Free There's Blood on the Moon Tonight by Bryn Roar Page B

D-A-D-D-D-YYYYY!!!”
    Two days later Jessie’s body washed up on the sands of Crater Cove. A sand dollar’s throw from the log home he’d built with his own hands. Every citizen on Moon attended his funeral; even that white trash, the Noonans,’ felt obliged to show their respects. Working the sea has always been one of the most dangerous professions known to man. There are a hundred-and-one ways to lose your life on the open water, but Jessie Huggins had succumbed to the number one killer: He’d fallen overboard. And since he employed no mates, not since his son went out on his own, there had been no one to help him in his time of need. This just added to the weight of guilt and grief Ham carried on his shoulders. He felt like he should have been there with his daddy, rather than on his own boat. But the decision to go out on his own had always been Jessie’s, not Ham’s to make. His daddy had insisted he go his own way! And to insure that his reluctant son did just that, Jessie had given Ham his own shrimp boat as a present on his wedding day. Besides, Jessie Huggins preferred to fish alone; everyone knew that. The man had a solitary soul that only the lonely sea could appease.
    Nevertheless, Ham was unable to forgive himself for not being there when his old man needed him most. Sadly enough, it was a feeling he would know again, in the not too distant future. As if God was piling it on, three weeks after his father’s death, Ham suffered another devastating blow. His mother passed on in her sleep.
    Jessie’s sudden death had left Reva heartbroken and unwilling to carry on. The cabin Ham and his new bride had been sharing with his parents was now theirs alone.
    As was Jessie’s growing fortune.              
    Unlike his father, Ham didn’t have any romantic notions about the sea. He knew her to be a killer, lying in wait for those who didn’t take the blue bitch seriously enough. That’s why, when he went out on his own, he didn’t think twice about making his best friend, Joe Rusty O’Hara, a full partner. It didn’t matter that Joe Rusty didn’t have any money to invest in their partnership; his worth as a man more than made up for his lack of funds. Some things you just can’t put a price on. Because when a man such as that has your back…well, that there, as the commercial says, ‘is priceless.’
    Rusty and Ham had gone to the same two-room schoolhouse on Moon. Back then the school only went to the eighth grade. If you wanted to attend high school, you had to take the six a.m. ferry to the mainland. Rusty and Ham chose not to. Their whole lives they’d known what their futures held, and they’d eagerly awaited the day when they could begin them in earnest. By the time they dropped out of school, both boys were just literate enough to get by.
    In The Body, Stephen King’s seminal tale about friendship, the author reminds us that the best friends we’ll ever know are those we make as kids. Never was this more true than with Ham Huggins and Joe Rusty O’Hara. Their childhoods were as one. Their coming of age a shared experience. Together they explored the island’s woodlands. Playing War in the many sinkholes pockmarking the forest floor. They knew where the largemouth bass liked to hide in Lizard Lake, and which oyster beds still produced offshore. Together they plumbed both marine and fresh water depths in the two-man Jon-Boat they’d built together, learning early on their life’s calling.
    The two boys did everything together.
    They even met their future wives together.
    Three years after finishing school on Moon, Rusty called on Ham for a favor. It seemed he’d met this young buxom blonde, Shayna Petterson, and had asked her out on a date to the new Drive-In movie theatre.
    The girl had said yes, on one condition: that Rusty find a date for her good friend Betty Anne Atkins.
    Even though he wasn’t exactly thrilled about it, Ham agreed to take her out. He’d seen this Betty