“You’ve never even spoken to me before.”
“I am now, and it’s going about how I expected.”
“You could go to college, you know.”
“Some of us got life to live,” JP said. “Some of us don’t have a benefactor.” He looked over toward the mirror, toward where Sofia’s uncle was. Sofia was staying composed. She’d told her uncle not to come in unless she asked him to, but that would go out the window the instant she seemed upset.
She wasn’t going to see anything else, nothing connecting JP to Barn Renfro’s death. She could tell. Just the egret, if the egret was real. She guessed he probably wasn’t guilty, or he wouldn’t be goading Sofia’s uncle. Of course, some people goaded everyone all the time; that was their program.
“So how’d old Spencer do on this exam?” JP asked. “He pass with flying colors, like me?”
“I don’t think I’m allowed to say.”
“He’s kind of a hothead, huh? Or he used to be.”
“He’s trying to be happier,” Sofia admitted.
“I always liked him. I guess I have to raise twice as much hell now that he turned over a new leaf. I need to pull some doubles.”
Sofia clasped her hands in front of her. They looked feeble under the fluorescent lights. She had no pen or barrette to fidget with. She could feel herself smirking.
“What?” said JP. “Whatever it is, say it.”
“You and Spencer were never the same.”
“Oh, no?”
“Spencer liked giving and getting. You, you’re cut more from the bully cloth. Am I wrong? Tell me if I’m wrong.”
JP laughed. It seemed genuine. “Is five minutes up? I’m a man of my word and I said five minutes. I got things to do today. I know you can’t relate to that. I told your uncle my whole alibi and all. Do I need to walk you through it again? I will. I just want to satisfy the powers that be so I can go about my business.”
“No,” Sofia said. “The powers are satisfied.”
“Your uncle must have nothing plus nothing on this, bringing in the… you know, the family circus.” JP cackled ostentatiously, like people did who were used to laughing alone.
“When you were a kid,” Sofia said.
JP nodded. He steered his attention back to her, bringing himself back to order. “Yeah?” he said. “When I was a kid what?”
“Did you stay home from church service one day and kill an egret? A white egret in a ditch?”
JP’s face turned stony, and Sofia could tell his mind was working. “The hell you talking about?” he said.
She looked at him solemnly.
“An egret? When I was twelve?” He tugged at one of his sleeves. “Are you serious?”
Sofia couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Maybe he was flipping through the catalog of cruel acts he’d perpetrated during his lifetime, or maybe he was thinking of something else mean he could say right now. He huffed and let his posture go jangly, pitching to one side in his chair. There was curiosity in his face, competing with the scorn. Sofia knew she wouldn’t get an answer out of him, that there was no way to prove that she hadn’t invented the egret and killed it herself.
“Nope, I didn’t shoot no water birds,” he told Sofia. “Sorry to disappoint you.” He sniffed sharply into the back of his hand. “Think of it, I didn’t shoot no bald eagle neither. And I didn’t kill no redheaded woodpecker with a slingshot.”
That afternoon Sofia ran into James at the coffee shop. He was sitting along the far wall under a painting of a dove, absorbed in a book, and he didn’t notice her until she walked up to his table with her mug cradled in her hands. He lifted his feet off the chair across from him — grudgingly, Sofia noticed — and she sat down. It always seemed odd, during the periods when they were broken up, to not kiss when they saw each other. It left a sad void to be pressed through.
“I’ve always liked watching you read,” Sofia said.
James looked at what was left in his cup and threw it back, then closed his book, using an old receipt to mark the page. Sofia’s coffee was too hot to drink. She asked James what his book was about and he looked down and made a face at it.
“It covers a good bit of ground,” he said, his voice flat but chafed.
“Give me a highlight,” said Sofia.
“How about a lowlight? Lowlights are easier to come by, I find.”
“I’ll make do with a lowlight, if that’s all I can get.”
James let his eyes drift to the ceiling, his lips tight, as if selecting just one downbeat tale out of so many was a chore. After a moment, he clucked his tongue. “Okay, how about this? I’ll tell you about this dude named Pánfilo de Narváez.” James shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. “I can’t get a ride from you but you can come talk to me if you feel like it. I don’t quite see how those rules are fair, but I’ll go ahead and give you one little morsel of woe.” He began, not looking at Sofia, speaking quickly as if to get the story out and done with. “He’s a B-list explorer, this guy. He comes over to Florida with a small army, the intention being to defeat Cortez. But after he lands, he decides to go on a little side mission to look for gold. Cortez can wait a couple weeks. So de Narváez starts interrogating whatever Indians he can find, asking them where all the treasure is, poking them in the ribs. Pretty standard stuff.”
“Okay,” said Sofia. James still wasn’t looking at her.
“Lo and behold, he can’t find any rich stuff. The Indians are sending him on goose chases. He’s getting bit up by mosquitoes, has diarrhea. He’s fed up. What he does then is arrest the chief of this particular tribe and start questioning him in a more persuasive way. Enhanced interrogation, we call it now. Chief won’t say a word. He’s a statue. You could put him in the cigar store. De Narváez keeps threatening him, beating him up — he just cannot scare this Indian. What ends up happening is de Narváez orders the chief’s nose cut off. Cuts off the guy’s damn nose. Bloody mess. Some of his men are embarrassed, a few of them walk away from his command. After that, the guy really won’t talk.”
James’s eyes had widened, a sign of life in his face. His expression conveyed bemusement. Sofia wasn’t sure if he’d come to the end of the story.
“He crossed a line between men,” James said. “He was cursed after that, they say. When he finally got around to confronting Cortez, he got slaughtered.”
James slid his book toward the edge of the table, pinning a saltshaker against the wall.
“Is there supposed to be a moral in that?” Sofia asked him.
James snorted. “The moral? There’s a moral in anything if you want there to be.”
Sofia was accustomed to James carrying a certain resigned disappointment in the world, but he’d never seemed cold before. Especially not toward her.
“I guess you heard about what I’m doing for my uncle,” she said.
He brought his gaze up to her face. “Yeah, as a matter of fact I did catch wind of that.”
Sofia blew into her mug. The coffee was still too hot. “And?”
“I was kind of wondering why you didn’t tell me yourself.”
“I wanted to,” Sofia said. “I would’ve. But we were broken up and all.”
“What did you think I was going to say?”
“I don’t know. I just didn’t want any discouragement, I guess.”
James looked provoked. “Is that what you’ve ever gotten from me?”
There was no need for Sofia to answer the question. They both knew the answer. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What do you think about it? Will you tell me now?”
“I think it sounds like an interesting thing to do is what I think. And something you might be good at.” James stopped and patiently rolled each of his sleeves to the elbow, making sure they were even. Then he took a breath. “What I’m skeptical about is the idea that you can make the future easier by parsing out the past. That’s what concerns me. You’re trying to find out what to do next, but you’re facing in the wrong direction.” He shrugged, as if to suggest that his opinion wasn’t necessarily important. “The only thing to do next is be a good person and let the moments unfold. I know you don’t want to hear that. My part in the play is to tell you everything will be peachy and yours is to say there’s heartbreak on the horizon, but honestly, neither of us knows.”