Tropical Freeze Read online

  Now Key Largo was losing it. The hot tubs and wooden decks, pastels had arrived. Fancy stores were festering along the highway, full of plastic geegaws you wouldn’t believe. Turning shit to chic. Everybody trying to snag the tourists on their way to Key West. Now the island was full of fern bars with brass railings and speakers seven feet tall. Bars with names of tropical fruits, Mangoes, Pineapples, Papayas. And the tourists dancing the night away while some guy did his Jimmy Buffet calypso imitation. All of them thinking this is the real Key Largo. Hey, let’s boogie. It bothered the fuck out of him.

  And then just this week John had heard talk that the Rotary Club was looking around for another Captain Kidd, the honorary king of Old Pirate Days. Papa John had had a lock on that for the last twelve years. He’d ride at the head of the parade, toss out gold foil-wrapped candy, while he swigged from his rum bottle.

  For a lot of the last decade Papa John had Monroe County by the balls. He’d made decisions right there on that barstool that had changed the island, shit, the whole chain of Keys forever-fucking-after. His photo had even been in the Chamber of Commerce brochure. Colorful local characters. Now look at him, at this place.

  “When I was thirty-two, I’d already done a ton of living,” John said, looking around at the photos on the walls of his bar, trying to find 1953, tickle his memory a little. He pointed his Camel toward a photo near the women’s bathroom. “There it is.”

  The photo showed Papa John standing on the docks in Key West next to Ernest Hemingway and one of Hemingway’s pals, some guy from New York, an editor or agent. Behind them, hanging from the rack, was an 388-pound blue marlin. Papa John was standing a foot to the right of the great man, holding the 40-pound rod that Hemingway had used. Papa John had led them to the spot, walked Hemingway through the whole thing, had practically swum down there and stuck the rigged ballyhoo in that marlin’s face.

  Papa John said, “You don’t kill somebody soon, you could wind up like that guy, blowing his head off with a shotgun. Guy had a lifetime hard-on to kill somebody. Kept going to war, never got a shot in. Best he ever got around to was on safari, water buffalo or some shit.”

  “Who is it?” Ozzie was using that greasy fucking rag to wipe the sweat from his forehead. John groaned to himself.

  “Who is it?” Papa John said. “Good God, boy. You made it to the what grade?”

  “Fifth,” Ozzie said, a hint of anger showing.

  “That’s Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway. The great man. The guy who made me rich, people looking to sit on the barstool where the great man farted. He was a farter, too.”

  “I know who fucking Hemingway is. I’m not stupid.” Ozzie wiped at the bar. He looked up and said, “I did kill a colored man once. But I just left him for dead, so I don’t count that.”

  John sipped his beer and dragged some more smoke in on top of the cool burn. Maybe he was wrong. He’d kept Ozzie around for the last few weeks ’cause of this feeling that the kid was capable of something bigger. It would come and go. About the time Ozzie seemed hopeless, he’d come out with something like this, and Papa John would go, well, maybe he’s got potential after all.

  Ozzie told his story. How he’d been out driving and he came up behind this black man in a pickup and got the black man to pull over. Out on one of those farm roads around Tallahassee you can’t believe they ever bothered building in the first place ’cause it doesn’t go anywhere. So he gets this black guy alongside the road and he gets out of the car and he goes over to him and the black guy is all, yes sir, no sir. And he’s got a yappy white dog with him, never stops barking. So Ozzie, and he’s with some other guy, another loser, tried to go to Vietnam but his arrest record was too long, so this guy is pissed at everybody, and Ozzie starts getting pissed at this little dog, yapping.

  “How’d you get a nigger to pull over like that out on some country road?”

  “I used the siren and the lights.”

  “What siren?”

  “I was driving a police car.”

  “What!”

  “Billy Dell’s, that’s the boy I was with, his stepdaddy was deputy sheriff. We took his car and we’re out chasing people. Spooking the spooks.”

  “Jesus Christ, Ozzie, a police car.” Now that’s why he kept the kid around.

  So Ozzie reached across this black man and grabbed that dog. What else was the kid leaving out? The dog a pit bull? The black guy six feet seven? Papa John made a note to work on the boy’s storytelling. I mean, that was what this was all about anyway, wasn’t it? John wanted to leave behind somebody to sit where John was sitting and talk to the tourists late at night, holding them by the lapels like the Ancient Mariner in that poem, dragging them back to when men were full-size.

  So Ozzie had the guy in the ditch by the time John got back to it. He and his buddy were holding the black man’s face down into a little ditchwater. The other guy was going a little berserk, talking Klan talk, kill talk. And Ozzie was holding on to the black man, sounded like just for more or less symbolic contact. The other guy found a Coke bottle lying nearby the ditch and gave the black man a blast to the back of the head. Then another one and a few more. And he handed it to Ozzie, and Ozzie was scareder of his buddy by that time than of the bleeding body, so he took a couple of turns.

  “And we got back in the car and drove off,” Ozzie said.

  “You mean you got back in the police car. Were the lights still flashing the whole time? Did you turn them off while you were killing this guy? You still holding the fucking dog or what? There’s some details here, some shit that you need to say to set the stage.”

  Ozzie looked at Papa John, eyes blank and watery as soap bubbles.

  “The fuck difference does it make, the lights were on or off? We left this guy for dead. That’s the story. That’s the point. We drove off and left the guy and his dog. I broke the dog’s tail just as we were leaving.”

  “Holy shit,” Papa John said, and he stubbed out his Camel in the mother-of-pearl shell. “That’s what I mean. You broke the dog’s fucking tail. That’s a detail. That’s a weird fucking fact should be in the story. In the main part of it. Not some afterthought. You broke the dog’s fucking tail. I mean, I never heard of that before. Never seen it, heard of it, nothing.”

  Ozzie said, “So what? I’m supposed to tell every little diddley-squat thing that happened? The guy had garlic breath, I’m supposed to say that? He was wearing a gas station shirt, his fingernails were greasy, shit like that?”

  This wasn’t going to be easy. Papa John finished his Bud. He gripped the longneck bottle by the throat and smacked it against the bar. Ozzie took a step back. Papa John held up the jagged remains like it was a microphone and he was about to interview this Cracker, see what made him so stupid.

  “What? What?”

  Jesus, the kid’s eyes got slimy when he was scared, like oily tears were building up in there.

  Papa John stood up, walked a few steps so he was just across from Ozzie, the bar between them. He lunged the bottle at the kid, drove him back against the cash register. He took another swish at him. He didn’t know if he really wanted to cut the kid or not. Probably yes.

  Ozzie was panting. His eyes sparking. Probably a little curl of shit appearing.

  His voice came to him finally. “So, I don’t tell stories as good as you think I should. That what’s got you so pissed?”

  Papa John held that ragged bottle out, making his face take on a crafty look, feinting a little with that hand. He felt as if he had a direct line to the boy’s pulse. Up, up, up, up.

  “Is it so fucking important I broke the dog’s tail or didn’t? It’s my story, ain’t it? Can’t I tell it how the fuck ever I want to, can’t I?”

  “No,” Papa John said, getting every bit of bass he had into his voice. “You got to know how to tell a goddamn story. The right way. You can’t learn that, then forget all the rest of it. You’re no use to me. I can get any cripple covered with weeping sores in off the highway to sell my pot
and do B and E for me. You think that’s what I want you for, that petty shit?”

  Ozzie held that rag, stared at John, a hazy smile coming and going.

  Papa John said, “You got some of the skills you’ll need to work with me. But you haven’t got them all. Sooner you just admit to that, sooner we can get on with your fucking education. Is that goddamned clear enough for you?”

  “It is,” Ozzie said.

  John put the bottle down and sat back on his stool. Ozzie finished wiping everything down, glancing over at John and that broken bottle. He put all the beer steins back on the shelves behind the bar. He got everything just like Papa John had shown him and shown him again. Ozzie was learning the rules even if he was about as bright as an escapee from the moron farm.

  When he’d finished cleaning the bar, Papa John was still sitting there smoking his Camels, drinking another beer, watching the dark spaces around the rafters.

  Ozzie stepped up behind him, holding his guitar.

  Ozzie said, “I know who it is I’m going to kill. I picked him out.”

  John closed his eyes. Maybe if he counted to ten thousand, his blood pressure would go down. He opened his eyes and looked at Ozzie. His personal albatross. He’d been looking for a son, and the gods sent him this poor doofus.

  “Yeah?” Papa John said. “You going after a poodle this time. St. Bernard?”

  “He’s that blond guy, lives around here. Shacking up with the TV lady.”

  Papa John smacked his open hand on the bar; then he caught himself, took a breath. Was the kid joking him with all this murder talk?

  “Look, Oz,” John said, letting more smoke out as he spoke, “you want to earn a merit badge with me? Then keep your old lady quiet, OK? I’m getting nothing but complaints from the trailer park. It’s the fucking noise from your place, the screaming and bitching. They can’t hear ‘Hollywood Squares’ ’cause of the noise. You want to kill somebody so bad, kill Harriet.”

  “Her name’s Bonnie.”

  “Harriet,” Papa John said. “It’s a joke. Ozzie and Harriet.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Papa John sucked a deep drag on the cigarette, let it drift back out his nose, squinting at Ozzie the whole time, not sure if the boy was putting him on or not.

  Ozzie said, “So, now I can play, right?”

  Ozzie switched on all the spotlights first, got them aimed just like he liked them. He climbed up on the four-by-four stage where back a few years ago the topless dancers had wiggled all night. Ozzie hitched his guitar on and spent a minute tuning it up. John shook his head. Jesus, the kid was twelve years old.

  Ozzie pretended to switch on an invisible mike, lowered it a few inches, and screwed it tight. Tapped it. The mood was coming on him now; all the shit he’d taken from John just seemed to whoosh out of his head. He strummed that opening C, then found G.

  It was forty years ago, he came to town riding on a shrimp truck through the middle of the night, looking for a fight, smelling like a hound, driving through the dark to that neon bright. That neon island in the sea, the dark dark sea. It was forty years ago, he came to town riding on a shrimp truck in the middle of the night, a lover of whores, a fighter, and a clown. …

  Papa John watched the boy looking soulfully out at the empty bar, watched him strumming that scarred-up guitar and tapping his flip-flop out of rhythm to the song. He was no Hank Williams, but he had a passable voice. Not much style, but John was giving him advice there, too. Look mean, get more smoke in your voice. Say a few words before you start in hammering on that guitar. Stuff like that.

  Ozzie was a good-looking boy in a cheap, shifty way. He’d brought that song in one night, proud as could be. And he’d gotten up there and sung it to Papa John, just the two of them in the bar. And damn if John hadn’t felt the hot burn of tears rising inside. The boy had him hooked.

  Now he let Ozzie get up there and sing the song every night, a sort of taps. Times like this Papa John thought maybe he was being too hard on the boy. Maybe it was time to give him a little more responsibility than driving the ice cream truck. Sometime soon maybe he’d even take the boy out on his boat, do some target practice, see if the boy had any kind of eye.

  7

  To the north the sky was jammed with the alternating light-dark scales of a mackerel sky. A few fat cumuli hovered to the south, their edges whipped into feathery mare’s tails. A sign the wind had shifted up there and soon would switch down below.

  Thorn watched as Jack Higby parked his pickup next to the VW. Since August the convertible top on the VW had been stuck in the open position. He didn’t see much point in fixing it. Maybe he’d just drill a hole in the floorboard when the summer rains began.

  Thorn was working the lathe. Since daybreak that Saturday morning, he’d had it going. He was turning one-and-an-eighth-inch squares of mahogany, bringing them down to one-inch pegs. He had found a soothing, dead-brained motion, dropping one peg every minute or so into a straw basket. Those pegs were holding the house together. Stronger than nails, they’d give it flex enough to keep it from snapping apart in a hurricane and sailing off to Yucatán.

  That particular chunk of mahogany had come from a tree knocked down by Hurricane Floyd that he’d found at the county dump. He hadn’t paid a nickel yet for wood. In fact, they were about a third done on the house and were only up to three hundred dollars total. Most of that was for gas to Miami and some blades. Higby was going to take his wages out in fishing trips on the Heart Pounder. Thorn figured he owed Jack about six years of good hard fishing by now.

  Jack came over and watched Thorn work for a minute, then yelled over the bray of the lathe, “What about them red tags?”

  Thorn shut the machine off and stepped away from it, dusting the spray of sawdust from his arms. “I’ll go down the building department Monday, see what the jerk wrote us up for. We could just catch up today, the pegs, whatever you think.”

  “Well, then I’m going to tackle that sink again,” Jack said.

  As Thorn got back to work with the pegs, Jack fastened the big chunk of lignum vitae to the standup Blaisedell lathe. It was a machinist’s drill press that Jack had converted. It had a Model A five-speed transmission and must’ve weighed a thousand pounds. Jack had gotten the idea that Thorn should have a wood sink in his bathroom. He’d cut off an eighteen-inch section of the trunk of that tree and was smoothing a basin into it. It was becoming a pretty thing.

  A welder down on Big Pine Key had hauled that lignum vitae tree up one afternoon a month ago. He said it’d been struck by lightning and had been lying out in his backyard for five years. The man had stood there, ready to leave, looking at the tree he was leaving behind. He told Thorn, if he wanted to bring back the smell of that wood, nice honeydew aroma, he’d have to treat it like a woman he’d been married to for fifty years. All the smell’s still in there, he said, but you have to rough her up a little to get it back.

  Thorn watched Jack turning that sink for a few minutes, then stepped back and looked at the skeleton of his house. It was at a stage now, there were a dozen projects to choose from. He could mill the siding boards or spend the day doubling up the top plates for the roof trusses. Or set up the builder’s level, that telescope on a tripod, and shoot all the levels, going from corner to corner, making sure everything was dead even, shimming up the low spots.

  Or he could stretch out in the hammock, have a beer from the cooler. He could watch Jack work for a while. Lie back and feel the new stirring in his chest that Darcy Richards had set off.

  Deputy Sheriff Sugarman rolled into Thorn’s yard at that moment. In his patrol car, and in uniform. And as he got out of the patrol car, Thorn could see he was in a bad mood. The way he huffed when he had to open the door again and pull out a wad of papers. The stiff, military way he walked across the yard toward Thorn. The sharp nod he gave Jack as he walked past the scream of the lathe. The tug he gave the zipper on his jacket.

  Normally he was a handsome man. Dark eyes
, straight, thin nose, café con leche skin. A short Afro. Harry Belafonte as a young man, riding the lobster boats ashore. A couple of inches over six feet, just taller than Thorn. But you wouldn’t call this man stalking across the yard handsome, not today.

  Up close, his anger was even more obvious. He glared at Thorn, shoulders heavied down, an almost imperceptible shake of his head. If they hadn’t been closest friends since they were six years old, Thorn might’ve run for cover. As it was, he said, “What’d I do now?”

  “Nothing,” Sugarman said.

  “Whew, that’s a relief. I was getting palpitations.”

  “No, no, buddy. This nothing is a bad nothing. This nothing is a nothing that should’ve been something.”

  Sugarman looked off at the dark line of clouds to the north.

  “Thorn, you didn’t file for a permit, you don’t have a licensed contractor, you got no proper plans.”

  “I have plans,” Thorn said. “Yeah, I do, over there.”

  He hustled over to a stack of mahogany siding boards beside the stone barbecue pit, looking for that book of poetry by John Ashbery. Thorn had found it in a remaindered bin at the Book Nook. He’d bought it because he liked the name, Ashbery. But the poems seemed to be encrypted by the insane. So Thorn was using the printed pages to start the nightly charcoal and the blank end pages to sketch on.

  He found the page with the plans sitting on the barbecue pit and brought it back to Sugarman.

  “This is just a box,” Sugarman said. “A box on six stilts.”

  “Exactly right,” Thorn said. “Our plans.”