Page 40 of The Drifter

I walked across my lobby and out the front doors of The Palmetto Rose, in the middle of a working day, with my hair down and my hands empty, and a Dane holding the door.

The heat came up off the sidewalk and took me in both arms.

One day, I thought. It's boots. It's one day. It doesn't mean a thing.

He fell in beside me on the brick with three feet of Charleston between us. He did not take one inch of it.

12

CLINT

She walked out of that hotel a different woman than the one who stood behind the desk. I was in trouble inside of a block.

The blouse and the pins had been armor. I understood that now, because the armor was gone. Jeans, a red top with no sleeves to it, her hair down and moving when she turned her head. She looked younger and sharper at the same time, and something about the plain clothes made her harder to look away from, not easier. I felt it land low in me, and I let it sit there. A man can carry a thing without acting on it.

She set off up the street with purpose. I fell in beside her, three feet of brick between us.

"That house there," she said, pointing with her chin at a pink one with its porch turned sideways to the street, "isn't facing wrong. Everybody thinks it's facing wrong. Those side porches are called piazzas, and they face south or west on purpose, to catch the breeze off the water. The front door on the street? Opens onto the porch, not the house. Used to be, if that door stood open, it meant the family was receiving visitors. Closed meant come back another day."

"A door that's a message."

"Everything in this city is a message. That's the first thing to know about Charleston." She stepped around a palmetto root heaving up the sidewalk without looking down at it. She knew where every crack was. "Second thing. See the iron gates? A lot of the good ones were made by a man named Philip Simmons. Started as an apprentice at thirteen. Blacksmith. There's poetry in his gates, and there are people who will walk you past two hundred years of mansions and never once say his name. So, I say it."

"Philip Simmons."

"Now, you know more than most of the tour guides." She cut me a look. "You're getting the friends-and-family tour, by the way. I don't do this for everybody."

"I figured, when you didn't charge me."

"Oh, this is going on the card."

I laughed, and she looked satisfied with herself. We went on up King Street with her narrating the town like a woman introducing me to her relatives. The bottom blocks were T-shirt shops and fudge, and she moved through them the way you move through an airport. Then, the street changed under our feet, and she slowed, and her voice changed with it. This block flooded on king tides. That window used to be a pharmacy with a lunch counter; her mother wasn't served there, and her mother's daughter now comped suites nearby. She said that one plainly, no flag on it, and kept walking. I carried it the rest of the block.

The boot shop was up past Calhoun, right where she'd promised. Two brands. Snotty about it. And in the back, at a bench with a lamp over it, a man with forearms like a farrier's, surrounded by lasts and leather.

"Oh," Sasha said, and stopped dead. "Oh, they do custom now. On site." She turned to me with her whole face lit. "Do you know how rare that is?"

The bootmaker looked up. He had half-glasses down his nose and the unhurried manner of a man whose work cannot be rushed and knows it.

"He does custom," she said to me, like I hadn't seen him.

"I heard."

What followed took the better part of an hour, and I'd have paid double for it. He measured my feet the way a surveyor measures ground—both of them, because feet are brothers, not twins, he said. He looked at my old boots a long time, turned them over, read the wear on the heels like a man reading tracks.

"You walk," he said.

"Some."

"This much wear on the outside line, you walk more than some." He set them down with respect. "These were good boots. They've got nothing left to give you."

Then, the price came up, and I about went over backward.

I kept my face still. I've kept it still through worse. But somewhere in me, a boy who grew up counting quarters made a noise, because the number was more than my father paid for his first truck. A man used to come through Valentine once a year with a trailer and a sewing machine, and he'd measure the hands' feet and send boots back from El Paso two months later. His price was pennies against this. Good boots, too. Men worked whole seasons in them.

Then, I thought about the jet. The suite. Brothers who flew me across the country and told me half of everything.

Screw it. I had a card that said Neverland on it, more or less. If Dominion Hall wanted to buy my silence and my patience, they could start with my feet.