by Tom Cooper
“Saw a three-tittied mermaid, me.”
They chuckled.
“Just you and your pop?” Lindquist asked.
“Yessir.”
“Ma split?”
“She’s gone.”
“Indiana?”
“What?”
“She go to Indiana?”
“No, she’s passed.”
Lindquist’s eyes fell somberly on Wes. “Well, hell,” he said. “Sorry to hear that, kid.” Then, just a few seconds later, “Knock knock.”
At first Wes thought he misheard Lindquist. Surely he wasn’t telling a joke now.
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?” Wes asked grudgingly.
“Asshole.”
Wes waited. “Good one.”
“No, you gotta say ‘Asshole who.’ ”
“Asshole who?”
“Asshole wearing my clothes fell asleep in the back of his truck.”
Wes shook his head.
At dawn they dropped off their haul and Lindquist paid Wes in the harbor parking lot. Already the air was beginning to burn and simmer, steam rising in a thick fog off the bayou. They were walking to their trucks in the marina when Lindquist asked, “You gonna sleep in your truck again?”
“I guess so,” Wes said.
Lindquist grunted and walked over to Wes. He rooted in one of the sagged-down pockets of his cargo pants and took out a key ring and tossed it to him. Wes caught it one-handed against his chest and Lindquist told him to take the small silver key on the end.
Wes asked if he was sure.
Lindquist nodded and said, “Just don’t burn the fuckin’ boat down, all right?”
For the next several days in early September, after he and Lindquist returned at sunup from shrimping, Wes stayed behind on the Jean Lafitte. He hosed the bycatch slime from the deck and bathed in the boat’s tiny standing shower and then he lay down in the single bed with the lumpy mattress and pillow. The cabin was small and wood-paneled, on the walls an antique brass barometer, a rusted Louisiana license plate, a sun-faded poster from the 1970s of Farrah Fawcett in a red swimsuit. The shelves were crammed with treasure books and magazines and Wes flipped through them when he was trying to get to sleep. He came across a bunch of stuff about Civil War sites and shipwrecks, about pirate treasure in Louisiana and Alabama and Florida. The pages of these were always dog-eared and finger-smudged. Wes had to admit the pictures and stories were interesting, if far-fetched and crazy.
Then there were a few books about the pirate Jean Lafitte. Wes read one of them straight through. He already knew some of the background from school. Louisiana was once the back of beyond, the book said, passed back and forth between France and Spain like a bastard child. Then Thomas Jefferson bought the territory from Napoleon for less than three cents an acre. But Louisiana stayed an outpost. A backwater way station along the route of westward expansion. Especially the Barataria, its labyrinthine expanse of waterways and barrier islands an ideal haven for runaway slaves and refugees.
And pirates, according to the book, which was why Jean Lafitte chose the Barataria as his base of operation. Here Lafitte and his privateers staged raids on cargo ships, ferried the booty via pirogue to New Orleans. The French and Spanish in the city didn’t care where their goods came from as long as they got them. The whores got their perfumes and silks, the Creoles their spices and tobacco, the bourgeoisie their booze and slaves.
For some time Lafitte’s enterprise and infamy only grew. Gunners and shipbuilders and carpenters—outcasts from all over the globe—joined Jean Lafitte’s crew. They reared families, grew crops, built stockades and brothels. The Barataria became a home away from home for pirates and outlaws and bastards. And Lafitte himself was rumored to have sired a bastard child or two. The author’s word: sired. Wes didn’t know what it meant and didn’t have a dictionary but figured it must have meant fathered.
When Governor Claiborne issued a reward for Lafitte’s capture, the pirate did what a pirate does. He hid his riches far and wide across the bayou. His fellow brigands, knowing their heyday was over, probably did the same.
There weren’t many passages about lost gold in the book, but they were all highlighted. Maybe Lindquist was onto something after all, Wes thought. He didn’t see the harm in Lindquist’s treasure hunting. And he didn’t think it was crazy. If he never found anything, so what? He wasn’t hurting anybody.
And who didn’t like a treasure hunt? Wes suspected everybody was chasing after treasure in a way. A lottery ticket, a baseball card, a long-lost photo of a high school sweetheart.
A boat.
Wes and Lindquist kept shrimping, one dismal outing after the next. They left at dusk and returned at dawn, dragging themselves off the boat like mannequins. Montegut’s payout was always far less than they hoped. Almost insulting. Every day restaurants were canceling their shipments and ordering freeze-dried shrimp imported from China, Montegut explained. Even bragging about the fact on their signs and menus.
Wes had trouble sleeping at night because he kept worrying about his father. He knew the longer he stayed from home the harder it would be to come back. If he ever did come back. Probably he would. Maybe his father had been trying to reach him, but Wes hadn’t paid his cell phone bill. What was the point? It wasn’t like he had a social life. And girls, girls were as unreachable as gods. He’d only kissed and felt up one girl, Lucy Arcinaux, a pretty jolie blonde from high school he’d dated a month. But Lucy was like any sixteen-year-old girl and when she learned how much time Wes spent on his father’s boat, how little time he had for socializing, she dumped him. Part of Wes was still angry at his father for this.
Day after day Wes and Lindquist saw fewer and fewer trawlers out in the Barataria. Sometimes there looked to be more planes and helicopters in the sky than boats in the water. One minute Lindquist was bitching about BP, how he’d like to blow up all those rigs out there with dynamite. The next he was telling jokes about French hookers, homosexual penguins, and Polish priests with peg legs. To Wes the jokes sounded no different than his angry cursing. Like both were dredged up from the same deep-down bitter place.
Wes spent what little money he made on canned goods and toiletries and other sundries. The rest he squirreled away for his boat. He knew it wouldn’t add up to much, but what he couldn’t afford with his savings he could beg and scrounge and borrow. One thing about growing up in the swamp, it taught you to be resourceful. There used to be a time in the Barataria, not long ago, when people eked out their livelihoods solely from the bayou. They shrimped and crabbed. They poached alligators for their hides and trapped muskrats and nutria for their skins. This was in the time of his grandparents and great-grandparents, before everyone sold their land for pennies an acre to the oil companies in the twenties and thirties, before BP gouged away at the marsh with their canals and pipelines. The few octogenarians still alive in Jeanette spoke of that era with melancholy nostalgia. They spoke of how different the Barataria was back then, an untrammeled wilderness untouched by man and time. How different the water and air had been, how much sweeter the seafood. Even the sunlight looked different.
But a strain of that old Baratarian resourcefulness remained in the people of Jeanette. It remained in Wes and it would probably remain in his daughters and sons if he had them. After that, who knew. In other places, even as nearby as New Orleans, Wes was always shocked to discover how clueless kids his age were. They couldn’t change the oil and tires of their cars, let alone build something like a boat from scratch.
One night Lindquist carried his metal detector onto the Jean Lafitte and at two in the morning when the shrimping was nil he oared his pirogue to one of the cheniers dotting the bayou. Wes went with him and they banked on the shore of an islet the size of a kiddie pool. Lindquist swung the coil over the mucky ground while Wes followed behind with the lantern and shovel-scoop.
After a while Lindquist leaned on the metal detector and rubbed the shoulder of his hook arm. H
is mouth was twisted and his face was red and he seemed to be in some kind of pain. He caught Wes staring.
“You lookin’ at my hook?” Lindquist said.
“Naw.” Wes looked away, his face burning.
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”
“How’d you lose it?” Wes asked, a nervous blurt.
“ ’Nam.”
“A mine? Or was it shot off?”
“A tiger came out of the jungle and ripped it off.”
Wes looked at Lindquist with shock.
“Just ran out of the jungle and knocked me down and ripped it clean out of the socket. Simple as that. Motherfucker was a professional. Then he took off. With my arm hanging out of his mouth. Like a cigar.”
Wes stared gape-mouthed at Lindquist.
Lindquist snorted. “Kid,” he said.
“What?”
“I wasn’t in any war, me.”
Wes kept quiet.
“I wasn’t in ’Nam. You think I’m old enough to have been in ’Nam?”
“Then what was it?”
Lindquist looked Wes in the face. “An accident with the winch. That’s all. An accident. I wasn’t saving any babies or taking a bullet for anybody.” Now he glanced away, his face going stiff. His voice was hard and matter-of-fact. “I was fucked up. Drunk and on a bunch of pills. I don’t even remember what I was doing. So fucked up, who knows. A crossword puzzle. Whatever. One minute my arm was there and one minute it wasn’t and it was a horror show. I still have nightmares about it when I don’t take my pills. So I always take them.”
Surprised by Lindquist’s honesty and unsure what to say, Wes looked at the ground and dragged the toe of his boot through the mud. “Well, hell,” Lindquist said, “enough of that.” He took the Donald Duck Pez dispenser from his cargo pants and flicked a pill into his mouth. The night was so quiet Wes could hear Lindquist’s teeth crunching up the pill.
COSGROVE AND HANSON
Tired of the rough living in the barracks, Cosgrove and Hanson rented side-by-side hundred-dollar-a-week rooms in a shit-hole Jeanette motel with a NO PROSTITUTION sign in the parking lot and a stray cat infestation in the courtyard. A nefarious aura presided over the place. How the doors were never open, how the windows were always curtained, how the occupants, almost all solitary middle-aged men, entered and exited their rooms with illicit stealth. Cosgrove’s neighbor was a young prickish-looking businessman who drove a Lincoln Town Car and left browning apple cores in the gravel. He never spoke with Cosgrove and Hanson, never even looked their way more than a split-second glance, as if deeming them not worth the trouble. At least he was quiet. Other tenants, Cosgrove couldn’t say the same. Sounds of revelry often woke him in the middle of the night. A woman’s pillow-muffled moan, a man’s baboonish grunt, an ass-pocket whiskey bottle shattering on the macadam.
Both their rooms had airport-blue carpet and equestrian-themed oil paintings and tube-model televisions from the eighties. The cinder block walls were painted shiny beige with hardened drips like veins. Lime and rust stained the bathtubs and toilets. Every so often they found a pubic hair in one of the nubby bleach-smelling towels.
Complimentary pubic hairs, was Hanson’s joke.
Hanson started letting the feral cats into his room six or seven at a time. Many of the cats were six-toed. Hemingway cats, according to Hanson. He was full of trivia such as this. The man couldn’t name the vice president of the United States, couldn’t point out the continents on a map, but he knew everything there was to know about insects and Vikings and the Kennedy assassination. An encyclopedic repository of bullshit, Hanson was.
Hanson fed the cats nubs of beef jerky from a ziplock bag he kept on the nightstand. He pinched the morsels between thumb and forefinger, waiting for the cats to stand on their hind legs like circus seals. He whiled away hours in this fashion, perched on the edge of the bed with a beer in one hand and the beef jerky in the other.
Several times Cosgrove reminded Hanson that cats weren’t dogs.
“Bet you fifty dollars that I’ll have one of these sons-a-bitches walking across the room in a week,” he said. “Strutting.”
Within a week Hanson’s legs were riddled with angry red bumps. There wasn’t a moment in the day when he wasn’t scratching himself like a leper. The housekeeper, a round-faced Vietnamese woman always shouting foreign curses into her Bluetooth headset, must have ratted Hanson out to the manager because a handwritten warning was slipped in an envelope under his door. The motel was not an animal shelter, the letter said. The letter also told Hanson to stop filling his Igloo cooler with the motel ice.
“These fleas been here since this shit-hole was built,” Hanson told Cosgrove, incensed. “Probably the only thing holding this place together. Rip open the walls and it’s a bunch of fleas holding hands.”
“You’re thinking of termites,” Cosgrove said. He stroked his beard and flipped through television channels. NASCAR. College football highlights. News footage of a polar bear mauling a zookeeper in Milwaukee.
Hanson wouldn’t stop talking, especially when he was drunk and high. Tonight he’d made a gravity bong with a plastic two-liter bottle of Big Shot pineapple soda and smoked what he called “middies” at the bathroom sink. Hanson told Cosgrove he never had a wife or kids. Didn’t want them, had no use. He’d passed through all the contiguous United States save for the Dakotas, which he thought the government should bomb for reasons he never elaborated upon. He’d followed Bob Dylan and Tom Petty for three months on their joint 1987 tour. AC/DC for two months on their 1988 Blow Up Your Video tour. His father, a hotdog vender, was struck dead by a cement truck when Hanson was just a boy. A year later his mother remarried a macaw breeder who wanted Hanson out of the house the minute he turned eighteen. Hanson dropped out of high school and enlisted in the army on his birthday. A few weeks later he was on a Greyhound bus headed to Fort Bragg but was discharged soon after when the infirmary doctor discovered his heart murmur during a routine checkup.
Also, Hanson had served a year at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville. “No cops like Texas cops,” Hanson told Cosgrove. “You think the cops in Louisiana are crooked? Make Lemon look like a saint. I was roofin’ out in Austin and got mixed up with the wrong people. Full of the wrong people, fuckin’ Texas. Most of ’em construction. Fuck’s this shit you got on? Cosby Show? Change the channel.”
From the dinky Formica table Cosgrove thumbed the clicker. It was past midnight and he was on his ninth beer and his head was spinning. The walls kept coming at him, like the room was collapsing in on itself. He told Hanson he needed sleep.
“Tell you what?” Hanson said. “If I could live this bullshit life over?”
Cosgrove got up from his chair. “I’m going,” he said.
On his bed, eyes closed, Hanson kept talking. Cosgrove stepped out of the room and shut the door quietly behind him.
The marijuana growers, they learned after some reconnaissance, were twin brothers. Reggie and Victor Toup. At first people in Jeanette were loath to divulge any more information. One guy said they’d better keep their noses up their own asses if they knew what was best for them. Another guy asked them if they were with the government. Yet another asked what butt-fuck place they were from, said they’d end up in the hospital shitting out their kidneys if they weren’t careful.
As a last resort Cosgrove and Hanson plied the men with alcohol. Soon they learned that the twins’ father and mother died in the 1980s. Some bizarre love triangle that ended in gunfire at New Orleans’s Roosevelt Hotel. The twins’ mother, fed up with her husband’s philandering, sought solace in her own lover’s arms. A Greek restaurateur, husband of twenty-five years, father of three college-aged girls. One day the twins’ father followed the couple to the Roosevelt, knocked on the door of their honeymoon suite when he knew he’d find them in flagrante. When the Greek answered the door the twins’ father barged into the room and shot him in the stomach with a Colt .45. The Greek toppled to the floor and cra
wled on his hands and knees to where his suit lay on the carpet and fumbled out his own gun, a Smith & Wesson Model 13. The Greek shot the twins’ father in the kneecap and the father went down and fired again, this time striking the Greek in the shoulder. Then more bullets were fired and by the end of the pandemonium the twins’ father shot his wife in the face. On purpose, by accident, no one would ever know. And by the time the cops arrived ten minutes later the three of them were dead. A bloodbath. All you had to do was go to a New Orleans public library and look the story up in the Times-Picayune microfiche.
Afterward the twins went to live with their grandmother, already so old and addle-brained that the teenage boys pretty much ruled the roost. By thirteen the boys were taking midnight joyrides in her Cadillac. By fourteen they were stealing liquor and cigarettes from the general store, selling the stuff at markup prices on the playground. Within two or three years they were high school dropouts, the Barataria’s biggest growers of marijuana.
They left Hanson’s truck in the harbor parking lot and crossed the road to the twins’ house. It was half past midnight and the mud-and-fish stench of the bayou was thick in the air. Every so often the wind switched directions and a chemical stink, of petroleum or oil, swept over them.
The house was just where they’d heard. A tidy, mint-green place on pilings across the street from the wharf, a light on in one of the windows. The kitchen: they could see the dark-wood cabinetry, the hanging ceiling light of varicolored glass.
“Wouldn’t mind living in a place like this,” Hanson said.
Cosgrove grunted, scratched his beard. He was wondering how Hanson had talked him into this madness. He wanted money and he wanted more of the marijuana, but many people wanted those things and didn’t go breaking into houses.
They climbed the stairs and Hanson knocked on the door. No answer. Then Hanson went down the stairs and found a tomato-sized rock in the yard and came back up, hurled it through one of the sidelight windows.