James Hall - Off the Chart

Thorn drew a breath. In the last few months Lawton’s condition had suffered a series of small and quirky downturns. For one thing, there were these new flashes of irritability. Curses flared to the old man’s lips without warning or cause.

‘This puppy and me,’ Lawton said, ‘we’ve bonded. It’d be a goddamn criminal travesty to separate us.’

‘We’ll talk to Alex when she gets home. See what she says.’

‘I don’t give a shit what she says. If I want a dog, by God, I’ll have a dog. I’m too goddamn old to take orders anymore.’

The puppy fastened his teeth onto the tip of Lawton’s finger. But as Lawton stroked the Lab’s throat, the spiky puppy’s eyes closed and with a quiet groan he began to nurse on the old man’s crinkled fingertip.

‘I need a dog, goddamn it,’ Lawton said. ‘I need somebody to talk to.’

‘You can talk to me,’ said Thorn. ‘Anytime you want.’

‘You know what I mean,’ Lawton said. ‘Somebody on my own level.’

Thorn smiled.

‘How old am I anyway?’ Lawton said.

‘Not all that old.’

‘Am I still a boy?’

Thorn shook his head.

‘Older than a boy.’

‘Well, damn it, I feel like a boy,’ Lawton said. ‘I feel twelve. That’s all right, isn’t it? Feeling twelve? I mean, it’s not sick, is it, feeling that way?’

‘I’d say that’s fine. Twelve is a damn good age.’

‘Well, good, then I’m a boy,’ Lawton said. ‘And every boy needs a goddamn dog. So this one’s mine.’

As Lawton stroked the pup, Thorn leaned back, propped his elbows in the brittle grass. The sky had gone pink with honeyed whisks and spatters of color as bright and unnameable as the garish shades of reef fish. A school of cherry clouds cruised in formation a hundred miles aloft, and the entire bay had turned the hazy pink of brick dust.

As the final glint of sun disappeared, he heard the foghorn blare of a conch shell blown from a neighbor’s rooftop. A venerable Keys tradition still hanging on, a long single-noted salute to the dying day performed with the shell of the nearly extinct gastropod. The queen conch, official symbol of the Florida Keys, had almost vanished from her waters. Too many roadside stands, too many tourists looking for a cheap memento of their week in paradise, too many conch fritters and bowls of conch chowder. These days the roadside stands had to air-freight their conch shells from distant oceans where the locals still believed they were the keepers of a limitless supply.

While Lawton tussled with the puppy, Thorn got back up and went over to the shade of the gumbo-limbo. He opened a can of yellow paint, stirred it till it was oily thick, then began to spread it on the new bench.

As the first coat of paint dried, Thorn lit the charcoal in the grill and went back upstairs to marinate the fillet of a dolphin that he and Lawton had caught the day before out on the edge of the Gulf Stream. He set a pan of brown rice to boil on the stove and sliced up a fresh avocado, a portobello mushroom, and a meaty tomato, fresh produce Alexandra had selected last weekend at the farmer’s stall in the Key Largo flea market.

Thorn drew the cork on a bottle of wine she’d brought down from Miami and poured himself an inch in a squat highball glass. It was her favorite wine, a lush cabernet from Oregon. They’d been indulging themselves these last few months. Good wines, fresh fish, chocolates for dessert. A diet far richer than either of them was used to. He supposed it was the flush of love that gave them such indulgent appetites, as if their senses had become so inflamed from the constant sight and touch and smell of each other’s flesh that only the most luscious foods could compete.

When he was finished with the preparations he walked onto the porch. The sky was a dreary gray. Only a seam of red still burned along the horizon. Lawton was out by the dock, trying to teach the dog to sit. The puppy had no attention span and barked in protest each time Lawton set his rump back down in the grass and commanded him to stay put.

As Thorn was settling the mahimahi steaks and portobello onto the grill, Alex pulled in the gravel drive and parked her glossy blue Honda behind his rusty VW. Thorn pushed the steaks to the edge away from the fire. He walked over and met her at the car.

‘He’s got a dog,’ Thorn said.

Alexandra looked past him into the yard. ‘I see that.’

‘It just came wandering out of the woods and he adopted it.’

‘And you said he could keep it?’

‘I said we’d wait till you got home and talk about it then.’

‘So I get to be the bad guy.’

‘I’ll do it. If that’s what you decide.’

Thorn leaned in and gave her a kiss on the lips, which after a couple of seconds warmed to something more than a hello.

The tart scent of her long day’s work in Miami clung to her clothes and flesh. She averaged a half-dozen crime scenes on a typical shift, shooting several rolls of film on each one, using her video camera on the larger scenes. From what Thorn gathered, it was hardly glamorous, rarely more than routine. Women beaten to death by boyfriends, teenage boys shot down in their first drug deal, geriatric suicides, babies fatally shaken by mothers trying to keep the little brats quiet. Mainly Alexandra moved through small dismal rooms with peeling paint and furniture abandoned by long-departed occupants, one sprawling body after another, usually discarded hypodermics, baggies of crack somewhere nearby. In the years she’d been doing it, Alexandra had cataloged so much death and misery, made such a study of cruelty’s stark poses, it was a wonder the heavy shadows of her work didn’t mute her laughter or dim her nearly ceaseless smile.

Finally she drew out of the embrace and pressed a hand to his chest to hold him at bay, a not-now-but-definitely-later smile in her eyes.

‘So about this dog.’

‘Well, I tried to stay neutral because I thought it was your call.’

‘Because he’s my dad.’

‘I didn’t think it was my place to decide.’

‘Meanwhile, look at him.’

Lawton was lying in the grass near the dock, flat on his back, hands laced behind his head, with the Lab’s snout propped on Lawton’s chest.

‘A dog is a long-term commitment,’ she said. ‘You ready for that?’

She turned her head slowly and fixed her eyes on Thorn’s.

‘Never been readier.’

A ghost of skepticism hovered just below the surface of her smile.

‘So it just came walking out of the woods?’

‘ Poof , like that.’

She lifted her hands and raked her fingers through her thick black hair as if unsnarling the thousand invisible knots from her long day. He heard what sounded like a quiet groan of pleasure escape from her throat. Then she tipped her head back and shook her hair so it rustled along the back of her white sleeveless blouse. Thorn looked at her neck, at her delicate ears, at the dusting of dark hair that formed her sideburns.

‘A boy and his dog,’ she said. ‘Oh, hell, why not?’

She put an arm around his waist and they walked down to the shoreline.

‘I’ve named him,’ Lawton said. ‘I’ve named the dog.’

‘Hello, Dad,’ she said.

‘I’m calling him Lawton.’

‘But that’s your name.’

The dog was staring up at Lawton as if waiting for the next command.

‘I know it’s my name. What do you think, I’m so far gone I don’t know my own name?’

‘You think that’s a good idea?’ Thorn said. ‘Two Lawtons, that might be one too many.’

‘Why not? It’s a good name,’ Lawton said. ‘It’s served me well.’

‘We might get you two confused. Lawton the dog, Lawton the dad.’

‘Get us confused? Now who’s losing their mind? I’m a man, this is a dog. How’re you going to get us confused?’