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  A new lawyer. Not one she found through Jed’s contacts.

  Turns out what she’d signed six months ago hadn’t been divorce papers as much as they were a post-nuptial agreement, a financial document that was in no part a divorce through the state of Louisiana. Looking over the files she’d emailed, her new lawyer sounded just as surprised as she was to learn that a post-nup was even a thing.

  Jed Wilkes was a slimy motherfucker, and even when she was a kid, dumbfounded by his bravado, part of Gail had known that. Maybe she’d even been attracted to that side of him before she’d grown a conscience. The capacity for abstract thought once her post-college brain had solidified in her early twenties.

  Now, three days after her new engagement, Jed was threatening to take another few years out of her life. The years she was planning to spend with Chase, the ones that would be the best of her life, same as the last few months had been.

  Jed fuck her again? Not. Gonna. Happen.

  She dialed his office number and began to wait for him to pick up, sending a couple of emails while she listened to the elevator music, his secretary putting her on hold.

  Their conversation was mostly Gail trying to find new and inventive ways to call Jed a cocksucker, with him trying to take the high road and occasionally interjecting that she “needed to calm down.”

  The phone call continued like that, Gail demanding a real, valid, divorce, until she heard the front door open downstairs and thumbed the red end-call key to hang up on Jed.

  Chase was home.

  *

  She was clutching the phone when he came into the room.

  “Who were you talking to?” he said, even though he already knew.

  “My sister,” Gail said.

  “Your sister.” He weighed the options in his mind. Call her on the lie outright or play her silly game. He decided to play it dumb, feign interest. “How is she?”

  “Chase,” she said, part genuine shock, part fortuitous change in subject, “your boots.”

  He looked down at his muddy, bloodstained boots. “Oh shit, I forgot.”

  “And you stink!” She pinched her nose with one hand and wafted the air in front of her face with the other.

  He should’ve felt bad or something, tromping through the house reeking like a piscine slaughterhouse, but all he felt was pride. His fingernails were black with dirt and dried fish blood. Silvery scales from baitfish had crusted over his hands and forearms, and yeah, he probably smelled something fierce. He grinned. “If I ever come home clean, it must’ve been a bad day of fishing. Hell, just try cleaning a mess of catfish and coming away smelling pretty as a rose. Not to mention baiting hooks, handling the fish…”

  She shooed him out of the room, half-playfully and half-serious. “Go downstairs and clean yourself off, then come back and fuck me,” she said.

  Her eyes averted to the portable telephone receiver, which she still held. He remembered that she was guilty. That she made an unconscious association between the phrase ‘fuck me’ and the telephone—rather, who he knew she’d been on the phone with—made her worse than guilty in his mind. He put all that aside for the time being as another disappointment crushed him. If she wanted him to fuck her, it meant she wasn’t pregnant. They’d been trying for three months. Her period had finally been late. She’d never been interested in sex until they decided to have a baby, but the day her period was due and didn’t show, she turned cold. If she’d turned back on now, it meant only two things: her period finally showed and she wasn’t pregnant.

  He left the room without another word, retreating to his shack in the backyard. When he wasn’t on the water, he spent the majority of his time in his shack, cleaning fish, rigging, repairing his rods and tackle, and drinking beer. He kept a deep fryer out there, and he liked to fry up heaping mounds of cornmeal-crusted catfish. He’d eat a whole plateful of fish while pounding back bitter, hoppy ales. It wasn’t so much of a routine as a ritual. His way of reflecting on the day that had passed and the day to come.

  For two seasons he worked double shifts, taking two groups of people out fishing on the Mississippi seven days a week. The other two seasons were downtime. Reconnaissance. R&R. This was August, and he’d be working his ass off at least through September.

  He cracked an IPA and sat at the workbench where he did most of his serious thinking. The first outing of the day had been a success. He’d taken four men from Alaska out for their first-ever catfish trip. They were all salmon fishermen, and initially expressed surprise and even a little skepticism at the rudimentary catfish rigs, but when the first hour on the river yielded four channel cats over thirty pounds, including a whopping sixty-five pounder, those boys from Anchorage had a change of heart.

  They released all four fish—big catfish tended to taste fishier and muddier than small ones—and proceeded to catch probably more than a thousand pounds of similar fish before changing spots and downsizing gear to load up on smaller, more delectable fish in the three to ten pound class so the Alaskans could take home some true southern gold. But damn, those big cats put on quite a show.

  The Mississippi had run unusually low for a month, allowing Chase and other cat hunters to anchor up in holes that were previously too swift to anchor in. So many big catfish were coming out of the river every day, it was like there was a catfish-filled cavity in the center of the earth, and someone had pulled the plug, unleashing the horde.

  Chapter Three

  Lucinda Hero’s boot caught on a nest of monofilament. She was out fishing at the locks on the Mississippi, a mile up from the suicide club. She called them the suicide club because they lined up shoulder to shoulder along the steep wall of the locks, and whenever they had a catfish on, they slid a noose down their pole and line, down to the fish, and pulled the noose tight around the fish’s gill plates, then hauled it fifteen feet up the concrete wall. Lucinda loved catfish, but she wasn’t much into lynching them.

  Anyway, Lucinda was tilting her head back to drain a can of Pepsi when her boot caught in some monofilament. She stumbled. Stringer of catfish in one hand and rod in the other, she had nothing to support the fall. So she fell. Smacked down hard. It pissed her off. She hated litterbugs, and she hated fishermen who littered even more. She decided to pick up all the discarded line, so she got up off the ground, leaving her fish and rod where they lay.

  The line was thick and wiry, forty pound test easy. She pulled and pulled, but the line kept coming, tangling around her hands like translucent vines.

  Who the fuck do people think they are?

  She pulled on the line until it stopped coming. Some of it was tied under a rock.

  What the hell?

  She walked over to the rock and cut through the knot with her knife.

  That’ll do it.

  No, that didn’t do it either. She pulled on the line some more and found that it kept going and going and going. Ten feet away, the fishing line was tied to another rock. Then another and another, leading Lucinda around in a circle twenty feet across. Finally, she stood in the center of the circle, a baby-sized bundle of fishing line in her arms. She looked around at all the rocks the fishing line had been tied to and realized something. The fishing line had been tied to the rocks in the shape of a pentagram. A satanic fisherman? This was some fucked-up shit.

  She stuffed the bundle of line into her fishing bag to discard later at home, then she picked up her stringer of fish and her rod, and jetted the hell out of there.

  The hike back to her truck was about half a mile. Behind every bush and every tree, the satanic fisherman might hide. She knew he was out there somewhere, watching her, waiting. Waiting for what, she didn’t know.

  She was so worked up about the satanic fisherman that she didn’t watch her feet, so when the big coppermouth appeared before her on the trail, she failed to see it until she nearly stepped on it. The snake looked at her and she looked at the snake. Here she was, just a woman holding some fish she wanted to sell to some corner market so she c
ould pay her bills, and here was this snake, a monument of writhing obsidian.

  Lucinda had no phobia of snakes, but she wasn’t much friendly with them either. She agreed to stay out of their way if they stayed out of hers. This time, the fault was on her. The snake and Lucinda looked at each other for what felt like a long time, then it slithered away about as fast as it’d appeared. She was unnerved, sure, but also convinced. Convinced the satanic fisherman was real, and that he appeared before her in the form of a snake. That made her feel no better about the monofilament pentagram or the blacker-than-black clouds rolling in, so she ran the rest of the way to her truck, and by a quarter past six, she’d already cashed in her fish and settled in for the night with a whiskey on ice at Rawhide 2010 in the French Quarter. She ate shrimp and watched the men dance, throwing money at some of them, but her mind was somewhere else. She thought of where she was in life, what she’d done and failed to do, how the choices she’d made led her to be sitting there. The suicide club was full of fish lynchers who rubbed shoulders with the satanic fisherman who littered, and could take the form of a snake. They were bad news for the earth, for sure. But maybe Lucinda belonged right there alongside them. Shit. She’d grown up in a hippie household. Freegan, free-loading, loaded. Her parents were pretty much up for whatever scored them ass or grass, but they’d always been hard-asses about eating animals. Cows or catfish, it didn’t matter. The road that led Lucinda to pay her bills selling catfish to mom-and-pop stores was a long and twisted one.

  When she was sixteen, her family hitched a ride to Burning Man with some douche of an occult bookmaker from New York. The dude was wealthy, and paid way too much attention to Lucinda, but he kept her parents high, so they pretended like everything was fine. The douche had a son who was Lucinda’s age, and like Lucinda, he despised the free-spirited upbringing he was born into. By the second day of Burning Man, they’d shared their first kiss together. They stayed up all night camped out in their own little tent on the Playa, and by morning they’d devised a plan to run away together. They were only sixteen, but they’d both practically cared for themselves for years. They didn’t need their parents. In fact, they felt they were better off without them. They wanted a new life. A different life. A life together.

  By the end of Burning Man, they connected up with a circus act set to hit the road for New Orleans. The clowns agreed to let them come along for the ride so long as they helped them busk along the way.

  When they arrived in New Orleans, the circus folks offered to let them stay on as apprentices, maybe even join the troupe full-time, but Lucinda and Daniel felt eager to move on. After all, joining the circus wasn’t exactly their idea of a life away from their parents.

  Within two weeks, New Orleans had eaten them alive.

  Honest work did not come easy to two sixteen-year-old runaways, and they discovered that the real world was not as friendly as the freaks and geeks they’d always lived among. In order to make some cash, they offered tarot readings to tourists in the French Quarter. They actually did pretty well at that initially. Within their first couple days, they brought in over five-hundred dollars. They ate well, bought some new clothes, stayed in a decent hotel, and even found a bar that didn’t card them. New Orleans was a dream.

  Then they got mugged.

  After that, some tarot readers in the area ran them out, said if they ever spotted them on their turf again, they’d pay the price.

  Lucinda and Daniel got in a screaming match that got them kicked out of their hotel, and the next thing they knew they were on the streets during one of the hottest summers on record. They resorted to giving handjobs in alleyways in order to afford a roach-infested room at a shithole motel and eat one hot meal a day. They told themselves it was only temporary, that they’d find another way to survive soon enough. But the worst hadn’t come to pass. Daniel got attacked by a john. The dude beat him over the head with a cinderblock, and fucked him as he convulsed and foamed at the mouth. That was it for Daniel. He called his father and begged for a bus ticket home. Lucinda accompanied him to the bus station. They exchanged salty kisses and tearful promises to reconnect soon, but Lucinda never heard from him again. A week later, she missed her period. A week after that, she stole a pregnancy test from a Rite-Aid and peed on the paper strip in an alleyway (without Daniel’s contributions, she could only scrounge up enough money for a room a night or two each week). The results were positive. She was pregnant.

  Little good can be said about being sixteen years old and pregnant. Being sixteen years old, pregnant, homeless, alone in a strange, hostile city? Let’s just say Lucinda grew up fast. Abortion was out of the question because any legitimate doctor would ask questions and require a guardian’s signature, and any sort of facility that would take in a sixteen-year-old girl no questions asked was the sort of place she didn’t want to go. Somehow, returning to her parents never crossed her mind. She’d wondered a lot about that in the ten years that had passed. After all, her parents weren’t abusive. Neglectful, sure. But they weren’t bad people. So why did she never reach out, even when she hit rock bottom? Even now, sitting in the strip club, eating shrimp and drinking whiskey as dudes slapped their big dicks together onstage, she did not know.

  Things turned so dark at that time, her memories of it were hazy. She couldn’t even remember how she met the man who gave her a chance to turn things around.

  Chase.

  He was a gangly young man not much older than herself, and he loved catfish above all else. She’d never fished a day in her life. Her freegan parents had taught her that hunting and fishing were savage, barbaric practices. Eating out of dumpsters was much more ethical. Then one day she was wading through hip-deep water with this guy she didn’t know. She held a stout cane fishing pole in her hand. They were in some sort of backwater, with low-hanging trees blocking out most of the light. The water was warm, but the air was less sweltering than she remembered. Her belly was swollen with child. It was the beginning of her first autumn in New Orleans.

  She had no idea how she’d gotten there, no idea how she’d survived, but when they came to a clearing on the bank, the man nodded at her and she cast out in the turgid water as if she knew what she was doing. She caught two dozen catfish that day, twice as many as the man did, and back at the shack that she presumed was his, she cleaned all their fish and carried them to a market down the road and haggled with the owner over the price. Then she returned to the shack and sat down on the couch next to the man and a strange dog and watched the Saints whoop the Falcons on Monday Night Football.

  She honestly had no idea how long she’d been living like this, and she was too afraid to ask.

  When the man said he was turning in for the night, she dreaded that he intended for her to follow him to the bedroom. Maybe he’d been drugging her, keeping her alive for sex and whatever else. But the man did no such thing. He said, “Goodnight,” and he went to bed. It was only later, in recent years, that she learned the severe effects of trauma. Memory loss was real, and it could be extreme.

  Eventually, she lost the baby due to complications during birth.

  Sometime after that, Chase received a sizable inheritance from his grandfather and decided to set off on his own, become a fishing guide. He bought a boat and a ranch-style house. Lucinda assumed full control of his prior business, selling catfish to markets and restaurants. She’d been doing it ever since, for nearly a decade now, expanding her clientele, and making a name for herself. Even several of NOLA’s higher-end restaurants occasionally bought their catfish from her.

  She didn’t know why the monofilament pentagram and the encounter with the copperhead had gotten her dwelling on her past. She guessed that a part of her new age upbringing remained rooted inside her, and encountering such omens unsettled her, even if the rational side of her thought portents and premonitions were bogus. And yet, there was darkness in the bayou.

  She ordered another whiskey and flagged over her favorite stripper, a blonde Frenchman who
called himself Jean Baptiste.

  “How’s it hangin’?” Jean said, rubbing his testicles on her knee, along the frayed edge of her jorts.

  “You got time for a private show?”

  “For you, baby, any time.”

  He took her hand and they slipped behind the velvet curtains that separated the rest of the club from the lap dance booths.

  If there was one thing that would take her mind off the past, it was a hot piece of ass.

  Chapter Four

  Harry Albright needed to lose some weight. He told himself this again and again, but on pour days—or pour nights, as the case may be—he found his internal monologue running the message in a loop.

  Lose some weight. Lose some weight. Cut out the cornbread you fat fuck.

  “No, no. Stop! It doesn’t go directly in. You don’t assume every truck has broken up the same, numbnuts. Get back up there and test it before you pour,” he yelled at some mook he’d forgotten the name of, some French-Creole fuck with a fleur-de-lis tattoo on his neck like he was in the beignet mafia or some shit.

  The mook just looked at him. Harry squinted, and the guy clambered up to the drum, going to do what he should have done ten minutes ago.

  There were three trucks idling on the banks of the Mississippi, all propped up high so that gravity could work on the system of troughs, scaffolding, and funnels they’d built to get the foundation out as far as it needed to go. Three trucks, two of the three drums rotating, two workmen at each, and Harry was running in between them, putting out fires before his site could be ruined by some union cum-stain who got too impatient.

  Yes, running. On pour days the three-hundred-fifty pound Harry Albright was constantly running.

  They had plenty of lights, but intense lights also meant intense, inky shadows, so his boots were tripping their way through muddy catwalks as often as he was able to watch where he was going. It had rained this morning, meaning that the crew had spent all afternoon swabbing all the surfaces down with industrial shammies. Any place that concrete was going to touch had to be dried, or the rainwater would dilute the mix.