Southernmost

by Silas House

  Asher catches Justin staring at them and tells him to go play, but he doesn’t, as this is all far too interesting.

  A sink in another room is filled with beard stubble where somebody has shaved without washing out the bowl. People think they can do anything in a rented room.

  Guests are always leaving stuff. Especially little things, which Justin finds especially interesting. If Asher says he can keep a find, Justin puts it in his Keds shoe box that also houses his nature collection. He has shells, sea glass, bird feathers, pressed flowers, a pale-blue bird’s egg (empty, with one tiny hole in the shell as if something sucked out all the juice).

  The cottage-finds item Justin seems to cherish most is a small silver medallion. He thought it was a dime when he first found it lying on one of the room’s tiled bathroom floors. There is a man in a robe stamped onto it. He’s holding his arms up in the air and there are animals all around him: a dog, a fox, a squirrel. There are birds on both of his shoulders and on one of his hands.

  Sometimes in the evenings when he is going through his collection, Justin takes the medallion out of his shoe box and holds it between his index finger and thumb.

  Asher loves it when Justin lays his collection all out on the wicker table on the porch in the pink light of late evening. In some strange way he even covets the treasures his son has found. There is a metal pencil sharpener that looks like a globe, with lots of bright colors for countries. A book of matches (on the cover: drag queens standing in for the I’s and E’s of the words AQUA NIGHTCLUB KEY WEST). A wallet-sized picture, deliberately left behind, of a woman from the 1950s, holding a metal stringer with about a dozen little fish hanging from it. She is wearing white capris and a white sleeveless blouse, a white headband in her black hair. She’s smiling but she looks sad. On the back someone has written Thelma in a crooked mix of cursive and printed hand­writing. Asher knew it would fit right in with Justin’s collection. Asher figured Thelma had been wild and sad every day, sometimes at the same exact time, and she went dancing in a red dress and she liked dogs, and sometimes she would sit on the riverbank while she was fishing and tears would fall out of her eyes while she thought of someone she loved but had lost. There is also a tiny little blue bottle of cologne: Davidoff Paris, Cool Water, .5 fl. oz. Justin likes to hold the bottle up to the sunlight. He says it is the blue of a thundercloud made into glass. He sprayed the cologne on his neck once and it did smell like cool water, somehow, but it was so strong Asher made him go wash it off.

  Some days Asher is alone throughout the day and spends his time memorizing everything, fearful of the day he may not have this freedom anymore. Sometimes when guests are getting their breakfast or having their free wine in the evenings he watches them. He thinks how lucky they are to be living their lives without being on the run. Yesterday Asher watched a woman stick her hand down the front of a man’s pants during wine time. He led her off to their room with her hand still in his britches. He saw a man slip his hand inside his girlfriend’s bathing-suit top and cup her breast and she laughed and then leaned in and kissed him on the mouth. Today in the pool a woman slapped her boyfriend’s face, and then took off on her scooter in her wet bathing suit. Asher studies on how things like this have never happened to him in his own quiet life. Until he kidnapped his own child, of course. He feels he has had two lives: Before and After.

  Bell is often at her desk, holding her papers up very close to her eyes because her glasses don’t work right and she doesn’t want to go to the eye doctor to get new ones. But Evona and Asher are always moving, Evona singing while she works (My love is like a red red rose). Asher works nonstop. He thinks if he works hard enough he’ll burn all the worry and sadness out of himself.

  Asher limits seeing Evona to suppertime at Bell’s. When he doesn’t see her it’s easier to not think about the way she makes him feel something he’s never felt before.

  Asher can sense that this kind of happiness and peace isn’t possible for much longer. His comeuppance is coming. Sometimes he thinks he can almost hear it, a hum that increases in volume throughout the day, becoming loudest at night when he is desperate to fall asleep.

  Luke would be able to tell him what to do. If Asher could just find his brother, that’d make everything alright. But he’s done everything he knows to do. Asked everyone he can, driven every street on the scooter, looking into every face.

  15

  The Everything

  The morning before the day when everything starts to unravel, the dog finds a very long and very old iguana that has died under the porch.

  Shady crawls halfway to it and is frozen in his barking, unable to tear himself away from his discovery. Justin maneuvers under the porch and finds the lizard lying a few feet from Shady, who is crouched down on his belly with his paws parked in front of him, a low growl in the back of his throat between deep barks. Justin hooks one of the iguana’s claws with a stick and drags it out.

  Bell comes out to see what’s the matter with Shady and when she sees the iguana—its skin green like limes except for the black blocks running down its tail, eyes open and milky white—she says “Oh no,” sadder than Justin has ever heard her be before. “I’ve been knowing that old man for a long time.”

  Justin asks if she had named him.

  “Oh, no. I don’t believe in naming wild things,” she says, leaning down with her hands atop her knees. “Me and this old man came to an understanding. Every once in a while I left him a treat—leftover collards or mangoes—and so he returned the favor by not eating my garden vegetables.”

  “For real?” Justin asks.

  Bell nods. “When you respect a wild thing, they return the favor,” she says. “Mostly.”

  The iguana is almost the length of Justin’s arm, tail and all, but she says he was actually kind of small for a full-grown one. “I’ve been here twenty years and he’s been here at least fifteen of them,” Bell says. “Poor old thing.”

  Justin can’t stop looking at its little claws, which are all curled up, very pitiful.

  Bell steps down from the porch and puts her hand on Justin’s shoulder while they look down at the iguana. Justin misses his granny then because allowing this silence to bloom between them is like something she would have done.

  Shady edges nervously forward, then takes a step back with his nose near to the ground, wanting to get close enough to get a good whiff of the death-smell but too afraid to venture all the way for fear the iguana might spring back to life and swipe at him.

  “Get back!” Bell hollers, very sharp. Afraid that Shady might try to snatch up the iguana, Justin reckons. Shady clicks his ears flat and sits, yawns to feign nonchalance and perches his head atop his paws.

  “Should we bury him?”

  Bell nods and tells Justin to go ask Evona for the shovel. Evona is in the middle of dividing an enormous aloe vera plant that is too big for its pot, and she points toward the toolshed.

  On his way back Justin passes his father, hanging sheets out on the clothesline. Asher watches Justin over the clothespins he’s latching to the line.

  “Where you headed with that shovel, buddy?”

  “Bell needs it.”

  “Love you, little man,” he calls after Justin. Sometimes he says that too much. Justin knows it good and well so there’s no use in him saying it twenty thousand times a day.

  Justin looks up at the sky where clouds like bruises are moving slow and low over the island.

  Bell has fetched a shoe box and now she has already lain the iguana inside and attached the lid.

  They choose a spot at the side of Bell’s house. Justin digs awhile but isn’t much good at it, so Bell shows him how to stand on the shovel to get the blade to go deeper, how to tug up on it to throw the dirt aside. “Hard to use a shovel properly when you’re wearing flip-flops,” she complains, but seems to be doing just fine despite her sandals. She is good at digging, her shoulders and arms moving like that big metal piece on the side of old-timey railroad engine
s that joins all the wheels together. Justin doesn’t know what that’s called but he can picture it in his mind. He tells her what he is thinking.

  “I’ve worked these old arms plenty enough. I don’t believe they’s a job I haven’t done to make my way in this world.”

  Shady watches from a good distance away, now sitting at full attention, his ears up like he knows something is dead and being buried.

  When they have a good-sized hole they put the shoe box in and rake the dirt back over, the clods making little tap-tap-taps and clup-clups on the lid until there is a dark mound. Bell pats the dirt down with the toe of her shoe and then they stand there again, not knowing what to do next.

  “Should we say a prayer or something?” Justin asks.

  “You can, I reckon,” Bell says. “You’re better at it than I am.”

  In Justin’s mind he knows what he wants to say: Everything, thank you for giving us this good old iguana. He was beautiful. Amen. But he can’t say that out loud, not even in front of Bell.

  When Bell sees that Justin isn’t able to speak, she puts her hand on his shoulder again—he can feel her sadness working its way from her fingers into his skin, an old sorrow that the iguana has conjured back up for her—and says: “Everything that is, is holy.”

  “Amen,” Justin says, so quiet he isn’t sure if he has said this aloud or not. He thinks: Olivia Bougainvillea Iguana.

  Justin and Bell sit on the porch afterward. Shady jumps up on the wicker love seat and sits with him. Bell rocks in her bright yellow rocker like a queen and looks out where the gray clouds are crowding together to turn the sky a dark blue.

  “You feel things in a real deep way, don’t you?” Bell says after a while.

  “I can’t help it.”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. But sometimes it’s a lot to carry around.”

  “Why are you so sad?” he asks.

  “Everybody in this world has troubles,” she says. “Not a person who don’t.”

  “My granny always says that a person has to live until they die.” Justin doesn’t add that ever since he can remember he’s been trying to figure out what that means. Sometimes he thinks she means that the living is harder than the dying. But other times he thinks she means we have to live as much as we can before we die. He tries to not think about dying, though. Sometimes he lies awake at night and thinks about eternity and even if he’s thinking that’s going to be a good thing, the thought still makes him feel like throwing up after a while.

  “Well, I agree with her. Life shouldn’t be feared any more than dying. I’ve never been afraid of either one. But when my time comes I sure will miss all of it.”

  “All of what?”

  Bell swept one hand out in front of her, indicating the trees, the sky, everything. The clouds have moved on and the world is brightly lit once again. “All of it.”

  As long as Justin can remember people have been talking to him this way. There’s something about him that makes people treat him like he’s an old man. Maybe that’s why all the kids at school hate him even if they don’t know why. Once Rabbit held him down in the bathroom and dipped a wad of toilet paper in the commode and shoved it in his mouth and got very close so that his words spat on Justin’s face: Eat that you weirdo bitch. For no reason at all. Justin hadn’t done anything to him.

  “I wasted a lot of years being mad. Don’t you do that. Alright?”

  “I won’t,” he says.

  Then Bell leans her head on the back of the rocker and closes her eyes. Justin watches her enjoying the sunshine. He wishes that she and his granny could know each other. He thinks they’d be real good friends. He thinks they’d have a fine time together.

  16

  An arrogant brood of hens pecks at the lawn of the Key West Post Office. They’re not like chickens back home. Here they strut around as if they own the place. Zelda has a few chickens back home—“laying hens,” she calls them—and hers are jerky, always on the edge of darting off with their heads pumping and wings tucked, clucking a ruckus if anyone gets too close. One of Justin’s favorite things has always been to go check for eggs in the mornings. The roosters are the worst here, swaggering along the streets; even the chickens of Key West show very little concern for the people approaching them.

  They park their bikes and Justin runs ahead of Asher, hunching down, spreading out his arms as he rushes toward them. “I am the Chicken King!” he hollers. “I can do anything!”

  The chickens barely look up.

  “Leave them be,” Asher says, but there’s a little laugh in his voice.

  Nine o’clock in the morning and already the heat has settled down over the island like a yellow bowl meant especially for brewing more heat. The post office stands in a still pool of air.

  Inside the post office the air conditioning is far too cold. All the clerks are wearing sweaters. Justin zooms straight to a big plate-glass window that is frosted over and puts out his finger to write in the milky dew.

  “Don’t, Justin,” Asher says. “That makes the windows look nasty.”

  Justin minds him, but with some hesitation. Justin has a weakness for surfaces that beg to be written upon. Once, at the Dollar General back home, on a dusty pickup he wrote In trunk! Call cops!

  Asher hustles down to Bell’s post office box to check the mail but glances behind him because Justin is dawdling behind. He watches as Justin puts his finger to the cold glass and writes: HELP. And just as Asher reaches him he finishes: I’VE BEEN KIDNAPPED!

  Asher swoops across the slick polished tiles and rakes his hand across the window, wiping away the words.

  “Why did you do that?” he whispers angrily.

  Justin is small and cowering there before him. “Not because I have been kidnapped. Just because it’s a funny thing to write. The way you’d do if it was the trunk of a car.”

  “But it’s not the trunk of a car, Justin.” He struggles to keep his voice low. “And we can’t be drawing attention—”

  “I’m sorry,” Justin says, frightened, small.

  “It’s alright,” Asher says.

  Yesterday Bell was on her porch taking communion and Asher snuck into her office and got online. He googled his and Justin’s names and there they were, all over the place. Their pictures. Lots of the articles got everything wrong. More than a couple reported that Asher had assaulted Zelda. Which he had.

  Most all of them were like this:

  An Amber Alert has been issued for a nine year-old boy in Middle Tennessee who was kidnapped by his father.

  Justin Kyle Sharp was spending the night at the home of his grandmother, Zelda Crosby, near the community of Cumberland Valley when he was taken by his father, Asher Sharp, 35, a former pastor who gained notoriety one year ago after his emotional breakdown in front of his church congregation was recorded and became a viral sensation on the internet. Sharp was hailed as a folk hero by many within the gay rights movement.

  According to the alert, Sharp left Cumberland Valley in the early morning hours of June 7 in a midnight-blue 2012 Jeep Wrangler with Tennessee license plate 4S47EY. Justin Sharp is described as very small for his age. He is about 4'2" and weighs about 56 pounds. He has dark brown hair, green eyes and freckles. Asher Sharp is described as dark-haired with green eyes, 5'11", weighing about 165 pounds. He is considered armed and dangerous . . .

  Almost all of the articles had a snippet of the video where Asher fell apart in front of the church but they showed only the worst part, where he broke down. Asher had watched only a couple before realizing they would all show the same section, the part that made him look crazy.

  And they linked to a short piece of the voice mail Justin had left his mother. All they played was him whispering “I’m with Dad.” They left out all the rest, where he promised her they were okay and said that Asher would take good care of him.

  One of the news stations had a video of Lydia, standing out in front of their house. So strange to see his own yard, the one he had m
owed hundreds of times, the house he had built standing behind her looking just as it always had. Somehow he had thought everything might have changed in his absence.

  “Asher,” Lydia said, looking right into the camera, “if you’re watching this, I’m begging you: please bring Justin back to us. Please don’t hurt him.” Then she started crying and the newswoman took the microphone away from her, looking very compassionate.

  Anger had flared in Asher’s chest. She knew he would never, ever hurt Justin. He could only imagine how this would play for people who didn’t know her, or him. They’d think Asher was a monster.

  Still, there was a new kind of sorrow in her face. He was tempted to call her, just to let her know Justin was alright. Bell’s phone was right there beside the keyboard. But the thing was, she always blamed everybody else, never took responsibility for her own part in things.

  In the post office, Justin is standing there looking up at him with those big eyes and his small nose and mouth, waiting, and it is all Asher’s fault. There is a dripping rectangle across the wet window, a collection of words wiped from existence with one motion of his hand.

  17

  Years later, looking back, Asher sometimes thought he heard the little gold key slide into its place in the post-office box. In his memory the sound was much like that of old-fashioned prison keys in the movies: the exaggerated sound of metal on metal when filmmakers wanted to drive home the fact that somebody was being locked away. By this time Asher was already a prisoner, too, and he would not be able to rid himself of that feeling for a long while. He had been terrified for an entire month, of course, but that moment in the post office was the beginning of the end. Easy to see now.

  A turn of his wrist, the grainy grind of the small hinges, his hand diving into the post-office box.