by Tom Cooper
“My folks, buried in the ground.”
Now Grimes saw. Beyond a stand of oaks at the edge of the yard was a scattering of lichen-spotted tombstones, one much newer than the rest and glaring like a bright tooth in the sun.
“They can be reburied,” Grimes said.
Trench’s jaw dropped with parodic incredulity. “Dig them up?” he asked.
Grimes knew he had to proceed cautiously. “It’s done much more often than you would think.”
Trench looked down at the ground, scratched the side of his nose with his forefinger.
“These are licensed people. Consummate professionals. Your folks”—in Grimes’s ears the word came out with all the mellifluousness of a turd plopping into a tin bucket, so Lord only knew how Trench heard it—“they’d be treated with the greatest care and delicacy.”
“Guess it wouldn’t matter either way to them.”
After a moment Grimes allowed that maybe it didn’t.
“I’ll never sign,” said Trench. He took a final suck on his cigarette and spat it in the grass, heeling it out with his boot.
“I get that a lot.”
“Listen to me,” Trench said, pointing. “You can set me on fire and ask to piss out the flames and I’ll never sign.”
“One more question,” Grimes said.
Trench folded his arms over his chest and glared at the ground.
“Why here?” Grimes asked. “What’s so special?”
Trench said nothing. And his silence so infuriated Grimes that he spewed the venom that had been building up for weeks. “This is the middle of nowhere,” he said, “the end of the world.”
Trench smirked sardonically. “Is it, now?”
It was dark when Grimes returned to his motel room. He poured three fingers of bourbon into a plastic motel cup and sat on the edge of the creaking bed. He wrestled off his shoes and loosened the knot of his tie and called Ingram on his cell phone.
“I made a mistake,” he said.
“What now, Grimes?”
“I lost my temper.”
“What happened?”
“I couldn’t help it.”
On Ingram’s end of the line, a lighter snapped. Ingram was trying to kick his cigarette habit, but it seemed he smoked every time he was on the phone with Grimes.
Ingram asked what happened.
“I told this Trench guy that this place was a shithole.”
“No, Grimes. No.”
“I didn’t use those exact words. I said something like this is the end of the world.”
Ingram breathed slowly through his teeth. “And what did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. But he didn’t seem to like it.”
“Grimes. You just pissed away weeks of work. Months. Because you couldn’t keep your mouth shut. How many times do we have to go through this?”
“It hasn’t happened in a while.”
“It shouldn’t happen ever.”
“You don’t understand. This guy. This guy, he’s like Bartleby the fucking Scrivener.”
“I’m hanging up, Grimes.”
“The story. By Melville. The one about the file clerk? His boss keeps asking him to do the simplest things, the simplest most basic fucking common-sense things you can imagine, and the guy, no matter what, keeps on saying I’d rather not. You want some lemonade? I’d rather not. You want a raise? I’d rather not. You want a blowjob? I’d rather not. That’s this guy. Bob Trench.”
“Level with me, Grimes.”
“What?”
“Are you drinking again?”
“No,” Grimes lied. “Why?”
THE TOUP BROTHERS
It was half past one when the black Suburban shuddered up the twin-rutted drive to Lindquist’s house, the only light from the moth-haloed porch globe throwing the long shadow of the birdbath, like a fedora’d man’s silhouette, across the yard.
The Toup brothers knew that Lindquist was now on his boat in the Barataria. That his wife had moved out months ago. That his kid, Reagan the redhead with the big tits, was grown up and living on her own. Small town like this, all you had to do was ask around. Sometimes you didn’t even have to do that much. They also knew that someone who spent so many nights metal detecting in the bayou had to be convinced he was chasing after something worthwhile.
Victor and Reginald stepped around the house, peering through the windows one by one. The night was silent save for the calling of crickets and frogs, their footfalls in the dead leaves and nettles. The stealthy rustling of an animal, possum or raccoon, creeping farther into the woods.
The front door lock was cheap and flimsy and it took Victor all of five seconds to jimmy it open with a snake-rake pick. They stepped inside and Victor fumbled for the wall switch and flicked it on.
Goodwill sofa. Green shag carpet from the seventies. Wood-paneled walls.
“Looks like a place you die in,” Victor said.
The stench of garbage wafted from the back of the house. The brothers turned to one another with wrinkled faces. They went past the littered dining room table to the kitchen, where they found three black trash bags heaped beside the back door. One of the bags was split and a tar-black puddle of slime had seeped onto the olive-green linoleum.
“Fuckin’ slob,” Victor said, holding the back of his hand against his nose.
The brothers walked again into the living room and went down the end of the hall to the master bedroom. Victor flicked on the light and went to a chest of drawers and riffled through socks and underwear and T-shirts. Reginald sat on the edge of the unmade bed and sorted through the junk in a nightstand drawer. A half-furled tube of ointment. A green pocket-sized Bible. A pair of drugstore reading glasses. Empty prescription bottles.
The brothers searched through another bedroom and then they returned to the kitchen, where they opened the cupboards and looked through coffee cans and cereal boxes.
Victor stood for a moment with his hands on his hips, staring up at the water-stained ceiling. He went to the refrigerator and opened it and peered inside at the barren shelves. A festering onion speckled with blue-gray mold. A six-pack of Abita beer. A bottle of Texas Pete hot sauce.
The brothers were back in the living room when Reginald called Victor over to the dining room table. They stood for a moment studying the array of old maps. Victor picked one of them up, a map of the Barataria waterways and islands, the complex maze of canals and cheniers. They owned such maps themselves. On this one Lindquist had marked with purple pen his meandering progress through the bayou, a stuttering line like a stitch. The path stopped at the small pear-shaped chenier where they’d seen him the other night. A scant half mile away was the dewdrop shape of their island.
“Look at this,” Victor said, pointing.
Reginald looked and huffed air through his nose.
“Goddamn if this guy ain’t crazy,” Victor said.
LINDQUIST
Lindquist was asleep on the couch when someone knocked on the front door and woke him. He sat upright and rubbed his stinging eyes and blinked down at his watch. Three o’clock in the afternoon. The night before he’d returned home and discovered his bedroom drawers opened and mussed, cans and boxes toppled over in the kitchen cabinets. At first he figured either Gwen or Reagan must have let herself in, but then he remembered they didn’t have the new keys. No, he must have fucked things up himself while somnambulating in a fog of beer and pills.
There was knocking again, this time more insistent. He rose from the couch and shuffled toward the door—quietly, in case it was a creditor. He held his breath and squinted through the peephole. On the doorstep stood his daughter, wearing a purple blouse printed with little cream-colored flowers, and a white chiffon scarf wrapped loosely around her neck. Her hair was done up with bobby pins and she looked bright-eyed and rested. A welcome change.
“I hear you in there, Daddy,” Reagan said through the door.
“Yeah, yeah,” Lindquist said. “Hold on.”
&n
bsp; He turned around and glanced quickly about. The remnants of a ground-up pill on the coffee table, an incriminating streak of pharmaceutical dust. He went over and swept the powder onto the floor and heeled it into the carpet.
Lindquist smoothed the back of his hair and opened the door. Reagan stepped in and pecked him on the cheek and looked around the room. “Jesus, Daddy,” she said. “You been partying?”
“Me, naw,” he said. “Nothing like that now.”
She went to the couch and sat with her red leather purse in her lap. Lindquist sat in the faded plaid recliner across from her.
“Wasn’t expecting company,” he said.
“You look thinner.”
“I lost an arm.”
“Daddy. That’s not funny.”
Lindquist shrugged. “Hey, were you in here last night?” he asked. Lightly, because he didn’t want to sound accusatory.
“Here, the house?”
“Yeah, I came home this morning and a bunch of my papers were messed up. Stuff in my bedroom.”
“I don’t even have a key anymore. Remember? Mom changed the lock after you guys had that fight two or three years ago.”
Lindquist made an O with his mouth. Yes, the famous Fourth of July fight where he’d gotten drunk and high on pills at a party thrown by one of Gwen’s coworker friends. He’d told nasty Polish jokes and set off cherry bombs in his prosthesis and ended up accidentally burning some lawn furniture. Gwen threw him out of the house for that fiasco and he had to stay at the Econo Lodge in Houma for a week.
“Maybe it was Bosco,” Reagan said.
“Oh, baby. That cat’s been dead two years.”
Now it was Reagan’s turn to look surprised.
Finally Lindquist saw why his daughter was wearing the scarf. The raspberry medallion of a hickey showed over the edge of the fabric. He thought about asking Reagan if her boyfriend was a lamprey. If she was attacked by a plunger. But some jokes were verboten, a courtesy he tendered exclusively to his daughter.
He picked a nub of fabric off the tattered arm of the recliner and rolled it into a pill between his thumb and forefinger and flicked it booger-like across the room. It pinged off his daughter’s ear—Lindquist could see the little gnat-sized thing in the sunlight—and landed somewhere in the carpet.
“Nice hickey,” Lindquist said. He couldn’t help himself.
Reagan ignored the comment. “Why you wearing that nasty old thing?” she asked.
“I like this shirt, me.”
“The hook arm.”
“You don’t like it?”
“Where’s your other?”
“I kinda like this old hook arm, me. Wait until the first guy screws with me. Wham! Right in his face with this thing. Word’ll be all over town. Don’t screw with Lindquist. He’ll mess you up with his hook arm.”
His daughter was watching him. Waiting.
“It was stolen,” Lindquist said.
Reagan’s jaw dropped and her bottom teeth showed, the same expression his wife got when she was distressed. Getting more like her mother every day, his girl.
“Oh God, Daddy,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What good would it do? You gonna get a search team together?”
“I would’ve come over. To cook. To whatever.”
“To cook?” Lindquist asked.
“Why you gotta say it like that?”
“I’m just playing.”
“You’re playing rough today.” She filched a box of cigarettes from her purse and shook one out and lit it. She inhaled and blew out smoke and leaned forward to tap the ash of the cigarette in the beanbag ashtray on the coffee table.
Lindquist glanced at his watch. Five hours from now he’d have to be back in the bayou if he wanted to get any decent shrimping done. The prospect of nearly killing himself out there with the mosquitoes, all for forty or fifty dollars, made him nauseous.
“What kind of sick dickhead would steal an arm?” Reagan asked.
Lindquist shrugged. “How’s your mother?”
Reagan turned her face and looked at him sideways.
“I can’t ask?”
“I’m not gonna be a go-between.”
They were quiet for a while, Reagan surveying the cluttered room, the dining room table strewn with tide charts and boating maps and pirate books.
“Still at it with the metal detecting?” Reagan said.
“You think it’s weird?”
“A little.”
“Well, hell. You used to think it was cool.”
“Yeah. When I was little.”
Lindquist slapped his thigh and got up. “Almost forgot,” he said. “Got you something.”
“What?”
“A surprise.”
“I didn’t come for anything,” Reagan said to Lindquist’s back as he went down the hall.
In the bedroom he opened the bureau drawer and rummaged among the loose change and receipts and Mardi Gras trinkets. He picked out a heart locket hung on a wisp-thin gold-plated chain and blew off the lint and dust. He glimpsed his daughter in the bureau mirror. She was standing at the dining room table and she picked up one of his pill bottles and opened it. She shook out a couple pills and slipped them in her purse and set the pill bottle back in its place.
In the den Lindquist held out the necklace to his daughter. Her smile faltered. She was expecting more, something else. Money, no doubt.
“Found that metal detecting.”
She dangled the necklace from her fingers so it caught the light. “It’s pretty,” she said.
“Tell your mother. Tell her I’m finding treasure.”
“You’re something else,” Reagan said. She hugged him and Lindquist hugged her back, his hook arm angled awkwardly.
There was something about her posture, an expectant air, that told him she was waiting for something. Lindquist dug into his pocket and took out a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to her.
“You sure?”
He reached out and held her fingers and closed them around the bill. “Only money,” he said.
WES TRENCH
After Lindquist left him at the harbor, Wes opened all the windows of his rickety Toyota truck and made a makeshift bed in the truck cab. A dusty-smelling moving blanket for a mattress, an old T-shirt for a pillow, a beach towel for a top sheet. He was filthy and hot and exhausted but had trouble falling asleep because it was the fifth anniversary of his mother’s death. Somewhere, right now, his father was no doubt grief-stricken over the fact. Like him. Well, he’d have to suffer on his own. They both had to suffer on their own now. Wes thought of his mother’s voice, tried to fill his head with its sweet soft cadence—it’s okay, Wessy—and he wept himself to sleep. Every so often the calls of trawlers woke him, their raucous voices carrying across the bayou, but he turned on his side and sunk back under.
Come sundown he was startled awake when someone rapped his knuckles on the window glass. Lindquist. Only faint orange light remained above the treetops, like the torn edge of pumpkin-colored construction paper, birds flitting through the gloaming.
Wes opened the rear cab door and slid out.
Holding a metal detector in his good hand, Lindquist winced at the sight of Wes. “Christ, kid. You die?”
“Sorry.”
“Well, hell. Change your clothes at least. Closet’s in the cabin. Grab any old thing. Just so I don’t have to smell you.”
Wes went aboard and Lindquist followed. From the cabin closet Wes dug out an old pair of jean shorts, so big around the waist that he had to belt them tight with a length of nylon rope. Then Wes found an old T-shirt that said THE BAHAMAS on the front and put it on.
When Wes climbed onto the deck in his new clothes, Lindquist was peering down from the wheelhouse as he coasted through the twilit bayou.
“I wanna tell you something,” Lindquist said.
“What’s that.”
“You look like an asshole.”
“They’re your clo
thes,” Wes said.
“You’re wearing them wrong.”
After a while they were out in the bay and Wes put the starboard net in the water and let out one hundred feet of cable and locked down the winch. He did the same with the port side and then he waited with his arms crossed over the gunwale. A chemical stink hung in the air, like he imagined napalm might smell in those Vietnam movies his Dad liked to watch. His Dad: he tried to push him out of his head. He spat into the water and looked out over the dark and muggy bay. From a distance came a whining grumble, which grew louder until a two-prop plane passed about five hundred feet overhead, its roar so loud Wes covered his ears.
Soon Lindquist slowed the boat to quarter speed and Wes hoisted up the nets, watching the cables and grates as they swung aboard. He dumped the haul on the deck and took the wooden paddle from its peg on the wall and began to poke through the pile of wriggling sea life.
Lindquist idled the Jean Lafitte and climbed down the wheelhouse ladder and squatted on the deck, sorting through the fingerling fish and puny shrimp with the hook of his prosthetic arm. Several of the fish were dead. So were a few blue crabs.
Lindquist picked one up, turned it over and looked at its gills, which were supposed to be pinkish white but were dirty gray. “Ever wonder why we’re doing this?” he asked.
“Sometimes,” Wes said. His eyes were watery and stinging from the chemical fumes. He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.
“No matter how hard you work, comes to nothing.”
“My dad says that a lot.”
“Your old man’s right.”
They were quiet for a time. Lindquist tossed a croaker back into the water, Wes a baby redfish cankered with lesions the size of hot pepper flakes.
“You smell that?” Lindquist asked.
Wes nodded, made a face.
“Suppose this stuff is poisoned?”
“They say it’s okay on the news. The Environmental whatever.”
“EPA?”
“Yessir.”
“You believe them?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve seen shrimp with no eyes, me,” Lindquist said.
“I saw a three-eyed redfish one time.”