The Marauders (23 page)

Lindquist walked to the customer service table and picked out a deposit slip and stub pencil. Then he sat on a vinyl-cushioned chair under a plastic ficus tree and balanced the deposit slip on his knee and started filling it out. Four dollars and thirty cents. He’d never usually bother with such a small amount but he wanted to show Gwen the coin. He wanted to show Gwen he’d been right all along.

When his wife finished with the Vietnamese woman, Lindquist got up and zigzagged through the maze of velvet ropes and went to her window.

“Hey, Gwen,” he said. He put the deposit slip and the money on the counter.

Gwen looked down and saw how much money was there and spitefully shook her head.

“How you doing?” he asked his wife.

The other tellers were watching in a way they thought discreet.

“Not too good,” Gwen said, glassy-voiced. The neck of her purple sateen blouse was open and Lindquist could see the livid red of her chest.

“Why not?”

“I think you know, Gus.”

“Well, hell. I’m just making a deposit. Ain’t here to cause any trouble.”

She took the money and deposit slip and clacked away at her computer.

“I like that color on you,” Lindquist said. “That fingernail polish. That’s a good color. Real flattering.”

Gwen printed out the deposit receipt and handed it to Lindquist.

“Have a good day,” she said.

Lindquist stood there with the slip in his hand, grinning like a dog. “I got a joke for you,” he said.

“Please, Gus.”

“You’re in a bad mood. Maybe this joke’ll help.”

“It won’t.” Gwen sounded immensely tired.

“You haven’t heard it yet.”

“There’s people waiting. This is my job.”

Lindquist glanced over his shoulder. No one.

“Knock knock,” Lindquist said.

Gwen said nothing.

“Knock knock,” Lindquist said again, louder.

“Who’s there?” Gwen asked in a small drowning voice.

“Dewey,” Lindquist said, resting his forearm on the counter, leaning his face closer to the glass. Then he said, “You’re supposed to ask ‘Dewey who.’ ”

“Dewey who?” Gwen asked quietly.

“Dewey have to use this condom?” Lindquist said. He threw his head back and cackled, his Adam’s apple jerking up and down like a grease-slicked ball bearing.

Gwen’s face was red and twitching.

“Didn’t like that one?” he asked.

Behind Lindquist a man cleared his throat. Lindquist turned and saw one of the managers, that guy with Bela Lugosi hair staring like some sheriff in a standoff, his arms crossed psychotically over his chest.

“Excuse you,” Lindquist said. He turned back around and grinned at his wife. He saw that the orange-haired teller next to her was watching.

“How you doin’, Marcy,” Lindquist said.

“Good, Gus.”

“Glad to hear it. Your hair looks nice today. That’s a good look on you.”

“Thanks, Gus,” Marcy said.

“Well, hell. Don’t thank me for telling the truth. Telling the truth is easy.”

“Please, Gus,” Gwen said.

“Please what?”

“Please leave.”

“That’s kind of rude. I’m a friendly customer.”

“Have a little dignity is all.”

“Sure, I’ll have some,” Lindquist said, looking around as if for an hors d’oeuvres tray. “Where is it?”

By now the room was silent, only the sound of the air-conditioning, of people shuffling papers and scratching their pens.

“Knock knock,” Lindquist said.

Gwen stared at the counter.

“Knock knock,” Lindquist said again.

Silence.

“Okay, fine,” Lindquist said. He looked at Marcy. “Hey, Marcy, knock knock.”

“Who’s there?” Marcy said.

“Little Boy Blue,” Lindquist said.

“No,” Gwen said. “Don’t ask him. Marcy, don’t do it.”

“Marcy, ask who’s at the door,” Lindquist said.

“I’m not sure if I should, Gus.”

“Where’s people’s sense of humor?”

No one said a word.

The desperado cleared his throat again.

“Okay, I’ll quit bothering you,” said Lindquist. “One little thing first, though.” He grinned and reached into his pocket and set the doubloon on the counter.

Gwen glanced down at the coin but her face showed no change in expression. “You’re going to get me fired,” she said.

“But look. That’s a doubloon. A real doubloon. I found it, me. That’s the real deal there.”

Gwen’s eyes were wet and now Lindquist saw the tear on her cheek. She knuckled it away.

Lindquist slipped the coin back in his pocket. “All right, okay,” he said. “I’ll leave.”

About three in the morning Lindquist heard a heavy thump on the boat deck, scuttling footfalls. Adrenaline shot through him. He looked through the wheelhouse windows. No one. The bay in hushed slumber, dark as dark could be, the diminutive sound of waves against the hull. He wondered if back at the wharf a dog had snuck onto the boat. Maybe some other animal.

These possibilities were careening through his head when Lindquist heard someone clamber swiftly up the ladder. He looked frantically about for something he could use as a weapon. Only a Louisville Slugger propped in the far corner, too far to fetch because the person was already halfway up to the wheelhouse.

At last a head popped up from the floor like some fiendish jack in the box. One of the Toup brothers.

“Evening, Lindquist,” he said. He came into the wheelhouse and stepped close enough forward that Lindquist could see his third eyebrow, fainter, between the two.

“You’re crazy,” Lindquist said.

This one was Victor. He knew because of the tattoos on his arms.

Victor’s eyes seared with contempt. “You know what I can do to you?”

Now ten or twelve yards away a light came on in the bay. Lindquist glanced. A small listing motorboat, the other brother, Reginald, standing like a sentry, a vale of dark beyond.

Victor went to the metal detector hanging from its peg and took it from the wall. He wrapped both hands around the handle like he was holding a golf club and slammed the coil against the floor over and over. Lindquist watched disbelievingly. The coil twisted away from the machine and dangled askew from its wiring and then Victor flipped the metal detector around and began smashing the other end. The control box exploded apart, shards of broken plastic and red and green wiring. One of the screws struck Lindquist on the cheek, raising blood.

Victor tossed the ruined machine to the floor and glared at Lindquist. A giant-shouldered troglodyte, a menagerie of tattoos on his arms. “We told you,” he said.

“You gonna pay me for that,” Lindquist said, childlike. He saw the handgun handle poking from the waistband of Victor’s black jeans, an insignia that said
SIG SAUER
.

“Pay you? I just busted the fuck out of it.”

“I don’t even smoke it, me.”

“Smoke? What the hell you talking now?”

“Reefer.”

Victor bared his teeth. “You have no idea how close to fucked you are.”

“What I do to you? Why you bothering me?”

“Don’t think I don’t know what you did to my house, you fuck.” This time the
fuck
came out with such venomous force that spittle flecked Lindquist’s face. He recoiled.

“Your house?”

“I’ll bust your fuckin’ head, Lindquist.”

“Stealing my arm wasn’t enough?” Lindquist said. “How about the alligator in my house?”

Victor glared, rough breaths scraping quickly out his nose.

“I’m seeing Villanova,” said Lindquist.

“Go to Villanova. I’ll deny everything. ‘Hell you talking about, metal detector?’ Everybody knows you’re a crazy pill-popper. Even your own daughter says.”

Lindquist blinked, mouth twisting mutely.

“Look at you. Fuckin’ retard.”

Victor stared another moment and then started down the ladder, his eyes staying on Lindquist until his head ducked out of sight. Then Victor jumped back onto the motorboat and it rocked under his weight. Reginald started the motor. The brothers crouched, Victor staring up at the wheelhouse. Lindquist watched the boat cut away, its light shrinking to a wavery dot before fading altogether.

Lindquist stared at the broken machinery on the floor. He cursed softly and reached to pick up the machine but then he sat back down.

An irreparable ruin.

Lindquist’s throat narrowed and grew hot. He didn’t want to cry but he did.

Lindquist leaned against the counter, forearms on the glass, his voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper though there was no one else in Trader John’s to hear. He asked the owner, Mrs. Theriot, to keep secret what he was about to say.

“What’s with the funny voice?” Mrs. Theriot asked.

“I need you to keep quiet about this.”

“Get off the glass.”

It was early morning and sun shined brightly through the shopwindows. Lindquist hadn’t slept in a day and his head hummed with exhaustion. The follicles of his scalp hurt, his eyelids. He’d been rationing his pills because only a dozen were left. Earlier he’d ransacked his house looking for something he could pawn, but everything of worth was already hocked. The flat-screen television, the stereo, the microwave, the blender, all of them sold. For pills. Ostensibly the appliances had been collateral, but Lindquist never returned with the money so Theriot ended up selling the merchandise.

Now Lindquist eyed the metal detector, a waterproof Fisher, hanging from the wall behind the counter.

“I got something, me. Need you to keep it out of sight for two weeks.”

“A week.”

“Ten days?”

“A week. Always been, always will be a week.”

Lindquist hesitated, looked around uneasily. Then he unpocketed the coin and chinked it down on the glass.

Theriot raised her hoary eyebrows and picked up the coin. She tapped it on her teeth. Then she studied one side and then the other through her jeweler’s loupe.

“My,” Mrs. Theriot said. “Where’d you find this?”

“Serious,” said Lindquist. “Don’t show anyone. Please.”

Mrs. Theriot looked at Lindquist speculatively. “Look at you. When’s the last time you slept?”

“Give me ten days?”

“A week.”

Lindquist pointed with his chin. “That metal detector up there.”

Wes looked around the parish for work, walking the docks and talking to ship captains and deckhands. Nobody was hiring and everybody was hurting. The captains, comrades in penury, were contrite when turning him down. “You might want to try Captain John over there in the Grand Pass,” they’d say. Or, “You try Harry Bogardus’s boat yet? The
Mustang Sally
? Piece of shit, can’t miss it.”

The sweltering days slid into mid-September and the heat was nigh apocalyptic. Halloween still seemed very far away. Nights Wes slept in the public park in the cab of his truck. His eighteenth birthday fell on a Monday and it didn’t seem much different from any other day. He bought himself a Twinkie and went to the movie theater to see some movie about Wall Street with Michael Douglas.

Wes knew he should give up, go home with his head hung low and beg his father’s forgiveness. It had been more than a month. More than anything else except maybe his bed, he missed building his boat. He’d wanted to finish it in time for the next shrimping season, but no way was that going to happen now. Maybe it would never happen. Maybe he should leave the Barataria like everybody else. Give up.