Remy Boudreaux's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Remy Boudreaux had six weeks before the bank took his grandfather's land, and the only thing on that land worth selling was already at the bottom of the bayou. He stood on the porch of the old timber cabin his grandfather built, holding a coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. The swamp stretched out past the dock in every direction, brown and green and endless. Somewhere under all that water sat the Marie-Claude, and inside her hull, if the stories were true, a strongbox his grandfather had guarded until the night the boat went down with him inside it. The stories said more than that. They said the old man had taken something from the swamp that wasn't his to take, and the swamp had taken him back. Remy did not care about spirits. He cared about the mortgage notice folded in his back pocket. He went inside. His grandfather's maps still covered the kitchen table, weighted down with a coffee tin and a rusted knife. Remy had studied them for three nights. The bayou on paper was a nest of veins. His grandfather had fished a thousand cuts and coves across forty years. Searching every one would take a lifetime Remy did not have. "Alright, vieux," he said to the empty cabin. "You gonna help me, or you gonna let the bank win?" He sat on the edge of the small timber bed in the back room. It had been his grandfather's as a boy, then his own every summer. He lifted the mattress the way he had a hundred times looking for hidden candy. This time he lifted it all the way off. A leather pouch was nailed to the underside of the frame. Remy pried it loose. Inside was a folded chart, softer than the others, worn at the creases. One channel was circled in red pencil. Beside the circle, in his grandfather's blocky hand: *Here she rests. Don't wake what sleeps with her.* Remy laughed once, short and dry. "Too late for that, cher." He took the chart to the dock. His skiff knocked against the pilings. He was untying the line when the water beside the dock split without a sound and a long green back rose through the duckweed. The alligator settled there, jaws slightly parted, watching him the way a man watches another man at a card table. It did not thrash. It did not sink. It hummed, low in its throat, a sound like a bass string. Remy froze with the rope in his hand. "You the welcome party?" he said softly. The gator held his eye a long moment, then slid under and turned toward the channel circled in red. Its wake pointed the way like a finger. Remy stepped into the skiff and started the motor. He knew where the boat was now. He also knew he was not going alone.