Roman had met him last night, but he couldn’t remember his name until he saw his feet.
Don.
Don doesn’t believe in shoes, Kirk had said.
Shoes are part of the social fabric, Roman replied. How can you not believe in shoes?
Kirk shrugged. Feel free to ask him.
Roman had learned his lesson about asking questions, though. The commune residents looked normal enough, but throw out one innocent question about whether the coffee was decaf and you found yourself on the receiving end of a lecture about the bleach content of coffee filters—which segued, improbably, into colonic cleansing, coffee-plantation labor abuse, the “bullshit” labeling of free-trade products, and, finally, obscure and truly disgusting African parasites.
He’d been forced to conclude that the only thing these people didn’t waste energy yammering about was the enormous alligator occupying the patch of grass just off the porch, between the dining hall and the swamp.
Roman had a lot of questions about the alligator.
He didn’t ask them.
“What kind of music does she like?” he asked, and then wondered what was the matter with him.
Heberto would ignore the man. Some people aren’t worth your time, he would say. With your education, your experience, you’re worth five hundred dollars an hour to talk to, easy. You have to ask yourself, is talking to this man worth five hundred dollars of your money?
Roman glanced at Don’s feet.
It wasn’t that he disagreed with Heberto. But old habits were hard to break. His foster father, Patrick, had believed everyone was worth listening to. Rapists and murderers, wife-beaters, alcoholics. It had made Patrick a pillar of the community—this insistence that everyone had value, every lost soul deserved an advocate.
Everyone but Roman.
“Her favorite’s Big Band,” Don said. “Aaron Everson’s been trying to get her into hiphop.”
Roman said “Hmm” and brushed invisible crumbs off the lapel of his suit jacket.
His phone flashed with the arrival of a new text from his PA. Roman fired back a response, shifting a bit so he could keep an eye on the alligator without accidentally allowing Don’s feet into his peripheral vision.
Their bottoms were the dull gray of hooves. Roman had glimpsed them at the drum circle last night, then wished for a way to un-glimpse them. Almost scarier than the alligator, those feet.
“She likes show tunes, too,” Don commented.
“Hmm.”
“One time we had a swing dance in the dining hall, and she came right up on the porch and looked in the window. I think she even smiled. Mitzi says gators always look like they’re smiling, though, so it’s hard to tell.”
“Hmm,” Roman said again, and tried not to think about what it would take to turn Don’s feet back into feet again.
Woodworking tools, most likely. A metal rasp.
“—gimpy leg, so Andy thought, ‘Why don’t we do our circle of healing on Flossie?’ And we brought all the drums out here and put them around—”
Roman tried to concentrate on what Don was telling him, but listening just made him yearn to escape. When he’d called the tow-truck place this morning, the owner-operator had declared himself “real busy” and asked Roman to call back after lunch. Then he’d hung up.
Was 12:05 too soon to call back?
And where the hell was Ashley? What was she playing at? What would happen to their truce when he left?
“—wouldn’t believe the way she acted once that tambora drum came into the picture. First, she started lifting her feet, two at a time, like the ground was hot. My partner, Shari, said it was like Flossie had a demon inside her that needed out. But Shari’s people were revivalist types, so she saw a lot of that stuff at the tent revivals when she was a kid. Not with gators, of course—”
The phone chirped another low-battery warning. Flossie took three quick steps toward the porch, and Roman clutched at the railing. Everything in his field of vision sharpened. The smell of warm, yeasty buttered rolls and swamp decay seemed to intensify.
His palms tingled.