Too Far Gone

56

Leland wasn’t a happy camper, because Doc had come up with yet another requested task, which was accompanied by a threat that he’d take back the new boat. While Doc was explaining how simple his transportation job was going to be, Leland was considering how he could beat the little jerk to death and let the crabs and gators handle the required disposal of his remains. It was just that simple, and ownership papers or not, he’d just keep the boat. Anybody showing up to take it away would be sorry.

Doc was still fussing with his fancy device, measuring with his roll-up ruler, fussing with this wire and that one and scurrying up and down the ladder here, moving it and climbing up into the rafters like a fussy little rat. He did remind Leland of a rat…or a nutria.

The man in the duct-tape suit moved his head once and Leland saw for himself that he was still alive. Leland found it puzzling how some people were so much harder to kill than others. This one was sort of fragile-looking, and he’d been hit hard enough to kill him outright, but here he was not dead.

Doc had been talking on the phone to the woman he was always talking to and making silly sounds and kissing the little phone after he closed it. Leland thought about the pipe he had in the boat that he used to bash critters that he found alive in his traps, and to finish off the garfish he caught before he threw them back in the water for gator food. Gars were useless as balls on a cow. You couldn’t eat them because there were so little meat and too many little bitty bones in them. Plus they ate other fish you could sell, their teeth were like straight pins, and they were mean little suckers.

Once, when Leland was a little boy, he had been sitting on the camp’s dock with his feet in the water, wiggling his toes, when a two-foot-long gar had taken a good bite on Leland’s foot. When Leland jerked his foot to free it, the gar flip-flopped so hard that some of the fish’s teeth broke off right in his foot. Worst part was the foot had gotten infected and, before his daddy finally decided to take him to a doctor, it turned black as a moonless night and the doctor almost had to cut it off. His daddy told the doctor to take it off, but the doctor wouldn’t do it just so Jacklan Ticholet could get back to his camp sooner.

Leland had hated gars since the day he was bitten. He enjoyed catching them and opening up their jaws and wedging a stick in there so they couldn’t ever close their mouths again and they starved on account of it. It was more satisfying than just killing them outright with the pipe. It gave the sneaky mean bastards something to think about while they died-knowing who had done it to them.

Leland sometimes thought about his daddy, who had been a swamper and moonshiner. Leland didn’t know anything about his real mama, because his daddy never talked about her but to say she was a slut who’d spread her legs for anybody she saw. His stepmother hadn’t been any better, and a drunk too.

Leland’s daddy had made him help out with fishing, crabbing, trapping, and making clear liquor from the time he was real little, and he’d learned everything by being hollered at and having the crap knocked out of him as they went about it. His daddy’s favorite thing was making, selling, and drinking moonshine. Leland couldn’t hardly remember a single time when his daddy wasn’t sipping from a jar or a milk jug.

If Leland’s daddy had to go to town, he’d leave Leland locked in the cabin while he was gone. Sometimes he came back when he said he would, but other times he would be gone days, till, stinking drunk, he’d come stumbling in, collapse on his bed, and snore like a mill saw. Sometimes when Leland was hungry his daddy would make him drink whiskey to help him forget about his empty stomach, but Leland never liked the taste or how it made him feel.

Leland grew up without going to any schools, but he knew everything there was to know about the swamp, the bayous, and the lakes around there. He knew where to find the things that you could sell and how to catch them, how to clean them, and how to cook what you needed to eat.

When his stepmother killed his daddy, Leland had taken his body to the landing and got Moody the store owner to call the sheriff to come and fetch his body, which was the last Leland had heard about that. The sheriff had gone to visit his stepmother. She told the sheriff truthfully she’d done it and explained it was self-defense. But of course the sheriff, who said he just needed to talk to her, put her right in jail. Leland had gone to her and his daddy’s place, picked out the things worth keeping, like the Nylon 66. 22 and some food, then he’d gotten in her hound dogs and a one-eared cat, and set that cabin full of critters on fire. That done, Leland motored out a ways so the heat didn’t hurt his skin and drank some moonshine in his daddy’s memory while he watched that cabin burn to the ground. He hadn’t done it because Alice Fay shot his daddy dead. He knew if she hadn’t shot him, he would have done it himself. He burned her cabin because he knew she’d figure out that he had gotten all his father’s goods instead of her.

He was fifteen then and he had waited for months, but nobody had come to take him away from his cabin, and so Leland just went on doing what he’d been taught to do, because there wasn’t anything else he knew how to do, or wanted to try. His father’s boat was one he’d traded liquor for, and when the motor got used up, Leland just went to a fishing camp when there weren’t any people around and stole a good one, which he painted black so it looked just like the old one he’d thrown off in the lake. He never got in trouble for doing that, so he figured rich people didn’t spend time looking for their missing motors, just bought another one.

Leland looked up, to see Doc studying him from way up on the ladder.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Doc said.

“I don’t got no penny,” Leland told him.

“Leland,” Doc started. He opened his hooded sweatshirt, probably so Leland could see the handle of the little lady gun he had stuck in his pants. “I know this must be frustrating for you, that the sirens of the bayou are singing to you. I give you my word that as soon as you do your part this evening, you can head off to whatever scuzzy fishing hole your little heart desires and pull fish out of the scummy water with reckless abandon until you have filled up your boat to the gunwales.”

“Gun whales?”

“Fill to the top until you are knee-deep in eels, or whatever it is you collect out of the vast stagnant purgatory you inhabit.”

Leland didn’t know the words, but he didn’t like the whiny tone. He wondered if Doc was mocking him. “When do I get the papers?”

“What papers are you referring to?”

“The owning papers on the boat.”

Doc smiled. “You mean the pink slip? The registration?”

“Yeah, the paper saying it’s mine and nobody else’s.”

“Tonight when you drop me at my car, I will give you your just reward. Scout’s honor. You’ll drop me and I’ll drop you…the owning papers.”

Leland said, “I guess so, but dropping them to me right now would be better.”

“If I gave them to you now, you’d go out that door, get in the boat, and haul ass back to your little home in the sticks. For all I know, if you had the papers in your pocket, you might be tempted to keep time on my head with that pipe.”

“You give me the pink papers and I won’t do nothing but say good-bye-dee-by.”

“And I’ll never see you again, not even in the funny papers?”

Leland nodded his head slowly.

Doc closed his sweatshirt so the gun was hidden and he clapped his hands together. “Absolutely positively tonight. Cross my heart and hope to die. Stick a needle in my eye. Guaranteed. Signed, sealed, and delivered, I’m yours.”

Doc made an X on his chest with his fingers. “Before the sun comes up in the morning, you will be hotfooting your way home to Valhalla aboard your new vessel. You have my most absolute disingenuous word of honor.”

“Okay, then,” Leland said, smiling. “Before the sun comes up again.”