Further Joy

by John Brandon

  The plan was to meet for the second interview later that day, at one-fifteen again. Sofia had to go to the Edison House and her uncle had to meet with a state investigator at a hotel over near the interstate. He had his good boots on, and a shiny watch he didn’t wear often.

  “It just looks hot out there,” he said, bending at the waist to peer outside.

  The state of Florida was reaching the time of year when the nights were as hot as the days. Everything was still as a painting out the window.

  “What time do you get up in the morning?” Sofia asked her uncle. “You always stay up later than me, then you’re up earlier.”

  “I’m a fast sleeper. I don’t dream. I don’t even roll over. I don’t get up and use the bathroom. I can sleep twice as quick as your average person.” He was sitting now. He dug his spoon into a lemon. He had a way of maneuvering around the seeds, of getting the meat out without squirting the juice.

  After a moment he set the spoon down on the table and his face clouded over, his brow creasing. He sat still, making no move for his milk.

  “What is it?” Sofia said.

  “Some boys up in Sumter County barbecued a manatee,” he said. “Came over my radio this morning. You heard me right. They netted a manatee and drug it on land and cooked it like a hog in one of them brick pits.”

  Sofia had some yogurt on her spoon but she put it back in the cup. “Maybe they were broke.”

  “I hope so, because these days there’s no place in Florida you’re not a couple miles from a Publix.”

  Sofia watched her uncle’s face. It wasn’t often that righteousness showed on it.

  “Sometimes you start wondering if you’re a redneck,” he said, “because the folks over on the beach think you are. But something always happens to put things back in order.”

  The second person of interest was JP. He was wearing a clingy long-sleeve athletic shirt. His shorts had numerous pockets and on his calf was a tattoo of an angel with dripping fangs. JP wasn’t much older than Sofia, mid-twenties. He’d almost been a big deal in baseball, had been drafted out of the local high school and made it to the majors for a stint. Sofia’s uncle said JP wasn’t satisfied with his right share of screwing up. He was going for the record. He’d bungled a baseball career, had a divorce and bankruptcy behind him already, and was on parole for DUIs. He was at the station because he had a boat up at Barn Renfro’s shop that Barn had refused to give back to him. Evidently, there’d been a misunderstanding over the fee. JP didn’t even want the boat anymore, and he and Barn had wound up agreeing to sell it, Barn entitled to a consignment share that would square them. The deal to sell the boat was unsubstantiated, since Barn wasn’t around to comment on it.

  The very second JP settled in and leveled his disdainful glare at Sofia, she didn’t feel right. She was taken by surprise, but kept a neutral expression on her face. Her limbs were leaden, her mind flustered. It came over her like a dry wind. She had a grip on her own knee under the table, and her sinuses burned the way they did before she cried. Was this it? Is this what it would feel like, after all this time? She took in a full breath and released it slowly. It could be the beginning of a flu, this feeling, or the product of nerves or bad sleep. She didn’t believe that, though. She raised her arm off the table, trying to be casual, and dabbed her temples with the back of her hand. JP was sneering at her. She swallowed hard. Part of her was unhinged but part of her, deeper, was blessed with calm.

  She was seeing a Sunday. The ancient pale sky and the black marl and the creatures in between that wanted to survive. A lie told. A boy sick and staying home from church—so yes, a Sunday—and then she saw a pistol. It was being looked at, but not yet held. Breathed upon. Sofia’s fingers felt stiffened, as if with cold. She could feel surly boredom, but that’s what JP was radiating right now. She saw a happy school bus on a country road. But Sunday? Little airplanes buzzing overhead, anonymous and joyriding. Buses and airplanes and pistols and church—the commonest of memories. Then she saw the egret, taking a high retreating step, puzzled at someone sloshing so close in the reeds of the drainage ditch. She could hear toads, the distant revving of an engine. JP was openly glaring at Sofia across the table, scratching his shoulder. She was still in the present, enough. Even scratching his shoulder, he was defiant. He still thought life was winning and losing, and he was claiming scorekeeper error and false starts. She heard the toneless echoing crack, saw the elegant white neck jerking, flung back and forth, an animal’s desperation and outrage. Sofia saw the body stagger forward, dragging the barely attached head, blood already blackening the feathers. She saw the bird topple over in the stagnant water, instantly a sodden ugly pile, instantly a meal for buzzards and nothing greater. And then all of it began to dissolve, her consciousness becoming whole again. She had no say in it, as far as she could tell—the wind dying out at once.

  “I told your uncle I got five minutes,” JP said. “I hope I didn’t come up here to compete in a staring contest.”

  Sofia sat up straight, giving her hair a shake. She quit squeezing her knee and crossed her arms in front of her, regaining her footing in the moment. She had no idea how to tack toward useful information, which was her duty here. She wouldn’t have imagined JP capable of guilt, but everyone was. The more you had, the deeper you kept it buried.

  “I don’t have anything against you, JP.”

  His face didn’t change. It lost no impatience.

  “You’re scowling at me,” Sofia said. “I have no idea why.”

  JP absently reached down to one of his pockets, a smoker’s habit. His pockets had been emptied. “I don’t mind telling you, if you got to know. The reason is because you think you’re better than everyone else. You always have, ever since you showed up here. And don’t say it ain’t true.”

  “What a boring reason,” Sofia said. “Besides being wrong.”

  “See, like that. That face you just made. Everybody’s always nice to you because your uncle’s the law, but people don’t appreciate you playing the little princess. I know, he’s right there watching. He’ll be mad at me now, but he’s always mad at me anyway.”

  Sofia heard the air conditioner kick on in the room. She hoped the draft from the vent would find the back of her neck. Whatever had come over her was fully gone now, and she felt worn and hot. She was holding the egret in her mind’s eye.

  “I think the person you’re mad at is yourself,” she said. “That’s probably not front-page news to you.”

  “I guess you aced your intro to psychology class at the college. You showed up here and held your nose through a couple years of high school and then off to get some bullshit degree so you can tell me who I’m mad at. Or is it whom I’m mad at. I’m glad you did that. I’m glad you went to school.”

  “You’ve never even spoken to me before.”

  “I am now, and it’s going about how I expected.”

  “You could go to college, you know.”

  “Some of us got life to live,” JP said. “Some of us don’t have a benefactor.” He looked over toward the mirror, toward where Sofia’s uncle was. Sofia was staying composed. She’d told her uncle not to come in unless she asked him to, but that would go out the window the instant she seemed upset.

  She wasn’t going to see anything else, nothing connecting JP to Barn Renfro’s death. She could tell. Just the egret, if the egret was real. She guessed he probably wasn’t guilty, or he wouldn’t be goading Sofia’s uncle. Of course, some people goaded everyone all the time; that was their program.

  “So how’d old Spencer do on this exam?” JP asked. “He pass with flying colors, like me?”

  “I don’t think I’m allowed to say.”

  “He’s kind of a hothead, huh? Or he used to be.”

  “He’s trying to be happier,” Sofia admitted.

  “I always liked him. I guess I have to raise twice as much hell now that he turned over a new leaf. I need to pull some doubles.”

  Sofia clasped her han
ds in front of her. They looked feeble under the fluorescent lights. She had no pen or barrette to fidget with. She could feel herself smirking.

  “What?” said JP. “Whatever it is, say it.”

  “You and Spencer were never the same.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “Spencer liked giving and getting. You, you’re cut more from the bully cloth. Am I wrong? Tell me if I’m wrong.”

  JP laughed. It seemed genuine. “Is five minutes up? I’m a man of my word and I said five minutes. I got things to do today. I know you can’t relate to that. I told your uncle my whole alibi and all. Do I need to walk you through it again? I will. I just want to satisfy the powers that be so I can go about my business.”

  “No,” Sofia said. “The powers are satisfied.”

  “Your uncle must have nothing plus nothing on this, bringing in the… you know, the family circus.” JP cackled ostentatiously, like people did who were used to laughing alone.

  “When you were a kid,” Sofia said.

  JP nodded. He steered his attention back to her, bringing himself back to order. “Yeah?” he said. “When I was a kid what?”

  “Did you stay home from church service one day and kill an egret? A white egret in a ditch?”

  JP’s face turned stony, and Sofia could tell his mind was working. “The hell you talking about?” he said.

  She looked at him solemnly.

  “An egret? When I was twelve?” He tugged at one of his sleeves. “Are you serious?”

  Sofia couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Maybe he was flipping through the catalog of cruel acts he’d perpetrated during his lifetime, or maybe he was thinking of something else mean he could say right now. He huffed and let his posture go jangly, pitching to one side in his chair. There was curiosity in his face, competing with the scorn. Sofia knew she wouldn’t get an answer out of him, that there was no way to prove that she hadn’t invented the egret and killed it herself.

  “Nope, I didn’t shoot no water birds,” he told Sofia. “Sorry to disappoint you.” He sniffed sharply into the back of his hand. “Think of it, I didn’t shoot no bald eagle neither. And I didn’t kill no redheaded woodpecker with a slingshot.”

  That afternoon Sofia ran into James at the coffee shop. He was sitting along the far wall under a painting of a dove, absorbed in a book, and he didn’t notice her until she walked up to his table with her mug cradled in her hands. He lifted his feet off the chair across from him—grudgingly, Sofia noticed—and she sat down. It always seemed odd, during the periods when they were broken up, to not kiss when they saw each other. It left a sad void to be pressed through.

  “I’ve always liked watching you read,” Sofia said.

  James looked at what was left in his cup and threw it back, then closed his book, using an old receipt to mark the page. Sofia’s coffee was too hot to drink. She asked James what his book was about and he looked down and made a face at it.

  “It covers a good bit of ground,” he said, his voice flat but chafed.

  “Give me a highlight,” said Sofia.

  “How about a lowlight? Lowlights are easier to come by, I find.”

  “I’ll make do with a lowlight, if that’s all I can get.”

  James let his eyes drift to the ceiling, his lips tight, as if selecting just one downbeat tale out of so many was a chore. After a moment, he clucked his tongue. “Okay, how about this? I’ll tell you about this dude named Pánfilo de Narváez.” James shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. “I can’t get a ride from you but you can come talk to me if you feel like it. I don’t quite see how those rules are fair, but I’ll go ahead and give you one little morsel of woe.” He began, not looking at Sofia, speaking quickly as if to get the story out and done with. “He’s a B-list explorer, this guy. He comes over to Florida with a small army, the intention being to defeat Cortez. But after he lands, he decides to go on a little side mission to look for gold. Cortez can wait a couple weeks. So de Narváez starts interrogating whatever Indians he can find, asking them where all the treasure is, poking them in the ribs. Pretty standard stuff.”

  “Okay,” said Sofia. James still wasn’t looking at her.

  “Lo and behold, he can’t find any rich stuff. The Indians are sending him on goose chases. He’s getting bit up by mosquitoes, has diarrhea. He’s fed up. What he does then is arrest the chief of this particular tribe and start questioning him in a more persuasive way. Enhanced interrogation, we call it now. Chief won’t say a word. He’s a statue. You could put him in the cigar store. De Narváez keeps threatening him, beating him up—he just cannot scare this Indian. What ends up happening is de Narváez orders the chief’s nose cut off. Cuts off the guy’s damn nose. Bloody mess. Some of his men are embarrassed, a few of them walk away from his command. After that, the guy really won’t talk.”

  James’s eyes had widened, a sign of life in his face. His expression conveyed bemusement. Sofia wasn’t sure if he’d come to the end of the story.

  “He crossed a line between men,” James said. “He was cursed after that, they say. When he finally got around to confronting Cortez, he got slaughtered.”

  James slid his book toward the edge of the table, pinning a saltshaker against the wall.

  “Is there supposed to be a moral in that?” Sofia asked him.

  James snorted. “The moral? There’s a moral in anything if you want there to be.”

  Sofia was accustomed to James carrying a certain resigned disappointment in the world, but he’d never seemed cold before. Especially not toward her.

  “I guess you heard about what I’m doing for my uncle,” she said.

  He brought his gaze up to her face. “Yeah, as a matter of fact I did catch wind of that.”

  Sofia blew into her mug. The coffee was still too hot. “And?”

  “I was kind of wondering why you didn’t tell me yourself.”

  “I wanted to,” Sofia said. “I would’ve. But we were broken up and all.”

  “What did you think I was going to say?”

  “I don’t know. I just didn’t want any discouragement, I guess.”

  James looked provoked. “Is that what you’ve ever gotten from me?”

  There was no need for Sofia to answer the question. They both knew the answer. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What do you think about it? Will you tell me now?”

  “I think it sounds like an interesting thing to do is what I think. And something you might be good at.” James stopped and patiently rolled each of his sleeves to the elbow, making sure they were even. Then he took a breath. “What I’m skeptical about is the idea that you can make the future easier by parsing out the past. That’s what concerns me. You’re trying to find out what to do next, but you’re facing in the wrong direction.” He shrugged, as if to suggest that his opinion wasn’t necessarily important. “The only thing to do next is be a good person and let the moments unfold. I know you don’t want to hear that. My part in the play is to tell you everything will be peachy and yours is to say there’s heartbreak on the horizon, but honestly, neither of us knows.”

  Sofia leaned forward. She wasn’t going to argue. Her discussions with James were always full of opposing truths. She was thinking about Pánfilo de Narváez. He had been asking the wrong questions. He had been worrying about gold when he should’ve been worrying about Cortez. James was right—you could tease morals out of anything if you had a mind to.

  She touched James’s book with her fingertips, searching for something yielding in his eyes. The smudgy dove was above them, taking flight before a lavender sky. The coffee shop had gotten quiet, it seemed.

  James rested his hand on his book and pulled it away from her, out of her reach. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d like to get back to my reading now.”

  “Eight months,” Reeve answered.

  Three interviews in, Sofia already felt experienced, on home turf in this interrogation room. Her subject was wearing a canary shirt and a beige sport coat, and l
ooked nowhere near perspiring.

  “Why here?”

  Sofia looked Reeve in the face and waited for his answer. He seemed intrigued by his surroundings and by Sofia herself, like this interview was a life experience he was gaining.

  “I was ready to get away from things, away from the city—well, if Jacksonville is a city, which compared to Lower Grove it is.”

  “What about Idaho, some place like that?”

  “In hindsight I did insufficient research.”

  “But why here?”

  Reeve adjusted the collar of his coat. He made no move to take it off. His legs were crossed and he folded his hands atop his knee.

  “My family used to vacation over in Labelle, when I was a little guy,” he said. “This one-story motel with a pool. Next door was a field full of donkeys. My dad would grill. I guess I have a positive association with this area.” Reeve cleared his throat. “I drove over there a couple weeks ago. Motel’s still there; no sign of the donkeys.”

  “What do you do, that you can move to the economic middle of nowhere?”

  “I was a pretty good businessman in my day,” Reeve said.

  “Past tense.”

  “I built up a chain of high-end health clubs, nine of them. Took fifteen years. When the time was right I sold them. I had commercials on TV and billboards and everything.”