In the silence that ensued, the small, everyday sounds of the cantina came rushing in: the clatter of plates, the call of orders, the ring of the cook’s bell, the murmur of small talk, an occasional burst of laughter that to White felt absurdly out of place.

He cleared his throat. “What happened then, Lucy?”

“What happened then?” She blinked. “They left me there, smeared with my own blood, their sweat, and their semen. But what did it matter? The deed had been done. To them, I was nothing more than a lump of clay. I had no warmth, no heartbeat, no breath. I was dead to them, as I always had been.”

“I’m sorry,” White said, surprising himself that he actually meant it.

“Why should you be sorry? You’re not a woman.”

And in just those few words she had put him in his place, had defined the unfathomable space between them, had made him see that whatever he thought he knew about women and life, he didn’t. He should have felt resentful, angry even. He imagined he would have with anyone else. But Lucy Orteño had a quality he could not describe, let alone understand. However, there was one thing he knew for a fact: he would never let anything bad happen to her again.

Chapter 33

33

The spinal cord is made up of nerve fiber bundles that deliver messages from the brain to the body. These bundles, protected from trauma by the bones of the spine, run down from the base of the brain through a canal in the center of those bones. This is the network that carries messages back and forth from brain to body and vice versa.

This simple anatomy lesson had been explained to Whitman not by a doctor, nurse, or neurosurgeon, but by a man apparently of middle years with no formal medical training. He didn’t call himself a doctor, or anything of the sort. Yet people came from all over the bayou to seek his counsel and, in some cases, feel his hands upon them.

The man had extraordinary hands—long and slender of finger, their movements both supple and subtle, as if they had not aged past twenty years or so. The man’s name was Preach—at least that’s what the locals called him, though Whitman finally discovered his family name was Desmortiers. The boy on the bike Whitman had met that morning in southern Louisiana was in some way attached to Preach, though later he discovered they were not related. Preach was not married—never had been—and he had no children. But there was something odd about that kid that had stuck in Whitman’s mind. Maybe it was the fact that he had the black shiny eyes of a crow.