They needed a boat if they were going to find the twins’ island. Provided it existed. They needed a boat but Hanson had no money and Cosgrove refused to squander any of his meager savings on a pipe dream. Hanson told Cosgrove he had something he took from the widow’s house he never told him about.
A ring.
“A ring?” Cosgrove said. “We agreed. Just stuff in the attic.”
“It was in the attic.”
Cosgrove stared at Hanson. A hard look of recrimination.
“Hey, Sasquatch, I’m telling you now, ain’t I?”
They took the diamond ring to a pawnshop just off the highway. Trader John’s.
“Like to see how much this’s worth,” Hanson told the old woman in the Hawaiian shirt standing behind the counter. He reached into his pocket and chinked the ring down on the hand-smeared glass. The woman picked the ring up and turned it around in her gnarled fingers, forehead seaming as she squinted through a jeweler’s loupe.
Cosgrove glanced at the merchandise behind the counter, sun-faded bric-a-brac hung from the walls: banjos, taxidermied animal heads, medical apparatus among Saints paraphernalia and anti-Obama bumper stickers. Whole damn parish had its life on consignment. Pretty soon people would be hawking their body parts for beer and cigarette money. Kidneys and corneas on layaway at Trader John’s.
“Where you find this?” the woman asked.
Without pause Hanson told the woman that the ring had once belonged to his fiancée. Penelope. Dead.
The clerk let the loupe drop, and the glass swung from the chain around her neck. She shot back her wobbly chin and clucked her tongue.
“Car wreck,” Hanson said, adjusting his rodeo belt buckle. “That wasn’t bad enough, there was a guy with her. Young dude.”
A plump cat, marmalade-orange, leapt onto the counter and strolled up to Hanson, staring with intense yellow-green eyes. “Dude had his pants down,” he said, stroking the cat’s head. “Down to his ankles. Both of ’em got themselves in such a frenzy she drove ’em both right off a bridge into the river.”
Cosgrove wondered if Hanson had made up all this soap opera bullshit in advance. He hoped to God so. He hated to ponder the kind of warped mind that could conjure this craziness on the spot.
Hanson went on. Surreally. “Wearing this very ring I bought for her. I didn’t know whether to cry or dig her up and kill her again.”
Hanson made a show of musing on this. The old woman’s face remained as inert as wood. Maybe she’d heard it all during her seventy-five or eighty years on earth. “Know what,” the woman said. “All this sounds mighty silly to me.”
Hanson huffed out an indignant breath and raised his eyebrows. He took off his camouflage cap, smoothed back his black ponytail, put the cap back on. “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I guess my life is silly then.”
The old woman offered nine hundred dollars for the ring. Fifteen hundred, Hanson said. Nine hundred, countered the woman. Twelve, Hanson said. Nine, said the woman. Ten, Hanson said.
Nine, said the woman.
Their next day off Hanson called a number from an ad in the paper and twenty minutes later they were on their way in Hanson’s Dodge to the other side of Jeanette. When they showed up to the brick ranch house, a stout bald man with a jazz patch and a wad of tobacco bulging his cheek limped out. He shook their hands, his fingers the roughest Cosgrove ever felt in his life, like tree bark.
The man led them to the backyard, where a T-shaped pier jutted out into a pea-soup-green lagoon. Cosgrove and Hanson looked over the aluminum powerboat, ten feet long and outfitted with an old lawnmower engine. The man stood with hands tucked in his pockets and his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, spitting tobacco juice in the water. Minnows rose up to the surface and nibbled at the bubbles with tiny kissing mouths.
“So where do we take it?” Hanson asked the man.
“Take it?”
“Where do we park it?” Hanson kept edging closer to the man. The man kept edging uneasily back, every so often glancing at Hanson’s shirt, which said METALLICA, KILL ’EM ALL on the front, above a drawing of a bloody hammer and gore-splattered tile.
It took a second for the man to figure out what Hanson meant. “You don’t have a slip?”
“No.”
The man scratched his chin and considered this. “Well, I guess you can rent a slip pretty cheap at the marina. If you don’t have your own pier.”
“How do we get it there?” Hanson asked.
The man looked at Hanson as if he were joking. “You drive it.”
“Can we tow it, I mean?”
“You got a trailer?”
Hanson shook his head.
“Then you got to drive it.”
“You got one for sale?”
“Naw. Naw, I don’t have no trailer.”
The three men stood in silence, gazing at the boat as if it would solve these dilemmas.
“Just askin’,” the man said, “you got a license, right?”
“Driver’s?”
“Boating.”
“Sure.”
The man looked at Cosgrove. Cosgrove shrugged. He imagined the man telling his buddies about them later. You never believe these dipshits came here the other day never been on a boat in their lives.
“Hell, none of my business,” the man said.
“It’s a fuckin’ boat,” Hanson said to Cosgrove. “How many aspects is there?”
Mid-September Cosgrove and Hanson fell into a regular pattern of reconnaissance. Every night after their shift at the bird sanctuary they piloted into the Barataria and explored the archipelago of islands, wandered shorelines by the feeble light of their lanterns like revenants of an apocalypse. The islets and cheniers were innumerable, most of them hardly more than patches of marshy weed. The coordinates Hanson took from the GPS led only to an island with a skeletal willow tree, its branches filled with sleeping white egrets. No marijuana. But they used the island as a reference point. If the twins’ island was anyplace, it was probably around here.
Sometimes they saw solitary boat lights shining far out on the horizon. Otherwise the bay was eerily bereft of human life. Maybe nobody else was stupid enough to come near this place. Every day the signs posted around the beach were direr in their warnings. AVOID WATER. AVOID DEAD ANIMALS. DON’T SWIM. DON’T BREATHE.
GET THE FUCK OUT, the signs would probably read in a week or two.
As far as Cosgrove and Hanson could tell, nobody was around to enforce the rules.
Cosgrove wondered why he was such a willing accomplice to Hanson’s dumbfuckery. Why he deferred to the whims of this latter-day village idiot. But there really wasn’t any mystery to his acquiescence. He was desperate. Desperate and, yes, curious. Curious to see what would become of all of this. Curious to see if there was any truth to Hanson’s bullshit. He figured all it would cost him was a week or two more of his life. A week or two: he had that. Time was all he had.
Besides, Cosgrove had nowhere to go, no other prospects on the horizon. He was stuck in the ass crack of Louisiana making fifteen dollars an hour as part of an oil cleanup crew. And this was probably as good as things were going to get for him. Of course he knew that searching for an island of marijuana was crazy. But he also knew that every so often fools stumbled upon fortune, whether by fate or fluke.