Part Five
Chapter Nineteen
GOING UNDER
ON the seventh morning after the hurricane, Sloane woke to the smell of bait. She was lying on a chaise in Randall Denton’s library. She fought to open her eyes. Dawn hadn’t come, though the darkness felt lighter than it had when she had finally settled down to sleep just after three in the morning. Something long and wet and stringy brushed her cheek and then withdrew. Sloane gasped, eyes widening. A sad, whiskered face leaned out of the gloom, bringing a powerful stink of wet shrimp and craw-dads. She had never heard of a Prawn Man coming so close to anyone before. She waited for him to move or speak. He did neither. He only watched, regarding her with a deep, gentle melancholy, his long stiff-shelled face tilted to one side, his eyes black and glistening like roe. Sloane’s eyes struggled under the weight of the night. They fell shut, opened, shut again, the smell of mud and cut bait like a drug in the dark air, until at last she slipped back into sleep. Dreams closed over her head, strange and slowly moving like the currents of a dark sea.
When she woke again it was grey dawn. The Prawn Man was gone, though a faint fishy odor lingered in the air. Somewhere beyond the library window a mockingbird called. The notes of her song were beautiful and sad, each line lilting up to end with a question, like the voice of a woman wandering through the underworld and calling for her family.
Or perhaps it was Jane Gardner, enchanted, searching for the city she had lost. Galveston was going under: Sloane could feel the magic seeping over the Island, bringing miracles with it and minotaurs and the Prawn Men who seemed to live within its current.
The morning after the hurricane rumors of minotaurs had begun to circulate. With so much fear in the air, and no Recluse to keep the magic from hardening around it, it was inevitable that pockets of dread and panic would precipitate into flesh. Sloane had heard of a little scalped girl who haunted the Fishes. It was said she had drowned when a tornado picked up the trailer home she had been hiding in, tore it to pieces, and flung it into the sea. The skin had been flayed from her head, and she was said to be drawn to long dark hair. There were reports of other minotaurs, too, the Glass Man and the Fat Boy, with his handful of knives, and a creature without a name that was said to haunt Pier 21, strangling its victims with slimy green tendrils like ropes of kelp.
What happens when nightmares start spilling into Jane’s little empire and there’s no Recluse there to shoo them off to Mardi Gras? It’s a hard old world we live in now, kiddo. Oh, ’Dessa, why did you let yourself get killed? We need you so much now.
Not every marvel was dark. The first bold sign of the new magic Sloane had witnessed herself was the unfolding of the angel in Alice Mather. From the time Japhet had returned to the Bishop’s Palace the day after the storm with his mother in tow, Sloane had been setting Alice more and more tasks. Mrs. Mather was competent and well-liked, and Sloane had needed all the help she could get. At first there was no missing the fact that Alice Mather was terribly worried about her son, no matter how many times she expressed her belief that God would take care of him. Alice had wanted very badly to keep busy, and not just with her family. Sloane had obliged her. Having jobs to do around strangers had been something to hold on to as the days went by with no sign of Ham, or the boat that had taken him into exile.
And then, curiously enough, Alice had begun to shine. Her step got lighter and lighter. Hope came into a room with her like the smell of fresh ironing. And finally three days ago, Lindsey the maid had run into the study where Sloane was working to tell her that Alice Mather was speaking in tongues.
Sloane had always thought her mother didn’t understand how alive things were. It was more obvious every day. For instance, she’d had the seriously ill quartered in Randall’s ballroom for five days; now the ballroom itself seemed to be sickening. The wallpaper had begun to blister and sweat, as if feverish, and the air tasted unhealthy even when they left the windows open.
I should be glad Mother never saw her city come to this.
In an improbable game of musical chairs, she now occupied Randall Denton’s house. Sheriff Denton, on the other hand, had moved his staff permanently into Ashton Villa. Sloane would have been happy to trade, but the sheriff had made it clear that if he caught her trying any such thing he would put her under arrest and “round up” the revellers, whatever that meant. Nothing good, Sloane assumed. If she wanted to get out of the Bishop’s Palace, which she did, she should do it now, while the rest of the city was either sleeping or busy coping with its own disasters.
Sloane forced her eyes open. She had slept in her clothes again, which she hated, but there wasn’t space to waste on privacy. The teenage boy with the hunting knife was sleeping on a pallet next to her. He’d lost his family in the storm and had no house to go back to. Scarlet, the little doll-girl with Sloane’s heart inside her, lay a few feet away, curled like a cat in the big leather armchair.
Awake, Scarlet was a bristling, sulky kid packed with so much energy she seemed to give off sparks as she darted through the Bishop’s Palace. She spent hours playing dominoes, very badly, with anyone who would give her a game. She was a furious loser, and gloated when she won. She stayed up past midnight every day, and made a point of being Momus’s granddaughter. She disdained the ordinary humans stranded at the Palace, taking great pains to spend her time among the revellers instead, who treated her like a princess.
But no matter where Sloane fell asleep, each morning when she woke Scarlet was curled up a few feet away. Twice now nightmares had driven the girl to her in the middle of the night. She had burrowed under Sloane’s arm, her small body shuddering. Slowly the shakes would fade and her breathing would slow down. She would sleep while Sloane lay awake, waiting for the long night to pass, afraid to move for fear of disturbing her.
Asleep, Scarlet was the most beautiful, the most fragile creature Sloane had ever seen. Visions haunted her: Scarlet shot by Sheriff Denton, or racked with malaria, or falling into the swimming pool in Randall’s backyard and drowned. Image after dreadful image haunted Sloane’s waking eyes until she squeezed them shut and forced herself to think of something else.
Outside the mockingbird sang and sang.
This hour before dawn was the only quiet moment of the day. The revellers had abandoned the ground floor of the Bishop’s Palace to the human refugees. Snatches of song came floating down the central staircase until three and four every morning, along with the rattle of dice and the clicking of dominoes and painfully obvious drunken tiptoeing into the kitchen.
In another hour, by five-thirty, Randall’s housemaids would be tending to his chickens, and Mrs. Sherbourne, the cook, would be in the kitchen to start breakfast and begin adding to Sloane’s alarmingly huge bill. Randall, predictably, had written out a contract for her to sign while the storm was still blowing. She had guaranteed to cover his damages and expenses, from her own pocket if necessary. At the time she had hoped the Krewe of Momus would foot the bill, but after a cautious exchange of messengers, Sheriff Denton had declared her an outcast from the Krewe.
“What gives him the right!” she had demanded. But as Randall had pointed out, with Jane Gardner dead, all Jeremiah had to do was bring Jim Ford around. No great feat for anyone with sufficient force of personality, as Sloane knew all too well.
This had required her to switch to a second plan: winning the money back. Every evening after dinner Mrs. Sherbourne began toting up the day’s expenses. Then Sloane turned the house over for the last couple of hours before bedtime to Alice Mather and invited Randall upstairs to play cards. At first he was dubious about sitting among the revellers, but there was a part of him that enjoyed the exoticism of it, especially after he discovered that few of them were very good players.
Sloane was, though.
She couldn’t possibly win as much as she was spending—Randall would have stopped playing if he realized he was losing that much money—but she had at least slowed the bleeding a little. Oh, yes, very noble.
And all for a good cause, too, she thought sarcastically. Because the truth was, she enjoyed the card games. If she hadn’t had that couple of irresponsible hours a day, she would have gone crazy. Downstairs, on the first floor, people were sick or dying or grieving for family lost to the storm, while up among the monsters Sloane Gardner was laughing and drinking and, let’s face it, having fun. Not what her mother would have done.
It also made for a very short night if you were up at first light the next morning. Sloane groaned inside.
She had heard from a couple of the revellers that Ace had been seen since the storm. One fire-eater who had snuck into the Bishop’s Palace on the third day after the hurricane claimed that Ace and a few other human-looking revellers were running an unofficial shelter at the old Railroad Museum. As relieved as she had been to hear he was alive—of course she hadn’t managed to shoot him, he was too lucky for that—the idea of facing him filled her with shame. Still, she owed him that. The leather chaise longue creaked beneath her as she got up, carefully stepping over the pale white boy sleeping on the floor.
Refugees littered the library and the billiard room, stretched on pallets made from Randall Denton’s quilts and comforters. Sloane tiptoed over more sleeping bodies, grey humps in the dim house, here an out-thrust arm, there a bruised unshaven face. Behind Randall’s pool table Sloane stepped over a woman and her child who had come in yesterday, both clammy with fever sweat. She turned the latch on the French doors that led to the back patio as quietly as she could, but the little girl’s eyes fluttered open at the click. She stared soundlessly at Sloane. She couldn’t have been more than ten. The mother stayed sleeping.
As much time as Sloane spent worrying about Scarlet these days, how much more must your heart catch watching a real child, a child you had borne and cared for every day for years and years? How unimaginably defenseless you would be. It shocked Sloane to imagine Jane Gardner that vulnerable. It brought a strange, shaky feeling to her chest when she thought about it. Maybe her mother had been fighting for more than just Galveston. Fighting for her, Sloane. Holding back not just magic, but the future, the relentless wheel of time itself. Trying with all her great energy and intelligence to keep life and all its changes from hurting her child.
A mother’s real duty was to prepare her child to live on her own. That was the pious thing people said to one another. But looking at Scarlet, or at that feverish ten-year-old girl lying on the floor, Sloane didn’t buy it. If she were a parent, she thought, she couldn’t do that. She would try with every breath to protect her child from any hurt, however small. However necessary or inevitable. It was ridiculous and impossible, but that’s what she would do. Let the world try to break her if it could.
Sloane stepped outside. Later in the afternoon the sun would set the coast simmering in another ninety-five-degree day, but now, in the grey predawn, the air was cooler than it had been since April. The humid sixty-degree morning would have been delicious if not for the smell of corpse fires. Sloane walked through Randall’s wrecked grounds, past his generator shed and his swimming pool. The pool was filled up with brackish water, littered with palm fronds and bits of shingle, leaves, and the bodies of several grackles and a squirrel. Yesterday there’d been a possum, but something had dragged it out. Even in the early dawn, wheels of buzzards turned over every part of the city. Thin ropes of smoke rose from the burning dead.
At 14th Avenue she passed a grey mare tethered to a streetlamp. In the early morning light the horse was grazing on the body of a dead dog, worrying the carcass with big yellow teeth. For some reason this seemed to Sloane the most terrible abomination the magic had spawned, worse than the men she had seen in Carnival with snake scales for skin or gills under their jawbones. She found herself wishing that Sheriff Denton would come and shoot the horrible mare and throw its body off the Island.
A quick spasm of pure hatred for the people of Galveston curdled Sloane’s blood. As long as she could remember, the Islanders had feared and despised her godmother, Odessa. Called her a witch, a murderess, a monster. Wished she were dead or vanished. Sloane watched the horse put one heavy hoof on the dog’s body and rip up another chunk of flesh. Well, my fellow citizens got their wish, she thought savagely. I wonder how they’re liking it.
THE Railroad Museum was busier than she remembered it, noisy with the murmur of conversation and footsteps, doors opening and closing, plates and saucers clinking and clattering in the diner. Somebody seemed to be keeping the place clean. Here and there she could see a tuft of seaweed caught under a bench, but the floors had been mopped, and while she could see a few smashed windows, somebody had nailed boards across them and swept up the broken glass. The gas was up and running, with plenty of lights burning in brackets along the walls. Ceiling fans turned high overhead.
There were more people here, and more statues, too. In the real Galveston, before Odessa died, all the sculptures had been of folks dressed in the fashions of the 1930s and ’40s, but today instead of the handful of old familiar statues, there were dozens and dozens of new ones: Japanese tourists and young women of Odessa’s generation, with white teeth and tight shorts, and two middle-aged Hispanic women, frozen in mid-stride outside the ladies’ room, both wearing dresses of dreary Galveston cotton from after the Flood. There was even a Karankawa Indian, one of the crying cannibals who inhabited the Island when Cabeza de Vaca first arrived. He was in the act of pushing open a door from the side of the station that faced the tracks and the abandoned railway cars, as if he had just ridden into town on the old Southern Pacific cotton run. Even the old black man was no longer sitting on his accustomed pew, thumbing through his paper. Now that the tide of magic was rising into Galveston proper, maybe he could turn his page at last, or put the paper down and walk out into the day.
There were live people at the station, too. The rumors Sloane had heard were true; most of them were revellers who had been stranded in the Mardi Gras until the two Galvestons fell back together. Some still wore tattered ball gowns or clutched their party masks. Quiet voices and bloodshot eyes were the norm. Hangover, Sloane thought, putting her finger on the subdued quality of the crowd. The morning after history’s longest night before.
She passed through the station as unobtrusively as possible, all Sloane, shoulders hunched and head bowed, with nothing of Sly in the tilt of her lips or the set of her head. Several people gave her long looks, but if anybody was sure they saw Sly, even without the mask, they didn’t accost her. Curious, in retrospect, that Lianna had recognized her at once the night of the hurricane. Sly must have been very much in her then.
She picked her way through the crowd to the diner. Waitresses threaded their way between the crowded tables, carrying food out or dirty dishes back, letting out a sizzling sound from the grill every time they kicked open the swinging kitchen doors. Volleys of shouted Spanish flew through the air like brightly colored birds. The place smelled of hot butter and lard and pancakes cooking.
Ace was sitting at a corner table, pushing some refried beans around his plate with a fork. After a moment he put the fork down. He took a small sip of coffee and then sat wearily with the cup clasped between his hands.
Sloane gathered up her scraps of courage and approached his table. Hi! You might not remember me, but last time we met I tried to kill you. She left her hands out of her pockets so he could see she wasn’t carrying a gun. “Hey. Ace,” she said. She meant to sound spritely, but it came out a whisper.
He looked up. “Ma’am?”
“It’s me,” she said. “Sl—Sloane Gardner.” She swallowed. “Sly.”
He wore a patch over the left eye Momus had taken from him, but his right eye widened. “Goddamn.”
“Probably,” Sloane agreed.
Samuel Cane’s face broke into a smile. “Good Lord, I had no idea. I’ve never seen you in pants before, and the one time you had your mask off I was a tad preoccupied.” Ace laughed again and waved at the chair across the table. “Sit! Maria, una más aqui! Have
you had breakfast yet? It’s rice and beans, or else beans and rice, take your pick.”
“I was hoping for the ranch eggs.”
“They lost a lot of chickens, and the ones left aren’t laying much. But then, I forgot you’re a Gardner. I guess you can afford chorizo and eggs even at post-hurricane prices.” Sloane smiled and decided not to tell him she was already buying breakfast, lunch, and dinner for thirty—at the prices, God help her, Randall Denton thought fair. “You look younger,” Ace said.
And you look older, Sloane thought. Much older. Ace looked as if he had aged ten years since she had seen him last. The lines around his mouth were deeply grooved, and his hair, which she remembered as salt-and-pepper, was almost entirely white. She glanced down at his plate. “You’ve hardly touched your beans.”
“Little under the weather today.”
They sat in silence for a while. Sloane searched his face for traces of Joshua. They were there. Father and son shared the same narrow, bony face and wide, straight eyebrows, though the effect of the features was very different on the two men. Josh’s face was sharp and full of intelligence. Life had used his father harder, and longer; weariness and wisdom lived in the rubble where calculation had been.
“Sorry I shot you,” Sloane said at last.
“Tried to, you mean.” Ace smiled. “If you’re going to pack a piece, you’d better learn to shoot a mite straighter.”
“I won’t pick so lucky a target, that’s all.”
The waitress brought her a glass of water and a menu. “Have you heard from your son?” Sloane asked. “I told everyone he was innocent.”
Ace stirred his coffee with a splinter of sugarcane. “I haven’t heard anything. Word is they meant to set him down somewhere up the Peninsula the afternoon the hurricane blew up. Ship never made it back. Lost in the storm, I expect.” He sipped his coffee. “Ever see that girl with your heart inside?”