“OK, Irv,” Milburn said, sweeping mosquitoes from his arms, his other hand brushing across his shoulders. “Whatever the fuck you want, man, it sounds good to me.”
“Oh, I’m just so thrilled,” cooed Irv, Scarlett O’Hara, southern fag. He floored his golf cart and spun around Milburn, around and around. “I just can’t tell you how my heart spills over with pleasure knowing I have pleased my wonderful pal.” Around and around.
Everybody else in Coral Gables, in practically all of Miami, was putting up bars, lacy steel grillwork over windows, caging in porches, keeping the family silver safe, and color TV sets. But Sarah’s mother was still oblivious, front porch was still bare, windows still vulnerable. Her damn front door was even unlocked.
Sarah stepped into the foyer and could hear the TV going in the den. She raised her eyes to the ceiling and shook her head. They were watching it for the second time since Christmas that year. Second time she knew of. Sarah’s mother and Father Monahan of the Church of the Little Flower, old friends, they got together to watch It’s a Wonderful Life every time one of them spotted it in the TV Guide.
Sarah thinking, Oh, shit, not tonight.
It was quarter till ten, fifteen minutes left, so Jimmy Stewart knew by now he was alive, and now he realized how his sugarcoated little town would have looked if he’d never been alive, and he’s hurrying home through the snow to hug his wife, kiss his children, make amends, accept whatever pains are still his due. And the town is all gathered in his living room, about to pay off his debt for him, and Sarah stepped into the den.
Father Monahan turned his head and glanced back at her, slick ribbons running down his cheeks. He nodded to her and smiled and opened his arms for a kiss, one hand holding his brandy snifter. She might have been a burglar, anybody, and Father Monahan probably would have done the same.
Her mother looked at the priest, then turned and saw Sarah standing there next to the dictionary stand and the Boston fern.
Her mother said, “Wait till the commercial.” She had tear trails, too.
Sarah knew she should just walk. Give Father M’s hand a squeeze and just go. Get out of that room before she strangled on her mother’s perfume, go back to her apartment and think this out. Just as the malignant bank president appears in Jimmy Stewart’s living room, the commercial breaks in. Some young lawyer with his shirt sleeves rolled up, asking them if they’ve ever been hurt through someone else’s negligence. One of Sarah’s colleagues, a fellow seeker of justice. Give these guys a little more time, and they’d come on the screen riding alligators or strapped to the fuselages of biplanes.
Sarah came around in front of their chairs and turned down the sound. Father Monahan wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his black coat while her mother blew her nose. Sarah stood there watching these two with the color TV light the only light in the room, the greens and blues playing on their faces. A ceramic bowl half full of popcorn on the table between them.
“How are you, Sarah? It’s been months,” the priest said.
“I’m not good,” said Sarah.
Her mother craned to watch the TV around Sarah’s body.
“What is it, child? You look terrible.” Father Monahan put his brandy snifter on the side table and moved to pull himself up out of the recliner. Sarah held up her hands to keep him put. She didn’t need that, a hug from the family priest. He caught himself and eased back in the chair.
“Mother,” Sarah said. “Mother.”
Her mother cut her eyes briefly to Sarah’s, and she could see how angry her mother was at this interruption.
“Kate Truman was murdered,” Sarah said.
“My God,” Father Monahan said. “This is your friend?”
“Yes,” she said, “more than a friend.” Still looking at her mother.
“I knew something like this was going to happen,” her mother said. “Didn’t I warn you about something exactly like this?”
“I should go,” Father Monahan said, and began to rise again. But Mrs. James put her hand on his arm and kept him there.
“The movie’s not over,” she said.
“If you’d like me to stay, Sarah,” he said. “You need a good ear, or anything?”
Her mother said, “This Kate Truman is just an acquaintance of hers. A radical down in Key Largo, protesting things.”
“She was a lot more than an acquaintance, Mother, you know that. And she was murdered. I got a call just now. I’m going down tomorrow, and I may have to be there for a while, I don’t know. But I came over here tonight to tell you where I’d be and because I ...”
“Because you’re upset,” Father Monahan said, and tried again to stand, but Sarah’s mother put her hand on his shoulder, held him down.
“We’ll talk about this,” her mother said, “if we must, after the movie. In a few minutes.”
Sarah said to Father Monahan, “I’m all right. It doesn’t matter. I’ll just go.”
“No, no, I insist.” Father Monahan pushed himself to his feet and moved to the TV and punched it off. He took Sarah’s hand and peered through the dark into her face.
Sarah’s mother aimed the remote gun at the set and switched it back on. The town was all talking at once in Jimmy Stewart’s living room. Donna Reed and the children were all smiling; Jimmy Stewart was shaking his head, amazed at everything. Happy as no man on earth had ever been before.
She used the remote switch to turn down the sound, and said, “He knows about your going down there, about your fantasy. Dallas didn’t have an accident. Dallas was kidnapped. Dallas was murdered. He’s heard it, Sarah, and he has some thoughts on the subject.” She turned to the priest. “I think you ought to tell her what you told me, Bryan.”
“Now, now,” Father Monahan said. “Sarah’s had a shock. She’s grieving.”
“Father Monahan thinks you should see a counselor, a trained psychologist. Don’t you, Bryan?”
He sighed.
Sarah’s mother watched the TV intently as a hat full of money was set in front of Jimmy Stewart, more than enough to pay off his debts. What was the message here? Sarah wondered, as the three of them watched the movie end and the ten o’clock news update come on. Die and come back to cash in? If Sarah died right now, it would be just these two passing the hat for her. Some consolation that was.
“Father Monahan says this is neurotic, hanging on to Dallas like this, denial, trying to keep him alive, pretending someone murdered him. Living this fantasy life. He’s seen this sort of thing before. Didn’t you say that, Bryan?”
Father Monahan switched on a desk lamp, turned, and gave Sarah what he meant to be a sympathetic look. But Sarah saw now he was drunk. Face red, eyes not fastening tight to anything. Mouth open. It’d been happening more and more in the last year or two as the parish had grown increasingly Cuban and the pressure was growing to hold services in Spanish. His time was nearly up.
“Mother, what are you trying to do?”
Her mother kept her eyes on the news show, and said, “Am I going to have to die before you’ll take any interest in me?”
“Oh, God,” Sarah said.
“Now, now,” said Father Monahan. “Now, now.” Sarah caught the priest taking a wistful look at his brandy glass on the table.
“It wasn’t Dallas that died,” her mother said. “It was me, wasn’t it? I was in that car. Your father, he’s more alive than he ever was. And I’m sitting here and I’m the one that’s dead.”
Her mother wouldn’t look at her. Sarah came over and stood in front of the TV, close enough to kick her mother’s shins.
“I agree with Father Monahan,” her mother said. “You need help. Professional help.”
The priest sat back down in the recliner, swilled the rest of his brandy. Stared down into the empty glass.
“Look,” Sarah said. She turned and flattened the power button on the TV. “It’s not a fantasy. It’s not a delusion. I’ve met the guy that killed Daddy. I know him. I see him every time I’m down there. I h
ave everything but a confession, and I’m very, very close to that.”
Father Monahan was staring at her. Her mother watched the blank TV.
“He kidnapped Daddy, drove him down to Lake Surprise, and killed him,” she told the priest. “That night nineteen years ago.”
“See what I told you,” her mother said to the priest. “It’s gotten worse. Worse and worse.”
“Sarah.” Father Monahan set his glass aside. “Would you come by? Come by and see me? I know you have your doubts about the church, its power in your life. But we could talk. Just normal adults, talking.”
“He came here late one night,” Sarah told Father Monahan. “Dragged my daddy off, and he killed him. He did that, and I saw him. And I know who it is.”
Her mother said, “She punishes me with this obsession, going off down there. I don’t know how I’ve stood it for so long.”
“Sarah,” Father Monahan said, “if we can help ... spiritually or otherwise ...”
Sarah picked at the seam of her work shirt sleeve. Standing there in front of these two, trying to get a grip on this little thread. Silence inflating the room, overinflating it. Sarah thinking, Yes, that’s what it would take at this point, Jimmy Stewart’s guardian angel, who led him on the tour of his hometown. That’s would it would take, her own assigned angel to come into this and give her peace. To show her how shallow and dismal all these people’s lives would have been if she had never lived.
But she knew that was wrong. If there’d been no Sarah, nothing would have turned out any differently. The world would be exactly as it was anyway. As corrupt, as forgetful. She was as anonymous as if she had never lived. She’d had exactly zero effect on anyone’s life. Except. Except, God help her if it was true, she might have had some effect on Kate’s.
“There are worldly ways I can help,” the priest said. “Things a man in my position can do that no one else can. You would be surprised to know the men of power in this community who heed my counsel.”
“Have another sip of brandy, Bryan,” her mother said as Sarah was turning, walking across the floor, getting the hell out of there.
12
THORN FELL ASLEEP NEAR DAWN and an hour later jerked awake, in the middle of some dream about being chased, or chasing, he couldn’t remember. He was sweating, and his heart was in overdrive. And then he looked around, saw where he was, still at Kate’s house, still in his old bedroom.
He drove back to his house, showered, dressed, caught up in a manic current. He was pacing the porch of the funeral home when Sally Spencer showed up at nine. She got down from her van, looking at him as if she weren’t sure which side of sanity he was on.
“I’m OK,” he said to her, raising his hands, showing her his palms. “I’m OK.”
She unlocked the front door and led him to her office, put her purse into the desk drawer, and sat down. She was wearing a yellow dress, had her hair up today. They looked at each other for a minute or two. He could tell she saw something in his face she didn’t trust.
“It’s not my place, Thorn. It’s a police thing now. Talk to Sugarman.”
“Was she raped, Sally?”
“I told you, it’s not my place to say anything.”
“I saw her pants. She was raped, wasn’t she, Sally?”
Sally thought about it for a moment more and nodded yes.
They sat that way, Thorn feeling the blood massing in his throat. Angry at her because there wasn’t anyone else around. Because she’d chosen such a shitty business. Because she was a woman and women got raped.
They sat looking at each other. Thorn held on to the arms of the chair. It wasn’t going to go away. He knew that. There had been Dallas, and now there was this. He could scream at Sally now, he could tear down all her plaques; but it was going to be there afterward, and after a long while it would still be there. Riding there below the surface.
Together they decided on cremation. Sally would drive the body to Miami today. Spend the day up there and bring home the remains tonight. She called them cremains. Thorn almost got angry again. Almost told her what he thought. Even if none of it was her fault, even if she was being sympathetic, open, kind. She shouldn’t have called it cremains.
Thorn said no, he didn’t want to see the body again.
Afterward he drove to the Caribbean Club, a bikers’ and construction workers’ bar with a water view. He ordered a beer. Drank it while he looked out at the bay, at a couple of Windsurfers sailing across the bumpy water.
Thorn ordered another beer, and when the bartender brought it, the man said they’d heard about Kate; as a matter of fact, they’d all just been talking about her. Thorn didn’t like how the guy’s voice sounded. Or how he exchanged smirks with the guy sitting beside Thorn.
“Yeah?” said Thorn. “So?”
“So nothing,” the pale bartender said.
“Hey,” Thorn called as the bartender was walking away, “hey, how come nobody in here but me is wearing a shirt?”
“ ’Cause it’s the fucking Keys, man,” said the guy beside him, a Hun with his metal SS helmet on the bar in front of him. His belly covering his belt. “Ain’t you heard, white boy? Isn’t no fucking law down here.”
“ ’Cept the law of the fucking jungle,” his pal said, leaning forward, trying to look crazy mean at Thorn. He was a little guy with a squashed pit bull face. He was still wearing his black cycle helmet.
A skinny man with a ponytail and a vest exposing his bony chest drifted across from the pool table, cue stick ready.
“Yeah?” Thorn said. “Law of the jungle, huh?”
“Sure as shit is,” said the Hun. He took his elbows off the bar, leaned toward Thorn, gassed him with his beer breath. Grinned, and called back to his buddies, “Let’s have another goddamn toast! To whoever croaked the rat lady. If a fucking rat can’t make it on its own, it should be extinct.”
“To extinction!” his little pal said. “To the law of the fucking jungle.”
Thorn took hold of his Budweiser by its long neck and backhanded the Hun with it across the eyes. Stepped quickly behind him and put his hand on the back of the little guy’s helmet and spiked his face into the bar. The guy with the cue stick took a batter’s stance, edging toward Thorn, choking way up on the cue. Thorn tossed the German helmet underhanded at him, and he swung at it, and Thorn stepped in, did a punter’s quick kick into the guy’s crotch. Got a reasonable hang time. The bartender had ducked out of sight.
Out in the lot Thorn thought briefly of dominoing their Harleys. But no, hell, he didn’t want to get guys like that riled up. No telling what they’d do.
He drove slowly, south down U.S. 1, trying to hold back the quiver that had worked into his hands. Every exhalation a sigh. Saying “goddamn” to himself, stringing them together, a dozen goddamns.
That four-lane highway ran like a spine through the center of the island. There were spots where the island was so narrow you could stand in the center of the road and lob a rock to either the ocean or the Florida Bay. Hear it plop.
Right now it all looked wretched to Thorn. There were just a few survivors of the old days, wood-frame houses with tin roofs and cisterns and cupolas, stranded between the Pizza Huts and skin diving shops and the shell stores that had mounds of queen conchs piled out front. A haze from deep-fat fryers hung over the cluster of franchise restaurants. Even the steady sea breezes couldn’t seem to wash the air of that smell.
There was no town of Key Largo, no grid of streets, no courthouse square, no park with statues. Not even any sidewalks. Just this hot four-lane strip of road with a rutted bicycle path running along its edge. Gas stations, mobile home parks, auto body shops, mom-and-pop motels, and bait stores with sailfish painted on their outside walls, billboard after billboard urging drivers forward through the tackiness to Key West.
There was still an occasional empty lot, an open space that gave a sudden panorama of the Florida Bay or Atlantic. A flash of fifteen shades of blue and green water, then mor
e cinderblock buildings selling flood insurance and hamburgers.
The island widened in several areas to a few hundred yards, where neighborhoods of concrete-block stilt houses had been built. But there was no need for a Key Largo architectural preservation league, no historical society. What the hurricane of ’35 hadn’t scraped away, the bulldozers were working on.
Everywhere there were shadows where there had never been shadows before. The oldest things still standing for a hundred miles around were the people. And all but a handful of them were new arrivals, retirees so used to the shopping centers and vast parking lots back home, in fact, so proud of their malls, so quick to describe to the Conchs what luxuries the rest of America was enjoying that defectors had been showing up everywhere.
Even some of Kate’s oldest friends had begun to desert her. Kmarts, not wood rats. Tired after all these years of driving up to Miami to do any serious shopping. Tired of being pioneers. Thorn thought for that moment of turning the Cadillac north and driving till the car gave out. Living there, wherever it turned out to be. Better to live where hope was long gone than stay here and see it all unravel, stage by stage.
But he drove home, sat in the Cadillac for a while, then walked out to the end of his dock. Just stood there, breathing, not looking at anything. It was ten when Sarah finally arrived.
Thorn stayed out on the dock and watched her get out of her red Trans Am. Watched how she was walking, how she was dressed, how her hair was. Was this how drug smugglers looked? He couldn’t tell anything. She had on brown corduroy jeans, a dark short-sleeved blouse, tennis shoes. Sunglasses. Her walk, her hair said nothing.
She came out on the dock, stood in front of him, and asked him how he was, and he said OK. He said he needed a drink.
“Think I should come along?”
After a while of looking at her, he replied that he did, he thought she should come along. He let her take his hand as they walked to her car.
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