Bayou Blood Money

The bank tells you things if you let it. The mudline's higher than it was this morning—a hand's width of wet dark clay standing above the water now, glistening. Water's dropping. That's why the gators have come up onto the banks, hauled out along the far side where the reeds thin, low humped shapes going shadow. By full dark they'll be everywhere along here. You don't mind them. They mind their business and you mind yours.

Blue cat on the fourth hook, fat, near ten pounds. It comes up heavy and mad and you set your feet and bring it in and it soaks the front of your shirt cold before it hits the box. You breathe out. There. That's the day right there, that one fish, and the light going peach to gray, and nothing in your head but the next buoy.

That's the thing you don't say to anybody. Out here your mind goes flat as the water. No room in it. Hands busy, eyes busy, and the rest of you just—quiet. Still. You mean to keep it.

You pole to the third line. It's the deep one, set across the mouth of the drowned channel where the old bank slumped away years back, where the water goes down farther than the pole. Good spot. Big fish sit in that cold.

Buoy's riding low. Lower than it ought.

You reach and lift it and start to pull and the line comes up two, three feet and then stops.

Snagged. You've hung lines a thousand times—on a stump, on a sunk log, on the ribs of somebody's lost pirogue. You lean and give it the steady angled pull that walks a hook off a snag.

It doesn't walk. It moves.

Not toward you. Down. And away.

You've hauled catfish and gar and a gator once that near took your arm, and every one of them fights up, toward air, throwing its weight against you in jerks and shakes with a living panic you can feel run right up the line into your wrist. This has no panic in it. No head. No fight. It drags steady and low, down toward the channel floor, heavy the way a thing is heavy when it doesn't care what you want.

Your hands go still on the rope.

They do it on their own. Before you tell them to, before the thought's even finished forming, they lock and hold and stop, the way they used to lock on something else in another place a long way from here, and some old part of you that you packed away and swore you were done needing comes awake behind your eyes and reads the pull.

Dead weight. Dragging. Tied to the bottom the way nothing alive is tied.

That part of you doesn't ask. It decides. Fast, flat, certain, the way it was trained to.

This is not a fish.

The line hangs in your fists, and the water lies still and copper around the boat, and you don't pull.

An editor is reading your scene, hunting for weak spots…

You lean on the pole and put your back into the line and it comes up an inch, then holds, then gives you another, sucking, and you know the sound the mud makes when it doesn't want to let go. Deep down there something is coming loose.

You wrap the line on your fist and pull. The bleach jug bobs alongside, riding lower now, taking the strain with you, this gray old thing that's raised nothing worse than snapping turtles going up against whatever this is. The Marie-Ange heels. You shift your feet and pull and the water boils dark below the surface, and a shape climbs up out of it.

A hull. Long and low, wallowing, upside down, mud pouring off the belly of it in ropes. Metal. You get the pole under the near edge and lever, and it rolls with a slow drunk heaviness, and the water sheets off and you see it plain: an airboat, the cage gone crooked, a strip of duct tape crossing a patch on the deck where somebody meant to fix a crack and never did. Blue once. You can still make out where the paint was blue.

Water don't lie, and it don't give back for free.

You don't remember deciding to keep hauling. Your hands just do it, the way they found the hooks before your eyes did.

The cargo hold has a lid webbed down with bungee. One cord has let go. You hook a finger under the netting and pull and the first brick slides out into the light, wrapped tight in plastic, and then another behind it, and another, a whole stacked wall of them going gray-green with the water, and you don't have a word for what they are for a second because your mind won't fit them into a swamp at dusk.

Then you do. Money. Shrink-wrapped bricks of it, one split open at the corner, the plastic peeled back, and the edge of the bills fanned wet and swollen and green.

You touch the split one. Some slick comes off on your fingers, gas-slick, oily, rainbowed. You wipe it on your pants and it doesn't wipe. You wipe it again on the gunwale and it stays, a shine on your skin like the water put its mark there.

You should stop. Everything Bo ever taught you says leave it, cut the line, pole home, forget the color of the boat. You know this. You know it the way you know the mudline and the gators hauled out and the drop of the water. Leave what the water takes.

Your hand's still on the pole.

The smell reaches you before the rest of it does. It comes up out of the rolled hull ahead of the sight, and it isn't fish and isn't mud and isn't gator-musk, and your gut knows it clean and old, knows it from somewhere you swore off, and everything in you goes still and cold and waiting.

You lean out over the cargo and look.

He's down in among the bricks. Wedged there, wedged wrong, the way a thing settles when the water's had it a while. Bloated up huge under a shirt gone the color of the channel, the skin at the wrists and the throat swollen tight and pale as a fish belly. The face you don't let yourself look at yet. The water shifts him and he moves, a slow nod, and settles again.

At his throat something catches the last copper light.

A cross. Small, silver, worn thin at the edges, hung on a leather cord grown black. You know it before your eyes finish on it. You'd know it in the dark by touch. You've watched it swing off a man's neck across a gumbo table and a duck blind and the bow of this same boat a hundred times. Remy's. Your blood's cross. The one his mama put on him and he never once took off.

Your hand goes to it. Closes on it. The metal's cold and slick as the money.

And you tell yourself no. You tell yourself look at the size of him, look at the shoulders on this dead man, Remy was lean as a rail—the water swells them, the rot swells them, three days down and any man puffs up a stranger. It's the rot. That's all it is. It's just the rot.

Your hand won't let go of the pole.

The cash you leave where it floats. It'll keep.

Behind the wall of it, back in the belly of the hold, there's a shape the water made soft. You knew it was there before you saw it—the way the airboat rode wrong, the weight of it, the smell that comes off the deck when the plastic stops holding it down. A man. Folded into a space too small for a man, webbed in with the same bungee that held the money, so he traveled with it.

You get the Marie-Ange snugged against the hull and cleat off the line and step across. The airboat gives under your boots, riding low, and you go down on one knee in the mud-slick and take out your knife.

The webbing has gone stiff and swollen where it's been under. You saw at it. First cord parts with a snap and the next lets go easy, and the shape shifts, rolls toward you an inch on its own, the way a thing does when the water in it has decided where it wants to be. The reek climbs. You breathe through your mouth and don't move faster. Bo taught you that, a long time before you ever needed it for this—that the wanting to be somewhere else is a thing you can set down and pick up later.

You cut the last cord. He comes loose.

You want a face. You want a wallet, a name inked on a waistband, a tattoo, anything that closes the question and lets you push all of it back into the channel and go home. So you get a hand under the chin, where the water has taken what a chin was, and you feel down along the throat for a collar, for a chain, for the give of skin against your fingers.

Your fist closes on it before your eyes come down to look.

You know it the way your hands knew the hooks. Small and cheap and worn smooth—the corner of it snapped off years back, a nub where the foot of the cross should be, filed flat so it wouldn't catch. You'd know it in the dark. You are knowing it in the dark.

—Remy at your mama's table, elbow-deep in crawfish, that same cross swinging out over the newspaper when he leaned to grab another, and him tucking it back inside his shirt without looking, a thing his hand did on its own—

"Non," you say. Just the one word, low, and it's out before you can stop it.

You hold still.

The cross lies in your palm. It doesn't hang. It lies there, loose on its chain, sitting on the swell of the chest wrong, like it was set down and not worn, and you feel that too, some floor of you feeling it, and you shove a plank over the hole before you can look through.

Because the shoulders are wrong.

Under your hand the frame is broad. Too broad. Remy was a whip of a thing, all wrist and Adam's apple, a come-here who never filled out his own jacket. This one fills the hold. You brace against it and the arm rolls and the hand flops over the gunwale, and it's a big hand, a working hand gone to sausage, and it's not—

You stop.

The dark is coming down for real now, the last copper light going off the water, and things swell in the water. Everybody knows that. A man three days under bloats past himself, past what he was, till his own mother wouldn't cut him from a lineup. That's all this is. That's the mud in it, the gas, the days. The size is the water talking, not the man.

You tell yourself that.

The scar on your wrist wakes up and starts to itch, that old burn pulling tight under the crucifix chain, and you make your hand go still against it. You make all of you go still—the way you'd lie in a hide and let an hour pass without a muscle, watching the shape of a thing you didn't want to be true and choosing, breath by breath, not to move on it.

You do not check the other hand.

You do not measure the shoulders against the boy you remember.

You close your fist around the cross, hard enough to feel the snapped-off corner bite, and you keep it, and you don't ask.

End of chapter one. 22 more chapters in the full book.