Free The Marauders by Tom Cooper Page A

airborne. Those were Wes’s mother’s last words. The ones he heard.
    Wes and his father watched the raging water, bodies poised as if they were about to fling themselves into the flood. Then Wes’s eyes met his father’s. Pure animal panic. An awful look Wes knew right away he’d never forget.
    For a second, ten or twelve yards away, Wes’s mother’s head popped up like a bobber. That was what Wes would always remember the clearest. Her crazed and twisted face, the terrified look in her eyes. Her open mouth making no sound. Then the water sucking her back under.
    His father screamed Wes’s mother’s name. “Sandy,” he shouted again and again, as if this would bring her back.
    From this point onward in his story for Mr. Banksey’s class, everything Wes wrote was pure fiction.
    For instance: weeks later, when he and his father were living in Baton Rouge, they were eating dinner in a fried chicken restaurant and Wes’s father, drunk on whiskey, asked, “Do you blame me?”
    In the story, Wes said,
Of course not
.
    In the story, Wes and his father said they were lucky to have each other.
    In real life, Wes had said, “Yes.”
    That was five years ago and, even half a decade on, nothing felt healed. No, the wound of his mother’s death still felt as big as the hurricane itself.

    The next evening when Wes showed up on time at the marina, his father was nowhere to be found. It was twilight, quiet save for the gibbering of frogs and insects. At the end of the dock the
Bayou Sweetheart
was unlit in her slip. Wes got out of his truck and paced in the bleached-shell parking lot. Another trawler got out of his truck and waved at Wes before trudging down the dock to his boat.
    As he paced, Wes had a nagging sense that he was forgetting something. He chalked it up to the perpetual unease that he felt around his father these days. Lately they argued about everything. About how much money should be spent on a lightbulb, about how to set the house thermostat, about what kind of gas Wes put in his truck.
    His father gave him the most hell about two things: Wes’s boat and the BP settlement money.
    Wes started building the boat in the backyard when he turned fifteen, just as Wes’s father and grandfather had done when they were the same age. Now the keel of the boat, reared on cinder blocks under a gunny-roped tarp in the backyard, sat untouched for months. Wes’s father used to poke fun at his shoddy craftsmanship and welding, eyeing the ragged seaming, running the flat of his hand along the hull like a cattle baron. “See this?” he’d say. “This wood, you’ll have to throw it out, this wholesection. And this metal, look. See how it’s bent? No way a boat’s going to float if it’s built like this. It’ll fall apart like a Polish submarine. One mistake leads to another. Listen to me.”
    Wes would stand back, burning with the impulse to tell his father that he never asked for his advice. That the boat was a work in progress. That he’d prove his father wrong and the boat would turn out to be the most beautiful he’d ever seen, whether it took three months or three years.
    But Wes hadn’t touched the boat in months and now it languished in the backyard under a moldering vinyl tarp. Like a dead elephant. Wes’s father stopped mentioning the boat, which was somehow worse than the shit-talking. Maybe his father was right. Maybe he’d given up without knowing it. Scared to move forward, scared that the more he built the more he’d prove his father right. The first Trench in generations not to build his own craft.
    “You seem glad,” Wes said one day, surprised he’d said it, let alone thought it.
    They were lugging their toolboxes home from the harbor when they passed the boat in the backyard. The evening sky was plum and scarlet above the treetops, a muggy spring night.
    “Glad about what?” his father asked.
    “That I stopped building the boat.”
    They walked on a moment before his father said,