Kessler rounded up the empty beer bottles on the back floor and tossed them into a trash can. He then opened the trunk of the car and removed his jacket. He hung it on a hanger in the back and then began rummaging through a duffel bag in the trunk. He removed his tie and shirt and slid on a blue, short-sleeve silk shirt. H also kicked off his oxfords and replaced them with a pair of sandals.
He opened the hood of the car and checked the oil. Aftter a moment, he shut the hood and got back in the car.
“You feel better now?” I asked him nodding at his wardrobe change.
“Not really,” he said reaching in the back to retrieve another beer. “You got any of that pot with you that you were smoking on the sheriff’s boat?”
I opened my cigarette pack and removed a half joint.
“What kind of shit is that?” he asked me, sounding irritated.
“Don’t worry,” I said. This shit will knock your dick in the dirt ”
“Great, that’s all I need,” he said.
We arrived in Madisonville a few minutes later. I don’t know the exact dimensions of the size of the town limits, but they don’t extend very far. As Kessler noted, you’d miss the damned place if you nodded off for a second. Kessler immediately wanted to go drive down Lake Road, out to the boat launch.
However, I was hungry and needed something to eat. We were just about to turn left toward the harbor when Kessler suddenly veered right and asked, “What’s this way?”
“Keep going and you cross the parish line into Tangipahoa Parish and Ponchatoula,” I told him.
Kessler drove down a little way and then pulled into a small store, called Nguyen’s I’d heard of the place, but had never been there. It was a combination deli, sushi bar, gas station and bait shop.

I’d heard a lot about the place, primarily that the owner, Mr. Nguyen was pretty much at odds with the entire town. I didn’t know the entire story, but from what I gathered, this was the place to be on the north shore if you were Asian. On the south shore, New Orleans East and Chalmette were still heavily populated by Chinese and Vietnamese.
There had never been a serious Asian migration to the north shore until the late 1980’s. Then, for reasons unknown, vast droves began immigrating to the region smack between Madisonville and Ponchatoula.
They were fisherman, for the most part, and they didn’t really dabble into the everyday lives of white people. But every now and then you’d hear rumblings about strange tales about them, like how the locals would get up tight when their poultry began to mysteriously vanish.
There were other tales too, about exiled communists, opium trafficking, and things of that nature. Ninety percent of it was probably not true. Some of the towns folk in Madisonville are an untrusting bunch, and they still, even after all the growth and development, don’t take kindly to outsiders.
Mr. Nguyen was no exception to this rule. He’d fought a long hard zoning battle, both against the town and the parish, before he finally got the approval to re-zone his lot to a commercial use zoning classification.
Basically, there was nothing legally the system could do to stop Mr. Nguyen from opening his business. Ever since, his relationship with the locals was strained at best and have included alleged police harassment, vandalism and hate mail.
“They are all like rats,” Mr Nguyen told me one day, emphasizing his words with a whack of a meat cleaver he was using to chop up slightly thawed sashimi with. “Their day will come though. I piss on them all.”
I’ve always liked Mr. Nguyen. He’s always had a very sharp sense of wrong and right. I figured he and Kessler would get along fine. But when I pulled into the parking lot, the doors to the place was closed up.
There was a “be back in 30 minutes” sign taped to the door and I figured there was no telling how many hours it had been since the note was taped there, so I got back into the car and told Kessler to drive back to Madisonville.
When we got back to town, we pulled into the parking lot of a small convenience store, right near the Madisonville bridge. I had just opened my third beer and Kesler had already drank around five or six.
That, mixed with the joint we’d smoked, had me feeling a little nervous about entering a public place with Kessler, who was obviously pretty tightly wound.
What’s the worst thing that could happen though, I thought to myself as we walked into the store.
One day I will stop asking myself that question, because once it is actually verbally asked, it demands an answer, whether you really want one or not.
As we walked up and down the aisles, loading up on more beer, Kessler grabbed two fishing poles from a rack and said, “Perfect. We’ll go fishing. I’m going to fish my blues away today.”
“Sometimes, it’s best not to talk at all,” I whispered to him.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, whispering back to me, mocking me, “Does the weed have you a little paranoid there fella?”
“Just be cool man,” I said to him. “The people in this town don’t take prisoners. And they eat their own young.”
“Don’t we all?” he asked, grinning lecherously at me. He then changed the subject and said, “By the way, what’s this boudin stuff they have signs for up front?”
“It’s kind of like a sausage,” I told him. “It’s a Cajun thing.”
“Are you Cajun?” he asked me, suddenly inquisitive.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got some Cajun in me, from my dad’s side.”
“How do you even pronounce it?” he asked me. “Do you say it like it looks? Boodin?”
“No, it’s pronounced boo-dan actually,” I said. “Must be a French thing.”
“Jesus Christ. The fucking French,” Kessler muttered. “Don’t even get me started on the French. So what is it? Is it sausage?”
“Kind of,” I answered.
“What do you mean kind of?” Kessler asked. “You should know these things if they’re part of your heritage. I’m going to be a resident now. I need to know these things if I’m going to be a Louisianian.”
I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to teach Kessler any sort of Louisiana history 101 courses.
“It’s like jambalaya or dirty rice, stuffed into a sausage skin,” I said. “It’s really pretty good. I usually buy a link or two of it every time I stop in here.”
“What’s it made with?” he asked.
“Some are made with ground pork, others are made from shrimp or crawfish,” I told him.
“Well I’m going to get some,” Kessler said, as we approached the counter.
It was around this time that Kessler noticed a sign for fishing licenses behind the counter.
“You have to have a fishing license to fish here?” he asked the kid, who couldn’t have been more than 19 or 20.
“Yes sir,” the guy told him.
“Even on public piers?” Kessler asked, suddenly mystified and seeming to get more aggravated by the second.
The vibe was getting ugly and I wasn’t sure why. I guess that’s what happens though when you basically slam five Heinekens on a hot day. I thought the weed would have mellowed things out for him, as it had for me. But instead, Kessler just seemed to be getting more and more cranked up by the instant.
“Especially on public piers,” the kid told him. “Especially out there near the new pier at Sunset Point. Wildlife and Fisheries guys have been going out there three times a day on the weekends.”
“That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Kessler blurted out.
The kid gave Kessler an “I didn’t make the law” kind of glance, but this had no effect.
“In most parts of Florida, fishing license requirements are waived on public piers,” Kessler said. “It’s supposed to be good for tourism. No wonder this state is still living in the stone age. Nobody ever wants to spend any money.”
Kessler turned to me and asked me if I had a fishing license. I didn’t, so I gave the guy my driver s license, paid $20 and had my license in hand.
Although Kessler had watched all of this very intently, he asked the kid, “So what do I need now?”
“Just a driver’s license,” the kid said.
“Well that I can handle,” Kessler said.
He set the fishing poles down and dug in his back pocket and removed a wallet He opened the wallet and handed a card to the guy. The guy looked at it and then looked at Kessler and said, “What is this?”
“It’s my driver’s license,” Kessler said, still edgy.
“It’s not a Louisiana driver’s license,” the guy told him. “I can’t give you a fishing license unless you have a Louisiana driver’s license.”
“Well actually son, you see, this license is good in every state in the United States and most of the U.S. territories,” Kessler told him. “I work for the government”
“Well sir,” the kid countered. “I’ve never seen one before.”
“So, what does that mean?” Kessler asked. “Does it mean you won’t take if?”
“I don’t think I can,” the boy said. “I’ve never seen one.”
Kessler pulled his cell phone from his pocket, held it out to the boy and said “You want to call my superiors at the Pentagon to see if I have clearance or not you little fucker.”
“Jesus Kessler,” I said. “Calm down.”
I turned to the guy and said, “Please excuse him. He’s a little jet-lagged at the moment. He’s had a long flight. From Aruba.”
“You pig fucker,” he snarled at me.
“There’s no need to get hostile,” the kid said.
“You think that was hostile?” Kessler muttered. “How about when I rip your fucking heart out? Will you still tell me I’m being hostile then?”
The boy had apparently seen worse in the store, because Kessler’s bullshit didn’t seem to phase him, which was good.
Everything got silent for a while, though, and Kessler and the kid just stared at each other. For an instant, I knew what it must have felt like right before the shootout at Okay Corral began.
Kessler just finally laughed and said, “Sorry kid. I was just fucking with you. Can you give me a license or what?”
Suddenly, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Suddenly, we were all friends again This was a good thing.
“You got a local address or something?” the kid asked him.
Of course Kessler didn’t so I told the kid to just use my address and Kessler ordered a dozen links of boudin.
“Christ,” I said. “What are you going to do with all that?”
“Eat it,” he said.
He then trotted back off down an aisle and grabbed a few bags of chips.
“Okay,” Kessler said, setting the stuff down on the counter. We got the license we got the fishing poles, tackle and bait. We have the beer, the boudin, the News on Wheels. Give us a bottle of Wild Turkey too and three bags of ice too.”
We had paid for everything, loaded it up into the car and were just about to pull out of the parking lot when Kessler looked down at his new fishing license and muttered, “Son of a bitch. No way. This isn’t acceptable.”
He climbed back out of the car and began marching back to the store.
Frantic, I glanced at my fishing license to see what it was that had caused him to start flipping out again. However, I didn’t see anything. I was a few seconds behind him and when I entered the store I could hear him yelling.
“What the fuck kind of scam are you trying to run on me here,” he hollered at the kid.
“Pardon me mister,” the kid responded, but I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about?”
“This you little prick,” Kessler said, shoving the fishing license back in his face. “Take it and read it.”
The kid took it in his hand and glanced at it.
“Look at the damned expiration date,” Kessler said.
Finally, I thought, looking at mine. I then saw the problem. The license expired in three weeks.
“June is when they issue the new ones for the year,” said the kid.
“So you’re telling me that if I came in here in three weeks I could get one for the year?”
“Yes,” the guy said.
“I don’t want this damn thing then,” Kessler said and he slapped it back down on the counter. “Give me my money back. I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous in my life. You should get your money back too.”
“No,” I said. “If that’s how it is, then that’s how it is.”
“That’s the kind of resolve that created the Nazi problem in the first place,” Kessler said. “You should stand up for your rights. And you have a right not be be jacked around by some limp-dick pencil pusher in Baton Rouge.”
“There’s no refunds on licenses,” the kid told Kessler.
This pushed him over the edge and Kessler launched into full screams.
“Give me back my fucking money,” Kessler screamed slamming his open palm down hard on the counter. The smack reverberated loudly through the store.
“Sir if you don’t step away and get out of this store now, I will call the police,” the guy said.
“By all means call’em,” Kessler said. “I’d like to report a fucking robbery. Fuck you and you’re fucking piece of shit store.”
Kessler smacked the counter again and stalked out.
“Dude,” I said, with my shoulders shrugged. “No need to call the cops. We’re out of here and we won’t be back. I promise.”
The kid just looked at me, stone-faced, and I backed cautiously out of the store. I climbed back into the car and Kessler cranked the engines with a laugh.
“Stupid little bastard,” he said. “Did you see that? He was about to piss in his pants.”
“No Kessler,” I told him. “That would have been me. The kid didn’t care less.”
“Fuck him, he was a freak,” Kessler said, spinning gravel as he floored it pulling out of the parking lot.
We drove down Lake Road and arrived at the boat launch around five minutes later.
We’d just parked when I noticed a sheriff’s truck approaching with its flashers on. He cut loose one quick burst of the siren and suddenly a loudspeaker filled the air.
“Would the driver of the vehicle please step out,” said the voice.
The treacherous little bastard at the store had called the cops anyway.
“Great Kessler,” I said.
“Maybe the cops have a better sense of humor than that stupid kid,” Kessler muttered. “Bunch of fucking inbreeds. This is worse than Deliverance.”
Kessler got out of the car and two cops approached. I couldn’t hear exactly what was going on, but there was no way I was going to get out of the car unless I was sent for. Kessler pulled out what I assumed was his government “driver’s license” and handed it to the cop.
Oh great, I mused to myself. This is going to go over nicely.
It was at this point that I realized one of the cops was the Seargent. He had walked over toward me and the car and when he got close enough to recognize me I motioned for him to come over.
“Hey man,” I said to him. “Can I get out of the car?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You know this guy?”
“Yes officer,” I said, not knowing what more to say after that. Did I tell the cop Kessler was an intern; or would that be lying to a cop and punishable by law? I decided to keep it neutral and told the Sergeant Kessler was just a friend of the family.
“What happened back at the store?” the Sergeant asked me.
“He got a little upset over a fishing license,” I said.
“Did he threaten to kill that boy?” he asked.
“No way,” I said. “He verbally assaulted him, but he didn’t make any threats.”
I was in the process of quickly relaying the whole story, when the other deputy walked up and motioned for the Sergeant to join him. I saw them talking to each other. Kessler was just standing near the sheriff’s truck with a look of utter contempt on his face. Meanwhile, the Sergeant and the other cop, who I didn’t know, were talking rapidly to each other. The Sergeant pointed at me and then both of them walked over to me.
“If being an asshole was a fucking crime, I would have thrown him under the jail,” the other deputy said to me. “He wants to file a complaint against the kid at the store.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I said.
“He’s got interesting identification too,” the Sergeant added. “You’re the news editor. Do you have any idea why we have a disgruntled NSA guy walking around terrorizing the locals?”
“NSA?” I asked.
“Yeah, National Security,” the other cop began.
“I know what it is, I just didn’t know that’s who he worked for,” I said. “Besides, I think he’s retired.”
“Nope,” the Sergeant said. “He’s on active status, as a consultant. We just had the sheriff on the line and he’s about to have a coronary because he likes to know when we’re going to have feds snooping around town.”
“As far as I know, he’s retired, just broke up with his fiance in Florida and he sold his condo,” I said. “I’ve hired him to do some freelance writing for the paper. That’s all I know. We’re just out today to do some fishing. Look, I know he’s upset about losing his woman. Can we just leave it at that for today?”
“For today yes,” said the Sergeant. “But the sheriff wants you to call him later on when you’re not with him. Does he have an address here in town? Because whatever he’s told you, I know the sheriff is going to want to keep tabs on him for a little while, just to satisfy his own curiosity.”
I wasn’t exactly sure what this meant, but still gave my home address anyway. The two told Kessler to go on about his business and to mind his temper.
“I don’t care who you are, or what you’re really up to here in town, but we treat each other with respect around here,” the Sergeant added. “I’d suggest you do the same.”
“I’ll take that under advisement sir,” Kessler said, smirking a little.
The cops got into their truck, turned around and left.
“They didn’t have much of a sense of humor either,” Kessler said, laughing as he walked back to the car and opened the trunk. He grabbed the fishing poles and asked me to grab the beer, as if nothing, none of this, had just transpired.
“You’re fucking crazy,” I said to him.
“It’s all a matter of perspective,” he said to me. “I’m the one that thinks all of you are fucking backwards and crazed. But fuck all that. It’s not important. Lets catch some fucking fish and see if we can’t find someone to boat us across to the sand bar. It’s time to get started on the book.”
I stood there for a minute, stunned, staring off blindly into the sunlight. The paper still had to be written and Kessler had just basically given the damned cops an open invitation to put him under surveillance. And, to top it all off, the sheriff wanted to talk to me about all of this.
“You coming or what?” Kessler asked me. “Come on, Cheer up. Fuck’em if they can’t take a joke.”
“It’s not a joke Kessler,” I said to him. “Those men had guns and they were not joking.”
“You worried about those guys?” he chuckled. “They don’t have a clue. They’re not like us. We’re professionals chief. Don’t ever forget that.”
We collected all our stuff and trotted over to the piers.
I was trying to be mindful of the time, and I mentioned this to Kessler as we lugged our gear over to the piers. However, he continued to tell me it wasn’t a big deal and that we could easily knock out the newspaper on the following day.
“Didn’t you say you already had four stories done already for the week?” he asked me.
“Five actually,” I admitted.
“Then quit you’re bitching chief,” he said. “You’re worse than a damned woman. Things will fall into place. They always do. Have you ever not put out a newspaper on deadline day?”
“Well, no actually,” I confessed. “But.”
“But nothing,” he said as we sat out stiff down on the pier. “Now all we have to do is find a ride across.”

It was just about then that Kessler noticed an old crabber idling by in a small flatboat. Kessler jerked his head in the man’s direction and then whistled and waved his arm at him.
The guy was only about five or six feet out from the pier.
“Hey cap,” Kessler called out to him. “Can you give us a ride across to the sand bar?”
The crabber, an older, grizzled black guy, looked at us and, after deciding we looked harmless enough, said, “If I take you across, how the hell you gonna get back?”
Sure enough, I glanced up at the sand bar and noticed there were no boats docked in the shallow waters. From the looks of it the entire place was empty.
“We’ll worry about that later,” Kessler said. “Can you take us?”
“Sure,” the old guy said. “It’s no sweat off my back. I’ll pull up over near the launch down there.”
I grabbed the ice chest and Kessler grabbed the backpack, fishing poles and two fold-up chairs he had stored in the trunk of his car. We dragged our stuff down to a small wooden boarding ramp of sorts when Kessler paused distractedly.
“Wait right here,” he said. “I have to get something out of my car.”
He sprinted off and returned a minute later with some thing, that looked like a weed-eater, in his hand.
In a matter of minutes we’d made it across and were getting off the guy’s and onto the sand bar. We grabbed the rest of our stuff and tha man asked us if we were sure we wanted to just be left there. Kessler said it wasn’t a problem though, and the guy pulled off.
“If worse comes to worse we can always swim back,” Kessler said.
He lugged the chairs up on the sandy shore and set them up near a small tree which gave off a little shade.
“This is just perfect. It’s good that no one is here now. It gives a chance to study the habitat without the interference of the natives.”
“What are you talking about you dingbat?” I asked. “There’s nothing here. We aren’t National Geographic Explorer.”
“Oh, but we are,” he corrected me. “Take a look around you. There’s all kinds of tell-tale signs that life was here. Look at this,” he added, holding up a broken flip-flop.”
“Good work inspector Clouseau,” I told him. “What anthropological facts can we glean from that.”
“Don’t mock me,” he said. “I thought you were serious about this.”
“About what?” I asked.
“The book,” he said.
“Well I am,” I answered him sitting down in one of the chairs and opening a beer. “It’s just that the morning has been a little intense.”
“The life of a professional is always intense,” he said. “It’s a job hazard.”
“I just want to take a load off,” I said. “I’ll scavenge the island for physical evidence later.”
“Suit yourself,” he said opening his backpack. He fished out a pair of swimming trunks and tossed them to me. “I’m going to go change behind those bushes. I’d suggest you do the same when I’m done.”
He trotted off and then returned a few moments later clad only in his swimming trunks. He settled back into the chair and took a long sip from his beer.
“Now this is the life,” he said. He then sat up and grabbed the thing that looked like a weed-eater.
“What the hell is that anyway?” I asked him.
“It’s a metal detector,” he said. “An expensive one. I bought off a guy in Vegas. Got it dirt cheap. He was desperate. Vegas is a great town for back seat sales. Half of those monsters would sell their grandmothers for one last game of blackjack.”
“Does it work?” I asked him.
“I used it after a few hurricanes last fall. Let’s just say that it paid for itself. I found three diamond rings, a Rolex watch and about $60 in change. I found a safety deposit box too but I haven’t figured out how to blow the lock without damaging the contents inside. Let’s just say demolitions was never my strong suit.”
“I’ll have to keep that in mind on the Fourth of July when you want to shoot off Roman Candles with Alex.,” I said.
He just laughed and opened his beer. He set it down in the sand and slowly rose to his feet. He flipped the thing on and started swiping it over the sand. Suddenly the thing let loose with a sickening chortle of electronic beeps. It sounded sick.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I muttered. “You got something so quick. It’s probably a bottle cap.”
He ignored me and waved it over the spot again.
“It’s buried,” he said, setting the detector down as he dug with his hands. After a moment he pulled out an old railroad spike.
“I’ll be damned,” I said, more impressed that he’d found something so quick instead of being too curious as to why a railroad tie was buried in the sand in the first place. He examined it and then slid it into his backpack
“You never know when that could come in handy,” he said and then started off down the shoreline.
I don’t know the exact dimensions of the sand bar. It’s longer than it is wide If I had to guess, I’d say the sand bar was about 150 yards long, possibly 200 at tops. It is probably about 50 yards wide at its widest spot.
Kessler’s metal detector was beeping with activity
“Hey chief come check this out,” he called out to me. He held out a ring a very expensive looking diamond in it.
“Is it real?” I asked.
“About ten grand worth,” he said. “There’s some real interesting trash here too.”

“That’s gross,” I said.
Aside from the bottles there was a cell phone, a shiny silver dildo, a tennis racket a nine iron, several old license plates (probably off of stolen cars), four sets of keys and an old gun.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Is that like a junker?” I asked, pointing at the gun.
“It’s a GIock, 9 millimeter and it appears to be in perfect working order. Only thing it’s missing is a clip.”
I grabbed the cell phone off of the pile and toyed with it. Surprisingly it had a signal.
“That thing works?” Kessler asked
“Yeah,” I said.
“Good. Keep it,” he said. “You never know when it could come in handy. Are there any other numbers in the history or in the contact list.”
“Yeah,” I said. There’s a shitload there. If we ever get bored on a rainy day we can reach out and touch somebody.”
“What’s up with that gun?” I asked. “Was it buried?”
“No, just tossed into some bushes,” he said. “You said yourself the cops came up here yesterday to write that ticket. Somebody was probably drunk, saw the cops coming, tossed the gun and then couldn’t find it.”
“Kessler, you might be on to something here,” I said. “Let me try that thing.”
He handed it to me and gave me a quick rundown on how to use it.
“This is pretty cool,” I said. “It’s true. The more shit we gather the more I see a pattern starting to emerge.”
“Yeah,” he said. “By all looks and appearances, I think this is a squatters ground for the filthy rich.”
I’d barely moved a foot when the metal detector went off again. Kessler came over and sifted his fingers through the sand, underneath the detector, and pulled up both a Timex and a small Swiss Army knife.
“Does the watch work?” I asked.
“What do you think?” he asked. “It’s a Timex, of course it’s working.”
A few moments later I found a pair of Ray Bans, which were only a little scratched on the lenses. Kessler walked over and tossed me something in the air. I caught it in my hand. It was a wallet.
“You know that guy?” he asked me.
I opened the wallet and looked at the driver’s license. Shit, it was a small world after all. I knew the guy allright. He was this asshole who worked for the parish, as department head of some sort for the planning department. As far as I knew he had a wife and child. I wonder if they’d been out here with him. I was pondering whether I should call him, as a joke, to tell him I found his wallet when I saw a bunch of bills tucked away in the billfold.
They were all hundreds, seven of them.
“Actually I do,” I told Kessler. “But I don’t like him much. You want a cut of this?”
“Nah, you keep it. You have mouths to feed chief,” Kessler said. If nothing else, he seemed more relaxed now.
“I found a used condom and a hypodermic needle over by those bushes,” he said.
“What kind of people come out here?”
“I saw them yesterday,” I said. “It was really a mixed crowd. There were even families out here.”
“I wouldn’t know that by looking at all this shit,” he said. “If I didn’t know any better I would think this was a regular pirates den. We’re going to really need some sort of good plan for just blending in here. We’re going to have to infiltrate them deep. Come in from behind some way.”
“Forget all that for a second,” I said. “There will be time for the book. What we need to do is totally excavate this sand bar. We’re sitting on a potential treasure trove here man. In one more week school lets out and this place will never be empty. We have totally free run of the place now. We should take advantage of it.”
He nodded in agreement.
We spent another few hours working the metal detector. We found eight more pair of sunglasses, three more watches, all gold, all expensive. We found six rings, ear-rings, a necklace, shell casings, canned tuna, two more cell phones, both of them dead, a pager, a garage door opener, and close to $200 in change.
The only thing we didn’t have was toilet paper, which was not a good thing because I had to take a shit. Kessler managed to find some Off wipes in his bag and he told me to just use those.
“I’m not gonna put bug spray up my ass,” I told him.
“It’s either that or don’t wipe at all,” he said.
Reluctantly, I grabbed the container from him and went to find a quiet place. I found a place in some shrubs and squatted over a log. I liked nature and all, but this was a little extreme.
I had just finished and was getting up to wipe when I noticed something near a bush. It was a strap of some sort and when I pulled it, I realized it was attached to a large green Army duffel bag. I pulled it and the bag was covered in earth, leaves and pine straw. I hefted it out to the clearing with me and motioned for Kessler to walk over. He did and we opened the thing. Inside were a bunch of blocks wrapped in plastic baggies, taped with duct tape.
“The mother lode,” he said.
“What do you think it is?” I asked.
“It’s either dope or coke, maybe both,” he said. “I think now would be a good time to try to flag a ride off of here.”

I was also trying to figure out how I was going to be able to place enough calls, collect enough quotes and information and then write a newspaper’s worth of copy for Tuesday’s afternoon’s deadline. I was in the middle matching story ideas up with the people I was going to have to talk to in order to get these stories, when the receptionist up front paged me and told me there was a Mr. Kessler on line one.
I hadn’t heard from Kessler since the day before, when I had been out on the boat. Not even a day had passed and here he was already calling.
“Hello,” I answered the line.
“Some people like to call me Maurice, cuz I’m right here, right here at your side,” he sung into the receiver.
“Has any one ever told you that you were a creepy bastard?” I asked him, half serious.
“Yeah, and I cut his hands off and mailed them to the Korean embassy in Moscow,” he said giggling.

“There is no Korean embassy in Moscow, you dimwit,” I said to him.
“Not officially at least,” he agreed ominously. “But enough of that. I’m calling because it’s time to go to work.”
“I am working,” I said to him. “I’ve already been here for two hours.”
“What are they running down there a sweat shop?” he asked. “I guess I’ll find out
soon enough won’t I.”
“Where are you Kessler?” I asked him.
“Oh, I’m close,” he said.
“How close?” I asked, half expecting him to materialize from the walls of my office with a machete clinched between his teeth.
“Just you never you mind,” he said. “That information’s on a need to know basis only and right now you don’t need to know. Anyway, like I was saying, it’s time to get to work, on the book. I think we’re going to have to move out to the sand bar.”
“People don’t actually live there,” I said. “At least I don’t think they do.”
“Yeah, but people live on their boats in the marina. And I bet people crash on the sand bar on weekend nights. Ten to one odds that sandbar is jumping on a Saturday night.”
“I’ll tell you what then,” I said. “You go sleep on the sand bar and record everything and I’ll write about it later.”

Just then Elaine, my publisher knocked on my door. I told her to please hold.
“I gotta go,” I told Kessler.
“I’ll see you soon,” he said.
“No you won’t,” I said to him. “I’m warning you Kessler, stay clear of me right now because I’ve got things to do. Like my job.”
I hung up and walked out to meet Elaine.
“I’ve got someone here for you to meet,” she said. “Remember the intern program I was telling you about?”
“Yeah, wow,” I said. “They already sent somebody.”
“They did,” she said. “He’s a graduate student from LSU. He’s a little bit older but he seems serious about wanting to be a journalist.”
“Free labor and a little relief is always a good thing,” I told her, adding, “I hope he can write a simple news story. I guess it’s better than being a door greeter at Wal-Mart.”
“Don’t be so crass, he’s not that old,” Elaine told me as she led me around a comer and through her office door.
Sitting in a seat facing Elaine’s desk, with his back turned to us, was a thin and balding man wearing a dark suit jacket. He rose as he heard us approaching and turned to look at us.
I nearly jumped. It was Kessler.
He winked at me as Elaine began to introduce us. Only his jacket was dark, navy actually. He also wore dress khaki pants, a button-down oxford, penny loafers and a paisley tie.
“Ashton this is Ryan Kessler, he’s going to be an intern here as part of his masters program for journalism,” Elaine told me.
I was trying not to look shocked as I leaned over and shook hands with him. Surprisingly, he didn’t assault me with his GI Joe Kung Fu action grip like he usually does. Instead, his handshake was firm and businesslike.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you Ashton,” he said to me, a mocking glint in his eye.
“Pleasure to meet you too sir,” I said, with heavy emphasis on the word sir.
“Please,” he said. “Just call me Kessler. Everyone else does; even my fiancee.”
It was an odd thing to say and suddenly Elaine stiffened a little with nervous apprehension.
“So when do we ride,” he said, clapping his hands together enthusiastically.
“Come again?” I asked.
“Yes,” Elaine cut in, beginning to explain. “Ryan is here from us on loan from LSU for what is it, six months?”
“Eight months actually,” Kessler added. “Possibly even a year if I do applied curriculum.”
I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about, much less how he’d managed to penetrate my inner sanctum and violate it in a mere matter of around ten minutes since his initial call to me.
Elaine continued. “I think just for the first week or two that you should basically follow Ashton around and see what he does.”
“I bet he does a lot,” Kessler said with a slight smirk. “It must take a lot of writing to fill up a newspaper every week.”
He was obviously mocking me. However, he was doing it in such a subtle way that Elaine had no clue as to what was really going on. Come to think of it, I didn’t either at that point. But the picture was becoming clearer.
“You’d be surprised,” Elaine told him. “In fact, I might even be able to get an extra computer moved into your office so Ryan could work with you. The office is big enough. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I think, today, that you guys should take an early lunch and then take some time visiting some of our branches of local government, so he can start meeting people.”
“I think that’s a great idea,” I said, suddenly thinking it was a good idea to get him out of the building before he started acting more creepy than he already was.

Once we got outside the building I looked at him and shook my head.
“Surprised to see me weren’t you,’ he said with a laugh. “You should have seen the look in your eyes. It was classic.”
“Kessler, you’ve infiltrated my place of employment,” I began.
“It was an easy op, as far as ops are concerned,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “But most civilian operations are. It’s the black ops that can really fuck you,” he added, snickering as he did.
He knows this type of talk makes me uneasy, and as a result, he uses every opportunity he can to try to spook me.
Kessler is one of those rare individuals who always manages to elicit a strong emotional response in people - for good or ill. Just as easy as he can scare the shit out of you by grabbing the steering wheel of the car while you’re driving, or ramble about assassination attempts in South America, I’ve seen him use it to charm the pants off both women and men.
He is a master of his art. He can usually does it by with mannerisms alone, sometimes as subtle as a slight raise of an eyebrow. I’ve seen him make grown men shifty and nervous merely by standing up straight. Kessler has the uncanny ability to blend right into crowd and totally vanish, and then, as if he has flipped a switch, come to life as the most prominent and vibrant personality in the room.
I know he had used his reasonably good looks and uncanny charm to weave some sort of plausible explanation for Elaine.
“God only knows what sort of lies you had to tell Elaine to get your foot in the door,” I said to him, almost in the same tone of voice I use to scold my five-year-old son. “I know when you do shit like this, you’re thorough, so God also only knows what you told the people from intern placement services.”
Then something ugly and dim dawned on me.
“What the fuck have you done to the real intern?” I asked him.
By this point was laughing hysterically.
“Oh, she’s okay,” he said. “I have her tied up back at my hotel room. I shot her up full of coke and smack last night and fucked her in every orifice until she called me daddy.”
I couldn’t even get words out, but my face was inflated and swollen with over-burdened red corpuscles full of stress, and I flailed my arms wildly. I tried to scream out but the sounds got caught in my throat in a strange gurgle.
“Relax,” he said. “There is no intern, but it was easy enough to get myself enrolled in the program, I wonder if we could order another one; maybe a cute little red-haired girl with big tits and an ass that can take a licking but keep on ticking. We’d fit in better on the sandbar if we had hot little intern at our sides.”
“I have a wife Kessler. And you have a fiancé,” I told him.
“Pilar left me,” Kessler said with a sigh.
“You told Elaine you had a fiancée just now,” I said.
“Of course I did,” he replied. “A man never, ever admits to another woman that he’s recently been dumped; unless he’s specifically aiming for sympathy sex.”
Kessler led me to his car, a dark green Mustang Cobra. It was sleek and menacing looking. In short, it matched Kessler’s personality to a tee.
“As much as I’d like to, I don’t have time to go gallivanting all over town with you this morning Kessler,” I told him.
“Relax man,” he said, turning the dial of the radio and sliding a tape into the cassette deck.
It was a gorgeous day out and even though I did need to get work done, a quick ride down to Madisonville would help me clear my head. Weird music was coming from the tape Kessler slid into the deck.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m your intern now. We can knock that shit out easy. I used to be a journalist you know.”
Meanwhile the music was still playing, “well we’re big rock singers, we got golden finger and we’re loved everywhere we go, we sing about beauty and we sing about truth at $10,000 a show, we take all kind of pills that give us all kinds of thrills, but the thrill we’ve never known, is the thrill that will getcha when you get your picture on the cover of the rolling stone.”
“When were you ever a journalist?” I asked him “You never told me about that.”
“You never asked,” he said. “I was the editor of our base newspaper when I was in the service. Now quiet. I told you we had work to do.”
The main task at hand, he said, would be for us to set up a base of operations somewhere. I reminded him again about my family and he just shrugged and muttered something about conjugal visits. He also told me he’d spoken to his publisher friend and that she seemed interested in the book, but that we had to move on it now, before someone else jumped on the story.
“With all this Survivor stuff and other reality tv crap still going strong, she thinks this could be big,” he said, jabbering as he reached into the back seat, opened a small ice chest and removed a beer.
I cringed a little because as he did all this, he managed to pass a small BMW while headed up Louisiana 21, toward Interstate 12. Kessler was in a frenzy, of sorts, which was odd, because he usually is also a master of composure. His chatter was all over the map, but eventually we came full circle, back to the idea of setting up a base of operations.
“What I need is a boat,” he said. “Then we could just set up shop smack dab in the middle of the marina and shuttle out to the sandbar whenever we needed to get out there.”
“Well don’t look at me,” I said. “They don’t pay that sort of salary for weekly newspaper editors.”
“Ahha,” he exclaimed. “This is exactly why you need to write this book. Consider it an investment in your family’s future.”
“There won’t be a family left to invest in if I move to the sand bar and go on an all-out crusade to write a book,” I told him.
“Oh I don’t know about that,” he countered. “Andrea is very supportive of you and your efforts.”
This was true. But she also gets edgy when I’m putting in 50 hour weeks for a job that barely pays the rent. There was a wide array of reasons why she wouldn’t be down with the idea of me moving to the sand bar.
It just wasn’t an option for me. I didn’t really see why it was necessary to move to the sand bar. Regardless of what Kessler thought he knew, I seriously doubted that anyone actually really lived out there.
“Hell,” I reasoned, high tides usually covered the thing for almost half the year, especially during hurricane season, which was once again breathing down our necks.
It was around this point that he winked at me again and said, “Oh by the way, she told me to tell you to have a nice day and for us to be home early tonight because she was marinading the Polynesian drumettes.”
Christ.

Kessler was relentless. I’d never seen this side of himbefore. Usually, in the past, when he came into town, I was lucky to get an afternoon with him, as he was always running around cutting deals and visiting with associates.
Now in a matter of less than 48 hours, he was well on his way to becoming a permanent fixture in my life. He came to visit us last summer for a barbecue at the house, and ended up cutting the visit short when he got a page from an arms dealer m Soho.
Andrea liked Kessler, which was cool. Things always flow a little smoother when your wife actually likes your friends.
But I also know how weird and age inappropriate he can be too. I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of him catching Andrea at home alone. It’s not that I don’t trust her, or him for that matter, but he was definitely acting fucking weird and I knew Pilar’s departure from his life had something to do with it.
I’d only met her once before, a year or so ago, right after Kessler had informed me he had retired from all life-threatening activities.
To this day, I still don’t really know what is Kessler does, or did, for a living. Arms dealing was a pretty legitimate business endeavor of his, along with real estate, but I get the feeling both of those ventures are hobbies more than anything. He jokes too much, and knows too much to have not been involved with some sort of intelligence work but on the times I have just asked him point blank what it is he did, he’s told me he’d have to kill me if he told me.
He seemed distracted and I asked him again if he d stopped by the house.
“No,” he said, downing his beer. “I called this morning from my hotel room. She sounded surprised to hear from me. You didn’t tell her I was coming to town,” he asked, almost sounding hurt.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t think about it. So you said you have a hotel room.
“Yeah, for now I do,” he said. “I’ve got to buy a boat though.”
“How are you going to buy a boat on intern wages?” I asked him, with a laugh.
“I actually sold off two ten-acre lots this morning, probably while you were still putting your underwear on,” he said. “So now, we need to find a boat. Where is the closest convenience store? I need to find one of those News on Wheels magazines. Don’t they have boats in them too?”
“I’m sure they do,” I said. I then ventured, “So you’re like planning to be spending a lot of time here or is this just a phase. Because I’ve never known you to stay in any one
“You know, there comes a point in time in every man’s life where he knows the beginning of the end is near,” Kessler said. “You sit back, take stock of your life and realize yeah, sure there were adventures, but what did it all mean? Garden variety existential angst I suppose. But you mix it up with a couple broken marriages, no children, no time for them, and a biological clock that seems to be bordering on the edge of extinction…it’s enough to make a man stop and take a long pause.”
He looked at me and added, “I’m depressed chief. I never had much of a world in the first place. But the world I did have lost it’s shiny core when Pilar left me. I’ve burned all my bridges. I’ve called in all my favors bud. You’re all that I have left.”
“Christ,” I muttered. “That is depressing.”
“Fucking tell me about it,” he said. “I figure this book project will be good for me, maybe even therapeutic.
Although I was semi-touched by his alarming ability to cut through the macho-man bullshit that is so much a part of the Kessler mystique, and open up to me like he had, I was also a little annoyed that I was like the fall-back plan.
My own life was far from in order. I didn’t have the resources, compassion or the patience to deal with Kessler’s problems too.
“I know this puts you in an awkward position,” he said. “But how the hell do you think I feel? I’ve been a lot of things over the past 45 years, but one of them has never been homeless. I’ve always had a place to lay my head.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What happened to your condo in Key West?”
“It was Key Biscayne,” he said, and then added, “I signed it all over to Pilar. It’s all hers now - along with my heart.”
“No need to be mellow dramatic about it,” I said.
“You insensitive jerk-off,” he replied. “Here I am, pouring my heart out to you and this is what I get?”
“What do you mean you signed it over to her?” I asked, still unable to get past this minute detail.
“Just what I said,” he muttered, tossing the empty beer bottle into the back seat, reaching behind him, grasping for another.
“Never mind that,” I told him, slapping his hand. “You fucking keep your eyes on the road.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “What’s the matter? Did my little maneuver around the beemer scare you?”
He conceded though and I reached behind the seat and removed two beers, Heinekens, from the cooler on the back floor.
“Damn Kessler, it’s not even ten yet,” I told him. “You could have at least packed light beers. Heinekens are a little extreme for this time of the morning.”
“Yes mom, I’ll remember that next time,” he muttered.
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “Pilar dumped you and you just gave her the condo? The way I see it, you’re the victim. You should have at least gotten the condo.”
“Believe me,” he said warily. “I thought about that too. I don’t know though. Signing it over seemed like the right thing to do.”
“Hello,” I said. “Now you’re homeless.”
“Kind of sucks doesn’t it?” he admitted.
“I’d say. What the hell happened? You guys were like together for what, three, four years?”
“We actually met twelve years ago,” he said. “We dated on and off for around three years. Somewhere around that time, I went overseas and then Guetemala and Haiti. I came back stateside in 2000 after that clown Bush took office. I looked her up and the next thing you know, we’d fallen in love all over again.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“It’s an ugly tale,” he said. “Lets put it this way. I think she had a few wild oats still left to sow.”
“Aww man, I’m sorry,” I said. “She had an affair?”
“Several actually,” Kessler admitted. “We took a trip to Aruba and things got out of control.”
“You mean she cheated on you while you were on a vacation?’ I asked incredulously. “More than once?”
“We were fighting on the way over,” he said. “From the minute we touched down it was like she had some kind of point to prove. It started with the pool boy; then the spa boy; then the parking attendant. It was awful.”
“You caught her in the act?” I asked.
“Oh God no,” he said. “It would have ended up in a blood frenzy and heads would have been rolling all over that godforsaken, piece of shit little island. As it is, I set fire to a canoe stand.”
“She fucked the guy at the canoe stand?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “She was fucking all the hired help. It was shameless. I was like a walking joke. All the help would snicker when they saw me walking by. The canoe boy was just the most arrogant one of the bunch. I didn’t have to go to Aruba to get treated like a jerk. Hell, I could have done that down in the keys.”
“What the hell was she so pissed off about?” I asked.
“The standard stuff,” he said. “She called me insensitive, self-centered, even hateful.”
“But those are your good qualities,” I said, trying to lighten the brevity of the conversation some.
“Those were the nicest things she said,” Kessler admitted. “She went on to blame me for everything wrong and horrible that had ever happened in her life, not to mention a few things on the global scale, like terrorism, war and a few other social ills.”
“That seems just a little drastic,” I said.
“Well to people like me and you, yes, it does,” Kessler began to explain. “The fact of the matter is, is that most people don’t understand the business I’m in. Not even you, fully at least. But you have the intelligence not to want to know and not to ask questions that might bring answers that would keep you awake at night with nightmares. I mean think about it, it’s not like I could ever tell Pilar I was just in Peru, training an army to carry out an assassination attempt. From the get-go with Pilar, there was always….dishonesty, on my part; because I couldn’t tell her the truth. It was more like dishonesty by default.”
“Sounds to me like you’re treading a little moral tightrope there,” I said.
“I never lied to her outright about what I did,” he said. “I didn’t want to have to lie to her. So I never did. And when she pressed to know what I did, I would tell her that I couldn’t tell her, for security reasons and that would just scare the mortal shit out her. And then there were all the different bugs I’d pick up from different places and a large machete scar across my chest. She knew she was dealing with a heavy and it upset her that I would never tell her what I did.”
He paused.
“Relationships are a liability for a man like me,” he said. “I learned that back in Cambodia after Sonlei got killed. I swore to myself after that it could never happen again. Pilar just flew in right under the radar and for a while, at least it really worked out well.” “What happened?” I asked.
“She lost a brother during the September 11th attacks,” Kessler replied. “He was working in the Pentagon. After that it all went downhill. I was kind of re-activated, as a consultant of course. She didn’t understand it”
“Fuck,” I said. “Who here does?”
“You for one, I think,” he said. “You’ve been trying for a long time to support a family on journalist wages. People can only take so much. When you fully realize you have absolutely nothing to lose, and all the glory is in the afterlife like these middle easterners do, you don’t think twice about strapping a bomb to your chest and taking out a church.”
“I can see that to a degree,” I admitted. “We’ve been through some hard times. But I have never thought once about taking part in a suicide bombing.”
“That’s the difference between them and us,” Kessler said. “They take this afterlife business and Allah seriously. We pretend to take the afterlife seriously, but our culture is mainly hedonistic. We’re all about the here and now and what we can do in this life. We go to church on Sundays, hell we might even really be deeply spiritual, but when you get right down to it, our focus is on this life.”
“It’s called responsibility,” I said.
“Maybe so, maybe not,” Kessler laughed lightly. “We’re all savages at heart chief. Don’t ever forget that for a minute. We should all be dancing naked in the moonlight. That’s why this sand bar interests me so much.”

This was a strange note I had scribbled to myself while I sat in my car, waiting for the Sheriff’s Office boat to come pick me up.

When I originally arrived here an hour ago, I realized just as I was pulling into the
parking lot, that I’d left my camera in my wife’s 4-Runner on Friday night when she, my
son, Alex, and I went out to the fishing pier on the Mandeville lakefront.
I walked out to the bait shop on the pier at Marina Del Mar and asked a lady and her two sons if they’d seen the Sheriff’s Boat fueling up.
They all looked at me like I was a raving lunatic.
I might have been for all I knew. I’d just smoked a bowl full of good pot and was feeling jittery about having to meet a cop while stoned and then explain to him how I forgot my camera at home.
Instead of pushing the issue I backed up, out of their line of vision and paged Charlie. He called me back minutes later, apologizing profusely for not remembering to tell the boat cop to come pick me up.
He told me someone would be at the dock to pick me up in around 45 minutes, which was good, because it gave me time to go home, grab the camera and some coffee and smoke another bowl.
I did these things and put gas in my car and still had 15 minutes before the boat cop arrived.
There were more weird notes in my reporter’s pad from that morning too:

“Which brings us to now: me in my car, waiting for the sheriff’s boat. All I can see are masts, rows of them, glistening in the sun and reaching toward the sky. Bob Marley’s Redemption Song is playing on the radio and I’m pondering the events that have led me to this point - still stoned and about to climb aboard a sheriff’s boat. Am I asking for certain arrest? Surely not. I’ve smoked a few cigarettes, in an effort to hide the
smell. I also have my shades on I figure the wind, once the boat gets moving, will mask any further odors.
I wonder what sort of Nazi Charlie will send me out on the water with. Will he have a K-9 aboard and if so, will it rip me from limb to limb, as it noses my crotch and smells remnants of marijuana smell on my fingertips.
These things are too ugly to ponder. I just want to get out on the water and see what, if any sort of story is out here. I suspect there is- but I am a little hesitant to hang my hat on the premise alone of rich people behaving badly. There has to be more to it than that. Or maybe not. Maybe that’s all it will really boil down to.”

I was still trying to shake the paranoia from my head as I ambled down to the boat dock, where I had seen the sheriff’s boat pull up moments before.
I walked up to the deputy, who was around six feet tall with sandy brown hair, shook his hand and introduced myself. He introduced himself as Charlie, and I climbed aboard.

The first thing he did was hand me a large jacket that looked like it was made from Gortex.
“I’ll take that jacket of yours and store it down here,” he said as I handed it to him. “That one will keep the wind off of you.”
I zipped up the bulky thing and realized it had built-in flotation gear.
“Is this a life jacket too?” I asked.
“Yep,” he said. “Pretty cool isn’t it? We have all kinds of neat toys. I’ll show you some more once we get going.”
Our first stop came about a hundred yards down river from the boat launch at Marina Del Mar. Charlie pulled us over to show me an eagles nest perched high up in one of the trees in the marsh on the east side of the Tchefuncte River.
“There’s a momma and two babies that live up there,” he told me. “Looks like they’re gone now, though.”
He maneuvered the boat some, getting me in closer, and I rose and took a few pictures with the newspaper’s digital camera. I’d already left the damned thing home, I thought to myself, all I need to do now is drop it in the fucking river too.
I didn’t drop it, though, and I was able to get some pretty cool pictures of the eagle’s nest. Charlie assured me it was very cool to see their white, feathery heads poking up over the walls of the nest.
As I sat back down I noticed some of the gadgets mounted near the ignition switch and steering wheel of the sheriff’s boat - a single engine, 21-foot Cape Horn.
Charlie tells me The Sheriff’s Office has six Cape Horn’s - three 21-foot craft and three 24-footers.
The 24-foot boats are equip with twin engines and 21-footers have single engines. Three of the craft are used for waterway patrols on the western end of the parish, the other three are deployed on the waterways on the eastern end.
I ask him about the things mounted on his dashboard. They include a standard marine radio, a radar, a depth finder and a GPS system that basically lays out the path of the river for them. The depth finder was the coolest thing on board. According to Charlie, it could detect cars or even a human body if the bottom of the lake or river were smooth enough.
Of course, the moment he accelerated and the boat picked up speed, the numbers started scrambling erratically.
He showed me the “no-wake” zones- which were near the marina and River Rats and then downriver some more to the Madisonville public boat launch.
“That sand bar is something else,” Charlie said, as we made our way out to the lake. “It’s a little cold this morning, but on a warm day in summer, when school is out there’s anywhere from between sixty to a hundred boats all docked here. They pull right up to the shore in flatboats and on jet skis, but the bigger sailboats and party barges anchor in the river. It’s pretty phenomenal.
“A lot of people party out there?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, this is, after all, southern Louisiana,” he said. “Alcohol, boating and fishing are all sort of intertwined.”
“Ever catch any public officials out here?” I asked him
I had visions of becoming some sort of deranged paparazzi, perched on the sand bar with an ice chest full of Coronas, trying to catch senators and assistant district attorneys with their pants down and their nostrils dribbling with cocaine residue, the neighbors daughter bent over in a compromising position. But these things were too weird for words and could end with a one-way trip to jail if I started jabbering to Charlie like a madman.
“If I told you that I’d have to shoot you,” he finally said with a good-natured laugh
“Some of them must get pretty torn up though,” I said.
“Oh yeah, we see that a lot,” he said. “Most of the time we just tell them to sleep it off. But we stop them if we see they’re trying to get back out on the water with a boat. The state DWI laws are applicable to any motor vehicle, including boats.
“I bet you get all kinds of people out here” I said to him, trying not to sound too
weird.
“That’s absolutely true,” he said. “I’ve never seen more of a mix of people than I
have on the waters of St. Tammany Parish.”
I asked him if he minded if I took notes. He said no and I asked him to explain this more to me.
“Just a lot of different types of boats and a lot of different types of people,” he said. “You get all kinds of people - rich, poor, black and white. You have teenagers just hanging out on the river all day during the summer. You have families that come out usually on weekends. We have a lot of people both from out of state and from Baton Rouge. Haven’t figured out the Baton Rouge crew yet. They’re kind of a strange bunch. Then you have all kinds of homes all the way up river to Three Rivers Road, and even to Boague Falaya Park up in Covington.”

Charlie paused for a second and squinted into the glistening sun.

“Everybody is different,” he said. “The crabbers in Madisonville are different from the crabbers on the east side of the parish, who crab out near the lake and near the Rigolets and Chef Pass. All the different social aspects of it interest me. You wanna see what I’m talking about, you should go out with one of our patrols on the east side of the parish next weekend.”
It was an idea - boating as a social phenomenon; but I wanted to keep the thing concentrated for now, though, on the Tchefuncte River, with a heavy focus on the sand bar. If Charlie was right, there might be a massive story here. Idle visions of book deals floated through my head as we approached Lake Pontchartrain.
Only a slight grin crept across his face as we navigated the channel markers to the lake. As we cleared the last of them Charlie showed me how boaters at sea could line up the front of their boats with a black stripe painted down the side of the Madsionville
“We’re going to pick up speed here,” he said in a dead-pan tone
I braced myself, but was still rocked a little as he thrust the throttle forward As the
Engines began to churn heavily, the bow of the boat practically stood upright in front of us. It was pure unadulterated adrenalin, as the boat began to pick up serious speed and
slam rhythmically, bambada-bambada-bambada, on the water.

Mists blew up at us, stinging, and when the boat was traveling at a certain angle, it felt like I could have been on the back of a motorcycle without a face-screen. The skin of my face and my lips flapped uselessly in the powerful wind and it felt like I couldn’t breathe. But then, we’d slightly alter coarse, and I’d be protected again behind the wind screen near the steering wheel of the boat.
We slowed down as we circled and began moving back toward the mouth of the river. Charlie maneuvered the boat and swung up behind a boat in front of us.
“I did a safety stop on them this morning,” he told me.
I asked him what all was involved in a safety stop and he told me we would make one once we got back on the river
Not one to disappoint, Charlie picked a small craft that was just making its way up to River Rats and the sand bar and flagged the driver down. He steered his boat up close until they were side-by-side on the river.
Charlie sat straddled with one leg in the cop boat and one leg in the guy’s boat.
“How are you this morning?” Charlie asked him and the guy said he was fine.
Charlie told the guy it was just a routine safety check and asked the man for a copy of his driver s license and boat registration papers. Once that was checked out, Charlie asked the guy if there were life vests aboard.
The man said yes, but that he stored them under seat.
“They have to be out where we can see them, or more importantly, where you can get to them easily,” Charlie told him, then asked the man if he had a fire extinguisher on board.
The man produced one, but again, it had been stored in plastic box of some sort.
The problem, Charlie said, is that these items are usually stored somewhere like underneath a seat, and not within arm’s reach.
“All it takes is an instant for something to happen on a boat,” he said to me after he’d let the guy go and we were moving upriver toward the Madisonville Harbor Bridge. “The time a person spends scrambling below for a life jacket or fire extinguisher can really be the difference between life and death when you’re on the water. People should have their life jackets close by, if not on, and fire extinguishers should be mounted, if at all possible, and within arm s reach.”
We were in luck. Just as we began our approach toward the bridge, it opened for a larger boat in front of us. Charlie radioed the bridge operator and asked him if he would hold it for us. The guy said it was no problem and we began our journey up river.
Once we rounded the first bend of the river, that completely blocked our view of the harbor, I began to notice the GPS system. It was pretty cool too. He showed me where on the monitor, our boat was. It reminded me of that old Atari game Night Racer where the road sort of unfurled in front of you. The GPS basically did the same thing but with a lot more advance warning. It charted approaching land masses as well as natural curves of the river.
We crossed under the Interstate 12 and came to Three Rivers Road. The three rivers which meet at this juncture are the Tchefuncte, Bogue Falaya and Abita rivers.
Charlie pointed to a tree with a rope swing attached to it.
“About two years ago, a kid drowned right here,” he said
“This close to shore?” I asked.
“Sometimes the river can pull you in pretty quick,” Charlie said. “In this case though, if I remember right, he hit something, maybe his head.”
It was a morbid little tale, but it helped to reinforce the thrust of my newspaper story, which was boater safety.
There were other stories too. Charlie went on to tell me how bad weather presents its own set of problems, particularly in the lake.
“When these summer thunderstorms kick up, the lake can go from totally calm to a four-foot chop almost within 15 minutes,” Charlie told me. “If you’re out in the lake and you see one of these things brewing, pack up your gear and get out of there. Don’t try to ride it out. Get out of there and try to keep ahead of it. And try to stay calm. The worst thing you can do, in any situation on the water is panic. I know that’s easier said than done, but again, clear thinking and a quick, solid plan of action can be the difference between life and death.

As we began to head upriver, towards Bogue Falaya Park, in Covington, Charlie began making more routine safety checks. As mentioned, the second one came the first time we were headed in from the lake.
The next happened a few moments later, as we cruised upriver past River Rats.
A small craft suddenly cranked it coming out of the Marina Del Ray boat dock,
leaving a pretty solid wake behind in its path.
“You see that?” Charlie said to me. “That’s what we, in law enforcement, call a no-no.”
“Look at him, he knows it too,” I said, noticing the man, who appeared to have his
family on board, suddenly cut the throttle and slow down to a snail’s pace.
I’d done the equivalent to this, in my car. It’s like slamming the gas on a yellow light, knowing you’re not going to make it, right in front of a cop. By the time you notice the cop sitting there in his cruiser, you’re already committed because the gas is mashed down. All you can do after that, or a rolling stop, is just sit there and hope he either didn’t see you.
The only problem was that we had seen this guy and he knew we saw him. As we pulled up next to him, Charlie sat down with one leg hurled over the side of the guy’s boat and kept one leg in the sheriff’s boat.
The man, muttered, “It was the wake right?”
“Yes sir,” Charlie said, launching into a quick lecture. ‘There’s a no wake zone here for a reason. You see how I’m sitting here now?”
The man nodded, suddenly unsure of himself. His wife was pretty and he had two children, around ten years old, in the back of the boat. The demeanor of everyone on board seemed to sink and the man’s wife had this, “See, I told you this would happen if you went too fast,” sort of look in her eyes.
“Well people kind of sit or squat the same way when they’re at the dock putting gas in their boats,” Charlie said. “A strong wake can rock a man straight into the water. I’ve seen it happen before.”
“I see,” said the man with a nod. “I’m very sorry officer.”
“Well, I’m just going to let you off with a warning today,” Charlie said, then as an afterthought, decided to perform a safety check on the man’s boat. He had all his gear, but it was all stored out of view. Charlie told him he needed to keep life preservers out, where deputies or Wildlife and Fisheries agents could see them, and that he needed to mount his fire extinguisher.
The man just nodded and agreed with everything Charlie told him.

By the time we made our third or fourth stop I felt like I was becoming a seasoned
pro.

My buzz had leveled out, mingling nicely with the natural high of being out on the water, and I began to grow bolder.
“You need to keep those life preservers out where you can get to them,” I told one guy during a safety check, and Charlie just looked at me queerly.
But I shrugged him off and kept jabbering.
“The seconds it takes you to scramble for a life preserver could be a matter of life or death once you get out there on the water,” I preached to him righteously.
The guy just looked at me and shook his head in defeat and apologized a few times until Charlie finally dismissed him with a warning only and no citations.
As the guy pulled away I caught a glimpse of Charlie who was eyeing me with a bemused look in his eyes. He finally shook his head and chuckled slightly.
“That was pretty damn convincing,” he told me.
“At least I didn’t have to lay my Jack Nicholson on him,” I said, muttering, “You can’t handle the truth,” for effect.
“Hell, I might even have to deputize your sorry ass before the day is done,” he said. “Speaking of which - how long do you want to hang?”
“I’m in no rush,” I said. “I’ll hang for as long as possible. I just want to get a feel for the day in the life of a boat cop is.”
Just then the marine radio churned to life and Charlie muttered, “You might just be about to find out.”
The squawk of the radio was indecipherable at first and until I heard, “man in the
water…coast guard on route.”
Charlie keyed the mic and let loose with a barrage of weird cop codes like zero alpha bravo 1090, or some similar nonsense. Whatever happened to good old fashioned ten code, I found myself wondering.
Some time around 1996, around the time of the advent of the Internet, I befriended a state trooper in North Carolina while online. Over the course of our friendship, he ended up sending me a cheat sheet of ten codes, and from there on out that’s how we sort of communicated.
I wasn’t sure what codes Charlie was using though, as he spoke into the mic. Eventually, a voice on the other end of the radio said something about Biloxi and we realized that the man overboard alert was coming from out of Mississippi.
We’d traveled all the way up the Tchefuncte, almost to Bogue Falaya Park, in Covington, when Charlie decided to turn us around and start the trek back to Madisonville.
The marine radio came to life again. This time it was Charlie’s sergeant. They talked for a while and then Charlie’s cell phone rang. He answered and began speaking again. After a brief conversation which I couldn’t really make heads or tails out of Charlie hung up the phone and told me his Sergeant needed assistance down at the boat launch.

It was around this time that my own ell phone rang. I answered and it was Kessler.
“How’s it going chief?” he asked me.
“On the sheriff’s boat as we speak,” I told him.
“I see,” he muttered, and then screamed, “Where’s your bong? You got any pot man? How bout some Valium? Heroin? China White.”

“Shut up you ignorant cocksucker,” I told him. “I’m with law men now. Don’t make us have to come arrest you.”
Thankfully, the boat engines were droning and drowned out most of Kessler’s gibberish. But this didn’t stop his good time.

“What about opium man, you got any opium?” he asked. “I’ll trade you my mini 16 over and under, grenade launcher for a couple Valium man.”
“I’m hanging up now,” I told him and did just that. He called back, but I put the phone on vibrate.

“What was that all about?” Charlie asked.

“Just a friend of mine,” I said. “He’s not a well man. I think his woman just left him for a Samoan.”

Around twenty minutes later, we were almost to the boat launch to pick up the sergeant, when another problem presented himself. We’d just cleared the draw bridge over the river, which separates Madisonville from Mandeville, when news that a very large pleasure craft was adrift and headed on a collision course with a bunch of boats that had anchored near the sand bar.

By the time we got there, the boat had been moved, out of harms way. It was a huge yacht looking thing, and still was pretty close to the other boats that had begun to congregate and drop anchor at the sand bar.

A guy on a sailboat yelled over to us, “We’ve gone aboard and re-anchored Shadow Dancer. The owner was not aboard, but someone should try to reach him, so he knows we were on board.”
Charlie nodded and then radioed in.
“Negative,” he said. “The owner is nowhere to be found. He took of in lifeboat or something. I have no idea where he is, he probably went to get lunch or something.”
As we crossed to the other side of the river to pick up the sergeant, Charlie explained to me how it is important for large craft like the Shadow Dancer to always drop enough line when anchoring.
“If you keep the line too taught, what ends up happening is that you run the risk of having the anchor shake itself loose,” he said.
The Sergeant was a short guy with sharp cop features. He was wearing sunglasses. He introduced himself to me and we shook hands. While Charlie was more or less laid back, this guy seemed a little bit more tightly wound and had a definite asshole cop aura floating around him, which was fine by me just as long as he didn’t try to arrest me.
The Sergeant had barely climbed into our boat when we got another radio call, this time from cops in the radio tower on the Causeway bridge. The bridge cops reported there was a crabber about a half mile out in the lake, who was apparently stranded.
When we came upon him, the man’s small boat was loaded down with wire crab traps, and he was waving a yellow raincoat in an effort to hail nearby boaters. In a matter of moments, the patrol boat had sidled up to his craft and hooked a tow rope to its bow.
“Put your life jacket on,” said the Sergeant, having to raise his voice some above the idling engines of the 21-foot Cape Horn patrol boat. The man motions that he can’t get to his life jacket because it is stored under the seat, beneath the stacks of crab traps.
“A lot of good it does him there,” said the Sergeant, as Charlie turned the patrol boat back around and began the voyage back to the boat launch. Once safely back on land, Fletcher thanked the patrolmen profusely.
“I just can’t tell you how grateful I am,” the man said. “I honestly don’t know what I would have done if you guys hadn’t shown up.”
This time it was the Sergeant who spoke up. “Well, you need to keep your life preservers out where you can get to them in case something happens,” he said.
The man nodded and as he turned away, the Sergeant said to me, “A lot of this is just plain old common sense. You’d be amazed at how folks who are usually intelligent people, just seem to get stupid once they hit the waterways..”
Charlie finished untying the tow rope from the crabber’s boat and the Sergeant then nodded.
“It’s time to go pay my fiend a visit now,” said The Sergeant.
His “friend” was a guy who had earlier sped across the no wake zone, between the boat launch and the sand bar, at top speed on jet skis. The Sergeant, who was patrolling
the boat launch at the time, didn’t have a boat with him
“I told a friend of his, who is a girl I know, to go tell the guy to come back over here and see me,” The Sergeant said. “I told her to tell him if he didn’t come see me that I was going to see him. Well, needless to say he either thought I was bluffing or stupid, and he didn’t come see me. So now, we’re going to pay him a visit.”
In a matter of minutes we were across the river, and pulled up to the sandbar.
This was the closest I’d been yet to the sand bar without actually going on land. I was amazed at what I saw. On land were about 50 people, scattered into various groups. Some of them were families. One family even had a tent and a hibachi grill set up. The rest, though, were clearly groups of friends. A lot of the smaller craft had just pulled right up to land.
Off of our port side was a small group of people. Charlie nudged me and I noticed than one of them was a pretty good looking woman who was laying flat on her stomach.
“Look at the ass on that one,” he whispered to me. “This is one of the perks of the
job.”
The Sergeant spotted his man, who was around 20 yards away on our starboard side, sitting down talking to a bunch of friends. The Sergeant stood up, pointed at the guy and motioned for him to come over.
The guy, who probably wasn’t much older than 30, ambled over with a stupid look on his face.
“You got a problem son,” The Sergeant said to the guy.
“No sir,” he said, with a far away glazed look in his eyes. It was a look I knew well. The guy was stoned, but I wasn’t about to let on that I knew this.
It was cool if the Sergeant made the presumption on his own, but I wasn’t about to let on that I knew how to identify stoned people. This sort of talent would obviously lead to awkward questions from the cops.
“Didn’t your friend tell you I wanted to see you?” The Sergeant asked him.
“I thought she was just messing with me,” the guy said stupidly, shaking his head, squinting as the sun beamed into his eyes.
“Well you were going way too fast in a no wake,” The Sergeant said. “I need to see some ID.”
The guy produced it and The Sergeant radioed in the information. Meanwhile, Charlie was checking out another woman on our starboard side.
“She’s a Saintsation,” he told me. “She comes out here almost every weekend.”
The Saintsations were the official dance team and cheerleaders, for the New Orleans Saints football team. From where I sat, she appeared to be pretty good looking.
But that really wasn’t what I was interested in.

I am, after all, a happily married man. When I mentioned this to the boys they just chuckled and said, “It never hurt to look.”
It was true, I guess, but the fact of the matter is that Andrea basically puts all women to shame. No. Any dingbat with a sack full of testosterone and a couple of beers in him, could gape at bikini-clad women all day. It takes a real pro, though, to figure out the culture of a community. And that’s what I’d stumbled into our there on the water that day. It was a community of river rats.
But I still didn’t know them.
When we initially pulled up, we didn’t get so much as a glance. The glances we did get were those of baleful annoyance. Although nothing was said, the message was clear. The cops were not wanted or needed on the sand bar- merely tolerated.
The Sergeant wrote the guy a ticket and we slowly moved away.
“Well, this is the part of the story you have to leave out,” Charlie said.
“Yeah,” agreed The Sergeant. “What stays on the sheriff’s boat, stays on the sheriff’s boat.”
I told them their secret was safe with me and we eventually docked for lunch.
“You wanna come with?” Charlie asked me.
“No, I have to be getting home,” I told him, thanking him for having me along.
“Any time you want to get out on the water just page us,” he told me.
I thanked him again and began walking back to my car.

I bumped into Glen at the Mandeville City Council meeting on Thursday night and reminded him that this was absolutely, positively, beyond every conceivable shadow of a doubt - the weekend - I would finally do the ride-along and write a story for The Weekly News, the weekly paper I was managing editor for.
When I saw him on Thursday night, I told him I was ready to do the ride-along on
Saturday.

On Friday night, long after I’d left the office for the weekend, I noticed that the atmosphere seemed sort of heavy. Andrea and I went to bed late, but it was still only “threatening rain” when we finally fell asleep.
I was woken around five in the morning by a blast of thunder that rattled windows and shook me from a deep sleep. I sat there, awake, wondering what this was going to do for my boat trip.
By 10:30 a.m. I woke fully and got Alex and Andrea out the door to go see Nemo on Ice and paged Glen. He didn’t respond with his usual speed. But it was the weekend too, and he’d recently sent out a media alert informing the press of his right to take back his “Glen Time” (How creepy is that?), so I was surprised when he actually called me back around 20 minutes later.
“What’s up with the boat for today?” I asked him.
“You want to go out in this weather?” he asked me.
He strongly advised me against this because, for starters, there were certain liability issues to be concerned with in hauling a professional journalist, a news editor no less, out o sea in the middle of a raging storm.
He also said that with the exception of a few stubborn fishermen, there probably
wouldn’t be many people actually out on the water.
“It’s supposed to be sunny and warm tomorrow, do you just want to do it then?” he asked me.
I told him that was fine. There were a lot of things that needed to get done around the house. However, it was still early. I wanted to go out to the fishing pier. The weather outside was nasty and I wanted to be out in it, hopefully catching some fish.

What happened next was like something you’d seen in an old Biblical movie starring Charleton Heston.
The fishing pier, at Sunset Point, was dead save four a small group of men huddled under a covered section of the pier about 250 feet out over Lake Pontchartrain. I’d just walked up when one of the guys nodded at another guy standing next to me and said, “Your line, your line.”
The guy next to me quickly ran over and reeled in small croaker. Not a minute had passed by when his other pole jerked spasmodically. He checked it and, sure enough, there was another fish. He did this again around three times in quick succession.
After a few moments, I felt a fish tag my line, but when I reeled it in, the bait had been taken. Foiled again.
I re-baited and cast the line back out. I didn’t introduce myself to them and they didn’t introduce themselves, and that was cool.
I was listening to their idle chatter when the talk took on an ominous tone.
“Yep, Wildlife and Fisheries were out here checking licenses again this morning,” one of them said.
“I hear they’ve been coming every day breakfast, lunch and dinner” said another one of them, who was missing a few of his front teeth.
Suddenly the guy next to me exclaimed, “Holy shit!” He reeled in his line and had successfully managed to pull out two croakers on his double-rigged line.
The talk about the fishing license thing was making me nervous because I had no fishing license. Meanwhile, the maniac next to me was pulling them up like there was no tomorrow. Another guy added, “You gotta be stupid to fish off a public pier with no license anyway.”
Indeed. The fish-head boy had a point.
Weeks ago, when the pier celebrated its grand opening, it was announced that the Wildlife and Fisheries guys would be patrolling the pier regularly.
I suddenly began scanning the parking lot for dark green SUV’s that looked like
Wildlife and Fisheries trucks. Seeing none, I packed up my gear and rolled out, sorry to be leaving behind the good fishing, but not thrilled about now having to go out in the rain, to K-Mart, to buy a fishing license.
The rain got really hard again, though, so I went home.

My friend Kessler called me the night before I went out to meet the sheriff’s boat.

I met Kessler around seven years ago at a gun show in Slidell. I was a fledgling reporter at the Northshore Daily News and the timing of the gun show was directly in the wake of the school shooting in Columbine, Co.
Needless to say, it seemed as if gun shows and the folks who ran them were under
heavy fire (pun intended) from lawmakers, law enforcement and news analysts. It seemed to me that arms dealers weren’t really getting a fair shake, so I wanted to go down to a gun show and check out the scene for myself.
I’m big into scenes. I always have been.
Sometimes the “thing” isn’t as interesting as the culture and the origins of the “thing” itself. Weird sub-cultures, like Louisiana politicians, fishermen and off-track betting junkies, are my forte and this was what was prompting me, anyway, to want to get out in a boat, in the first place.
There are a tremendous amount of waterways in southern Louisiana, but my primary area of focus was on the waterways on the western end of St. Tammany Parish; namely the Madisonville Harbor.
There’s a serious amount of wealth in western St. Tammany Parish. The city of Mandeville, which basically borders one end of the Tchefuncte River, is one of the most affluent municipalities in the entire southeast region of the state.
Most of these folks own boats- big ones, which they keep anchored at either the Beau Chene marina, off of Louisiana Highway 22 or at Marina Del Mar, which lies at the foot of the Madisonville Harbor Bridge. Most of these folks also seem to like a good time and there are always stories of wild goings on that take place along the river.
Apparently mild mannered folks, doctors and lawyers during the weekdays, turned into sloppy, crazed drunks and drug fiends on the weekend, as they hit the waterways where the mouth of the Tchefuncte River meets Lake Pontchartrain. Tales of excess, parties and other tomfoolery were too rampant not to at least have a few grains of truth and wanted badly to get out there ad check out the scene.
River Rats, a bar near the end of Lake Road in Madisonville, is a favorite hangout for a lot of folks. The rear of the place has docks, and people spend entire weekends shuttling back and forth between the back dock at the bar and a sand-bar (That looks more like a small island) on the other side of the river.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
I was talking about Kessler. Most of the folks I met that day at the gun show were a little paranoid about talking to a newspaper man, and far be it for me to make edgy people with guns even more nervous.
Kessler wasn’t like this though. He had a “kill’em all, let God sort them out” attitude and mentality that I found easy to deal with. Kessler liked to talk.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” he said to me as I walked up to his booth and shook hands with him. “I can teach you 1,001 ways to kill a man and 5,000 ways to make it look like an accident.”
He said this with a sly smirk and I wasn’t sure whether to take him seriously or not.
“I can also teach you how to bring a person to their knees by using just your thumb and your index finger,” he added, chuckling. “Don’t trust any of these other freaks
here. They’re all a bunch of 2nd Amendment faggots and gun rights wannabe’s. Not one of them have ever been there.”
I didn’t ask him where there was, but had the idea he’d seen some sort of heavy action somewhere. He told me he was an arms dealer, but that he also had an interest in St. Tammany Parish for some possible real estate development endeavors of his.
I kept in touch with him over the years, usually when he came to town to check on his investments.
He was in a heavy, brooding mood when he called me Saturday night.
“You know what those little serrated edges are for on the back of a Rambo knife?” he asked me when I answered the phone.

There was no hi, no greeting, just this weird question.
“Scaling fish,” I said, venturing s guess.
Kessler let loose with a wet, slapping fart noise and said, “Wrong answer. Do you want to know what they’re for?”
“Even if I didn’t, you’d tell me anyway Kessler,” I said.
“You’re right on that chief,” he said. “They’re for snagging the entrails during a gut jab. You thrust the knife up and in and then twist it round and round, just like you do with a fork in pasta, and then you just yank outward. The serrated edges help the entrails catch on the knife. The result is practically total disembowelment with not so much as a single stab wound. It’s quick and efficient. It can get messy though.”
“That’s the most disgusting and disturbing thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” I told him, which only made him laugh.
“These are disturbing times chief,” he told me. “It’s a dangerous time to be alive. I don’t know how you do it; raise a family in this day and age. I couldn’t do it. I’m too high strung for that sort of shit.”
“It’s not easy,” I said. “The shit kids have to worry about today are things we didn’t even think about when I was a kid.”
He agreed.
“Yeah,” he said. “The worst thing that happened when I was a kid was that you might get your ass beat. And the worst weapon anybody ever brandished was a baseball bat. Nowadays, they have to worry about some mope bringing a shotgun to school and mowing down the entire faculty and staff. And don’t get me started about airport security.”
“Don’t get me started about airport security,” I said to him. “No lighters, no nail clippers and they can just rip your bag open and detain you for no apparent reason - all in the name of U.S. security.”
“You’re not going to whine about your Fourth Amendment rights are you?” he asked
“Well, yes,” I replied. “As a matter of fact I am.”
“Be careful with your wording their chief,” he said to me, laughing. “Langley is only a phone call away. I have them on speed dial. I’d hate to have to report you as a dissident, subversive and a pervert.”
Despite his sullen tone, he laughed softly at this in a creepy voice.
“No. I was just going to say is that it all boils down to the loss of our rights, all in the name of national security,” I said. “It’s going to become worse than McArthy-ism.”
“Going to become?” he asked. “It already is. Terrorists are still boarding planes, still slipping on, while airport security is messing around with dopes like you.”
“No need to get nasty about,” I told him.
“That’s the war on terror for you bubba,” Kessler said. “The fact of the matter is, a trained assassin or professional mercenaries could overtake a plane using nothing but their hands as weapons. Terrorists, at best are just cheap thugs. Besides, any of them worth their gram in salt are probably on U.S. soil and have been since well before 9-11.”
The conversation tapered off and I asked him why he was calling.
“I’m going to be in town here shortly,” he said. “What do you have cooking?”
“I’m going out on the river with the boat cops tomorrow,” I told him.
“Are you sure that’s the wisest thing to do,” he said. “I mean for a man with your tastes.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “It’s not like I’m going to meet them at the pier with an ice chest of beer in one hand and a bong in the other.”
“What if they have the K-9’s with them?” he asked.
“I’ll just medicate myself before I go,” I said.
“What sort of story are you working on?” he asked me. “Anything that might excite an old geezer like me?’
“Boater safety story,” I said. “There might be something more to it than that though.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“Out of control rich people with big boats and coke whores,” I said. “There may also be a little white slavery, voodoo and pirates involved. I’m not sure what I’ll really find until I get out there. I think there’s definitely a sub-culture out there though and I want to infiltrate.”
“You’re going to infiltrate by pulling up to them in a cop boat?” he said with a hearty chuckle. “The coke will be flushed and the girls will be back in their Sunday School dresses before the cops even get within 20 feet of their yachts.”
“This is more like recon work,” I told him. “I have to pull a story out of it, so that will be on boater safety for the newspaper. But, like I said, I have a feeling there is more to it than that.”
“Hmm, recon only you said right,” Kessler said, mulling it over in his head.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“I think it’s fucking ingenious,” he said. “People may keep an eye on cops, to make sure where they’re at, but very seldom do they ever make eye contact when they get up close to one. I still think you’re going to need a consultant on this thing before it’s over though; probably a massive cash infusion too. It’s kind of hard to talk shop with people when you’re ordering draft beer and they’re ordering Long Island iced teas and boat drinks.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“You have to run with the big dogs if you wanna get the fleas. You won’t even get close unless you’re throwing cash around like they are,” he said. “You’ll stick out like a turd in the punch bowl if you sit around, rationing out dollar bills for cheap beer. You have to deal with these people on their own terms.”
He was right, of course, but I had no buyers for anything beyond what I was going to write for the newspaper.
“Don’t worry about that,” Kessler told me. “I have a friend in the publishing business, who will probably buy the story. I can probably even get a little advance money out of her too. I have some photographs of her. Well never mind that. You’ll have to forgive me my friend. I am suffering from a broken heart.”
This threw me.
I hadn’t known Kessler to ever be much of a ladies man. He told me he was married once, in another life, but that his young bride had been killed in an explosion in Danang. In his line of work, he often told me, there just wasn’t enough time or liability for a family.
To suddenly hear him, the man who only moments ago was telling me how to disembowel someone with my Rambo knife, suddenly start moaning about heartache made me feel ashamed and almost violated in some weird way.
“Anything serious?” I asked.
“You don’t worry about these things,” he finally said, seeming to snap out of his reverie. “I’ll see to the expenses. You just follow your instincts. You have better instincts than most people your age do and a lot better than the entire combined staff at CNN and Fox News put together.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Call me when you get to town.”
“Will do chief,” he said, and hung up the phone.

Douglas Brinkley:

So, today is inauguration day today for our buddy Ray Nagin. I wonder if you’ll be there in the audience at the Convention Center booing, or better yet, throwing Hieneken bottles at him. Somebody certainly should be. Or maybe one of those little kegs they make. I understand those things pack a pretty good wallop.
On second thought, though, a Chocolate Soldier bottle might be even more fitting.
Can you imagine Ray picking glass shards out of that pretty bald head of
his with a pear of tweezers right there in the middle of the press conference?

Talk about a Kodak moment, a virtual wet dream for Anderson Cooper and all the folks at CNN and Fox News who have been shaking their fingers at us “dumb Louisianians” and muttering “I told you so” since August 29, 2006.
Fuck it. I’ve got enough recovery issues of my own to deal with here on the
north shore. Cleco had a hurricane preparedness workshop yesterday.
I also climbed up to the roof of the EOC here in Covington (which actually used to be the old courthouse) yesterday with an engineer from WWL Radio. I’d never been up there before. The view was pretty damned impressive.
Unfortunately, I was wearing sandals, (Wednesday is casual half-day around here at the paper), so the climb up was pretty damned treacherous. I was able to get some good pictures, though, so it was worthwhile.
He, the WWL guy, was installing an antenna. Apparently, WWL Radio is installing satellite links inside the EOC’s in Orleans, Jefferson and St. Tammany.
Amidst all those little nuisances during Katrina, like bodies floating dead in the streets and people being rescued from their rooftops, the government folks say communications was a real problem and they’ll be damned if they will let that happen again.
So, the top of the EOC here is a veritable fortress of satellite disks, antennae (?). They even have a fleet of civilian HAM radio operators waiting in the wings, who will hole up here at the EOC if or when the going gets rough.
Never mind the obvious questions, like what happens when lightning strikes that big dish there or when 155 mph sustained winds rip that little aluminum tower down and send it through the window of some grandmother’s house six blocks away.
These things are simply too fucking ugly to ponder. And the fragile egg-shell minds of Katrina victims are not equip to deal with them. But not mine, Douglas. My mind is sharp as a tack. Conventional thought is out the window.
And I traded my khaki pants, plain white dress shirts and cheap Van Heusen ties (standard reporter “uniform” for lack of better word for more fitting apparel - tiger stripe camo fatigue pants; my well-worn red Sketchers t-shirt (a free souvenir from the Houston Galleria mall to all “evacuees from Louisiana” for purchases over 50 bucks); and ther black Sketcher sandals I bought to acquire said free t-shirt above; and my CNN cap; which has gotten me into more places where I didn’t really belong than I’m really comfortable fucking admitting.
I drink energy drinks now; lots of them; and I carry a Rambo knife, billy club, smoke flares; a large Bowie Knife and boxes of MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat) in the trunk of my Saturn. The vibes here are ugly. Sleazy, out-of-state contractors are not to be trusted; I’d gut one rather than trust one. Fuses are short; traffic has been at a standstill for a year now; and the addition of a new Hispanic workforce into the southeast Louisiana equation is questionable and barely tolerated at best.
But I digress.
No. The WWL guy didn’t want to hear questions like this. That’s nay-saying, and in these troubled times, where everybody is already teetering somewhere between dread and full-blown panic, that sort of outlook isn’t going to be tolerated.
He said the tower would be anchored. The sheer stupidity of some people, Douglas. Would it be the same way the casinos in Biloxi were anchored right before they
were blown and floated right across the damned highway?
I think people have to really scout out the damage zone, visit, or at least drive through each area where Katrina hit, to really grasp the full magnitude of the thing. I think that’s a big problem. Not just for Senators and Representatives in Congress who are hesitant to doll out money to Nagin-Wood aka Chocolate City. Even people here in the parish don’t have a clue; one hand really doesn’t know, or care, what the other hand is doing.
For all the talk of united fronts and coming together, I’ve never seen such
a discordant, unintelligent and inefficient bunch of people and government bodies in my entire life. There are a lot of weird dynamics at work here in St. Tammany Parish - stupidity mostly, but still a factor nonetheless; but also greed - and lots of it. We’re just one big, dysfunctional family here Douglas. But since I’m from here, I can say these things.
My guess is that people will be telling Katrina stories for many years to come. For as much media coverage as we have seen, I don’t even think the surface has been scratched yet. There are so many people stories out there. There are so many ramifications and issues. And now, this new season is upon us.
Don’t let any of them kid you. I hate to be the harbinger of doom, death and destruction, but we are nowhere near ready for another storm, not even a Cat. 1. A Cat. 1, at this point, is going to feel like a Cat. 3, because all the coastal speed bumps are gone.
Here, on the north shore, they’re still dragging ass trying to get waterways cleared out and leaners and hangers down. Our road infrastructure in St. Tammany is for shit. Half of U.S. 190, near Covington, is in the midst of a widening project, which doesn’t look anywhere near completion, and which will create a major clusterfuck. On the east end of the parish, nothing has been done in terms of any sort of flood protection.
In fact, the shoring up of levees on the south shore, provided they were to hold under a Katrina-like storm, will probably mean more, and possibly worse flooding for east St. Tammany.
Think about it, Douglas. You don’t have to be an engineer or a rocket scientist to know that if the levees on the south are more solid, the water not going into the city has to be diverted in some direction. The path of least resistance is through the Chef Pass, Rigolets and coastal areas of Slidell, all the way even to Lacombe, Mandeville and Madisonville.
Well, I imagine I’ve rambled enough for one morning. It’s good to hear you may be doing an updated version of “Deluge” which might include more St. Tammany material.
Like I said before, I know there are tons of stories that have not been told yet, a lot of things that either I didn’t have time for because of higher recovery priorities or that my publisher killed because they were “Slidell” stories. See, I told you about these Covington people. It’s almost enough to make a person wish a tsunami strike on them. In fact, one of the most fucked up things I’ve ever heard out of my publisher’s mouth was when the Times Picayune first identified the small handful of people who died in St. Tammany.
(A side note - our official death count in St. Tammany was seven, maybe eight. One death has been disputed as to whether it was actually hurricane-related or not. I’ve heard, though, that the death toll was actually much higher here. I even had a deputy as much as tell me that there are probably lots of people flung into bayous, woods or other areas that will probably just never be found because they are in areas that are essentially inaccessible. It could be urban legend, but maybe not.)
My publisher tells me, “We’re not worried about them, they’re just Slidell people.” That utterly floored me. I almost quit on the spot. I wanted to cream at her “Hello, I’m from Slidell you stupid bitch.”
It’s that overall general attitude that is going to end up being disastrous if it prevails during a time of emergency. Anyway, I’d be happy to act as point man for you when you begin to gather St. Tammany information. Just let me know.

Sincerely,

Ashton Daigle

I have completed the 2008 National Novel Writing Month 2008 Challenge. I wrote a 50,601-word novel, The Long Hunt, in a month; actually 18 days. But who’s counting?

Most of the time, it didn’t seem like work. And, most importantly, I’m pleased with the end result. I like the damned book. At the risk of sounding vain, it’s a very good book; much better than I ever dreamed or imagined it could be; especially considering time constraints.

When I first heard about Na No Wri Mo in late September, I was skeptical. The idea of turning out any sort of coherent novel in 30 days seemed unlikely, if not impossible.

I even doubted the 50,000 word limit, thinking to myself on more than one occasion, “50,000 words is a novella, not a novel.” But I was wrong. The Old Man and the Sea, one of Hemingway’s masterpieces, fell in at right under 38,000 words and it was considered a novel; sparse as it may be.

It was ultimately that work, Old Man and the Sea, that I had in mind when I began seriously toying with the idea of giving NaNo a shot.

Perhaps if I stuck to a very simple plot; like man catching a fish; or as in the case of The Long Hunt; man catching a wolf; and I didn’t introduce too many characters and sub-plots; maybe; just maybe I could pull it off.

Simplicity was going to be the key though.

I didn’t begin the contest from a position of strength. Over the course of the month of October, I tried my hand at writing another, separate novel; just to see where it would lead. Before I knew it, Halloween had arrived and my “test run” had only reached about 30,000 words.

I was bummed about not getting further along on the test book. I had company at my house on the first days of November, so I didn’t write. I was seriously beginning to wonder what the hell I’d gotten myself into on around November 5; when I realized my word count was barely even at 10,000.

I’m not sure exactly what happened between then and now. I won’t be so blasé as to say the book wrote itself. Because it didn’t; I did. There were days when the writing flowed - other days; not so much. But I kept moving, kept writing and kept my whining to a minimum. And in the end, it worked.

Next up, acknowledgements. This book, this accomplishment would not have been possible without the insight and unwavering support of more than a few people. If I forget anyone, I promise you it’s due to fatigue and carelessness; not ingratitude; but here goes.

First and foremost, I have to thank my wife Andrea, and my son, Alex. Without their patience (my wife has the patience of a saint), love and encouragement, I probably wouldn’t have even gotten involved with this contest in the first place. Their patience through the process was amazing too; especially around dinnertime. They’re amazing people and I love them with all my heart.

Secondly, thanks and gratitude are in order for the person who got me involved in this whole NaNo madness in the first place - my Plurk pal, NaNo Buddy and comrade-in-arms Perpstu. Perpstu was the one who brought NaNo to my attention; she also, along with my wife, played a significant role in talking me into participating.

We have bitched and moaned together when our stories hit walls; we’ve bounced character development and plot twists off each other; we’ve nudged each other gently, and sometimes not so gently when we needed to get our butts in gear. I probably wouldn’t have even started this project had not been for her; and I definitely wouldn’t have finished it without her support. Thanks chica. You rock.

Next up, I have to put a shout out to the rest of my crazy Plurk pals: Chic; Jeff Young; Sprezzatura; Lisa; Citizen Janey; Ruprecht; The Goof; sar1e; Keli; all of you. You’ve been cheerleaders, motivators and fans. You’ve inspired me, humored me and never took my self doubt or the word no for an answer. Thank you all.

It was also a quiet night. There seemed to be no night time sounds, no crickets, no wind, nothing save for the solitary sounds of their horses hooves clopping repeatedly onto the tired earth, as they traveled.

As far as plans went, they didn’t have much of one. Jesse had inquired earlier and Rakov only patted what Jesse thought was his rifle holster, which was strapped to the horse’s side. But instead, Rakov removed a slender, hollow tube that resembled a tube.

“You going to charm her into submission, like a snake charmer?” Jesse asked.

“No,” Rakov replied. “It’s a blow gun, favored by a lot of African tribes. I have darts which are coated with a powerful sedative. All we have to do is get close enough to her, and the darts will take care of the rest.”

“What if the sedative ain’t strong enough?” Jesse had asked.

“Then I guess it’s going to be a long night,” was Rakov’s reply.

They heard her long before they saw her.

They hadn’t even made it to the creek yet, but had already tied the horses and were slowly making their way thro