Buzz Cut

by James W. Hall

  Hell, yes, she knew there were a thousand worse calamities than being rich and beautiful. Tortures so grievous she had no inkling. Wars, famines, grinding poverty, abuse of every kind. She wasn't so far gone she confused her plight with real tragedy. Even at its worst, her misfortune struck her as no more than bitterly ironic. A mild irritation chafed to a bleeding sore by all those daily reminders of how blessed she was.

  Severe enough, however, to bring her there, to Sugarloaf Retreat. Grievous enough to cause her to rename herself Irma Slater. Irma Slater. A name as harsh and unattractive as she could invent. All because she had concluded finally that she could no longer trust anyone who knew her by her real name.

  Not even David Cruz.

  She'd known David in high school. They'd dated, nothing serious. He was Cuban, wanted to be a cop. So far out of her league, he was a joke among her friends. Though David never seemed to mind. She liked him, had a soft spot, but lost touch when she went off to boarding school her sophomore year.

  Five years later, a college girl then, the summer of her junior year, home from Sweetbriar, she bumped into him at someone's goofy barbecue. He was a cop by then. Living his dream. Hair cut short, looking cute and strong and very different from all the others. And he seemed immune to her beauty, to her father's wealth. Looked at her, seemed to peer past the surface, searching for who was down there. They talked. And he spoke to the hidden person, the invisible one, coaxing that part of her into view. They went to supper at the big bright, raucous Cuban restaurant he liked. A place her other friends used to mock as being too bright and raucous and Cuban.

  Back in Virginia, she wrote him. He answered. His letters full of specifics, anecdotes about his days on the streets of Miami. He was funny. Earnest. He was doing what he'd dreamed of doing and he loved it. Sharing this with her. Her letters were glib. Acid stories about the Miami yachting crowd she'd always mingled with. Pen-and-ink caricatures of the Virginia prissies.

  By Christmas her senior year, she and David Cruz were making secret plans to marry. And then a month before graduation, a month before she was to return to Miami, throw it in her parents' faces that she was becoming a cop's wife, a commoner, her mother dove into the Atlantic from the upper decks of a cruise ship. Her bloated corpse recovered two days later.

  A mother she barely knew. Her fragile heart, her migraines, her long voyages into speechless depression had kept her in her darkened room most of her married life.

  Home for the funeral, she slept over at David's apartment. Lying in his bed, snuggled against him, she felt his tension, knew something was wrong. Not the same David he'd been at Christmas. What is it? she asked him. What's going on?

  I took a new job, he said. Head of security operations. You did? Not with the police anymore? You quit being a cop! That's right, he said. I'm moving into the corporate world. Safer, he said. Safer, yes, she agreed. That's fine, off the streets, fine. As long as it's what you want. Sweetheart, he said. Your father, he said. He said, Your father gave me the job. Assistant security chief for the whole company. He knows about us. He knows we're engaged. I didn't tell him, I promise, but he knows. He knows? How could he know? Look, he said, this job, it pays very well. This is a real job. I could provide for you this way, give you things you're used to. Your father, he said. Your father, he said.

  She got out of bed. She dressed.

  It's okay, she told David Cruz. It's fine. You did the right thing. The only thing you could. My father's a determined man. He's going to throw down a yellow brick road in front of me no matter what.

  You're mad.

  No, she told him. I understand. I love you.

  I love you too. You're sure? Everything's okay?

  Of course, David. Of course it is.

  Another soul stolen. Fuck him, fuck all of them.

  Back at school, she went about her business. Finished hanging her senior art show. A hundred black-and-white ink drawings, minimalist, some no bigger than postage stamps, scenes of Florida. A beach ball lying on an empty beach. A tumbled umbrella, an elaborate sandcastle ruined by the tides. Gulls in broken formation. Intricate drawings, her Japanese period. Deceptively simple but with thousands of precise razor strokes. Her major professor named the show "Florida Dissonance."

  The weekend of her show, she told her roommate she was going to the grocery for a jug of wine, then drove her Saab to a mall on the edge of campus. Stared out the windshield for half an hour, watched darkness settle, watched the parking lot empty. Then she took a long breath, gripped her hair and yanked out a hunk, scattered it around the interior. She drew a razor blade from her purse, pressed the cold metal against her fingertip, bore down. She milked the wound, wiped the blood on the steering wheel, the dash, the door handle. Left the keys in the ignition, walked away, caught a bus. It was April.

  Of course, disappearing wasn't that easy. Her father went on a mad campaign. The papers took it up. The magazines. He made the national TV news four nights in a row as his daughter lay in cheap motels in Virginia, Carolina, Georgia watching him. Foul play. Fearing the worst. FBI in on it. His wife dead two weeks ago, now this. Hinting there might be some connection.

  Some good leads developed. A Hispanic man seen lurking at the mall that afternoon. Father pleading with her abductors to let her go, get in touch, something. A huge reward. Her father choking up for the cameras, a thing he hadn't managed at her mother's funeral. Married over twenty-five years, but at the graveside her father smiled, a cordial host. Now look at him. The cameras, the lights. Dark circles under his light blue eyes, he's choking big time. Drama king.

  As she drifted south, entering Florida, and finally into the Keys, the posters met her everywhere. She ducked her face, tucked her hair under a baseball cap. Wore Salvation Army blouses, men's trousers, big round sunglasses. Took buses.

  A dozen times a day, she swung between euphoria and panic. Had trouble breathing, her chest too tight. None of it as easy as she'd imagined. So isolated. So disoriented, which, she supposed, was why she was drawn back to Florida, something familiar, the Keys, a place where she and her mother had been happy for two weeks together years earlier. The only mother-daughter trip they'd ever taken. Staying in a bayside motel, snorkeling over the turtle grass, reading side by side, feeding the snappers. Sharing the quiet together.

  Four months into her exile, August, her photo faded from the papers. The posters on the telephone poles were tattered and bleached. Continuing the slow, secret slide down the Keys, she stopped at every joint and dive and funky outdoor tavern she could find, searching for the place she and her mother had spent their two weeks together. Every night she collapsed in a different mom-and-pop motel. Numbing herself with tequila, taking boat bums into her bed, dancing every night to jukebox music. Finally one August evening on Sugarloaf, seventeen miles from the dead end of Key West, she found the motel. New owner. Things run down. But the ghosts still hovered. She stopped. Checked in. Felt a warmth sweep through her.

  A month later, down to her last six dollars, she accepted the job Jesse offered. And this place became the best home she'd had. Sugarloaf Retreat, eighty motel rooms, a netless tennis court, a dolphin named Sweetcakes in the lagoon. Jesse had grown up watching Flipper, and this was part of the fantasy, migrate to the Keys, sun and ocean breezes, perpetual summer, star in one of the canceled TV shows of his youth.

  She worked as a maid. One of two, the other being a Guatemalan grandmother with no English. They made beds, swept, vacuumed, swished the toilets, the usual. Cleaning up the remains of other people's pleasures. Got paid cash. No social security numbers, no withholding. Jesse didn't ask. Her free time, she fed snappers off the dock. Tossing them shrimp, bits of bread, just as she and her mother had years ago. Her drawings enlarged, relaxed. Still dense with detail, but more open, more available, a deeper breath. Three fishing poles leaning against the wall of the bait shop, a desiccated shrimp on one of the hooks. A flats boat staked out fifty yards from a tangled mangrove island. Each twist of mangrove roo
t rigorously accurate.

  She became Irma Slater. Brash and ballsy. Kept the guys at bay. Liking this new woman who took no shit, knew how to give it by the bucket. This spitfire who could tell them to fuck off and sit there staring them in the eye until, by God, they stalked away. Or else if the moon and mood were right, take them back to her motel room, strip away the Kmart clothes, have her way. But even then, the minute the words came from their lips, beautiful, gorgeous, all that, she would spring the trapdoor beneath their feet. Let them drop.

  Irma Slater taught her how to do all that. Tough Irma. Happy Irma. A no-nonsense woman growing inside her, filling the hollows. No games, no bullshit. Just took her pleasures when she wanted, shut the door and locked it the rest of the time. Irma looking at the world, seeing the rough, simple things. Drawing them honestly in pen and ink. No hokiness. No gimmicks or intellectual interference. Irma Slater, not looking for love. A long way past that.

  Her first month at Sugarloaf, Irma Slater buzzed her hair, sheared off fifteen years of blondness. Got right down to the scalp, a buzz. Found that her skull had some interesting ridges and knobs, little plateaus she'd never known were there. The buzz cut didn't make her ugly, but it helped. The men steered wider arcs. This close to Key West, they assumed she was butch. Though that didn't stop all of them. She did her hair twice a week. Kept it to a pinch, that was it, a fine blur of yellow.

  For three years she'd been doing the Sugarloaf shuffle, the same strict ceremony every day. Irma Slater becoming solid inside her. A woman of simple tastes. In the cockpit by six, broiled yellowtail two hours out of the water. A plate of conch fritters on the side, two beers. For the next couple of hours, she'd watch the sun tick lower until it flattened against the Gulf, then watch its golden fire leak away into water and clouds, watch the pelicans darken to silhouettes. Then the moon would rise and some nights it coated the black water with silver as if a giant parachute of lace had drifted to earth. Irma briefly considering watercolors, acrylics, oils. But decided no. A greater challenge to continue with ink. The white page. Make that silver lace visible through the magic of omission.

  While she dawdled over the second beer, she hummed along to the ten-year-old country tunes playing on the jukebox. At eight or nine, warmed by the Heinekens, the fritters, the yellowtail, she'd pace the quiet hundred yards along the seawall to her motel room. Take a quick shower, crawl naked inside the sheets, flip on the light, and forge on through the next chapter of the biography of the week. Whatever the librarian was pushing. Submerge herself in Truman's life, Monroe's, for an hour or two, fill herself up with someone else's tragedies, conquests, their inevitable last days. Fall asleep listening to the clicks and baby babble, the sweet gasps of Sweetcakes ten feet beyond her open window.

  In these last three years, three barefoot, liberated years, the euphoria had flattened out, become a steady, reliable hum of pleasure. A Zen calm. Watching the next moment, the next after that. No expectations, no aspirations. Breathing and eating, sleeping and fucking, working and reading and drawing, satisfying Irma Slater's spartan needs. Building her nest egg. Her crisis fund. And in those three years she'd filtered out most of the residue. Not cured, not by a long shot. But a start, a damn good running start on some kind of deliverance after all. Self-pity in remission. Penniless and anonymous. What more could she want?

  That Friday night she was down to the last sips of her second Heineken, a small crowd accumulating along the railing beside the canal. Motel guests, snared by Jesse's gaudy neon sign. A couple of Japanese girls taking flash snapshots of the pelican sleeping on the tallest piling. At the picnic table a family of blond giants from Minnesota ate fish sandwiches and sipped Cokes. She watched a flats boat skim off the dark bay, come surfing in on its following wake. The jukebox throbbed with Hank Williams, the moon a smiling sliver in the east.

  She was lifting the last conch fritter to her mouth when a man filled the waitress's station to her right. Jesse gave her a look, see if she wanted help. She grimaced that she didn't as she munched the fritter. Since coming to Sugarloaf, she'd made it a part of her training to learn how to handle the bozos, defuse the lust that she still sometimes inspired. Her figure decoded inside the shapeless shirt.

  "I'm waiting for my boyfriend," she said, eyes on her beer. "He's Italian and the last guy he caught putting the moves on me is in the trunk of a '55 De Soto in a Dade County canal."

  The man didn't move. He was tall, she could sense that. Standing quietly, making no attempt.

  She drank down the last of the beer.

  "Abracadabra," the man said quietly. "Abracadabra."

  She kept her eyes down.

  "It's a beautiful word, don't you think? So full of magic."

  She turned her head, took a glimpse of this one.

  Tall with blond hair down to his shoulders, wavy and clean. Light blue eyes that held to hers. Eyes with a deep spark. In faded jeans and a crisp white button down shirt. Wide shoulders, narrow hips, a deep chest. His skin was pale, more white than cream. In his early twenties. A mouth poised on the edge of a smile. Only a degree or two off Hollywood handsome. Nose too prominent, a half inch too much forehead. Interesting, you'd call him, worth a second look. A third. Irma was vaguely curious. The moon in the right phase. Her cowboy for the night, perhaps.

  "Abracadabra," the man said. "It's from the Hebrew ab, which means father, and ben, which is son, and ruach acadasb, which is the holy spirit. Do you like words? I do. I like words. My mother gave me a lifelong interest in them. I study them. We become friends. Words in my mouth, saying them, the feel of them, bringing them alive, and them bringing me alive. Do you have words like that, words you enjoy feeling in your mouth? Words that bring you alive? Abracadabra. Father, son, and holy ghost."

  The young man smiled at her and leaned closer. "Look, I know this isn't a normal way to begin a conversation, discussing etymologies. But these things are on my mind, and you should say what's on your mind. Don't you agree? Anyway, the fact is, since we're old friends, I thought we could jump over the formalities anyway. Get reacquainted."

  Irma changed her mind. She slipped down from her stool, picked up her pad and razor pen, and stepped away from him. Feeling the tidal pull of his voice, the dark undertow. Resisting it. "Are you fleeing? Have I scared you?"

  "I don't scare that easy."

  "Don't you remember me?"

  He was a yard away. Composed, his eyes on hers as if this were the end of a pleasant date, warming up to the kiss.

  "My name is Butler Jack. In that order, Butler first, then Jack. I've found I have to explain it because some people, they hear my name, they think there's a comma between the words, like I'm saying it backward. But that's frontward. Butler Jack. Ring a bell?"

  "No," she said.

  He showed her a charming smile. "Come on, don't fool around. Sure you do."

  "I don't know any Butler Jack, frontward or backward."

  "Oh, stop," he said. "You don't need to keep pretending."

  "You have me confused with someone else," she said. "I'm Irma Slater."

  "No, you're not. You're Monica Sampson. Daughter of Morton Sampson of Fiesta Cruise Lines. And I'm the kid who was in love with you. Butler Jack, the one who sent you love letters. Long letters full of poetry. I'm finally here. I've come to get you like I promised."

  CHAPTER 6

  The woman known as Irma Slater coaxed herself back to her stool and settled there. Took a casual sip of the warm slosh in the bottom of her bottle. Felt the fish sandwich turn, grow fins, swim upward.

  "Your daddy made number forty-one on the Forbes list last year. Did you know that? Only a dozen Americans above him. Closing in on some of the lesser Saudis. And I was very sorry about your mother. I would've gone to the funeral, but back then, four years ago, I was at sea. Working the cruises. By the time I got back to port, the funeral was long over. She was a beautiful woman, your mother. Not up to your standards maybe, but striking just the same."

  Irma drew a clumsy br
eath. She glanced across at Jesse. He was washing glasses, bobbing up and down, focused on his work. She steadied herself with a hand against the bar. Looked closely at this guy. Hair off-blond, a tinge of red, or maybe that was the lights. His eyes darting around, interested in everything, the people coming and going, Jesse working behind the bar, Butler's gaze returning to her with a crinkle of humor as if he were absorbing this place, amused to find her in such a spot.

  "You're making a mistake. You're confused."

  "You haven't changed that much, Monica. Sure, your hair is different. Oh, I understand why you cut it. It isn't just for the disguise, is it? You wanted to get rid of all those years hanging down your back. All those memories. But does that really work, Monica? Can you shave your head and get rid of the past? I don't think so."

  "What the fuck do you want?"

  "Want," he said. "Now there's another interesting word. We use it all the time, but what does it really mean?"

  Irma felt the blood burning her face as if she'd been slapped hard on both cheeks. Fight and flight battling to a standstill in her veins.

  "On the one hand, if you want something, you desire it. But then of course want also means lack. You desire what you lack. What you want is what you're wanting, the thing you're missing. The things that would complete you."

  "Look," she said. "Save the bullshit. I'm satisfied with my vocabulary like it is."

  "Electricity works like that. It seeks what it's missing. Positive charge seeks negative. Negative ions seek positive. What nature wants is to get even, get back to zero. Everything neutralized. But of course that never happens. There's always a negative charge floating around, or a positive one, looking to stir things up. Wanting the thing it doesn't have, that last little thing that would make its world complete. Everybody's searching, right down to the subatomic particles, we're yearning for something, some little bitty thing."