by Tom Cooper
The deputy, a gourd-shaped Dominican named Lemon, looked at the ponytailed man and then glanced down at his clipboard. “Hanson, is it?” he asked.
“John Henry Hanson,” the ponytailed man said. “Yessir.” He hung his thumbs from his canvas belt.
“What does it look like, Hanson?”
Hanson turned again and considered the sagging house. Paint was peeling off the clapboards in great leprous swatches and the front porch steps were spavined and weather-warped. Off to the side was a carport with a corrugated tin roof. No car, only buckets and paint cans and pallets of lumber, shovels and rakes and other gardening tools leaning against the walls.
“I’m no carpenter,” Hanson said.
“Man of your mental caliber can manage a little sanding and painting, I’m sure,” said Lemon. “You have any trouble with the hammer and nails, ask Cosgrove. He’ll tell you which pound which.”
Deputy Lemon got into the van and lurched away into the morning traffic. Hanson sidled up next to Cosgrove and watched the van turn down Magazine Street. Cosgrove, six foot two with a lumberjack beard, felt like a grizzly bear next to the little guy.
“Bet that son-bitch is on his way to fuck somebody’s wife,” Hanson said, gripping his belt buckle.
Up close the house looked even worse than from the street, beyond hope of repair. The front windows were cockeyed, many of the panes broken and covered with scraps of cardboard. Here and there the porch boards were missing, and from underneath the house the ammonia stink of animal piss wafted up as strong as poison.
Cosgrove and Hanson got to work with their scrapers. Lavender scabs of paint fell from the stanchions and motes of plaster swirled in the air. The only sounds for a while were the scratching of their tools, the rattle and groan of traffic on Napoleon. Ambulance and police sirens wailing in the distance.
When Hanson’s rhythm slowed, Cosgrove, feeling watched, glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough, the man was looking at him askance.
Cosgrove asked him what he wanted.
“Not very friendly, are you?”
Other people, mostly women, had told him the same. “Why don’t you talk?” they asked. “Why don’t you listen?” Because he liked silence, he wanted to say. Because there was nothing he wanted to say and nothing he wanted to hear. At first they found his silence alluring, mistaking it for mystery, depth. But then they learned there was nothing behind it except indifference, maybe a low-grade depression.
“Just trying to work,” Cosgrove said. Already his white V-neck T-shirt was stuck to his back with sweat.
“Work. Shit. We’re a corporation now?”
Cosgrove hadn’t wanted to seem unfriendly, just quiet. The less conversation, the better. Some guys never stopped once you let them get started. This guy already seemed one of them.
“Why you here?” he asked Hanson.
“Forged autographs.”
“Who?”
“Presidents. They busted me for selling pictures with fake autographs on them in Jackson Square. Some tourist got his dick in a pretzel because I was selling signed photographs of George Washington. Went to the cops.”
“There’re no photos of George Washington.”
“Bullshit. How’d they have painted those pictures?”
They got back to work. After a while Hanson asked Cosgrove how he ended up here.
“Public drunkenness,” Cosgrove said.
Hanson shook his head and snorted incredulously. “In New Orleans?” he said. “That’s like cops going out to the cemetery and arrestin’ folks for being dead.”
The next few days of Cosgrove’s community service were much the same. In the morning Deputy Lemon dropped them off and left them to their business. In the late afternoon he returned and surveyed their work like a plantation dandy, touring the house with his hands clasped behind his back. Whether Cosgrove and Hanson put in two minutes or two hours of work, his reaction was always the same. “All right, gentlemen,” he said, “that’ll do.” Sometimes Lemon even gave them coupons. For laser tag, for free pancakes and car washes, for complimentary admission into a Bourbon Street strip club called Love Acts.
Lemon seemed to give even less of a shit than other cops in New Orleans, which Cosgrove had thought impossible.
One afternoon, about two weeks into his community service, Cosgrove finally caught glimpse of the widow. In a rose-colored terrycloth robe hanging askew from her bony shoulders she watched him querulously through the kitchen window, her snowy hair as bed-headed as a child’s.
Cosgrove, digging up a dead rosebush, leaned against his shovel. Raised his hand, half smiled.
The window blind dropped as swiftly as a guillotine blade.
That afternoon as they took a break Hanson asked Cosgrove if he knew why they were fixing the old widow’s place.
Cosgrove grunted, didn’t give a shit.
“Lady’s going to die any day now and she owes county taxes all the way back to 1982,” Hanson said. He took off his cap, stroked his ponytail. “Soon as she kicks it, state’s taking everything. Down to the lightbulbs and hinges and every aspect.”
“So?”
“So? So, her family comes from French pirates. Lafitte. Exiles from the Caribbean. Been here all the way back. Practically invented crime in this city. Practically invented fuckin’.”
Sitting on the porch step chewing on a tuna fish sandwich, Cosgrove wondered if there was a moment in the day when shit wasn’t flying out of Hanson’s mouth. He stuffed the remaining half of his sandwich back into the brown paper sack and asked Hanson how he knew all of this.
“Did a little snooping around,” Hanson said. “Came out here on my day off with a tie on and knocked on some neighbors’ doors. Told them I was from the Census Bureau. This old lady, turns out she’s a real piece of shit. Always starting hell with the neighbors. Kicking them off her lawn during Mardi Gras. Every goddamn aspect.”
Cosgrove wondered what kind of person would believe this man had anything to do with the Census Bureau. Someone blind and deaf, he suspected. Someone crazy. Someone brain-damaged.
But he was intrigued despite himself. “I don’t see how it should make one bit of difference to us.”
Hanson smiled, crooked but clean teeth. “You seem like a man who can keep a secret,” he said.
“You know nothing about me.”
“I know enough. You’re not a rat. You’ve seen me fucking around here all day and haven’t said anything to Lemon. That counts for something in my book. Money, I’m guessing you don’t have much. Otherwise a lawyer with a state school diploma would’ve gotten you off.”
“That’s a whole lot of assuming.”
“Am I wrong?”
“What’re you on about?”
“Okay, what am I on about. The old lady, I bet she’s got some treasure in that house.”
GRIMES
Brady Grimes was here on behalf of the oil company. In their parlance, a liaison to minimize liability. Some such horseshit. Whatever designation they bestowed on him, he knew his purpose: to gather the signatures of as many fishermen and trawlers as he could. The public relations clusterfuck of the next several years was unavoidable, but the flood of compensation claims and lawsuits, the mob of lawyers and ambulance chasers, could be held at bay.
So, the oil company sent Grimes to shake trawlers’ hands, to listen to their stories, to offer words of promise and consolation. But most importantly, to collect signatures. For a ten-grand settlement, a pittance compared with what British Petroleum might have to pay years down the line, the company would protect itself from further claims. Better to open the checkbook now and make amends before the true extent of the oil damage surfaced years ahead.
“Do what you do,” Ingram, Grimes’s boss, told him. “Show your all-American face. Smile your all-American smile. Commiserate. Apologize, promise, lie. Anything. As long as they take the money and sign on the dotted line.”
At first Grimes protested. Why him? Why not someone who never s
tepped foot in southern Louisiana? After all, he was born in the Barataria, and as soon as he graduated high school he couldn’t leave fast enough.
Ingram said this was precisely the point. “Those swamp people will notice a Yankee right away,” he said. “And we want to send somebody who seems like they have a stake in the place.”
“But I don’t,” Grimes said. “I hate it there.”
“Seems, I said.”
“What if they don’t sign?”
“Grimes. Who am I talking to here? Of course they’ll sign. They’ve got no money. They’ve got to eat, right? Do I like it any better than you do? No. But it’s business. Trick is, you make it seem you’re doing them a favor. ‘Oh, this is terrible, a fucking tragedy, but let me help you out.’ You offer them ten grand at first, enough to make a difference. If they put up a fight the first few weeks, up it to fifteen. No way they’ll turn down fifteen. That’s enough to pull the stakes, take the circus somewhere else. Up it to fifteen but only give them a day. After that, then the settlement goes back down to ten. Put on the pressure.”
In the thrall of his deviousness, Ingram continued. “Tell them whatever huge payoffs and settlements they’re waiting for? A mirage. Which is true. You know how many forms they’ll have to fill out? How many of their forms will be quote-unquote lost? It’ll drive them crazy. They’ll never want to see another piece of paper as long as they live. Then there will be one appeal after another. As all that so-called settlement money gathers interest. A win-win situation.”
A win-win situation; Grimes found that hard to believe. News of the oil spill, the Macondo blowout, grew grimmer by the day. The end of the bayou as we know it, people were saying. Rita, Gustav, Katrina, these seemed like the bell tolls of the apocalypse, but this was really it. The oil company officials said one thing, the news anchors another, and then marine biologists flown in from universities far and wide contradicted them all. No one was sure what to believe except that the numbers were startling. The amount of oil and poison in the water, the millions upon millions the shrimping and fishing industries lost. Grimes had even heard about a trawler taking his own life, some poor bastard so broke and broken he shot himself through the temple at a Fourth of July barbeque.
Ecologists worried about the crude washing into the marsh. One tropical storm, one unlucky shift in the winds, would bring in a black tide that laid waste to the ecosystem. Herons, terns, cormorants, laughing gulls, frogs, lizards, alligators, redfish, mullet, oysters, crawfish, deer, muskrat.
And, yes: shrimp.
Last spring, a few months ago, as the desperation and confusion grew, there was mention from oil company executives of top kills and junk shots, talk from congressmen of setting fire to the sea. “Setting the sea on fire!” Baratarians marveled. Why not just bomb the goddamn town and get it over with?
Columnists opined in editorials that it was time to wean off the oil tit. Coastal Louisianans wrote letters back, saying that a drilling moratorium would be the final deathblow to the community.
People pointed fingers at British Petroleum, at Halliburton, even at the oil rig workers, of whom eleven were dead and over a hundred injured. Baratarians were certain of only one thing: none of the talking heads on television were telling the truth. BP said most of the oil was out of the water, that the cleanup operation was a success, but most of it was still there, deep down and out of sight.
And Baratarians didn’t need to hear the truth in order to know it. All they needed to do was look around. The truth was in the water and in the air and in the strange tides that washed ashore the dead birds and fishes, bone by blackened bone.
The company put Grimes up in a cracker-box motel in Jeanette, Louisiana, and by the end of the first week Grimes lost track of the hours he spent in living rooms and kitchens, in bayou shacks and shanties, listening to fishermen rail about the oil spill. Some of the men were old, others young, but they all had in common a seemingly inexhaustible outrage. They hoisted themselves out of chairs and lifted their T-shirts, showing him the angry rashes on their chests and arms. They complained of mysterious afflictions of the eyes, ears, and throat they said they never had before the rig explosion or dispersants. They pounded tables with their fists and called him obscene names and made threats. A few even spat out curses in French.
They almost always ended up taking the money.
He spent countless hours poring over the settlement papers, painstakingly explaining every nuance of legalese while the men listened woodenly. Sometimes Grimes suspected the trawlers were acting thickheaded out of spite. A coon-ass wariness of outsiders. But Grimes wasn’t an outsider. He was from the Barataria, couldn’t recall a time when he didn’t want to leave it. One of his trademark refrains, when people asked him about his past, was that he was born wanting to leave the swamp. That he wanted to leave it while still in the womb.
He thought he’d blend in easily once he was up in New York or Boston or Chicago. But as time passed and he entered his thirties it began to dawn on him that he’d always be an outsider. He was an outsider in the Barataria when he was growing up, so it had been foolish of him to think he’d belong someplace else simply by virtue of wanting to be there. Sometimes Grimes suspected that no matter how far he distanced himself, no matter how much time he spent away, there was a certain stink of the South that would never wash off him.
Up north people heard the bayou in his mouth, those telltale cadences. Untraceable to his ears, but there. And hearing his accent, people wanted to know about his past. Where was he from?
“Down South,” he’d say. “Little place middle of nowhere. Long ago. Another life.”
“Oh wow,” they’d say, nodding, pretending to be more interested than they were, “no kidding.”
Knew this guy was a coon-ass, Grimes was sure they were thinking. Coon-ass: one of those words like nigger. You could use it as a curse, a belittlement, an endearment, a self-deprecation, a damnation. It could be a complex muddle of all these things, depending on who said the word. Context was everything, context and intention.
“Living down there must’ve been paradise,” they’d say, “all that seafood.”
And Grimes, “Sure, oh yeah.”
Grimes detested seafood. All of it. He’d inherited from some obscure tributary of his family’s gene pool an aversion to the stuff. Shrimp, crab, redfish, it all tasted the same. Like rotting garbage marinated in sulfur water. But when Grimes was growing up, his family was so poor they often had to catch their meals, which meant seafood. He’d smother the shrimp and crawfish in ketchup and Zatarain’s just to choke the garbage down.
And now here he was, years later, driving hour after hour through the Barataria in his rental car. Nothing changed; still hardly even a town. No superstores or megamalls, just a loose strew of markets and restaurants and go-go bars around the crossroads. The whitewashed spire of a Catholic church, the squat cinder block hulk of a correctional facility, a tin-roofed zydeco dancehall. Roadside stands run by trawlers and fishermen, Creoles and Cajuns and Isleños selling crawfish and satsumas, their craggy faces like sun-basking turtles.
Amazing the place was still standing. The clapboard houses on creosoted pilings, so jury-rigged they looked ready to topple into the oblivion of the swamp. Same with the makeshift piers, the mud boats and trawling skiffs. Now and then Grimes spotted signs for SWAMP TOURS, some enterprising local who’d slapped a magnetic sign on the side of his boat. Grimes went on these tours against his will during high school field trips. Twenty dollars a head, a guy would take you into the bayou. He’d point out the hummock where escaped slaves once hid from their owners. The man-made hill where a thirty-two-room antebellum mansion once stood before the hurricane of 1915. The place on the horizon where the treasure-laden ships of the pirate Jean Lafitte once sailed.
The state’s dearth of infrastructure was awe-inspiring. Third World countries would deem the place an outpost of civilization. He passed through Lilliputian enclaves, most of them nameless, no more than a
few clapboard houses and shanties scattered on pilings along the levees. He made countless wrong turns, followed single-lane roads until they turned to rutted dirt lanes that dead-ended in swamp.
“Recalculating,” the GPS said. A scolding woman’s voice.
He would tell the machine to shut the fuck up.
“Recalculating,” the GPS would say again.
“Fuckin’ murder you,” Grimes said, lambasting the dashboard with his fist.
“Up ahead make next left,” the GPS told him.
There was no left. No nothing. Only cattail and bladderwort and black puddles of mud as far as the eye could see. Trackless swamp.
Grimes executed a thirty-point turn like an old crone, engine straining and smoking, wheels spitting up gouts of slime.
How much longer would he be here? A month? A year? Maybe he’d died and gone to hell.
On the leather passenger seat of the Town Car was a printed-out list of names, fishermen and trawlers who’d filed complaints and claims with the oil company. So far he was halfway through the K’s. For a spell this heartened him. This epic clusterfuck would soon be over. But then he gave the list a closer look, noticed all the surnames beginning with T’s and S’s. And the Z’s. He’d never seen so many Z’s in his life. An orgy of Z’s. Zatarain. Zimboni. Zane.
Then the other names. Trench and Toup. Lindquist and Larouche. Names he knew, names that were carved on the tombstones in the picayune cemeteries dotted around Jeanette.
And among the names on the list was his own: Grimes. The only surname beginning with a G remaining. Chris Grimes.
His mother.
A visit he was dreading and putting off.
At night Grimes returned to his motel room on the verge of collapse. He poured three fingers of whiskey into a plastic motel cup, loosened the knot of his tie, and threw himself onto the bed. He flicked aimlessly through the channels with the remote, the wash of pictures lulling him into a daze. President Obama delivering a sit-down news interview about the future drawdown of United States troops in Afghanistan. J. D. Salinger’s toilet for sale on eBay. A possible peace talk between Israel and Palestine in September. The Barataria was so small and smothering, it was easy to forget there was a whole other world going on out there.