If the End of the World Could Talk

My name is Sage Duperior, and I once lived at the End of the World. At least, that’s what they call Venice, Louisiana, the last pit-stop before entering into an abyss that is the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the closest thing you’ll get to being on another planet while still floating around on this one. The town is basically surrounded on both sides by water. On the map, the state of Louisiana seems to shrivel out and branch into a frail leaf or two – that’s where Venice is. Somewhere on that leaf. There are stretches of land after it, but it’s all swamp and animals. And lots of enormous fish: trout, wahoo, marlin, yellowfin tuna, blackfin tuna, and more tuna. If you take a boat south and keep going and going, you’ll reach the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.

Most people who live in Venice work on the oil rigs or on shrimp boats. What else would they do? My dad was solely a shrimper until it became impossible to earn a living wage. So he did shrimping on the weekends and commuted a miserable 90 minutes to New Orleans to work construction on weekdays. I barely remember the day my mom left since I was only 6 and a half years old, but my dad always told us she’d gone to work at “The Pony” and never returned. That meant my brother, Abel, and I were looked after by the older kids in town, Beau and Caroline, twins who didn’t have that many years on me. They’d just finished their sophomore year of high school, and I’d be turning 14 at the end of the summer.

For the past 5 years or so, our favorite game had been trying to get this man named Mr. Thibeaud to speak. Our games always involved some element of bothering someone or something. Beau got us started when he had us hide behind makeshift forts built out of old tires and throw rocks at gators crossing the wetland roads. When I started having to bring 2-year-old Abel along after my mom left, everyone was too worried he’d actually become gator dinner. So we stopped. And then started harassing Mr. Carrier, who owned the local dive bar. We snuck hilarious notes into the styrofoam to-go dinners on the ledge of the window facing the outside and drank water from beer bottles around the tourists who came to fish.

“Y’all stop it with the fake beer drinking!” Mr. Carrier would yell. “They’re gonna call ABC on me.”

Which always sent Abel into a chorus of The Alphabet Song. Which sent the three of us into a laughing fit because what in the world was ABC, anyway?

But when old Mr. Thibeaud came to town, we had a fascinating new target. He was old, maybe in his 60s, and wore the same dirty overalls nearly every day. He had thick eyebrows that were always furrowed into a frown. Nobody knew much about him besides the fact that he hauled in an ungodly amount of shrimp each week and he never talked to a single soul. Not even Jay Carrier, who owned the local dive bar and could list out entire Venice family trees, knew Mr. Thibaud’s first name. Of course, we all had our conspiracies.

“It’s gotta be something real Cajun,” Beau would always say.

“Nah, I bet he doesn’t even have one,” Caroline would respond.

Abel alternated between saying it was either “Doodie” or “Tuna,” or some other fish name, laughing until he’d almost fall over backwards.

Mr. Thibeaud was gone shrimping so much that we knew if we were going to catch him, it would be at the marina. We’d lurk under awnings that covered the boats and lean in, catching deep whiffs of the sea and stale beer, avoiding the thick, slimy green mold that grew where the water hit the wooden stilts.

“Hey, Mr. Thibeaud!” we’d yell at him when he was turned around.

“Guess what?”

“Knock-knock!”

“Cat got your tongue?”

“If you’re not a criminal, say something!”

“What, did someone cut off your tongue or something?”

Mr. Thibeaud would often turn around to that one and shake his balding head. He’d wave his finger at us– the one that didn’t have a fat cigar in it– and sometimes almost look like he was about to open his mouth and say something. Once, he even opened his mouth halfway and made a series of strange sounds.

“I don’t understand!” yelled Caroline. “What are you trying to say?”

Obviously frustrated, he swatted the air as if to say “forget it” and turned around.

Apart from that one time, he never tried to respond with words when we spoke to him. He just looked up, shook his head, and then turned back around to his buckets of shrimp and continued working. He ignored every note hidden within the paper airplanes we flew into his boat. Not a word was said about the baby gator we snuck onto the captain seat. But our games started to dwindle after Beau and Caroline started high school.

It was mid-July, and we were all out of school, much to the town’s dismay. I’ll never forget that summer for many reasons, including the way Beau started looking at me differently. Something seemed softer in his striking blue eyes, so much so that I sometimes avoided eye contact because of the way it made me feel my face warm up. He also just looked different. I started feeling my eyes wander to his muscular back when he took off his shirt. His voice was sexier, and I started using that word in my head when I thought about him. Sexy. Sometimes, he’d bring only me a Gatorade from his and Caroline’s fridge next to their houseboat. One weekend, after he’d left to go visit his mom in New Orleans, he hugged me when he came back instead of the usual high-five.

“He likes you,” said Caroline smugly. “He thinks you’re cute.”

“No way,” I said. I looked down at my grimy feet in my old sandals and felt my cheeks turn bright red. There was nothing cute about me.

We might have been older, but we were still playing childish games every once in a while. It’s not like we had much else to do – we lived so far away from everything. Cell service sucked, and only Caroline and Beau had phones, anyway. Mr. Thibeaud remained a mystery, and Abel, who was 9, was in his prime annoying years. We’d watch a movie in Caroline and Beau’s parents’ houseboat and send Abel off to harass Mr. Thibeaud. When the lights were off, Beau would always scoot a little closer to me, our knees almost touching.

I didn’t know how to kiss, but Caroline told me once that your tongue got involved, and that about made me want to throw up.

“Why would anyone like that?” I remember asking, aghast. She just laughed.

It’s not like I could ask her how I should go about kissing her brother. But what if my tongue was too short? Or too long? What if she was lying to me, and you weren’t even supposed to do that?

One night, I was down by the marina just after the sun had dipped below the horizon watching a group of tourists tote coolers full of their catches in. I sat near Mr. Thibeaud’s boat and let my bare feet hang over the edge.

“You think he’d say anything if we got in his boat?”

I turned around when I heard that familiar voice behind me. Beau stood there in just his Nike shorts and a pair of sliders, his skin so tanned that it nearly blended in with his hair. I was suddenly so shy. But Beau hopped in and held his hand out to me. I accepted it and jumped forward, landing in an unsteady position that made him grab me by the waist. We were face-to-face. And then he kissed me. And we used our tongues. And I liked it.

I never wanted to stop. We kissed at the dive bar in the back corner. In the middle of the road at sunset. In his family’s houseboat on the couch. We made out in an abandoned boat, laying down, him on top of me and my heart racing, ignoring the risk of snakes lurking beneath us. After I started kissing Beau, for some reason I didn’t want to play the game at all anymore.

Occasionally, Abel would whine enough to get us to go out there with him, and Beau, Caroline, and I would reluctantly follow and sheepishly participate.

“Y'all are about to graduate high school,” scolded Mr. Carrier, who’d walked down near the marina for a smoke one night, catching us mid-act. “Grow up and stop bothering this poor man.”

That made us feel kind of embarrassed, so we finally just taught Abel the game we used to play with the gators. He was old enough by then not to get snatched up. Then we stopped seeing Mr. Thibeaud. He wasn’t there for several weeks. Even though we weren't looking, in a town as small as Venice, Louisiana, you notice pretty quickly when someone is gone.

“He left a note with one of the shrimpers,” said Mr. Carrier, our trusty source. “He went up to New Orleans to get some health issues taken care of.”

The four of us looked at one another, and I could almost see the questions swarming around in our brains like minnows around feet in the river.

“What’s wrong with him?” Abel blurted out.

“He has cancer,” explained Mr. Carrier, pausing before adding, “in his mouth. His tongue, I think. That’s why he never answered any of y’all’s silly questions.”

“His tongue?” repeated Beau, a look of utter horror on his face. “I can’t imagine my tongue not working.”

“Yeah, I bet you can’t, son,” said Mr. Carrier, shaking his head but smirking. Beau and I avoided eye contact. He must have seen us at some point.

“But the point is, y’all shouldn’t bother folks like you do,” he continued. “Because you never know what kind of secret hell they’re going through.”

So, as it turns out, Mr. Thibeaud had some kind of mouth cancer that meant he had to get part of his tongue cut off. I would have never guessed that since I never saw him open his mouth. And he sure did chew a lot of tobacco and smoke the thickest cigars I’d ever seen. You would think someone who came close to seeing death once might avoid those things.

But I guess once you start living at the End of the World, you feel like you’re about to fall right off at any moment, anyway. Why would anything matter?