***
Even with his eyes closed, even in the total dark, he could see her glowing above him. Butler Jack couldn't stop trembling. The glow of her. The power. He'd been wrong to believe it would be the same. The little girl had power, yes, her image in the swing, the white dress, the wide porch, all that. She had power, but it was nothing like the woman who lay in the cot above him. This one glowed. The uranium more unstable than he'd imagined. So close. He could reach out his arm. Her body molded above him. The heat she threw out. Butler sweating, his bones aching. His erection.
She was here.
None of it mattered now. None of the humiliations mattered. The pains he'd endured. The intricate work, the plotting. She was here. Monica lay above him in the dark, her body floating a foot away. The night glowed with her. The air was rich. Giving him a strength he'd never known. He was a warrior. A Viking. He could wade through a thousand armored soldiers. Slaughter them all. Berserk.
***
Before dawn on Saturday Thorn rose, dressed in the shadowy living room, and left the house without waking Rochelle. He drove to Sugar's concrete-block house in Largo Sound Park. The sun beginning to tint the low mountain range of clouds with the purples and sulturous yellows of a week-old bruise.
Sugarman's house was locked up, blinds drawn, no car in the drive. Cal Higgins from across the street was having a cup of coffee in his front yard, watching his dog pee on the neighbor's trees.
"Haven't seen them since last week," he called over to Thorn. "Crack of dawn Monday, I think it was."
Next door Mrs. Miranda came out to her porch. Pink housecoat, front half of her hair in curlers. Thorn went over. Mrs. Miranda shook out a Camel, lit it, and talked around the smoke. Saying she thought the two of them were getting a divorce.
"A divorce!"
"They didn't tell me in so many words. But both of them been hinting around about it for a week or two. Then one morning she drives off in that Jeep, it's full of her things, baggage, a TV set, lamps, her macrame collection. Half hour later he leaves in a taxicab, hanging his head. Now to me that looks like she was setting up shop somewhere else. Going their separate ways."
Thorn stared at Sugar's house.
"Usually he tells us when he's away," she said. "Leaves a number where he can be reached. But I guess he was in a hurry this time, embarrassed or just forgot. He was working the cruise ships, you know, but a couple of days ago he let it slip that he was quitting that job."
"Quitting?"
"Yeah," she said. "Tell 'em to shove it."
"You know all Sugarman's business, don't you?"
She squinted at him through her acrid smoke. "I see what I see."
Thorn drove a couple of miles up U.S. 1 to the strip shopping center where Sugar's office was wedged in between an inflatable raft store and a beauty shop. The red-haired beautician opening up next door had no idea where he was. Gone for at least a week as far as she knew.
He went back to the VW, climbed inside, stared out the windshield at the big plastic alligators and sharks hanging in the window of the raft shop, the air-conditioning stirring them. He stared at the heavy door on Sugar's office. It was constructed from thick planks of mahogany, Thorn's office-warming gift. Some leftover wood from rebuilding his house. Sugarman loved that goddamn door. And Thorn remembered vividly the couple of punch-drunk days they'd spent dovetailing it together.
Under ordinary circumstances Sugarman never would've left the island without giving Thorn his full itinerary. And for twenty years he'd consulted with Thorn over the slightest tremor in his marriage. But then, circumstances were no longer ordinary between them. Sugarman had seen to that. Pushing Thorn into that impossible ultimatum. An act so completely unlike his mild-mannered friend that the more Thorn had considered it, the more obvious it became that Sugarman was concocting this feud. Pushing Thorn away. Pushing him, it seemed, safely out of range.
Thorn started the engine, continued to stare at the bright floats in the window beside Sugar's office. With a growl, he revved the tinny engine, sucked down a long breath, then jammed the shifter into first, popped the clutch.
The wheels mashed against the curb and the car stalled.
He started it again, drove it up against the edge of the sidewalk, the engine groaning and complaining as if it had been babied too much lately, Thorn letting it get flabby. Just like he'd been babying every fucking thing, letting it all go soft and dopey.
Thorn revved it higher, worked the clutch, and finally the car lurched forward, scraped and bumped over the curb, kept grinding forward until it rammed into Sugar's office door. He threw it in reverse, pulled back. The mahogany was barely nicked.
Thorn thumped back down into the lot. Sat there a moment revving the engine, goosing it higher and higher. The red-headed hairdresser from next door threw open her door, stuck her head out, a cigarette in her mouth and a portable phone pressed to her ear. She was in her aqua smock.
Holding the throttle flat to the floor, Thorn gave her a nod and shoved it into first again, popped the clutch, and the car lunged forward, slammed over the curb. This time he angled the wheels properly, and the edge of the bumper battered the center of Sugar's door. Cracked the thing down the middle, top to bottom. He backed up, parked the car, took care to get it neatly between the lines before he turned it off. The beautician was yammering into the phone as she craned for a view of the door, half of which still dangled on its hinges.
Thorn pushed his way inside, went through the reception area into Sugar's office, flipped on all the lights and began to search. He found no notes in Sugarman's calendar, no tickets, no reservation slips, nothing. Not even any papers strewn about his desk. Only a neat stack of magazines, Time and Newsweek, People, a month or two out of date, dentist's office stuff. Perhaps Mrs. Miranda was right. A divorce, gone their separate ways. A not-so-sudden dismemberment of their union, a decision that had been in the making for years.
Stubbornly Thorn worked his way through the drawers, top to bottom. Finding nothing the least bit unusual until he reached the next to last one. There, tucked beneath a stack of typing paper, was a five by nine black-and-white photograph. He drew it out.
Two people sitting on a broad porch somewhere, wicker furniture. A pretty blond woman, late forties, a boy beside her. Mother's arm over the blond boy's shoulder, hugging him to her. The shot had the graininess of a telephoto lens. A hazy surveillance photo. Thorn was about to set the photograph aside and move on but something in the woman's eyes snagged him.
He drifted across the office, carried the photograph over to the bookshelves. He stood there for a moment studying Sugarman's shelves, ran his eyes back and forth along their length, and there it was. He held the photo out, positioned it next to the snapshot of Sugar's teenage mother.
It was the eyes. The older woman was fleshier, cheekbones softened, hair swept back in a more stylish wave. But the haunted eyes were identical. The woeful shadow, the faraway focus. Thorn moved back to Sugar's desk. Took a couple of deep breaths, trying to absorb this.
He was just easing down into Sugar's chair when the young patrolman appeared, inching forward in a tense squat, steering himself around the edge of the fractured door with his service revolver leading the way. His eyes snapping onto Thorn's.
"You're dead if you twitch," the young cop said. "Keep your fucking hands in view."
Thorn stood up. "Hey, look it's okay, Sergeant."
"Shut up, and keep 'em where I can see them."
"Look, I'm the owner's friend. We do this all the time. Bust into each other's place. Like a joke we play on each other."
"Keep your motherfucking hands up where I can see them."
"It's true. Ask anybody around here. Thorn and Sugarman. We're famous for doing shit like this."
The kid was sweating, inching forward toward Thorn. He could see the enlarged veins in the cop's wrist. Guy fully pumped. When was it that all the cops got younger? Suddenly moved down a generation from Thorn.
"Lo
ok, there's no reason to get all . . ."
The kid tightened his stance, aimed down his barrel.
That's when Thorn felt the prickle in his nostrils, a sneeze rising inside him, coming on with such abruptness he didn't have time for a word of warning, just squinched his eyes, shot both hands high, and threw back his head, felt the spasm shake him hard, echo in his ears. Thinking as it happened that this was how it was going to end for him, killed by a chance sneeze. And thinking how that was the way it should be. Same way his life had consistently worked, some stray mote or insect wing floating out of the swirling chaos, microscopic debris sucked into his nostril and bing. Thorn becomes splatter on the wall. No more Thorn. Shot for random sneezing. Thorn's God guided by the same unwavering perversity he'd always used. Sneeze, bang. One long loaded crapshoot from birth to death.
He heard the roar of the gunshot and somewhere nearby a scream. When his eyes cleared. Thorn saw the beautician huddled behind the cop. An aqua-smocked angel. The young patrolman, white and shaky.
Over Thorn's shoulder something toppled to the floor. He swung around and watched a shattered fragment of Sugar's one and only trophy tumble off the shelf beside his desk. The slug had split it in two and gouged a five-inch hole in the concrete block.
"Christ, he's going to be pissed," Thorn said, coming back around. "He averaged 205 that summer. Never bowled better."
The cop holstered his pistol, kept his hand on the butt as though his flesh had melted, bonded forever to that steel.
***
Two hours later Rochelle bailed him out. Breaking and entering, resisting arrest, criminal mischief. Thorn managed only a sketchy explanation. Got carried away, he said. That's all. He waved off her other questions and they drove home in silence, had a quiet lunch. She didn't ask him anymore. Gave him a wide berth as she went outside to work in the yard.
Thorn sat for a while at the round oak table and stared at the curtains billowing with an easterly breeze. He got up, circled the room, touching her things. Cooking utensils, microwave, vases, dried flowers, a photograph of her parents. Her sewing basket, her portable Singer. Her rings and jewelry, her black-faced watch, her wind-up clock, her four different styles of tennis shoes lined up neatly beside the bed.
To quiet the racket in his head, Thorn went to the bedroom closet, got down his fly reels from a high shelf. Took them outside on the sunny porch.
He removed them from their boxes, stacked them on the floor. He went back inside, got his screwdrivers, some cleaning stuff. Back in the sun, he chose the Orvis to disassemble first, laying out the parts beside the railing. Began carefully dusting each of the twenty-eight pieces with a small paintbrush. On a few of the parts he had to use the edge of an oily rag to flake away the salt scum, a few freckles of rust. It'd been a damn long time since he'd had this reel opened, done any kind of upkeep.
His wooden house, his several reels, his skiff and ancient cabin cruiser all needed constant tending. Thorn had surrounded himself with high-maintenance possessions. The absolute worst thing you could do for stuff like that, reels, boat motors, or wooden houses, was let them sit. But that's just what he'd done lately while he and Rochelle explored the dark side of the moon.
On the north perimeter of his property, she was kneeling in the fishtail ferns, weeding. First time, as far as Thorn knew, anyone had ever pulled a weed on his five acres. He wasn't sure how she knew which ones were weeds, but she was working hard. Sweating profusely, on her knees, snipping with hand shears, tugging up vines, uprooting crabgrass, making huge piles. She'd already finished the south side, working with furious concentration.
Everybody irritated today. Everybody teetering. Like some frightful phase of the moon.
Thorn dusted off the drag assembly, the knob spring, the drag click ball, the knob retainer. When he had them as clean and shiny as he could get them, he started on the spool cover. Focused, working that shiver out of his hands.
Finally Thorn began to reassemble the reel. He set the click pawl spring against the spindle. Slid on the O ring assembly, tightened the retaining screw, pressed the spool drive plate to the compression spring. Done it a few hundred times, could manage in the dark if necessary.
Not seeing it until now, that of all his reels, he'd chosen this one first. Staring down at his hands, at this Orvis, which was a present from Sugar on Thorn's thirtieth birthday. Given to him during a raucous party that commenced at sunrise and didn't end till two days later. The house swarming with people. Thorn and Sugarman and dozens of their closest. Kids and dogs. Somebody even brought a butchered pig, laid a spit and roasted it.
Thorn had never owned a reel so fine. It must've set Sugar back a month's salary. But here it was, over a dozen years later, and that reel still sang as sweetly as it had on its first afternoon. And while it had broken the spirit of countless heavyweight fish, it had never once seized up.
Holding the reel in his right hand, Thorn's eyes drifted up and he looked out at Rochelle, then out at the bay again. He felt a nettling sting behind his eyes. As he raised his hand to rub them clear, the reel slipped from his grip and broke open against the rough boards of the porch, its clockwork spilling through the gaps in the planks, all those tiny disks and springs and nuts falling in a bright rain down into the dust below.
CHAPTER 9
Thunder shook the Winnebago, and the dream she was having abruptly vanished. Something about eyes, lots and lots of eyes floating in a gray mist. She pushed herself up on her elbows, blinked away that haze. The light inside the van was tinted purple. A thunderstorm rolling over, its gusts rocking the big van.
"Good morning, sleepyhead." Butler smiled at her, then swiveled back to his work.
He was stationed at a workbench across from the bunks. Wearing a pair of gray jeans and a white tennis shirt. A blue bandanna clenched his hair into a ponytail.
He was hunched forward over the long desk, some kind of high-tech soldering gun in his right hand. She craned forward to see, and it looked like he was melting dots of silver onto a circuit board. As he worked he peered through a jeweler's magnifier on a band around his head. Taking one look through the lens then glancing up at what appeared to be a blueprint tacked on the wall before him.
Scattered around the walls above his workbench were dozens of black-and-white photographs. She swept her eyes around the compartment and saw more photos on the walls, on cabinet doors, on the door of the small fridge, the shelves. Rows and rows of children. Several hundred of them. All those eyes, dark, empty. Asian boys, Hispanic girls, European, African. Some naked, some in loincloths. Bellies swollen, flies walking on their eyes. All staring into the camera lens with matching expressions as though they'd been posed by the same manipulative photographer. Come on, kid, gimme that sorrowful, hopeful, hungry look.
Outside there was a white flash then the immediate cannon blast of thunder as if the lightning spike had struck one of the tall pines a dozen feet away.
She climbed down from the bunk, came over to him. He was bent over, touching another careful dot of silver to the circuit board. She glanced around the room, scanning the faces in those photographs. Feeling a cold tingle move up her neck.
"I was an only child, just like you," Butler said, continuing with his work. "My mother and I, alone together. I never met my father. Don't have any idea about him. But it didn't matter. It was just me and Lola."
"Look . . ." she said.
"No, let me finish. You need to know about me. What you're getting into."
She heard the eighteen-wheelers sizzling past on the wet highway fifty, sixty yards away. The never-ending flow of goods to Key West, Saturday traffic pouring down from Miami. She took a seat on the edge of the bottom bunk.
"There I was, her only son. But I couldn't do anything right for Lola. She wanted baby Jesus as a son. Albert Einstein wouldn't have been smart enough for her. Nothing I did made her happy. She'd stick a book in front of my nose, no matter what it was, I'd read it, drink it down and it would stay in my head.
Every word. But was that good enough for Lola? No, sir.
"I'd quote the book back to her, give it to her word for word, but she'd just shake her head, unhappy, like I didn't understand. I'd fallen short again. Nothing was ever right for Lola Jack. Fall down on the playground, get a little tear in my brand-new pants, Lola wouldn't hit me. She wouldn't get out a strap or anything like that. She'd squint at me like I was the devil and I'd just farted poison gas. Just stand there and scrutinize me and not say a word. And I remember how at times like those the lights seemed to get dim, how I'd begin to whimper and grovel and she'd just stand there and look. Never hit me.
"Though I wish she had. I wish she'd beat the ever-loving shit out of me. So I'd know where I stood. But she didn't. Lola was too good for that. She was white and pure and Christian. Sang in the Presbyterian choir. A soloist. Wonderful voice. White dresses, white hats, white gloves. Going to church every chance she had. Good Lola. Bad Butler."
He kept his head down. One part of his brain glancing up at his blueprint and then adding another silver dot, the other part talking. Talking.
"We were poor. Always struggling. Barely enough money for food, clothes, rent. Lived in a terrible neighborhood, murders out in the street. It took her twenty years, but Lola finally worked her magic on your father. Got him to notice her, promote her. Got him to marry her.
"And that was what she wanted all along. Her plan. A big tall rich man. Somebody to swoop her up and take her off to the penthouse for bottles of champagne and caviar and scintillating talk with his pals. She used to tell me how she was selling herself short all those years. She deserved better. But then she found a buyer worth her stock. That's Lola. Now that's who she is, my mother. Living at the top of the pyramid, eating baked Alaska and escargot while the world starves.
"But, you know, Monica. I'm not angry. I'm actually grateful to her. Grateful she pushed me away, taught me self-reliance. Because what I found out was, a person doesn't need his mother's love. A person like that can accomplish a great deal if they stay focused. If they use every second to advance their cause. If they have a list and follow it, an outline. If they know where they're going, why they're going there, what it's all for. And that's been me. I've had my list, my commandments, I've followed it, and I'm here now because of it.
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