We filled a single plate and then sat alone on a bench in a darkened corner of the yard, overlooking the party. With no utensils in sight, I asked, “What do we eat with?”
She fingered a chicken leg and bit into it, talking with her mouth half full. “Fingers.”
I lifted a chicken leg and the barbecue sauce dripped down my fingers. “Doesn’t make sense to cover the women in diamonds and the tables in white linen but leave Charleston’s finest sucking on their fingers.”
“Welcome to Charleston.”
“By the way”—I chewed, mouth full, the corners covered in sauce—“I owe you a commission.”
Another bite. “Huh?”
“A lady came in this week and actually bought Miss Rachel. Asked me if I’d take seventeen hundred.”
“What’d you say?”
“I asked her if she wanted me to gift wrap it.”
She laughed. “So you paid rent this month?” I nodded, brown smear spreading across my face. “Good, it’s nice to know I’ll be able to find you and won’t have to play stupid, snooping around the art school again.”
“That how you found me the first time?”
She waved at someone across the yard and then stared out across the crowd. “People will tell you most anything if you know how to ask the right questions.”
“In your case, I’d say it had less to do with how you asked, and more to do with the fact that you asked at all.”
She looked at me, her voice growing soft. “Doss Michaels, you flirting with me?”
“That bad, huh?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Refreshing, actually.”
“I thought it sounded a bit rehearsed. Sort of like I rushed it.”
She set my glass on the grass, out of reach. “I’m cutting you off. No more lemonade for you.”
My tongue felt thick and the sides of my lips were tingly. “Good idea.” An iron gate marked the corner of the backyard and an exit for me. “You feel like walking?”
“You had enough culture for one night?”
“I’m not too big on parties. Never know how to act.”
She hooked her arm inside mine and led me through the gate. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Probably not.”
“That’s why they make the lemonade.”
We walked across South Battery, through White Point Gardens and onto the high battery overlooking the split of the Cooper and Ashley rivers. Named after Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, the twin rivers once served as the cotton highway of the Confederate South. Plantations floated their white gold downriver on barges, parked them in Colonial Lake—just a few blocks away—and waited on a buyer and export to the rest of the world. Which explains why most felt the Atlantic Ocean started at their doorstep.
The breeze was cool so I slipped my jacket over her shoulders. A well-lit yacht motored inland, returning to the marina. I waved my hand across the wake, making small talk. “A lot of history has passed through these waters.”
She considered that a moment. “Tell me about you.”
Her tone caught me. The playful woman at the party had been replaced by a serious, real and curious girl. I dangled my feet off the concrete wall. “So much for small talk, huh?” She shrugged. “I grew up on a…a river south of here. A paddle in one hand, pencil or paintbrush in the other.” I waved my finger like a wand over the landscape around us. “This is beautiful, but Charleston, for me, can’t hold a candle to the St. Marys. She’s…well…” Feeling foolish, I trailed off.
“What brought you here?”
“Art scholarship.”
“How’s that going?”
“Not sure. I don’t know if I’m learning how to make better art or forgetting that I once could.” She raised an eyebrow. “I used to think it was pretty simple. Being here, different teachers, different motives, it’s gotten complicated. Confusing. I’m not sure I look at a canvas the way I once did.”
“But your stuff is selling.”
“Well, let’s be honest. One piece sold. Thanks to you, but more importantly, I don’t make art simply to sell it.”
She stared at me. “But you’re selling it.”
“Sure, I hope it sells like hotcakes, but that’s not what I’m thinking about while I’m making it.”
“So you’re an idealist.” While she leaned against the concrete wall, I sat further back, dangling my feet. This placed her just inches in front of me. Lights from the marina lit the right side of her face, highlighting the lines of her cheek and the short wisps of hair just above her ear. My eyes traced the contour of her ear, the softness of her hair, then glided along the rim of her cheek, skating between the shadow of her eyelashes and the recess of her cheek. Moonlight bounced off the ripples of the water where it bled seamlessly into the edges of her face. In the distance, Fort Sumter sat twinkling between the rim of her lips and the lines of her nose.
“I was fourteen when my mom’s car slid off the road, broadsiding a concrete barrier. She was driving back from the store on bald tires in a light rain. On the front seat the paramedics found new paints and a roll of canvas. After the burial, I went home, lined up each of my inhalers on the fence and shot them with a stolen shotgun. Then I slipped beneath the cover of the river and disappeared. I had a lot of questions I couldn’t answer and was tired of living inside a plastic bag. For an entire summer, I paddled from the swamp to the ocean. No medicine. If I couldn’t breathe, I wouldn’t. I stole enough to eat and learned to duck and dodge people who asked too many questions. Sometimes early in the morning or late at night, when the mosquitoes hatched and the mist rose off the river, I’d lay on my stomach, my nose inches from the water, and squint my eyes trying to catch a glimpse of Momma’s God in the river.”
She interrupted me with a smile. “And if you found Him?”
“I was going to grab Him around the neck and choke Him until He answered me.”
“Did He?”
“If He did, I never heard Him. ’Course, it’s hard to hear when you’re hurting.” I shrugged. “I turned fifteen, swam to the surface and convinced enough folks in the trailer park to forge enough papers to help me finish school. Mom would have wanted that. At least that’s what I told myself. Besides, the school couldn’t argue with what I could do with a brush. It was somewhere in there I first remember hearing the term realist. I didn’t even really know what that was. I used to tell them, ‘’Course it’s real. I painted it.’”
“While technically my work was good, it was also devoid of emotion. Hollow. Even I could see that. That river summer had changed me. I had learned how to hold my breath. To live half alive because it kept the pain away.”
“Pain of what?”
“The present. Beyond all the coughing, sputtering and hacking, in between the moments when the light around the edges of my eyes narrowed and the tunnel closed in, I have held on to the inkling that I was made to breathe. That my lungs actually serve a purpose other than suffocating me. All they need is a reason.
“My mom helped me see beauty when I thought there was none. She’d steal me away to the river and then dip me in the sunlight as it dripped through a weeping willow. Then she’d set me in front of the canvas, hold my hand in hers, tell me to close my eyes and then rub my fingertips across the texture of the canvas. ‘Doss,’ she’d say, ‘God is in the details.’ I told her, ‘Momma, that may be but’—I’d touch her temple or point to the bruises on her neck—‘he ain’t no place else.’”
“I’d like to have met her.”
“I can take you to her grave.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.” A minute passed.
“And your dad?”
I shrugged. “Word around the trailer was that my mom was ‘easy,’ so I’m not quite sure if the guy who lived with us was my dad. I haven’t seen him since before the funeral.”
She stared at me, letting the sound of the wake from the yacht roll across the top of the river and spill across the rocks. “So when you
paint, you’re painting for your mom?”
Between her father’s power and her own success, everybody wanted something from Abbie. Given this, she was guarded. Not unkind, not insincere, but careful. It didn’t take a genius to see there was more behind her question.
I shook my head. “I grew up in…in pieces. Mom saw this and it hurt her. Oil and canvas were her gifts to me. And sometimes, even if for the briefest of moments, they were the glue that put me back together. I can’t explain that. It just did.”
“An aspirin for your anger?” Another question.
“Anger?”
“I watched you fight a man twice your size.”
I nodded. “Yes, sometimes I come angry. But then there are moments when I lose track of time and when I look up and the canvas is staring back at me.”
My tone softened. “It’s a welling-up. I can’t not do it.” I tapped the side of my head. “When God wired my brain to my mouth, I think he might have crossed a wire. What’s supposed to go to my tongue, runs out my fingers. I think and my fingers move. So I paint.” I stared at my hands, trying to poke fun at myself. “If you want to know what I think, talk to the hands.” She rolled her eyes. “I came here, art school, thinking they knew more than I. That they could teach me more than some battered woman along the river.” I shook my head. “They’re just painting by numbers.” She said nothing. “But…I’m also a realist and I’d like to graduate, so I’m keeping my mouth shut.” I put my hand on her shoulder, then realized I had and pulled it back. “It felt good to sell that piece to that lady. The thought that she might hang it where it can be seen fills my need.” I picked a pebble off the wall and tried to skip it across the water.
After a moment she asked, “What’s the need?”
I shrugged. “Take a deep breath.”
She frowned.
“Go ahead. Take as deep a breath as your lungs will allow.”
She inhaled deeply.
“Now hold it.”
Thirty seconds passed.
“Keep holding it.”
Her face began to turn red. At a minute she let it out and sucked in a long breath.
I nodded. “That’s the need.”
10
JUNE 1, EVENING
We slid onto the beach around dark. I checked the GPS. “Distance traveled” read 9.6 miles. Not good. I needed to rethink how we did this. I could travel half again as fast with only one canoe. Problem was, we needed that second one to make it to the ocean. I would just have to walk and paddle faster, which was going to be difficult given that I was out of practice and out of shape.
I spread a bed on the beach for Abbie, propped her up and then started searching for wood. I built a small fire to warm us and fend off the mosquitoes and gnats. Night on the river can be tricky. It’s Africa-hot during the day, but mountain-cool at night beneath the trees.
Riding in the canoe had worn her down. A lot. She closed her eyes and lay perfectly still. Around nine, she said, “You need to eat something.” Her mouth was cottony dry and her breath had a weird metallic smell.
The thought hadn’t crossed my mind. “I’m not too hungry.” I held a mug to her lips and she sipped.
“You just pulled two canoes and me ten miles down this river.” I straddled a log, pulled the lid on a can of peaches and ate slowly. She opened one eye. “That’s not going to cut it.”
I finished the peaches, zipped open the tent and lifted her slowly off the beach. I laid her inside, then boiled water in the Jetboil. While it cooled, I zipped us inside, then slowly slid off her clothes. She whispered, “You’re getting good at this.”
“Practice.” Her fentanyl patch needed changing so I peeled off the old, swabbed the skin on her arm, dried it and applied a new one. I slowly wiped down her arms and legs, toweled her off, slipped her head and arms through a T-shirt and zipped her inside a single-layered fleece bag. In the last several months, she’d quit sleeping in anything that placed pressure on her skin—said it felt like it was cutting into her. I tied the scarf loosely around her head and pointed. “I’ll be outside.” She squeezed my hand and turned on her side.
I stoked the fire, dragged a dead limb from behind some palmetto bushes, laid it across the fire and then sat on a log, swatting mosquitoes and counting what few stars I could see through the canopy. An hour later, I heard a stick crack. Having spent enough time in the woods, I could hear the difference between a small twig under the foot of a squirrel and something larger, broken under the weight of a larger foot. This far out in the boonies, it wasn’t uncommon to bump into feral hogs, deer, armadillos, raccoons, wild dogs, even a bear, so I slung the shotgun and scanned the bushes with the flashlight. When I saw nothing, no two eyes staring back at me, I worked the slide action on the shotgun—loading the number 8 birdshot into the chamber—thinking the sound alone might deter something looking for a meal. I had loaded the first round birdshot, the second two as buckshot and the last two as rifled slugs. My thought process was deter, stop and kill. Number 8 would kill most anything in these woods, if close enough, as would the buckshot. The slugs were insurance because they’d pass through most anything—like an engine block. Nothing moved so I clicked the safety back on and set the shotgun beside me.
I grew up in or around the woods so I’d grown accustomed to the sights, smells and sounds. Especially the sounds, since my nose has never been that reliable. While it may get quiet at night, it is seldom silent. Birds, crickets, frogs, gators, dogs, you name it. And often they will feed off each other. Little sounds here and there that create some sort of animal-chain reaction. If one chirps or croaks, often the others will assume it’s okay to do the same. The reverse is true as well. If one goes silent, the others will fall silent long enough to figure out why. I sat back down on that log and noticed how deathly quiet the woods had become.
I started thinking about old movies. Especially those scenes in which some character named Festus, Stumpy or Lefty scratches the back of his neck and says, “I can’t see them, but I got a notion we’re being watched.” Usually, he’s right. Because the next scene we see is filled with Indians wearing war paint.
I can’t explain it, but I had that feeling. I went over it in my mind: I heard a stick crack. Under weight. Probably more than a squirrel or raccoon. Also, the sound appeared muffled. Deer and hog feet don’t do that ’cause they’re hard. But people feet and bear paws do. To be honest, I wasn’t too concerned about bears. Black bears are more curious than dangerous. But it’s that other possibility that had the hair up on my neck.
I unzipped the tent, lifted Abbie—still in her sleeping bag—off her mat and pressed my finger to her lips. “Shhh.” She hung her arms around my neck. I looped my arm through the Pelican case lanyard and then the sling of the shotgun and slipped down the bank out of the fire’s reflection. I crossed the river—ankle-deep—and walked up a sandy beach on the Florida side. Abbie whispered, “What’s wrong?”
I scanned the river, listening. “Not sure.”
I set her down on the bank beneath a few overhanging trees. Twenty minutes passed. While we waited, I found myself plotting tomorrow’s path in my mind, thinking about where we could lunch and where we might take on more water. Where we might encounter people, where we could hide. While the river was cleaner than most, and you could drink it if you had to, I tried not to given the runoff. Too many pesticides I couldn’t see and too much manure I didn’t want to risk tasting. Artesian wells fitted with hand pumps dotted the riverbanks if you knew where to look.
I was about two seconds from carrying Abbie back to the tent when the first man appeared in the river. He was tall, skinny, barefooted, wore cutoff jeans and a T-shirt with no sleeves. He had stepped out from behind some trees, dipped his feet into the river and walked slowly to the canoes. He picked his feet up slowly, and then slipped them back in the water without a sound. Deer walk the same way when they don’t want to be noticed. A second man appeared behind him and walked directly to the tent with a third man clo
se on his heels. The first man picked through the canoes while the second and third tore the tent apart. I could only hear snippets. They whispered in harsh tones.
The two at the tent got in a shoving match and then threw the whole mess—tent, my sleeping bag, our clothes and everything else I had stowed—into the fire. The flame-retardant tent smothered the fire, filling the campsite with smoke, causing more shoving and all three to cough. Finally, the heat won. The flames caught, climbed chest-high and lit the riverbank.
By the time the smoke cleared, the quiet man picking through the canoes had packed most everything we had into one canoe and began pulling it back upriver. A hundred yards or so later, he pulled it up the riverbank and slid it into the trees. For several minutes I could hear him sliding it through the woods. The fire roared and crackled, showering the bank in heat and light. The two that remained were getting more aggravated. Their faces glowed golden. I saw enough to know I didn’t like them but not enough to pick them out of a lineup.
We edged back under the trees. I placed my finger on Abbie’s lips again and lay down beside her, staring through the grass toward our campsite. Growing angrier, the two that remained gathered up everything they didn’t want and threw it in the campfire turned bonfire. The flames were now fifteen feet high and licking the underside of the tree limbs. They slung whatever else remained over their shoulders and began carrying it back across the river, following the lone man who’d just stolen our canoe. That left one canoe and little else.
I placed my hand on the shotgun. Abbie put her hand on mine and said, “Everything over there is replaceable. You’re not.”
11
With her parents’ party still in high gear, Abbie hopped off the concrete wall, tucked her arm inside mine and said, “How much do you know about Charleston?”
“I know how to get to work, school and a few places where the fish occasionally bite.”