“Oh well.” The unbound magazine pages were thrust across the counter, the Sharpie perched on the cover. “Here. Sign it.”
Three
“You don’t belong in the swamp. None of us do.”
Sometimes, usually in the wee hours, when he’d saturated his liver with Johnnie Walker and his mind was playing tricks on his senses as sleep swept up to consume him, he thought he heard his grandmother’s voice. “God, he lets us pass through Her, lets us take what we need to live from Her. But she is too wild and strong a beast for any of us to own. Never forget that. Never forget how small you are, Felix. When a man starts thinking he can control the beast, that’s when She swallows him whole. No one remembers his name; he ain’t nothin’ but bleached bone washing up amongst the reeds, bits of him deep in the belly of a gator somewhere along the slimy bottom.”
She’d been Cherokee, as frail, leathered and wrinkled as a week-old raisin, her hair thin white ribbons down her bony back, her gnarled fingers trembling as she threaded her woven baskets together, one sun-dried stalk of reed grass at a time. She’d been from Georgia, originally, and married a French Canadian who’d been passing through on his way to the gulf. She’d talked of her former beauty, of how handsome her pale, blonde, retiring Frenchman had been. With only two teeth left in her head, she sipped tin mugs of broth and watered moonshine round the clock, as she sat and worked on the porch of their tar paper shack where it perched at the water’s edge, in a deserted, stagnant clearing. A break in the canopy of laced oak limbs poured molten, humid sunlight down onto the water’s glimmering brown surface; steam rose, day and night, choking their yard, peeling thick strips of the tar paper, baking mildew in flaky patches along the porch boards. Gnats, flies, and mosquitoes teemed in competing clouds, their droning a constant sad soundtrack to the plop of frogs into the water, and the deep-throated groaning of the alligators as they basked on the far bank.
He returned there more than he wanted to, to that shack in the swamp, with its lawn of weeds and wildflowers, the rusted out Ford, the rutted drive that flooded with every rain, the outhouse, reeking of shit, swarming with flies, filled with the hissing of the snakes that fed on the rats in the refuse down below that awful wooden perch. He returned to his grandmother spitting tobacco juice and predicting when the next storm would come barreling in over the tree canopy.
He returned to Daddy’s voice: “Get your ass a’movin’, Felix! Let’s go!” Daddy was never happier than when they were loading up the boat first thing in the morning to go check the lines. He got that big grin that split his tan face nearly in two, his gapped teeth flashing, yellow and stained along the gums from the tobacco. He whistled and sang to himself, old French songs that sounded bawdy even if Mercy didn’t know the words.
The old bateau with its patched bottom and the outboard Evinrude that gleamed like a shiny humpbacked beetle at the stern, Daddy’s one financial splurge. “You don’t want a bad motor,” he always said. “Good way to get stuck out in the bayou.”
Mercy could still recall – when the drink was in him and he hovered under dense clouds of consciousness – the thump of the aluminum lunchbox and thermos settling down in the bow. He remembered the jangle of the fishing poles they took every time, to catch themselves dinner on the way back. The soft thunk of the gunstock where it touched down across the seat. That was his responsibility, that old Ruger 10/22 that he cleaned after every trip out, wiping it down by kerosene lantern in the shack’s tiny kitchen. Daddy had taught him to shoot it; it didn’t kick hard, so his ten-year-old shoulder could support the stock when it went off. He could control the long barrel. In the last two years, his finger had become familiar with the trigger. That Ruger .22, he thought, when he looked back on it, had been like his first lover. The first thing in all his life that had amplified him in some way, projected a stronger version of himself into the air, until he heard the low-level buzzing of his real self and his amplified self struggling to merge, as the atoms tried to cleave to one another and create a whole new conglomerate boy. Not a boy, a man. That gun had been the first thing to touch his hands and make a man out of him.
Daddy, so quiet and drawn through most of the week, transformed on line-checking days. He was up frying bacon and eggs and hash in the kitchen, the greasy smells flooding the shack, bringing Mercy up out of bed by his nose. They ate by lantern light, left a covered plate in the oven for Gram, then loaded the bateau in the mist-swirled dawn. It was eerie and beautiful, that time of morning on the swamp. The singing frogs and crickets, the chattering birds, the indigo tree trucks with their gray beards of moss, all shadows and monster-shapes against the pearlescent water and its shifting, endless waves of mist and steam. With lunch, ball caps, thermoses of coffee and water, the rods, reels, and rifle, they climbed into the bateau and the Evinrude started with a snort and a belch of white smoke.
As they whipped along down the black highways of water, the swamp breathed around them. It inhaled and exhaled; like they traveled through the belly of some dark and fearsome beast, it seemed to expand around them, great lungs working. The swamp was a wicked, unforgiving mistress, but Daddy knew all the safest pathways; he could find their way home using the stars. He remembered markers that Mercy could never keep track of. He navigated the bayou with awe-inspiring grace. “I don’t fight it,” he explained. “I’m good to her and She’s good to me.”
Just as the sun was scaling the tree tops, and the steam was thinning, they reached the first of the lines. Mercy saw, by the bowing of the branch to which it was hooked, and the way the strong length of rope disappeared down into the water in a straight tight line, that the bait – a whole chicken carcass concealing the hook – had been taken. A gator awaited them on the bottom, and hopefully, he was a big one.
Daddy piloted the bateau around in a smooth arc and shut off the motor, letting the small boat’s momentum carry it alongside the rope with a practiced expertise, the same way regular men might handle razors when they shaved their faces. The bateau rocked on the fleeting waves kicked up by the Evinrude’s wake, then went still, hovering on the black, glass surface of the water.
“The gun,” Daddy said, and Mercy picked it up, hefted it to his shoulder and let the barrel trail down toward the water.
So many times they’d done this, their bodies knowing the routines and rituals of it better than their minds. Daddy slipped on his leather gloves and leaned over the side, taking the rope in both hands. It was taut as a fresh guitar string; it vibrated when Daddy plucked it. His arms, red from the sun and laced with shiny white scars, gleamed with anxious perspiration, all wiry tendon and muscle over heavy bone, dusted with dark hair, horribly puckered and pockmarked in the places where gator teeth had sunk deep and ripped chunks of flesh. Strong arms. Strong hands. A truly invincible father. And never had Mercy admired him so greatly as in these moments when he wound the unbearably tight rope around his hands and started to pull. There was nothing so awesome or beautiful, in Mercy’s eyes, as the sight of his father pulling an eight foot gator up from the depths.
“It’s a big one,” Daddy said, and the sweat popped out on his brow. His shirt clung to his chest as he gave another slow pull. “And he’s fighting it. He’s backed in under the reeds. You get ready now, Felix. You get that gun ready. The moment his head’s up, you get the bead, ya hear? I’m countin’ on you, son.”
Mercy nodded. His breath backed up in his throat; his lungs swelled to bursting. He dug the butt of the rifle into his shoulder and laid his cheek on the stock, so he had the perfect view down the barrel, through the sights. Sometimes, he wasn’t so proud to admit, he said a little prayer right at this moment. A prayer that he’d hit his mark; a prayer that Daddy didn’t get bit again; a prayer that this was a big one, and not a sunken log, and that it’d bring them a pretty penny when they turned it in. His stomach growled, and he settled his finger in next to the trigger. Roast, he thought. Not canned chicken, but it’d be a roast they had if this gator was as big as they thought.
“Here we go,” Daddy said. And he gave the real pull, the deep one, where his shoulders worked like a winch and his back bowed and all the veins popped out on his arms and in his face. The rope started to come up, giving just a little. And then there were the bubbles, the little tiny ones that burst at the surface. “Yeah, here he comes, here he comes,” Daddy chanted, his own prayer. “Here he comes. Yeah. Come on, sucker. Show us your ugly–”
Mercy saw the disturbance just beneath the surface. There was an almost imperceptible sound, like the gathering of breath.Now, he thought.Here he comes, here he comes. Underwater, he knew the gator’s long serrated tail dug down in the mud and whipped back and forth, strong as a propeller, sending him up, up…
The water drew back; there came the rushing sound, the hiss, the froth, the great sucking of air as the water was pulled down and down by the sweeping speed of the gator as he made his launch up toward the side of the bateau.
From the foam, fast as blinking, his scaled snout broke the surface, his shining ivory teeth, open jaws, long flat wedge head. He hissed and water slopped into his mouth as he lunged up toward Daddy.
Bang. The .22 bucked and the gator’s headlong rush ended with a lurching thud against the side of the bateau. He went still, and then his body sank, bobbing back down into the water, his jaws frozen in an open-mouthed grimace.
Mercy kept his gun trained, just in case, but he saw the neat hole behind the eyes, on the top of the head, and knew the first shot had done the trick.
“That’s a way,” Daddy said. “That’s a good boy, Felix.”
Together they dragged the weighty corpse up over the side of the boat, until its swamp-slimed scales slipped and it flopped over into the bottom of the bateau, belly-up. Its tail and claws twitched: death throes. It would twitch for hours, yet. That had scared Felix his first time out, sure that the gator would come back to life and swing around to chomp on his leg. But now, he climbed over the quivering head and settled into his perch in the bow, plucking up the coffee thermos and taking a swig. Daddy always put something in the coffee that made it extra warm on the way down, something that left his head pleasantly heavy and full of fuzz. He took three long swallows and passed it back; Daddy accepted it over the body.
“That’s a good way to start the day,” he sang out, and began to whistle between slugs of black coffee as he settled at the Evindrude and fired it up again.
The gator writhed in its throes, and Mercy patted the soft white underside of his jaw as the bateau’s prow slid through the water, and they went off in search of quarry at their next baited line.
No one from Acadia had been surprised when Felix Lécuyer grew up and joined the Lean Dogs, and adopted the name Mercy. No one in his club was surprised that one of his skillsets was hunting alligators. Nothing about him surprised most anyone, really. He was too big to ever go unnoticed, and too convincing to ever be mistaken for something else. They were qualities that made him believable; duplicity was not his game, only strength and force and honesty.
No, no surprises from Mercy, from the displaced Cajun boy.
But then he’d been asked to watch out for Ghost Teague’s wife and daughter, and before he was able to recognize what was happening, he’d gone and surprised himself – and shattered the tiny world he’d built for himself outside of New Orleans. It was home he’d gone, after that, letting the steam of Louisiana swallow him up again; he’d slid down her throat, that one gator he could never kill: home. He hated it there, but that was where he belonged; he was nothing but a swamp rat with a taste for violence and a penchant for dealing it out. Dangerous creatures needed to live amongst other dangerous creatures, in appropriate cages with thick steel bars.
