He paused. “Josh ain’t like that. Truth is, he’s a Yankee at heart. He doesn’t have the greatest bedside manner in the world. He doesn’t much care how all’s your kin is doing. And between you and me, I don’t know if Josh Cane has cracked a Bible in a very long time.”
Deacon Bose stirred. “If you’re going somewhere with this, Mr. Mather, best get on with it, son.”
“To the best of my recollection,” Ham said, “Jesus Christ is pretty quiet on the subject of manners. What he does say is, ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’” Ham paused and looked around the room. “Well, look at what Josh Cane has done. He has worked his ass off for the people on the wrong side of Broadway, getting paid so little he has to sell beer to make ends meet. Thank God,” Ham added piously, pausing to pat his ample gut. A little ripple of laughter passed through the room. “Josh has done a deal of good. To deny that just because he doesn’t smile and say howdy at the same time—now that would be a sin.”
“Amen,” said Alice Mather. Josh looked at Ham’s mother gratefully, and she smiled back at him, ignoring the rows of heads that turned to stare at her. Bless you, Josh thought.
Ham sat down.
SHERIFF Denton was wearing hand-tooled calfskin boots. The Mexican who made them lived in a fine house on Post Office Street now. At the end of the twentieth century his little shoe repair shop had made just enough money for his young family to be slowly starving. He had joined the Krewe of Togetherness in the spring of 2004 to try to make contacts, looking for a new line of work. Then the world ended and suddenly there were no more department stores stocked with new Tony Lama and Nocono Boot Company products. He became a wealthy man, a living example of the fickleness of fate.
Josh figured he could have eaten for three weeks on the price of Jeremiah Denton’s boots. They had good wooden heels on them. When he paced slowly across the courtroom, the heels struck firmly, with authority. Crack. Crack. Crack. “Mr. Cane, would you care to explain how we came to find a pair of Sloane Gardner’s stockings in your house?”
Crack. Crack.
“She said they were ruined while she was in Mardi Gras. I asked if I could have them.” The crowd murmured. Josh spoke over them. “I needed them, as a mesh for seining. Screening. When I’m mixing a drug or a medicine, I often need to grind up dried leaves or minerals into powder. The stockings struck me as a good mesh screen.”
“I see.” Crack. Crack. Crack. Sheriff Denton walked toward Josh. “Mr. Cane, would you care to explain how we came to find traces of Sloane Gardner’s blood in the stockings?”
“She was cut. In the Mardi Gras.”
“I see.” Sheriff Denton turned his back to Josh, pacing even more slowly, measured steps in those fine boots. “Mr. Cane, would you care to explain why we found significant amounts of drying semen in Sloane Gardner’s stockings?”
Josh’s heart kicked him in the chest like a mule. The crowd roared. Deacon Bose slammed his gavel. Josh stared overhead at the circling fans and said nothing. His cheeks were burning.
“Mr. Cane? We are waiting.”
Josh didn’t even try to speak.
Sheriff Denton turned and jabbed at Josh with a finger. “By God, boy, I want to hear what you have to say. What is your explanation? What do you have to tell the judge? What do you have to tell Sloane’s family? Why were her stockings stained with your semen?”
Ham surged up from his chair. “Mighty pink Christ on a barbecue,” he growled. “It’s as plain as the ears on a jackass, Sheriff. Josh asks for the stockings just like he said. Later he gives in to a moment of temptation and whacks off with them.”
“Ham!”
“For Christ’s sake, Josh, it’s embarrassing, but it ain’t a capital crime to do the five-finger mambo.”
“I was asking Mr. Cane the question,” Sheriff Denton snapped. “You had best save your wits for your own excuses, Mr. Mather.”
“Easy there, Sheriff,” Ham said. “My boy Josh here is on the delicate side. He embarrasses easy. I’m sure you’d admit that Miss Gardner was a peach. Are you telling me you never once in your life spent a romantic interlude in and amongst your own fingers?”
You could have heard a straw snap in the ensuing silence. Sheriff Denton said, “The trouble with people like you, Mr. Mather, is that you can’t imagine anything higher than yourself. You think base thoughts and you feel base feelings, but instead of repenting them, you assume that you must be normal, that other men and women—decent, respectable men and women—are just like you.” He turned his back so that he faced the crowd. “Mr. Mather, we are not like you.”
Ham stood flushed and glowering, his massive jaw and gut out-thrust. “I hold these truths to be self-evident, Mr. Denton: that ALL men are created EQUAL; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
“Not Jefferson,” Josh moaned. “Not now.”
“That to SECURE these rights, governments are instituted among men,” Ham thundered, “deriving their JUST POWERS from the CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED, YOU PUSSY!”
Someone at the back laughed.
Sheriff Denton consulted his watch. “Mr. Mather, would you care to explain how we came to find two of Sloane Gardner’s hairs in your boat?”
The crowd buzzed and leaned forward. Ham’s jaw dropped open, then snapped shut. Josh twisted around to stare at his friend, shocked.
Sheriff Denton strode to the Deacon’s bench, boots cracking crisply on the floor. “We have the hairs in this plastic bag,” he said, laying it down on the judge’s bench. “Obviously Sloane—or her body—was in Mr. Mather’s boat some time recently.”
Even at the back of the room, where Ham’s friends and supporters stood, faces looked pale and shocked.
“Your Honor,” Sheriff Denton said, “Sloane Gardner entered Mr. Cane’s home in a dubious part of town. She never returned. Mr. Cane claims she went to Mardi Gras, fleeing her responsibilities to her family and her Krewe. I find that hard to believe. Mr. Cane spent the day attempting to join any Krewe that would have him. I submit he was looking for protection. We know he was pursued by a ghost. I submit that is no good thing. He claims it was his mother’s. I suggest that he is a liar and this is another lie. I very much fear that the ghost attending him was the ghost of the young woman he had tricked, compromised, and killed. We found Miss Gardner’s stockings in the defendant’s house, matted with blood and semen. We found strands of her hair in Mr. Mather’s boat. They have been studied under a microscope and compared to hairs left in a brush at home. They are hers.”
Jeremiah Denton turned and stared at the defendants. “Joshua Cane likes to think of himself as a charitable man, doing work among the poor. What he has never accepted is that he is the poor. I suggest to you that from the day his father gambled away the family fortune, Joshua Cane has lived in bitterness, filled with contempt for the unfortunates he lives among, and consumed with hatred and envy for those who still have what he believes should rightfully be his. Did he admire Sloane Gardner? Possibly. Was he jealous of her house, her breeding, her clothes, her fortune? I would bet my life on it.” Jeremiah Denton paused. “My family, you may remember, has taken something the Canes felt was theirs,” he said, “and paid a terrible price for it.”
“I object!” Josh said hoarsely over the murmur of the crowd.
The sheriff ignored him. “It is true we have no body, Your Honor. But against the testimony of Mr. Cane and Mr. Mather we have three eloquent pieces of evidence. The word of witnesses who saw Sloane Gardner enter his house but never leave it. The bloody stockings in Mr. Cane’s possession. And the hairs found in Mr. Mather’s boat. Surely the story they tell is compelling.”
Deacon Bose scratched out another line of notes. Joshua held up his hand. The effort made his arm shake. He’d had next to no food and less sleep for more than a day. His gut and ribs still ached badly from the beating Kyle had given him.
Deacon Bose looked up. “Y
ou may speak, Mr. Cane.”
Josh dropped his hand and hunched down a little, then slowly stood. “I plead guilty,” he said. The crowd let out a protracted sigh, and Sheriff Denton nodded.
Josh held up his hand for silence. “Guilty of many things. To the charge that I found Miss Gardner attractive, which seems to be most of Mr. Denton’s case, I plead guilty. To the charge that I live in the wrong part of town, I plead guilty. To the charge that my house smells and I am not friends with many in this room, I apparently have to plead guilty, too. To the charge that I don’t look fit to entertain any thoughts about a woman above my station, I also plead guilty, like a good little criminal, with the extenuating circumstance that my best clothes were ruined as I was beaten repeatedly last night by the brave men of Sheriff Denton’s militia while my hands were cuffed behind me.”
“Liar!” shouted someone in militia colors. Several people hissed.
“I will be the first to stipulate that my friend Ham gets drunk and says stupid things in bars,” Joshua added, glancing at Ham, who had the decency to wince. “I’ve told you what happened. The issue of the stockings has been—explained. How Miss Gardner’s hairs came to be in Ham’s boat I cannot imagine, but I swear to you that he, and I, did nothing wrong. We two saved Ms. Gardner’s life. That much is known. The rest is merely what Mr. Denton believes and conjectures and submits and fears. It’s his word against ours.” Josh looked at the courtroom. “Are we two really so different from you, that you would destroy our lives on nothing better than the sheriff’s word?”
“Yes, faggot,” said someone from the back.
Deacon Bose banged his gavel for silence. “Have you any further arguments, Mr. Denton? Mr. Cane? No?”
He consulted his notes. “My experience of the law,” the deacon said at last, “has been that motive, while fascinating, is largely irrelevant in criminal cases. The physical evidence rarely lies. In the absence of a body, I cannot in good conscience find the defendants guilty of murder beyond a shadow of a doubt. However, I think the evidence warrants a sentence of exile, and that is the penalty I mean to impose.”
In the back of the courtroom, Ham’s mother and his sister Rachel began to weep.
“The court finds that Joshua Cane and Ham Mather are to be exiled from Galveston,” Deacon Bose said. “They are to be set down far from our shores with the supplies mandated in the penal code, and banished henceforth, never to return, on penalty of death.”
Part Three
Chapter Eleven
ASYLUM
COLD lightning went through Sloane as Josh told her of her mother’s death. The instant he turned to make her tea, she grabbed her mask with shaking fingers and put it on, desperate for the high, blank feeling it brought.
The leather settled over her face and she was back in Mardi Gras. It was dark, and the energy of Carnival hummed and snapped in her veins, holding her up like a kite in a strong breeze. She made her way to Broadway. The big boulevard was full of revellers: jugglers and clowns, sword-swallowers and men who breathed fire. Stiff-legged stilt-walkers strode overhead, cautious as cranes. A woman with the claws and haunches of a cat bounded by on all fours with a dead bird in her mouth. Fireworks burst in the darkness, Roman candles and sparklers and Catherine wheels. Snakes of firecrackers lashed across the ground, crackling like gunshots.
The full moon grinned down at her. She stared back. The moon was so bright it stung her eyes. You lied. You lied, you son of a bitch.
I am Sly, I am Sly, I am the grin and the narrow eyes. The little jingle went around and around in her head as she made her way through the throngs to the Stewart Beach Amusement Park. The moon burned like a white candle overhead, making the legend over the entrance gleam:
It Just Doesn’t Get
Any Better Than This!
A geek in the Wild Boy cage was eating a live frog as she pushed her way past. The frog’s legs still hung from his mouth, twitching. She ignored the come-ons of the shrimp-grillers and the hawkers in front of the Pussy Show tent, working her way past the Unicorn Cage and the Genuine Human Maze. She strode up to the manager’s office just as Momus stepped out of it. “You lied,” she said.
The hunchbacked dwarf looked up. “I never lie.” Light from his eyes crept over her like frost, making her skin go cold and stiff. “Your exact words were, I just can’t stand to see her die. You didn’t. Be happy.”
“You knew what I meant.”
“Yes,” Momus said, “I did.”
She felt shame catch her again like a blow to the chest, squeezing her heart. If I weren’t wearing the mask right now, if I were just Sloane, I would kill myself.
A dog ran by, wild-eyed. Someone had tied a sparkler to its tail. It vanished into the labyrinth of stalls, trailing a spray of white fire and lurching shadows. Momus said, “I am a moralist, in my way. I despise illusion.” He took her by the arm. “Walk with me, Stepdaughter. I want to show you something.”
Momus steered her around the side of the geek cage to a little alleyway that ran behind one line of exhibits. Where they walked the crowd went quiet and split around them. The god stopped at a small shed. The padlock on the back door fell open at his touch and he waved her inside. A cold white light fell from his blue-veined hands and his round head, illuminating the interior as if by moonlight. It was a storage room. Props and bits of carnival equipment were jumbled everywhere within: rings for the ringtoss, balls and BBs, bowling pins and tin ducks for the shooting games, wigs and false teeth, spirit gum and lengths of crepe hair the same shade as the Bearded Lady’s beard. There were cards and coins and mountebank’s cups, collapsible swords and a moth-eaten gorilla suit that stank like a monkey.
Momus gestured at a bowling pin, the kind Sloane had seen people trying to knock over with a baseball at one of the stalls on the fairground outside. “Pick that up.”
She did, grunting in surprise. “Wow. These are heavy sons of bitches.” Sly swore more than Sloane ever had.
“They ought to be,” Momus said. “They’re made of lead.”
“Lead!”
“Painted white afterward, of course. They look just like regular pins, but they’re also wider at the base. It takes a very fine shot indeed to knock over one of these.” He ambled over to another shelf and hefted up a jar of marbles. A placard pasted on it read, Guess How Many and Win Our Grand Prize! Momus tilted the jar forward. Looking down, Sly saw that there was another smaller empty container inside. The marbles that seemed to fill up the big jar were actually only a thin layer around the outside.
“Another cheat.” Sloane felt her face pulling into Sly’s sharp grin. “And the unicorn?”
“A goat with a fake horn glued to its head.”
“The Bearded Lady?”
“She’s a man.”
Sloane chuckled. “And the geek? The wild boy I saw eating the ‘live’ frog?”
“Oh, that’s real,” Momus said. “He’s just hungry.”
She laughed out loud. “I thought you said you despised illusion?”
“This is not illusion,” Momus said. “I don’t lie, not ever. The world is full of lies, if called by other names. Advertisements. Policy platforms. Love poetry. Believe me when I tell you, Stepdaughter, you will never in a long life find a more honest statement than the motto of my kingdom.” He tapped the lead bowling pin with a fingernail. “It just doesn’t get any better than this. That is the cold truth.”
“But it’s a swindle.”
“It’s a lecture,” Momus countered. He shook the marble jar and listened to it rattle. “It’s a monograph, an experiment, a public demonstration of a basic law. Why do you think the sober men of your Krewe and the lunatics in the Krewe of Harlequins both bow to me? You think my carnival is a cheat because it should be fair. But life is not fair. The universe is not fair. The game is rigged. You can win for a time—find love, hope, happiness. But in the long run the house always wins. It always wins. That’s the truth.” He glanced at her and winked. “If you don’t bel
ieve me, ask your mother. Which reminds me, Stepdaughter—how are you taking dear Jane’s death? Bearing up?”
Sloane shrugged. “I want to kill myself,” she said. “Hm. That wasn’t what I meant to say at all. I suppose it must be true, though. Can you stop me from feeling that?”
“Of course.” Momus padded across the storage room to where she stood, plunged his hand into her chest and pulled out her beating heart. Sloane jerked and dropped like a puppet with her strings cut, smacking the side of her face on the plank floor. Beads rattled and a few pieces of ancient confetti drifted up and settled along with the dust. She lay on the floor, shaking. Momus squatted beside her. They looked at her heart together for a moment, the bloody organ shaking in his palm.
He patted the pockets of his waistcoat. “Now where…? Ah. Here we go.” From the hip pocket of his ringmaster’s suit he pulled out a doll. Sloane recognized it immediately. It was herself as a girl, only prettier, wilder, more exotic than she had ever been. Its dress was made of blue velvet, trimmed—more fancifully than Jane Gardner would ever have allowed—with lace from a veil she had lost a year ago. The doll’s features were sharper and more beautiful than hers had ever been, and where Sloane’s hair was mouse-brown, the doll’s was fiery red. Her eyes were made from glinting jade buttons.
Momus stuffed her heart into the doll. “There we go, all tucked away. Doesn’t that feel better?”
And it did. For the first time since she had heard of her mother’s death, something loosened inside her ribs. She felt lighter inside. Much lighter, as if Momus had pulled an anvil out of her chest. She laughed and pointed at the doll. “Where did you get that?”