The Marauders (3 page)

“Couple of guys already radioed in,” Davey said. “Shrimp look thin. Early yet, though.”

“Oil?”

“Everywhere.”

Davey looked at Wes. “How you doin’, podnah? Thought you’d’a gone Ivy League on us by now.”

Wes forced a grin and shook his head. College, he already knew, was pretty much out of the question.

“Boy, is that gray in your hair already?” Davey said.

“A bit, yes sir,” Wes said. Just after his sixteenth birthday, the gray had begun to pepper the sides of his head. A little at first, but every time he got his hair cut there were several new grays and Wes guessed he’d be as white-haired as his father before he turned thirty.

“You two come on over to the house for supper when all this dies down, huh?” Davey said.

“We will, Davey,” Wes’s father said. “You say hello to Kelly and Renee now.”

“Shuh, shuh.”

Wes followed his father down the dock to their boat and hopped onto the deck and untied the ropes from the dock cleats. He heard someone step behind him and turned. It was Father Neely in his cassock and alb, the sweat on his forehead gleaming in the dock lights.

“How you, Father,” Wes said. He stood and shook the man’s hand. Soft and damp. Never a day of boat work in his life.

“Wesley,” Father Neely said. “Good to see you, son.” He glanced up at the boat, said hello to Wes’s father, who was coiling up the mooring rope. He only held up his hand and turned his back. Then he climbed the metal ladder up to the wheelhouse. Through the window Wes saw the spark of his lighter, the guttering flame of the candle nub beside the wheel. Another spark when his father lit a cigarette.

“You guys missed the blessing,” Father Neely said, tactful enough to not say
again
.

“Running late tonight,” Wes said.

“Shuh, of course,” Father Neely said. He glanced up at the wheelhouse and smoothed down his smoke-yellowed mustache with his thumb and forefinger. He looked back at Wes and dug in his robe pocket and fished out a St. Christopher medallion. Wes hesitated. He knew his father wouldn’t want it but neither could he exactly turn it down. He took the medallion and pocketed it and thanked Father Neely.

“I’ll pray for a prosperous season,” Father Neely said.

Wes thanked him again and said that they needed all the praying they could get.

Their boat, the
Bayou Sweetheart
, was a thirty-three-year-old Lafitte skiff, one of the few of its kind in Jeanette that survived the hurricane. Weeks after the storm, when Wes and his father began picking through the ruins, they found the boat miraculously intact, sitting on top of the levee as if placed there by a benevolent giant’s hand.

Like many other Baratarians, Wes and his family had chosen to ride the storm out. Or, really, Wes’s father had chosen for them. When Wes’s family woke on the morning of August 28 and turned on the television, the weatherman on WGNO news out of New Orleans was predicting a Category 5 hurricane. One-hundred-and-fifty-mile-per-hour wind gusts, fifteen-foot storm surges, levee breaks. A monster.

The first winds were just beginning, moaning in the eaves, and outside
the sky had already blackened to charcoal, so dark the trees in the yard threw off a strange glow, as if lit from within.

“We should leave,” Wes’s mother said for the umpteenth time.

They stood before the old Zenith in the den. Still in their bedclothes, faces puffy with sleep.

“You know how many times they’ve said this and it turned out to be nothing?” Wes’s father said. The worry wasn’t yet showing in his eyes, but there was an edge in his voice.

Thunder shook the house and rattled the windowpanes. Their black Labrador, Max, scampered to the kitchen and hid under the table, where he watched them timorously, head on forepaws.

“We can stay in Baton Rouge,” said Wes’s mother. She meant her parents’ place.

“Come on, Dad,” Wes said, wondering how his father could be so blasé, wanting to take him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him.

But his father was watching the television, rubbing his unshaven chin, hardly listening. “Then you and Wes go ahead and pack. But you better get to it. Now. Before the roads get too choked up.”

“You too. You’re going.”

Wes’s father shook his head as if this were out of the question. “I gotta tie down the boat. Help other guys with theirs. I gotta board up these windows. There’s a million things.”

“Listen to the TV,” said Wes’s mother.

“They always say this stuff. It’s their job.”

All morning Wes figured his father would come to his senses and change his mind, but no. And by afternoon, when the first bands of the storm lashed the Barataria, it was already too late to leave. That night the hurricane hammered Jeanette like a djinn. Within hours, houses and mobile homes were smashed apart and swept away like dollhouses. Docks ripped from land and carried down streets turned into raging rivers. Boats snapped away from their moorings and were sucked into riptides.

By the time the storm had run its course, several people in Jeanette drowned in the flood.

Among them Wes’s mother.

That was almost exactly five years ago, and the anniversary of his mother’s death, August 29, was just half a month away. A day Wes was dreading. Half a decade ago: that meant he’d now lived almost one third of his life without her. He was amazed so much time had passed. Yet the pain was still there, the regrets and resentments between him and his father. There were little things about her he was forgetting, gestures and sayings he struggled to remember. But he recalled her voice distinctly, sometimes even heard it in his dreams. The sweet soothing lilt, a soft halcyon balm on his nerves.
Oh, it’ll be fine, Wessy. Oh, Wessy, stop being such a worrywart
.

What a strange pair Wes’s mother and father had been, she the quasi-Bohemian peacekeeper in Birkenstocks, he the hotheaded live wire. Wes often wondered whom he took after most. He preferred to think he was more like his mother in certain respects—the most important, like temperament. But he wasn’t sure. As time passed he found himself growing angrier, more doubtful and worried, like his father. But his father’s stubbornness and resourcefulness, those were good, and Wes felt those beating in his blood.

Sometimes Wes caught his father glancing at him strangely. He supposed it was because he looked a lot like his mother now that he was full grown. He was slightly short and narrow-shouldered, just like his mother, and his skin browned darkly in the sun instead of reddening to brick like his father’s. And Wes had his mother’s sharp widow’s peak. Her wide-set green eyes, teal in the winter and pale mint in the summer, depending on the darkness of his tan, the color of shirt he wore. Girls in his high school were always telling him what pretty eyes he had. Wes’s mother used to say he’d never have a problem with the ladies as long as he stayed a gentleman and kept his eyes in his head.

Recently a memory came back to Wes that he’d long forgotten. One of his friends, Tommy Orillon, offered him a stick of gum at a Fourth of July barbeque and Wes took it, not knowing it was blackberry-flavored. As soon as the taste flooded his mouth, Wes remembered the time his mother took him blackberry picking when he was eight or nine.

The day Wes remembered, a sunny Sunday morning in late June, he and his mother held their own tin pails and they were picking among the thorny bushes beside a still-water creek, making a kind of game out of who could gather the most. Wes picked his blackberries so quickly he ended up nicking his hand in dozens of places with the briars. The lashes began to sting only when the game was over, after they returned home. His mother cupped his hands in hers as he sat crying on the fuzzy cover of the bathroom toilet. “Poor Wessy,” she said, gently daubing his fingers with a Mercurochrome-soaked cotton ball. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said, stroking her fingers through his hair.

Tonight Wes’s father commandeered the wheel while Wes readied the booms. Under the cloud-shawled moon they yawed through the bayou, passing buoys hung with oil company signs.

DANGER, DO NOT ANCHOR. GAS LINE.

PROPERTY OF BP OIL.

CAUTION: PIPELINE.

Wes fiddled with his cell phone, checking Facebook, because soon they’d have no signal.

“Quit fooling with that phone,” his father called down from the wheelhouse. “Like a baby on a titty. I swear.”

Wes clenched his jaw and pocketed his cell phone. Starboard was a peninsula bowered with dwarf oak and scrub pine. Through the rushes Wes could see a small graveyard, bone-white mausoleums like crooked teeth, a brick fireplace like a basilisk in a clearing. An antebellum mansion belonging to the Robicheaux, a five-generation Creole family, once stood here. They’d evacuated before the storm and when they returned they found everything in ruins and went back to Texas. Last Wes heard, they were running a fried chicken stand in Galveston.

When the
Bayou Sweetheart
reached the pass, the water was scrummed with boats passing back and forth within feet of each other, jockeying for position. A festive glow suffused the water from their red and green
running lights. Horns shrilled madly in the night. Men screamed threats and curses from pilothouses and decks.

A tire-bumpered oyster lugger passed their boat. A wizened deckhand, maybe thirty, maybe sixty, impossible to tell, shouted at Wes. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, lookit.”

When Wes turned, the man tossed something from a tin cup. Wes twisted away, but too late. A foul-smelling yolk splattered across his face. Wes wiped with his hand and looked at his fingers. Chum.

The man and his crewmen cackled. Wes gagged against the fishy reek and cleaned his face with the end of his shirt. The man on the oyster lugger shucked down his waders and mooned him. His ass was enormous and inflamed-looking, like an orangutan’s.

Wes’s father slowed the boat to quarter-speed and Wes lowered the booms and dipped the nets into the water. Other boats passed within yards, laboring crewmen hunched in shadowy cameo. Wes moved between starboard and port, checking the booms.

A familiar round-bottomed shrimper, sixty feet long and hung with a Confederate flag, glided alongside them. The captain shouted something from the wheelhouse and Wes looked up. It was Randy Preston, a man who years ago worked on his father’s boat. He grinned down with his too-big dentures and Wes gestured up at his father, who got on his megaphone and leaned out the starboard window. “What you got so far, Randy?”

“Nothing worth a shit.”

“That bad?”

“Wife’s gonna divorce me.”

“Could be a good thing,” said Wes’s father.

“No shit.” His boat was moving out of earshot so Randy had to shout quickly. “Heard on the radio they were catching a lot five miles west. I’m gonna see what’s going on over there. Get out of this mess.”

“Let me know if it’s any good,” Wes’s father said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Randy said. He held his arm out his window and made a jerk-off motion with his hand. “Keep a firm grip on yourself, Wes.”

Wes grinned and shot a bird at Randy. Randy leaned out of his window and shot one back. After a while his boat drifted away and was lost among the rest.

Wes hitched the starboard trawl to the winch. The motor smoked and strained and soon the swollen net emerged from the water like an amniotic sack, inside a squirming mass of fins and pincers and glinting black eyes. Then Wes went port and began winching up the other net.

His father put the boat in neutral and climbed down the wheelhouse ladder. With drip nets they dumped the haul into the sorting box and then they put on gloves and poked through the teeming pile. Hard-shell crabs snapping their pincers like castanets. Catfish and flounders and fingerling baitfish. Soft-shell crabs by the hundreds, so tiny and luminescently pale they looked like ghosts of themselves. A baby stingray whipping its barbed tail, a snapping turtle shooting its head back into its shell.

And then there were pinkie-sized shrimp, their brains and hearts beating like small black seeds beneath their rice paper skin.

“Worst I’ve ever seen,” said Wes’s father. His thousand-times-washed chest-stripe polo shirt, the same kind he always wore, was already stuck to his back with sweat.