by Bret Lott
He took in a breath, said quieter, slower, “There’s no honor in that no matter how you look at it.”
Coburn said nothing.
My eye was open as wide as it would ever be, and searching.
I wanted to see the stars above us. I wanted to see the wide band of stars behind stars, the Milky Way up there, and the black that held them all, cupped them like velvet.
I wanted to see Tabitha’s face, her eyes. I wanted to see her.
I wanted to see Unc’s eyes, too, him back at the stern of this boat and listening just like I was, just like we all were. I wanted to see the white marbles of his eyes I could only see with his sunglasses off, wanted even to see those scars across his cheeks and eyebrows. To touch them.
I wanted to see anything, everything—even a row of three pens tight in a shirt pocket, even a floorboard strewn with Red Bull empties and fast-food wrappers—because all I could see just then, and what seemed might be forever, was her face.
A woman named Ellen, now. A person. A human.
Her face was green, and bright. It was a grimace of bare teeth, a ragged pull of flesh away from them. It was a nose and chin the same ragged matter, a burl of loose flesh down to the cheekbones, the bones two green shards beneath where her eyes should have been. Her face was a swirl of flesh at her jaw, picked at by a blue crab.
A woman named Ellen, who’d smiled at an infidel.
An honor killing.
“Don’t think I don’t know it’s you killed her, you towelhead son of a bitch,” Prendergast went on. “Don’t think I don’t know it’s your self-righteous ibada shit you’re always talking about made you have to kill her for the dishonor of it, of her doing nothing but fucking smile at Stanhope. Robert wouldn’t even do it, her own flesh and blood wouldn’t kill her for honor, so you decide to do it yourself, then decide to kill Robert because he’d turn you in to me, and to Jessup, and to Stanhope and Harmon, and we’d deal with you.”
He stopped, took in a breath, let it out hard. “But not for killing her. We’d deal with you because of the compromised situation you’ve brought into the whole thing. Because if you hadn’t killed her, then none of this would have happened. None of this Leland and son turning up a dead body, because there’s no fucking dead body to turn up!”
He slapped something hard then—the console, maybe—and took in another breath. Still Coburn hadn’t said a further word. “If there’s no dead body, there’s no you trying to tell Stanhope and Harmon and me it’s Robert did it. No need for you to kill Robert too, because he wouldn’t kill his own sister. Then there’s no need for you to get rid of his body while we try to get rid of Ellen’s, and you don’t end up doing the shittiest job of it ever by dumping a body in the trunk of a car not ten feet from the fucking bridge at Wambaw Creek so’s it’ll show up on the evening news the night of the operation. Shit!”
“You’ve got your money,” Coburn nearly whispered. “You have your way out.”
“Fuck you!” Prendergast nearly shouted. “You better pray to Allah the one thing actually works in this whole thing is that that convoy with al-Qahtani in it comes down Perimeter Road on its way to the heliport tonight, and the fact a body showed up at Landgrave last night hasn’t shut everything down. You better pray two of you can blow up that son of a bitch instead of the three it would have been if Robert were here. Because we don’t know which of the fucking three vehicles he’s going to be in. Do you understand that?”
Coburn said nothing.
And I thought of the Chinook helicopter I’d seen making a night landing while Unc and I’d been on our way to poker tonight.
I thought of Perimeter Road, and the way it cut so close to Landgrave Hall you could see it in winter from the green on sixteen or the tee at seventeen.
I thought of Judge Dupont, dead for who knew how long, his house empty but for a set of homegrown terrorists, waiting their whole lives—the ones left alive—for this night. Now.
And I thought of Major Alton Tyler out on Wambaw Creek at the Echaw Bridge, and a body in a trunk, and I prayed that somebody—Tyler, SLED, any of the crew-cut crowd of investigators who’d come to our house and interviewed us about the whole thing—would piece together something that would lead them to know what had happened. That the man in the trunk was related to the body at Landgrave, never mind they were found fifty miles apart.
I prayed to the God I knew—the good one, the one who had a wrath all His own but who loved us, it was reported, enough to save us all from ourselves—that somebody’d save Tabitha and Unc and Five and me, and do it now.
But in the middle of that prayer there came to me another thought, a digging pain rising up into me, same as the pain in my eye and jaw was coming back, that oyster pried open under the skin, and same as the pain in my stomach from being kicked was rising in me, a hidden and spring-loaded pain about to let go any moment: Tabitha and Unc and Five and I made only four people.
We were only four collaterals, when Prendergast had said five. He’d have to dispatch five collaterals.
Here was the pain: I knew now where Jessup was.
I saw him knocking on the door of a 4200-square-foot cottage at Landgrave Hall, and saw my mom all smiles as she opened it to him, someone she’d known a long long time. She’d known him since her son, Huger, was a boy, known him from all the way back when they all lived in the same neighborhood in the shadow of the Mark Clark Expressway.
Jessup Horry. Someone she could trust.
Mom’d talked to Prendergast last night. Once some suicide ambush had taken place, she’d be asked questions same as every single person on Landgrave would be asked, and she’d mention him.
And she knew him for what he was, had known since all the way back to high school: Prendergast was an evil man.
She might talk about that time to an investigator, tell someone, finally, what had happened, and one extra word about Prendergast might make all the difference in whether he could melt into any wallpaper at all.
And then I knew, too, exactly where we were going: straight back to Landgrave Hall, the place I’d figured we’d never end up. Landgrave, where we’d be the subject of a video in the empty house Judge Dupont had left when they let him die.
We five collaterals.
I’m a kid, and have on my yellow nylon Jurassic Park backpack, the padded shoulder straps cinched down tight. In the backpack is a huge and bright blue lidless cookie jar.
It’s supposed to be an apple. I’d painted it with something that seemed red when I’d put it on. But now, stepping down out of the school bus at the corner of Attaway and Sumner, all I’m carrying in my backpack is something bright blue, and heavy.
It’s not what I’d thought I was making.
I’ll lie to her. I’ll tell Mom it’s a giant blueberry, and she’ll believe me. Because she’s my mom, and she loves me.
The bus pulls away, and I and the rest of my friends—Matt and Jessup and Rafael, LaKeisha and Polly and Deevonne—all split up, each of us headed for home.
I know the way to mine. First I have to walk along Sumner away from the C & S Grocerette and McTV Repair, the afternoon sun behind me, then pass houses just like ours: short concrete driveways, concrete steps up to front doors. Oil stains in the driveways, room air conditioners in the windows.
At the corner where Marie hits Sumner, I’ll turn right, and see at the far dead end of the street the Mark Clark Expressway high up on huge concrete pilings. The train tracks are down there, too, though Mom warns me to stay off them, that they’re dangerous, kids have gotten killed messing around on train tracks.
But we play down there anyway, put pennies on the rails and watch the trains lumber past, then go get the thin disks, medals from some kid war. We throw rocks from the tracks hard as we can up at the Mark Clark, hoping one day one of us will land something up there, but no one ever does.
Cars rush by up there, horns honk, sometimes brakes squeal. Everyone up there moving, heading somewhere, doing something.
From that corner where Marie hits Sumner, my house will be the seventh one on the left, and I’ll have only that far to walk.
That’s where my mom will be, waiting for me, and where I’ll be able to unload this backpack, and tell her the lie that what I’d made is what I’d intended, that this heavy blue thing is a lidless blueberry cookie jar.
I’ll be home.
I look around. Everyone is gone, all my friends already headed toward where they have to go, and I put a hand up to my forehead, look back toward that afternoon sun.
It’s still a couple fists above the trees out here, and I know I’m only looking back at it because I don’t want to turn, start that walk home. Because my backpack pulls at my shoulders, weighs me down, and because this thing I’m hauling home isn’t what I’d thought it would be. It isn’t what I’d hoped it would be. It’s just a giant blue ceramic thing without a lid. And the sad thing is it’s the best I could do.
I turn back, toward the way I have to go, and now I can see my shadow, long and thin out in front of me. Pointing straight down the street.
And I go, finally, because I know the way home. I know the path I have to walk, and I know too I’m the only one can carry this thing in my backpack.
I start for home, but only two or three steps in, the pavement rises up in front of me, a tarred carpet pulled up in a wave in front of me, and my next step is a stumble, and I’m starting to fall backward for the way this path rises too quick, too quick in front of me, and I woke to the boat speeding up, the outboard gone loud, the hull rising with how it cut quicker through water.
Here was my eye, and that pain. Here was my stomach, and that pain still hiding.
I felt something coarse across my face, felt it even through the pain there. Something lay across me, over me, covered me, and I knew from the smell what it was, and from how coarse it was on my cheek and forehead and chin, but I couldn’t name it. It was something I knew well enough, a word just over there, in a place I couldn’t grab hold of or see.
Fish smell, and coarse.
A croker sack. They’d thrown a burlap croker sack over me, and must’ve done the same with Tabitha, and with Five and Unc too. Because, I realized, the boat speeding up like this meant we were out in the open on the Cooper River, headed back up it toward the mouth of Goose Creek.
We were gunning it up the river right past the wharves where the 841st Transportation Battalion complex butted up against the Cooper, right where the Army loaded ships with sand-colored MRAPs and tanks and transport vehicles. If anyone was watching us from over there, even with night-vision goggles on, they’d see only two men motoring up the river, and not four people tied up and sitting in the hull of a boat.
And figure, too, that the boat we were on was most likely registered to Judge Dupont. If someone watching zeroed in on the numbers on the hull and did any kind of check, they’d find they saw a boat from some local just passing through, some moneyed dude from over to Landgrave Hall out doing a little night fishing. Just a local: let him go.
So why not just hide your hostages with croker sacks? Why not motor into Goose Creek at whatever time of night this was, the Naval Weapons Station on your right, SPAWAR and the transportation battalion and the United States Naval Consolidated Brig on your left, and act like you were just headed home with whatever fish you’d caught in these burlap bags?
Why not keep staying so low under the radar your knuckles drag ground? It’d worked so far for all parties involved.
A few minutes later the engine cut way back, and I could feel the roll stern to bow as we slowed, the hull dropping. We were in Goose Creek.
And of course I thought of what I could do. I thought of how I could try and save our lives. Because, and I mean this true, my own didn’t matter anymore.
I was someone whose life had come to retrieving golf balls in the middle of the night. I was someone whose life had come to sitting out in a vehicle and waiting for my father to finish gambling. I was someone who’d banked somehow on a girl—a woman, a person—named Tabitha, who seemed somehow still to like me, maybe even still to love me, but who was a part of the trouble we were in, and so someone who deserved to get out of it somehow, to be delivered of it, and if not by me, then by who?
And there was Unc, too, in this same trouble, in this same dead end we were headed toward. He deserved better, I knew, than to end in what was about to come: some video to be broadcast on the Internet, a video to accompany the destruction of the twentieth hijacker, a Muslim terrorist who’d turned evidence against his brothers.
Unc deserved better than to be a part of the shit this knuckle-dragging terror had already brought into the country. He deserved to live, as did Tabitha. And Five.
And my mom.
I could stand right now, right now, here where Goose Creek began to narrow in toward Landgrave on the left, the Weapons Station still on the right. Even with my hands Zip-Cuffed behind me, I could roll onto my knees, stand up, this cloak of burlap falling away from me as I did, and launch myself at the two of them standing at the console, try to knock them both down, maybe luck out and get them both. And maybe then Unc would hear what was going on, get himself up and have at it, too, and then maybe Five would join in. Maybe we could all of us, even Tabitha, tackle them, take them out.
All four of us with our hands cuffed behind us, duct tape around our heads.
And Coburn most likely with a gun, Prendergast too, and this would be the end, right here, for all of us.
Mom would be the only one left for any video to be made. Mom, alone.
Or maybe I could just pitch myself overboard, try to stay on my back with my hands behind me, swim to whatever side of the creek was closest, and make it away.
Through pluff mud, with my hands still behind me, unable to get a good breath, my ribs kicked in, my eye broken, to some unknown place or person. All if they didn’t shoot me first.
But would they shoot? Would they risk that, a pistol shot in the dark on the creek, right here between the Weapons Station and Landgrave?
And even then, even if I got to that pluff mud by swimming on my back with my hands behind me and with duct tape across my mouth, even then Tabitha and Unc and Five would still be onboard. And Mom still held by Jessup at Judge Dupont’s.
But what if when they heard me jump in, they all jumped in, Unc and Tabitha and Five getting to their knees and standing and pitching into the water on the creek to get away? What if we all right then—
The engine cut off now altogether, silence around me but for the thin whisper of water just moving along the hull, and then I felt a nudge against the hull where my back was pressed against it, the smallest touch on land but a touch enough to push us away from it, and then came an answering nudge against the other side of the hull: more land, the boat nosing into the head of a finger creek.
And then we hit ground for certain. A pitiful bit of momentum that jostled me same as last night, when I’d dropped that cinder block.
But nobody’d hear anything this night. There was only the touch of a hull against pluff mud. There was only this quiet around us, not even the odd and cold whir of cicadas I’d heard after I’d seen the body, a strange sound that had come to me in the same moment I felt the surprise shock of my own pulse through me.
After I’d seen a woman named Ellen. A member of the cell, killed for honor, but mutilated first. For honor.
“I see Jessup,” Prendergast whispered then, and the words broke whatever spell it seemed lay over us for this quiet, this no-sound of a world about to end for all of us. His voice sounded like he was looking away, maybe somewhere ahead of us, but then, right here, he whispered, “Fifty-seven minutes before al-Qahtani’s on his way. You get these fucks off this boat and I wipe it down and I’m gone.” He paused. “You and Jessup do what you’re going to do with them. But you be ready for my signal it’s a go. Because I’m not making it twice.”
Coburn said nothing, and I heard movement, felt Prendergast hop again, the boat rock a l
ittle for it. I heard a push of some kind, another low and heavy grunt from the stern: Unc.
I saw him on the dock out back of our house, him in a folding chair he’d pulled from the marine storage locker and sitting in light from a sun a couple fists still above the trees, a ghost of smoke off his cigar. Beyond him lay the marsh on the other side of the creek, the grasses all mid-spring colors, the brown of winter hustled out by the sharp green of new growth, a hard push of colors one against the other out there.
And in this silence I saw Mom, too, saw her beside me in our old tan Corolla, us driving away from the closing on the chunk of land at Hungry Neck and on our way to Landgrave for the very first time. I saw her black leather purse in her lap, the black suit and purple silk blouse she’d worn. I saw her smiling, her eyes straight ahead, and saw she was still pretty, her eyes still that same sharp green, her red hair still in its soft curls, a spray of freckles across the top of her nose what somebody’d think was cute.
“Stand up, you blind fuck,” Prendergast whispered hard, and I felt the boat give a quick totter, heard again movement, Unc’s grunts, then two stiff thuds, and Unc groaning.
“Stand,” Coburn said.
There was movement again, slow this time, and then I felt the croker sack whipped from off me, the rush of cool air behind it, and saw above me a shadow, what looked like Prendergast.
A thin wash of stars behind him.
“The easier you make this the quicker we’ll be done,” he whispered, and reached down to me, took hold one arm and pulled me to standing, but the pain in my eye and in my gut staggered me, swayed me to one side and another, no matter I tried to focus, tried to focus.
And still I figured if I pushed against him in some way I could topple him, his ankle like it was. I could butt him and push him and push him, and turn as I pushed him to where he’d be at the gunwale, and his ankle would give, and I could get him over the edge and into the creek and pluff mud, and Unc could butt Coburn somehow, and Five would see, and Tabitha could—
But as I stood there all I could do was snatch at a breath through my nose, tear at a breath, and try to stand firm.
