Page 7 of The Company We Keep

He turned to the other man — to A.R. Carrow, notorious crime boss, head of The Company, wanted across the country, and the object of Dust’s affections.

Carrow was smiling.

“Do you think you have a doppleganger out there, hunting you down?” Carrow asked.

“That would be a hell of an ironic thing, boss.”

He could barely make eye contact with Carrow.

Together, they mounted the bike and made their way back home, back to Las Abras — back to the life that had been made infinitely sweeter by their time together, if not infinitely more complicated.

I

1

Many years ago, before the explosions and the blood and the betrayal, before he’d give up the name Charlie for the rest of his life in order to gain something much more important, the little boy who would someday become Dust Wrenshall stood on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean.

He watched the adults move around him on the sand during the golden hour when late afternoon bleeds into evening.

Two men from down the street waded into the slowly churning brown water, and Dust knew that it felt as warm as a bath. His skin was still salty from swimming in the morning, even after a shower, because it seemed to stay salty all summer long.

Dust grew up a few blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. He was an only child and intensely quiet. Unremarkable, and that was fine. But Dust was always watching.

There was so much to be learned from the ocean. His parents were protective but he never understood why. Maybe because he was the only child they had, or maybe it was because of some horror story they never shared with him.

The men walked away from each other, cutting a "V" in the water with the open mouth of the net expanding to swallow the sea in between them. The water pulled at the fine mesh of the net and already they were beginning to struggle as they trudged out, the water at their thighs.

The sea was rolling and slow that evening and Dust could tell just by looking at the water beyond where the waves were breaking that there was no strong current. He’d been taught to look for runouts — that supernaturally strong current of water that would snag a swimmer in its invisible grip and drag them out to sea until they were too exhausted and would drown.

You could see the slick pattern of water moving under water when it was a day with runouts, and the pattern caught his eye with the same strange bolt of fear that a shark's fin did.

But there was no runout that day and no white-tipped waves. Just the endless roll of the ocean onto the shore.

The men were up to their waists then as they waded down the gentle slope where the earth gave away to the ocean. Slowly they closed their loop and the "V "billowed out in a circle behind them. Once joined, they walked parallel to the shore until they were past the boundary of their net. Then they turned to the shore and began the arduous journey back to land.

The net sagged and pulled behind them. Dust tried to pretend like he wasn't excited, because even as a child he was concerned with dignity. He did not act like a child because he wanted to be respected as an adult. So, like the adults who had gathered on the shore to watch the men fishing, he stood stoic and unimpressed.

The strain was apparent in the men's mirrored postures as they worked their way back. The water pulled against theirnet and — Dust hoped — their bounty of life and treasures reaped from the sea.

Every summer day when Dust waded into the water, he did so while fighting the fear of what might lurk under the surface. The Atlantic Ocean there on the Georgia coast was brown and murky, and it was rare to have a day calm enough to see anything through it.

The dead and dying things that had washed up on shore gave him some clues. Most were harmless, like the empty oyster shells and the clear jellyfish that collapsed in their little puddles at low tide. But some days brought the alternately fascinating and frightening reminder that there was much more to the ocean: the sad and flamboyant fans of dead Portuguese man of wars, the sharp gray sharks’ teeth that were freshly shed and retained their serrated edges.

He was too impatient to see what they had caught in the long seining nets — and so Dust turned his attention to the adults that dotted the shore with him. People from the neighborhood had followed the two men down the street as they crossed to do their fishing. By the time they had walked the three blocks to get to the beach access, they were the leaders of an abbreviated parade of people who stepped into their flip flops on the way out the door.

There were no other children with him on the beach, and he felt a pang of regret. Yes, he wanted to be a grownup — but the presence of kids would allow him to feel less self-conscious about what he felt was a childish curiosity. He knew, then, that he would be the only one squatting beside the two fishermen, parsing through what they brought to shore. The other adults would circle around them with their backs straight as rods, tilting their heads down just a few degrees and pretending that they weren't just as fascinated as Dust was by the variety of aquatic flora and fauna the men caught in their net.

Finally, they were there, ropey muscles straining and shorts dripping as they padded barefoot in the shallows. They stood shoulder to shoulder, dragging the net then, hand over hand, until the white sinews began to expose their catch. Finally, everything was gathered on the shore.

The catch moved as if the net itself were a living thing. Fish and invertebrates and shells and trash — there was always colorful trash.

From the moment they pulled the catch onto shore, everything within the net was dying.

It was cruel to fish this way. Every unlikely thing that got stuck in the seining net's perimeter was dragged in, whether it was good to eat or not. Sometimes they would throw back the undesirable things and they would flop a little and wriggle through the few inches of water flowing over the sand until they could return to the sea. But more often than not, the things that were pulled up died there on the shore, flopping and gasping or silently drying out.

It didn't matter to Dust.

He realized it was cruel, and he valued every little life there in the net each time it was pulled back to shore. He would never have caught a fish in his hands and taken it back to shore to watch it die — but somehow it was different with the seining nets. It was cruelty, but it wasn't cruelty by his own hand.

---