followed the meandering waterway around so many bends that I lost all sense of direction. We passed under arched bridges and weaved around dozens of fruit stands. The channel gradually tapered the deeper we penetrated into Floodbank. The young girl was now using her pole to keep us from bumping the channel walls, which were actually homes that we could see into. Hawkers came out from inside and leaned out over the water, tipping wood poles in close enough for us to reach, one with bags of nuts tied to the end, another with fruit, and yet another with cigarettes. Another hawker jumped onboard carrying a tray loaded down with “soda in a bag.” The baggies were filled with cherry soda and then sealed up with rubber bands anchored around straws that poked out the tops. The boat captain bought one for himself and another for his daughter before the hawker jumped back off.
None of it felt real. It all felt dead to me, like the whole planet was dead, and I was the only person left. Or maybe it was me who was dead, and I was some kind of ghost that could move around and see the world but couldn't interact with it. Try to pick something up and my hand would just pass through. Try to talk and nobody would hear me. My theory proved false when I succeeded in buying up a bottle of supercheap hooch from a kid with a lazy eye.
When the channel became too narrow to proceed any farther, the pilot slapped the motor into reverse. Maggie and I would have to walk from here. I slipped a few bills to the captain, and remembering I didn't have a partially developed spine hanging over my head anymore, I passed another bill to the daughter.
Maggie stopped me once we'd stepped up onto the walkway. “Are you sure you're ready for this, Juno?”
“Yeah,” I said. My voice sounded muffled, like my head was stuffed with cotton balls and my ears were filled with water.
Maggie and I hoofed along the floating walkway, which creaked with the river's gentle rocking. Floating buildings rubbed against one another with the sound of scraping wood. Ropes-all kinds of them-were all that held this place together. Thin and thick, twines and tug ropes, they were all that kept Floodbank from pulling apart and floating downriver. There were ropes all around us, running every which way like the threads of a drunken spider's web.
We crossed a plank bridge that bowed under our weight and stepped in through the beaded curtain that substituted for a door. The one-room home was triangle shaped, custom-built for this particular gap in Floodbank. The man we'd come to see was eating a sandwich, looking at me with a surprised expression. “Juno?” he said.
“That's right, Ian. Long time no see.”
Ian Davies, Sr., put his sandwich down. “What brings you here?”
Maggie and I took seats at his table. “This is Maggie,” I said. “She's your kid's partner.”
“So?”
“Have you talked to him recently?”
“No. I ain't seen him in a long time. He's an ungrateful punk.” He pulled the top slice of bread off his half- eaten sandwich and tossed it through the back door where it skidded off the plank deck and down into the water. “I heard you retired, Juno.”
“Something like that.”
He picked the meat off what was left of his sandwich and tossed the other slice of bread. “You gonna tell me why you're here?”
“What? Can't a couple ol' retirees get together and have a chat about the old days?” I held up the bottle I'd bought.
He rolled up the lunch meat and took a bite. “Not today. I'm kind of busy.”
I didn't let his sourpuss act dissuade me. I knew this guy-you get a couple drinks in him, and you can't shut him up. “Now you're being rude, Ian. You got any glasses?”
He took another bite of his lunch-meat cigar. “No.”
Maggie reached behind her and pulled the cupboard open. She pulled out three dusty glasses and set them on the table. He had his arms crossed.
“Now don't be like that, Ian. We're just going to have some drinks, okay?” I took my time cleaning the glasses with my shirttail. Maggie poured the glasses half full, and I raised mine with my left. “To old times.” I stayed in that pose, with my glass held high, for what must've been thirty seconds, waiting for a reluctant Ian to clink glasses.
Maggie stopped after one, but Ian and I were into our fourth when he started to loosen up. I smiled and laughed at all the right times while he yapped about the time he busted that pimp, how he had the pimp down, and he was about to cuff him when one of the guy's bitches came screaming in, buck naked, and started trying to pull Ian off her guy. He managed to snap the cuffs on the pimp, and then he wrestled her down, and since he didn't have another pair of cuffs, he had to restrain her until backup arrived. They came storming in, and there he was, lying on top of this bitch, and she's bucking like a fucking horse…
He kept prattling on with that big mouth of his. Telling us about the time he stopped an armed robbery when he was off duty. He was just going to the store to pick up some booze, and there was this punk, you know the type, with the fresh tats and the hotshot attitude. And he could tell right away that the punk was up to no good. The punk was all jumpy and shit. Ian, Sr., played it cool; he acted all nonchalant and waited for the punk to make his move, and then he jumped the little bastard and took his lase-pistol. That was when the kid went after the owner with a blade, and Ian had to shoot him.
I remembered that incident. It was a long time ago, but the way I heard it, the kid was hopped up on stims when he tried to knock over the liquor store. Ian jumped out from one of the aisles and screamed at the kid to freeze, knocking over a whole rack of bottles in the process. The kid reflexively jumped away from the spray of shattering bottles, and Ian fried him in the back.
“You sure taught that punk a lesson,” I said.
“Damn straight I did.”
I kept tipping my glass to my mouth every so often, but I'd already stopped drinking. He kept rattling on, his tales getting taller and taller. He was talking mostly to Maggie now. Her face was a hell of a lot prettier than mine. I kept up the illusion that I was keeping up with him in the drinking department by emptying my glass through a hole in the floor, the cheap booze running down the side of an oil drum that served as a pontoon.
I kept the hooch flowing and soon enough Ian, Sr., was 180 proof. His exaggerated yarns were turning into paranoid rants. He was going off on some doctor now. “This bitch must think I'm stupid, trying to rip me off. She thinks I don't know how much a fucking pill costs? I ain't no damn pushover. She thinks those degrees on the wall give her a license to bend me over.”
Blah, blah, blah… This was the way he'd always get at the bars. Always the victim of some imagined wrong, talking nonstop trash. I remembered how one night, he started off on some bullshit about a mechanic who jacked up the price on him and how he was going to go down there and teach him a lesson. “Let's go,” I'd told him. I wanted to see him teach this mechanic a lesson. That's when he told me to butt the fuck out or he'd have to take me to school. Had we been alone, I might've blown the comment off, but I couldn't let him get away with it when there were other cops around, watching. What kind of enforcer would let something like that pass? I gave him a good ass-kicking that night, and if need be, I was ready to do it again. “Hey, whatever happened to your wife?”
“That whore? Who gives a shit?”
“When did she leave?”
“That was seventy-three. She ran off and never came back. She knew better than to come back. She knew she could beg all she wanted, but I wouldn't take her back. No way. She knew better.”
“What a bitch, leaving you to raise two kids by yourself.”
“Damn straight. I did right by my kids. Not that it did much good. They both got too much of their mother in them.”
“What do you mean? Your son's a cop, and a good one.”
“No thanks to her. I was the one that got him that job. You'd think he'd be thankful after all I did for him. He should be over here every night thanking me for getting him that job. Shit, Juno, you know how many favors I had to cash in to get him that job. They wouldn't even take him the first time. They thought he was too soft, so I got him that guard job at the Zoo. Remember that? A year as a zookeeper and there was no way they could call him soft anymore. He was such a momma's boy when he was little. He wanted to be a chef. You believe that? I had to drag his crying ass to the Zoo most every day. That toughened him up. You better believe it.”
“What about your daughter? What's she up to?”
