* * *
He awoketo thejar of a wagon stopping. There was a dull ache between his legs that told him he wasn’t dead. A reminder of his last conscious moment and the pain. He hadn’t doubled over. He hadn’t screamed. He had passed out.
He lay on the bottom of the wagon, the weight of weaker prisoners, now dead men, alongside of him. He took a shallow breath and almost gagged. He didn’t know if the cause was the pain from his bruised groin or the stench of death surrounding him.
He knew the routine. One priest and one guard buried the prisoners outside the compound walls. In a pit in the jungle.
He waited, listening.
Just his luck. No one spoke. The wagon seat creaked. Boots hit the ground with a thud. Birds screeched in the distance. Tropical insects droned and whistled and buzzed. The chains on the wagon tailgate rattled.
Finally, a priest began to chant last rites in Latin. Slowly, one by one, the wagon was unloaded.
He couldn’t screw this up, not now. Not when he’d come this far. But that dull ache burned through his groin again.
Escape? He didn’t even know if he could stand. He thought of the last four years. Hell, he’d stand if it killed him.
Someone gripped his ankles and yanked.
The priest chanted and touched his forehead.
Hank opened his eyes and shot upright, his fist raised. He knocked out the guard with a right cross, then stumbled to his feet.
He scanned the area. There was no one but the stunned priest, who just stood there. Hank took a step toward him.
The prayer book fell from the priest’s shaking hands.
“Keep praying for me, Father.” Hank picked up the book and handed it to him. “I need all the help I can get.”
The priest blinked once, then stared at him for a moment.
Hank grinned. The priest took the prayer book. Then Hank punched him.
2
Two days later, Port Helene, the north side of Dolphin Island
Hank walked down the crowded cobbled street that separated the town of Port Helene from its busy wharf. Pulled low over his sharp eyes was the wide-brimmed black hat he’d stolen from the priest. His hands were shoved in the deep pockets of the man’s black tunic, and his fingers worried the rosary inside.
To his left, brightly painted houses with deep verandas looked like a row of smiling colored teeth next to the narrow gray clapboard customs house and tall coconut palms that reigned over the west end of the wharf. Nearer the street, dockside fruit sellers stood at makeshift palm stands and hawked bananas and papayas, breadfruit and mangoes.
Cotton-clad native women bought baskets of tropical fruit and fresh fish from peddlers who sold everything from food and machetes to tapa cloth and bamboo windpipes. Hank strolled through the crowds and managed to swipe three bananas and a harmonica.
Lined up like prisoners during roll call were wooden pallet crates, keg barrels, and stacks of thick island hemp. At the far eastern end of the dock was a wall of green lumber and three wagons of quarry rock for export to another island. He stared at the rock for a moment—a black memory of the last four years. Then he took a deep breath of fresh air and moved away.
A small local band played lively island music with bamboo pipes and hip-high pod drums while native girls and boys sold sugar cane and seashells from woven palm baskets slung on their small brown backs. Someone shouted to a fishing boat coming into dock, and the fishermen chattered back about the fat profits they’d make from a full net of tuna.
Nuns in their broad headdresses trotted along in twos, and other priests, their dark hats bobbing through the crowd, blessed the fish for Friday’s meal, the goats, donkeys, even the pets of small children. Milling about the customs house were island plantation owners dressed in stark white. They haggled with rich merchants in dark tweed suits, sporting derbies and fat wallets as ripe for picking as the bright pink island mangoes.
All around him were the sounds of life and freedom, things that for too many long, hot days had seemed as unreal as a distant memory. While he peeled a banana and ate it, he stood there and watched for the briefest of moments—the sights, the sounds, the taste of freedom.
When he had been inside his cell, staked, or locked in a box, his mind had focused on seeing and living these things again. That had been part of what drove him to survive in a place where the chances of survival had the same odds as getting a home run on a bunt.
But as he stood there, watching island life go on without him, he remembered something else he’d forgotten. He had never fit in. Anywhere. And he still didn’t. The trappings were there. He was wearing a black tunic, like the Catholic priests on the island, but he wasn’t a man of God anymore than he was part of this life outside the prison.
He was an outsider. Always had been. For a reason. There was safety in being alone. He did things the way he wanted. And carried no one else’s taint, only his own. Survival was easier alone. He’d learned early that even if he played by the rules, most people assumed he didn’t.
In prison, he’d forgotten his solitary place in life. Now, as he stood there free, in the middle of where he had craved to be, he remembered where he actually was, where he always had been—outside, on the fringes of the life most people lived.
