by Attica Locke
“No.” He hadn’t. And his mother still hadn’t returned any of his phone calls.
“Good, ’cause until we get this thing down on paper, get a notary to witness his confession, I don’t want to be putting our business in the street. Frank and his team in San Jacinto County been working this one for nearly two months now, and I want to be sure we got this in the bag before I tell him we got the killer, tell him to back off and let us run the case from here on out.”
“I want the same thing.”
“Well, maybe I’ll wait to figure out what he wants,” Wilson said. He made a wincing sound and then took a swig from something on his desk. Darren pictured another of his wife’s concoctions, some buttermilk and mashed-beans brew, maybe; Darren could only imagine. “You on your way back to Houston? I imagined you’ve done worn out your welcome in Marion County.”
“We’ve still got a missing child.”
Wilson belched into Darren’s ear. “I don’t follow. Steve Quinn told me the feds were moving on an arrest in that case, one of the old-timers in Hopetown.”
“I believe the boy is alive, sir, and I need to get an assist from the game warden to get an escort out on the water.”
“Water?”
“He’s on the lake, sir. He’s on an island out there, I’m almost certain of it. An island that’s connected to the history of Hopetown. I believe the old man was holding him as leverage to get Rosemary King to change the terms of the sale.”
“Mathews, you sure about this—”
“I found a snake pit out here. Thieves and liars. And I think Leroy Page has some misguided idea about how to make things right, and he took the boy. And there’s a woman involved, a woman who’s gone missing, a lawyer working on the sale, and I think Rosemary King had something to do with that.”
“Son,” Wilson said. It was rare he didn’t call him Ranger, though Darren often slipped through, given how close Fred Wilson and William Mathews had been when they served in the department together. The son here came out tender as a caress, the kind usually followed in these parts with the soft insult of Bless your heart. But Wilson was actually trying to communicate something that Darren hadn’t expected: trust. “I don’t have feet on the ground and can’t really wrap my mind around all this, but Darren, if you’re telling me you think there’s a kid alive out there somewhere, I ain’t gon’ do a damn thing to stop you from looking. But I can promise you ain’t gon’ get a lick of help from Marion County. You give me an hour or two to make a few calls, I’ll see which one of our regional offices has access to a boat we can get to you.”
“We don’t have time. It’s been almost six days.”
“You think he’s in danger?”
“Strange enough, I think Leroy’s been feeding him, taking care of a kid he openly admitted he couldn’t stand.” It was Leroy who was in danger of going to prison if someone didn’t get this kid before he actually died out there, now that his grandfather’s old fishing buddy wasn’t around to bring him food and water. Darren said, “It’s just time he came home,” and left it at that.
“Do what you have to. I back you one hundred percent.”
He didn’t think he’d ever heard those words from Wilson, and hell if it didn’t cross his mind that to save a white child he was being given carte blanche to go around the locals here, that with this one, he had Wilson in his pocket. A match head’s flame of anger lit in his chest and extinguished itself just as quickly. Did he think the missing blond boy lit a fire under Wilson? Yes. Did it mean the boy didn’t still need his help? No. Could he possibly keep Leroy out of prison? Yes.
He took the torn map from Marcus’s book plus a tourist version that Marcus kept in the store, tucked both of them into his pants pocket, and started for the door. He didn’t realize Marcus was following him until he was on the pavement outside and heard the door to the store lock behind him. He turned.
“I’m coming too,” his uncle’s old college roommate said.
“What?”
“You’ll never find it without me,” Marcus said, sliding his arms into a red faux-leather bomber jacket. He put a hand on Darren’s shoulder as if they were partners in some grand adventure, as if he was about to have the time of his life.
Marcus told him they’d find a ton of boats on the docks in Karnack near the Big Pines Lodge restaurant, but he neglected to add that every last one of them would be filled with tourists, men, women, and children who’d paid good money to buy lake-tour tickets from one of the five tour companies running businesses out of shacks sitting like rotting teeth in a semicircle behind the restaurant’s parking lot. The air carried the scent of burning boat fuel from the idling engines and the grease exhaust from the lodge’s kitchen, where everything from gator to catfish to hushpuppies swam for its life in a vat of hot oil.
The boats were pontoons mostly, each loading between ten and eighteen people. Darren set a boot on the lip of the nearest boat. He kept a hand on his pistol but didn’t remove it from its holster, knowing the stance was enough to command folks’ attention. “Everybody off this boat.” The boat’s captain was a leathery white man who was all skin over bones that looked as thick as carved stones, so he appeared vulnerable and terrifying at the same time. The sides of his head were shaved, and his mullet, bleached white from the sun, bopped up and down as he pushed through his paying customers to the back of the boat to see what in hell was going on. “We got a kid missing out there on the lake and not a lot of time,” Darren said. The captain saw Darren’s hand hovering near his Colt .45. He saw the badge too. Something flashed in his eyes—maritime duty, Darren hoped. He believed they had an understanding. “This is an emergency. We need to get everybody off this boat.”
There was a toddler who started crying when the captain began ushering the tourists off the boat, promising refunds and a free ride later. Marcus hung back on the dock, offering a hand to passengers as they exited the boat, grumbling and grousing as they went, the women holding their children tightly. Once the Blue Heron was empty of passengers, Marcus joined Darren in the boat. He put on two life vests, one strapped over the other. Darren pulled the maps from his pocket and told the captain to take them north along the narrow branch of Cypress Bayou that was a passageway to Carter Lake, which would lead to Back Lake and Goat Island and the spot on the map Darren was pointing to. “Gogo Island,” he said.
The captain walked to the engine’s control panel. It was set in the center of the boat, with seats all around it, built with a tourist’s unobstructed view in mind. So Darren left the map with the captain—Jim, he’d said his name was—and went to stand at the front of the boat, the metal railing pressing into his hip bones. Marcus hadn’t said a word since they started sailing. He was pressed into the bench seat in back, not moving. “Never heard of it,” Jim called to him. “But, hell, you could live in these parts fifty, sixty years and never know every stretch of island, every bayou strait, every duck blind or bootlegging outfit once tucked in these woods. I bet there’s stuff in here even God couldn’t find with a map.”
“A little more optimism, huh?” Darren said, not liking the frank nihilism of futility from a man who was helping him find a child. He asked Jim if they couldn’t pick up the pace, then leaned back to see if Marcus thought this was all looking right. Were they headed in the right direction? Marcus either didn’t hear him or was more nervous on a boat than Darren had realized. “Seriously,” Darren said, turning to the captain. “Not meaning to bust your balls, but could we kick it up a bit?”
“Heading into a cypress forest up here,” Jim said. “We race through there and bump up against one of the cypress knees shooting up out the water, and we’re liable to tear up this boat. Trust me when I say you don’t want to be stuck out here come sundown. They call it ‘spending a night in the Caddo Motel.’ You picked the quickest route, but a lot could go wrong between here and there.”
Behind him, Marcus made a sound, a hiccup of panic.
The sky hadn’t even grayed to th
e ashy purple of coming dusk. They had at least a couple of hours of light, Darren figured. He couldn’t understand the captain’s odd demeanor, the faint joy he seemed to be getting out of a dire situation of which he was not in control. The scraggly mustache made it hard to tell, but Darren thought the man might be smiling. He was about to tell the guy to quit fucking around and take this thing up to full speed when they entered the cypress forest. Jim actually slowed the engine to a near crawl, and he was smiling, Darren could see now. Beaming. “There she is.”
“My God,” Marcus whispered.
Inside the forest they were floating through, there was no sound beyond the tinkle of lake water against the sides of the boat, no world beyond Caddo Lake. Darren had never seen anything like it. Cypress trees, their trunks skirted so that they appeared like shy dancers at a church social, leaving enough space for God between them, enough space for Jim to snake his way through dozens of trees shooting up to a sky that was darkening after all, Darren thought. That or the canopy of Spanish moss hanging from the trees had steepled the forest, had put a roof over this holy sanctuary on water.
The three men rode in silence for what seemed like an eternity.
It was raw beauty, floating through a forest of trees older than time itself, trees that seemed to stand sentinel against outsiders, against any man or woman who didn’t respect the lake’s history, who didn’t respect or understand what had been here before any of them on that boat had been born, before America was even an idea, before Mexico and Spain had a piece of it, before the French tried it too, before Texas was more than a word of kindness on a Caddo’s lips. Tayshas.
When they broke through the forest and onto the open water of Carter Lake, Darren was happy to catch a snatch of sun behind clouds that were moving in from the east. They would face nighttime or a storm if they didn’t get through this quickly. In the open sound, Jim picked up speed, as Darren had asked him to. They moved into Back Lake and skirted along Horse Island and then the southern border of Goat Island, which stretched for a few miles. The Blue Heron was closing in on the area on Marcus’s map that represented Gogo Island. Darren scanned the water in front of him, staring at the stand of pine trees that seemed to shoot up out of the water but were actually more like a wall around a piece of land that grew bigger the closer the boat got to it. Darren turned to Marcus, who was still pressed into his seat at the back of the boat.
“Is this it?” Darren said.
Marcus was quiet. Darren waved him forward. “Is this the island?” When Marcus shook his head uncertainly, Darren yelled at him to get up and come look. Jim had started to slow his engine as they approached not so much a shore but a place where the land rose a solid foot out of the water. Darren pushed Marcus against the railing.
“I don’t know, man,” Marcus said.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I’ve never seen it.”
“You lied to me?”
With an embarrassed shrug, Marcus said, “I can’t swim.”
Hence the two life jackets, the way Marcus was clinging so hard to the boat’s metal railing that Darren could see every ridge and wrinkle on his knuckles. He caught a flash of lightning out of the corner of his eye, followed a few seconds later by a cannon shot of thunder. There was a storm coming for sure. “If y’all finna do this thing,” Jim said, “now’s the time.”
Marcus snatched the map from his book out of the captain’s hands. He stared at it for a while, then looked at the open sound behind them. He nodded with less certainty than Darren would have liked and said, “This is it.” Followed a few moments later by an equivocal, “Gotta be.”
“Can’t really pull up on land in this thing,” Jim said to Darren. “This is as far as I go.”
Darren nodded, then made to climb over the rail. He would have to swim or wade and find a tree root he could grab to hoist himself onto the island. But just as he was about to go over the side, he heard Marcus yell his name and felt an arm around his neck. It was Jim, those stone-like bones crushing Darren’s windpipe. Worse, he felt a weight lift at his side and knew the man had gotten hold of his gun. He didn’t understand what was happening until his eyes, leaking with the stress of trying to breathe, saw the tattoo on the captain’s wrist.
A teeny-tiny dixie flag.
Jim whispered in his ear, “You think Rosemary ain’t put out a word or two about you? The mother of Bill King can always count on our support.”
“He quit the Brotherhood.”
“What’s that?” Jim said, squeezing Darren’s neck tighter.
“Let him go, man,” Marcus said weakly.
In Darren’s ear, Jim laughed. “Brotherhood is for life.”
“The boy,” Darren croaked.
“If this ain’t some nigger magic, some bullshit story about Indian islands, and Bill King’s kid is really on this floating bushland, I’ll go get him.”
And then Darren heard a faint metallic thud.
The pressure on his neck was gone at once.
When he turned, he saw Marcus holding the boat’s fire extinguisher, which he had used to extinguish the boat’s captain. Or, shit, no. Darren took a second look and saw that he was still breathing. He took the gun from Jim’s hand and held it out for Marcus, who looked scared to touch it. “What’d you say about my uncle choosing academia over real-life shit? Well, this is as real as it gets.”
Marcus took the gun and Darren told him both of their lives were in his hands before he jumped over the side of the boat. The water was much deeper than Sheriff Quinn had said, at least out here in the open sound. He was treading water around the side of the land, looking for something he could use to yank himself onto the shore. Eventually he stepped on the root, or knee, of a cypress tree, which gave him enough height to reach the trunk of a pin oak that was sandwiched between two pines. It was small enough for him to wrap his arms around the whole of its base. He pulled himself up and onto Gogo Island.
It was like walking through a park at first or going off trail on a hike, never mind that he could hear the whisper of water surrounding the island. He found remnants of previous lives scattered here and there. Pieces of broken pottery, circles in the ground where dozens, maybe hundreds of pit fires had burned through, changing the landscape forever. He saw birds nesting, squirrels, and nutria rats. It was too cold for water moccasins, but in another season he would have added them to the list of wildlife. He’d been walking for twelve minutes or so before he came upon something that stopped him in his tracks. He stood so still he could hear the water dripping down his pants onto the hard, packed earth. He was staring at a conical hut almost identical to the one near Margaret’s people in Hopetown, only this one had rotted through in places, and part of its roof was hanging down. Through the holes in the wood-and-straw wall, Darren saw a flash of movement. He screamed Levi’s name and ran toward the hut.
He was within a few inches of it when a rock flew by his head. Another shot out of the hut, this one hitting him squarely on his left shoulder. A third rock hit Darren’s hip bone. “Go away,” he heard a voice say, one that was choked with snot and raw with rage. “I will kill you. I swear I will.”
Darren had to duck his considerable height to make it into the hut. What had been a holy site for Caddo Indians at one point now smelled like piss and bologna and the funk of an unwashed child missing for days. He was scrawnier than Darren had imagined, but maybe nearly a week out here without proper nutrition had whittled the boy down to this; his clavicle was showing through the oversize flannel shirt he was wearing, one of Leroy Page’s, Darren guessed. He wore the old man’s dungarees too, rolled three or four times at the ankle. He was covered in chigger bites that he’d scratched into angry red welts. Darren saw older scars on his legs too. He remembered Marnie saying Gil had hit the boy before and thought of all the wounds he didn’t wear on his skin.
“Let’s get you out of here, Levi.”
“I ain’t doing nothing niggers say do no more.”
> “I’m here to take you home,” Darren said, crouching before the boy.
Levi wiped away snot with the back of his hand. “That’s what Mr. Page said and then he brung me here. He a lie, and you a lie too, and you better git before I end your nigger life.” He picked up a very large rock, one he’d clearly been saving for a battle up close. He raised it high, beads of sweat forming on his forehead as he bore the weight of it, as he prepared his skinny arms to attack Darren, who didn’t flinch. “And then what, Levi?” he said. “Like it or not, besides Mr. Page, I’m the only other person who knows you’re out here. And he’s in a coma.” He watched Levi’s eyes go wide before he bit his lip, trying to figure what all this meant. “So no more sandwiches, no more clean clothes and water. No one else is coming for you, Levi. But Leroy, he wanted to get you out of here. I believe he was planning to before he got hurt.”
“What happened?”
“Someone shot him. Can’t have all the hate talk out there and it not end up in violence some kind of way. It’s just human nature. You talk it enough and it carves out a path of permission in your heart, starts to make crazy shit okay.”
“I ain’t mean nobody to get hurt,” Levi said. “It wasn’t Gil’s ass, was it?” He sounded suddenly like the oldest, world-weariest nine-year-old on the planet. The dark puffy circles under his eyes looked like twists of gray cotton candy.
“Naw, he’s in jail.”
And that’s when he broke wide open, tears and snot raining down his face. “Gil’s gone?” Darren nodded and Levi threw his body forward and fell into Darren’s arms, nearly knocking him backward. His warm body was almost feverish. He was racked with sobs, and Darren could feel the bones in his rib cage trembling against his hands. “I want Mama and Dana. I want to go home.”
Something about Gil Thomason out of the picture released the pain and anger and fear the kid had been holding in for who knew how long. He wiped his nose on Darren’s shirt, then looked down at Darren’s five-point-star Ranger badge, then back up at the dark skin on Darren’s face, then down again at the silver badge.
