The Bayou
ALSO BY ARDEN POWELL
A Summer Soundtrack for Falling in Love
The Faerie Hounds of York
THE BAYOU
Arden Powell
The Bayou
Copyright © 2021 by Arden Powell
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover art and book design by Arden Powell.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the copyright owner, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review.
Content Warnings:
On-page suicide, child sexual abuse, dubious consent, period-typical homophobia, graphic descriptions of gore and violence, gun violence, religion.
THE BAYOU
I.
The summer of 1935 was a hot one: the kind of damp, heavy heat that seemed like it would last forever. The scent of roses hung stilted in the air, an all-pervading perfume that clung to Eugene’s clothes and caught in the back of his throat. People moved slowly, like they were walking underwater; even the birds sang sluggishly, and the frogs croaked their dusk songs under duress. The weather felt like something dying.
A cop was bleeding out in front of the National Bank.
He lay on his back, eyes wide and staring as he gasped uselessly for air. He should have been dead before he hit the ground, the back of his head blown clean off and his brains leaking onto the pavement. Instead, he clung to the edge of life, refusing to accept the inevitable. The entry wound from a single bullet burrowed messily in between his eyes. Flies were already starting to gather, humming discordantly around his face like a threat.
Eugene stared at him from the other side of the street, pressed flat to the ground and using his car as a shield. He had dropped to the pavement as soon as the shooting started, the gunfire the only thing loud enough to drown out the cicadas screaming from the trees. Keeping his camera curled protectively against his chest, he shut his eyes and tried to breathe. If he breathed through his nose, he could smell the cop dying: blood so dark it looked black on the asphalt, bowels loosening as his body gave up on him. If he breathed through his mouth, he could taste it.
He hadn't come to Baton Rouge to take pictures of a dead cop, not even one the papers would laud as a hero. Never mind the fact that the cop had shot first, that there might not have been any violence at all if he'd been a little less keen on pulling that trigger.
Eugene opened his eyes as a pair of boots came into view on the other side of the car's undercarriage. Black and polished to a shine, out of place in a desperate bank robbery. Eugene straightened up by inches, balancing his camera on the roof of the car as he slicked his hair out of his face one-handed. His glasses were slipping down his nose and sweat pooled in the small of his back, his shirt limp from the humidity, as his heart rabbited behind his ribs.