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  It split him in two.

  Stupid bastard, whatever he and Merrill had between them before they parted company is pretty much wrecked— that sad, ugly last exchange, with no way to rewrite it or start all over again. Like a man in an old copper diving suit dropping over the side of the mother ship, he fled into sleep, sinking until the next damn fool tromped up on Earl’s front porch or tried to get in by the back way hunting him, and the altercation brought him to the surface— aggressive fuckers, your redneck whites.

  Life went on in the rest of the house as though Davy wasn’t there. Earl kept busy pretending he wasn’t. Outside, intruders came and went until they stopped coming.

  He slept until Earl brought in a plate with corn bread and his best shrimp pilaf— when? It was either stone dark outside or not. It was midnight inside his head. “Perloo. Bored much?”

  “Hot and cold running rednecks.” Earl shrugged. “I had to look busy.”

  “I should go.” With Merrill missing and whatever hopes he has for the two of them pending, he asked, “Is it time?”

  “Not nearly. It’s half past nine.”

  “I should…”

  Earl took the plate from him. “Not yet.”

  “Earl, it’s already fucking dark.”

  He was halfway off the bed when Earl stopped him with the flat of his hand. “Not now.”

  He snapped to, electrified. “There’s someone in the house.”

  “Shuh, that’s just a DVD.” Earl pushed him back down on the bed. “I put on The Wild Bunch for Mom.”

  “You’re some kind of ironist.” He tried again. “Let go.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  They were beyond explanations. Earl stared Dave into obedience: stay. When he had him back in the bed Earl said patiently, “Not until the last patrol boat’s come and gone.”

  “Patrol boat?”

  “I warned you.”

  Dave sagged. “You did.”

  “And the motherfuckers are armed.”

  “OK, when?” Like a drowning sailor, he submerged with no memory of the last thing Earl said to him. He thinks the last and most important thing he asked Earl, that Earl never answered was, “How?”

  This way.

  They took the fiberglass flat-bottomed boat Felix gave Earl for his tenth birthday: a kid’s thing, lightweight and easy for two men to carry. They stopped Earl’s pickup a half-mile short of the Kraventown causeway and ducked under the boat without needing to discuss it. Raising it over their heads, they walked it the rest of the way, two grown men creeping down on the sand like a giant turtle, under the boat’s scarred shell. When the lights swept their way they squatted, so they’d look like debris from an old wreck to whoever happened to be looking. They carried the boat out to the Kraven island bridge on the fisherman’s path that flanked the raised road, pushed it into the water and shoved off. They rowed without talking, letting the current take them under the bridge and into the channel. They tied up under the dock in Kraventown harbor, waiting until isolated gunshots and the shouting died and it was safe to go on.

  Early Saturday: Now

  When they hear hollow footsteps overhead, the last designated sentry heading back along the dock to the street, they talk, but only a little bit.

  Earl says reflectively, “So, what the fuck do you think happened here?”

  And Dave is blindsided by the thing scuttling around underneath the wreckage in his head. The plans. He was so intent on getting here that he forgot. “I don’t know what I think, I only know what I know.”

  “That being…”

  The Northerner abandoned everything when he left that room in the Harbor City Inn. “I think Steele’s behind it.”

  “Who?”

  “I searched his room.”

  “Whose room?”

  “Rawson Steele, or whatever the fuck his real name is.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Crap developer, as it turns out, came in sniffing around all charming, but I knew. I saw the plans,” he says, going on what little his Maglite showed him before he had to cut and run. “He’s fixing to ruin Kraven, like the monster that shits on everything it’s too full to eat. Giant water park on the lake, apartment tower, megamall, the works. He holds messes of deeds and shit. People you don’t know about already sold out to him.”

  “I don’t know much about Kraven,” Earl says.

  “I do. This dude’s bought up half the property out there.”

  “Without you knowing?”

  “Shills,” Dave says. “He sent shills in to pick it up for him, and they got it cheap. Too bad he didn’t scope the lake for himself before he sank all that money into it.”

  “The lake!” Earl smothers a laugh. “Wait’ll he starts to dig.”

  Dave finishes, “In flood season.”

  “He’ll be floating out to sea on the forms before they even think about pouring cement.”

  It’s dark under here, but Dave knows Earl is grinning. The idea that anybody can do anything but grieve tugs him eight ways to Sunday.

  Earl adds, “But I kind of don’t think he could disappear a whole mess of people.”

  “He wants to get rid of us somehow.” It takes him a painful while to say, “If it’s him and I can prove it, at least we’d know where to start.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “They’re all gone, and besides.” Desperation makes him dogmatic. “Everything happens for a reason!”

  “Who says?”

  Anger roars into Dave, wham. “It has to! There’s gotta be an explanation.”

  “Like, scientific or techno?”

  “Yeah.”

  Earl comes back after some thought. “Don’t count on it. There’s a lot going on that we can’t see and a lot more that we don’t know about,” he says to Dave, whose life has marched in order until now.

  “There’s always a reason.”

  “What if God just did it for no reason?”

  Dave goes all werewolf in the middle of the change; fangs sprout. “What makes you so sure there’s a God?”

  Gentling him, Earl tries, “I’m not sure about anything, but if you meet him, tell him…”

  God. Dave is trapped in rage: can’t get in, can’t get out. Instead of picking up on Earl’s favorite setup line as he has ever since fifth grade, instead of finishing with “… tell him I have a colored friend,” so they can both laugh and get over it, Dave cuts him off. “It wasn’t God.”

  Good old Earl. “Fuck you know.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck it is!” This is so true, so utterly obscene, and the truth of her disappearance is so irrefutable that it beggars him.

  “Right.” Earl’s working hard to redeem the friendship. “We don’t know how it happened, but it happened.”

  “Why?” Shaken, Dave thinks, God! Why am I so bitter, but in spite of this, unmoved by Earl’s persistent kindness, he rears up and lashes out. In a fit of blind logic, he brings down his fist on Earl’s knee. “Everything happens for a reason!”

  Confident even in unknown waters, Earl says, “Face it, you may never find out why, or how.”

  And so scared. What if they never … “Shut up.”

  “Shuh,” Earl says. “There are things we know and things we’ll never know, get used to it.”

  “No!” He drives his fist into Earl’s shoulder, too close to the heart.

  “For true,” Earl says. Earl, who is still easy in his life, repeats as though they’re still friends, “So, deal with it.”

  Dave’s voice is so raw even Earl flinches. “Just stop!”

  “OK fine.” Earl picks up the oars, starts to row. Gliding out from under the dock and back into the channel, he heads for the tidal creek on the east end of the island, where they can make land without being seen.

  Dave lays silence between them like a knife. They’re lugging the boat out of the water at the head of the creek when his voice comes back. Whatever he does on Kraven isl
and, he’d better do it soon; sun’s on its way up, showing pink over the horizon. Wading in through the sawgrass he says, too low for anybody but Earl to hear, “You could of left me off at the harbor.”

  “Fuck I could.”

  For too many reasons he says, “It would have been better. You’d be home by now.”

  “No big deal.”

  “I forget why you came.”

  “Boogie, remember? You felt so bad about him.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s all. You get Boogie out and we take Boogie home, somebody has to do it. Then we’re done.” Earl waits too long before adding, “Maybe forever.”

  So Dave says what he has to, to make up for it. Picking up on the running gag Earl laid out when they were ten and just now, back at the city dock, the one stupid Davy blew off in a fit of rage, he feeds his best friend in the world the classic setup line. “What if I get busted?” It used to make them fall out laughing like bandits. Now it’s a sword that cuts more ways than Dave can bear to think about but he tries, waiting for Earl to come back with the punchline that bonded them. Good old reliable, they used it to stir up trouble with the worst people:

  Just tell ’em you have a colored friend.

  But Earl is beyond comeback lines or anything else they’ve shared. “Take care, dude, and fuck you.” Then he bends over the side of his boat, reaching under the seat. “Hold up, asshole, you forgot your shit.”

  Yeah, right. He’s about to go up there empty-handed.

  Earl hands off a chisel from the box his dad put under there when they were ten. “You might could stop a guy with this.”

  They’re done talking. Dave nods and slips it under Ray’s snakeskin belt. Do this, he thinks. No time for the blueprints in the hotel milk box. Do this fast, so Earl can go home.

  His progress through back ways to Front Street is smooth, although he’s making it at first light. The occupying forces have done everything they could and are sleeping it off somewhere; somebody trucked in a generator and there are lights in the Harbor City Inn. By this time the few armed monkeys left patrolling the streets are tired and slow, easy to dodge. As he comes out in the block behind Bay Street, Dave hears a thump-thumping that he can’t make out, although it is familiar. He comes around through the alley behind Weisbuch’s store and it comes clear: the metronomic thud of Boogie Hood, tied up somewhere and doing like he does when things in his life get beyond him, banging his head against the wall like that will make it stop.

  He’s not hard to find. For no clear reason, they put him in a portable jailhouse— Ray Powell’s horse trailer, trucked in and hastily converted to the purpose. Ray’s palomino racking horse Sherman foundered ten years ago. He fell behind the barn. Even the vet couldn’t get him up. There was no hope for it, so they had to put Sherman down right where he fell. Ray loved that horse. He said Never Again, but he kept the rickety horse trailer back there, just in case. The plaque that says Sherman on it is still screwed tight to the bottom of the Dutch door, which someone has secured with a Kryptonite bicycle lock.

  Dave climbs up on the back bumper and looks in through the top half of door where Sherman used to hang his head out when Ray and Junior had him at horse shows in Charleston and Savannah. Ray keeps Sherman’s trophies on a shelf in the barn to this day, or kept them until the day he vanished, along with everyone else Dave cares about, Merrill Poulnot in particular.

  Infuriated by the grillwork some vandal nailed over the opening to keep Boogie in, he pries it off with Earl’s chisel and looks inside. His big friend is crouched on the floor with his back to the door, rocking back and forth on his haunches, making that reassuringly regular thud with his head. He bangs like the noise he makes will bring help or put him to sleep or transport him to another world.

  “Hush, Boogie, it’s me.”

  Boogie doesn’t look up, he just keeps on thumping. Some asshole secured the bottom half of Sherman’s door with that bicycle lock but maybe he can get Boogie out through the top. He’ll do it, no problem, but first he has to get his attention.

  “Yo, Boog?”

  Yeah, right. Boogie keeps on doing what he was doing, as if he hadn’t heard. A little louder. It takes him four tries. Finally he forages in Ray’s pockets and throws a sodden cigarette lighter at him. Boogie turns that full moon face on him, dead white except for the red rings around his eyes. “Davy!”

  “Hush.”

  He doesn’t hush; he can’t. In a thin, scared voice a lot smaller than he is, Boogie asks, “Are you OK?”

  It’s like a knife to the heart. “I’m fine, Boogie. Just fine.” Fuck, it’s my fault you’re in there. “Can you stand up?”

  Barely, but Boogie does.

  Moving after all this time— how much time?— must hurt; his big friend is so slow and sad that Dave’s heart breaks. This is my fault. I never should have left you. There’s no getting this man out through the top half of that door, not like he is. OK, the hard way.

  It’s getting light fast. There are unknown quantities patrolling out there. He has to hurry. It’s a sixty-year-old trailer. Layers of paint have glued the screws and the hinges to the wood. Patiently, Dave pries at the paint with his chisel until the paint cracks and the hinge starts to give. It takes too long but he talks nonstop, gentling Boogie in a low voice as he works until the whole mess, Kryptonite lock included, falls to the ground and the half-door follows, turning itself into a ramp as it drops, taking Dave down with it. He has to roll over and out from under before it pins him to the street, which he manages seconds before Boogie tramples out like a bolting horse and mashes him.

  On this second day of the occupation, the streets leading back to the tidelands are quiet. Dave is wary and reflective. No invaders in sight, maybe they left off looking because they’re done. Maybe two days of wrecking and pillaging wore the suckers out. Maybe this, maybe that, get Boogie the fuck out of here while you still can, which is a lot easier than he thought.

  “Come on,” he says to Boogie, hurrying him along.

  “Where?” Boogie, hush!

  “Tidal creek, now, shhh.”

  “Why?”

  No more questions, please! “Earl’s waiting with a boat.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  Shit, did they not feed you? “I promise, as soon as you get to Earl’s house.”

  Boogie hesitates. “Off island?”

  “Yep. I told you, Earl is out there with a boat.”

  “A boat?”

  “Earl’s carrying you to his house, where it’s safe.”

  The big man slows down. “Off island. I can’t.”

  “Boogie, you can’t stay here.” Boogie is too big to move if he decides to stop moving. Say the right thing or he’ll dig in. “He makes the best shrimp perloo.”

  “But they won’t know where to find me!”

  “And corn bread.”

  Boogie, yearning to be diverted: “You sure?”

  “Earl’s corn bread is awesome, no shit. There’s a ton left over. So, you’re OK with this?”

  To his surprise, Boogie nods. Relieved, he says, “OK.”

  Dave thinks to reassure him, just in case. “If the rapture comes, it won’t matter where you are, Boog. They’ll find you.”

  “Oh, that. I done gave up on that.”

  Stricken, Dave says, “I know what that’s like.”

  From there on, they don’t talk.

  There are no false alarms and no real ones on their way out to the marshy tidal creek; at sunup they come out into the open and there’s Earl poking around in the sawgrass where they beached his boat a lifetime ago. His oldest friend says, “Dude!”

  OK, Dave thinks. OK. On a better day, he would be smiling.

  Earl waves them into the boat. “It’s getting late.”

  Hanging back, Dave gives Boogie a push in the right direction, into the shallows where Earl stands, waiting to get him into the boat. “No problem. Nobody’s out that I saw.”

  “Boogie is bigger than I re
membered.”

  “He’s about the same. No problem, Earl.”

  “Shit yes it’s a problem.”

  “I said, no problem.”

  With his back to the gaudy sky and the changing water, Earl hesitates, squinting. “Don’t know if I can fit you both.”

  The grief and confusion that have been driving Dave since he lost Merrill eddy and fuse into the decision he’d already made without being aware of it, that solidified at some point in Felix Pinckney’s bedroom just before night. He takes a breath. “You’ll be fine.”

  By this time Earl has Boogie in the boat. “Hurry up, dude. We’ll make it somehow. Let’s shove this thing off.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Together they lean in and push until the boat clears the mud and at the exact right moment, Earl skins up over the side and into the bow like a diver surging out of the deep end. He settles in the bow, a perfect counterweight to Boogie in the stern. “Get in, let’s see if this motherfucker still floats.”

  “Take care of him, Earl. I’m not coming.”

  “Hell with that. Get in.”

  “I was never coming,” he says.

  “We did what we come for, Ribault. Let’s go.”

  The rest rolls in on him like an eighteen-wheeler. “I can’t.”

  “Dude…”

  “You knocked yourself out for me and I thank you, but. OK. I have to stay.”

  “What for?”

  He is done grieving. “Just shove off and let me do this.”

  Earl is grieving now. “That won’t bring ’em back.”

  “No. No, Earl, it won’t.”

  “Then come on.” Earl stands to make his point, never mind that the boat is rocking. “Come with.”

  “Sit down before I capsize you. Sorry.” Still mired in the sawgrass, Dave gives the boat a last hard push. “Can’t.”

  Earl’s face says things he can’t find words for. “Dear God, don’t make me come back for you.”

  “No need.”

  “OK then, I won’t.” Earl ships his oars, reluctant to turn away. “But this obsession or whatever.”

  “It’s not an obsession.” It isn’t even a need. It’s a want.

  A Gullah lilt to Earl’s concern. “It’s gone sink you.”

  “Chill, Earl. I am.” Dave can feel the gangs of expressions snaking across his face, none of them fixed. “You’ll keep care of Boogie for me, right?”