Body Language

by James W. Hall

  “That works?”

  “It has.”

  “Single working woman, in a rush. Easy prey,” the cowgirl said.

  “Exactly,” he said. “You’re quick.”

  “Not all that quick,” she said. “Actually, I’m a little slow to rouse myself.”

  “And do you do that, rouse yourself?”

  She hesitated, then said quietly, “If I have to.”

  Pitch, catch, tit, tat.

  “I know somewhere better than this,” he said. “A more honest place.”

  “Yeah, I bet you do. Where, your apartment?”

  “No. I call it my Edenic garden. Quiet and beautiful, sand, water. Moonlight and stars and jasmine.”

  “I know karate,” she said. “I’m a second-degree brown belt.”

  “Good,” he said. “You can protect us from the moonlight.”

  She touched the hair that curled near her cheek. She drew out a strand. A gesture he’d noticed quite often, when women were being coy, feeling pretty, in control of the chase. Touched their hair. Played with it.

  “All right, I’ll go with you, but just for a little while,” she said. “Just to see this Edenic garden.”

  “Whenever you want the night to end, it will end,” he said. “I promise.”

  And she slid out of the booth. Stood up beside him. Taller than he’d thought. Eye-to-eye. She’d do fine.

  “So. Will you put me in your research paper, Ms. Mead?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “It depends:”

  “And on what does it depend?”

  “Whether you can teach me something I don’t already know.”

  NINETEEN

  Fingers clenched to the shimmying wheel, Alexandra steered the Ford pickup through the night. Ahead, the highway signs and headlights flared up from the dark like spring-loaded targets in a shooting gallery. Every few seconds, she peered into the rearview mirror, and whenever a pair of headlights began to gain on them, her chest clenched, lungs shut down, until finally the chasing car moved safely past and she could breathe freely again.

  Lawton slept through the night, head bumping against his window. He woke twice and replied with scorn to some bothersome character in his dream, then fell immediately back into his black slumber.

  Three times, she stopped for gas and to use rest rooms. They were working their way along the corridor of I-75, heading north up the skinny, interminable state of Florida. The same four restaurants at every brightly lit plaza, same hot breeze stirring the same thousand insects that hovered around sputtering fluorescent lights. She was numb and wired, her mind chattering with voices, snatches of conversations recycled from the last forty-eight hours. Stan’s threats, Gabbie’s entreaties, the blather of TV reporters, her dad’s aimless rant, Scarlett Rogers touting her assisted-care facility. Stray fragments firing off in her head as though she were twirling the radio dial up and down the frequencies of memory.

  And throbbing in the background was his name. A hateful chant.

  Darnel Flint. Darnel Flint.

  His name on Stan’s lips was a curse, pulsing with foul black magic, full of the bile of Stan Rafferty’s hatred. The man she’d married had become the man who haunted her dreams—the seventeen-year-old boy who lowered his weight onto her flesh again and again whenever she felt herself drifting into sleep.

  It was as if nothing else had happened in her youth. That one morning looming so high and wide that every other event of childhood was lost in its shadow. No birthdays or Christmases, no bright red bicycles, no Easter dress, no doll, no happy afternoon baking cookies with her mother. Not a single movie or television show, no teacher’s name, no happy mornings waking full of the raw power of adolescence, no fragrant summer evening dancing with fireflies, no ball games in the yard, no fishing trips with her father, nothing escaped the shadow of Darnel Flint.

  The memories were there, surely they were. But each of them was contaminated, dulled to oblivion by a larger, darker recollection. Like some ravenous tumor that swelled and stretched until no corner of her brain was safe from its tentacles.

  Darnel Flint had made her learn karate, the art of deflecting human touch. Darnel had chosen Stan Rafferty as her husband, a man bitterly incapable of providing the affection she needed most. And he’d selected Gabriella as her friend, a woman, like Alex, whose childhood wounds had never healed. Darnel had even selected a career for her, a job that required that night after night she sight through her viewfinder and contemplate his bloody remains.

  Eighteen years ago, Darnel Flint had sent her running for her life, and goddamn if she wasn’t running still.

  At dawn as the trees and hills began to emerge from the gloom, she pulled off the interstate and into a 7-Eleven and stood in line with speechless construction workers holding Styrofoam cups and packages of Twinkies. Hangovers in the air. Lawton used the bathroom while she paid for a Tallahassee Democrat and two large black coffees.

  Back in the truck, with her dad slurping his coffee, she found the small item in the state roundup section.

  Well-known Miami political figure Gabriella Hernandez was killed Friday afternoon as her quiet neighborhood erupted in gunfire. Discovered by one of her two sons as he returned home from school, Ms. Hernandez’s bullet-riddled body was sprawled on her living room floor. When asked if he believed Ms. Hernandez’s death was related to her recent controversial encounter with the Cuban dictator, Harry Antrim, spokesman for the Miami Police Department replied, “In this city, your life can be in serious danger if you happen to have the wrong foreign policy.” Deepening the mystery of Ms. Hernandez’s murder was the Toyota Camry found in her driveway. The Camry is registered to Alexandra Rafferty, an ID technician for the Miami Police Department. “Damn right we’re worried,” Antrim said. “Ms. Rafferty didn’t report for work Friday night and she didn’t call in. Yes, we’re all quite concerned.”

  Alexandra set her coffee aside. She stared at the pale brick wall of the 7-Eleven and held very still. She tried to breathe evenly, to keep it settled. But a moment later, she felt it rising inside her, the constriction in her throat, the hot rush behind her eyes.

  She bent forward, pressed her forehead to the steering wheel, hugged her chest, and wept. A mourning she had not allowed herself in years. The tears burned—stored so long and deep, they had turned to acid. Covering her mouth with her hand, she sobbed quietly until she was breathless and her stomach began to cramp. Until Lawton reached out and touched her arm.

  She wiped her eyes clear, settled back in the seat, and looked over at him.

  “Are we in the newspaper? Our names?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, Dad.”

  “I used to get my name in the paper a lot. Did I ever show you my clippings? I was quite the media darling.”

  “I’ve seen them, yes.”

  Alexandra found a Kleenex in her fanny pouch, blew her nose, wiped her eyes. She braced herself against the back of her seat until she found the natural rhythm of her breath. Then she folded the newspaper and wedged it between the seats.

  She started the engine and wheeled the cumbersome truck out of the lot and back up the ramp onto I-10, heading west now. The Ford labored up to cruising speed, smoothly and without complaint.

  “Well,” her dad said. “Nothing like a fresh start.”

  “I killed her, Dad. I killed my best friend.”

  “You did?”

  “I led those murderous bastards to her.”

  “Who were those guys anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Some of Stan’s friends, I suppose. His accomplices.”

  “You sure they weren’t there to clean the pool?”

  “No, Dad. They were killers.”

  “Well,” he said. “Then they’re the ones who’ll burn in hell, not you. You didn’t know they were out there. You can’t feel guilty for everything, Alex. There’s a name for that. Some term—I forget what. People thinking they’re to blame for the world’s problems. You can’t live like
that. Christ, nobody would get anything done if they were always feeling guilty about every damn thing that happened. Where we going anyway? Are we going to Ohio, Alex?”

  “No, Dad.”

  A moment later, he said, “Are we out of Florida yet?” “Almost.”

  “Martyrs, that’s the word. Martyrs, like Joan of Arc. Who, by the way, they burned at the stake for believing such nonsense.”

  She held the wheel steady along the wide and empty stretch of highway while overhead the clouds slid by low and fast, dark silver corrugations. Here and there, bright shafts splintered through, beaming down like searchlights from a dozen police helicopters.

  “Did we steal that money? Are we on the lam?”

  She looked over at him, then back at the unfurling road.

  “No, we didn’t steal it, Dad. We’re just carrying it with us until I decide what to do next.”

  “It sounds obscene,” he said. “Being on the lam. Like a bad farm joke.”

  He chuckled to himself and opened the glove compartment, then slapped it shut it again.

  “I’ve been wanting to relocate,” he said. “Miami’s gotten too damn dangerous lately. You can’t go anywhere these days without running into stray gunfire. That’s not how it was when I first took your mother there to start a family. No, sir, it was safe and secure. Everyone in town got along, spoke the same language, ’cause back then everybody was from Ohio or Indiana. Now you meet somebody on the street, they might just as likely be from Tibet. It’s gotten crazy. Have you noticed that, Alex?”

  “I’ve noticed, yes.”

  “That’s a lot of money we’re carrying. It’s mostly hundreds. I could count it if you want.”

  “I don’t want to know how much it is.”

  “You don’t? Why?”

  “Because it’s not ours.”

  Lawton leaned forward and Alex looked over at the old man’s crooked smile.

  “Sure it’s ours.”

  “We’re going to give it back, Dad.”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “Because it’s somebody else’s money.”

  “Not now it isn’t. We got it in our possession. That’s nine-tenths of the law, remember?”

  “It’s not ours, Dad.”

  “I think we earned it, all we’ve been through.”

  She sighed. Having to teach him ethics like he’d once taught her.

  “Just because someone’s suffered an injustice doesn’t mean they can throw away the rules. You know better than that.”

  “God, I smell terrible,” he said, plucking the armpit of his jumpsuit and pulling it close to his nose. “I need a bath. I need two baths. Maybe three.”

  She looked over at him to see if he was joking again, but he was staring at her, his forehead tensed with worry.

  “You sure we aren’t on the lam?”

  “No, Dad, we’re not.” She reached over and patted him on the leg. “We’re making a strategic retreat, that’s all. Just stepping back, taking a breather, a little time to plan our next move.”

  Alexandra watched the hawks slice through the rippling clouds. She took a long look in the mirror, watching a big red and chrome semi roaring up the outside lane.

  “You know it’s dangerous,” Lawton said, “always watching the rearview mirror. That’s no way to drive a car. You can’t see where you’re going.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “It’s not smart,” he said, “heading one direction, looking in another. You can go for a while like that, but eventually, sooner or later, you’re bound to crash into something that’s right there in front of you.”

  She glanced over at him as the wake of the big truck rocked them.

  He drummed his fingers on the dash, rubbed at a smudge on his window.

  “I know about rearview mirrors. Oh, yes, I do. I know that condition all too well.”

  “I’m a careful driver. You know that, Dad.”

  “Oh, it’s bothered me every day of my life. I should’ve been there to safeguard you. And I should’ve been the kind of father you could have confided in, instead of you feeling like you had to go over there and face that kid alone. I thought about it so much, it was like I was stuck right there, caught in that same groove in the record, going round and round, hearing the same few moments play over and over, like I was never going to move forward. So I know, Alex. I know how rearview mirrors work.

  “But lately, this thing that’s been happening to me, losing my memory like I am, it’s almost a relief, everything disappearing. A little more every day. Not that it’s the most pleasant thing in the world, getting so confused. But at least I’ve been spending more time in the here and now, and that’s not bad. I highly recommend it.”

  Alexandra stiffened her arms and pushed her spine flat against the seat. Her eyes were misting, but she blinked that away, fixed her gaze on a white car way out ahead of them.

  “Don’t pay any attention to me,” Lawton said. “What the hell do I know? An old man, brain in meltdown. Who the hell am I, giving advice to someone as smart as you?”

  “I listen to you, Dad. I always listen.”

  “We’re running for our lives,” he said. “With nothing but the shirts on our backs, and a sack of cash. Whooee, what fun.”

  She kept the truck at the speed limit through the rolling hills of gnarled scrub, palmetto, piney woods. Traffic was light, only an occasional big truck booming past. Her father zipped and unzipped his jumpsuit, humming a song from a long time ago, before everything got so complicated.

  Several times, she had to pull off the highway to check the map, but finally she worked the truck south through a maze of narrow county roads until they were on 30A, the beach highway. And suddenly, the air smelled richer, full of the thick, juicy scent of the sea. The sunlight was clean and sharp, the blue of the sky a deeper, more perfect shade than it had been a mile earlier.

  They passed the sprawling bayous of Grayton Beach State Park and crossed a low concrete span, then rounded a sweeping bend and emerged on a straightaway that shot along the edges of the dunes. And then there it was.

  Springing up from the brown scrub and low pines, it looked like a whimsical cake-frosting village, a frothy confection of pastel purples and yellows and pinks and ultramarine. Dozens and dozens of peaked and gabled Victorian dollhouses with tin roofs and white porches and balconies, picket fences and gingerbread scrollwork and filigree. A startling fairyland, dreamy and absurd.

  “What the hell is this place?” Lawton was leaning forward against his seat belt, peering at the town.

  “It’s Seaside. Seaside, Florida.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. What is it, an amusement park?”

  “It’s a town, Dad. From the book you like so much.”

  “A town?” he said. “What book?”

  “They built it right next to where we stayed that summer. You remember? Seagrove.”

  “I remember that, sure. But why the hell did we come back? Did we forget something?”

  “I thought maybe we could work on that sand castle again. You remember that, Dad? That gigantic castle we built together?”

  “They got any rides here? Tilt-A-Whirl, merry-go-round. I like Tilt-A-Whirl best. Yes, sir. And goofy golf. I was pretty good at that once.”

  She stared over at the pleasant jumble of beach houses with their tasteful colors and stately designs, rising out of that drab scrubland of palmetto and slash pine and oak thicket like some storybook kingdom, beautiful and ludicrous.

  “This is where we’re going to stay for a while, Dad. We should be safe here until I can make some arrangements.”

  Leaning forward, he studied the bright town as they rolled forward into its midst.

  “Well, it’s not Ohio,” he said. “But hell, I guess it’ll do for now.”

  He watched from a parking space across the street as the morning shift began to arrive. In his blue Honda Accord with its dark windows, he was anonymous and invisible, his car positioned so he could s
urvey the events through the windshield, a full panoramic view.

  The cowgirl had believed he was sincere and kind-hearted. She’d warmed to him in the ride from the cowboy bar to downtown Miami. He entertained her with stories from his past, the same stories he’d used before, and they never failed to charm. Women liked anecdotes about mothers and sisters. They trusted men who had good relationships with females, men who were observers and appreciators of women. The cowgirl was so touched by one of his stories about his mother that she reached out and lay a hand on his shoulder as he finished it, and she kept her hand there until he parked in the sandy lot.

  “Do you feel safe here?” he said when the engine was quiet.

  She looked over at the tall building.

  “This is your Edenic spot, next to the Miami Police Department? God, you’re some kind of weird.”

  “That I am,” he said. “That I most surely am.”

  Now he sat in his car with a copy of the Herald and looked up every now and then from the national news to watch the late-arriving secretaries and detectives pull into the four-story parking garage for the police department. The Saturday shift.

  There was a lull about nine o’clock, just as he finished the national section. Floods and riots and political disgraces and criminal outrages in distant cities. He set the section aside and picked up the local pages and read a paragraph or two from the Herald’s star columnist—a middle-aged guy who’d discovered sarcasm in the fifth grade and had never gotten over it

  Today, he was being snide about a new real estate development out on the edge of his precious Everglades. A scathing attack on some businessman who had the gall to want to build some houses where the columnist used to fish with his cane pole as a kid. Because the guy had grown up in Miami and remembered it when it was a drowsy backwater tourist town, he thought he was the goddamn pope of alligators. Everybody was supposed to squirm up to him, kiss his ring, and let him decide what got built, what didn’t. Fucking journalists.

  When he looked up from the newspaper again, the business day was finally under way. A few good citizens with law-enforcement business, unable to find street parking, started to pull into the sandy lot beside the garage where a dozen palm trees were planted.