Buzz Cut (34 page)

Butler Jack lay on his rubber mat in his private paradise. He rubbed his testicles, trying to restore full blood flow. He was more at home in that cramped space than any place he'd ever been. At home inside the very skin of the ship. It was his ship now, the
Eclipse.
He was the true captain.

Butler Jack had the entire vessel in his head. Every digit, every switch and rotor and toggle and wire. He could roam it in his mind, go anywhere, knew all the specs.

2 x 14 MW CYCLO propulsion drives. 6.6 kV switchboards, four 10.3 MVA and two 6.8 MVA generators, plus six thruster motors, all engineered and supplied by ABB Marine, Helsinki. Electric synchronous motor connected directly to the propeller shafts, providing smooth shaft torque through the entire speed range, thus minimizing vibration. The cycloconverter controlled a standard synchronous motor that was robust and simple and required virtually no maintenance. The CYCLO control system provided flexible control and protection, automatically preventing the generators and prime movers from becoming overloaded at unexpected changes in voltage, load, or frequency in the electrical power system.

Over a thousand miles of electrical cable, five hundred tons of paint to cover the exterior, four thousand fire detectors, twenty-five miles of neon tubes, seventy-two air-conditioning units, five cooling compressors, and over forty miles of ventilation ducts, five hundred tons of marble.

Magnavox I 100 series Maritime Satellite Navigator, incorporating the Global Positioning System, Loran C navigator and Omega navigator, Doppler Log with simultaneous indication of speed forward, aft and sideways and a Voyage Management System.

Propulsion, navigation, air conditioning, water treatment, plumbing, electricity, diesel engines, hydraulics, refrigeration, pumping controls. There was no operation of the ship he hadn't mastered. And now he would show them. And now he would take his rightful place at the helm.

Him, Butler Jack. A boy who had been born with nothing. No father, no money, no education, no class. Watching his mother slave for Fiesta Cruise Lines. Thirty years she'd done their typing, their accounts, taken dictation, imprisoned behind her desk.

He'd watched her humiliate herself, always quick with a secret smile for her boss. Grins and little flicks of the eye, gestures and looks the likes of which, Butler Jack, her own son, never received from her.

Butler studied her. He'd seen her change her stance, an arch coming into her posture when Morton Sampson was around, showing herself, presenting her body. Her tits. A trollop. Sexing her way up the pyramid. Too busy stalking a husband to waste her affections on her own son.

That afternoon twelve years before, the iced turkeys, the Thanksgiving employee picnic, five hundred people eating on the broad front lawn of Sampson's house. Lola had disappeared into the pool house, Morton Sampson slipping in there a few minutes later. Everyone had known it. Smiling, little winks. Everyone murmuring while the money fell from the turkeys, while the food was served, while Morton Sampson's wife, Irene, moved among her husband's employees as though nothing unusual were happening. Monica sitting beside Butler, the golden down on her arm igniting in the sunlight. Butler feeling his blood steam. Feeling the flush rise up his neck, the sun growing dark overhead. Everyone knew. All of them smirking. Lola in the pool house. A whore. His mother fucking her way, little by little, into that big house. Leaving Butler behind.

A boy with nothing. Not mother's love, not father's. Nothing but a brain that absorbed everything that passed before it. A brain and a dream. I will wait for you always, forever, till the end of time. Ice turkeys filled with money. The coins trickling out. He'd waited and he'd waited. He'd watched the money fall, watched it mount up.

He shifted on his rubber mat. And for one final time he consulted the schematic diagrams that were emblazoned in his head, traced the rudder lines from bridge to NFU box, a thousand feet of kinks and twists, moving finally to the rudders themselves, and when he was absolutely certain, absolutely ready, he picked up his black-handled dagger, chose the correct wire, and cut.

Monday morning Thorn and Monica breakfasted outside on the Sun Deck. Seven o'clock and the buffet was steaming. Asian men in lopsided white chef hats stood smiling behind the silver trays. She and Thorn passed by the deep dishes of eggs and bacon and sausage. Pancakes, waffles, omelettes cooked on command. Chipped beef, shrimp, and crabcake. Standing behind a hunk of bloody roast beef at the end of the service line the tall black chef, armed with a carving knife and sharpener, was clearly disappointed at their paltry appetites. Only a muffin apiece and a large mug of coffee.

Just before breakfast Monica and Thorn went back to her cabin and they'd discovered that sometime during the night Butler had come and gone, taken his duffel. Thorn cursed himself for not thinking to stake out the cabin. Monica retrieved her Sugarloaf clothes, the faded denim work shirts, the Bermudas. Changing in the bathroom into a frayed pair of pink shorts, one of the work shirts. Stuffing the rest of her wardrobe, old and new, into a laundry bag, carrying it along.

This morning Thorn had on a pair of white walking shorts and a blue print shirt with marlins and sailfish jumping from a sloppy sea. Stiff creases marked the front of the shirt as if he'd just unpinned it from months on the shelf. The fabric looked as stiff and shiny as tin, and Thorn kept making small wriggles to limber it up.

They chose a table in the lee of the three-story smokestack. Thorn glancing up at it, frowning. Apparently the architects who designed the ship tried to disguise the big exhaust vents with a few tons of brightly painted sheetmetal formed into a windswept design, but the funnels couldn't be completely concealed, what with the air-rippling currents pumping out of them every hour of the day.

Monica munched her bran muffin and watched the TV crew set up the lights, the chairs, the three-step wooden stage where
Lola Live
was to be broadcast back to America in another two hours. They were anchored in a cove about a mile off the coast of Nassau. The water was blue white, shockingly clear. A plump sun rose over the shadowy green hills and to the east cloud slivers piled up like soap shavings. Lining the shore, the white hotels were tinted various shades of pink, their eastern windows harsh golden mirrors. As she and Thorn ate, a breeze washed over them scented with coconut oil, an undercurrent of booze. A black helicopter with red lettering hung in the sky off to the west.

Thorn set down his mug. He opened the paperback dictionary he'd borrowed from the ship's library, paged through it till he found the word he was looking for. He read for a while, a smile playing on his face. Then he closed the book, mouthed a few sentences to himself, opened the book again, studied the passage a little longer, then slid it aside.

"Got what you need?"

"Yeah," he said. "And what I don't have, I can make up. A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down the pants."

Thorn turned his head, stared across at a long-haired young man in a silk jacket with LOLA LIVE embossed on the back. As the guy watched the stagehands work, he played with the tips of his hair, twirling strands of it between his fingers as if he were rolling a joint.

"A friend of yours?"

"Name is Rafael," Thorn said. "He's the cohost. I like his jacket."

"I know who he is."

Thorn pinched loose a piece of his muffin and dropped it in his mouth. "You've seen this show?"

"Once or twice," she said.

"What the hell's a cohost anyway?"

A smile spread her lips. "You're kidding."

"I'm serious. What's the kid's job?" Thorn continued to stare at Rafael.

"He sits next to Lola, makes fun."

"Makes fun of Lola?"

"Sometimes, yeah. Or the guests. Or whatever the hell zips through his head."

"You watch this show a lot?"

"It comes on at nine. I started cleaning rooms about then. There's not a whole lot else on at nine unless you want to listen to the screamers."

Thorn shook his head, bewildered.

"Screamers," Monica said. "Talk shows where the audience boos the guests. Hoots them down. Bigots, sex maniacs, various losers confessing to all their dirty secrets. Lots of bleeping, dirty words flying around. I can't watch them. Too embarrassing."

"The two of them, Rafael and Lola, it's a weird match," Thorn said. "He can't be more than twenty-five."

"I think that's the idea," she said. "Cover the age spectrum. Lola lures in the middle-agers and the old folks. Rafael is for the rest."

"What? The thirteen-year-olds?"

Monica chuckled. "He used to do a show on MTV. Very hip. Very L.A. Got a cutting edge sense of humor."

"Rafael? He's cutting edge?"

"That's what they say."

"Well, I like his jacket." Thorn watched as a makeup woman ran a brush through Rafael's hair, teased it a little, misted him with hairspray.

"So have you ever been to the Bahamas?" she asked.

Thorn pulled his eyes away from Rafael, gave her his undivided.

"A few times. Last year I sailed over on a friend's boat. Stayed a month on Andros, some little rental shacks my friend knew about. Very nice, very romantic."

"You're a real romantic guy, huh?"

He looked at her for a few seconds, trying to decipher her tone. She didn't know what it was herself. Maybe she was flirting, or maybe she was doing an Irma Slater number. Rough him up a little, get him off-balance. For Irma every affair was a wrestling match. Get on top, work to the pin.

"It was a romantic week," he said. "Living on a beach, cooking fish over the fire, running around naked, watching the sun rise and set, drinking wine. You'd have to be brain dead for it not to be."

Monica finished her coffee, watched one of the TV crew guys roll a big monitor to the edge of the set. Behind the stage a gang of passengers who were squeezed into one of the hot tubs let out a raucous laugh. They'd been out there when she and Thorn had arrived. Pulling an all-nighter.

"Everyone's drunk," she said.

"Free booze will do that."

"Thorn," she said. She drew a breath, let it go. "Look, I've decided something. I hope you're not upset, but I'm going to get off in Nassau. Take my earthly possessions and bail out of this bullshit. The Bahamas shouldn't be such a bad place to start over."

He was looking at her, his face empty.

"I'm sorry if it spoils your plan."

"Don't worry about that. We'll get this asshole one way or the other. You should do what you want."

"What I want," she said. A rueful smile. "What I want."

"Now there's a hard one, huh?"

"Yeah," she said. "But why? A person should damn well know what they want. It should be easy. You should be motivated, yearn for something, work toward a goal. That's how it should be. Right?"

"Maybe you've been on the run too long."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You get good at whatever you do a lot of. Maybe you've gotten good at running away."

"Screw you," she said. She pushed her plate away. "You don't know me. You don't know a fucking thing about me."

Thorn took a bite of his blueberry muffin. Brushed a crumb off his lips. He stretched his arms out, flexed his shoulders as if that new shirt were chafing his armpits. "You got any skills, anything you can do beside clean motel rooms?"

"Hey, fuck off, okay. Just fuck off."

"Sure. Whatever you want."

Monica dabbed up a few crumbs of her muffin, sucked them off her fingertip. A tall red-haired guy on the TV crew was doing a sound check. Counting to ten, then singing a few bars of some Jimmy Buffett song. Rafael peered at him through a camera's viewfinder, still twirling the tips of his hair.

"I draw pictures," she said.

"You draw. That's a skill."

"I studied art in college. I was an art major."

"What do you draw?"

"Pen and inks. Small drawings with lots of detail."

"Yeah, but what're your subjects?"

"What, you're an art critic?"

Thorn leaned back in his chair, looked off at the island.

"Things I see," she said. "Objects with odd mixtures of shapes. Tennis rackets leaning in corners. Fishing poles, mangroves. I've done some birds, pelicans, stuff like that. Not exactly art."

"You do faces?"

"People are too hard."

"Yeah," he said. "They are that."

"You know, I don't get it with you guys. You're sitting around, scratching your nuts, thinking up clever ways to catch Butler. Why the hell don't you just go room to room? Bust in, surprise the son of a bitch."

He twisted his head around and stared at her. "There's only three of us. There's eleven hundred rooms on this boat. That's just the passenger cabins. We could spend a hell of a lot of time searching and all he'd have to do is duck out of the way for a second or two, we go by, and the whole thing's been a waste. It's better to draw him out. Set a trap."

"Doesn't matter," she said. "No, I don't give a shit what you guys do anymore. I'm getting off in Nassau, get back to work on my running skills."

"You feel safe doing that? Knowing Butler's still floating around?"

"Hell no, I don't feel safe. I've never felt safe."

"Soon as the show's over, we're docking. It's your call. I'm sure as hell not trying to convince you."

"Oh, sure you aren't."

He was way too old for her. Had to be in his early forties. With that charter fishing captain look about him. Been soaking up the sun all his life, skin getting leathery. Hair burned to a crunchy blond. A haircut that looked like he might've hacked it off himself with a fillet knife. Blue eyes with some weird distance behind them. A guy who'd spent too much time thinking about the imponderables. Weighted down with what he'd discovered.