Buzz Cut (41 page)

"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.

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.

The joystick was dead in his hand and the throttle had no effect. The
Juggernaut
was guiding itself to a destination it seemed to have decided upon on its own. Plowing ahead through a vicious following sea, going much slower than usual, five knots, four, David Chan had no earthly idea where he was, no idea where he was headed. And he had begun to feel that it would not make much difference if he did.

***

Thorn and Monica showered together and Thorn was instantly ready again. Something to be said for the age spread, something on both sides. Monica shaking her head at his erection, taking it in her hand and pushing it down as if it were a catapult. Letting it spring back up. Set a boulder there and fire, by God. Send it over the wall.

"How old are you again?" she said.

"I forget," said Thorn. "I'm at the age where I can't subtract the year of my birth from the current year anymore. I stopped being able to do that the last couple of years. In any case, I know I'm younger now than I was an hour ago."

She soaped him between the legs. Ducking down, she slid her hand between his cheeks, came up on the other side. Thorn going "Wheee." But not completely sure it was out loud.

That's how it had been for the last hour. The separation between inside and out had dissolved. He wasn't certain if she was in his head or he in hers or neither of the above. Something he remembered from his dope-smoking days. Impossible to tell which words were spoken, which were merely thoughts.

The soap was down to a double-thick credit card, just enough to lather Monica's abundant blond patch. Big triangular foam, working his fingers in, getting her folds clean, the folds inside those folds. Another "wheee," but he wasn't sure if that was her or him or just a random creak of the ship.

They'd probably docked already. The passengers had probably bought every geegaw in Nassau, every straw hat, every voodoo doll, and reboarded, and they'd crossed the thousand miles of sea to Jamaica and on to Mexico by now. Gone through the Panama Canal, come out the other side, into the Pacific. That's how he felt, that bar of soap gliding over her and gliding over him. A slippery finger, a tight velvety place, the nubs and pleats of her flesh. The Panama Canal, easing through the locks. Moving from one body to another, that isthmus, that narrow neck of land. A ship slipping in one side, slipping out the other. Entering a new place. As if the two of them were pouring warm milk from one pitcher to another and back again. He was one vessel, she the other. Back and forth they poured the milk.

The shower was warm and her body was fitting better than it should for someone so different from anyone he knew. For the moment she wasn't twenty-five and he wasn't twenty years older. They were meeting somewhere without numbers and almost without words. Tasting the bitter soap on her lips, committing rubbery kisses, while she got him very clean and he got her just as clean in return. The cleanest he remembered being. Cleaner than that. So clean he might squeak the rest of his life. "Wheee," one of them said as the soap shot out of someone's hand. Or was it soap or was it a ship through a canal going to the other side, the Pacific Ocean, that wide body of peaceful water. Milk flowing back and forth, warming one pitcher, then the other.