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  Then Steele steps in and sets Ned aside with a simple: “Stay back. You’re needed here,” and this is strange. The kid backs away, no problem; he trusts the guy. Then Steele bends close and mutters into his ear and Ned nods, all business, and backs away. Merrill wonders, but can’t ask; her guide is out the door too fast.

  He slips out into the dark and she follows. Ned slams the door on her heels as Steele drops off the side of the porch, into the deep shadow of the house.

  He takes off, running along in the dark. Won’t stop, won’t look back.

  Like he doesn’t care if I come or not. She has no choice. Cold, excited and anxious about leaving Ned in that dismal house, alone and overflowing with unanswered questions, she gulps down fear and plunges after Steele. Bastard, he doesn’t even slow down to see whether she made it all right.

  It’s odd, seeing how he darts in and out between the patches of light, so swift and sure that she wonders when and how he got into the desert soup bowl where they’re interned and how, exactly, he knows his way through this surreal landscape, even in the dark. To find out, she has to follow. So she takes out after him, running along in hopes that he’ll lead her out of here.

  Tearing along like this, blindly following a man she barely knows, Merrill is touchy, uncertain and vulnerable. She’s exposed, quivering like a hermit crab turned out of its shell. It’s the first time she’s come out into the night without Ray Powell walking point. This is weird enough, but there’s more. On their forays, Ray always looks out for her. Like a good father, Ray takes the lead, scoping out the route. He won’t wave her on until he’s gone ahead to make sure it’s safe. Not Steele. Whether he’s a good man is still in question.

  Good or not, the Northerner came to Kraven island with an unspecified link to everything Merrill cares about, and this draws her along. He arrived in the low country with some unstated claim or deep history that so far, he’s kept to himself. Standing with Merrill on her front porch on that last night on Kraven island, he was poised to tell her, she thinks. Electric, buzzing with it, teetering on the verge of laying it out, so she’d know. Then Davy pulled up and they were done.

  Now he’s running so fast that it’s hard to keep up. Wait. Is he whistling through his teeth, some old song she almost knows, so she can follow? Who is he? What is this? They’ve come all the way from the low country to this bleak compound for reasons he can’t or won’t name, and she doesn’t even know what brought him to the border islands, Kraven island in particular. Steele took the lead; it’s in his nature, but when Merrill fell in behind him she expected something more, or better from him. Kindness. Explanations, but he won’t slow down and he doesn’t look back. He rushes on, tss-tss-tss-tss-ing as though he could care less whether she follows.

  Furious, she puts her head down and lengthens her stride, running so hard that when without warning he stops short she smashes into him, body on body. It’s like a little car crash.

  She swallows a shout. “Shit!”

  He turns on her, swift and urgent. “Shh. We’re here.”

  They are standing in front of a long ersatz-adobe building. It’s made on the same plan as the ones lining the plaza, with one difference. There are no outside doors that she can see. No windows and no way in. Hell yes she’s mad. “This? You brought me out here to see this? This is nothing!”

  “My point.”

  Everything in her rushes to a dead stop. “And the rim?”

  “Oh, that. That’s just a story I told the kid,” he says, and she has no way of knowing whether this is true. Before she can find the right comeback Steele takes her elbow and steers her behind the utility building, power plant, whatever this place turns out to be that makes it so important. He gestures at a heap of refuse. “In here.”

  “What?” It looks like nothing to her. Jutting out from the back wall, a row of outsized cartons forms a makeshift annex. It’s the first asymmetrical element she’s seen in this nowhere place with its relentlessly unbroken planes. Then she understands. Made by human hands. “Your work?”

  Stupid, expecting him to answer. Pulling a Maglite out of nowhere, he opens a flap in the biggest of the boxes and waves her inside. “Quiet. It’s something you need to know about.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Please. This is where we wait.”

  She considers her options: turn back. Go into this corrugated shipping crate and deal with whatever comes of it. Merrill has made it through her life in one piece so far because anxiety and remembered grief make her resourceful. She deals in fallback plans, and she’s quick to devise them. In split seconds her mind scurries here, there, and comes back with one. Given the man, the hour, her options, she ducks into the unknown, thinking, Lady, it’s a carton. If she has to, she can topple the thing and crawl out the bottom or punch her way out, banging at the corners until the tape gives— or, oh shit, what if this thing is stapled together? Then she’ll …

  As it turns out, she won’t have to do any of these things. Steele stands aside as she enters and waits for her to settle before he follows. The thing is bigger than a piano crate, big enough to hold a forklift, but she has no time to speculate about how it got here or what it used to contain.

  Inside, he waves her to a Styrofoam cooler positioned by the exit and hunkers down on the far side of the carton, setting a safe distance between them, as in: whatever you’re thinking, I won’t. Then he sets the Maglite on the ground between them with the beam aimed at the cardboard overhead, creating enough light for her to see him clearly. Like a magician, he makes a quick gesture: nothing up my sleeves, showing empty palms. At least he spares her the slick, performer’s smile.

  Nothing about this is feasible; the constricted space, the fact that it’s below freezing in here and even colder outside; that she can see her breath but Steele is easy with it, sitting there in a sweatshirt, grinning as though the cold desert night can’t touch him.

  Measuring credulity, Merrill says, “You live here?”

  “No. This is where I watch.”

  What!

  She can’t speak. There are more questions than there are words: when and how he arrived in this— there is no right word for this place; she needs to know why he wasn’t dumped in the same spot at the same time as every other soul on Kraven island the day they arrived; whether in fact, he was an advance man for whatever seized them or just another victim, caught in the wrong place. Waiting in his oversized carton with nothing between them but the harsh beam of the Maglite, Merrill strangles on the central question, the one that surfaces no matter how hard she tries to choke it down. There are too many possibilities, and this one terrifies her.

  What if he caused all this?

  Who are you, really? One of us, or something else?

  The next thing he says to her answers no questions, but it blows her doubts to hell.

  “I packed the tintype to show you, but when this thing happened, it got, um. Left Behind. Never mind, they had the photographer make two. If you don’t have it your dad does, that’s for true.” So odd: he sounds like somebody from home. “My great-great-whatever and his best friend Hampy home from the Citadel, two Charlton kids all brave and don’t-mess-with-me in their dress blues and slouch hats with the ostrich plumes, fixing to go to war. Pictures of their new husbands to give the girls they left behind.”

  She stuffs her knuckles into her mouth.

  “You have seen it, right?”

  The hell of it is, she has! Her great-grandmother Poulnot kept the image in its velvet pouch stored in the ancestral brass-bound box that Grandmother passed down; it came through the generations until the last Hampton Poulnot … Merrill winces.

  He doesn’t exactly smile. “Southerners do love to pass these things down.”

  Exact phrase. She thinks: That doesn’t mean … But it does.

  “Two best friends in their new uniforms, all cleaned up for the man with the magic box. You know. In case they didn’t come home.” Is it her imagination or is he grinni
ng that same jaunty grin she saw on the young rebel officer’s face?

  “They made it back the first time, at least. Else we wouldn’t be here.”

  Yes she knows what he is claiming; she thinks, I would. Would you?

  “It came down in my family through the generations, but there were complications, and I only just got mine.”

  “What?”

  “Yours is still around, for true.”

  Raging at her the night she moved out for good, Father ripped the case in two pieces and threw it into the fire, but it’s not like she’ll explain.

  “Hey,” he says, grinning, “I owe you one. If the first Hampton Poulnot hadn’t dragged my great-great-great-great off the field when he did, I wouldn’t be here. Mine was named…”

  She completes it from memory, “Archie Rivard. It’s on the note…”

  And he finishes, “… in the back of the tintype case. It’s short for Archbold.”

  “I know.”

  The air between them changes, but it’s nothing they said. At the first subtle vibration, his head comes up.

  She begins, “You’re his…” when he lunges.

  “Shhh!”

  Everything in her shudders to a stop. Even after he retreats to his corner she can feel the warmth of the hand he just clapped across her mouth— not gentle, exactly, but sure. Silenced, she listens as the building at his back comes to life. What comes next is too subtle to be heard, but the vibration penetrates her to the bone. It’s as though the installation, the air surrounding and the sky above it are located somewhere deep in the guts of an infinite, mysteriously soundless MRI, and the great machine is imaging— what?

  It is in this cold, intensely physical period of stasis, confined in a tight space with Rawson Steele, who is a stranger to her in spite of shared history, that she senses Davy— nothing they said— just a physical memory of the two of them, body on body, Merrill and her lover back when they were at their best, indestructible, locked together as though nothing could change or even threaten what they thought they had.

  In spite of the context or perhaps because of it— Rawson Steele, this close— sense memory warms her in the inevitable way, and this is both sweet and tremendously sad. Without being aware of it, she slips into the zone. Sitting with her head bent and her hands clamped between her knees, she hears, frames and re-frames and rehearses certain soft words she will say to make things right, when she and Davy … If.

  He says what you say. “Are you OK?”

  “What?” She snaps back into herself, blinking.

  It’s too dim in here for him to see her clearly, but his tone changes. “Was it good for you?”

  Is he laughing at me? Anger drives her to her feet.

  “Sit down. You can’t go out right now.”

  “The hell I can’t.”

  “We can’t.” Standing, he fills the carton. “This happens every night. We have to lay low until it’s over. The sweep. Now, shut up and sit down.”

  “Why?” They face off in a collision of wills, Merrill with her fists bunched to fight, or wring some truth from him. It’s like confronting a large, intelligent dog; you don’t know whether he’s trying to protect you or what. Exasperated, she backs into the Styrofoam cooler and sits. Steele moves back into place and drops to his haunches as though equalizing their positions, but he’s not about to answer. In the end, Merrill breaks the long silence, “OK. What sweep?”

  “Believe me, you don’t want to be out there. Let me put it another way. If you get picked up, I can’t help you.”

  This raises more questions, but she’s too rattled to ask him who or what sweeps the installation or what foreign bodies it sweeps away or why a sweeper is needed at all in this relentlessly pristine trap. Brooding, she rehearses questions while Steele sits patiently, listening for something Merrill won’t recognize and may not be able to hear.

  Then she does. The whirr is just loud enough to tell her that something huge is passing. She catches a glint of light reflected in its metal flank— just a flash, seen through a crack created by the monstrous instrument or machine as it nudges Steele’s makeshift shelter, veers around the foreign object and glides on. Merrill’s mind does that thing it does when things get too intense: she flashes on an image she knows— the Roomba she bought Father, as though a blind vacuum cleaner could make a dent in the dirt accumulating in the house she fled.

  As the sound recedes she collects herself; she has to leave! Before she can start up, Steele brings her down with one hand, not the way Father would, not like Davy. “No.” He lets go at once, but the warmth of his hand imprints her. “Not until they’ve swept the perimeter. Stay. They’re almost done.”

  How do you know?

  They face off in silence. Finally, he says offhand: “We can’t go yet, but it’s OK to talk.”

  By this time there are so many issues boiling up, pressing questions backed up and waiting, that they fill her throat and she can’t speak. When she manages to cough one up, of all the answers she can’t get and needs to know, what comes to the top isn’t what she intended. It’s not what she wants at all.

  She needs to stop, rethink, but at these close quarters and in this dim light, this bothers her the most. It comes out with such force that as it explodes between them, she notes Steele’s immediate, reflexive flinch:

  “What were you digging for?”

  19

  Ned

  Dawn

  Fuck, shit. Crap, shitass son of a bastard bitch, fucking fuckface and every other pissed-off combo I’m too messed up to get back right now, this totally blows. I was up all night but there’s a whole chunk of it that I can’t remember. What’s up with that? Do they gas us nights, or pipe in worse things that we don’t know about, or did I just slag off and accidentally take a nap and they came back and left all over again while I was knocked out?

  Whatever, Merrill, wherever you are. Whatevs.

  I’m awake now, shit, it’s almost light out and the only person here is me. Where the fuck are they? Rawson told me, sit tight and he’d come back and get me, but it’s been forever and there’s no sign. My big sister just up and took off with my new best friend, the only one I have in this rotten hole, if he really is my friend, which, I am beginning to wonder.

  If we were real friends he’d be back by now.

  And there’s nothing to eat! Merrill’s crap white fridge in her dead white kitchen is dead empty, I looked. No leftovers, not even noshies like you serve with drinks, plus there’s nothing in the dumbwaiter, what’s up with that? Does their searchbot scope all our houses at night and they just know, or did she leave out a note, like, DON’T BOTHER? What was she thinking? I could starve to death and she wouldn’t give a crap.

  If Merrill cared she would be back by now just like she promised. Yeah, right.

  Like Merrill ever keeps her promises, like the ones she made the night she left home for good, with me still in it. OK, she did promise that Patrice would live in and keep care of me, Mer paid time and a half out of her college fund to make it happen, but it didn’t last. After a while, Patrice couldn’t hack it. Too much Father and she was done, but until last week she came out and did for us every day; we both felt bad and promised to stay in touch, but, you know. So Merrill promised to keep an eye on me and him, she said if Father got bad, all I had to do was call her. As if! She was never home. OK, after that one time she said, If you can’t reach me and you won’t call the cops, go straight to the ER, the X-ray will help us in court. Or get the whole thing on the answering machine: evidence! All we have to do is play it back for the cops and Judge Brock. They’ll give me custody for sure, and that’s a promise.

  All I had to do was pick up that phone. Like I would do that. He’s my fucking father, yo.

  I begged her to stay back at the house along with me but she said, I can’t be that person and when I said, What person, she just teared up and said, “It’s hard to explain.” If he was messing with her she wouldn’t tell, at the time I was to
o little and stupid to know.

  Shit hey, I could of showed her how to bring down a man twice her size, I learned that in the Koro Ishi, we trained for worse things back in the dojo. I could of showed her, but, shit, I was never sure that what I think is what she really meant. Listen, Merrill ran out on me back then, so what if she was crying when she did it, I’m not showing her shit. Then her and that Rawson took off from here like shit sliding down a shingle last night, and if you think I’m over it, well, fuck you.

  If there was anything in this place sharper than a spork, I would slash all her shit to ribbons, starting with the white fluffyruffle curtains and the flibberty quilt on the flat, empty bed in her dead white bedroom.

  Fuck that shit, I’m not staying here just because they said. My man Rawson came on to me all man to man, like, “We’re in this together,” and I was so stupid that I thought he actually gave a crap.

  If he gave a crap, they’d be back by now.

  Unless.

  Get out! Unless! No way. I’m not going there.

  It’s cold and lonely and hungry as hell in here, plus, in another minute that sun will pop up outside like a great flaming ostrich egg and if I try to go home, I’ll be fried like pork sausage before I can make it, which …

  Why would I go back there?

  That isn’t home. It’s just another place with Father in it. Our first night, when her and Ray Powell shut me and Father in together and walked away, I thought, At least this one is clean. I thought that clean meant it would be better, but except for the extreme silence, which was a ginormous load off after all the ranting, oh right, and the no whiskey, Father is pretty much the same. He quit talking and he doesn’t hit anymore. He doesn’t even get mad, but it’s all backed up inside that big white head of his, and I think he’s fixing to blow.

  The minute they shut the door on us he went all still and glassy-eyed. He’s spent all day and half the night in that tombstone chair ever since, staring into the shiny white tabletop and puking up words nonstop, but so low that I can’t exactly make them out. He probably looks reformed or whatever from being in there with nothing to drink but milk or water and nobody but me to push around, but he could just as easily rear back and rip my ears off. All the old poison’s still in there. It, like, compressed in his belly and his chest and it’s filling him up ’til there’s noplace left for it to go but OUT. Fuck yes I am scared of him.