Lost Cargo by Hollister Ann Grant, Gene Thomson Page A

“Where are my socks?”
    The door had shown up twice now. He saw it last week when he was stuck in a cab on Pennsylvania Avenue. The glowing door had appeared like a tiny sun behind the cab driver’s bald head and hovered by the man’s ear for a few seconds before it blinked itself out.
    “It could be my eyes,” Monroe told himself. Maybe he needed vitamins. Or maybe he’d inherited the Third Eye his Haitian grandmother Antoinette claimed she was born with. She’d always said she knew who was going to ring her doorbell twenty minutes before they came clomping up the steps, but then she’d thrown a live chicken over his head to cure him of the chickenpox. Thanks, but no thanks. He was a modern man with no interest in crazy family folklore.
    Time to go. He found his keys and took the Metro downtown to the law firm where he clerked, intending to study government contracts on the train. Someday all this was going to end, the train, the book on his knees, running from work to night class, gulping coffee after coffee to stay awake. Someday it was going to pay off.
    Instead of reading, though, he found himself reliving his childhood on the banks of the Cane River in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. After he finished college, he’d landed a scholarship to Georgetown University Law School in Washington, D.C. He’d expected great things, but before his second year a monster hurricane hit the Gulf Coast. The storm surge swept the family’s charter fishing boat away and washed the house off its foundation, taking every last photo, spoon, and scrap of furniture out to sea, even the fourteen-year-old cats.
    He left law school to search for his parents. Rescue workers finally recovered their bodies festering in a swamp by an interstate, but he never found out if they’d been on the boat or in the house when the storm struck. He railed at the merciless sky. Day after day the television showed ruined lives in a ruined landscape: houses reduced to nightmarish piles of rubble, downed power lines, cypress and catalpa trees torn from the earth, upside down cars pointing at the angry clouds.
    Time passed in a blur. The lawyer Monroe paid to track down his mother and father’s insurance and other records took forever to come up with nothing. The funerals cost thousands of dollars. Heartbroken and burdened with debt, Monroe returned to Washington to clerk for a law firm and pick up his studies at night, realizing it would take him years now to get his law degree.
    Annie Wong was the one bright spot.
    That night, Monroe watched Annie turn off the last lamp among Maxwell’s aisles of fine cooking equipment, linens, and organic wine. The recessed lights behind the counter caught the curve of her face, her silver rings, and plum-colored dress.
    “You look beautiful,” he told her.
    “Well, I don’t feel beautiful,” she said. “I guess I’m just tired.”
    “We’ll take the Metro. We don’t have to walk home.”
    She shook her head. “I’m fine, really. I can walk.”
    “You’re not sick?”
    “It’s nothing, really.”
    He wasn’t sure he believed her, but sometimes she got like that. Shy, hard for her to say what was on her mind. Besides, she didn’t look sick. She looked radiant, and had for a while, her skin and hair glowing with health. Before they left, she rang up ten lottery tickets for him, locked the cash in the office, found her coat, and draped her long hair over the collar. The lottery tickets were probably a waste of money, but he had to keep a few dreams burning.
    They began the long walk to her Dupont Circle apartment.
    She took his arm. “So, Monroe Henry Broussard, what are you going to do when you win the lottery?”
    “Buy fourteen bulldogs and finish law school.”
    “American bulldogs or the short and squatty kind?”
    “Short and squatty.”
    She laughed. “What else?”
    “Fly,” he told her. “Get a pilot’s license and fly over the Pacific. Get away from civilization. Fly over all the