by Tom Cooper
“Maybe he didn’t want us to find our way back home,” Reginald said.
Victor kept quiet and Reginald dropped the subject. Maybe he’d bring it up another time. A time when they weren’t chasing a one-armed man through the swamp like assholes.
“We should turn back to the boat,” Reginald said.
“We’ll never make it back now.”
“What’re we doing when we catch up with them?”
“What you think?”
“This is crazy,” Reginald said. “We need to get to the boat.”
They moved along in silence. The electric stammer of insects.
After a minute, Victor said, “Nobody’s dreams are interesting except to themselves.”
COSGROVE
Cosgrove heard the twins before he saw them, one telling the other in the dark that something was crazy, damn-fool crazy. Then his brother told him to stop being such a pussy. The rest Cosgrove couldn’t make out, the voices muffled by the jungly bracken, the susurrus of swamp life. It was several hours since Cosgrove parted ways with Lindquist. Now he could hear the popping of twigs as the twins came toward him through the brush. He looked around for a stick he could use as a weapon, for a hiding place. Anything.
A few yards away was a fallen tree trunk near a bright clump of swamp flowers. He went to it and dropped belly-down into the sludge and snake-shimmied into its hollow.
When he heard the twins stepping near he held his breath. He was slathered in mud and worm shit and God knew what else. Bugs scuttled across his arms and face, their eyelash legs tickling his skin.
The squelching of shoes ceased.
“See those holes?” said one.
“That’s a snake nest. Get.”
“Leg-sized. Somebody’s been here.”
A big daddy longlegs spider dropped onto Cosgrove’s chin and scurried up his face. It dipped into his open mouth and crawled quickly out. Then on string-like legs it climbed onto his nose and paused there. Cosgrove shot out a breath and the spider scurried across his forehead and dashed across his ear before it was gone.
“Look, that’s a boot print. Right there.”
Cosgrove’s heart clenched. He held his breath and waited for the boot that would bust the log apart, for the barrel of the gun. What then? Oblivion.
But now he could hear the twins moving away, the slow diminuendo of their bickering voices.
He stayed motionless for a time. Then he popped his head out of the trunk and looked around. Faint moonlight, dark leaves and branches against the paler darkness of night.
He crawled out of the hollow trunk and stood.
Then he ran.
LINDQUIST
Sometime in the night Lindquist began to talk to himself for company. Random jabbering, mostly jokes.
“What’s the difference between a lobster with breasts and a Greyhound bus stop?”
“How do you circumcise a hillbilly?”
“How did Joe the Camel quit smoking?”
He didn’t bother with the punch lines. He already knew them. The setups were the best parts anyway.
Sometimes his laughter sounded strange, not like him at all. He stopped, swiveled his head, but he was alone in the dark. He caught sight of his moonlit reflection in the black mirror of the water. He resembled an insane mage: hair stuck out in greasy tufts, white curds of dried spittle in the corners of his mouth, clutching his stick like a staff.
It was some wee hour of morning, the swamp rustling with a million small sounds, when Lindquist smacked square into something hard. He yelped and clutched his throbbing nose. Then he stepped back and held up his hook arm to fend away whatever it was.
A hulking human-shaped silhouette, a full head taller, stood before him. It said something in a low gruff voice. “Got you, asshole,” it sounded like.
Lindquist jerked his torso back as if dodging a blow. The twins. Surely one of the twins.
He crabbed another step back, letting out a sound that was part sob, part whimper. “What I ever do to you?” he asked.
Silence. Only his own rasping breath, the myriad swamp sounds—buzzings and chitterings and rustlings—around him.
“I ain’t ever done a thing. Why you got to do this?”
The wide-shouldered figure stayed quiet. As if to intimidate him. As if to drive him mad.
Lindquist was electric with panic. “Just leave me alone,” he begged.
Silence.
Lindquist snapped, slashing maniacally with his hook arm, gouging into the twin’s hard torso. A few times the hook stuck and he had to rear back and yank it out tug-of-war style. He hacked away until he was dizzy and could lift his prosthetic no more. Then, swaying punch-drunk on his feet, he reached out with trembling fingers. Tree bark. A tree, that’s all.
Shaking and feverish and drenched with sweat, Lindquist collapsed to the ground, his legs giving out like a marionette’s. The earth was damp and gritty against his cheek. His stump was bleeding, hot stitches down the right side of his torso. He couldn’t recall such pain, not since the day he’d lost his arm, the day the coast guard helicoptered him out of the Barataria to the Mercy General trauma ward. The pain then had been so obliterating he couldn’t make sense of what happened. He’d lost an arm? How? How did somebody lose an arm? What kind of asshole? What kind of loser?
Then, after the paramedic applied the tourniquet, they shot him full of morphine. At once the red-hot agony vanished, replaced with a cool bliss that made him feel hollow, billowed full of glacial air. He felt kissed by God.
Now, lying on his side across the mucky ground, panting and sobbing, he’d give half the coins in his pockets to feel such relief.
The cypress knees in the three-quarter moonlight looked like a mob of hunkering imps, their elfin faces leering in the bark, their wood-bore eyes tracking his passage. When the wind rose it clacked through the tree branches and Lindquist could swear he heard the moan of imp voices. What language was it? Maybe Latin, maybe Gaelic. Maybe some long-forgotten tongue silenced by history. The language of witches or succubi.
Whatever language, Lindquist got the gist. The imps were saying he was as good as dead. That he was never going to make it out of the swamp. That he’d pissed his life away.
“What if a bat pisses in my eye?” Lindquist said. Was this a joke? He didn’t know himself, but laughed anyway.
“What if a bat pisses in your eye?” someone said. Startled, Lindquist looked left. Several yards away a cypress-stump imp stared at him, the enormous wooden gash of its mouth downturned like a grim headmaster’s. Now it cocked its head, a movement so slight that Lindquist would have thought his eyes were playing a trick if the cypress stump didn’t also smile.
“What?” Lindquist said.
“What if a bat pissed in your eye?” the stump said. Its voice was deep, patrician.
“Shut up,” Lindquist said.
“You shut up,” the stump said.
Lindquist took off running into the dark, the cypress stumps cackling around him. He leapt over deadfalls of cypress and pine, until his left leg got sucked down in mud. Lindquist cursed and wrenched his leg free, the bog belching as it let go of his boot.
“Whoa there, fruitcake,” said another cypress stump.
The surrounding stumps erupted in wild laughter.
So this is withdrawal, Lindquist thought. He could deal with jeering cypress stumps. If other men went through war, famine, plagues, droughts, then he could deal with talking cypress stumps.
When Lindquist resumed walking he kept his pace casual, a little more strut in his style. Go ahead and laugh, motherfuckers, he tried to tell the stumps with his walk.
He reminded himself that he was forty-five years old but might as well have been a hundred, the way he’d treated himself. Well, no more putting his body through the wringer of ritual abuse. Once he got out of this swamp, if he ever did, he would put himself on a vigorous health regimen. Quality vitamins, a top-notch juicer. He would buy a new arm and he would move away fro
m the bayou, maybe even from the country. He would settle down with a black-haired girl with blue eyes and a dramatic face, a French girl who’d listen raptly to his recollections of the story he was living right now.
He pictured vividly this waking dream.
The girl looked very much like his wife.
Exactly like his wife.
THE TOUP BROTHERS
It was just after dawn when the Toup brothers came upon the swamp shack. They stopped and listened for signs of human life. The only sounds came from the half-sleeping wilderness. The myriad rustlings of bush animals. The distant calls of birds. Otherwise, the world was hushed in cloistral quiet.
Victor scouted through the weeds and picked up a rock and hurled it. It whomped against the side of the shack as loud as a gunshot. A covey of mourning doves exploded out of a bush, scattering above the treetops.
The brothers waited.
Nothing.
Victor kicked again through the weeds and picked up a stick and hurled it like an Olympian. It twirled and whistled through the air and smacked the front door.
Faint rousing sounds came from inside the dwelling. Human. Then a man’s voiced, cracked with age. “What the fuck?”
Victor ran full-bore across the clearing. When he reached the shack he raised his leg without slowing and kicked the front in a kind of flying karate move. The shack listed and then froze crookedly still for a moment before collapsing like a magician’s house of cards. As if nothing more than illusion had held it together.
Someone stirred beneath the junk heap.
At the edge of the wood Reginald pocketed his hands and came warily across the clearing. Another pain in the ass to deal with, this.
“What the fuck,” said an ireful voice at the bottom of the pile.
“Get out,” Victor said.
“Out?” said the man. “There ain’t no in anymore.”
Victor kicked the pile.
There was stirring from within the mound. Pieces of wood scrap and corrugated metal tumbled. A bony hand shot out from the rubble and picked up a two-by-four and flung it aside. Another and another. Finally a figure rose like a junkyard Lazarus, pieces of scrap sloughing from his shoulders and back. The old man brushed off his filthy overalls with an oddly foppish show of propriety. In the dim purple daybreak he looked at Victor and then at Reginald. His babyish white hair was awry, his eyes beneath their wily brows still puffy with sleep.
“We’re looking for somebody,” Reginald said.
The man glared at Reginald. “Well, why the fuck didn’t you just knock?”
“Guy come through?” Reginald asked.
The man pointed to the ground, the junk pile. “Here?”
“No time for your shit,” Victor said.
“A man with one arm,” Reginald said.
Something in Victor’s face gave the man pause. His body swayed in panicked indecision, his hands squeezing in fists at his sides. As if part of him wanted to fight, as if the other part wanted to flee. At once his defiance vanished. “Yeah, a guy come,” he said.
“When?” Victor asked.
The man stared at the ground in bewilderment. As if waiting for the mud to tell him what to say. What to do.
“When,” Victor said.
“I’m trying to think,” the man said. “You woke me up from a deep fuckin’ sleep.”
The swamp had fallen eerily quiet, even the birds and crickets silent. Maybe watching from their boweries and nooks, waiting to see how this scene would transpire. Meanwhile as daybreak grew brighter the swamp was seeping back into place, like an old oil painting revealed tint by tint by restorative solvent. Mushroom browns and moss greens and lichen grays.
“I guess it was four hours ago,” the old man said. “Five.”
“Which way?” Victor asked.
The man pointed east with a palsied finger. “Said he was going back to Jeanette. That he had something you guys wanted.”
“Let’s go,” Reginald said to his brother.
“Drugs,” the old man said.
Reginald’s shoulders sagged. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes.
“You drug dealers, right?”
“What makes you think that?” Victor asked.
“Shit, I don’t care.”
“What makes you think we’re drug dealers?”
“He told me so.”
“And you believe everything you hear?”
“Come on,” Reginald said.
Victor stayed in place. Arms folded over his chest, a professorial cant to his head. “What if I were to tell you your mother was a whore?” he said.
The man kept silent.
“Was your mother a whore?”
“Look. Just leave me alone. You already done destroyed my house.”
“I heard your mother is a whore. Is that true?”
The old man worked his mouth pensively. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s true.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Your ma was a whore?”
“Yeah.”
Reginald started to walk back toward the woods. At the edge of the clearing he stopped and looked around at his brother. “Come on,” he said.
“She was a whore,” the man went on. “Big ol’ one. So if that’s it.”
“I heard she gave blowjobs to strangers in bathrooms,” Victor said. “Is this true?”
“Come on, goddamn it,” Reginald said. “No time for this shit.”
“Probably,” the old man answered Victor.
“Who would sell his mother out like that?” Victor asked.
The man sat heavily on the rotted pile of scrap, liver-spotted forearms resting on his thighs, hands loose-wristed between his knees.
“Even if she were?” Victor went on. “Who would sell their mother out like that?”
The man shook his head. It was a moment before he spoke and when he did his voice was soft. “I don’t even remember my mother.”
“When did she die?”
“Long ago.”
“When?”
“I was eighteen, nineteen.”
“You have trouble with numbers.”
“I’m fuckin’ eighty-five.”
“Are you sure?”
“You the Toup brothers?” asked the old man.
The brothers exchanged a glance.
“How’d you know our name?” Victor asked.
“The guy told me.”
Silence.
“As long as you ain’t from the government I don’t care.”
Victor waited.
“You guys got any drugs?”
“You’re crazier than shit, aren’t you?” Victor asked, smiling a smile that looked sharpened on a whetstone.
The old man thought about this but didn’t answer.
“What’s your name?”
The man looked up at Victor. A woebegone supplicant. “You already destroyed my house.”
“That was a house?”
“I’m going to die out here anyway. I got no house now. And I sure as shit ain’t goin’ to Jeanette. So why not just leave me. Let the wolves have me.”
“Wolves. Stop being so fuckin’ dramatic.”
“You ruined my fuckin’ house.”
Victor stared down at the man and lifted his shirtfront and reached for the gun tucked in his waistband.
“Hey,” Reginald said from the edge of the wood.
Victor ignored him.
“My mother wasn’t a whore,” the man told Victor.
“So?” Victor said.
“Just for the record.”
Victor rested the muzzle of the Sig Sauer against the man’s forehead, pushing hard enough to make a divot in the flesh.
“Yours was,” the man said. “Your ma was a whore.”
Victor cocked the gun.
“She must have fucked a real piece of shit to squeeze out a turd like you.”
“Hey,” Reginald called.
Victor finally looked at his
brother.
“Cut the shit,” Reginald said.
Victor uncocked the gun and tucked it back into his waistband and began to walk away. To his back the man spat quick French curses, his voice soft but full of fury. Without turning Victor called him a crazy son of a bitch. The old man reached into the pocket of his overalls and threw gray ash-like powder into the air. It silted softly down, sighing in the weeds and leaves.
COSGROVE
Twig by twig, leaf by leaf, the tangled wood around him gathered shape in the pale gray dawn. He could hear water sounds, splashing baitfish, and he could see the bay’s smoky shimmer through the leaves. He stepped tentatively forward, eyes stinging with exhaustion, shoulder throbbing with every heartbeat.
There it was across the channel of foggy water. The island. A fucking miracle.
Cosgrove went running high-kneed in the water, a few times tripping in the mud. He rose and cast wild looks about because now he was out in the open and one of the twins could shoot him easily. When the water deepened and his shoes no longer touched bottom he paddled and kicked, a flailing swim. Then his shoes touched bottom again and he staggered dripping wet onto the island.
In the clearing what was left of Hanson lay belly-up in the mud. Cosgrove stared down at the body. There was blood, already drying dark, on the ground. Blood splattered on a cypress stump. Blood speckled on the leaves of a trumpet creeper.
Horseflies as big as grapes supped on the gore.
Cosgrove looked away from the mush of Hanson’s head and doubled over with his hands on his knees and retched into the underbrush.
Then he squatted over Hanson, averting his face, reached into one of his pockets. Nothing. He rooted through the other and felt the keys and pulled them out. Then he scrabbled backward, half expecting Hanson’s hand to shoot up and grab him. A crazy thought, he knew. He was half delirious.
It took him ten minutes to find the motorboat, moored in its bowery of bulrush and vine. Still convinced that a bullet might go through his head any second, he leapt into the boat. It rocked away from the shore, water splashing over the gunwale and puddling on the floor.
He pulled the choke and the engine grumbled and the boat shot into the water, the prow lifting and smacking back down. Cosgrove glanced back at the island, its shape blurred behind gray morning fog. His shoulder hurt, his chest, his heart.