dying when brutal hands manacled his waist, maneuvered his head forcefully to the surface, dragged him out of the water and flung him onto the muddy bank.
A rough voice cursed him in Cajun French. Gnarled fingers tore off his soggy blindfold, ripped at the duct tape over his mouth, then yanked the gag out.
“Jesus.” His rescuer’s breath stank of gin and tobacco as he pounded his back. Water trickled out of the drowning man’s lips in spurts.
“Damn it,” he pleaded.
The hard palm froze. “Ha! So! You’re alive!”
He was rolled over and a flashlight jammed under his chin. “You don’t look too good.”
“Damn it!” He grabbed the light and shone it at his rescuer.
The stranger had wrinkled brown skin, white hair, and soulless black eyes. “You don’t look so good yourself.”
Yellow teeth flashed in an irreverent grin. “The name’s Frenchy.” Frenchy seized his long black flashlight and turned it off. “Frenchy LeBlanc. I was just helping my brother check his trotlines. We fell out…. He’s kinda cranky.”
“Not like you…sweet as sugarcane.”
With a grin, Frenchy ripped off the tape at the prisoner’s ankles along with a wad of dark body hair.
“Ouch!”
“You need a ride home? A hospital? Or the police station?”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re beat up pretty bad—” When he said nothing, Frenchy held out his hand and helped him to his feet. “You gotta name, boy?”
He hesitated. Then, just like that, a name popped up from his childhood. But his voice sounded rusty when he used it. “Tag…”
The older man eyed him. “Tag. Tag what?”
Right. Right. Last name. “Campbell…Tag…Campbell.”
“Like hell!” The yellow grin brightened. “You been to Texas…Tag?”
Tag shook his head.
The older man’s gaze appraised his tall, muscular body. “You got soft hands for a big guy…and a hard face…and eyes that don’t quite match it. That suit, even trashed, looks like it set you back some.”
Tag said nothing.
“Real work might do you good—”
“Damn it…if you’re going to insult me—”
“I fish. I could use a deckhand.”
Tag turned away helplessly, and stared at the lurid shadows the cypress trees with their draperies of moss made. A deckhand. Minimum wage. For years he’d been on the fast track. His education. His career. His high-flying plans for his father’s company. He’d been good, really really good at one thing.
But he couldn’t go back.
“I’ve always worked in an office, but I lift weights in my gym every afternoon. I’ve never had time to fish,” he said. Never wanted to. But he didn’t say that.
Frenchy nodded, taking in more than was said. “I don’t blame you for saying no to such hard, thankless work.”
“I didn’t say no, old man…. You’d have to teach me.”
Frenchy patted his shoulder. “You gotta job.”
“Thanks.” Tag’s voice was hoarse. He was disgusted that it might betray eagerness and gratitude. He knew better than to believe that this crude stranger or his casual offer and his kindness tonight meant anything.
He was through with ambition, through with dreams, through with false hopes that led nowhere. Again he was staring into his father’s cold gray eyes. He was through with family and dreams of real love, too.
A deckhand. A trashy job working for a crude, trashy guy.
Get the hell out of here, you half-wild, no-good bastard.
“Thanks, Frenchy,” Tag repeated in a colder, darker tone.
One
Five years later…
Stay with me, Frenchy. I need you.
That’s as close as Tag had come to telling the best friend he’d ever had, he loved him.
But maybe Frenchy had known.
Tag had clasped him in his arms long after Frenchy’s eyes had gone as glassy as the still bay, long after his skin had grown as cool as his dead mother’s that awful morning when the alarm clock had kept ringing.
Stay with me, Frenchy.
He’d lashed the wheel of the shrimp boat to starboard with a nylon sheet…his makeshift autopilot…and headed home, cradling Frenchy’s limp, grizzled head in his lap.
Stay with me, Frenchy.
But Frenchy’s eyes had remained closed.
The deck had rolled under them.
It was midnight. The full moon shone through the twisted live oaks and tall grasses, casting eerie shadows across Frenchy’s tombstone. Tag was all alone in that small, picturesque, historical cemetery located on a mound of higher earth that overlooked Rockport’s moonwashed bay. Come morning, this time of year, the graves would be ablaze with wildflowers. Funny, how death could make you see the truth you didn’t want to see. Tag had been living so hard and fast for so long, he hadn’t admitted he’d loved the old bastard, till he’d held his friend’s limp body and begun to weep.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen! Damn your hide, Frenchy, for leaving me like everybody else…. But most of all I damn you for making me give a damn. It should be me who’s dead.”
They’d buried Frenchy beside his son, the son he’d lost right before Frenchy had saved Tag’s life.
Tag was glad the cemetery was deserted. He didn’t want anybody to see how profoundly Frenchy’s death had upset him.
Sunken black circles ringed Tag’s bloodshot eyes; his jaw was shadowed with several days of dark stubble. His stomach rumbled painfully from too much liquor and too little food.
The moon shone high in a cloudless, bright sky. The salt-laden sea air smelled of dry earth and newly mown grass. Frenchy’s favorite kind of night. The shrimp would be running. Not that Tag could bear the thought of shrimping under a full moon without Frenchy.
Tag’s big black bike was parked a little way from Frenchy’s tombstone under a live oak tree that had been sculpted by the southeasterly prevailing winds that blew off the gulf, cooling its protected bays and low-lying coastal prairies.
Tag was kneeling before the pink tombstone. Soft as a prayer, his deep voice whispered. “Haunt me, Frenchy. Damn you, haunt me. Stay with me.”
“You don’t need an old man past his prime. You need a woman, kids,” Frenchy had pointed out, in that maddening know-it-all way of his, a few nights ago.
“Strange advice coming from a man who’s failed at marriage four times.”
“Nothing like a pretty woman to make a man old enough to know better hope for the best. Life’s a circle, constantly repeating itself.”
God, I hope not.
“You’re young. But you’ll get old. You’ll die. Life’s short. You gotta fall in love, get married, spawn kids, repeat the circle.”
“There’s places in my circle I don’t want to revisit.”
“You’re not the tough guy you pretend. You’re the marrying kind.”
“Where’d you get a damn fool notion like that?”
“You’re