Whiskey and rum could drown both dreams and failures.
So he drank, a kind of self-persecution for every goddamn mistake he’d ever made. And over forty years he’d made plenty. As a kid he’d been warned, heard the words but didn’t heed them—that he was someone bent on destruction. “You’ll never be anything, Henry James Wyatt.”
He’d heard similar warnings when was an angry, young kid of fifteen, and the grizzled old owner of a baseball team had bellowed at him, “No one can destroy your life but you, you hardheaded bastard.”
And Billy Hobart, that grizzled, old owner, had been right.
Hank was forty years old, and there wasn’t much left of him. He wondered what else he had destroyed inside of himself. Or, he thought, had there ever been something to destroy?
He had fought so long against being what everyone else was, telling himself they were the world’s suckers. But he wondered now if the only sucker out there was him.
He held the bottle to his lips and took a long drink, not because he needed it or even because he wanted it, but because it dulled his mind, dulled the truth he had to face. He was a man who had been throwing himself away for so damn many years that he didn’t know how to stop.
Hank awoke to a loud crash. He groaned and turned over. His head felt like it was about to explode. He opened one eye, then the other. The sunlight made his head throb and about killed him.
Smitty’s shadow came past, and a loud clash of metal against metal echoed through his head and down into his teeth.
“God,” he groaned and clapped his hands over his ears.
She walked past him, pausing at the doorway. “Good morning,” she said brightly.
He scowled up at her from his hammock. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“I’m a morning person.”
“She’s a morning person,” he repeated as she disappeared through the door. He flung an arm over his eyes and lay there. His mouth felt like something had died in it.
Another crash echoed through his pounding head. It sounded like a train wreck. He staggered to his feet. No, the train wreck was in his head.
He sucked in a breath of pain, then blinked and stumbled toward the water bucket they kept inside. He looked at the cup hanging next to it, ignored it, and picked up the whole bucket. He chugged down half of the water, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His mouth felt half human again.
He went outside, stood in the doorway, and watched her. Smitty was whipping around like a busy little beaver, clanging pots and pans and clattering seemingly anything and everything that was metal against metal.
He’d never flinched so much in his life. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Cooking.” She hammered some more pans together.
“Cooking what? A train?” He ran a hand through his hair and kept it there when she tossed an iron lid against a kettle.
“Fruit.” She held up a bottle and dumped it into a pan.
“Sweet Jesus! That’s my rum!”
She looked up. “Oh, it is?” She held the bottle up again, eyed the last two inches of booze, and dumped the rest of it in the pan. “Thank you for sharing it.” She gave him a sugary smile that made him itch to do something to her. But he couldn’t think of anything terrible enough with his head pounding and his ears ringing. Even his teeth hurt.
She lit a match and dropped it into the pan.
He groaned and swayed. His rum turned orange and blue and went up in the air with loudwhoosh!
He was going to kill her, but later, when he felt human again. He was going to do it with his bare hands.
She frowned and stuck a stick into the pan, then whipped it around as if she knew what she was doing. She grabbed one of the sticks he’d sharpened to use for spits and jabbed it into the pan, then pulled out something brown and black and slimy. She walked over and held it in front of his face.
The sweet, sickening smell of burnt rum hit him like a hard pitch to the gut. His stomach turned over. He could feel his blood drain from his head. His hand shot out and gripped one of the door’s support poles.
“You look a little wan. Probably from lack of food.” She waved it near his nose. “Want a bite?”
He lurched past her and stumbled across the sand, almost running over the children. His hand over his mouth, he staggered to the oleander bushes and heaved his guts out.
