Off the Chart. James Hall

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was Monday morning after another raucous weekend with Sugar’s kids. A day of bird-watching and hide-and-go-seek. Lawton was pretty funny, doing a stiff-legged Frankenstein walk, arms outstretched, eyes squinty, as he searched for the squealing girls, who hid behind bushes and in closets. At dinner Jackie nibbled at her pizza while the rest of them scarfed stone crabs and shrimp.

      After Alexandra left for work and Lawton climbed into his hammock with a stack of fishing magazines, Thorn tied on his carpenter’s apron, filled the pockets with nails, and dug into his latest project. He’d been working on it for the last month and had almost finished the framing, raiding the tall stack of milled hardwood planks that had been lying on the gravel beneath his stilt house for years. They were leftovers from the time when he’d had to rebuild the place entirely, and now he’d decided those old boards would work perfectly for enclosing the downstairs area – the open space between the eight telephone poles that held his house fifteen feet above the ground.

      It was to be a room for Lawton, granting all of them a measure of privacy they hadn’t known since Alex and her dad moved in. For the last few months Lawton had been sleeping on a cot in Thorn’s living room, a mere ten feet away from where he and Alexandra shared a bed. Thorn had told the two of them that he was building a workshop, wanting to keep the real intention secret until the room had actually taken decent shape.

      At Thorn’s current rate, he figured Lawton’s room would take another month to finish. By then he was fairly certain he’d know if it was safe to tell Alexandra the true purpose of the space. The reason he’d shied away from confessing it already was that he didn’t want to scare her off. It seemed so permanent, such a pivotal step. A room for Lawton. An unmistakable display of the growing bond he felt toward the old man and his beautiful daughter.

      At noon he’d finally finished the framing. To celebrate he decided to take Lawton on the skiff, go out past Crocodile Dragover to McCormick Creek, check some snook holes he knew. Do some damage to the fish population.

      So he showered, put on fresh shorts and a white T-shirt, and carried his spinning rods and tackle box down to the skiff. Out at the end of his dock, he heard the grinding roar, a noise he’d become all too familiar with lately. Two properties to the north a bulldozer was leveling the Island House. For fifty years the small motel with a half-dozen quaint bungalows had been at that location. He’d heard Doug and Debbie Johnson had sold out but assumed the new owner would keep it intact as all the previous owners had for half a century.

      Thorn stood at the end of his dock and watched the big machine uproot an old gumbo-limbo, then flatten a stand of wispy Australian pines, mowing down those shallow-rooted trees that took decades to reach those heights. That rocky shore and the rickety motel had been in his peripheral vision for so many hours and so many years that now, with the coastline so suddenly altered, he was feeling a whirl of vertigo.

      When the land clearing was done, Thorn’s neighborhood was probably going to be getting another of those ten-thousand-square-foot get-away-for-the-weekend mansions. A million-dollar party house owned by a Miami heart surgeon or a pitcher for the Florida Marlins – with a half-dozen Jet Skis and a flashy red speedboat at the dock. Progress.

      Back on the shoreline Lawton was standing in water to his ankles with fishing line tangled around both arms. In the stiff breeze, his casting practice had been going badly.

      In a couple of hours Alexandra would be home and they’d open a bottle of wine and hold hands while they watched the last trickle of the daylight drain from the sky. If she was in the mood, she’d tell him about one of her cases that day. Keeping it light but still managing to give him a glimpse of the brutalities that were commonplace in her daytime world. He’d recount his time with Lawton, things the old man had said or done. And she would listen without comment, her eyes on the distance. After these few months, their routine felt solid and reliable. Thorn, his lover, and his lover’s father, an odd little family but a family nonetheless. For someone who’d spent most of his life working hard to stay isolated, it was startling to discover how much satisfaction he found in the constant presence of that old man and his strong-willed, beautiful daughter.

      Thorn smiled at Lawton’s struggle with the fly line and headed over to give him a hand – glad to have some reason to pull away from the bulldozer’s dismal work. He was halfway down the dock when the car pulled off the Overseas Highway and began to inch down Thorn’s gravel drive. A dark blue Crown Victoria.

      The car parked in the shade near his house and the man who got out from behind the wheel was squat and square-faced, with a paunch stressing the buttons on his blue madras shirt. Despite his stumpy legs, the man advanced on Thorn with a cocky stride. His head was shaved and gleaming and his beard ran in a narrow, precise band along the outlines of his jaws and chin. He had on jeans and boat shoes, but both looked as if they’d been purchased an hour earlier and hadn’t yet been broken in. This seemed to be a man for whom casual dress did not come easy.

      ‘Thorn,’ he said as he came across the yard.

      Lawton was swiping at the wispy fishing line as if trying to pluck a spiderweb from his skin.

      ‘You okay, Lawton?’

      ‘Fine, fine,’ the old man said. ‘I’ve caught a monster this time. Me.’

      The stranger held out his hand, and after a moment’s reluctance Thorn shook it.

      ‘Do I know you?’

      ‘You should,’ the man said. ‘Mind if we stand in the shade?’

      Thorn followed the man over to the shadows of the tamarind tree.

      ‘Jimmy Lee Webster,’ the man said.

      ‘Listen,’ Thorn said. ‘I don’t mean to be impolite, but—’

      ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Webster said. ‘You’re busy tying flies, or whatever it is you do with your free time.’ He flashed Thorn a one-second smile, then said, ‘Which seems to be most of your day. And a lot of your night.’

      The man produced that miserable smile again, like something he’d acquired from a second-rate drama coach.

      ‘You might’ve seen me on TV,’ Webster said.

      ‘If I had one.’

      ‘Or in the newspaper.’

      Thorn shook his head.

      ‘Jimmy Lee Webster.’

      ‘I heard you the first time.’

      ‘Really? Not even the faint tinkle of a little bell?’

      ‘What’re you, a TV star?’

      ‘Secretary Webster.’

      ‘Oh, okay. You’re the guy that answers the phone, takes dictation.’

      ‘Yeah, I was warned,’ Webster said, ‘what a smart-ass you are.’

      ‘Fair enough,’ Thorn said. ‘But I still don’t know you, Webster.’

      ‘I was Secretary of the Navy, last administration.’

      Lawton had dropped down in the grass and was peeling the knotted strands of line off his legs and sandals. He noticed Thorn looking at him and showed him his palms. Didn’t need any help, doing just fine.

      ‘I know,’ СКАЧАТЬ