Under Cover of Daylight (5 page)

“Oh, God,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Not you, too.”

He followed her outside and stood out on the porch and watched her walk downstairs and get into her Trans Am. That car bothered him. It didn’t suit her. Too flashy, too powerful. He waved to her as she swung the car around and started out. He listened to the V-eight rumble down his road and kept listening until he lost it in the general highway noise.

T
HE
K
EY
L
ARGO
E
LEMENTARY PARKING LOT
was filled. Kate parked her VW convertible on the grass out near the highway. Top down. Thorn asked her if she wanted to leave it like that. She looked up at the clear summer sky, said, yes, she’d just had the top repaired from the last public meeting. This way, if someone slashed anything, it would be just the seats.

Thorn walked between them, feeling spiffy in long pants for a change, an ironed shirt. Nodding at folks he knew, catching some of them with distressed looks as they saw Kate.

She had her silver hair back in a bun. Wore a white cotton dress and carried a yellow legal pad. Her bifocals were pushed up onto her forehead. And on his other side, Sarah. Tonight dressed like a lawyer. White long-sleeved blouse, sleeves rolled up, black straight skirt, black pumps. A no-nonsense expression. Her hair barely under control with three barrettes.

They entered the auditorium. A stage at one end, with a basketball goal cocked up above it. The big room also served as the cafeteria, and Thorn smelled the scent of fried food.

“Where are we on the program?” Sarah asked.

Kate said, “Near the end.”

Thorn asked if that was good or bad.

“Both,” Sarah said. “By then the hooters are warmed up. Or drunk. And a lot of people have gone home. But at least she’ll have had a chance to hear the other speakers.”

“Not that anything’ll be new,” Kate said.

They took seats in the last row. Chairs for seven-year-olds. Thorn had already been working up a case of awkwardness, and now these pint-sized chairs. His was yellow. He tried to find the right position in it. But the back kept catching him just below the shoulder blades. Sitting up straight, turning to the right, crossing his legs, finally settling on a forward lean, his elbows on his knees. Player on the bench ready to go into the game.

Thorn recognized some people from high school days. And there were retirees, some boat captains he knew. Lots of people he assumed were realtors because they all seemed to know each other and they were dressed for church.

Four men with bandanna scarfs and headbands and grimed T-shirts took the chairs right in front of them. One of them still wore his leather sling, hammer, and measuring tape. The one in front of Thorn had a red beard. He set a six-pack of Miller on the floor at his feet, tore three cans loose, and passed them to his buddies.

Sarah took a deep breath, fanned her hand in front of her nose. Thorn sat back in his chair.

“End of the pay period,” he whispered to her. “Low on Brillo.”

“Mr. Natural lives on,” she said, loud enough for them to hear.

Redbeard glanced over his shoulder, saw Kate. He leaned forward and whispered down the row to his buddies. While one by one they checked her out, redbeard twisted around and took in Sarah, then Thorn. Gave her a beefy smile.

“Want to move?” Thorn asked her.

“It’d be the same,” she said.

At seven the program began. By seven-thirty Thorn’s shirt was soaked. He had tried every position he could in that chair and was coming around for a second attempt at each one. Kate had stayed unmoving, her feet flat on the floor. Memorizing, it seemed to Thorn, the words of that first speaker.

For thirty minutes it had been Philip Grayson, a smug, compact guy, making the case in his patronizing Yankee voice for the group of investors trying to build Port Allamanda. Allamanda was a condominium community, but not just another hundred-unit glorified apartment complex. This one was a small city. Over four hundred acres. A thousand units, complete shopping center, banks, a couple of marinas, a golf course. Fifteen miles of internal roads, its own sewage plant.

But the particular issue tonight was wood rats. The Key Largo wood rat had been designated by the federal government as an endangered species, and its last major stronghold in America was in the hardwood hammock where Grayson’s investors wanted to build Port Allamanda. And the county commission had assembled to hear the will of the people.

Thorn knew wood rats. They weren’t anything one way or the other to him. He’d caught one coming up the stairs of his stilt house once, lured by his shrimp gumbo, he supposed. Thorn had shooed it off, and that was that. And he’d come on them in the woods, seen them squirming back under their bed of leaves when he approached. He had no case for or against them. And was having a little problem warming to the issue.

Grayson had shown charts and graphs, aerial views, making his point that the wood rats wouldn’t be wiped out. A lot of the tract in question would stay just as it was, with only minor variations, wooden walkways and one or two roads. His organization was willing to comply with this and that regulation.

Grayson made little jokes, calling the wood rat cute, saying he could understand why so many people were so worked up about such a cute thing. And then finishing up by saying how you had to weigh all of this very carefully. Weigh the future of the Key Largo wood rat against a new library, a new public park with a lighted baseball field, and not to mention, and here he paused, the first pause of the night. Gazing out at the crowd with his sharp metallic eyes. Not to mention, weighing that wood rat against jobs. Jobs!

The guys in the row in front of them stomped and cheered. And the rest of the audience joined in. Grayson gave a friendly wave and took his seat in the front row.

Thorn leaned across Sarah as the applause was dying and said, “Now how can you disagree with a guy like that?”

“Exactly,” said Kate.

One of the county commissioners introduced the next speaker. The commissioners all sat at a cafeteria table off to one side of the podium. Two women, three men, making a show of taking notes.

This speaker was a local realtor, a young blond woman, her voice quivering a little from talking to five hundred adults. By that point it was standing room only. She started in on the U.S. Constitution, about how there were people among us tonight trying to take away our guaranteed property rights. She got from there to Communists and about how her husband had been wounded in Vietnam and now here she was doing her part. She finished up by describing an afternoon a couple of years earlier, when she’d been living in a mobile home park and she’d come into her baby daughter’s room and found a wood rat in the crib with the little girl. Her voice almost broke as she recalled it. “That’s the creature these people are trying to get you to give up the Constitution for.”

Thorn glanced across at Kate during the applause. She was looking off at the wall of the cafeteria, at the posters left over from the spring semester. Crayon kids swimming, snorkeling. Blue and green parents in their boats catching sharks. The colors were the bright, fantastic primary colors of the reef.

Next it was a retired high school biology teacher with a New York accent. At first the row of carpenters in front of Thorn seemed edgy, ready to hoot. Then the teacher got past his preamble and into his proposal.

“You want wood rats? How many you self-appointed consecrationalists want?” he asked. “How many is right? You give me a figure and set aside an acre of land for me and I’ll start a wood rat factory. Give you any number you want.” He got the laughter he’d been after. Redbeard put his fingers in his mouth and made a piercing whistle. “Five hundred. A thousand? I dare you people to give me a number. What would it take to keep you happy? All I need is a number and I’m prepared to be the Henry Ford of rodents. Solve this whole damn dispute.”

Sarah was tapping her foot, staring at her lap. Kate still looking at those posters. Thorn couldn’t help smiling at Henry Ford, though he had enough sense to look away as he did it.

It was ten o’clock before Kate’s turn came. Thorn was leaning against the back wall by then. Near the water fountain. Sarah had gone out to the breezeway and come back in several times, standing out there with the smokers, trying to cool off. Maybe half the original audience was left. Redbeard had gone out and come back with two more six-packs. Giving Thorn a look as he came back in.

So far there’d been only one speaker against the project. A seventy-five-year-old man. First off, he’d told the crowd how old he was and told them not to scream at him when he spoke his mind or else he might have a heart attack right there and his death would be on their hands. Then he started a ramble about how bad the fishing was now compared to forty years ago. How he used to pull ten-pound snappers out of bays and sounds that were dead empty now. About how there was a time you could cast off any part of the coastline from Key Largo to Key West and foul-hook your supper. He could remember when you could drive along the highway and look out at the water, before all the motels and those other things. He tried twice to say “condominium” and gave up.

It took him fifteen minutes to run dry of memories.

There was a stir when Kate walked down the aisle to the podium. One of the bandannas said something, and the crowd around him laughed. Thorn went over, took his same seat.

Kate introduced herself, said she represented a coalition of groups. She aligned her notes on the podium, took off her glasses, and set them on her notes. She glanced over at the posters again and came around in front of the podium.

Her pale blue eyes seemed twenty years younger than the rest of her. Silver hair back in a bun. She had a boxy but delicate face and had probably been considered a beauty for a few years when she was young. Now, at sixty-five, she was a serene but plain woman.

“Most of you have made up your minds already,” she said, her voice fuller than Thorn had ever heard it.

Redbeard called out, “So whyn’t you shut up and go home?”

Thorn nudged him in the back, and redbeard twisted around and gave Thorn a menacing look.

Thorn said quietly, “I want to hear this.”

“Most of you,” she said, “most of you are good people, thoughtful people. You’ve looked at this and you’ve decided. Between wood rats and libraries, we’ll take libraries. We’ll take a broader tax base. Growth. We’re for human beings, not rats.”

“Damn right!” one of redbeard’s friends called out.

“I understand that. But I have just one question.” Kate paused and looked back toward Thorn’s section. “When are you going to be ready to draw the line? When will it be that someone will walk into a room like this and say, ‘I’ll trade you a library, I’ll trade you a couple hundred temporary jobs for your last lobster’? Is that when you’ll say no? Not lobsters. We
like
lobsters. Or make that sailfish. Or put in there grouper, snapper, trout. You name it.”

“Sheeit,” said redbeard to his cronies. “I’d trade my damn wife for a steady job.”

Kate said, “This year it’s wood rats. And you say, yes, we’ll part with our wood rats. We’ll take the library. We got bills and taxes, so we’ll take jobs. Next year what’ll it be? And five years from now? What I want, and what a whole lot of people like me want, is for all of us to draw the line here. Right here.”

Thorn nudged redbeard again as he started making farting noises. His buddies rooting him on. Redbeard didn’t even look back at Thorn. Thorn’s chest tightened. His hands were sweaty.

“You heard Mr. Grayson call them cute,” Kate said. “I wish to God they
were
cute. I wish they had big, dewy eyes and a button nose and long whiskers and they had a name that made them sound cuddly. But they don’t. They’re just simple, ordinary rodents, nothing special about them, nothing cute either. The only thing remotely special about them is that there are only a few hundred of them left on earth.

“Mr. Grayson’s the one that’s cute. He’s coming in here, representing people you’ve never seen, people you won’t ever see ’cause they’re the kind of people who arrive in helicopters. They like this island. They think it’d be nice to live here for a week or two whenever it suited them, have a penthouse looking out at the ocean, have that penthouse and make a little money at the same time. And you can bet these people wouldn’t care if that piece of land had the last bald eagles living on it. They’d still be in here trying to get you people to give away those eagles for a handful of jobs.

“I’m here to tell you I don’t think that’s cute,” Kate said. “I think this gentleman’s walked up to you and said, ‘Can I trade you an ice cream cone for your baseball glove?’ and you’ve looked at your old glove, one you’ve had for a long time and not given much thought to and you’ve looked at that cool, beautiful ice cream and you’ve said, ‘Sure, of course.’ ”

She went back behind the podium, took hold of the sides of it, and leaned forward to the crowd.

“Tomorrow, after that ice cream cone has become something else entirely, you’re wondering what’s become of that glove you used to play with. That one you were planning to hand on to your kids. And then there’ll be an afternoon your son or daughter asks you if you want to go out and pitch the ball and you start looking around for that glove and then you remember. You don’t have it anymore. You traded it. You didn’t think anything of it.”

Redbeard said, loud enough for the whole room to hear, “What the
hell’s
she talking about?”

Thorn took a handful of his hair, dragged his head back, and whispered into his ear, “Let my mother finish her talk and then you and me’ll go out in the grass.”

Thorn let him go, and redbeard scooted his chair halfway around, sized Thorn up, and said, “You got it, asshole.”

Kate, looking back at Thorn, her eyes sending him signals. Thorn crossed his arms across this chest and smiled to her. She said, “We’ve got numbers, facts, charts. We can show your taxes are going to go up, not down. We can show how many more cars there’ll be between you and the grocery. How long the lines are going to be at the bank and the drugstore. We can tell you just how small the trickle coming out of your faucet will be as soon as they tap into the lines. But this whole thing isn’t numbers. It’s not numbers at all.”