Fearless

by Lauren Gilley

  “Ass,” she accused. “I feel like I got run over by something.”

  “You just need to get drunk,” he said cheerfully. “Come on, baby doll. We wanna hit the water while there’s still plenty of light.”

  “Water?” She straightened and was pulled along by his hand.

  “Yeah,” he said over his shoulder as he towed her. “Unless you wanna ask Lew if you can borrow his hammock.”

  “Where are we?”

  He slapped a wooden sign as they passed it. Lew’s Tackle and Grocery.

  “Oh nice,” she muttered. “Ice cream and worms.”

  But she wasn’t disgusted. Under all the aches and pains, she was fascinated, and charmed.

  The store was a long, narrow building, half of which perched over the water on thick pylons. It had a three-sided, roofless porch, old rusted shovels, garden tools, boat anchors, and other oxidized metal bits hanging on the walls. An ancient Coke machine sat beside a hip-high cooler with a hand-labeled Fresh Bait sign taped to the front.

  The land sloped down toward the water, the little dock that jutted out across its dark surface. Ava spotted a sequence of outbuildings, under the dense shade cast by the trees, and between two of them, the hammock Mercy had mentioned. She also spotted the gas pumps.

  Mercy paused when he reached the door of the place and turned back to give her the most excited, boyish smile. It did dangerous, melty things to her insides. “I just gotta warn you. You’re about to step into the Land That Time Forgot. This ain’t no place for princesses like you.”

  “Call me a princess again,” she said, “and the only place for you will be the bottom of that lake out there.”

  Unperturbed, he said, “Technically, that’s a bayou.”

  “Technically, I don’t care.”

  He squeezed her hand. “Come meet Lew.”

  Despite the high peak of the roof, the ceilings were low inside the store. With a scant handful of small windows, shadows lay thick between the squat, wooden aisles; dust clung to shelves, marks of fingers and sleeves where merchandise had been taken and restocked. The walls and floors were a rough gray barn wood, the overhead tube lights flickering and hissing. A window unit chugged and fussed and failed to cool the entire space; they walked through a pocket of cool air on their way to the wooden counter.

  Behind the register, a bent man in a trucker cap perched on a stool, dealing a hand of solitaire onto the rough surface of the counter. He had the sleeves of his striped button-up folded back, and his wrists were thin, knobby, dark tan and speckled with sun spots. He glanced up at the sound of Mercy’s footfalls, his face deeply lined, cracked and leathery under the bill of his hat. He wore rectangular-framed glasses low on his nose, and peered up at them with filmy eyes a long moment before he gasped.

  “That…” His voice sounded like it had been used often, deep and well-oiled, despite his frail outer shell. And there was that Louisiana accent, so unlike the traditional Southern accent, one familiar to her because of Mercy. “That’s not – nah, that can’t be Remy Lécuyer’s boy.” He put his feet on the floor and the effort of straightening his legs looked like it hurt. “That’s not Felix, is it?”

  Mercy reached across the counter, caught the man’s hand, and steadied him. “You know it is, you old fart,” he said with deep affection, smiling. “Hey, Lew, how you doin’?”

  Still beaming, the man said, “Mad as hell I ain’t seen you in years! Boy, when you move back to New Orleans, you’re supposed to come visit more often. What’s it been? Two? Three?”

  “Three and a half,” Mercy said. “But I got bad news, man. I’m moving back to Tennessee.”

  “Son of a bitch. You just can’t stay put, can you?”

  “Nope.” His free arm came back, encircled Ava’s shoulders and pulled her forward. “Lew, I want you to meet my wife. This is Ava.”

  The pride in his voice furthered the inside-melting. She wanted to cry and smile all at once. Instead, she said, “It’s very nice to meet you, Lew.”

  The old man was gaping at her, still smiling a little. “Wife? Did you say wife? Oh no, she’s too pretty for you. Wife? I’ll be damned.” He laughed. Then he sucked in a big breath. “Ava? Now, you don’t mean…she’s not…” He looked at Ava. “Are you that little girl he keeps in his wallet?”

  Before she could answer, his smile became small and warm, and he nodded. “It is you. You’re his girl.”

  Ava felt the shock bloom and turn to wonder. She looked up at Mercy, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze, his high cheekbones suspiciously dark. She stared at him, hand slipping up under his jacket and shirt in the back, so she could press her palm to his skin. Stared until he finally granted her one bashful glance from the corners of his eyes. She didn’t say anything, because she didn’t have to.

  He had a photo of her at ten in his wallet – she knew that. But she hadn’t known that he’d showed it to people, that he’d talked about her. That, in the eyes of people she’d never met, she was “his girl.”

  She rested her head against his chest, soaking up this proof of unspoken love.

  Mercy cleared his throat. “Sweetheart, why don’t you go see if there’s anything good to drink in the back? Aisle seven.”

  She nodded and slipped away from him, knowing this was his way of asking for a moment alone with the shopkeeper. “Lew, do you have chocolate?”

  “Aisle twelve.”

  There was something quaint and picturesque about the cramped store with its odd assortment of goods, all the dark barn wood absorbing the light. The liquor was arranged by brand, shelves sagging from the weight. Ava took two bottles of Johnnie Walker Red…and then two more. She didn’t care about drinking. She didn’t want to be numb right now, not when she had him all to herself. But Mercy liked his Scotch, and he could put it away.

  Arms loaded with bottles, she managed two Hershey bars before she had to admit defeat and go back to the counter for a basket. She paused a few feet back, and watched Lew and Mercy exchange a handshake.

  “…long as you need it,” Lew was saying. “I’ll be happy to.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “And if anyone comes sniffing, you know I’ll turn ‘em away.”

  “Appreciate that, too.”

  Mercy turned and spotted her, and came to take the bottles out of her arms, put them on the counter. “Anything else you want?” he asked. “The house should be stocked, but I don’t know with what.”

  “House?”

  “I’ll explain on the way.”

  Amid the cluttered shelves, she found microwave popcorn, a box of saltines, and a block of white cheddar. Staples from her college years; she could live on that stuff for weeks if need be. Mercy bought some bait, fresh hooks, a few lures, and some fishing line. Lew told them they needed to come back and visit him, and he assured, with a wink for Mercy, that “not a soul” would catch their trail from here.

  “He knows we’re running?” Ava asked, as they walked back out onto the porch, bags in tow.

  “One of three people I trust outside the club with all this, yeah. He knows, and nobody could get a word out of him about it. Lew’s good people.”

  She agreed.

  Mercy stripped all the saddlebags off the Dyna and rolled it into one of the outbuildings that he then locked with a combination Master lock. He told her the code and made her repeat it back to him five times, so he was confident she’d memorized it. Then they went down to the dock, to one of the small, weathered fiberglass boats that were anchored on boat hooks. The thing was stained and ancient, a sharp contrast to the shiny huge motor on the back. It was an Evinrude, and she knew just enough about boats to know this engine could send it flying across the water.

  “She ain’t pretty,” Mercy said as he stepped down into it with one foot and began loading their belongings. “But she’ll get the job done.”

  Ava handed over the bags one at a time. “And that’s for backup?” she asked of the long pole resting in the bottom of the boat.
>
  “Push pole,” he explained. “If I was worth a damn, I’d use that instead of the engine. Safer for the wildlife, cleaner.” He shook his head. “But I grew up with motors. It’s easy to get lost out here and you need the speed. Plus” – he glanced up at her – “I ain’t taking you anywhere that I can’t make a fast getaway.”

  She nodded, not wanting to dwell on the potential for getaways.

  When he’d arranged everything to his liking, he reached up a hand for her, a bright excitement in his dark eyes. “M’lady,” he said with a smirk, though his tone was serious and respectful.

  As Ava laid her palm against his, and as his fingers closed around hers, she felt a shiver move through his arm and up into hers. He wasn’t just inviting her down into this boat; he was inviting her into the part of his life he’d never shown her, that moss-draped past that captivated her, and that he’d kept guarded so tightly.

  It’s okay, she wanted to tell him. Nothing you show me will change things. I love you more than anything; there’s not a skeleton I can’t overlook.

  She put her foot down and felt the movement of the boat, the water shifting under her. She grabbed at the front of Mercy’s shirt as she stepped fully down, letting him catch her weight and steady her.

  “Okay, so…” She tipped her head back and sought to project all her warmth and acceptance toward him. “Where are we going?”

  **

  He was a man torn. In so many ways, he hated this place. This hot, smelly, head-wrecking place that had devoured his meager family and sent him running. It always came back to running, didn’t it? How many times would he run back and forth between New Orleans and Knoxville? Seeking to escape the horrors at either end. He hated the idea of having his girl here, bringing her to the place that had crippled him so badly. There were ghosts in these swamps, some of his own making, and he didn’t want the taint getting into her blood, turning her soft writer’s heart into a bloody abscess.

  But on the other hand, this moment was a recurring dream brought to life. Ava at the bow of his boat, legs drawn back behind her, face in the wind as the Evinrude powered them through the black water, the cypress rising tall around them. Her eyes were wide, scanning both banks, drinking it all in. As he sat at the stern, hand on the throttle, he watched her grip the edge of the boat and lean down, fingertips skimming across the shiny green duckweed.

  He edged back the speed, so she could hear him, and said, “What do you think?”

  “It’s beautiful.” And she meant it, too.

  “Giving you story ideas?” he asked.

  “So many.”

  It was a gorgeous night on the bayou. The sun fell in hazy shafts through the cypress trunks, glimmered on the dark surface of the water, bold stripes that rippled as the spreading wake of the boat lapped toward the banks. Moss hung in thick drifts. Amongst the knobby knees of cypress roots, a white egret was startled and took flight, winging silently above them. Turtles sunned themselves on half-submerged logs. And…there, there was one. A gator at ten o’clock, its eyes and tip of its snout all that were visible above the water. To a tourist, it would go unnoticed; Mercy could spot a gator like it was glowing neon.

  He slowed the boat and pointed it out to Ava. “You’ll see a lot more than that,” he assured her, and he loved the light in her eyes, the way being enchanted made her seem even younger, more like she’d been at seventeen, before anything bad –

  No. He wasn’t going to think about the bad parts. That was why he’d put the ring on her finger. A promise that nothing like those five years would ever come between them from now on. This wasn’t a fresh start, but a return to what had been. A do-over.

  As they moved toward their destination, he planned their boat trips in the days to come, the hours exploring his childhood stomping ground. But for now, they’d go to their home for the next…however long. Their honeymoon spot and sanctuary from all outside threats.

  He took a hard right, through a curtain of moss, where the banks compressed and it looked like the boat couldn’t possibly go through. He slowed the boat, then killed the motor, plucking the pole up and sinking it down below the surface toward the bottom.

  “The water’s deep here,” he said, “deeper than it looks. But we’ll go in careful, so you can see your way.”

  He hadn’t been to this spot in years and years, not since Daddy was still alive, but its textures came back to him, fresh and familiar all at once.

  The bank rose steeply to the right, and crawling down its face where high-kneed cypress roots that formed a deep cavern going into the hill, a little wooden cave floored with water.

  “Duck,” Mercy instructed, and Ava dropped down low as he poled the boat into the opening.

  Tiny stripes of light fell across them, and there, at the far end, where he could just make out a similar boat tied up, a thick spill of sunlight flooded through the opening that led up into the clearing above. In its golden light, he could make out the earthen and wood stair carved into the bank that was their way out.

  “Stairs,” Ava said, delighted. “Is this real? Or am I dreaming?”

  “Wait till you see what’s up top.”

  He tied them up alongside the other boat. “Friends,” he assured, and he urged her on ahead of him up the stairs, leaving their stuff behind for the moment. She wouldn’t want to be weighted down with luggage when she got her first look of the place, and he didn’t blame her.

  The sun was at that perfect evening slant when they stepped out from the cave and entered the clearing. Mercy’s eyes were on his wife, the way the light burnished her hair, the way her eyes flipped wide, her face smooth with surprise. And then, because he couldn’t resist, he looked at their surroundings.

  Over a century ago, mule-drawn wagons had hauled timbers and glass through the swamps to this idyllic spot along a narrow finger of water. A white clapboard chapel and caretaker cottage had been erected amid a grassy meadow, ringed by ancient, massive oaks, a screen of cypress along the water. In the fifties, the narrow roadway leading out to this spot had been washed out. Inaccessible by land, the chapel had withered, until it was nothing but a gray shell. The cottage, though, had served hunters and fishers, a safe harbor for the lost and the weary. Its paint had peeled and its roof had been badly patched, but the tiny house with its dual windows on either side of the door was warm and dry and charming inside, its stone chimney always stocked with wood. That was the rule of this place: you had to leave firewood when you left, for the next lonesome soul who stopped to seek shelter within its walls.

  The chapel stood closest to the water, with a view of the opposite bank and the tangled swampwood that he’d always found so darkly beautiful. It no longer had a door. Grass and weeds floored the aisles between the pews. Thick tendrils of jasmine had claimed the pulpit, and the ten-foot-tall cross behind it. Its bare windows looked sad, like they were crying.

  Beyond, the cottage glowed with lamplight; a fresh stack of firewood was piled against one outer wall, and Larry dusted off his hands as he stood on the small porch.

  Ava turned to him, and he didn’t know how to classify her expression. “What is this place?” she asked, voice just a whisper.

  “They call it Saints Hollow.”

  “It’s perfect,” she breathed, drifting to him, like she was floating. When she put her arms around his waist, he hugged her against him, hard. “Who are your friends?”

  “You wanna come meet them?”

  She kissed his chest, through his clothes. “Yes.”

  Mercy’s father’s name had been Remy, something Ava had learned from both Lew, and the O’Donnells. Remy. She filed it away: French, warm, mischievous. She liked it. She pressed it into her internal baby name book.

  She was intrigued by this chance to meet people who’d known Remy and Felix Lécuyer. Larry had hunted gators also, sometimes working with Remy. His wife, Evangeline, the Cajun spice to Larry’s pale Irish heritage, had cooked many a dinner and taken it to the Lécuyer house via bateau. T
he families went way back. Larry and Evie were so obviously delighted to see Mercy again, both hugging and kissing him on the cheek.

  “You got married!” Evie exclaimed. To Ava, she said, “And you’re his – oh, come here. Hug me.” She was a regular-sized woman, but her arms were strong, and she crushed Ava to her chest. Then she pushed her back.

  “You’re so pretty!” she exclaimed. She caught Ava’s chin in her hand. “And sweet. I can just tell.” She smiled. “I guess it’s not always true what they say about marrying someone like your mama.”

  When Evie let go of her, Ava turned a questioning look up to her husband. “His mama?” she asked Evie. “What was she like?”

  Mercy’s expression became thunderous.

  “Well,” Evie said, quickly, face coloring. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.” Big breath. “Anyway,” she said, smiling at Ava again, “I’m so glad he’s got himself a girl. Someone to love and feed him.”

  Mercy shook off his black look and snorted. “Well, love anyway. The food, not so much.”

  “Oh, honey, you can’t cook?”

  Ava cringed.

  “Don’t worry. I can teach you. I can–”

  “Jesus Christ, Evangeline,” Larry said. “Let the girl breathe. You’re running on like a chainsaw.”

  Evie glared at her husband and slapped his arm, but she backed off a little. “I want the poor thing to feel welcome. Felix’s dragged her half through the swamp.” She addressed Mercy: “That’s no way to treat your bride, by the way.”

  “Yeah.” Mercy sighed. “I know. Before shit went south in Knoxville, I was planning a whole trip to the Bahamas.”

  Evie pursed her lips. “Smartass.”

  Mercy grinned. “Okay, a Holiday Inn in Chattanooga, at least.”

  “Makes a girl want to swoon, doesn’t it?” Evie winked at Ava.

  “Are you done yammering yet?” Larry asked. “So we can take them inside?”

  “Yes,” Evie said, and slapped him on the arm again, harder this time.

  The inside of the cottage was warm and bright. There was electricity here, Larry explained, lines running through the swamp that had been maintained. And there was well water, but he suggested she drink the bottled water stacked in cases in one corner. The cottage was one wide room, furniture designating the use of each corner. In back left was an old iron bedframe, tidily made up with a red and white patchwork quilt and two stacks of white pillows. Back right was the kitchen, small sixties-era fridge, wood-burning stove with pipe vent snaking up to the ceiling, a butcher block island and wall-mounted shelves loaded with cast iron pans, Dutch ovens, and stone pots. A faded green velvet sofa, in an old tufted, Victorian style marked the living room. There was an ancient TV with rabbit ears, a radio on a side table, two floor lamps. And in one front window, a makeshift office had been established with a cherry escritoire and more wall-mounted shelves arranged with books, boxes of envelopes and stationary, fishing paraphernalia and what looked like car parts.