“Course not,” Ham said. “You’re a doctor, right? You take care of people.”
“What do you want from me?” Josh said. “They kicked us out, Ham. If we go back they’ll kill us both. I have tried and tried to do the best I could, and they just didn’t want me, okay? Well, all right, I got the message.”
“You little fucker,” Ham said. He wiped his big red face with his hand. “We wanted you, Josh. Me and Shem and Penny and the Grooks and the Stephensons. That Bowles kid you saved who was dying of asthma. We wanted you. But we’re not rich, so we just don’t fucking count.” His face was full of frustration and disgust. “Have you even figured out yet why you had the hots for the Gardner bitch?”
“What?”
“It’s her house you want to fuck, Josh.” Rolls of sunburned flesh spilled over the waistband of Ham’s ragged prison pants as he grabbed his crotch and pumped his big hips. “You want to crawl up under the official and sanctified Duchess of the Krewe of Momus floorboards and hump her fine china and feel up all the swanks who come to her parties.” Ham shook his head and spat, jaw working. “You’re just a two-bit snob, Joshua Cane, and fuck me for ever telling anybody otherwise.”
“That’s not true.” Josh felt parched and weak. He shook his head. Remembered what they had all said about him in the courthouse. Remembered how nobody had defended him. Nobody but Ham.
The big man gathered up a handful of food. “I think I’ll rest out on the beach.”
“Ham. Jesus. Stay in the goddamn shade! We don’t have the luxury to be stupid. You need to stay in the shade. Conserve water.”
Ham eased his way out of their little bower of live-oak twigs. “It’s hard to eat in here, Josh. Your fucking wrist stinks, if you want to know the truth.”
“Ham.”
“There’s a fair little breeze out here,” Ham said. “I’m jes’ a rough ol’ redneck, Josh. I ain’t comfortable in no big fancy house,” he said with an exaggerated drawl. “You can have the run of the mansion.”
“This is childish.”
“Childish?” Ham turned, quick as a fox, and shoved Josh back against the trunk of the wrecked oak with one huge hand around his throat. His whole body was shaking. “You…” He licked his lips. “Maybe you forgot that my sister Rachel lives in a double-wide, Josh. What do you figure her trailer park looks like this morning? Hey? But hell, it serves her right, don’t it? Serves them all right for not recognizing your fucking genius.” Josh fought for air. His friend’s huge hand was hard as a brick, shoving against his windpipe. “People used to say, ‘That Cane boy, he’s a mean one, ain’t he?’ and I would tell them they were wrong. If you get past the prickles, I’d say, Josh is all right. But you aren’t, are you, Josh? You’re just a spiteful little fuck and nothing is ever your own fault and the world has done you wrong.” Ham’s fat arm was trembling with fury. “And because of you—you—I wasn’t there for my family when they needed me. I have friends and kin who mean the world to me, and I sold them out for you.” He dropped Josh in disgust. “So which one of us is stupider, eh? How many times have I saved your ass? Whereas I got dick from you. Less than nothing. Maybe while I was out here watching you feel sorry for yourself, and stick your hand into rattler holes like no child of five should do, maybe my folks or my sister was getting drowned. Maybe my niece Christy, maybe she was getting a pane of glass through her neck because they didn’t have enough help to board their windows up in time.”
Josh felt sick with shame. He had never seen his friend like this. “Ham—”
“I don’t want to hear it, you contemptible little fuck,” Ham said flatly. He backed out of their makeshift hut. “I’ll be outside,” he said.
Josh watched him walk down the beach, looking west, toward Galveston.
JOSH closed his eyes. Ham would get over it, he told himself. He always did. He’d heard the big man bluster before. He wasn’t the type to hold a grudge. And yet…that flatness in Ham’s voice as he backed out of the lean-to—that was something Josh had never heard before.
The lean-to that Ham had made, that Josh was using. How many times have I saved your ass? Whereas I got dick.
Ham’s sister Rachel had two kids. Christ, Josh thought. What a prick he was. Even if somehow they had survived, they had terrible sewage problems in her run-down neighborhood. They’d be starting to see dysentery in a day or two. Cholera, too. Josh rubbed his eyes with his left hand and pressed his palm against his aching forehead. Ham was right. He was a mean, petty, vindictive snob. Hell, he thought, I wouldn’t let me join a Krewe either.
The sound of Ham’s footsteps was soon swallowed by the angry breakers and the hiss of surf against the sand. Gulls cried. Josh heard the piping of a gang of little shore plovers. Back when they were little, Sloane used to call the big ones sandpipers and the little ones sandpeepers. She probably didn’t remember that. He did. He remembered chasing after them with Sloane and Randall Denton and Jenny Ford, a whole pack of kids. Birds fluffing into the air, offended, the kids stringing out, most of them faster than him. He had stopped to pick up a sand dollar one time, he remembered, then put it back in the surf so it wouldn’t dry out. By the time he looked up, the other kids were gone. They had run down the beach, nobody had waited for him. He was alone.
Josh’s wrist ached and his body felt heavy as mud in the mid-afternoon heat. Exhausted and feverish, he fell into a long series of anxious dreams in which his mother needed something but he had lost it through pure carelessness and time was running out. The thing he was supposed to bring to her kept changing—a sand dollar, a Bible, a watch, a pair of black silk stockings spattered with blood. The dream seemed to go on and on, and his first reaction on waking was relief.
It was a sound that had woken him, a heavy metallic thunk, dull yet slightly musical. An odd sound. Opening his eyes, he was surprised to find that it was full dark out. Ham must have fallen asleep, too. Peering out through the lattice of twigs, all Josh could see was the dull glimmer of starlight on the waves breaking offshore. Ghostly ribbons of surf washed along the beach.
His head ached and he was thirsty. His mouth felt as if it were made of hot cloth. His wrist throbbed sharply when he tried to move. He fumbled at his pocket for another hank of willow bark. What the hell could have made that odd noise? It had sounded like someone dropping a cowbell wrapped in a tea towel. Grimacing, he started to crawl from their makeshift hut. Each pulse felt like a double rap with a tack hammer, one spike of pain from his right wrist and another ache a moment later in his pounding head. He poked his head out of the shelter and felt the cool wind on his face.
Someone jabbed him in the neck with a knife. “Move and I cut you right here,” said a woman’s voice. “George? I’ve caught the little one. Should I cut his throat?”
Chapter Sixteen
CANNIBALS
JOSH could see another figure stooped over the shadowy bulk of Ham’s body. “This side of beef ain’t dead yet,” said the man called George in a businesslike East Texas drawl. “Can the little one walk?”
The woman holding the knife against Joshua’s throat coughed, a dry hacking cough. “Can you walk?” He figured from her accent that she was black.
“Here’s a hint,” George said. “If you cain’t walk, we’ll cut your throat and leave you on the beach.”
“I can walk.”
“Attaboy.” With a grunt George heaved Ham’s body over so he was lying facedown in the sand. “This’un’s a big sumbitch, ain’t he? Hardheaded, too. I gave him plenty of whack with my baseball bat. Would have been a waste to kill him, but better safe than sorry, that’s my motto.”
“Why are you doing this?” Josh said. He thought about jumping back under the screen of brush, but that would leave him trapped. He was too weak and dizzy to hope to outrun his captors in a scramble along the beach. “We’ve got nothing worth stealing, not even food.”
“Not even food?” George said with a laugh. “Hell, son, you are food.”
Joshua’s heart ba
ttered against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Cannibals.
Still chuckling, George pulled Ham’s arms behind his back and lashed his wrists together with practiced speed. “Here’s the deal, little man: After I get done with this big side of beef, you’re going to stay still while I tie you up. Then we’re going for a walk. If you make a break for it I will beat your friend’s head like an egg and then haul ass after you. Comprende?”
“Why should I go along? You’re just going to kill me anyway.”
“Well, now, the game ain’t over till it’s over, that’s my philosophy. Heck, I might let you go!” George said expansively. “That was a joke, son. Why ain’t you laughing? Seriously, though, I got plenty of food, specially after a blow like this. Good workers, now—those are hard to come by. You’ll be alive and un-et just as long as you are useful.” George got busy down by Ham’s ankles. “Nothing personal, friend. But it’s a tough old world, and everybody’s got to look out for number one. Martha, help him out of that lean-to and make sure he can walk.”
The knifepoint teased Josh out into the open. He willed himself to stand up, biting his lips against a surge of dizziness. The woman named Martha coughed again. “He looks a little shaky to me. Skinny, too.”
“You’re so damn lazy, Martha.” George came up behind Josh and began binding his wrists with what felt like wire. Josh screamed and thrashed as the loop jerked tight around his snakebit forearm. George punched him hard in the back of the head, and he fell facedown into the sand. George sat on his back. “Now, what in the hell? Give me some light, Martha. Oh, I see. Well, that’s all right. We’ll just tie you by your elbows then.—There. That’s better, ain’t it?”
Josh tried to stop sobbing as the pain in his wrist receded. His arms were pinned tightly behind his back with his elbows almost touching. George rolled Josh over so he was lying on his back in the sand, then squatted over him with a knee on each side of his chest and gripped his chin to hold his head still. “You might want to close your eyes,” George said.
“I can walk! I can walk! Don’t kill me, please!” Josh kept his eyes shut tight.
“If I was going to kill you, would I waste time tying you up?” Josh heard a click, followed a moment later by a faint odor of kerosene on the Gulf breeze. His eyes flew open as a searing pain on his forehead made him buck and shriek.
Josh had been branded. “Welcome to the Bar V!” George said. Martha was holding a slender stamp made out of coat-hanger wire, glowing dull red. Josh writhed in his bonds, smelling the stink of his own burnt skin. George chuckled, taking the brand from Martha. A moment later he was squatting over Ham, stamping his forehead. The big man groaned and jerked, his great body curling and uncurling on the sand as George stepped off of him.
Seeing Ham utterly vulnerable, his ankles hobbled and his hands tied behind his back, made something click over in Josh, all his fear and pain precipitating suddenly into a cold, bitter anger. “If you really want us to walk, turn him around,” Josh said. “If you hit him in the head he may have a concussion. Elevate his feet and give him some water so he won’t go into shock.”
A slender flame jumped in George’s cupped hand—a silver cigarette lighter. That must have been what he had used to heat the branding wire. Shielding the lighter’s wavering flame with his body, George peered at Josh. Josh stared back at his captor. George had been born white, but burned by sun and wind to a ruddy mahogany. The leathery skin of his face was grooved and deeply lined. He had the used-up look of a man that has lived too hard and suffered too much from hunger and thirst and sickness. It was a look Josh had seen before, in his poorest and most brutalized patients. At first glance you would figure George for a strong man nearing seventy, but Josh guessed he was closer to forty-five. His hair was thin and kinked from malnutrition. Each side of his gaunt face was seamed with a long, deep scar. The flesh along the scars was puckered and gnarled from cheekbone to jaw. Above them, on his forehead, he bore a third scar, a barred V like the one he had branded onto Josh and Ham, but this one had been cut rather than burned in.
“You a doctor?” George said.
“Pretty much.”
Martha coughed.
Josh lay on the sand with his arms lashed behind him and his ankles hobbled together. He drew his cool, professional detachment around him like a lab coat. It was the only covering he had left. “If you need Ham to walk, you’d better elevate his feet. I’d do it myself, but…”
Tears of pain started in Josh’s eyes as George tapped the blistering brand on his forehead. “I give the orders here,” he said. “You hear me, son?” Josh didn’t answer. George reached around and gave his swollen wrist a squeeze. “Hear me?”
Josh gasped. “Yes, sir.”
“That’s all right, then,” George said. A moment later he swung Ham’s body around so his feet were up the shore. Then he dribbled a few drops of water into Ham’s mouth from his canteen.
Ham recovered full consciousness within ten minutes. Half an hour later he and Josh were staggering slowly down Highway 87 under the stars, with their arms tied behind them and their ankles hobbled. Their captors walked behind them, Martha taciturn and coughing, George in robust good spirits. Though the cold rage did not leave Josh, his strength quickly began to flag. The third time he fell in the road, George called a halt.
A thin band of sky was beginning to lighten on the eastern horizon. George had Josh and Ham lie back to back on the road. Josh could feel Ham’s muscles begin to tense as George bent down to lash them together. George paused and then kicked Ham savagely in the stomach. “Don’t go getting no ideas,” he said with a chuckle. In a few seconds he used another hank of cord to tie their bound arms together. “Martha, I’m going to scout for some water and some grub. If they show any signs of moving, stick the little one and stay clear. I doubt the big one will get too far with his friend’s body on his back.”
Martha coughed. “I’m hungry,” she said, eyeing Ham.
George laughed. “Not for long.” Then he left them, striking inland. They could hear him splashing through the salt-grass marsh long after his dim form passed out of sight.
Grey light filtered slowly into the humid air. Josh and Ham lay back to back, with Josh facing inland. The Gulf breeze had died in the middle of the night. Grass and reeds rose motionless from the grey water that still covered much of the waterlogged prairie. Large humped shapes dotted the plain. Some were still, but others were moving, giant beasts as massive as live-oak trees that dipped and raised their great heads as if drinking. Suddenly Josh realized they were oil wells, solitary grazers of the kind they called cricket pumps, or dipping birds. He tried to wet his cracked lips. “Now I know why we didn’t see any houses or barns,” he said. “This land must have been leased to an oil company. There’s cricket pumps all over it.”
Ham grunted.
“They’re cannibals,” Josh said. “George says we’re to work as slaves, near as I can gather. He says he won’t eat us till we can’t work. How’s your vision?”
“Kind of blurry. Not too bad. Feels like my head got kicked by a horse.”
“It was an aluminum baseball bat. I saw it as our pal George was leaving.”
“Easton Howitzer,” Martha said with a chuckle. “B’longed to my brother. Had it since the Flood.”
Josh squinted at Martha, who sat cross-legged on the road behind them. She was a lanky black woman with unhealthy yellow eyes and the sour look of someone with low expectations who had still been disappointed. Her cheeks were scarred like George’s, but she had a different mark on her forehead, a diamond with a line through it. She was younger than George, he judged—thirty-five going on fifty. She would have been nine or ten when the Flood fell, and grown up during the bloody anarchy that followed.
George had been lean and sinewy, but Martha was painfully skinny. Too skinny, really. Even in hard times, the sea ought to supply enough food to keep more weight on her than this, Josh thought. The knuckle of her left ring finger was s
wollen twice as large as the other fingers on her bony hands. Arthritis? Scurvy? Her breasts hung low and flat beneath a long-sleeved cotton shirt. She wore polyester pants that had been patched and repatched with bits of other clothing, and a pair of rubber flip-flops on her feet. Josh looked at them enviously; his feet were already salt- and wind-chapped, his toes badly blistered. She still had her knife in her hand, an eight-inch blade with a non-slip molded rubber handle. It had once been a fat-bladed hunting knife, judging by the steel near the hilt, but years of sharpening had worn the blade thin and taken off any serrations, so now it looked more like a filleting knife.
Martha coughed. “Don’ be looking at me.”
“Help us get rid of George and we’ll make it worth your while,” Ham said.
Martha laughed. “That didn’t take long. ’Xactly how you going to make it worth my while, beef? George and me got a place. George and me know the land, and we know the folks around here. You got jack. You know jack. Minute I let you out those ropes, you try to cut my throat.”
“We wouldn’t,” Ham said.
“Then you even dumber than you look,” Martha said.
Josh didn’t like the sound of that.
“Josh?” Ham said flatly, a while later.
“Yes?”
“Thanks again for getting me into this.”
Josh watched the cricket pump heads lift up and down among the rushes. “You’re welcome,” he said.
Silence returned as the daylight broadened. A mosquito whined in Josh’s ear. Another one settled on his cheek. He shook his head, trying to dislodge it. It rose for a second and then alighted again. His arms were tied behind his back. He watched the mosquito, eyes straining to keep focus, as it dipped into his skin. Anopheles. He wondered if it was carrying malaria or yellow fever.
Martha coughed again. A bell went off in the back of Joshua’s brain. He looked sharply again at the swollen joint on her left ring finger. “How long—” He stopped, calculating.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said.