Buzz Cut (4 page)

Afterward, Thorn leaned back against the canvas seat in a half doze, listening to a distant osprey's shrill lament, his rod at his feet. He heard Sugarman casting, felt the gentle wobble of the canoe as he worked his line.

Thorn drifted down into the dusky light of a snooze. Picturing Rochelle's face. Her striking face behind the pages of a book. Turning pages. Reading in the bed beside her. Smelling her cinnamon scent. Hearing Rochelle breathe. The dream shifting suddenly to a conversation. Dreaming soundless words. A stream of them coming from Rochelle's mouth, one of her theories. She had dozens of them. A theory about dreams. Why we dream. Why we remember some, don't others. Something to do with physics. Thorn following her words, her idea, then things becoming more and more intricate until he was lost and found himself watching her lips shape the words, not hearing her theory anymore, just watching the stream of beautiful words coming from her intriguing mouth. Exotic words, wide exotic mouth. Rochelle.

Sugarman let out a whoop that jerked Thorn upright.

Sugar's reel was revving, and twenty yards to the east the silver water humped and surged and a monster snook flopped hard on its side, shook its head savagely against the six-pound line.

Sugarman rose to get leverage on the fish, but the canoe wobbled precariously and he squatted back down. For the next ten minutes, Thorn watched him fight that same impulse, until the snook made a sudden reel-melting run and Sugarman came to his feet again, hauled back on the rod, and tipped the canoe.

Everything went overboard. Their gear, the remains of their lunch. The puppy splashed around, then started swimming in delirious circles licking at the water as he went. Up to his knees in muck and soft sand, Thorn laughed and cursed, and after a moment's bewilderment, Sugarman joined in. The two of them wallowed about until they got the canoe righted, the provisions and the puppy back inside, Sugarman one-handing his rod the whole time, keeping the line taut on his fish. Thorn steadied the canoe while Sugar climbed back inside, then Thorn slid over the side and settled into his seat again.

Finally Sugar hauled the fish to the boat. While Thorn held the tippet high, they examined the brute. Close to forty pounds. On Sugar's light line, the snook might even be a world record if they wanted to take it back, weigh it on official scales.

"Gonna keep it?"

Sugarman gave Thorn a quiet look and pried the barbless hook from the fish's jaw, eased him back into the water, moved him gently back and forth till the fish recovered and glided away into the labyrinth of tidal channels.

As they were drying out in the sun, Sugarman lifted his hand and gestured at the deepwater cove twenty feet away. A pod of dolphin had rolled into the inlet. Thorn counted half a dozen circling the cove.

A moment later the water boiled with bait fish. For several minutes the dolphin worked together, herding what must have been a very large school of mullet tighter and tighter until they had them clustered in a thick mass. Then the dolphin moved in, the water churning briefly. Lunch.

"Damn mullet never had a chance."

"Makes you glad dolphin are on our side," Sugar said.

Thorn stared at the last flutters of water. "Only reason they're on our side is 'cause they don't know us that well."

They watched the dolphin move away, an undulating line. "We ought to get out here more often," Thorn said, leaning back, stretching out his arms. "Blow out the arteries."

"Some of us got jobs, man."

"Go on," Thorn said. "Give me some more shit."

"Naw, it's too easy."

"Well, anyway, that explains where the hell you been these last few weeks. I was beginning to worry about you, man."

"It's good to be missed."

"Actually what it is, I'm running a little low on hair."

Sugarman scowled.

For the last few months Sugar had been grabbing handfuls of hair out of the trash can behind the Hairport Beauty Salon next to his office. Dropping the hair off at Thorn's so he could experiment with it in his bonefish flies. Thorn had discovered that pinches of frosted hair worked the best. The frosted stuff stood up to saltwater almost as well as boar bristle.

"You been kind of engrossed lately," Sugar said. "I didn't think you'd notice I wasn't around."

"You mean Rochelle. Engrossed with Rochelle."

Sugarman shrugged.

"Yeah," Thorn said, smiling. "I guess you could call it that. Engrossed."

Sugarman lifted his gaze to some clouds in the east. "By the way. Tell me something, Thorn. Why the hell'd you name that dog Rover? All the names you could've picked, you couldn't do any better than that?"

"It was Rochelle's idea. It's ironic."

"Ironic?"

"Well, actually she's got another name for it. Post-modern. It's a post-modern thing. Like an intellectual joke."

"Ironic I've heard of."

"That year of Harvard," Thorn said, "it gave her a peculiar sense of humor. Some of the books she reads, I can't pronounce their titles."

"Well, making your dog the butt of a joke, I don't know about that. Seems like bad karma."

"He doesn't mind. Rover seems to suit him fine."

Rover was curled in a ball in the shade of the middle seat.

Out in the center of the cove, a single dolphin rolled. Lingering behind to clean up the scraps. Thorn watched it surface and dive, surface again, its sleek gray hide blending perfectly with the water. It made one more round of the cove, then headed toward the bay to catch up with its buddies.

"The wind's changing."

"I don't feel anything." Sugarman raised his palm into the still air, moved it around.

Gazing to the north, Thorn tried to find some sign he could point to, a riffle in the mangroves, some darkening of the waters, a swerving frigate bird. But the sky was the same impeccable blue it had been all day, the bay gleamed as bright and motionless as ice, no birds, just a quiver of breeze out of the southeast.

So here was another of those things Thorn knew to be true but could not find words for. There were turning out to be more of those as the years went on. The silence inside him teeming with inexpressible knowledge. Things his skin knew, his fingertips, a host of sounds and scents, visceral data he could decode but not describe.

"You're sure?"

"Yeah," Thorn said. "Switching around to the north. Going to be in our face pretty soon."

"I sit here, I'm looking the same place you're looking, and hell if I see anything."

"Birders call it jizz," Thorn said.

Sugarman turned his eyes, gave Thorn a skeptical smile. The yellow lab puppy lifted his head and stared at Thorn.

"Jizz." Thorn smiled. "It's all the little things a bird does, preening, fluttering around on its perch. The way it lands, the way it takes off. Body language. Birders can tell the jizz of one bird from the jizz of another. When they're too far away, or the sun's in their eyes, even with binoculars they can't see the bird's exact shape or coloration. To identify it, they have to recognize its jizz."

"Jizz," said Sugar suspiciously. "Jizz."

"Yeah, a tremor in the mangrove leaves, smell of the water. Something's different. It's like you and your guy on the cruise ship, his furtive gestures. Maybe you can't describe it, what exactly he was doing that caught your attention, but you knew it anyway. It's like intuition. You know something, but you don't know how you know it."

"Well then," Sugarman said, reeling in his line. "I guess we better pack it in."

Sugar set down his fly rod, took a minute to neaten his gear, then picked up his wooden paddle, let go of a long breath, and began to slice through the water.

In sync with Sugar's stroke, Thorn swung the canoe back to the north, toward that first set of mangrove islands a mile away. They glided across the windowpane, kept a smooth pace, Sugarman groaning slightly with each stroke.

Thorn watched a leopard ray approach from the right, saw it flash beneath them, just the tips of its wings waving as it skimmed flat across the sand. With his bare feet on the thin canvas floor, Thorn could feel the faint tickle of its passing.

Half an hour later as they left the protection of the last mangrove island and swung out into the open miles of Whitewater Bay, the wind was full in their faces, a twenty-knot breeze, and they had to jab their paddles in deep and pull hard just to move ahead a few feet at a time.

But still, that wind felt good. It was laced with clean, freshly filtered air that tingled in Thorn's nostrils. Dewpoint in the fifties, a few more grains of oxygen than usual, drier than anything they'd breathed since last March. Air off the glaciers. It popped open the sinuses like menthol, gave everyone an extra jolt of energy, the chattering pulse of a new season.

Off to the west in an upper limb of a slash pine, a bald eagle observed them as they labored across the sound. Approaching from the northwest was a wedge of dark, silver-tipped clouds. Whorls of white foam spun upward off the leading edge of the front like an extravagant pompadour, some ghostly Elvis about to wail.

Thorn watched Sugar's back. Watched him paddle, timing his own stroke to Sugar's, falling easily into Sugar's rhythm as if he were waltzing with a lifelong partner.

Sugar was in his early forties. Thorn's closest friend. Six three, a thin and handsome man with severe cheekbones, dark almost pretty eyes with long lashes, and caramel skin a half shade lighter than Thorn's constant tan.

Sugar's Jamaican father disappeared shortly after his birth and his Norwegian mother, a fragile blond teenager, stayed around Key Largo a year or two more before she too vanished. There was an overexposed photo of her in Sugarman's office, his only one. Not more than eighteen at the time, his mother sat on a ratty sofa, a cigarette in one hand, a can of Schlitz in the other, laughing at someone's joke. An attractive young woman, but with eyes already shadowed by harsh memories. Thorn had only one vague memory of her. She was kneeling in the sand helping Sugar and Thorn build a sand castle on a beach somewhere. He remembered her jittery manner, nervous as an April butterfly. Eyes always scanning the area as if she were searching for something she couldn't name.

After she ran off, Sugar was raised by two black spinster sisters who sang in the Key Largo Baptist choir and whose income came from running a tomato stand beside the overseas highway. Tomatoes and the dented hubcaps they retrieved daily from the shoulder of the rutted road.

The spring Sugarman graduated high school, he married Jeannie Frost, his cheerleader girlfriend of several years. She was fair and blonde, a devout Caucasian. Unconsciously, Sugar had duplicated his parents' mixed marriage, a fact Jeannie was fond of reminding him whenever they argued.

A year or two ago, after twenty years with the Monroe County police department, Sugarman grew so disgusted with the hamstringing bureaucracy, he dumped his shield on the Sheriffs Department desk and walked. His idea was to rent out his expertise to small businesses, install alarm systems, handle employee surveillance. But it hadn't worked that way.

What he discovered was that hardly any businesses in the Keys made enough profit to pay for a security advisor. Even the lawyers and doctors were just scraping by. Dropouts from colder climates, most of them worked only when they had to. Half-assed fishermen or drunks, more likely both. They all seemed to be running from some failed life back on the mainland. One thing was certain, it was rarely money that attracted people to that string of limestone islands trickling off the tip of Florida.

While Sugarman struggled as a cop and later as a capitalist, Jeannie devoted herself to self-discovery. She'd had a host of hobbies, none of which lasted more than a few months. But still, by God, she knew she was good at something. It was out there, all she had to do was find it—that self-actualizing activity. That's how she talked. Jargon she'd picked up from years of fifty-dollar-an-hour counseling sessions.

Back in August Jeannie had given up on her most recent fantasy, to be a Flamenco guitarist, and she'd sold her two guitars to a high school kid who lived across the street. By September, she'd decided what she'd really wanted all along was to get pregnant. Be a mother before her clock expired. Already she'd visited half a dozen Miami doctors, sent Sugarman to labs up there for sperm cultures, hemizona binding tests, hypo-osmotic swelling tests, some new unpronounceable outrage every week.

"Hell, I could tell her why she isn't getting pregnant," Sugarman said. "It's 'cause every last drop of my goddamn sperm is going into sterile plastic cups."

***

When Thorn and Sugar finally got the canoe back in the no-wake entrance canal, a narrow channel that shot straight to the docks, the wind died off and Sugarman seemed to get a fresh burst of energy. Thorn kept the rhythm, the canoe racing along, the only noise was the deep rasp of their breathing.

A seven-foot alligator surfaced beside them, swam along, escorting them back. Rover woke, leaned over the low gunwale and began to bark at the dark creature.

A few hundred yards from the docks, Thorn heard the roar of an outboard engine behind them and swiveled in time to see a white fishing boat bearing down. He rammed the paddle in deep, drove the canoe hard to the right into the dense mangroves, and the boat blew past, not three feet away, forty miles an hour. Its huge wake pitched them sideways deeper into the branches, nearly tipped them. Thorn lunged for Rover, caught him by the scruff as he was about to tumble overboard, a succulent dollop. For the next ten minutes while they bailed, the alligator drifted nearby eyeing them eagerly.

At the docks they found the white boat tied up alongside the gas pumps. A man in a red long-sleeve flannel shirt and jeans was lounging against the leaning post, watching them paddle. His hair was tucked under a navy watch cap, big wraparound sunglasses hid his face. A black mustache so bushy it looked like he fertilized it. The man was tall, but with the pinched waist, wide shoulders, and compact physique of a gymnast.