Midnight in Ruby Bayou (26 page)

“Neither one of you is thinking real clear.”

Faith ignored Walker, just as she had ignored all his attempts to ship her back to Seattle. She had no intention of going home. There was too much to see, to feel, to absorb right here. Designs shimmered and condensed in her mind as she studied the exotic landscape of salt marsh and palmetto alternating with live oak, pine, and deciduous trees on the drier ground. At low tide the marsh had a heady, earthy, primeval scent, as though time had slowed to the speed of a big reptile sunning on the side of a drainage canal.

“That alligator looks like a big truck tire that's come unwrapped,” Faith said as they passed a road-killed gator.

Walker sighed and knew he wasn't going to get any further on the subject of her going back to Seattle. “Tires don't have teeth.”

“I didn't say I was going to walk up and pet it.”

“Well, thank God for small favors.”

“Someone I know is in a snit.”

“Shit,” he hissed under his breath.

“No,
snit
.”

Smiling despite himself, Walker reached out and tugged lightly on her hair. “You're a brat.”

“Thank you.” Then she laughed softly and reveled in the freedom of being able to tease a man and not worry about his tender ego. “You're fun, Owen Walker. Like having a brother without years of baggage to juggle.”

Walker's smile turned down slightly. “That's me, sugar. Everybody's brother.”

Faith smiled out at the winter-brown marsh basking in the sun, but her smile faded when she remembered that she once had asked Walker if he was an older brother. He had answered,
Not anymore.
At the time she had let the subject drop. But now she didn't want to. She wanted to know more about Walker with an urgency she didn't question.

“You never talk about your family,” she said.

He didn't answer. He was still wondering how long he would be able to keep his hands off Faith. Not long enough, he was afraid. Not unless she went back to Seattle real soon. An hour, max.

Just the scent of her nearby in the car had made him hard as stone.

“Walker?”

He bit back a searing curse. This was what came of letting her think he was a kind and smiling brother type.

He shouldn't want her.

He shouldn't touch her.

And he wouldn't be able to put her off the subject of his family without making her mad, which he couldn't afford to do and still stay close enough to do his job.

“My parents gave up on each other when I was twelve,” he said flatly.

She waited, but he didn't say anything more. “Did you stay with your mother?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see your dad much?”

“Not until I was sixteen.”

“Then what?”

Walker gave her a narrow look. “What do you think?”

“If I knew, I wouldn't ask.”

He hissed a word under his breath and concentrated on his driving. Silence grew until it was a living presence inside the car. Walker wanted to put his fist through the windshield, but he controlled the urge without really noticing it. Faith had done nothing to earn his anger. She sure hadn't asked to have him panting after her like a dog after a bitch in heat.

“Steve, the guy who moved in after Ma and Dad split,” Walker said carefully, “didn't like having two teenage boys underfoot, eating food and such. So she bought two bus tickets and dumped Lot and me on Dad.”

“Lot? You have a brother?”

“Not anymore.”

This time Faith didn't let Walker's bleak expression warn her away. “What happened?”

“He died.”

She closed her eyes. “I'm sorry.”

“So am I,” he said bitterly. “But sorry doesn't get him back, does it?”

When the silence in the car began to eat at Walker, he glanced toward Faith. The stricken look on her face made him feel lower than a gator's tail for lashing out at her over something she had nothing to do with. His fingers clenched around the wheel. Slowly he forced them to relax.

“It was a long time ago,” he said finally.

“I don't think—” Her voice broke. She swallowed and tried again, only this time she forced herself not to visualize her own family, the pain of losing someone who was as much a part of her as her own blood and bone and memories. “I don't think there's enough time on earth to get used to losing a sibling.”

Walker couldn't disagree, especially when he had been to blame for Lot's death.

“Was he like you?” Faith asked softly.

“Like me? How?”

“Smart. Gentle. Good-looking. Dark. A smile like a flash of light.”

Walker let out a long, silent breath. Later he would sort out how he felt about being smart, gentle, and good-looking. For now it was all he could do to allow himself to remember his younger brother.

“Black hair,” Walker said, his voice huskier than he knew. “Yellow cat eyes with eyelashes so long they tangled. Too mean to be pretty, but still almost beautiful. The devil's own looks. Tough in a lean, long-boned way. Street-smart in some ways and dumber than a rock in others. Women started staring at him when he was twelve. When he was thirteen he found out why. He was twenty when he died.”

“Jealous boyfriend?”

“A deal that went sour.” Walker's voice warned her not to go any further.

Faith ignored the warning. “What kind of deal gets a kid killed?”

“The kind where he's counting on his older brother to cover his ass and his older brother fucks up big time and the trusting younger brother dies with a surprised look on his face.”

“I don't understand.”

“Lucky you.”

Walker turned down one of the narrow, winter-dusty side streets that led off into the Hilton Head Island scrub. Pine straw clung to everything like long, spiky brown moss, covering roofs and overflowing the gutters of ramshackle houses that were half hidden by overgrown vegetation.

A high, sheer veil of clouds condensed across the sun. Wind stalked the marsh and pounced on the narrow channels that wound among clumps of man-high grass. The road turned sharp angles along old property lines and climbed up on a low, sandy ridge that was covered with wicked palmetto and vine-shrouded trees. Pools of brackish water winked like alligator eyes in the scrub, marking the slow dissolving of land into marsh and marsh into sea.

Another turn, another low rise, and live oaks bearing burdens of shriveled resurrection ferns and silvery Spanish moss appeared among the palmetto and pines. Pools of black water became a slow creek coiling across the nearly flat land, imprisoned like an immense snake between banks of dense trees. Then the marsh took over. Sometimes there was only mud marking the margin of the creek. Sometimes oysters clung to every wet surface like dirty white ruffles.

Bronze, shimmering, dark, secretive. The winter salt marsh was all of that. It was also as graceful as a dancer, as untamed as the flight of a hawk.

“It's beautiful,” Faith said softly.

Walker grunted. “Tell me that when you're covered in bug bites.”

“Don't you like it? You were born here.”

He shrugged. “The Low Country is like family. Doesn't much matter how you feel about it. It's bred into your bones.”

Her smile came and went as quickly as a cat's-paw of wind. “It helps if you like it.”

“I went hungry too often to like it.”

“After your parents divorced?” she guessed. Absent fathers too often forgot about supporting their children.

“Even before. Pa was a drinker, a mechanic, a plant thief, and a gator hunter. Ma was a waitress at a shrimp shack. Sometimes she stole food for us when hunting was lean.”

Faith almost flinched at the deadly neutrality of Walker's voice. “Good for her. What does a plant thief do?”

“Steal plants.”

“From?”

“Marshes. Swamps. Government land, mostly. Wherever the rare plants grow, the endangered species, the ones people will pay money to collect or to grind into folk remedies for everything from gallstones to brewer's wilt.”

“Gallstones, I know about. Brewer's wilt, I don't.”

“That's when too much beer wilts what a good ol' boy is most proud of.”

Faith blinked, then laughed as she understood. “Brewer's wilt, huh? Never heard it called that. So your dad helped out men where they, um, needed it the most.”

Walker's smile flashed briefly. “Looked at that way, he was a real do-gooder. Pa figured the various government agencies had enough plants so that they wouldn't miss a few here and there. Mostly they didn't.”

“What happened when they did?”

“Ma worked double shifts until the fine was paid or Dad got lucky hunting gators.”

“Which was also illegal, right?”

“You bet. They paid real good, though. Tasted good, too.”

“So does anything, if you're hungry enough.”

“We were hungry enough to eat mud. I had a trapline when I was six. What I caught, we ate. When the traps were empty I caught the kind of licking that taught me not to come home without food for the table.”

She heard the simple truth underneath Walker's casual tone. The thought of him as a lonely, skinny boy haunting the swamps for anything edible sent a shaft of sadness through her. She didn't like thinking of him as hungry, poor, caught between a drunken father and the need to survive.

“It got a little easier after Lot was old enough to have a trapline of his own,” Walker said, remembering. “Then I could concentrate on hunting. Pa wasn't much account when he was drinking, but sober he was a fine hunter and a better mechanic. He took off for Texas when I was twelve. Said he would come back and get us when he found work.”

“Did he?”

“Find work?”

“Come back.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you didn't see him until your mother bought you and your brother bus tickets to Texas.”

“You're learning, sugar.”

She looked out the window, but she no longer saw the countryside. She kept thinking of a young boy taking on the swamps and bayous and marshes in order to eat.

“Don't look so grim,” he said finally. “It sounds worse than it was. Lot and I had some fine old times hunting and fishing and hell-raising. We weren't long on polish, but we knew the country better than the teacher's pet knew multiplication tables. When Steve was riding a mean, Lot and I just went out in the swamp until he was too drunk to make a fist.”

“Your mother's boyfriend beat you?” Faith heard her own shock and said quickly, “I'm sorry. That sounds so naïve. I'm not. Not really. It's just the thought of a man raising his hand against children and their own mother allowing it . . .”

Walker shrugged again, although it cost too much to be casual. He had never understood his mother. In time, he had given up trying. “Ma needed a man nearby, and she didn't mind a drinker. That's why when it came time to choose, she chose that drunken, woman-beating son of a bitch.”

Faith gave Walker a quick glance. There was nothing gentle about him now. Even his beard couldn't conceal the hard line of his mouth. “You were better off with your father.”

“Wasn't much choice when it came down to it. The night I stomped Steve into the mud, Ma bought Lot and me bus tickets and sent us off before he came to. Took me three weeks, but I tracked down Pa. He was working at a ragtag little airport on the Gulf. He taught me about engines. One of the flyboys taught me about airplanes and books. I took to it like fire to pine straw.”

She looked again, drawn by the change in him. He loved flying. It was there in the easing of his drawn face, in the huskiness and pleasure vibrating in his voice, and in the gentle, remembering curve of his lips.

“By the time I was nineteen, I was shuttling stuff in and out of Central America and the Caribbean,” Walker added. “It was the first real job I had.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Supplies and mail and medicine, most of the time. Some missionary pamphlets and Bibles. The occasional rich eco-tourist. That sort of thing.” He gave her a sideways glance. “No drugs. I was young, but I wasn't stupid. I left that to my brother.” Walker's smile was like his memories, bittersweet. “Lot had enough young-and-dumb for both of us.”

Walker didn't mention that he had also run guns for the U.S. government or its surrogates from time to time. It wasn't something he talked about. The pay had been good. The numbered bank accounts fattened on schedule. That was all a ragged twenty-year-old who was supporting his father and younger brother could ask.

A gust of wind moved over the marsh like an invisible comb, making grass bow and sway in rippling lines. Walker lowered the window and let the soft air run through his hair. Out on the water, a shrimper was coming in. Its working arms, the two long booms that held the nets, now were folded straight up like a butterfly's wings. Drying nets added to the illusion of something winged at rest.

“If we had time,” Walker said, “I'd take you down to Tybee Island to watch the shrimpers come in. They sail in under a bridge so low that they have to put down their trawling arms to get under the span. A pretty sight at sunset, with the pelicans lined up on the pilings like kids watching a parade.”

“Really?”

He smiled. “God's truth. But it's the dolphins that really put on a show. Somehow they always know when a boat is coming in to unload at the packing house. The dolphins come pouring in from the ocean and start leaping and rolling and playing along the wharf. They know that when the shrimp tanks are flushed, a lot of juicy tidbits will be washed right into their lazy, grinning mouths.”

Faith laughed. “I'd like to see that.”

He smiled at the sound of her laughter. It was like the air, soft and warm and alive with possibilities. “I'd like it, too.”

She smiled at him in return and decided not to ask any more right now about his brother and childhood and death. “How much farther to Ruby Bayou?”