The Marauders (35 page)

“I’m not much for slumber parties.”

“I got to get back to Jeanette, me.”

“I don’t know you.”

“Well, hell. I can give you money.”

“Shit.”

“I can give you a lot of money, me.”

The man peered steadily at Lindquist over the fire. “How much?”

“How much would it take?”

The man shook his head. “I’m eighty-three years old and don’t need bullshit.”

“I can give you gold.”

The man let loose a wild yodeling laugh. “You really crazy, aren’t you?” He shook his head and kept shaking it. Or maybe it just shook on its own. “They always said I was kinda crazy myself. Never gave a shit, me.”

“Sir. I’m begging you.”

“Get to sleep if you want. Draw you up a blanket over there. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

“Sir.”

“I already answered you,” he said, his voice gone harder now.

“Well,” Lindquist said. He got up and went to the door and waited for the man to change his mind. To show some mercy.

Silence, only the soft crackling of the fire.

“Well, I better get going I guess,” Lindquist said.

“I guess you better be,” said the man.

After midnight and the black-green swamp was swollen and dripping, moonstruck jewels of dew trembling on the leaves. The Toup twins came across a fallen oak, its trunk worm-bored and teeming with larvae. The log was too large to leap so they climbed on top, boots crackling in the rotten wood, and then they hopped down to the other side.

For the better part of a day they’d been chasing after Cosgrove and Lindquist and every time they were about to turn back, figuring the men either lost or dead, they heard or saw a sign ahead. Something large crashing through the brush from a distance, a pinpoint twinkle of a roving light.

Now they came upon a spiderweb as big as a shrimping trawl, stretched between the tumorous trunks of two alders. A hand-sized spider like a blown-glass objet d’art lazed in the middle, motionless in the beams of their flashlights.

As they skirted the web a memory came to Reginald. At first he said nothing about it, only moved abstractedly along, his eyes someplace else. Or sometime else. Maybe the memory was a figment of his imagination, a neurological glitch caused by exhaustion and dehydration.

No, this was a memory. Reginald had no doubt. It had that quality, indelible as a dream, etched in acid. Realer than the moment he was living now.

“You remember being lost out here?” Reginald asked Victor. Even his whisper seemed loud in the dark.

They were wallowing along side by side, their pants muddy to the waist.

“We’re lost now,” Victor said.

“I mean when we were kids.”

Victor looked at Reginald, breath rasping from his nose. “You finding God over there?” he said. “If so, I don’t want to hear it.”

“We were lost out here once. I swear it.”

“Right here?”

“Not exactly here. But a place like it.”

Victor shook his head.

“My God, I can’t believe I’m remembering this.”

“You probably dreamt it.”

“I didn’t either. You were beside me. Crying. I remember that now.”

Victor swatted his hand. “Bullshit.”

“We were young. Four or five. We were real little. I remember.”

They treaded through the big slick-leaved plants, Reginald watching Victor for a reaction, some telltale flicker in his face, a subtle recalibration of the mouth or jaw. But his brother only scowled along.

“You have to remember,” Reginald said.

“What we’d be doing out here?”

“Daddy dropped us off. Left us out here.”

Victor forearmed the sweat from his brow. “You dreamt it.”

“You can keep on saying that all you want but it’s true. Daddy left us out here.”

“All right.”

“He left us out here and we had to find our way home.”

“All right,” Victor said.

“You remember how we wandered and wandered? We wandered all day. You kept on saying we had to keep in one direction. You’d seen that in some movie. Some cartoon. We stepped through a big spiderweb and you ran away all crazy, slapping yourself all over. Then you stepped on
something and it went through your shoe. A piece of metal or something. A nail. I had to carry you piggyback for like a mile.”

Victor grunted and shook his head.

“What?” Reginald said.

“None of that shit ever happened.”

“You sure you’re not just blocking it?”

Victor looked at his brother rancidly. “You a psychiatrist now?”

“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 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.

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 from 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.

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.