The Bayou

by Arden Powell

The weather felt like something dying.

They had a wildness about them, something beyond the guns and the way they laughed in the sweltering heat, their teeth white like animals’.

Benoit was more of a neighbor than a friend, but he had stretched out for Eugene's camera, revealing a long, slow slide of skin as the bedsheets slipped away. The setting sun cast stripes over his ribs through the blinds.

Walker and Monnet turned up a few months later, as if somebody needed to fill the gap that Bonnie and Clyde had left. Like America needed somebody to mythologize, then tear to shreds.

The gators were coming with it, their eyes glowing flat and gold like coins in the moonlight. Huge, hulking beasts with crooked smiles, lurking amid the tree roots and the choking vines.

They faded into the background noise of daily life, lost to the whispered conversations he shared with Mary Beth amid the roses. She told him ghost stories to distract him, or just because she could, their gory contents at odds with the beatific expression she wore.

They sometimes found company in each other, two shipwrecked souls drifting side by side, but never for very long.

Eugene wondered whether he’d have offered the same cigarette he held between his lips, and his stomach flipped uncomfortably.

He replayed the way Walker’s eyes glittered from under the shadow of his hat, and the sharp cut of his hair against his cheek—far too long to be fashionable, as people said. It lent something of the fey to his look, androgynous and somehow more dangerous than any blade or bullet he carried. Dangerous too the lines of his mouth, how they slanted in that crooked, wicked smile, his lips plush and full as any girl’s.

the idea hung in the air like the smell of rotting meat, and wormed its way into people and set them sweating with some nameless dread.

It had been such a long summer, the sun so bleak and unforgiving, and at the end of such a wearying decade. He prayed there were no heroes left.

It was the sort of place where one might drown on dry land if he lingered too long.

Folks didn’t need so many churches unless they had something that needed praying away.

“What was that old line about how children are innocent, so they demand justice, while adults would rather pray for mercy?” “I prefer justice,” Johnny said. “I like the taste of it.”

Eugene pictured them curled around a trigger and he shivered. He pictured them doing other things, warm and wet and secret, and he burned hot.

He looked less like the devil then, his eyes wide and earnest, but Milton wrote that Lucifer knew how to cry.

"Your heart's beating so fast," Johnny murmured against his mouth. "What are you afraid of?"

They wanted to come out as prayers, a blasphemous litany of the sacred and profane.

“They say the devil comes dressed as everything you’ve ever dreamed of. I never really imagined what it meant until I met you."

“Hell has no claim on me, but if it did, it wouldn’t be on account of who I take to bed.

“I knew a girl who died, a long time ago.” Eugene fell to his back, his hands on his ribs. Everything felt underwater. “Am I dreaming?” “Go to sleep, Eugene.”

The light from the stained-glass windows glowed over him like a halo, the dust motes floating around him as he stood there like some long-lost pagan king, modernized in his suit and his shiny black boots. He looked like the afterimage from a dream.

“I’m not the devil,” Johnny repeated, and stretched out long, his arms over his head. “The devil is just the word you give to humanity’s darker impulses. You’ve seen the devil, but it was never me. And it’s not you, either.”

"Children have disappeared." Mary Beth shrugged. “I was a child.” “They called you their little angel.” “I was an angel. Then I was dead. Now I’m something else.”

You went around talking about exorcisms when you should've been talking about rape. Are you sorry for that?"