by Bret Lott
Warchester Four’s still fighting the raid on his house, and hasn’t reconvened anything yet. We see him in the paper and on the news now and again, ranting about the archaic laws of South Carolina, the provincial state of mind we have going on here, the cracker mentality that just keeps holding back this state.
But there’s still no poker. And far as we can tell he still doesn’t know it was Unc to call it in.
Mom leans forward, pinches up a piece of white meat from down near the wishbone, pops it in her mouth.
“You sure you’re ready?” she says to me, and smiles. “The doctor says it’s up to you, but that doesn’t mean you should.”
“Leave the boy alone, Eugenie,” Unc says, and now he reaches to the chicken too, peels off a last bit of dark meat down where the thigh’s been pulled off. “He’s fine. He needs this.”
He sets the piece of chicken, no bigger than a postage stamp, on his plate, then reaches for the salt where we always keep it, there at the empty fourth spot at the table, and tips the shaker, sprinkles what he deems is enough.
But he’s missed the chicken entirely, sprinkled instead the empty space where his salad had been.
He picks up the piece, puts it in his mouth, chews it. “Perfect,” he says, and Mom and I just look at each other, shake our heads yet one more time.
Then: “You buy the airplane tickets to the blind duffers’ golf tournament out to Palm Springs today, like I asked you to do?”
And me: “Not yet. Because we’re not going until you try to golf in daylight.”
And Unc, like always: “One day.”
Three months gone already. I had four broken ribs, and a fractured eye socket. The best treatment for which was to just lay low. Just stay home. Just do nothing.
That had sounded all right, until three or so weeks in, and I wanted nothing more than to be out to Hungry Neck on a boat, or driving an ATV out there, or even just taking a long walk somewhere, anywhere.
Tabitha’s come by a couple times. She had to take a leave of absence from her postdoc in order to try and sort out everything that went down. It wasn’t like she could just jump on a plane and fly home to Frisco, start Aggregating Encryptions and Probabilistically Functioning.
At least that’s what she told me when I asked her the second month why she was still here in town.
Actually, it’s been more than a few times she’s been over. And one night two weeks ago, the night before she headed back, we went out together. I took her to Cypress in downtown Charleston. A very nice place. And now things seem closer to possible between us. Or at least the possibility for possibility seems possible.
Because things changed after that night. After all of what happened.
Five went back to Charlotte and that job he has not but a couple days after what happened, for one thing. It’s like he was running away, tucked his tail and took off. Which no one can blame, because we all deal with what we’re dealt in our own way. He hasn’t posted on Facebook once since then, either. And Tabitha turned her status back to single.
Jessup is gone. And somewhere are Tammy and Nina. Maybe in the brig itself.
And though we were debriefed in the days that followed, though we were brought over to the Weapons Station offices across Goose Creek and sat in windowless rooms being asked question and question and question from people in suits who identified themselves as being representatives of, in turn, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, the United States Naval Consolidated Brig, the Naval Weapons Station, Homeland Security itself, and, finally, Federal Protective Service; after all those questions and all those hours and all those suits, the only thing we received was a verbal thanks—and a warning not to tell—from a man with two stars on his shoulder. Not even someone in the Navy, but someone in the Army.
But I had a question myself, for the man in the suit across the table from me who’d told me he was from the Federal Protective Service: “Will you tell Jessup I said thank you?”
He only smiled, one side of his mouth going up, and let his eyes meet mine a moment. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said, and nodded.
The news reported it all as a domestic disturbance that erupted at Judge Dupont’s house when Coburn Graham, a boyfriend of the judge’s in-home caregiver, Nina Sanchez, motored in on the judge’s stolen boat to the property at Landgrave Hall, only to find her there with another boyfriend, Commander Jamison Prendergast. They killed each other. She fled the state when it was discovered that Judge Dupont had in fact passed away seven months before.
These are the ways that things have changed for us all: we know something.
But the most important thing that’s different is that there’s something I want to do now. There’s a path I think I can see. A way I think I want to go. From here.
And now that Tabitha’s back at Palo Alto, she’s not even sure she wants to be out at SPAWAR because of what happened, the profile of events too high. She’s got her eye on NSA now, she says. Maybe that’s where she ought to land, she says, though I’ve told her it can get cold in D.C. in the winter.
These are some of the changes. There are others. But this most important one begins tonight. The thing the doctor says I’m ready to do.
Once we’ve cleaned up the kitchen, me washing, Unc drying, we step out onto the deck. Mom is upstairs, touching up, I know, though I’ve told her I don’t want this to be something she thinks she has to primp for.
And as soon as we’re out the door onto the deck, there it is, like always, like every time I ever come out here. Right in the center of our own wrought-iron table: the planter, bright blue. A sprig of rosemary growing out of it.
I haven’t told anyone of what I dreamt just before everything happened. I haven’t told anyone about that whole thing with seeing a path, with me being a kid and knowing what I had to do. No one.
Not even Tabitha.
Because I wouldn’t know what to say about it. Only that it gave me what I needed, though what I needed I cannot name.
I saw what I had to do. This time I saved no lives. I killed no one. But it was that moment, when all else fell away except what that path before me called me to do—to follow it—that has made all the difference.
Here I am. Starting.
I think of Jessup a lot. I think of what he might be doing right now—think of him serving somewhere for counterintelligence. What he’d done right here among us. I think of him working to save lives somewhere else, or maybe still right here, though he hasn’t been here since that night. But I think of him serving the country somewhere right now, somewhere.
I think of him raised within a secret, and him seeing enough of the evil in that secret to shut it down.
And I think too of a quiet kid I knew, riding in a hot bus on field trip day. I think of a kid I knew who threw right along with us all rocks as high as he could toward the Mark Clark, hoping to land something up there.
I think of that empty desk in homeroom that first day after, when the whole world changed.
I miss him.
Mom steps out the door behind us onto the deck. The sun is down, the sky a pale violet stretching back into a slate blue in the east. But before we start down the dock toward the creek, that silver arc of water, I lean to this hideous planter, smell the rosemary in it, and say, “Mom, did I ever tell you this is the best blueberry planter I ever made?”
Because what I’d intended no longer matters.
“No,” she says, and gives a small laugh.
“Here he comes,” Unc says, and starts out onto the dock, his stick—it was in the poker room at the Whaleys’, left there when Harmon and Stanhope hauled him and Prendergast away—tapping before him.
And the goggles never even made it into the Range Rover that night. They’re out in the garage right now, hidden in the piles of military and security gadgets Unc has out there, Unc having put them there while I’d slept that day. He’d only wanted Prendergast to think he’d brought the goggles in to poker night, knowing full well the cops were on
their way to arrest them all. No need to give Prendergast what he demanded if he was going to get busted.
Or at least that had been Unc’s plan. What he’d intended, but not where the path led him.
I turn from the table, and this planter, and from Mom across the table from me, to see the boat Unc’d heard and headed out for. It’s a Boston Whaler, curving in on the arc Goose Creek makes to Landgrave Hall right here. A Boston Whaler, trolling in low, standing at the wheel—I can make him out now—Major Alton Tyler.
I look at Mom, see her smiling out to the water, her eyes on the boat, and I reach to her arm, loop it in mine, and we walk down the dock, Unc already almost there to the end.
“You got you a bottle of Cutter?” Mom asks. “Because you’re going to get eaten alive out there.”
“Already in my book bag, sitting out there on the storage locker.”
We take a few more steps, Major Tyler’s boat almost here, and now he cuts the engine altogether, steps from the console, and throws the bow line out to Unc, waiting.
The rope lands precisely in his outstretched hand, and Unc kneels, cleats it off, and now Tyler is out of the boat and on the dock himself, cleats off the stern line. Unc stands, holds out a hand, and Tyler, there in his olive green ball cap and DNR uniform, the gold badge above his right shirt pocket visible even from here, grabs hold Unc’s hand hard, and shakes it, slaps Unc on the back.
But now Mom stops, and I have no choice but to turn to her, because her arm is looped in mine, and I look at her, see her eyebrows together, her mouth a thin line.
“Is this what you want to do? Be an agent with DNR?”
I swallow, look past her to the marsh, the myriad greens out there dimming down with the evening light. Then I look at her again.
Tyler and I have been setting this up the last six weeks or so. I’ve signed the papers for me to ride along. We’ve talked about everything from salaries to shrimp balls, from baited dove fields to drug busts. From water rescues to water recoveries.
We’ve talked.
I look down at the planks of the dock, give a quick nod, then look back at her.
“It’s what I want to do,” I say. “Yes.”
“You know you’ll have to finish college. You know you have to go back and do that, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say. “I do.”
She looks at me again, holds my eyes on hers a long moment. Then she nods, and turns, starts the last few feet we have to the boat.
“Here he is,” Unc says, maybe too loud, and sidesteps a little toward me, his hand finding my shoulder. He pats it, says, “Taught this young man everything he knows.”
“We can cook that out,” Tyler says, and smiles. He takes off his hat—that forehead tan line again—and says, “Eugenie, we’ll be taking good care of this boy tonight. Heading out to Clouter Creek to start with, follow up on a report about somebody stealing crab pots.”
Mom smiles, nods. “Put him through the wringer,” she says, then Unc says, “Give him hell. Only way to teach him.”
Tyler puts his cap back on, and it’s then he puts out his hand, and I shake it.
“Let’s go,” he says.
And we’re gone.
This book could not have been written without the help of Gregg Anderson, Kevin Kalman, Brian Stanton, Jeff Deal, and Zebulun Holmes Lott, whom I thank especially for his advice, insight, and service to our country.
ALSO BY BRET LOTT
Novels
The Man Who Owned Vermont
A Stranger’s House
Jewel
Reed’s Beach
The Hunt Club
A Song I Knew by Heart
Ancient Highway
Story Collections
A Dream of Old Leaves
How to Get Home
The Difference Between Women and Men
Nonfiction
Fathers, Sons, and Brothers
Before We Get Started
About the Author
BRET LOTT is the bestselling author of twelve books, most recently the novel Ancient Highway. He has been a Fulbright Senior American Scholar and writer-in-residence at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, has spoken on Flannery O’Connor at the White House, and is a member of the National Council on the Arts. He teaches at the College of Charleston, and lives with his wife, Melanie, in Hanahan, South Carolina.