“But of course,” Josh said. “Pray, don’t worry on my account.”
Sheriff Denton frowned as he walked slowly from the room.
Josh felt the front of his mouth with his tongue. His lip was fat and his mouth still tasted of blood and vomit. His stomach also hurt badly, a sharp aching pain in the gut where Kyle had punched him with his gun.
The door closed behind Sheriff Denton. Josh looked up warily as the deputy put down his clipboard. Kyle Lanier stood, stretching, and then came around the table. “The old fella has such beautiful manners, don’t he?” Kyle shook his head and smiled. The gold caps on his front teeth winked in the lamplight. Except for his ugliness he looked very much the elegant young man Josh should have been. His shoulder-length hair was gathered in a small dirty-blond ponytail. He wore a rough cotton vest over a smooth shirt, and expensive pointy-toed boots. His grey uniform pants were cut tight around his calves and ankles.
He walked past Joshua and behind him. Josh strained his neck trying to watch him, but with his hands cuffed to the chair back he could only turn so far. There was a long moment of silence. The skin on Joshua’s back began to crawl. “What are you doing?”
Kyle tipped Joshua’s chair backward until only his hand kept it from crashing to the floor. “My manners aren’t so fine,” the deputy said. “I’m what you’d call a self-made man, Josh. You see, I started out poor. I mean dirt-poor. When I was a boy my daddy used to whup me with a belt if I didn’t bring my own dinner home at night. A crawdad or a squirrel or some damn thing. He used the buckle end, too. I didn’t care for it at the time, but I tell you what, it was instructive. Did wonders for my character. I learned to work hard for what I wanted, and I didn’t much go hungry.”
“Put me down,” Josh said. He spread his legs as wide as he could, searching for the floor with his toes. Kyle stepped beside the chair and drove his fist into Joshua’s stomach as hard as he could, twice. The breath went out of Josh in fireworks of pain. His lungs kicked and strained for air.
“Sheriff Denton don’t understand about the buckle end,” Kyle said. “He thinks everybody is as good and fine and noble as him. I don’t. Most people are animals, if you want my opinion. In the old days that got covered up a little, but now that the screws are back on you see folks showing their true colors. If you want to get anywhere, you need to put the spur to ’em.” This time Kyle punched Josh in the balls. Then he dropped the chair. Joshua’s head bounced off the concrete floor and he blacked out.
When his eyelids fluttered open a few seconds later Kyle was standing over him. “Sloane Gardner was a friend of mine.”
Air flooded back into Joshua’s body. “I didn’t—”
Kyle kicked him in the side, just above the kidney. “I recommend a full and complete confession. You know we won’t kill you and your fat friend, even if you are found guilty. The sheriff don’t believe in making ghosts.” Josh curled up on his back, drawing his legs up around the horrible pain in his testicles and stomach and side. “In case you were wondering,” Kyle added, “you are already one found-guilty son of a bitch. That’s a done deal. We talked to the judge before we ever went to your house. It’s over. The only difference a confession makes”—he kicked Joshua in the side again with his shiny leather boots—“is how much personal satisfaction I get from kicking the crap out of you for what you’ve done to Sloane, you freak.”
Kyle heaved the chair up with Josh still in it and arranged him in front of the table. It hurt Josh terribly to breathe.
The door creaked open and Sheriff Denton returned. “What’s going on? I heard a crash.”
“The prisoner leaned back in his chair and it tipped over,” Kyle said easily. “We’re all right now.”
“He beat me,” Josh said raggedly.
Sheriff Denton looked seriously at Kyle. “Deputy?”
“I didn’t touch him.”
“See that you don’t.”
“Make him swear it,” Josh said. “Make him swear it by Momus.”
Sheriff Denton looked at him. “Son, you are here on a very serious charge. My advice to you is to be more helpful and stand a little less on your pride.” The sheriff sighed. “Not that I wasn’t stiff-necked myself, at your age.” He coughed into his fist. “Let’s get back to work.”
Joshua tried to decide if he should tell them about Sloane’s trips to the Mardi Gras, about the smell of cigarettes and liquor on her dress, the ripped stockings and the out-of-character recklessness in her smile the morning she had stayed with him for breakfast. She had held his hand and trusted him when he promised to keep that secret. But it was hard to ignore his whimpering body. It wanted to tell everything right away. Of course its motives were pretty clear, and Josh was afraid it was influencing his judgment. Still, the sheriff meant to try him for murder, that was obvious now. Besides which, Ham wouldn’t think twice about spilling the beans. He had no reason to be exiled or marooned for the sake of Josh’s confidences. It would go a lot easier on Josh if his story and Ham’s matched.
Sometimes you have to fold your cards and wait for a better hand.
Josh betrayed Sloane’s secret, disliking himself and resenting her for making him a traitor. But when he told about Sloane’s visits to the Mardi Gras, the sheriff didn’t want to hear it. “You are actually implying that the Grand Duchess’s daughter was in Carnival, not once but many times, by her own choice, while her mother lay dying?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That doesn’t sound like the Sloane Gardner I know,” Sheriff Denton said. “She has always been a quiet, dutiful girl. I have known her since she was a child.”
“So have I,” Josh said. “Though everyone forgets it.”
“Hm. Yes.” The sheriff’s eyes rested on Josh. “Do you know the Ten Commandments, young man? The last one is, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.” The sheriff coughed. “I imagine daughters fall under the general law.”
“I’ve been just that hungry,” Kyle said softly. “I’ve wanted it so bad it made me puke. But I earned it, Josh. I earned what you tried to steal, you gutless fuck.”
“You’re vulgar and you’re not very smart,” Josh said. “Nothing you get will ever change that.”
Kyle looked at him a long time before a slight smile parted his lips, letting a gleam of gold escape from his capped teeth. “Speaking of not too smart,” he said.
Joshua continued to look at Kyle with contempt, but his stupid body was scared. His mouth hurt where Kyle had jabbed him with the gun, his head hurt where it had banged the floor. It had been hours since he’d had a chance to pee and he needed to go badly. The pain in his balls had faded, but the hurt in his sides and stomach was growing slowly worse. He wouldn’t show a lot of bruises, of course. How convenient for Kyle. It hurt to breathe. He wondered if the deputy might have cracked one of his ribs, kicking him, or damaged one of his kidneys.
Sheriff Denton paced back into the gloom. Click. Clack. Click. Clack. “Our two families never seem to cross in the best way, do they, Josh?”
It took Josh a moment to make the connection. “You mean our house?”
“I told Travis he shouldn’t have collected on that bet. He should never have put Sam’s family on the street, even if your daddy was foolish enough to gamble your house away. But Travis was…” The sheriff gave a short laugh. “A Denton, I suppose.” He coughed into his fist. Gold chain clinked as he pulled out the Waltham pocket watch again. “Almost one.” He closed the gold case with a click and settled the heavy watch back into his waistcoat pocket.
(“You can always tell a rich guy by his watch,” Ham had said once. “The less real work one of those fuckers has to do, the more he thinks about the time.”)
The sheriff resumed his pacing. Click. Clack. Click. Clack. “Do you know there are members of my family who believe that fire was not an accident?” the sheriff sa
id. “Randall Denton, for one, believes your father sabotaged the gas line.”
“That’s a lie!” Josh started to his feet, but the yank of the chair’s weight against his cuffed wrists made him stumble and sit again.
“Shut up,” Kyle said.
Josh forced his body to be still. Forced himself to ignore the shaking in his breath, the iron knot in his stomach. “It was all a long time ago,” he said. “No hard feelings. A bet’s a bet. My father made the wager and I lost it for him. A bet’s a bet.”
“What do you mean, you lost it?”
“I saw my father’s cards. I knew he was bluffing and I gave away the bluff. I didn’t have much of a poker face then.”
“It’s getting better,” the sheriff said. He coughed into his hand, hard. Then he sighed and turned for the door of the interrogation chamber. “Excuse me, gentlemen; I need another drink of water. I’ll be back directly.”
Kyle put his clipboard down on the table and smiled at Josh.
“Please,” Josh said.
The sheriff turned, his hand still on the doorknob. “Yes?”
“Don’t leave me alone with him.”
“Son, I am an old man and I need a drink of water. I’ll be back soon enough.”
“Then I’d like to request another guard. Please.”
“Josh, I can’t do that.” Sheriff Denton paused and looked at him, old eyes grey under white brows. “Unless you have something important to say…?”
Josh felt his heart thud once, twice, three times. Ah. So that’s the way it was. The sheriff knew Kyle had beaten him. He was waiting for Josh to confess. If he didn’t, Denton would leave the room and Kyle would beat him again. It was very well played. Really, it should have worked. “But I didn’t do it,” Josh whispered. To his horror he felt two tears begin to slide down his face. “I didn’t do it!”
Sheriff Denton regarded him. “I need to get me a drink of water,” he said. “I’ll be back in directly.”
IT had been a long time since anyone had beaten Joshua. His first year in the barrio it had happened a lot, but then Ham became his friend and the beatings had abruptly stopped. Most of the time Joshua never gave his body a second thought, concentrating instead on which drugs to mix, which cards to play, how he was going to pay the next month’s rent. But when he was sick or hurting, unstrung with nausea or ringing with pain, it was impossible to live beyond the edges of his skin. All thinking suddenly fell away, except for a single clear understanding: The meat is the only thing that matters.
Later he would get well and forget the lesson, until the next wave of sickness came to remind him that the body is the only truth. Pain is master. Everything else is fantasy.
AFTER twenty minutes of brutal punishment, Kyle called two guards. They had to carry Joshua away. His knees wouldn’t hold him up, and his body kept folding around the terrible pain in his gut. He was shivering.
He had peed himself sometime during the second beating. Nobody offered to get him clean clothes. It shouldn’t have mattered, but as the guards dragged him to his cell, waves of humiliation ran through Josh at the reek of urine coming from his best pants, the ones he had dyed for Shem’s wedding. His silk shirt was wet with pee at the waist. As much as he hated the guards, he was more terrified of being left alone, because then he would have to check his stinking pants for traces of blood in his urine.
One of the militiamen carried a Coleman lamp. Their shadows jerked and swayed at every step as they dragged him down a long tiled corridor. The ceiling was set with burned out fluorescent bar lights. Long broken and no way to fix or replace them. That was Galveston all over. All the real, true, steady lights going out, one by one, to be replaced by gaslight, firelight, moonlight. For one bright century men had moved beyond Nature’s fickle, shifting illumination, but then the Flood had come and they had fallen from the shadowless, well-lit twentieth century, back to these dark hallways and burning lamps.
The corridor ended at a heavy glass door with steel bars and steel mesh embedded in it. Its old electronic touch pad still worked, apparently; the guard without the lantern punched in a code, a series of chimes sounded, and the lock opened with a click.
Through the door was a small antechamber, beyond which was a second door, this one solid steel except for a small window and a key lock. One guard unlocked the door and held it open. The other shoved Joshua inside. Without anyone to lean on he stumbled and fell to his knees. The door slammed shut behind him. Flashes of lamplight flickered through the observation window for a few seconds, then dwindled and died. The guards must have withdrawn behind the antechamber’s outer door.
It was not quite pitch-black. There were two long narrow windows on the far side of Joshua’s cell, set near the ceiling at what must be street level. Pale bars of moonlight fell through them. Josh curled up on the floor, shaking and shaking. His mind spilled back and forth from one fear to another. He saw Kyle standing over him in the interrogation room. Fiona Barret’s condescending smile. Sloane Gardner eating rice porridge at his kitchen table in the grey dawn, smelling faintly of smoke and liquor. When she lay dozing on his table he had come up behind her carrying her bowl of porridge and seen a crescent of bare skin through the armhole of her sleeveless dress, a glimpse of the gently curving side of her left breast. That memory melted into his mother’s ghost, staring up at him from the sea floor behind the motorboat on Pier 23, then to the glossy sheen of Kyle’s handsome leather shoes just before he kicked Joshua in the side.
Only when daylight began to creep into the cell, making things finally safe and definite and certain, did Josh manage a fitful doze.
Chapter Ten
THE TRIAL
JOSH would have said he never slept at all, except that waking was so hard. He heard a jangle of keys and voices approaching. By the time the cell door swung inward he had managed to force his eyes open. They felt stiff and swollen, like the rest of his body.
Two guards stood in the doorway, one older white guy with two days of stubble on his face, one younger Hispanic fellow with handsome features scarred by smallpox. Both guards wore the dark grey uniforms of the Galveston militia. Dyed with pecan hulls and…ferrous sulfate? Joshua couldn’t remember.
“Come on, Cane. Time to rise and shine,” the older man said.
“I can’t.”
The guard’s hand fell on the butt of his nightstick. “You need help?”
“No thanks.” Josh crawled to the side of the room and stood up, using the wall for support. He kept leaning on it as he shuffled down the corridors. He found it impossible to stand straight. Instead he walked hunched over, as if his muscles had knotted into place at some moment when he was curled around Kyle’s foot.
They took him to a locker room. “Get in the shower,” the older man said. “Paco, get him some clean clothes.”
“Appreciate it,” Josh whispered, fumbling at the buttons of his stained silk shirt.
“No one’s doing you any favors, you sick bastard,” said the guard. “We just don’t want the judge to feel sorry for you.”
Though Jane Gardner had trained as a lawyer, she hadn’t believed them necessary for a population as small as Galveston’s after the Flood. Disputes were argued in the old County Courthouse, but the defendants, unless incompetent, argued their own cases before a judge, without much care for legal technicalities. Josh thought the courtroom looked a lot like a church. Row after row of pews were filled with spectators who hushed as he was led in through a side door. In front of the pews were two tables, one for the defendant and one for the prosecutor. The high judge’s bench dominated the far end of the room, where a pulpit or altar might have been. The guards sat him on a chair at the table to the left of the bench. The crowd began to whisper again, more loudly, pointing and staring at him.
It was already hot in the courtroom. The air conditioner strained and ceiling fans turned overhead, but the combination of another scorching hot day and a room crammed with more than a hundred spectators was far too much to ov
ercome. Women flapped cloth fans, and men mopped at their foreheads with cotton handkerchiefs. Flies drowsed against the glass windows, and every now and then someone slapped at a roving mosquito. Josh wished he had forced himself to drink more in the shower. Too late now.
A second door opened at the side of the room and the judge made his entrance, murmuring a word or two to the bailiff and climbing up to his bench.
For the first time that morning Josh felt a surge of hope. Judge James Bose was to run this trial. Deacon Bose was tough but fair. He had even known Joshua’s mother, back when she was still active in the Krewe of Togetherness. Jim Bose was a farm boy, not a Gardner or a Denton. He had lost his left thumb in a combine accident. Josh had heard him speak the eulogy at the funerals of several of his patients; he could still remember the way the deacon held his Bible with both hands, made awkward by his missing thumb, his face stern and strong as he spoke. A deacon at the Island Church of Christ, he was a smart, hard, principled man and nobody’s fool. Josh had seen him more than once on the wrong side of Broadway, bringing food and clothing for the poor, and reminding parents that they could always drop their kids off at Sunday school even if they didn’t attend services themselves. He was past seventy now, but what hair he had left was as black as the Bible on the bench beside him.
The crowd shifted and whispered in the pews. Half the town must have jammed into the courtroom—Krewe officers in Corpus Christi cottons, dyed in colors the barrios never saw, scarlet and peach and indigo. Rich Hispanics with dresses of crepe chenille and old-fashioned suits; the women strung with rosary beads and crucifixes, the men with tiny ceramic hands and hearts dangling on necklaces to invoke the aid of El Mano Mo Más Poderoso and the Corazón Sagrado. Members of Sheriff Denton’s Galveston militia, all in smartly pressed grey uniforms. Serious-looking black men from the Krewe of Togetherness. Fiona Barret and her family. Jim Ford. The entire staff of Jennifer Ford’s Galveston Daily News. Randall Denton, elegantly turned out in a wasp-waisted coat and vest, eyed Josh with interest from the front row. Randall Denton made a point of having the best seat at any entertainment.