Buzz Cut (9 page)

She gave him nothing.

"How about the ice turkeys? Those sculptures sitting in the middle of each picnic table. A turkey carved out of ice, each one filled with silver dollars. Fifty, sixty silver dollars in every one. Remember that?"

Irma kept her face empty.

He took his hand from her forearm. She looked down at the place where it had been, half expecting a welt.

"While we ate, the ice melted in the sun, the heavy coins dropped into the silver trays.
Pinjj, ping.
"

"My name is Irma Slater," she said.

"And one day, you came down off the porch. You sat at my table. None of us knew what to say. Everybody went dead quiet. That ice melting. You sat there with the napkin in your lap, looking down at the plate of hot dogs and sauerkraut. Your bare arm right next to mine.

"Remember? Remember telling us not to grab the money? You said your daddy was playing a trick. Trying to humiliate us, make us snatch the money from the weaker children. We should just let it sit there. Not take it. Not fall for his scheme. Don't give him the satisfaction."

Irma looked out at the dark horizon, the spray of stars. "None of the others listened. They kept on grabbing. Not me. I sat there and watched the silver dollars fall onto the trays and I didn't try to snatch any of it away from the other boys. I didn't surrender to your father's game.

" 'It's a war,' you said. ''You're on one side or the other.' " Irma swung around and peered into his eyes. The color of the Atlantic on a gusty day, turquoise stirred to a milky blue.

"You might recall my mother. She worked in your father's office. His private secretary. Took his dictation, made decisions he didn't have time for. Remember her?"

She slid the beer bottle forward a half inch, a pawn taking the center of the board. Using up some time, once again looking out at the darkness, the red heartbeat of a channel marker. Feeling the fish in her belly slide back down into the acid juices.

"So what is this? You want money? A handout? Well, you've come to the wrong damn place."

"I remember the angle of your neck when you sat on the porch, the way you cocked it to one side, how you kicked your feet to make the swing move, the way you'd move your eves over all of us. You gave us dreams, Monica, fantasies. All the boys. Even some of the men. They'd talk about you, say things I can't repeat.

"You remember our correspondence?"

Of course she did. A letter from him arriving one spring afternoon on blue stationery, a lock of his blond hair inside. Using the sweeping, flamboyant phrases of romance novels, he'd pledged his undying love. Asked for hers. She'd answered the letter. Not even remembering which boy he was from the employee picnic, but going ahead, trying out the vocabulary of courtship, a twelve-year-old's fantasy. She put the lock of hair in her jewelry box. Waited for his next letter. Answered it immediately. Then came several more. And finally the ring.

A two-carat diamond Scotch-taped to the sheet of stationery. "Be mine forever," the note said. "Pledge your troth to undying love." She wrote back and gave him her unqualified yes. She wrapped yarn around the ring to make it snug against her finger. Wore it to bed. Woke one morning to find her mother standing above her holding her left hand, examining the stone. It was his mother's ring. He'd stolen it from her. It went back. No more letters allowed, no more contact of any kind. Her mother more angry than she'd ever seen her. Monica went away to summer camp. Fell in love with a fourteen-year-old boy across the lake. Larry something, a swimmer. Forgot about the episode entirely.

"I remember," she said.

She felt sand flies chewing on her legs. The bay rippled with crimson light as though it had been sheened with kerosene and set ablaze. She inhaled the familiar sulfurous scent that rose on windless nights from the surface of the lagoon. A pungent mist. Fish guts and seaweed with a tinge of swamp gas.

"My father sent you," Monica said. "You're here to drag me home."

"No, I'm a free agent." Butler edged up to the bar, leaned a hip against it. "But the truth is, Monica, your father knows you're here."

She swung around, stared into his eyes.

"Yeah," he said. "Your friend over there, Jesse."

"What about him?"

"Ask him. Ask him where he got the money for his new sign out front. All that neon doesn't come cheap, you know."

"You're lying."

"A man called one day, my mother spoke to him. He wanted to report that he knew where Mr. Sampson's daughter was hiding out, but first, he had to know what the reward was up to. There were a lot of calls like that, but the difference was, this one was real. This guy knew where you were."

She stared across at Jesse. He was looking at her now, his eyes working back and forth between her and Butler Jack. She drew a breath, pulled her eyes away from him and rubbed at the clot of tension forming at her temples.

Butler Jack touched her shoulder. "That little girl on the swing, she was very wise. What she said when she sat down at our table. The little girl who didn't want any part of that money. She had everything in the world, but there was still something missing, something she wanted very much, something she was yearning for. Positive ion searching for its other half."

She stared out into the shivering darkness.

"I still don't take the money," Butler said. "It falls on the silver plate in front of me,
ping, ping, ping,
but I'm not tempted. I've chosen my side. You changed my life, Monica. You changed everything. And now I'm here. I'm a warrior for the cause."

"What the hell do you want with me?"

"You know, it's amazing," Butler said. "Here we are like this, side by side, talking about the past, about all these memories. Reunited after all these years. I thought I was ready. But look at me. Look."

He held up a quivering hand.

"How long has he known? My father."

"Years," he said. "Since the first month you arrived here."

She took a breath, another. Felt a moth flutter inside the membranes of her heart. "Okay, so why hasn't he done anything? Why hasn't he shown up?"

"I don't know, but I can tell you one thing. Right after you disappeared, stock in Fiesta Cruises went up forty percent and it's stayed there ever since. Might be a coincidence. Or maybe it's from all that sympathy and free publicity he got. I don't know. Makes you wonder though. Makes you think. A man like your father, he has to calculate every move, there's money riding on everything he does. Lots of money."

She eased off the stool, Butler stepping aside.

"One last thing before I go," he said. "I guess you don't watch TV or anything. I guess you haven't been keeping up."

"Keeping up with what?"

"What your father's been doing. His major life changes."

"I don't give a damn about my father."

"Oh, but it's interesting, Monica. It bears on us. You and me."

"There is no us."

"Oh, yes there is. You and I, we're related now. Two years ago your father married my mother. She went from private secretary to wife and TV star. Morton and Lola. Cute couple. Which makes us brother and sister. Family."

She felt as if a corpse were breathing on her neck. A bleak chill sneaking through that humid air, finding her, lifting the flesh on her back, her arms.

"I'm parked in the lot," he said. "Right out front, big white Winnebago. When you're ready to join me, that's where I'll be."

"And why would I want to do that?"

"Because he's coming. Your father is coming to get you, take you home. Get you psychological help."

"I don't believe you."

"So wait and see. Take your chances. I'll be out in the lot when you need me."

He smiled at her and turned and walked away. When he was just beyond the swimming pool, Jesse was at her shoulder, patting her roughly on the back as if she'd choked.

"You okay, honey? You look shaky."

She couldn't look at him. Fizz in her veins, blood churned to useless foam.

"Who the hell was that? An old boyfriend or something?"

She stared at the water, the bar lights quivering there.

"Look, let me buy you another Heineken."

Jesse went back behind the bar, opened her a new beer, and set it down on the polished mahogany in front of her.

"You have a history with that guy?"

"Apparently I do."

"I thought so, way you were talking to him. I could sense something going on there."

Jesse rubbed a damp rag across the glossy bar. She was silent, staring at him. Finally Jesse looked up, saw what was in her eyes. He opened his mouth, then shut it.

"Does my father know?"

"What?"

"Jesse, don't make the last thing you ever say to me a lie."

"Hey, hey. Irma, what're you saying to me?"

"He gives you money, but what do you give him, Jesse? You keep him informed about my eating habits? What I'm reading. Weekly progress reports?"

"Jesus," he said. "Jesus."

"It's true, isn't it? You son of a bitch."

The family from Minnesota was standing by the cash register, father giant holding the check, waiting. Burning a laser hole in Jesse's flowered shirt.

He kept staring at her as she turned away. The jukebox was cranking up again. Something sappy about truck stops, big rigs rolling, lonesome women, cheating men.

Rover lay on top of the sheets between Thorn and Rochelle. Barefoot, in his cutoffs and gray T-shirt, Thorn was propped up on a pillow, reading, working his way through Jack London's stories about Alaska, something he'd read as a boy. He'd been doing that lately, revisiting stuff he had strong memories about. Most of it turned out to be disappointing, corny or flat, making him wonder about the rest of his childhood, what else he'd gotten wrong back then. Thirty years later still coasting on those questionable judgments.

But these London stories remained strong. Cold and foreign. Taking him off somewhere he had no real desire to visit, but was still glad to know about. Lying on his bed, an eighty-degree breeze stirring the moonlight around, the fronds clittered just beyond the new curtains. Less than a week till Thanksgiving and just those two cool fronts so far, nothing below seventy this fall. That was fine with Thorn. Far as he was concerned, man wasn't meant to live north of Fort Lauderdale. Look what happened when he tried. He wound up having to kill his dog, eat it, wrap himself up in its fur to stay warm.

Rochelle, in an oatmeal-colored chemise trimmed in satin. The chemise showed her long tanned legs, hinted at everything else. She was doing needlepoint, a garnet and gold square with words emerging. He couldn't read them yet, but suspected it might be on its way to saying "Home Sweet Home." With Rochelle there was no way of knowing. She might be doing Home Sweet Home for the same reason she named the dog Rover, another of those post-modern things. A joke on herself. A new challenge for Thorn, an intellectual woman, not just smart like the others had been, but this one a student of rare and formidable subjects.

Rochelle had already finished her book for the night. A novel with Gothic overtones set in the world of newspapers written by a journalist. She said she liked it. Said it was scary and provocative, unadorned prose. A speed-reader, Rochelle could gulp down a few hundred pages in an hour, books on quantum mechanics, on natural herbs, biographies of statesmen, historical novels, books on psychology, dog-training manuals. Every night something new, as though she were cramming for some extraordinary final exam.

"Another couple of weeks when we're done with all the home improvements," Rochelle said, "what in the world will we do with all our spare time?"

He bent the corner of a page, closed his book, looked at her. She kept her eyes on her needlework.

"I have a couple of ideas."

"I know about your ideas."

She leaned over and kissed him on the ear. Touched a cool tongue to the sensitive whorls.

Thorn set the book aside. But Rochelle drew away, smiled at him from a safe distance. A smile that fiddled with his thermostat.

"How do you feel about paint?" she said.

"Paint?"

"Latex, acrylic. You know, paint."

"Are we still talking about sex?"

She chuckled. Or was it a giggle? He could never find the exact word for her laugh. Girlish but husky. That was Rochelle, a woman of tantalizing contradictions. The hippie dress, the black lace beneath. A woman who could discuss particle theory and was teaching herself needlepoint.

"How do you feel about painting some of this wood? Brighten up the inside of the house. It's like a cave in here."

"You don't like weathered wood?"

"Well, it's a little raw. It looks unkempt."

"That's the point."

She glanced at him, then went back to work.

"Are we arguing?" she said.

"I think it's called a discussion."

"Now don't forget, Thorn, you're the one who said you wanted to spruce things up. Don't make me out as some Good Housekeeping Nazi."

Thorn gazed up at the bedroom ceiling. "You have some particular color in mind?"

"Well, for the outside, I was thinking a buttery yellow might be nice, maybe a hunter green on the shutters. If we wanted to live dangerously we could try a salmon inside, mauve. And brighten up the ceiling with a quiet white."

Thorn kept staring at the exposed beams. Ironwood trunks. Heavy with sap. It had taken an entire afternoon for Sugarman and him to winch those beams in place.

"Everything is optional," she said. "I'm not campaigning."

Rochelle's parents owned a couple of frozen yogurt shops, one in Key Largo, the other down in Plantation. Rochelle kept their accounts, though she hadn't been going in to work much in the last two months. She brought the books home now, only stopped by once or twice a week to visit her parents. They seemed to like Thorn okay. Though most of the time they smiled nervously as if expecting him to erupt any second, spew molten rock.