Imagine

by Jill Barnett

  For the next four years they tried to break him. They were still trying.

  He’d been standing in the sun for two days, his hands and feet tied to two log stakes that had been hammered into the ground. His hair stuck to his head in black sweaty clumps that had whips of silver gray tangled through it, its once-dark color worn like the leather straps of an overworked cat-o’-nine-tails.

  The corners of his eyes were creased with wrinkles—nature’s scars for every hard year of the forty he had survived. Hank Wyatt had resolute, determined eyes. They were gray, a carbonic iron color. Like a wall of steel those eyes reflected only the light that shone at them, giving no clue as to what went on behind them, but he was thinking. He had to think to survive.

  His skin was brown, fried by a sun so hot it would blister the skin off the new prisoners. His jaw was ruthlessly square, stubborn, and covered with a dark shadow of a beard that was uneven from trying to shave with a piece of metal scavenged from the dark corner of a stone cell block.

  He was tall, solid but lean. He had powerful, athletic arms made stronger from years of slinging a sledgehammer at the prison quarry. His legs were long and just as muscular. The weight of a chain gang either made men stronger or broke them.

  But now, Hank’s legs were stiff from standing. He refused to bend them. His bound hands were numb. His mind was not. His breath was shallow—a trick he’d mastered to fool the guards into thinking he was closer to passing out than he was.

  To stay alert, he concentrated with the sharpened ears of one who was desperate. He listened to the hone of tropical flies. They buzzed around him as if he were garbage. He heard the defeated cry of another prisoner’s punishment. He vowed no one would hear that sound from his throat.

  He listened to the rattle of chains and ankle cuffs, the constant, monotonous ringing of prisoners’ hammers smashing against rock in the quarry compounds. That sound could drive the mind from a weaker man.

  In the distance he could hear the haunting call of the sea—the waves pounding away at the island. And every so often, the caw of a seagull flying free.

  Sounds as far away as another lifetime. As close as madness.

  He’d been staked before. But this time he’d laid the groundwork so he would never be staked again. He listened to everything. To anything. Hell, to survive Hank would listen to himself sweat.

  It took two more days for them to think he was dead, or think him close enough to it. They cut the rope that kept his hands and feet tied to the stakes, dragged him to the center of the compound, then dropped him.

  No sound came from his lips. No movement. Nothing. They hit him with bucket after bucket of water. Fresh water. Drinking water. No staked prisoner had ever been able to resist licking at it or finally cracking and gulping the water after being so long without it.

  Only the dead lay unflinching. And Hank.

  “He’s dead.”

  Silence ticked by as it had for the past few days in minutes that seemed to take longer than a life sentence.

  “Kick him just to make certain.”

  Hank heard the shuffle of the guard’s boots. Near his head. He steeled himself for the blow.

  “Not there!” came a sharp command. “Here!” The bastard kicked him in the crotch.

  He awoke to the jar of a wagon stopping. There was a dull ache between his legs that told him he wasn’t dead. A reminder of his last conscious moment and the pain. He hadn’t doubled over. He hadn’t screamed. He had passed out.

  He lay on the bottom of the wagon, the weight of weaker prisoners, now dead men, alongside of him. He took a shallow breath and almost gagged. He didn’t know if the cause was the pain from his bruised groin or the stench of death surrounding him.

  He knew the routine. One priest and one guard buried the prisoners outside the compound walls. In a pit in the jungle.

  He waited, listening.

  Just his luck. No one spoke. The wagon seat creaked. Boots hit the ground with a thud. Birds screeched in the distance. Tropical insects droned and whistled and buzzed. The chains on the wagon tailgate rattled.

  Finally, a priest began to chant last rites in Latin. Slowly, one by one, the wagon was unloaded.

  He couldn’t screw this up, not now. Not when he’d come this far. But that dull ache burned through his groin again.

  Escape? He didn’t even know if he could stand. He thought of the last four years. Hell, he’d stand if it killed him.

  Someone gripped his ankles and yanked.

  The priest chanted and touched his forehead.

  Hank opened his eyes and shot upright, his fist raised. He knocked out the guard with a right cross, then stumbled to his feet.

  He scanned the area. There was no one but the stunned priest, who just stood there. Hank took a step toward him.

  The prayer book fell from the priest’s shaking hands.

  “Keep praying for me, Father.” Hank picked up the book and handed it to him. “I need all the help I can get.”

  The priest blinked once, then stared at him for a moment.

  Hank grinned. The priest took the prayer book. Then Hank punched him.

  Chapter 2

  Two days later, Port Helene, the north side of Dolphin Island

  Hank walked down the crowded cobbled street that separated the town of Port Helene from its busy wharf. Pulled low over his sharp eyes was the wide-brimmed black hat he’d stolen from the priest. His hands were shoved in the deep pockets of the man’s black tunic, and his fingers worried the rosary inside.

  To his left, brightly painted houses with deep verandas looked like a row of smiling colored teeth next to the narrow gray clapboard customs house and tall coconut palms that reigned over the west end of the wharf. Nearer the street, dockside fruit sellers stood at makeshift palm stands and hawked bananas and papayas, breadfruit and mangoes.

  Cotton-clad native women bought baskets of tropical fruit and fresh fish from peddlers who sold everything from food and machetes to tapa cloth and bamboo windpipes. Hank strolled through the crowds and managed to swipe three bananas and a harmonica.

  Lined up like prisoners during roll call were wooden pallet crates, keg barrels, and stacks of thick island hemp. At the far eastern end of the dock was a wall of green lumber and three wagons of quarry rock for export to another island. He stared at the rock for a moment—a black memory of the last four years. Then he took a deep breath of fresh air and moved away.

  A small local band played lively island music with bamboo pipes and hip-high pod drums while native girls and boys sold sugar cane and seashells from woven palm baskets slung on their small brown backs. Someone shouted to a fishing boat coming into dock, and the fishermen chattered back about the fat profits they’d make from a full net of tuna.

  Nuns in their broad headdresses trotted along in twos, and other priests, their dark hats bobbing through the crowd, blessed the fish for Friday’s meal, the goats, donkeys, even the pets of small children. Milling about the customs house were island plantation owners dressed in stark white. They haggled with rich merchants in dark tweed suits, sporting derbies and fat wallets as ripe for picking as the bright pink island mangoes.

  All around him were the sounds of life and freedom, things that for too many long, hot days had seemed as unreal as a distant memory. While he peeled a banana and ate it, he stood there and watched for the briefest of moments—the sights, the sounds, the taste of freedom.

  When he had been inside his cell, staked, or locked in a box, his mind had focused on seeing and living these things again. That had been part of what drove him to survive in a place where the chances of survival had the same odds as getting a home run on a bunt.

  But as he stood there, watching island life go on without him, he remembered something else he’d forgotten. He had never fit in. Anywhere. And he still didn’t. The trappings were there. He was wearing a black tunic, like the Catholic priests on the island, but he wasn’t a man of God anymore than he was part of this life outside the prison
.

  He was an outsider. Always had been. For a reason. There was safety in being alone. He did things the way he wanted. And carried no one else’s taint, only his own. Survival was easier alone. He’d learned early that even if he played by the rules, most people assumed he didn’t.

  In prison, he’d forgotten his solitary place in life. Now, as he stood there free, in the middle of where he had craved to be, he remembered where he actually was, where he always had been—outside, on the fringes of the life most people lived.

  He tossed the banana peel away as easily as he had accepted the isolation fate dealt him, and he walked on.

  He used the camouflage of the crowd so he could safely scan the dock.

  There were five ships.

  And no dogs. He’d only heard the hounds twice: once when he’d been running only for half a day and again that morning before he’d crossed the steep rocky gorge that separated the north and south sides of the island.

  The first time the dogs had trailed him he’d used river mud to muck up his scent. The last time he’d used a tin of pepper he’d stolen from a small traders’ outpost. He’d known he had one weakness: he’d never been able to run worth a damn. But he figured by crossing that gorge he had about two hours on them. Two hours to get away.

  At dockside, two of the ships were ready to depart. One was a sleek wooden clipper, L’Amelie. The other was a squat ocean steamer with a steel hull that rose up to the main deck. It was small, one-tenth the size of a large ocean liner, the kind of double-stack steamship that served as both a packet and freighter between the larger islands of the South Seas. The ship’s name was obscured by a group of pallet boxes and a wooden cage filled with a few braying goats.

  After four years in a French hellhole like Leper’s Gate, there was no decision. Hank finished the banana and moved toward the island steamer. He walked with slow purpose toward the boarding ramp, eyeing the crewman who handled the loading of the ship.

  Sneaking on board was one option. He examined the ramp, then the winches that lifted the pallets and crates, weighing his chances of making it on board unseen.

  It wasn’t a cinch.

  He rubbed the stubble on his jaw that had turned into a week’s worth of itchy beard, then he weighed his options with what another prisoner once called his knack for mother wit.

  He had liked that. Mother wit.

  He could use some of that wit now. He supposed he could bluff his way aboard, then stow somewhere. He spent a moment listening and trying to gauge the attention and manner of the crewman on the dock.

  The crowd suddenly shifted. There was a commotion nearby.

  He froze, not looking and half waiting to feel the cold barrel of a French rifle pressed against his unlucky neck.

  “Let me pass, please! That’s my ship!” It was the sweet voice of a woman. Better yet, an American woman.

  He turned, and the crowd shifted again, shoving and pushing. There was a little shriek of surprise, then like manna from heaven, a tall blonde fell into his arms.

  Oooo-wee. My lucky day.

  She grabbed his priest’s tunic to catch her balance. He steadied her, holding her waist with both hands.

  She was so tall that her nose came up to his chin and the feathers on her brown hat brushed his face. He caught a whiff of that distinctive scent of a female. Something he hadn’t smelled in years. He savored it for just a brief second.

  She released her death grip on his black tunic and glanced up at him from a face too damned gorgeous to be real.

  “Sweet Jesus Christ,” he muttered, then caught himself with a cough and added, “. . . will bless you, my dear.”

  She straightened swiftly, her face flushed. “I’m so terribly sorry, Father.”

  He wasn’t the least bit sorry. Hell, she was the damn best-looking woman he’d ever seen. And she was a woman, not some green eighteen-year-old fresh from her daddy. She looked to be . . . thirty. And all ripe female.

  She jammed her cockeyed hat back on a thick wad of blond hair, giving him a direct look from an unusual pair of golden yellow eyes. She reached out and touched his chest, brushing the wrinkles from the front of his tunic.

  Mating howls went off in his head.

  “Please forgive me. I’m late.” She removed her hand and waved a finger at the ramp, her voice rushed. “My ship is leaving.”

  He glanced at the crates still waiting to be loaded, then at the dark spout of coal smoke burping from the stacks. “You have a few minutes.”

  “Do I? Oh.” She seemed to relax a bit and gave him a quiet smile. “I haven’t taken many voyages.”

  Come to Papa, sweetheart. I’ll take you on a voyage.

  Her gaze had shifted to his hands, which were still gripping her waist, then with an unsettling frankness, she looked him square in the eye again.

  He released her, then touched the brim of his priest’s hat and gave her his best “The Lord be with you.”

  She smiled again, and he stifled a deep groan. Whoa, boy.

  She had started to turn away.

  In an old habit borne from too many years spent in rum joints, he raised his hand to swat her on her sweet butt.

  She paused midturn, snapping her fingers as she murmured, “Oh! I knew I forgot something.” She glanced up.

  His hand was level with her nose.

  She grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously. “Thank you, Father!”

  A second later she had whipped around and was rushing toward the gangplank.

  Hank stared at his right hand, then at the back of her tall figure as she ran up the ship’s ramp. He grinned, then called out, “May He shine His countenance upon you.”

  She stopped halfway up the ramp and waved, then turned back around.

  “And give you peace!” His gaze shifted to her ass. What a piece . . .

  He just stood there, even after she had disappeared onboard. Legs, he thought. Beneath that skirt were yards of long legs. He shook his head and gave a short whistle.

  A moment later he felt the nudge of the crowd that still milled around the dockside. He turned back and looked.

  No dogs. No guards.

  No French militia.

  Nothing but the crowd.

  He grinned, stark and white and full of the devil, then strolled toward the gangplank. He shoved his right hand back into his pocket. In his left hand, he casually tossed a small leather pocketbook he’d picked from her purse.

  He approached the crewman. “The young woman who just went on board dropped her pocketbook in the crowd.”

  The man appeared to listen with only half an ear. He cast a quick glance at the small purse, then at Hank. “Yes . . . yes, Father.” He waved Hank aboard the steamer. “Go aboard and find her.”

  Hank walked up the ramp toward his freedom, whistling a barrel house rendition of Ave Maria. He handed the pocketbook to a steward and waited until the man disappeared in the passage, then casually made his way along the railing toward the stern.

  He slipped up a stairway to the upper deck and moved toward the closest lifeboat. Covertly, he unsnapped the tarp, glancing left, then right. The crew was busy readying for departure.

  In a flash he stowed under the tarp. He quickly refastened the tarp snaps.

  Canvas life vests were clipped to rings in the lifeboat and oilskins and blankets were wrapped in an extra tarp. A tin box of supplies, a lantern, and a container of water were wedged into the bow. He pried open a can of potbeef and devoured it, the other stolen banana, and a few crackers, then washed them down with some of the water. The bread and cheese he’d swiped from an outpost the night before had been a better meal. Probably because he’d washed that down with three stolen beers.

  He took a few of the life vests, blew them up, and lay back, using them as pillows and the tarps and blankets as a bed, and he waited. Before long the steamer whistled and moved away from the dock. The ship rocked on the sea, slowly, like the hips of a native girl.

  Hank took a deep breath, the first
one he’d taken in a helluva long time. One more breath of freedom, and it all caught up with him, the torture, the running, the isolated hell of the past four years.

  God . . . He rubbed his face with a hand and let his head sag back against the vests. He took in deep chestfuls of air. Sea air, not the heavy tight air of a cell. He closed his eyes, and before long every muscle in his hard and tense body had relaxed.

  His days were his again. His alone. His nights, too. No more bars. Except those that served cold beer and strong whiskey.

  No more stakes, just beefsteaks, thick and rare.

  No chains. No pounding the rocks. No stifling cells where sleep was impossible. Sleep was possible. Real sleep. Not those catnaps he’d taken for so many years. He had the freedom to sleep.

  For the first time in too long he felt as if life had dealt him an ace.

  Chapter 3

  By midnight, he’d been dealt his deuce.

  The ship had pitched and rolled in a brawl with the sea. Hank had gripped the rim of the lifeboat at least a hundred times, cursing every time. After an endless hour of bad weather, the wind stopped howling as suddenly as it had all begun, and the sea grew calm.

  He lay back in the boat and listened. He could hear the crew rushing on the deck to secure things. He heard their laughter and a few bawdy jokes, the sailors’ way of dealing with the aftermath of fear. Soon it was calm and quiet again, so he closed his eyes.

  He awakened with a start, his pulse racing like someone in the throes of a too-real nightmare. He jerked up, fist swinging. An old reflex. His fist connected with the tarp, and he stared at it for a disoriented second. He rubbed a hand over his face, then shook his head. He remembered where he was.

  He listened again, his senses alert. There was nothing. He didn’t know how long he’d slept. It felt as if it had been only a few minutes, but it could have been a few hours.

  He lay back on the life vests, his hands still clammy, his pulse still racing. Uneasy. The air was absolutely still. Absolutely silent. Yet he was as tense as he had been in prison.