John Brandon - Further Joy

“How about a lowlight? Lowlights are easier to come by, I find.”

“I’ll make do with a lowlight, if that’s all I can get.”

James let his eyes drift to the ceiling, his lips tight, as if selecting just one downbeat tale out of so many was a chore. After a moment, he clucked his tongue. “Okay, how about this? I’ll tell you about this dude named Pánfilo de Narváez.” James shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. “I can’t get a ride from you but you can come talk to me if you feel like it. I don’t quite see how those rules are fair, but I’ll go ahead and give you one little morsel of woe.” He began, not looking at Sofia, speaking quickly as if to get the story out and done with. “He’s a B-list explorer, this guy. He comes over to Florida with a small army, the intention being to defeat Cortez. But after he lands, he decides to go on a little side mission to look for gold. Cortez can wait a couple weeks. So de Narváez starts interrogating whatever Indians he can find, asking them where all the treasure is, poking them in the ribs. Pretty standard stuff.”

“Okay,” said Sofia. James still wasn’t looking at her.

“Lo and behold, he can’t find any rich stuff. The Indians are sending him on goose chases. He’s getting bit up by mosquitoes, has diarrhea. He’s fed up. What he does then is arrest the chief of this particular tribe and start questioning him in a more persuasive way. Enhanced interrogation, we call it now. Chief won’t say a word. He’s a statue. You could put him in the cigar store. De Narváez keeps threatening him, beating him up — he just cannot scare this Indian. What ends up happening is de Narváez orders the chief’s nose cut off. Cuts off the guy’s damn nose. Bloody mess. Some of his men are embarrassed, a few of them walk away from his command. After that, the guy really won’t talk.”

James’s eyes had widened, a sign of life in his face. His expression conveyed bemusement. Sofia wasn’t sure if he’d come to the end of the story.

“He crossed a line between men,” James said. “He was cursed after that, they say. When he finally got around to confronting Cortez, he got slaughtered.”

James slid his book toward the edge of the table, pinning a saltshaker against the wall.

“Is there supposed to be a moral in that?” Sofia asked him.

James snorted. “The moral? There’s a moral in anything if you want there to be.”

Sofia was accustomed to James carrying a certain resigned disappointment in the world, but he’d never seemed cold before. Especially not toward her.

“I guess you heard about what I’m doing for my uncle,” she said.

He brought his gaze up to her face. “Yeah, as a matter of fact I did catch wind of that.”

Sofia blew into her mug. The coffee was still too hot. “And?”

“I was kind of wondering why you didn’t tell me yourself.”

“I wanted to,” Sofia said. “I would’ve. But we were broken up and all.”

“What did you think I was going to say?”

“I don’t know. I just didn’t want any discouragement, I guess.”

James looked provoked. “Is that what you’ve ever gotten from me?”

There was no need for Sofia to answer the question. They both knew the answer. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What do you think about it? Will you tell me now?”

“I think it sounds like an interesting thing to do is what I think. And something you might be good at.” James stopped and patiently rolled each of his sleeves to the elbow, making sure they were even. Then he took a breath. “What I’m skeptical about is the idea that you can make the future easier by parsing out the past. That’s what concerns me. You’re trying to find out what to do next, but you’re facing in the wrong direction.” He shrugged, as if to suggest that his opinion wasn’t necessarily important. “The only thing to do next is be a good person and let the moments unfold. I know you don’t want to hear that. My part in the play is to tell you everything will be peachy and yours is to say there’s heartbreak on the horizon, but honestly, neither of us knows.”

Sofia leaned forward. She wasn’t going to argue. Her discussions with James were always full of opposing truths. She was thinking about Pánfilo de Narváez. He had been asking the wrong questions. He had been worrying about gold when he should’ve been worrying about Cortez. James was right — you could tease morals out of anything if you had a mind to.

She touched James’s book with her fingertips, searching for something yielding in his eyes. The smudgy dove was above them, taking flight before a lavender sky. The coffee shop had gotten quiet, it seemed.

James rested his hand on his book and pulled it away from her, out of her reach. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d like to get back to my reading now.”

“Eight months,” Reeve answered.

Three interviews in, Sofia already felt experienced, on home turf in this interrogation room. Her subject was wearing a canary shirt and a beige sport coat, and looked nowhere near perspiring.

“Why here?”

Sofia looked Reeve in the face and waited for his answer. He seemed intrigued by his surroundings and by Sofia herself, like this interview was a life experience he was gaining.

“I was ready to get away from things, away from the city — well, if Jacksonville is a city, which compared to Lower Grove it is.”

“What about Idaho, some place like that?”

“In hindsight I did insufficient research.”

“But why here?”

Reeve adjusted the collar of his coat. He made no move to take it off. His legs were crossed and he folded his hands atop his knee.

“My family used to vacation over in Labelle, when I was a little guy,” he said. “This one-story motel with a pool. Next door was a field full of donkeys. My dad would grill. I guess I have a positive association with this area.” Reeve cleared his throat. “I drove over there a couple weeks ago. Motel’s still there; no sign of the donkeys.”

“What do you do, that you can move to the economic middle of nowhere?”

“I was a pretty good businessman in my day,” Reeve said.

“Past tense.”

“I built up a chain of high-end health clubs, nine of them. Took fifteen years. When the time was right I sold them. I had commercials on TV and billboards and everything.”

“And now you don’t have to work?”

“Not if I live somewhere like this.”

“I see,” said Sofia.

Reeve was intending to convey openness and full cooperation. His act seemed too flawless.

“Do you have any experience with the spiritually adept?” Sofia asked him.

“Actually I do. By marriage,” said Reeve. “My ex-wife’s aunt was a medium in St. Augustine. People used to fly in to see her. Some of them came once a year, like a checkup.”

“But you never sat with her?”

“She wouldn’t do family.”

“You could go see her now. She’s not family anymore.”

Reeve frowned, not unhappily. “You could do it. You could give me a reading.”

“No, I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not? My wife’s aunt made pretty good dough.”

“I don’t think I’m nosy enough.”

Now Reeve chuckled. “Work from home. Cash business.”

“Your ex-wife’s aunt,” Sofia said. “She’s mostly an actress. Not to say she doesn’t have a talent, but she put herself in show business.”

Reeve uncrossed his legs. He regarded Sofia wryly. “What about this here?” he said. “You’re in business.”

“This is pro bono. I’m not getting paid and I’m not taking advantage of anyone.”

Reeve thought a second, picking something off his sleeve, and when he spoke again Sofia couldn’t hear him. There was another sound in her ears. She was being flooded with exactly what she needed to know and not a thing more, the knowledge filling her abundant and organized. She felt like her mind was being held at the bottom of a fast-moving river, but it had all the air it could use. The feeling was serene yet bracing. It had nothing to do with her body, asked no physical effort, nor even surrender.