Dead Last (7 page)

He went inside and returned several minutes later with an armload of framed photographs and a table lamp. He heaved the junk into the center of the circle and went back inside.

When Rusty died, some crucial atom inside him had cracked apart and all the wild-eyed craziness that was stabilized by her presence went into a state of fission. Attractive and repulsive forces, knocked out of equilibrium, were releasing some mind-melting pulses. He’d tried to contain the meltdown but apparently it was too late. The chain reaction was under way.

Thorn knew this would be finished only when it had run its course, when all the electrostatic forces had neutralized their equal and opposite valences. Until then he could only stand apart and observe the mad electrons radiating around his body, and listen to the delirious hum in his head like some turbine spinning ten times past its tolerances, and observe himself committing acts he only dimly comprehended.

For the next two hours, while Sugarman watched from a lawn chair, Thorn made trip after trip into the house, returning to the circle of stones and pitching more of his accumulated possessions onto the heap.

Things he’d purchased himself, gifts from friends, items he’d inherited, objects he’d made by hand like his collections of carved wood plugs and bonefish flies, which for many years had been his sole source of income. He tossed a hinged maple box containing a hundred hand-tied flies he’d set aside for his own use some day, a day that had never come, and never would.

He carried out rods and reels, three mounted fish he’d caught as a kid, his first clumsy attempts at taxidermy, a half-deflated basketball, a pair of old prom shoes still glossy under decades of dust, scuzzy flip-flops and ragged sneakers he’d outgrown years ago that were forgotten on a back shelf in a closet down the hall, and the dresses and flowery skirts of women who’d shared his bed for a time and left them behind in the haste and confusion of their final getaways. Sarah, Monica, Darcy, Alexandra, Rusty, and the others. A string of hard-nosed, beautiful ladies.

He hauled out an assortment of straw sun-hats his adoptive mother, Kate Truman, used to wear when she was fishing with her husband, Dr. Bill. The woman had died twenty years ago, but the hats were still haloed with the lilac scent of Kate’s favorite perfume.

He threw her hats on the pile, along with cardboard boxes containing documents Kate had accumulated: tax statements, paid receipts, and income ledgers from her fishing guide business decades past; a vast hoard of paper where dozens of palmetto bugs scurried for safety, stacks of papers that were irrelevant when they were filed away, and were a hundred times more irrelevant every year thereafter, yet Thorn had never had the heart to toss any of them out until that day.

When the mound grew to the edge of the rock circle, Thorn walked to the boat house north of the basin and took down a can of kerosene from a high shelf. He brought it back and walked around the edge of the circle, splashing it over the pile.

“Your flies, Thorn? You’ve got thousands of hours invested in that.”

“You want them, take them. Now’s your chance.”

Sugarman made no move.

“I wouldn’t want to hamper your fun. But buddy, you might want to wet a line again someday.”

“Then I’ll tie some new flies.”

Thorn dug a wooden match from the pocket of his shorts and scratched it against a stone. He held it out, studied the flame for a moment, then bent down and touched it to a framed photo taken aboard the ancient thirty-foot Chris-Craft, the
Heart Pounder,
Thorn at sixteen, shirtless, his hair longer and blonder than it ever was again. Thorn was grinning at Sugarman, who with Kate Truman’s help was holding up a sailfish he’d just hauled from the blue-green waters at the edge of the stream.

Thorn watched the fire take hold and when he was sure it was fully caught, he plodded back to the house to resume his cleansing.

FIVE

FOR THE NEXT FEW HOURS
while the bonfire raged, Thorn hauled out more junk. At midnight gusts of sparks were still swirling skyward. Sugarman dozed in the Adirondack chair, waking up now and then when Thorn crashed a table or bookcase into the flames.

Around two in the morning, Thorn carried out two suitcases, set them on the grass near Sugarman’s chair, and nudged his friend’s leg. Sugar woke, his hand swatting reflexively at a mist of mosquitoes.

“Something for you.”

Sugar stretched and rubbed his face. Most of the smoke was riding out to sea on the off-shore wind, but a thick haze had collected around the sheltered dock lights and hung like melancholy fog.

Thumbing open the latch of one suitcase, he took a look.

“Well, at least you haven’t completely lost your mind.”

The case was packed with books, some Thorn had reread many times over the years. A collection of paperback sea stories, mysteries, and adventure yarns, and some bird guides and books on weather and Florida history. His Travis McGee paperbacks, some Rudyard Kipling, Patrick O’Brian, and the complete Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

“There’s more inside. In boxes. Take them with you. Give them to your girls, donate them to the library, or keep them, I don’t care.”

“Listen, Thorn.”

“Don’t try to talk sense to me, Sugar.”

“Oh, I know better than that.”

“I’m starting fresh,” he said.

“That’s what this is about? Starting fresh?”

“Call it simplifying. All this shit was weighing me down.”

“Thorn, you got fewer possessions than anybody I know.”

“Now I have less.”

They stood watching the swirl of the bonfire.

“In the past, when the bad shit came raining down,” Sugar said, “there was always a path to justice. Some righteous action to take. A person to track, clues to unravel. But this is different. Rusty got sick, she fought it and lost. It was a natural chain of events. There’s nothing to fix, no way to make it right. You can’t track down God and punch him out.”

“What God?”

“Okay, okay. You’re going to do what you’re going to do. I can’t stop you, and I’m not about to try. But before I leave I got two things to say.”

Thorn stayed put. He was weary beyond endurance. The scream in his head had died to a vicious hum. Nothing he couldn’t manage. He’d had tequila hangovers that were worse.

“You won’t remember this, but I been planning it for a year. Tomorrow I’m taking Jackie and Janey to the Grand Canyon. We’ll fly to Phoenix, rent a car, be gone ten days, seven hiking, plus the out-and-back travel time.”

His twin girls were teenagers, living with their mom in Lauderdale. A nincompoop judge had found her more competent than Sugarman.

“So?”

“So I’ll change my plans, call off the trip if you need me.”

“Why would I?”

“Thorn, you’re halfway around the bend. You’re having a last-straw crack-up. One thing too many, one thing more than even Job had to handle. Because Rusty was healthy one minute, gone the next. Because she was the first woman in years that could take your bullshit and keep smiling while she gave it back with a double scoop. And because you just spent the day burning everything you own.”

“I’m not half done.”

Thorn heard the rage in his own voice, but was powerless to stop it. He was skidding down an oil slick highway with no brakes, the steering wheel useless in his hands. Sugarman in his headlights.

“Okay, so I’ll be gone till a week from Sunday. I’ll have my cell. You need me to come back, call me. You understand what I’m saying?”

“That’s one thing. What’s the other?”

“You need to promise me you’re not about to take your own life.”

Thorn said nothing.

“I’m not leaving until I get your word. I won’t have that on my conscience. You understand me? If I have to, I’ll chain you to a palm tree till this thing blows over.”

“You couldn’t manage that.”

“Don’t try me, Thorn.”

Thorn stared into Sugarman’s eyes and said nothing.

“Okay, if that’s how it is, then I’m staying.”

Thorn turned to watch the haze moving past the dock lights, teased into action by a draft off the Atlantic.

“Go on your trip, Sugar. Make your girls happy, hike the canyon, take some snapshots, buy them all the pizza they can eat. Tell them Uncle Thorn sends his love.”

“Is that your promise? You’ll not harm yourself?”

“Go on, Sugar. Be with your family. I just need to get rid of a few things. Simplify, start fresh. Really. I’ll be fine. Go.”

Sugarman studied Thorn’s eyes for a minute.

“Okay,” he said finally. “But you know this will pass. It doesn’t feel like it now, but it will.”

“I know it will,” Thorn said. “It’s already started.”

In tense silence they carted boxes of books from the house to Sugar’s dinged-up Honda. When the car was packed, Sugarman got in, started it, and gave his headlights a farewell flash.

Thorn raised a hand and waved at the lights. It took all his strength.

After Sugar was gone, Thorn decided he was too exhausted to toss more furniture into the fire. He had just enough energy left for his clothes.

That shouldn’t take long. Thorn’s wardrobe consisted of a collection of threadbare cowboy shirts and flowered Hawaiians and T-shirts from local bars and tackle shops. Some shorts and jeans he’d had for thirty years, Jockey shorts so droopy they wouldn’t make decent cleaning rags.

He gathered up the shirts and pants and an armload of socks and gym clothes he’d worn in high school and a black pea jacket Kate had given him when he went away to college in Baltimore. He’d dropped out after only two months, long before it got cold enough to wear the thing. It was heavy and reeked of mildew.

He threw the clothes in the fire. Threw the bedsheets in. Threw in his towels and baseball caps and running shoes and boat shoes and an old Timex Dr. Bill had awarded him at his high school graduation. It was still counting off the seconds when it disappeared into the flames.

Stashed at the bottom of Rusty’s lingerie drawer, he found her father’s Colt .45. When Rusty was five, the tortured man had pressed that pistol to his temple. Somehow he’d only wounded himself with the first shot and managed to pull the trigger a second time before his skull blew apart. A drunk and compulsive womanizer who couldn’t keep a job, he’d beaten Rusty’s mother for as long as Rusty could remember. The two gunshots woke Rusty from a nap and she stumbled outside to find the old man’s body slumped against her swing-set. Her mother kept the pistol and passed it along to Rusty before she died. A ghastly reminder of the man’s final hateful act.

Thorn filled a liquor box with Rusty’s underthings and set the pistol on top and carried it out to the fire. He took out the pistol, checked the magazine to make sure it was loaded, and set it on the ground at his feet, then tossed her silkies into the flames.

He watched them crinkle and turn to smoke, then peeled off his shorts and the gray T-shirt he was wearing and slung them into the fire on top of Rusty’s stuff. Then he stripped off his undershorts and tossed them too. Let their smoke mingle and rise to the sky, and blow away.

Standing naked and barefoot on the soft grass, Thorn stared into the blaze where something in the pile was releasing streamers of blue and green and yellow, like bright ribbons intertwined in the yellow flames. Birthday bows and frilly Christmas decorations coiling into the dark.

A breeze carried the smoke away and his lungs filled with cleaner air.

He picked up the pistol, lifted it, took aim at the fire.

He fired and fired twice more and then a fourth time and was about to empty the weapon when a car’s headlights swept across the yard and settled on him. Whoever it was flicked on their brights and cut the engine.

Thorn, naked, holding a half-empty pistol, had an audience.

Through the smoke and dazzle of the headlights he made out the car door opening and a shadow stepping out.

“Excuse me, sir. Is everything okay?” A woman’s voice. A stranger.

Thorn said nothing. She reached back into the car and turned off the headlights and walked slowly across the lawn toward the flames. She appeared to be a blocky woman with short hair, wearing trousers and a loose-fitting shirt.

Thorn stepped around the fire.

“I was driving past and heard the gunfire. Everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine. No problem. You can go about your business.”

The woman held her ground, head tipped forward, squinting through the smoky darkness.

“Well, you see, that’s the thing. I think you may be my business.”

“You’re wrong. I’m nobody’s business.”

“Are you Daniel Oliver Thorn?”

He didn’t reply.

“Though I believe people just call you Thorn. Am I in the right place?”

“That’s my name.”

“Whew, I wasn’t sure. It’s so dark out here, no house numbers.”

“It’s the middle of the night. What do you want?”

“Valid question, yes, sir, it certainly is. Actually, I hadn’t meant to stop. My plane got into Miami late, I picked up my rental, drove down to find a motel, then I thought maybe I’d try to find your place to mark the spot for tomorrow. ’Cause that was my intention, to drop by at a decent hour. But I saw the fire, heard gunshots. No way I could drive on.”

“What is this?”

“You’re the husband of the late Rachel Anne Stabler, known as Rusty?”

Thorn was silent. His body had hardened, lips too stiff to speak.

“I’ve caught you at an awkward moment. Buck naked, firing a pistol into a bonfire. Maybe it’s normal around here. What you folks do in the Keys, a ritual or whatever. I heard things down here get a little strange. But sir, wouldn’t you feel more comfortable putting on a pair of pants? Setting that pistol on the ground. I know I’d be more easy.”

There was something wrong with her face. He couldn’t make it out in the flickering firelight, bad acne scars or burns.

“What’s your name?”

“Well, okay, since I’m here, I guess we could do this now if you want.”

“I asked your name.”

“All right. My name’s Buddha. Buddha Hilton.”