The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
KING OF NOD: SOME THINGS NEVER DIE
Originally published by Hooded Friar Press, Brentwood, Tennessee
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the author.
For information regarding permission, write to:
P. Scott Fad; 308 Glen Road; Landenberg, PA 19350.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2008 Scott Fad
Cover Design © 2008 Hooded Friar Press
Cover and Interior Design by Bobby Dawson
Cover Photos:
©iStockphoto.com/Kateryna Govorushchenko, AVTG
©2008 Jupiterimages Corporation
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to include the following copyrighted material:
Face Behind the Moon by Samuel Easterman. Copyright © by S. Easterman. Used by permission.
Changeling by R. Gustavius Creek. Copyright © by R. G. Creek. Used by permission
Selected by Limon Cevreaux. Copyright © by Limon Cevreaux. Used by permission.
Dark Rooms by Candice Chance. Copyright © by Candice Chance. Used by permission.
Th e Deathbird by Harlan Ellison. Copyright © by Harlan Ellison. Used by permission.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Fad, Scott.
King of Nod : some things never die / Scott Fad.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-9817609-0-2
1. South Carolina—Fiction. 2. Science Fiction. 3. Supernatural—Fiction. 4. Islands—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3556.A32 K5 2008
813.54—dc22 2008934695
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Suspense Publishing on Smashwords
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For Miss Virginia Wood
He was a little white boy, but he crawled onto the old black woman’s lap as if she were his very own mother—or, more likely, his grandmother or even his great-grandmother, for she was certainly old enough. A frog’s foreleg was snatched in the round puff of his right fist. The rest of the animal dangled, lifeless and pungent as a stalk of seaweed rotting on the beach.
He presented the frog to her chin. “Lookit, Miss Laylee! Lookit what I done killed.”
“Why look at that, Mr. Boo! You kill him all by yourself—or you find him dead?”
“Myself. Hit ’im with a stick.”
She examined the frog with doctorly interest. Her jowls, butterscotch pudding, sagged. “Oh well now,” she said and tapped the frog with a yellow pad of flesh, sending a dozen tin bracelets clattering to her elbow. Then, blazing for a miraculous instant, bluish sparks fizzled from her fingernail. In the boy’s knuckles, abruptly, a mossy knee flexed. “I don’t see as that jasper’s really dead.”
The boy was used to her jokes. And her magic. He slung the frog close to his eyes, frowning and uncertain. “He a’sleepin?”
“Naw, he ain’t sleepin.”
He waggled his fi st. “He pretendin?”
The boy’s words curled tartly around the edges—the salt of Carolina low country. Oak leaves fallen and left to broil in the sun. The old woman’s voice was a sweet lyric of songbirds and Baptist hymns. The boy came from one of the wealthiest families on the island. The old woman lived in a shack.
She stroked a gnarl of brown sticks through his hair. “Mr. Boo, I ever tell you the story ’bout this ol frog I come ’cross one day?”
The boy was still eyeing the dead animal mistrustfully. He shook his head.
“Don’t figure you wanna hear ’bout him…”
“Tell me!”
She shifted his slight frame around to ease the stab against her hip. Then she told him the story the way it actually happened, and it had happened a hundred years ago (or maybe it was two hunert, she guessed), about a little frog who had once approached her from Pigg’s Creek.
Ice crystals glittered, melted in her eyes. She was made of cinnamon and molasses, burnt wood, rusted bedsprings, pine soap, cypress hides. Her dress was the rag she used to mop floors.
“Come hippy-hoppin right up to my garden where I’se pullin weeds. Well, I look at him. An’ he look at me. Then you know what that jasper went an’ done?”
The boy lowered the frog and watched her closely.
“Why, Mr. Boo, that ol frog get to talkin. Jes open his little mouth and talk, plain as you talkin to me. An’ he say, ‘Is you the guffer doctor?’”
And since it had been some considerable time since she had come across a talking frog, she had dropped her load of weeds in surprise and nearly squashed him. When she didn’t answer him right off, the frog asked his question again. (She rocked-creaked her chair gently, petting the boy’s small back.)
“‘Why yes, I suppose I is the guffer doctor,’ I says to him.
“Then he say, ‘Thank gawd, cause I got a black whammy on me that needs fixin.’”
So she had picked up the talking frog and carried him inside her little house.
(Passing through the very same tottering porch where she and the boy now sat, looking over the very same garden. Pigg’s Creek was beyond the garden, beyond a field, slogging somewhere behind oak and ficus and magnolia.)
The frog told her, “Witch put that whammy on me, turnt me into this here frog.
’Fore that…well, it been so long, I don’t hardly remember. Seem to figure I was a prince once, a ways back.”
(The dead frog curled into a rancid green pickle on the boy’s naked legs.)
So, she had gathered up some stump water (so she told the boy) and some bellis petal and some teneka root and dry cricket wings and pennywort and the two fattest beetles she could find along with all the other magic flotsam it took to untangle a witch-spell. It went into a skillet over a low flame…she chanted…she spit…set light to four candles…snipped a sprig of her hair and chucked it in the flame (not the skillet, mind you, boy, but the flame—an’ my, wasn’t my hair jes as black-pitch as crow feathers in them days?)…recited the twenty-second Psalm (only the beginning part— My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art though so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?)…dappled in some sour mash…poured the lumpiness into a wooden cup…then set the concoction under the house to cool.
The frog, as instructed, gulped it down.
“Well, Mr. Boo, you know what happen next?”
The boy rocked his head slowly, mouth open.
“Why that little frog, he turn into a slug. A slimy ol gray slug.” Her wrinkles wadded into a scowl of distaste, and the boy, watching her, scowled too. “‘You ain’t no prince,’ I says. An’ that slug, he look up at me with them slimy eyes, an’ he say, ‘Oh, that’s right, I’m gettin to remember it all now. That wasn’t no black whammy that witch put on me—it was a white one.’”
The old woman cackled and rocked the chair.
The boy scrunched his lips; a tuft of chestnut hair fell across his brow. One eye closed, he considered the green sack of jelly in his lap. “Not a prince…” he said thoughtfully. The dead frog suddenly squirmed. It sat up and looked at him with dull accusation.
The boy yelled out and then laughed. The old woman’s pigtails reared back, and she laughed with him.
That was the first lesson.
* * *
They attacked from all directions.
He raced them (they were gooks; he was an American pilot) from the beach to the Indian shell mound, whipping through brambled hedgerows, tip-toeing gator infested sloughs, pounding sun-baked lanes—arriving ahead of them all, breathless, giggling. He fell to his rump, heedless of the broken-edge oysters and clams that bit him.
From behind, still struggling through the brush, their complaints: “You cheater; you cheater!”
He laughed and scrambled up the great pile, planted his legs on top and shouted at them. “King of the island! I beat you all!”
His father said Seminoles made the pile; they traveled to the island in canoes and dug in the sand and mud for shells and came to this place to feast on them. So many shells, a billion shells, piled up over centuries as the Indians came and made this a sacred place. After the red men were murdered or exiled, it was the runaway slaves who escaped here and topped off the peak. Built over centuries, and now he claimed the summit. A mountain of dinosaur teeth and mastodon tusks and whalebones and aborigine skulls all pounded into sharp little white-gray flakes and daggers. He could see every compass point across the island: down into South Patch and north toward his own house. He saw the fuzz of mainland trees in the west across the Yamawichee Sound. He saw the Atlantic in the east, a bolt of slate-blue silk stretching to other worlds. He stood atop the mound, and he was lord of it all.
Then realized someone had been there before him—for perched alongside him at the peak was a burlap doll, its apple head carved into a grimace of pain and anger. It was a face from the carvings of African masks. The boy bent to study this unexpected discovery when Dewey Fitch appeared from the scrub, saw him standing high above, and pointed at him. “Boo Taylor, you cheated! You took a shortcut!”
He quickly forgot the doll. “There ain’t no shortcut, boy. I’m king of the island!”
Then Lester Meggett stumbled into the clearing. Then Ashford Marchant, pushing up his thick glasses.
“You boys look awful small down there!”
At last, Hoss Beaudry burst through: his shirt ripped, thorn scratches making an Indian tattoo across his cheek.
“King of the island!” Boo Taylor jumped up and down, crushing Cro-Magnon ribs and brontosaur legs. “Try and get me down!”
They came after him, and he easily pushed them away one after the other until they came up from different sides. They circled him, and he circled to face them, laughing, breathless. Then they yelled out and jumped him—so many arms and legs pushing and grabbing and kicking, the doll was decapitated and eviscerated under their feet—and in a big ball they all tumbled, boys and their burlap victim, sliding down the sharp, petrified shards of mammoth spine and dragon tail and whale jaw, laughing and falling and being gobbled alive by a pile of dead bones. Not yet seeing the ancient, dark giant who lurked just a few feet away in the brush, the thing that would terrorize their lives. Its shadow was already moving against them, preparing to make itself known, preparing to leap, to scream.
“King of Sweetpatch Island!”
That was the second lesson. When the beast finally did spring a few moments later and a child was left shredded in pieces (not unlike a burlap doll), they ran shrieking and were changed forever.
April 4, 1968
It wasn’t until he was nine-going-on-ten when the lie was finally exposed—thrust into harsh sunlight where it roasted like week-old roadkill on playground blacktop.
“Liar!” was the word he hurled at it.
The word was followed by his fist.
The other children were a yellow-jacket swarm around the two boys, fearful and enthralled, agitated by the feuding swelter of Atlantic salts and marsh stink, and now gasping as a single being.
The punch caught Wade Dutton square in the mouth. The big boy teetered: a road sign in the teeth of a hurricane. And then he fell backward, hard.
In the dizzying heat, Boo Taylor hitched deep breaths, T-shirt sweat-plastered to his skinny ribcage. Tall oaks dripping Spanish moss hemmed the ball court. Beyond trees and children, cicadas rattled in scrubby fields and the ocean pounded sands.
From somewhere else, amid the jangle of children sounds, a band of Negro girls chanted at jump rope:
Who dat comin when de sun get low,
Snatchin dem childrens when dey moves too slow?
Who dat comin from de swamptree shade?
It’s grandaddy comin wit de butcherman’s blade.
He watched Wade Dutton strike the ground. Watched sweat fleck off the red crew cut. Watched Neanderthal dullness cross Wade’s face. “Why, you little bastard!” Wade spat, and there was blood in it. “You little fourth-grade bastard!” The wide-eye surprise narrowed to furious slits. Wade shuffled to his feet. But the nine-year-old fist swung out again, and Wade Dutton went down again.
From the spectators, another collective sigh. “Oh good Lord, Boo Taylor,” someone whispered, “you’re crazy!”
From under the basket, Gussie Dutton—Wade’s little sister—shrieked: “Git that boy, Wade!”
The game, forgotten as the basketball pinged into the grass, had begun under the glow of spring blossoms. The boys of Mrs. Wiltbank’s fourth grade had razzed and clowned up and down the court with routine, after-school good cheer.
Until Wade Dutton bullied onto the court and the glow bleakened under a passing fat cloud. The others avoided him, were cautious and ingratiating and anxious for the game to end so they could be rid of him.
All but Boo Taylor who had pitched himself against the older boy in a battle of honor.
It was an unforgivable perversion of accepted schoolyard order. The Duttons were a motherless clan risen from the dark romance of poverty to assume a brutal redneck lordship over the island. Wade was the youngest of the four Dutton boys—two years older than Boo Taylor, although just one grade separated them. (Gussie, the only Dutton girl, pug-ugly and carrot-haired, was Boo Taylor’s age.) Their father was a drunkard who scuttled his shrimper on Cedar Knee Hammock in ’62. As the youngest son, Wade had honed supreme skills in intimidation through years of abuse at the hands of his father and famous brothers. The children of Sweetpatch Island knew this—and knew that on playgrounds, nine-year-old boys did not block Wade Dutton’s shots, did not steal the ball away from him, and did not weave lithely past him with the ball and score points.
Aghast, the other boys—Hoss Beaudry, Ashford Marchant, even half-retarded
Lester Meggett—shadowed Boo between shots to whisper their cautions. Boo did not acknowledge them.
It was the stubbornness that, under other circumstances, merited their admiration.
For if Wade Dutton was the last son of a generation of terror, Boo Taylor (the only son of the island’s only white physician—royalty by the standards of Sweetpatch Island) was the blue-eyed prince of a nobler dynasty. By the age of nine he had already distinguished himself as hero and eccentric, equally welcomed in the home of the mayor and the humblest Negro shanty. His natural charm kept him in good favor with the gentry despite his pagan restlessness and his occasional wanderings down to the dilapidated schoolhouse in South Patch where he sat in on class with the colored children and their flustered schoolmistress. His proficiency with his daddy’s .22 and with a skiff salvaged from the Pittman Boatyard had birthed legends of daring adventures through the inlets and creeks and swamps that tangled the western coast of the island: downing marsh deer and ducks, gallantly offering these kills to neighbors and strangers, landing hammerheads and skewering gators and slitting them open in search of human remains.
Boo Taylor’s father was the esteemed Dr. Silas Barnwell Taylor, a local boy educated in the finest schools of the North; his mother was the refined lady of Beaufort, Miss MaeEllen LaCharite. Antagonism was not presumed of young Robert E. Lee Taylor; it was the province of bohunk trash like the Duttons. His rampage against Wade Dutton on the playground was not only suicidal, it showed poor manners.
The boys on the basketball court had shied away as Wade Dutton hurled his brawn, shoving and grabbing at Boo’s shirt, tripping and spitting. Boo’s knees and elbows were skinned raw, his neck and arms cross-hatched from Wade’s ragged fingernails—but he accepted the abuse mutely, played grimly, and had shown at least enough wisdom to keep from shoving back or complaining. Wade called for the ball but time and again was flustered by Boo’s darting hands. Each time Boo Taylor touched the ball, he danced around his clumsy rival, slid to the basket and—with or without an elbow in his ribs—logged another two points.
Wade Dutton, to his credit, had remained true to his nature. He could rough Boo
Taylor around the court, but to fl at out strike him would be an admission of defeat, and he could not conceivably admit defeat to a scrawny nine-year-old rich boy. Not with his bratty sister watching and just slavering at the chance to blab it to his brothers.
Nevertheless, he saw the futility of the brute-force tactic, and so he had called upon another celebrated Dutton talent, one he could wield with equal proficiency.
And the taunting began.
“Hear your momma’s laid up with a gin hangover again. Why, your momma surely loves the bottle, don’t she, boy?
“You still nursin on that ol nigger housemaid, rich boy? You suckin her teaties?”
Wade probed as the ball worked up and down the court. Boo ignored him, and Wade’s frustration ballooned.
It was Dewey Fitch who supplied the lethal indignity. Dewey, who lived in rabid terror of Wade Dutton under all other circumstances, now supposed a certain kinship since they were on the same team. Having fallen into the hypnotic rhythm of Wade’s taunts, Dewey soon blurted his own: a vague bit of rumor picked from an overheard conversation.
Wade Dutton recorded Boo Taylor’s fl inch at the words and called time-out for a consultation. The story was stammered out; the game resumed, and Wade Dutton had his weapon.
“You’re a liar!” Boo yelled.
“No I ain’t neither. Ain’t that right, Dew-boy?”
“Right as rain, Wade. My momma said so.”
“Liar!”
The taunting was relentless—it was all lies, all of it; Wade Dutton and Dewey Fitch were two liars and nothing they said could be true.
When Wade Dutton went down the second time, he did not pause for words or to examine his spit. He tore to his feet bellowing. Boo saw the fat right hand coming but did not bother to duck it. It crashed into his cheek and sent lightning bolts through his head. He crumbled into clouds. . .
…rising breeze-tossed like a feather…like a dry leaf…like a cotton burst of dandelion…the girls at jump rope, making witch incantations:
Queenie, Queenie gots two daughters,
Hated one and likes the other.
One was black, and one was white,
One was day, and one was night.
One is milk and silk and spice,
The other ain’t so very nice.
…higher…finding at last the old woman, wrapped to her waist in bean shoots.
“Miss Laylee!”
She straightened up and raised one dirt-gnarled hand to her eyes; a dozen tin bracelets slipped to her elbow. Her other hand clutched an apron-load of weeds
to her hip.
“Miss Laylee! Is it true? Is what those boys said true?”
Sprigs of wispy steel wool fl uttered in a tidal draft, framing a delicate portrait of wrinkles. A million broken-glass wind chimes jangled, sent out a million white hot needles.
Why wouldn’t she answer? Oh, his head hurt, pounding and swelling as though he were wearing a too-small football helmet, and why couldn’t he move his arms?
“Miss Laylee, is it true?”
Her lips moved, a single word, but it was lost in a sough.
“…what did you say? Miss Laylee, you got to tell me.”
Again she moved her lips; again the word was…
“Bastard!”
Stung, his eyes fluttered.
He stared into a denim crotch.
His arms were pinned under massive knees. Somewhere above that, a broad ape torso. And even higher, a smeary pig’s face squealing a blue-ribbon stream of curses. Caged, armless, Boo attacked again and clapped a sneaker into Wade Dutton’s ear, making him howl.
“Goddammit, Boo Taylor, you quit it!”
Wade tugged a swatch of Boo’s hair, and Boo cried out, kicking and kicking until the burn in his scalp and the hot ache in his gut wore at him. His limbs slackened, and he wailed in frustration.
Wade Dutton was a hound now, barking spittle in his face. “Say you’re sorry!”
“No! You’re a liar; you’re a liar!”
Gussie Dutton had shouldered her way through the boys, and her orange head now hovered over her brother’s. “Make him say it, Wade! Make him say he’s sorry!”
Wade tugged Boo Taylor’s hair, and Boo groaned. “Say it!”
“No!”
Another tug. “Say it!”
“Make him say it! Make him say it!”
“No! No! You’re a fat liar!” Kicking again, knees thumping Wade Dutton’s back until Wade reared back and cannoned a punch at his nose.
Boo’s skull smacked the ground. Sun flares erupted, and all kicking ceased.
Blood welled from his left nostril.
Gussie Dutton shook her head. “Boo Taylor, you don’t got the sense God gave a turnip. Wade, you make that boy say he’s sorry.”
Warmth trickled a snail’s trail over Boo’s cheek, into his ear. His braincase pulsed kettledrum rhythms. When he squirmed again, a big fist materialized an inch from his nose, a wad of grass splayed like green hair through sweaty knuckles.
“You say you’re sorry, or I’ll make you eat this,” Wade said.
Instead, Boo hockered deep in his throat and spit.
Another round of gasps.
Then, iron bars fell on him. Wade was spitting back, slamming grass at his mouth; “Eat it,” growling, “eat it, eat it, eat it! Goddamn little fourth-grade rich boy, you spit on me!”
Boo clenched his teeth, pitched his head under the fat hand, skull grinding into dirt and loam while Gussie Dutton shrieked gleefully, “Make him eat it, Wade!” and the grass and thick fingers wormed over his gums until something bitter leaked into his throat. He coughed and spit, his head hammering against hardpan.
Iron bars lifted. Tears dripped down each side of Boo Taylor’s face.
“Now, say you’re sorry.”
Choking, sputtering green saliva: “I hate you, you fat liar.”
“My brother ain’t no liar, Boo Taylor,” Gussie said.
Wade Dutton wiped the remaining grass across Boo’s shirt. “I ain’t lyin. It was Dewey’s momma who said it, and Dewey’s momma ain’t no liar. Dewey!” he called out, “Is your momma a liar?”
Boo craned his neck and watched Dewey Fitch cringe. “No, Wade,” Dewey answered softly, “she ain’t no liar.”
“Well, your girlfriend here says your momma’s a liar. But ol Boo Taylor never did have no sense, did you rich boy?”
Gussie’s red face bobbed in agreement. “Don’t have the sense God gave a turnip.”
Wade breathed a sigh and shook his head sadly. “Called me a liar an’ spit on me.”
“And he socked you when you weren’t lookin!” Gussie offered.
“That’s right. You socked me when I weren’t even lookin. Now, you just say you’re sorry, rich boy, and I’ll let you up.”
“No. Get off me.”
Wade’s hand came forward and grabbed hold of Boo’s ear. “Say it,” he bellowed, and coiled the ear.
“Get off!” Boo cried. “You’re a liar!”
Wade twisted, and Boo screamed, and Gussie clapped and laughed. The other boys shuffled nervous glances to each other.
“Say it you little bastard!”
“You’re a big fat STINKY LIAR!” With the roar, Boo Taylor heaved a sudden, violent jerk, and his right arm pulled free. He marveled for an instant. In the next instant, he jammed the hand into Wade Dutton’s throat. Wade gagged, and now the ear was freed, too. The meat slab above him faltered. Boo Taylor yanked the rest of himself clear, then stomped Wade’s broad stomach.
Wade rolled away, and Boo sprang to his feet. The swarm disassembled. Dewey
Fitch lit off for the safety of the schoolhouse.
Gussie Dutton gaped at Boo Taylor. “Get up, Wade,” she said weakly.
Wade Dutton was cradling his belly and gulping for breath when Boo Taylor landed on him: a wildcat down from the hills, a hailstorm of lead fishing weights.
“Get up, Wade,” Gussie said again, then hollered angrily, “Wade, you get him; you get up and get that rich boy!”
Boo Taylor’s ropey arms flailed wildly. Mud and bits of grass sprayed filthy rain from his back. Wade Dutton, still gulping for air, cried for Boo to stop punching him and curled into the ground.
“Wade, you get up or I’m tellin Harley an’ Petey, an’ they’ll tan your hide! Now you get up!”
When Wade Dutton began sobbing, Ashford Marchant called out, “Let him up, Boo!” and after another few punches Boo Taylor stopped.
He stood. Ribcage rising, falling. Rabbit’s heart tripping. He swung his eyes around to meet the stares of the other boys and girls. He shot Gussie Dutton a quick glance, fearing an attack from her. But she was standing behind her fallen brother and looking at Boo Taylor with astonishment.
“You let that little boy whup you,” she said. “Boo Taylor, you whupped him good.”
Boo stepped away from the crumpled bull on the ground, and the swarm parted for him. They watched him and saw someone different than they had known: this boy in the T-shirt slopped with dirt and blood and grass, his wary eyes sweeping over them with dangerous intent. Boo Taylor looked like a Dutton.
“Boy’s a liar,” Boo whispered at them. And then he tore away.
* * *
Where Pigg’s Creek made ready to spill into the brown marsh flats of the Yamawichee Sound on the south end of Sweetpatch Island, a cottage massed of scavenged timber, tin, clapboard, and tarpaper sagged on squat stilts with a mean leeward pitch. By its looks, a stiff wind might knock it over. It had, however, survived several hurricanes and nor’easters and one memorable blizzard, all contributing to the eerie romance of the old woman who lived there. The old woman herself was in the garden, wrapped to her waist in a patch of bean shoots as the sudden, certain feeling of the boy came to her, running (hopping) reckless like the boy (like a little frog). She straightened into the shadow of a scarecrow and looked toward Old Sugar Dam Road.
Not yet within sight, of course, he was still Up Island where the white folks lived along the cobbled roads in their fine homes far from the scrubland trailers and shacks of the South Patch coloreds and the marsh-side white trash.
He was still there, but he was coming to her.
She clutched an apron-load of weeds to her hip. A large gray dog hovered nearby; he had sniffed the scent of whatever had caught the woman’s attention, and so he moved closer to her to protect her from its threat.
Cicadas rattled in the sage, and no-see-ums swirled about her stubby pigtails.
As she stared toward the north and a hot breeze bore a marshy whiff from the Yamawichee, a fish crow took wing high above her head and shrieked her name.
She glanced at the bird.
Liar! she heard.
Bastard!
Then the sun exploded. The garden tilted; the island itself shifted like a boat running aground. She felt her legs buckle but caught herself as she reached high and snagged the crow in her free hand, not even dropping her load of weeds.
It was an old trick, and one of her favorites.
She flew north as the black feathers fitted themselves into her flesh. She closed her eyes and let the wings carry her.
* * *
She flew at last to Carriage Avenue where oaks grabbed handholds across the center of the cobbled lane to construct a miles-deep cavern of wizards and faeries.
She found Boo Taylor pelting through this tunnel, arriving at a wide lawn buried under overgrown azaleas, swinging across the grass, up steep porch steps, dashing into the white Victorian that soared high among the others in the Up Island antebellum quarter.
The crow swung down and perched on a windowsill.
“Boo sugar, is that you?”
It was the boy’s mother, her words sinking like a liquid fog from her second-floor bedroom along with Debussy piano chords from her turntable. Both crow and boy pictured her: exquisitely beautiful but languid and blurry on her bed, washcloth on her forehead, pulp romance split open in her lap.
The boy crept noiselessly over the polished floorboards and past the stairway.
“Robert E. Lee Taylor, if that’s you down there will you please answer me?”
Yes, he heard. No, he would not answer; he ignored the call with house cat aloofness.
He eased through the door that separated the doctor’s suites from the rest of the house and slipped through the first door to a stark white hallway.
The crow hopped to another window to follow him.
The boy was crouched at the door of his father’s office, hovering there to listen.
Doctor Silas Barnwell Taylor was in an examination room across the hall. Mumbling and a faint sob—some patient was in there with him, eyeing a big needle in the doctor’s hand. Boo Taylor leaned around the doorframe and saw his father turned three quarters away. The doctor’s jet-black hair was slicked back precisely until it got to the rough dark spokes along his neck. The boy could see only a small part of his father’s face but had no trouble making out the sharp features—the hooked nose, abrupt angles of cheekbones and jaw, the thin black mustache lining the upper lip.
What do you see, boy? the crow whispered.
But the boy would not answer her. He withdrew from the doorframe, slipped into the office and glared at his own face in a cabinet mirror: tousled red-brown hair, ruddy flesh tones, blunt and round features. As he watched, without realizing it, his hands curled into fists.
What are you thinking, boy?
For a moment, again, he would not answer, then whispered back to the crow—whispered about the time his mother called his father handsome, like a European nobleman, something she had gathered from one of her romance stories. Mama, will I look like a nobleman? But she had laughed at him, saying, no of course not, that he would be rugged and beautiful, like a ship’s captain. Or a cowboy. But he would not look like a nobleman. Not like his father. This is what he whispered to the crow as he remembered his mother’s words and as the bully’s words slugged him like a fist in the gut. The crow fl inched as it felt his pain.
No, you’re a liar.
The boy watched his round cowboy features and flexed his thick ship’s captain fists and now understood that the liar was not Wade Dutton after all.
He punched the mirror. The crow blinked and then disappeared in a puff of black feathers.
* * *
The dog was at her hip, nudging her.
She looked around, coming back into the land of flesh and blood. Then down to the nuzzling animal.
“Shamus, looks like Mr. Boo’s comin,” she told the dog. The dog flapped his tail and licked her hand.
The sun, real now, as was the ground beneath her feet and the stink of the marsh, swept its heat over her in the sway of the trading tides. Still clutching an apron-load of weeds, she started her slow shamble out of the field.
Inside, she made ready for the boy’s visit, muttering and humming about her kitchen; she pulled two mason jars from the cupboard and drew a milk bottle filled with yauponberry wine from the icebox. She filled the mason jars with the reddish black liquid and sneaked a sip. This particular batch was a bit sugary to her liking, but the boy favored it sweet. After a moment’s thought, she picked a sprig from one of the herb-bundles that dangled like sleeping bats from her kitchen ceiling. She dropped it into the boy’s glass, and stirred it with her finger.
The cottage was dark. She’d had electric lights since the power company finally ran lines into South Patch back in ’63, but she didn’t use the lights much. They heated up the place like an oven; without them, the house stayed cool on even the most blistering of days. She attributed this to the newspaper she had packed into the walls, which made for good insulation and was widely known to keep out ghosts.
The pain in her left knee growled for her to hurry off to the porch and find a place to sit. Dr. Taylor had wrapped the knee after she hurt it slipping on a freshly mopped floor two weeks back. He had even offered her a bottle of white pills for the pain, but she had waved him away. Instead, she had boiled up some adder’s tongue and crowley root and chickweed, swaddled it all in buckram, and slid it inside Dr. Taylor’s knee-wrap. She had no doubts Dr. Taylor was a fine doctor or that his pills were good medicine. But she had her own medicine and had lived by it since before Dr. Taylor was a baby. The coloreds and the white trash knew old Laylee, the guffer doctor, and they came knocking on her porch door when they had a touch of the swamp air, or their bowel was running hot-and-cold, or some young mother wanted the herbs and spice to help carry her child, or they needed a root-cure to help with the pains in their joints. She supposed Dr. Taylor knew as much. Supposed he had gotten used to such things on this backward little island where the poor marsh-side whites and the poorer
South Patch blacks thought it funny that their guffer lady and midwife scrubbed floors for the fancy Up Island white doctor.
Wind chimes jingled a greeting to her when she made it through the screened door with the two jars of wine. She settled into a battered wicker rocker. From inside, her radio rolled staticky, angelic choruses. Her hound, Shamus, joined her on the porch, scattering a half-dozen chickens in the yard where she and the boy—when he was younger, at least—sometimes took stark-naked showers under rainstorms.
She looked west, to the sun falling and setting fire to the mainland. In the place between, the staggering orange rim of the ruined Chaliboque Mansion reared from the swampland. The house was now inseparable from the oaks and cypress and vines and bog creatures that clung and rooted to its corrupted hulk—so that house and swamp had become a single creature unto itself: half inanimate and dead, half desperately and violently alive. And in this burning at the brink of day-lost and night-gained, the house-creature stretched for her with shadowy skeleton fingers, trying to catch hold of her to drag her into nightfall. It was no accident that her porch was aimed at that old, ruined place. She had to keep watch over it; that too was part of her curse.
The place had once thrived with field hands and Sea Island cotton and old-world wealth. No more. The Chaliboque house, which had survived two burnings, did not survive a third. The shifting sands had pushed Pigg’s Creek back on itself until the house was now mostly wrapped by marsh, and anybody who wanted to poke through the old place would need a boat to reach it when tide was in. The plantation went bust, and the Sladeshaws (who inherited it from the LaValle family) were long gone from Sweetpatch Island. And the black flesh that bled for the Chaliboque crop was gone too; only the ghosts and a scrap of colored poor remained.
Eulahlah Colebriar, now looking over those same fi elds from her own house where she tended her own crop, had survived it when the rest had gone extinct. It was a victory of sorts, but surely a bitter one. And one among a dismal few.
From its perch over the garden, the scarecrow turned with the breeze. She followed its gaze to fi nd the boy, at last, coming on the dirt trail that spiked off Old Sugar Dam Road. The frog-hop was gone from his step, head drooped, hands shoved in trouser pockets. His sneakered feet dragged and raised dusty roostertails.
“Shamus, go fetch that jasper ’fore it gits too dark.”
Sad gray eyes considered her, tail thumping porch floorboards.
“Gwon,” she urged.
And the dog trotted off to the boy. She watched as dog and boy met and made their way finally to the foot of her tiny porch. The boy would not look at her; he ruffled the dog’s shoulders, kicked absently at the chickens. Close up, she could see his bruises and scrapes and his shorn, dirt-smeared clothes.
At last, she said, “Why, Mr. Boo, you been out wrasslin gators again?”
The boy shrugged. A grown-man face on skinny, little-boy limbs. She thought of a marsh deer. Or a just-hatched egret.
“You been fightin, boy?”
He shrugged again. Then he nodded.
“Lordy, Mr. Boo, I never knowed you to fight nothin that didn’t have four legs an’ a big set of teeth. What you been after this time?”
After a moment, he offered, “Wade Dutton.”
“Gawd, ol Hank Dutton’s boy?” she asked, feigning great surprise.
“Yes’m.”
“Well, no wonder you look like a hog that’s been through the slaughter house.
That boy’s twice your size an’ three times as ugly.”
That made him smile a bit despite himself.
“Now, why don’t you git on up here so’s we can have us some wine an’ watch that fine sunset the Lord saw fi t to give us this evenin. And ol Laylee can give them bruises a lookysee.”
“Don’t need no lookysee.”
“Naw, course you don’t,” she said, exaggerating a nod, “you jes too almighty hard in the head. Now you git on up here.”
“Yes’m,” he said, and he climbed the three porch steps with Shamus behind him and sat on a bench next to her chair.
The old woman cupped the boy’s chin in her ringed fingers and examined the blood and grass that streaked his face. “Mm, mm, mm. Ain’t you jes hard in the head, Mr. Boo.” She spit into her apron and wiped his cheeks and eyes and all the way back to the ears, her bracelets jangling.
“Does your face hurt, boy?” she asked, very serious.
“Only a little.”
“Well, it’s killin me,” she said, and cackled. It forced another reluctant smile.
When she brought the apron away, the corner of it was soiled with his wounds, and the boy’s face was raw. “Don’t believe nothin too serious got broke. ’Spect you gonna live to a ripe ol age if you can steer your way ’round them Dutton boys.”
“Yes’m.”
Her fingers probed the puffy red swell under his left eye. “I believe you need a poultice for this eye, Mr. Boo.”
“Don’t need no poultice.”
“Ain’t no trouble!” she exclaimed, giving him her finest pickaninny act. “Got me some ginger root right here in my kitchen. And some cooter bones, and some smelly ol bat dung—”
“Miss Laylee! I ain’t in no mood for teasin!”
“Aw, now I forgot how all growed up you was,” she said. “N’how danged hard in the head. Well, your daddy’s sure to raise a ruckus when he gits a look at that shiner.”
He jerked his face from her hands, blurting, “He ain’t really my daddy.”
In the plum-orange glow of sunset, she watched his jaw tremble.
“Did you know?” he asked.
She made a sing-song voice of disbelief, saying, “Lordy, what make a boy ask such a thing?”
“That’s what Wade Dutton says, and that’s what Dewey Fitch’s momma says. I’m a bastard! I’m adopted! And everybody heard it! Momma and daddy lied—and you knew it, too! Didn’t you?”
“Why Mr. Boo, you—”
“Didn’t you?” His eyes lashed at her, and she was stung. She tried to match his bold little-boy glare, but inside she was an old nigger fi eld hand and he was the master, and despite herself, she cowered a bit.
Gently, she asked, “You ain’t spoke to Miss MaeEllen or your daddy ’bout this, has you?” Rigid on the bench, he shook his head. “Well, you best speak with them first, Mr. Boo. Lest you want ol Laylee t’get whipped for speakin when it ain’t her turn.”
He glared a moment longer. A plum-orange glitter rimmed his eyes. When it spilled over, he looked away and was once again her little boy. In the quiet, she offered him his jar of the yauponberry wine. He glanced at it briefly, then took it from her, needing both hands.
The radio played “Revive Us Again,” and the melody seeped unbeckoned and sweetly high from her throat. She rocked the chair, allowing Boo Taylor his quiet turn to taste the wine and still his stormy waters. The last of the sunset was dying over the mainland. As the ground cooled, the ocean-breeze gave way to the land-breeze. She took turns watching the evening’s first stars and watching her boy fidget with his jar, drawing pictures in the dew of the glass. From the fields came the first signs of night: crickets chattered, frogs chirped, wallerwops groaned, graves trembled. The rustle of bats on the wing flitted close to the house, then far away, and then close again. Lightning bugs sparkled in the nighttime air, and she remembered a bit of folk wisdom she’d been told as a little girl.
“Mr. Boo, you know what some folks says ’bout firefl ies? They says if you git the light from a fi refl y in your eye, you go blind.”
After a moment, his voice came to her from the darkness, “You already told me
that one.”
She chuckled. “Did I? Well did I ever tell you what some folks say ’bout skeeters?”
“If a skeeter bites you,” he dictated back, bored, “hold your breath so it can’t fly off. Then you can kill it. Yes’m, you told me already.”
She clapped her hands on her knees, bracelets clanking, and chuckled again, “Well, Mr. Boo, I s’pose I need to tell my stories over and over so’s I can keep ’em all straight. Did I tell you what folks say about snakes? What happens when their tails gets broke? Lord, I must’a told you that one.”
She waited for him to respond, but for a while he said nothing. Then, in a very quiet voice, she heard him say, “I remember the story ’bout that frog. The one who thought he was a prince.”
She sighed.
Lesson learned.
(Inside the shack the radio-song of angels came to an end, replaced by a frightened man’s voice . . . the man choking out some news about the doctor—interrupted by thunderburst crackles—or about the king . . . )
Into the gloaming, she said, “You best be on your way home, Mr. Boo. If your momma knew you was out on ol Laylee’s porch this time a’night, she’d whip us both. And tell your daddy to fi re me skit-skat.”
(…terrible news…a rifl e, shots fi red…a balcony…)
“She ain’t my real momma,” the boy said plainly. “And he ain’t my real daddy. I
don’t know who my real momma and daddy are.”
(…Memphis?)
Before she could say something of comfort, the boy stood and climbed down the porch steps. Shamus, who had crawled under the house, scrambled out to follow him up the dirt track as far as the trees.
(The king-doctor, the scared man said…shot dead, and cities were burning; the beasts were raging in the streets.)
She watched him go, the tiniest jumble of stick arms and legs poking from a dirty T-shirt and ragged shorts, becoming lost beyond the deepening purple veil where monkeyshine creatures, seen and unseen, rustled silk wings, giggled, and breathed low, husky sobs. Just a pup and easy prey to the haunted and brute fiends loose in the winds of this night.
She called out to him, “Mr. Boo, don’t you go crossin that ol troll-bridge this time a’night! You go Church Street, you hear?”
A faint call in return: “…okay.”
“An’ you stay to the middle of the road, boy!” she called again. “And steer clear a’ them spooks!”
Eulahlah Colebriar leaned forward in her hand-me-down wicker rocker, waiting for the boy’s answer. But he had vanished.
(The king is dead.)
That was the third lesson.
Whiskey nor brandy, ain’ no friend to my kind,
Dey kilt my po’ daddy, an’ dey trouble my mind.
—Old Rhyme
Hurricane Joseph was born angry off the west coast of Africa—more vapor than substance in those infant moments; nevertheless, a conspiracy of terrible forces that could neither be circumvented nor mollified. He gathered corpus in all the timeworn patterns on his deliberate and steady crossing of the Atlantic, drawing from the depths and summoning from the heavens and spinning electric turbulence in an ever expanding arc.
Making landfall on the Indies, greatly fattened, he paused to gorge on the steaming gulf surge before veering north. By the time he slammed into the Carolinas, spilling forth the great accumulation of his rage, he was a monster.
He rained devastation and death.
Then shifted again, moved now north up the coast, sending out watery tentacles, feeling, searching, sniffing, drawn toward his destined end, plunging into the Delaware as land masses shattered him, diminished him. He slipped into the Brandywine and Christina, searching and closing in, seeping into the Red Clay and White Clay, into a hundred feeder streams and creeks and rivulets and gutters, until at last he found his place to die.
All cyclonic phenomena, by definition, repeat. Concepts of beginning and ending are meaningless.
Two
Would she have judged him a decent man?
He wondered.
Three
Boo Taylor watched the storm through the window of a dingy Texaco station.
I thought I killed him.
Rainwater dribbled down the sides of his face, mingling with his sweat. The rainwater and sweat were collecting in his collar, the discomfort not registering as it should have had he not been preoccupied with the thing outside. He stared through the streaked and grimy glass into the downpour. A dim grey shape was out there, a grey just a shade darker than the grey of the storm, wavering in and out of perception, taunting. The harder he focused, the more indistinct the shape became.
“You a ball player?”
The attendant was calling to him from behind the counter.
“You look like a ball player.”
Boo answered without turning. “I’m a brick layer,” he said. He continued to gaze through the window, trying to will the shape out there into clarity. A remnant shiver passed through his shoulders, tremors after an earthquake.
The man behind him was mumbling. “Look like a ball player.”
It was midafternoon, but the sky had vanished behind a pulsing dark veil that hovered at lamppost height. Traffic was rumbling by on the water-choked lanes of Route 13, headlights glaring, wipers whacking madly. The Tahoe, safe and dry by the pumps, was the only vehicle in the station. Boo Taylor had checked the front fender and grille for dents or some other sign of a collision, was surprised and relieved to fi nd none, and then pumped the truck full. The attendant had shadowed up to the shop door to watch as he got on his hands and knees before his truck to look for evidence of whatever beast he’d just murdered on the highway. When he went inside to pay, he and the attendant were the only two people in the place.
He could still feel the impact, the solid thud against the truck, that fi rst spike of panic.
“S’cuse me, mister brick layer.” The attendant was calling to him again. “Need your signature by the old X when you’re ready.”
Boo turned from the window and went to the counter. He bent to scribble his name, dripping water on the counter. The attendant was looking at Boo Taylor’s calloused and scarred right hand as he wrote, drops splattering from his sleeve. The hand was minus two fingers.
“How’d you get so dang soaked?” the man asked.
Boo glanced outside again, still seeking that shape in the gloom. “Thought I hit something a ways back,” he said. “Dog or something.”
“Ouch!” The attendant held up Boo’s credit card. “Kill it?”
Boo Taylor looked at the attendant: gap-toothed grin and twinkling eyes. Rudy was embroidered over the heart of his black shirt in blood-red letters. “Couldn’t say,” he told him. He plucked the card from the man’s hand. “Got out to look, but I couldn’t find anything.”
Or maybe whatever he hit was standing out there now, waiting for him.
“Ouch!” Rudy said again, smile widening. He was taking in Boo’s suit, all sopping wet wool, chafing and obviously uncomfortable. Yes, the suit was expensive, double breasted charcoal gray with pinstripes. Boo Taylor owned just three suits; they were all expensive, and now the Armani pinstripe was ruined.
“Give you credit,” Rudy told him, “gettin out in this bitch. If it was me, I’da gunned it the hell out’a there, high and dry. Fuck the dog for gettin in my way, see? Say, you mind me askin what happened to your hand?”
Boo glanced at the scarred mass of his hand, at the remaining fingers holding
his card. “Cut myself shaving,” he said.
The attendant snorted. “Reason I ask is, used to be a fella with three fingers that pitched for the college up the road.”
Boo arched an eyebrow.
“Helluva junkballer. Christ, that must be close to twenty years ago.” The man squinted at the credit card receipt. He frowned. “Fella had a funny name. Sure as hell wasn’t Robert. Heard he went pro.”
Boo Taylor watched as the man glanced back and forth between him and the receipt.
“Reason I ask is, that fella looked somethin like you.”
He handed Boo the receipt, and Boo tucked it into his wallet along with the card.
“Well, you know us three-fingered fellas,” he said, turning to leave, “I guess we all look alike.” The attendant snorted again. When Boo touched the door a flare of lightning suddenly blasted the day apart, and the sky above the gas station splintered into pieces. The building trembled. A can of something wet fell from a shelf and crashed on the floor. Then the lights of the station sputtered and blinked out.
The attendant was muttering as Boo Taylor pushed his way through the door.
Outside, the storm was battering the tin overhang, and the world was a roar. As he approached his truck, he watched scattered motes of substance gather, specks of lightning and flecks of molecules accumulate and thicken with each step to summon, at last, the very definite shape of a man.
The man stood just beyond the protection of the roof, not more than five feet from the Tahoe’s right fender. Clothes clung like wet leaves on wide, rawboned shoulders.
Drops of rain dappled a shaggy afro, capturing glints and sparkle to make a silvery halo. The man was cradling his left elbow in his hand.
(Some things don’t never die, boy.)
The words swam to him through the mist, across distant Southern swamplands.
(They jes change shapes.)
Boo Taylor shrugged sodden wool over his flesh. He picked out the ignition key and continued toward the truck, and when he reached the truck’s door, he stopped. He flicked his eyes to the elbow and the hand that clutched it. “You hurt?” he called out.
Up close, he could now see the face: craggy and weathered like driftwood, only so much darker; eyes like the halves of seashells, glowing mutely, with a hundred thread-thin bloody veins shot through them. The man could be thirty or sixty.
“Gwine naut.”
The sound was startling, the slogged boil of a garbage disposal. Boo Taylor realized he hadn’t expected the man to speak.
“What was that?”
The old-or-young face didn’t change. The graveled words dribbled out again.
“Naut. Gwine up naut.”
For another long moment the words remained gibberish. Then Boo heard the familiar rhythm from his childhood, the Gullah cadence of black-water swamps and tin shanties and shady porch stoops. Eye to eye, he saw now that he and the man were almost exactly matched in dimensions—height, thickness—each the negative image of the other.
I know you, he said in his mind. I know you…don’t I?
The tiniest crack curled the corner of the man’s heavy lips. “Doan b’lee suh.”
Don’t believe so?
Through the veil of rain, blood-soaked seashell eyes shimmered back at him.
From the highway, the sudden blare of an eighteen-wheeler. Boo Taylor turned to watch a VW Beetle squeal out of the big truck’s way like a turtle scooting from the path of a barreling gator. He felt the man’s gaze piercing him between the shoulder blades like an ice pick.
When he looked around again, the man with the seashell eyes hadn’t moved.
Even the faint smile lingered. After another unsure moment, Boo Taylor slipped out his wallet. He thumbed out a fi ve dollar bill and held it out to the man. The man looked back—then looked down at the bill and the mangled right hand that held it.
“They’ve got coffee inside,” Boo told him. “And sandwiches.”
The man glided forward and lifted his wounded left arm. His fingers uncurled like snakes, then curled again around the bill. “Gwine up naut,” he said, locking the seashell eyes back onto him.
Boo Taylor looked away. He nodded toward the shop. “There’s coffee inside,” he said. Then he climbed into the truck and pulled away.
Four
Forty minutes later he was settled in a leather booth. The Armani jacket was a puddle in the seat next to him. Across the table, brown hands held an old magazine, open to a page near the middle.
“This is you?”
Boo took a sip of ice-cold vodka and nodded. He couldn’t see the man across from him, just a pair of thick forearms and rough hands. The candle in the center of the table cast the man’s flesh in a dusky rose. All around him, candles at the other tables flickered like stars in the night. The hurricane had knocked out the lights.
The rough, rose-lit hands pushed the magazine closer to the flame. “How old were you?”
“Seven, I think. Maybe eight. Where’d you fi nd that, anyway?” Boo rubbed at the sparse brown hair at his thinning temples, thinking how old and grizzled and thick-shouldered he was now and how young and spindly that boy in the picture had been.
In black and white, rows of ragged Negro schoolchildren sat at simple, wooden desks. All were looking up with an expression of casual interest—the pleasant continuity abruptly interrupted by that single Caucasian face. The photographer had cropped the white face upper-left like a star on a flag. The white boy was reaching up to clasp the hand of a smiling black man in a dark suit.
“I didn’t find it, Stoney had it—and I lost ten dollars over it, ’cause there’s no way this is real. You tellin me you went to a black school down on that cracker island?”
“Sometimes,” Boo answered. “We had a white school, too. I guess I took turns for a while.”
A waitress, glowing in a white tuxedo shirt, hovered past. Boo Taylor caught her by the arm and ordered a cigar and another vodka.
“So, you’re saying that kid in this picture is actually you.” The voice beyond the candle was incredulous.
“Yes,” Boo answered. He felt weary. A wet collar chafed his neck; he tugged his tie loose and unbuttoned the collar.
“And you met Martin Luther King Jr.”
“Yes.”
“You actually met him.”
Now at last the first tendrils the vodka were seeping into the capillaries of his brain, making wavy echoes of the tinkling glass and disembodied whispers swirling about the darkened tavern. He wondered that people felt the need to speak in whispers: was it in reverence to the hurricane or simply a reaction to the darkness?
“He was visiting the island,” Boo said—and realized that he, too, was whispering. “I had no idea who the man was at the time. That picture didn’t come out until after he was killed, and that was probably two years later. Where did Stoney find that thing, anyway? I haven’t seen it in twenty-five years.”
The November 1969 edition of Harper’s was now rolled up next to the candle; the photograph and article inside had caused a sensation on tiny, impoverished Sweetpatch Island when first published. The whites were unhappy the island’s brief chance at fame was dominated by a Negro image. And the blacks resented a rich white boy commandeering their champion.
The caption: Little Robert Lee Taylor welcomes Reverend King to the Palmer
Washington Schoolhouse on Sweetpatch Isle, SC.
Boo glanced around at the random firefly glitter of candles and the useless glow of emergency lamps. Doors gasped open, inhaling a new party into the bar, unseen in the gloom but stomping feet and clattering umbrellas.
(He felt the thud shuddering solidly through the front bumper, through his bones. A moment before, some blackness had streaked across the storm-blinded highway. What had that been? What in God’s name had he killed?)
He swallowed the rest of his drink.
Almost immediately, the waitress appeared out of the dark again with his second vodka and the cigar. Boo Taylor promptly pinched the end off the cigar.
“By the way, Elgin,” he said, rolling and crinkling the cigar in his fingers until a fragrance like old books rose from the dry leaves, “crackers come from Georgia. I’m pure South Carolina.”
He lit the cigar with the candle, momentarily brightening the flame and sending dark plumes into the air. (Something burning; something dead, he thought in an obscure flicker of a memory.)
A second waitress came into view and caught sight of the man in the booth across from Boo Taylor. She made a quick spin about. “Elgin? Elgin Highsmith? When’d you get here?”
From across the booth, a brown, bald head slid into the candlelight—momentarily, the man was identical to the vagrant at the gas station—then shadows shifted, and the resemblance was gone.
The girl bent to the table and gave the man a kiss on the lips. Her hair was a purple crew cut. The sparkle of at least four hoops dangled from her left ear and another from her left nostril. “Isn’t this just wild! Doesn’t it look like Phantom of the Opera in here?”