Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 SOUTHERN LOUISIANA
A RESTAURANT’S GREASE trap stinks in a way that’s impossible to forget. The stench locks itself into a brain like initials carved into an old desk. Ben realized this in the days that followed his first close encounter with the vile waste.

He had found himself wedged into a small opening between a brick wall and a dripping, stinking grease trap behind a diner. He tried to stay as silent as he could as he watched the flashlight bob toward him down the weed-covered, trash-strewn alleyway.

He had not known it at the time, but the minute or so he spent in that hiding place would haunt Ben for a very, very long time. It was the first time in his life he’d been completely floored by dread. Paralyzed almost. He’d never felt anything like it before; he’d never felt his hands, joints, and mind completely seized up by shrieking, hysterical panic. It felt like black swamp mud filled his veins.

In the days that passed since that moment, he’d thought about it constantly. The grease trap’s putrid citrus stench of rot, the inch-thick black grime on the bricks and cracked asphalt around the trap, the humidity in the air, the din and roar of his heartbeat in his ears, the shrieking cicadas, the cop slowly pacing down the alley toward him. He’d actually gagged on several occasions as he’d recall the sensation of the reeking burnt-orange grease running down the sides of his face, his neck, forming an adhesive slick between his shirt and shoulder blades.

To Ben, it felt like every excruciating detail of the moment was laser-burned into whatever part of the brain was right behind the eyes.

Ben had robbed a gas station a few blocks away from that diner and its disgusting grease trap. He’d only had an airsoft gun, the orange muzzle of which had been lazily Sharpied over in the dark on his walk toward the gas station. Thing looks real enough, he’d thought.

The lady at the counter certainly couldn’t tell the difference. He grabbed about eighty dollars from the register and as many candy bars, jerky sticks, and packaged shitty pastries as he could carry. When he saw police lights start to pulse off the dirty windows of the abandoned old building across the street from the gas station, he bolted out the door. Ben ran as fast as he could until he saw the hiding place, and went for it.

He figured it was likely the cops had already seen him turn into the alley, but he dove behind the grease trap anyway. He thought about running once he’d wedged himself into the hiding spot, but he was shaking too badly. He was too exhausted, too dehydrated, too malnourished. His body knew it was already over. The grease and grime embraced him. Ben felt like he was stuck to a roach trap; those strips of adhesive brown tape the insects get trapped onto as they skitter across, then even more stuck as they kick and writhe until death takes them. Once the cop’s flashlight got to within about thirty feet, all Ben can remember is that he started screaming.

He screamed that he didn’t have a gun, he begged not to get shot, pleaded to be helped out from under the grease trap. He cried as he was put into the back of the cruiser. The next day, he cried more on the ride home from his arraignment in the back seat of Aunt Nicki’s old Buick. Not once on the whole drive did she glance up at the rearview mirror to look back at him through the haze of cigarette smoke. Worse than the smoke was the razor-edged silence, the kind that was loaded with the assurance of beatings and pain.

Over the next week, Ben caught up with the buddies he’d grown up with in Lafitte, Louisiana. He regaled them with the tale of his days on the run. He told them about how he’d stolen his neighbor’s johnboat and split off into the bayou, how he’d broken into private fishing camps where he drank good bourbon and robbed crab traps for his meals. He told them about how he’d finally run out of supplies and camps to raid, and about how he’d stashed his boat along a canal somewhere in Plaquemines Parish, then hiked up Highway 23 in the dark with a plan to knock over the first gas station he came across, then finally about how that plan had gone pear-shaped and how he’d been caught by the constables.

He told them about how he’d kept his mouth shut throughout a blistering, night-long interrogation from multiple different detectives. He told them about the deals he’d been repeatedly offered, which he’d repeatedly refused. He said he’d told the detectives to go fuck themselves, that he’d happily do his time in Louisiana state’s juvenile corrections, where he had plenty of friends he was excited to catch up with. Ben’s buddies were proud of him. Their elder brothers were proud of him too. Part of Ben felt like a king, like he’d sunk a buzzer-beater three.

In reality, no detective interrogated Ben. No one offered him a deal. He hadn’t been driven by some outlaw spirit as he’d stolen the boat, broken into the fishing camps, or knocked over the Chevron station. From start to finish, all he’d felt was fear and anxiety. He’d done it all to try to find somewhere safe to take his little brother, Wade, where their aunt couldn’t find them—and he’d been scared shitless the entire time. He hadn’t even considered how he’d sneak back to his hometown of Lafitte to get his little brother, let alone how he’d actually smuggle the small child away. The whole week was just a poorly planned cascade of fiascos, catalyzed by one moment of meteoric panic and rage. Panic for his little brother, and rage at being too small and not knowing how to protect him.

He hadn’t even actually been brought to the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s Office detention center in Davant, fabled among his friends, their elder brothers, uncles, fathers, and grandfathers. He spent his one night in “jail” locked in a sterile, fluorescent-lit room in the back of some double-wide that served as a district patrol office somewhere off state highway 23. He’d been relegated to this unique incarceration due to the late hour he’d been arrested and his only being thirteen years old. It felt worse to Ben somehow. It was insulting.

Ben spent several hours in that room disgusted by the stinking grease that still caked his upper body and head. He had been waiting for it to begin drying and crusting, hoping this would help abate its stench and allow it to be scratched away, but the nature of the wicked substance prevented that, so he tried to focus on how he was going to go about doing the one thing he’d always been good at: manipulating adults and talking his way out of shit.

He had read and thereby memorized the Bill of Rights and portions of several state statutes that he’d deemed potentially helpful based on their focus. He also had access to a collage of courtroom and interrogation scenes from television and movies he’d logged away over the years. However, over the last few hours Ben had started to see how truly useless that archive of surface-level information was. He’d sound like a damn fool just spouting off recitations of black-letter law without knowing when or how to use it. There was an operative nature to state law and constitutional rights; he knew they had to be employed in a particular sequence to specific facts. However, he didn’t have any fluency in how to do that, and knew he’d sound like a dumbass to try. That aside, Ben did know that he was not required to talk to law enforcement without a lawyer present, especially as a minor, so he’d just have to rely on that as his mainstay for now.

Finally, the sound of slow, dragging feet in the hall outside preceded a massively obese corrections deputy who opened the door and trundled into the small space holding both a bottle of water and a bag of chips in one meaty, pink hand. Sweat glistened on his forehead and rendered swathes of his white uniform almost translucent under his arms.

Ben’s panic had worn off at that point and had been replaced with exhausted irritation. He looked up at the deputy and spoke without solicitation for any such comment.

“I want a lawyer here if you fixin to question me.”

The deputy just glanced at Ben with cold eyes as he set the water and chips on the collapsible camping table, the only thing in the room other than the flimsy, plastic deck chair Ben sat in. He spoke as he turned and headed back toward the door.

“Boy, you tink anyone here gives a fuck about anything yous gots to say?”

The officer talked with that raspy, Cajun twang that could make Ben’s skin crawl. His mom, aunt, and all the men he’d been around as he learned the English language spoke with such a strong, French-peppered version of this accent that even most Louisianans struggled to understand them.

Ben wasn’t sure why it grinded his gears so badly, hearing that insufferable parlance that afflicted so many of the white folk reared in the swamps south of I-10, like Ben himself. When Ben was tired or angry, he’d hear that same Acadian lilt flood into his own voice. It would come out from somewhere deep in his throat to sizzle into the skin of his words like a boiling acid, eating away vowels and rendering down consonants.

For the briefest of moments, Ben’s subconscious urged him to withhold a witty response, but he had been alone for too long. Since he’d run away, he’d been deprived of any good opportunities to properly screw with a grown-up. He was as hungry for that opportunity as he was for the bag of chips in front of him. It’s what he lived for. It was all he had.

Ben leaned back and rested an ankle on the opposite knee. He pushed back with his foot still on the ground, tilting the chair to lean back a bit onto only two of its flimsy legs.

“Maybe not your boss, but I spose I could say quite a few things that’d make you give a fuck, Boudreaux.”

The cop snorted through his nose, ceased his progress toward the door, and turned to face the boy. Ben knew it was very unlikely that this man’s name was actually Boudreaux, but from the big man’s accent alone, Ben knew—that the cop knew—that calling someone “Boudreaux” was a subtle way of calling someone a dumbass. This particular aspersion would only register as such to someone who grew up in Acadiana, someone who grew up in Cajun country.

The deputy narrowed his eyes and leaned his head toward Ben. Ben could see from subtle features on his face that the man’s brain was attempting to gin up some response. He pointed at Ben as he replied.

“You still yappin, couyon. You said without no lawyah present you was gonna chut the fuck up, so how bouts you chut the fuck up.”

Ben made himself grin at the man before he responded—not a happy smile, but an amused smile. He couldn’t put the differences between smiles or facial expressions into words, but he knew them all, had all their little nuances cataloged away, and he knew their different effects on grown-ups. He knew this difference between a happy smile and an amused smile was important right now.

“Well, heavens to Betsy, sir, I did not mean to hurt your feelings so badly. I think what’s most important for us right now is for you to take in some deep breaths to try and calm yourself down, alright?”

The man clenched his fists and began to stride toward where the boy sat, as Ben knew he would.

At that same moment, Ben let the front legs of his chair fall and planted both feet on the ground. The noise and sudden movement made the deputy flinch. Ben stayed seated, leaned his upper body toward the man, pointed his face up to the right, and used his index finger to tap on his jawbone on the left side of his chin—making sure to maintain the same amused smile as he did so.

As Ben also suspected he would, the man checked his flustered surge toward the boy, looking confused and surprised as he came to a stop a few feet away. Ben kept tapping on his jawbone as he spoke.

“Land that hook right here, my man, right in the off switch. Come on, Boudreaux, help reform me.”

The man cocked his head to the side as lines around his eyes and forehead formed, slowly evicting the look of confusion and replacing it with a disgusted glower. He stared down at the boy and ran his hand up his neck to his chin, which he rubbed back and forth a few times.

The coarse rasp of the man’s big palm against his two-day stubble sounded abnormally loud in the small room. Ben could almost taste his rage.

After a long moment, the deputy began slowly shaking his head as he backed away from the boy toward the door. He eventually forced an awkward smile as he reached back to open the door to leave, suggesting he’d found a few words. Ben already knew the gist of what was about to be said.

“Whew, boy, that lips gon’ get you killed fore you turn eighteen, you know that, right?”

Ben leaned back again and began slapping a palm on his belly before the cop had even finished speaking, and shouted out his reply just before the door was slammed shut.

“Not before them clogged-up arteries get you, hoss!”

Ben’s smile faded as he tried to will away the pressure building in his tear ducts. He felt his efforts fail as tears fell down his cheeks. He wiped them away aggressively with the sleeve of his shirt. He was wearing the same old T-shirt he’d had on for the last week; it had a cartoon version of the legendary lumberjack Paul Bunyan on it, grinning broadly as he held an axe over his shoulder in one hand and gave a thumbs-up with the other.

Ben was tough, he’d had to be, and was certainly no stranger to confrontation, but he was still just a boy being sworn at and threatened by a grown-up. A big fucking scary one, at that. He could talk shit and banter with anyone he’d ever met, better than anyone he’d ever met, but he could still be plagued by fear—the kind of red-hot fear that can only be felt by a kid.

Before the arraignment the next day, Ben learned that the prosecutor already had clear security camera footage of him pointing the fake gun at the terrified old woman behind the counter at the Chevron as he stuffed his pockets with cash and snacks.

Ben did not interrupt the flow of information the well-dressed lady appointed by the juvenile court to represent him decided to direct toward Ben’s aunt Nicki. He knew he understood it far better than Aunt Nicki did, and had also gathered more than enough to grasp the fact that they had him red-handed, dead to rights. At one point the attorney asked Ben why he ran off and robbed a business. Ben didn’t tell her about his plan to find somewhere safe for him and his little brother to live, somewhere quiet, somewhere without any adults, somewhere Aunt Nicki wouldn’t find them.

He just shrugged and told her he didn’t know.