Southernmost

by Silas House

  Tucked into the dip of a roll of circulars, there is a utility bill, an issue of Time magazine, what appears to be a letter from Guntersville, Alabama, and then: a rectangular card. One side is blank save this address:

  RESIDENT

  KEY WEST, FL 33040

  On the other side, in huge letters along the top:

  HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?

  Below that, a picture of Justin that Asher himself took almost a year ago. Justin is looking right into the camera, big eyes and open face, his full beauty exposed. A revealing picture of him, one that had been chosen because that shining look is on his face. He had taken the perfect picture for a card announcing a kidnapping: completely innocent, appearing younger than his true age, small. The kind of child anyone would want to help save.

  What the picture does not show, since it has been cropped down to only his face: Justin had been standing on the banks of Cheatham Lake behind Asher’s rented trailer. Since the photo has been made black and white by the card makers, the peach-orange light of near-sunset has been lost, too.

  That day, Asher had packed them a lunch: peanut butter and jelly sandwich for Justin, a ham sandwich for himself, a bag of chips for them both, and two cans of peach Nehi that Asher kept cold in a Bunny Bread bag full of ice.

  That day they had eaten their lunch beneath the willows, watching the small waves sup at the bank. Then he had taught Justin how to skip rocks.

  It’s all in the choosing of the rock. Look at this one, it’s perfect.

  The sky had turned a deep golden pink, and the light on Justin’s face had made him look like he was glowing from inside, like some kind of modern child-saint.

  Don’t move. No, don’t, now. Daddy’s gonna take your picture.

  The click of the camera, the moment caught forever.

  Then they had lain back on the quilt and let the sun set and listened to the lake. A perfect day. A day Asher had immediately known he would always remember.

  And now a day they are using against him.

  Below the photo there is Justin’s full name, birth date, height, weight, eye and hair color.

  And then, a picture of Asher. The worst possible one they could find. He is looking just past the camera, sad, a moment of terrible depression caught on film.

  He doesn’t know where they have even found such a picture; he has never seen it before. Zelda was always snapping away at every family gathering, so most likely it had come from her collection of poorly composed and out-of-focus pictures. Asher figures that in the original photograph, he had not been the subject, but was just caught in the frame as he stood in the background behind Justin (Zelda’s favorite—and really, her only—subject).

  Beneath this picture is all of Asher’s information, too. Birth date, height, weight, eye color, hair color, no tattoos, no piercings. All of it on this card that would go out all over the eastern United States.

  Below both the pictures, in big block letters like a scream: KIDNAPPED!

  Asher takes in everything on the card: the pictures and words causing pistons to pump in his brain, flashing from here to there, all the thoughts firing back and forth until the feeling of dread floods him like adrenaline, leaving him exhausted. He has to draw in a deep breath and steady himself by leaning against the wall of post-office boxes.

  Asher can see the shape of Justin in his peripheral vision: he has found something to busy himself, as he is always able to find something of interest no matter the situation.

  If there is one of these in Bell’s box, there is certainly one for every person in Key West.

  Then Asher sees the trash can, around which cards are scattered. People trying to get rid of their junk mail in a hurry, not noticing or caring about it. Maybe they hadn’t even glanced at the Kidnapped! card. But most likely they had given it at least a look. Pictures of little stolen boys have a way of burning themselves into people’s minds.

  Asher snaps up each card.

  He is aware of his labored breathing and then Justin is humming as he peers out the window, watching the chickens.

  “Justin!” Asher can hear the firmness in his own voice. “Let’s go. Right now.”

  Asher steers Justin down the sidewalk with his hand capped over the boy’s shoulder, toward the rack where they left their bicycles.

  A couple of tourists are strolling across the parking lot. “Look at the chickens!” the woman cries out like a child. She is dressed for a day of golf. Only people with money can afford to go around all dressed in white. That’s what Evona told him one day when they were watching guests leaving for a day out on the island.

  Asher gets ahold of Justin’s shoulders and turns him around so he won’t face them.

  “What’d you do that for?” Justin says, loud, and Asher shushes him.

  “Be quiet,” he says, and starts to say more, but then, all at once, Asher is stumbling sideways and then falls, catching himself with one hand that lands palm-spread-out.

  “Daddy!” Justin hollers out. “You okay?”

  Asher is hunched over, shaking his head, little beads of sweat standing above his lip.

  “It’s alright,” he says, and dusts the grit from his palm. “I just got dizzy a minute.”

  Asher climbs onto his bike. He knows it doesn’t make much sense to climb on a bicycle right after a dizzy spell, but they need to get back to the cottage.

  “Let’s go,” Asher says, and nods to Justin’s bike so he will get on. “I’ll stay close behind you.”

  Their legs pump them up Whitehead, back toward Olivia Street, back to what passes for home.

  18

  While Justin is cannonballing into the pool Asher is searching the kitchen drawers for a box of matches. When his eyes aren’t on Justin, he hears him splash in the water, but he turns back to the front door after every drawer search, checking on the boy.

  In the farthest reach of the last drawer, Asher finds matches in a small red box. Galatoire’s New Orleans.

  He has managed to gather up three or four dozen cards from the post-office floor and garbage can. He tears them into small strips, watching Justin’s photographed face as he shreds the papers, and stacks them into a large, black ashtray on the porch. He strikes at the flinted side of the matchbox several times and then finally the flame startles to life. Asher shoots a nervous glance at Justin, who is racing back and forth in the pool (always alone—never a child to play with).

  Luke, where are you? I’m alone. I need you.

  The small squares of the card smolder and he has to keep lighting matches to the pile until they flame into a brilliant orangeness.

  “Everything alright, darlin?”

  Bell stands with one foot on the step, her eyes alternating between him and the pile of ashen-edged paper in the ashtray. He maneuvers around to stand between Bell and the cards.

  “Just mind your own business,” Asher says. He hasn’t even realized he had that kind of rudeness in his mouth. But he says nothing else.

  Bell comes closer, then pulls Asher toward her, swallowing him up with her big arms and her muumuu and her scent.

  Asher can’t help it, he relaxes there, settling against her. He lets loose a breath he has been holding for weeks now and this feels like a tight fist unclenching. He feels the breath leave his body and travel past the porch, brushing past plants and easing through the leaves of trees, his grief unleashing until it catches the wind and is carried out to the sea. Bell holds on to him and there is only their breathing. Asher realizes he has closed his eyes. He can hear Justin splashing in the pool.

  Bell steps back. “I saw the card,” she says. “We get mail here, too.” He hadn’t thought of that, even though he has seen the mail carrier come plenty of times. “The P.O. box is for personal mail; this one’s for business.”

  He waits, watching her.

  “And I’ve read some of the news reports. Have you done all the things they say?”

  “No.” A lie. “Yes, but the way they make it all sound. It’s—”<
br />
  “Why would you take him away from his mother, though, Asher? Was she mean to him?”

  “No, not like that. But—”

  “I know things are always more complicated than they appear,” she says. “But you can’t raise your boy like this.”

  “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Are you alone in this world?”

  “Except for Justin,” he says. “My brother, but I did him wrong.”

  “Now you have me, too.” She isn’t smiling, but a tenderness overtakes her face. “People like us have to stick together.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know what it’s like to be on the run.”

  Asher nods. How is it that a stranger can feel more like family than folks he has known his whole life?

  “Try not to get so wrought up,” she says. “He can feel it. And right now, you’re a mess. You’ve got to get yourself together.”

  “I know it,” Asher says. Then: “I’ll try to figure out how to get out of here as soon as I can, if you can—”

  “You landed in a safe place.” She eases into the rocker, wincing as she sits back. “A blind man could see what a good daddy you are to that little boy. That’s good enough for me.”

  “Thank you,” Asher repeats, thinking thank you thank you thank you.

  19

  There are clumps of seaweed all along the water’s edge, rocking endlessly back and forth as the little waves come in and go out, in and out. The waves aren’t as heavy on this side as over on the beach at Fort Zachary Taylor because of the protective reef. Seagulls puff their white chests out toward the Atlantic, watching the ocean, soldiers waiting for re­inforcements to arrive. Curmudgeonly pelicans flap overhead, their eyes firmly set.

  Up the beach a loud group of college kids are vacationing on their parents’ dime. They have been raised with too much money to simply be still and seem to think themselves the only people in the world who matter, so there is no need to lower their voices. One of the boys—his hairless chest and legs oiled and glistening in the sun like a seal’s skin—drinks rum from a white bottle so that everyone can see him. A girl in a blinding-pink string bikini chides him in her Valley-Girl-by-way-of-Atlanta speech, but he shouts “This is Key West, Aimee. Everything is allowed.”

  Asher has been here long enough to resent that kind of thinking.

  A biplane slices the sky, silent, far out over the sea.

  “Can I get in, Dad?” Justin asks, barely audible over the constant, warm wind. Asher nods, and unfurls his beach towel, which flaps and snaps at the air until he manages to settle it on the white sand. He has brought along a book Zelda had insisted he read—Jonah’s Gourd Vine, by Zora Neale Hurston (It’s about a preacher who loses his way, too, she said, shoving the novel into his hands) —but he is too paranoid to take his eyes off Justin.

  So Asher watches his son and everyone else. This is the off-season, August, and most schools have started back, so the beach is not very crowded. Except for the college kids, most everyone seems to be a local. No fanny packs, no electric rental cars parked crooked at the curve.

  A very fat man strolls by in a Speedo. So fat that only one thin, black line of the bathing suit can actually be seen in the front, and then, in the back: total flatness, as if his back goes straight to the tops of his thighs. Not far behind him is a woman in a shimmering gold bathing suit, complete with a matching, floppy-brimmed hat. A pair of gold-colored flip-flops dangle from the fingers of her right hand. She is talking on a cell phone as she twists along the water’s edge. Two teenaged girls—confident in a way that Asher had never been, not ever—sashay by, giggling. So much like girls back home. Asher reckons teenaged girls are the same everywhere: either totally confident or not at all, but surely always giggling when they find one of their own kind.

  Justin splashes into the water, pausing to study a white rock at the edge of the surf. He reaches down and runs his hand over its surface. God lives in rocks and water and sky for Justin. Asher knows this without ever having been told.

  A Cuban woman and her grandson approach and make their place nearby. Asher homes in on the music of their talking. The grandmother is still curvy enough to make Asher aware that she had once been a stunning knockout. She has rolled her Levi’s up to her knees and tucked her blouse under the bottom of her bra, exposing a pale hunk of belly fat. She speaks to her grandson in a pretty rat-a-tat-tat: “¿Jesús, meterte al agua conmigo? ¿O tienes miedo?”

  A heron wanders the dunes, amazing in its clean whiteness.

  The sun broils down, boils down, a punishing, comforting heat unlike anything that Asher has ever known back in Tennessee. A fierceness of heat.

  He watches Justin, and the Cuban grandmother, and the ignorant, spoiled kids with their tight gym abs and long brown legs, an old woman with sagging breasts, the flat-rumped man as he strolls in the distance down the beach. As far down the strip of sand as he can see, there are people, each of them with their own stories and hurts and joys. And he loves every one of them.

  At long last he believes he understands the poem he has been saying to himself ever since Luke’s postcard made him look it up: the poem about a sandpiper wandering the beach, taking note of every little thing, naming things specifically. That was the way back to believing: being conscious, seeing the God in everything and not just the Bible or the Church. That was the way back. He had to be like the sandpiper, running to the south—as far as he could drive—to find out the answers, and the way back.

  He keeps his eyes on the people down the beach and he knows there is something living in each of them. Some people might call it God. Some might not have a name for it. What he knows is that they all have the good and the bad in them. He does, too. But that’s where the God of his understanding lives—not just in the goodness and not in the badness, but in the shimmering knot of the two.

  Asher thinks of

  Lydia

  Zelda

  Jimmy

  Stephen

  Kathi

  Cherry

  Caleb Carey

  Rosalee Carey

  The girl who filmed him

  The congregation, watching him

  Jane Fisher

  Adalia, the cashier at the Git ’n Go

  The man who thanked him in Georgia

  The Cherokee girl at the truck stop

  The cashier who said a prayer for him

  The hungry people on the side of the road along the way

  Shady

  Bell

  Evona

  And first and last is Justin. Always, there is Justin for him.

  For a long while Asher hasn’t known how to believe. Because how does a person keep their faith intact when they lose their child? How can we believe in a God that would allow a father and a son who love each other to be separated unfairly? Where is the goodness when a man turns his back on his brother for being who he was made to be? How can God sit by and let evil twitch itself out over the world?

  That’s God, he thinks, looking out at Justin standing in the water, the sun behind him so that Asher can make out only his shape, a shape he has memorized, has burned into his mind’s eye. Because God is in my son.

  Justin has walked a long way out but the water is so shallow the ocean still does not strike him higher than his chest. He turns to Asher and raises his arm, motioning for him to join.

  Asher slips off his red flip-flops and runs down the beach and into the warm, silky water and joins his boy. Justin rakes his hand across the waves and splashes him when he comes near. Asher dives under and the ocean swallows him whole.

  20

  They pedal home slow and easy in the gathering shadows of the twilight. The sun and water have exhausted them, so they are taking their time. The island is very quiet tonight, a weeknight after one of the hottest days of the year. Asher reckons that everybody is worn out from the heat. He can hear the click of their bicycle chains over everything else and they don’t speak a word the entire way.


  There is some kind of sadness on Justin’s shoulders but Asher knows he won’t tell what is wrong. He doesn’t bring it up for fear of what the boy might say: that he wants to go home, that he misses his mother too much, that he hates Asher.

  The guilt is worse now that school has started back. Every morning Asher thinks of how he used to always drive Justin to school, the little pang of pride and hurt when Justin would shuffle into the building, his backpack seeming bigger than him. He has thought about going to the library to get some books to at least continue Justin’s education but the prospect of homeschooling seems ridiculous. He knows that these are the last days. Yet when Asher thinks about this fact he is filled with a terrible feeling of purgatory.

  Darkness has settled over Key West by the time they return to Song to a Seagull. As soon as they enter the gate they can hear Bell playing the piano, a familiar tune but one Asher cannot place. The courtyard is dark except for the yellow-lit windows of Bell’s cottage.

  Asher and Justin both stand in the yard after they have put down their kickstands, listening, and the music becomes louder by their stilling. The music causes Asher to picture the willow trees down by the Cumberland River, back home, the way they looked when the late evening breeze traveled across their leaves, making its way down the course of the river, following the water. Asher knows the melody so well he can almost sing the words, but he still can’t place the song.

  “What is that?” Asher whispers.

  “Something sad,” Justin says.

  They are almost to their own porch before Asher sees Evona sitting on the steps, barefoot, all the windows of their house dark behind her. Shady is lying against her and one of her hands is buried in his fur.

  “It’s ‘Blue’ by Joni Mitchell,” she says, and Asher thinks Of course. This had been one of Luke’s favorites.

  “She’s crazy over that singer, ain’t she?” Justin says.

  “Joni’s songs remind her of somebody.” Evona says this in such a way that Asher knows not to ask for more explanation. Bell is a mystery and a secret. She has respected his privacy and he figures he should do the same for her. These are the only people he has ever known who let him be who he is, no questions asked.