The Swamp Killers

by Sarah M. Chen

  Her hair hung soft about her face, free of heat-induced frizz and sticky spray. Duck made as though to run his hand through it, but she shook her head, the swinging strands brushing his face in the briefest caress. “He’ll be back soon. You’d better go.”

  He touched his fingertips to her face, an unspoken promise of return, and trotted lightly around the back of the cottage, ducking beneath a window there, slipping from one unit to the next, staying in the shadows, until he reached the office, pressing his ear to the wall until the silence within assured him of safety.

  “He just left.” Red let out a cackle. “Good thing for you.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He’s all het up over some briefcase what got lost. Said he dropped it down by the swamp. Said he’d make it worth my while to find it, no questions asked, as long as he gets it back with everything in it.”

  Duck stood to one side of the window and peeped down the row of cabins, their paint shrinking almost audibly away from the fierce onslaught of the midday sun. “You need to get after these cabins, Red. You let ’em go all the way down to bare wood, they’ll rot. I’ll come by later when it gets cool, help you paint. What’d he say was in that briefcase, anyhow?”

  “He didn’t. Just that it was worth ten thousand to him to get it back.”

  “Good thing you got more than that.” Duck hadn’t thought twice about sending couple of bundles Red’s way.

  “Shoot, Duck. I wouldn’t dime you out even if you hadn’t been so generous. But you want to watch your back. He’s carrying. And he’s asking around in town. You throw any more money around anywhere else today?”

  Duck thought of the eager tremble in the jeweler’s fingers as he drew the cash toward him. “Course not.”

  “Then I guess you got nothing to worry about.”

  Duck turned to go. “I guess not. Hell, Red. Everybody around here carries.”

  “You don’t.”

  An alligator bellowed, right on cue. Duck smiled. “I don’t need to.”

  “There’s one more thing.”

  Duck stepped back from the doorway.

  “What’s that?”

  “He said he lost it down by the swamp. Slipped and dropped it, or some such. Wanted to know who around here knows the swamp. I said I didn’t know. But he asks around, the first name out of anybody’s mouth will be yours.”

  When he went back to the store, the jeweler was waiting.

  “Had a feeling I might see you again. And I’ve got a feeling you’re going to like what you see here today. A moment.”

  He disappeared into the back room. Duck heard voices. No. Just one voice.

  The man returned, babbling through his routine—“one of my finest pieces”—the lamp clicked on, the teasing withdrawal of a narrow box from a drawer, the slight hesitation before lifting the lid—“No, no! Don’t look yet.” Nervous, Duck thought, afraid he was overplaying his hand with such an expensive piece, afraid he wouldn’t get the big payout he was hoping for. He had no idea how much money Duck had, and how little he had to spend it on.

  “There. Now you can look.” The jeweler stepped back from the table. Duck’s breath caught. The stone within its double border of diamonds was twice the size of the sapphires in the earrings.

  “Ice and fire,” the man breathed, “all in one magnificent, flawless stone.”

  “How much?”

  Duck wasn’t even sure he’d spoken until the man told him. He counted out the packets, the man still talking, talking. “Hope you’re taking her somewhere special to give her this. Might I recommend Le Petit Outre? I’ll talk to Francois on your behalf, tell him to set aside some Veuve Clicquot for you.” Sweat stood shiny on his forehead despite the store’s Arctic air conditioning. He’d called someone when Duck had come in. Huh.

  The man Timmy had been asking around in town, Red had said. Would this stupid, stupid jeweler really risk losing Duck as a customer? Still, it wouldn’t hurt to let the man think he was the stupid one.

  “Much obliged,” Duck said. “And maybe you could recommend a…” Motel sounded too sleazy for the sort of woman who would wear a necklace like this, despite Melody’s present abode. “A…a nice place to stay?”

  The jeweler patted at his brow with a handkerchief. “You want the Du Ponte. Finest in town. Ask for the honeymoon suite.” His lips trembled as he stretched them in a smile.

  Duck nodded thanks. “Think I’ll check it out on my way home. Maybe that restaurant, too.” Let him send the man Timmy running all over town.

  The necklace danced in the jeweler’s shaking hand.

  “Same as before? No box, no wrapping?”

  “Same as before.”

  The parking space beside the end unit stood empty. What if the man Timmy had taken Melody with him?

  His fist fell against the door.

  “Who is it?”

  That voice. He leaned his head against the doorjamb until he rediscovered his equilibrium. “Duck. Uh, Makepeace.”

  “Just a moment.”

  Duck waited and waited some more. Then the door opened and she was pulling him into a room darkened in an ineffective hedge against the heat, curtains drawn tight across one of the back windows. An air conditioner rattled and dripped in the other.

  “I wanted to put these on first.” Melody tilted her head this way and that so he could see the earrings. Even in the dim light, they glinted and shone. But they couldn’t compete with Melody’s eyes, gleaming brighter still.

  “Makepeace. They’re so beautiful.” Her lips brushed his cheek.

  “There’s something else.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Take off your top.”

  Oh. That.

  She didn’t say it. But he saw it in her face. Every woman’s realization that sooner or later, everything is a transaction.

  Wordless, she shrugged out of her tee-shirt. Her breasts were bare beneath it, small and high, no need for a bra.

  “Close your eyes.”

  She complied, shoulders slumped. He lifted the necklace over her head, lowering it gently until it lay upon her skin.

  She didn’t wait for the order to open her eyes.

  “Oh! Oh!”

  “This is how you should always wear it.”

  She shook her head, shoulders straight again, sass in her smile. “No. It’s not quite right.”

  Not quite right? Duck thought of the packets of money, no doubt locked away by now in the jeweler’s safe. Should he have spent more still?

  “This is how I should always wear it.”

  Melody slid out of her shorts and underwear and eased away until her calves struck the bed, collapsing backward onto it, shaking her head so that her hair spread across the pillow, showing off the earrings. She lifted the pendant to her lips and licked it, and then lay it sparkling between her breasts. She shifted on the bed. Her legs fell apart.

  “Don’t you agree?”

  Yes, Duck thought as he fell upon her. Yes.

  He woke to the sound of a car door.

  Shit.

  He leapt from the bed.

  “Honey, don’t go.” She clutched at him, pulling him back.

  A moment’s hesitation at the thought of the man Timmy, his soft smooth hands, the bit of belly pooching out his shirt. In a fair fight, he could take him. But Red’s words came back to him. “He’s carrying.” A naked man against a gun was no fair fight. He lunged for the door.

  Melody got there before him, arms spread across the door, mouth open in a scream. “He’s here, Timmy! Hurry!”

  Time stopped. Duck’s heart broke.

  The front door rattled. He snatched the coverlet from the bed, wrapped it around him, and dove headfirst through the back window, threw off the glass-scored bedclothes and ran like a motherfucker for the swamp.

  The first shot whanged past him.

  The second clipped his right elbow and knocked him to the ground, whic
h likely saved him from the third.

  Up again and into the reeds, kicking the pirogue free of the mats, leveraging in the cooler, climbing in behind it and poling one-handed away from shore in a crooked, yawing path. But free.

  Free.

  Of everything, love included. Which was everything.

  Deep within the swamp, a gator bellowed.

  Another muttered, closer, and even in his agony, Duck noted the sound’s inevitable resemblance to the putt-putt of an oncoming boat.

  Putt-putt-putt-putt-putt.

  Nearer by the minute. Not a gator.

  Duck on his feet, pain forgotten, a quick glance to verify the damning, swirling trail behind the pirogue, the mud stirred up by his pole, invisible at night but clear as a goddamn superhighway by day, leading any pursuer straight to him. Even as realization struck, the craft came into view, Red’s old boat, Red himself with a hand on the tiller and a gun to his head.

  Anybody else, Duck could have shaken off. But Red, for all his years at the motel, knew the swamp as well as Duck, maybe even better.

  He’d have to count on the gators, then. He poled straight for the hanging vines, not bothering to sweep them aside, snakes be damned, the boat so close now he could hear the man Timmy calling above the motor.

  “Just give me the briefcase. I won’t hurt you.” Melody sat beside him, making herself small.

  Duck almost laughed. He’d been stupid about Melody. He was done with being stupid.

  He poled harder. The island came into view. Sun glinted off the shack’s tin roof. So now they knew where he lived, knew where to find the briefcase. What the man Timmy didn’t know was that he’d never get the briefcase.

  One by one, the gators rose, corrugating the water’s surface.

  Duck felt bad for Red. The bullet the man Timmy undoubtedly was saving for him, once Red delivered him safely back to dry land, would have been easier. But it couldn’t be helped. Duck was happy to see Melody in the boat with the two men. Melody and that goddamn jewelry, so that someday, somebody would cut open a gator and get the surprise of a lifetime at the sapphires winking within.

  He lifted the pole from the water and let the pirogue drift.

  The boat came closer.

  “Come on, Duck. You heard the man. Let’s just get this over with so we can all go on about our business.”

  The gators exhaled en masse, a prolonged hiss that subsumed Red’s weak, reedy plea. Duck grappled left-handed with the cooler’s latch. Sweat slid down his forehead and stung his eyes. Goddammit. He yanked hard at the latch. The cooler, flung so haphazardly into the pirogue, began a slow tilt toward the water. Duck lunged for it. The pirogue angled precariously, its floorboards shoving against his feet, one gunwale canting skyward, the other dipping into the water, the cooler sliding behind it, sinking unopened into the black depths.

  A final lurch sent Duck in behind it, the warm water almost soothing after the first electric jolt of horror—but no. This swamp was his. These waters, his. These gators, even now spiraling into the rolling dives that would bring them beneath him for better purchase—no one knew them better than he did. Duck shot to the surface and stroked toward the boat, leading the gators that could still vanquish his foes, just as he’d intended.

  He raised his head a split-second, just long enough to take in the satisfying sound of Melody’s shriek, the fear twisting Timmy’s face. The apology in Red’s eyes as he hauled on the tiller and opened the throttle, the boat disappearing from view even as Duck himself disappeared into the maw of the swamp.

  Back to TOC

  The Movie Version

  Tom Sweterlitsch

  I am the black screen. Black before stadium seating, black before theaters with pleather chairs and once-cushiony seats now the texture of mange. I am the black screen in second-run dollar theaters with sticky floors and single men watching in midmorning. In the odd art house hoping for a quick Hollywood cash-in to fund the next Godard-fest or Bergman-palooza. I am the black screen at the mall before fumbling teenagers tongue kissing in the dark. I am cell phone screens in subways, laptop screens in dorm rooms with social media running, I am the black screen on an airliner tucked into the seat ahead, the flip-down screen in a minivan. I am the black screen, I am the black screen, the black screen, the black screen. I am the black screen before the worn couch, husband asleep, children asleep, the black screen in the hours of insomnia. I am the black screen.

  Lens flare. Waves, waves, a woman in a diaphanous gown emerges from the ocean, through foam—she is soaked but effervescent, her clothes cling, translucent. Her eyes are the color of the ocean, the color of the sky. She is a nineteen-year-old actress named Rosalie Dobbs discovered in Milwaukee and flown to Los Angeles, auditioned, promised, met with, lunched with, managed, when she was cast as this Venus and asked to wear a russet wig and walk soaking wet for several takes on the shores of El Segundo. When I imagine myself, I imagine myself as her. She would never work another film, she was never great at parties, she read lines like an amateur. She would move home to Minnesota after working in a Glendale bowling alley for a few years to make ends meet, she would move in with her parents to work as a pharmaceutical rep and eventually marry a man who refused to understand how close, how so very close, she had once been to making it in Hollywood. Here, now, however, eternally now, she resolves into Botticelli’s Birth of Venus branded with the name of the production company: Mimesis.

  I am, unfortunately, a shitty film. Wide-angle shots of swampland dissolve into boxy green interstate signs pointing the exit to Atlanta. Not quite one star, not quite gonzo shit-storm awful, redeemed through insanity or the sheer exuberance of earnest incompetence, but two stars, two and a half maybe, boring and nonsensical at times, veering on unwatchable. An image of the mirror-like façade of the Symphony Tower at twilight. These are the first moments of my life.

  Morning of the Killers (★★): Teenage daughter of Atlanta crime boss double-crosses family, FBI, and hired killers to discover buried treasure. Rated R for pervasive violence and nudity.

  I am still ninety-three minutes away from the brash credits sequence that will end me.

  Sixty-four from the scene of Melody Duplass, the teenage daughter, orgiastic in her revenge against her mother, against the law, her body bathed in swamp water and blood that glistens in the firelight of burning airboats and alligators, holding aloft by their hair the severed heads of her boyfriend Timmy Milici and a hitman named Jig, laughing hysterical, a Judith with double Holofernes as thousands of hundred-dollar bills whip in the wind behind her like a paper tempest.

  Forty-three minutes away from the choreographed alligators shown in all the trailers.

  “Do you think that’s possible, all that stuff you wrote about choreographing the alligators?” asked Donora Kovic, the original Director of Photography, on the single day she and the original screenwriter, Javier, shared together on set. Bird-like Donora, with squared-off bangs and black turtlenecks and skinny jeans pegged above steel-toed boots, Morning of the Killers her first film after NYU. She was steeped in the compositions and natural lighting of John Alcott, the cold warmth of Gunnar Fischer, especially the easy cool of Raoul Coutard, and she knew entire sections of Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph by heart to recite, neat whiskey raised to her speaking lips.

  Javier was intellectual, quirkily handsome, with black curls and a wide smile, glasses that slipped down the crest of his nose. He had once had an interesting career as a political reporter that Donora found a cool relief from the filmmaker machismo she so often encountered.

  I wonder what I would have been had I been born of these parents, the original screenwriter, the original director of photography, but Javier was never hired for rewrites, Donora was fired a few days into production. The Director who fired them both, my Director, my Father, subscribed to the auteur theory of filmmaking and suggestively associated his name with Kubrick’s whenever the chance arose on press junkets, a claim repeated i
n the internet hype before my release and rarely challenged. He had gained a career foothold making the stylized horror Slasherface and the softcore superhero League of Lolitas. He had a vision for me different than Javier’s, he had a vision different than Donora’s, and replaced them both with his usual yes-men and frat house cronies at the first opportunity. My production was a wreck from the first; I am the child of a troubled family.

  On the single day they met, Donora and Javier stood apart from the crowd at one of the parties following their day of shooting, finding every syllable uttered by one another fascinating and alluring as the sounds of the party around them drained away to watery background noise. From dawn until they quit for the day, Javier had trailed Donora on set as she filmed the Florida swamp scenes in a soundstage just outside of Toronto, interested in her craft, pressed into corners and hidden behind props to stay out of her shots. And Donora took Javier on walks to the craft services truck on her breaks, explaining everything he had seen her do, describing her cameras and lenses, backup storage, the artificial lights she used to replicate the heartrending beauty of the Golden Hour. They might have someday tumbled together into bed, I like to believe, they might have, they might have…

  “Choreographing the alligators maybe isn’t the right word,” said Javier, sipping his whiskey. “But, sure. Training the alligators, might be more like it. Like training a pit bull. That’s absolutely true, you can do that. Easy. I saw trained alligators. Probably you can make the case that just about every alligator in Florida is trained, to a certain extent. Sharing habitats with humans, etc., etc.”

  The original screenplay, spark of my life, the full potential of what I might have been, was entitled Kobultana. Javier Mason, only child of Puerto Rican immigrants, born and raised in Duluth, was a writer in his teens, usually of pulpy detective short stories with clunky prose and telegraphed twists, but he fell under the allure of journalism when in college, imagining he might become a hardboiled journalistic crusader, press pass tucked into fedora band, digging out corruption in the Minnesota State Legislature and exposing evil to the glary light of Truth. He eventually became a stringer covering state politics. All in all a fine life as one year ground into the next, of coffee breaks, of smoke breaks, of hasty meals of King Dongs from the vending machines in the Capitol building, chatting with aides in the courtyard, reading over press releases, attending news conferences, hammering out articles on his laptop. Not married yet, but with a girlfriend named Astrid, a graphic designer with clients in the Twin Cities and a swank loft overlooking water.