Next time they checked the island, the Toup brothers discovered their crop ravaged, whole swathes gouged out of what was once a garden as big as a tennis court. A blizzard of dead stems and leaves littered the ground, and plant pots were knocked off the platforms into the dirt. Impossible to tell in the dark the extent of the damage. Here and there in the mud was a discarded candy bar wrapper, a potato chip bag, a crushed beer can.
Victor paced, frenzied disbelief in his eyes as he looked over the plants. He cupped his hand over his mouth and spat curses and paced some more. “Good God,” he said in a voiced strangled with anger.
Meanwhile Reginald surveyed the ruin from the edge of the clearing, his shoulders sagged with weariness. A dread of what would happen now.
“Look at this shit,” Victor cried, looking at Reginald in a way somehow accusatory, as if he expected Reginald to argue otherwise. As if he almost suspected him complicit in the theft. “Looks like somebody took a weed whacker to it.”
A night breeze, hot and tar-smelling, gently shook the leaves around them.
Reginald glanced around as if the marauder were hiding somewhere in the dark. His brother cursed and clenched his fists and kneeled in the dirt among the paw prints and bird tracks. He skimmed his flashlight beam over the ground and studied the boot marks in the mud. Two different pairs crisscrossed back and forth, one big and the other small. They tracked away toward the shore, where there was a large drag from a skiff boat in the mud.
“I’m gonna kill him,” Victor said.
Reginald said nothing. Holding his lantern aloft, he squatted on his heels and picked up from the ground a joint stub as thick around as a 54-ring-gauge cigar.
“Lindquist, I told you,” said Victor. “You wouldn’t listen and here we are.”
“All right, goddamn it.”
“Right here. See.”
“What you want? I see.”
Victor’s face was twisted with rage in the lantern light. “I want you to stop being such a pussy is what I want.”
Reginald swatted his hand. He dropped the joint stub into the dirt and Victor came over and kicked it.
“Flagrant,” he said.