The Swamp Killers

by Sarah M. Chen

  “Give that thing back, Melody. We got to get back before it gets dark.” The man tugged her in the direction of the motel.

  She looked back at Duck. Hollow cheeks and burning eyes. Hungry, but for what? Whatever it was, the man Timmy wasn’t supplying it.

  “You keep it, miss. It suits you.” Duck surprised even himself. Around the flea market, he was known as a hard bargainer. He had to be. Other swampers abandoned the life as they aged, opting for the ease of pumping gas, stocking shelves, or even working fast-food drive-thrus. But the swamp only drew Duck in deeper as the years passed and he found himself more comfortable among the strange solitary habits of its panthers and alligators and rare black bears than his own kind. What little money he earned went toward gasoline for his boat’s engine, his trips to the chicken processing plant, and the occasional woman. He didn’t need much, but every cent came hard.

  Melody’s blue-eyed gaze caressed the bracelet, then lifted to Duck’s face for a long moment. He was used to people’s scrutiny, trying to figure him out. What was he? His skin—naturally dark or just sun-burnished? Head shaved bald, so no helpful clue from hair color or kink. The cushiony mouth whose slow sweet smile made women agreeable before he even asked, said black; the slashing arcs of cheekbone and nose suggested Indian; and those amber eyes could have been anything at all. It bugged people. But Melody’s eyes locked on his own in a stare that thrummed so loud he barely heard her murmur the mandatory demurral, “I can’t possibly accept this.” Even as her lips curved upward in thanks.

  “That’s right. You can’t. Give me that damn thing.” The man wrenched the bracelet from her wrist and flung it onto the tarp that held Duck’s unsold offerings. He turned and barked his shin on the outsize cooler that sat to one side of the tarp. It moved not at all. The man kicked at it. “What have you got in there? A body? Melody. Don’t try my patience.”

  “I apologize for my companion’s manners. You’re very kind, Mister…?”

  “Makepeace,” he heard himself say. “Makepeace Conard.”

  “What an interesting name.” In-ter-est-ing—each long syllable the feel of fingertips trailing across rising flesh. “I hope we meet again, Mister Conard.”

  From nearly the time he could walk, Duck’s feet had sought the silence of grass, of soft sand, of quaking mud barely able to hold his weight. A wagon, its axles and bearings oiled weekly against the corrosive effects of humidity, rolled soundlessly behind him as he followed the couple. Their voices floated toward him, the anger still clear in his; in hers, the mollifying tone that every woman seemed born knowing how to use.

  Duck scowled into the darkness. That was no way to treat a woman, especially not one like Melody Duplass.

  Light leapt into the night, the yellowish rectangle of an open doorway, the couple silhouetted within. The man’s arm flew up, catching the woman in the middle of her back. She pitched forward onto a bed. The door closed on the man’s low laugh.

  Duck increased his pace, breathing hard against the weight of wagon and cooler, as he passed the motel, skirting the end-of-the-road barrier and on to the edge of the swamp, where his friend Red kept his old motorboat and where Duck’s own pirogue lay concealed beneath woven mats of maidencane. He flung away the mats, tipped the cooler into the pirogue, and hurried back toward the motel to deal with the sonofabitch who was hurting the woman he’d just realized he loved.

  He crouched by a corner of the bungalow, listening hard to the hush, wondering how to lure the man outside without involving Melody. Fuck it. He’d just knock and take a chance that the man would be the one to answer.

  Duck flexed his fingers and curled them into a fist, anticipating the crunch of cartilage, the hot spurt of blood. He’d come late to fighting, not until high school, when a French teacher had droned nasally on about canard, the slur, and canard, the duck. It didn’t take long for someone to make the link from canard to his last name—Conard—and from there to Duck and then on to “Fuck a duck,” with accompanying squawks and flapping motions, at which point his fists discovered their reason for being. “Fuck a duck” fell by the wayside, but “Duck,” the perfect nickname for a swamper, persisted.

  The bungalow’s door opened. Duck froze.

  “I’ll be right back,” the man Timmy said over his shoulder as he left the room. A large trash bag flapped from one hand; in the other, he held the spade. He crossed to a car parked before the bungalow and opened the trunk. Its weak light splashed across him. The man retrieved a briefcase, dropped it into the trash bag and tucked the spade under his arm. In his other hand, he held a cell phone high, using its light to follow the path to the swamp Duck had taken moments earlier.

  Duck ran to the motel office. It was empty, a television turned up high somewhere within. He banged the desk bell until the clerk emerged.

  “Geez, hold your horses…oh, hey, Duck.” The clerk looked of an age to have been at the motel since it was fashionable, the cynicism in his eyes testament to every event that had led to its present degradation. “You need a room for an hour?” His watery gaze searched the blank space beside Duck as if expecting someone to materialize. “No lady friend tonight?”

  Duck shoved a paper bag toward him, the bracelet heavy within it. “Red, you give this to Miss Melody Duplass, the lady in the end unit. Do it right now, before that guy she’s with gets back.” He smoothed a five and five ones, the sum total of his day’s earnings at the flea market, onto the counter and ran back out into the night.

  It was easy to catch up with the man, dry canes snapping beneath his shoes as he moved uncertainly toward the swamp. A squelch and a curse announced his arrival. The man Timmy stopped and balanced the phone on a cypress knee. Duck heard the plopping sound of soft globs of mud being unearthed. It didn’t take long for the sounds to change, the mud falling back onto something hard. That didn’t take long, either.

  Then, the quick muffled chop of steel against soft wood.

  What the…?

  Duck padded to the spot the man had just left and ran his hands over the cypress knee until he felt the gash. In the morning sun, the disturbed earth would shout its location to the world. By nightfall, maidencane would already be sprouting across it and within a couple of days, only the mark on the cypress knee would distinguish the spot.

  Duck withdrew the short, wide knife with a serrated blade from the leather scabbard on his belt. He moved from one cypress tree to another, slashing at their knees, a dozen in all. An occasional soft swish and near-soundless splash preceded him, cottonmouths sliding from the trees into the water at his approach. He cut into a dozen more trees, keeping count as he moved from one to the next, then counted his way back to the original.

  He drove his hand deep into the patch of overturned muck, fingers searching until he felt the hard rectangle of briefcase within the plastic bag.

  Duck checked the sky. The moon rode high, trying its best to outdo the collective firepower of the stars. He was running late, unmoored from his usual rhythms. He retrieved a long pole from the bottom of the pirogue and shoved off, poling quickly away from the most recent treasure yielded by the swamp that sustained him.

  Hubcaps, almost too many to keep.

  Dolls. Wigs. Shoes—never a complete pair. Wallets, purses, fishing poles and miles of line.

  More jewelry than you might have thought, including once a diamond ring that proved to be nearly more trouble than it was worth, given the difficulty of selling it. Duck ended up going to a fence, knowing he was getting ripped off, but glad to be rid of the damned thing.

  Pipes, bongs and, more recently, vape pens. Whiskey bottles, not all of them empties. Beer cans, to be flattened and turned in for change. Cell phones lying dead in their watery graves, but once cleaned of muck surprisingly saleable at the flea market.

  And—this surprised him—only one body in all these years, the bullet hole in the middle of forehead neat, precise by comparison to the great gaping breaches inflicted by the turkey vul
tures who swooped down from on high, alligators who swam up from below, and the crabs that picked delicately about the edges.

  A briefcase, though. This was something new. He prodded it with his toe as he poled, the pirogue sliding low through the water, burdened by the cooler’s weight.

  No longer worried about being seen, Duck kept to the open water, out from under the trees that more than once had dropped a cottonmouth into the pirogue. He’d developed a quick scoop-and-flick motion of the pole to deposit snakes back in the water, but that only worked when you saw them coming.

  He passed occasional hummocks of more or less solid land, some with the vegetation-choked remains of shacks. People had always lived in the swamp, poor whites, escaped slaves, and the Creek and Seminole before that. Swamp hideouts had proved useful in the days of Prohibition; modern-day entrepreneurs had thought to try their hand at growing weed there, or stashing cocaine, the result being the swamp’s outer reaches were nearly as heavily traveled by dealers and the DEA as tourists and poachers.

  Duck poled placidly deeper into the swamp, losing himself in the hypnotic rhythm—lean, dig, push, glide—the water shushing away from the prow as the pirogue followed the silvery path lain down by the moon. What an outsider might have taken as a monotonous sameness of water and trees was as individual as signposts on city streets for Duck. Here, the cypress knee shaped like a camel; there, the place where twin rivulets ran into the main channel, and there, concealed by hanging vines, the side channel that would take him home.

  Duck turned the pirogue toward it and made a precautionary sweep of the vines with his pole. They fell into place behind him, a lacy green curtain that always made him feel like taking a bow whenever he parted it. A quarter mile ahead lay the hummock he called home.

  They rose singly and in pairs, elongated shapes shattering the water’s mirrored calm, slow-motion torpedoes homing in on the pirogue, rumbling low in their throats.

  A mouth gaped wide, pale in the moonlight, teeth like alabaster. At the first hiss, the swamp fell silent. Then another hiss, and another, exhalations so fast Duck hunched against them. He dropped the pole into the bottom of the pirogue and fumbled with the cooler’s latch, trying as always not to think what would happen if he didn’t reach it in time.

  He dug his hand into the mess within. The chicken guts were frozen when he’d picked them up at the processing plant that morning; they thawed by layers in the cooler. He swung his arm wide, turning his head against the stench, and opened his hand. The water boiled around the site of the splash.

  He scooped and threw, scooped and threw, until he’d burrowed down through the softened offal to the still-frozen layer, then poled as fast as he could away from the horror show behind him, the alligators in full bellow now, trees quaking with the reverberation.

  Each time he left the island, and each time he returned, he’d scrape away a new layer of chicken guts and throw it to the swarming gators, a routine to which they’d become so accustomed that they’d rush any approaching craft, his own version of sharks in a moat, and woe to anyone who lacked a way to distract them—at least, that was his theory, so far untested but reassuring nonetheless.

  He rinsed his hands in the water lapping at the edge of the hummock, then dragged the cooler up the ladder to the shack sitting high on its stilts, protection not only from alligators but from the occasional floodwaters when hurricanes swept through, then returned for the briefcase. He lit a match and turned up the wick on an oil lamp. The wick flared. His own shadow crawled up the wall. He ignored the combination lock on the briefcase, retrieved a screwdriver, and popped the hinges.

  He wasn’t surprised to see the cash, although based on recent years’ gleanings from the swamp, he’d expected bags of cocaine, nestling like marshmallows against one another. The surprise came in the amount, the briefcase packed so tight that when he lifted the lid, a couple of paper-banded packets of Benjamins slid out as though in relief from escaping their too-tight quarters. Damn, that was a lot of money.

  He picked up one of the packets, slit the paper binding with a thumbnail and riffled the bills, considering the opportunities they offered. No more long hot Saturdays at the flea market. Goodbye Ron Rico, hello…well, he didn’t know what kind of rum would replace it, other than the stuff in the fancy bottles up on the high shelves where the bums couldn’t pinch them. He couldn’t think of anything in the way of food—the swamp provided more than he could eat—other than a steak dinner in town once in a while. Maybe a new pirogue, although the one he had worked just fine. Hell, he could buy a new pirogue for each day of the week, eat steak dinners every night, knock back the kind of rum that would set him to howling at the moon, and not even get all the way through the bills in his hand, let alone the contents in the briefcase.

  Until this day, he might have added women to the list, although like the pirogue, his regulars were just fine. He supposed he could buy fancier ones, the kind with the hard fake titties and bare down there but for a wisp of landing strip, a little girl look that always made him avert his eyes. But over the years his regulars—Summer and Tessa and sweet Cinnamon, with a caboose to latch onto and let go a changed man—had become friends and he couldn’t imagine doing them like that.

  Except he was going to have to, all because of a girl who barely had a caboose at all, but whose witchy eyes and whiskey voice had taken him to a place he’d never been before.

  Duck blew out the oil lamp and walked out onto the gallery, examining the bills in the streaky light of dawn.

  He had an idea.

  The jeweler did the patented Duck triple-take—the bald head, the skin color, cheekbones-nose-lips, not to mention the frayed cargo shorts, the cracked flip-flops—and took a step back from the counter. Duck took a corresponding step forward and stood, letting the air conditioning chase the sweat from his skin, waiting for a rote offer of help. It didn’t come. He and the man eyeballed each other silently until Duck got bored with the game.

  “I’m looking for something for a lady.”

  The jeweler pointed to display cases beside the door. “That’s where we keep our more inexpensive…”

  Duck reached into one of the bulging pockets of his cargo shorts. The man’s hand moved below the counter. A panic button? A gun?

  His focus switched, fast, when Duck slapped the bills onto the counter. “There’s more where that came from. For something blue. And pretty.” He saw her face again, the parted lips, the ravenous eyes. “Not just pretty. Beautiful.”

  The man’s gaze slid to the cash, a slight tightening of the skin around his eyes and mouth his only reaction. Merchants in this part of Florida were used to drug money, depended on it, even, and had increased their high-end stock accordingly, Jaguars hard by the Chevys in the car lot, cinder-block taverns newly stocked with Cristal and single malt. “A moment.”

  He moved toward an alcove at the rear of the store, beckoning Duck to follow, pulling out a plush chair before a low table with a mirrored surface. Duck grabbed the money and settled himself.

  The jeweler clicked on a small lamp. “Something blue. Sapphires, then. Are we thinking a necklace, a bracelet, earrings? Perhaps all three?” A look at Duck’s face cut short his anticipatory chuckle. “Just these, then.”

  Two earrings tumbled onto the table, catching the light, refracting it in rainbows mirrored by the table into infinity. Tiny diamonds surrounded sapphire teardrops the size of Duck’s dirty fingernail. The man nattered on about carats and cut and clarity but Duck barely heard him, seeing instead the jewels swinging from Melody’s delicate lobes, brushing the pale satiny skin of her neck, the blue picking up the shade of her eyes.

  The man cleared his throat. “I take it, then, that these are satisfactory?”

  Duck nodded. He didn’t trust his voice. He shoved the packet toward the man.

  The man looked at it without touching it. “Ah…do you have more of those?” His laugh rose giddy and uncontrolled. “Unless, of course, y
ou only want one earring.”

  Duck swallowed. Retrieved his voice.

  “How many more?”

  “Three should do it. Technically you’d need another five thousand, but let’s call this a discount against future purchases. Once you see these on the lady, you’ll be back for the necklace.”

  Like hell I will, Duck wanted to say. He withdrew the necessary packets from the deep pockets of his cargo shorts.

  “I’ll wrap these real pretty for you.”

  “No.”

  Duck shoved the money at the man, snatched up the earrings, and left.

  The stones dropped warm from Duck’s large palm into Melody’s small cool one. “Don’t look until I’m gone.”

  He’d waited until the man Timmy had left the room with an empty ice bucket, sauntering toward the office. Red at the front desk would keep him talking awhile; that is, if he’d recovered from his shock at the amount of cash Duck had bestowed upon him.

  “Mister Makepeace Conard!” Melody gasped when she’d opened the door.

  “People call me Duck.”

  “I prefer Makepeace. It’s such an unusual name. A kind name. It suits you.”

  He folded her fingers around the earrings.

  “More alligators?” she guessed. The bracelet hung heavy on her thin wrist. His heart swelled at the sight. He lifted his gaze to her face. His regulars applied their makeup with a heavy hand, an occupational necessity designed to attract attention but one that fared badly in punishing heat. Melody’s pale face was scrubbed clean, no rings of melting mascara raccooning her eyes, no blush working its way south in an orange smear from cheekbone to jaw.