Too Far Gone

24

A fly landed on Leland’s top lip and crawled right into his nose like it lived there. He turned, pinched his nostril to pin it, closed his mouth, pressed his index finger to close the clear nostril, and expelled the stunned fly out into the shallows, where a minnow ate it right off the surface, then vanished into the murk. What he was doing wasn’t hard work, but it was time-consuming, and he had things to get done.

Overhead, a line of honking geese churned the air as they rose from the bayou. Turning from his task, Leland watched the flowing line of geese start to straighten, and he smiled at how the birds formed up into a flying V. How could they learn such precision, know a letter of the alphabet like that, with brains no bigger than a rat turd.

After field-dressing them-removing their innards so they couldn’t float up-Leland had filled the empty cavities of the corpses with chunks of concrete, then tied up their torsos with nylon rope. Blood had made the deck so slippery, he had to move carefully to keep from falling. He had decided to bait some gator hooks on the way back to camp so he wouldn’t waste time. He didn’t want the warden’s boat, because the twin engines were smaller than his one, and it was too sloppy in the turns for his taste. Before he’d got the better boat from Doc, he mighta kept it and painted it and used it to work out of, but his boat was a lot, so he didn’t mind scuttling theirs.

As he approached the last gator hook, hanging over the water from a tree limb, he slowed and let the vessel coast in under the tree. A fat cottonmouth swam across the water, sitting up so high it didn’t appear to be getting wet as it made for the shore, vanishing into the reeds. Leland wished he could catch it and put it in with the others, but he didn’t have time just then, and he’d find one just as big when he did.

Leland took the last piece of meat off the bone and baited the hook with it. After he was satisfied that the tendon would make the meat difficult for the gators to steal off the hook, he looked at the way the sock was rolled down under the ankle before throwing the leg bone, socked foot and all, up into the weeds onshore.