“No. No punches.” Joshua grimaced. “I might have shaken the bastard once or twice. Just by the shoulders.”
“Hm.” Ham looked over at him with one shaggy eyebrow arched.
(Once, when they were both thirteen, they had been out walking together when Josh said, “I don’t know why we stay friends, but I sure am glad of it.”
“We stay friends because you think you’re better than me,” Ham had said, “and I let you.”
That had shut Josh up in a hurry.)
He was accustomed to thinking of himself as the smart one, the forceful one, the dominant personality. But on a day like this, having been bounced by four Krewes and nearly arrested for drunk and disorderly behavior, he suddenly felt that it was Ham, standing by him solid as a rock and jiggling softly on his line, who really had his shit together.
Ham spat meditatively into the Gulf. “Cast, Josh. I’m looking to eat tonight, even if you aren’t.”
The setting sun was nearly at their backs. Beneath bright air the sea was dark with the shadow of the land. Their own shadows stretched out farther still, hard to track against the swell, broken into pockets and flashes of darkness against the green water. Joshua cocked his rod back, feeling the weight of the little steel lure bouncing and trembling at the end of his line. He snapped the rod forward and felt the lure go sailing up, line whining as it paid out, not nearly so far as Ham’s cast but still far, a beautiful arc of line hanging over the dark water, gold as angel’s hair in the low sunlight. When the lure finally hit he could feel it, a little tremor up his arm and into his core.
He felt absurdly, painfully grateful for the big man’s company.
“I also made a rude suggestion about the Krewe director’s mother,” Josh said after a while. “And his sister.”
“Oh, my.”
“I seem to remember that ‘togetherness’ was a theme,” Josh added reflectively. Ham snorted. Josh slurred his voice. “I’m just as good as any of you dinks. I’m a dink, too. You think you’re so much better than me just because yer lucky? Well, nobody stays lucky forever, you know. Maybe one day you wake up and it’s you who’s so fucking unlucky, maybe something happens to your house or your family, and then I’m looking at you in the gutter where I live and you’ll come crawling to me! And will I help you then? Eh? EH?” He hiccuped with great dignity. “I don’t know! How d’ya like that?”
Ham was wincing and laughing at the same time, his big torso shaking beneath its acres of shirting. It made the whole boat rock beneath them.
Josh sighed. “I did manage to throw up on Carl Banks as they were dragging me out of the Krewe offices.” He looked down at his silk shirt, splotched all over where he had tried to rub out the stains with seawater.
“You showed those pussies.”
“Hey. You should have seen the other guys. They won’t be wearing those clothes again in a hurry.”
Ham’s small eyes screwed up even tighter and squeezed out a tear of laughter. When the fit had passed he reeled his lure in and cast again. “So was your mom there for that one, too?”
Josh pulled in his lure, cocked his rod and cast. The barbed spoon sparkled in the air, then fell into shadow, drifting down into the dark waters. “Yeah.”
“Is she here now?” Josh shook his head. “Do you know what she wants?”
“Nope.”
Two brown pelicans passed before them, low above the water, wings beating heavily. Farther off, the last stragglers of the Mosquito Fleet were coming in, each shrimp boat hazed in a cloud of gulls. Their calls came across the water, made thin and lonely by distance. “I didn’t used to need Galveston. Not our barrio, I mean the real Galveston,” Josh said. “I didn’t even know I was hungry for it. And now suddenly I want it so bad, Ham. I want everything. I want my house back. I want my life back.”
“How about the girl?”
“Yes, damn it, I want the girl. I wish I’d never seen her. I wish you hadn’t brought her to my house.”
“She’d had the crap kicked out of her.”
“I know.” Josh reeled in and hooked his lure to one of the fishing rod’s eyelets and slumped on his thwart. “The day I’ve been having, I’ll probably put the lure in my eyes if I keep casting.”
“Some days you jus’ cain’t win for losin’,” Ham drawled. “Give me three more chances to catch us some dinner. I’ve got some rice and eggs at home if I don’t.”
“Find your leak?”
“On Line Number Three? Nope.”
“Come by my place after we eat and I’ll do your ears.”
“Hoo boy,” Ham said sourly. “Now you’re talking.” He threw out his line. The little aluminum boat rocked on the swell. Water chuffed and gurgled against her. “Your problem is, you keep expecting life to be fair,” Ham said. “You think it ought to be like checkers or something. And if you make all the right moves you win. But it ain’t. It’s like fishing.” He played his line. “You load your lure, you pick your spot—and that’s all you can do, pardner. Some days they bite, and some days they don’t.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe life is like that. But it shouldn’t be,” Josh said. “It didn’t used to be. Back in the old days, before the Flood, it wasn’t just luck.”
Ham spat again. “Well, maybe that was a fluke, is my philosophy. Not natural. And the world woke up and put a stop to it purty quick, too.”
“My mother had diabetes. It was ‘natural’ for her to die,” Josh said. Ham’s hand stopped for a second on his reel, then continued drawing his line in, the steady click-click-click of the mechanism soft and soothing in the evening air. “Is an animal all you want to be?” Josh asked. “You think it’s wrong to strive for a world where merit counts for more than luck? I won’t ever agree to that.”
“Josh, you have a point.” Ham made a face. “Lord, but I hate saying that. Which is too bad, ’cause I have to say it so damn often.”
Despite everything, Josh smiled.
HAM caught a redfish on his last cast and they took it to the Mathers’ house, where he lived with his parents and his little brother—well, younger brother—Japhet. Ham board-grilled the fish, and he and Josh ate it with a side of rice and pinto beans and a shot of pepper sauce. Ham had his with a beer, as he said God had intended such meals to be eaten. Josh stuck to water. Japhet was home, and Ham’s sister Rachel stopped by to visit with her husband and three kids. It was warm and crowded and familylike in a way Josh found deeply comforting at first, but as time wore on, the noise and smell and booming laughter began to wear on him. Ham’s family was big and their house was small; Josh couldn’t escape the feeling he would be crushed to death the moment he got caught between a Mather and the refrigerator.
It was full dark by the time he and Ham headed out. Of course in this neighborhood nobody kept the streetlights in good order, or the streets either, for that matter. Ham brought an old Coleman lantern and held it up, hissing, so Josh could see to get his key into his front door lock. With their eyes blinded by the lamp, Ham and Josh were caught completely by surprise by the armed men waiting for them inside. “Freeze!” someone shouted, and Josh heard a bunch of gun slides go back.
Chapter Nine
SHERIFF DENTON
“WHAT the h—”
Josh shut up as someone shoved a gun barrel hard into his face. The smell of cold steel tied his belly in a knot. Well, he thought, now I know what Mom was trying to warn me about. He wondered if he was about to die.
“We ain’t moving,” Ham said. “Right, Josh? Two statues, that’s us.”
The Coleman lamp hissed, throwing out its circle of hard white light. Josh could see four men: two behind his counter, one behind his examination table, and the one whose gun was pressed into his face. That one must have been standing behind the door. Three of them had handguns; the one behind the examination table had a pump-action shotgun. He chambered a round, ratchet-click.
“If you want the beer, take it,” Josh said. He spoke with his doctor’s voice, chilly
and clinical. He had used it to keep calm when faced with any number of traumas—tumors and disfigurements and death. The cool, rational doctor’s face was the only one he trusted not to give away his tells. It was the one he wore when he couldn’t afford to play scared. “Liquor isn’t worth dying for. It’s not worth killing for either.”
“Howdy, Mr. Cane,” said the man with the gun pressed against Joshua’s face. He moved to stand in front of the apothecary, jamming the gun hard against his teeth. Joshua imagined the gun going off, his teeth shattering like dropped china, the bullet blowing out the back of his neck in a spatter of meat and bone.
It was a bad sign that the gunman was willing to be seen in the circle of lamplight. He wasn’t afraid of being identified later. Josh looked him over as calmly as he could, trying to put him on a hand. The gunman’s face was pitted with old scars, adolescent acne or possibly childhood smallpox. He had broken his front teeth at some point; both the upper ones sported gold caps. Expensive but vulgar; Sloane Gardner or Jim Ford would have picked something less obvious. He was about Joshua’s height and build, small and lean; but instead of wearing patched scraps and hand-me-down shoes, he was dressed in a crisp shirt and vest, polished black boots and grey pants—ah. Charcoal uniform pants with a black stripe. City militia.
Josh allowed himself to relax. This was one of Sheriff Denton’s men. “I suppose this is about the Krewe of Togetherness,” he said. “I can pay reasonable damages, but the fault was not all on one—”
“Where is she, you little fuck?”
“Where is who?”
The militiaman punched forward with his gun, hard, splitting Josh’s lip and making him stumble back. Blood sprayed into his mouth, and his teeth rang. The panic in his muscles suddenly balled into something hard and furious, and he started a wild punch—only to find his hand wrapped in Ham’s big fist. Ham could crack crab shells with his fingers and pitch cinder blocks like horseshoes. Joshua’s fist wasn’t going anywhere.
“I’m sorry, fellas,” Ham said peaceably. “We seem to be getting off on the wrong foot here. What was it y’all were looking for?”
“Deputy Lanier,” said the man with the shotgun. “We’ve got them. Let’s take them in.”
The deputy tapped Joshua’s face with the barrel of his gun. “If I knew she was dead already, if there was no hope you left her alive, so help me God I’d blow your brains out in a heartbeat.”
Joshua’s mouth was full of blood. He swallowed it. Ham seemed in no hurry to let go of his fist. The fury in his stomach switched back to terror again. He ignored it, disgusted with himself, his voice even cooler and more distant. “Well, Deputy, you may have to hit me again, because I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“I’m guessing Sloane Gardner,” Ham said. “Judging from the high-class nature of the posse. Two government-issue Colt .45 automatics, a Glock 17, and if I’m not mistaken the fella with the shotgun back there is Sheriff Denton himself.”
“Sloane!” Josh said. He shook his head. “I should have guessed.”
Deputy Lanier belted him in the stomach with the gun barrel. Josh buckled at the knees and retched helplessly, vomiting his dinner of redfish and pinto beans onto the floor of his consulting room. The deputy stood over him. “That’s Miss Gardner to you.”
“Kyle! Quit that,” Sheriff Denton said.
Sloane’s elusive stars blinked and faded in front of Joshua’s eyes. He got his breath and tried to struggle to his feet, but buckled again, heaving.
“Last I heard we still had trial by jury on this Island,” Ham said. He didn’t sound quite so calm. “And innocent until proven guilty.”
“Bring them,” the sheriff said.
AN hour and a half later, after fingerprints and processing, Sheriff Denton, Deputy Kyle Lanier, and Josh were in the interrogation chamber in the basement of the County Courthouse. (At night any confidential business was carried out in rooms either windowless or heavily shuttered, to make sure no stray slivers of moonlight could let Momus in on the conversation.) The room had a smooth concrete floor, ancient fake wood paneling, two chairs, and a small vinyl-topped card table. Josh sat in one chair with his hands cuffed behind him. Kyle Lanier sat across from him with a clipboard and a sheet of rice paper, taking notes with an exquisite Waterman fountain pen. The only light came from a hissing propane lantern on the table. It lit Kyle’s face unflatteringly from below, exposing the pitted skin of his neck and cheeks while filling his eyes with shadows.
Jeremiah Denton paced in the murk beyond the circle of lamplight. Occasionally he would approach, emerging from the gloom to rest his hands against the table’s edge, lamplight winking on his gold watch chain. Josh wondered if the sheriff chose not to sit because he suffered from back pain. The stiffness in his gait as he walked and the deliberate way he placed his fingers on the table before putting weight on them suggested a touch of arthritis. He also seemed to have a slight dry cough, which could mean anything from ex-smoker to convalescence from bronchial infection to incipient tuberculosis.
After getting Joshua’s version of the day’s events, Sheriff Denton paused in his questioning. The lamp hissed. Kyle’s pen scratched to the end of a line and then stopped. He blotted it on a rag. A silence built.
“Ham voted for you,” Josh told the sheriff.
“You preferred my opponent?”
“I didn’t vote.”
“That’s a mistake,” Sheriff Denton said. “You owe it to yourself to have a voice in the direction of your community, and you owe it to your neighbors, ‘that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.’ But you were inquiring about joining a Krewe today, weren’t you? That was a sudden burst of public spirit.”
“I would have thought you’d welcome it.”
The sheriff coughed into his closed fist. Then he reached into the watch pocket of his vest and drew out a gold-plated Waltham. His fingers were stiff, and it took him a few moments to get the case open. Definitely some arthritis. He glanced at the watch, started to shut the case, then paused and courteously showed Joshua the time. It was thirteen minutes past midnight. Josh reminded himself not to read too much into the sheriff’s small acts of consideration; that might be merely Jeremiah Denton’s impeccable breeding. Nothing personal. Joshua’s father had been blessed with an easy manner and a smiling, amiable poker face, but he had always played to win.
Sheriff Denton tucked his watch away. “Did you tell your friend Ham you intended to make applications to these Krewes?”
They were corroborating his story with Ham’s. Josh hoped Ham remembered the morning the same way. “I believe I mentioned wanting to join.”
“And what did he say about that?”
“He was surprised.”
On the whole, Josh thought he was doing a good job of hiding his tells. This was critical, because his body was terrified. His pulse was racing, his stomach was tense, and he felt a cramp lodged like a stone in his throat. It was infuriating that his body felt guilty. Ham lived inside his meat, at home in his own bone and muscle. Not Josh. In Joshua’s experience his body made bad decisions. It felt things it shouldn’t. It gave him away.
“We have two witnesses who saw Sloane Gardner enter your house this morning,” Sheriff Denton said. “Neither saw her leave.”
“It’s never the wrong time for my neighbors to mind someone else’s business,” Josh said. “As it happens, I didn’t see her leave either.”
“Could she have gone out your back door?”
“Hm.” An opening. Josh studied the sheriff. If Sloane went out the back, that would explain why Joshua’s gossiping neighbors had never seen her leave. On the other hand, other neighbors might have been out back early in the morning, tending chickens or working on their generators. And there were always the winos who loitered around his backyard hoping to scavenge table scraps, or better yet cakes of used yeast and fermented rice from the beer he made—anything that might have traces of alcohol on it. r />
Josh figured the odds were two to one the sheriff was waiting to catch him in a lie, with witnesses willing to swear Sloane hadn’t left out the back. He met the sheriff’s gaze dispassionately. “No, she didn’t go out the kitchen door. There’s no way she could have walked by me while my back was turned. There wasn’t enough time, and I would have heard something.”
Kyle’s pen scratched across his sheet of rice paper.
“You claim this was the second time Miss Gardner had come to your house voluntarily, after being brought there without her consent by Mr. Mather.”
“She was barely conscious when Ham—”
“We can come back to that,” Sheriff Denton said. “You also claim that on both these visits Miss Gardner purchased some tea. Dami—?”
“Damiana. It’s a mild stimulant. She was very tired.”
Sheriff Denton paced away into the darkness, his back to Josh. His boot heels clicked slowly on the concrete floor. Click. Clack. Click. Clack. “May I ask why she chose your shop?”
“I had done her a service. I should add that Ham and I have learned our lesson, and solemnly promise never to be good Samaritans again.”
“Don’t get smart,” Kyle said.
Sheriff Denton held up his hand for quiet. “Mr. Cane, did you find Sloane Gardner attractive?”
Joshua’s heart jumped, and the cramp in his throat pulled tight like a knotted string. He shrugged, expressionless. “Somewhat.”
“What does that mean, Josh? Did you think her plain or pretty?”
“Physically? I suppose she was tolerable. I’ve seen better.”
Kyle wrote, shaking his head. The sheriff nodded. “How about her personality? Did you like her?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“She wasn’t stupid.”
The sheriff regarded him. “Did you expect her to be?”
“I have learned not to take intelligence for granted.”
Kyle laughed. “Arrogant little bastard, aren’t you?”
“Kyle—” Sheriff Denton laid a hand on his deputy’s shoulder. He coughed. He coughed again and cleared his throat. Another cough. “Pardon me, Mr. Cane. I need a drink of water. I will be back presently.”