Cocodrie

Pat gazed out of the car, a vapourish look of weariness occluding his handsome features. The split rear window of the car neatly spliced his field of vision into the left and right halves of the house.

It was early September in Cocodrie, Louisiana. The parishioners of Terrebonne were in a state of alert as Hurricane Ida approached the United States Gulf Coast. Ida was touted as the strongest landfalling cyclone that season. Pat and his family were one of several evacuees escaping its wrath and were preparing to leave poste haste. After much deliberation, they had decided to permanently move inland.

 

As the last of the family’s possessions were loaded into the family Buick, Pat’s baleful look cautiously gave away to alacrity- as if a carousel in his head had started moving..first slowly, then purposefully..quickly.

Pat pushed the rear door of the stationary vehicle, rolled over the oversized valise beside him and landed head first onto the shingle, all at once. Even as he recovered his dignity, he made a desperate lunge in the direction of the house.

-Pat, where are you going…come back!!! his family screamed, individually first and then in unison.

But Pat knew where he was headed for- he will not leave his cache behind.

As Pat gained ground, his gaze chanced upon Rupert, peering through the picket fence, in a clandestine effort to study the day's proceedings. Rupert, with whom Pat shared an ambivalent relationship, lived with his family next door. Although, they had a series of fall outs, Pat knew instinctively that Rupert’s absence would create a sizeable void in his life.

As Pat reached the garden shed, his lungs felt empty and his head like warm gelatine. He could barely register his family's distant pleas any more.

It was a white apex shed made of tongue and groove timber and built on tall castors, so the shed could be moved in the direction of the sun during the winter. An old Remington lay there, a vestige of a former occupant, a herpetologist who had relocated to Houma after Katrina. The shed was otherwise occupied by fishing accoutrements- an impossibly tangled drift net, a few creels, a disused harpoon. But Pat wasn’t interested in these baubles, what he wanted lay beneath.

An uninviting gap existed between the shed and the earth below. The gap was once manageable but the shed had since been moved over to more uneven ground. This was not an insurmountable obstacle for Pat’s dogged pursuit. As he squeezed himself into the gap and attempted a supine crawl, a straying piece of tin foil, originally used to buttress the shed floor, caught him on the nape of his neck. His eyes became at once hot and watery as a caustic sensation ran down the length of his spine.

The hole lay directly beneath the first half of the shed towards the middle. As Pat crawled over some loose soil, he finally came upon the exact spot.

There was nothing there apart from a gaping hole slightly bigger than the one he had originally dug.

Crestfallen, he just wanted to lay there, but his family’s pleas were once again audible. He had to go. Carefully avoiding the foil he freed himself from his flat roofed shackle and began an urgent trek back to the family car.

Rupert was still there, as if rooted to his spot, with a vacuous disinterested look that is so typical of a feline. He had been left behind by his family.

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Pat was 2 years old when he first displayed a natural aptitude for the discovery and retention of bones. Growing up in Cocodrie, an artist’s impression of a fishing hamlet, Pat had to contend largely with fish bones, crab skeletons and tiny dead molluscs and crustaceans. It was an osteological marvel when he discovered an exponentially large bone during the family's trip to Mandalay- they had won a hunting license lottery that spring season.

It had once belonged to a feral hog and was a remarkable find in itself. The yellowing greater trochanter that peered out of the waterlogged soil was detectable to none but the keenest eye. The cypress-tupelo swamp could challenge a grown man's patience and will. But Pat used his size and instincts, especially his instincts, to read the terrain. And the rest was a rush of blood to the head- sheer inspiration. He chose to tread on cattails and phragmites and any other vegetation or pods of roots that felt like it could support his weight. Often he took a second step before the first one was complete, thus deceiving he swamp's sly mechanism of suction. Once the animal tissue was retrieved, he negotiated the swamp once more using his short term memory of natural markers and passable areas. It was a triumph.

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Pat returned to the Buick feigning urgency and reclaimed his spot on the back seat. It was time to leave. They had to get to Baton Rouge before night fall. The Bayou State Capital offered them the transient security of a FEMA home.

Ida was waiting for no one, she was now a malevolent twister approaching Cocodrie at 111 mph. The whistling wind and the erratic flight paths of local foliage were of little interest to Pat. Amidst this audio-visual matinee, he did not notice a tattered child blanket removed from the valise and passed in his direction. As the blanket unfolded, Pat regarded the contents with the kind of affection a bride normally reserves for her trousseau. For within the folds of the blanket was a large femur bone.

You were looking for this? said the voice.

For the remainder of the fraught journey, Pat implemented a well thought out plan of anointing the bone with his saliva. Ida wrought awe inducing spoliation on Terrebone later that day but such was Pat’s canine glee that even she would have been a mere divertissement.