Under Cover of Daylight (8 page)

“You were too stupid,” Irving said, happy now, grinding his favorite asshole.

“Stupid,” Milburn said. “Stupid, huh? What’s your IQ? Mr. Jack Nicholson, Zen master. You know what it is, and I know what it is. What is it, above average? Would you believe, ladies and gentlefolk, it is subnormal, a mere shadow of a brain, the very edge of handicapped, we’re talking Down’s syndrome here, way, way down.”

“And you’re the big Mensa hotshot with the hundred forty IQ and shit for brains.”

“One hundred fifty-three. I’m the smart one in this group. You should be paying attention to me. You should be following my plan.”

“You’re a joke, Milburn. I heard this same speech, what, a hundred times? A hundred fucking times, and it never varies. You should be the leader; you should be rich like your daddy; you should be running this and that. Well, how come you’re such a dirtbag then? How come you’re not governor, or mayor, or even the head of the fucking garbage department? It’s because you’re such a fucking jerk, a wimp, and a goddamn whiner.”

Milburn swallowed another Percodan from the bottle on the glass table, chased it with the rest of his St. Pauli’s Girl. He sat down at the wet bar, threw a dart at the dart board. It hit the outer rim, hung for a second, and fell to the floor.

“All I’m saying is, it’s a weird fucking thing to see when you start up with that Jack Nicholson shit.”

“You love it. The whole thing. There we are, the ultimo Cubans. We had her fooled every way from Tuesday. I just wanted to see her face, man, when she finds out she’d been had. Tough old lady captain. Big billfish dyke. That’s what it’s all about, man, see their faces when you take off the mask and they see they been dancing with the devil.

“So don’t give me your shit, man. If it wasn’t for me not following the fucking plan, we’d still be stoolies for Abe Philpot. You liked that? Flying around everywhere, tagging around behind Abe, looking mean? You want to go back to that? Waiting for fucking Abe’s check every month to buy groceries? Man, if it wasn’t for me coming up with our own plan, inventing things, we’d still be muscle for some two-bit real estate contractor, putting a barrel in some zoning official’s ribs so Abe can build a couple of extra fucking stories on his condo. You want that? You want to get back to that kind of fucking, dim-witted life, being somebody’s lackey? Man, I don’t believe you sometimes. Mr. Plan Follower.”

“I need to get down to the doctor, man.” Milburn not whining now. The pain turning him serious. The sweat making a dark butterfly on the front of that pink shirt. He was probably right about that eye. He’d lose it. That old lady got the tip way in there, punctured the shit out of it.

Irving found the keys to the BMW. He felt fine, happy. Not so much the five thousand for the job. Shit, he’d given Ricki the bargain basement rate anyway. Five thousand, he got that every month from his old man. Smelled like fried chicken, every dollar of it.

But it was the idea of it, his profession. He was sailing now, a career in the fine arts. His name getting around where it mattered, people with money and some dirty little deal to do. People he’d met when he and Milburn had been Abe’s goons were calling him up. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, all over the place. They remembered Irv, said they liked his style, his unfucking-predictabilities.

He felt good. Even getting fat Milburn on his feet and out the door. There were parts for a lifetime. Parts and parts and parts. He hadn’t even scratched the goddamn surface.

T
HE PUFF, THE HARD PUFF,
Wild Harry’s Delight, the Muddler, Improved Nasty Charlie, the Horror, Bonebuster, Purple Shadow.

Thorn sat at his rolltop desk and looked up at the cork board where his collection of flies was displayed. It was quiet, still an hour till daybreak. He could finish maybe three Crazy Charlies before the roosters started in.

There was an old rooster and a young one that’d recently begun to debate over a brood of wild hens that lived in the mangrove woods that bordered his house. The chickens provided him with feathers for his flies, and the crowing coaxed him back to an earlier day when the Keys were more a cousin of South Georgia than Miami’s weekend playground and a tour stop on the Disney World circuit.

Captain Eddie would be showing up at dawn. Seven days a week he poled up to Thorn’s dock, even at high tide, when there was water enough to use his engine, always wanting his half dozen assorted flies.

And after Eddie it would be Bill Martin, a retiree from Massachusetts, a professor of something or other who had discovered fly-fishing for bones and had acquired gradually the same reticence and sun-glazed stare of all bonefish addicts. And on like that all day, Thorn tying between their visits, never enough, always learning from them what was catching fish this week. And standing out on his coral dock, wondering with them why in the hell that little scrap of hokum brought those fish awake.

Crazy Charlie was the epoxy flat base fly he’d created in June. It skittered across the mud flats, trailing purple flasharoo, these Mylar strings that shook like tassels on a stripper’s skirt. Silver beads from a key chain for eyes. A pinch of white squirrel fur for the body. Like a Martian roach. Glitter and flash, dressed for a twenty-first-century nightclub.

He had a desk full of animal fur, pelts, tails, whiskers, toenails. His friend Jerome Billings had a contract with the county to keep the dead animals off the highway. Thorn got his pick of the daily supply of highway cats and dogs, squirrels, raccoons, and rats. If the pelt were still fresh, Jerome would drop it by. Thorn gave him flies as payment, though he knew Jerome had never fished a day. Either Jerome sold them, or Thorn couldn’t imagine, displayed them somewhere, used them in the bedroom? Scraping up squashed animals all day might have put a deep kink in there somewhere.

He laced the Crazy Charlie tight with the purple Mylar, tying a double turle knot and leaving a single thread, something to attach the last of the squirrel fur to. All glitter and flash, but a bonefish might smack that thing and rip off a hundred yards of line in about four seconds. All torque, that fish wouldn’t waver or jump, just burn those reel bearings, one long frizz. The pole straining. Heart crawling up into the esophagus. Thorn had been there; he’d been there and been there. And now he was here.

He loosened the vise a notch and rotated the Crazy Charlie. That vise had cost him a couple of hundred. It was a custom job he’d designed with a machinist in Tavernier. It had a needle-nose vise, rubber-coated gripping surface, and a largemouth vise with a fine-tune setting so he could hold a hook without marring the finish. Beautiful little tool.

The vise was about the most expensive thing he owned. His house. A few tools. A trickle of cash to pay the lights, and more anytime he wanted to speed up production. A library card. The land was his. Taxes paid from the trust fund Dr. Bill had left. A little cash left for gas for his rusted-out ’65 Cadillac Fleetwood, his Keys Cruiser.

It’d been Dr. Bill’s final car and had just enough life left to make the journey down to Islamorada once a month for Mexican food. It was about that often that Thorn wanted a break from snapper, grouper, trout, lobster, his payments, or gifts, from the guides who knew who he was, where he was, and what he did better than anybody else in the Keys.

All of his two dozen regular customers could tie their own flies, often bringing one by so Thorn could admire. But Thorn could do something else, some bright tiny nightmare magic he could bring to that chenille, that pipe-cleaner body, the flourish of calf tail or rabbit fur or cat. His flies caught fish. And not one of them looked like anything real.

Let it drift down into the murky dull mud of a saltwater flat, down into the drab world of bonefish, that little wedge of clear epoxy with bead-chain eyes and a flare of calf tail, and drag that fantasy through the silt anywhere in the peripheral sight of a bone and it’d smack that thing and run that zinging line to Bimini.

Bones ate like paranoid schizophrenics. Scared of food half the time. Offer them a jumbo shrimp, flicking away in front of their noses, snap, they’d be gone into the fourth dimension. But flicker one of those garish little gremlins nearby and they just might gulp a ton of them. You never knew. Not even the best ever knew.

Far as Thorn could tell, it was a kind of voodoo. He didn’t have any picture in mind, but he’d sit there at that old railroad desk, start pulling scraps of fur from pigeonholes, badger, possum, raccoon, horse, cow, dog. Get his clear nail polish ready, his bobbin, his scissors, his hackle pliers, holding, tying, looping, imagining. Three-eyed Louie came in a frenzy like that. No plan. But it emerged, three silver eyes across a bar in front, and for one whole June in 1979 it caught bones every day from Marathon to Card Sound. Then poof, it was over. The guides standing out on the dock, shaking their heads, grinning at the bounty, frowning at the ongoing search.

That was the great pleasure of this for Thorn. The minor wacko variations. Permutations of eyes, head, body, tail. And always the barbless hook. There were a hundred thousand possible bonefish flies. Oh, hell, lots more than that. Nobody had found one that worked every time. Nobody ever would. The best bonefishermen in the world could go a week without having one on. They could pole across a hundred miles of flats, see a hundred tailing fish, lay a quiet line and a perfect lure right in their path, perfect presentation a hundred times, and that fish would rather starve.

Those guys were priests. They thought like priests. It meant whatever they thought they kept to themselves. When they did talk, they all talked alike, quiet as dust floating in church. And they had eyes burned hard and transparent by the sun off shallow water, from tracking ghosts with a ten-ton pull.

Thorn had been one of them for a decade. Back from his failed year at college, he’d started up. Nineteen and with about nineteen years of experience on the flats. Baptized out there. Knew how to be quiet and blend in. For ten years he tried to learn how to take money from strangers who knew how to do neither.

The lures, though, they were the real art. And as he moved through his twenties, he found it was tying flies, dreaming into life these surreal roaches, that sustained him.

At thirty he had quit guiding and started carving soap molds for his epoxy bodies, looking for the shape that slid across the bottom, glided and twitched with that rhythm he could picture but not describe.

Until Sarah had begun to change things, he’d been content with the hours of narrow focus. Willing to warm himself before these small, fiery creations. For years he’d stayed hidden away in the woods, the only action in his life happening deep inside. That had been enough. The silence. The reading. The food. The weather. The bonefish strikes. But now it wasn’t. He was starting to feel a hunger. Lately he’d found his eyes drifting up from the desk, looking off.

God, Thorn couldn’t believe it, but he’d even begun, at those moments, his eyes wandering out into the distance, to speak her name.

Thorn finished the Crazy Charlie. Set it beside the Flig and the Muddler he’d finished last night. Crazy Charlie—its knobby backbone was glossy purple. Iridescent trailers. Bug-eyed with a silver eyelet for a mouth. This one had a small disposition problem. Thorn noticed it now. One of its bead-chain eyes looked askance. Walleyed Charlie. It wasn’t pleased, brought together like this.

Thorn broke the eye out of the epoxy body, touched the socket with another speck of clear nail polish, and reset the eye. There it was. A straight-ahead look. Smug, cocky even, but still vulnerable. Not an inch long, and nothing on it had ever met up with salt water before. But the thing would drift down to the marshy bottom and flicker into the dreams of the strongest, spookiest fish there was.

He stood and stretched, walked outside, and sat on his porch railing, watching the distant mangrove island lighten. His stilt house was twenty feet from Blackwater Sound, a quiet bay rimmed with mangroves. His coral and limestone dock ran out a hundred feet into about two feet of water at high tide. Behind him the two sets of French doors he’d put in were opened, and a breeze stirred the musky air of his house. The smell of pelts, salt marshes, brackish air.

Dr. Bill had left him the house. When Thorn was still in high school, Dr. Bill had used it as a retreat. Just three miles south from their house, but still a getaway. Thorn had never even seen it till Dr. Bill died, and suddenly it was his.

It’d been full of carpentry tools, saws and the belt sanders he’d used to smooth off the edges of those molded, sculptured chairs. That was something else Thorn had never seen or known about till after the funeral. The furniture he’d grown up with had been country-simple, straight-backed oak chairs and round oak tables and plain oak breakfront.

Thorn had scoured his new house, searching for the sex magazines or leather harnesses, any secret that could’ve made Dr. Bill more than the tough, flat-sided man he seemed. It was just chairs.

Uncomfortable-looking things. Everyone who visited tried to avoid them. Without cushion or pad, they looked like the chairs in the corner of the classroom for the misbehaving kid. But once Thorn had coaxed a newcomer into one, they would sigh, go slack, close their eyes like they’d just eased into a warm bath. It was weird, because Dr. Bill had never been a rester, never been a coddler either. The chairs threw Dr. Bill out of focus.

Thorn kept a few of them, donated the rest to friends, the Salvation Army. “You sure you want to get rid of these? These aren’t junk.”

“Absolutely.”

Now the one-room house was uncluttered. Plank floors. No shades on the windows. He had an acre of buffer on both sides. He was about four hundred yards down a gravel road from U.S. 1. If anyone wanted a peep of him, they’d have to pole into the flats off shore.

He had a small collection of books, some poetry and sea stories left from childhood. He’d run two shelves for them above his bed and filled up the spaces between them with horse conchs, queen conchs, and cowries he’d salvaged from around the reefs twenty years before. There was a Frigidaire that Dr. Bill had kept stocked with Black Label, still chugging in one corner, and a sink next to it with a red checked skirt to cover the plumbing and Ajax and roach spray. Kate had given him an Oriental rug he laid out between the foot of his bed and the sunset porch. And there were two pole lamps with lampshades covered with nautical insignia, boat wheels, life preservers that an old girl friend had given him. The walls were pine paneling, Dade County pine, supposedly impervious to termites, though he’d been finding suspicious-looking wings in cobwebs the past few months.