by Tom Cooper
At noon he was passing through a glade of eelgrass when a shadow flitted across his face. He looked up. A buzzard hovered above him, huge and ragged, its face like a wad of spat-out gum.
When he looked up again a second bird had joined the first. A minute later, a third. They wheeled above him like a sinister mobile.
“Pieces’a shit,” Lindquist said. He dropped to his knees and rooted one-handed in the mud and found a fist-sized stone. He stood and hurled it. It wobbled pathetically in the air, shooting five or six feet wide of the birds, and then it plopped down in the mud. Lindquist went after the rock and threw it again. This time a stitch of pain seared along his side and he groaned, grabbing at his lower back.
“Pieces’a shit,” Lindquist said, glowering at the sky.
He gave up and moved on. Soon the buzzards gave up too, maybe figuring him not worth the trouble.
The swamp was a hellish obstacle course. There was no such thing as walking straight in the swamp. There were quagmires of mud, impassable brambles, murky lagoons, sloughs deeper than he was tall. Lindquist figured that for every three miles he wandered and zigzagged, he made it one mile north toward land.
One wrong move and Lindquist knew he was fucked. He imagined stumbling into a pit of quicksand. A vine dangling just beyond his grasp. His hook arm flailing uselessly as he sank deeper and deeper. The gold falling piece by precious piece out of his pockets, irretrievably lost in the mud.
WES TRENCH
Wes’s father was released from Mercy General on a sunny Tuesday morning. The hospital had a strict policy: outgoing patients, no matter their condition, had to be wheelchaired out of the building. No exceptions, even for the mule-headed likes of Bob Trench. In the same cranberry polo shirt and faded jeans he was wearing when he was admitted—laundered, courtesy of the hospital—his father slouched in the chair as Wes shoved him through the automatic glass doors. As soon as they were out in the sun, he leapt to his feet like a pardoned prisoner and patted his pockets for cigarettes that weren’t there.
“Feelin’ okay?” Wes asked his father once they were in the truck and rolling out of the lot.
“Like a hundred bucks,” Wes’s father said.
One arm curled around the wheel, the other dangling out the open window in the sun, Wes kept his eyes on the road. He knew that one concerned look, one split-second glance of worry or doubt, would be enough to set his father off. He’d take it as an insult, a lack of faith in his powers of recuperation.
It was a warm breezy day, the sky that deep cerulean it wore this time of year after a good rain. The road, rutted and tar-patched, took them past a small cemetery, ten or twelve lichened tombstones leaning in a clearing dotted with wildflowers. In the corner of his eye Wes noticed his father fidgeting. He fiddled with the air vents, opened and shut the glove compartment, eyed the floor mat. He was looking for something to criticize, one stupid little thing he could bitch about to break the silence. Look at this dashboard, look at these fucking windows. But the windows were scrubbed spotless and the trash picked off the floorboards. If anything, his father could only point out the truck’s myriad tiny creakings as they moved along, but those were no fault of Wes’s. The Toyota, a hand-me-down from his father, had a hundred and seventy-five thousand miles on it. And the road was as bumpy as a spoon vest.
“Fuckin’ penal colony in there,” said Wes’s father, as if continuing a conversation that was already underway.
Wes grunted.
“Say what?”
“I bet.”
Ahead was a tin-roofed mini-mart of weather-slumped scrap wood. They were close enough now that Wes could read the metal A-frame sign in the crushed-shell lot. MILK. BRED. CIGS. ICE COLD BEER. GEAUX TIGERS. WHO DAT.
“Pull up,” said Wes’s father.
“Cigarettes?”
“Pull up. Gotta grab something.”
Wes waited in the idling truck, watched two blackbirds chase one another around a dusty mulberry bush. A stub-tailed tabby, pregnant from the looks of her swag belly, crept up to observe the fray and after a moment it lunged at the bush. In unison the birds winged and swerved away, as if tied together with invisible string.
Wes’s father climbed back in, tearing the cellophane wrapper off a pack of Virginia Slims cigarettes.
“Don’t smoke in here,” Wes said.
Wes’s father lit a cigarette with a cheap plastic lighter that said FLICK THIS BIC in festive party-time lettering over an American flag.
Wes snapped a look at his father.
“One isn’t going to kill me.”
“How ’bout the one after that?”
“Aw, shut up. Let me feel good for a second.”
Wes leaned his head out the window and breathed the clean outdoors air and didn’t say another word.
The doctors ordered Wes’s father off his boat for a month but his first day out of the hospital he kept himself busy around the house. He picked weeds in the front and backyard, cleaned scrap lumber out of the garage. His father didn’t know he was watching, and through the kitchen window Wes saw him leaning his back against one of the backyard persimmon trees and resting an apprehensive hand over his chest. The same way you might touch a sick puppy to check its breathing.
That night they were at the dining room table eating a takeout casserole when Wes’s father asked, “What’s your problem?”
Surprised, Wes looked up. They’d been silent for several minutes, ESPN murmuring on the television.
Wes asked him what he meant. He had his forkful of casserole halted between his plate and lips. He’d been thinking of Lindquist. Imagining him dead and floating in the swamp.
“The sour look,” his father said.
“Nothing,” Wes said. He noticed his father’s face was pink and splotchy, the tip of his nose red.
“All right. Suit yourself.”
The clatter and scrape of their cutlery.
“Know what I wanna do?” his father asked.
Wes grunted.
“Wanna go after that oil guy. Grimes. Break his fuckin’ kneecaps with a crowbar.”
Wes couldn’t tell if he was serious. “Yeah, you’re not doing that.”
“Sure makes me feel better picturing it.”
“Picture it all you want.”
Before long, his father asked again what the matter was.
Wes set down his fork and shook his head. He had no appetite though his stomach was growling and empty. “I shouldn’t have left him there,” he said.
His father only chewed for a moment, his brow scrunched. “I still don’t understand what happened,” he said.
“He went crazy. Hard to describe.”
“He didn’t go crazy, Wes.” It was odd hearing his father say his name since he seldom did anymore. “He’s already been there. For a long time.”
“No he isn’t,” he said. He was about to say wasn’t. Verbs were tricky in a situation like this. He remembered those months after his mother drowned, how they had so much trouble with the tenses.
Present, past. Was, is. None seemed right.
“At least not in the way people think.”
Silence. Wes picked up his fork but only kept it clutched in his fist.
“Some guys, you got to let them make their own mistakes,” his father said. “Because they’re going to make them no matter what.”
“If he doesn’t turn up,” Wes said.
“Should’ve, would’ve, could’ve. The signs on the road leading to living hell, trust me.”
Wes knew what his father meant. Exactly. But he wasn’t going to get into that discussion.
Apples and oranges.
Apples and oranges, yes, but Wes couldn’t help but remember how he felt after his mother drowned in the storm, the horrible black feeling that roosted in his chest. But that was later, not right after she died.
Right after, those first months after the storm, Wes and his father were never alone with their feelings long enough for them to take root. Too many th
ings to do, too many distractions. Because their house was in ruins they lived for half a year in Baton Rouge with a cousin of his father’s, where they slept on inflatable beds in a converted game room with a ping-pong table and Journey pinball machine. The cousin, “Uncle Eddie,” was a car salesman, volunteer fireman, and part-time dog breeder—Labradors—and Uncle Eddie had a wife and three middle-school-aged kids, so people were always coming and going. And Wes’s father was always on the move, shuttling every day between Baton Rouge and the Barataria in his truck, picking his way through the wreckage.
Besides, they still had hope then, Wes and his father. Irrational hope, insane hope, but hope. They never exactly expressed this hope to one another, didn’t need to. It was there, the way they hung MISSING PERSON flyers on telephone polls and in store windows, the way they watched the local evening news with religious devotion, the way they constantly called the shelters and hospitals and police stations. Maybe the flood carried her far out into the bayou, spat her out on an islet where she awaited rescue. Delirious, on the brink of death, but alive. Maybe in all the pandemonium she’d somehow—the somehow part was hazy to Wes—ended up in Houston, bussed there with countless other evacuees from southern Louisiana. Maybe she was comatose in some hospital in a neighboring parish. Maybe she’d been knocked so hard over the head she couldn’t remember her name.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
This was the extent of their denial.
It was only after they moved back to Jeanette when they got the call one gray Friday afternoon in February. Wes was on the living room couch, penciling out a linear equation in a marble composition tablet. Homework. From the kitchen he heard his father say “Dental records” in a flat voice. Wes went and stood in the doorway, leaned his shoulder against the jamb and listened. His father’s back was turned and his hand clutched the telephone cord like he was strangling it. Wes could hear the tiny bug voice buzzing out of the receiver.
Before long his father thanked the person on the phone and hung up and stood motionlessly, his hand on the wall as if for support. His shoulders jerked a few times like he had the hiccups. Wes could hear his breathing, loud and rapid.
“Dad,” Wes said.
His father didn’t answer. He stiffened his shoulders and started punching the wall, punching over and over until there was blood and busted plaster. Wes watched helplessly. He heard tiny cracking sounds, the crunching of his father’s bones. When his father finally stopped there was a hole in the wall as big as a grapefruit and his hand was busted and pulpy, dangling limp at his side. The knuckles bled bright coins of blood on the linoleum.
“Your mother,” he said in a choked voice. That was all.
Right then a feeling opened wide in the center of Wes, a feeling so monstrous and large he was sure it would swallow him alive. Sadness and anger and terror and regret all mixed together. His mother was dead and he’d never see her again. Never tell her he loved her. She would never see him win a track and field trophy or graduate high school or build his own boat. All of that was wiped out in one fell swoop, a history that could have been but would never be because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Because his father had said, “We’re staying.”
After that Wes’s father got lost in his anger. He turned the way he still was today. Anything would set him off. An inopportune phone call, a slow traffic signal, a stale loaf of bread. The world was in collusion against him. With the slightest provocation, his face would turn an inflamed pink and his expression would bunch. Bottles were broken. Dishes and coffee mugs. A saltshaker was called a cocksucker, a broken tape measurer an asshole motherfucker.
His father had always been surly—Wes’s mother, affectionately, used to call him the Grump—but now his fury was resolute and never-ending. Nothing and no one was spared.
Not even Wes.
He never called Wes names, never placed a hand on him, but he screamed at Wes for little meaningless mistakes. For not minding his tone of voice, for not turning out a light. Wes weathered these tempests the same way he used to weather rainy days when he was a little boy. He went to his room and shut the door and lay in bed with his headphones blaring, waiting for the tempest to end.
Why her? he’d think.
He tried to quash these bad thoughts down, but they sprang up over and over again, like a game of Whac-A-Mole.
He wondered how different life would be had his mother lived. Had his father died instead. He felt guilty and horrible for these feelings but he couldn’t lie to himself. He loved his father but didn’t like him very much.
His father never apologized for his outbursts, but sometimes Wes would find a little gift, a peace offering, waiting for him on the dining room table. A takeout dinner, a comic book, a candy bar. “Got this at the store,” his father would say. “Had a special.”
And, yes, sometimes Wes found himself feeling sorry for his father. Rarely, but sometimes. Especially late at night, when his father’s screaming startled him awake. His heart still drumming, Wes would lie in bed listening to his father as he choked and groaned and jabbered in the middle of his nightmare. Then after a while the house would fall silent and Wes would drift back asleep.
Wes used to wonder back then why his father didn’t leave the Barataria when he seemed to hate it so much. He suspected his father was punishing himself. It was only years later that he realized he didn’t leave because all that remained of his mother was here, in the Barataria. He couldn’t turn his back on history, on the past.
And it was only later still, after Lindquist disappeared, when Wes realized what it was like to carry such regret around, such anger, like a millstone around the neck.
The entire world hinged on a decision.
A word.
COSGROVE
Around noon Cosgrove heard someone or something approaching swiftly through the brush. The crackle of leaves and twigs, the sloshing of swamp water. Something this size: had to be a man. Or a bear. He wondered if there were bears in the swamp, hoped to God not.
Cosgrove kept still as the footsteps approached, halting and furtive. At last a man emerged from the brush, short and big-bellied with a hook arm and yacht cap. His eyes were wide and deranged in his filthy face.
“Hey, man,” Cosgrove said amiably, showing his palms. “Hey. I don’t mean any trouble.”
The man blinked, his mouth a slack O.
Sunlight speared in coruscant shafts through the leaves. Cosgrove had to shade his eyes to see the man’s face.
“Who’re you?” the one-armed man asked, pondering him with an eye squinted.
“Lost.”
“Who’re you?” His voice harder, but playacting harder, with a high and trembling edge like bullied kid’s.
“Nobody,” Cosgrove said. “Just a guy lost.”
The man stared. Insects buzzed in the boggy air, in the sun-shot leaves.
“I’m not looking for trouble,” Cosgrove said.
Something in the man’s posture eased and the wrinkles around his eyes softened as he looked about. “You seen those twins?” he said in a low voice.
“Hours ago.”
“You with them?”
Cosgrove shook his head.
“They after you?”
Cosgrove hesitated. Nodded.
“Name’s Lindquist.”
“Cosgrove. Looking for my boat.”
This news seemed to interest the man, who again made a gaping O with his mouth. “It close?”
“I don’t know.”
“No clue?”
“No.”
The hope in the man’s eyes was snuffed. He shook his head miserably. “Then you’ll never find it,” he said.
Together they slogged through the swamp, passing cypress knees and vine-strangled tree trunks and fallen logs teeming with pale larvae. They swatted at vines and branches that released showers of water, the cool drops wetting their shoulders and scalps.
“You got anything to eat?” Lindquist asked.
For a while they moved in silence, the mud slurping at their feet. Spiderwebs broke delicately across Cosgrove’s face but he no longer paid them any mind. Bigger things to worry about now. His throat was silica-dry, sore with dehydration. His head hurt and his feet were numb. He worried about foot rot and gangrene.
“Hey, you look familiar,” Lindquist said, looking at Cosgrove sideways.
“Thought the same thing.”
“Saw you out there on a boat. With a little fella.”
“How long you been out here?” Cosgrove asked.
“A week maybe?”
A week, Cosgrove thought. No wonder the man seemed bat-shit crazy.
Then Lindquist asked, “You out here looking for treasure?” He slapped a mosquito on his cheek, flicked the bug off his fingers.
Cosgrove thought he’d misheard him. Or maybe treasure was his euphemism for marijuana. “Say what?” he asked.
“Pirate treasure?”
“A buddy and me got into some trouble with those twins.”
“Marijuana?”
Cosgrove glanced at Lindquist. “Yeah.”
“The little fella?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s he at?”
“They killed him,” Cosgrove said.
Lindquist made a hoarse choking sound, almost a sob. He stared at Cosgrove loose-jawed.
“Blew his head off. Without even thinking.”
“Blew his head off,” Lindquist repeated. He took off his filthy yacht cap and raked his fingers through his hair, his eyes roving with panic. “Oh man,” he said, “oh man.”
“We’re going the wrong way,” Cosgrove said.
“This is the right way. Toward land. The only way.”
“Away from my boat.”
“You’ll never find that boat.”
“This looks familiar.”
“It all looks familiar. It’s swamp.”
“No, I remember this place.”
“You sure?”
“Real familiar.”
Hope lit again in the man’s eyes. “You find it, you’ll take me?”