Squib could allow that he missed having a daddy, even a fake one, so long as he kept that thought inside his own head.
Even if that daddy did drink beer like it was keeping him alive instead of the opposite. Even if he did raid Momma’s coffee tin for change and spend it on lottery scratch tickets.
Even if he did swing for Squib whenever he had a drunk on.
Squib reckoned he’d loved his daddy, a little, anyways. A person can’t help loving their kin. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t hate him, too. And when Fake Daddy left his momma, Elodie, with nothing more than an empty coffee tin and a string of gambling notes running all the way down to New Orleans, which, turned out, the holders had zero problem transferring to his common-law wife, Squib hated his fake daddy with a laser intensity that was pretty focused for a boy without even a scrap of fuzz on his chin.
And now, two years later, Squib hadn’t seen much improvement in the fuzz department, but he was half a foot taller and working on a scrappy attitude that had him on the cops’ radar even at the age of fifteen. There was a constable by the name of Regence Hooke who got shot down by Squib’s momma in the Pearl Bar and Grill one time in front of a packed house, and ever since that night Hooke had himself a hard-on for Squib and made sure to take any complaint against the minor real personal. It seemed to Squib that every time he farted, old Regence would be knocking on the door offering to “forget all about it” for a little consideration from Squib’s momma.
Goddamn Hooke, Squib thought. He ain’t gonna back off till someone gets fucked.
Matter of fact, it had been Regence Hooke who bestowed the nom-de-crime “Squib” upon Squib, whose given name was Everett Moreau. As Hooke had commented, Squib’s first time in the station, “‘Moreau’ like the doctor with the island of freaks, right, kid? ’Cept you’re one o’ them freaks, not the doctor.”
The nickname incident was back when Squib’s fake daddy was still bunking in the Moreau shack and young Everett went out on the lake one night fixing to dynamite a few catfish with a boomstick he bought off a kid in school whose poppa had a strongbox. No catfish were harmed in the experiment as Everett had succeeded only in blowing off both the little finger of his left hand and the stern of a canoe he’d borrowed for the job. Regence Hooke had been waiting when the patched-up boy, hampered by overkill manacles, was brought into the station.
“I hear that weren’t much of an explosion, boy,” he’d said. “More of a damp squib.”
And there it was.
Everett Moreau came away from that night with nine fingers and a nickname. So, when the time came for Regence Hooke to really take against Squib on account of his humiliation, they were already acquainted. And Squib wasn’t hard to recognize with his hands over his head.
BEHOLD SQUIB MOREAU at fifteen: a swamp-wild, street-smart, dark-eyed Cajun-blood young man with a momma driven to near despair and no future to speak of unless he wanted to work creosote or hump bricks in Slidell. Long on dreams, short on plans most of the time. He was doing his best to stay straight, but it seemed like straight didn’t pay the bills, even with his own three jobs and his momma’s shifts at the Petit Bateau clinic.
But change was a-coming, for Squib had been presented an opportunity. On this summer evening with the bloodsucking gauze of mosquitoes hovering above the swamp murk and the cypress trees standing sentry on the shores of Honey Island, Squib would be shaking on a deal to buy himself and his mother a little wiggle room from the attentions of Regence Hooke, who was escalating his courtship of Elodie Moreau. Felt like hardly a day went by when he didn’t make time to swing by the Moreau landing with some bullshit excuse for being in the ass end of a dirt lane:
Noise complaint.
Truancy office.
Disturbing the peace.
Jaywalking, for Christ’s sake—whatever shit he could dredge up. Always with a bottle of sparkling wine packed in blue ice packs in his Chevy’s cooler. Blush. Momma’s favorite. And it was only going to be a matter of time before Regence got a foot in the door, and then the only thing standing in his way was a fly screen. And you didn’t put a halt to a man like Hooke with a fly screen. Squib knew that his momma hadn’t warmed to the constable, not nowhere near it, but nights are long in the bayou, and with Regence Hooke pissing all over the boundary, the other dogs were staying the hell away.
“Regence could provide for us, cher,” Elodie told Squib one night, eyes heavy after a long shift at the clinic. “And he could straighten you out. Lord knows I can’t do it.”
Squib knew that his momma must be bone-tired and a long way down in the dumps, having maybe nursed a favorite patient through their final hours on God’s earth, even to talk like Hooke was an option for her. He knew that the only reason Elodie Moreau would allow such a world-class asshole across the threshold would be to put a stop to Squib’s own criminal gallop, and he felt responsible for that. Sometimes he dreamed of Constable Hooke in some kind of embrace with his momma, with kissing and such, and he woke up in a cold sweat that had nothing to do with bayou heat.
So for maybe the hundredth time Squib swore he would shape up: He vowed it most fervently and, to his credit, believed his words to be gospel at the time. But he was fallible, by virtue of his youth. After barely a week Squib was back to skipping class.
This is me, he realized. I can’t never change.
And so when school broke up, he had approached Willard Carnahan in the Pearl Bar lot. Carnahan was perhaps the only man in Louisiana who knew the swamp better than Squib himself, and so the boy offered his two hands and strong back to the swamp moonshine runner. A trial run was offered, and tonight was the night that Squib kicked off his apprenticeship.
Just for the summer, Squib told himself. And just hooch or cigarettes. Maybe machine parts. No drugs, nor people neither. I’ll make enough to pay off our debts and maybe get us a place in town. Far away from Hooke and Fake Daddy’s reputation.
AND SO SQUIB crept out into the swamp without bothering to communicate any particulars with Elodie, who was on night shift at the clinic and would have chained him to the water pipe if she knew who he was fraternizing with.
He launched the marine-ply pirogue he had fashioned himself, with some pointers from Waxman, into the water not ten feet from the porch of the Moreau river shack, but decided against starting up the long-tail engine bolted to the stern. It’s all gonna change tonight, he thought, as he paddled his little flat-bellied pirogue upriver in mud-slick levee wash-off, sticking close to the borders of bulrush.
I got a black T-shirt on and a pack of jerky in case of emergency, thought the nine-fingered boy. Ain’t nuthin’ can go wrong.
REGENCE HOOKE WAS without doubt a colorful individual. There wasn’t hardly a crime he hadn’t participated in or turned a blind eye to at one point or another. Safe to say that he didn’t get to where he was by attending church regular and baking cookies for Africa. Hooke had gotten into law enforcement via the military, and he’d gotten into the military by virtue of the fact that he judged it better than the federal penitentiary. Those had been his options at the time. When eighteen-year-old Regence stood up before a Miami-Dade judge, the clerk had to draw breath before reading the charges, which included, but were not limited to:
Conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, intimidation, bribing a witness, grand theft auto, narcotics possession with intent to sell, assault, and obstruction.