Chapter 11 Assumption Parish is largely backcountry, crosshatched with ragged forest and waterways and split down the center by Lake Verret, which drains into that great artery the Atchafalaya River and eventually out into the Gulf of Mexico. Most of Assumption's population centers lie east of the lake, a scattering of small towns bordered by farmland, but on the western shore a few settlements hang on between the trees and the swamp. In Jacknife, a billboard advertises the sale of metal detectors, ammo, and snow kones with a K . Outside the dry cleaners, dark bursts around the external pipes make it seem as though rust has seeped into the paint. A faded wooden horse like something from a carousel casts a leaping shadow over the sidewalk, which itself narrows quickly into weeds and street shoulders littered with junk food wrappers. Jacknife is not a town where people walk from one place to another. The heat would knock them out before they got where they meant to go. On the corner of Main Street, the diner is gradually slipping into the wetlands behind it. The smell that lingers in the air is a mix of chemicals from the plastics plant along the waterway and the bitter black coffee that the factory workers and fishermen flock to consume first thing before their shifts. Strip lights hum from five in the morning to ten at night, reflecting off the colorless linoleum and Formica tabletops, the whole place sweating in the heat of southern Louisiana. A sign outside, scrawled and rescrawled over the years in marker pen, boasts "Homegrown gator steak, so good your tongue'll beat your brains out!" When she was a girl, Cutter Labasque used to watch her brothers try to piss on that sign. Only Dewall ever hit it, being the tallest, and even knowing that Cutter and their little brother, Beau, would never manage, he'd still insist on dragging them round to the diner on nights when their parents were blackout drunk, because it was all Dewall really had. This proof that he could do something others could not. The three of them grew up split-lipped and bloody-knuckled, hunting alligators and collecting gator eggs for their parents' farm, which was, in the end, the only thing that Vin Labasque and Gina Stokes had to leave their offspring when their car came off the interstate at a hundred miles an hour. That, a whole heap of unpaid bills, and a reptilian viciousness among the three Labasque siblings, which both parents had cultivated. Cutter is a crowbar of a woman, twenty-eight, with dirty boots and dark hair that she buzzed down to the skin on one side, one night in the bathroom of a bar. Anyone who gets close enough might be able to smell the traces of the joint she's just smoked in the car--weed that tasted like the bayou she'd nearly drowned in as a child--but nobody will. Get close enough. Men and women have kept their distance since the night of her sixteenth birthday, when the sheriff's son had tried to put his hand down her tank top and Cutter had bitten his finger. "What did it taste like?" little Beau had asked curiously, while Dewall yelled at the cops. Cutter had shrugged, picking her teeth. "Like some other girl's pussy." She swings by the diner most mornings, ostensibly to drop off a few pounds of alligator meat, but mostly Cutter just appreciates the quiet. Or, no, that's the wrong word, since it's never truly quiet at the diner; the place is always alive with the clink of cups and cutlery, the scrape of stools at the counter, the whir of the ceiling fans, the furtive chatter as gossip is exchanged, the hacking coughs of the factory workers. Yet all this contributes to a kind of white noise in Cutter's head, which provides an escape--from the farm, from the debts, from her brothers--that is sorely needed. Especially this morning. Especially knowing what she has to do. Grateful for the distraction, she lets her ear tune in to the voice of young Kaylee Petitpas, who is wiping down the counter where her brother, Sasha, and her boyfriend, Tyrone, are swigging the last of their coffee. "You hear Loyal's back in town?" Kaylee's saying. "Nina saw her at the gas station. Said she's got some fancy car now. Said she was wearing a suit like she was headed to a funeral or something." "Loyal--wasn't she the one used to steal road signs?" Tyrone is barely twenty-one, with a scraping edge to his voice on account of the throat cancer. Cutter knows he's still hoping to get recompensed by the plastics plant, but proceedings are slow and costly, and he jokes that everyone round here is so broke even the plant has to save up money to pay him. "Nah, you're thinking of the Morgan brothers," Sasha Petitpas says. "Loyal May, she was a senior when we were sophomores. Kind of cute, like a sad professor." "Like a what?" Kaylee snorts. "Like she looked smart, but deep, you know? You wouldn't get it, since you're neither." Tyrone grins. "Wait, are you talking about the fat chick whose hand got bitten in half by a gator? You thought she was cute?" "I said kind of! Until that hand thing, anyway. That was gross." Kaylee rolls her eyes. "Boy, you didn't even see it." She is Sasha's twin right down to the way they shut one eye when they grin, like they're aiming at a target. Kaylee has a wild mane of hair, turned brittle from too much bleach, while Sasha's is a washed-out pink with greasy roots, revealing a smudged attempt at a stick-and-poke tattoo behind his left ear. Both have a penchant for standing on the railroad at night when the freighters are thundering down the tracks, hoping somebody will jump out and save them. Now Sasha spares a quick glance around the diner and leans in closer. There is a dark kind of glee in his voice. "You know what Loyal's really doing here, don't you?" He delights in the fact that they do not, as someone does when they have so little they must savor every scrap of gossip like it's a crumpled dollar bill. "Loyal's back in Jacknife because her mom's gone nutso." "Her mom was always nutso," Kaylee says. "Why'd you think her daddy left?" "Not like this. Apparently, the neighbors found Rosa May in the yard digging in the dirt with her bare hands. Called the cops and everything. So Loyal had to pack it in at her big paper in Houston, move back home to Nowhereville." Kaylee frowns at her brother. "How d'you know all that?" "Because Loyal's working for my paper now. Helping me and Uncle Chuck get it online." "Please, baby, a bunch of horoscopes and catfish steak reviews hardly counts as a newspaper." Sasha sticks his tongue out, and they proceed to make faces at each other, conversation meandering on to car parts and pop songs, which girl they went to school with is having her third baby, who shot a stray dog in their yard. Cutter barely hears any of it. So, Loyal has come home at last. All Cutter can think is that her brothers must not find out--not yet. Not until she has cleaned up the mess of these last few weeks. Her brothers are going to be pissed at her as it is; last thing they need is Loyal coming around opening up old scars. Cutter feels too hot all of a sudden, the mugginess of the diner pushing up against her like an unwelcome visitor in her booth. She leaves the money on the table and makes her way to the door, the beginnings of a headache settling between her eyes. Just as she's slipping out, she hears Kaylee Petitpas's quick, sharp voice aimed at her back: "God, I wish she'd get someone else to deliver the meat. She gives me the creeps." "You'd rather it was one of her brothers?" Sasha says. "Whole family's insane. They've got homemade land mines in their yard. Dewall's a Nazi or some shit." "Bet your sad professor was glad to see the back of them," Tyrone adds. "Wasn't it them who did it to her? Tried to feed Loyal to their gators?" Cutter lets the door slam shut on the lot of them. In the parking lot, kudzu sways lazily from the telephone wires overhead and the air smells ripe. It's early enough that a faint mist is still hanging over the unmown pasture that leads from the diner down to the wetlands that border Lake Verret, making the bulky oaks nearby seem to float upon it. The tamaracks are bent double, driven to their knees by hurricanes over the years, but still clinging on, their roots having burrowed deep into the earth long before any white man ever set foot here. This is the landscape on which Cutter has sharpened her teeth. Places like this all over the Atchafalaya Basin that feel as if they are in the process of being reclaimed by nature, even if they haven't realized it yet. She loves it here, but at the same time, this morning the trees and the water and the insects trilling in the long grass seem oddly far away. Something has changed. She thinks maybe she has changed. As Cutter stands in the parking lot, she feels a shiver across the back of her neck, though the day is sweltering and it's not yet eight a.m. This morning, she woke to find that Dewall had already left in the boat, bait and hooks gone, too--off to run their gator lines without her, even though she's supposed to be his sharpshooter. That's how she can tell he suspects something. Wrangling a six-hundred-pound alligator into a boat is a two-man job, unless you want to throw your back out or wind up crushed by a pair of primordial jaws. He is punishing her--by putting himself at risk, sure, and by denying her the chance to get out on the swamp, which he knows is the only thing that really keeps her blood hot these days. There is nothing like it. The way the world gets quiet when a gator's nearby. The way no toad or bird or blade of grass in the landscape dares to move. And then the water, suddenly boiling as that black head surfaces and the ancient reptile erupts into the air hissing like a devil, shaking the whole boat down, bait line burning through Dewall's hands as he lines that sucker up, barking, "Put it on him, girl, put some pain on him!" The way the crack of the rifle seems to come from deep inside Cutter, from someplace under her ribs. The way she feels it in her throat and between her legs. She knows she's a good killer. But she is stalling. Avoiding getting back into her truck and driving the twisting, empty miles back to the boat launch, because then there will be nothing standing between her and what she has to do. Not much space for running when you're caught between a rock and a hard place. And she will have to confront her brothers, or they will confront her, and Sasha Petitpas wasn't wrong about that: The Labasques aren't like other people. They take betrayal the same way a bear takes a flank full of buckshot. After their parents died, it was Dewall who taught Cutter how to be in the world. How to stand her ground against guys twice her size without pissing her pants and how to shut the hell up when cops came around. He taught her how to lie low in the undergrowth watching for deer, how to stitch a wound, how to take her share of pain and swallow it. Their family love was the bruising kind, and it made her strong. Her mother used to say, "You burned your bridge, now lie in it," a mangling of old idioms that feels fitting in this moment. Cutter knows she will have to be very strong indeed to take the pain that's coming to her, but she can't hide at the diner forever. "Fuck this," she says, scuffing the heel of her boot in the dust. "Fuck this all the way down." For old time's sake, she stomps over to the diner sign, unzips her jeans, and squats in the yellow grass that curls up around the rusted metal pole. She hopes the Petitpas twins see her pissing on it. Give them something new to talk about. Excerpted from Our Last Wild Days: A Novel by Anna Bailey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
