Back in the old Galveston, he would have been snitched out to the Recluse and gone to Krewes in a matter of days, with this kind of omen written on his flesh. But now the Recluse was dead and the Krewes had come to Galveston instead. He wondered if the Harlequins were liking the new world as well as they had anticipated.
Ham took in the marble fireplace across the foyer with its carved traceries of vines and gargoyle heads erupting from the mantle. He studied the great crystal chandelier overhead, and the gorgeous Persian carpet, now filthy with muddy footprints. He observed the polished baby grand in the piano room, the brass spittoons and velvet curtain pulls. He nodded judiciously. “So this is how the po’ folk live.” He tugged his cap over his ears and bent to examine the cherrywood display case Randall kept in his front hall, full of the trophies of Dentons past. The seat of his pants hung loosely from his hips and his neck was still an angry red from sunburn and the mosquito bites he hadn’t been able to keep from scratching.
Josh joined him in front of the display case. “Those are the old Colonel’s Civil War medals.” Josh remembered getting the tour once, as a boy of eight. Randall’s father had pointed out each item in the case, his hands shaking from the Parkinson’s that would eventually kill him. “That’s a signed letter from his friend William Jennings Bryan, who ran for president.” Josh pointed to a stuffed parrot. “When someone came to Will Denton to ask for a loan from his bank, he used to bend his head down to this parrot—it was already dead and stuffed at the time—and then look back with a little smile and say his partner had refused the loan. And these are the plane tickets Randall’s daddy decided not to use on the day before the Flood.” Continental Fit. 204; a yellowing Hertz rental car coupon still peeping out from the decaying paper covers. “If he had decided to go, he would have been in New York City and swallowed with everyone else when it woke up.”
“Hoo boy,” Ham said.
They stood side by side, looking at the Denton heirlooms. “I’m sorry,” Josh said. He felt sick. His heart was pounding and the palms of his hands were clammy with sweat. “I’m not going to make excuses. You and your family, you’ve been good to me. And I haven’t always—I should have done better. I’m sorry.” Ham showed no sign of having heard him. The blush of shame that had burned Josh so often over the last few days came back, stinging fiercely on the blotched white skin where Joe Tucker’s blood had bleached his face. “So I guess I’m asking for another chance.”
“You’ve had a ton of chances.”
“I know,” Josh said.
For the first time in days, Ham turned and looked him in the eye. “Is that finally the sound of genuine remorse?” A tiny quiver of relief went through Josh, and he remembered to breathe. “Are you going to turn over a new leaf?” Ham said. “Are you going to be a new and better Joshua Cane, full of care for others and actually looking beyond your own asshole?” The big man scratched under his cap. A few flakes of peeling skin drifted down from his sunburned scalp. “I don’t know,” Ham said. “And frankly, I don’t care.”
Josh could hear the blood running in his own eardrums, feel it pulsing in his neck and at the ball of his thumb.
Ham turned and ambled off, hooking his thumbs in the waistband of his pants. “I guess I’m not so mad anymore. Not like I was. But to tell you the truth, Josh, I find it exhausting just to listen to you. It feels like there’s years and years and years of bullshit between us, and all I want to do is forget about it. So go ahead, turn over a new leaf. I’m all for it. But don’t tell me about it. Because somewhere out there on the Bolivar Peninsula I just stopped giving a damn.”
Josh’s heart felt tight and dry and leathery, as if it had been hung in the rafters of his house with the thyme and sage and garlic. “Fair enough,” he said. “Some hands you just have to fold.”
“I reckon,” Ham said.
The housemaid trotted downstairs, her face-rag fluttering. “Ms. Gardner will join you directly,” she said. “Can I get you gentlemen something to eat or drink?”
“We just ate,” Josh said. The idea of food made him sick.
Ham beamed. “Chicory if you’ve got it, and I’d take a little snack if you have one handy.”
“Very good.” The maid bobbed and slipped back toward the kitchen.
“Like I’m going to miss a chance at working the Dentons for a free lunch,” Ham said. “But be proud if you like. That’s just the way your momma was. Too proud for everybody. Lot of good it did her.”
“Ham, is there anything I can do—” Josh stopped. He gave a little laugh that felt like a knife in his chest. “Never mind,” he said. “I just remembered something.” Ham didn’t ask what it was, and Josh realized he was still acting as if Ham cared, pathetic as a schoolboy turned down for a date. “Okay,” he said.
Josh turned back, staring blindly through his own reflection in the Colonel’s display case. What he had remembered all of a sudden, like a bubble rising to the surface of a deep sea and popping, was the sight of his father standing on their step a lifetime ago, drunk and penitent and exultant all at once. Don’t you understand, Mandy? I’ve still got it. I still have my luck!
Even then his mother had loved Sam Cane. Josh was sure of that. It just didn’t matter anymore. His tired mother had held Josh back, blocking the doorway with her body, her voice flat. I know. But you don’t have us anymore.
Josh watched Ham walk away. After a lifetime of standing in that doorway behind his mom, he thought, it was surprising to discover himself out in the street, and the door closing in front of him.
FOOTSTEPS thumped quickly down the stairs, and a moment later a tiny red-haired girl dashed into the parlor. “There’s someone new. I heard voices. Oh,” she said, coming to a stop and looking them up and down. “Humans.”
Ham laughed. “What were you expecting?” he said, squatting down to meet her face-to-face.
The girl was the size of a toddler, but lithe and athletic as a ten-year-old, with a face Josh instantly recognized as being just like Sloane’s, only much more dramatic. Her hair was fiery red and her skin white but completely unfreckled, a thing never seen in nature, not under the Texas sun. He wondered if his own hands would splotch and stain where Joe Tucker’s blood had bleached them, or if they would stay milk white for the rest of his life.
“I was hoping for something interesting,” the girl said. “This place is so boring. Nothing to do but wait for the sheriff to come and shoot us to death.” She mimed a yawn and a stretch. “Exciting when it finally happens,” she said with heavy irony. “But not much fun until then. You’re fat,” she added.
“You smell funny,” Ham said instantly.
“I do not!”
Ham wrinkled his nose and snuffled. “Pee-yew.”
“I don’t smell funny!” the girl shouted. Ham shrugged. The child’s nose quivered.
“Made you sniff!” Ham crowed.
“I wasn’t playing!”
“You were and you lost,” Ham said with satisfaction. “You’re Scarlet, I bet. My niece Christy was telling me all about you this morning. You put on a puppet play for her.”
“Christy makes a fine audience,” Scarlet allowed. “Sometimes I let her play the humans.”
“Good of you,” Ham said gravely, and he stuck out his enormous hand, thick as a brick and pretty nearly the same color, for the girl to shake.
Josh watched them becoming friends. Ham always said most men were fools and blockheads, but somehow that opinion did not touch him at any depth. He liked people, he liked being around them, and he went out of his way to befriend them. He was always willing to talk, to men and women, fishers and land folk, the popular and the outcast. Josh had often wondered if it was his enormous size that made it possible. Ham just didn’t fear people; ridicule bounced off of him, and nobody was stupid enough to actually take a swing. (Well, not twice.) Ham liked any man, red, brown, white, or black, as long as he worked like a son of a bitch.
The things that made Ham able to squat in his bag
gy pants in the Bishop’s Palace and make friends with a little reveller girl (for it was obvious that was what she was) were probably the ones that had made him willing, all those years ago, to spend time with a nervous, proud, prickly kid who thought himself too good for his neighbors. And Josh, who was much less likely to say that most men were idiots, was a great deal more willing to believe it. He didn’t like people very much, and he hadn’t respected them.
He did now, a day late and a dollar short. Watching Billy and Gina Tucker hold down their boy while Josh cut off his leg had left one indelible thought in his mind: Everybody suffers. Rich or poor, black or white, even the cheeriest person he had ever met had known pain. Many had known more pain than him. Maybe most. Joshua had never given Billy Tucker a second thought until last night. Now he would do anything not to feel the anguish he had seen in the car-cutter’s eyes. Once Josh had thought it was intellect you admired in a man, his ability to hold his tells and play his cards. How stupid he had been not to recognize the one thing everyone had in common: Sooner or later, every man lost more than he could bear.
Suffering was something Josh could respect. Suffering and the courage to stay at the table in the face of it. He closed his eyes and tried to shut out the memory of Joe Tucker, terrified, whispering, “Pa says I ain’t old enough for the hard stuff.”
The maid brought them two cups of chicory, a selection of rice crackers, and a pot of mustang grape jelly to spread on them. Ham had eaten three crackers of his own, fed one to Scarlet (she had confessed her name at last), and was working on a third cup of chicory by the time Sloane Gardner finally bothered to come downstairs and greet them.
She was a disappointment. In his mind’s eye Josh had been expecting the superbly dressed woman with downcast eyes he remembered from the night Ham had first dragged her over to his shop. Or if not her, then the laughing party girl who had stripped off her ripped silk stockings and left them in his house. Or the woman he had fed damiana tea to, who reached out and held his hand, vulnerable, and trusted him with her secrets.
This Sloane Gardner was wearing a man’s shirt that didn’t fit very well and a plain pair of wrinkled pants. Her face was too small, her eyes set too close together. She hadn’t been sleeping enough. Her skin was pale and puffy, with dark bags under her colorless eyes. She was just a body, like everybody else: a plain human tacked to an animal that was going to need sleep and food, that was going to sicken and die.
“Good afternoon,” she said in a polite, reserved voice.
Josh nodded. “Ms. Gardner.”
Ham lifted Scarlet off his lap, where she had been sitting. “You!” he said.
“Mr. Mather. I’m so pleased—”
Ham jabbed at her with a finger the size of a big dill pickle. “Thanks to you, Josh and I nearly bought the farm out on the Peninsula, did you know that? Thanks to you, he got bit by a rattlesnake and I was nearly eaten by cannibals, and both of us had the shit kicked out of us by that hurricane.” He rose from his chair and stood glowering down at her. Tall as she was, her eyes faced the mass of infected welts on his neck from his scratched mosquito bites. “What have you got to say about that?”
Sloane bit her lips, composed herself. “I am so sorry,” she said softly. “I am so very, very—”
Ham clapped her thunderously on the back. “Right, then. ’Nuff said.”
Sloane blinked. “But—”
“Ah, hell, honey. I’ve tied one on a time or two myself. No harm, no foul,” Ham said, turning back and grabbing another rice cracker.
“Ham is very generous,” Josh said. Bile rose in his throat.
The big man slathered on a thick layer of jam and stuffed the whole thing in his mouth at once. He pointed at Scarlet with the jam knife and said, “Nice kid,” before he had quite swallowed, sending a small spray of rice cracker crumbs everywhere.
“Glad you think so,” Sloane said dubiously.
“I think we should put them in the Guest Bedroom, don’t you?” Scarlet said, cackling.
“Mmumph?” Ham said, cocking his head as he chewed.
“There seems to be a room in the Palace left over from Mardi Gras.” Sloane explained. “It’s got air-conditioning and polyester pillows and a TV that still works. Every now and then someone wanders into it by accident, but you never find it on purpose. Randall says he can remember it being renovated when he was a boy.”
“We call it the Guest Bedroom because it never stays for long,” Scarlet said.
Ham shook his head. “Good Christ in duck blind.”
“I heard there were people needing medical attention,” Josh said. “Or did they all get better during the rather long time we’ve been waiting?”
Sloane regarded him. “They’re upstairs. When you’ve done with your snack, I would be grateful if you could have a look.”
“I’m done.”
Ham shooed them off. “Go ahead,” he said through a mouthful of jammy cracker. “I’ll catch you up.”
“Your friend is very amiable,” Sloane said as she led Josh up the central staircase to the second floor of Randall Denton’s mansion. “I don’t expect you to be so forgiving.”
“Good,” Josh said.
SLOANE showed him into the small ballroom at the back of Randall’s mansion, where she had quartered the sickest and most injured. “You may want to move these patients,” she said. “I think the room is getting sick.”
Josh remembered the story of Vincent Tranh’s wife, trapped in the UT Hospital when the Flood of 2004 hit. When the magic grew thick enough to clot around suffering and fear, a room full of sick people was not a good place to be.
Joshua’s tire-rubber sandals clopped across the floor. He remembered this place from long ago—the blond dancing floor with parquet patterns all around the baseboards, the eight matched ceiling fans and the heavy swaying crystal chandelier. There had been a great stained glass window dominating the east wall of the room: Jacob wrestling the angel, a whimsical counterpoint to the gentler dancing that went on below. But the hurricane had smashed part of that window in, and what was left seemed very wrong. The angel was gaunt, his thin face wasted and flushed with fever. Jacob looked worse: conjunctivitis in one eye, the kinked hair of slow starvation, his face inflamed with pox. The very air seemed weary. Instead of the sounds of dancing feet and a swing band playing, Josh would have to listen to the labored breathing of the sick. Instead of the rich aromas of wax and leather and perfume, the ballroom smelled of sour sweat and urine.
Sloane said there should be eight patients. Two were out on the shaded verandah for a few minutes of air. Probably suffering chills and anxious to get in the sun, Josh thought. One fellow was on the toilet in the bathroom, shitting his guts out. The other five lay on pallets of bedding on the sprung wood dancing floor.
Josh’s first patient didn’t look good. Her face was clammy with sweat. Her dark hair was lank and unwashed, heavily streaked with grey. She was probably only in her early thirties, but she looked much older. Joshua knelt down and felt her forehead with the back of his hand. Fever beat against his sensitive skin. About a hundred degrees; he found he didn’t need to consult a thermometer. A little touch of magic in him, too, then, where Joe Tucker’s blood had fallen. “Is the fever constant?”
“Sometimes worse, sometimes better,” she said. “But even when it’s gone, I feel so damn tired. I’ve got so much to do, the house is a wreck, and there’s nobody else to take care of my niece and nephew…” The woman’s mouth worked, and a couple of tears slid down her cheeks. “But I’m so tir—”
“Fatigue,” Josh said impatiently. “What about vomiting?” The woman shook her head, tears still streaking her face. “Stick out your tongue, please.” Basically normal. Good. “Diarrhea?”
“A little.”
Softly he turned the woman’s head, checking for stiffness in the neck, looking for signs of conjunctivitis in her bloodshot eyes. “Delirium?”
“Two days ago, when her fever was really bad,” Sloane
said.
“What did you do for it?”
“For the hottest patients we keep the ceiling fan on full and wrap them in wet sheets. There was a supply of willow-bark aspirin, but we’ve used it up.”
“Just as well. It was the wrong thing to do,” Josh said. “Not that you could know that. This woman probably has malaria, which is usually accompanied by anemia and possible internal bleeding. Aspirin is a blood-thinner. Not a good risk.”
“I’m sorry,” Sloane said. “We didn’t know.”
“Malaria?” the sick woman said. “Oh, my God. What can you do?”
“Not much. Unless Ms. Gardner would like to take a trip to the Andes to collect the bark of the cinchona tree so we can make quinine. I suspect her calendar is full, though.” For some reason Josh couldn’t get rid of the cool tone in his voice, but his hands contradicted it. Never had they been so gentle as they were now, not even when holding a baby. He picked up the sick woman’s wrist and felt for her pulse. It was quick and weak. “Good. Yes, malaria.”
He looked at her for a long time, taking in her wan, lined face, her exhaustion and the waxy sweat of fever. “I’m really sick,” she said, embarrassed, as if he might think she was malingering.
“I know.” He met her eyes until he was sure she believed him. He did it because she was sick and he had no way to make her better; he had no comfort to offer her except to acknowledge her suffering. Because he owed her that, like he owed the Tuckers. Like he owed Ham and the Mathers and was going to keep on owing, for years and years and years, even if they never invited him into their house again. Even if they never said another word to him. Like he had owed Raúl and Conchita. That’s where he had failed them when their baby was born dead. If he had to do it over again, he would have made the same decisions, he would have saved his adrenaline, he wouldn’t have changed a thing—except he would have respected their grief.