I wanted so badly to run into their arms and join their routines of afternoon casseroles, evening board games, school-night early bedtimes. Any quiet mundanity—I’d take it and love it and never want anything else, I’d swear to it.
But even these people were scattering, half grinning with the anticipation of the stories they’d tell about the outrageous dispute they’d seen at lunch. Only Crying John remained at my father’s side. He took a clean towel from a cook and placed it in Harnett’s hand, then lifted that hand so that it applied pressure to the wound. Harnett shook off the man’s grip and looked away in shame. With nothing but a lugubrious frown, Crying John slipped through shoulders and became just another plaid shirt receding from spilled food and broken dishes. I thought, but wasn’t sure, that I heard a distant muttering: “C’mon, Foulie.”
Braver legs approached. “You okay, mister?”
Harnett checked the towel. It was deep red. At his feet, blood made moth blots across the tile. He wiped his slick face and neck and tossed the towel onto the destroyed table.
“The truck,” he told me.
“Good,” I said, tearing my eyes from the gore and scooping up my biology text. “Let’s go home.”
We pushed through the crowd and were outside. Boggs was nowhere.
“We’re not going home,” Harnett said as we carved the cold morning air. The sidewalk behind him was spattered with red.
“What? But school. My test.”
“Lionel.” For once he ignored the caskets tasting fresh air across the street. “We talk to Lionel.”
5.
BLUE MOUNTAINS, YELLOW FORESTS, black miles of scorched highway—landscapes metamorphosed in ways I’d never imagined as we barreled through West Virginia, then Virginia, and on into North Carolina. Harnett drove so fast I could feel the tires battle their axles.
As we neared Lionel’s home in the Outer Banks, the landscape adjusted yet again to long, shimmering inlets and grassy flatlands giving rise to tall fronded trees and spiked bushes. Houses were built on stilts. Storefronts were pink and turquoise and waved flags that looked beaten by centuries of sand. And yes, sand—it was everywhere, shifting in random patches along the shoulder, rippling across the highway, piled intentionally in front lawns and speared with novelty flamingoes. I lowered the window and tasted fish. Harnett cranked the wheel, and for the next half hour we traveled parallel to an ocean I wanted badly to see. The surf shops and seafood restaurants ebbed. Only when there was nothing left at all did Harnett turn down an unmarked path.
He killed the engine a respectful distance away from a charming, if crooked, white house with pink trim. For a moment we sat listening to the overheated engine. Then he got out and I followed, and the ground was so solid I nearly fell.
The front door squealed and a cane stabbed its way into the driveway. It was an elderly man sporting a floppy beach hat, sunglasses, and an unbuttoned shirt that revealed a gaunt torso and sparse curls of white hair. Harnett met him in the middle of the yard. They stopped a few feet from each other.
“It’s Baby, isn’t it?” Lionel’s voice broke into octaves almost musical. “Baby’s dead. Baby’s dead.”
Harnett shook his head. “We just spoke to him.”
With a liver-spotted hand he flipped the clipped-on shades from his bifocals and examined the brown rings of blood encircling Harnett’s skull.
“Must’ve been some conversation,” he said.
“He’s up to something and I don’t know what—”
Lionel waved for silence. “Please. You’re tired and hungry. We’ll save unpleasantness for a bit.” He stretched his neck toward the truck, a smile playing at his lips. “Where’s Grinder?”
The remorse was overwhelming.
Harnett faked indifference. “She broke.”
Lionel’s face fell. There was a complicated moment of give and take between the men, hard emotions fought down and painted over with softer ones, possibly for my benefit. “I’m sorry, Ken. She was a good instrument. You’ll find another, I’m sure of it.”
Then he looked at me. Even swaddled in folds of skin, the brown eyes sparkled.
Harnett hooked a thumb my direction. “The kid.”
Lionel took an unsteady step, poked my foot with his cane, and laughed. He reached down and took up my hand. His palm was dry and his bones, as they squeezed, felt fragile. Still I could see the ghost of his former physique.
“Don’t fret,” he said softly. “All instruments break. All it means is that they have served their purpose. It’s all any of us can ask, really.” I found myself nodding, strangely heartened by how the term instrument could refer