Redfish Cove

by Benjamin Soileau

 

When Leo Broussard spots the Do Not Anchor or Dredge sign at the mouth of the canal, he swivels the tiller of the Evinrude and steers the boat toward it. Passing the sign up close, he notices that the water has inched nearer to the letters, or hell, he thinks, maybe it’s the sign that’s sinking. It’s the same with the canal, getting wider each year, the grass thinner. He considers that if they’d not been coming to this place for the last two decades then he might not be able to find it. Also to be considered, of course, is that this trip might be the last for them, but he doesn’t want to ruin the moment. The marsh grass on either side of them shines golden in the still December afternoon as if it’s been painted there. The unmistakable puff of a porpoise coming up for air steals his attention to the side of the boat, where he sees the sun ripple off its slickened pebble-gray skin before it slides back under. Leo looks to the front of the boat to see if Emily has seen, and she’s already smiling at him from under her straw hat.

He and Emily christened it Redfish Cove the first time they discovered it, celebrating with ice-cold beers over an Igloo that they couldn’t close for the tails protruding from it, each one the size of a man’s open hand, and dusted with its own unique pattern of black dots. They were happy and laughing because it ached their forearms to even bring the beer to their lips. By then the girls were in middle school and not interested in driving three hours down to the coast to sit in a boat all day with their parents, fooling with dead shrimp. Leo and Emily used to say that it was like dating again, those weekends without children. Once a year, always in the first couple weeks of December, they’d load the boat up, drive down to Leesville and stay at Boudreax’s Marina for the weekend to visit Redfish Cove, and not once, with the exception of last year, had it ever been unproductive.

Approaching the dead end of the canal where Leo will beach the boat, he slows the engine to an idle. Emily crouches at the front of the bateau with the rope coiled at her elbow, like a Cajun hood ornament, Leo thinks. He cherishes this part of the ritual: to see Emily leap into the marsh grass when the boat slides onto the mud, turning as she lands in one graceful movement and pulling the boat further up to capitalize on her momentum. It is an act of pure grace, a testament to her strength. Leo notices how loosely her blouse fits, how it whips over her frame in the soft breeze. He considers the next round of tests, how they are still not out of the woods.

“Be careful up there, girl,” he calls out. “I can get us up just fine.”

Emily braces herself on the front of the boat, and Leo knows that she is weighing her ability. She begins to turn around, but hesitates, stares forward in defiance of her body, as if she’s playing the image of her younger self doing it all those many times before. When she takes a seat, Leo feels her pride lanced, like the sting of something passing, and he wants to wrap his arms around her. He revs the engine slightly and then cuts it.

Once they are beached, Emily steps out with the rope, stretches it taut. Leo hands her the fishing poles, the landing net, and then carries the ice chest onto the bank and ties the rope to one of the handles.

They have a patch of land about fifteen feet by a hundred feet on which to navigate. Every trip they find themselves fishing in a tighter space, and since last year they’d not been able to come, it seems even smaller now. In the last few trips they’ve had to bring rubber boots so they can walk over the muck. They keep their sneakers in a plastic bag to change into before getting back into the boat to avoid tracking mud over everything. They’ve evolved with the diminishing land, adapting with towels, a piece of plywood to lay down at the foot of the boat, whatever becomes necessary.

“We still got some time before the water starts moving right,” Leo says, cracking a beer and looking out at the flat marsh. On the horizon, a speck of orange fire flickers from a platform far out in the Gulf. A helicopter in the distance floats across the pastel sky, the same robin’s egg blue as Emily’s eyes.

Emily is already standing at water’s edge with her line in the water, and Leo chuckles at her enthusiasm. She’d be fishing even if there were no fish left to catch. She removes a tomato from her fanny pack and eats it like an apple. Emily is fiercely proud of the ones she grows in their garden in Baton Rouge. She sells them occasionally at the farmer’s market downtown, mails them to their daughters in padded shoeboxes.

A whip of wind carries the high, bitter scent of it to Leo, and he inhales with the salt air. He wonders if she will continue to grow them in Tennessee, and if so, will the soil there grow them as big and firm. Will the family moving into their house at the end of the month continue to care for the garden they’d built and cultivated over the years? He imagines digging up the entire garden, preserving it over a network of tarps, and transporting the whole damn thing in a monstrous moving truck to Sweetwater with them.

The water still isn’t moving the way it needs to. If everything goes the way it always has, when the tide begins to come in, they will stand on the bank and pluck big redfish on every cast. They’ll catch their limit in no time, and spend the rest of the afternoon catching and releasing them for next year. When the sun sets, they’ll eat some blackened with a bottle of wine at the picnic table under their room, and then make love in their flimsy bed with sore forearms, and aching shoulders. They’ll feel the foundation move beneath them, creaking on the weathered planks and pillars that support Boudreaux’s.

Leo sits in a folding chair, and watches Emily fish, looking for the V-shaped wake moving away behind fins slicing through the surface. When the redfish turn on, the baits won’t even hit bottom. The reds will be stacked up in the shallow water, conserving their energy with open mouths, letting the cockahoe minnows pour in. Leo can’t recall in all their trips ever catching more than a few rat reds, the smaller, illegal ones that are better tasting because of the lack of blood in their meat. He considers the difference in strikes. Rat reds attack it, hit it hard as if they’re proud of their conquest, but the bulls are different. They inhale it and you won’t feel any machine gun tugging with the grown ups, just a heavy weight building up, as if you’re hung up on a car, and of course, that’s when you set the hook, brace yourself.

Leo hears the zing of Emily’s drag and goes to her. She’s hunched over with her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth. “It’s not a red,” she says, guiding the tip of her rod over the bank while reeling in. “Hopefully something good, but not a red.” She lifts a flounder out of the brown water, sets it flopping on the ground. Leo takes a knee and steadies it with the flat of his hand. He unhooks the jig from its mouth and tosses the bait back out over the water. The flounder flips over so that its bone white bottom is to the sky, as if displaying its smooth meaty side to demonstrate that it still has so far to go. “It’s no doormat, that’s for sure,” says Emily.

Leo stands and turns the fish in his hands. “It could be the doormat at a hobbit’s house, maybe.”

“Let me catch a bigger one and I’ll stuff it with crab meat.” Emily adjusts the sparkle beetle on the jig.

“You should tighten your drag,” Leo says, getting ready to toss the fish back.

“Don’t forget the bet,” she says, making the adjustment.

Leo grins, and brings the fish to his face, kisses it softly on the mouth. The bet is always the same: the first one to catch a fish, the other has to kiss it. “Not too bad, actually,” Leo says. “I might just save this one for later.”

“Lucky flounder,” Emily says, casting back out.

“Go tell your momma to come see us,” Leo says to the fish, and flings it back out into the still water.

Inspired by his wife’s success, Leo takes a seat on the cooler to bait up. He selects a red jig head with most of the paint flaked off, revealing the grey lead beneath, a sign of luck. After tying it on, he grabs an oily chartreuse sparkle beetle and fits it onto the hook, sliding it up to the head. Leo walks in the opposite direction from his wife and casts at the point of a cut. Bumping his bait off the bottom as he retrieves it, Leo gives thanks to God for allowing him and Emily another year together, slipping in a prayer for their success that day. Two years ago, their prayers had nothing to do with a fishing trip, and Leo is grateful that his silent pleas can afford to be so benign.

Leo had just retired from Exxon when Emily got sick, and she hadn’t been able to finish her last year teaching at the middle school. Emily was optimistic as always, expending her energy on setting his mind at ease when she was the one whose cells were betraying her. It was her way. Looking up now, seeing her take measured, calculated steps along the water’s edge, the way a spoonbill would, looking for a good, clean spot to fish, Leo imagines that the blur of waiting rooms, the antiseptic tang of hospitals, the surgeries, might all have been some surreal movie he’d seen in the early morning hours while half asleep. To be back at Redfish Cove as if they’d not missed a beat, it’s possible to believe that it was something that had happened to someone else.

In the distance, a flock of seagulls trails a shrimp boat, and it appears that the trawler has simply hooked a silver cloud and is dragging it across the horizon. The cloud is a thing alive, pulsing and surging above the nets, as if trying to break free from its snare. Leo smiles, thinking of the men on the boat, sorting through their catch, covered in bird shit, laughing and cussing the seagulls. Leo squints in an attempt to sear the image into his mind, to capture it like a photograph, something he’s been making an effort to do lately, since by Christmas they’ll no longer be residents of Louisiana.

The girls had as much to do with the decision to leave as Emily. They’d been down regularly through the whole ordeal, coming in shifts to help out, talking about how beautiful it is in Tennessee, how clean the air is, how much better it would be for her, and what really did they have left here, besides dead ancestors all the way down the line pushing up Saint Augustine grass?

When Emily started echoing their sentiment, Leo feared it was just a matter of time, but the grandbabies sealed the deal. The girls coordinated their pregnancies, the way they did everything else together. Something had gotten started that was beyond their control, and there was no stopping it. Emily had reminded him that Louisiana wasn’t going anywhere, and that they could always return if Tennessee didn’t work out, which is how he reasoned leaving the only place they’d ever known. The girls were both over the moon. “Just don’t go expecting me to start rooting for the Vols,” Leo had told them.

Leo reels in his bait and walks to the edge of the island, wanting to see the shrimp boat lilt out of sight. He follows a trail of raccoon tracks to a patch of mangroves. The tracks end suddenly, bit off by the depression of a boot print. It’s so fresh that he can see the zig zag patterns of the rubber. A Payday candy bar wrapper hangs from a branch of mangrove and then flutters in a small whip of wind. He feels a twinge of disappointment, but it quickly betrays itself as anger, like he’d discovered his home had been burglarized. When he looks closer, he sees several more boot impressions. Emily’s whistle arrives like a bottle rocket, and he sees her signaling him over.

When Leo gets to the other end of the island, Emily is crouched over a large white ice chest caked with mud. The cooler appears massive next to her.

“It was covered up with palmetto and that,” says Emily, pointing to a camouflage tarp balled up to the side. Next to it are a dozen crumpled beer cans shining silver in a swath of sunlight.

“That’s a three-hundred-dollar ice chest,” Leo says. “That’s what they take out on the charter boats.”

Emily pulls back the lid and Leo steps closer, leans over. Two enormous bull reds lay at the top, one of which has been decapitated to make it fit. The solitary black dot on its tail is the size of a fifty cent piece. “Jesus,” Leo says, moving them to the side to see underneath. He counts eighteen rat reds beneath them. The limit is five redfish per person, and they have to be at least sixteen inches. Besides the two bulls, most of the fish are thirteen inches at best. The bed of ice is still fresh. The color has bled from the fish, the once glittery orange scales now faded to a sickly amber. Leo runs his hand along the bull red where a layer of slime has begun to gather. The fish are stiff and cold on the pads of his fingertips.

“Greedy sons of bitches,” he says. “This is jail time. Beaucoup fines.”

“No wonder they’re not biting.” Emily closes the lid.

Leo holds onto Emily’s shoulder for support and steps up onto the cooler, looks around. Nothing but shimmering water cut through with golden grass. The helicopter is headed back to the platforms in the Gulf. He steps down, walks to the tarp and toes it with his boots, shakes his head at the beer cans. When he turns around, Emily is staring out toward the Gulf with her hands on her hips like she’s about to scold one of the girls. He can see by the way her shoulders rise that she is taking a deep breath, trying to gather herself. He is behind her immediately with his old strong hands cupped over her shoulders. “I know, Darlin,” he says.

“Not on this trip,” she says. “Not today.”

“We’ll be back,” Leo tells her. Until now, they’d given no voice to the possibility of not returning, as if by avoiding the subject they could somehow continue having it forever, and Emily’s words now seem to cement some reality.

“I don’t think so,” she says.

“Don’t go talking that nonsense,” Leo says. He wants to tell her they’ll always come back, but he swallows the swell rising in his throat. He places his hand on the back of her neck, brushes it with his thumb. “Come on now.”

“We have to keep them,” Emily says, turning around. She pinches the bridge of her nose, and swipes at the corners of her eyes. Leo sees that she has made a decision. “They’ll be wasted any other way,” she tells him.

“That’s a tough ice chest to be discreet with. I’m not going to jail over some fool’s doing.”

“You have your knife,” says Emily. “We can filet them and put them in Ziplocs at the bottom of our cooler.”

“I have my electric knife, but that’s no good out here. It’ll take me two hours to filet those fish with my rusty old knife, and I ain’t getting shot when some roughneck comes hunting his ice chest and finds me carving up his fish.”

“It’s just not right,” Emily says. She locks Leo with her eyes. “This is ours, Honey. All of this.”

 

Leo unravels the brown twine that’s been sitting by the gas tank for God knows how long. He will hide them out of sight until they leave, and he’ll find a spot to clean them before heading back to the marina. After removing the fish, Leo runs the twine through the gills of each one, cutting his fingers on the tiny rows of teeth as he passes it out the mouth and into the next set of gills. It takes him the better part of an hour, and he works quickly. He does all of them except the headless bull red. They leave that one, and return the palmetto and tarp back on the ice chest as if it had never been discovered.

The stringer of fish is twenty feet long when he’s done. He’s looking around for something to weight it down with, something that will keep them underwater, when he hears the approaching buzz of an engine. He can’t see it, but he doesn’t have time to spend looking. Leo runs to his boat and slashes the rope connected to the small anchor. He ties the end of the twine to the anchor, hurrying to fasten it.

“Hurry up, Honey,” says Emily.

Leo’s hands tremble as he loops the knot, pulls it tight and lobs the anchor out into the canal behind his boat. He bends down and ties the other end of the twine to his prop. When he stands back up he doesn’t have any breath. The edge of the boat pushed into his stomach, and he knows there will be a bruise. His heart is drumming, but the fish are staying under. He looks up and sees the boat coming toward them, still too far away to see clearly. He climbs back out of his bateau and joins Emily, who’s already got her line in the pond.

It’s another few minutes before the boat approaches. They’re in the next canal over, and because the land is so flat, it appears that they’re floating on the marsh grass. The boat cuts its engine and they coast to a stop at the dead end not fifty yards away. Leo’s shoulders tense when he considers the possibility that they have binoculars and have seen everything. He says a prayer and picks up his rod, casts out.

They hear the voices of the men carry over to them, the mechanical wheeze of their power pole reaching down to secure their Boston Whaler in the muck. Leo glances over, but the men aren’t paying him any mind. There are two of them, and they both have waders on. They step off the boat and wade through the water and grass until they are on dry land on the other side of their ice chest. Leo takes a deep breath and notices that the tide is beginning to come in.

When Leo and Emily hear the sharp curses reach them, they stare dead ahead at the slack lines arcing from the tips of their rods into the water. Mumbles, more curses bounce toward them. Leo knows the men are discussing the possibilities, the next course of action, and when they begin trudging over, he wishes he carried a pistol.

“How are you all doing this morning,” says the bigger man as they approach.

“Comment ca va,” says Emily, smiling like a girl.

“Howdy,” says Leo.

The man, Leo guesses, is in his forties. He’s got charcoal stubble above a strawberry red neck and stocky shoulders. His tattooed arms are bronze and Leo figures he works in a shipyard or on a rig somewhere. His Houston Oilers hat is molded onto his head as if he’s been wearing it his whole life. His companion is younger, early twenties, a scatter of acne across his cheeks. They wear sunglasses that flash yellow and green in the sun, the kind they sell in bait shops, with the clips attached so that they don’t fall off.

“Having any luck?” the older man says.

“Not yet,” Leo says. “How bout y’all?”

“We been tearing them up,” the younger one says. Bulging veins ride his neck like fingers of lightening. The older man reaches an arm behind the young one and taps him on the back, as if to let him know to keep quiet.

“We had a good run last night, but they seem to have laid down,” the older one says. “You happen to see anybody else out here today?”

“No,” says Leo. “We haven’t been out here long.”

“The game warden was here,” says Emily, beaming.

Leo’s chest tightens and he cuts in. “He was just checking for licenses, but he left. Lots of people landing their boats this morning, though.”

“Is that right?” says the man.

“We must be the only ones not got the telegram that the fish weren’t biting.”

“You seen anybody tooling with that ice chest over there?”

“Not until just now when y’all were. Shoot, I didn’t even know it was there.”

The older man digs out a cigarette and lights it. He walks past them to the bateau and pretends to be interested in it. The younger fellow lights a cigarette of his own.

“This is a nice boat,” the man says, gripping the front, giving it a little bounce, as if testing its durability.

“Yeah, nice boat,” the younger one slurs. His voice has an edge to it that Leo doesn’t like.

Leo thinks that if the older one were to scratch his ass the younger one would follow suit. “It’s nothing fancy,” says Leo, reeling in his line and laying his pole down. “That’s what we call a Cajun cruise ship. Whereabouts y’all from?”

“Here and there,” he says. He steps into the water beside the bateau, opens the compartment that Leo built on the side where he keeps the life jackets and tackle, peers in.

Small waves of panic ring out from Leo’s gut in icy metallic ripples, as if a jagged rock had been thrown there. He prays the man doesn’t go deeper to circle the whole boat.

“Pretty spacious for such a small ride,” the man says, glancing around, and not seeing any other hiding spots, comes back out of the water. He approaches Leo’s ice chest and the younger one joins him there. “We sure are thirsty,” he says, squatting down beside the cooler. “Would you mind terribly if me and my partner here borrow a drink from you?”

“Help yourselves,” says Leo.

The man opens the lid and rifles through the ice, upturning beers and lunch meat, digging his hand to the bottom. He withdraws two beers and hisses them open, hands one to the younger man, who stumbles forward to receive it. He takes a long swallow and Leo watches his Adam’s apple lurch like the bubble in a carpenter’s level. He walks along the edge of the water out to the mangroves, taking sips from his beer, casting his eyes over the grass, hunting his fish. The other man is doing the same, and Leo looks out behind his bateau where he’d thrown the stringer and sees the corpse of a rat red, brushing against the marsh grass, its white belly up to the sun. Oh Lord, he thinks. Please, Lord, help them not to see. Leo looks for more fish and thinks that every patch of foam or debris riding the incoming tide is another corpse. He looks up at Emily and she meets his gaze.

The men are wandering up and down the banks, searching. Emily lays down her pole and slaps her hands against her hips before clapping them together. “I’ll bet you boys are hungry. Let me make y’all some sandwiches.” She’s almost singing with joy. “I got some bologna here and some cheese. The bread got a little wet, but I can make it so that you won’t even notice.” She presses a tomato into the young one’s hand, and then opens the ice chest, starts removing condiments.

The men look at one another, and Leo sees the young one shrug. The older man steps over to the cooler. “No,” he says, turning up his beer can once more. He pumps it down, crumples it and drops it to the ground. “We were just leaving. Thank you for the drinks,” he says, and walks toward his companion, who, getting the message, upturns his beer.

“We may swing by later to see if the fish have started up again,” the older one says.

The young man places his finished beer on the ground and brings his foot down to smash it, but misses, curses the can. He flattens it on the second attempt. “Ain’t no goddam fish left out here,” he says.

“Ought to be ashamed of y’allselves,” Emily says to their backs as they’re leaving.

“OK,” says Leo, louder than he’d intended, taking up her hand in his. “Let them go now.”

The older man turns, puts his hand on the back of the younger one’s neck. “I’m sorry ma’am. This one’s got piss poor manners.”

The men walk back to their cooler. They each take a handle and carry it back to their boat, the young one dragging the tarp behind him the way a sleepy child would his blanket. Once they fling the cooler up, they climb onboard to join it. The power pole hums as it retracts from the mud and the twin engines cough to life. They point the boat back toward Bayou Lafourche and gun it, their wake crashing into and burying the marsh grass that borders the canal.

Leo and Emily watch the boat turn into the channel and disappear, heading north. Emily wraps her arm around Leo’s waist, pats his side, and says, “Where were we?” She returns the condiments to the ice chest, deposits the men’s cans in a plastic bag, and moves off to collect the rest of their garbage.

Leo takes a seat on the cooler, bristling with rage at the men’s intrusion. He sees Emily cover the marsh, stooping delicately to pick up trash, trying to erase any sign of the men’s presence on the island.

If the girls could have just been happy with their lives up there and left well enough alone. There would always be holidays and visits. He and Emily would beat the goddamn thing and carry on in their own way, the way they were meant to in the place they were made to be. He clamps his jaw hard enough to hear the calcium whine in his ears, bites against the helplessness of being swept along, and scrabbling to find some foothold, his mind claws for purchase to slow it down. Looking up, he sees Emily heading back over with her bag full of trash, and he remembers the fish.

Leo steps back onto the boat and bends down near the engine. The twine hangs limp from the prop, and as he gathers it slack in his hand, he pictures the anchor sailing free from the rushed knot he’d tied when it reached its threshold. That twine had to be ten years old. The redfish corpse is still twirling in a patch of foam against a cut in the marsh, and he spots another in the next cut down, belly up. Leo imagines them all floating one by one off the string, rolling and tumbling across the bottom, being carried away into a hundred directions by a legion of blue crabs.

He cuts the twine with his pocket knife and sits down in the boat, hunched forward. Staring at their clean sneakers in the plastic bag, he shudders at the idea of putting them back on. Just what in the hell is in Tennessee? His grandchildren will grow up fishing there, and he doesn’t even know what kind of fish they catch. Leo crams his eyes shut and sees the violating boot prints in the mud, wills them full of salt water. He imagines the Gulf surging in like the Red Sea upon the Egyptians, fast forwarding through time until the entire island is underwater, finding comfort in knowing that Redfish Cove will be tucked away, safe under the smooth quiet surface.

A shadow crosses him, as though cast by a swift-moving cloud, its darkness passing away from him across the mud, moving out toward the Gulf, but it shatters upon the vision of Emily at the water’s edge, poised stoic under the sun, rod and reel in hand. She has purged her island, and is back doing what it is she came to do.

The sun is shining on her in such a way that he can just make out the smile carved on her face from under the shade of her straw hat. Her shadow is cast out on the water and Leo squints her in, lets the image materialize into his brain. Her thin arms hold fast to the rod and reel, determined to counter the weight she seems to know will gather there, to feel the strain of life on the other end, turning in the shallow, flinging up mud and spray as it lunges desperately for deeper water.

Leo climbs out of the boat and collects his fishing pole. He sidles up alongside Emily and she smiles at him, her eyes pure liquid gratitude. Several brown pelicans swoop low over them, their shadows tracking over the water and marsh grass toward the bay beyond, where they begin diving, a good sign. The tide will be coming in for a little while longer. Leo breathes deep the southeast wind kicking up and casts out as far as he can.

 

Benjamin Soileau was born and bred in south Louisiana. His stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Louisiana Literature, Bayou, Eclectica, and many other journals and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He drives a beer truck in Olympia, Washington, and is finishing a collection of short stories and beginning a novel. Reach him at bsoile2@gmail.com.