It was such a waste. They had just been a couple of kids when they started, barely stealing enough money to get by. They'd died starving and sold out by what they thought was a friend, and the public that had cheered them on in the beginning now came to gawp at their deaths.

"It was easy enough to like them at the start," Eugene's boss had said. "They were struggling, same as anybody else. But once you start shooting folk, what are we supposed to do?" Murdock shook his head. "Them cops were just trying to do their jobs and make an honest living. Can't have much sympathy once you start gunning down hard-working folk like that, no matter how you started."

So, Eugene had gone out with his camera and snapped pictures of the blood-soaked dirt and the torn-up road where all those cars had gone through the day before, and he tried not to feel sorry for the dead. Everybody died, after all. Some just went out meaner than others.

Walker and Monnet turned up a few months later, as if somebody needed to fill the gap that Bonnie and Clyde had left. Like America needed somebody to mythologize, then tear to shreds.

* * *

The bayou was swollen. It was the most pervasive topic of conversation at work, besides that of Walker and Monnet. Eugene kept his head down at his desk, his eyes on his notes, and let the talk roll over him. The water was encroaching closer than it had in a decade, maybe longer. The gators were coming with it, their eyes glowing flat and gold like coins in the moonlight. Huge, hulking beasts with crooked smiles, lurking amid the tree roots and the choking vines.

Eugene didn’t go down to the bayou. It was hard to breathe there; the air was so thick it smothered him, filling his lungs as sure as drowning. He had always been sickly. His poor constitution would have killed him during the 1918 pandemic if he hadn't been tucked away in Chanlarivyè. The flu had come creeping right up to their doorstep before deciding the town was too small to bother with.

At work, he kept the photo of Walker and Monnet in his breast pocket, and as the weeks passed and the photo’s corners frayed until they were soft, he imagined it burning its way through skin and ribs to nestle into his heart, until it was inseparable from the rest of him. That was the only excuse for how the couple came to occupy his thoughts.

But he didn't write about them. Instead, he wrote about the man who couldn’t keep his business afloat and drowned himself in the river, and what that meant for his family. He wrote about the man who disappeared one night, never returning from his evening walk. He wrote about the bayou, and what might happen if it flooded for good. Folks still talked about the great flood of ’27, the damage it did and the lives it took. Chanlarivyè was south and east of New Orleans, nestled in right against the Mississippi, and had borne the brunt of it when they broke the levees. The town was no stranger to rising tides.