myself reaching for it in quite some time. I’d lost the habit, if not the memory of killing a child.
Wayne got down on his knees to inspect the bolt system on the legs of the cot and then looked around.
“Y’all got any tools?”
I was right about his mechanical inclination.
“I had to bend the metal of that strap to get it off, just worked it until it broke,” I said.
“Yeah, I seen that,” Wayne said, like I’d pulled some third- grader stunt on the thing. He got up and I watched as he walked to the sink, now disregarding me. He went through a drawer and came out with some silverware—a spoon, a couple of butter knives with blades so dull they’d have a time cutting butter. I’d passed them all over on my earlier inspection.
“So none of you guys seem to be injured from the hurricane,” I said, continuing my interview. “Your place must have held up pretty well.”
“Yeah,” he said, giving up nothing more. Not a storyteller.
I watched the kid set to the bolts, using the straight lengths of the two knife handles to pinch the metal nuts in parallel and then turn them. The fingers of his left hand worked in an odd but efficient manner, making up for the loss of his thumb. He’d adapted. Maybe this kid had never heard of the evolution of the opposable thumb that let man crawl out of swamps like this one a million years ago. Right now I was hoping for a little less sophistication in his perceptiveness.
“Mr. Morris said your camp was up to the northwest, so are you all from Belle Glade or Clewiston or what?” I said.
“Hell, no,” the kid reacted, like I’d put him in some rival high school. He started to go on but thought better of it.
“How ’bout I loosen these up and you can finger twist ’em off, sir,” he said instead, looking over at me before moving on to the next leg.
“Yeah, sure.”
I changed positions with him and we worked together. The kid was either naturally closed-mouthed or savvy enough not to let loose any more information about himself and his buddies than he was forced to. His could be an attitude from too many times in the backseat of a police cruiser or in the local juvenile lockup, or a simple backwoods avoidance of people unlike himself. A perceptive kid would have noticed the difference in our clothing, my speech, even in the way I moved. I’d already done the same with this trio. I was leaning toward the supposition that they were Gladesmen, or closely descended from. Easy in the water. None of them carried a sweat in the humidity, meaning their bodies were used to the climate. Their boots were old leather, the kind that was oiled and waterproofed the old-fashioned way. They were all lean, the leader with a cabled musculature that meant tough manual labor and a diet that was more local and natural than the empty calorie, fat-filled urban or suburban fare. But my eye had been a lazy one too. I’d searched the kid over, looking for clues, and missed the biggest one.
Wayne took a few steps back after he loosened all the nuts and stood while I finished the job. I looked up a couple of times, continuing to ask questions that might give me more information to size his crew up, give me some clue why they were rattling my internal cop alarms. A couple of times I caught him looking down at Sherry, who had gone quiet. It was hard to read her pain now or tell how much her head was in the moment or moving deep into survival mode, concentrating only on the internal, on keeping her core together. From where I was I couldn’t even see if her eyes were open.
Not for a moment did I think of the kid’s eyes roving over her body, the fabric of her sweats cut away almost up to her crotch when I’d cleaned and bandaged the leg wound. Her blouse, soaking wet and transparent, stretched across her breasts. Then she said something—“water”—in a rough whisper.
The kid jumped, and then started looking around.
“Over there. The bottle by the end of her cot,” I said, directing him.
He stepped over and picked up the bottle and moved to Sherry’s side. She turned her hand slightly, opened her palm and he had to bend over to get the bottle to her. But instead of taking it,