An Honest Man

by Michael Koryta

He looked into her eyes and saw the glimmer of pleasure in them. A look that said You saw the blond hair and the tan skin and the white teeth and you underestimated me, didn’t you? Well, smile for the camera, fella, because I’ve got your nuts in a vise now and the whole world is watching.

Israel Pike was a killer, and he was an honest man. They were not mutually exclusive. Even with his uncle, whom he hated more than anyone alive, he hadn’t lied. He wasn’t an unreliable narrator. He was a withholder.

An informant was nothing but a storyteller. A good informant told the truth. A smart informant told the truth as needed. There were a lot of foolish informants in prison cells and burial plots. And maybe some smart ones.

He spoke endlessly of what he saw as the sad demise of not simply the Pike family or even Salvation Point Island but of the entire country, the loss of America’s morality, work ethic, and compassion. He saw Salvation Point as a symbol, a place of opportunity and gumption that had once teemed with loving neighbors and stern but benevolent authority figures, a place of patient lessons and collective wisdom, Happy Days rebooted on an island.

Sterling Pike had seen his deputy’s badge as a symbol of leverage rather than leadership, viewed bribes as a revenue stream.

The public was less interested in real justice than in the clean, self-righteous satisfaction of immediate blame. They didn’t want the truth. The truth was complicated, messy, required something of them, maybe even an admission of their own fallibility. All the questioning and the listening and the thinking, so exhausting, who had the time? They just needed someone to hang.

Before the first dawn light reached the easternmost shore of the United States, Lyman Rankin fell asleep in a dead man’s house while a strange woman sat beside him holding a hatchet.

He had a warm voice but his eyes held the chilled distance of someone who expected to be lied to.

“Don’t blame the place. The island was there before the evil.”

Charlie Pike wasn’t disappointed in his son for failing to do the right thing; he was disgusted with him for thinking the right thing mattered. For thinking small.

Hoss was the greatest concern, and not only because of his size; he had the bearing of a man who wasn’t entirely sure if he cared to keep on living. Israel felt that rising from him like steam.

It wasn’t hard to sell a lie if it was what you felt. What you felt was maybe more important than the truth. More authentic.

that island lost its law a long time ago, and you know it.”

“You were in the can for years, then you got out and came back to a place you don’t like so you could do penance for a crime you don’t regret,” Caruso said. “Odd choice.

people on this island believe things about me that are not true, and they’re using their fists and boots and baseball bats to make the point.

Lyman liked Israel Pike. A strange response, considering he was a murderer, yet he seemed to be the kind of man Lyman had always wanted his father to be—he listened, he saw how others felt and cared how they felt, he considered things from different points of view, and, above all else, he was honest.

A lot of people on this island need the strength and can’t deliver it. I do it for them. I deliver.”

So how did you preserve what you loved about your home? Tell the right stories and help people find their footing whenever you could. Understand that you were temporary. Understand that being temporary wasn’t a tragedy.