Off the Chart

by James W. Hall

  Anne leaned forward and drew her hand out of Daniel’s grasp.

  “You’re telling me you’re a pirate?”

  “I’ve always preferred the sound of buccaneer,” he said.

  She leaned back in her chair. The air was pinched in her throat. She brushed a hand through her hair, felt her face warming.

  “Well, this is just perfect. My mother would’ve fainted away.”

  “Those are my men out on the dock. That’s one of my vessels.”

  Anne stared out at the yacht. The work had finished, the men standing around smoking.

  “So how does it work?” she said. “You commandeer a ship at sea, repaint its name, hoist a new flag, sail it away like it’s yours?”

  “That’s one way,” Daniel said.

  “Kill everybody, throw them overboard?”

  “We sometimes have to defend ourselves. But no, we’re not killers. Five years, no casualties yet. On either side.”

  “But you would if you had to. You’re armed.”

  “If we had to protect ourselves. Yes.”

  Daniel met her eyes, a defenseless gaze she hadn’t seen from him before. Every spark of cockiness vanished, his debonair smile gone. This was who he was, no hedging, no juking and jiving. Her lover, a goddamn pirate.

  Anne touched a fingertip to her forehead, combed a stray hair back into place. She hadn’t been waiting for this man. She hadn’t been waiting for any man. She was still young; other guys would come along, or no guys. She’d always told herself that either way suited her fine. She could grow old in Islamorada. A weathered waitress with sun-brittle hair, her voice coarsened from secondhand smoke. Take your order, sir? She knew a lot of those. Living in their silver Air-stream with their overfed cat and their quart of rum. Carpenters or boat captains sharing their bed for a week or two. It wasn’t so bad.

  She closed her eyes and listened to her body, felt the alien quiver spreading through her gut. All these years with little more than a tingle. Now this. This man who was way too handsome, way too dangerous. For all these years she’d stayed well inside the lines, a good citizen, invisible. Ten-hour shifts, then back to her apartment. At night in bed she’d read thick biographies from the library, getting lost in other people’s lives, their quirks, the moments of triumph and despair. On her hours off she puttered through the mangroves in her aluminum boat, watched the endless reshaping of the clouds. There were a couple of waitresses she talked to, not friends exactly. Over the years she’d allowed a couple of dozen men to lead her to their beds, but no one who stirred her blood. Except maybe Thorn, and even with him she’d managed to cut it off on the brink of something more. She refused to let them charm her. Always disciplined, drawing back at the first warm shiver. She wasn’t going to sacrifice everything. Hand her life over to a dark-eyed dreamboat. Be a martyr for love like some sappy heroine in a pirate movie.

  “Who put that bug in our room?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It could’ve been a number of people.”

  “How long have you known it was there?”

  “Since yesterday.”

  The waitress came back. An older woman with thinning blond hair.

  “More coffee?”

  He turned to Anne and she shook her head.

  “Just the check, please,” Daniel said.

  The waitress gave Anne a look, then turned and headed for the register.

  “I want you to come with me, Anne. Try it out. If it doesn’t work, if there’s anything at all you don’t like, I’ll bring you back here immediately. No questions, no hesitations.”

  “You can’t be serious, Daniel. Three weeks together, and you expect me to become a pirate? A criminal?”

  “I’m very serious. I’ve never been more serious.”

  One of Daniel’s crew had come down the dock and was standing near the patio railing. Daniel looked over and the man touched a finger to his watch.

  Anne watched the family at the nearby table. The mother was feeding the toddler from a jar, the father reading a newspaper.

  Anne Bonny Joy had never needed any man. She’d worked hard to assemble her world, her routine, every austere second under her control. That feeling in her gut was real, yes, this new hum resonating in her bones, but if she waited long enough, the rumble would pass. She knew it would.

  “It’s okay,” Daniel said. “I can understand your caution.”

  Anne Bonny swung back to him. Her pulse was roaring.

  “You’re not going to say you love me, fall on your knees, plead?”

  “Would it make any difference?”

  “Hell, no,” she said.

  “You already know I love you.”

  Anne knew it all right. For whatever it was worth.

  “If it doesn’t work for you, I’ll give up the life,” Daniel said. “Take a job.”

  “Oh, yeah. Go straight. Sure, Daniel.”

  “If that’s what it takes for us to be together,” he said. “I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.”

  “You should’ve warned me, prepared me a little. You throw me into this cold. Men waiting out on the dock. The boat running. What did you expect?”

  “I had hoped we would have more time. I could tell you in a more relaxed way.”

  “And why didn’t you?”

  “The device in our room.”

  “What? The law’s closing in. We’re about to be arrested?”

  “Possibly,” he said. “I don’t believe we have the luxury of time.”

  “But you bring your boat right here. You’re not worried?”

  “The boat’s clean. If they had enough to arrest me, it would’ve happened by now.”

  “You couldn’t work nine to five, Daniel. You’d hate it. And before long you’d start resenting the hell out of me for forcing you into it, and oh boy, what fun we’d have then.”

  “People change,” Daniel said. “I know I could do it, Anne. If that’s what you truly want.”

  Daniel’s eyes were quiet and exposed, nothing shifty, no attempt to turn up the volume, radiate charm. Glossy blue with those calm depths. At ease in his skin. In their weeks together he had shown her nothing but a steadfast courtesy, a gentility approaching shyness. Just that one flare-up of jealousy about Thorn. Even when both of them were dizzy with lust, Daniel was still reserved, dignified. An honorable man, an outlaw.

  Then again, she had little trust in her judgment. Bad training, corrupted genes, a flawed vision. Long ago she’d banished herself to solitary confinement, lived out the sentence she believed was her due.

  She watched the waitress returning to the table carrying the check in a padded leather folder. The woman was in her sixties. She wore no rings, and the creases in her face hadn’t come from smiling. She padded toward them carefully, as if walking a tightwire of exhaustion.

  At the nearby table the toddler flung his plastic drinking cup in the air, and it rolled across the patio. Daniel pushed back his chair and went over and retrieved the cup and took it back to the young family. The father set the newspaper aside and nodded his thanks. Daniel said a few words to the couple, and they laughed, then he returned to the table.

  “I’ll take that when you’re ready,” the waitress said.

  “We’re ready now.” Daniel counted out the bills, leaving her a tip that would have been sufficient for a dinner of twelve. The waitress stared at the cash and Daniel said, “Thank you for taking such good care of us.”

  The woman gave Anne another look, then left.

  “I barely know you,” Anne said.

  “You know more about me than anyone has ever known. This isn’t easy for me, either, Anne. But it’s right. I know that much. It’s real.”

  “And I’m supposed to step aboard that ship and just go riding off? Leave everything behind.”

  Anne watched the waitress refilling saltshakers.

  “If you don’t feel the same way I’m feeling, Anne, you should stay here. I’ll respect your decision either way.”

&n
bsp; The man from Daniel’s crew came onto the patio and walked over to the table. He had a narrow face and an olive complexion and was wearing a white shirt and khakis and his sunglasses hung from a leather strap around his neck. He carried what looked like a small radio. He nodded at Anne.

  “Weather’s deteriorating in the straits,” he said. “We got maybe till tonight before things kick up out there. It’ll be rough after that.”

  “Thanks, Sal. I’ll be there in a second.”

  Sal nodded again at Anne and left.

  “This has been wonderful,” Daniel said. He took her hand again. “Like nothing I’ve ever known.”

  “Stop it,” she said. “Don’t give me some goddamn good-bye.”

  She turned her eyes from his and watched the waves shatter against the beach. A musky, sexual scent rode the briny mist that drifted to the patio. Seaweed, crabs, barnacles exposed to the sun—as if the surface of the ocean had been peeled back to divulge all the sensory richness below.

  The truth was, Anne had felt an axis shift inside her. It happened days ago. Maybe it had even begun to tilt that first moment she’d seen Daniel at the Lorelei. She’d been denying it. Pretending he was simply another man she’d admitted to her bed. But that was a lie. He’d changed her, awakened appetites and aspirations she’d stifled until now. A dangerous man. A pirate.

  “All right, goddamn it.” Anne Bonny heard the words rise from her throat unbidden. A voice more certain than her own. “But let’s get one thing absolutely straight, Mr. Buccaneer.”

  “Yes?” Daniel said.

  She reached out for his hand and gripped it hard.

  “I won’t be some goddamn scullery maid for a bunch of scurvy dogs.”

  Daniel’s mouth relaxed into a smile. And the sun was never brighter.

  “Marbled godwit,” Janey said.

  “Where?” Sugarman lifted his binoculars.

  “Eleven o’clock, two hundred yards.”

  Sugar swung to the left and caught only a flash of the bird. The godwit made a wide arc to the west to avoid some tourist strapped into a parasail.

  “Yeah, yeah. Good eyes, Janey. Good eyes. Or was that a curlew?”

  “It’s a godwit, Daddy. The bill’s too straight for a curlew.”

  Janey trained her binoculars on a platoon of pelicans skimming a foot above the leaden surface of Blackwater Sound. It was the first weekend in March, another blast of cold air pushing through, chopping up the water, tossing the palms, a spritz of chilly rain now and then from the blue-black clouds sailing past. Thorn was upstairs with Alexandra making lunch while Lawton snoozed in the hammock that was strung up between two coconut palms.

  At the picnic table on the upstairs porch, Jackie had her chin propped on her fists. She was fuming again. She’d wanted to go back to the Lorelei to hear that reggae band they’d listened to three weeks ago. Sugarman said no. Uncle Thorn had invited them to lunch and he’d gone to a lot of trouble. Just yesterday he’d traded a few dozen of his custom bonefish flies with one of his regular customers for ten pounds of stone crabs and a bucket of fresh shrimp.

  Jackie said she hated stone crabs and she was pretty sure she hated shrimp, too. Before it escalated further, Alexandra said she’d run down to the Upper Crust for a double cheese and pepperoni twelve-incher. But nothing would appease Jackie. She had inherited a heavy dose of her mother’s pissy tendencies. Me first and last and always. Sugarman tried to treat the twins evenhandedly, but at times like this it was rough. Jackie was just so damn frustrating, coasting along fine one minute, in a full-blown snit the next.

  Beside Sugarman at the end of Thorn’s dock, Janey sat with binoculars pressed to her eyes. For the last half hour she and Sugar had been scanning the overcast sky, the rocky shoreline, and the snarl of woods that edged both sides of Thorn’s property, spotting birds, racing to see who could ID them first.

  As usual, Janey was way ahead. On the drive down the eighteen-mile stretch from the mainland into the Keys, she’d already collected five roseate spoonbills, a dozen white pelicans, uncountable egrets and herons, and five kingfishers on the telephone wires. Since they’d been at Thorn’s she’d spotted another kingfisher, two warblers, a red-shouldered hawk, and an osprey. Suspended about a half-mile overhead, there was a single frigate bird holding its place in the currents with small tips of its wings. So far Janey had missed the frigate bird, but Sugarman was confident she’d notice it soon enough.

  While she combed the darkening sky, Sugar set aside his binoculars and began to thumb through The Sibley Guide to Birds. He wanted to have the Latin name ready when she finally noticed the frigate bird. A juicy factoid would be nice, too. Lately, Janey had been sponging up the names of birds and bugs and reptiles so fast, Sugar had started to worry he was slipping in his parental duties. Each week before their visitation, he’d been doing homework—an hour or two poring over Sibley or one of the Audubon field guides he’d been collecting. From a lifetime in the Keys he already had a pretty good command of shorebirds and waders, and he was good on the diurnal raptors. The anhinga, boobies, cormorants, and the rest of the pelecaniformes he knew. He was weak on small sandpipers, but the tourist birds were what really threw him. The Keys were a north-south highway for a variety of the migratory species, some pretty exotic specimens flittering past all through the winter and spring. Purple martins, swallow-tailed kites, parrots, shrikes and vireos, wrens and finches and sparrows. It’d take him two more lifetimes to keep all those sparrows straight.

  “Over there by those ferns,” Sugar said. “What’s that bobbing its tail?”

  She swung her binoculars around and found the bird.

  “Oh, you know what that is, Daddy. It’s a palm warbler. They’re always in the dirt, hardly ever in tree branches.” She panned the binoculars slowly back and forth across the dense foliage. “Did I tell you about the tufted titmouse?”

  “The one in Orlando?” Sugar said.

  “At Disney World. It was sitting in a bush shaped like a brontosaurus. Its call is real loud. Peter-peter-peter. Tufted titmouses are rare down here in the Keys, huh?”

  “Yeah, you hardly ever see them this far south,” Sugar said. “But I think the plural is titmice.”

  “Look at that, Daddy. Up there.” Janey had her binoculars tilted up.

  Sugarman was ready for her.

  “Fregata magnificens,” he said. “The frigate has the longest wings relative to its weight of any bird there is. Steals food from other birds, a pirate.”

  “Not the frigate bird,” Janey said. “That man in the kite.”

  “Is that damn flasher back again?” Thorn had come out on the dock behind them with a plate of crackers and smoked fish spread. “Close your eyes, Janey. This guy is gross.”

  “He’s taking pictures of us,” Janey said. “Look.”

  She raised her binoculars and handed them to Thorn.

  It took him a few seconds to locate the big blue parasail against that dark sky and then tilt down to see the guy strapped into the sling below it. He wore a black tank top and white shorts and a red bandanna on his head. He was holding a camera, clicking away.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Thorn. “That who I think it is?”

  Sugarman tightened his focus.

  “Maybe he thinks I’m still dating his sister.”

  “I’d heard about this,” Sugarman said. “The guy’s been working up and down the coast taking pictures. Three or four people told me about it, but I didn’t believe it.”

  “Who is it?” Janey said.

  “A bad man,” said Thorn. “A crook.”

  Sugarman said, “His name is Vic Joy, honey.”

  The boat that was hauling the parasail made a slow turn away from shore, circling out to deeper waters.

  “What makes him so bad?”

  “Probably his past,” Thorn said. “Things that happened to him when he was a kid.”

  “No,” Janey said. “What does he do that’s so bad?”

  “He
takes advantage of people, sweetheart,” Sugar said. “He doesn’t play fair. He tries to get what he wants no matter who it hurts.”

  Janey stared out at the bay for a moment, filing away this new fact. The water was glazed with silver like cooling lava. The shifting scent of the cold front rode the breeze, mingling its rough blend of fall leaves, wood smoke, and the sweet burn of fresh-cut pine with the sulfur and saffron of the resident tropical air mass.

  Janey lifted her binoculars and swung them to the right. So much for bad men—now back to work.

  “Yellow-crowned night heron, Daddy. Look, three o’clock.”

  Three

  It was Monday morning after another raucous weekend with Sugar’s kids. A day of bird-watching and hide-and-go-seek. Lawton was pretty funny, doing a stiff-legged Frankenstein walk, arms outstretched, eyes squinty, as he searched for the squealing girls, who hid behind bushes and in closets. At dinner Jackie nibbled at her pizza while the rest of them scarfed stone crabs and shrimp.

  After Alexandra left for work and Lawton climbed into his hammock with a stack of fishing magazines, Thorn tied on his carpenter’s apron, filled the pockets with nails, and dug into his latest project. He’d been working on it for the last month and had almost finished the framing, raiding the tall stack of milled hardwood planks that had been lying on the gravel beneath his stilt house for years. They were leftovers from the time when he’d had to rebuild the place entirely, and now he’d decided those old boards would work perfectly for enclosing the downstairs area—the open space between the eight telephone poles that held his house fifteen feet above the ground.

  It was to be a room for Lawton, granting all of them a measure of privacy they hadn’t known since Alex and her dad moved in. For the last few months Lawton had been sleeping on a cot in Thorn’s living room, a mere ten feet away from where he and Alexandra shared a bed. Thorn had told the two of them that he was building a workshop, wanting to keep the real intention secret until the room had actually taken decent shape.

  At Thorn’s current rate, he figured Lawton’s room would take another month to finish. By then he was fairly certain he’d know if it was safe to tell Alexandra the true purpose of the space. The reason he’d shied away from confessing it already was that he didn’t want to scare her off. It seemed so permanent, such a pivotal step. A room for Lawton. An unmistakable display of the growing bond he felt toward the old man and his beautiful daughter.