The Marauders

by Tom Cooper

  “You sure?”

  “Let’s leave,” Cosgrove told Hanson.

  “Twenty cash,” Benji said.

  “Twenty?” Hanson said. “That’s robbery. Should get a Lear jet for this shit.”

  The kid stood. “Maybe. Probably. But where else you gonna sell all this?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Take the bags. Put them back in your truck.”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Take the bags.”

  “Twenty-seven and that’s it.”

  “Take the bags. Go ahead. No hard feelings.”

  Several minutes later Cosgrove and Hanson were out on Royal Street, ten grand in hundred-dollar bills apiece stuffed in their pockets. Hanson wore a grin of dopey triumph. They hurried down the sidewalk, as if afraid that Benji might chase after them and renege on the deal.

  A crowd of Friday revelers was already gathering. Two lumberjack-looking men passed, holding hands. A pretty black girl with a big afro pedaled a pedicab. A middle-aged woman wearing a leotard and what looked like a merkin made of neon feathers sauntered by.

  From a few streets away came the brassy flourish of jazz horns. Farther off, the metronomic throb of 4/4 drums and bass.

  “Raped,” Cosgrove told Hanson. “We just got raped in there.”

  “Stuff wasn’t even ours,” Hanson said.

  “Worst negotiator in the world.”

  “Hell, you were the one almost got into a fight with the guy.”

  Cosgrove was silent.

  “What were we supposed to do? Sell it ourselves?”

  Cosgrove knew that Hanson had a point. And he felt as if a weight had been lifted. Even his breathing felt lighter, unburdened. There were lots of things you could do with ten thousand dollars. People started over their whole lives with less.

  They walked to Bourbon Street, into the pandemonium of a late-summer Friday night. Everyone was drunk. Canadian tourists, transsexuals, newlyweds, college kids, hucksters, erotic puppeteers, rednecks, cover band musicians. A cheesy stink hung in the air. Zydeco and funk and rap spilled out of barroom doorways, mad cries and laughter piercing through the music’s roar. Fake cobwebs and giant cardboard pumpkins and skulls—early Halloween decorations—hung in strip club windows.

  Cosgrove and Hanson bought hard liquor shots with beer chasers and wandered up and down the Bourbon Street strip. Inebriated college girls were slumped on curbs, vomiting between their splayed knees. A walrus-sized man wearing countless beaded necklaces lay comatose on the sidewalk. Drunkards stepped over him and on top of him. One kid stuck a smoking cigarette between the man’s lips.

  Hanson wandered into a souvenir shop and bought a black sateen jacket with a massive green appliqué marijuana leaf emblazoned on the back. He shrugged into it, strutted proudly. On the way out of the store a baseball cap, black with a fleur-de-lis and 2010 across the front, caught his eye. It said LE BON TEMPS ROULE in silver-stitched cursive across the bill. Hanson bought this too and chucked his filthy old camouflage cap in a trash can. In his new jacket and cap he sauntered pompously as a rooster, thumbs hooked on his belt. Walking beside him, Cosgrove noticed tourists smirking at the spectacle of Hanson. The nudging, the whispers: look at this guy. Something like pity and protectiveness sparked in Cosgrove’s chest. Did you motherfuckers just make twenty grand? he wanted to say.

  At the Old Absinthe House they drank two shots of tequila apiece and when they were back on Bourbon Street Hanson went again into the tourist shop. He tried buying another black sateen jacket before the Indian clerk pointed out that he was already wearing an identical one. Bewildered, Hanson thanked the man. Then he angrily told him that he wanted to buy another jacket, was about to, anyway, before his smart-ass remark. He’d take his business somewhere else. Where a man might buy two identical jackets, twenty identical jackets, if he so pleased.

  Sometime after two at Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop Bar they fell into conversation with two fortyish women in halter tops. One wore a straw cowboy hat with puka shells on the band. The other wore a fedora cocked at such a rakish angle she had to be a tourist. On her forearm was a tattoo, the beatific face of her dead toddler son, the dates of the boy’s birth and death above, SEE YOU IN HEAVEN, RUSTY below. Less than three years on earth. Hanson and Cosgrove knew better than to ask.

  The women were hell-bent on merrymaking, both of them laughing so wildly at Hanson’s jokes that Cosgrove suspected they were in some kind of contest or freshly escaped from a facility. Hanson moved two stools down so the women could sit between them. The one with the cowboy hat settled next to Cosgrove and he noticed the tan line on her ring finger. Like he gave a fuck.

  The women said they were in town for a morticians’ convention and weren’t looking for trouble, only fun. Hanson told them they just won the lottery. Fun was his middle name. He bought everyone drinks.

  Cosgrove told the women that he was the world’s first African American astronaut.

  “Sasquatch made a joke,” slurred Hanson.

  They all laughed for a long time at this.

  At one point the cowgirl, Dixie, whispered to Cosgrove, “Got any other friends here tonight? I don’t think Mary Ann’s really into your friend.”

  Cosgrove stroked his beard. “Well, we’re kind of a package deal,” he said.

  The woman considered this.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way?” Cosgrove whispered. “But the little fella? Hanson? Egyptian. Very well endowed. A camel. And oral sex, he’s kind of famous. A wizard.”

  Jesus, he was beginning to sound like Hanson.

  The cowgirl, to Cosgrove’s relief, guffawed at this. She and Mary Ann excused themselves and when they returned from the restroom they seemed enervated, perhaps drugged. Mary Ann’s face was flushed, her hat skewed more rakishly than before. “You guys have cocktails back at your place?” Dixie asked.

  Cosgrove and Hanson brought the women back to the JW Marriott on Canal Street, where they had adjoining rooms on the twenty-first floor. Hanson took Mary Ann into his room, Cosgrove the cowgirl into his. When the woman got naked she seemed embarrassed of her C-section scar, but he told her he didn’t mind and really didn’t. Plus, she had tan lines and big puffy areola, which he especially liked. She asked him to turn off the light and close the drapes and when he did she thanked him and told him he was a gentleman. It had been a long time since a woman called him that.

  Just before dawn, when the woman lay naked and asleep in his bed, Cosgrove went in his robe to the picture window and looked out at the city. Even from this high above the street he could hear the rat-a-tat of a second line, the blare of taxi horns. He watched the bustling expanse of Canal Street, its panoply of taxis and shuttles, of fast food restaurants and tourist junk shops. He saw the red-lit signs of the hotels nearby, the Roosevelt, the Astor. All the way to the right was green and yellow neon cursive that said Dickie Brennan’s Palace Café.

  Standing there taking in the Gothic neon panorama of New Orleans, Cosgrove for the first time since he could remember felt something like hope.

  Next morning they drove back to the Barataria and spent the day sleeping off their hangovers. In the evening Hanson went to check on Cosgrove and they lay silent in the separate twin beds watching television. They were both gray-faced and yellow-eyed and looked freshly dug from a graveyard.

  “How much work we miss?” Cosgrove asked.

  “What they gonna do?” Hanson said. “Fire us?”

  Cosgrove grunted. Then, “What you got left?”

  “Eight grand.”

  He cut Hanson a look. “You’re kidding.”

  “Closer to seven five.”

  “Two and a half grand you spent,” Cosgrove said, convinced they were the dumbest fucks in the world.

  “Easy spending money. All those drinks and tips. The strippers and drugs. The hotel rooms.”

  Cosgrove closed his eyes and rubbed the stinging lids.

  “How much you got?” Hanson asked him.

  “B
etween the hotel room and drinks and shit? Spent a grand, about.”

  Hanson chuckled hoarsely, coughed. “We sure know how to party. Must’ve bought shots for fifty bitches.”

  They were quiet for a time.

  “Hey, let me float something out.”

  “No.”

  “One more time.”

  “Hell no.”

  “We grab as much as we can.”

  Cosgrove lay with his eyes shut and pretended to ignore Hanson.

  “Going one more time,” Hanson said. “Choice is yours.”

  WES TRENCH

  It was dawn when Wes parked in the harbor lot and got out of his truck carrying a paper sack from the mini-mart. A few bottled waters, protein bars, a big bag of smoked jerky. Stuff for Lindquist, in case he’d run out. It had been stupid of him, so stupid, to leave him in the Barataria. But Lindquist had been out of his mind and deaf to reason, on some kind of vision quest. Still, how foolish to leave him out here. He should have forced him at knifepoint, called the cops. Or stayed with him, seasickness be damned.

  Something, anything.

  Wes piloted the Jean Lafitte toward the island with the dead willow and when he reached it brassy fog was still rising off the bayou. The egrets were already roused from the branches and mobbed the shore, some standing one-legged and preening, others beaking the mud. Wes steered the boat closer to the island and cut the motor and scanned the bank.

  No Lindquist, no boat.

  He picked up the binoculars from the dash and glassed across the gray and green trees.

  No Lindquist, no boat.

  He opened the wheelhouse window and cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted for Lindquist. His voice petered out flatly, sucked into the immensity of the bayou. Then there was only the sound of purling water.

  Sticking east, Lindquist had said, so Wes headed east and circled the next islet. He slowed the boat and opened the wheelhouse window and shouted hoarse-throated.

  No Lindquist, no boat.

  By the time Wes reached the third island the bayou was fogless. Farther out the water looked strange, darker, but it was hard to tell because the windows were so dirty, the glass scummed over with salt rime and grease. Wes would never hear the end of his father’s bitching if he left a boat so filthy. He rubbed a patch in the glass with his palm but it did little good so he threw open the portside window. Yes, the water was darker, braided with ochre and red. And around the chenier was a black apron of crude.

  “Mr. Lindquist,” Wes called.

  His mind raced. Maybe Lindquist had pirogued back to Jeanette and was safe at home. If he knew where he lived he’d check. If he knew his number he’d call.

  Wes told himself he was worried for no reason. The bayou was enormous, yes, but Lindquist was resourceful. And a man, even a one-armed man in his shoddy condition, could easily row back to Jeanette. Even a one-armed man with a head full of pills. Men twice as old as Lindquist had done the same in the old days. All the time.

  Wes opened the window and shouted again. A covey of plovers burst out of the brush and winged away, their high calls somehow peevish, as if censuring yet another disturbance from man.

  The G-Spot resembled a low-slung bingo hall, a dour-faced cinder-block building with a pink neon sign on the roof like a carnation in a widow’s hat. Even with the truck windows rolled up Wes could hear the mortar fire of music in the bar. Inside, the thumping bass was nearly deafening, so loud Wes had to shout at the man behind the register, a shave-headed black Goliath, six foot and a half easy, whose muscled arms dangled in a way that seemed a threat.

  “Twenty-one and over,” the man said.

  “Yessir,” Wes said. “Don’t need to go in. Just need to talk to somebody.”

  “Sure you do,” the man said. “Get out.”

  “Lady named Reagan, sir. Lindquist.”

  The guy paused and stared at his face. “What’re you, a stalker?”

  Wes shifted nervously on his feet. His mouth was chalky. “No sir. It’s about her father.”

  The man cleared his throat loudly and went out from behind the register and punched through the flapping double-doors. In the instant before the doors swung shut Wes glimpsed inside the bar proper. In the bathyspheric light a young blond woman in a skimpy bikini circled a pole, a dozen men huddled like vultures around the stage.

  Wes waited, bass music thumping in his sternum. A peeling SACK IRAQ sticker was stuck on the face of the register.

  Soon a long-necked redhead barged into the anteroom. She had on a string bikini and all the pretty chubby parts of her were bubbling out. It took every bit of Wes’s willpower to keep his eyes on her face. He explained why he was there as Reagan’s face knotted with worry.

  “I’m sure he’s at home,” he told her. “I just want to make sure.”

  “I don’t get it. Why take his boat?”

  Behind the register the black guy was pretending not to listen, scratching with a ballpoint pen at a sudoku puzzle.

  “I was sick and had to go back,” Wes explained. “But he wouldn’t. I must’ve asked him a thousand times. Really, ma’am, I did.”

  Reagan was waiting, arms crossed over her chest, so Wes felt obligated to say more.

  “We were out for a week,” he said. “But he wouldn’t turn back. Refused. I told him I’d take the pirogue. He made me take his boat.”

  “How long ago was this?” She kneaded her bottom lip like a pill of dough between her fingers.

  “Two days.”

  “Two days in the bayou on that teeny-ass pirogue.”

  “He had stuff. Supplies.” The more Wes spoke, the more aware he was of how ridiculous he sounded. “I just wanted his address and number if that’s okay.”

  Reagan asked the black guy for paper and a pen. Then she scratched down her father’s address and number on the back of a receipt. She gave Wes the scrap of paper and then took it back and wrote down another number. Hers.

  The black guy shook his head.

  “Fuck off, Antoine.”

  “Your life,” said the man. He went back to frowning at his puzzle.

  “What’s your name again, baby?” Reagan asked.

  He hadn’t told her. Every part of him felt like it was blushing. “Wes.”

  “All right, Wes,” Reagan said, sighing out a long breath, patting her forehead.

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” he said, but even to him it sounded a lie.

  GRIMES

  There she was again. Grimes’s mother in the café window, sitting alone in a booth. He wondered if he should get back in his car and drive away like last time. No: he could put this off no longer. And he was still buzzed from his visit with Trench. He got out of his rented Lincoln Town Car and stood in the steaming heat of the parking lot. He took a breath, tightened his gut, walked into Magnolia Café. It was eight o’ clock in the morning and there was no one else in the restaurant except the young gum-chewing waitress fiddling with her cell phone behind the counter. An old man on a corner stool drinking coffee, hunched over his paper.

  Grimes wished them good morning.

  Nothing. Not even a grunt.

  Grimes had on his mirrored aviator sunglasses but his mother recognized him at once. The small muscles around her mouth twitched as he approached. She stood and Grimes pecked her on the cheek. She hugged him and he hugged her back and they held one another for a good five seconds. Then he sat across from her in the booth. “Take off those glasses,” she said. “Let me see you.”

  Grimes took off and folded his sunglasses, setting them on the chrome napkin holder. His eyes pinched against the glare of sun. When they adjusted to the light he saw his mother up close for the first time in years. Her face burled and beaten in the light. Her graying eyebrows. Her tea-stained teeth. But her eyes were lively and shiny and she seemed glad to see him. Nervous, as she always was around him, but glad.

  “Oh, Brady,” she said, reaching across the table over her plate of scrambled eggs and wheat toast and clasping
his hands in hers. “It’s been too long.”

  Grimes said it had been. “How are you?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer because the waitress was walking their way with a coffeepot and mug. She set the mug in front of Grimes and poured. Grimes’s mother looked up and smiled. “How you doin’, Grace? Okay?”

  “Okay, Mrs. Grimes,” the girl said softly. She didn’t look at Grimes.

  Grimes’s mother waited until the girl was out of earshot before she spoke again. “Notice that?”

  Grimes asked what.

  “Usually sweet as can be. Can’t get her to stop talking. Today?”

  She was wearing an LSU baseball cap and now she removed it and set it beside her. Her hair was thinner, Grimes noticed. Grayer. Of course it was.

  “What?” Grimes’s mother said. “You come here to show me that paperwork?” She grinned as if she were joking.

  “You think that’s why I’m here? I wanted to see you.”

  Her mother scoffed him with her eyes.

  “I was going to visit you sooner,” he said.

  “How long you been here?”

  “A month about.”

  “Longer than that from what I’ve heard.”

  “I lose track of time,” Grimes said, feeling guilty.

  His mother said nothing, eyeing his face intently. Maybe trying to unravel the mystery of how they were flesh and blood.

  “I don’t know how things got this bad,” Grimes said.

  His mother sipped her coffee. She put her hands on the table and looked at them. Grimes looked at them too. The crescents of blackened grime under the nails. She could never get rid of that dirt. His father when he was alive could never get rid of it either. No matter how hard and how much he scrubbed with the Lava soap.

  “One day passes and then the next,” said Grimes. He hadn’t meant to say what he was about to. There was a measured quality to what he spoke. As if he’d written the words beforehand and recited them in front of a mirror. “Before you know it, it’s a month. Then a season. Then it turns into this thing, you know? This awkward thing. You don’t want to call because it’s been so long. Too many things to catch up on. Those little day-to-day things make up a life. You don’t realize it, but they do.”