Blood in the Bayou (The Iron Compass MC #3)

Prologue

Bishop

Fifteen years ago, the last night I was a Louisiana man.

My uncle Rene kept his kitchen light on a dimmer, which is a thing rich people do and a thing Rene did because the bulb was dying and he was too cheap to change it. So the whole room sat in that half-brown glow, like the inside of a bottle nobody had finished.

I had a duffel bag by my foot. I had a lie in my mouth, already chewed soft, ready to go.

"You eat?" he said.

"I ate."

"You didn't eat."

"I ate at Mimi's."

"Mimi closed in April." He didn't look up from the stove.

He was making a roux the way he always made a roux, which was slowly, and with the general air of a man performing surgery on somebody he disliked.

"So either you're lying to me about eating, or you drove to a boarded-up building and licked the door. "

"I licked the door."

"Mm." He stirred. "How was it?"

"Needed salt."

That was the whole first five minutes. That's how my family talked. We could go an hour sideways before anybody said a true thing, and then the true thing would come out flat and fast like a car through a guardrail.

I sat down at the table because standing was starting to look like an announcement.

Outside, the bayou was doing what it does at night, which is sound like a room full of people who stop talking when you walk in.

Frogs, then no frogs. Water moving, then water not moving.

My whole childhood had that soundtrack and I'd never once found it peaceful.

People say the swamp is peaceful. People say that from a porch, with a drink, in October.

"Your daddy called," Rene said.

"He's got a phone now?"

"He's got a phone at the facility. He gets nine minutes."

"He spend it on you?"

"He spends it on me." Rene tapped the spoon. "You'd know that if you picked up."

"I pick up."

"You picked up in February."

"February's a month."

"February's the shortest one." He finally turned around. My uncle at fifty-two looked like a boot that had opinions. Gray in the beard, forearms like dock rope, a face that had spent four decades deciding it wasn't going to be surprised by anything ever again. "That was cute. You practice that?"

"On the drive."

"It shows."

He brought two bowls to the table. I hadn't asked for one. He put it in front of me anyway, and I ate it, because I have never in my life been able to refuse food from a man who is about to ruin my night with it.

We ate for a while. Good gumbo. Better than mine, which he knew, which was probably the point of making it.

Then he said, "Bag's by the door."

"Bag's by my foot."

"Bag's by the door in your head. Same thing." He set his spoon down. "Where."

"West."

"West is not a place, Bishop. West is a direction. My cousin went west and ended up in Beaumont, which is not west, it's just Texas, and it's the same swamp with worse music."

"Further than Beaumont."

"How much further."

"Until the trees quit."

He looked at me a long moment. "Arizona," he said. "You been reading brochures."

"I been reading maps."

"Same industry." He pushed his bowl an inch away. That was the tell. My uncle never finished anything he was about to be serious over. "So you're running."

"I'm leaving. There's a difference."

"There is," he agreed. "The difference is what you're carrying when you do it."

Here it comes, I thought.

"You want to know what I did today," he said.

"Not particularly."

"I went out to the Duplessis lease and pulled forty sacks and came in at eleven and slept four hours." He wiped the table with the side of his hand, moving crumbs that weren't there. "You know how long I been doing that?"

"Since you were fourteen."

"Since I was eleven. Your grandmother lied to the man about my age and the man knew she was lying and hired me anyway because it saved him nine cents an hour." He nodded at his own bowl. "That's this parish. Everybody knows and everybody signs."

"Is this the part where you tell me my life is easy?"

"No. Your life's not easy. Your life's light, which is different, and it's light because three people ahead of you carried something so it wouldn't be sitting on you." He looked up. "I'm not saying that to guilt you."

"You're saying it in a kitchen at midnight while I have a bag on the floor."

"Alright," he conceded. "I'm saying it to guilt you a little."

I remember laughing. I remember the laugh not going anywhere, just landing on the table between us and sitting there.

"Rene."

"Mm."

"If it was nothing, you'd have told me what it was ten years ago."

He didn't answer that. He got up instead, and I knew from the way he pushed the chair back — carefully, not scraping, the way you do when you don't want a room to know you've moved — that we were finally getting to it.

He went to the cabinet over the sink, the one that never had food in it, and he took down a tin box that I had known about since I was six years old and had never once seen opened. The lid had a painted pelican on it, mostly scraped off. It sounded like paper when he set it on the table.

"No," I said.

"You don't know what it is."

"I know what it is."

"You do not know what it is," Rene said, and for the first time that night his voice moved.

Not loud. Just moved, like something turning over in deep water.

"Nobody in this family knows what it is.

That's the arrangement. What you know is that it exists, and that we keep it, and that we get paid to keep it, and that we have gotten paid to keep it since before your great-grandmother could write her own name. "

"That's plenty to know."

"It's less than half."

"It's plenty."

He sat back down. He put both hands flat on either side of the tin, like he was holding a table still in a storm.

"Your daddy couldn't do it," he said. "Your daddy's a good man with a soft place in him and they found it and they pressed on it till he broke.

That's not his failing. That's just where he was thin.

He's in Angola for eleven years because he was thin in the one place a Thibodeaux can't afford to be thin. "

"He's in Angola because he did a thing."

"He's in Angola because he did a thing for them," Rene said. "There's a difference. You like differences tonight, so hold on to that one."

The frogs started up again outside. Then stopped again.

"I'm sixty-one next spring," he said. "That's a lie, I'm fifty-two, but I feel sixty-one and I look seventy, so let's say sixty-one and give me the sympathy." He almost smiled. "After me it's you. There's nobody else. Your cousin Adrien's got the sense of a wet dog. Your aunt won't touch it."

"Then let it stop."

"It doesn't stop."

"Everything stops."

"Not this."

"Uncle." I put my spoon down too, so we were even. "I'm twenty-three. I'm not taking a job I don't understand from people I've never met to protect a thing nobody will name, for money I don't want, for the rest of my life. That's not loyalty. That's a lease."

He nodded slowly. Not agreeing. Just filing it.

"You think the debt's not yours," he said.

"The debt's not mine."

"Say the rest of it."

"There's no rest of it."

"There is. You just don't like the sound.

" He leaned in, and the dim bulb caught the side of his face and made it older.

"You think if you cross a state line the arrangement forgets your name.

It doesn't. It's not a bank, Bishop. Banks forget.

This doesn't. Everything in this parish is somebody's.

The land, the water, the shrimp, the dirt under the church.

The people." He tapped the tin once with two fingers.

"Especially the people. That's the whole business of this place and it always has been, and the only thing that ever changed is how polite we got about the paperwork. "

"Ask me one thing," I said.

"Ask."

"If I say yes tonight. Right now. I sit down and I take it." I put my hand on the table. "What happens tomorrow?"

Rene thought about it.

"Nothing," he said.

"Nothing."

"You get up. You go out on the water. Somebody comes to the house four times a year and you're polite to him. Once every eight or ten years you move a thing at night." He shrugged. "That's it. That's the whole job. It's the easiest work in this parish and it's why nobody's ever refused it."

"And in forty years?"

"In forty years you're me," he said, "sitting in a brown kitchen at midnight, telling a young man it's nothing, and hoping he believes you, and knowing exactly what you look like while you're doing it."

The refrigerator came on. That was the loudest thing in the room for about ten seconds.

"Then I'll be somebody else's."

"You'll be nobody's. That's worse. Nobody's is how you end up floating."

I stood up. I picked up the bag. I remember my hands being very steady, which surprised me, because everything under the hands was going about a hundred and ten.

"Put it in a hole," I said. "Put it in the ground and put me in the ground with it as far as anybody down here needs to know. I'm not the keeper. I'm not the next one. I'm just a guy who used to live here."

Rene looked at the tin. Then at me.

"You know what happens," he said, "to a thing that's been held for four generations, when the hand lets go?"

"It falls."

"It gets looked for," he said. "That's the part you're not smart enough yet to be scared of.

Long as somebody's holding it, everybody knows where it is, and everybody sleeps.

The minute nobody's holding it—" He opened his hands.

"Then it's out there. Then it's a rumor.

Then it's worth something to a person who never had a stake before. Then it's a fire."

I stood in that brown kitchen light and I did the arithmetic and I got the answer wrong.

"Not my fire," I said.

He didn't argue. That was the terrible thing. My uncle Rene, who would argue with a weather report, who once got into a forty-minute fight with a priest about the correct way to peel garlic, just sat there and let me have it.

"Alright," he said.

"That's it?"