CHAPTER 34
THE KING OF THE RIVER
POV: LUCIEN
Cormac Brannigan looks at his own face in charcoal.
The whole room watches him look.
I watch the man behind him with the stitched face. His hand is inside his jacket. His shoulders are high. His eyes keep going from Cormac’s back to my wife at the head of the table, and every time they land on her, the red seam on his cheek jumps.
She cut him. She let him go. She sent him home with her face in his head, and he’s carried it for a day and a half, and now she’s sitting fifteen feet away in red with a pencil through her hair.
He’s going to do it.
I know before he does.
“Cormac,” I say.
He looks up from the menu.
“The man behind you,” I say. “Tell him to take his hand out of his coat.”
Cormac doesn’t turn around. He looks at me down the table. There’s something in his face I’ve seen before: in the engine room, on the ramp, in the cockpit of my mother’s boat. A man doing arithmetic and not liking the sum.
“Danny,” he says. “Take your hand out of your coat.”
Danny.
The boy Bastien threw over the rail four weeks ago. The one who came out at the Chalmette slip half dead and puking river. The one she cut. Of course it’s the same one. The river keeps giving him back.
Danny doesn’t take his hand out of his coat.
He pulls.
He’s fast. He’s been practicing. The gun comes out black and clears his lapel and swings toward the head of the table, toward the red dress, toward her—
I’ve had the Sig in my lap since Cormac sat down.
I shoot him once through the stitched cheek, and he goes back against the new paneling and slides down it, and the gun drops from his hand and skids across the new carpet and stops against the leg of Cormac’s chair.
Someone screams. Then no one does.
The white flag has fallen over. It lies across Danny’s legs.
Cormac hasn’t moved.
He sits at the far end of the table with his big hands flat on the cloth and his own face in charcoal in front of him and a dead boy at his back, and he looks at me.
“Under a flag,” he says.
“He drew under your flag,” I say. “Not mine.”
“You’d have killed me anyway.”
“Yes.”
He nods slowly. He looks at my wife.
“Noelle,” he says. Almost fondly. “Claire’s girl.”
He says her name.
I stand.
Four weeks ago, on the upper deck of this boat, I poured a man’s whiskey into the river and told him what to tell his master.
Tell him her name isn’t currency on this river. Tell him the next man who says it goes in with weights.
Kinnane told him. I know he did. Kinnane was a good messenger.
I walk down the length of the table. Past the judge, who has gone gray. Past the senator and his wife, who has both hands over her mouth now. Past Marchand’s men, who are already moving to the doors. I stop beside Cormac Brannigan’s chair.
He looks up at me.
“You told Kinnane something once,” he says. “About weights.”
“Yes.”
“I thought you were being poetic.”
“I’m never poetic.”
Bastien is behind me. One arm in the sling. In his good hand, the end of a length of chain. Not a dramatic chain. The old anchor chain from the stern locker, rust brown and heavy, the kind that has held this boat to this dock through three hurricanes.
Cormac looks at it.
“Here?” he says. “In front of all of them?”
“In front of all of them,” I say. “That’s the point.”
We take him out through the new doors onto the river side of the deck. The rain has stopped. The river is high and black and fast under the lights, pulling at the hull. Every window on that side is full of faces. No one comes out. No one looks away.
He doesn’t fight. He’s seventy years old, and his knee is bad, and he’s buried enough. He stands at the rail while Bastien and Marchand’s man wind the chain, and he looks out at the water, and just before they lift him, he turns his head and looks back through the glass.
Not at me.
At her.
She’s standing in the doorway. Red dress. Dark eyes. The pencil back in her hair. She’s holding the menu. She walked down the table and picked it up off his plate and carried it out here with her.
She looks at him.
She doesn’t look away.
We put him over.
He goes into the Mississippi without a sound. The chain takes him straight down. The water closes over the place, brown and black and patient, and in a moment there’s nothing on it but the lights of the boat and the current, going on to the Gulf the way it always has.
I go back inside.
The room is exactly as we left it. Sixty people standing, sitting, frozen. Danny against the wall. The flag across his legs. The gumbo going cold in sixty bowls.
My wife walks back to the head of the table and stands behind her chair with one hand on its carved back.
I stand beside her.
No one speaks. The river breathes against the hull. The judge is looking at his hands. The senator is looking at the door. Marchand has his hat in his hand.
“The papers will say,” I tell the room, “that the Brannigan family’s business on the east docks collapsed under a federal indictment.
That Cormac Brannigan fled the jurisdiction.
That he’s believed to be somewhere in the Gulf.
” I look at them one after another, down the length of the table. “All of that will be true.”
No one laughs. No one moves.
“You’ve watched my family on this river for a hundred years,” I say. “You’ve called us a great many things. Monsters. Thieves. Murderers. Keep calling us that. We don’t mind.”
Noelle lays the menu on the table in front of her chair. Cormac’s face, face up, in charcoal, dated.
“Let them write us as the villains,” she says to the room. Quietly. Clearly. “We’re the ones still standing.”
She sits.
I sit at her right.
After a long moment Marchand pulls out his chair and sits. Then the judge, with a shaking hand. Then the senator. Then the whole room, chair by chair, until only the dead boy against the wall and the waiters are left on their feet.
My wife picks up her spoon.
She tastes her mother’s gumbo.
“It needs filé,” she says.
***
Later, at two in the morning, after the last car has gone and the cleaners have come and gone and the boy has gone into the river too, lighter than Cormac and without the chain, I find her on the upper deck at the rail.
She’s taken off her shoes. The red dress is black in the dark. She’s looking down at the water where Cormac went in.
I come to stand beside her.
She doesn’t turn. She reaches out and takes my left wrist and runs her thumb over the rosary beads.
“You didn’t let go of these once tonight,” she says.
“No.”
“Did you pray?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I look at her. At the gold and the key at her throat, catching the dock lights. At the charcoal smudged at the corner of her eye.
“I didn’t need to,” I say. “It’s been answered.”
She looks at me, and I let her.
Then she turns back to the river.
“It’s ours,” she says. “All of it. From the canal to the bridge.”
“All of it.”
“And you.”
“And me.”
She leans against my shoulder.
I put my arm around her.
The river goes on to the Gulf, black and patient, carrying everything we gave it.
They’ll call me the king of this river now.
They’re wrong.
I’m only the man who keeps the queen.