ALSO BY EDWARD J. DELANEY
Broken Irish
Warp and Weft
The Drowning and Other Stories
EDWARD J. DELANEY
FOLLOW THE SUN
TURTLE POINT PRESS
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
Copyright © 2018 by Edward J. Delaney
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher.
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Turtle Point Press
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher upon request
Cover photograph by Emerald Bailey
Design by Jakob Vala
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-885983-55-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-885983-51-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-885983-56-5
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS Part One Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Part Two Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Part Three Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Part Four Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Part Five Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Part Six Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Part Seven Chapter 38
PART ONE
THE FUNERAL FOR A MISSING MAN BECOMES REDUCED to objects. Small proxies, a collection of artifacts. In lieu of a body, just left-behind things. Things judged dear to the departed, or emblematic of his quicksilver existence, as all our existences are ultimately mercurial. The table, where the eye looks for a casket, is set up with his childhood photos and the chosen props: the mildewed leather baseball glove, the football cleats, all the equipment of lost youth. The brass sextant, ceremonial and that day left behind, ironic perhaps for a man disappeared into the sea. Some rust-tinged tools, as if the place setting of a simple life. As present in the moment are the objects not offered: the needles and pipes and plastic bags, all those defeated soldiers of a decades-long war. How ironic, then, that his beloved sea has claimed him after he’d thought he’d looked behind at all his demons.
The funeral parlor, filled with his own kind, of two kinds: the remnants of his family and old friends, and to the other side, the thick-handed lobstermen rubbing their weathered faces, itching to cast off even as they account for another loss among them. Small murmurs in the back rows about another, a man swept off a deck down by Cape May. They sit in leather jackets and mended trousers and look warily at those here who are not among their ranks.
Their boats fill the harbor today. The lobsters are granted stay. A man is gone, but a table of effects remain as scant touchstones of a full existence. And over it hangs that fog of indistinct death, and possibly of murder, but by whom, and to whom, unknown.
1.
THE BUGS INVADE QUINN BOYLE’S MIND IN THE NIGHT, strangely, now that he’s finally clean. Or maybe because he is. It’s been almost three years from the spider’s bite of that last needle, nearly two years off the prison bit, and a dozen months since he finally felt he had mastered it. But the bugs are a nightly reality, crawling up into his head.
When he worked on that first boat, he’d laughed when they called the lobsters that. The bugs. He laughed hard at nearly anything back then, seventeen years old and looking at all the world as a joke. He laughed hard before the fatigue of life wiped it from his face.
Bugs. In that diminution, he came to see, lay the illusion of control, a presumption of rendering them manageable. Always, they came out of the ocean fighting, tail-fisted in the back of the bedrooms of the stainless-wire pots, slashing into light and air they’d never known. Pulled free and sorted by the thick-gloved human hand, that unfamiliar rival. Rubber-banded into submission, and then dropped into the churning hold tank. The broken and undersized got probation, flipped back over the side like an afterthought. The strong ones were the doomed.
Down in that bristling hold,