Sean Chercover - The Trinity Game

“A mercenary driving a Subaru,” said Tim Trinity as they followed the green Forester. “Now I’ve seen everything.”

“Pat and I bulled our way from Honduras to Guatemala in one,” said Daniel. “They’re solid. And check it out, up there,” he pointed, “it’s got a snorkel, you could drive through four feet of water.” He started to point out the crash bars and roof lights, but realized Trinity had just been bantering. He smiled back.

“Quite a ride,” said Trinity. “Yesterday morning we were 2,500 feet up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, hanging out with the flying squirrels. And now we’re below sea level in the Louisiana swamp, hanging with Mr. Allie Gator and his pals.” His hand swept the scenery. They were no longer just in Bayou Country; they were now well and truly in the swamp.

Pat slowed and signaled, turned right onto a one-lane covered with oystershell gravel. Just a thin finger of land, maybe thirty yards across, moss-draped cedars and shrubs, surrounded by the mangroves and cypress trees that rose from the water on both sides. Their tires crunched on the gravel as they rolled slowly along the finger, toward a one-story ranch house, surprisingly modern for the setting, situated at the end of the narrow spit of land. About fifteen yards from the house, a thick cypress had fallen across the road.

Pat reached up to his visor and pressed on something like a garage door opener. An electric motor somewhere by the side of the road started, and the fallen tree slowly rose to standing. They pulled forward, past the tree, into a circular driveway. The tree came down behind them, once again blocking the road.

Doesn’t matter if you run a barbershop, pharmacy, or gas station, remaining independent in today’s America is an uphill slog and the hill gets steeper with each passing year.

Buddy had always taken great pride in his entrepreneurship, and he’d rejected all buyout offers from the multinational petroleum conglomerates. So the big guys did just what big guys do to mom-and-pops—they built a super-mega-store across the road and undercut his prices. In a few years, he’d be gone and they’d own the road.

To fight back, Buddy had put an oil drum smoker and some picnic tables out back, and Buddy’s Gas Bar became Buddy’s Gas Bar & Bar-B-Que. It helped, but it wasn’t enough. So when the mob guys had come with their offer, Buddy added three video poker terminals to the place.

FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY

And for a stranger, that was true. Just a video game to waste your time and take your quarters. You could rack up credits for free games, and that’s as far as it went. But for locals in the know, the game was real.

The mob guys had provided Buddy with a cashbox to pay out any winnings over twenty bucks, and they gave him a monthly rental fee for the floor space. Sure, it was illegal, but it was a common practice throughout the South, and Buddy needed the money. And the risk to his business license seemed minimal, since the guy they sent to empty the machines each week, Bam Price, was a sheriff’s deputy.

Buddy watched Bam carry the three thick canvas bags out to his police cruiser. Bam locked the money in the trunk and returned to the gas station.

“How’s the float, Buddy? Need topping up?”

“Naw, thanks,” said Buddy. “No big payouts this week.”

“OK.” Bam put a photo on the counter. “Have a look.”

Buddy looked. “Yup, I’ve seen ’em.”

“You’ve seen them?”

“On the TV. Whole world’s lookin’ for them.”

Bam chuckled. “Yeah, well, if you see ’em not on the TV, gimme a holler.”

Buddy grabbed the reading glasses hanging from a chain around his neck, put them on his nose, and took a closer look at the picture. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “I seen the younger one just today.”

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. He bought a cell phone and a hat.”

“When?”

“Couple hours ago. There was another man in his truck, but I didn’t see him too good, don’t know if it was the preacher. They left here heading south.”

It cooled off some as evening fell. Pat Wahlquist made a crawfish boil, and they ate outdoors, piles of spicy crawdads and corncobs spread before them on newspapers covering the picnic table in the backyard. Half the yard was fenced off into a pen, about twenty feet square, ten feet tall, chain-link stretched over a steel pipe frame, even covering the top. Inside the fence, a doghouse, a soccer ball, an old tire, and some chew-toy made of knotted yellow rope.

“Edgar’s playpen,” said Pat, scratching his coonhound’s ear. A handsome dog, splotches of black and white, with expressive brown eyebrows. Pat put a crawdad tail between his puckered lips, pushed his face forward, and Edgar gently took the crawdad with his teeth and ate it. “Who’s my spoiled puppy?” Pat baby-talked. “Who’s my baby?” Edgar licked him square on the mouth, then turned in a circle and lay at his master’s feet. A nickel-plated .12-guage pump-action Mossberg leaned against Pat’s leg on the other side.

Daniel broke open another crawfish, sucked the head, dropped it in the communal pail in the middle of the table, and drank some sweet tea. He looked up and was startled yet again by Trinity’s new look.

Trinity had resisted the idea, but Pat assured him that it would wash out, so he’d reluctantly taken the bottle and dyed his hair brown. Daniel had given Pat the Reader’s Digest version of their journey and told him the goal was to get Trinity into the French Quarter to see a woman, and back out again. The silver mane was Trinity’s most identifiable feature, so it had to go. Pat had lent them some clothes, shown them to a guest room with double beds, and they’d freshened up while he made dinner.

With the dye job, Trinity more resembled the man Daniel lived with as a boy, and the effect on Daniel was almost surreal. Not altogether unpleasant, but profoundly strange, like he’d become unstuck in time, like Billy Pilgrim in that great Vonnegut novel Daniel loved as a teenager.

Daniel ate one more crawdad and, realizing how full he was, declared it his last.

“Make more sense for you guys to stay here,” said Pat, his tone signaling a return to the business at hand. “I can go and get the woman, bring her to you.”

“No way,” said Trinity. “I’m telling you, it was a vision, me standing in front of her place. A vision. I have to go there.”

Edgar sprang up, cocked his head at the waterline, and said, “Woof.” His attention was focused just to the right of the dock, to the right of Pat’s aluminum airboat, where the wake of a gator moved steadily toward shore.

“Stay,” said Pat, and in one fluid motion, he stood and swept the shotgun into position, pumping a round into the chamber as he walked forward. He stopped about six feet from the water. The gator stopped about the same distance in the water, its snout and eyes just above the surface. They stared each other down.

“Keep comin’ and your new name’s gonna be Handbag,” Pat told the gator. After a few seconds, the gator turned away and glided on down the bayou. “Tell your friends,” Pat called after him. He clicked the safety back on, returned to the table. “Tim, I’m agnostic about the metaphysics of your predicament,” he said. “Maybe you’ve been touched by God, maybe you’ve just gone batshit crazy. Not my area of expertise. My area of expertise is thwarting bad guys, and I’m telling you, it’s poor tactics to go there if you don’t have to.”

“Not negotiable,” said Trinity.