The Marauders by Tom Cooper Read Free Book Online

and kitchens, in bayou shacks and shanties, listening to fishermen rail about the oil spill. Some of the men were old, othersyoung, but they all had in common a seemingly inexhaustible outrage. They hoisted themselves out of chairs and lifted their T-shirts, showing him the angry rashes on their chests and arms. They complained of mysterious afflictions of the eyes, ears, and throat they said they never had before the rig explosion or dispersants. They pounded tables with their fists and called him obscene names and made threats. A few even spat out curses in French.
    They almost always ended up taking the money.
    He spent countless hours poring over the settlement papers, painstakingly explaining every nuance of legalese while the men listened woodenly. Sometimes Grimes suspected the trawlers were acting thickheaded out of spite. A coon-ass wariness of outsiders. But Grimes wasn’t an outsider. He was from the Barataria, couldn’t recall a time when he didn’t want to leave it. One of his trademark refrains, when people asked him about his past, was that he was born wanting to leave the swamp. That he wanted to leave it while still in the womb.
    He thought he’d blend in easily once he was up in New York or Boston or Chicago. But as time passed and he entered his thirties it began to dawn on him that he’d always be an outsider. He was an outsider in the Barataria when he was growing up, so it had been foolish of him to think he’d belong someplace else simply by virtue of wanting to be there. Sometimes Grimes suspected that no matter how far he distanced himself, no matter how much time he spent away, there was a certain stink of the South that would never wash off him.
    Up north people heard the bayou in his mouth, those telltale cadences. Untraceable to his ears, but there. And hearing his accent, people wanted to know about his past. Where was he from?
    “Down South,” he’d say. “Little place middle of nowhere. Long ago. Another life.”
    “Oh wow,” they’d say, nodding, pretending to be more interested than they were, “no kidding.”
    Knew this guy was a coon-ass
, Grimes was sure they were thinking.
Coon-ass
: one of those words like
nigger
. You could use it as a curse, abelittlement, an endearment, a self-deprecation, a damnation. It could be a complex muddle of all these things, depending on who said the word. Context was everything, context and intention.
    “Living down there must’ve been paradise,” they’d say, “all that seafood.”
    And Grimes, “Sure, oh yeah.”
    Grimes detested seafood. All of it. He’d inherited from some obscure tributary of his family’s gene pool an aversion to the stuff. Shrimp, crab, redfish, it all tasted the same. Like rotting garbage marinated in sulfur water. But when Grimes was growing up, his family was so poor they often had to catch their meals, which meant seafood. He’d smother the shrimp and crawfish in ketchup and Zatarain’s just to choke the garbage down.
    And now here he was, years later, driving hour after hour through the Barataria in his rental car. Nothing changed; still hardly even a town. No superstores or megamalls, just a loose strew of markets and restaurants and go-go bars around the crossroads. The whitewashed spire of a Catholic church, the squat cinder block hulk of a correctional facility, a tin-roofed zydeco dancehall. Roadside stands run by trawlers and fishermen, Creoles and Cajuns and Isleños selling crawfish and satsumas, their craggy faces like sun-basking turtles.
    Amazing the place was still standing. The clapboard houses on creosoted pilings, so jury-rigged they looked ready to topple into the oblivion of the swamp. Same with the makeshift piers, the mud boats and trawling skiffs. Now and then Grimes spotted signs for SWAMP TOURS , some enterprising local who’d slapped a magnetic sign on the side of his boat. Grimes went on these tours against his will during high school field trips. Twenty dollars a head, a guy would