Off the Chart. James Hall

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      ‘Eleven o’clock, two hundred yards.’

      Sugar swung to the left and caught only a flash of the bird. The godwit made a wide arc to the west to avoid some tourist strapped into a parasail.

      ‘Yeah, yeah. Good eyes, Janey. Good eyes. Or was that a curlew?’

      ‘It’s a godwit, Daddy. The bill’s too straight for a curlew.’

      Janey trained her binoculars on a platoon of pelicans skimming a foot above the leaden surface of Blackwater Sound. It was the first weekend in March, another blast of cold air pushing through, chopping up the water, tossing the palms, a spritz of chilly rain now and then from the blue-black clouds sailing past. Thorn was upstairs with Alexandra making lunch while Lawton snoozed in the hammock that was strung up between two coconut palms.

      At the picnic table on the upstairs porch, Jackie had her chin propped on her fists. She was fuming again. She’d wanted to go back to the Lorelei to hear that reggae band they’d listened to three weeks ago. Sugarman said no. Uncle Thorn had invited them to lunch and he’d gone to a lot of trouble. Just yesterday he’d traded a few dozen of his custom bonefish flies with one of his regular customers for ten pounds of stone crabs and a bucket of fresh shrimp.

      Jackie said she hated stone crabs and she was pretty sure she hated shrimp, too. Before it escalated further, Alexandra said she’d run down to the Upper Crust for a double cheese and pepperoni twelve-incher. But nothing would appease Jackie. She had inherited a heavy dose of her mother’s pissy tendencies. Me first and last and always. Sugarman tried to treat the twins evenhandedly, but at times like this it was rough. Jackie was just so damn frustrating, coasting along fine one minute, in a full-blown snit the next.

      Beside Sugarman at the end of Thorn’s dock, Janey sat with binoculars pressed to her eyes. For the last half hour she and Sugar had been scanning the overcast sky, the rocky shoreline, and the snarl of woods that edged both sides of Thorn’s property, spotting birds, racing to see who could ID them first.

      As usual, Janey was way ahead. On the drive down the eighteen-mile stretch from the mainland into the Keys, she’d already collected five roseate spoonbills, a dozen white pelicans, uncountable egrets and herons, and five kingfishers on the telephone wires. Since they’d been at Thorn’s she’d spotted another kingfisher, two warblers, a red-shouldered hawk, and an osprey. Suspended about a half-mile overhead, there was a single frigate bird holding its place in the currents with small tips of its wings. So far Janey had missed the frigate bird, but Sugarman was confident she’d notice it soon enough.

      While she combed the darkening sky, Sugar set aside his binoculars and began to thumb through The Sibley Guide to Birds. He wanted to have the Latin name ready when she finally noticed the frigate bird. A juicy factoid would be nice, too. Lately, Janey had been sponging up the names of birds and bugs and reptiles so fast, Sugar had started to worry he was slipping in his parental duties. Each week before their visitation, he’d been doing homework – an hour or two poring over Sibley or one of the Audubon field guides he’d been collecting. From a lifetime in the Keys he already had a pretty good command of shore-birds and waders, and he was good on the diurnal raptors. The anhinga, boobies, cormorants, and the rest of the pelecaniformes he knew. He was weak on small sandpipers, but the tourist birds were what really threw him. The Keys were a north-south highway for a variety of the migratory species, some pretty exotic specimens flittering past all through the winter and spring. Purple martins, swallow-tailed kites, parrots, shrikes and vireos, wrens and finches and sparrows. It’d take him two more lifetimes to keep all those sparrows straight.

      ‘Over there by those ferns,’ Sugar said. ‘What’s that bobbing its tail?’

      She swung her binoculars around and found the bird.

      ‘Oh, you know what that is, Daddy. It’s a palm warbler. They’re always in the dirt, hardly ever in tree branches.’ She panned the binoculars slowly back and forth across the dense foliage. ‘Did I tell you about the tufted titmouse?’

      ‘The one in Orlando?’ Sugar said.

      ‘At Disney World. It was sitting in a bush shaped like a brontosaurus. Its call is real loud. Peter-peter-peter. Tufted titmouses are rare down here in the Keys, huh?’

      ‘Yeah, you hardly ever see them this far south,’ Sugar said. ‘But I think the plural is titmice.’

      ‘Look at that, Daddy. Up there.’ Janey had her binoculars tilted up.

      Sugarman was ready for her.

      ‘Fregata magnificens,’ he said. ‘The frigate has the longest wings relative to its weight of any bird there is. Steals food from other birds, a pirate.’

      ‘Not the frigate bird,’ Janey said. ‘That man in the kite.’

      ‘Is that damn flasher back again?’ Thorn had come out on the dock behind them with a plate of crackers and smoked fish spread. ‘Close your eyes, Janey. This guy is gross.’

      ‘He’s taking pictures of us,’ Janey said. ‘Look.’

      She raised her binoculars and handed them to Thorn.

      It took him a few seconds to locate the big blue parasail against that dark sky and then tilt down to see the guy strapped into the sling below it. He wore a black tank top and white shorts and a red bandanna on his head. He was holding a camera, clicking away.

      ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ said Thorn. ‘That who I think it is?’

      Sugarman tightened his focus.

      ‘Maybe he thinks I’m still dating his sister.’

      ‘I’d heard about this,’ Sugarman said. ‘The guy’s been working up and down the coast taking pictures. Three or four people told me about it, but I didn’t believe it.’

      ‘Who is it?’ Janey said.

      ‘A bad man,’ said Thorn. ‘A crook.’

      Sugarman said, ‘His name is Vic Joy, honey.’

      The boat that was hauling the parasail made a slow turn away from shore, circling out to deeper waters.

      ‘What makes him so bad?’

      ‘Probably his past,’ Thorn said. ‘Things that happened to him when he was a kid.’

      ‘No,’ Janey said. ‘What does he do that’s so bad?’

      ‘He takes advantage of people, sweetheart,’ Sugar said. ‘He doesn’t play fair. He tries to get what he wants no matter who it hurts.’

      Janey stared out at the bay for a moment, filing away this new fact. The water was glazed with silver like cooling lava. The shifting scent of the cold front rode the breeze, mingling its rough blend of fall leaves, wood smoke, and the sweet burn of fresh-cut pine with the sulfur and saffron of the resident tropical air mass.

      Janey lifted her binoculars and swung them to the right. So much for bad men – now back to work.

      ‘Yellow-crowned night heron, Daddy. Look, three o’clock.’

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