Tropical Freeze

by James W. Hall

  Darcy said, “You know, the station pays a fortune for these electronics, but to tell the truth, that’s mainly to trick you folks into thinking we know what we’re talking about.”

  “Come on, Darcy,” said the voice in her ear. “Easy now.”

  “What I think is, we’ve blown it. I think we’ve put too much fancy jargon between us and the weather. Low-pressure ridge, tropopause, adiabatic changes. We’ve gotten as bad as lawyers. As my daddy used to say, if you want to change the world, first thing you got to do is start calling things by their right names.”

  The voice said, “Eight, seven, six, tossing it back to Jill and Mike, five …”

  Darcy stepped toward the camera, to the edge of the set. She stood there for a moment and smiled at the cameraman, who was smiling at her. Right with her.

  “So, I’m saying it plain. It’s gonna get damn cold.”

  The young man and woman sitting at the WBEL’s news central desk grinned like maniacs as Darcy took her seat again next to the black sportscaster.

  The male anchor turned his bright teeth on Darcy. “Well, we can always count on you, Darcy, to tell it like it is.”

  Darcy nodded to him and then nodded into the lights.

  The female anchor started in on the Hollywood news notes, something about a young actress dating one of the Kennedy boys.

  Ozzie Hardison switched off the television set and stood there, getting his breath back. Bonnie, his old lady, was hammering on the front door, but Ozzie didn’t move. He was holding on as long as he could to the weatherlady’s face, her body. For months now he’d been planning on liberating a VCR from some weekend house around Key Largo so he could tape her and play her back, put her on freeze-frame, slo-mo. Count her freckles.

  “You dorkus, open the door!” Bonnie got one eye up into the little window near the top of the door and yelled at him. “You dickbrain!” She hammered some more, clacking her beer bottle against that little window.

  Ozzie walked into the bedroom, wiped some sweat from his lip. He was still feeling weak. Man, the weatherlady had looked good tonight. A dark blouse, light skirt, her thick hair simple and straight. Just the way he liked it. Hippie chick hair, bangs coming close to her eyes. The color was more red than blond. And tonight she’d even licked her lips once; that drove Ozzie right across the line, made him grab his hard-on through his jeans and squeeze.

  Bonnie banged and banged on that door. A neighbor across in the Bomb Bay Village trailer park yelled at her to shut up. She screamed back at him to piss up a palm tree, and she went right back to pounding on the door, down to a good steady rhythm.

  It was Friday, so the weatherlady would be pulling into her trailer in a couple of hours, spending another weekend in Key Largo. Shacked up with that blond asshole. Ozzie didn’t know what she saw in that white bread guy. Mr. Neat. Mr. Haircut. But then it didn’t really matter. ’Cause Mr. White Bread wasn’t long for this earth. Ozzie could just tell.

  Darcy drove her Fiat Spider up Biscayne Boulevard, watching the wind shake the cabbage palms. She breathed in that hint of ozone, an electrical turbulence from the first collision between the strands of cold, dry air and the sultry high-pressure ridge over Florida.

  The squall line would arrive by Sunday. A wall of boiling black fog, storms breaking out along the edge where the two air masses clashed. Those squalls could be more turbulent, do more damage, than some hurricanes.

  And these were the charged hours before it happened. When the first opposing scouts met and struggled briefly and quietly at twenty-five thousand feet. All that icy air piling into a rounded prow as it advanced. The air closer to the ground slowed down by friction against the earth. Stringy gray nimbostratus clouds reaching out, the upper air unstable.

  As usual she had had an early hint of it, something like the tartness of green apples in the back of the throat, a quiet burn in the sinuses. It was something no radar could trace and no normal person would even give words to. But it was her work and the nearest thing to a gift she had.

  It wasn’t a sense or a superstition, didn’t reside in the nose, the bunions, or any section of her viscera. It was the weight and color of the air, the taste in her lungs, the vibrations her bones could hear, the odor of light. Weather moved through her as if she were permeable, and she extracted from the currents their messages, whispers of where they had come from, where headed.

  She drove the Coconut Grove route tonight. Wangled through a complicated intersection governed only by yield signs. Nearly got hit by a Ford, honked at by a black pickup truck. Yield signs! Deputy sheriffs were unloading footlockers of cocaine at the Port of Miami at noon. What made anybody think yield signs still worked?

  She’d heard that almost every bill above a twenty in South Florida had been found to be dusted with traces of the drug. Little white footprints, ghost tracks. Death dust everywhere. It was in the air, maybe giving everyone a faint high all the time, getting in there and making the synapses fire a little hotter. Maybe that was causing the quicker pulse on the streets. The silt of cocaine on every bill. It got into the blood and simmered on low, rendering the brain down little by little to a thick broth of its former self.

  As her front wheels hit the rough asphalt of the Bomb Bay Village trailer park, all the automatic streetlights in the village switched on. She drew the Fiat up onto the cement slab outside Gaeton’s silver Airstream. The place had become her weekend retreat for the last few months.

  A brown Mercedes was parked in front of the mobile home and Thorn was lying in the recliner on her porch, shaded from the twilight by a green and white awning that was attached to one side of the Airstream. The lights switching on like that, Thorn over for a rare visit, the first major front coming. Darcy felt a foolish surge of happiness. Signs, signs, a world of signs. Things on the verge of change.

  Thorn was her brother’s friend really. He and Gaeton had been grade school and high school buddies and she’d been the tag-along sister, three years younger, but because even then she had an instinct for the weather, the tides and resulting movement of fish, they’d let her come along, a kind of human barometer.

  How does this feel, Darcy? Over there by the sandbar?

  No, farther, by that stand of mangroves.

  Thorn had always asked her how she did it, trying to learn it in the way you’d learn to read the depths by the tint of water. But it wasn’t anything out there. It drifted somewhere in her consciousness. Something so wispy that the moment she began to try to describe it to him, it would vanish.

  Thorn smiled as she opened her car door. He always seemed to pick up the pace of her pulse. He was rawboned and tanned. His eyes looked at you. They didn’t slide off. They were blue and deep-set beneath thick blond eyebrows. He’d let his sun-singed hair get a bit shaggy, and there was a mistiness in his eyes she didn’t remember, but considering all that had happened to him lately, he was still Thorn. The only guy she’d ever trusted enough to tell about her gift. The only guy who even came close to being the fisherman she was.

  5

  “Hey, stranger,” she said, settling into the recliner beside him. She looked at him more closely. “Thorn, you OK? You look spooked.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” he said. “Really.” He smiled to show her how fine he was. “Just came over to drop off Gaeton’s car.” He nodded at the Mercedes.

  “Oh, boy,” she said. “What’ve you two been up to?”

  “Well, now that’s a story,” Thorn said. He had a Budweiser in his hand, four empties on the cement beside his recliner. He’d been picturing that alligator, its jaws wide, its eyes empty. It made him very thirsty.

  Thorn tore out the last beer from the six-pack and offered it to Darcy. She took it, drained a third of it, gasped, and said, “I could use a good story.”

  He took a small sip and looked up at the last shreds of daylight. A sulfurous golden glow, like honey swirled with blood, shone in the west through a tangle of telephone poles and palm fronds. From down the row of trail
ers, Bruce Springsteen began to wail. The old couple sitting out on their porch across the street stood up, glared down the street, then across at Thorn and Darcy as though they were accomplices, and went inside their trailer, and turned on their chuffing air conditioner.

  He told her about the morning, keeping it light, and when he was finished, she was quiet. He took another sip from his beer, watching the last light take the red in Darcy’s hair, leaving a flicker where her eyes were.

  She said, all business, “And did you stay around, see how he handled the Porsche guy?”

  “Yeah,” Thorn said. “They made some calls, worked it all out.”

  Darcy sighed.

  “This company Gaeton works for, it’s what, a rent-a-cop thing?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s bigger than that. It’s international.” There was something odd in her voice, as if she wanted to say more, maybe debating it.

  “Gaeton asked me to help him with something he’s working on.

  “Well, now that’s just great.”

  “What’re you so pissed about?” Thorn looked at her through the final stages of twilight, tried to read her face. But the parts that mattered were gone.

  She sighed again, said, “I just don’t like to see him mixing you up in his business, that’s all.”

  “It’s OK, I need a break,” Thorn said. “I been working nonstop on the house. It’s good to get out, see how the world’s going.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “Maybe you two deserve each other.”

  This was a new Darcy. Not little sister Darcy. Not Miss Congenial, Miss Monroe County, Runner-up Miss Florida. That Darcy, who never froze her smile into place like the other beauty queens but really seemed to enjoy it, standing up there in a bathing suit, as if it were too goofy not to enjoy. Only reason she was runner-up to Miss Florida was that Darcy had not really given a shit about the whole thing, and when they asked her what she wanted to do with her crown if she won, she said to nail it on the wall just below the 110-pound tarpon she hauled in last summer. That was that. It got a laugh. And second place.

  But this new Darcy had a tang of bitterness in her voice. A nervous impatience that Thorn assumed came from working in Miami all week, only getting back home on the weekends. As if she were taking on the accent of the fast-lane Miami hotshots she had to work with.

  “I’m sorry, Thorn.” She reached over, touched his hand briefly. “Don’t mind me. I’m just going through something. I don’t know. Maybe it’s El Cambio. Hot flashes, loss of procreative urge. General aimlessness.”

  “Maybe it’s just a tropical depression,” he said.

  “I’m serious, Thorn,” she said. “I read about this. It’s like a disease that everybody gets, middle-age measles. It’s on page one twenty-three of that book, whatever it’s called. A person turns thirty-six, the longing genes switch on. You start thinking about Yeats, him saying that life was a long preparation for something that never happens. You just got to wait it out. Twenty pages farther in that book, your genes are going to throw something else at you. May take a few years, but it happens.”

  “And while you’re waiting?”

  “That’s what I’m working on at the moment,” she said. “A whole new career. I’m sick of predicting the future. I’d like to cause the future, make something happen.”

  Thorn said, “If your genes are going to change you anyway, why do anything? You could just lie around, watch the clouds for five years till life had meaning again. Rediscover your navel.”

  He liked being a little boozy. You could have conversations like this. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d said “life” and “meaning” in the same sentence. Maybe never.

  She said, “Even you, Thorn. You’re not immune. You roll a rock in front of your cave, but that won’t stop the changes. That’s my point. It doesn’t matter what you do, whether you’re striving or not striving, you still change.”

  “All I’m striving for is to finish my damn house,” he said. “Live on land again. I’m sick of that boat. I turn around, I hit my head on something. I turn the other way, I hit the other side.” He sipped his beer, and they were quiet for a moment. She kicked off her leather pumps, and Thorn watched her wiggle her toes, playing scales in the air.

  She said, “Sometimes I think, just quit your complaining, Darcy. You’re the weatherlady. You’re the vivacious beauty queen with the big knockers. What’re you bitching about?”

  “Big knockers?” Thorn said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I had large breasts once. You never noticed? I had them all through high school. It’s how I got hired at WBEL. Out to here.” She motioned in the dark. “A couple of years ago I had an operation, had them reduced. I was sick of them. My back hurting all the time. You men don’t know about big breasts.”

  “We’re always happy to learn.”

  She was silent. Down the row of trailers, Bruce Springsteen was getting weepy about steelworkers and their bars. Pushing his voice down into his throat, between a grunt and a C flat.

  “Size doesn’t matter,” Thorn said. “They say it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

  “You guys got a million of those,” she said. “I heard ’em all. It’s not the length of your wand, it’s the magic with which you wave it. Horse pucky.”

  “OK, we’re in touchy territory here. I’m sorry, I thought we were still joking.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “We are, I guess.”

  They listened to Bruce going on about the shot-and-a-beer guys, Thorn thinking he could use a couple of shots just now.

  She said, “Only guy I ever knew who didn’t feed me one of those lines had a dick like a sequoia. So figure it out.”

  Thorn said, “I don’t think I know you well enough to be having this conversation.”

  “I don’t know anyone,” she said, “well enough to be having this conversation.”

  The moon was a smudge of light behind thick clouds out in the Florida Straits. Thorn took a fast ride out there, cruising weightless along his line of sight. It was a boyhood game he’d played on those nights when the island fever burned too hot. He stayed out there for a moment or two, got some order back in his head, then came back slowly to that island, that trailer park, that chair, that body grown heavy with drink.

  The bathroom in the mobile home was smaller than the head on Thorn’s Chris Craft. And the racket he was making in there, mainlining five Budweisers into the John, blotted out Springsteen. When Thorn was finished, he washed up, checked his face in the mirror. The beers had taken root in his eyes. He experimented with a happier look, lifting his eyebrows, forcing a momentary shimmer to his eye, raising the corners of his mouth. But it was grotesque, a drunk’s cockeyed smile.

  Darcy was waiting for him in the dark living room. She was leaning against the doorsill, looking out at the sky, holding on to the brass door lock chain.

  “Another front coming?” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But a high-pressure ridge’s deflecting it at the moment.”

  He came up to her side. Snagged the toe of his boat shoe on the edge of the rug and stumbled into her shoulder. She turned and put out her hand to steady him, and it slipped into his shirt, grazed across his chest. She smiled and began to slide it out, but Thorn covered it with his hand, kept it there. One of her fingertips pressing against his nipple.

  “I’m a little drunk,” he said. But he didn’t release her hand.

  She brought her other hand up slowly and touched his face. Fingertips reading the stubble on his cheeks, braille, a message there. Then a slow tracing of his eyebrows, nose, upper lip, up the cheekbone, and brushing the hair at his temples. Thorn felt a flood of warmth rise inside him. His eyes swimming. The muscles in his neck relaxing as well. He gave himself over to this ticklish tour.

  Her hand circled his neck, back-combed up through his hair, and cupped his head. He let her have some of its weight. Holding there, cradling his skull.
r />   “Are you drunk?” he said. Drowsy, his head floating in her palm.

  “No,” she said. “Stone cold sober.”

  “Good.”

  After a time he opened his eyes, looked at her now, at the moonlit face, sideburns of down. He lifted a finger, brought it to that dust of hair on her cheek, ruffled it against the grain of the light till it was a milky powder.

  He brought his face to hers, their mouths aligning, but not a kiss. Holding off the hunger. Their lips grazed, adjusting, making the slightest calibrations of angle and shape as if they were whispering into each other’s breaths. Both of them trying to make this first kiss, this one which Thorn did not even realize until now that he had been waiting for for a very long time, to make it as close to perfect as possible.

  And it was.

  6

  “I didn’t kill anybody till I was twenty-eight,” Papa John said. “What’s your hurry?”

  Ozzie said, “I’m thirty-two, for christ sakes.”

  John lit another Camel and rubbed the thumb of his smoking hand across the beard stubble on his throat. He eyed Ozzie through the smoke. Ozzie was wiping down the bar with a wet, greasy rag, putting a fleeting shine on the mahogany. The guy wasn’t at all what Papa John had had in mind. He was a Florida Cracker for one thing. Worse than an ordinary redneck. You couldn’t teach Crackers anything. They had undescended brains.

  It was three o’clock in the morning. It’d been another slow Friday night. Used to be that the Bomb Bay Bar was the axis of the universe in Key Largo. You didn’t come to this island and not squeeze into Papa John’s place some time or other.

  But something had happened. Some tilt he couldn’t quite figure out. Now just an occasional tourist might stick his head in Papa John’s place, maybe even step inside, but then he’d stop and give him a little embarrassed wave and he’d leave. Was it some smell he couldn’t smell? Fuck if he knew.

  It wasn’t the money that bothered him. He still had enough scams going down, enough cash stacking up out on his boat. No, what bothered him was the lie of it all. Here he was, the original thing. A Conch, sixty-three nonstop years on the islands. Half of that he’d spent running Papa John’s Bar in Key West, the rest of it bouncing around the Keys, making some smuggling runs, pot, rum, Uzis once, always on the lookout for a place with the fishing camp feel that Key West had lost. And then fifteen years ago he’d found it in Key Largo.