by Bob Mayer
All the trauma aside, Emily found herself much more accepting of her parental situation. The problem now was that she felt like a huge, pale lump especially with her three perfect friends. They got asked to dance. They got handed the beers, and the promotional t-shirts and key chains. It was hard to be so ignored. Lisa thought she was full of crap and insisted she looked great. That made Emily feel worse knowing she had to look pretty bad for Lisa to tell her she looked great.
The song was thudding to a finale, and she waited for her friends to join her hoping that they were ready to go. The extra pounds she was carrying seemed to be just the amount that would hold her back from the fun. What she found perplexing was the question of whether guys were truly affected by those pounds. She suspected it might be the other way around if she waited long enough. She glanced at her watch and noticed it was almost one. She yawned into her cupped hand and waited as Lisa fought her way through the crowd.
“You can’t be that tired.”
Emily stared at Lisa noting her sweaty, lanky hair and the dark mascara circles around her eyes. “Please, you look a little wiped yourself.”
Lisa licked her finger and tried to wipe the biggest smudges from her eyes. “OK, I’m tired but there’s plenty of time for sleep later.”
“I’m not like you guys, I can’t store up sleep and then stay awake for three days”
Lisa lifted the hair off her neck in a vain attempt to cool down. “Look the place is closing in an hour; just find a nice quiet seat and then we’ll go.”
“I can’t wait an hour. I’m taking the car. You guys can take a taxi.” Emily hoped that Lisa was sober enough to see the logic in that.
Lisa shrugged and dropped her hair back onto her sweaty shoulders. “Whatever. Just remember to hide the key.”
The idea made Lisa cringe. She hated the thought of hiding the key outside — kind of defeated the purpose— and was still pissed that the condo company had issued only one key to four paying guests. “No way. Ring the bell. I’ll wake up.”
Lisa laughed. “Yeah, right. I’ve seen you sleep.” Her voice took on a more plaintive tone. “Come on, just another hour?”
Emily shook her head. “Sorry, I gotta get out of here.”
Lisa realized her friend meant what she said and knew further discussion was pointless. A small part of her was mildly put out. Emily wasn’t one to suck it up. “You better be at that door as soon as I start banging.”
Emily felt a wave of relief. She could take off and she didn’t have to hide the key for some nut to find. “Thanks. I’ll be a lot better tomorrow if I can get some sleep.”
The look on Lisa’s face made Emily realize that it was time to shut up.
She watched as Lisa, obviously the one chosen to deal with her, ran back to their friends.
As she dug around in her purse feeling for the car keys, she thought of sleep. She knew Lisa was upset and by extension so was everyone else. Screw it. They were all supposed to be adults. And someone had to be awake enough to begin the drive back to college later in the day.
The parking lot was still packed, and as she wandered across the crushed shells that served as gravel, she thought of the traffic jam to come. It really was best to get the car out of here now, and let them take a taxi. She edged her way to the side of the narrow lane as she heard a car coming up behind her. It was moving slowly, but she decided it was time to cut across the lot instead of remaining a target for some drunk. There were two rows of cars parked head to head off to the left, and as she turned the big SUV passed by her on the right.
She never even noticed the van. She did hear the door start to open, but by then she was right next to it. The man didn’t even bother stepping out. He grabbed her neck, and yanked her into the van so suddenly; she didn’t have time to scream. Like a tiny ripple on a still pond the van slowly pulled away and left no trace of Emily Cranston. All that remained were two slips of paper the man slid out the driver’s window, floating to the ground like the first two leaves of fall.
CHAPTER TWO
The sun rose slowly, fighting through the mist to send warm fingers to the wide beach left exposed by the inevitable cycle of the tide. High above, the trade winds blew thin cloud contrails against the last vestiges of night. The sounds of the thick swamp beyond the beach shifted from the occasional outbursts of predators and prey to the more serene symphony of daytime activity. Palmettos, old oaks gray-bearded with Spanish Moss, and tall pines rose high, competing for the coming sunlight.
Between swamp and beach is a thin stretch of grass-covered sand-dunes where storms had heaped all they picked up as they thundered toward the coast, and the ocean in calmer weather could never quite reach to pull away. It is called Pritchards Island, but at high tide it really is several islets as the seawater filled canals like blood into the island’s veins, bringing fish, turtles, gators and birds. It is one of thousands of islands that dot the coast of South Carolina. The Marine Corps base at Parris Island is to the west, and to the south, separated by the Broad River, is Hilton Head Island, a vacation destination along the east coast. Just north, Fripps Island was following the same fate of Hilton Head as developers moved in and seized prime ocean front property.
The man sat on the crumbling concrete portal of a long-abandoned Coast Guard station. He’d heard that a beach front lot on Hilton Head went for a couple of million. As far as he could see left and right, the beach was clear and open. Of course, he didn’t own any of it. He didn’t own any land. He considered himself a visitor, even though he’d been here for just under a year and a half, except for his few trips. He’d learned the island was privately owned, but perpetually deeded to the University of South Carolina for research. He’d often seen the students and their professors making forays out of the bungalow on the north side of the island in their small boats and ATVs, but they had never seen him. The island was a preserve for sea turtles and the visitors were focused on that.
As he sat, watching the sun rise, he lifted his entire body off the concrete by virtue of pressing the fingertips of his right hand down and keeping his legs extended straight out in front. He would do this ten times with each hand, staying balanced on those five fingertips for the space of two breaths on each lift, then shift to the other hand. He did it almost without noticing, a monotony born of long practice. The fact he was lifting one hundred and eighty pounds with each thrust was displayed only by the veins on the down arm pulsing full of blood, much like the canals of the island at high tide. He breathed slowly, forcing the tensed muscles of his stomach holding up the legs to ripple with the exertion.
He’d come to the Low Country for simple reasons for a man who lived a complex life. He’d read Pat Conroy’s tales of the land while at the Military Academy and he thought it was about as far as one could get from the mountains and the deserts of the world he’d spent the previous decades fighting in. And before that the streets of New York where he’d spent his childhood. He particularly enjoyed the mornings, watching the sun come up out of the ocean. It made him feel small and insignificant, as if his actions mattered little. That gave him comfort.
He’d also come to the south because he’d always been fascinated by the Civil War, and he’d already walked all the battlefields of the North — Gettysburg, Antietam and the others— and most of the rest were south of the Mason-Dixon line. The previous month he’d gone to the site of Andersonville Prison in Georgia, not exactly a battlefield, but a place of significance in that war and he still hadn’t shaken off the depression and despair still emanating from that small patch of South Georgia despite the years that had passed since it had been home to so many Yankee prisoners.
While the occasional students and professors knew nothing of the long time visitor to their island, there were those who had known of his presence within a few days of his arrival. The Gullah, the descendants of freed slaves who’d lived on these islands for generations, had noticed him almost immediately but left him in peace. He’d returned the courtesy, only gr
adually getting to know these people with their own language as he met them hunting and fishing around the island. It took six months of passing nods across the water and marsh before one of them pulled close enough to speak to him and then it was only a brief greeting and a warning of a storm coming despite the deceptive blue sky.
He’d always found that there were those who had their senses attuned to the pulse of the land and saw more than most. In Germany, the local forest-meister always knew when a Special Forces team had parachuted into their woodlands to conduct training exercises. In the desert the Bedouins could also sense a sand-storm on the clearest day and were aware of who traversed their lands. In Afghanistan the mountain villagers knew who walked the high trails and when. As a child in the Bronx he’d seen the men in white undershirts who sat in front of the small store on the street corner watching with half-lidded eyes whenever unknown cars turned into the block. Territoriality seemed to be genetic in men, but he must have missed out on that particular chromosome. He had no yearning to return to the Bronx from the day he escaped there to go fifty miles up the Hudson to West Point at seventeen. He considered wherever he currently slept to be his home.
He’d been told by an old Gullah man named Goodwine that a house had once stood at this spot, built by pirates in the late eighteenth century. And that the pirates had been caught by the fledgling American Navy and massacred to a man, refusing to give up the location of their treasure even under the painful incentive of the blade. Goodwine said the sailors burned the house and then dug through the ashes searching for the gold and, finding none, filled the hole with the bodies of the pirates. It was not a place of bad spirits Goodwine insisted, but of discontented spirits. The man liked that story. He didn’t share with Goodwine his own belief that the pirates had not had any treasure, which explained why they couldn’t point out where it was buried. The man knew the difference between fact and fiction and the fact was, in his experience, that everyone talked under enough pain and in fear of death.
The Coast Guard station had been built on the spot during the early days of World War II when German submarines had hunted the coast, sinking ships within sight of the shore, the flames observed by a civilian populace who thought themselves safe. It had been abandoned after the war and slowly gave in to the weather and vegetation. The man had constructed a cozy shelter inside, one that kept the rain off in winter and gave him shade in summer.
There was no bed. He had forsaken beds years ago as they were a place where one could be expected to be found, usually in a vulnerable state. He had a thin therm-a-rest pad that he rolled out when he was tired. Sometimes he slept on the beach above the high water mark, sometimes in the dunes, and if the weather threatened, in the station. He had a small battery powered radio with which he listened to National Public Radio twice a day. The portal to the station had been made for smaller men, set at an even six feet, so he had to duck slightly to come and go.
The biggest issue was fresh water. He made a run in his kayak over to Parris Island once a week and filled up two five-gallon cans at the dock. He had a solar shower, simply a clear bladder of water resting on top of a shelf, under which he quickly bathed when needed. The green-colored kayak he kept hidden up one of the waterways, tucked behind a cluster of thick palmetto bushes.
He knew what time it was very accurately according to some inner coding he’d never bothered to examine. In the same manner he’d never used an alarm clock. Even at the Academy during Beast Barracks. He always rose when he determined he needed to wake before he went to sleep.
Done with that exercise, he walked onto the beach and began his katas, the ritualized movements that were part of martial arts training. His specific form would not have been recognized in any dojo as it was an amalgamation of various techniques from a spectrum of disciplines. The moves were focused on those that incapacitated and killed as quickly as possible.
He heard the tinny murmur of a small outboard and came to a halt in mid-kata. He walked down to the beach as a small flatboat came around the headland.
* * *
Goodwine saw the strange white man waiting on the beach. He was always up. Goodwine had passed by the island late at night or hours before dawn and it seemed the man was always around, like a ghost, often simply sitting in his strange way on one hand, or moving slowly along the beach or through the swamp. The first time he’d spotted the buckra—white man — Goodwine had thought he was a lost hunter or fisherman as few came to Pritchards, but the man had shown no sign of distress nor did he seem interested in what Goodwine was up to, so the two had noted each other with a simple nod but said nothing.
So it went for months before one day Goodwine saw the man out on the sand-bar a hundred yards from the shore, simply walking, paralleling the shore at low tide, the water up to his waist. It was February and the water was cold, but the man had not seemed to notice. It wasn’t until he got home that Goodwine realized that the man had been working his body against the water, building up his legs.
Goodwine had paused to tell the man a storm was coming and the tide would be up higher than had been seen for a while. The man had simply thanked Goodwine and continued on his way. What had impressed Goodwine more than the man’s taciturn manner was his skin. He was a buckra, but the sun had burned him brown, except the lines and craters that marked the impact of violence on his flesh. There were dark tales written in those scars but the man said nothing of it, not even after they spent more time together. Goodwine had a similar crater on his right thigh where a North Vietnamese bullet had punched a hole many years ago. He didn’t like talking of that so he respected the man’s silence. It had been Goodwine’s only time away from the Low Country and he had been glad to return, even though the leg had never quite been the same.
After several more months of gradually longer exchanges, Goodwine offered to take the man deep into the swamp. He was unlike any white man Goodwine had ever met. The man had blue eyes that constantly moved yet always seemed to be focused on something. The thing that Goodwine told his wife as soon as he was back home was that the man had the patience of the ‘gator. This was indeed a high Gullah compliment as Goodwine had seen alligators submerged, eyes and nostrils only showing, in the same place for days on end. The ‘gator knew it needed just one good meal, a nice fat buck coming too close to the water’s edge, to last it for months, so it was willing to be still for days in exchange. It was the epitome of disciplined violence.
The man had spoken only in response to something Goodwine said. He’d helped with the hunting in silence. And when the tide went out, he’d assisted in pushing the boat across the mud barriers while mosquitoes feasted on his blood without a word or sign of protest or inconvenience. They’d efficiently butchered the deer Goodwine had shot and the man had accepted a portion of the meat with thanks.
The man raised his hand in greeting as the flat bow grated on the sound and Goodwine tilted the engine forward. The man put the hand down and held the boat still as Goodwine carefully stepped over the gunwale onto the sand. The man then pulled the boat above the tide line with ease.
* * *
The man let go of the boat, then turned to face Goodwine. He saw the envelope in the old man’s hands and was not anxious to know its contents. He pulled a cigar he’d bought on his last trip to Parris Island out of his shirt pocket and offered it to Goodwine who accepted it with a nod of thanks.
“Yuh.” Goodwine held out the envelope.
The man took it. He glanced at the return address. New York City. Addressed to Major Jack Gant. He found it interesting that his Uncle used his rank and that name. An appeal to loyalty and to forgive the past, he realized.
Goodwine had cut the end of the cigar and fired it up, inhaling deeply and letting out a puff of smoke that was borne away by the off-shore breeze. “Be good news?”
Goodwine spoke the white man’s English as well as any on the coast when he wanted to. Gant had listened to Goodwine enough to have a basic understanding of Gullah, but he felt i
t would be insulting to try to carry on a conversation in the old man’s native tongue.
Gant opened his Uncle’s letter and looked at the thin, spidery writing. He read the first line and then lifted his eyes and looked out to sea.
“Is ya all right?” Goodwine asked.
“My brother is dead.”
“I am sorry.” Goodwine hung his head, his lips moving as he said a prayer for the dead.
“I knew it,” Gant said, when the old man was done. He tapped his chest. “I felt something a few weeks ago. I felt something go. He was my twin.”
Goodwine tapped his own chest. “His spirit be taken.”
Gant shrugged, uncertain. “Something.”
“Were you close?”
“Once. Not for a long time.” Gant looked at the rest of the letter. “My Uncle would like me to come back to New York for a visit with my mother,” he finally said.
Goodwine nodded. “Will ya be going?”
“No.”
Gant heard a sound in the distance, one that brought mixed emotions on the top of the news of his brother. Today it brought a feeling of utter weariness. He wondered if it was connected to the letter, but doubted it. The man who had sent the helicopter didn’t deal in sentimentality, if Gant’s guess about the chopper’s mission was correct.
“You shoulda get home,” Goodwine said. His voice deepened as he shifted to Gullah. “Mus tek cyear a de root fa heal de tree.”
Gant mentally translated the words — must take care of the root to heal the tree. The helicopter was getting closer. He looked along the shoreline to the south. Goodwine also turned in that direction, the old man’s stomach fluttering a little also at the sound, decades old memories of a faraway land threatening to come back. A Coast Guard chopper appeared just above the surf line, coming in fast. Gant hoped it kept on going, but it was too early in the morning for the first shark patrol.