Buzz Cut

by James W. Hall

  As the canoe coasted closer, the man reached into his cooler and drew out a speckled sea trout and lobbed it into the basin a few feet in front of their canoe. The water exploded and the fish vanished below the surface. Thorn watched the wide pebbled backs of two large gators slide beneath the water to contest the spoils, churning up a mass of bubbles from their combat.

  Without looking toward the boat, Sugarman paddled the canoe up to the dock, eased out of his seat, stepped out onto the slippery ramp, and hauled the canoe a few feet higher up. He steadied it while Thorn stepped out. Thorn set Rover on the dry part of the ramp, and the puppy shook himself hard and walked up to the shade of a cabbage calm and collapsed.

  "Gators are going berserk," the man said.

  His jeans were tight and a handful of blond hair curled out the neck of his flannel shirt.

  Thorn climbed up the ramp, mounted the dock, and approached the man.

  "Interesting word, berserk," the man said. He yawned, covered his mouth with a fist, then took it away and gave Thorn a faint smile.

  "It's Norse. Combination of bjorn, which is bear, and sark, which is shirt. Bear shirt. What the Norse warriors wore as armor."

  He leaned forward and opened the fish box again. Full of reds and snook, a year or two short of legal.

  "Sometimes after guzzling too much wine, a Norse warrior would flip out, run into battle, bellowing like crazy, go crashing into the opposing enemy lines without his bear shirt. So that's what it means. Fighting without armor. Going berserk. Taking a risk and not giving a shit."

  Sugarman was there now, standing a couple of steps from Thorn.

  "I like words. I study them. Their histories. They each have one, you know. Like people. They come from some place, they change over time. A blend of different backgrounds. Like people, mating, reproducing. My mother gave me a lifelong interest in words."

  Thorn shifted his feet. He felt something happening behind his eyes, a teakettle's whistle rising to full volume. His face felt chapped.

  "That's a no-wake zone back there, asshole," he said. "You almost swamped us blasting by like that."

  "Oh, really?" the man said. "Golly gee."

  Thorn gave Sugarman a look and Sugar shook his head. Forget it. Another hopeless psycho wandered down from Miami.

  The man reached into his fish box again and grabbed the tails of two undersized redfish and slung them out beyond the dock. Another gator had drifted in to join the fun, and the three of them splashed and jostled until the fish were gone. A few scales sparkled on the surface, some entrails. And then those too swirled down into the dark water.

  The man straightened, moved to the edge of his boat, put one foot up on the gunwale. "How about you boys? Ever go berserk?"

  The man grinned behind the mustache and hoisted himself up to the dock. He craned his head forward, squinting at Sugarman. With a huff, the man started toward him.

  "Forget it, Thorn. He's mine."

  Thorn stepped aside while Sugar held his position. When the young man shot his left hand toward Sugar's face, he caught the guy by the wrist and held him at arm's length. The guy twisting, trying to lever out of Sugar's grip. Thorn had watched Sugar handle himself in at least a dozen fights, but even in the ones where he was seriously overmatched, Thorn had never seen the look that was on Sugar's face at that moment. Not fright, not panic, something closer to horror.

  Sugar stiff-armed the young man, held on against several wrenching lunges, but even though it seemed to Thorn that Sugar could easily take the man to his knees, he did not press his advantage, and used his free hand only to swat away the man's wild swings.

  Behind the two fighters the gators surfaced. The man saw them and it seemed to give him a surge of strength. He grunted and dipped his shoulders and bulled Sugar backward toward the edge of the dock. Sugarman staggered and winced, but kept the man's wrist trapped in his grip. And Thorn saw the opening, a simple judo move, a swing-your-partner do-si-do, requiring only an easy pivot to toss the guy down the length of the dock. It was there, so obviously there, something he'd seen Sugar execute a few times before, but this time Sugar didn't take it. But seemed instead to be in a languid trance.

  And the guy groaned, leaned forward, planted his right foot between Sugar's legs and they were locked in a tug-of-war joust. Sugarman's back to the water, the young guy pushing forward. Thorn watched as Sugar lost ground, an inch, another inch, but still he didn't use his free hand to strike the man, didn't do anything but hold on, keep the guy at bay, backing closer to the gators. That same look on his face. Horror and something else now, a dark confusion.

  Thorn waited as long as he dared, and when Sugar's heels were a foot from the edge of the dock, he lunged, clapped a hand on the man's shoulder, and spun him around. Sugarman slumped forward, rested his hands on his knees, gasping for air.

  The man faced Thorn, gathering himself, studying this new adversary. Two feet of humid air between them, a mosquito droning in Thorn's ear. The guy looked even fitter up close. Face crinkled with amusement. Everything a joke for this one.

  The man summoned an exaggerated smile, the kind that beauty queens must practice before a mirror. Then slowly he lifted his right hand, spread his fingers into a V as if he were going to stab Thorn in the eyes Three Stooges style. Something on the tips of those two fingers flashed like shiny false fingernails.

  He curled the rest of his hand into a fist and a bluish white current arced between his two extended fingers.

  "What the hell . . . ?"

  The current sputtered and snapped. The man inched closer, stretching out his hand in a mild and exploratory gesture as though all he meant to do was test the softness of Thorn's cheek.

  Thorn set his feet, balanced himself, and when the hand shot toward his face, he kept his feet planted, simply bobbed to his right, drew his chin out of range. The man stumbled to the side, then spun around, lowering himself into a crouch. Thorn followed him around like a matador sweeping after his bull.

  After a moment of glaring silence, the man lunged again, knifed the right hand, this time at Thorn's chest, but Thorn fanned the blow away. The man struck again, and he struck once more and another time. And each time Thorn used the skills he'd practiced in the sweaty gymnasium all through September and October. Slipping, ducking, dancing to a wordless tune with his partner. Creating the other half to this man's ungraceful ballet, balancing him, smoothing out his jerky movements. Sending the younger man onward in the same trajectory his swing was taking him. Thorn didn't counterpunch, didn't try to hurt the guy, but looped him off again and again out of the sphere of Thorn's space.

  Two or three minutes of that and the young man was exhausted. Not much of a fighter. Just had that one trick, that inch of current. The man moved out of range, stooped forward, rested his hands on his knees, lifted his eyes and stared at Thorn. Still that smirk. Thorn had smothered his best shots, but the man wasn't cowed.

  Sugarman was standing upright now. Face drained.

  "Okay," Sugar said. "That's enough. Let's switch off the juice, we'll sit down in the shade, talk this over. How about it? See what our choices are, where we go from here."

  The young man lifted his eyes, focused on Sugarman, then straightened. He raised his fingers again, closed his fist, and once more the current hissed. Sugarman stepped back.

  The guy turned and hopped into the rental boat, and with two yanks on his mooring lines, he shoved the Aquasport ten feet from the dock.

  "I'll be seeing you around," the man called out. "Count on it. Both of you."

  He shoved the throttle forward, surged up on plane and headed back up the channel.

  Sugarman stared at the boat's wake as it sloshed through the mangrove roots. "Did I see that right? Guy had sparks shooting out his fucking fingers?"

  "Yeah," Thorn said. "Must've been plugging his pecker into a light socket for the last week. Getting all charged up. Freddy Megawatt."

  Sugarman stared down the canal where the wake was dying out. "You see
n that before? That some kind of weapon you can buy in the store these days?"

  "Not any store I been in," Thorn said.

  Sugar was still staring down the canal.

  "What the hell happened to you, man? That guy was half a second from kicking your ass into the goddamn water. Gator brunch."

  Sugar shook his head, swallowed. Pulled his eyes away from the canal. "I was trying my best."

  "Bullshit."

  Thorn stared into his eyes. Sugarman shrugged it off.

  "I don't know," he said. "I don't know what happened. He took me by surprise, I guess."

  "That was weird, Sugar. That was fucking weird. You were out there, teetering on the edge. It looked like you halfway wanted to go over."

  "I'm okay," he said. "Don't worry. I'm fine."

  Sugarman wiped the sweat from his forehead. Dusted off the bottom of his shorts.

  They rested for a few minutes in the shade of a cabbage palm, then in silence they pulled the canoe out, loaded it onto the roof rack of Sugar's Ford Explorer, lashed it tight. Put Rover in the back. Thorn giving Sugarman careful looks.

  A few miles down the coarse strip of asphalt, Sugarman looked over, then back at the empty highway. Sky darkening now. Fast-moving front about to catch them.

  "By the way, buddy," he said. "What the hell were you doing? Those moves."

  "I was fighting. Saving your ass from electrocution."

  "You know what I mean. What was that, judo?"

  "Judo, yeah, and a bunch of other bullshit mixed with it. Aikido, other things. Hell if I understand the gobbledygook that comes with it. Last couple of months Rochelle and I've been going twice a week, taking classes from this woman she knows. You're supposed to blend with your opponent. Convince them they damn well aren't going to hurt you no matter what they do, and you aren't going to hurt them. This's the first time I had a chance to try it out. Seems to work."

  "Work? Hell, I never saw anything like that. It was goddamn magical."

  "I'm the only guy in the class, so they're always using me for the attacker. I didn't know if I'd learned anything or not."

  Thorn smiled and looked out his window. That empty stretch of sawgrass and marsh, gray and brittle and rich with hidden life. The teakettle in the back of his head had cooled now.

  Sugarman was silent, hard at work driving his truck. The highway clear ahead, the Glades brown and desolate around them. Rover rose up in the backseat, whined like he had to pee again.

  Sugarman took a long breath. "I don't like Rochelle."

  Thorn looked over at him. Smiled. "Is there a punchline?"

  "It's no joke, Thorn. She's a tramp. You should dump her."

  Thorn stared at his friend. Sugarman kept his eyes on the road.

  "She's fucked every guy between here and Key West and now she's finally gotten around to you."

  "What're you, crazy? What's going through your head, man?"

  "I'm dead serious. It's been bothering me from day one. I think it's time you dumped her." Sugarman's jaw worked. He shifted in his seat, took a fresh grip on the wheel.

  Rover stuck his head between the seats, sniffed at the arm rest, then tried to climb forward, be with the guys. Thorn turned him around and headed him back to the rear.

  Sugarman stared out at the empty road, breathing deeply. Thorn's ears were hot. His throat had clutched up. So angry he wasn't sure if he could speak. He cleared his throat.

  "Okay, listen," he said. "I like Rochelle. I like her a lot. She's not like anybody I've been with. We're comfortable together."

  "Comfortable, huh?"

  Sugarman glanced over at him, then back at the road. "Yeah," he said. "Maybe not in the same way as Darcy, but yeah."

  "Comfortable," Sugar said. "You're comfortable."

  "That's right. Something wrong with being comfortable?"

  "Just doesn't sound like your word, Thorn. Doesn't sound like one of your top-ten goals in life."

  Thorn watched a white Winnebago passing them, big lumbering thing. Thorn watched the Winnebago dwindle in the distance.

  "I don't know what you think you're doing, Sugar. But I think we better just drop it right here."

  "No, Thorn. I'm not dropping it. I can't stand to be around the woman. I gotta tell you that. You keep hanging out with her, I don't see how you and me are going to stay friends."

  "Hey, fuck you, Sugarman. This isn't even a little bit funny. I don't believe you're saying this bullshit. What the hell's going on with you?"

  Sugarman drove the truck with great care. A mile. Another mile. Pressure growing in Thorn's ears as if he were strapped inside a plummeting jet. The stubborn silence seemed to gel around them. There were a dozen things that would break this trance. A joke, an apology. But nothing made it into his throat, and the hush deepened and took root.

  Two hours later they were back in Key Largo standing in the deep shade below Thorn's stilt house, unloading his canoe. The silence felt ancient. Rover ran up the outside stairs and Thorn could hear Rochelle talking to the dog, asking it questions about its day.

  Sugarman got into his Explorer, sat for a minute then sent his electric window down. He gave Thorn a long look, a last chance for one of them to break the silence.

  Then he drove away.

  CHAPTER 4

  It was Friday the seventeenth, almost two weeks since their Everglades trip. Thirteen days without speaking to Sugarman. His office just a half mile up the road, his house a mile south. It was absurd. A childish stalemate. Endangering the best friendship Thorn had known, childhood buddies, high school teammates, a long history of fishing trips, hilarious midnight card games, two lives so intertwined Thorn could barely remember a day they hadn't laughed over some snippet of local gossip or a joke Sugar had heard somewhere and badly mangled in the retelling. Now look at them. Letting the icy silence build brick by brick into some insurmountable wall.

  Thorn was tying flies in the shade of a giant sapodilla tree, his vise and workbench facing Blackwater Sound. A mile away the markers of the Intracoastal guided a steady flow of boats up and down the coast, and beyond that were a scattering of mangrove islands and the waters of Florida Bay and the Gulf.

  Blackwater Sound was eye-flinching bright, a dazzling shelf of diamonds. The sunlight ricocheting off its surface, brilliant sparks flying. From the southeast a humid breeze flooded up out of the Florida Straits and rattled the seed pods overhead, made the pelicans and gulls bank hard to gain altitude as they worked their territories from one side of the island to the other, Atlantic to Gulf and back again.

  Squinting out at the blaze, Thorn saw the stark silhouette of someone poling a skiff across the tidal flats. For a pulse-bumping moment he imagined it was Sugarman. But as the skiff grew closer, he saw it was only Calvin Jaspers up on the poling platform of his blue Hewes bonefisher.

  The old man leaned into his long fiberglass pole, coasted ahead ten feet, reset the claw foot against the muddy bottom and leaned into it again, a good solid rhythm, moving along, heading toward Thorn's dock.

  Calvin was a lean and dignified man of seventy-five with a thick tangle of white hair and high English coloring. He'd ministered to Ohio Presbyterians for thirty-five years. Now he was a bonefish convert, and Thorn's best customer.

  For the last few years Jaspers had managed a fishing school fifteen miles down the road in Islamorada. Eight hundred dollars for a weekend of flats-fishing instruction by some of the world's best guides, room and board at The Cheeca Lodge, and all the frozen margaritas his lawyer and doctor clients could guzzle at the end of every sunburned day.

  But about a year ago everything changed. Some contagious disease had swept through urban centers all around the country and apparently infected a large percentage of the professional class with the fly-fishing bug. In one year alone, applications for Jaspers' school quadrupled. For the last five months he'd been hustling seventy-five to a hundred fly-fishing wanna-bes through his school every weekend, and because most of them were beginners or hopeless bu
nglers, they lost a lot of tackle, brand-new flies snagged on the bottom, caught deep in the mangrove branches, or simply spilled overboard.

  All summer Thorn had been tying flies as fast as his fingers could work, handing over dozens of Crazy Charlies and Bonebusters to the Reverend Jaspers every Friday afternoon. Clearing over three hundred dollars a week, the highest steady income Thorn had seen in his life.

  He watched as Jaspers made his skiff fast to the cleats, straightened up and waved hello, and started slowly down the dock. He was barefoot and wore a long-sleeved khaki shirt, matching shorts, fishing pliers in a leather holster on his belt, a white floppy hat, and black wraparound sunglasses. As he approached, Thorn could see his lips were crimped into a strange and unfamiliar smile. The look of a man with ruinous news.

  They exchanged hellos and Thorn handed him the green felt pad with a dozen of his latest creations. A weedless fly, small and light, meant to resemble the tiny shrimp that bonefish shot to the surface for. It was the most realistic fly he'd created in a long time.

  First he wrapped a barbless hook with an iridescent pinkish thread—a few hundred tight turns to form the plump body of the shrimp. Near the eyelet he glued two silver beads bought by the scoopful from the hobby shop tray, beads intended for some summer camp bracelet. He dotted the beads with bright red marine paint to give the shrimp a goggle-eyed stare. Then used a half-inch spray of beauty shop frosted hair for a tantalizing hula skirt that concealed the razor-point hook.

  The fly was pink and small with a frothy, tantalizing look. An easy gulp. Not as outlandish as the ones he'd been tying over the last few years, but a convincing fly, with just enough whimsy to mark it as Thorn's.

  Calvin Jaspers took the felt pad from Thorn and stepped back from the workbench, away from the sapodilla's deep shade. He tilted the pad at different angles to the light, tugged one fly off, held it up as though he were checking a diamond for a smudge of inferior color. A moment or two later he hooked the fly back onto the green pad and held the pad down by his side and stared out at the bay for half a minute.