The noise was terrific, a thunderous thooom rising from the earth and crashing over him in waves of sonic terror. Bayou mud, shellfish, mangrove root, and slate were liquidized and dragged skywards in drapes of swamp slop which fell in a harsh deluge upon the boy, scouring him to his pores. It felt to Squib like he was being summarily interred, buried by the sheer weight of debris tumbling on his slight frame from above.
Momma will never know what happened to me, he realized, and the thought terrified him. He tried to call out, but that turned out to be a mistake as his mouth was filled with falling debris. Squib’s eye sockets filled up with mud, and even his T-shirt was shredded by the assault.
I am surely dead, thought Squib. I can’t figure out nothing.
But gradually the earth’s revolutions settled down, and the whine in Squib’s ears was intruded upon by laughter from out on the water. Sounded like Regence Hooke was having himself one hell of a time.
“You like that concussion grenade, fella?” he called. “Was that your cup of iced tea? I bet you opened your stupid mouth, didn’t you? Took a gutful of swamp shit and shellfish.”
Hooke laughed again, and it might have been shell shock, but Squib could have sworn there was an animal tinge to his mirth.
“Every night after a firefight we’d have some fool greenhorn running around with his mouth open, getting himself a mouth of shrapnel. We had more busted teeth than limbs.”
Squib peeped between the rushes. He reckoned himself camouflaged enough. Regence Hooke was seated on the cabin of his boat, a squat weapon across his lap and his boots kicking against the windshield. His grenade launcher sat in his lap like a favored pet. Squib even knew the model from Call of Duty: the MM-1. Funny-looking chunky fucker. The barrel organ of death.
“Lovely night, ain’t it, boy? I bet you’re wishing you never set foot outside New Orleans, right? I bet you’re wishing old Ivory had sent someone else to do his spying.”
Ivory, thought Squib. Hooke don’t know who I am.
This meant that if he could give Constable Hooke the slip, then all he had to do was make it back to his pirogue.
Hooke hiked the grenade launcher to his shoulder. “Son, I bet you’re thinking that all you gotta do is crawl snakelike back to your boat and paddle out of here. Well, I got bad news for you on that front. Your boat just floated on past me toward the bay. I guess you didn’t secure it none too good.”
Squib squinted his eyes mostly shut, thinking that the whites might give him away. Was Hooke shitting him? Had he secured his boat?
Probably not.
He hadn’t exactly been planning the final step of this mission. So now he was stuck on this goddamn island with the boars and the cougars and maybe a bunch of fire ants forming an orderly line to crawl up his pecker. And if he tried to make a bolt for it, then Hooke would spiral a grenade up his ass like a rocket-powered snow cone.
What a peach of a night this had turned out to be.
Everett fucking Moreau: master planner.
Like that little French guy who used to get with tall ladies to prove a point. Napoleon.
But not like him at all, except for they both ended up fucked on an island, if he didn’t misremember his history. Or maybe it was Huck Finn who got fucked on an island.
Either way, he was the idiot getting fucked on a water-locked landmass this fine evening.
Sorry, Miss Ingram, he broadcast to his social studies teacher, the only teacher he had ever liked in the ten-year history of his education.
“Hey, son,” called Regence Hooke, his voice boomy across the sound, “I tell you what. Why don’t you toss out that cell phone you got there? It’s probably all sorry-looking and waterlogged anyways. Hell, I’ll even sign off on your police report for a new one. Because we both know you ain’t getting a lick of signal in this stretch of the Pearl.”
It ain’t sorry-looking, thought Squib. It’s safe and sound in my work pants pocket.
“You do me that favor,” continued Hooke, “and I’ll see myself off with my box of munitions and call it a night. What do you say to that? There’s a deal you won’t see in Target.”
Seemed like Hooke was in the mood for chitchat. This was his general mood, in Squib’s experience. Waxman once opined that Hooke’s brand of chitchat was akin to a prison cake: “All purtied up on the outside with sugar frosting, but you know there’s a blade lurking in there somewheres.”
It was like how Hooke always referred to Squib as “Monsieur Moreau” when Elodie was around, tousled his hair and such, said he was a fine figure of a “jeune homme,” but soon as Momma’s back was turned, the constable would lean in close and growl some off-color remark along the lines of Fine piece of tail, that, Squib. Sooner or later, boy. I’m giving your momma her head for now, then I’ll reel her in when she’s wore out. Spittle rimmed his lips as he leered: Regence Hooke, a prince among men.
“Otherwise,” said the prince now, “I surely do plan to blanket-bomb the island with half a dozen more of these grenades from this dandy launcher I got here. And just to assure you I mean business, here’s another firecracker to set you thinking.”
Shit, thought Squib. Shit and goddamn.
There was no time to figure the correct course of action. And even if he did have the time, he didn’t have the tactical experience. Should he hunker down or make a run for it? Which was best? Both seemed downright fraught with mortal peril.
While Squib was equivocating, Regence Hooke sat back on the roof of his cabin cruiser and, with a squeeze of his trigger, lobbed a metal cylinder high into the night. Up she flew into the drape of mist, trailing a plume of gray smoke, and Squib judged by what he could make out of the trajectory that he had about ten seconds to live.
This entire scheme was a fool’s errand.
“Bye, Momma,” he whispered, and the regret he would carry with him to his watery grave was that now there was nothing between Hooke and his mother but a screen door.
“Bless me, Jesus,” said Squib, just in case, and “I’m sorry for all the shit I done.”
Then he shut his eyes and waited for the end.
VERN WAS ALL set up in his La-Z-Boy watching Swamp Rangers on Netflix. Goddamn, but he loved that show. Those Everglades boys tooling around in their golf carts, wrangling tiny gators and such, making a big old deal out of it.
I would fuck those boys up, thought Vern good-naturedly. But in truth he probably wouldn’t. They were amusing guys, all confident and shit. It would be fun to see that braggadocio drain down to their boots.
Vern took a slug of vodka soda and laughed. Imagine their faces. Those stupid goatees would drop off in shock.
He did his best Jack Nicholson for the only squirrel on the island with enough nuts to sit on his windowsill. “Wait till they get a load of me.”
Then he heard the explosion.
“Well, shit,” he said resignedly, cranking up his chair. If there was one thing he’d learned from centuries hiding out in various remote spots round the globe, it was that certain things heralded discovery.
Elephants for one.
Elephants were assholes, and no one could tell Vern any different. Those big gray bastards had a nose for dragons, and that nose was called a trunk. There was this one bull who worked for one of the Mamluk sultans way back. Mean fucker with a cloudy eye and a grudge against fire lizards for some reason. Hunted Vern all over the Delhi province for ten years until Vern paid him a visit one balmy night in his paddock and stuck that trunk where the sun historically did not shine. Old Cloudy kept his dragon-seeking skills to himself after that.