Under Cover of Daylight (4 page)

She said, “I’m just full of jabber today. Sound like a proud mama. It’s this rum. You made these too strong again.”

Sarah said, “So, tell me.” She settled back into her chair. “Thorn says there aren’t any other women in his life. I find that hard to believe.”

“Oh, my,” Kate said. “This
is
serious.”

S
ARAH WAS WEARING
one of Thorn’s T-shirts, a long gray one that came to her thighs. She had pulled a loaf of rye bread out of his refrigerator, put it under her arm, and was still poking around in there. She tore off a handful of grapes and popped them one by one into her mouth. While she chewed, she let the refrigerator door shut, opened the bread, and took out the top slices.

Thorn watched her, liking it all, liking her in that shirt, her hunger, the way her hair had not recovered from their lovemaking. Her skin, chapped by the sun. Most of all, he liked the way she seemed to be at home here in his one-room house.

“You don’t have a toaster?” She didn’t look back at him but seemed to know he was watching, seemed to bask in it.

“I’m not much of a toast eater.”

“I guess not.” Sarah fiddled with the dial for the oven.

“Oven doesn’t work either,” Thorn said. “Just the back left burner.”

“How quaint.”

Thorn propped himself up on his elbows to give her a look. She smiled over at him, a somewhat drowsy one. In the fluttering light from the two hurricane lanterns her skin seemed coppery. A trick of light, for her skin was pearl white. A refreshing change for Thorn, even slightly exotic in this land of tans. He liked to watch his sunburned hands move across her white flesh. An eerie arousal.

Thorn asked, “How many burners do
you
have?”

“Four,” she said. “And all of them work.”

“Yeah, I can vouch.”

“No, you can’t, Thorn. Don’t get carried away with yourself.”

He let it pass. No reason to square off. Maybe she was right; they were cooking on less than maximum heat. Still, it was hotter than anything Thorn had ever known.

He said, “You are free in direct proportion to the number of burners you can do without.”

“Well, if you want women to keep making house calls, you’re going to have to upgrade your appliances.”

“I thought you-all came for the view.” Thorn rolled out of bed, came across to her.

A skeptical tilt of head, she said, “Withered, shriveled view that it is.”

“It has its moments,” said Thorn as he reached out and pulled her into an embrace, his skin still damp.

“Hmmmm.” She hugged him hard, cartilage in his spine popping.

“Want to smoke another one?” He spoke into her shoulder, pressing his thigh into the subtle parting of her legs.

Stepping out of the embrace, she said, “I don’t like people who smoke dope anymore.”

“Me either,” Thorn said. “But you couldn’t call what we do smoking dope. Not exactly.”

Sarah said, “I only smoke it with you. I thought you liked it.”

“I like it OK. Take it or leave it. I thought you liked it,” Thorn said. “Till you showed up, I hadn’t smoked any for years. I still got a half a lid from 1978.”

They smoked a joint out on his balcony, looking off at Blackwater Sound at the metronome blink of a channel marker for the intracoastal. A jet headed into Miami, also blinking, timing its beat to the channel marker. Thorn felt himself warming inside, the loosening of some clenched part of himself.

“For someone who doesn’t smoke it, you always have the best shit,” Thorn said, letting the smoke out gradually as he spoke.

She leaned forward in the oak rocker and took the joint back. Before she took her turn, she said, “One of the perks of working at the courthouse. The only perk, come to think.”

“Hell of a perk. Perks me right up. Better than having all four burners going at once.”

“It’s good,” she said, “but it’s not that good.”

“Do all the public defenders do drugs?”

“Ex-hippies. Every one of them. The state’s attorneys are the worst. Judges, too. I know a couple of judges, they’ll pitch a fit if you’re prosecuting somebody for inferior dope. They sniff the stuff, shake their heads. They laugh prosecutors out of their office. Tell them to bring in some serious dope if they want a conviction. They do all this in chambers, and in court they’ll just drop the case soon as a PD moves to dismiss.”

Thorn smiled to himself. Out here in the night air, talking about things from the larger world. Not tides, not the migration of fish or the latest hot spot. A conversation, like he supposed normal people had.

Sarah said, “I can understand that. Got to draw the line somewhere. They got their pick of so many cases a day, why not just burn the guys bringing in the potent shit?”

“Hard to believe. Hard to believe,” Thorn said. He paused, watched the marker light blink. Said, “I got to get you and my friend Sugarman together. I told you about him. Only black cop in the Keys? Well, this is his. Know how you can tell which ones are the drug dealers on the highway?”

She shook her head.

“They’re the only ones doing the speed limit.”

Sarah smiled, said, “Guys at work’ll like that one.”

“And Sugarman calls it the Veranda Act. The act that keeps you waiting out on the veranda while they flush all the dope down the johns. Funny guy, but he has no idea. Got no sense of humor. Everybody’s always laughing at what he comes out with, and he’s there saying, ‘Huh, what, what’s the joke?’ ”

“I like him.”

Thorn said, “He’d like you,” and slid his hand lightly down her shoulder, collarbone, ran his hands across the sides of her breasts, barely a touch at all. The worn cotton of the T-shirt was silky against his palms.

Sarah said, “He the one with wife troubles?”

“She’s young,” Thorn said. “And she’s white. High school cheerleader marries all-county fullback. I don’t think she even knew he was black till the summer after they were married.”

Sarah told him that what he was doing felt good. Thorn’s hands beneath the T-shirt, fingertips dialing her nipples, listening for the fall of tumblers.

Her eyes closed, she said, “You make these chairs?”

“No, Dr. Bill.” He kept his fingers there, hovering, feeling her nipples rising against his palms.

“You called him that? Doctor?”

“Yeah. Everyone did.”

“And Kate, what do you call her?”

“Always so many questions,” Thorn said.

“It’s a bad habit,” she said. “My job.”

She handed the joint back, and Thorn took his hands away from her, sat back in the chair, and drew in a harsh, deep drag and held it tight.

He let it out and handed her the roach. He was starting another surge. Blackwater Sound shimmered like licorice Jell-O. He felt seventeen. Foolish, on the edge of a panicky laugh.

“Well,” Sarah said. “Dr. Bill made nice chairs. Nice chairs for a heart surgeon. The Cadillac of Cardiologists is what Kate calls him.”

The dope didn’t seem to be hitting her. Thorn heard her voice seem to come from out in the mangroves, out toward the channel marker. It sounded so cool, saying all the syllables, a radio voice, enunciating. It troubled him a little. He wanted her where he was.

He jumped as her hand touched his arm and lit up a welt of gooseflesh there.

“You perking, Thorn? You off somewhere?”

“I’m here,” he said, hanging on, gripping the cypress armrest, his toes curling down for a hold on the porch.

“We could stay out here.”

Thorn couldn’t muster more than a nod. She stood up and sat down astraddle him. She crossed her arms in front of her, took hold of the T-shirt, and pulled it off. His face suddenly in the cool hollow between her large breasts. Thin-armed Sarah with heavyweight breasts. You never noticed because of the drapey styles she wore. But there they were. And there was Thorn, wondering who she was, who this beautiful, smart woman was, devoting so much time to him.

“I’d like to meet your parents sometime,” Thorn said.

“OK.” Nothing showing in her voice.

“I mean it,” Thorn said. “I’d like to meet them. I’d like to see where you live. Visit you at work. Take you to lunch, pick you up after work, take you home. Everything.”

“All right,” she said. “Sometime soon. I’ll give you the grand tour. Show you my turf.” She smiled.

“Soon would be nice,” Thorn said.

She massaged his scalp with her fingertips, his neck, a light touch, then a deep rub into the shoulder muscles. Thorn wasn’t feeling seventeen anymore, much younger than that, younger than he’d ever been.

She drew parallel lines down either side of his spine, then under the wings of his shoulder bones, both hands into his armpits. Coiling the damp underarm hair into a single strand, drawing it into a tight spike, doing one armpit then the other. Thorn cooperated, his hands behind his head, exposing that hair for her. He felt himself reviving, rising into her darkness.

“I like you,” he said.

“You should,” she said. “I’m likable.”

It rose, and neither of them had to guide it into her. She made a small adjustment of hips to let it into the liquid flesh. He watched the channel marker across her shoulder, brought his rhythm closer and closer to it. Syncopation.

They were kissing. No borders. The channel marker still guiding his beat, even with his eyes closed. They
were
comfortable chairs. Accepting all the contours of his squirms. Her strong hands held his face, guided his mouth onto hers. Drew him against her mouth, tilted his head to an angle where their lips meshed perfectly. Thorn had never kissed this way before, such a sinking away, such a disappearance. His tongue becoming hers.

He had always been awake before. Alert behind closed lids. But this, the way her mouth seemed to draw him out of himself, this was kissing. This was why people kissed.

She was coaxing him deeper, drawing him upward. His hands still gripped behind his neck, holding himself in his own full nelson, her nipples now dragging across his cheeks and mouth, left, then right. A growl rising from him, the biting pain as he asked, and some gland within him grudgingly complied, to release for the third time that evening. And she beginning to whip her hair across her face. Arching back, and he hugged her, hugged his face into that damp hollow between her breasts, holding hard and letting go.

Afterward she looked down at his head as he buried his face between her breasts. She was not smiling anymore. Nothing in her face at all. She stared into his sun-bleached hair for a few moments, then lifted her eyes to the night sky. Her right arm still hugging him to her, keeping his face hidden against her chest, while she bit at a flake of cuticle on her left hand. Eyes roaming through the bright stars.

“You could open a practice down here.” Thorn finished lacing his boat shoes. Looked at Sarah sitting at the table, plucking grapes. She’d finished her pan-fried toast already. The dawn was casting a bright wedge across the wood floor.

“Thorn,” she said, a patient warning.

“There’s plenty of sleaze down here need defending.”

“And what?” she asked him, holding her coffee cup just below her face. “Live here at Walden Pond. Cook on one burner?”

“I’d consider a microwave, you move down here.”

“You’re just letting your androgen do your thinking. You know you don’t want a woman living here. You’re the Gandhi of Key Largo, a loincloth and sandals and one burner. Introduce a blow dryer into this monastery and you’d freak.”

“I’ve been considering the virtues of blowing dry.”

“It’s better visiting you.”

Thorn said, “Who am I, your once-a-month stud? Fish and screw and get back to the city?”

“I wouldn’t call you a stud exactly,” Sarah said, smiling. “Thorn, Thorn. Let’s just go with it, step at a time.”

He said, “What’s Kate been telling you about me anyway? That I’m some hermit? Don’t get involved with me?”

“She tells me you’re a guy who’s made himself a paradise out here, making lures for the best bonefishermen in the world, and you’re happy for the first time in your life.”

“I’ve been happy lately.” Thorn smiled at her. “It’s an interesting feeling. Grows on you.”

She stood up from the table, brushed crumbs of toast from the lap of her dress. “Well, I’d be happy to hear more. I want to know you. You know that. I’d like to hear the unexpurgated saga of Thorn.” An awkward smile.

“That’s nice. I like that.”

“I’m interested,” she said.

“That’s nice,” Thorn said. “I like it when you’re interested. You turn me on when you’re interested.”

“Not now,” she said. “I’m cutting it close as it is.”

Thorn watched her gather her clothes. Roosters were waking in his woods. The air was already changing from balmy to muggy. He watched her pack her things in her oversize straw purse.

Thorn said, “Maybe this is it. What if this is as unexpurgated as I get?”

“There’s more to you. I know there is.”

“OK, I’ll work on it, come up with something spicy.”

“The truth’ll do fine,” she said.

“I don’t know,” said Thorn. He moved over to the doorway, stood there, his eyes straying to the bay. “Maybe anonymous is better. You stir things up, go dredging around, things can get murky.”

“We’re at the point,” Sarah said. “Either we get to know each other better, or we stall out, start sliding away from each other.”

“Yeah,” Thorn said. “I guess we are.” He scratched at his beard, looked at her there on the edge of his bed, the straw purse in her lap. “There’s a couple of things I could tell you,” he said. “It’d help you know me better.”

“Yeah?” Her hands laced in her lap, as if she were about to lift them to her face and pray.

“I don’t want us. to stall out,” he said.

“Me either.”

“OK,” he said, nodding his head. “Next time. I show you mine, you show me yours.”

She released her breath, stood, and came across to him. “Now you’re all serious again,” she said. With a finger at each corner of his mouth, she drew his lips into a smile. She put a quick, dry kiss on his cheek. “I’ll see you Thursday night, the wood rat meeting.”

He backed away a step, said with a grin, “When you and Kate are finished saving all the wood rats, what then? Buy them all little leisure suits?”