Under Cover of Daylight (2 page)

The fat man screamed for help. He turned in the seat and yelled into the wind back toward Miami. The young man nudged the car up to seventy-five.

“I got a family,” the man yelled at him.

The young man turned his head and stared at the man.

“I can give you money. I got money. Whatever you want.”

“I want you to know,” the young man said. “Know how they felt.”

“You’ll get prison,” he said, all menace.

The young man smiled and pushed the car on. “I’ll take what’s coming to me,” he said.

“I was just your age, for chrissakes,” the man said. “It was a careless mistake. A kid’s stupid mistake.”

The car was up to eighty by the time they rounded the long curve and came up to Jewfish Creek Bridge. The car hurtled up the ramp of the bridge, left the ground briefly, and the undercarriage banged on the other side. The fat man grabbed for the door handle. Sober as hell now. Adrenaline sober. Night air, going eighty-five through the dark sober.

The young man’s foot drove deeper into the accelerator pedal, and he watched the flash of guardrails, saw Lake Surprise appear, the car slewing right, a tired slipping off the edge of the pavement, catching in the shoulder, twisting the wheel from his hands, and he didn’t try to recapture it, and the Buick rammed through the guardrail, sailing out into the water. The young man thinking, Yes, this is exactly right. Exactly as it should be. Yes.

There was the short flight, the pounding drop, the spray of glass, the sledgehammer to his chest. The warm water of Lake Surprise flooding in. And he lost consciousness.

When the young man woke, he heard the faint wail of sirens. Water was up to his shoulders. His chest ached, ribs burned. He climbed out the window, slogged around the car to see about the fat man. A wedge of glass had opened the man’s throat, and his head rested on the back of the seat. Dark syrup rose at the gash. If he wasn’t dead just then, he was about to take wing.

The young man went back to the driver’s side and leaned in and hauled the fat man across the seat, head lolling, and he wedged him behind the steering wheel. Then he swam and waded two, three hundred yards through Lake Surprise to the mangroves. And climbed into them. Wet, hurting, nothing numb, not the least in shock. Feeling every mosquito sting.

He stayed for the whole show. There was nothing dramatic about it. Just men working, figuring out. A physical problem with winch, long cable. Cops wading out with the ambulance boys. No one looking around for a passenger. Just another drunk who’d lost control.

He watched it all. And finally, an hour or so before dawn, it was over. They were gone. Lake Surprise was calm. It went from oily black to gray to green. An early-morning fisherman arrived in his skiff and began casting into the shadows along the shoreline a mile away.

The young man worked his way through the dense mangroves up to the highway. He was having trouble taking breaths; his hands were shaking. There was blood coming from somewhere inside his shirt. It was only a three-mile hike back to his house, but it took him two hours.

T
HORN WATCHED HER STANDING
at the shore, up to her ankles in Lake Surprise. The moon had laid down a wide silver path across the water, and a light breeze was blurring patches of the glassy surface. For the last few minutes Sarah Ryan had been standing there, gazing out at all of it.

Not turning around, she asked, “So what’s the ceremony?”

“There isn’t any
ceremony,
” Thorn said. “I just sit here, try to be quiet.”

“You don’t get in the water? You don’t
do
anything?”

Thorn sighed. Maybe it’d been a mistake bringing her. She’d wanted to come since he’d known her—what?—a little less than a year. Soon as she found out about his ritual, she wouldn’t leave it alone. Started hinting around that June. By the first of July she was out in the open about it. Take me along. I won’t bother you. I’ll participate, do whatever you want me to. OK, so he’d let Sarah, his lover, come along. Maybe to tell her the details, fill in blanks he’d not even revealed to Kate. He had thought they were ready.

But who showed up? This other Sarah. Sarah-the-Public-Defender, cross-examiner of cops, used to prying open clamped mouths. Intolerant of lazy emotions. Breezy and tough. And what he’d planned on saying, the confession he’d been rehearsing for weeks, had gone cold and quiet.

Still looking out across the sound, Sarah said, “Well,
I’m
going for a swim.”

“Look. Point is, this is my one day a year. Like going to the graveyard, flowers on the grave. Like that.”

“The overexamined life is not worth living,” she said. “Haven’t you heard of baring your soul and getting on with it?” She turned and the moon gleamed in her dark hair.

“I’ve heard of it,” said Thorn.

Sarah shook her head and said, “And then there’s the theory of swimming your way to mental health. Getting out there, exposing yourself to the waters.”

She peeled off her khaki camp shorts. No underwear for Sarah. The T-shirt next, and she was there naked in the moonlight. Full moon. Two hundred yards from U.S. 1. The cars rumbling across the grating on Jewfish Creek Bridge. She let Thorn take in her silhouette. She was tall with wide shoulders and thin limbs. And had a gawky gracefulness to her movements, like a fashion model slightly out of practice.

“Watch out for lemon sharks.” Thorn felt himself hardening for her.

“Let them watch out.” She hesitated for a moment at the shoreline, took a deep breath, and waded out into Lake Surprise, into the meadow of light from that heavy moon.

Thorn watched her float on her back. Her breasts breaking through the calm surface. Her pubic hair sparkled. Maybe this was her game. Shake him awake with a little splish-splash, some serious treading of water.

He shifted on the army blanket, dusted away a mosquito singing in his ear. The repellent was already wearing thin. He steered his eyes away from the glisten of Sarah Ryan, following that path of light across the mangrove-rimmed bay to where it veered west toward Mexico.

Would she swim so easily there if she knew the blood that water was spiked with? Thorn had shuddered when Sarah first grazed her toe across it, but he’d said nothing. He had not been able to touch that water himself for twenty years.

Twenty years he’d been coming out here on the fifth of July to sit beside the bay. Twenty years. It sounded like a jail term. Twenty to life. That was about the sentence he might’ve expected if he’d turned himself into the sheriff.

Maybe he should’ve done that. Maybe that way the guilt would be gone, and Thorn, thirty-nine years old, could walk away from all of it, back into the world, debts paid. This way was turning into a life sentence. A sentence with no period at the end.

Sarah was gliding out farther, on her back, the water bubbling quietly at her feet. It seemed that she was trying to let him have his time, his little meditation, get it over with. Or maybe she had caught the doleful vibrations of the place. The ghosts. The ghosts of Quentin and Elizabeth Thorn and one Dallas James. Fat, drunk, puke-scented Dallas James.

Thorn watched Sarah Ryan. She was still on her back, the water bubbling up from her quiet, efficient flutter kick. It glittered like silvery foam. She swam farther out into that warm bay, making a lazy circle near the spot where it had happened.

Thirty-nine years before, Quentin and Elizabeth had been driving home to Key Largo from the Homestead Hospital. Thorn was twenty hours out of the womb, still four hours left to get him back to the Keys so he’d be officially, by local custom, a Conch. To give the boy roots.

Maybe
roots
was wrong.
Suction
was a better word. This island didn’t grant much purchase. Limestone and coral just under the couple of inches of sandy dirt. It was just a long, narrow strip of reef really. And with a little melting at the North Pole, one good force five hurricane, it would be reef again. But Conchs had suction. They could hold on to places where no roots could burrow in.

The custom was important enough to Quentin and Elizabeth to steal away from that hospital after midnight against her surgeon’s warnings. She’d had a C section. Fat little Thorn, ten and a half pounds, stalled at the hatch.

There were four hours left. No hurry. The drive back down to the Keys took only half an hour. It was July 5, 1947.

Everything Thorn knew about that night had come from the
Miami Herald
article. Dr. Bill had saved it till Thorn had asked one too many questions about his real parents’ death. Dr. Bill had led Thorn into his study, where the newspapers were spread out on his desk. And Dr. Bill had gone outside to whack his machete at a rotted limb while Thorn, thirteen years old, read and reread. Nothing to soften it. The same clean surgical cool Dr. Bill had about everything. Read this. This is all that’s known. Outside chopping at punky wood while Thorn grappled with it.

July 5, 1947, had been a clear night. Hot like any July. Light breezes from the southeast. Oh, Thorn read everything else before letting his eyes take hold of the headline about the Thorn family. The weather. The sports, the Reds Reject the Marshall Plan. Three-cent first-class stamps. Today’s Chuckle. A story about a young couple getting married. She says, “No,” not, “I do,” at altar. Changes to “Yes,” but then he says, “No.” Thorn read that.

Finally, there was only one article left. Thorn, picturing it as he read, taking the gray neutral journalism and brightening it with detail, fixing it in his imagination forever. Whenever he recalled it after that afternoon, it came up like this. It was a clear night. Twenty miles of two-lane highway, along the bed of an old railway line. You could reach out either car window and touch mangroves, said the old-timers. Narrow and dark, an empty stretch of asphalt. Thorn was asleep in Elizabeth’s lap. Sleeping with the rhythm of her breathing and that old car humming along.

Coming from the other direction, in his old man’s Studebaker, barreling home from Key West, was twenty-one-year-old Dallas James. A couple of his friends in the backseat. Everybody giddy from bourbon and Coke. A girl at Dallas James’s side. A nice girl from his university graduating class who didn’t know the ride was going to involve Key West and back to Miami in one day, and all that drinking and hooting. She was Doris Jean Parish. All of it was in the paper. She was the one blew the whistle. Next day she blurted it out to her daddy. Good Catholic girl, couldn’t survive overnight with all that guilt.

That night Dallas had been telling a story, a long one, and he was looking back over his shoulder for reactions. Bourbon and Coke, a long joke, caring more about the laughs, impressing the two in the backseat and Doris Jean than about whose headlights he was straying into.

Quentin Thorn swerved off the shoulder, over the low bank, and out into Lake Surprise. No choice. Into those headlights and the tons of steel behind them or into the moonlit water of Lake Surprise. Surprise, surprise. There’d been only four feet of water at that hour. Tide was out. But with heads flattening against that steel dashboard, a birdbath would’ve done fine.

Thorn had bounced around in there, coming finally to lodge atop his mother’s suitcases in the backseat. And as the black, warm water of Lake Surprise seeped into the car, Thorn squawked probably, the water rising to cover his parents’ faces, peaking finally a few inches from where he squirmed.

Dallas James stopped his car, got out, looked over the situation, gave his morals a quick workout, and got everybody back in the car and drove off.

In the second clipping, from a few weeks later on, Dallas had had his moment in court. His story was that this other car was weaving, Dallas honked, veered to avoid it, and the new father, new mother, and their infant of their own free will sailed into that lake. The judge allowed as how there had been enough tragedy already and, seeing how Dallas was from a good family and all, was inclined to give him nothing more than a stern look.

Not Thorn. It had simmered in him for six years, but he had finally done it. And now he was here, serving his indeterminate sentence, his hard time out among the innocent. Very cruel, very unusual. And this was visiting day at the penitentiary. Mr. Thorn to visit Mr. Thorn.

Sarah was coming ashore. Thorn watched her wake arrive before her, stirring among the mangrove roots. As she waded up to the bank, the moon glazed her body.

“You done?” she asked, the gold water falling from her, standing a couple of yards away.

“I guess
so,
” Thorn said.

“What were you thinking about just now?” She stooped and pulled her towel from her large straw bag, began patting herself dry.

“Your hair.”

“Before that?”

“Your skin,” he said.

“Oh, come on, you know what I mean.”

“About this place,” Thorn said. “Lake Surprise, dark, serious things.”

“But you’re not going to tell me about them.” She spread her towel out beside him and lowered herself onto it, leaned back, propped on her elbows. Moon tanning.

“My voice is failing me at the moment.”

She said, “Maybe I should get dressed, help you get it back.”

A transfer truck rumbled from the highway, heading south with supplies. In the Keys everything had to be shipped in; even freshwater was piped down. The only natural resources were fish and balminess.

“Maybe you should,” Thorn said.

“Am I being sacrilegious, naked in the graveyard?” She smiled at him and moistened her upper lip.

“Yeah,” Thorn said, “but I like it.”

“We could swim,” Sarah said, the smartass gone from her voice now. A regretful tone that almost matched his mood. “It did me a world of good.”

“No, thanks,” Thorn said.

“I hear it’s good in the water, all that buoyancy.”

“No,” he said. “I just want to stay a little longer. Like this. Nothing fancy.”

“I’ll shut up.”

“Yeah.” Thorn let himself look at her again. “And there’s nothing wrong with the buoyancy at my place, is there?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing at all.”

I
T WAS A TWO-FOOT SEA
, overcast. Noon on Sunday. Time to start thinking about Monday, the week. Sarah was rocking easily with the light chop on the second level of the tuna tower, alongside Kate Truman. Sarah’s long black hair snapping, skin not feeling yet the sunburn she knew she’d gotten. It had something to do with the blue-eyed Irish in her, bred for gloomy skies, layers of clothes, a heavy gray mist on the moor.