Sugar Rain by Paul Park Page A

squinted up at the sky. A rip had opened in the clouds above them, and the sun was shining through. The light made swirling patterns on the water. Charity looked at her reflection over the side. She trailed her fingers in the lake, joining hands with her reflection. The lake gave off an acrid, sweaty smell. Smiling, she turned around and watched the sweat gather on the boatman’s forehead and drip slowly down into his eyes.
    “I’ll say this for her,” the man said. “She’s easily amused.”
    They were coming in among some buildings and the tops of flooded tenements. Charity looked through the windows into the apartments. Some were still furnished and intact, and some had rowboats parked outside, tied to the fire escapes.
    She saw no other people. But soon the water was much shallower. Ahead she saw a group of wooden houses built on stilts. It was a style that had been popular in winter, when the snow was very deep.
    “There is one thing,” said the parson. “I could write you a charm. In lieu of payment. What kind of man is he? Your sick friend.”
    “Like me. He has a fever.” The man put his oars up and let the boat glide from its own momentum into Spider Ghat.
    “Understand, I don’t guarantee results. It’s a question of faith.”
    “I understand.”
    “Just so you know.” The parson fished a ballpoint pen out of a pocket in his robe. From some other place he produced a book of rolling papers, and he took one out and ripped it in half. He spread it out on the gunwale and bent over it, hiding it from Charity as he wrote. Then he handed it to the boatman. “Have him roll it up and take it like a pill.”
    “What does it say?”
    “It is a verse from holy scripture. A very potent verse.”
    One of the houses had a wooden porch built along three sides, and steps ran down from it onto a wooden landing. The landing floated on the shallow water, lashed to oil drums at either end. “There,” said Raksha Starbridge. “Take us there.”
    A scum of Styrofoam and driftwood covered the water near the landing, wreckage from the submerged apartments, pieces of furniture, and broken chunks of roof. Charity pushed aside some saturated sofa cushions and stared down into the water. She could see the concrete curbstone two feet down and, superimposed, the reflection of the house as they drifted to the landing. It was one-storied and dilapidated, with cracks in the sheathing. The windows were broken and boarded over, the walls covered with graffiti. The porch and the landing were crowded with objects salvaged from the flood—crates and chains and spools of wire, a child’s tricycle, a broken rocking chair.
    Charity raised her eyes. The boatman was still sitting in his seat, puzzling over the fragment of paper. He spindled the paper in his hand, curling it around his finger while the parson stepped out onto the landing. And then he made a tiny gesture with his head, a gesture of dismissal. Charity got to her feet, and the parson grabbed her around the wrist and pulled her from the boat. He let go of the painter. But the man just sat there in the boat with the paper curled around his finger, until the parson pushed the gunwale with his foot, and the boat drifted away. Charity stood looking after it, while the parson held onto her wrist, forcing his fingernail into the vein beneath her palm. The man in the boat backed water slowly, but it wasn’t until he was out of sight behind the wreckage of a wall that Raksha Starbridge permitted himself to laugh. “He’d better pray there is no God,” he said.
     
    *
Five miles away, Lord Chrism stood on Bishop’s Keys, beneath the belly of the temple. From Wanhope Prison he had traveled underground, along a web of waterways that stretched for miles under the city. Returning to the temple he had traveled underground, in his somber, hearselike barge of state, all gilded wood and purple hangings, poled by silent members of his guard.
    He stood at the edge of the stone pier,