First Thrills

We just said, oh.

They gave us a description of the fugitive, a name. Showed us a picture. We didn’t recognize me. We said we had never seen the guy, but if we did, we’d blow his ass away. Better not come around here.

The deputies said that was a bad idea. Told us to just keep our doors locked. If we saw anything, call 911 right away. We offered them coffee and booze, for the cold, but they said they had to continue their search, even though the skel probably got into a waiting car out on the highway and was long gone. There was a big alert out, roadblocks.

We felt safe with all the cops in the house. When they left, it was good to see them still driving around the neighborhood on patrol. Past midnight, they moved on, looking for the guy somewhere else. The clock on the mantle clicked gently after we shut off the TV news. We checked all the doors again, to make sure they were locked, and went upstairs to the bathroom.

That’s when I stopped being invisible, quietly crawled out from under Harold’s couch, and softly mounted the stairs. I knew Harold would go to the bedroom closet and get his shotgun soon, to have it by the bed while he slept. When he opened the closet door I would be inside. I wouldn’t be invisible then. I’d let him see me.

Then we would be one.

***

SEAN MICHAEL BAILEY is the pen name for the New York Times bestselling author of crime nonfiction who went from the dark side to the darker side to write the thriller 1787. He has completed his second novel, Triad, and is working on another.

When Johnny Comes Marching Home by Heather Graham

It was eighteen sixty-five when the terror came to Douglas Island.

Eighteen sixty-five when Johnny came home.

Naturally, it was a time when few people cared what was happening on a small, barely inhabited southern island off the coast of South Carolina.

So much tragedy had already come to the country; there were so many dead, dying, maimed, and left without home or sustenance that a strange plague descending upon a distanced population was hardly of note.

Unless you were there, unless you saw, and prayed not just for your life, but your soul.

The war was over, but not the bitterness. Lincoln had been assassinated, and all hope of a loving and swift reunion between the states had been dashed.

Brent Haywood, Johnny’s cousin, had made it home the week before. A government ship-a Federal government ship-had brought him straight to the docks. He limped. He was often in pain. Shrapnel had caught him in the right hip, and he’d be in pain, limping, for the rest of his life.

Brent had been a prisoner a long time, and he told me that he hadn’t seen Johnny since Cold Harbor, and that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to see Johnny; he hadn’t known that his cousin had survived until we had received the news. “There’s something not-right with Johnny,” he told me.

The world, our world, or that of our country, was in a sad way, desperately sad. On Douglas Island, we had survived many years of the travelers who had come from far and wide to see the beauty of our little place, to ride over the sloping hills, to fish and boat and hunt. The war had barely begun before we had ceased to care who won or lost. Now, far too many people were struggling just to survive. The South was in chaos.

And so it was on the day that Johnny MacFarlane came home.

At first, nearly the whole town came out, two hundred odd of us came to the docks to meet the boat that had brought him home. A letter had been received the previous week, and we knew just when the schooner the Chesapeake was to bring him home. A kindly surgeon Johnny had come upon somewhere in his travels home after the surrender at Appomattox Court house had written that Johnny MacFarlane was not well, but friends were helping and would be sending him home with all possible speed, and they made arrangements for his travel.

Came the day. I was there with my father, eager, barely able to wait through the moments that would bring him back to me. From the widow’s walk of Johnny’s home, Janey Sue, his sister, had seen the schooner out on the horizon, and so we had gathered. Our town band was playing welcome songs, and it was no matter that he’d been one of the last battered soldiers of Lee’s army, we were one country now, and the band played for him, using all the songs we knew. People sang at the docks, and it was momentous. Federal song, fine. They played, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”

Except that the schooner stopped far out to sea, and it was strange, for even the music ended by the time Johnny rowed himself to shore in a small boat.

There was deep dockage at the island, and throughout the war, we’d been visited now and then by ships from both sides, and it was only the fact that we were, actually, so small and seeming to offer so little in support or importance that they all passed us by with little interest after docking. Sometimes, sailors wanted to loot the houses, but thanks to my father’s brilliance at hiding all assets, they did not stay. We had never imagined that any ship would eschew the fine docks and send Johnny home in a longboat, but so they did.

No matter.

Johnny was coming home.

And we watched as he rowed, and we waited until the little boat reached the docks, and then we all raced to him, descended upon him, really, tying up the rowboat, and helping him to the dock. His dear little sister, Janey Sue, immediately threw herself into his arms, nearly knocking him from the dock.

He hugged her in return; over her shoulder, he looked at me.

I was shocked.

Johnny and I had been together forever. We’d both been born and raised on the island. We had dreamed great visions for our future, and in those dreams, we would travel, but always return to our island. He wanted to be a teacher. Knowledge gave a man power and strength, he believed. Oh, Johnny had always been a thinker, and I had loved following the pro cesses in his mind.

But he’d been more than a thinker. Johnny had been a doer, a man who had always been strong, in a way, the typical Southern gentleman of his age. He could drink, ride, and shoot with the best of them, and also been able to repair any leak or damage done to Fairhaven, his estate on the island.

He was a man ahead of his time; he had joined the Confederate forces because he had believed in states rights. He had never believed in slavery-how could one human being, one soul, ever own another?-but he had also believed that change had to come about with laws that would help newly freed individuals make a living-survive, in short.

He had been… Johnny. Beautiful, such a handsome man. Smart, always careful in his thoughts and words. Strong, a man’s man, a woman’s man, in de pen dent, powerful, capable.

And now…

Johnny was a shell of the man he had been. My father had warned me-war changed people. It brought out their strengths and their weaknesses, but either way, it changed a man for good. We had heard that Lee’s troops had been starving, so his emaciated shape shouldn’t have shocked me. His pallor had come about, certainly, because of his illness.

But I had never expected the look in his eyes.

Once, they had been the blue of the sky on a summer’s day, as brilliant and vital as Johnny himself. Once… they had brightened easily with laughter. Once upon a time, they had looked at me in way that had awakened every raw and erotic thought in my mind, and stirred my heart to a thunderous pounding. Once…