Miami Noir

by Les Standiford

  Speck slid down from the tractor and moved over to the empty shack where there was a double-bitted ax resting against the wall. He reached into his pocket for a whetstone, spat on it, and began working the blade.

  “Mr. Talley?” the man said. “My name’s Calvin Hallaway.” He untangled his hand from the girl’s and offered it to shake, but the sawyer turned his attention to the boy and the ax even while telling the stranger that, yes, John Talley was his

  Calvin’s narrow, hooded eyes darted while he surveyed the contents of the yard: the two shacks, the portable mill, the tractor, the beat-up Ford truck. He took a long drag on the cigarette clinched in his tight lips and then pinched the butt and flicked it away.

  “What brings you here?” the sawyer said.

  “Well, sir, it’s a long story,” Calvin said. “We come from up around the lake. Been working our way south, you might say. We stayed a time in Miami, but that was a regular hellhole. I’m an out-of-doors man, sir, like yourself, I suspect.”

  They had been on the road for weeks, Calvin said, riding when they could but mostly on foot. “It’s unusual to see a man and his daughter out on the road, I’ll grant you. But there’s nothing usual about these times. Them last few miles liked to done this little girl in,” he said. “I felt just terrible about it. Thought I’d have to carry her sometimes. But she made it. This here’s Marcy. Say hello, honey.”

  The girl nodded.

  “My daughter,” Calvin said.

  They had heard in Perrine of the sawyer and his tractorrun sawmill from a man at the collection yard on the Florida East Coast Railroad.

  “Fella there said you maybe need some help,” Calvin added. “I been logging and sawmilling all over, up in Georgia and Carolina, mostly, but up and down the coast in Florida too. All I know is timber. And Marcy can cook real good. She’d be a big help to your wife. We’re not looking for a handout. We want to work.”

  “There’s no wife. Just me and him.” The sawyer pointed to his son. “We manage. This is Speck. He usually knows better than to gawk, but we don’t get many visitors. Come on over here, boy. These people are looking for work.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Speck said.

  “Ain’t we mannerable,” Calvin said. He grinned like he’d heard a secret. “Pleased to acquaint you too, young chap.”

  “I can’t give you an answer now,” the sawyer told the visitors. “But you can stay the night in the empty house here. It’s not much, but it’ll beat sleeping in the swamp. We’ll see if we can’t get you something to eat. I’ll let you know in the morning about staying on.”

  “That’s much appreciated,” Calvin said. “They told us you was fair.”

  Inside the helper’s shack, Marcy had pushed the suitcase under the bed, taken her shoes off, and was examining her blisters. Calvin was stripped down to his dingy undershorts and sprawled on the mattress.

  Speck watched them through the window of the shack, then listened just outside the door.

  “You think they’ll let us stay here for a while?” Marcy asked.

  “Depends,” Calvin said, lying back with eyes closed and blowing cigarette smoke toward the roof slats. “You saw the way that boy looked at you. Wouldn’t hurt our chances if you was to show him some attention. Must be a lonely thing, strong young fella like that one, working out here on this ridge, nothing but gators and toads for company day after day.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing bad, baby girl. You’re a charmer. Just be nice to him. Maybe get him to put in a word with his sourpuss of an old man. We need some time here. Maybe after they get to know us better we might even be partners. Or something like that. They got a nice truck out there, did you notice that?”

  Speck paused a moment at the open door to the hiredhand’s shack to make his presence known before he walked in. Calvin remained where he was on the bed. Marcy jumped up and hurried over to the door, and when she took the canned goods Speck had brought over she brushed her hand across his. She was a couple of inches shorter than the boy, and she looked up to speak.

  “Thank you, Speck,” she said.

  “You’re a regular little gentleman,” Calvin said, lifting up from the bed. “Your daddy must of raised you right. But you don’t favor him.” He turned to Marcy. “He must take after his mama. Maybe he’s his mama’s boy.”

  “You should stop,” Marcy said.

  “He knows I’m just fooling,” Calvin said. “You didn’t take offense, did you, son?”

  In reply, Speck shook his head and walked quickly out the door. Marcy followed him.

  “You shouldn’t let my daddy bother you,” she said. “He didn’t mean no harm. He was just saying how much he admires you and your father for working so hard up here all alone.”

  They were standing in the middle of the clearing between the two shacks, near a rough-hewn table with stumps for chairs.

  “Do you mind if we sit here awhile? My feet ache from walking.” The girl’s palms were rubbed raw from carrying the battered suitcase, and the broken-down brogans had rasped blisters on the heels of each foot.

  She said they had walked all morning from Perrine before turning off onto the log road and heading up the ridge into the woods. Some cars passed. Two or three slowed before speeding on, and one pulled to the side of the road, but it too hastened away when the driver apparently got a closer look at the two.

  “People just aren’t too trusting,” she said. “But just listen to me complain. It sure was nice of your daddy to let us stay.”

  Speck spat in the dirt and sat. “What do you want?” he said.

  “Just talk,” Marcy said. “How old are you? How long you been out here? How much longer you going to be working here?”

  The boy said he was sixteen. He and his father had hauled the tractor mill up Cutler Ridge more than a year before and had been working this stand of scratch pine ever since. But no matter how hard they worked something was always breaking down, and then the sawyer would say it was God’s will. They were on a contract with the owner of the land, a farmer who himself barely scratched out enough of a living to make his mortgage payments to the land company. If they didn’t finish here in the next two weeks and move the mill they’d forfeit the contract, and the lumber already cut would go to the farmer.

  “Where’s your mama?” Marcy asked.

  “She died in a hurricane three years ago,” Speck said. “That’s why we came out here. My dad was a minister in Miami, but he said he was through with preaching. He was through with people, I guess. We come out here and went to work for ourselves.”

  “Looks like you could use some help.” She reached over and put her hand on the boy’s. But Speck stood up.

  “We’re managing,” he said.

  “I was just observing,” she said. “And I was thinking that if you did need a helping hand then maybe you’d put in a good word for us with your daddy.” She smiled sweetly. “I sure could use some rest.”

  The boy backed away a few steps and then turned toward the main shack. “We’ll see,” he muttered.

  Back inside the main shack, he watched the girl rubbing her feet in the middle of the clearing. He knew his father would let her and Calvin stay on. The sawyer wouldn’t ask where they’d been, what they were running from. He’d never bothered to ask any of the hired hands. All that mattered was the work. In their time on the ridge a half dozen men had come and gone. Black, white, young, old, every one had something or someone trailing them, pushing them south and then, when there was almost no farther south to go, west toward the swamps. This ridge was the edge of the solid world, and no one who thought he had any other choice would put up with the heat and bugs and toil for more than a few days. The sawyer would let the strangers stay for as long as they were help. He would overlook their trouble because he had no choice. He’d make use of them, the same way he’d made do with the cranky tractor and balky sawmill. The boy would put aside his suspicions too, because the girl would be
close for a while. But it wouldn’t be for long. This was not a place where strangers took comfort or refuge.

  Speck was up early the next morning, and as he stood at the edge of the woods, he watched Marcy shuffle out of the helper’s shack and make her way to a little creek just beyond the clearing. She was carrying clean clothes, which she hung on a branch, and then leaned from the waist to pull off the dingy dress she was wearing when she arrived. The boy saw the gray hem rise like a curtain revealing pale shins and thighs, the dark triangle between her legs, the slight swell of her belly, and the circles of her breasts. She waded into the green water up to her waist and bathed, and as she climbed back onto the bank she turned and looked up into the woods where Speck stood still, trying to make himself invisible. If she saw him, she pretended not to notice. She pulled on the clean dress quickly, washed her dirty clothes, and hung them on tree branches to dry. Then she slowly made her way back up toward the mill yard. The boy moved over to the sawmill and pretended to study the machinery.

  Calvin appeared in the doorway of the helper’s shack, barefoot and shirtless, and when he stretched his arms mightily high over his head, he revealed a red scar that curved along his pale flank. When the boy looked over, Calvin balled his hand into a fist and made a pumping motion toward his groin. The boy glared at the man.

  John Talley came out of the main shack eating a biscuit. He walked on over to Calvin. “Well, sir, I guess we might see how it works out with the two of you here awhile,” the sawyer told Calvin. “I don’t know you from Adam, and I don’t need to know. But the fact of the matter is, I have to get this lumber cut and delivered to the collection yard. Truth is, it’s hard, hot work, and I’ve had men come and go that wasn’t up to it. But you’re saying you can, so I am offering you a chance.” Together, they worked out the wages. They agreed Calvin would be paid after the sawyer delivered the last load of lumber to the collection yard.

  “I’d like to get to work,” the sawyer said. “So soon as you’re ready, come on out to the mill. I’ll have Speck show your girl to the supplies so she can get started on dinner. You be quick about it,” he then told Speck. “We got work to do.”

  For a week, Calvin worked shoulder to shoulder with the sawyer and the boy, cutting the pine, dragging it back to the clearing, and bucking the timber at the tractor mill. And then one morning when Calvin didn’t show up for breakfast, the girl said that he had left the night before to take care of some business.

  He still hadn’t returned the next day, and that night there was light in the window of the helper’s shack, and the girl was moving about inside alone. Speck stole closer in the darkness to the window.

  Marcy wore a clean white dress, and arranged around her on the bed were women’s things, brushes and tins and powder. She sat with her back to the window and picked up the brush and began to stroke her brown hair. But then she heard the boy at the window and turned with a start. “You scared me,” she said.

  Speck moved closer and looked around inside.

  “It’s all right,” Marcy said. “I’m all alone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Speck said.

  “Sorry I’m alone, or sorry I caught you peeping in my window?”

  “I saw the light and wanted to make sure everything was all right.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I just wanted … Sorry,” he said, and he turned to leave.

  “Wait a minute,” Marcy said. “Go around by the door. I’ll be out.”

  When she met him at the door, the boy reached to touch her cheek. He wanted to do something, to kiss her, maybe, but he didn’t know where to start.

  Marcy reached up and took his hand before he touched her face. “Be careful,” she said.

  “I was just—”

  “You was just maybe figuring we’re alone out here and you’d take advantage of the situation. If my daddy knew, he’d—”

  “I’m sorry.” The boy turned his head to check the edges of the clearing. “Where is he?”

  “He went looking for something to drink,” Marcy said.

  “He won’t find much around here.”

  “He’s got his ways. He says he’s got a sixth sense.”

  “A what?”

  “Sometimes he sees things before they happen. Not always, and not that he can control it, but I seen it work. Like coming here.”

  “Visions, like?”

  “I don’t pretend to understand it.” The girl’s face darkened for a second and she shivered. “I shouldn’t be talking to you. If he knew I was alone with you…”

  “He won’t know if you don’t tell him. We’re just talking. So why are the two of you out on the road?”

  “There was trouble.”

  “With your mama?”

  She looked up at the boy. “My mama’s dead. This trouble was with the law up in Duval County. They said Cal, my daddy, they said he stole. Said I was in on it. It was a lie, but we had to go anyway. I didn’t have no one else, so I went with him. I didn’t have a choice.”

  “You could leave him.”

  “He needs me, and I need him. You understand that, don’t you? Ain’t that why you’re out here in nowhere?”

  “I could leave. I will someday.”

  “But you haven’t yet.”

  “It don’t seem right, though. You, a girl, out on the road.”

  “Well, we’re not on the road now, are we? Come on inside. There’s something I want to show you.”

  Marcy took Speck’s hand and led him inside over to the bed. She reached down and slid the battered suitcase from underneath. “This is my hope chest.” She untied the twine and lifted the lid. She took a carefully folded white cotton dress from the case and then a patchwork quilt, a pair of polished black leather shoes with hard buckles, something made of lace that she quickly hid beneath the quilt, the brush and mirror, and finally a photograph—Marcy when she was a fair-haired child wearing a long white dress—in a gold frame.

  “This ain’t the hope chest itself, naturally. It’s what goes in one.” She arranged the few pieces on the bed. “These are my pretty things. I’d hate worse than anything to part with these.” She lifted from the suitcase a wad of newspaper and unwrapped a small glass globe.

  “I thought it’d be broke,” she said. “It’s so delicate.”

  She showed Speck. Beneath the little roof of glass there was a tiny city of white with steeples and onion-shaped domes, castles, and palaces. Blue lagoons and arched bridges connected the white streets. On the bottom of the globe there was gold printing: Enter herein ye sons of men.

  “What is it?” Speck said.

  “It’s the World’s Fair. In St. Louis a long time ago. This came from there. It was a keepsake. It’s for looking and dreaming. Watch.” She turned the globe upside down and hundreds of silvery flakes floated above the miniature city before settling silently back to the bottom. “Don’t they look just like stars?” Marcy said. “Don’t you wish you could be somewhere so pretty? It was handed down in my family from my mother’s side. Her daddy helped build it—the fair.”

  “You saw it?”

  “It was a long time ago. It ain’t there no more. They built up this great white city and people came from all over the world, and then when it was over they tore it all down like it never happened, like it was kind of a dream. Still, I want to see where it was someday.”

  “I could take you there.”

  “That would be nice. Maybe someday you’ll be there, and you’ll look up and I’ll be getting off a trolley car, just like that. It’s nice to think so.” She carefully rewrapped the globe and put it back in the suitcase in the folds of the quilts and dresses.

  “Why can’t you just go back to where you came from?” Speck asked. “Back to your people. There must be someone.”

  “I told you, they wouldn’t want me,” she said. “Not now.”

  “But why? You deserve better than … than this.”

  “Oh, it’s not so bad.” She cupped her hand on
Speck’s smooth cheek. “Now you better go.” From within the woods came the sound of movement, and Marcy told Speck, “Go. Now.”

  The boy ran for the door as Marcy hurried to put out the light.

  Calvin made his way unsteadily toward the door and then stopped and pissed on the ground before going inside. Speck creeped around to the back of the shack and watched through the widow.

  “What’s all this?” Calvin said. He grabbed the girl and threw her onto the bed. Marcy tried to scramble for the door, but Calvin caught her by the leg and dragged her back. He pulled his belt off in one quick motion and began to lash her legs. Marcy curled into a ball and covered herself with her hands, but then Calvin whipped the belt across her face. She whimpered and begged for him to stop. And then she lay still while he climbed on top of her.

  The boy felt powerless to stop it. He told himself it was for the girl that he hesitated. That it would be worse for her if he interfered. But he knew he was afraid for himself. So he waited while the man’s grunts and moans subsided, watched as the girl turned her face into the mattress and waited for the whole thing to be over.

  The next morning, Marcy moved like an awkward, tentative bird. She wore the old floppy men’s hat pulled down over her forehead. Calvin, meanwhile, emerged from the shack smiling his thin, menacing smile. “Breakfast ready?” he said as he passed by Speck on his way to the sawmill.

  Marcy’s eyes were raw and the red edges beneath her right eye darkened to almost purple above her cheek. Before Speck could speak, she said, “I fell. Don’t ask no more.”

  “He did this to you,” the boy replied.

  “I just fell,” she said, looking over the boy’s shoulder. “Leave it alone. You’ll be better off. I have to get the cooking started.”

  “This ain’t right. You can’t … Your own daddy … Something’s got to be done.”

  “Not now, and not by you,” she said. And she pulled the broad brim of the hat lower over her eyes and started off for the main shack.