Bottom Feeders

by Cesare, Adam

  The summer had been demoralizing, so he’d cut his trips back, taking out just enough suckers to pay the bills and keep Bel stocked in Gerber formula, himself in beer.

  As he cradled Bel and held the bottle for her to suckle, he thought back on the previous summer. All those glorious days and nights of catching big cats. Beyond that, he recounted the day they’d discovered the biggest one, the one he’d come to refer to as the queen of the catfish, Lucinda merely as “the one that got away.”

  Standing there, his baby spitting and cooing against his bare chest, he also thought about that weird cult, how they had scattered into the marshland after the queen ate their leader. Because he’d been looking, keeping an eye on the local newspapers, Chase knew that there was a spate of disappearances that had cropped up all along the Mississippi over the last year, but nobody ever connected them to reports of a giant catfish.

  How was that possible? How had nobody else seen it, caught it, twelve months later? Was the creature the reason the lines were coming back empty? Had the “mother” cannibalized the entire catfish population?

  Mostly because she’d tagged the queen as their catch, Chase had made a pact with Lucinda to never speak of it to anyone else. Still, the beast and its worshipers crept into his thoughts and dreams often, and whenever he and Lucinda fished together or went out for beers, they couldn’t help speculating on the matter, but never above a whisper in public.

  At first, they’d attempted to construct plausible scenarios, but everything sounded so ridiculous. A catfish the size of a diesel truck? Primitive people dressed in catfish skins worshiping it? After a while, trying to get it all to make sense got tiresome, so they took to stringing together ridiculous scenarios. The more ridiculous the better, a kind of drinking game when they were alone. In their drunken conversations, the monster came from outer space, escaped from a top secret military lab, was mutated by the latest Gulf oil spill. They didn’t know the truth. They would never know the truth. Somehow, laughing at the unknown made that fact a little more acceptable. What was hard to accept right now was Jezebel’s condition.

  She’d been born with fins and a tail.

  No, she was a healthy baby girl.

  It was just a tiny skin condition, some oddly placed birthmarks.

  Bel was fully human.

  Beautiful.

  When she’d finished feeding, Chase tucked her back in her crib and turned on the white noise machine that helped her sleep. He smiled.

  Instead of returning to bed, he headed out behind the house to his work shed and set about sharpening hooks, a simple, repetitive task that helped him think. Before the beast had swallowed the old man, the guy had said that She would take to the land in twelve orbits of the moon. One year. Next Friday marked the one-year anniversary of his death.

  What were those crazy fuckers doing? What had they done, if anything? Had they been just witnesses, rubberneckers gathered to watch a solar eclipse, smoked glass in hand, ready to watch some phenomena they had absolutely no control over?

  Their god wasn’t an obscure cosmic deity. He’d seen the monster. He knew it was out there in the dark water, and if it was anything like the darkness that could hide inside a man, he knew it was liable to rear its ugly head again. He lit a cigarette, and when he smoked that one, he lit another. Finally, as blue light filtered in through the window and birds began to sing, he looked down at his work. A mound of razor-sharp fish hooks lay before him.

  No. Chase wasn’t worried about the one-year anniversary of the sighting. After all, who trusts a guy in a catfish tunic?

  Chapter Nine

  Harry Albright stood behind Jed, shifting his weight, rubbing his hands together, and generally being a sweaty, annoying, fucking mess.

  “You’re going to call him?” Harry asked.

  “Do you see any other option?”

  Jed waited, phone in hand, for Albright to give him an answer, then said: “No, that wasn’t rhetorical. Do you see any other option? Do you know anyone else who would be able to fix this shit?”

  The rug stretched before them in all directions had been Persian. Well, at least it had been modeled on an exquisite Persian rug that Jed had seen at some high-end supplier. He’d snapped a picture with his camera phone and had his carpet guys make a knock-off of the pricey design, enough of the material to wrap a football stadium with some leftover to cover the parking lot.

  Now most of his precious knock-off carpeting was ruined, water-damaged, and he hoped that the cleaning crew could vacuum off the river water and mud so that it didn’t set into the base of the video poker and slot machines. The machines were new, top of the line, but their bases weren’t meant to get wet, were still particle board. There was no reason for the gaming manufacturers to build them out of anything stronger, considering the speed with which most class A casinos turned over their machines.

  If they were allowed to soak for much longer, they would mildew and stink, and the circuit boards would fog up. In the worst areas, it was possible the machines might even crumble or sag under their own weight. Droopy Lord of the Rings penny slots: not something the Ole Dixie’s opening day crowd was looking forward to.

  The cleaning crew was already on its way, but if things had gone down on the surveillance cams like Harry Albright had described, then Jed had one more call to make and he didn’t like it.

  “The flooding wasn’t caused by a structural problem. Not yet. The windows are still sealed, so it wasn’t a boat or any other change with the river. The water didn’t sweat out from the walls, but was pushed up from underneath,” Albright said, pointing down at the muddy carpet. “Look, the darkest parts are at the joints of the foundation, like fault lines. It’s a fish, or fishes. I’m telling you. Something big under the casino, coming in and out at night. And no, I don’t know anyone else who could help,” Albright explained, breathlessly recapping his hypothesis before circling back and actually answering Jed’s question.

  “And you think this was the same thing that fucked up the pour? Caused the bump and disappeared your Pollack?”

  It had been a year, a whole year, and Harry Albright still bristled when Jed mentioned the lost contractor, Pataki.

  “Could be. You’ve seen the stuff on the news, same as I have.”

  Jed had. There wasn’t much except grainy cell phone recordings of giant dorsal fins, six-foot high wakes in tributaries that should have been naturally still and weren’t deep enough to drive a boat through. They weren’t run as real news, though. The videos were puff pieces at best, local channels desperately trying to pad out their runtimes by poaching YouTube videos marked as “Mysterious Giant Fish” and “Cryptid Cat Strikes Again” and airing them as wacky weird news segments.

  At the same time, the fishing trade was going tits up and experts were speculating that it wasn’t just the BP spill, or the fracking, or any of the other reasons that the commies and the loonies usually pointed to when dead fish were washing up. In fact, there were no dead fish washing up, just less fish to catch.

  And now his multi-billion-dollar investment was floating apart at the seams, his project lead insinuating that everything was connected.

  All Jed had to do to be sure was to call that motherfucker. That wife fucker.

  “Fine,” Jed said, taking a step toward the middle of the casino floor, the carpet spongy under his boots. As he walked, the smell of wet acrylic and the finishing touches of the construction—wet caulk and tacky paint—melded into a swampy chemical bouquet in his nostrils.

  Jed dialed Gail’s number on his phone. He didn’t have a direct line for the bastard fisherman, that Crocodile Dundee guy who’d knocked her up.

  It rang three times before Gail snapped “What is it?” from the other end of the line. So she hadn’t deleted his contact information from her phone. That was something, Jed thought, and put on a smile. Even though she couldn’t see him, it was easier to sound nice when he was forcing himself to grimace.

  “Well, hello to you too, dar
ling. I’m sorry to be calling you this early. I hope I didn’t wake the baby. I know it’ll sound strange, but I actually wasn’t looking to talk to you. I need to speak with your beau. Is Chad around?”

  “Chase?” Gail asked, sounding suspicious and annoyed. Jed hadn’t talked to her in six months, not since her park bench lawyer had finally been able to pry an actual divorce from him, the legal foot-dragging his own in-house guy was capable of positively miraculous. It comforted Jed Wilkes that he still had it, was able to still rile the bitch.

  “Yeah, Chase. Sorry, I just forgot his name. That tends to happen when you don’t think about someone at all. Even when they’re balling your ex-wife.”

  With that she hung up and he dialed again. There were enough rings that it seemed like she wasn’t going to pick back up. Maybe he misjudged.

  Nope, there was the click. No voicemail.

  “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for,” Jed said before she could speak, the apology quick, like pulling off a Band-Aid. “I really do need to speak to him. Business stuff. An opportunity for you to get even more of my money.”

  She growled, started to mumble “I didn’t get much in the...” her voice trailed off, the receiver being pulled further away from her mouth until there was a clatter and new breathing on the line. She’d handed the phone to her man.

  “Hello. Is this Chase? The fish man, the gill hunter?” Jed asked, flicking his eyes to Harry Albright. The cleaning crew had arrived and Harry was directing them away from where Jed was standing, their pumps and vacuums looked like they could be loud, once powered up.

  “Speaking,” Chase said, his tone not as outwardly hostile as his wife’s, but still not warm.

  “I’m going to cut to it, Chase,” he paused for laughter, and there was none. “I think I have a problem down at the Ole Dixie. A big fish problem. By which I mean problems with big fish, not a problem with many little fishes.”

  “What kind of problem?” Chase said, the man’s interest clearly piqued despite his best efforts to stay unfazed.

  “You’ve heard about the project, yes? The casino? Either from your charming wife or just from the news?”

  Chase said he had and Jed continued.

  Of course, the rube had heard of the Ole Dixie. It didn’t matter how much of a slackjawed swampboy Gail had found for herself, the media saturation level that the Ole Dixie had attained meant that everyone in Louisiana had heard of it. And the majority of the rest country on top of that.

  “You know how it floats, yes? I mean, it’s not a boat, it’s moored, but it does float, there is water underneath the casino floor.”

  Chase said that, yes, he’d heard something along those lines too. Jed wasn’t much listening to the other side of the conversation, was too in love with gloating, talking about his casino. He ignored who the other person on the line was, that Chase even was a person. Because he really wasn’t a person, a guy like Chase—even if he was fucking Jed’s ex-wife—was just a tool to someone in Jed’s position. He was an exterminator, the cable guy, the plumber you called when your toilet backed up as a result of too much filet mignon, excess success.

  “Well, now there’s not only water underneath the casino floor, there’s water on the casino floor, seeping up through the plates of the foundation. My foreman thinks that there’s something swimming around down there, somehow futzing with the plates. I think he’s crazy, but I thought I might humor him, reach out, and ask if you thought something like that was even possible. Like maybe a rogue whale, or a shark the size of Jaws or something swimming up the Delta?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, a pause so long that for a moment Jed Wilkes wondered if he’d been hung up on without hearing the click.

  “It might be possible,” Chase said, sounding like he was feeling the words out. “And I might be able to help. I’ll need new equipment though.”

  “Ha! Already gouging the price, sounds like, putting the screws on me for a fancy new boat because you think I owe you something. I admire that, Chase. Maybe you’re not half the dumbfuck rube I thought you were.”

  “No, I'm not, so tell me what this is all about,” Chase said.

  Jed could get away with calling him anything now that he had him on the line, heard the interest in his voice. You aren’t the only one who knows how to reel ’em in, boy.

  “But my partner and I will need scuba equipment.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Don’t do this,” Gail said.

  Lucinda was in the boat, running her fingertips over the equipment, and trying not to look like she was eavesdropping, but Gail could tell that the girl was.

  Chase’s teenage sidekick was a big part of both their lives, yet Gail didn’t know much about the girl; hardly spent any time around her. In fact, Gail didn’t even know if Lucinda was a teenage sidekick. The girl may have been anywhere from seventeen to thirty-five. Gail had never asked.

  She trusted Chase enough to know that they weren’t sleeping together, and that was all she needed to know. If he required someone to talk bait and tackle with, so be it. It was better than a group of rowdy male friends, the kind of guys that drove home drunk from strip clubs and left cigar ash wherever they went.

  “It’s going to be fine. We know what we’re doing. There’s probably nothing down there, just shitty workmanship on Jed’s shitty casino,” Chase said.

  Just because she trusted her husband’s fidelity didn’t mean she thought he was incapable of lying. Or that she couldn’t immediately tell when he was lying. Chase was expecting to find something down there. If she couldn’t tell from his voice, it was easy to see that his partner was practically vibrating, trying to hold her excitement in as she looked over the scuba gear and personal sea-scooters that Jed had shelled out to buy them.

  None of the equipment looked like it was rented. Jed was serious, or at least serious enough to drop coin.

  “Everything loaded up?” Chase asked without turning away from Gail, telling his wife with his eyes that everything would be fine, that Bel wasn’t going to be an orphan. Bad enough she had that skin condition. With no dad around to help her fight off the bullies, Gail would have to do it.

  Lucinda stood up in the boat, the aluminum rocking slightly against the trailer hitch. She stared down the sights of a spear gun, pointing it into a nearby tree, ready to take out a squirrel. “It all looks good to me, cap.”

  “Don’t look so worried,” Chase said, taking Gail’s chin between his thumb and forefinger, the calluses tickling her. “What do you think? That your ex has some kind of Bond villain trap set for me? I’ve been over there, seen the damage. He’s not making it up, he needs help.”

  “Expert help!” Lucinda chimed in, as if there had been any doubt that she’d been listening to the husband-wife conversation.

  “And he’s so desperate he’s willing to pay for that help. We’re going to go down there, take some pictures of whatever barnacles, lampreys or whatever he’s got boring holes in his casino, then we’re going to collect our check.”

  “And if he tries to screw you?”

  “He won’t, but if he does,” Chase turned and indicated the boat, “look at all the shit he just bought us. All of it makes a pretty good consolation prize.”

  He pecked her on the cheek, giving her one last look in the eyes for confirmation. He was looking for some kind of consent or permission that it was okay for him to be going diving in the Mississippi, a river with terrible visibility, looking for a big fish while her nefarious ex-husband waited above.

  In Gail’s mind’s eye, she could visualize Chase in old-timey scuba gear. The lead boots and helmet were weighing Chase down so he couldn’t swim to the surface, and Jed was standing in the boat above, kinking his air hose.

  Even on the tenth time hearing them, this time with an audience, none of Chase’s justifications did anything to ease Gail’s mind. The baby monitor on her hip began to whine, a whine that stretched into a more pronounced wail. She had to go feed Bel, co
uldn’t stand in the driveway arguing with Chase any longer.

  The man was going to do what he was going to do.

  And she was going to kill Jed Wilkes if anything happened to him.

  Chapter Eleven

  They launched a mile upriver from the Ole Dixie.

  While Chase piloted the boat toward the floating casino’s gaudy glass and metal exterior, Lucinda sat cross-legged and played with one of the sea-scooters. Her wetsuit wasn’t a perfect fit, so the extra material bunching up at her thighs and crotch only enhanced the effect that she looked like a little girl.

  Chase watched out of the corner of his eye as she held her arms out in front of her. Under the wetsuit he could see her muscles twitching and shaking with the exertion needed to hold what was basically a small outboard motor as if it were a Fisher-Price steering wheel.

  Between making burton burton burton noises with her lips, she muttered, “Can’t believe that asshole bought two of these.”

  Chase didn’t look at her to let her know he’d heard, but he couldn’t help smiling. Her calmness and how she could still be so unaffected by the fact that they were about to strap on scuba tanks and get into the water? They were looking for a monster.

  Pushing the thought out of his mind, he brought the starboard side of the new boat into alignment with the casino. The u-bolt connecting the stick to the rudder was sticking, only slightly, nothing that affected their trajectory. But this meant that the boat was too new, would need some WD-40 when they got back to shore.

  “Are we ready?” Lucinda asked.

  “Me first?” Chase asked, not really a question because he turned himself around and hefted the tank onto his back. Lucinda took her time, adjusting each of his straps until he gave her the thumbs-up, then tugging against the tank to make sure it wouldn’t wiggle.