| Melvin Sterne: Writer, Teacher, Editor, Photographer |
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Dead Water (originally published in Blue Mesa Review)
Rex was the senior crewman so he always drove—his name a joke not wasted on the rest of us.
The new kid was riding in the back and rested his chin on the on the seat between us like an old
dog I used to have. I was navigating and didn’t know where the hell we were. It was five-thirty in the
morning and foggy as all get-out. With the headlights we could see about fifty foot in front of us and
maybe ten to either side. We might as well have been driving through a cotton bale. I had a map
spread out on the dashboard in front of me.
“You’re about as useless as tits on a boar hog,” Rex said.
The kid laughed, and I shot him a sideways glance.
“If you’d slow down,” I said, “I might could make out a sign somewhere.”
“No matter, we’ll get there.”
“We could ask somebody,” said the kid, but when Rex and I glared at him he shriveled up and
turned it into a question, “couldn’t we?”
“And what the fuck are we supposed to say?” I asked. “’Scuse me, sir, I know it’s five o’ clock in
the morning, and I don’t mean to wake you, but could you please tell me where I am?”
“I’m just trying to find the bridge,” said the kid, “where’s that confounded bridge?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Rex asked.
“Led Zeppelin,” said the kid.
Rex might be the only man in Louisiana who doesn’t know Led Zeppelin. He plays accordion in a
Zydeco band called the Mud Mountain Mamas and he don’t know shit—or care—about life outside
of Iberville Parish. If you look up ‘redneck’ in the dictionary, it’s got his picture there. But in his
uniform you can’t tell how really bad off he is.
“You sure you’re twenty-one?” Rex asked.
It was the kid’s first week and he didn’t look a day over sixteen. He wasn’t tall and he wasn’t
muscular, maybe five foot eight and one-seventy, tops. He had a wispy little blonde moustache and
a gold ring in his ear. I wouldn’t have figured him to make it through basic training, but he had. With
honors, supposedly; head of his class.
“Nobody could hardly blame us for being lost in this fog, could they?”
“Put your seatbelt on,” I said. “It’s regulation.”
The kid sat back in his seat, but didn’t put his belt on. He had this nervous, high strung look
rookies get on their first call. We generally let them mind the truck for about a month before we get
them ‘involved;’ bore them to death until they let their guard down. The last thing I need is a kid
trying to think his first day on the job.
Rex steered with his elbows while he poured himself a cup of coffee.
“You want a doughnut?” I asked.
Rex reached in the bag and pulled out a cream-filled. “How would it look?” he asked, “us pulling
up and asking directions? I mean really, what would people say? Goddamn fire department out lost,
driving around in the woods. Waste of good taxpayer’s money.”
“But aren’t we supposed to be looking for somebody?” the kid asked.
“Some body,” I said. “They already dead, so there ain’t no use hurrying too much. ‘Sides, it’s still
too dark to get the boat out.”
Rex stuffed the doughnut in his mouth and swung the Blazer off on a side road that gaped
suddenly out of the fog. “Shit,” he said, taking the doughnut out of his mouth, “I dropped a wad of
cream in my lap.”
“Looks like you came in your pants,” I said.
“Fuck you.”
The kid laughed and leaned over the seat between us again.
“I knew we’d find it. You got a napkin?”
I looked in the bag, then in the glove box. “Nope,” I said, shaking my head.
“Just like a gook,” said Rex, untucking his shirt and rubbing up the filling, “to skimp on a damn
napkin.” He licked the filling off his fingers. “Fuckers sure can cook, though.”
“Did you say gook?” asked the kid.
“Put your seatbelt on,” I said.
“I didn’t think we were supposed to slur people.”
“Shut up, kid.”
The call came in about 2:30. Cops in Donaldsonville found a car abandoned on the bridge. The
keys were in the ignition and it wasn’t stalled. That only meant one thing.
“How do they know it was a woman?” asked the kid.
“Maybe she left a purse?” said Rex. “I dunno. It seems like it’s almost always women what jump.”
The kid looked thoughtful. “75% of jumpers are women,” he said. Then looking around
apologetically he added, “that’s what they said in school, anyhow.”
“I wonder if it’s so,” I said to nobody in particular.
Rex nodded and slurped his coffee, then fiddled with the radio for a minute and made it screech.
He’s been with the department 39 years and he’s about seen it all. “Man’ll face right up to things,”
he said, “but a woman...” He hit the brakes sharply and the truck lurched to one side and skidded to
a stop. “Jesus!” he said. He spilled coffee all over the dash.
I turned my head in time to see a buck bounding across the ditch and out of sight. “Did you see
the rack on that bastard? He must have been a ten point, at least.”
“Eight,” said the kid.
“Whatever.” Rex grabbed the map and used it to mop the dash. “You won’t see him come hunting
season.”
“Great,” I said, as Rex handed me what was left of the map. It was soaked in coffee, coming apart
in my hand. “Now what?”
“Map’ll only tell you how to get where you’re going if you know where you are.” He let off the
brakes and the truck eased forward, and for just a moment the fog lightened up. “And I know where
we are. So, a man’ll face up to things, just blow his head off with a shotgun. But a woman hasn’t got
the nerve. She’s always thinking ‘what if…’ So she’ll jump, you see, so there’s a chance she might
make it. Women like to be talked out of things, but a man’d just as soon shoot hisself.”
“Women don’t like to be messed up,” said the kid.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I know lots of messed-up women.”
“Their corpse. They don’t want to abuse their corpse.”
“Are you saying women worry about how they look after they’re dead?”
“Women always worry about how they look,” said Rex.
“Can I have one of them doughnuts?” the kid asked.
I handed him the bag. There weren’t any but cake doughnuts left. “I don’t know why they make
them things,” the kid said. “Nobody likes ‘em.”
“Give it here,” I said, “I’ll eat it.”
The kid took a bite and offered me the rest, then busted out laughing.
“Put your seatbelt on,” I said.
“He’s right though,” Rex said. “It’s always women who jump. But if they’d seen what I seen, they’d
take a bunch of pills, or something.”
“Why?” asked the kid.
“You ever seen a body what’s hit the water from 300 feet up?” asked Rex.
The kid shook his head.
“Might as well of hit concrete. Nothin’ solid left in ‘em. They get all crunchy, like a big bag of
Fritos, like a lumpy old mattress. Breaks all their bones. And the drowned ones, they’re all swole up
and bleached out. Doesn’t take but a few hours. Even the niggers. ‘Cept some niggers‘ll turn
purple. I don’t know why that is.”
“You’re shittin’ me?” said the kid.
The fog began to pulse red ahead of us. “There it is,” said Rex, and he eased over onto the
shoulder and pulled up behind a state trooper and a couple of trucks from the parish road crew.
The trooper climbed out of his cruiser as we pulled up.
“That’s Floyd Foucalt,” said Rex.
Floyd was a fat cop with a bad reputation, which was why he mostly worked shit jobs, nights, and
weekends. He stretched his arms out over his head, then hitched his gun belt up on his hips and
checked his fly. He pulled his hat down low over his eyes and sauntered up to us.
“Hey, Floyd,” said Rex, climbing out of the truck and slamming the door behind him.
“Hey, Rex. Hey, Bill. Who’s the kid? Did you bring coffee?”
“Fuckin’ rookie,” said Rex, handing Floyd the thermos. “What do we got?”
Floyd looked the kid up and down. “Do I know you?” he asked.
The kid blushed. “You made me pour out a six pack on the highway a few years back. When I was
in high school.”
“You sure you’re twenty-one?” Floyd asked. “Don’t seem like that long ago.” Floyd unscrewed
the thermos and poured coffee into the cap. “Got damn!” he said, shifting the cup back and forth
between his hands. “This thing leakin’ or what?”
“Got a crack in it. Drink it fast ‘fore it runs out, less you got your own cup.”
Floyd held the cup so it wouldn’t drip on him and gulped down the coffee the best he could. He
spilled some on his shirt, more on his pants, and finally spat out a mouthful and threw the rest away.
“How long did you boil these beans, anyhow?”
“Not long,” said Rex, “but my socks was in the kettle overnight.”
“Fuck your socks.”
“Might be the best piece of ass you ever got.”
“Or the worst case of crotch rot. Why don’t you send that kid after some decent coffee?”
“We almost didn’t get here,” Rex said. “And I wouldn’t send that kid round the corner by hisself.
Boy could fall off a ladder and be lost ‘fore he hit the ground. Send the parish boys if you want.”
“You call this fog?” Floyd asked, looking around.
“Had to stop and ask directions of some fella in a rowboat,” Rex said, “and he was a good six foot
off the ground.”
Floyd sighed and pushed his hat back on his head, then scratched his neck behind his ear. “What
we got,” he said, “is a young woman jumped the bridge last night ‘tween midnight and two.”
“How’d they know it was a woman?” the kid asked.
Floyd glared at him. “Tommy Flowers run the plates early this morning. Car b’long to a young girl
from LSU. There was folks driving by, but nobody called it in.” He shook his head. “Don’t know what
the world’s coming to.”
“Why’d she do it?” the kid asked.
We all looked at him.
Floyd hunched his shoulders and said, “who knows. Maybe she was out drunk driving around,
depressed, had a fight with her boyfriend? Maybe she just wanted to kill herself. What difference
does it make, anyway? How’s the missus, Rex?”
“Not so good,” Rex replied, and they walked up the bridge past where a disspirited road crew set
orange cones on the road to slow traffic.
The sun was coming up and I was chilled to the bone from lack of sleep. A foghorn sounded out
over the water, and in the distance I could hear a train chumping down the tracks across the river.
A bit of a north breeze stirred the fog, and a seagull screeched overhead, though we couldn’t see
him. The kid was standing around so I hollered at him, “You ain’t no tourist, son, get our gear down
to the boat. And mind your step. He opened the back gate on the Blazer and took out a steel tool
box, a nylon bag that held the pike, and another canvas satchel with a couple of stainless steel
grappling hooks and some good nylon line. He slung the bags over his shoulder and lurched off
down the road the tool box in his free hand. When he was gone I slipped a flat bottle of Southern
Comfort out of my hipboots and took a long swallow, then put my jacket on and slid the bottle into
my inside pocket. I grabbed a flashlight and two life preservers, shut the door, and ambled down to
the water.
The kid set the gear down on the bank by the dive boat. He was rubbing his elbow.
“Did you fall?” I asked.
“No,” he replied.
The boat was a zodiac. The crew came upriver a few minutes before we got here and beached it
under the bridge. The divers sat off by themselves, their wetsuits on. The crew sat smoking
cigarettes and gazing out at the fog.
“Say, Bill?” the kid asked.
“What?” I replied.
“If that girl jumped upriver by Plaquemine, why are we looking for her here?”
“River spits ‘em up around here. If they don’t hit a snag, they roll along underwater for a while.
After a few hours, they bubble up and float to the top. Right past the bridge there’s a deep hole,
dead water. We find a lot of them here. If we don’t find her today, we’ll work the banks upstream
tomorrow. Better hope we find her today, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“They’re bad the first day, but by the second or third they get ripe.”
A minute later the divers came over and pooh-poohed the water.
“Waste o’ time, if you ask me,” said one.
“Too damn muddy to see,” said the other. He kicked at the dirt with his toe.
It was growing light and the breeze combed the fog into tatters, so we glimpsed, from time to
time, a boat on the river, or a bit of the far bank. It had rained a lot the past week, and there was a
lot of debris in the river besides the usual trash. I could make out a stump bobbing, a barrel, a few
planks and boxes. The levee was littered with bottles and cans, plastic buckets, old diapers,
whatever people throw out. Every now and then the fog lifted enough to see houses and lights in
Lutcher on the far bank. There was a rickety-assed pier tilting out into the river with a red light on it.
I could see somebody scraping paint off a boat hauled up onto the bank. Then the fog closed in
again and I couldn’t see past the first truss of the bridge.
Rex and Floyd leaned on the railing above us and looked down, pointing at likely places on the
river. There was some traffic now, trucks mostly; and the drivers slowed down and gawked as they
rumbled over the bridge. I knew the guys from the boat crew but not too well. They were from
Ascension Parish, across the water, and we met up every few years on a drowning, or some kind of
training exercise, or to play softball if we got a league up in the summer. “How’s Rex’s old lady?”
one of them asked. “I heard she was sick.”
“Not too good,” I said. Then I asked the kid to go back and get Rex’s thermos and when he was
gone I took another sip of whiskey and passed the bottle to the guys in the boat. They took a hit
each and then uncorked a bottle of their own and we passed that around. “That’s too bad,” they
said.
Right then Rex whistled and we could see him and Floyd pointing out at something in the water.
The crew climbed into the boat, then the divers, grumbling as they lugged their tanks, and I got in
last after tossing them the bags with the pike and the grappling hooks. As I kicked the boat off, I
looked over my shoulder at the kid running and stumbling down the bank with the thermos. The
pilot fired up the motor and in a minute we were bouncing along and I thought it was like riding a
rock skipping across the river, only we weren’t spinning.
The wind was cold in the boat, the fog made the air heavy and wet, and I was glad I wore my
jacket. I tried to make out where Floyd was pointing, but it wasn’t much use. Though he hollered, I
couldn’t make out a word he said over the outboard. I unzipped both bags and rummaged for the
radio, but the kid must have stowed it in the toolbox, and I made a mental note to chew his ass
when we got back. I screwed the pike shaft and the hook together, out of boredom, mostly.
There was a small searchlight on the front of the boat, and the crewman flicked it on and it fired
up with a zap like a flashbulb and threw out a bright, narrow, orangish beam that lit up the fog but
didn’t show anything on the water. He fooled with it a minute, then shut it off, and we buzzed around
in an aimless circle until one of the divers shouted, “Over there!”
The pilot drew us up close, cut the engine, and we coasted slowly towards a pulpy-looking gray
shape that floated forlornly just below the surface of the greasy brown river. But up close we saw it
was a thick foam cushion from a couch or a recliner, with a tattered remnant of blue fabric holding
onto one end and fanned out in the water looking, from a distance, like hair. We didn’t bother to
haul it in. We circled aimlessly until we got hungry, then drank another round of whiskey and
headed back to shore.
The kid was waiting with the thermos. “Where’s the radio?” I asked him. He had hung it on his
belt. “A lot of good it does me there,” I said.
“I thought I was coming.” He sounded pouty.
“Don’t think, rookie. I carry the radio. I wouldn’t trust you to hold your dick. You’re here to learn,
not to do.”
“What am I supposed to learn on the bank?”
“Patience. Why don’t you go up and watch the river with Rex?”
“He told me to come down here and help you land the boat.”
“Gimme some of that coffee,” I said.
“All gone.”
“Then take the truck to town and get some more.”
“But you said I couldn’t drive.”
“That was then, this is now. Here’s a five,” I said, digging in my wallet. “Get coffee and some more
of them doughnuts. And make sure the coffee’s fresh. If it ain’t, tell ‘em to brew us up a pot.”
After the kid left, Rex came down and squatted down on his haunches, plucked up a dandelion
and began to chew on the stem. “Seems like I never get no sleep anymore.”
“Myrtle?”
“If it ain’t her then it’s Francine fighting with that no-good son-in-law of mine.”
“I thought they moved to Natchez,” I said.
“She came back last weekend. Swears she’s gonna quit that son-of-a-bitch forever, but never
stays gone more than a week or two. The little boy cries all the time. Cries at night ‘cause he’s
scared of the dark. Cries in the daytime if you look at him cross-eyed. Wets his pants.”
“Somebody been beaten on him?” I asked.
“Could be,” said Rex. “If I find out it’s so…” his voice trailed off.
“I never could figure out why a woman would stay with a man what mistreats her.”
“Beats me,” said Rex, then he looked at me and chuckled. “Reckon you’ll ever get married
again?”
“I’ll be paying child support ‘til I’m fuckin’ near sixty. Why would I want to do that?”
“Pussy?”
“I got more pussy since I was divorced than I ever got from Ellen.”
“You musta got at least two good shots?”
“I got at most two shots and I don’t remember ‘em being that good.”
“Don’t look at me,” Rex said, “I didn’t sample the merchandise.”
“If somebody else can get some off her, more power to ‘em.”
“How’s the kids?”
“They all right.”
“They like Lake Charles?”
“Not really.”
“They’ll get used to it. It’s a nice place. Not too far to visit.”
“Far enough.”
Word came over the radio the girl left a note at home. Said she’d been depressed about school, a
boyfriend who left her, some “family stuff.”
The kid came back with coffee and doughnuts. “Cups,” he said, “and napkins, for the messy
eaters.” He poured coffee all around and then sat down.
Suddenly Rex turned to the kid and asked, “You ever seen a dead body?”
The kid stopped mid doughnut and shook his head.
“The drowned ones get all bloated and pulpy, but they get hard, too, on the inside. Muscles lock
up. They’ll float face down with their arms dangling, or out to the side, and then they’ll lay like that
when you haul ‘em into the boat. ‘Cept the ones what jumped off the big bridge. They ain’t nothin’
solid left in them. Haul ‘em up out of the water and they’re like picking up a wet mattress. Dead
weight. Like putty.”
“Like Gumby and Pokey?” the kid asked.
“What the fuck are you talkin’ about? Do you know what he’s talkin’ about?” Rex asked, looking at
me.
I shook my head.
“On TV,” the kid said.
“Your mama have any children that lived?” Rex drained his coffee and crumpled his cup. “Gimme
a sip of that whiskey, will you?”
I handed him the bottle and he finished it. “Myrtle’s got the cancer again,” he said.
“I thought it was in remission.”
“It was.”
“She been to the doctor?”
“Hell, no. I can’t get her to go.”
“Then how do you know it’s back?”
“She’s bleedin’ again.”
“And she won’t go? She could go back, get another dose of chemo.”
“Says she’d rather die, she was so sick the last time. Says the cure is worse than the disease.”
I whistled through my teeth.
Rex looked at the kid. “I had a corpse once sit up in a boat once and spit water,” Rex said. “He
was a fat boy, too, and naked as the day he was born. He was supposed to have been working on
some pilot tug. He got drunked-up and went overboard in the middle of the night. That was my
rookie year.”
“What did you do?” the kid asked.
“I like to shit my pants!” Rex said, laughing. “I jumped out the boat.”
“No way.”
“I did,” Rex said, standing up and stretching. “Like to give me a heart attack. The fellas was just
as scared as me. Hell, they all jumped but one. And he was trying to hold the fat boy down and keep
the boat from tipping over.”
“What happened to him?”
“They made him the next chief.”
“Not him, the fat boy.”
“He died. They’ll come to, sometimes, but if they been in the water for long, they’s always too
fucked-up to live.”
Floyd whistled from the bridge and waived. Rex looked, but made no move to get up.
Floyd shouted again, and came towards us on the bridge.
“What’s the matter?” the kid hollered. “Got a ten ninety-eight? Fire in the doughnut house?”
“Go see what he wants” Rex told the kid. But just then the radio cackled and Floyd shouted, “get
up, you hunk of shit, there she is.”
Rex and I jumped up, and the crew piled into the zodiac and fired up the outboard. The divers ran
over to the bank while I scanned the water and sure enough, there she was, about 200 yards off,
just rolling under. Rex waived the divers off and the kid handed me the radio, helped push us off,
and in a minute we were just downstream of where we saw her last, but suddenly the girl was
nowhere to be seen.
“Shit,” said Rex, “where’d she go?”
I raked the water carefully with the pike. I saw a fireman hook a cable once, and it pulled him
overboard. The pilot throttled back to trolling speed. We looped once, then twice, and finally Rex
pointed to a flat spot on the water and we covered it twice before I felt the pole brush something
heavy ten, maybe 15 feet under.
It was full daylight, now, and the fog was gone. The river was brown and smelly like the sewer that it
is. If everybody in America flushed their toilets at once, New Orleans would flood.
The crew cut the motor and we drifted. I felt for the body, trying to bring her up without setting the
hook in her. It ain’t fun pulling them out like a dogfish on a gaff. I had to explain once to a distraught
grandmother why I’d ripped half her son’s face off. And them Catholics like open-casket funerals. I
could hear Floyd’s voice cracking on the radio in a high pitched frenzy, and then he said, “pack it
up, boys, they found her upriver at White Castle.”
Rex shot me a puzzled look, so did the pilot. I swirled my finger in the air, keep circling. I probed
the water with the pike.
The radio cracked again and Floyd said, “come on in, it’s lunchtime.” The rookie shouted and
waived his arms.
“I don’t care what Floyd says,” I said, “there’s a body down there. I saw it.”
“Hold on,” Rex said into the radio. “Bill thinks he’s got one.”
“Well, they can’t be two bodies, can there?” I heard Floyd say.
“I don’t see why not,” Rex replied, and right then I got the pole solid under her and levered her
up. The crewman reached over and grabbed her by the hair. I reached back to hand the pike to Rex,
but he’d turned white, and instead of taking the pike he sat down. Then, while I watched, he passed
smooth out; slid down into the bottom of the boat.
She was a pretty little thing, or she would have been if she hadn’t taken on so much water. She
looked about 13 or 14, dirty blonde, in a long blue cotton print skirt, a thin cotton top that didn’t
come quite past her belly button. There was a strand of beads around one wrist and her feet were
bare. I figured she might have changed her mind and kicked her shoes off trying to swim. She had
her hair in thick ropes like snakes, and a silver ring in her belly button, a tattoo on her right arm I
couldn’t make out ‘cause her skin was so bleached.
We laid her on her back in the boat and her eyes were open to the sky. Black water trickled out the
corners of her mouth. There was mud and straw on her face, and I couldn’t help but brush it away.
Her arms reached up like she was asking us for a hand. I covered her with my coat the best I could.
Rex groaned, rolled over, and puked.
“You OK” I asked.
He nodded groggily and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I think I been up too long,”
he said.
Floyd had hurt his knee climbing down the levee and he lay on the ground swearing while we
beached the zodiac. He had us lay the body on the grass while he hobbled around looking stupid.
He kneeled beside her and checked her dress for pockets, found that she had none, and no
underwear, either. He tried to read the tattoo on her arm, noted a small gold ring in her nose. “Don’t
make no sense to me,” he said. “Kids these days. When I was growing up the only folks what got
tattoos was soldiers and whores, and she don’t look like no soldier. You know her?”
I shook my head. “Not that I can recall.”
I helped Rex out of the boat. He was wobbly on his feet. The kid reached down and touched the
dead girl’s hair. “Dreadlocks,” he said.
“Get off,” Floyd growled. “This here’s a crime scene, not show and tell.”
“Her hair,” the kid said, “they call it dreadlocks.”
“I call it ugly. Now move on over there outta the way.”
“Hey,” I said, “get our gear up to the truck.”
The kid looked at me darkly, then turned and took the toolbox up on his shoulder and lumbered
up the levee.
Rex bummed a cigarette from one of the boat crew. “You got any whiskey left?” he asked.
They didn’t.
“I though you quit,” I said.
“I did. I might quit again. Right now I need a smoke and a whiskey.”
The kid skidded back down the levee and disassembled the pike. He wiped down the pole
sections with a towel and slipped them into the bag.
“Hey, kid,” Rex said, “Drive back into town and get me a quart of Old Granddad and two six packs
of Miller tall boys, you hear.”
The kid looked at me and I nodded.
“And bring me a pack of Camel no-filters.”
He took the gear and a minute later I heard the truck fire up and pull out into traffic.
Floyd was on the radio saying he didn’t know where she came from or who she was, but she was
dead. An ambulance approached from town, siren wailing, and a few minutes later two grim
paramedics appeared. They came slowly down the levee carrying a gurney, which they set up by the
girl, pulling back the top sheet before stooping beside her and feeling her neck for a pulse. Finding
none, they hefted her by her shoulders and feet and plopped her onto the gurney. Then they
covered her with the sheet and strapped her in.
“You OK?” I asked Rex.
“I had a fright, that’s all.”
It was a little past eleven. The traffic on the bridge passed slow as everybody looked to see what
the commotion was all about. Somebody leaned out a truck window and shouted my name. A
meadowlark, or a warbler, struck up a song in the pines behind the levee. Swallows darted from
under the bridge.
“Kind of pretty here,” I said, and Rex nodded, then looked around as though newly aware of his
surroundings. The fog had burned away. The crew from Ascension Parish waived and shoved off,
the zodiac skipping away over the wake of a passing tug. Beyond the tug the rust red hull of a
freighter loomed, and it sounded a blast from its horn to signal a drawbridge downstream.
“Let’s go,” Rex said, and I offered him a hand and helped him to his feet. We climbed the levee
and stood by the highway. Across the road was a pasture of about 80 acres, with a dozen or so cows
grazing, a line of moss-hung live oaks beyond them.
“Myrtle and I was gonna buy us a bigger place next year,” Rex said. “We was gonna farm some. I
was gonna play every weekend, maybe add-on a little recording studio. I can take a full retirement at
62 with 40 years service. She ain’t but 57 herself.” Rex’s hand began to tremble. “She started
writing me when I was in the war,” you know. “She was just a little kid then, not much older than the
girl,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder. “It was some kind of school thing, write a soldier for
Christmas. But we wrote a lot after that, and when I came home, I married her.”
The paramedics came up the levee with the girl and loaded her into the ambulance. They drove
away quietly, no siren, no lights.
“I ain’t never been with no other girl,” Rex said. “I was too scared to fuck the whores in ‘Nam, even
though they was all over.” He laughed, then wiped his eye.
I said, “if the kid don’t hurry, we’ll have to haul Floyd back up the levee.”
“Come on,” Rex said, and he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me across the road.
We leaned against the guard rail. A slow tug pushed an oil barge upstream, smoke belching from
her stack. I could smell the diesel.
“For a minute,” Rex said, “I thought that was Francine in the water.”
“I knew that.”
A little red Honda stopped in front of us, the back speakers thumping so the whole car shook.
Two teenage girls leaned out the passenger side windows and waived at us. “What happened?”
“Girl drowned,” I said.
“Oh,” they said together. The girl in front seat turned and said something to the others. The girl in
the back seat looked sad. “They know who?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Nobody local.”
“I thought maybe it was a car wreck,” she said. They drove away.
“Did you ever wonder how many bodies float out to the gulf and never get found?” Rex said.
“No,” I said, “Never thought about it.”
“There could be a whole boatload of them in the water and we might never know.”
I thought about that for a minute. I pictured a river of dead girls, skin bone white, hair like dirty
blonde mops, broken arms waiving. Me and Rex and the kid hauling them into a rowboat by the pike
as fast as we could, one after another. Our arms ached, sweat rolled down our backs, the boat filled
to swamping, but for every one we snagged, ten floated by, their glassy eyes accusing us for letting
them slip away. If the fog hadn’t lifted, we never would have found this one. “I forgot my jacket,” I
said.
The kid pulled up in the blazer, leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door. “I brung
the whiskey,” he said. “I got sandwiches, too. Ya’ll hungry?”
“What am I gonna do?” Rex asked. “What am I gonna do now?”
The kid leaned back in the truck and turned the radio on. He had changed the station from Country
Cajun to some kind of Rap Crap out of New Orleans. He looked across the highway where Floyd
came limping and puffing up the bank. He waived, then drummed on the dash with his fingers. “You
coming, or what?”
Rex climbed into the back seat and rummaged through the grocery bag. He opened the whiskey
and took a slug. “You forgot my cigarettes,” he said.
“You shouldn’t smoke, anyway,” the kid replied. “It’s bad for you. You don’t want to die of cancer,
do you?”
To the south I could see the cranes of a shipyard, and a tall steel railroad bridge a few miles
downstream, the spans parting to let the freighter through. Somebody sounded their horn at
oncoming traffic, and the acid smoke from the tug burned my eyes. The river, almost muddy enough
to walk across, rolled endlessly out of sight. I walked around to the driver’s side and opened the
door. “Move over,” I said. “I’ll drive.”
Rex was the senior crewman so he always drove—his name a joke not wasted on the rest of us.
The new kid was riding in the back and rested his chin on the on the seat between us like an old
dog I used to have. I was navigating and didn’t know where the hell we were. It was five-thirty in the
morning and foggy as all get-out. With the headlights we could see about fifty foot in front of us and
maybe ten to either side. We might as well have been driving through a cotton bale. I had a map
spread out on the dashboard in front of me.
“You’re about as useless as tits on a boar hog,” Rex said.
The kid laughed, and I shot him a sideways glance.
“If you’d slow down,” I said, “I might could make out a sign somewhere.”
“No matter, we’ll get there.”
“We could ask somebody,” said the kid, but when Rex and I glared at him he shriveled up and
turned it into a question, “couldn’t we?”
“And what the fuck are we supposed to say?” I asked. “’Scuse me, sir, I know it’s five o’ clock in
the morning, and I don’t mean to wake you, but could you please tell me where I am?”
“I’m just trying to find the bridge,” said the kid, “where’s that confounded bridge?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Rex asked.
“Led Zeppelin,” said the kid.
Rex might be the only man in Louisiana who doesn’t know Led Zeppelin. He plays accordion in a
Zydeco band called the Mud Mountain Mamas and he don’t know shit—or care—about life outside
of Iberville Parish. If you look up ‘redneck’ in the dictionary, it’s got his picture there. But in his
uniform you can’t tell how really bad off he is.
“You sure you’re twenty-one?” Rex asked.
It was the kid’s first week and he didn’t look a day over sixteen. He wasn’t tall and he wasn’t
muscular, maybe five foot eight and one-seventy, tops. He had a wispy little blonde moustache and
a gold ring in his ear. I wouldn’t have figured him to make it through basic training, but he had. With
honors, supposedly; head of his class.
“Nobody could hardly blame us for being lost in this fog, could they?”
“Put your seatbelt on,” I said. “It’s regulation.”
The kid sat back in his seat, but didn’t put his belt on. He had this nervous, high strung look
rookies get on their first call. We generally let them mind the truck for about a month before we get
them ‘involved;’ bore them to death until they let their guard down. The last thing I need is a kid
trying to think his first day on the job.
Rex steered with his elbows while he poured himself a cup of coffee.
“You want a doughnut?” I asked.
Rex reached in the bag and pulled out a cream-filled. “How would it look?” he asked, “us pulling
up and asking directions? I mean really, what would people say? Goddamn fire department out lost,
driving around in the woods. Waste of good taxpayer’s money.”
“But aren’t we supposed to be looking for somebody?” the kid asked.
“Some body,” I said. “They already dead, so there ain’t no use hurrying too much. ‘Sides, it’s still
too dark to get the boat out.”
Rex stuffed the doughnut in his mouth and swung the Blazer off on a side road that gaped
suddenly out of the fog. “Shit,” he said, taking the doughnut out of his mouth, “I dropped a wad of
cream in my lap.”
“Looks like you came in your pants,” I said.
“Fuck you.”
The kid laughed and leaned over the seat between us again.
“I knew we’d find it. You got a napkin?”
I looked in the bag, then in the glove box. “Nope,” I said, shaking my head.
“Just like a gook,” said Rex, untucking his shirt and rubbing up the filling, “to skimp on a damn
napkin.” He licked the filling off his fingers. “Fuckers sure can cook, though.”
“Did you say gook?” asked the kid.
“Put your seatbelt on,” I said.
“I didn’t think we were supposed to slur people.”
“Shut up, kid.”
The call came in about 2:30. Cops in Donaldsonville found a car abandoned on the bridge. The
keys were in the ignition and it wasn’t stalled. That only meant one thing.
“How do they know it was a woman?” asked the kid.
“Maybe she left a purse?” said Rex. “I dunno. It seems like it’s almost always women what jump.”
The kid looked thoughtful. “75% of jumpers are women,” he said. Then looking around
apologetically he added, “that’s what they said in school, anyhow.”
“I wonder if it’s so,” I said to nobody in particular.
Rex nodded and slurped his coffee, then fiddled with the radio for a minute and made it screech.
He’s been with the department 39 years and he’s about seen it all. “Man’ll face right up to things,”
he said, “but a woman...” He hit the brakes sharply and the truck lurched to one side and skidded to
a stop. “Jesus!” he said. He spilled coffee all over the dash.
I turned my head in time to see a buck bounding across the ditch and out of sight. “Did you see
the rack on that bastard? He must have been a ten point, at least.”
“Eight,” said the kid.
“Whatever.” Rex grabbed the map and used it to mop the dash. “You won’t see him come hunting
season.”
“Great,” I said, as Rex handed me what was left of the map. It was soaked in coffee, coming apart
in my hand. “Now what?”
“Map’ll only tell you how to get where you’re going if you know where you are.” He let off the
brakes and the truck eased forward, and for just a moment the fog lightened up. “And I know where
we are. So, a man’ll face up to things, just blow his head off with a shotgun. But a woman hasn’t got
the nerve. She’s always thinking ‘what if…’ So she’ll jump, you see, so there’s a chance she might
make it. Women like to be talked out of things, but a man’d just as soon shoot hisself.”
“Women don’t like to be messed up,” said the kid.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I know lots of messed-up women.”
“Their corpse. They don’t want to abuse their corpse.”
“Are you saying women worry about how they look after they’re dead?”
“Women always worry about how they look,” said Rex.
“Can I have one of them doughnuts?” the kid asked.
I handed him the bag. There weren’t any but cake doughnuts left. “I don’t know why they make
them things,” the kid said. “Nobody likes ‘em.”
“Give it here,” I said, “I’ll eat it.”
The kid took a bite and offered me the rest, then busted out laughing.
“Put your seatbelt on,” I said.
“He’s right though,” Rex said. “It’s always women who jump. But if they’d seen what I seen, they’d
take a bunch of pills, or something.”
“Why?” asked the kid.
“You ever seen a body what’s hit the water from 300 feet up?” asked Rex.
The kid shook his head.
“Might as well of hit concrete. Nothin’ solid left in ‘em. They get all crunchy, like a big bag of
Fritos, like a lumpy old mattress. Breaks all their bones. And the drowned ones, they’re all swole up
and bleached out. Doesn’t take but a few hours. Even the niggers. ‘Cept some niggers‘ll turn
purple. I don’t know why that is.”
“You’re shittin’ me?” said the kid.
The fog began to pulse red ahead of us. “There it is,” said Rex, and he eased over onto the
shoulder and pulled up behind a state trooper and a couple of trucks from the parish road crew.
The trooper climbed out of his cruiser as we pulled up.
“That’s Floyd Foucalt,” said Rex.
Floyd was a fat cop with a bad reputation, which was why he mostly worked shit jobs, nights, and
weekends. He stretched his arms out over his head, then hitched his gun belt up on his hips and
checked his fly. He pulled his hat down low over his eyes and sauntered up to us.
“Hey, Floyd,” said Rex, climbing out of the truck and slamming the door behind him.
“Hey, Rex. Hey, Bill. Who’s the kid? Did you bring coffee?”
“Fuckin’ rookie,” said Rex, handing Floyd the thermos. “What do we got?”
Floyd looked the kid up and down. “Do I know you?” he asked.
The kid blushed. “You made me pour out a six pack on the highway a few years back. When I was
in high school.”
“You sure you’re twenty-one?” Floyd asked. “Don’t seem like that long ago.” Floyd unscrewed
the thermos and poured coffee into the cap. “Got damn!” he said, shifting the cup back and forth
between his hands. “This thing leakin’ or what?”
“Got a crack in it. Drink it fast ‘fore it runs out, less you got your own cup.”
Floyd held the cup so it wouldn’t drip on him and gulped down the coffee the best he could. He
spilled some on his shirt, more on his pants, and finally spat out a mouthful and threw the rest away.
“How long did you boil these beans, anyhow?”
“Not long,” said Rex, “but my socks was in the kettle overnight.”
“Fuck your socks.”
“Might be the best piece of ass you ever got.”
“Or the worst case of crotch rot. Why don’t you send that kid after some decent coffee?”
“We almost didn’t get here,” Rex said. “And I wouldn’t send that kid round the corner by hisself.
Boy could fall off a ladder and be lost ‘fore he hit the ground. Send the parish boys if you want.”
“You call this fog?” Floyd asked, looking around.
“Had to stop and ask directions of some fella in a rowboat,” Rex said, “and he was a good six foot
off the ground.”
Floyd sighed and pushed his hat back on his head, then scratched his neck behind his ear. “What
we got,” he said, “is a young woman jumped the bridge last night ‘tween midnight and two.”
“How’d they know it was a woman?” the kid asked.
Floyd glared at him. “Tommy Flowers run the plates early this morning. Car b’long to a young girl
from LSU. There was folks driving by, but nobody called it in.” He shook his head. “Don’t know what
the world’s coming to.”
“Why’d she do it?” the kid asked.
We all looked at him.
Floyd hunched his shoulders and said, “who knows. Maybe she was out drunk driving around,
depressed, had a fight with her boyfriend? Maybe she just wanted to kill herself. What difference
does it make, anyway? How’s the missus, Rex?”
“Not so good,” Rex replied, and they walked up the bridge past where a disspirited road crew set
orange cones on the road to slow traffic.
The sun was coming up and I was chilled to the bone from lack of sleep. A foghorn sounded out
over the water, and in the distance I could hear a train chumping down the tracks across the river.
A bit of a north breeze stirred the fog, and a seagull screeched overhead, though we couldn’t see
him. The kid was standing around so I hollered at him, “You ain’t no tourist, son, get our gear down
to the boat. And mind your step. He opened the back gate on the Blazer and took out a steel tool
box, a nylon bag that held the pike, and another canvas satchel with a couple of stainless steel
grappling hooks and some good nylon line. He slung the bags over his shoulder and lurched off
down the road the tool box in his free hand. When he was gone I slipped a flat bottle of Southern
Comfort out of my hipboots and took a long swallow, then put my jacket on and slid the bottle into
my inside pocket. I grabbed a flashlight and two life preservers, shut the door, and ambled down to
the water.
The kid set the gear down on the bank by the dive boat. He was rubbing his elbow.
“Did you fall?” I asked.
“No,” he replied.
The boat was a zodiac. The crew came upriver a few minutes before we got here and beached it
under the bridge. The divers sat off by themselves, their wetsuits on. The crew sat smoking
cigarettes and gazing out at the fog.
“Say, Bill?” the kid asked.
“What?” I replied.
“If that girl jumped upriver by Plaquemine, why are we looking for her here?”
“River spits ‘em up around here. If they don’t hit a snag, they roll along underwater for a while.
After a few hours, they bubble up and float to the top. Right past the bridge there’s a deep hole,
dead water. We find a lot of them here. If we don’t find her today, we’ll work the banks upstream
tomorrow. Better hope we find her today, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“They’re bad the first day, but by the second or third they get ripe.”
A minute later the divers came over and pooh-poohed the water.
“Waste o’ time, if you ask me,” said one.
“Too damn muddy to see,” said the other. He kicked at the dirt with his toe.
It was growing light and the breeze combed the fog into tatters, so we glimpsed, from time to
time, a boat on the river, or a bit of the far bank. It had rained a lot the past week, and there was a
lot of debris in the river besides the usual trash. I could make out a stump bobbing, a barrel, a few
planks and boxes. The levee was littered with bottles and cans, plastic buckets, old diapers,
whatever people throw out. Every now and then the fog lifted enough to see houses and lights in
Lutcher on the far bank. There was a rickety-assed pier tilting out into the river with a red light on it.
I could see somebody scraping paint off a boat hauled up onto the bank. Then the fog closed in
again and I couldn’t see past the first truss of the bridge.
Rex and Floyd leaned on the railing above us and looked down, pointing at likely places on the
river. There was some traffic now, trucks mostly; and the drivers slowed down and gawked as they
rumbled over the bridge. I knew the guys from the boat crew but not too well. They were from
Ascension Parish, across the water, and we met up every few years on a drowning, or some kind of
training exercise, or to play softball if we got a league up in the summer. “How’s Rex’s old lady?”
one of them asked. “I heard she was sick.”
“Not too good,” I said. Then I asked the kid to go back and get Rex’s thermos and when he was
gone I took another sip of whiskey and passed the bottle to the guys in the boat. They took a hit
each and then uncorked a bottle of their own and we passed that around. “That’s too bad,” they
said.
Right then Rex whistled and we could see him and Floyd pointing out at something in the water.
The crew climbed into the boat, then the divers, grumbling as they lugged their tanks, and I got in
last after tossing them the bags with the pike and the grappling hooks. As I kicked the boat off, I
looked over my shoulder at the kid running and stumbling down the bank with the thermos. The
pilot fired up the motor and in a minute we were bouncing along and I thought it was like riding a
rock skipping across the river, only we weren’t spinning.
The wind was cold in the boat, the fog made the air heavy and wet, and I was glad I wore my
jacket. I tried to make out where Floyd was pointing, but it wasn’t much use. Though he hollered, I
couldn’t make out a word he said over the outboard. I unzipped both bags and rummaged for the
radio, but the kid must have stowed it in the toolbox, and I made a mental note to chew his ass
when we got back. I screwed the pike shaft and the hook together, out of boredom, mostly.
There was a small searchlight on the front of the boat, and the crewman flicked it on and it fired
up with a zap like a flashbulb and threw out a bright, narrow, orangish beam that lit up the fog but
didn’t show anything on the water. He fooled with it a minute, then shut it off, and we buzzed around
in an aimless circle until one of the divers shouted, “Over there!”
The pilot drew us up close, cut the engine, and we coasted slowly towards a pulpy-looking gray
shape that floated forlornly just below the surface of the greasy brown river. But up close we saw it
was a thick foam cushion from a couch or a recliner, with a tattered remnant of blue fabric holding
onto one end and fanned out in the water looking, from a distance, like hair. We didn’t bother to
haul it in. We circled aimlessly until we got hungry, then drank another round of whiskey and
headed back to shore.
The kid was waiting with the thermos. “Where’s the radio?” I asked him. He had hung it on his
belt. “A lot of good it does me there,” I said.
“I thought I was coming.” He sounded pouty.
“Don’t think, rookie. I carry the radio. I wouldn’t trust you to hold your dick. You’re here to learn,
not to do.”
“What am I supposed to learn on the bank?”
“Patience. Why don’t you go up and watch the river with Rex?”
“He told me to come down here and help you land the boat.”
“Gimme some of that coffee,” I said.
“All gone.”
“Then take the truck to town and get some more.”
“But you said I couldn’t drive.”
“That was then, this is now. Here’s a five,” I said, digging in my wallet. “Get coffee and some more
of them doughnuts. And make sure the coffee’s fresh. If it ain’t, tell ‘em to brew us up a pot.”
After the kid left, Rex came down and squatted down on his haunches, plucked up a dandelion
and began to chew on the stem. “Seems like I never get no sleep anymore.”
“Myrtle?”
“If it ain’t her then it’s Francine fighting with that no-good son-in-law of mine.”
“I thought they moved to Natchez,” I said.
“She came back last weekend. Swears she’s gonna quit that son-of-a-bitch forever, but never
stays gone more than a week or two. The little boy cries all the time. Cries at night ‘cause he’s
scared of the dark. Cries in the daytime if you look at him cross-eyed. Wets his pants.”
“Somebody been beaten on him?” I asked.
“Could be,” said Rex. “If I find out it’s so…” his voice trailed off.
“I never could figure out why a woman would stay with a man what mistreats her.”
“Beats me,” said Rex, then he looked at me and chuckled. “Reckon you’ll ever get married
again?”
“I’ll be paying child support ‘til I’m fuckin’ near sixty. Why would I want to do that?”
“Pussy?”
“I got more pussy since I was divorced than I ever got from Ellen.”
“You musta got at least two good shots?”
“I got at most two shots and I don’t remember ‘em being that good.”
“Don’t look at me,” Rex said, “I didn’t sample the merchandise.”
“If somebody else can get some off her, more power to ‘em.”
“How’s the kids?”
“They all right.”
“They like Lake Charles?”
“Not really.”
“They’ll get used to it. It’s a nice place. Not too far to visit.”
“Far enough.”
Word came over the radio the girl left a note at home. Said she’d been depressed about school, a
boyfriend who left her, some “family stuff.”
The kid came back with coffee and doughnuts. “Cups,” he said, “and napkins, for the messy
eaters.” He poured coffee all around and then sat down.
Suddenly Rex turned to the kid and asked, “You ever seen a dead body?”
The kid stopped mid doughnut and shook his head.
“The drowned ones get all bloated and pulpy, but they get hard, too, on the inside. Muscles lock
up. They’ll float face down with their arms dangling, or out to the side, and then they’ll lay like that
when you haul ‘em into the boat. ‘Cept the ones what jumped off the big bridge. They ain’t nothin’
solid left in them. Haul ‘em up out of the water and they’re like picking up a wet mattress. Dead
weight. Like putty.”
“Like Gumby and Pokey?” the kid asked.
“What the fuck are you talkin’ about? Do you know what he’s talkin’ about?” Rex asked, looking at
me.
I shook my head.
“On TV,” the kid said.
“Your mama have any children that lived?” Rex drained his coffee and crumpled his cup. “Gimme
a sip of that whiskey, will you?”
I handed him the bottle and he finished it. “Myrtle’s got the cancer again,” he said.
“I thought it was in remission.”
“It was.”
“She been to the doctor?”
“Hell, no. I can’t get her to go.”
“Then how do you know it’s back?”
“She’s bleedin’ again.”
“And she won’t go? She could go back, get another dose of chemo.”
“Says she’d rather die, she was so sick the last time. Says the cure is worse than the disease.”
I whistled through my teeth.
Rex looked at the kid. “I had a corpse once sit up in a boat once and spit water,” Rex said. “He
was a fat boy, too, and naked as the day he was born. He was supposed to have been working on
some pilot tug. He got drunked-up and went overboard in the middle of the night. That was my
rookie year.”
“What did you do?” the kid asked.
“I like to shit my pants!” Rex said, laughing. “I jumped out the boat.”
“No way.”
“I did,” Rex said, standing up and stretching. “Like to give me a heart attack. The fellas was just
as scared as me. Hell, they all jumped but one. And he was trying to hold the fat boy down and keep
the boat from tipping over.”
“What happened to him?”
“They made him the next chief.”
“Not him, the fat boy.”
“He died. They’ll come to, sometimes, but if they been in the water for long, they’s always too
fucked-up to live.”
Floyd whistled from the bridge and waived. Rex looked, but made no move to get up.
Floyd shouted again, and came towards us on the bridge.
“What’s the matter?” the kid hollered. “Got a ten ninety-eight? Fire in the doughnut house?”
“Go see what he wants” Rex told the kid. But just then the radio cackled and Floyd shouted, “get
up, you hunk of shit, there she is.”
Rex and I jumped up, and the crew piled into the zodiac and fired up the outboard. The divers ran
over to the bank while I scanned the water and sure enough, there she was, about 200 yards off,
just rolling under. Rex waived the divers off and the kid handed me the radio, helped push us off,
and in a minute we were just downstream of where we saw her last, but suddenly the girl was
nowhere to be seen.
“Shit,” said Rex, “where’d she go?”
I raked the water carefully with the pike. I saw a fireman hook a cable once, and it pulled him
overboard. The pilot throttled back to trolling speed. We looped once, then twice, and finally Rex
pointed to a flat spot on the water and we covered it twice before I felt the pole brush something
heavy ten, maybe 15 feet under.
It was full daylight, now, and the fog was gone. The river was brown and smelly like the sewer that it
is. If everybody in America flushed their toilets at once, New Orleans would flood.
The crew cut the motor and we drifted. I felt for the body, trying to bring her up without setting the
hook in her. It ain’t fun pulling them out like a dogfish on a gaff. I had to explain once to a distraught
grandmother why I’d ripped half her son’s face off. And them Catholics like open-casket funerals. I
could hear Floyd’s voice cracking on the radio in a high pitched frenzy, and then he said, “pack it
up, boys, they found her upriver at White Castle.”
Rex shot me a puzzled look, so did the pilot. I swirled my finger in the air, keep circling. I probed
the water with the pike.
The radio cracked again and Floyd said, “come on in, it’s lunchtime.” The rookie shouted and
waived his arms.
“I don’t care what Floyd says,” I said, “there’s a body down there. I saw it.”
“Hold on,” Rex said into the radio. “Bill thinks he’s got one.”
“Well, they can’t be two bodies, can there?” I heard Floyd say.
“I don’t see why not,” Rex replied, and right then I got the pole solid under her and levered her
up. The crewman reached over and grabbed her by the hair. I reached back to hand the pike to Rex,
but he’d turned white, and instead of taking the pike he sat down. Then, while I watched, he passed
smooth out; slid down into the bottom of the boat.
She was a pretty little thing, or she would have been if she hadn’t taken on so much water. She
looked about 13 or 14, dirty blonde, in a long blue cotton print skirt, a thin cotton top that didn’t
come quite past her belly button. There was a strand of beads around one wrist and her feet were
bare. I figured she might have changed her mind and kicked her shoes off trying to swim. She had
her hair in thick ropes like snakes, and a silver ring in her belly button, a tattoo on her right arm I
couldn’t make out ‘cause her skin was so bleached.
We laid her on her back in the boat and her eyes were open to the sky. Black water trickled out the
corners of her mouth. There was mud and straw on her face, and I couldn’t help but brush it away.
Her arms reached up like she was asking us for a hand. I covered her with my coat the best I could.
Rex groaned, rolled over, and puked.
“You OK” I asked.
He nodded groggily and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I think I been up too long,”
he said.
Floyd had hurt his knee climbing down the levee and he lay on the ground swearing while we
beached the zodiac. He had us lay the body on the grass while he hobbled around looking stupid.
He kneeled beside her and checked her dress for pockets, found that she had none, and no
underwear, either. He tried to read the tattoo on her arm, noted a small gold ring in her nose. “Don’t
make no sense to me,” he said. “Kids these days. When I was growing up the only folks what got
tattoos was soldiers and whores, and she don’t look like no soldier. You know her?”
I shook my head. “Not that I can recall.”
I helped Rex out of the boat. He was wobbly on his feet. The kid reached down and touched the
dead girl’s hair. “Dreadlocks,” he said.
“Get off,” Floyd growled. “This here’s a crime scene, not show and tell.”
“Her hair,” the kid said, “they call it dreadlocks.”
“I call it ugly. Now move on over there outta the way.”
“Hey,” I said, “get our gear up to the truck.”
The kid looked at me darkly, then turned and took the toolbox up on his shoulder and lumbered
up the levee.
Rex bummed a cigarette from one of the boat crew. “You got any whiskey left?” he asked.
They didn’t.
“I though you quit,” I said.
“I did. I might quit again. Right now I need a smoke and a whiskey.”
The kid skidded back down the levee and disassembled the pike. He wiped down the pole
sections with a towel and slipped them into the bag.
“Hey, kid,” Rex said, “Drive back into town and get me a quart of Old Granddad and two six packs
of Miller tall boys, you hear.”
The kid looked at me and I nodded.
“And bring me a pack of Camel no-filters.”
He took the gear and a minute later I heard the truck fire up and pull out into traffic.
Floyd was on the radio saying he didn’t know where she came from or who she was, but she was
dead. An ambulance approached from town, siren wailing, and a few minutes later two grim
paramedics appeared. They came slowly down the levee carrying a gurney, which they set up by the
girl, pulling back the top sheet before stooping beside her and feeling her neck for a pulse. Finding
none, they hefted her by her shoulders and feet and plopped her onto the gurney. Then they
covered her with the sheet and strapped her in.
“You OK?” I asked Rex.
“I had a fright, that’s all.”
It was a little past eleven. The traffic on the bridge passed slow as everybody looked to see what
the commotion was all about. Somebody leaned out a truck window and shouted my name. A
meadowlark, or a warbler, struck up a song in the pines behind the levee. Swallows darted from
under the bridge.
“Kind of pretty here,” I said, and Rex nodded, then looked around as though newly aware of his
surroundings. The fog had burned away. The crew from Ascension Parish waived and shoved off,
the zodiac skipping away over the wake of a passing tug. Beyond the tug the rust red hull of a
freighter loomed, and it sounded a blast from its horn to signal a drawbridge downstream.
“Let’s go,” Rex said, and I offered him a hand and helped him to his feet. We climbed the levee
and stood by the highway. Across the road was a pasture of about 80 acres, with a dozen or so cows
grazing, a line of moss-hung live oaks beyond them.
“Myrtle and I was gonna buy us a bigger place next year,” Rex said. “We was gonna farm some. I
was gonna play every weekend, maybe add-on a little recording studio. I can take a full retirement at
62 with 40 years service. She ain’t but 57 herself.” Rex’s hand began to tremble. “She started
writing me when I was in the war,” you know. “She was just a little kid then, not much older than the
girl,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder. “It was some kind of school thing, write a soldier for
Christmas. But we wrote a lot after that, and when I came home, I married her.”
The paramedics came up the levee with the girl and loaded her into the ambulance. They drove
away quietly, no siren, no lights.
“I ain’t never been with no other girl,” Rex said. “I was too scared to fuck the whores in ‘Nam, even
though they was all over.” He laughed, then wiped his eye.
I said, “if the kid don’t hurry, we’ll have to haul Floyd back up the levee.”
“Come on,” Rex said, and he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me across the road.
We leaned against the guard rail. A slow tug pushed an oil barge upstream, smoke belching from
her stack. I could smell the diesel.
“For a minute,” Rex said, “I thought that was Francine in the water.”
“I knew that.”
A little red Honda stopped in front of us, the back speakers thumping so the whole car shook.
Two teenage girls leaned out the passenger side windows and waived at us. “What happened?”
“Girl drowned,” I said.
“Oh,” they said together. The girl in front seat turned and said something to the others. The girl in
the back seat looked sad. “They know who?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Nobody local.”
“I thought maybe it was a car wreck,” she said. They drove away.
“Did you ever wonder how many bodies float out to the gulf and never get found?” Rex said.
“No,” I said, “Never thought about it.”
“There could be a whole boatload of them in the water and we might never know.”
I thought about that for a minute. I pictured a river of dead girls, skin bone white, hair like dirty
blonde mops, broken arms waiving. Me and Rex and the kid hauling them into a rowboat by the pike
as fast as we could, one after another. Our arms ached, sweat rolled down our backs, the boat filled
to swamping, but for every one we snagged, ten floated by, their glassy eyes accusing us for letting
them slip away. If the fog hadn’t lifted, we never would have found this one. “I forgot my jacket,” I
said.
The kid pulled up in the blazer, leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door. “I brung
the whiskey,” he said. “I got sandwiches, too. Ya’ll hungry?”
“What am I gonna do?” Rex asked. “What am I gonna do now?”
The kid leaned back in the truck and turned the radio on. He had changed the station from Country
Cajun to some kind of Rap Crap out of New Orleans. He looked across the highway where Floyd
came limping and puffing up the bank. He waived, then drummed on the dash with his fingers. “You
coming, or what?”
Rex climbed into the back seat and rummaged through the grocery bag. He opened the whiskey
and took a slug. “You forgot my cigarettes,” he said.
“You shouldn’t smoke, anyway,” the kid replied. “It’s bad for you. You don’t want to die of cancer,
do you?”
To the south I could see the cranes of a shipyard, and a tall steel railroad bridge a few miles
downstream, the spans parting to let the freighter through. Somebody sounded their horn at
oncoming traffic, and the acid smoke from the tug burned my eyes. The river, almost muddy enough
to walk across, rolled endlessly out of sight. I walked around to the driver’s side and opened the
door. “Move over,” I said. “I’ll drive.”