Page 21 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

She stared at him.

He stared back.

“I’m assuming, since you met Dee before, that you’ll know what to look for?”

He stared some more.

“Hm?”

He sighed.

“Call and order the peonies. I’ll go fix my hair.”

Eight

The first aid kit in the boat contained a box of Dramamine, so Toly was sleepy, but no longer hacking up his guts when they set out from the cabin. The same cabin where Mercy and Ava had spent their cut-short honeymoon, a little dusty, and damp, and in need of a deep-cleaning it wasn’t going to get, but serviceable for their sleeping bag and bathroom needs.

Once upon a time, Mercy could have navigated to their current destination in the semi-dark and while sleep-deprived, but it had been a long, long time since he’d made the trek. They grabbed three hours on the floor of the old hunting cabin, checked their gear, and headed out.

It took forty-five minutes to get there, the waterways growing narrower and more heavily-shaded the farther they went. The moss hung in great curtains so dense Mercy was forced to slow, and idle the boat while they swept them back with poles.

“Christ, man,” Devin said after the third such incident. “If you can’t get through how do you expect your FBI wanker to make his way out here?” For once, he wasn’t laughing, and when Mercy glanced over, he saw his forehead sheened with sweat, his mouth curved downward. For the first time since meeting him, Mercy thought he most resembled Walsh, of all his sons.

For a moment, Mercy doubted his plan – but, no. This was the swamp, and that was what it did: it turned even the most capable of men clammy and nervous-stomached. From Toly’s motion sickness, to Devin’s skepticism, it was working its magic on the outsiders.

But Mercy wasn’t an outsider.

And that clammy, nervous-stomached fear was going to work its magic on Boyle, too, and work in Mercy’s favor.

As quick as it had come, doubt evaporated on a laugh. “Don’t you worry, mon cher. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s bait a hook.”

Finally, Mercy recognized the landmark he’d been searching for, and grinned. “Here we go.”

Decades ago, long before Mercy navigated these waters as a boy with his father, someone had decided it would be a good idea to build a little stone house deep in the swamp, right on the edge of a canal. It must have been torture hauling all the construction supplies out this deep into the wilderness, where nothing more than game trails offered an overland route, and the water was tricky. Daddy said he’d heard it told that the stones had been driven out by boat, and that a whole pallet load had tipped overboard.Good way to scrape a big ol’ hole in your hull.

Mercy backed off the throttle and let their momentum carry them past all that remained of the never-completed stone house: a triangular column, and collapsed section of porch, long rotted. A low-hanging branch overhead dangled pendulums of ivy that Mercy chose to duck, rather than sweep aside. The others ducked, too, with soft curses, and Mercy pushed up the throttle.

The boat emerged in a lake. Not a big one, but a lake all the same, broad, and deep, its water black and gleaming beneath the burning midday sun. Cypresses ringed its perimeter, their roots ancient, naked knees the water slipped between, little hidey holes for rats, nutria, lizards, frogs. They were tall, curved inward over the mucky shoreline, their shadows turning the shallows twilight-dark.

But it was the center that drew the eye. That sat tall and spired and commanding as a king’s crown on a black satin pillow.

“An island?” Toly asked, drowsy, but a touch scornful.

“An island,” Mercy confirmed, and, looking at it, he knew he’d made the right decision.

It was more foreboding than he remembered: small, lushly green at its edges, where duckweed turned to grass in an illusory way that could get a man stuck in quicksand-like black mud. Crowded with trees, a blend of pines, and willows, and cypresses, all crowded together, half of them black and dead thanks to a lightning strike twenty years ago. The branches of the neighboring trees, and wrist-thick vines of poison ivy had kept the dead soldiers standing, and they clawed at the sky with skeletal, charcoal fingers. A lone sandbar jutted toward the lakeshore, and on it, heads tipped back, clawed feet braced as they sunned themselves, basked seven alligators. From a distance, Mercy estimated the largest to be eight feet long.

Mercy slowed the boat again, then killed the engine. In the ringing silence afterward, he could hear the low din of the birds who’d chosen to stay on the island, or hunt the lake’s edge rather than fly to safer hunting grounds.

“This, boys,” Mercy said, “is the rookery. And it’s where Harlan Boyle is going to die a slow, painful death.”

~*~

It was his first year of proper hunting – of checking the traps, collecting the tags, and wielding the .22 alongside Remy – that Daddy first brought Mercy to this place. They’d just dropped the day’s catch at the depot, and the sun was already sinking, that pink-gold May twilight that was warm, but not yet oppressive, redolent of jasmine and honeysuckle, singing with crickets and peepers.

“Daddy, it’ll be dark soon,” Mercy cautioned, snugged next to Remy in the stern, beside the till, hands still smelling of gator, back of his neck prickling with nerves when Remy steered them away from home, and toward the deeper parts of the swamp where they rarely hunted.

“Mmhm,” Remy hummed. “That’s what spotlights are for.” He put his free arm, heavy with muscle, around Felix’s shoulders, and said, “I wanna show you something. Something good. Don’t be scared.”

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