Chapter 8
CLINT
The bed was good. That was the problem.
A bad bed gives a man something to do. You negotiate with it.
You find the one position that works and you defend it all night,.
The work of that is almost like rest. This bed was wide and clean and quiet, in a room the size of some houses I've slept in.
It took my body and left me alone with the other thing.
The other thing was my head.
I lay there in the dark with my hands folded on my chest like a man practicing for his own funeral. I thought about why I was in Charleston.
Nothing came. I turned it every way it would turn. The brothers needed me. For what, in a city like this—old money, old brick, water on three sides. I built theories and knocked them down.
An hour of that. Maybe more. The clock on the nightstand said 1:40 in numbers designed not to wake anybody.
Sleep and I have an arrangement, and the arrangement is that sleep does what it wants.
Some nights, it comes. Other nights, it stands off somewhere and watches me, and no amount of lying still will call it in.
I learned a long time ago not to fight that.
Fighting it is how a man ends up staring at a ceiling hating his own heartbeat.
When I can't sleep, I walk.
I said it out loud to the dark—fuck it—and got up and dressed. Jeans, shirt, boots. The pistol went in my waistband at the small of my back, and the shirt went down over it. A man walking a strange city at two in the morning either has a reason to feel easy or he makes one.
The hallway was empty. The elevator was empty. The lobby was almost empty.
There was a girl at the desk. Not Sasha.
I noticed the disappointment before I could do anything about it. It went through me, small and quick. Of course, she wasn't there. It was the middle of the night, and the woman had a home somewhere. Whatever hours she kept, she'd earned the ones she wasn't keeping.
The girl at the desk was maybe twenty, hair up in a clip, bent over a textbook thick enough to stop a round.
She had a highlighter in her teeth and a legal pad going and the hunted look of the young under deadline.
She heard my boots and her head came up.
She smiled at me the way you're trained to smile at guests, and then a little past it, because it was the middle of the night and we were the only two people in the world.
I glanced at the book. Chemistry, the college kind. Diagrams like chicken wire.
"Test tomorrow?"
"Yes, sir." She took the highlighter out of her teeth. "Cramming all the bits I can."
"Good luck."
"Thank you, sir."
I kept walking. Behind me, I heard the pages start up again before I was through the doors, and I thought, she'll be fine. The ones who worry were always going to pass.
Outside, Charleston was doing something to the air.
Every city has a night smell, and I've cataloged more of them than I could count.
Diesel and cold dust, that's West Texas.
Baltimore is brine and asphalt. This was different.
This was salt and pluff mud and jasmine and old stone that had been holding the day's heat and was letting it back out slow, like a rock by a campfire.
There was water in the air without it raining.
The air had weight, and the weight was soft.
Walking into it was like walking into a room where somebody had just finished cooking.
I picked a direction and went.
That's the whole method. There isn't anything else to it.
One foot, then the other one. I don't plan a route, because planning a route makes it a task, and the entire point is that it isn't one.
My legs run the machinery and my eyes run the perimeter.
Somewhere underneath all that, the sediment starts to settle.
I was aware. I'm always aware. That never shuts off. I stopped wishing it would around the time I understood it was the reason I was still alive.
I clocked the parked cars and the gaps between the streetlights and the man asleep in a doorway on Meeting Street with his shoes set neatly beside him, the way a man sets his shoes when the shoes are most of what he owns.
None of it required anything of me. It went in, got weighed, got filed.
Awareness is not the enemy of quiet. For me, it's the doorway to it.
Some men sit cross-legged on a mat and count their breathing. I put ground under my feet. Same church. Different pew.
The city wasn't asleep. It was two-something in the morning and pockets of it were wide awake—light and noise spilling out of a bar on East Bay, a knot of tourists on a corner laughing at something on a phone, two kitchen guys in aprons sitting on a curb sharing a cigarette in that boneless way of men just off a double.
A carriage horse smell lingered on one block with no horse in sight.
Down a side street, a woman sang a piece of something through an open second-floor window, no words I could catch, just the shape of it coming down through the dark.
Festive, but respectful about it. That was the vibe. The town was enjoying itself at a volume that said it intended to be allowed to do this again tomorrow.
It wasn't Texas. Texas at night is a big, dark room with the stars turned all the way up.
The towns sit in it like campfires, small and far apart.
This place was the opposite of that—close, layered, three hundred years of brick leaning over the sidewalk, alleys that went crooked for reasons nobody alive remembered.
In Texas, the land ignores you. Here, the city paid attention.
Every street felt watched by its own windows.
Most nights, I'd have called that crowded.
Tonight, I liked it.
That surprised me, and I let it. I walked down streets named for dead men and the live oaks came over the top of me like a roof, beards of moss hanging still in the dead air, gas lamps actually burning—actual flame, wobbling in glass boxes on the walls like the city hadn't fully committed to the twentieth century, let alone this one.
My boots were loud on the brick and then quiet on the asphalt and then loud again.
I crossed a square with a fountain running for nobody.
Mile by mile, the sediment settled. It always does.
There's nothing a long hike can't cure.
My father used to say that.
He'd say it standing in the yard at first light with a canteen in each hand, and seven boys would groan like one animal, because we had horses.
That was the insult of it. We had good horses standing right there in the pen, watching us go, and that man would lead us out across that hardpan on foot, hours of it, lechuguilla and dust and the sun coming up mean, all of us grumbling two paces behind him.
He'd just walk. He never once turned around to see if we were keeping up. Knowing we were.
I laughed. Because it's a funny thing, what sticks.
That man said ten thousand sentences to me before he went, and I couldn't give you fifty of them now.
Whole years of him have worn away like a creek bank.
But that one line went in like a fence staple.
I've spent the better part of my life proving it—one long hike, thirty years wide.
Looking for the cure.
Sometimes, I found it. A long walk clears me the way nothing else on this earth clears me. It takes the noise off. Ninety percent of whatever I'm hauling drops away somewhere around the third mile, every time, reliable as gravity.
But it never touched the last ten percent.
The last ten percent is him.
I made a peace with that a long time ago, or I made a treaty, anyway.
The terms are simple. I don't go looking for the ache, and the ache doesn't ambush me in daylight.
It keeps to nights like this one. Because on nights like this one, on a strange street in a strange town with the world gone quiet, there's still a boy in me, standing where the caliche meets the blacktop—who believes, in the sealed-off way a jar holds air, that the search never actually ended.
That every walk since has secretly been the same walk.
And that on the next corner, around the next turn, under the next gas lamp, I might look up, and there he'd be.
Walking toward me. Coming back.
Dad.
It has never happened. It was not going to happen tonight, on a peninsula fifteen hundred miles from the road where I last watched him go.
Tonight, I found I was all right with that.
That was the strange part. I stopped on a corner under a lamp and stood with it a minute, checking it the way you check a healed bone.
There was a lightness in me. It had been there since—I ran it backward, honestly, because a man should know his own inventory.
Since the diner? Putting those two on the concrete had felt like work done, and work done has a shine to it.
Since Cash? Seeing my brother settled like that, seeing whatever it was he'd found—that had moved something, no question.
Or since a hallway of a hotel, and a woman with her shoulder against a doorframe, telling a stranger about Dubai with her hands cutting the air. Coming apart a little, right there in front of me, and putting herself back together prouder than she'd been before it.
I shook my head and kept walking.
It was somewhere south of there, down along the water, that the back of my neck went up.
I didn't break stride. That's the first rule and the oldest one—the body reports, and the body doesn't ask you to do anything stupid about it.
I kept my pace exactly what it had been and let everything else come up to speed.
Ears. Edges of the eyes. The map in my head, which never shuts off, lit up with the last quarter mile behind me: the parked cars, the porch lights, the one window with a curtain that had been open on my first pass down this street and was open still.
Someone was watching me.
I've been watched by professionals on multiple continents and by amateurs everywhere else, and my instrument for it has never once lied to me.
It's not a thought. It's older than thought.
It lives in the same place as the thing that turns a herd all at once.
Every man in my former line of work either learns to trust it or gets buried by men who did.
So, I trusted it. I gave no sign, and I trusted it.
I came off the narrow street at the next corner and put myself on a wider one, water on my left, good sightlines, streetlamps in a row going away like fence posts. Public ground. If it was going to come, I'd make it come across the open.
Nothing came.
I walked six blocks of that seawall with the harbor breathing beside me, black and patient, a container ship sitting way out in the channel lit up like a small town.
I gave whoever it was every opportunity a courteous man can give.
I stopped once and looked at the water a while, hands loose, back open to the street—an invitation, if anybody wanted to accept it.
Nobody did.
No car rolled slow. No footsteps checked when mine checked. No shape detached itself from any of the hundred shadows I was tracking without looking at them. By every measure I owned, every one I'd bet my life on for years, that street was empty of anything that meant me harm.
And the feeling didn't lift.
That was the part I turned over as I walked.
It didn't sharpen and it didn't fade. It just sat there, even and steady, less like a man in a doorway and more like—I worked for it—more like the city itself.
Like the whole old town had one eye, and the eye had been shut when I got here, and somewhere in the last few hours, without any fuss, it had come open. And turned. And found me.
Not hostile. That's what I couldn't square. Thirty years of reading intent off the night air, and the read I got was not threat.
The read I got was noted.
Strange.
I didn't like it, but there was nothing to do about it. Those two facts have shared a bunk my whole life. Best to keep walking.
So, I did. I walked the seawall to the end and came up through a park where the fountains were shut down for the night.
I went on, street after street, letting the miles do what miles do.
Somewhere in there, the feeling of the eye faded, or I got used to it.
I've never been sure those are different things.
I walked until the sky over the harbor went from black to a dark, waiting blue. The first gulls started up. My legs finally sent word that the account was settled.
Four in the morning, by the clock in a church tower that had been telling this town the time since before Texas was Texas.
I turned back toward The Palmetto Rose. The gas lamps were still burning on the quiet streets, steady little fires in their boxes, and I came up the block toward the hotel with my whole body finally ready to be done.
There's nothing a long hike can't cure, my father had said.
He was mostly right. He was ninety percent right.
I went up the steps and in through the doors. The girl at the desk lifted her head from the chicken wire and gave me a tired smile. I nodded at her and took the stairs.