Off the Chart (12 page)

“I'm still not used to it,” Alexandra said. “How quiet it gets. Nine o'clock, half the island's in bed.”

They were sitting outside on the upstairs porch looking out at the glossy black water. All the shoreline houses in either direction were dark, only a few dock lights burning. Lawton was asleep on his cot in the living room. On the floor beneath him, the puppy was stretched out, legs trembling, making small yips at some rival in his dream.

“My neighbors,” Thorn said. “Crashing after another long day of leisure.”

“It's unreal,” she said. “Up in Miami, people haven't eaten dinner yet.”

She had a taste of her wine and leaned back in the low-slung chair, tipping her head back to look up at the heavens. The stars were all there. Showing off a little in the clear sky.

Thorn had a sip of wine and set the glass back on the deck. He saw the flitter of dark wings above the tamarind tree. Bats or mosquito hawks clearing swaths of air.

“You miss it, don't you? Living in the city, the twenty-four-hour hum.”

“I'm there all day. I don't miss it. I'm still in it.”

“I don't know if I could do it. Adjust to the pace up there,” Thorn said. “When it gets dark here, it gets dark. Up there, the lights don't ever shut off. The sky's orange.”

“No one's asking you to adjust. We're here. This is what we're doing.”

“For now,” he said.

“What're you saying? You thinking about taking that offer for your land, living in a big house with lots of light switches and bathrooms, going out to dinner at ten o'clock?”

“I don't know what I'm saying.”

“You're worried about me, that's what. That city girl speech I gave the other day. That's bothering you.”

Thorn watched a slow boat passing across the sound, headed for Adam's Cut and the oceanside. A catamaran, its small engine nudging it along at less than ten knots. Only a single light burning at the wheelhouse.

“I'm not worried about you,” Thorn said.

“But it's on your mind. You think I feel the tug of Miami. You think this is just temporary. A fling. My heart's not really in it, living down here.”

Thorn watched the sailboat disappear. The bay was empty. Thursday night, second day of May, already entering the long sluggish summer, when only the mosquitoes seemed to have any motivation.

“Key Largo's a tough place,” Thorn said. “It's beautiful, but it's not easy. I know how it works. Eventually the beauty part wears off, then it just feels isolated. Some people start getting antsy after a while.”

“They miss the hum,” she said.

“Yeah, they miss the hum.”

“Well, I get a good healthy dose of hum every day,” she said. “Don't worry about me.”

Her hand found his and she squeezed and he gave an answering grasp.

“I like spending time with Lawton,” Thorn said. “I like that a lot.”

“The dog or the dad?”

Thorn smiled at her in the dark.

“Even like he is, he's funny and smart,” Thorn said. “I can't believe the stuff he comes up with. He must've been one hell of a guy when he was young.”

Alexandra said nothing for a moment. Thorn could feel her grip soften as if the blood were seeping from her veins.

“He was,” she said at last. “You would've liked him then, too, and he would've liked you. A lot.”

“He seems to like me now.”

“He does,” she said. “But that's not Dad. That's a wonderful, sweet, brave old man who's short-circuiting.”

Thorn held her hand and watched the shimmer of dark water, a warm gust flooding in from the Atlantic side, keeping the mosquitoes at bay.

“It's awfully quiet,” he said.

“Quiet is good,” she said. “Quiet is wonderful.”

“You ready to go inside, be quiet in there?”

“I'm ready,” she said. “But I don't know how quiet I can be.”

“We'll hum,” he said. “We'll make our own hum.”

She stood up and bent over to kiss Thorn on the top of his head. He could feel the heat of her lips through his hair, feel her whisper against his scalp. Her wordless breath calling out his secret name.

 

Thorn woke with a gasp and pushed himself upright against the pillow, his heart floundering. The dream of snapping jaws had evaporated so quickly, he had no memory of it beyond the flash of two rows of sharpened teeth. Maybe a crocodile, or a great white, or maybe only a plastic set of chattering dentures wound up by the practical joker who roamed his psyche. He sat there staring out at the darkness, feeling silly. Just a dream, unhooked from any reasonable fear, only a random image bubbling up from the cauldron of his general anxiety. Nothing to analyze, not even a story to share with Alex over morning coffee. Just those disembodied teeth snapping the air inches from his nose.

Across the room a chalky dust seemed to coat the dresser and the rough-hewn walls. A haze hung in the room like electrified fog. He
blinked his eyes and worked to fill his lungs. It took another moment before his head cleared and he saw the pearly glow was simply the full moon leaking through a thousand microscopic chinks in his plank house.

Beside him Alexandra was sleeping on her right side, one arm tucked beneath her pillow, the other hidden by the quilted bedspread. Her long black hair was coiled into a glossy rope lying across the pale blue sheets. As he crawled out of the bed, she snuffled twice as if flirting with wakefulness, then dug deeper into the same pose as before, a sleeper descending with firm resolve back down into the shadowy nowhere.

Naked, Thorn padded across the room and opened the door and stepped into the living area. With the shades open, the room was as bright as noon. Their dishes from dinner sparkled in the drying rack, and the mirror on the far wall was full of golden tree branches and gleaming bay water.

It was a small open kitchen with a tiled counter, an ancient Frigidaire that chugged on into a new century, and a two-seater breakfast nook. That nook and every beam and plank and joist in the rest of the house had been fashioned out of rain-forest hardwoods that Thorn had salvaged from the Miami dump. Used to ship VCRs and color TVs and fax machines from Asia and South America to the hungry shores of the U.S., those once-used crates were often made from two-hundred-year-old cinnamon teak and rosewood and mangium, ebony, and purpleheart. In Miami the crates were crowbarred open, the shabby contents removed, then those scraps of noble wood were burned and pulverized at the city landfill. With Sugarman's help he'd rescued a few tons of the treasure and milled the wood into planks to rebuild his house, every day for a year making the long trip to Miami to pick through piles of abandoned timber.

Forever after, his house gave off a welter of pungent aromas. Dark roasted coffee mingled with peppermint and citrus and leather and tangy spices so exotic they had not yet been named. With every breeze the wood house flexed. Each barometric shift made the boards creak and groan like dry hinges on an old gate. But the structure was tough beyond steel, curing each year into something ever harder as the sap turned inward. A wood so dense it would not yield to fire or
rot or termites. And Thorn was certain the house would be the last building to go down to the inevitable hurricane that would someday sandblast these coral islands smooth. For years it had been his bunker against change, his hideaway from the ceaseless onslaught of human folly. Inside those four walls, perched on stilts fifteen feet above mean high tide, he sometimes felt himself disappearing into all that wood, as if those old trees still grew around him, ring by ring, spreading their girth, rising heavenward with Thorn trapped happily inside.

As he stood in the center of the living room, with the last ghostly tatters of dream departing, Thorn's eyes fell on the empty cot. Across the room beneath the west window the moon brightened against Lawton's disheveled sheets. The old man was gone and so was the pup.

Thorn marched out to the porch and leaned over the rail and peered into the snarl of shadows. On the yellow bench beneath the gumbo-limbo in a halo of moonlight Lawton sat primly, knees together, feet flat on the ground. He was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and a string tie, and his valise sat at his feet. Beside him on the bench, Lawton, the dog, was sprawled on his side with the edge of his snout resting on Lawton's thigh. The old man's eyes were open and he was looking to his right, back toward the highway as if he heard the heavy
whoosh
of air brakes, his Greyhound bus come at last.

Thorn went inside the house and stepped into a pair of baggy gym shorts, then went back outside and walked down the stairs. Lawton was speaking, and the pup had stirred awake.

Sugarman stood at the edge of the bench.

Thorn walked over and even in that half-light he could see in Sugar's hunched shoulders and his bowed head that all was not well.

“That bus late again?” Thorn said.

“Hell, yes,” said Lawton. “I'm a half-second from walking out to the highway and hitching a ride with the next passing stranger.”

“This time of night most of the idiots out there are tanked up on margaritas,” Thorn said. “Probably best to wait till daylight.”

Thorn sat down beside the old man. He reached over and scratched the pup's throat.

“That's true,” Lawton said. “About the only enjoyable thing to do
on this godforsaken rock is get plastered. That's another reason I'm heading out.”

“Aren't you sleepy, Lawton? Need a little shut-eye?”

“Old people don't need sleep,” he said. “You'll see someday.”

Lawton, the pup, sighed and snuggled against Lawton's thigh.

“And you, Sugar. What're you doing out here, middle of the night?”

“I needed to talk, but I didn't want to wake you.”

“You were going to sit out here till sunup?”

“I been running around for the last couple of hours, trying to figure this thing out and getting nowhere. I didn't know where else to go.”

“What is it?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Probably nothing.”

“Okay,” Thorn said. “So now that you're here, you going to share it with us or do we have to arm-wrestle it out of you?”

“I'm sorry, man. I shouldn't bother you with this.” He looked at Lawton, then back at Thorn. “You got your hands full and everything.”

“Goddamn it, Sugar.”

Thorn waved a mosquito away from his ear.

“Okay, okay. It's Janey.”

“What about her?”

“I was doing a virtual visitation with her tonight. On the computer, you know, that laptop I bought. Talking to her on-line.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we were talking, and she was showing me this pair of binoculars she got for her birthday, then all of a sudden there's this guy next to her. Never saw him before. He's dressed like a goddamn pirate, of all things. Knife in the teeth, bandanna over his head, maybe even an eye patch, I don't know. The image was fuzzy.”

“A pirate.”

“Janey was on Markham's yacht, out in the Atlantic. One of those bullshit cruises where he takes out a bunch of true believers, puts them in a trance, and they go back a few thousand years, find out all the people they've been. Reincarnation, channeling, whatever it's called.”

Lawton turned his head and peered through the darkness at Sugarman.

“Don't tell me you believe in that horseshit?”

Sugarman shook his head at Lawton, then turned back to Thorn.

“I was talking to Janey, then out of nowhere there were fireworks or some kind of noise up on deck, then this guy dressed like a pirate sticks his face in the screen and Janey makes a little squeal and the two of them disappear.”

Thorn looked out at Blackwater Sound, acres of shimmering moonlight framed by the dark mangrove islands. The constant blink of a channel marker off to the south.

“Some kind of entertainment maybe,” Thorn said. “It's her birthday.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Sugar. “I know it's probably that. A while back on one of these cruises Markham hired a bunch of bodybuilders and dressed them up like harem slaves and gave all the old ladies a thrill. Another time he did gladiators. Trying to get them in the mood for a little time travel.”

“So it was probably that, goofy entertainment.”

“Yeah,” Sugarman said.

“But you don't really think so.”

Sugarman looked out at the water. Something was splashing about a hundred yards out. Barracuda after pinfish, or maybe a mullet trying to launch itself at the giant moon.

“I should go,” he said. “It's the middle of the goddamn night. I'm being an idiot.”

“It's allowed,” Thorn said. “Around here it's even encouraged.”

“Well, there's my bus,” Lawton said. He stooped over and nabbed his suitcase, then hitched the dog under his arm and stood. “I've got to hit the highway, boys. It's been fun.”

“Where you going, Lawton?”

“Columbus, Ohio. My birthplace.”

“But this is the midnight bus,” Thorn said.

“So?”

“So this one doesn't go to Ohio. That one's tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“That's right.”

“First I heard of that.”

“It's been that way for years, Lawton. Ohio is in the morning.”

“You wouldn't be trying to trick an old man, would you?”

“Still some good sleeping hours left before daybreak,” said Thorn. “Soon as Sugar and I are finished, I plan to crawl back into bed myself.”

“All right, goddamn it,” Lawton said. “But tomorrow there's no stopping me. You hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

Lawton walked over to the foot of the stairs and halted. He swung his head from side to side, staring at the trees and the bay and all those familiar sights with a puzzled look as if he might be waking from a session of sleepwalking.