The Four Corners Of The Sky (58 page)

The slender man lifted his shoulders rhythmically, so that the alligators danced on his yellow shirt. “I know nothing. I am only Rosencrantz and I forget the other one.”

“Raffy, isn’t a friend like family? Wouldn’t you rather help out Jack, your best friend, than sit here alone in this cell?”

He glanced sadly around the small bare barred room. They looked at each other.

Dan said, “Do it, Rook. Annie’s fought for you. You should have heard her in there fighting for you. Come on. Help her.”

The Cuban sighed at the ceiling. “Ahhh, Annie…‘my love’s more richer than my tongue.’…” He sighed at the floor. “I’ll do it.”

Dan gave him both thumbs up.

Annie told the MP that they were ready to go. The young man helped Raffy to his manacled feet.

“I don’t want to do this,” Raffy whispered to Annie. “I really don’t want to. I don’t want to go back to jail in Cuba. Not without Jack.”

She kissed him. “You won’t,” she promised. “I’m going to get you through this. And you’re going to see your mother. She doesn’t want to see a Thorn of the Holy Crown in a silver box. She wants to see you.”

His ponytail flicked from side to side. “That’s what you think.”

Annie stepped back so the MP could walk him out of the room. “Everything’s going to be okay. Do you believe me?”

His eyes sweetened. “I do believe you.” He leaned around her to Dan. “You, you son-of-a-bitch Miami police, I don’t believe. But her I do.”

Dan slapped the Cuban’s thin back, assuring him he’d be home with Chamayra and they’d be hanging out the Love sign in no time.

“No time would be better than eighteen months,” sighed the Cuban as he shuffled down the long, overlit corridor.

Just as McAllister Fierson had pledged, the government made the arrangements. If there was one skill the government had, Dan noted, it was
VIP
arrangements: The government knew how to grease the wheel (in the packets Trevor had handed them there were Canadian passports and Cuban pesos and euros with which to bribe any people whom it might be appropriate to bribe). The government was good at paving the way (at the Key West airfield, Annie’s father’s Cessna Amphibian was already checked out, gassed up, and waiting on the ramp). They knew how to jump the queue.

Annie moved the Cessna to first position on the tarmac. Eagerly Dan pulled open a loosened panel in the fuselage of the Cessna. Annie had told him the sort of panel to look for, predicting that her father would have hidden the gold statue of the Queen of the Sea just as he’d done before in the
King of the Sky.
Why else would he have told her in his phone call last night, “The Queen’s in the plane”?

Dan whistled when he pulled out of its green cloth wrapping the gold Virgin Mary in the Incan Pachamama cape, with her sunburst crown and large rectangular emeralds inserted in three of the seven gold rods. “Look at this thing! Holy Mother of God.”

Carefully strapped into his seat, Raffy clutched a life jacket. “Yes, it’s the Holy Mother. Are you being funny? Don’t be funny. Aren’t you scared?”

Dan looked out the window at the naval crews. “I tell you what’s scary. I’m in love with somebody in the U.S. military.”

Cleared for take-off, Annie taxied onto the runway and turned to look down the center. “You know what, Dan? You’re a whole lot better off with the military than you are with politicians. Like I keep reminding Sam, it was Eisenhower who said, ‘Watch out for the military-industrial complex.’ It was Admiral Leahy who said dropping the A-bomb on Japan would turn us into Dark Age barbarians. Good guys are in the military.”

Raffy shouted at Annie, “Stop talking, stop talking, pay attention to what you’re doing. Oh Jesús Cristo, hear my prayer!”

Dan laughed. “‘Hear my prayer’? Rook, you said you weren’t a believer.”

Raffy checked the buckle on his guitar in the seat next to him. “‘I love long life better than figs.’ And Chamayra will kill me if I get myself killed!”

The flight was not a long one. Within the hour, they spotted the green mountains of Cuba’s coast. The mountains were heartbreakingly beautiful.

Soon their small plane was approaching a quiet harbor north of Puerto Esperanza in the western province of Pinar del Rio. Right on time, they were coming in for a sea landing on the Archipiélago de los Colorados: lat 22º 47’ N, long 83º 43’ W. Annie radioed her position as instructed back at Sigsbee. She raised the wheels and soon was being guided in her descent by Raffy’s cousin Tico Ramirez. He’d been watching for them from his boat, just beyond the reef off the coast of the dockmaster’s office in the harbor.

The sea was gray and unexpectedly rough.

Annie glanced behind her at a strange noise. Raffy was making it. “Dan, get Raffy’s head down between his legs right away!” The musician was hyperventilating in loud gasps. She called back from the cockpit. “Raffy, take it easy! This is nothing! This is just a little choppy! Hang on.”

Dan cupped his hands over Rafael’s nose and mouth. “Breathe slowly,
paisano
. Don’t fight me, you chickenshit Cubano.”

“Let go, son of a bitch,” panted Rafael, pulling free of Dan, his hair flying, distracted from noticing that the seaplane was gliding with a smooth straightforwardness onto the bouncing waves. “O my Savior, gracias, gracias!”

They motored toward the buoy where Raffy’s cousin’s boat was waiting to meet them. So far, Dan admitted, everything had happened as Jack had said it would. “Let them send you to Havana, he said. Fierson will pretend it’s about Cuba and the church and the statue. And the
FBI
will really believe it. Jack’s gone way up in my estimation. I don’t mind having him for a father-in-law. If they double-cross us and he gets 20 years, I’m going to go visit him in prison.”

They still didn’t know what was in the bank pouch or what picture Jack wanted them to give Helen Clark. Or what Raffy was supposed to do that he always did.

“It will all fall pat,” the Cuban promised, cheerful now that he was out of the sky.

S
am, in the recovery room following her surgery, felt herself float up to the ceiling away from the pain. She had wings and was flying all around the room but, like a fly or a bee in search of an exit, she couldn’t find her way out and struck herself against the windows.

Annie, seven years old, stood with Clark at the foot of the hospital bed, their heads tilted back, turning to watch her aunt fly from light to light. “How come she’s got wings?” Annie asked Clark. “Is she dead?”

Clark said no, that Sam was not going to die yet because she hadn’t finished cleaning out the attic as she often promised to do before she died.

“Only angels have wings,” Annie told him.

“Don’t flyers?” he asked.

“That’s true,” the solemn little girl agreed. “Flyers have wings.” She unpinned the tiny medal bar of wings from her jean jacket and broke it in two, fastening a wing to each of her shoulders. The wings suddenly grew to full size, sprouting out of her jacket, and, using them to fly, Annie glided up to the ceiling next to Sam, who was trying to kick open a transom window. “Come back, Aunt Sam. It’s about that time.” The phrase was the one Sam used nightly to let Annie know it was time for her to go to bed. Tugging on Sam’s hand, Annie floated down with her in looping circles back onto the hospital bed below. Sam lay on the bed and Clark pulled up the white sheets around her.

An hour later, in the recovery room, Sam awakened from her dreams, worried that Jack hadn’t received the FedEx he’d asked her to send him two nights ago to his hotel in Key West—enclosing the photograph of Jack and Annie at The Breakers Hotel in West Palm Beach that he’d left in Annie’s little blue suitcase so many years ago and that Sam had framed when she’d found it. There had been something about that photograph that Jack had suddenly needed. Sam couldn’t now remember if Jack had explained what the importance was and she worried that maybe she hadn’t sent the FedEx correctly. Had she talked to Jack since she’d sent it?

Something had happened to her this morning; something had fallen on her. The old Worth armoire, that’s it, it had been her mother’s armoire. She’d been distracted, listening to news on the television from down the hall while she’d tried to drag the heavy ornate walnut piece of furniture into Jack’s room. That’s right, she was fixing up Jack’s old bedroom for his recuperation. The armoire had caught on the doorsill. Served her right. She’d been wearing her old leather weight-lifting belt to help strengthen her back but it hadn’t helped. She was not as strong, not as fast as she once had been. Why, when she was a girl, she’d once caught a runaway horse for a neighboring farmer and she’d ridden the horse home bareback. Once she’d killed a wild pig with a bow and arrow. She’d shaken apples out of the tops of trees for her friends and rescued her brother Jack from a bull’s charge.

Jack had called the teenaged Sam “the fastest woman alive.” He’d boasted to D. K. of her “amazing catch” of the infant Annie when the year-old baby was crawling so fast across the porch that she headed straight off into the air over the top of the steep steps. Jack was standing not far from the steps, talking to D. K. about the
King of the Sky
. They hadn’t noticed the baby. Sam had been upstairs, cleaning out the rooms that she never seemed able to empty of the collected past. She heard Annie laughing downstairs in the hall and then the door screeching open. According to Jack, Sam had flown down the stairs and through the air out onto the porch and never touched the floor before she had snatched Annie’s heel with her outstretched fingers and stopped her from falling.

But then Jack always exaggerated.

Sam drifted back into a dream in which she was trying to edit together a film but at the same time she was showing that film on a projector at the Paradise, Emerald’s now defunct old movie house. Sam was in a state because the film kept jamming and breaking off and unraveling, twisting like small black snakes, like a mechanical hydra, lashing the projection room. She had to keep stopping the movie, to the displeasure of the audience. They sat in the dark, chanting “Slowpoke! Slowpoke!” which is what her mother had called her when she’d “dawdled” over difficult homework.

The scenes of the movie, jumbled and disjointed, included awful memories that Sam had told no one but Jill and Clark and that she was upset to see playing out at the local cinema. In one scene, her father Judge Peregrine, austere in his black robes, spoke directly to the camera in extreme close-up. Addressing the mourners at the funeral of his two-year-old son John Ingersoll Peregrine, he told them that “candidly” he did not care for his daughter Samantha, whom he considered not particularly bright and that “frankly” he had an aversion to his son Jack, who had from his youth been defiant and volatile and beautiful and who had therefore always reminded the judge of his wife.

The camera panned rapidly left to right and ended up on the second-floor hallway of Pilgrim’s Rest. Then it tracked into the bathroom where the judge was pushing the teenaged Jack down into a tub of scalding hot water, holding the boy’s head under, while his wife Grandee beat him on his back.

The next shot was in a tennis court, where Sam hit dozens of serves of yellow apples to her mother, who ignored them.

Then her mother was sitting on the living room floor, bloody, with photographs of Johnny around her. The photographs burned like candles.

Then Sam ran into the St. Mark’s cemetery. Her mother was there, digging a hole and jumping down into it. Sam heard her screaming from beneath the ground and she heard the deep growling bark of a dog down there. Sam pulled her mother out of the open grave, just before a massive black dog snapped her leg between his jaws. Sam’s mother held to her breast the blue corpse of her first-born son, dressed in his white burial clothes.

Sam awakened to sharp pain in her leg. A young African American nurse leaned over her. “You doing okay?”

“Not really,” admitted Sam.

The nurse looked at the IV drip, adjusted it, gave it a tap. Sam drifted back to sleep.

Outside, alone in the recovery room lobby, Clark sat on a vinyl couch, his long legs resting on a nearby chair. He had read a report about Sam’s surgery and it looked to him as if the orthopedist Sarah Yoelson had done a fine job repairing the nerve damage, replacing the knee. There was no reason Sam wouldn’t even be able to play tennis again, although it would be unlikely that she could again be a state champion. He recalled how once years ago they’d pushed a big dead oak root up out of the loosened earth. He’d wanted to quit but she hadn’t let him. By strength and will, she’d kicked the last tendril loose. Sam never quit; not with him, not with Annie, not even with her awful parents.

“Tell me what Sam and Dad’s parents were really like.” On summer break from her first year at Annapolis, Annie had asked Clark that question one hot summer night. “Really. Tell me.”

And so he had. At least the part he knew at the time.

Sam’s father was a Peregrine, the youngest Superior Court judge in the state; snobbish, bright, cold, and sanctimonious. Sam’s mother had from her baby days been called Grandee Worth as an ironic comment on her petite stature and her illustrious family. She was capricious and charming, with a reputation as a great beauty. Grandee had tormented young Judge Peregrine into proposing, flirting publicly with his friends even on their wedding day. She had once confided to Clark—she was erratic and careless in her confidences—that she had never liked her husband but that she had started actively hating him after the death of their son Johnny. “He killed my baby,” she told Clark in her soft secretive lilt.

The toddler Johnny, while in the care of the judge, had drowned in the new swimming pool Grandee had insisted on building between Pilgrim’s Rest and the Nickerson house. It was the first inground pool in the town of Emerald, and the briefest, for the whole thing was filled in with dirt within a month after the two-year-old had playfully jumped off the diving board and sunk to the bottom. The judge had possibly drifted off to sleep for only a minute in his poolside chair and had awakened too late.