This year promised to be the most difficult yet, thanks to the arrival of the veterans. Against his advice, the town had invited them to the celebrations. It had been hard for him to take such a stance, given his service record, but his frequent visits to the camp had convinced him that it was unwise to include them. His eyes fell on the Heron Key Bugle, with yet another outraged headline: VETERANS ARRESTED AFTER PAYDAY BRAWL. Such headlines had become depressingly regular, although the damage had been limited to property. So far.
He pressed the cool glass against his throat, remembered his shock on the first visit to the veterans’ camp, the utter squalor of it. He had been called to aid a poor old sergeant from Minnesota who had been poisoned by the deadly smoke of the oleander wood used for his cooking fire. Doc could not imagine why no one had warned him against the innocent-looking shrub with the pretty pink flowers that grew wild all along the coast. The men were housed in stifling, overcrowded “cabins,” which sounded quaint but were actually just flimsy wooden partitions held together with a canvas roof. Whites and coloreds still had separate quarters, equal for once in their misery; the latrines would have disgraced the trenches of France—the stench alone was a real health hazard. Doc had shared his concerns with the superintendent, Trent Watts, but it was like talking to a block of granite. The men had nothing to do but drink when they weren’t working on the bridge to Fremont in the awful heat and humidity. And it was clear they felt they were being punished by Washington for marching on the Capitol to demand the bonus promised to them. And now this, the final insult: condemned to a close approximation of hell, in a place no one knew existed, where the country could forget what it owed them.
Doc’s contemplation was interrupted by a face at the screened door. “You decent?” It was the voice of Deputy Sheriff Dwayne Campbell. Amiable, shambling Dwayne, his uniform always unkempt, buttons straining at the belly. Doc had seen little of Dwayne since he attended the birth of Dwayne’s mulatto baby, Roy. He had heard that Dwayne seemed to accept the child, which many men would not have done. Noreen Campbell, by all accounts, had not fared so well. There was talk of savage beatings that left no visible marks—Dwayne was careful—but since she did not seek medical help, Doc could do nothing. He had always liked Dwayne, whose open, freckled face carried a permanent look of mild surprise. The deputy was not blessed with great mental agility, but he usually took a sensible approach to conflict, and his physical bulk on its own seemed to calm most situations.
“In here, Dwayne. Just getting ready.”
“Not sure there is such a thing, Doc, not this year.” Dwayne had also advised against including the veterans in the barbecue. He removed his hat and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. The skin at his hairline showed white where the hat’s brim protected it from the sun.
Doc had hoped to be reassured that Dwayne would draw on his years of experience to face the evening with the same ease and calm he brought to most problems. The tension in the big man’s jaw and shoulders said otherwise. Doc wondered if something had happened at home but decided it was the wrong moment to delve into Dwayne’s domestic situation. The priority was to get through the next twelve hours.
Dwayne took a seat at the kitchen table. “Got any more of that lemonade?”
Doc poured him a tall glass and thought he noticed a slight tremor in Dwayne’s hand as he took it. Dwayne drank the liquid down without pause or breath and set the empty glass on the table.
“We warned ’em,” he said as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “And they went ahead anyway. Leaving you and me to pick up the pieces.”
Doc could see both sides of the argument. How could the veterans be excluded, on this of all nights, when the nation celebrated the people who gave it its freedom? They had given their limbs and, in many cases, their sanity in the service of their country. Yet he was convinced they were a danger to others—and themselves. “Maybe it will be all right,” he said and heard the note of foolish optimism in his voice. “Maybe everyone will just get along. Is that really so impossible?”
Dwayne regarded him in silence, eyebrows raised. The man was wound tighter than Doc had ever seen him.
“Okay, then,” Doc continued. “What’s the worst that can happen?”
Dwayne tipped his chair back, hands folded on his paunch. “Oh, I don’t know, how about this: maybe they drink the place dry and then go looking for more in folks’ houses. Maybe they decide to take what they want from the women. My guess is it’s been a mighty long time since those boys got any. They’re psychos. You know that better than anyone. Drunks and psychos.” He leaned forward, arms on the table. “Would you want them in your house, if you had a wife and child?”
Doc made no reply, just cleaned his already spotless glasses again.
“Sorry, Doc,” Dwayne mumbled. “I know it ain’t easy for you.”
“Never mind, Dwayne. That was a long time ago now.” Five years, four months, thirteen days, to be precise. He could probably even give an accurate account of the number of minutes since Leann had left, taking Cora with her. He had changed, she’d said. He’d seemed numb to the world and everyone in it, even her and Cora, except at night, when he screamed and screamed. They had tried separate bedrooms. He woke once to find his hands around Leann’s throat, her eyes wide with terror, her fingers trying to pry his away, Cora wailing in her crib, and no idea at all how he had gotten there. She left soon after. They lived with her parents now in Georgia. He got regular notes from Cora, in her achingly precise child’s hand. She did well in school, Leann said, in her infrequent letters.
Doc blinked hard, tried to focus. Dwayne said something about getting some extra police in for the barbecue. Doc regarded him over the top of his glasses. “You say you got help coming?”
“Yep, some fellas from over Fremont way.”
“But they’ll hang back, right? Just come in if there’s trouble?” He could imagine the effect of a group of unfamiliar cops, bored and milling around with nothing to do. Incendiary didn’t begin to cover it.
Dwayne suddenly scraped his chair back and stood up. “I’ll do my job,” he said and jabbed a finger in Doc’s chest. “You do yours.” He grabbed his hat and left by the back door, allowing it to smack loudly into the frame.
Doc watched Dwayne stomp across the hot asphalt toward the beach and rubbed his chest. Only a few nights ago, that same kitchen chair had been occupied by another angry man. Henry Roberts had been drinking stronger stuff than lemonade. Their service in France together had created a bond of shared memories that even Jim Crow couldn’t break. Henry had sat there, making slow work of a glass of bourbon while the mosquitoes droned and the crickets sang and moths pirouetted around the bare bulb overhead. Henry had the loping shuffle of the hobo on the rail. His clothes had been washed to a noncolor between brown and gray. They smelled musty. The skin of his face, stretched tight over his bones, spoke of a long habit of hunger…so different from the cocky young man who had boarded the train to war with him all those years ago.
Doc had recognized the look in Henry’s eyes. It was the same look he saw in the mirror each morning. It did not invite questions. The past was the stuff of nightmares; the present was something to be endured; the future was… Well, Doc had learned hard lessons about the foolishness of having a plan. His plan had been simple: raise his family, treat his patients, and grow old peacefully alongside Leann. But it seemed the universe had other ideas.
Doc had thought Henry was different. He always had a plan, always some scheme or other. Doc had no doubt he would succeed at something. But then he had disappeared after the war, and no one, not even Selma, knew where he was. He was just one of the tens of thousands adrift on the backwash of the war. As Henry sat at the kitchen table and turned the glass slowly between his hands, Doc noticed the shadows in his eyes, of defeat, of hopes destroyed, of shame…the bitter ashes that remained when anger burned up a person’s heart.
&
nbsp; “So what’s the plan these days, Henry?” Doc had asked.
“No plan, Doc,” he said with a swirl of his glass. “I used to think I’d make some money, enough to see Grace and Selma right, and then go back to France.”
“You got a sweetheart there?”
“Yeah.” Henry’s smile split the somber planes of his face. “Thérèse. Met her when we were camped outside her village, told her I’d come back. One day.” Then the shadows returned. “Although I guess she’s long married by now.”
Doc remembered how the soldiers had been welcomed by the French locals—all ranks, all colors, it didn’t matter. “It must have been hard, coming back here, coming back…to this.” His eyes took in the separate door for colored patients to use. Just like everything else in town, from the separate serving hatch at Mitchell’s store to the separate diner on the highway. Doc had even seen a driving map of the South that showed which restrooms colored people were allowed to use.
“You could say that,” Henry said softly, his eyes on the brown liquid in his glass. “I just… We thought, you know, when we came back, that things would change. That they’d be different. And instead…”
“It was worse than before,” Doc said. He thought back to those heady days when they had first come back, so flushed with victory and pride and faith in the future. That initial euphoria had curdled so quickly, once it became clear the men had brought newfangled ideas home with them. The rest of America, it seemed, shared none of the veterans’ sense of a new era. They liked the old era, the old order, just fine, thank you very much. Doc recalled the headlines. It was almost like some kind of mass insanity had taken hold. There were riots in the cities, lynchings in the country, as far south as Fort Lauderdale. Even down in sleepy little Heron Key, they felt the cold wind of change. And then came the stock market crash of ’29, which only made people cling tighter to the comfort of old, familiar things. “I understand why you feel like that,” he began and tried to imagine what it must have been like for someone like Henry, an officer who by rights should have been on course for prosperity. “Why you want to go back to France, to the way of life there. But we need people like you, if things are ever going to change here.”
Henry’s gaze had flickered into life. “And end up with a noose around my neck? Or worse? I heard about a guy upstate, accused of raping a white girl, forced to eat his own dick before they shot him full of holes. Little kids cut off parts of him, Doc.” He had slammed his glass onto the table. The liquid sloshed onto the Formica. “For keepsakes, Doc. Keepsakes,” he said more quietly. “And what are people like you doing about it?”
Still some anger left in him after all. It had given Doc hope. You had to care about something to be angry. Far better that than the flat hopelessness that bent Henry’s shoulders into the posture of defeat. And Henry was right, he conceded. Where did Doc get off, talking about change, when he had lost any stomach for a fight? It lay buried somewhere in the French mud.
He checked his bag one final time. Maybe it will be all right tonight. Maybe people will just get along. With a last look around, he hefted the bag and went out into the late afternoon sunshine. And maybe that hog will fly out of its hole in the ground.
• • •
Dwayne walked quickly for several hundred yards before he felt the tension begin to seep out of his pores with the sweat. He had been unfair to Doc, who only ever meant well, but the man’s interference, his habit of looking over the top of his glasses like a schoolteacher, had gotten on Dwayne’s last nerve. He slowed and went to rest in the shade of a palm at his favorite picnic table on the beach.
Ever since that little brown baby had come out of his wife, he had felt like he was living in a fever dream. He was well acquainted with them, having suffered with the Spanish flu in 1918. He had almost died during a week in which he lost all sense of reality and time and had been left with permanently impaired hearing. No one knew the extent of it, not even Noreen, thanks to his lip-reading skills.
A hermit crab crawled up to his boot. Dwayne picked it up gently in his palm and marveled at the delicate engineering of the claws, the phenomenal strength needed to haul that shell around everywhere. At that moment, his own responsibilities felt just as heavy. The whole town depended on him to make the evening run smooth and safe. He had taken every precaution possible, installed every backup available, yet he could not shake the sensation of shadows brushing against him, even in the bright, slanting sunlight.
The crab pinched the flesh of his palm, not hard, more like an experiment. Roy would like this, he thought. At only a few months old, he already took a keen interest in the world—the pelicans, the herons fishing in the mangroves, the peacocks. Even the march of ants across the wooden floor would transfix him. The little lizards that sped along the porch, miniature dinosaurs with bright eyes, were a source of special delight. Roy clapped and giggled each time he saw one, which was about forty times a day.
How was it possible, he wondered, to love the child while hating its mother? How had he become this person? He, who had always used his strength to help the weak and vulnerable? It was Noreen’s fault. Each time his hand went out to strike her, he felt physically sick yet compelled, as if some invisible force took control of his limbs, made him shout unforgivable things at her. She still refused to name the father—in fact, refused to say anything at all—which only enraged him further.
Dwayne had insisted that Noreen stay home tonight. After all, Roy didn’t belong on either side of the beach. He couldn’t be with the whites, and the coloreds wouldn’t want him either. He feared this would be the case for the boy’s entire life. And Dwayne could do without the curious looks and well-meaning comments while he tried to do his job. The anger toward Noreen, always smoldering, reignited inside him.
But even so, he could remember that things had not always been like this. Noreen, when they first met, had called him her “gentle giant.” The first few years were good. No babies, but not for lack of trying. Then he began to notice she seemed distracted. She no longer waited up for him to finish his shift. She no longer listened avidly to all the details of his day. Instead, she cleaned and tidied around him while he talked, her mind clearly elsewhere, and this while he struggled to cope with the extra workload caused by the veterans’ arrival twelve months previously. He was working harder than he ever had in his life, all thanks to them, and when he came home, he just wanted some appreciation. But when he reached for her in the night, she pretended to be asleep, so it felt like he had to force himself on her. The pregnancy was such a welcome surprise that he buried his doubts in happy plans for the baby, while she became more pale and withdrawn as time went on.
The whole town was laughing at him now, he knew that. He felt it each time he attended a disturbance or took someone down to the county jail. He knew what they were thinking: How was he supposed to keep the criminals of the district in check when he couldn’t even control his own wife? It was the lack of respect he minded the most, as if his badge meant nothing just because his wife was a whore. She had ruined him, and Roy was a daily reminder of that—would be for the rest of his life. The flame of anger burned higher. He felt it rise up through his feet, as if it came from the very earth, through his legs, his groin, his torso, to his neck and finally to his head where it burned coldly. Dwayne set the crab onto the sand and raised his boot to crush it. He felt the approach of trouble, like the whiff of the camp latrines that sometimes carried all the way down the beach. Everyone would look to him when it came.
He lowered his foot harmlessly. On dainty claws, the crab tiptoed away across the sand.
Chapter 4
Selma sluiced seawater over the bloody tools, then scraped them clean with handfuls of sand until they shone. The gator steaks were laid out on her kitchen counter, ready for the grill, covered by a fishing net to keep off the flies. The iron smell of raw meat filled the small space.
Her back ached from t
he butchery, and her shoulder throbbed from the rifle’s recoil. Blisters shone on her hands, in just about the only places not already calloused. She tore a chunk from the aloe plant beside the kitchen door and rubbed its soothing juice over her skin.
Her husband, Jerome, had gone fishing with some of his boys, said he would meet her at the beach. He had struggled for years to find an occupation worthy of his talents: bartender, pineapple farmer, bus driver. He had a turtle kraal for a while, but Selma had to do all the killing for him because he couldn’t stand how they screamed. After she witnessed the way he hacked away at the poor creatures’ throats, she could well understand why they did. But meat was life, any meat that didn’t already have maggots in it. Her mother, Grace, had taught her that, during the hungry years.
None of Jerome’s schemes had lasted for more than a few weeks. He had even tried selling encyclopedias door-to-door for a while. This was one of the strangest things ever to happen in Heron Key, as most of his customers couldn’t read, and neither could he. The only good thing to come out of it was when he gave his entire sample set of the Encyclopedia Britannica to Missy when he quit. He was all for putting it on the fire, figured it would burn real well, but Selma had persuaded him otherwise.
Now, it seemed, he was a fisherman. Good thing that fish don’t scream.
She stripped off her blood-spattered apron and dunked it in a bucket of seawater to soak. Leaning against the sink, she kneaded the sore muscles in her neck and wished Jerome had stayed to help. They had been married fifteen years, and every day of it had been a battle of one kind or another—to get Jerome’s lazy ass to work, to raise enough food from their tiny plot…to swallow the sad knowledge that it would only be the two of them, forever. That last was like the taste of bile in her throat.
Under a Dark Summer Sky Page 3
