Free Where by Kit Reed Page A

299 on Gaijin Samurai inside my head and wonder what’s going on at Level 300, whether the Koro Ishi figured out how to crash the Eternal Gates without me or if they’re milling around all helpless and discommoded, waiting for me at the top of the Eleven Bloody Steps.
    This blows!

 
    10
    Davy
    Thursday, late afternoon
    When you’ve lived in these parts all your life except for the six years you spent at school in New Haven, you know everybody in Charlton and everybody on Kraven and practically everybody in between, and in the way of things in the low country, most of them are friends.
    Then there are boon buddies, like Earl. Sucks that it took him half a day to figure out that he should have started here and the rest of the day making it back to Pinckney Creek and Earl’s house, but he’s here now.
    Davy pulls his car into the woods, backs around, parking deep in the brush. If they find the car, they won’t know which way he was heading or where he went. He ties his sneakers around his neck and rolls up his pants, thinking if the Poyntertown P.D. sends out Sidney and them in the Jeep to patrol the shore road, they won’t know he’s anywhere near the Pinckney place. Sweeping his footprints out of the dry sand behind him as he goes down to the water, he walks the rest of the way to Earl’s house in the swash.
    The look of the sand, the sky, the vegetation in the swash around the Pinckneys’ dock take him back to Saturdays when he was a kid, pedaling out here on his bike to go crabbing with Earl. If they weren’t best friends they were as good as, and that hasn’t changed. Armed with a bucket of chicken necks, the string, the weights and the net, they used to wade into the shallows and scoop up enough blue crabs to guilt Earl’s mother into making her amazing crabmeat thing. She made it with eggs and cream and a whole mess of cheese laced with enough port to get them pleasantly drunk. He remembers him and Earl taking the half-empty bottle out on the water afterward, two kids in a flat-bottomed boat, staring at the sky while they dreamed those dreams and talked that talk. In the years between they’ve been lucky enough to end up doing exactly what they wanted to do when they grew up.
    Until today.
    When things are going right, Davy’s dreams turn into clean designs, houses, schools, comforting public spaces that satisfy his eye, and Earl, Earl splits his time between days out on the water and nights making music in his studio in the low-slung barn Gaillard Pinckney built back in the day— renovation designed by D.A. Ribault Inc. “I wonder what old Gilyard would think,” Davy said when it was done.
    Earl grinned. “He’d freak.”
    Now Earl hails him from the dock. “Dude!”
    â€œYo, Earl.”
    â€œYou OK?” He waves in the general direction of Kraven island. “There’s some big shit going down out there.”
    â€œI know.” The weathered wood warms his feet. He smacks the heel of his hand into his old friend’s shoulder, he’s that glad to see him. “What the fuck, Earl? What the fuck?”
    â€œâ€™Od damn if I know. It flared up green.”
    â€œYou saw it?”
    â€œMom did. She, like, wanders in the night?”
    He knows that face. “Right.”
    â€œShe saw it, but it’s not like she can tell you what she saw. Whatever it was, it set off instruments from here to east Jesus, starting with the surveill stuff over at the base. Time I got out in the boat everybody in God’s creation was here: cops, troops, you name it.”
    â€œI saw.”
    â€œAt least I pulled in this pike.” Easy in a Market Street Crab T-shirt and cutoffs, Earl gestures at the filleted fish laid out on the dock at his feet. “Ma says it was on the TV before it crapped out, but it’s not like she remembers.”
    It’s not like she even knows if she did. “Is she