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• • •
I found him standing beneath a pole light fifteen feet away, bent double and grasping his knees. The night had cooled considerably, and the puddle between his feet was steaming lightly. As I approached, his body heaved and the puddle grew larger. When I touched his arm, he jerked and stumbled, almost falling into his own vomit, which would have made for a fragrant ride home.
The panicky gaze he turned on me was that of an animal caught in a forest fire. Then he relaxed and straightened up, pulling an old-fashioned rancher’s banda
“Sorry, Jamie. You startled me.”
“I noticed.”
“It was the heat, I guess. Let’s get out of here, what do you say? Beat the crowd.”
He started walking toward the Lincoln. I touched his elbow. He pulled away. Except that’s not quite right. He shied away.
“What was it really?”
He didn’t answer at first, just kept walking toward the far side of the lot, where his Detroit cabin cruiser was parked. I walked beside him. He reached the car and put his hand on the dew-misted hood, as if for comfort.
“It was a prismatic. The first one in a long, long time. I felt it coming on while he was healing that last one—the guy who said he was paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident. When he got up from his chair, everything went sharp. Everything went clear. You know?”
I didn’t, but nodded as if I did. From behind us the congregation was clapping joyously and singing “How I Love My Jesus” at the top of its lungs.
“Then . . . when the Rev started to pray . . . the colors.” He looked at me, his mouth trembling. He looked twenty years older. “They were ever so much brighter. They shattered everything.”
He reached out and grasped my shirt hard enough to tear off two of the buttons. It was the grip of a drowning man. His eyes were huge and horrified.
“Then . . . then all those fragments came together again, but the colors didn’t go away. They danced and twisted like the aurora borealis on a winter night. And the people . . . they weren’t people anymore.”
“What were they, Hugh?”
“Ants,” he whispered. “Huge ants, the kind that must only live in tropical forests. Brown ones and black ones and red ones. They were looking at him with dead eyes and that poison they use, formic acid, was dripping from their mouths.” He drew a long, ragged breath. “If I ever see anything like that again, I’ll kill myself.”
“It’s gone, though, right?”
“Yes. Gone. Thank God.”
He dragged his keys from his pocket and dropped them in the dirt. I picked them up. “I’ll drive us back.”
“Sure. You do that.” He started toward the passenger seat, then looked at me. “You too, Jamie. I turned to you and I was standing next to a huge ant. You turned . . . you looked at me . . .”
“Hugh, I didn’t. I barely saw you going out.”
He seemed not to hear. “You turned . . . you looked at me . . . and I think you tried to smile. There were colors all around you, but your eyes were dead, like all the rest. And your mouth was full of poison.”
• • •
He said nothing more until we arrived back at the big wooden gate leading to Wolfjaw. It was closed and I started to get out of the car to open it.
“Jamie.”
I turned to look at him. He’d gotten some of his color back, but only a little.
“Never mention his name to me again. Never. If you do, you’re done here. Are we clear on that?”
We were. But that didn’t mean I was going to let it go.
IX
Reading Obituaries in Bed. Cathy Morse Again. The Latches.
Bria
It wasn’t the first time we’d done this in such pleasurable circumstances, but we both understood we were getting closer and closer to the last time. In September she’d be leaving for New York to interview for I-T jobs with the sort of firms that paid upwards of six figures at the entry level—she had appointments with four already penciled into her calendar—and I had my own plans. But our time together had been good for me in all sorts of ways, and I had no reason not to believe her when she said it had been good for her, too.
I wasn’t the first man to enjoy a dalliance with a woman less than half his age, and if you said there’s no fool like an old fool and no goat like an old goat, I wouldn’t argue with you, but sometimes such liaisons are okay, at least in the short term. Neither of us was attached, and neither of us had any illusions about the long term. It had just happened, and Bria
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I had asked.
“Absolutely.” She flashed a grin. “Soon I’ll be in the big wide world, and I think I better work out my daddy issues first.”
“Was your daddy a white ex–guitar player, then?”
That made her laugh. “All cats are gray in the dark, Jamie. Now are we going to get it on or not?”
We got it on, and it was terrific. I’d be lying if I said her youth didn’t excite me—she was twenty-four—and I’d also be lying if I said I could always keep up with her. Stretched out next to her that first night and pretty much exhausted after the second go, I asked her what Georgia would say.
“She’s not going to find out from me. Is she from you?”
“Nope, but Nederland’s a small town.”
“That’s true, and in small towns, discretion only goes so far, I guess. If she should speak to me, I’d just remind her that she once did more for Hugh Yates than keep his books.”
“Are you serious?”
She giggled. “You white boys can be so dumb.”
• • •
Now, with coffee on her side of the bed and tea on mine, we sat propped up on pillows with her laptop between us. Summer sunshine—morning sunshine, always the best—made an oblong on the floor. Bree was wearing one of my tee-shirts and nothing else. Her hair, kept short, was a curly black cap.
“You could continue without me just fine,” she said. “You pretend to be computer illiterate—mostly so you can keep me where you can nudge me in the night, I think—but ru
As a matter of fact, I did. We had started with three names from the Miracle Testimony page of C. Da
Bree had tracked the Pastor Da