Josh remembered the swimming pool he had been sitting at the night Sloane Gardner showed him how the stars went away when you looked at them. It still bothered him that she didn’t remember that. Let’s not tell the others, she had said. It was supposed to be a secret between them.
The desk fan reached one edge of its arc, blowing air across his face. He felt it most on his forehead, where Joe Tucker’s blood had wiped away George’s brand. “You want to know what’s coming?”
“Not particularly,” his father said. “I’ll play them as they fall.”
A blue jay flashed by the window in a cobalt streak. “Okay,” Josh said. (Hemorrhages, anuria, delirium. Then jaundice, blistering fever, slow pulse, vomiting of black blood. More delirium and agitation, possibly leading to coma and death.)
“’Less you need to tell me,” his father said.
“No.”
“Could I have a drink of water?”
Josh fetched him one. He drew back the curtain of mosquito netting and held the glass to his father’s lips. Sam’s tongue was still bright red, and when he finished sipping there were smears of blood on the edge of the glass. Josh let the mosquito netting fall. “Thought I’d see you at Mom’s funeral.”
“I came afterward. I meant to visit, but…” The fan swept, whirring, to the edge of its arc of motion, stopped, stuttered, and headed back the other direction. “Do you think I should have come more often?” Ace asked. “Your mother had strong feelings. She was doing the work of raising you up and I respected her decisions. But now I wonder if I should have come anyway.”
“I guess that was your choice,” Josh said.
“I guess so.” His father coughed. “Josh, did the Mathers take some care of you?”
“Better than I ever deserved,” Josh said.
“I gave them a fair sum, after the funeral. But of course Jim and Alice aren’t the sort who’d have stole it. Damn. My nose is bleeding.” Ace laughed breathlessly.
Josh wiped his father’s face. The rag came back bloody. “You paid the Mathers to take care of me,” he said.
“I guess I knew you were tough enough to look out for yourself, but I figured a good home-cooked meal wouldn’t hurt once in a while. Damn, it’s hot in here.”
“That’s why they had me over for dinner all those times.”
“I think I’ll have another sip of water,” Sam said.
Joshua remembered how loud the meals had been at Ham’s house, thick arms reaching across the table, the dull clatter of silverware on wooden plates and bowls, or, if it was Sunday dinner, what was left of Alice Mather’s china. The mismatched napkin rings Ham had lathed for his mom, Jim telling his kids to mind their mother, the taste of black-eyed peas with a little bacon fat cut in. And Joshua had always helped do the dishes. Even when Ham and his brothers were slumped out in the front room talking with their dad, Josh stayed behind with Rachel or Mrs. Mather because it was important to do his part. Because his mother had taught him not to be beholden to anyone.
“Pass me that towel, would you?” Samuel Cane’s face was turning red again, the fever spiking up. Josh gave him the rag, but his hand was shaking too badly to use it. Josh wiped the blood off his father’s lip himself. Samuel Cane’s eye was red and he was blinking all the time, as if the light were hurting him. “Some days,” he rasped, “you have to look pretty hard to see the luckiest man alive.”
Chapter Twenty-one
OFFERINGS
WHILE Joshua Cane was nursing his father upstairs, Sloane was washing sheets and blankets. She had forced Scarlet to help, for once. The girl sulked and scowled and let the wet linen drag on the ground as she carried it outside to where Sloane stood with a bag of clothespins, hanging up laundry. “I’m bored,” Scarlet said.
“Me, too,” Sloane said, pinning up a pillowcase that had been used as a bandage. The bloodstain hadn’t come out. Randall would call it ruined and charge her to replace it, of course. Just because he was funny about it didn’t mean he wasn’t a cold-blooded son of a bitch who would screw her every way he could. “Mardi Gras is over, kid. You’re living in the real world now. Everybody works. Everyone has work to do, even you. Get used to it.”
“I don’t see why you’re so mad at me.” Scarlet dumped an armful of wet laundry into Sloane’s basket. “You ran away from all that work, too, from what I heard. I heard you went down to the beach even when your mom was dying.”
Washline passed through the creaking pulleys as Sloane pushed the pillow slip away and clipped up a badly stained towel. Ace had started vomiting black blood late in the afternoon, and even after washing the slip in the Denton’s excellent pre-Flood washing machine, the marks still lingered. More internal bleeding to come, Josh had warned. “At least I knew I was doing something wrong.”
“But you did it anyway,” Scarlet said.
THERE were fourteen revellers in the house—fifteen if you counted Scarlet, which Sloane didn’t. Kyle Lanier, the sheriff’s deputy, called just before supper time to say, as politely as possible, that if the revellers weren’t surrendered by the next day at noon, the sheriff would cut off all gas and water to the Bishop’s Palace.
“People will die!” Sloane had said.
“That’s up to you,” Kyle had said, and tipped his hat. “Ma’am.” He’d left two militiamen behind to watch the place.
It was official: They were under siege.
Supper time came. Alice Mather organized the few remaining human refugees in the house to take food around to their sick fellows. Sloane brought dinner up to the revellers herself. It was short commons now: rice pudding and molasses again, chicken broth for the sick, and dandelion tea. Mrs. Sherbourne couldn’t kill any more chickens; they needed the rest for eggs. Sloane wanted to send a couple of her refugees down to the market to pick up more supplies, but she had no money to give them. In the end she had taken a few small items of Randall’s she never saw him use, like his silver cigarette case. She wrote them down on Mrs. Sherbourne’s account sheet and then told her agents to sell them and get extra food with the proceeds. They did it but didn’t like it. “They thought we’d stole the stuff,” one said.
Mrs. Sherbourne and Lindsey headed home to their families as soon as the dinner dishes were done. An hour later, Alice Mather gathered up Japhet and Christy and got ready to leave the Bishop’s Palace, too. “What if they won’t let us back in tomorrow?” she asked, with a glance at the militia picket loitering at the front gate.
“Don’t try,” Sloane said. “This situation is getting ridiculous. I’ll straighten things out with the sheriff tomorrow.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Wait and see,” Sloane had said, with her mother’s calm, competent smile. She kept smiling until Alice was gone. Her mother always said both panic and levelheadedness were contagious, and that a leader’s job was to spread the latter. Jane Gardner had lived through worse, far worse than this, and handled it magnificently. That’s what everyone always told Sloane. She wondered if her mother had ever used that calm smile to hide so much hopelessness and confusion. She hoped so. She remembered her mother saying, When I was your age, I wasn’t me either.
Not to mention, You do what you have to do.
Well, if Sloane was ever going to discover a cool, collected general inside herself, it had better happen in the next twelve hours. Come on, caterpillar, she thought bitterly. Grow wings and fly, damn you, fly!
Some time after nine o’clock she realized she hadn’t eaten since her breakfast on the patio with Randall Denton. She slipped down to the darkened kitchen, caught one of the refugee kids crouched over a pot of molasses in the pantry and sent him back to his family. Twine baskets hung overhead, swaying lazily. A week ago they had been laden with garlic and onions and peppers—bell peppers, poblanos, anaheims, and habañeros. Now they were empty.
If Sheriff Denton cut the gas off they would run out of fuel for the motors in the generator shed. No electricity. No refrigerator. No washing machine; the lau
ndry would have to be done by hand. No air-conditioning. No fans. No lights except oil lamps, until the oil ran out. Then no lights at all.
People could live that way. Odessa’s grandparents hadn’t had any of those things. They had survived. Not if they had malaria, they didn’t, Sloane answered herself. Not if they had yellow fever and there was no water to drink and no food to eat either.
Sloane went to grab a rice cracker, but they had all been eaten, so she settled for a spoonful of molasses instead. After a moment’s pause she opened one of Randall’s cupboards and took down a small saucer. What do gods eat? She started with a dollop of molasses and a clove of garlic. Then she grabbed a paring knife and cut three strands of her hair and put them on the saucer, too. It still didn’t feel like quite enough, so she poked the end of her finger until a drop of blood welled out. She added that to her offering, and then carried the saucer out to Randall’s patio and left it on the iron table underneath the magnolia tree. With luck, a god or ghost would get to it before the tree roaches did.
Good Lord, what Mother would say if she caught me doing this. You make your own luck, Sloane! Not anymore, Mom. Not always.
She stopped herself from imagining which dress they would have buried her mother in when she felt tears beginning to leak from her eyes. She couldn’t afford to fall apart now, however badly she had acted. Even Jane Gardner would say so. She had to remain tough and focused and together.
Ha.
It was warmer outside than in the air-conditioned house, but the heat was less oppressive in the open, somehow. The humid night was clear, the stars bright but unsteady, flickering and blurred at the edges, as if seen through a heat ripple like the ones that came off the road on a hot summer day.
A glimmer of light from the back caught Sloane’s eye. Someone was out in the generator shed. Sloane stepped down the patio steps and followed the path to the backyard. A mosquito whined by her ear, faded and then returned. She slapped at her neck, panic washing through her. Couldn’t afford to think of mosquitoes as just pests anymore. They were black widows now, scorpions and rattlesnakes with the deadly venoms of malaria and yellow fever in their stings.
When she cracked the door of the generator shed—“shed” was really the wrong word, it was bigger than a big garage and stocked with more tools than their place at Ashton Villa—she found Ham inside, squatting next to Randall’s gargantuan gas-powered barbecue grill, surrounded by a jumble of large glass bottles, copper tubing, rubber seals, and hand tools. He glanced at her as she came in. “Hey, Miss Gardner.”
“Call me Sloane. What are you doing?”
Ham stood and hefted a huge glass bottle filled with water onto the grill rack of the barbecue. “I heard they were thinking of cutting off your water supply, so I rolled over to Josh’s place and fetched his still.”
“Where did you get the water?”
“Swimming pool. I poured it through the pool skimmer to get out the leaves, but I wouldn’t care to drink it just yet.” He began attaching a short length of rubber hose to a curving beak at the top of the bottle. “How’s Josh’s dad?”
“Not great. Vomiting blood. Can I help?”
“Damn,” Ham said. “Nah, I don’t think so.” He looked over and grinned. “Although if you don’t mind sticking around awhile, just to piss Josh off, I’d be obliged.”
Sloane laughed and hopped up on the seat of the Denton’s old John Deere riding mower. Of course there hadn’t been a lawn here for twenty years; it had long since been converted into a hen run and a piggery and a vegetable garden. Randall’s dad had taken the blades out of the riding mower, and the Krewe of Momus used it every year to pull floats in the Mardi Gras parade.
Ham got his length of pipe attached. He hooked his thumbs in the belt loops of his enormous pants and hitched them up his belly an inch or two. “If I had spent as much time sweet-talking girls as I did trying to make up with that ornery little son of a bitch, I’d have the three happiest wives in Galveston by now.”
“Why did you bother?”
“Damned if I know.” Ham squatted and fooled around with pipes and fittings and seals, attaching his copper tube so it ran into what Sloane guessed was a collection jar for the distilled liquid. There was a frown of concentration on his big face. His sausage fingers were quick and precise. “I think I felt sorry for him, at first. He didn’t fit in so good, and there were a couple of kids who beat him up just on general principle. I thought of myself as the neighborhood cop, you know, so I stuck up for him. Little spiky kid. He owed me one, but you sure couldn’t tell it. He made me feel bad all the time when we were kids. Made me feel stupid.”
“Have you gotten to the part about why you were friends?” Sloane asked. “If you did, I missed it.”
“Well, you see, I was stupid.” Ham looked over at her. “Josh…he didn’t see things like other kids did. You could tell he was going to make something of himself. The guys that beat him up, I knew them. I knew their brothers and their dads. I knew they were going to end up working, oh, warehouse jobs if they was lucky, getting pissed every night and hitting their girlfriends. My uncle Mordecai was like that. Josh wasn’t. He made you want to understand things. My dad would teach me how to tune the engine on our boat, say. But Josh’s mom had this encyclopedia on a computer that would show you how the engine worked, and why. And Josh was always interested in that stuff. He got me to take things apart and try to make new ones. He made me smarter.” Ham stood up. “I’m a troubleshooter, first-class, with the Gas Authority.” He gave a comic scowl and flexed his arms. Biceps pushed up like fat tree roots from his upper arms. “If you’ve got a body like this, people always see you as a strong back first. If it hadn’t been for Josh, I’d have been a stevedore, I reckon. Blown my back out at thirty or thirty-five, drunk myself to death at forty like my uncle Mordecai. If I didn’t get drowned first, or axed, or shot in another man’s bed.” Ham shrugged and scratched at the mosquito bites on his fat neck.
To her surprise, Sloane realized she wanted to have sex with him. She looked at Ham incredulously. It was absurd. When Sloane fantasized about sex, her imaginary lovers were dashing and elegant and fabulously well-dressed. Dangerous, even. And yet, right now she could feel a little tingle inside her, Sly waking up and stretching. She found herself thinking about Ham’s big meaty fingers unhooking hooks, undoing clasps with the same unexpected precision with which he could disassemble a motor. She imagined those fingers working the buttons on her shirt, a man’s shirt she had filched from Randall’s closet. Pushing a seashell button through, a building tension of resistance, the button tight between cotton lips, then slipping free. The whisper of cloth falling open.
Sloane blinked, looking up—way up—at Ham’s broad face. Well, she wouldn’t feel so damn tall anymore. Next to Ham she would be practically petite. “I think you’re a wonderful friend to him.”
Ham grimaced. “Not anymore.” She looked at him curiously. Ham shrugged. “He just…he wore me out. I had a friend once, decided to kill himself over a girl. I listened to him talk about it every damn day, hours and hours for months and months. He even tried it, kinda—ate some foxgloves or something but didn’t die from it. Anyway, finally he got better, but for the next year I was sick of the sight of him. And here’s Josh. All those years I kept saying he was misunderstood, he had a tough life, blah, blah. But how long can you make excuses? Hurricane comes, I’m saving his ass out on the Peninsula because he’s hot for some skirt—begging your pardon—while folks are dying here. And all he can think about is me, me, me.” Ham shook his head and spat.
Sloane said, “That’s a lot of years to lose, even so. My mother used to say, the thing about old friends is you can’t make any new ones.”
Ham rubbed at his sunburned nose. “I’ll live,” he said. “Hell, I don’t even like myself when I’m around him anymore. Like this afternoon. Since when do I need to throw a guy into a wall? Josh’s dad shows up for the first time in ten years, only he’s about to die and Josh can?
??t do squat for him. Time was I would have cut him some slack. But right now everything about the little bastard just pisses me off. Everything he says and does.”
A few more peels of skin drifted off Ham’s nose as he rubbed it. Am I just slumming? Sloane thought. She tried to imagine him in a nice shirt and jacket, subtle colors, brown or maybe olive green. First thing she’d do, she’d get rid of that belt and put him in suspenders. Would she still like him, dressed up like one of her own?
Oh, yes.
“I just didn’t catch up to him fast enough when his dad showed up. My family, everyone’s pretty simple. Give us a present, we smile. Shout, we shout back. Give us a beer, we get drunk. Josh is a ways twistier. I’m just sick of trying to guess where he’s at.” Ham paused. “You used to know the Recluse pretty well. I reckon you know a thing or two about magic. Did you see Josh’s hands?”
“I was going to ask about that.”
“He took the leg off Billy Tucker’s boy this morning while I was still sawing logs,” Ham said. “He’s been real funny ever since. Out of balance. I guess it’s a hell of a thing, cut off a kid’s leg.” The big man shuddered, making his chest and gut wobble under acres of shirting.
“How old was the boy?” Sloane asked.
Ham squeezed his brows together in thought. “Ten? Maybe eleven?”
“Hm.” Sloane remembered the way Josh had looked at her when she first came into his house. That bitter, hungry look he shared with Kyle Lanier. Slowly she said, “I think I could name another boy who lost the life he knew at about that age.”
“Oh,” Ham said. His eyebrows rose. “You mean Josh his own self? I hadn’t thought of that.” He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and hitched up his pants, giving her an admiring look. “I guess you can see around a few corners. Is that a Gardner thing?”
Sloane felt a little smile at the corner of her mouth. “No. Mother never had to be that…sly.”
Ham ambled back over to the Dentons’ giant gas grill, checked the propane tank, and turned it on. “I figure we oughta set this up outside the house proper. No sense pumping all this extra heat for the air-conditioning to fight with. Talking of your mom reminds me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask since we got back.” Ham squinted up at the night sky. Only stars were out. “What’s the deal with Momus?” he asked, more quietly.