by Tom Cooper
He uncapped a purple felt-tip pen with his teeth, studying the map, marking over one of the islands. He reached for his beer, but his right arm still wasn’t there. He dropped the pen and clutched the bottle, thinking of the last thing Gwen had told him before she left.
You’re in a bad place, she’d said. You need help.
Lindquist finished his beer, went to the refrigerator and got another, sat back down at the dining room table and opened his laptop. In Google he typed Jean Lafitte and pulled up more than a million results. Then he typed in Lafitte and Barataria and got nearly two hundred and fifty. He typed in the words treasure and gold and pirate and then he typed in other search terms until he stumbled upon a treasure-hunting board where men—only men—had posted their metal detecting stories. One of the posts showed pictures of brass mushroom buttons and musket balls and doubloons, another a War of 1812 artillery button, another yet an 1851 Officer’s Eagle Sword belt plate.
He was still at the kitchen table drinking his beer and browsing through the treasure pictures when his e-mail pinged. He opened up the new message and read it.
TO : LINDQUIST007@gmail.com
FROM: Youredead98989898@gmail.com
WE KNOW WHO U R. WHERE U LIVE. U TRESSPASSING PRIVATE PROPERTY. THIS IS UR ONLY WARNING.
Lindquist’s heart kicked and his body went rigid. He sat for some time at the dining room table wondering what to write. Then he typed one-fingered. “WHOSE THIS?” He tapped the delete button several times. Rewrote the original message. Hesitated. Hit send.
He waited, the only sounds the ticking house timbers as they sighed out the heat of the day, the thumping of moths against the windowpane. The faint white hum of the lightbulb filament in the ceiling fixture.
Lindquist’s e-mail pinged again.
TO : LINDQUIST007@gmail.com
FROM: Youredead98989898@gmail.com
STAY AWAY FROM THE ISLANDS, FUCKFACE.
WES TRENCH
Midnight. Wes and his father followed the trail from their house toward the harbor. Even from a quarter mile distant, through the palmetto brakes and waist-tall swamp grass, they could hear singing voices carrying through the marsh, the faint quick-tempo strains of zydeco music: the blessing of the shrimping fleet. For the past five years Wes and his father had forgone the ritual, waiting until Father Neely was done blessing the boats until they journeyed to the docks. Wes’s father was still angry at God about what happened to his mother. They both were.
One of many things they never spoke about.
It was dark except for the beams of their flashlights skeltering across the ground, the cherry of Wes’s father’s cigarette. His cotton-white hair, high and tight. Above them a cloud-dimmed quarter moon gleamed through a lacework of live oak branches. They followed a bend in the trail around a stand of sand pine and crossed a rough-board footbridge over a creek. A black snake sidewindered across the water and slipped inklike into the bracken.
Now Wes could hear the grumbling of boat engines, the wheezing stutter of an accordion. The clickety-clack of a washboard, a boat captain shouting orders at his crew. “Don’t lay them nets there,” said a man with a salt-cured voice. “Starboard, asshole, starboard.”
One of Wes’s earliest memories was of making this trip through these same woods. On an August night like this, breezeless and heavy with the scent of loam. His father was sprightlier then because this was before his chronic backaches, before the shrimping hauls got smaller and smaller, before all his hair turned white.
Wes’s mother held his damp hand in hers as they followed his father in the dark. He could feel the cold metal kiss of her wedding ring.
“How many shrimp you gonna catch, Daddy?” Wes asked.
“Know Mount St. Helens?” his father said.
“Naw, sir.”
“Mount Rushmore?”
“Naw, sir.”
“You know Miss Hamby, your math teacher with the big ass?”
Wes’s mother told him to hush.
He was happier then, Wes’s father. Hopeful. They all were.
It was around this time, maybe a year or two later, when Wes came home from school and found a midnight-blue Schwinn waiting for him in the driveway. His father had hauled in a three-ton catch, ridiculously lucky, and bought the bike, new, on a whim.
And later that night while his mother washed the dishes Wes saw his father come up to her from behind and put his hands on her hips. She turned around and they kissed with their eyes closed, something he saw only once or twice before and once or twice after.
Wes didn’t know this then, but he knew it now: whoever said that money didn’t buy happiness was a damn fool. A damn fool who’d never been poor.
On the other side of the bridge Wes and his father followed the trail up a slippery rise. They stepped over a lichened footlog and saw the harbor lights glimmering through the pines. About thirty or forty people stood on the docks, their silhouettes against the amber lights of the pier. Ship captains and crewmen stood aboard skiffs and oyster luggers, filling bait wells with ice, untangling trawling nets. A few of the boats were already entering the bay, their Christmassy red and green pilot lights glinting on the horizon.
Wes’s father flicked his cigarette into the bushes and they stepped onto the dock. In the harbor parking lot a few folding tables were set up with crockpots of gumbo, paper plates, plastic spoons. Transistor radios droned in competition, one playing a pop station out of New Orleans, another an AM talk show out of Baton Rouge. A big-bellied old woman was boiling crabs in a gas-lit kettle. A hunchbacked man fingered the mother-of-pearl buttons of his wheezing accordion. Another man scraped his vest frottoir with rusty spoons.
Wes had known these faces his whole life. They were captains and crewmen, crabbers and trappers. In May they shrimped for pinks and in August for whites. In the fall some of them went after alligators and oysters. And they were the sons and daughters of captains and crewmembers, still too young to help on the boats. The heavyset wives with harried faces and graying hair. The grandmothers and grandfathers with rueful eyes and worried toothless jaws.
“Hey, Bobby,” a man said to Wes’s father. He had on yellow waders and pulled a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket and tapped the bottom with his gnarled forefinger. He lipped the cigarette.
“Where the hell you been, Davey?” Wes’s father said.
“Daytona,” Davey said. “Workin’ on one of those charter boats for a bunch of rich Florida fucks.”
A few years ago Davey had worked for Wes’s father, but he quit and joined the crew of a bigger boat when the hauls got smaller and smaller and when the price of shrimp went down. A bigger boat meant a bigger paycheck. Wes’s father didn’t begrudge him the fact. He knew how hard it was scraping by in the Barataria and probably would have done the same.
“You like it over there?” Wes’s father asked.
“Yeah, it was paradise,” Davey said. He lit his cigarette and scrunched one side of his face against the smoke. “Just about gave all this up,” he said, gesturing across the bayou at the boats shambling out of the harbor, at the bent trees brooding over the water.
At the end of the dock a bare-chested little boy pissed gleefully into the bayou. When he finished he zipped up his camouflage shorts and hopped barefoot like a monkey back to his mother. Wes was about this boy’s age when he started coming out here to the harbor. Young enough to remember the air of festivity that once presided over these first nights of the shrimping season. The fais-do-dos, the Cajun dances. Those were better times for everyone in the Barataria. Before the bayou started grubbing out smaller and smaller hauls of shrimp. Before the oil spill. Before Katrina.
Before Wes’s mother died.
“Any word yet?” Wes’s father asked.
“Couple of guys already radioed in,” Davey said. “Shrimp look thin. Early yet, though.”
“Oil?”
“Everywhere.”
Davey looked at Wes. “How you
doin’, podnah? Thought you’d’a gone Ivy League on us by now.”
Wes forced a grin and shook his head. College, he already knew, was pretty much out of the question.
“Boy, is that gray in your hair already?” Davey said.
“A bit, yes sir,” Wes said. Just after his sixteenth birthday, the gray had begun to pepper the sides of his head. A little at first, but every time he got his hair cut there were several new grays and Wes guessed he’d be as white-haired as his father before he turned thirty.
“You two come on over to the house for supper when all this dies down, huh?” Davey said.
“We will, Davey,” Wes’s father said. “You say hello to Kelly and Renee now.”
“Shuh, shuh.”
Wes followed his father down the dock to their boat and hopped onto the deck and untied the ropes from the dock cleats. He heard someone step behind him and turned. It was Father Neely in his cassock and alb, the sweat on his forehead gleaming in the dock lights.
“How you, Father,” Wes said. He stood and shook the man’s hand. Soft and damp. Never a day of boat work in his life.
“Wesley,” Father Neely said. “Good to see you, son.” He glanced up at the boat, said hello to Wes’s father, who was coiling up the mooring rope. He only held up his hand and turned his back. Then he climbed the metal ladder up to the wheelhouse. Through the window Wes saw the spark of his lighter, the guttering flame of the candle nub beside the wheel. Another spark when his father lit a cigarette.
“You guys missed the blessing,” Father Neely said, tactful enough to not say again.
“Running late tonight,” Wes said.
“Shuh, of course,” Father Neely said. He glanced up at the wheelhouse and smoothed down his smoke-yellowed mustache with his thumb and forefinger. He looked back at Wes and dug in his robe pocket and fished out a St. Christopher medallion. Wes hesitated. He knew his father wouldn’t want it but neither could he exactly turn it down. He took the medallion and pocketed it and thanked Father Neely.
“I’ll pray for a prosperous season,” Father Neely said.
Wes thanked him again and said that they needed all the praying they could get.
Their boat, the Bayou Sweetheart, was a thirty-three-year-old Lafitte skiff, one of the few of its kind in Jeanette that survived the hurricane. Weeks after the storm, when Wes and his father began picking through the ruins, they found the boat miraculously intact, sitting on top of the levee as if placed there by a benevolent giant’s hand.
Like many other Baratarians, Wes and his family had chosen to ride the storm out. Or, really, Wes’s father had chosen for them. When Wes’s family woke on the morning of August 28 and turned on the television, the weatherman on WGNO news out of New Orleans was predicting a Category 5 hurricane. One-hundred-and-fifty-mile-per-hour wind gusts, fifteen-foot storm surges, levee breaks. A monster.
The first winds were just beginning, moaning in the eaves, and outside the sky had already blackened to charcoal, so dark the trees in the yard threw off a strange glow, as if lit from within.
“We should leave,” Wes’s mother said for the umpteenth time.
They stood before the old Zenith in the den. Still in their bedclothes, faces puffy with sleep.
“You know how many times they’ve said this and it turned out to be nothing?” Wes’s father said. The worry wasn’t yet showing in his eyes, but there was an edge in his voice.
Thunder shook the house and rattled the windowpanes. Their black Labrador, Max, scampered to the kitchen and hid under the table, where he watched them timorously, head on forepaws.
“We can stay in Baton Rouge,” said Wes’s mother. She meant her parents’ place.
“Come on, Dad,” Wes said, wondering how his father could be so blasé, wanting to take him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him.
But his father was watching the television, rubbing his unshaven chin, hardly listening. “Then you and Wes go ahead and pack. But you better get to it. Now. Before the roads get too choked up.”
“You too. You’re going.”
Wes’s father shook his head as if this were out of the question. “I gotta tie down the boat. Help other guys with theirs. I gotta board up these windows. There’s a million things.”
“Listen to the TV,” said Wes’s mother.
“They always say this stuff. It’s their job.”
All morning Wes figured his father would come to his senses and change his mind, but no. And by afternoon, when the first bands of the storm lashed the Barataria, it was already too late to leave. That night the hurricane hammered Jeanette like a djinn. Within hours, houses and mobile homes were smashed apart and swept away like dollhouses. Docks ripped from land and carried down streets turned into raging rivers. Boats snapped away from their moorings and were sucked into riptides.
By the time the storm had run its course, several people in Jeanette drowned in the flood.
Among them Wes’s mother.
That was almost exactly five years ago, and the anniversary of his mother’s death, August 29, was just half a month away. A day Wes was dreading. Half a decade ago: that meant he’d now lived almost one third of his life without her. He was amazed so much time had passed. Yet the pain was still there, the regrets and resentments between him and his father. There were little things about her he was forgetting, gestures and sayings he struggled to remember. But he recalled her voice distinctly, sometimes even heard it in his dreams. The sweet soothing lilt, a soft halcyon balm on his nerves. Oh, it’ll be fine, Wessy. Oh, Wessy, stop being such a worrywart.
What a strange pair Wes’s mother and father had been, she the quasi-Bohemian peacekeeper in Birkenstocks, he the hotheaded live wire. Wes often wondered whom he took after most. He preferred to think he was more like his mother in certain respects—the most important, like temperament. But he wasn’t sure. As time passed he found himself growing angrier, more doubtful and worried, like his father. But his father’s stubbornness and resourcefulness, those were good, and Wes felt those beating in his blood.
Sometimes Wes caught his father glancing at him strangely. He supposed it was because he looked a lot like his mother now that he was full grown. He was slightly short and narrow-shouldered, just like his mother, and his skin browned darkly in the sun instead of reddening to brick like his father’s. And Wes had his mother’s sharp widow’s peak. Her wide-set green eyes, teal in the winter and pale mint in the summer, depending on the darkness of his tan, the color of shirt he wore. Girls in his high school were always telling him what pretty eyes he had. Wes’s mother used to say he’d never have a problem with the ladies as long as he stayed a gentleman and kept his eyes in his head.
Recently a memory came back to Wes that he’d long forgotten. One of his friends, Tommy Orillon, offered him a stick of gum at a Fourth of July barbeque and Wes took it, not knowing it was blackberry-flavored. As soon as the taste flooded his mouth, Wes remembered the time his mother took him blackberry picking when he was eight or nine.
The day Wes remembered, a sunny Sunday morning in late June, he and his mother held their own tin pails and they were picking among the thorny bushes beside a still-water creek, making a kind of game out of who could gather the most. Wes picked his blackberries so quickly he ended up nicking his hand in dozens of places with the briars. The lashes began to sting only when the game was over, after they returned home. His mother cupped his hands in hers as he sat crying on the fuzzy cover of the bathroom toilet. “Poor Wessy,” she said, gently daubing his fingers with a Mercurochrome-soaked cotton ball. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said, stroking her fingers through his hair.
Tonight Wes’s father commandeered the wheel while Wes readied the booms. Under the cloud-shawled moon they yawed through the bayou, passing buoys hung with oil company signs.
DANGER, DO NOT ANCHOR. GAS LINE.
PROPERTY OF BP OIL.
CAUTION: PIPELINE.
Wes fiddled with his cell phone, checking Facebook, beca
use soon they’d have no signal.
“Quit fooling with that phone,” his father called down from the wheelhouse. “Like a baby on a titty. I swear.”
Wes clenched his jaw and pocketed his cell phone. Starboard was a peninsula bowered with dwarf oak and scrub pine. Through the rushes Wes could see a small graveyard, bone-white mausoleums like crooked teeth, a brick fireplace like a basilisk in a clearing. An antebellum mansion belonging to the Robicheaux, a five-generation Creole family, once stood here. They’d evacuated before the storm and when they returned they found everything in ruins and went back to Texas. Last Wes heard, they were running a fried chicken stand in Galveston.
When the Bayou Sweetheart reached the pass, the water was scrummed with boats passing back and forth within feet of each other, jockeying for position. A festive glow suffused the water from their red and green running lights. Horns shrilled madly in the night. Men screamed threats and curses from pilothouses and decks.
A tire-bumpered oyster lugger passed their boat. A wizened deckhand, maybe thirty, maybe sixty, impossible to tell, shouted at Wes. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, lookit.”
When Wes turned, the man tossed something from a tin cup. Wes twisted away, but too late. A foul-smelling yolk splattered across his face. Wes wiped with his hand and looked at his fingers. Chum.
The man and his crewmen cackled. Wes gagged against the fishy reek and cleaned his face with the end of his shirt. The man on the oyster lugger shucked down his waders and mooned him. His ass was enormous and inflamed-looking, like an orangutan’s.
Wes’s father slowed the boat to quarter-speed and Wes lowered the booms and dipped the nets into the water. Other boats passed within yards, laboring crewmen hunched in shadowy cameo. Wes moved between starboard and port, checking the booms.