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.
Johnny Walker stood in the middle of the street like the heat didn't bother him and bullets couldn't touch him. Like there wasn't a cop dying at his feet. Angelique Monnet stood by his side, her revolver pointed to the ground, a bag of stolen cash in her other hand. The gun was a Colt Peacemaker, the name as ironic as they came, long-nosed and gleaming dully in the sun. Monnet looked indifferent to the violence, her sharp eyes flickering up and down the street, cataloguing witnesses and potential threats, before settling on Walker. His tommy gun rested against his shoulder, his hat set at a smart angle to keep the sun out of his eyes, but it did nothing to hide his face.
Eugene froze, his fingers locked around the camera. Johnny Walker met Eugene’s gaze through the lens as Eugene pressed his finger to the trigger and snapped the shot. It was over in a fraction of a second, but his heart stuttered and skipped a beat at the look they shared, as if Walker knew him. He didn't. They had never set foot in the same town together, before Baton Rouge.
Johnny Walker and Angelique Monnet had been declared public enemies months ago. Together they had mapped a trail across America, zigzagging back and forth across state lines all through the South and Midwest, leaving a wake of bodies and stolen cash behind them. They were a handsome couple, Walker in his sharp suits and Monnet in her flashy black dresses, both of them with smiles like razorblades for the cameras. They took up residence in the public consciousness like they belonged there, and Eugene, pale-faced in his ill-fitting suits, was pulled to them like a moth to the flame. They made trouble at every turn, always skipping just out of reach of the law, like stones over water. They couldn’t keep it up forever, the authorities promised, grim and mirthless. They would burn bright for a few months and then die hard, the same as all the others before them.
Eugene wasn’t so sure. There was something almost preternatural about the way their luck ran, like they had God or the devil on their side. They had a wildness about them, something beyond the guns and the way they laughed in the sweltering heat, their teeth white like animals’.
Walker broke into a slow smile, his coal-dark eyes still locked on Eugene's, before he turned and murmured something to Monnet. As one, they broke away from the scene of the crime, piling into a dusty black car and tearing off as the mournful wail of city sirens closed in.
Eugene stayed where he was for a second longer, his heart thudding as a solid lump in his throat. Soon, reporters would swarm the site like flies over a carcass, and he didn't want to be present for that. He had wanted to report on the rumored bank robbery, not a shooting, and he no intention of being questioned as a witness. There were other people who must have seen the whole thing from the windows, people who would gleefully expound on the cop's heroism and his tragic, unnecessary death at the hands of two ruthless criminals. Eugene wanted no part of that. The hostages from the bank were already flooding out the doors, not a single mark on any of them.
Forcing his legs to move, Eugene slid into his car, settling his camera in the passenger seat before wrapping his shaking hands around the wheel. He couldn't even print the picture he had taken, not now that he was unwilling to write the story that accompanied it. The threat of violence still hung in the air. It tasted like gunmetal and copper tang.
As he drove away from the bank, heading south for Chanlarivyè, the dead cop stared after him. Flies landed on his open eyes, gone glassy and pale in the blinding sun.
That evening, sore from the day's long drive and still sick with anxiety and the scent-memory of all that blood, Eugene shut himself in his dark room to develop the film. He had repurposed his linen closet for the job, removing the shelves to make just enough room to house him and his equipment. It was claustrophobic in there, stuffy and glowing red from the bare bulbs, but he had adjusted to the discomfort. There were other dark rooms he might have used—enough of his colleagues at the Chanlarivyè Gazette developed their own film—but he liked the privacy of having his own space. Some pictures, he didn't need anyone else chancing on. Some pictures, he was a fool for daring to take at all.
There was one such photo he kept in his bedside drawer. Benoit was more of a neighbor than a friend, but he had stretched out for Eugene's camera, revealing a long, slow slide of skin as the bedsheets slipped away. The setting sun cast stripes over his ribs through the blinds.
"I'll burn it," Eugene promised as he put the camera aside, his mouth pressed to Benoit's shoulder, tasting the salt.
He didn't burn it, but he buried it under a flood of myriad other items until it was lost at the bottom of the drawer, where he was careful not to disturb it. Benoit looked at him sometimes like he knew Eugene had kept it, but he never said anything, so Eugene didn't, either.
The Gazette didn't know Eugene had gone to Baton Rouge that morning; there was no call for him to publish the photo of Walker and Monnet or write an article on the violence. Other papers could tell that story. America had no shortage of bank robbers or killers, but there was always a gossipy undercurrent to the articles on Walker and Monnet. People wanted to dissect the tilt of Walker’s hat and the brand of cigarettes he smoked, the cut of Monnet’s dress and the necklaces that struck her breastbone as she ran. The way they bared their teeth in smiles sharp enough to cut, eyes glinting with the promise of bullet shells and pocketknives. And other, crasser things—the fate of Monnet’s husband, the fact that she and Walker wore no wedding bands, and his hair—wasn’t it a little long? What business did a man have, wearing his hair in a girl's cut like that? Do you think—
The questions dug at Eugene, scratching right between his shoulder blades. It was as if by seeing Walker and Monnet in the flesh after following their story for so long, he was now connected to them by invisible string. They had tied themselves to his ribs, and where they went, he would follow.
He shook his head. It was a ridiculous notion. They had the same magnetism as any other charismatic criminal, and that was all.
Slipping the photo out of its chemical bath, he held it up to the red glow of the lights. It had developed just out of focus, blurry around the edges, but it caught Walker and Monnet from the chest up, black and gray against the stark white block of the bank. Despite the blur, Johnny Walker’s smile was immortalized clear as day, sly and curved on his perfect lips. Eugene shivered, studying the expressions on their faces. There was something knowing in Walker’s gaze, something dark and glittering, the one clear focus of the photo. He looked at Eugene like he knew—what? Eugene kept his secrets closely guarded. He didn’t like being looked at like he could be easily read.
He propped the picture up on his night table where he could see it in his peripheral vision from his bed. The ceiling fan turned in lazy circles, doing nothing to dispel the stagnant heat. Vines climbed the bricks outside, tendrils creeping in between the cracks to edge around his window, like fingers looking for a way to inch inside. He stared at the ceiling, his hands folded over his chest, as the water stain in the corner slowly spread. It was dark around the edges, and it grew a little larger every day. What must it be like to live somewhere else, somewhere better? Closing his eyes, he inhaled the smell of roses, strong enough to mask the mold, and he let the whining drone of the day's last cicadas wash over him and settle under his skin.
His stomach turned in memory of the cop’s blood. The cicadas had been screaming then, too, under the mid-morning sun. None of the reports that had come out over the course of the afternoon could agree whether it was Walker or Monnet who had shot him. Eugene wasn’t sure it mattered. Not to the cop, anyway.
The year before, Eugene had gone to see the place where Bonnie and Clyde were shot. The day after their deaths, he walked the highway shoulder under the bright May sun to where their car had stopped. It was easy to imagine them there, slumped behind the wheel of that bullet-ridden V8 Ford, bleeding out over the upholstery. People called it the Death Car now; there were rumors of it making the rounds in carnivals and state fairs, where people paid money to sit in the same seats where the infamous lawbreakers had died. Eugene found the whole thing gruesome, but he made his private pilgrimage to Sailes all the same. The dirt at the side of the road was trampled flat with footprints from a hundred different people, the bank robbers' blood turned to mud in the dust.
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.