The Marauders

by Tom Cooper

  One night a loud rapping on the cab window woke Wes and he jerked upright, striking his head on the ceiling. He clutched his skull and when his eyes adjusted he saw it was Lindquist.

  Wes told him hey, raked his fingers through his bed-headed hair, opened the gate and slid out of the truck.

  “Well hell, kid,” Lindquist said, squinting at him. “Livin’ like a vagrant.”

  Head still foggy with sleep, Wes shrugged and glanced at his watch. 3:25 a.m.

  “Why don’t you just go home?” Lindquist asked him. “Bury the hatchet?”

  Wes shook his head.

  “That bad, huh?” Lindquist asked.

  “I guess so.”

  Lindquist sat beside him on the gate and they were quiet for a while.

  “What’re you doin’ out here?” Wes asked.

  He lifted up his metal detector and rattled it. “Detecting. Thought I’d take a break from the bay.”

  Wes nodded.

  “You look like crap warmed over.”

  Wes considered this. “I guess I feel better than I look.”

  “Let’s hope. Because you look dead.”

  Wes chuckled.

  “Meet me in the marina tonight,” Lindquist said. “Sundown.”

  “You shrimping again?”

  Lindquist shook his head. “Harder metal detecting and digging with one arm than you’d think.”

  Then he told Wes that they’d be out there for at least a couple of days, to think it through. Wes said he didn’t need to and was up for it. Any work would do.

  It was harder work than he imagined, just as Lindquist warned him. The bugs, the heat, the methane-smelling muck. By the end of the first day his fingers were blistered and his hands were crabbed from so much shoveling.

  And by their second day out Wes no longer knew where they were in the Barataria, they’d drifted so far. He was used to sticking to one part of the swamp, and these islands looked unfamiliar. Five or six hours’ sleep a night, bloody hands, an aching back, and neither Wes nor Lindquist had a thing to show for it. But Lindquist’s enthusiasm burned unabated, as if he were driven by a force stronger than faith.

  On the eve of their fourth day out Lindquist was metal detecting in the canebrake fringed along a little island’s shore when his machine blipped. It was early evening, the last light leeching from the sky, tatters of purple and pink and orange above swag-bellied clouds. Gnats swarmed around their heads, thick as wreaths of smoke.

  Lindquist passed the metal detector coil over the same spot three or four times. Finally he pointed to a place on the ground just above the tideline. He unpocketed his flashlight and flicked the beam over the sand. Fish bones and shell and silica. “Right here,” he said. “There’s something.”

  Wes didn’t move. Sweat was running down his face, into his eyes. Where this man got his energy was beyond him. He was a freak of nature.

  “What you waiting for?” Lindquist asked.

  I want to go home, Wes wanted to say. But he began slowly and spiritlessly digging, flinging clods of dirt over his shoulder. Lindquist stepped sideways to dodge the blitzkrieg and passed the coil of the machine over the turned dirt. For a while Wes only dug and soon it was full dark, the sough of soft warm wind in his ears, the cane whispering on the shore.

  Soon Lindquist picked something off the ground and made a noise that was part moan, part exclamation. He was clutching something small in his hand and ran to the water and washed it off. Then he turned, almost tripping as he ran out of the water, his face crazed in the dark.

  “I told you,” he shouted. “Look at this.”

  In the palm of Lindquist’s grimy hand was a silver money clip embossed with an Aztec calendar. Wes took the clip and brought it to his face for a closer look and saw a tiny stamped inscription on the back: MADE IN TAIWAN.

  Wes remembered one of his high school friends, how he used to act like Lindquist was acting now: manic. The friend, Preston Teague, caused such a commotion in class—jabbering and fidgeting and chuckling—that their homeroom teacher, Mrs. Brown, would make him spend the remainder of the period in the hallway. He’d sit on the linoleum with his back against the lockers, muttering to himself, thumbing the buttons of his cell phone, tapping his sneaker on the floor.

  Then the next day Preston would seem like another person, trudging sullenly into homeroom under the weight of his backpack. He’d stare wall-eyed at his desk, doodling boobs and butts and funny faces on a sheet of loose-leaf in his Trapper Keeper.

  Yes, Lindquist reminded Wes of Preston. That strange energy, that ferrety way of jerking his head left and right. Like he wanted to go in every direction at once.

  Lindquist slept only an hour or so at a time, catnaps. Then, inexplicably refreshed, he’d wake and stay up for another eight. Wes worried Lindquist might give himself a heart attack. And all those pills he took. He didn’t know how old Lindquist was and knew better than to ask, but whatever age, all those pills seemed dangerous.

  One night they’d just finished metal detecting their last chenier of the day and were sitting on the foredeck of the Jean Lafitte. It was three hours until dawn, the moon such a thin wan sliver that Wes had never seen so many stars at one time. They were sprent in milky festoons all the way to the edge of the earth. Even Lindquist, usually indifferent to such spectacles, beheld the sky with wonderment, his head tipped back as far as it would go, his mouth open so wide Wes could see his uvula.

  Wes told Lindquist that maybe they should go to shore for a day or two. Come back out to the Barataria refreshed.

  Lindquist flicked a dismissive look at Wes, said nothing. He turned his attention back to the map spread across his lap. Every so often he would put down his flashlight and squiggle down a mark with a green felt-tipped pen.

  The boat jostled in the slight chop, a misty spume feathering Wes’s arms and face.

  “One more day,” Lindquist said, as if just having finally heard Wes. “One more and we’ll take a break.”

  “Mr. Lindquist. I don’t feel right. I’m getting boat-sick.”

  “Been out here just three days.”

  “It’s been a week.”

  “Bull.”

  “A week and a day, maybe.”

  Lindquist looked shocked. “You sure about that?”

  Wes nodded.

  “Well hell, so what? Those Vietnamese stay out here two weeks at a time.”

  “I don’t know if I can, is what I’m saying.”

  “You never know you can until you do.”

  Wes shook his head.

  “You hungry? I’ll cook you something.”

  “Naw, it’s not that.”

  “Let me cook you something. I got some onions and garlic in the galley. I can whip up some red fish. I’ll take it easy with the cayenne and hot sauce this time.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Knock knock,” Lindquist said.

  Wes picked at his eyebrow, nausea roiling in his gut. Lindquist was grinning and staring at him. Wes knew Lindquist wouldn’t give up until he played along. “Who’s there?” he said, barely able to get the words out, he was so tired.

  “Little old lady,” Lindquist said.

  “Little old lady who,” Wes said miserably.

  “Shit, you’re a good yodeler.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “But you’re smiling.”

  “Because it’s stupid.”

  “But it works. You’re smiling.”

  “Mr. Lindquist, I gotta get off this boat.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Because ain’t a reason.”

  “Because we’ve been out here for a week.”

  Lindquist’s face changed, his lips slackening into a loose O. As if he were trying to solve an algebra problem. “You swear not to say a word of this to anyone?” he asked.

  Wes nodded, not caring.

  “Gold. I already found some. A doubloon.”

  Wes could barely find the words
. “Well, whatever you’re looking for, it’ll be out here tomorrow,” he said. “And the day after that. We can cover more ground after we rest.”

  “But someone might get to it before we do.”

  “Mr. Lindquist, no disrespect?” Wes said. “Nobody’s out here.”

  “The twins are.”

  “I haven’t seen them.”

  “That’s because we headed away from their island. Now we’re headed back. We skipped ahead a dozen islands. Now I got to backtrack.”

  An owl hooted on a neighboring island. Another hooted back.

  “I can’t do it,” said Wes.

  “What if we find more?” Lindquist asked.

  Wes picked at a bug bite on his knee.

  “If we find more, you’ll be getting some.”

  “I need to go now. I’m sick. I need to be on land for a while. Please take me back.”

  Lindquist scratched the back of his neck, peered irritably about. “Well, you go home then.”

  “You’ll take me?”

  Lindquist flicked his hook arm dismissively. “Go by yourself.”

  Wes didn’t get it, felt stupid. “You want me to swim?”

  “Of course not. Take the boat.”

  “Leave you here?”

  Lindquist nodded.

  “I can’t do that,” Wes said. “No way I’m doing that.”

  “Then you have to stay.”

  “The hell,” Wes said.

  “Take the boat. Leave the pirogue. They won’t see me this way.”

  Wes brooded, clenched his jaw.

  “Come back for me in a day. I’ll stick due east. Won’t be but a few islands away.”

  Lindquist got up and went into the cabin and returned with a backpack hung from his shoulders. In his good hand he held his metal detector and he tossed it into the pirogue and climbed in.

  “Please don’t do this, Mr. Lindquist.”

  But Lindquist dropped the little boat into the water. “A day or two,” he shouted up to Wes, oaring one-armed.

  “Mr. Lindquist. Don’t do this.”

  Lindquist’s voice was already small. “It’s an adventure.”

  Then Wes was alone in the bayou darkness, silent except the smacking of waves against the boat. He looked north, where the harbor lights of Jeanette glimmered so far and faint on the horizon they might as well have been a mirage.

  He started the motor.

  COSGROVE AND HANSON

  A week into their searching, late September, Hanson was batting his way through the bracken, Cosgrove slogging close, when nearby in the woods an owl let loose a piercing call. Startled, Hanson tripped over a cypress root and toppled forward. He rolled on his back in the mud like a pig in a sty, cursing and trying to rise.

  Cosgrove swung one leg and then the other over the root, holding the lantern over Hanson.

  Eyes gleaming white, Hanson glared up at him, his face so slathered in muck he looked like something discharged from an elephant’s rectum.

  “Fuck you doing with that light?” Hanson said. “Can’t see shit.”

  Cosgrove fought a twitching grin.

  Hanson held up a muddy hand. “Help me here,” he said.

  “Hell no,” Cosgrove said.

  “You laughin’?”

  Cosgrove felt a slow spreading grin.

  “Fuckin’ lift me up.”

  Cosgrove grimaced and took Hanson’s hand and pulled him up and then they returned to the boat and started toward the next chenier.

  A petro-stink hung thickly in the air, a smell like hot tar in summer. Cosgrove saw spangles of crude in the water, the flotillas of diarrheic froth. He worried about the fumes he was breathing, all those ominous-sounding toxins he heard about in the news. Benzene, arsenic, Corexit. Dolphins, he’d heard, were coughing and bleeding out their assholes. Not good.

  “Feel like shit warmed over,” Cosgrove said, shouting over the motor. He felt a headache coming on.

  “You’ll feel plenty right once we find what we’re going to find, Sasquatch.” A crooked-toothed grin, very white, on his muddy face.

  How many times had Hanson said this in the last few weeks? Countless. But now, this time, ten yards away from the island, they exchanged a glance. Hanson sniffed, then Cosgrove.

  An evocative scent. Green and resinous, unmistakably familiar.

  They said nothing, as if superstitious that one word would jinx the possibility.

  They banked on the tideline and Hanson leapt from the boat. Cosgrove followed. A few yards inland the island was corseted by a barrier of waist-tall wire fencing, a vermin blockade. They stomped a section flat and then they crossed it and began wallowing through the buggy bracken.

  “Wait a second,” Cosgrove told Hanson.

  Hanson halted, threw an impatient look over his shoulder.

  “If somebody set up that fence, they probably set other stuff.”

  Hanson gaped at the dirt as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him.

  Cosgrove looked about and went to a sapling cypress and snapped off a stick from one of the low limbs. Then he moved slowly deeper into the underbrush, stabbing the ground like a blind man with a cane.

  Salamanders like squiggles of ink slithered away across the slimy leaves.

  When something seized the stick with a loud metallic snap, Cosgrove leapt back. In the moonlight he saw the dull glint of metal. A trap, its jagged jaws locked around the end of the wood.

  “Well son of a bitch,” Hanson said.

  Cosgrove’s heart whomped in his ears, a sound like a cotton-wrapped hammer striking tin. He crept along, Hanson following close behind. As they drew closer to the center of the island the familiar smell grew stronger.

  “It can’t be,” Cosgrove said.

  “Would be the perfect place,” Hanson said.

  “I’ll saw off both of my feet,” Cosgrove said.

  Once in the clearing Hanson let out a high-decibel sound of jubilation. A tent-revival cry. In awe they stood side by side and swept their flashlights. Before them was nothing less than a miracle of ingenuity. Posts stood up from the mire and on them were raised wooden platforms teeming with marijuana plants, a kind of elevated hydroponic garden. Canopied two feet above the plants were sections of camouflage shade cloth strewn here and there with clumps of leaves. The marijuana plants sprouted from two-gallon containers filled with some kind of pale fertilizer that looked like aquarium gravel. Among the containers was a network of snaking tubes running out of rain-harnessing buckets.

  Impossible to tell how much marijuana there was because it was so dark. Certainly enough weed to get the whole state of Louisiana high for weeks on end. Cosgrove vacillated wildly from doubting what he saw to believing it. He wondered if there was some herbal equivalent of fool’s gold. The raised garden had to be as big as a tennis court. The smell was thick and dizzying.

  “Look at this Willy Wonka shit,” Hanson said. He flung himself giggling into the plants, hugging a great thatch of them to his chest and burying his face in the leaves.

  “Careful,” Cosgrove said. A strange mixture of jubilation and dread swept through him. How could they be this lucky? Nobody was this fucking lucky.

  Hanson tore at the leaves, stuffing wads into the pockets of his jean shorts. His hands were shaking and his face was sweaty and wild.

  “Hanson,” Cosgrove said, a heaviness in his gut like a premonition. “Place is rigged. Gotta be.”

  “Best goddamn day of my life,” Hanson said in a voice tremulous with joy.

  Cosgrove waited and took a breath and then stepped into the plants. He pulled a handful of leaves, then another. Soon, his fingers were sticky and his head was spinning and he pulled at the plants with abandon.

  The next night they boated again to the island, Cosgrove manning the engine, Hanson smoking a fifteen-gram blunt the size of a banana. Ordinarily Cosgrove would have scoffed at such waste, but they already had more marijuana than they knew what to do with.

  As they yawed toward the
island of marijuana Hanson offered Cosgrove the blunt.

  Cosgrove waved it away. “One of us gotta stay sober,” he said.

  “That’s your problem,” Hanson said. “Too goddamn sober.”

  Cosgrove pshawed. He marveled at Hanson’s state, his eyes scarlet-webbed, his mouth slack and spittled. An overgrown idiot child at the tail end of a three-day party. If the coast guard or game warden stopped them, he’d shoot Hanson on sight for looking the way he did.

  They ventured farther into the swamp, the reedy banks receding, the water whitecapping. Soon they passed barrier islands studded with dead cypress and water tupelo, shorelines corseted with crude-blackened boom.

  Behind them the lights of Jeanette diminished, an orange glow under-staining the sky. And ahead on the horizon were towering oil rigs, their hazard lights blinking far out in the Gulf.

  “A spaceship,” Hanson said, pointing.

  “Have another toke,” Cosgrove said.

  “Shit’s so wet it won’t stay lit.”

  They passed an occasional oyster lugger or Boston Whaler sailing under an orange triangular flag: VESSELS OF OPPORTUNITY, private boats hired by BP to patrol the waters for oil and fallen boom. The boats slalomed through the water with no seeming coordination, paths crisscrossing, booms almost colliding. Rumor was, BP paid them a thousand dollars a day. Sign the check-in sheet in the morning, sign out at night. Simple as that. No supervision.

  A shrimp boat grumbled near, a flat-capped captain in the wheelhouse, two young deckhands staring at Cosgrove and Hanson, their faces ghoulish in the red and green glow of the pilot lights. One of them had a cigarette hanging from his lopsided grin, the other a plaid rip-sleeved shirt unbuttoned all the way down.

  “Heya, fellas,” Hanson called.

  “Heya, ace-hole,” said the one with the cigarette.

  The two men cackled and rumbled away into the night.

  On the island of marijuana they stuffed garbage bags with fistfuls of sticky leaves. Every time Cosgrove heard a snapping in the wood, a rustling in the bracken, he froze and listened.

  Within an hour they had trash bags full of the stuff, the smell of the plants so potent that even triple-bagged their scent was unmistakable. Resin stuck to their fingers like pinesap and their hands reeked even after scouring them with mud and swamp water.