Buzz Cut (7 page)

"You're not one of those men who works so hard because he's got to leave an empire behind, some monument with his name carved on it."

"No, no empire. Nothing like that."

"Or maybe you use work to block out some dark, tormented interior life." Smiling playfully.

"I like tying flies. It's not complicated. I just like doing what I do."

Her forehead smoothed. Rochelle raised her glass. "Well, then. Let's drink to doing more of what we like to do."

"A worthy toast," Thorn said.

"And to spinning our cocoon against the poisons of the world."

Thorn hesitated, then lifted his glass to hers.

"To cocoons everywhere." he said. They clinked.

The noise woke Rover. He hustled out to the porch, giving himself an ear-flapping shake as he came. Lately Rochelle had started pouring out little puddles of wine on the bare planks for him to lap up, and now whenever he heard the tinkle of glasses, he came mooching around.

"What would you think," Thorn said, "about inviting Sugar and Jeannie over for supper one night this weekend?"

A strained smile played on her lips. "Sure, of course, invite them over. I like Sugar."

"You do?"

"Sure. Any friend of yours."

"Tonight or Saturday?"

"We've got martial arts Saturday, Thorn."

"Tonight then."

"Oh, God, I forgot," she said, topping up her glass, then his. "Sugarman called."

"Called? How'd he do that? There's no phone."

"My cellular. He called my dad, got the number from him."

"What'd he want?"

"I don't know. He didn't tell me."

Rochelle had a sip of wine. She lifted her free hand and pointed at the lazy arc of an osprey as it crossed overhead.

"Where's your phone, Rochelle?"

"In my purse. What? You're going to call him now?"

"I thought I would. Yeah."

"He's left by now."

"
Left?
"

"He was going somewhere, just wanted to tell you good-bye, I think. This was a couple of days ago."

"Couple of days?"

"Three maybe. Four, I don't know. Since I've been living here. I've been losing track of time."

"Four days ago. And you just now remembered?"

She narrowed her eyes. Set her wineglass on the railing, turned to face him full on.

"Yes, I forgot," she said precisely. "I'm sorry. But, Thorn, you don't even own a phone, no clock, no calendar, now all of a sudden you're worked up at me for not being a good personal secretary?"

"I'm sorry."

She turned away. And when he put his hands on her back, she was stiff. It took a full minute massaging her shoulders, her neck, before her muscles relaxed, and she closed her eyes, let her head slump forward. Made a small croon of pleasure.

The bay still dazzled, boats left their luminous signatures across it. The sky was an empty, perfect blue, and butterflies making ditzy gyrations around the geraniums at the far end of the porch. A glorious day. A beautiful, alluring, and highly intelligent woman groaning beneath his hands.

But Thorn was not there. Thorn was not anywhere.

Irma Slater. That's what she called herself. The ugly name she'd plucked out of the air. Grating, off-key, a handful of sour notes. Irma Slater. She'd considered Earlene, Eunice, briefly toyed with Brunhilda. But no one would believe those. Even Irma was pushing it, not a name you heard anymore. Someone born in a tarpaper shack, had pine twigs for toys, illiterate and malnourished. Ozarks, Appalachia, one of those hill women who looked twenty-five years older than she was. Washed clothes against the river rocks. Lucky to get out of the hollow once a year.

The young woman known as Irma Slater was having her Friday evening fish sandwich at the Mangrove Bar on Sugarloaf Key, seventeen miles up the road from Key West. Feeling the usual salty crust on her arms and throat from the day's accumulated sweat. She wore a blue denim shirt, washed so often it was fragile as cobweb, faded pink Bermudas, and a pair of rubber flipflops she'd picked up for seventy-nine cents at the Price Mart.

Hell, if she amortized the cost of her five identical outfits over the three years she'd worn them, frayed cotton panties included, her whole damn wardrobe probably worked out to something like point zero zero two cents a day. Maybe she should sit down, do the math, have the exact number ready. A good conversation killer.

Add in all the money she'd saved these last three years in the Keys, no makeup, jewelry, perfume, manicures and facials, no panty hose or bras, purses or cashmere sweaters or Armani suits. Throw in the hundreds of sad, hollow afternoons of impulse shopping at Neiman-Marcus she'd missed out on, and she'd probably saved enough money to put a dozen kids through college. Buy each one a Ferrari.

As it was, she'd saved four hundred and eighty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents in the last three years. Hid her stash in a Tampax box under the lavatory. Her nest egg. Her run money. In case she had to leave in a hurry, hit the road again, bus tickets, a few weeks' food until she got established somewhere else.

And it was a damn good thing she'd learned to be thrifty, because on what she made at Sugarloaf Retreat she barely had enough to cover her seven fish sandwiches a week. Coffee for breakfast, skipping lunch so she could splurge on Heineken instead of Busch at dinnertime.

It was the seventeenth of the month, middle of November, less than a week till Thanksgiving, the tourists just beginning to trickle down the highway again, shed their sweaters. Tonight, like every night, she sat on the corner bar stool, her razor pen, her drawing pad lying beside her dinner plate. An empty space on either side where the waitresses gave their drink orders. Jesse called her spot the cockpit.

Jesse was the bartender, chief bottle washer, and owner of Sugarloaf Retreat. Kinky gray hair in a ponytail. He was in his mid-fifties, from Indiana, retired real estate broker who'd scored big in shopping plazas, retired early, bought this broken-down motel. Now he spent his days roaming the ten acres of his bayside property in a red thong bikini, no shirt, barefoot. Nights he played bartender, and as a concession to the tourist crowd, he put on a flowered shirt. Like most everybody else in the Florida Keys, Jesse was going through a very public second childhood.

Reason he saved the cockpit for her was to help her ward off the bozos—the turkeys who slugged down a couple of courage beers and came sidling over to hit on the lonely lady with the short blond hair. Between the waitresses coming and going and Irma Slater's sour tongue, the bozos were usually back with their buddies in less than a minute.

"Hello, pretty lady," they'd say. Some variation.

Beautiful, gorgeous, ravishing, luscious, stunning. Heard it all her life. First words she remembered. Beautiful face, gorgeous sunny golden hair. Grown-ups always touching her curls as if to check that she was real. Touch, touch. And even when they didn't speak the words aloud, they said it with their eyes, said it with the change in their voice. Beautiful, gorgeous.

The boys were the worst, and later the men, the ones who winced but kept on staring as if her beauty caused an ache in their guts. A painful affront, a challenge. They stared at her as if she were a museum goddess. Marble, granite. Cold stone. That's how they treated her. Left room around her as they circled, marveling. While she waited for the inevitable—for one of them to break out of the orbit, move in, mutter the words, beautiful hair, a knockout, all that. As though she hadn't heard it before, hadn't already come to despise them for what they said, despise herself for making them say it.

In the process she sank away inside that museum goddess. Became a woman no one knew, no one cared to know. They saw the sculptured face, the large blue eyes, the sharp cheekbones, the figure that swelled and narrowed in extravagant proportions. You should be a model, they said. You should be an actress, they said. So she could get paid to be gawked at. Yeah, right.

She found she could go anywhere, do anything, the doors always swung open for her. The doors inside those doors. It was hers, the ripe world, the plums. The gorgeous sweet secret heart of things was laid out before her. Hers for the selecting. All she had to do was show up, point an elegant finger at what she desired.

And as though that weren't enough, there was the money. The cash, the lucre. Tainting everything, infecting it. Formidable wealth. Born with it, surrounded at every turn. Lavish house with Miami's most expensive vistas, childhood vacations to Paris, Zurich, hundred-thousand-dollar cars to chauffeur her to tennis classes and cotillion. Wealth so abundant there came a time when she was no longer sure where the money started and she began, no longer clear on which passion she aroused in those who professed their love. Which were the playthings, which the players.

Hell, yes, she knew there were a thousand worse calamities than being rich and beautiful. Tortures so grievous she had no inkling. Wars, famines, grinding poverty, abuse of every kind. She wasn't so far gone she confused her plight with real tragedy. Even at its worst, her misfortune struck her as no more than bitterly ironic. A mild irritation chafed to a bleeding sore by all those daily reminders of how blessed she was.

Severe enough, however, to bring her there, to Sugarloaf Retreat. Grievous enough to cause her to rename herself Irma Slater. Irma Slater. A name as harsh and unattractive as she could invent. All because she had concluded finally that she could no longer trust anyone who knew her by her real name.

Not even David Cruz.

She'd known David in high school. They'd dated, nothing serious. He was Cuban, wanted to be a cop. So far out of her league, he was a joke among her friends. Though David never seemed to mind. She liked him, had a soft spot, but lost touch when she went off to boarding school her sophomore year.

Five years later, a college girl then, the summer of her junior year, home from Sweetbriar, she bumped into him at someone's goofy barbecue. He was a cop by then. Living his dream. Hair cut short, looking cute and strong and very different from all the others. And he seemed immune to her beauty, to her father's wealth. Looked at her, seemed to peer past the surface, searching for who was down there. They talked. And he spoke to the hidden person, the invisible one, coaxing that part of her into view. They went to supper at the big bright, raucous Cuban restaurant he liked. A place her other friends used to mock as being too bright and raucous and Cuban.

Back in Virginia, she wrote him. He answered. His letters full of specifics, anecdotes about his days on the streets of Miami. He was funny. Earnest. He was doing what he'd dreamed of doing and he loved it. Sharing this with her. Her letters were glib. Acid stories about the Miami yachting crowd she'd always mingled with. Pen-and-ink caricatures of the Virginia prissies.

By Christmas her senior year, she and David Cruz were making secret plans to marry. And then a month before graduation, a month before she was to return to Miami, throw it in her parents' faces that she was becoming a cop's wife, a commoner, her mother dove into the Atlantic from the upper decks of a cruise ship. Her bloated corpse recovered two days later.

A mother she barely knew. Her fragile heart, her migraines, her long voyages into speechless depression had kept her in her darkened room most of her married life.

Home for the funeral, she slept over at David's apartment. Lying in his bed, snuggled against him, she felt his tension, knew something was wrong. Not the same David he'd been at Christmas. What is it? she asked him. What's going on?

I took a new job, he said. Head of security operations. You did? Not with the police anymore? You quit being a cop! That's right, he said. I'm moving into the corporate world. Safer, he said. Safer, yes, she agreed. That's fine, off the streets, fine. As long as it's what you want. Sweetheart, he said. Your father, he said. He said, Your father gave me the job. Assistant security chief for the whole company. He knows about us. He knows we're engaged. I didn't tell him, I promise, but he knows. He knows? How could he know? Look, he said, this job, it pays very well. This is a real job. I could provide for you this way, give you things you're used to. Your father, he said. Your father, he said.

She got out of bed. She dressed.

It's okay, she told David Cruz. It's fine. You did the right thing. The only thing you could. My father's a determined man. He's going to throw down a yellow brick road in front of me no matter what.

You're mad.

No, she told him. I understand. I love you.

I love you too. You're sure? Everything's okay?

Of course, David. Of course it is.

Another soul stolen. Fuck him, fuck all of them.

Back at school, she went about her business. Finished hanging her senior art show. A hundred black-and-white ink drawings, minimalist, some no bigger than postage stamps, scenes of Florida. A beach ball lying on an empty beach. A tumbled umbrella, an elaborate sandcastle ruined by the tides. Gulls in broken formation. Intricate drawings, her Japanese period. Deceptively simple but with thousands of precise razor strokes. Her major professor named the show "Florida Dissonance."

The weekend of her show, she told her roommate she was going to the grocery for a jug of wine, then drove her Saab to a mall on the edge of campus. Stared out the windshield for half an hour, watched darkness settle, watched the parking lot empty. Then she took a long breath, gripped her hair and yanked out a hunk, scattered it around the interior. She drew a razor blade from her purse, pressed the cold metal against her fingertip, bore down. She milked the wound, wiped the blood on the steering wheel, the dash, the door handle. Left the keys in the ignition, walked away, caught a bus. It was April.

Of course, disappearing wasn't that easy. Her father went on a mad campaign. The papers took it up. The magazines. He made the national TV news four nights in a row as his daughter lay in cheap motels in Virginia, Carolina, Georgia watching him. Foul play. Fearing the worst. FBI in on it. His wife dead two weeks ago, now this. Hinting there might be some connection.