Signals by Tim Gautreaux

Author:Tim Gautreaux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

Easy Pickings

He drove into Louisiana from Texas in the stolen sedan, taking the minor roads, the cracked and grass-lined blacktop where houses showed up one to the mile. The land was overrun with low crops he did not recognize, and was absolutely flat, which he liked because he could see a police car from a long way off. He was a short man, small of frame, tattooed on the neck and arms with crabs and scorpions, which fit his grabbing occupation of thief. In the hollow of his throat was a small blue lobster, one of its claws holding a hand-rolled cigarette. He thought of the woman in Houston he’d terrorized the day before, coming into her kitchen and pulling his scary knife, a discount Bowie he’d bought at the KKK table at a local gun show, and putting it to her throat. She wept and trembled, giving him her rings, leading him to her husband’s little stash of poker money. The day before that, he’d spotted an old woman in Victoria returning alone from the grocery store, and he’d followed her into the house, taking her jewelry, showing the knife when she balked, and getting the cash from her wallet. He’d robbed only these two women, but it seemed that he’d been doing it all his life, like walking and breathing, even though he’d just got out of jail the week before after doing two years for stealing welfare checks. He looked through the windshield at the poor, watery country. Anyone who would live out here would be simple, he thought, real stupid and easy pickings.

His name was Marvin, but he called himself Big Blade because the name made him feel other than what he was: small, petty, and dull.

He noticed a white frame house ahead on the right side of the road, sitting at the edge of a flooded field, clothes on the line out back. Big Blade had been raised in a trashy Houston subdivision and had never seen clothes dried out in the open. At first he thought the laundry was part of some type of yard sale, but after he stopped on the shoulder and studied the limp dresses and aprons, he figured it out. Across the road and two hundred yards away was a similar house, an asbestos-siding rectangle with a tin roof, and after that, nothing but blacktop. Big Blade noticed that there were no men’s clothes on the line, and he turned into the driveway.

—

Mrs. Arceneaux was eighty-five years old and spoke Acadian French to her chickens because nearly everyone else who could speak it was dead. She came out into the yard with a plastic bowl of feed and was met at the back steps by Marvin, who pulled out his big knife, his eyes gleaming. Mrs. Arceneaux’s vision was not sharp enough to see the evil eyes, but she saw the tattoos and she saw the knife.

“Baby, who wrote all over you? And what you want, you, wit’ that big

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