to the back, where they set it on the porch. Wes said he’d pay back the money as soon as he could but his father told him it was a gift.
Later it occurred to Wes that if he had opportunity to write again his short story for Mr. Banksey, he might choose this moment for a more truthful end. Knowing himself and knowing his father, it was probably as close to reconciliation as they would ever come. If his mother had been listening from her grave several yards away behind the pink-blooming mimosa tree, she probably would have considered it enough.
In early April the weather warmed and the bayou came alive again: the rain beat away the last trace of winter and the days grew longer and warmer yet, and the cypress and oak trees looked like they were erupting in gray-green smoke. And the water too began to stir and burgeon, the alligators sunning on the muddy banks, the snakes whipsawing like ink across the shallows, the herons stalking on stilt-like legs through the bracken. Everywhere near the water was the muddy smell of humus, the electric calls of cicadas and frogs.
