The Four Corners of the Sky

by Michael Malone

  On the floor lay a large, smashed framed group wedding photograph, glass slivers sticking into it, obscuring the faces.

  There was no furniture in the room except for one tanned leather Deco armchair with an ottoman. Beside this chair was a round glass coffee table that also looked Deco.

  Lying on the floor, wedged between the chair and the stereo, through which Otis Redding was pleading, “Please don’t make me stop now,” Annie saw a young well-built male body wearing nothing but pale blue boxer shorts and one white sock. It was the back of a young man who looked to be in perfect physical condition except for the fact that, judging from his contorted torso and stiffened limbs, he was dead. The rest of his clothes (shirt, pants, sports jacket) lay scattered about the otherwise bare floor like little throw rugs. As Annie leaned over his body, she smelt the agave fumes of tequila and saw a half-empty bottle of Cuervo 1800 in his rigid hand.

  Then she screamed, as suddenly the man’s other arm flung out, hitting her back and knocking her down on top of him. Pressed against his breastbone, Annie could now see that the body was alive, the chest had a heart in it that was beating, although nothing else moved, not a tremble of the dark-bronze curls. As she tried to lift herself away, the arm stiffened rigidly.

  Then the body turned over. The thick long eyelashes flickered. It was Daniel Hart. His arms moved tightly, warmly, around her and unexpectedly he kissed her. The kiss took her breath away, soft, strong, unending until she pulled back and elbowed him in the stomach.

  Slowly his mouth spasmed, forming the sounds ooofff and then drinnn..., which Annie took to mean an effort at the word drink. Pulling herself up, she made her way along a hallway whose walls had bright-painted wood crèches and skeletons on them, past two bedrooms (one empty, one with nothing in it but a large bright blue wooden bed, its head and foot hand painted with what looked like Mexican saints).

  In the colorfully tiled kitchen, someone appeared to have started preparations for some complicated Asian dish, then lost heart and quit. There were grocery bags and wooden cooking utensils everywhere, copper pans stacked by the stove.

  Filling a coffee mug with water, she brought it back to the living room. The body hadn’t moved. As she lifted Hart’s head, his lashes quivered, then his eyes opened, blue as Miami neon, Deco blue, the blue of the sea in Annie’s dream. She held up the mug to his lips.

  “‘Sorry, no silver cup,’” she said as she tilted the water into his mouth.

  He spluttered spitting, pushing the mug aside. In a rusted croak, he growled at her, “It’s ‘Sorry, no silver cups.’ Not ‘cup.’ ‘Cups.’ You don’t look like John Wayne.”

  Annie was taken aback but replied, “You don’t look like Claire Trevor either.” Sam had mentioned on the phone that this Sergeant Hart had made some comment about his familiarity with old movies. He certainly appeared to know her dad’s old quote from Stagecoach. It might have made him interesting if he hadn’t so obviously been a hopeless drunk, an emotional wreck, and a derelict housekeeper.

  She offered him more water, but he shook his head with a groan, twisting his face as he slowly unbent one rigid leg. “Listen, Duke,” he grumbled, grabbing the mug and pouring the water on his head, “Water’s not a drink.”

  “Take it or leave it,” she told him exasperated. “I need some information from you about my father.”

  “Get in line.” He rubbed the water in his hair over his face and chest. Yanking his jaw from side to side, apparently to see if it still worked, he lurched to his feet with moans that sounded much like the wailing lamentations of Otis Redding, now singing “Mr. Pitiful” in the background.

  He stumbled, his hand on Annie’s shoulder to steady himself. “Pardon me,” he said. He hobbled down the hall into his kitchen, returning with a long-necked bottle of beer. After a long swallow, he stared a while at her immaculate white slacks and T-shirt. “Annie Goode. You look like a paramedic.”

  “You look like you need one. You shouldn’t drink so much.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Tugging at his boxer shorts, he walked to his opened front door, glanced out. In horror, he grabbed at the doorway, staggered back to the huge power saw on the hall floor and picked it up. “My fucking magnolia tree! I fucking sawed down my fucking magnolia tree!” Hurrying outside, he stared aghast at a lawn full of leafy branches and fat cut logs.

  Picking up his blue linen shirt, Annie followed him from his house to the small yard. “You are definitely Sgt. Daniel Hart of the Miami police?”

  He sank down onto the raw tree stump with the saw in his lap. “I was,” he said obscurely. Gesturing ruefully at chopped up sections of tree trunk, he added, “This was my dad’s house. My dad planted that magnolia tree the day I was born. Twenty-six years old.”

  Annie raised her Claudette Colbert eyebrow. “Castration anxiety?”

  Hart growled. “What, you’re a shrink too?”

  Smiling despite herself, she took the saw from his lap and set it down beside him. “No, but I’ve got a friend who’s a shrink. She’d say there was some reason you chopped up your dad’s big tree and gave yourself alcohol poisoning today. Is it your birthday? That can be depressing. Mine was two days ago.”

  “I already know that. I spent a year on fuckin’ Jack Peregrine’s life.” He sat morosely on the stump and rubbed his temples. “Yeah, sawing up the tree, that could be a kill-Dad thing. Dad was a cop, full time; you dropped a towel on the bathroom floor, you got chucked in the slammer. But I’d say…” He glanced around his yard. “Chopping this magnolia is more about my ex-wife Melissa. We’re divorced.”

  Annie gestured around the yard. “This’ll bring her back?”

  He glanced up. “You always so sarcastic?”

  She shrugged. “Most of the time.” A large pink fuchsia lay on the ground, ripped out of its pot; carefully she replanted it.

  “Thanks,” he acknowledged. “So where do you get off razzing me? You’re divorced too.”

  She sat across from him, balancing on a pile of logs. “Not because I’m sarcastic.” The stars were so bright she could see the thin lariat-braided bracelet that clasped his wrist. She smiled at him. “Well, maybe it was because I’m sarcastic. But actually I’m not divorced.”

  He looked disappointed. “You’re not?”

  Oddly she felt she had to explain. “Not yet…One more week. Didn’t you get all my messages?”

  “About your upcoming divorce? Nope.” He tilted the beer bottle, drank from it.

  “You’re pretty sarcastic yourself.” Impatient, she tossed him his blue shirt. “I meant the six messages I left to tell you I’ve got the Queen of the Sea, that Inca statue that belongs to Cuba. My dad actually had it. You drop the charges against him and I’ll give it to you. It’s in my hotel room.”

  He nodded. “I like the hotel room part of it.”

  Her blush surprised her. “Don’t be funny.”

  Pulling his arms through the shirtsleeves, he rubbed at his curls. He was, Annie thought, very good-looking and (unlike Brad) he didn’t seem to know it.

  He said, “I wasn’t being funny. I think what’s going on between us is more the light-hearted repartee of incompatible people destined for—well, I don’t know what we’re destined for. We’ll have to sit here and find out.”

  She smiled, grew embarrassed, held out her watch to show him the time. “It’s midnight. So if you want to cut this deal, let’s do it. I’m sort of in a hurry to get my dad out of that hellhole Golden Days.”

  “That’s for sure.” He shook his head. “Don’t put me in there. Drink?” He held out the bottle.

  “No. In St. Louis, in the airport, why didn’t you tell me who you were? What kind of game are you playing?”

  He stood slowly, groaning loudly, setting the chain saw down on the tree stump. “Okay, you want to get tough? You’re subject to criminal charges for aiding and abetting. On Ficus Avenue, you and Rafael Rook deliberately ignored my order to halt. Not to mention you knocked
me down on purpose.”

  She waited but he said nothing more for so long that finally she asked, “What, are you arresting me?”

  He seemed to have fallen into a funk. Finally he stretched with a long sigh. “I wish I could arrest you. I’ve had a lousy couple of days and you’ve got a lousy attitude.” He moved nearer to her, tan even in moonlight, and slowly held up his arms in surrender. “I can’t arrest you. Thanks to you they fired me.”

  “The Miami police fired you?” She saw him registering her unmistakable surprise.

  He pointed at her Navy cap. “Yeah, I know. In the Armed Forces, you probably put people up against a wall and shoot them. But usually at MPD, they fire them.” He rubbed his bare foot in the grass. “Well, they shoot them sometimes but usually they just fire them.”

  “I’m sorry,” Annie told him. “But I don’t see how you’re getting fired is ‘thanks to’ me.”

  He rubbed the other foot. “You’re Jack Peregrine’s daughter. Jack Peregrine turned out to be a puddle of quicksand and I stepped in it up to my neck.”

  His beer bottle tipped and Annie quickly reached out and righted it. His hand closed over hers and they both looked at their joined hands. Then she pulled away to ask, “Should I go to your former partner then? The police didn’t seem interested.”

  Daniel opened his arms to the sky. “Yeah, well, they’re interested. They’re so interested your dad’s not going to jail. He’s as free as Oliver North. The Feds,” he explained, “shut down the whole investigation. Like that!” His fingers snapped loudly three times. “Maybe more like this…” He snapped again, softly.

  “You’re telling me the case is closed? There’re no charges against my dad?”

  Elaborately he nodded. “Not by MPD. They’re out. I’m definitely out. I knew your old man had friends but frankly I thought they were more the Rafael Rook variety. Let’s go get some food.”

  Annie didn’t move. “If there are no charges against him, why shouldn’t I keep the Queen of the Sea?”

  “You probably should.” He shrugged. “Meanwhile, you want to hear about my day? Lousy. Yesterday wasn’t so good either. Yesterday I’m standing in the street watching you and Rook speed off, after I receive some very bad personal news at Golden Days from my ex-wife—”

  “What’s your ex-wife doing at Golden Days?”

  “She runs the place; big mistake since she never liked old people. Melissa Skippings.”

  Entirely taken aback, Annie laughed. “Wait a minute.” She reached for his beer bottle and without thinking, drank from it. “Wait a minute! Your wife, your ex-wife, is the HMO administrator of Golden Days? Melissa is M. R. Skippings? She’s platinum blonde and has long legs?”

  His mouth twisted wryly. “The legs are really hers.”

  Annie handed back the beer. “I’m sorry, that woman’s a bitch.”

  “You’re sorry?” Dan rubbed at his face with both hands. “So I’m there to see Melissa and I spot you and Rook. I’m watching you flee the scene, by the way at excessive speed, then out of nowhere, I’m grabbed and flung in a high-tech van where some seriously edgy agents of our government behave like they’re auditioning for a Tom Cruise thriller.”

  Annie interrupted. “I thought those were your friends in that van.”

  “Friends? They’re Feds. They grill me about your dad, they take me over to Second Avenue, drag me in the back way and they’re at me all night. Then comes morning, my chief—otherwise known as the Vapor—tells me the case is closed and when I argue that decision, he tells me to back up before I step off a cliff without a health fund. I tell him, ‘Fire me, you chickenshit dickhead!’ So he did. At 5 p.m., I get handed a box of everything that used to be in my desk, including my dirty gym shorts. Then he shoves a piece of paper at me to sign about how it’s a mutual decision.”

  She thought about this. “Bottom line is, my dad’s no longer being investigated by MPD? He’s not going back to jail?”

  Hart scowled at her. “Will you stop rubbing it in? He should go to jail. He owes three years minimum. And that’s just in Florida. Even cutting deals like salami, I would have said he’d get fifteen. It’s bullshit the way they shut this thing down.”

  “All I care is, if he’s not going to jail.”

  She noticed Hart’s stomach muscles tighten as he snatched back his beer. He said, “Well, then, you should be happy! Me, I don’t like looking like a chump.”

  She stared at him a while then smiled. “I think it’s the single white sock with the blue underwear that makes you look like a chump. Lose the sock.”

  The young man’s smile came toward her, kept coming, kept coming, and for all her skilled deflection, finally reached her. She felt her face loosening, felt herself smiling back, although it made no sense that she should do so. They just sat there a while, smiling at each other.

  Finally he said, “I hitched a ride to St. Louis in your husband’s jet.”

  “I heard.”

  “Wow. Carrying on a conversation for two hours with Brad Hopper makes me wonder what the hell you could have been thinking of, marrying him. I mean, the conversation! He gives me details of every single hole of his best golf game at Southern Pines. Yep, I have had a very rough couple of days,” he sighed.

  “Because of my ex and your ex?”

  “Plus your dad.” He counted out with raised fingers a sequence of misadventures. “I lose Jack in St. Louis, thanks to you.”

  “Don’t blame me.”

  Uninterested in accuracy, he continued, “Then I lose my wife.”

  “What do you mean? Haven’t you been divorced for years?”

  He started tossing branches into a neat pile. “I lose my job. I mean, sure, I’ve been suspended plenty of times, but fired? This is a first.”

  She waved her finger at him. “That’s not my fault either. And you had no business conning Brad into flying you to St. Louis.”

  “Brad is a jerk. Well, I married just as stupid as you.” Dan made a fist, striking at his breast. “Melissa invites me to her office where she informs me she’s just gotten engaged to an asshole financial planner that I introduced her to.” He stacked the magnolia branches more and more quickly. “This was when I was dumb enough to let the man who was stealing my wife manage my very small retirement savings that are now even smaller.”

  Annie started helping him clear the chain-sawed branches. “I’d say Melissa’s new fiancé is doing okay, because I got a peek at her engagement ring when she was throwing me out of Golden Days and it is big.”

  “Yeah, I saw it too. Serious bling-bling.” He made the shape of a baseball.

  “Tacky.” Annie found it baffling that Hart had ever married this woman. But then, hadn’t Clark and D. K. found it baffling when she’d married Brad? Even Georgette and Sam, both of whom had fallen for Brad, had wondered why she’d chosen him. She neatly added the final branch to the pile “People make mistakes,” she conceded. “I mean, like you.”

  “Like me? How ’bout Melissa?” Sitting down with the beer, Hart gave her a rueful look. “This guy she’s marrying? He’s a pod person; seriously, the kind nobody can tell the difference when the pod takes over. He proposes to Melissa at intermission of Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas! You hear what I’m saying? And she’s such a pod herself, she’s boasting about this to me like it was something great he’d done, as opposed to an act of sleazy toe cheese! She thinks that’s a good proposal? Intermission at Cirque du Soleil?! Jeez!”

  Annie heard herself asking Dan what he would consider a better proposal.

  Frowning, he reached up as if he could grab an answer out of the stars. “Okay.” He rubbed his hands against his bare thighs. “Say you’re ice-skating in Central Park, Wollman Rink, and it starts to snow, big soft pretty snow. Say you can waltz her around the rink, dancing while you’re skating. Well, you turn and turn and turn together, arms around each other, and then you stop and skate off the ice. You hold your faces up to the snow, you feel the snow on your eyelids and you
taste it on your tongues and that’s when you propose. Okay?” He leaned over to her.

  She nodded with her wry smile. “That’s okay.”

  Frowning, he jumped up, pacing back and forth across his small yard, the unbuttoned shirt flying open behind him. “Okay, how’s this? It’s raining outside your house, November rain, and you’re wrapped in a blanket on a rug in front of your fireplace and you’ve just finished eating fresh figs with prosciutto di Parma. You’ve got Dinah Washington singing “Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you—”

  “You mean, a CD of Dinah Washington. Because she’s dead so she couldn’t be—”

  “God, you’re impossible! Okay, listen.” Grabbing a bough of a banyan tree, the only tree left in the yard, he swayed from it, close to her. “All right, here’s the one. You’re in Peru, you’re hiking at fourteen thousand feet, through the clouds, and you hike for days and sleep under the stars and you make your way around that last curve on the high Inca trail and all of a sudden there you are. At the same instant the two of you see that big Peru sun rising through the clouds, lighting up the high green mountains. And then it comes out of the mist. The lost city of Machu Picchu.” He leaned down to Annie’s face. “That’s when you propose.”

  Annie looked up at him for a long moment. She knew she either had to acknowledge what was going on between them or she had to pretend it wasn’t there. So she glanced away.

  “Oh, you chicken,” he whispered as he swung on the bough, back from her.

  After a silence, she asked if any of these imagined proposals of his had ever been real. Had one been his proposal to Melissa?

  Dan said no, that his proposal to Melissa had been at the Dorado bar. Actually his whole relationship to Melissa had been alcohol-related. He’d first met her when he was a rookie cop, part of a bust-up of a fraternity house binge at U of M; he’d pulled her naked out of a hot tub filled with shaving cream.

  It was hard to imagine. “Ms. Skippings? She was so hard-assed at Golden Days.”