Buzz Cut

by James W. Hall

  After their cruise they would flow upstate to one of the plastic theme parks where the great white shark would lunge predictably, the rocket ship would plummet right on schedule, the ferocious beasts would charge their car on the hour every hour, and the black-hearted pirates would carry away shrieking damsels, all of it on steel tracks, a conveyor belt dragging them forward smoothly and dependably and safely above the shallow sea. This was Florida. This was his home, what it had become. Where the false and the true had become so interchangeable that hardly anyone could tell the difference. And those who still could were so worn down they barely cared.

  He stopped at an empty span of railing on the Sports Deck, his gaze drifting out beyond the crystal water of the harbor, looking at the distant Caribbean. Out there the sky was scoured clean, its blue had the hard glossy shine of wet enamel. Coasting a few hundred feet up was a lone gull. A warm aroma wafted on the breeze, the scent of smooth black river rocks heated by the sun.

  Two men and a boy in a rough-hewn outboard fishing craft were heading straight for the Eclipse, then twenty yards shy, the skiff veered west and peeled open a frothy seam on the flat green water. The midmorning sun plated the boat and its passengers with silver glaze. Their tackle was ready, their bait rigged. Full of the same reliable hunger and hope of all fishermen heading out, a yearning he realized with a wicked jolt that he had not experienced himself for many many months.

  Somewhere along the way of courting Rochelle and mass-producing his flies and performing the never-ending upkeep on his house and boat and equipment, he'd lost the habit of going out on the water. Only that one trip into the Everglades with Sugarman, one trip in many months. He couldn't even remember the time before that one. And that, of course, was the answer. The reason his flies had lost their allure.

  He had always tied them for himself. Sold his extras. The compulsion behind each one was the simple desire to snag his own bonefish. To concoct a bait so appetizing it would guarantee the thudding strikes and wrenching excitement he had relied on for over thirty years. But he'd lost something, tying them exclusively for others. His fingers committing the same act, tweezers and scissors and vise, Mylar and feathers, hackle and ribbing. Everything exactly the same. Identical to the eye. But now they were duds. Failures on some level so subtle, so subatomic that only the fish could see it.

  Over the last half year, his craving to go out on the water had dwindled to little more than a glimmer. He had fallen into the tedious and consuming rituals of the land animal, lost his hunger to hunt for those bright, wild creatures.

  Now, standing at the railing of that boat that was not truly a boat, looking out at that primitive fishing skiff as it swung around a palm-lined point, with the yeasty, sun-baked scent of the sea in his lungs, the screams of the gulls overhead, the relentless magnetism of the blue distances, it was as though a layer of calluses and epidermis had been flayed back, and the bright tender nerve endings were suddenly exposed to the shock of the familiar. A fresh discovery of what he had always known.

  To him a house had always been merely a place to clean fish and reels and plot the next voyage. From the earliest time in his life, his incompetence at social discourse and his craving for isolation had fueled his calling. He'd spent the majority of his waking hours for the last thirty years wandering across the markerless flats of the Keys, rod at the ready, tracking the fleeting shadows that he'd trained his eyes to see. He had never felt at home with the rules of land. Had never known more than a marginal happiness traveling its well-worn thoroughfares.

  Now after only two days at sea, even in such a ship as the Eclipse, he felt again the tingle in his blood. Some stagnant cluster of molecules rousing. He watched as that skiff headed out to the wrecks and reefs and deep underwater trenches where the big bottom fish lurked, or farther out where the weedlines or circling, diving gulls would steer the fishermen to schools of migrating dolphins. Or perhaps those men were headed to the flats where the jittery permit and tarpon registered every tremor in the tide and were spooked by clouds tickling across the sun or a single human utterance a mile away.

  As they disappeared around the point, their boat lifting up onto a sluggish plane, Thorn knew exactly what was alive in their nerves. The weight of every fish they'd ever lifted from the water. The thousand sharp colors, the wavering silhouettes, the blinding speed of barracuda and hammerheads and bone, the snapper's cautious nibble before the tug, the yellowtail's bump, the trout's nervous plucking. All of it was there, stored for all time, the jig of the line, the slow, deliberate reel, the long false casts and the release, the jarring strike and steel-melting power of marlin and tuna. All still there, even if it had been dozing in some desiccated twist of cortex for far too long.

  Thorn held up his hand, wriggled his fingers against that polished sky. It might take a week or two of steady fishing, some hard sweaty hours of fruitless labor, but now he was fairly sure he knew how to restore the suppleness to his fingers, how to regain that simple, baffling sorcery that once came so easily.

  ***

  Monica showered. She burned her skin with the hottest water she could stand, piped up straight from the boiler. Poaching herself. Then she backed it off, lathered with the ship's lavender soap. Scrubbed away a layer and another.

  With her flesh bright and quivering, she put on one of the terry-cloth robes from the locker, drew the curtains against the brightest day she'd seen in years, and lay down. Her eyeballs burned as if they'd been packed in salt, throat so scalded it felt as though she'd been vomiting for days.

  An hour ago when she'd walked off the stage, her father calling after her, she had not turned to face him, hadn't answered his cries. She'd marched away, the hard, tangible core of her anger vaporized, leaving an acrid residue that made her breath burn and her mouth taste like dirty copper. There was a sickly ache in her belly as if she'd been punched repeatedly.

  Maybe she slept. Maybe she only imagined sleeping. Maybe she dreamed or maybe she only dreamed she dreamed. Confused and feverish, every breath a struggle, every heartbeat sending a pulse of grief through her gut.

  With her eyes shut, she heard the cabin's lock come open, heard him come in, pad across the floor. Felt the mattress give as he sat across the bed from her. He looked at her a long time. He must have seen her eyes wide awake behind her lids. When he spoke, Thorn's voice was as quiet as the first shadows of the evening.

  "You feeling any better?"

  She opened her eyes, stared up at the ceiling.

  "Of course," she said. "I purged, didn't I? I purged big time, in front of twenty million people. I bashed my daddy, I spilled it all out. I drew major quantities of blood. Wrecked his reputation. Did you see? He wasn't smiling anymore at the end of it. I took away his fucking smile."

  "You disemboweled the bastard."

  "Yeah, I cut his heart out and held it up, and let everyone watch it pump."

  "And now you feel shitty."

  "Ten times worse than shitty."

  "But you did it. You needed to do it, and you did. It's over now."

  "It's that simple?"

  "Isn't it?"

  "Fuck no, it's not."

  Thorn eased onto his back, settled his head on the pillow, and looked up at the spot on the ceiling she had been studying earlier. "Butler is in the brig. Locked up. That part's over anyway."

  She blew out a breath. "Thank God."

  "Now you're free."

  "Yeah, sure," she said. "I could go back to Sugarloaf, or I could go somewhere else. But how's it going to be any different than it was? That's all horseshit. I've unburdened myself, but it's all still there. There's no magic in saying the words. I still gotta do something. I still have to start over, hack out something for myself. I'm still me. Same curse as before."

  "Not such a bad curse."

  "No?"

  "Your father will disinherit you. So that solves the money problem. Then all you have to do is wait a few years, you won't be beautiful anymore. It happens all by itself. The
wrinkles, the sag."

  "You're great, Thorn. A real help."

  "Maybe you should be thankful you have such a challenging problem. You might've been one of those people who just skimmed through without a concern."

  She rolled up on her elbow and stared at him.

  Thorn said, "This way you have an edginess. You're always alert, dealing with it. You know what they say. A person can get too comfortable, stop questioning. Lazy faith is no faith at all."

  She shook her head. "They say that, do they?"

  "I don't know if they do, but I heard one guy say it."

  She came down off her elbow and let her head rest on the middle pillow. She tightened the belt on the terry-cloth robe.

  "Words," she said. "Fucking words."

  "Maybe you feel better than you know," Thorn said. "You're still churning inside. Could be, it's too soon to know how it's going to be. A couple of days from now, the storm is a few miles up the coast, the sun comes out, maybe you'll be able to take a deep breath, have a good chuckle about it all."

  "You're not very smart, are you, Thorn?"

  He smiled. "I've met a couple of people who were dumber. Not many."

  "My father is still my father. My past is still my past." Monica touched a finger to the bristle on her scalp. Hair longer than it had been in a while. She drew a line from front to back along the path where she'd once parted her hair.

  "The past," Thorn said. "It's just a bunch of stories you've decided to tell yourself. You can always tell different ones if you want. It takes some work, but it's possible."

  "You can, huh? Just lie to yourself?"

  "Not lie. But go back, find some stories you've forgotten. Things just as true as the ones you've been holding on to. Tell the new ones to yourself for a white, Slant it a different way. Everybody's got a shitload of stories, a shitload of different pasts. No reason to get stuck with just one set."

  "Is that what you do? Make up new pasts?"

  "I try."

  "And does it work?"

  "Not very often," he said. "But I keep hoping."

  She rolled onto her stomach, craned her head his way. He was still looking up at the ceiling, but his eyes were flickering as if he knew exactly how far away her lips were and it distressed him a little. She leaned forward and kissed him on the temple, the hard lump his friend Sugarman had left.

  He made a noise in his throat. An I-don't-know-about-this hum. Kept his eyes focused upward.

  "I'm too young for you," she whispered.

  "Absolutely."

  "You're an old man. You could be my father. Your arteries are halfway clogged. You've got a twisted sense of humor. We have nothing in common at all."

  "I'm pretty," he said. "We have that. I've been told I'm gorgeous."

  "Fuck you, Thorn."

  "Although the truth is, no one's said it lately. Actually, no one's said it in years."

  Monica kissed the knot again and he made another noise in his throat, another hum, this one not quite as pessimistic. It took two more kisses before the hum had some pleasure in it and two more after that before Thorn turned his head and met her lips with his.

  ***

  Nuts. Crazy, or passionate. A devotee, a fan, as in "sports nut." And the coarse slang for testicles, of course. All the words growing out of the Dutch noot or the German noos meaning the kernel of a hard-shelled fruit. All the slang spinning out of that, the testicles' resemblance to acorns or walnuts, only soft and vulnerable. Having in common with acorns, beyond the size and shape, that they were also full of life, the seeds of the new tree. The storage place for new existence. Eggs and nuts. The association with passion sprang from the copulatory connection with seeds and sperm. Crazy following from that passion. Extreme passion, copulatory madness. Nuts.

  Butler's nuts were bowling balls. Black and hard and huge. They were dead. They had moved beyond pain into the realm of absolute horror. The nerves had suffered more than nerves can suffer. He could not move. Lying in the corner of the metal cell, glancing up from time to time to meet the old man's eyes in the window, the man with the straw in his mouth peeking in to see Butler.

  His nuts were nuts. Crazy and hard.

  He was dead and paralyzed and full of anguish that was so far beyond any misery the body could absorb or the brain could categorize that it was as though he had no pain at all. He hurt so bad he didn't hurt.

  His nose was broken probably, numb, no air passing through. It felt skewed to the side, loose on his face. He knew he could not stand. He knew he could not walk and probably couldn't speak. There was nothing his body could do to release him from this box of iron. He was as helpless as a newborn. Crying. Wordless. Staring out at the cold fog, the bright silver room.

  Butler Jack was nuts.

  Nuts to believe he would ever escape, finish his plan. Nuts to believe that all was not lost.

  But he did believe that. As nuts as it was. He believed it. Knew it to be true. Knew that his plan was still unfolding even though he was here in an iron room. Caught by the black man with the white name who shared his atoms. A common egg, different nuts.

  He knew he would be free soon. Then he would have to stand. He would have to walk and speak. He would have to complete the last few steps on his list. And he would do all of that. For the swelling would subside as swelling always did. Things would shrink again to the normal. Pain would slacken until it became only the low-frequency noise that was tolerable. He would rise. He would walk. He would kill anyone who tried to interfere.

  The eyes were at the window again. Butler Jack giving them back everything they gave him and more. Sending out all the anger and hate and disgust and horror that was brimming in him now. A lifetime of it. Focusing it through the double magnifiers of his corneas, a laser look. Firing that at the man's eyes in the window.

  And to Butler's amazement, the man in the window flinched, his eyes filling with terrible pain and revelation. And he threw his head to the side and sank out of view. A few seconds passed. Butler's heart was howling. And then those old man's eyes were replaced by other eyes.

  And Butler Jack was saved.

  CHAPTER 32

  The sun was setting in the east.

  Or else his compass was upside down, the N and S reversed. Then again, perhaps David Chan was about to die from diarrhea and dehydration and this was simply a final hallucination before the sky swallowed him. North becoming South. Heaven becoming Hell. It was possible and entirely harmonious when you considered it. The universe playing fair. David Chan had had an exceptionally prosperous life and now the pendulum was cocking in the other direction and he was going to be sent on a hellish journey.

  He believed in the prophecies of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in which the soul when set loose from the body begins to roam the dark plains of afterlife searching for some speck of light. Finally seeing it, moving toward it, then entering it as the sperm enters the vagina and battles its way up the hostile twists of tube to reach the great mother egg. A dead man wanders until he sees his new parents, then reenters the world through their moment of great pleasure. Becoming a child again, a disembodied scream. All of it starting over and over and over.

  David Chan stood on the bridge of the Juggernaut. It was five o'clock. Five in the afternoon he believed, though a little while ago the sun had disappeared behind a bank of clouds and now it was dark and rainy, as sunless as midnight. A storm without benefit of lightning. The Juggernaut gliding easily through the swells. The great ship with her burden of oil had no trouble whatsoever except that he was not sure if the compass had failed or his mind had failed. Five o'clock, that much he knew, unless, of course, the timepiece was malfunctioning like all the other instruments.

  He had found the old man, Su Long Doc, in the auxiliary water storage tank. His body had been decomposing for several days, a great swollen mass, rubbery and cold like the inflatable doll a Chinese crew member had brought along several trips ago. Its mouth puckered open, its face a plastic cartoon. An inflatable doll
overfilled, cold to the touch, ready to burst.

  The dead man, Su Long Doc, had served as security guard while the ship was in dry dock in Baltimore. In his late sixties, with no family, Su Long was the ship's machinist. He had been missed when the repairs were finished in Baltimore, some frantic efforts were made to locate him, but finally David Chan was unable to wait any longer for him, so they had left port one man short.

  Apparently Su Long Doc had been killed, his body stuffed into the water reservoir, and it was the bacteria from his offal and his rotting flesh that had caused the spread of disease on the ship. Two men were near death and three others would be heading that way.

  Some time ago David Chan had radioed a distress signal to the U.S. Coast Guard and they had agreed to dispatch a helicopter from Miami. But now he was not sure he had provided the Americans with the correct coordinates. His Loran was giving him one location and his GPS was giving him a reading almost a thousand miles away. The compass showed their course to be almost due west when David Chan knew the autopilot was programmed to take them south by southwest as they approached the Gulf Stream, which was where he thought they were.

  Of course, the storm might have interfered somehow with his instrumentation. Or it was possible, entirely possible, as he had remarked to himself earlier, that he was hallucinating. But how could you be certain you were hallucinating? Did that not require a second viewpoint, someone who was fairly certain he was not hallucinating who could compare observations? But there was no such person aboard the Juggernaut. There was no one on this very large ship, one of the largest ships ever constructed on the planet, no human being who could confirm or deny that David Chan was hallucinating.

  For all he could tell, a monumental holocaust had befallen the earth. A meteorite had passed close by and the magnetic poles had swung around. North and South had been reversed. Heaven and Hell. And now the world was toppling out of control through the galaxy.