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.

The gator's wake pulled Remy a mile down the channel before the water went still and dark over what he guessed was the Marie-Claude. He killed the motor and looked over the side. The bayou here ran deeper than he remembered. Thirty feet, maybe more. He had a mask in the skiff, a length of rope, and lungs that had never held air past a minute. He knew what that meant. He could dive down there and drown, or he could sit in the boat and lose the land. Neither answered the mortgage. "Alright, vieux," he muttered. "How you want me to reach you." He motored back toward the landing and tied off near the old tavern at the edge of the water. The place had been shut since he was a boy. Broken windows. Loose boards. A door that hung open on one hinge. His grandfather used to drink there and swore the owner kept a compressor and hose rig in the back for pulling crab traps off snags. Long shot. Only shot he had. He stepped inside. Dust rose off a busted couch shoved against the wall, its cushions torn, its cloth faded to nothing. He walked past it toward the back room. Something croaked. Then something else. He stopped. Five toads sat in a wet cluster on the bar, watching him. Their throats pulsed. The biggest one spoke first, and its voice came out flat and plain, like a man ordering a drink. "Wrong door, cher." Remy did not move. "He said don't wake her," said a smaller one. "He did," said a third. Remy set his hand on the bar and leaned down close. "My grandpa send y'all?" "The swamp send us," said the big one. "Compressor in the back. Hose still good. Take it and you owe." "Owe what?" The toads did not answer. They only stared. He walked to the back. The compressor sat under a tarp, rusted at the seams but whole. A coil of air hose hung on a nail. A regulator, cracked but usable, sat on a shelf. He tested the pull cord. The motor coughed, caught, and ran rough. He shut it off before it drew more attention than it already had. He hauled the rig out past the bar. The toads had not moved. "You gonna tell me the price?" he asked. "She'll tell you," the big one said. "When you get down there." Remy loaded the compressor into the skiff. His hands shook once and then steadied. He had a way down now. He also had a debt he had not agreed to, owed to something he had not seen. He pushed off from the tavern and pointed the bow back toward the deep water over the Marie-Claude.