“Don’tcha go for the eyes themselves, though. The crocs can retract those.”
He held up two gnarled fingers and jerked them back into his fist.
“Thanks for the advice,” said Louis. He imagined screaming underwater and the tiny needles of salt against his gums and eyeballs. Louis, curiously modest, refused to strip before diving. He jumped in with his pants and cotton underwear on and kicked beneath the dross of slimy marine plants. His legs floated like two planks behind him, every muscle tensed, ready to jerk away from an alligator’s teeth.
The dredge was there to dynamite the marl, spud down into the blasted muck, spud up with a bucket of oozing crust. And this task in a swamp where you could sink a support platform through twenty-four feet of peat before hitting stabilizing rock!
Louis T. wasn’t a particularly quick learner, but he was strong and docile and within one month he was doing all sorts of jobs on the dredge: trimming greenish fat off the pork in the cookhouse, helping the sweating firemen to keep up steam. The men looked like beekeepers in their cotton gloves and mosquito veils, their lungs filling with black mangrove smoke from the smudge fires they burned constantly to keep the insects away.
“Line up, boys! Take your medicine,” the cap said, pressing indigo flecks of charcoal and sulfur into Louis’s cupped hands. Every time you asked what they were for you got a different answer: ear infections, hay fever, styes, skin lesions. Gideon Tom said the pills were placebos, although Louis noticed that he still queued up to receive them like a good Catholic boy in line for communion.
“Ahhh,” Gideon said, extending his chaw-stained tongue.
“Stick out your palm, you jackass, I’m not your damn mother!” the cap howled. If the pills were making a difference, it was hard to imagine how bad you could go without them. Men held their fallen orangey scabs up to the sun and cataloged them like entomologists. Week 1: Men couldn’t sleep for the bug bites; scratching at them, and fending off new ones, was an eight-hour endeavor. The insects had been a chronic irritation on the CCC barge, but out here on the marshy open prairie they felt pestilential, their sawing sound filling the air like a cruel ventriloquy of the men’s own thirst. Their dense bodies put a fur on the steel hull of the Model Land dredge. More mosquitoes rose out of the cattails at dusk like tiny vampires. Theodore Glyde, the dredge’s dour engineer, grumbled that he was working back-to-back shifts on the dredge, quitting the deck at sundown to work a second job as a bug killer. Week 2: Everybody’s legs acquired the cracked sheen of cockroach wings. Louis, who had hosted much more colorful bruises back in Auschenbliss country, poured a little vial of alcohol over his shins and returned to work. Back on the CCC barge, they had never been more than twelve miles from a port with a doctor, but now they had entered an unmapped part of the swamp where wounds had the opportunity to fester. Week 3: Sores began to ooze. Of all the dredgemen, only Louis T. was indefatigably happy. He volunteered to haul water off-shift and shared his larded fried eggs with whomever.
“Louis, are you on a diet or what?” Gideon Tom grumbled; he was leaning against the starboard railing next to Louis, gobbling down a plate of Louis’s eggs with a guilt-racked expression. “You should eat, kid. It’s not good to share the way you do out here. What the heck are you always staring at?”
“The landscape.”
“The landscape!” Gid snorted. His broad nose wrinkled as it often did when someone said something he didn’t like, as if he were trying to sniff out what was wrong with their reply. “There’s something … something womanly about watching that, Lou.”
Louis grinned over at Gideon Tom, shrugged; even the other men’s ribbing made him happy. Daybreak, sunset: he liked to watch the red sun pour through the tiny doors of his mosquito screen until his blue eyes filled. Behind the screen he had the face of a man in church.
“Hey, Gid?” he asked his friend when they were baling wastewater later, the sun a pinhead of color behind the green trees. “Gid … are you anxious to get back?”
Warily his friend turned to him. “Get back where?”
And what Louis really meant was Anywhere. Back to land. Back to themselves, back to their names without jobs, back to any motionless, dirty place — or back to either of the twin poles that the swamp road they’d been digging was meant to connect. He had heard of hydrophobes, and he wondered if there was another word like that, for him. Or for what he was becoming. Terraphobia? It was a fear of the rooted, urban world, of cars and towns and years on calendars. He wouldn’t be the dredgeman there, that was for sure. Sometimes, at night, Louis thought in a dreamy way about becoming the dredge’s saboteur — plucking parts like flowers from the engine room. It was only a thought, and a crazy one; but the closer they got to the Gulf the sicker he felt. His sweats got worse when he pictured the dawn horizon solidifying — a sudden break in the mangroves that revealed the swallowing saltwater ocean, the big success for which the bosses of the Model Land Company had hired the dredge and her crew.
“Jesus, Louis, you’re just like what’s-his-name? Greek guy. Narcissus! Just making puppy eyes down at your face in that bucket.”
“Sorry. I was getting a little … homesick, I guess. So you’re excited for the end? For the Gulf side of things?”
“Fool, of course I am!” Gideon laughed, pouring the black water over the railing onto the head of a small and outraged alligator. “Am I excited for a paycheck and a woman and a bed? Am I excited to climb out of this soggy hell and get a pair of pants that’s not infested with forty kinds of insects, and get a pair of shoes where I can’t count my toes? Goddamn, Lou, I’ll be singing ‘Ave Marias’! I’ll be diving for land!”
Louis spent the morning of his death beating himself at hand after hand of solitaire with Gideon Tom’s faded deck. He was off-duty, and free to ruminate. He did not have any headaches that day or dark presentiments. At noon he felt a little hungry, ate some ibis jerky, considered rowing over to the houseboat to bathe. He lit sticks of dynamite and lobbed them into the marl, watched as the white-tailed deer shot off through the elevated hammocks. For every ten hours of work, the canal grew eighty feet longer; they were still months away from the Gulf and the end of their contract.
Louis T. was sitting on the starboard side of the dredge barge with his bare feet swinging, his calves hot against the metal rail, watching a pair of otters mock-dueling in the cattails. When next they appeared they were lovers, their bodies turning in a silly ballet, black volutes beneath the lily pads and the purple swamphens. He was maybe twenty-five feet from the engine room when a roar like a tidal wave rolled forward and nearly knocked him loose from the deck. He turned and watched flames engulf the roof of the engine room in one spectacular red spasm; within seconds a thick smoke swallowed the entire port side of the deck and shrouded acres of the sunlit saw-grass prairie to the southeast.
What Louis saw next came filtered redly through one slitted eye:
A stencil of a man — Ira, Louis thought sleepily, or maybe Jackson — went flailing off the fantail. Louis heard him hit his head on the way down; another man jumped in after him. To save him, Louis thought, proud to have finally made the connection. Foggily, it occurred to him that he should perhaps do a thing, too. This fog seemed to have penetrated his brain from the outer world, because the whole deck of the dredge was lost in a roar of escaping steam. The boiler head has burst, Louis thought, and felt his pulse jump. That’s what shook the deck. He pushed himself up and started to make his way toward the smoking engine room, where the other men were already hauling water.