James Hall - Off the Chart

Frozen in the center of the room, Antoinette stared at the curtains. Just beyond that window Jack Joy groaned like a man lifting more than he could manage, and the whole house shuddered.

Antoinette flew across the room, whisked the shotgun from its bracket, and was out the door barrel-first. A second later the shotgun’s blast got two quick pistol shots in reply and the front window exploded. Jack Joy hurtled into the room, tearing down the red-checkered curtains and coming to rest in a sprawl of blood and mangled parts.

Outside, the shotgun roared again, and Vic stepped out the door with Anne close behind him.

Through the smoky dark Anne saw Al Woodson blown backward against the blinking schooner, his arms and legs tangled in the nest of wires. The bulbs continued their beat, but the big man was unmoving. On the floor at Anne’s feet lay her mother. She’d taken a slug in her seamless forehead and lay with arms flung wide against the porch as if waiting for her darling man to lower himself onto her one last time. Her foolish eyes still open, catching the green lights and the blue ones and the red, the eternal blinking of that schooner.

In the yard Sherman Woodson knelt with his hands high. Vic held the shotgun his mother had dropped. In his right hand Woodson still gripped his chrome pistol, but his hands waved unsteady circles in the air.

‘Your daddy done wrong, kid. Had his hand in the fucking cookie jar. We didn’t have no choice but to pay a visit. But didn’t nobody mean for this—’

Vic unloaded on the man and kicked him spread-eagled beside his brother into that web of lights that continued to twinkle across the dark valley below.

Anne stooped down and fingertipped her mother’s throat, felt the cold silence of the woman’s flesh, then raked the bloody hair off her face and closed the woman’s eyes. Anne blinked away the itch of tears, then turned on her brother.

‘Now what? There’s a hundred Woodsons within earshot.’

Vic dropped the shotgun in the dirt and stalked into the house and came out with a flour sack under one arm and Antoinette’s painting under the other.

‘What’s that?’

‘Our nest egg,’ Vic said.

Vic marched across the barren yard and stuffed the painting and the sack of money into the backseat and got in behind the wheel and cranked it up.

Full of the dreamy numbness that was to take up residence inside her head like a never-ending trance, Anne walked over to the car and got into the shotgun seat, and the two of them rolled silently down the hill, headlights off, and idled through the darkened town, then hit the highway south. For the next few hours bright lights raced up behind them, then slowly fell away as Vic held the pedal down and screamed through the black night.

Outrunning the Woodsons at last, they drove hard through Tennessee and Georgia, then entered the ceaseless gray monotony of north Florida, driving without rest or food, until the sky turned blue again and winter changed to summer in a single day and the birds grew stalky and white and America finally petered out and became no more than a dribble of rocky islands where the road ran narrow and low, seeming to plow a path right through the blue sea, as if Moses himself had gotten there just seconds before, leading the way to the promised land.

Beside her in the dark, Thorn listened to Anne Joy’s impetuous purging come to a close. When she was done, he lay silent for a moment more, staggered by her tale, searching for something to say. But before he could find the words, Anne slid from the bed, tramped to the bathroom, dressed quickly, and left his house without even a good-bye. Thorn hustled down the stairs after her, but she beat him to her car and was gone in a hail of pebbles.

She never returned to Thorn’s house and would only smile brightly at him when he showed up at her apartment to talk, giving no reply to his questions and finally asking him to leave.

Over time Thorn came to believe that the bond he and Anne had forged in that month of ravenous lust was simply too flimsy to support the sudden, unwieldy bulk of her past. Maybe later on if the structure had grown more secure and their trust more solid it would’ve been fine. God knew, Thorn’s own story could match hers death for death and shame for shame. But it was too early in the cycle for such a heavy dose of truth, and their fragile bond had crumbled to powder in that instant of confession.

Later, when Thorn returned to the memory of that evening, the seeds of what was to come were so obvious in Anne’s story, the warnings so goddamn clear. If only somehow he’d managed to grasp the prophetic hints, he would have climbed out of bed that very night, loaded his pistol, and driven a few miles down the Overseas Highway to kill one particular man – an act that would have spared many from death and shielded a young girl from terrible harm, that blameless, intelligent kid who was as close to a daughter as Thorn had ever known.

On that warm Sunday afternoon, when Thorn got back from the john, the drinks were just arriving. He and Alexandra Collins were at a table for six on the outside deck at the Lorelei in Islamorada. The sheer February light had turned the spacious bay to a brilliant blue mica. Over at the rail Lawton and Sugarman and his twin girls were peering down at the resident school of tarpon that threaded between the pilings.

‘Hey, stranger,’ the waitress said as she set their beers down on the table and put the Cokes in front of the empty places.

Thorn stumbled for a half-second, fetching for her name.

‘Oh, hey, Anne. How’s it going?’

‘Just another day in paradise,’ she said. ‘How about yourself?’

‘Fine, fine.’

She bent forward and pressed her lips to his. Inhaling that familiar scent of her shampoo, lime and something herbal, Thorn had a quick cascade of memories, a blur of nights together, their bodies knotted, sheets kicked to the floor. The final story that broke their bond for good.

More than a year had passed since Thorn had last seen Anne Joy. In her early thirties, she still kept her auburn hair cropped short, and her dark eyes had the same electric shine. Thin-lipped, with soft cheekbones, a sleek and coppery complexion, and the coolly impassive smile of a runway model. But her body was far too lushly proportioned for that profession, and no matter what bulky and unflattering styles Anne wore, she couldn’t conceal it.

She stepped back from the table and clutched her tray against her breasts.

Alexandra was looking up at Anne with a curious arch of eyebrow.

‘I think we’ll wait on the order,’ Thorn said. ‘Kids are feeding the fish.’

‘Sure, okay,’ she said. ‘Be back in a few.’

She took a second look at Alexandra, then gave Thorn a quick, approving smile and turned and set off toward her other tables.

‘I’m sorry,’ Thorn said. ‘I should’ve introduced you.’

‘So this is another one?’ Alex said.

‘Another what?’

‘Oh, come on, Thorn. Do you usually kiss your waitress? And this time don’t tell me you two were just old high school friends. She’s ten years too young.’

Alex shook her head, her smile wearing thin.

‘Hey, it’s a small town,’ he said. ‘Limited supply of single women.’

Alexandra tasted her Heineken. She watched Sugarman’s girls fling bits of bread into the water. The Lorelei was packed, tourists lining up to be seated.

‘Was it serious?’

‘A month maybe. Not serious, no.’

‘A month by my definition is fairly noteworthy.’ Alex peered into his eyes, cocking her head slightly, as if searching for a flicker of deceit.

‘We didn’t click,’ he said. ‘Anne’s a little intense, bottled-up.’