“Oh no, not around.”

“Will he be back soon?”

“No. Se murió.”

I could feel, in that moment, a fierce wild descent, as if I had slipped from some high precipice and was now flailing toward the distant earth, the helicopter blades chopping the air above me, the sawgrass racing up in its vast endless plain. “He’s dead?”

“Walked into the sea.” There was an edge of emotion in her voice but she did not break down, did not fall into weeping.

“He drowned?”

“He was a good boy,” she said. And then, without saying goodbye, there was the faintest click and the phone was silent.

The sound I made was something like a bark or a cry, a sort of explosion that welled up out of my heart like black bile. That morning, I had sat at this very table and had eaten a piece of toast with strawberry jam and drained a cup of Maxwell House with milk from my grandmother’s refrigerator, and all that time Chiggers was dead. When I thought of him then and when I was to think of him in all the years to come and when I think of him now it is of a forest of black pines and a cold, hard surf rolling in upon a gray beach. And Chiggers, tiny against that great sweep of mist, stepping forward into the sea, fully clothed, his body as black as those trees, as gray as the surf, as dark as the sky.

It could happen, I knew, to anyone. The sniper’s sight still tracked my shape through the palms, the bamboo, through the wild plum in the backyard, and here, at the kitchen table.

My grandmother stood in the doorway to her bedroom, her nightgown held tight around her shapeless body. “John?” she called to me, her voice coming as if from across some great and terrible distance. “Are you all right? John?”

“No,” I said, my body seeming to come all apart as the first of the waves tumbled in from the wine-dark sea. “I’m not all right. I’m not all right. I’m not.”

Chapter 12

12