He ran over to Pleasure and knelt down. Cauthron got out of the car. Railroad tried to pick up the cat, but she hissed and bit him. Her sides fluttered with rapid breathing. Her eyes clouded. She rested her head on the gravel.
Railroad had trouble breathing. He looked up from his crouch to see that Maisie and some customers had come out of the diner. Among them was the detective.
“I didn’t mean to do that, Lloyd,” Cauthron said. “It just ran out in front of me.” He paused a moment. “Jesus Christ, Lloyd, what happened to your chest?”
Railroad picked up the cat in his bloody hands. “Nobody ever gets away with nothing,” he said. “I’m ready to go now.”
“Go where?”
“Back to prison.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Me and Hiram and Bobby Lee killed all those folks in the woods and took their car. This was their cat.”
“What people?”
“Bailey Boy and his mother and his wife and his kids and his baby.”
The detective pushed back his hat and scratched his head. “You all best come in here and we’ll talk this thing over.”
They went into the diner. Railroad would not let them take Pleasure from him until they gave him a corrugated cardboard box to put the body in. Maisie brought him a towel to wipe his hands, and Railroad told the detective, whose name was Vernon Scott Shaw, all about the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and the hearselike Hudson, and the family they’d murdered in the backwoods. Mostly he talked about the grandmother and the cat. Shaw sat there and listened soberly. At the end he folded up his notebook and said, “That’s quite a story, Mr. Bailey. But we caught the people who did that killing, and it ain’t you.”
“What do you mean? I know what I done.”
“Another thing, you don’t think I’d know if there was some murderer loose from the penitentiary? There isn’t anyone escaped.”
“What were you doing in here last week, asking questions?”
“I was having myself some pancakes and coffee.”
“I didn’t make this up.”
“So you say. But seems to me, Mr. Bailey, you been standing over a hot stove too long.”
Railroad didn’t say anything. He felt as if his heart was about to break.
Mr. Cauthron told him he might just as well take the morning off and get some rest. He would man the griddle himself. Railroad got unsteadily to his feet, took the box containing Pleasure’s body, and tucked it under his arm. He walked out of the diner.
He went back to the boarding house. He climbed the steps. Mr. Foster was in the front room reading the newspaper. “Morning, Bailey,” he said. “What you got there?”
“My cat got killed.”
“No! Sorry to hear that.”
“You seen Miz Graves this morning?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
Railroad climbed the stairs, walked slowly down the hall to his room. He entered. Dust motes danced in the sunlight coming through the window. The ocean rowboat was no darker than it had been the day before. He set the dead cat down next to the Bible on the table. The pineapple quilt was no longer on the bed; now it was the rose. He reached into his pocket and felt the engagement ring.
The closet door was closed. He went to it, put his hand on the doorknob. He turned it and opened the door.
CANDIA
Graham Joyce
Graham Joyce is the author of sixteen novels and a collection of short stories. He won the World Fantasy Award for his novel The Facts of Life, and has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel an unprecedented five times. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. In 2009, he was awarded the O. Henry Prize for his short story “An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen.” He is currently working on the computer game Doom 4.
Joyce says: “While I was still trying to get published as a writer I lived on the Greek islands for a while, and I spent six months in Chania on the west of Crete. It had been under Ottoman rule for some centuries, when the name of the town was Candia. While I was there someone led me to a strange nightclub behind the old spice warehouses on the seafront. The person who took me there left the island suddenly and I was never able to find the place again. At the place where I thought it should be an empty building was home to a number of feral cats, and that last detail was what triggered the story.”
Candia. It was surely in Candia, with its crumbling Venetian waterfront and its abandoned minarets, and its harbor sliding into the rose-coloured sea further by an inch every day. Just like Ben Wheeler when I first spotted him, with his bottle of raki at his permanent station outside the Black Orchid Café, a misted tumbler forever fixed at some point on the arc between tabletop and bottom lip.
I had just climbed down from the rusting, antiquated bus, the sole passenger to disembark in that dusty square, when I saw him, at a time when I never expected to see again anyone I’d ever known.
His glass of raki arrested itself on its mechanical ascent, and he peered across the rim of his tumbler directly into my eyes. He was sitting at a table on the concrete edge of the neglected wharf. Over his shoulder the sun was punctured on a derelict minaret, spilling lavender and molten gold across the motionless waters of the harbor. He took a sip from his glass, and turned away.
“Wheeler,” I called. “Hey, Wheeler!”
On hearing his name he spun round and looked at me again, this time with an expression of incredulity and horror. Then he looked around wildly, as if for egress. For a moment I thought he was actually going to make a break for it and run away from me. I crossed the square to the café and dragged a seat from under the table; but as he showed no sign that he would allow me to join him, I was made to hover.
“Don’t you remember me?” I asked.
Before I got an answer a singer struck up in the square. He had a cardboard shoe-box for donations and was singing in that curious, deep-throated and unaccompanied resitica of the dispossessed people from the mountains. The sound was of almost unendurable melancholy and sweetness, and the guttural voice resonated along the baked brickwork.
Wheeler put down his glass and hooked his thumbs in his waistband, regarding me with an unblinking gaze. I wasn’t fooled. He was clearly nervous. It was as if he had somewhere important to go, but in his astonishment at seeing me there, he couldn’t tear himself away.
“So what are you doing here?” I asked.
He eyed me steadily. “I might ask you the same question.”
He looked back at the square and stroked the white stubble of his beard. Again I got the impression I was detaining him from something important.
“I’ve come here to drink myself to death,” I joked. At least, it was a truth hidden inside a joke, but he nodded seriously, as if this was perfectly reasonable.
The arrival of a waiter brought a moment’s relief. Slow to spot him, Wheeler turned suddenly and fixed the waiter with his extraordinary gaze. The boy shuffled uncomfortably, tapping the steel disc of his tray against his thigh.
“Let me stand you a drink,” I suggested.
Wheeler put his hand to his mouth, removing something very small from the tip of his tongue. “Sure.” He let his eyes drop. “Sit down. I’ll have a beer. Yes, I’ll have a beer.”
I sat, but I was already beginning to regret this. Ben Wheeler looked terrible. I could see a ring of filth on the collar of his short-sleeved shirt. The hems of his oil-spotted chinos were rolled and his bare feet were thrust inside a pair of rotting, rope-soled espadrilles. When the beer arrived, he slurped it greedily. We sat in a stiff silence for a while, the swelling vocalizations of the resitica man the only other sound in the square in the parched heat of the afternoon.