Miami Noir

Ride along by James W. Hall

Coconut Grove

Jumpy was reaching for the door handle to get out when Guy took hold of his arm, saying, “Nothing weird this time. Promise me.”

Jumpy took a few seconds to turn his head and look at Guy.

“Define weird.”

He had a point. It was more than weird already, an oddball pair like them out on a Sunday morning, 4 a.m., parked in a gravel lane next to a boarded-up house, with the orange sulfur lights from Douglas Road flickering like sky-fire through the big banyans. Three blocks north was the rubble and peeling paint of the Coconut Grove ghetto, three blocks the other way the mansions rose like giant concrete hibiscus blooms, pink and yellow, surrounded by high fortress walls, video cams, and coconut palms. The have-nots getting the exhaust fumes from Dixie Highway, the haves taking nice sweet hits on the ocean breezes.

Thirty feet in front of where Guy was parked, standing next to a battered Oldsmobile, two black dudes were fidgeting while Guy and Jumpy stayed inside the white Chevy with the headlights off. Been there two, three minutes already. Doing deals with fidgety folks wasn’t Guy’s idea of good business practice.

“The soul train must have a station around here,” Jumpy said.

“You’re jacking yourself up, man. I told you. You freak out this time, it’s over, I walk.”

“I don’t like dreadlocks,” Jumpy said.

“It’s a hairstyle is all,” Guy told him. “A Rastafarian thing from Jamaica. Same as a crew cut is to you.”

“I never did like dreadlocks. It’s a gut reaction.”

“Okay, so you don’t like dreadlocks. But a little fashion incompatibility, that isn’t going to keep us from doing our business, right?”

“It looks dirty,” Jumpy said. “Unkempt.”

“Yeah, well, then let’s forget it. Start the car, get the hell out of here.”

“You losing your nerve, teach? Get right up close to the devil, feel his warm breath on your face, then you back away?”

“Nothing weird, okay? That’s all I’m asking.”

Jumpy was 6’4″, skinny as a greyhound, pasty-skinned, all knuckles and Adam’s apple. Kind of muscles that were easy to miss in that string bean body, like the braided steel cables holding a suspension bridge together. From what Guy had been able to learn, Jumpy had a couple of years of college, then he’d shipped out as a Marine for two hitches, then a lone-wolf mercenary for a while, off in Rwanda and Venezuela, spent a few years in a federal pen in Kansas, now he was on the prowl in Miami. Whatever unspeakable shit he’d been into never came up directly in conversation. Guy didn’t ask, Jumpy didn’t say. But it was there like a bad smell leaking from a locked room. The man was dangerous, and Guy loved it. Got a little tipsy from the proximity. So much to learn, so much to bring back to his own safe world. Riding the knife blade of violence, ever so careful not to get cut.

Jumpy didn’t pump up his past. Very understated, even flip. Guy considered that a form of extreme cool, like those muscle-bound bodybuilders who only wore loose clothes. Tight shirts were for showboat assholes.

Jumpy didn’t have to flaunt. There was a halo around him nobody could miss, a haze of androgen and pheromones that could turn a barroom edgy in a blink. Guy had seen nights when the bad boys lined up for a chance at Jumpy, pool cue in one hand, switchblade in the other, one by one coming at him like twigs into a wood chipper. Going in solid, coming out a spew of sawdust.

Trouble was, in Jumpy’s line of work, nuance might be a better strategy than overwhelming force. But try to tell that to Jumpy. Dialing back that guy’s throttle, even for Guy, a silver-tongued specialist, a man Jumpy respected, it could present a challenge. Not that Guy was morally opposed to violence. In the abstract, inflicting pain and drawing blood was fine. He’d written about it for years, described it in excruciating detail. But putting it into flesh-and-blood action, no, that wasn’t his instinctive first choice like it was with Jumpy.

“So we cool on this?” Guy said. “Do your deal and walk. No crazy-ass banter, no stare-downs. Right?”

Jumpy kept his lasers fixed on the two dreadlocks.

“I need some signal of agreement, Jumpy. A grunt is enough.”

Jumpy turned his head and blinked. That was all Guy was getting.

They got out and Guy tried to match Jumpy’s casual saunter over to the Olds.

The two gangstas insisted on patting Guy down, then after a moment’s indecision, they did a hurry-up job frisking Jumpy and stepped away like they’d burned their hands. The tall one went around to the trunk of the Olds and popped the lid.

Guy stayed a couple of steps behind Jumpy while the tall dude, wearing a black T-top and baggy shorts, showed off the Squad. His dreadlock buddy stood by the driver’s door watching. His right hand fiddling around his shirttail, ready to quick-draw if things went bad.

Dreadlock One was extolling the merits of the Squad Automatic Weapon, otherwise known as SAW. Eight hundred — meter range, lightweight, just over twenty pounds with the two hundred — round magazine. Talking straight English with a little Bahamian singsong, none of the hip-hop, we-badass bullshit.

When Dreadlock One paused, Guy said, “You want to hold it, Jumpy? Inspect it?”

Jumpy was silent.

“One of you should check that shit, man, we don’t want no pissing and moaning later on.”

“Let me know when the sales pitch is over,” Jumpy said. “I’ll get the cash.”

Dreadlock One shifted his angle, moving for a better view of Guy.

“What’re you looking at?”

“That’s what I’m asking myself,” he said.

“Do that again?” Guy said.

“Who’m I doing business with,” Dreadlock One asked, “man or woman? From across the way, you look like a dude; up close like this, you could be a bull-dyke bitch.”

Guy felt Jumpy shift closer to him.

“Happens all the time,” Guy said. “It’s the haircut.”

Guy had blond shoulder-length Jesus hair, slender hips, and sleek Scandinavian features. A man of long smooth planes. Not feminine so much as asexual. A floater. Hovering between the sexes. Some women found him sexy, and just about as many men.

“More than the freaking haircut. It’s your whole entire weird-ass self.”

Jumpy stepped between Guy and Dreadlock One and said, “Why don’t you reach down my partner’s pants and find out?”

The second dreadlock cackled, then grinned a big gold smile. “Yeah, Willie, do it, man, reach your hand in there and squeeze.”

“I was just curious,” Willie said. “It don’t matter. Forget it.”

“Don’t be shy,” said Jumpy. “Reach in, take a handful, make yourself happy. Guy’s cool with that, aren’t you, Guy?”

Willie stared at Guy’s face for a few ticks, then shook his dreads.

Jumpy took two quick steps and grabbed Willie’s hand, took a grip on Guy’s belt buckle, pulled it out, and jammed the dude’s spidery fingers down the front of Guy’s pants.

The other dread had his pistol out and was aiming at Jumpy, ordering him to step the fuck away from his partner, let him go, stop that shit.

Jumpy released Willie’s hand and the man yanked it out of Guy’s pants.

“So what am I?” Guy said.

Willie didn’t say anything. He turned and saw his partner with the pistol out.

“Put that shit away, man. Put it away.”

“So what I am?” Guy said. “Did your field trip enlighten you?”

“Two thousand for the SAW. Five hundred for the loaded magazine. Take it or leave it, no negotiating.”

“Two for the whole caboodle or I’m outta here. Starting now. Ten, nine, eight, seven...”

“Two’ll do,” Willie said.

“Hard bargainer,” Jumpy said. “Tough nut.”

Jumpy and Guy walked back over to the stolen Chevy, Jumpy getting into the passenger seat. Staying there for a minute, another minute with Guy standing back by the trunk waiting, watching, recording.

Jumpy’s door was swung wide open, the overhead light on.

The two dreadlocks were talking near their Olds Ciera, but after a while they started shooting looks over. Willie held the SAW in one hand.

Jumpy sat there and sat there and sat some more until finally the head dread came strolling. Dumbass carrying the SAW one-handed.

“You got the bread or you fucking with me?”

“It’s stuck,” Jumpy said. “Fucking glove box is stuck.”

“Stuck?”

Jumpy leaned back in the seat, gestured toward the glove compartment.

Willie leaned in the door, peered through the darkness.

“You got a screwdriver,” Jumpy said, “something that can pry it open?”

Willie craned another inch forward and Jumpy took a grip on the padded handle and slammed the door closed on the dreadlock’s neck. Opened it and slammed it again and then a third time. Then one more for good luck and pushed the dread out of the way and reached down to the gravel and took hold of the SAW and aimed it out the crook of the open door at Dreadlock Two, who was trotting over with a big-ass chrome .45 in his right hand.

Guy was frozen. It was a freaking movie streaming around him. Every outrageous, amazing second of it. Hand down the pants and all.

The SAW kicked against Jumpy’s shoulder. Jumpy fired again over Dreadlock Two’s head, yelling at him to drop his weapon. Which he did. Not giving it a second thought, just tossing it into the gravel.

The downed dread struggled to his feet. Jumpy aimed the SAW at his chest.

“So what’re we going to have here? Two dead assholes?”

“No, man. Don’t be doing that. Ain’t no need. We just get the fuck up and be gone.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Jumpy said. He fired the SAW into the air and the two men sprinted off toward the neighborhood where lights were coming on in bedrooms.

Jumpy got out of the Chevy and walked over to the Oldsmobile. “We got about ten seconds. You coming? Or you want to stay here and get the police point of view on things?”

Guy trotted over to the Oldsmobile and got in.

Jumpy pitched the SAW onto the backseat. Guy could smell its oily warmth. Jumpy must’ve used nearly forty rounds. Which left one-sixty still in the magazine.

Guy started the car. Put the shifter into drive and made a U-turn.

“Can you use any of that?” Jumpy said when they were five blocks away, cruising down Douglas Road into the ritzy jungle shadows of Coconut Grove.

“Think I can,” Guy said. “Yes sir. I think I most certainly can.”

Guy dug the little Sony from his front pocket and found the record button and he started to speak into the miniature device. Jumpy smiled and took them south toward the condo parking lot where he’d left his old Civic.

Sirens filled the night like the wails of predatory beasts circling their night’s meal.

“What’s this mean?” Jumpy held up a sheaf of papers.

He was standing in the doorway of Dr. Guy Carmichael’s tiny windowless cubicle. Guy’s office hours were from 4 till 6. At 6:15 his evening graduate fiction workshop started and ran till 9:40. At the moment it was 5:30, so at worst he’d have to deal with Jumpy for fifteen minutes before he could claim he had to rush off to class.

“Could you be more precise? What does what mean?”

“Okay,” Jumpy said. “What the fuck is this? A fucking C minus on my story.”

“Did you read my comments? Is there something you’re confused about?”

Jumpy looked down the hall, then checked the other direction. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and blue jeans and loafers without socks. Trying to fit in with some preppie image of a college student still surviving from his first fling at higher education back in the early ’70s.

“I wrote what happened. You were there. You saw it. This is what happened. And that’s all it’s worth? Not even a fucking C? What’ve I got to do, kill somebody to get an A?”

“It’s the writing,” Guy said. “Not the events you describe.”

“On my paper you said — shit, where is it?” Jumpy started fumbling through the typed pages, looking for Guy’s tiny scrawl.

Jumpy used a battered Royal typewriter and he whited out his mistakes with big glops smeared across paragraphsized portions of his paper. Guy admired his stamina, hunched over the tiny machine, those enormous fingers drilling letter after letter onto the white page. Stamina was one thing. Talent was another. Guy had tried hard with Jumpy, made him a special project, devoted hours and hours to one-on-one’s in his office and in a bar on Biscayne. But after a minute or two of anything short of unadulterated praise, Jumpy glazed over and slid back into the murky grotto inside his bulletproof skull.

Jumpy found the comment he’d been searching for and put a finger on Guy’s words as he read.

It’s not credible that two such dissimilar men would pair up for such an effort. That’s what I mean. Not credible But we did. We paired up. So why in fuck’s name is that a C minus?”

“You have to convince the reader it’s credible.”

“You’re the reader, Guy. You were fucking there. You were fucking standing right there pissing your fucking Dockers. And you don’t believe what happened right in front of your fucking eyes? I’m missing something here.”

One of Guy’s grad students, Mindy Johnston, stuck her head in the doorway and said, “Ooops. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

Mindy was a poet, aggressively ethereal. Wispy red hair, enormous breasts that defeated her every attempt to conceal them.

“I just came by to drop off my assignment. I can’t be in class tonight. Migraine’s acting up.”

Guy accepted the paper and told Mindy he hoped she felt better soon.

“Try a pop of heroin,” Jumpy said. “Blow that migraine right away.”

Jumpy’s gaze was fixed on Mindy’s bosom. A smile slathered on his lips.

“Heroin?” Mindy said.

“Say the word, and I’ll drop a couple of hits off at your apartment. Special delivery. First two are free.”

She squinched up her face into something between a smile and a scream.

“That’s a joke, right?” Mindy backed out of the office and floated quickly down the hallway.

“Inappropriate,” Guy muttered.

Jumpy said, “You got anything going Saturday night?”

Guy drummed the nub of his red ink pen against his desktop.

“Not more gun dealing,” Guy said. “I’ve had my fill of that.”

“I got so much shit going on I gotta get a bigger appointment book,” Jumpy said. “Name your poison. Something that’ll get me an A this time.”

“I remember one time you mentioned organized crime. That caught my attention. There’s a place in the book I’m working on, I could use some details.”

“The mob,” Jumpy said. Then he looked around Guy’s office at the framed diplomas, the photographs of his kids and wife and two little dogs.

“Might could arrange something,” Jumpy said. “I’ll give you a call.”

“And about that C minus,” Guy said.

“Yeah?”

“I’ll read it again. Maybe I missed something the first time.”

“That’s cool,” said Jumpy. “Maybe you did.”

Jumpy picked Guy up in the Pink Pussycat parking lot at 1 a.m. on Saturday. He was driving a green Jaguar convertible, top down. Chrome wraparound sunglasses and a black aloha shirt with red martini glasses printed on it.

Guy got in, and without a word or look in his direction, Jumpy peeled out, slashed into traffic on Biscayne. Once they’d settled down into the flow of vehicles, Guy smoothed his hand across the leather seat. His long blond hair tangling in the wind.

“Car yours?”

“It is tonight.”

“A loaner,” Guy said, smiling, trying to get with the lingo.

Jumpy looked over. His expression was dead tonight, maybe he was working himself up, or he was nervous, Guy couldn’t tell. That had been his biggest challenge, trying to capture the interior life of a man like Jumpy. Was he constantly on drugs and so blitzed there was no coherent thought rolling through his head? Or was he dumb, just incapable of nuanced feelings or thought? Based on the writing Guy had seen, he was tilting toward the dumb option. Jumpy couldn’t string two sentences together without making half a dozen errors of grammar, syntax, or logic. By the end of a paragraph, Jumpy’s ideas were so insufferably scrambled, making sense of his story was impossible.

Guy was getting good detail from these ride-alongs, some nice asshole-puckering moments of violence, but overall, Jumpy wasn’t giving away a lot about his psychodynamics. What pushed the man’s buttons? Who the hell could tell?

After tonight, Guy figured he’d bail on this whole enterprise. He’d had enough of the street for a while. A night or two like the gun-buy last week could keep Guy satiated for a good long time. His wife, Shelly, had no idea what he was up to. But she could smell the fear on him when he returned, the stink of sweat and cigarette smoke and the prickly tang of danger. And she was beginning to make irritable noises.

So after tonight Guy was done. Cash out, walk away with his winnings. Spend the rest of the semester using this brief immersion in the back-alley world of Jumpy Swanson to fuel his imagination for one more crime novel.

He didn’t know how Jumpy would take it, him making his exit. Or what quid pro quo Jumpy was expecting. C minus was already a mercy grade. And Guy wasn’t about to fudge on his own academic values as payback for a half dozen adventures on the South Florida streets. There would come a day, Guy was pretty sure, when Jumpy would stomp out of his office disgusted with Guy’s failure to give him the secret key to the kingdom Jumpy so passionately and unaccountably wanted. Jumpy Swanson, an author? Oh, get serious.

Jumpy headed north off Biscayne into neighborhoods Guy didn’t recognize. Residential, middle-class, or maybe edging down to lower-middle. The cars in the driveways were mostly midsize, newer models. The houses were dark, probably retirees or working-class folks who’d had their fill of TV movies for the evening and had headed off to the sack.

It wasn’t the sort of neighborhood Guy had been expecting. Though Jumpy had revealed only that his mob friends were eager to meet Guy, a professional writer. Guy assumed the gangsters had the customary overinflated sense of their own glamour and the resulting ambition to have their lives portrayed on the screen, or on the pages of some runaway bestseller.

Guy was always ambivalent about being introduced as a writer. On the one hand, it embarrassed him to be the object of admiration to people who had no inkling what the artistic endeavor was all about. It felt silly to get the little bows of courtesy from illiterates. On the other hand, in an instance like tonight, meeting men for whom crime was a way of life, having some professional connection with the larger world was, to Guy’s way of thinking, like wearing Kevlar. Sure, he was a snitch. But it was all in the open, and for commercial, not legal gains. He’d make sure these guys got a copy of the next book, maybe even put their nicknames on the acknowledgment page. Johnny “The Nose.” Frank “Hatchet Breath” Condilini.

Jumpy wheeled into a yard that was crowded with cars. They were parked in every direction: beaten-up compacts, a brand-new white Cadillac, a couple of BMWs, a pickup truck from the ’60s. Hard to decipher the demographics, but the haphazard parking jobs suggested the occupants had arrived in haste and under the influence of dangerous substances.

There was a peephole in the front door. A cliché that Guy saw instantly he would be unable to use. The man whose face appeared was fat and his greasy skin danced with colored lights. Guy could feel the throb of bass music rising up from the sidewalk, a beat that was as hypnotically slow and primitive as the heartbeat of a dying man.

“Who’s the pussy?”

“I told Philly I was bringing him. He’s the guy, the writer.”

“What’s he write?” the thug said. “Parking tickets?”

“Open the fucking door, Moon.”

The door opened and the wall of music rushed like dark wind from the house. Guy waded past Moon. The man was at least four hundred pounds and he moved with a sluggish wobble like a deep-sea diver running low on air.

“What is this place?” Guy spoke an inch from Jumpy’s ear but wasn’t sure he heard. Jumpy made no response, just led the way across the room.

The living room stretched half the length of the house and through sliding doors looked out on an empty swimming pool and a dark canal. The strobes were covered with colored lenses and Guy was almost instantly seasick. No furniture, no rugs on the terrazzo. Half a dozen mattresses sprawled around the room, where knots of naked people squirmed in the flickering light.

“You brought me to a freaking sex party, Jump?”

The music cut off halfway through his question and Guy’s voice echoed through the room. Someone tittered and there was a muffled groan. A second later, as Guy was still processing his embarrassment, the music restarted, something faster and even louder, and the strobes picked up their pace as well. The air was tainted with chemical smells, booze and weed and other compounds he could only guess at.

Guy followed Jumpy over to a makeshift bar, a long picnic table laid out with iced buckets full of longnecks and pints of gin and bourbon. Jumpy mixed a gin and tonic in a clear plastic cup and handed it to Guy.

“Relax you, put you in the mood.”

He made his own drink, then held up the plastic cup for a clink.

“To improving my grade,” Jumpy said.

“To creating credible characters.” Guy wasn’t backing down on his values for some quick tour of a sleazy hashish den.

Jumpy gulped his drink and Guy followed suit, mano a mano.

Jumpy led Guy deeper into the house, down a long narrow corridor. This was architecture Guy had seen in dozens of Florida tract homes built in the ’60s. Three bedrooms down that tight corridor, a single bath. Sliding doors on the closets and hard surfaces in every direction. He had never considered such spaces forbidding, but given the present circumstance Guy held back a few paces behind Jumpy, and started to consider his options for escape.

At the end of the hall, the music had softened to a thudding growl. Jumpy halted before a closed door and tapped four times and a voice answered from within.

Jumpy opened the door, then looked at Guy hanging back. “You wanted to meet my people, right? Get down and dirty. Isn’t that the idea?”

Guy felt his fear collapsing into something more extreme. A dark knot of dread. He was not up to this. He felt suddenly trapped, cornered by Jumpy. Conned into deeper water than he’d bargained for. A wave of paranoia rolled and crashed in his gut.

“Philly, meet Guy. Guy, Philly.”

The man was bald and short and his stomach was as tight and perfectly round as a bowling ball. He wore striped undershorts or perhaps pajama bottoms, but was otherwise naked. The room was lit with a vague blue light as though rare mushrooms might be growing in long trays somewhere nearby. It was the master bedroom and was probably half the size of the living room. Its sliding glass door had a view across the canal, looking into the patio of a house where an elderly couple were slow-dancing under paper lanterns.

Philly shook Guy’s limp hand and stepped back to size him up.

“This is Mr. High and Mighty? Pardon me, Jump, but he looks like a fucking twit.”

Guy was turning to leave, to run back the way he’d come, jog all the way home if it came to that, when a hand touched his bare ankle, the fingers sliding around the knobby bone and taking a strong grip.

Down in the blue haze on the bedroom floor he saw the girl, naked, with enormous breasts. Her wispy red hair was tangled and dirty, and there was a sloppy grin on her face as if Mindy Johnston had finally entered the gossamer stratosphere she was always writing about.

Guy staggered away from her touch and lost his balance. He shot out a hand to steady himself, but the wall beside him moved away. As Guy lurched toward it, the wall moved again. He flapped his arms like a clumsy tightrope walker, and after another moment found his equilibrium.

The gin and tonic was spinning inside his skull.

“You son of a bitch.” Guy turned and stepped into Jumpy’s face. “What the fuck have you done?”

“Hey, professor, come on in, the water’s fine.” It was a woman’s voice he vaguely recognized.

He turned back to the mattress and saw beside Mindy was Paula Rhodes, a new grad student who’d been struggling to find her place in the program. A bit more mature than the others, a woman who’d written for New York travel magazines and already had a Master’s degree. She, like Mindy, wanted, for some ungodly reason, to write poetry. To sing the body electric.

She had risen up to her knees and was reaching out to Guy with her unloosened breasts wobbling and her eyes on fire with some chemical enthusiasm. Around the room, he made out at least four other students from the program, all of them tangling and untangling like a nest of snakes.

“Hey, I want to thank you, professor,” Philly said. “You got us hooked up with a better class of consumer than we been seeing lately. I owe you, man.”

Moon, the bull-necked gatekeeper, appeared in the doorway. He too was now wearing only his underwear. Saggy white briefs with dark hair coiling out around the edges. In one hand he was holding a silver tray with syringes and rubber straps, and an array of other nefarious equipment that Guy didn’t recognize. In the other he gripped the barrel of the SAW. Eight hundred — meter range, lightweight, just over twenty pounds with the two hundred — round magazine.

Moon presented the hors d’oeuvre tray to Guy, poking him in the sternum with its corner.

“A little hit of research, Guy?” Jumpy said.

The walls of the bedroom were breathing in and out and the lights had invaded the interior of Guy’s chest.

“You used me. You son of a bitch, you used me to take advantage of these kids.”

“I used you, Guy? I fucking used you?”

Mindy Johnston’s hand snaked inside the leg of Guy’s trousers, her fingers trickling up his calf. Her voice a swoon.

“Come on, professor. Come on, it’s fun. It’s so wild.”

Guy looked across the canal and saw the old couple still fox-trotting to some melody that didn’t pass beyond their walls. He thought of Shelly, his wife of ten years, the way they used to dance in their own living room. Languorous steps, drifting around their barren house for hours at a time.

Jumpy edged to the door, slipping past Moon into the hallway. Moon slid sideways like the bars of a cell locking into place between Guy and the world he’d known.

“Hey, Guy, enjoy yourself, man. Moon’ll show you the ropes, won’t you, big fellow?”

Moon had stashed the tray and gun somewhere and now had a grip on Guy’s right biceps and was injecting some clear solution into a bulging vein in the crook of Guy’s arm. The room was bigger than Guy had originally thought. The ceiling was no ceiling. Where the roof should have been, there were stars, whole galaxies exposed, comets shooting from left and right. A cool solar wind swirling down from the heavens.

“This is what you wanted, right?” Jumpy said from the hall. “Up close and personal.”

There were bare hands on his ankles drawing him down to the quicksand mattress, down into a pit of flesh and crazy-colored lights, a world he’d written about before. But he’d gotten it all wrong. All completely wrong.

Dead storage by Christine Kling

County Line

Mama loved to watch those old movies on TV and she used to tell me that since I was born in Hollywood, she’d named me Kate and I was gonna grow up to be a movie star. Like the dumbshit I was, I believed her. But kids are like that and after she left, when I told Daddy what she’d said, he smacked me upside of the head, called me an idiot, and told me that the movie stars lived out in California, not here in Hollywood, Florida.

So I figured that’s where she went. I’m not stupid and I knew she’d been hitting the crack pipe, but I figured they got drugs out in California same’s here. Sometimes now, I have a hard time remembering what Mama looked like. The last time I saw her she’d got so skinny her elbows looked like broomsticks and her hair had gone all patchy, but I try to push those pictures out of my head. She was gone for some long spells before she finally took off for good. That was when I was ten. Six years ago. And still being a dumbass kid back then, I believed for the longest time that she was gonna come back for me.

Daddy and me been living in this trailer at Pattie’s Ravenswood Marina and Trailer Park on a canal by the airport ever since she left. I knew even if she did come back she’d never find me in this shithole. That’s how Daddy wanted it. Besides, she was probably out in California getting high with movie stars. Daddy said we were better off without her, and I thought, yeah, sure, you’d think that.

I knew my daddy got some kind of disability check from the government, and when Mama was still with us, he spent most of his days either outside lifting his weights, the sweat pouring off him, or inside sitting in his chair watching HSN or QVC on a little TV he had connected to the cable on the pole. And he’d drink beer. I still went to school back then, and I had some friends and could go over to their houses, so I wasn’t home all that much ’cept to eat and sleep.

I used to tell my friends my mama was a movie star, that she was gone lots ’cuz she had to fly to places where they was filming, and then finally ’bout how she’d gone out to California to act in a TV show. We moved before any of her movies come out.

Now, Daddy’s got me working in the office at Pattie’s here, though there ain’t a whole lot to do and he gets my paychecks before I do. Says I owe it to him for rent. Not like he buys us much food around here. We pretty much live off Corn Flakes, powdered milk, mac ’n’ cheese, and the occasional catfish I catch in the canal. He’s got an old Chevy pickup that he drives down to Flossie’s Bar sometimes. That’s when I like it here. Nights when he’s gone and it’s quiet and I can pretend he ain’t never coming back. I pretend I’m going to take a taxi to the airport, get on an airplane for Hollywood, California, go find Mama, and become a movie star. But he always comes back. And if he ain’t too drunk, he always comes to me.

The first time, I was missing Mama so much and I cried happy tears when he come in and hugged me and touched me and told me he loved me. It seemed like the first time in my life he wasn’t calling me stupid. And then all of a sudden it was like, what the hell, and he shoved his finger up inside me. I was only ten and just this dumbass kid who didn’t know what the fuck was going on, but he was my daddy and he was telling me he loved me and I would like it, so what was I supposed to do? We was already living at Pattie’s then, and outside the trailer window there’s these tall poles in the distance with red flashing lights for the airport, and I just watched them, trying not to smell his breath, and counted how many times they flashed until he climbed off me. One hundred ninety-seven flashes.

We’d moved to Pattie’s when Daddy got the job managing the dead storage yard. If you wanted to use your boat pretty much, you put it up in the stacks and Fred over on the other side of the basin drove the forklift and slid your boat out of its parking slot in that four-story beehive. But some people had boats and they just never used them. They had broken motors, holed hulls, peeling paint, and all kinds of palmetto bugs crawling all over them. They ended up with Daddy in the dead storage yard. The rent was cheaper. Daddy showed them where to park their crappy old boats and then they paid him their rent and they never come back for months and months. Some of them never come back at all, seemed to me. I saw boats go into that yard, but I hardly ever seen any come out.

The boats in the marina, most of them didn’t look much better than the ones in dead storage. Some had people living on them and they had so much crap piled on their decks, it was like Pattie’s was some kind of big shit machine. You’d get up in the morning, and it seemed like there were more old tires and rusty boat parts and broken beer bottles than there had been the day before. Shit just came out of nowhere.

About half the trailers in the park were boarded up and abandoned. On one side of us there was this old guy. Daddy called him Bud and he just sat out on his concrete slab and drank beer every day till he passed out. He was deaf and he’d never wear his hearing aids, so even if you did try to talk to him, he couldn’t ever hear a goddamn thing you were saying.

On the other side, the trailer had sat empty for a couple of months ever since old Mrs. Jackson died. I noticed her cat was squalling one day and it didn’t smell too good over there, but I could hear the TV was on inside. She give Daddy a key to her place one time so’s I could feed the cat when she went to see her daughter. I got the key and called out her name, but she didn’t answer so’s I went into her trailer to see what was wrong. She’d died on the crapper in her nightgown with her big cotton panties down around her knees. She’d pitched forward and I found her with her neck bent sidewise on the floor, her eyes open, and her huge fat naked ass sticking up in the air in the doorway of the trailer’s little head compartment. I didn’t even like to look at her trailer no more and Daddy was talking ’bout moving it into dead storage. What was the point? The whole fuckin’ place had become dead storage.

That’s why I was surprised when I got up Saturday morning and saw a truck in front of old Mrs. Jackson’s place and some men was carrying out all the old crap and taking some nice new furniture inside. That’s when I seen Daddy out there wearing jeans and a wife beater, leaning against his pickup and talking to this short redheaded lady who was holding old Mrs. Jackson’s cat, which I ain’t seen since the morning I found the old lady dead. Somebody said it was Mrs. Jackson’s daughter what took the cat, and I wondered if that was her outside talking to my daddy.

When I went out there, I guess the short lady didn’t hear me walk up ’cuz she flinched like she’d been snake bit. The cat jumped to the ground and run off.

“Oh! Child,” she said. “Don’t go sneaking up on people that way. You gave me a fright.” Her voice sounded squeaky as a cartoon character on the TV.

Standing next to her like that, I got the full effect of just how short she was. I could look down on the top of her head and see a line of pink scalp and about an inch of gray hair at her roots.

“You Mrs. Jackson’s daughter?” I asked.

Daddy shook his head and said, “Sorry, ma’am. She’s got no manners. I try to teach her but it just don’t stick. This here’s my daughter Kate. Kate, this is Mrs. Murphy.”

The redheaded lady put out a hand the size of a little kid’s. She was old, though, lots older than Daddy, and heavy makeup was caked on her face, but she probably didn’t weigh no more’n a hundred pounds. When I reached out to shake her hand, she looked scared, like she thought she might catch something.

“Hello,” I said. Her palm was squishy with sweat and she yanked her hand back after one pump. She wore these fake eyelashes like you buy at Walgreens for $6.99. They fluttered at me when she tried to smile.

Daddy said, “Mrs. Murphy’s gonna move into her mama’s trailer. She’ll be our new neighbor.”

For such a little lady, Mrs. Murphy had a good-sized rack on her, and with her low-cut blouse Daddy couldn’t take his eyes off her titties. He kept on talking to her and she kept on backing up, her hands messing with the buttons at the top of her blouse. When her ass hit the side of her trailer, she scooted inside and disappeared.

Daddy sat down at his weight bench and told me to go in and fix him some cereal.

Over the next few weeks I barely ever saw Mrs. Murphy. She mostly stayed inside her trailer, only coming out a few times to drive her little Ford Taurus to the Winn-Dixie to get her some groceries, and even when she done that, she nearly run out to her car like she thought somebody outside was gonna jump out and grab her. One time when she come home in her car, Daddy went over and offered to help carry her groceries but she shook her head no, and she carried those bags up high so’s to cover her chest and her face and she run into her trailer. Daddy laughed out loud.

I seen it all from the windows in Pattie’s Marina office where I went to answer the phones and take folks’ rent checks and mostly just watch TV or jaw with Fred and Pattie. Sometimes I read books. Pattie had a whole bunch of paperback books that folks had left in the office and most of them were pretty good. They were stories about detectives and spies and shit like that. Beat the crap out of watching Days of Our Lives with Pattie.

After she’d been living there about a month, Mrs. Murphy come into the office one day to pay her rent. Pattie’d gone out to her boat to sleep off last night’s Jack and Coke and Fred was over running the forklift for some Miami hot-shot. It was just me and her.

“Hey,” I said when she walked in. She didn’t say nothin’ but just pulled her checkbook out of her little handbag and started writing out the check.

“How d’ya like living here at Pattie’s, Mrs. Murphy?”

“Okay, uh, Kate, was it?”

“Yeah. Like the movie star, Kate Hepburn.”

“I’m surprised someone your age would know about her.”

“I’m not stupid, you know.”

“Oh dear, I didn’t mean to say that you were.”

“Mama used to say I have a active imagination.”

“I’m sure you do, Kate,” she said, but she turned away when I looked up at her from the receipt book where I was writing in the number of her check. She had a look on her face like she just tasted milk that had turned.

“You sure do stay in your trailer lots. You don’t work?”

“Well, I did. I’m an administrative assistant,” she said, like I knew what that was, “but I’m currently between positions.”

“What’s that mean?”

She blinked her eyes real fast and those fake lashes looked like moths that just been hit with bug spray. “It means,” she said, and her voice sounded funny, even for her. “It means that I got laid off.” She was stuffing her checkbook back into that little purse of hers and then she zipped the pocket closed like she thought I was gonna reach across the counter and snatch it away from her. “I still have trouble believing it. Four years short of earning a pension. They said I wasn’t quick enough, but that really means they think I’m too old.” She started crying for real and dragged out that word “old” like it had about sixteen letters.

“I’m sorry, ma’am.” I wished I knew what to say. I hated her crying like that. It was goddamn irritating.

“And I keep sending out resumes and the unemployment is going to run out soon. I sold my condo and I’m reduced to living alone in this place.” She looked up at the ceiling like she thought it was gonna just cave in on her that minute, then she snorted up the snot that had started to drip out her nose. I handed her a paper towel from the roll Pattie kept behind the desk.

“Well, Mrs. Murphy,” I said, “living here sure must be lots different from a fancy condo.”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t I know.”

“Pattie’s Trailer Park’s not exactly what you’d call a good neighborhood. I hope you got plenty of locks on that trailer of yours, ’cuz a pretty little lady like you—”

“What are you talking about?”

“Must make you pretty scared living in a place like this all alone with no one to protect you.”

“Yes, yes, it does. But it sounds like you know something. Has something happened?”

“You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what? What are you talking about?”

“You ain’t heard about the rapist?”

Her eyes grew big and those lashes quit twitching. “Rapist?”

“Yes’m. I figure I better warn you.”

“Around here? Close by?”

“Yes’m. They’re calling him the Trailer Park Stalker in the papers.”

“Oh my Lord.”

I looked down at the greasy countertop, leaned in closer to her, and spoke quiet. “Happened to me. Daddy was down at Flossie’s. He come into the trailer late at night and climbed on top of me and, well, you know. There weren’t a thing I could do. He’s too strong.”

“Oh, you poor child.”

“I wished I’d a had a gun or something. I would’a killed him,” I said, and I meant it.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about that. Getting something for protection.”

I shrugged.

“It must have been so terrible for you. It’s no wonder you dress like that now.”

“Like what?”

“Those clothes — they’re men’s clothes. Those big T-shirts and jeans, and that hair of yours. You know, if you got it cut in a stylish way instead of that mop of snarls, and got your teeth fixed to close up that gap, why, you’d be pretty.”

“Mrs. Murphy, I don’t give a shit about pretty.”

It was about two weeks later, when I was walking over to the office on my day off to get another book to read, that Mrs. Murphy’s door opened a crack and she whispered, “Kate, pssst. Kate.”

When I got to her door, she opened it and pulled me in, slammed the door, and locked it. The inside of the trailer was different now. It was all clean and neat and the furniture looked like it was new and bought all at the same time. There was curtains on the windows with bright yellow sunflowers on them. Against one wall, she had these shelves that looked like miniature boat stacks, but inside each little box was an old-timey doll in a pretty dress.

“Nice place,” I said.

Mrs. Murphy sat down on a couch cushion that was wrapped up in some kinda plastic and patted the seat. “Sit down, Kate, and talk with me for a while. I could use a little company.”

I sat and kept my hands to myself. There was too much stuff in that trailer. I was afraid I’d break something.

“How have you been, dear?”

“All right, I guess.”

“You don’t go to school?”

“Not since I turned sixteen. My daddy says I had enough school.”

“I see. Your daddy says, huh.” She crossed her arms over her chest.

“My daddy likes you,” I said.

“Oh,” she replied, and she wiggled her butt on the plastic and it made crackling noises.

“He hasn’t been with a woman since Mama left. He was all broke up about that.”

“What happened to your mother, Kate?”

“She went out to California to work in the movies. She sent for me and I was gonna go out there too, but then we heard she was dead.”

“Oh dear, what happened?”

“She was murdered. Stabbed sixteen times in her own bed.”

Mrs. Murphy sucked in her breath so hard she started coughing. I got up and got her a glass of water.

“Thank you,” she said, and she drank the whole glass. When she put it down, her hands started fussing with the buttons on her blouse and the whites of her eyes looked extra bright.

“Remember what I told you last time, you know, about what’s been happening around here?”

She nodded.

“I heard he attacked another woman over in the Shady Palms Trailer Court. This one almost died. Daddy said he hoped you could protect yourself ’cuz he sure wouldn’t want to see anything like that happen to you.”

That night after dinner when he was about a six-pack and a half down, he brought it up. Daddy come to the door of my room and said he seen me go into Mrs. Murphy’s trailer.

“I want you to stay away from that woman,” he said. “You got no business going over there.”

I was lying on my bed reading one of Pattie’s books. It was about a private detective named Elvis out in Hollywood, California. “She was only being nice to me, Daddy. We just talked. She don’t have no friends.”

“She sure as hell don’t need a dumbass kid like you hanging around bothering her, probably telling her all kind of lies.”

“I’m not stupid, Daddy. Wish you’d quit calling me that. Leastwise I don’t sit around all the time drinking beer and slobbering over stuff I can’t even buy on the Home Shopping Network.”

It only took him two steps to cross my room and back-hand me across the mouth. “Shut up. You think you’re so smart reading your books now. But that don’t change nothing. Your mama was a crackhead whore and you ain’t gonna be no different.”

He left to go to Flossie’s after that and I turned off the TV and sat in the quiet night reading my book under the lamp, pretending it was me in the book, out in Hollywood, California, hoping he wouldn’t never come back, but knowing he would. I was in bed when he come in and, one more time, I watched the red blinking lights at the end of the run-way and held my breath as I floated up out of my body and counted. One hundred thirty-six flashes.

After that, I done my best to listen to Daddy and stay away from her. Shit, it weren’t no fun getting hit. Avoiding her wasn’t no big deal because she started going out and staying out for hours in the afternoons. Daddy said he wondered if she found herself another job because when she went in and out, she was carrying a black zipped case hugged to her chest.

One afternoon a couple of old boys come into the office and said they wanted to store their broke-down airboat in the dead storage yard till they could order a new engine for it. They both had shaved heads and yellow teeth but one of ’em had a gut on him that stuck out and hung low over the front of his belt. The other one wore cutoff jeans and a T-shirt about two sizes too small stretched tight cross his chest muscles with the sleeves cut out to show off his guns. They both smelled like beer and the one in the cutoffs leaned over the counter and told me that he knew of something he’d like to stick in that gap in my teeth. I went out the back door of the office and hollered for Daddy. When he come into the office, he hit it off with these two and invited them to go back to our trailer for a cold one before he opened the gate to the yard.

They’d been at it most of the afternoon, all three of them drinking beers and leaning on the old boy’s boat trailer, when Mrs. Murphy come driving up in her little Taurus. The sky had turned light blue and the last rays of sun was slanting across the boat basin. I’d stayed in the office way past quittin’ time when Pattie and Fred had all left. I told them that I had some stuff to finish and I wanted to pick out another book, but in fact I knew better than to show my face anywhere near what was going on out there in the yard. Mrs. Murphy didn’t have no choice, though, since she couldn’t get her car past their truck and trailer that was parked in front of the gate to the dead storage yard.

She stopped her car in front of Bud’s trailer and got out, holding that black case so tight she was squishing her own boobs. Them boys was on her before she took two steps.

“Yeeuuii,” the muscled one said. “Looky here, Franky. We seem to be blocking this lady’s way.”

“Shit, Jimmy, would you look at the tits on her?” the fat one said. He moved up close like he was gonna touch one.

Daddy just leaned there against the trailer watching ’em, his eyes half closed and a smile on his face.

The muscled one was trying to stand in her way like a football player ready to tackle, and she was pulling at the zipper on that bag of hers. Even in that low light I could see those eyelashes outlined against her white skin — not moving. Then she got her hand into the bag and she faked right, then ran left. The old boy got his legs tangled and fell and Mrs. Murphy run into her trailer and slammed the door before his fat buddy could help him up off the ground.

They was still laughin’ and jokin’ when the three of them backed the airboat trailer into the dead storage yard and then took off for Flossie’s.

I never did turn on any lights. I just sat by the window and watched her trailer. Every few minutes the sunflower curtains moved aside and even though I couldn’t make it out in the dark, I imagined those lashes blinking at the night, her hand inside that black bag, and I knew where she’d been all these afternoons she’d been away.

I went to bed when her last light went out and I lay there waiting for Daddy. He come in just past 2:00, and as usual I heard him whispering curses and bumping into things in the front room of the trailer. He couldn’t come home quiet when he was drunk. Didn’t matter if it was the first time or the last time, though, I always felt the same when I heard him coming. Every muscle in my body tightened up and it seemed like somebody’d sucked all the air out of the room and the saliva in my mouth started to taste real sour. I heard the noise of his zipper, then he yanked off my covers, rolled me onto my belly, pulled off my panties, spread my legs, and kneeled back there lifting my butt up and jamming himself inside me, over and over.

It hurt. It always hurt, but this time I couldn’t see my red lights, I couldn’t leave my body, I couldn’t do nothin’ but scream into my pillow.

I waited till I heard the snoring start in the other room, then I got up and washed myself and put on a clean nightie and pair of panties. I didn’t have to turn on the light in the kitchen to find the key. I stopped for a minute in the doorway to his room and watched him sleep. He had passed out on his bed, one shoe on, the other’d fallen on the floor. His jeans was still unzipped, and since he never wore no underwear, I could see the dark shadow at his crotch.

I thought about Mama and the movie stars out in Hollywood, California. I couldn’t find any picture of her in my head no more. I tried to remember what it felt like when she touched me, and I couldn’t find that neither.

He caught his breath and coughed on a snore when I grabbed his shoulder and shook him.

“Daddy! Daddy, wake up. I heard something, Daddy.”

He groaned and tried to push me away.

“Daddy, wake up. There’s a man out there. He broke into Mrs. Murphy’s trailer.”

I helped him to his feet and buttoned his pants for him.

“Kate, what you saying? You seen what?”

“Daddy,” I said as I helped him to the door to our trailer. “I seen a man nosing around Mrs. Murphy’s place. You better go see if she’s okay.” I pressed the key into his hand and he started across the dirt toward her trailer.

It was only a few steps from my bed to the front door. The trailer wasn’t big, not like the movie star mansions out in California, but it was home. I wondered, as I crawled under the covers, if Pattie’d give me his job. Then I tipped my head so’s I could see the lights on the tower, and I started counting. Fifty-nine flashes. Six shots.

Silence of the stone age by George Tucker

North Miami

The moment he saw Eustace Green, Dr. Vernon Lemaistre knew his job interview wasn’t going to work out as planned. Green, dressed in his trademark sleeveless flannel shirt and battered jeans, stood next to a man with a leonine halo of hair and academic loafers. Was it too late to walk away?

The crowd pushed past Vernon, heading for craft booths lined up like boxcars in the thin shade of the Australian pines. A breath of air fluttered the white vinyl banner:

Vernon wiped beads of sweat from his forehead. Why Green, why here, in Out of the Way University, Miami? Last he’d heard, Green had a cushy endowed chair somewhere in Massachusetts.

You simply didn’t see him, Vernon told himself. Like many academics, Vernon was familiar with the application of tactical ignorance. He turned away to search for Dr. Wallace Mackenzie. The interview wasn’t officially till tomorrow, but he wanted to make a good impression today. I have the best years of my career before me, Vernon told himself. I have a lot to offer this university. He had a page with several other affirmations folded in the breast pocket of his jacket — and with Eustace Green around, he felt pretty sure he’d need them.

“Vernon!” That familiar gravelly boom.

Too late. Vernon groaned, turned, tried to rearrange his face into something like a greeting.

“The woods are just full of old friends and acquaintances today,” Green said. He offered his hand, which, after a moment’s hesitation, Vernon took. Eustace’s knuckles felt like steel ball bearings wrapped in leather.

“Quite a surprise,” Vernon said. He smiled at the loafered man and then asked Eustace, “How are you?”

“Full of piss and vinegar as ever,” Eustace said. “Wall, meet Vernon Lemaistre.”

“Dr. Lemaistre?”

To Vernon’s dismay, Eustace and Dr. Wallace Mackenzie, he learned, went way back. Grad school at Cornell. Shovel-bummed around the continent together. Vernon waved at a swarm of gnats that seemed to be attracted to either his sweaty face or his rigid smile.

“So, you here for the festivities? Going up against the world atlatl champ this afternoon?” Green said.

“Yes — uh, I always try to...” Vernon said.

“Dr. Lemaistre’s applying for our opening,” Wallace said. “The interview’s scheduled for tomorrow. Right after yours, Eustace.”

Vernon froze. Eustace grinned at him. “Reckon I’ll see you in the lobby, then.”

Vernon excused himself and wandered away through the crowd. What the hell was Eustace doing here? Applying for the opening — was that a joke? Eustace Green was the reason Vernon needed this job. They’d both been struggling post-docs interested in lithic tech, Stone Age weaponry. Vernon had discovered the true nature of the atlatl, an ancient spear-throwing device that was little more than a stick with a notch on the end. Eustace helped him refine his theories and offered encouragement, an occasional insight. And then Eustace published everything under his own name and never returned another of Vernon’s phone calls.

Now Eustace had an endowed chair at Blueblood U somewhere in Massachusetts, while Vernon held a sufferance post at Lake Okechobee Community College where he taught five introductory classes each semester. He lectured to students who thought evolution was a leftist conspiracy. He worked far too hard to do the kind of research that’d lead to a better job — banished for eternity to the fringes of academia and archaeology.

He watched Eustace saunter through the crowd carrying his atlatl. The forearm-long piece of wood had been used by ancient mankind for millennia to launch slender arrow-like darts at their prey. Archaeologists had discovered hundreds of atlatls with odd stones — “banner stones” — attached to them, presumably as good-luck charms. Vernon had proven that the banner stone kept the atlatl from vibrating from the force of a throw, acting as a Stone Age silencer. Archaeologists theorized that only a heavy, rigid spear would have sufficient momentum to bring down an animal. Vernon and Eustace put the lie to that theory by proving that a slender, flexible dart was much more efficient.

Go on, Vernon told himself, talk to him, ask him to put in a good word for you — why would he want this job anyway?

Not far from the booths and the milling crowd, a long strip of lawn had been set up with hay bales and tacked-on paper targets fluttering in the faint breeze. Along the side, propped-up white signs ticked off the distance from the target: 50, 100, 150.

Eustace nodded to him. “Need to warm up for this afternoon,” he said.

Vernon’s own atlatl — a fine Nanticoke he’d made himself — and two four-foot-long darts lay in the trunk of his dusty gray car. He’d thought of participating in the atlatl throw himself — thought it’d be worth a few brownie points with Mackenzie, show off his skills with the tools of his trade — but if Eustace planned to join the contest, there wasn’t much chance of winning.

Vernon watched Eustace settle his dart along the atlatl. “You really here for this job?”

Eustace glanced at him. “I miss the Everglades,” he said. “Nothing like ’em up north.”

“But it’s only an assistant professorship.” Vernon tried to keep from whining. “Wouldn’t that be a big step down?”

A shrug. Eustace turned to the distant target and flung the dart downrange with barely a hiss. Despite everything else, Vernon still felt vaguely amazed when he remembered he’d been right about the banner stone’s function.

“Why’d you do it? Why’d you take all our work and publish it as your own?” Vernon asked. A question he’d wanted to put to Eustace for so long — but the words just fell out of his mouth. Not at all the delivery he’d imagined.

Eustace looked at him. “The fact that you’re asking that question should be answer enough.”

In that moment, all Vernon’s disappointment and out-rage blazed like a lightbulb filament in his brain — he hated Eustace Green more than he’d ever hated anyone, would’ve gouged those narrow black eyes out with his thumbs and... Eustace raised a bushy eyebrow at him. Then deliberately turned his back on Vernon and strolled toward the target.

Vernon followed him, his mind white-hot and completely empty. He watched Eustace put a filthy sneaker against the hay bale and tug the dart. The wooden shaft slid free but the stone point remained stuck.

“Goddamnit,” Eustace said.

“Can you at least give me a good recommendation?” Vernon said, and hated himself for asking.

Eustace walked away laughing. Vernon stood beside the target, fists clenched, took long deep breaths until his heart-beat eased. He turned to the hay bale and used the blade of his Swiss Army knife to work Eustace’s arrowhead free. The onyx point gleamed black in the bright sun. Vernon remembered how particular Eustace was about his tools — perhaps it would make a good peace offering.

Vernon stepped up to the white chalk line drawn across the clipped grass. Even with his glasses on, the paper targets 150 yards downrange seemed pitifully small. An Ice Age tree sloth, he thought, or a cave bear — those would be proper targets. This was a bad joke.

The crowd, clustered off to his left, rustled and coughed its impatience. Hurry up. All his back-and-forth mental debate about whether or not to deliberately lose the competition to Eustace seemed ludicrous. He hoped he didn’t look like a silly stoop-shouldered academic to the crowd.

He balanced his dart on the atlatl, stepped, and threw. At the top of his arm’s arc he felt a muscle, something small and vital, let go in his shoulder and he shouted — the sound halfway between a karate battle cry and a yelp.

Vernon tucked the atlatl under his arm and rubbed his shoulder to scattered applause. He squinted downrange and saw his dart sticking out of the extreme upper-right corner of the stacked hay bales. No less than six feet from the edge of the paper bull’s-eye. He felt his face burn and turned away, headed for the crowd. He used to be good, back when he practiced weekly in an empty field along Harp Creek, back when he and Eustace e-mailed one another every day with new thoughts, ideas, theories.

He saw Mackenzie at the edge of the crowd and turned toward him. A self-deprecating comment, academics and sports just don’t mix, or something along those lines, might answer perfectly. Then he noticed Green beside Mackenzie. He kept walking anyway.

“Good shot, Dr. Lemaistre,” Mackenzie said.

“Not really,” Vernon replied. He tried to smile.

“Those things are tough to aim. The first time I ever shot a dart I accidentally killed a steel garbage can,” Mackenzie said. “I haven’t touched one since.”

Eustace snorted. “That’s because you didn’t know what you were doing. This guy,” Eustace jerked a thumb at Vernon, “he used to be pretty good. Not as good as me, but pretty good. What happened?”

Vernon felt his body heat rise and his heart swell as if it was about to explode. While he spoke, a separate part of his mind attended to the strange feeling and took notes. What a strange sensation. Am I having a stroke?

“Did you know Eustace and I used to work together?” he said to Mackenzie. But somehow his voice wasn’t quite in control. “We worked on atlatls together, everyone used to think they were made to throw a rigid spear and the banner stone was just a decoration, but I thought they were wrong and Eustace and I worked on it together and I trusted him—” Words tumbled out, fast and shrill. “And then he stole my research!” he added, his spare dart pointing at Eustace like a sword.

Vernon’s search for further accusations faltered when he noticed the amused expression on Eustace’s face, Mackenzie’s wide eyes and open mouth.

“Come on, Mac,” Eustace said. “Let this guy simmer down for a little while.” He turned to walk away.

“Admit it! You stole my research.” Vernon noticed the crowd staring. Even the next contestant in the atlatl throw had turned to watch.

Eustace paused and shook his head. “You are uniformly the worst researcher I have ever known. I would be embarrassed to put my name on anything, and I mean anything, you worked on.” He turned to Mackenzie. “Goddamn shame,” he said.

“Yeah? Well, you weren’t embarrassed when you slept with my wife!” Vernon shouted at Eustace’s back.

The two men left Vernon standing there sweating in the middle of the crowd. His clenched fists trembled. Then, out on the fringes, someone clapped their hands. The applause gathered slowly until everyone, even the people closest to Vernon, took it up. A clatter like rain on tropical leaves.

Vernon slurped at his fifth beer. In the dim cool bar, his prospects seemed much better. No reason to get in his car and drive back to Orlando tonight. He’d go to the interview tomorrow, tell Mackenzie about the bad blood between him and Eustace. Maybe he’d even imply that he’d deliberately missed the target because he didn’t want to compete against his former research partner.

This trip could still be salvaged. Vernon crunched a stale pretzel. Unless, of course, Eustace was serious about applying for the job. But who knows? Maybe Mackenzie’s department didn’t have enough of a salary budget to attract Eustace. Vernon grinned when he thought about how much he made — heck, it’d be the first time his mediocre tax bracket had ever been an advantage.

Vernon pulled the powwow schedule out of his back pocket and smoothed it on the bar. A little spilled beer left a dark spot on the paper. If he left now, he could get back in time for the bonfire. He waved a hand at the bartender for the bill. He’d show them. He was a good sport — he wasn’t beaten. Not by a long shot. Vernon drained the last of his beer.

The next morning, Vernon sat in an uncomfortable chair and watched across the desk as Mackenzie blinked at a piece of paper. Purple hollows sagged under Mackenzie’s eyes and Vernon wondered if he too was hung over.

After a long moment, Mackenzie lowered the page. “Eustace Green died last night.”

“What?” Vernon stared.

Mackenzie shook his big head. Tropical light filtering through the high narrow windows gilded his hair. “The police seem to think it’s suicide.”

“I... I don’t understand.” Vernon glanced out the office window, saw the tops of palms and blue sky. “I just... Did he seem depressed to you?”

“No. Did you see him last night, surrounded by those groupies?” Mackenzie shuffled through some papers on his handsome walnut desk, but when he stopped his hands were still empty. “I don’t understand it either, but they say he impaled himself with an atlatl dart.”

“Christ almighty. That just... that just doesn’t make any sense.”

“God — what happened to him? Eustace was a good friend. Not as close as I could’ve wished, not for a long time, but... I just didn’t see that coming.”

Vernon watched Mackenzie put a wide hand over his eyes for a moment and then saw glistening trails of tears work their way down the creased pink cheeks. Vernon tugged at the decorative handkerchief in his breast pocket. He’d always assumed it was just a decoy, stitched into place, but to his relief the fabric pulled free. He offered it to Mackenzie, who took it with a nod. Vernon looked away while Mackenzie wiped his eyes and resettled his glasses on his nose.

“My apologies,” Mackenzie said. “Now.” He shuffled the papers on his desk again. “Let’s try to get back on track.”

“I mean this respectfully, Dr. Mackenzie, but I don’t think now’s the right time for this conversation. You’re very upset.” Vernon tried to keep his voice upbeat and confident.

Mackenzie shook his head. “He’s gone. I don’t think there’s anything else we can do.”

“I could — let me ask some questions.” Vernon nodded. “I’d really like to help.”

Vernon was so distracted by thoughts of exactly what questions he was going to ask that he almost bumped into a student at the department’s exit.

“Excuse me,” Vernon said.

“Are you Dr. Mackenzie?” the boy asked. When Vernon straightened out his identity, the guy introduced himself: “I’m Detective Sheldon. Assigned to the Green case.” A brassy flash of badge from a brown leather wallet. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“So you would say that you and Dr. Green had disagreements?” Sheldon asked.

“Well, I, uh, pretty much hated him, actually,” Vernon said.

The two stood together in the shade of the Australian pines, near the flattened and litter-strewn park that had hosted the powwow. Long sagging filaments of yellow tape bounded an irregular square where Eustace’s body had been found that morning by a Guatemalan groundskeeper.

“Hated him?” Sheldon squinted. “Why?”

“We had a disagreement about some research. He took a lot of collaborative material and published it under his own name. Then he slept with my wife. Does that about sum it up?”

“Your wife, huh? Listen, you saw him last night.” Sheldon pointed to the flattened patch of grass with his chin. “Did he seem depressed to you? Any irrational behavior, that kind of thing?”

“He was acting rather cranky,” Vernon said. “And he drank a lot last night.” As he said it he wondered if the ghost of last night’s beers lingered on his own breath.

Sheldon nodded, hands behind his back. He wasn’t even writing anything down.

Vernon waited a long moment. “So, what do you think happened?”

Sheldon rubbed his chin. Vernon noticed a small cut from the morning’s hasty shaving. “He came down here because he didn’t like his job up north. Acted cranky. Had a fight with a former colleague,” a nod to Vernon, “in public. Spent the evening drinking cheap beer.” Sheldon walked toward the police tape and Vernon followed. “Wandered out here, saw the futility of his life.” Sheldon turned to Vernon and lowered his voice. “You’d be surprised how many people kill themselves on moonless nights. I don’t know what it is, something about the stars. The immensity of the universe.”

“He killed himself?”

“Without a doubt,” Sheldon said.

Vernon shook his head at the absurdity of the scene — two men in full suits sweating in the subtropical sun. And the world atlatl champion impaling himself on one of his own darts.

“I want to help you, detective. When you recover the tip of the dart, the stone point, bring it to me. An expert can look at it and tell you who the craftsman was.”

Sheldon nodded. “I’ll make a note of it,” he said. But he didn’t. “How exactly do these things work, anyway?”

Vernon arranged to meet Sheldon that evening for an atlatl demonstration — enough time for Sheldon to get the stone point from the pathologist. Maybe enough time for Vernon to figure out a plausible theory for what happened to Eustace Green. Sheldon didn’t seem to be working on one.

Vernon sat at the plastic table in his underwear, surrounded by charts of the crime scene he’d drawn. His motel room smelled vaguely of mildew and sweat. Thin blades of burning sunlight pierced the drawn curtain and illuminated the unmade bed, the rumpled clothing, the pages he pored

Several hours after their morning meeting, Sheldon had knocked on the door and showed him an onyx point in a plastic bag.

Vernon examined it, rubbed the stone through the thin plastic. “That is definitely Eustace’s work,” he said. “He liked to serrate the edges of his stone points like that. Don’t know why, it’s really tough to do.”

Sheldon nodded. “That’s what Dr. Mackenzie says. Do you think somebody could take one of these darts and just,” he mimed an overhand toss, “throw it?”

Vernon shook his head. “Not enough mass. It’d be like hitting someone with a wadded-up piece of paper covering a pebble — nothing but a nasty cut. You really need an atlatl to throw it with enough force to hurt anything.”

Sheldon gave a brief shrug, barely more than a hitch of his shoulders.

“You still think it’s suicide?” Vernon said.

Sheldon crossed his arms. “For a minute there I was starting to think you did it.”

Vernon’s heart stopped.

Sheldon said, “But you couldn’t kill him with his own dart. Mackenzie said he treated his tools like they were his children.”

Vernon nodded.

“The other competitors couldn’t. It’s just Oscar’s Razor — he must’ve killed himself. But why not use his flint knife, cut his wrists? He still had it on him when we found the body.”

“And he had a gun somewhere, right?” Vernon asked

“A Charter Arms Undercover,” Sheldon said. “Loaded. How’d you know that?”

“He waved it at me once, when he came to pick up my wife’s clothes. But stabbing himself with a dart?” Vernon shook his head. “You’d have to be an anatomist to get that right. Who would take that chance? He could’ve just lay there bleeding.”

Sheldon held up the stone point again. “Look at this thing. Three inches long, sharp as broken glass. The pathologist cut himself on it. It’s more than enough to kill someone.” He tucked the arrowhead into his breast pocket. “Anyway, according to the blood tests, he was seriously drunk. Alcohol thins the blood, you know. He wouldn’t have just laid there bleeding for long.”

Vernon had watched Green consume at least a dozen cans of beer and pitch the empties into the bonfire. “I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t make any sense. He had women all around him, he’d just won the contest, coming to Florida for a new job — then he kills himself in suicidal despair? I mean, despite the moonless night...”

“There’s something else you need to understand, doc,” Sheldon said. He hitched his jacket back with one hand and Vernon caught a glimpse of the holster on his belt. “This isn’t exactly the crime of the century. You read the paper? Two nights ago a guy tried to rob a Burger King, shot three people. Still at large. Understand, doc? We’ve got to prioritize.”

“You can’t just close the case because you’re busy,” Vernon said.

“Be realistic. A guy from out of town gets drunk and depressed and kills himself. People do stupid things all the time, even when they’re not playing cowboys and Indians. A closed case is a good case.”

But there are no closed cases in archaeology. How tidy detective work must be, with its filing cabinets full of closed cases. Vernon felt a momentary pang of jealousy.

“Give me till 6 o’clock to come up with something. We’re still on for 6, right?” Vernon asked.

Sheldon held out his hands, palms up. “What’s the point?”

“If Mackenzie sees me demonstrating the atlatl to you, it might put his mind at ease,” Vernon said. “He’ll be there too.”

After a moment, Sheldon nodded. “All right. But keep it quick.”

Only a few wisps of hay clinging to the grass indicated there’d ever been a target range here. Vernon found a scrap of the bright police tape. He found a suitable branch and forced it into the ground, took the wooden clothes hanger from the hotel and arranged his suit coat into a makeshift scarecrow. He examined his own Nanticoke atlatl and two four-foot darts, one aluminum and one of fine-grained ash.

He stood about where Eustace Green had, his back to the targets, and waited for Mackenzie and Detective Sheldon. Fifty feet away, a shadowed line of cabbage palms and twisted sea grape had born mute witness to the death. At this range, in daylight, Eustace would’ve been able to knock a squirrel off a branch. But he’d been drunk.

Vernon walked to where Green’s atlatl had lay. According to Sheldon, drunk, depressed, lonely Green had walked out into perfect nighttime solitude, dropped his spear-thrower here, then walked over here. Turned around. Faced — what? The moonless sky? And then Green had yanked his dart with its glittering obsidian point through his sternum and into his heart, fell backward. Vernon sprawled on the grass, acting out the scene. His arms instinctively spread. But Green’s hands had been on the dart’s shaft. Was he trying to press it in further? Or pull it out? The pain must’ve been punishing. Everything he deserved. How long had he lived? Four minutes until brain death, his heart trying to beat around the black razor edges while he attempted to tug the barbs of the dart from his sternum.

“You’ll catch cold, rolling on the ground like that,” Sheldon said from the shadows.

Vernon jumped, even though he’d been expecting him. He managed to modulate his scream into a mere howl of greeting.

“Yeeargh yourself,” Sheldon said. “What’d you want to show me?”

“Dr. Lemaistre? Is that you?” a voice called.

Mackenzie emerged from the brush and walked over. Gloom had settled into the clearing much faster than Vernon anticipated.

Sheldon sighed and tried to read his watch. “Let’s get this over with,” he said.

Vernon said to the detective, “Eustace lay about here. His atlatl wasn’t beside him — where was it?”

“Great props, by the way.” Sheldon walked to a patch of ground forty feet from the scarecrow and pointed with his sneaker. “Here. We have pictures of it all.”

“Right,” Vernon said. “You ever wonder why he threw his atlatl twenty feet away before he killed himself?”

Sheldon shrugged. “Suicides do weird things. Once I saw a guy who took all his clothes off, even his shoes, folded them up and left them on the beach. He waded out into the ocean and shot himself in the head.”

Vernon held up his atlatl. “Ever seen anybody use one of these, detective?”

Sheldon shook his head and stuck his hands in his pockets.

“It’s not like a gun. You can’t turn it on yourself.” Vernon set the aluminum dart on the atlatl’s hook. “It’s like a bow and arrow — it shoots the dart away from you. Watch close.” He reared his arm straight back and brought it down hard as he could, and the dart snapped forward and disappeared into the gathering shadows. The pulled muscle in his shoulder throbbed.

Sheldon whistled.

Mackenzie said, “Stone Age man used it to bring down mammoths. Cave bears. Sabre-toothed cats — all the mega fauna. Wiped it out ten thousand years ago.”

“Mammoths, huh?”

“When Cortez invaded the Aztec empire, their warriors still used atlatls,” Mackenzie said.

Vernon added, “Their darts went right through the Spanish armor. They could shoot farther and straighter than a musket.” He glanced at Mackenzie, who was just another unreadable silhouette.

“This is a fascinating lecture, docs, but can we speed it up a little? I have work to do.”

Vernon resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He offered Sheldon the atlatl and the wooden dart. “Here, you try it.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Sheldon walked over and took the weapon.

While Sheldon fiddled with the two pieces of wood, Vernon said, “Two steps back. Right there.” He pointed to his suit-jacket scarecrow. “Eustace was standing right about there.”

“I don’t see your point,” Sheldon said.

“Ah,” Mackenzie said. That single syllable full of understanding and remorse.

Vernon waved Mackenzie back, behind Sheldon. “Throw the dart.”

Sheldon swung the atlatl back and faced the scarecrow.

“No,” Vernon said. He pointed. “Aim down there. Where the targets were, remember? Nothing but trees.”

Vernon watched the detective peer into the shadows, then give a little shrug. He cocked his arm and swung forward and down.

The dart flipped off to the left. The three men watched it pierce the suit-jacket without even slowing down and plow into the ground some forty feet beyond.

“I’ll be goddamned,” Sheldon said. He let the atlatl fall from his hand.

Vernon couldn’t have asked for a better demonstration. “See what you just did?”

Sheldon looked around, his eyes wide. “But I was aiming...” he said, then noticed the atlatl at his feet. His mouth hung open.

“The same thing happened to me first time I shot one,” Mackenzie said. “Put a dart right through a steel garbage can. What a waste. What a terrible waste.”

Sheldon stared at the dart’s path. Maybe he was envisioning Green transfixed, the look of surprise on his face, the backward fall.

“I think that happens because the dart’s not settled just right on the hook,” Vernon said. “The idea of the atlatl’s easy, but actually getting the dart to go where you want, that’s hard.”

“I’ll be goddamned,” Sheldon said again.

“Mackenzie and I both saw him with women last night. And what would groupies of the atlatl world champion want more than anything? A quick lesson.”

Sheldon nodded, but his eyes were still on the scarecrow. “Sure. A quick lesson.”

Vernon walked over to Sheldon’s side. “She stood here, with his atlatl. Had no idea what she was doing. Aiming downrange, toward the target. He stood right over there,” Vernon nodded at the jacket, “probably rooted her on.”

“He just wasn’t far enough out of the way,” Mackenzie said.

Sheldon turned to them. “But she hit him square in the heart.”

Vernon shrugged. “Luck. You’d have to be a doctor to be able to do that on purpose.” He knelt and touched the fallen atlatl. “Then she dropped the evidence, just like you did.” There must’ve been no sound at all except Green’s body hitting the ground. “Then she ran.”

“God, it was all just an accident,” Mackenzie whispered. Then he cleared his throat. “We still have the list of registrants.” He put a hand on Sheldon’s shoulder. “You could track them down, right?”

“No fingerprints — the handle was wrapped with leather. But we can check the list,” Sheldon said.

Vernon looked at the young detective. You aren’t going to check anything, he thought, because a closed case is a good case.

Vernon walked behind the scarecrow and plucked the dart out of the ground. Rolled it between his fingers to insure it was still straight.

“Thanks for the demonstration, Dr. Lemaistre,” the detective said, but he didn’t sound like he meant it. Sheldon stuck his hands in his pockets and slouched, as if in thought. “I better go check on that list.” After a moment, he turned and plodded away through the dark.

Mackenzie walked over and rested a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Hard to believe it was just a ridiculous accident. Eustace deserved better than that.” He cleared his throat. “Good work, Vernon,” he said. “Come to my office tomorrow morning. We’ll finish up that interview.” He shook his head. “Such a waste.”

Alone in the clearing, Vernon stared east at the acrylic lights of Miami Beach blazing on the horizon. He hadn’t deliberately planned anything. He’d taken Eustace’s onyx point and set it into one of his own darts, for good luck, he thought. Nothing but luck put Eustace on the range when Vernon had been trying for one more bull’s-eye, despite the dark, despite the beer. He wasn’t sure if he’d aimed or not.

Vernon tapped his atlatl against his palm. Eustace hadn’t even heard it coming. The dart hit him, he fell down and died without even knowing what happened. Vernon was right, though — the banner stone really did quiet the throw. Technology had reached forward from the Stone Age to silence Eustace Green.

Vernon pulled his coat off the makeshift scarecrow and stuck his finger through the hole in the cloth. He’d need to get that mended. He walked downrange, into the trees. His first dart should be here somewhere and he didn’t like the idea of leaving it out overnight.

No witnesses, a dead man already rotting on a mortician’s table. A detective who was happy to forget anything had happened. A new boss, a new job. A new life. Vernon searched the trees for his dart until he heard something moving through the underbrush. He backed away, into the clearing. Maybe he’d come back in the morning and look for the dart. Or maybe he’d just leave it, stuck in a tree, until the aluminum shaft eventually oxidized. That might take a hundred years. The stone point, he knew, would outlast him. Would outlast even his bones.

Sawyers by Kevin Allen

Perrine

The boy, Speck, and his father, the sawyer, were wrestling a log onto the sawmill carriage and didn’t see the two strangers when they first appeared at the edge of the clearing. Nor had they heard them calling because of the thumping engine of the Fordson tractor that powered the mill and its screaming saw blade. The boy looked up through the swirling sawdust to idly scan the yard and down the dirt road, and that’s when he saw the man and girl.

“Look there,” he said.

The two strangers stood at the head of the log wagon path that led to the road to Perrine, eight miles to the east. The young girl, carrying a suitcase strapped up with a piece of baling twine, stood alongside a much older man with a canvas bag like a sailor’s duffel slung over his shoulder. Both were chalked with dust. The man was lean, sharp-boned, dark, and bristled with a growth of whiskers. The girl was rounder, but a bit frail too, her brown hair tied up under a man’s brimmed hat, in spite of which her nose and cheeks were red and freckled from the sun. She wore a shapeless dress that came down below her knees but clung to her body under her arms and along her chest where she was wet with sweat.

John Talley beat the sawdust from his bib overalls with a stained handkerchief, pointed to the tractor, and told his son, “Cut that off.” He wiped his hands, sizing up the two, and left a trail in the sawdust and wood scraps as he shuffled across the mill yard toward the strangers. His big voice echoed from the board sides of the two box-house shacks and the slash pine beyond them. He said, “If you folks’re lost, then you done a good job of it.”

Speck slid down from the tractor and moved over to the empty shack where there was a double-bitted ax resting against the wall. He reached into his pocket for a whetstone, spat on it, and began working the blade.

“Mr. Talley?” the man said. “My name’s Calvin Hallaway.” He untangled his hand from the girl’s and offered it to shake, but the sawyer turned his attention to the boy and the ax even while telling the stranger that, yes, John Talley was his

Calvin’s narrow, hooded eyes darted while he surveyed the contents of the yard: the two shacks, the portable mill, the tractor, the beat-up Ford truck. He took a long drag on the cigarette clinched in his tight lips and then pinched the butt and flicked it away.

“What brings you here?” the sawyer said.

“Well, sir, it’s a long story,” Calvin said. “We come from up around the lake. Been working our way south, you might say. We stayed a time in Miami, but that was a regular hellhole. I’m an out-of-doors man, sir, like yourself, I suspect.”

They had been on the road for weeks, Calvin said, riding when they could but mostly on foot. “It’s unusual to see a man and his daughter out on the road, I’ll grant you. But there’s nothing usual about these times. Them last few miles liked to done this little girl in,” he said. “I felt just terrible about it. Thought I’d have to carry her sometimes. But she made it. This here’s Marcy. Say hello, honey.”

The girl nodded.

“My daughter,” Calvin said.

They had heard in Perrine of the sawyer and his tractor-run sawmill from a man at the collection yard on the Florida East Coast Railroad.

“Fella there said you maybe need some help,” Calvin added. “I been logging and sawmilling all over, up in Georgia and Carolina, mostly, but up and down the coast in Florida too. All I know is timber. And Marcy can cook real good. She’d be a big help to your wife. We’re not looking for a handout. We want to work.”

“There’s no wife. Just me and him.” The sawyer pointed to his son. “We manage. This is Speck. He usually knows better than to gawk, but we don’t get many visitors. Come on over here, boy. These people are looking for work.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Speck said.

“Ain’t we mannerable,” Calvin said. He grinned like he’d heard a secret. “Pleased to acquaint you too, young chap.”

“I can’t give you an answer now,” the sawyer told the visitors. “But you can stay the night in the empty house here. It’s not much, but it’ll beat sleeping in the swamp. We’ll see if we can’t get you something to eat. I’ll let you know in the morning about staying on.”

“That’s much appreciated,” Calvin said. “They told us you was fair.”

Inside the helper’s shack, Marcy had pushed the suitcase under the bed, taken her shoes off, and was examining her blisters. Calvin was stripped down to his dingy undershorts and sprawled on the mattress.

Speck watched them through the window of the shack, then listened just outside the door.

“You think they’ll let us stay here for a while?” Marcy asked.

“Depends,” Calvin said, lying back with eyes closed and blowing cigarette smoke toward the roof slats. “You saw the way that boy looked at you. Wouldn’t hurt our chances if you was to show him some attention. Must be a lonely thing, strong young fella like that one, working out here on this ridge, nothing but gators and toads for company day after day.”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing bad, baby girl. You’re a charmer. Just be nice to him. Maybe get him to put in a word with his sourpuss of an old man. We need some time here. Maybe after they get to know us better we might even be partners. Or something like that. They got a nice truck out there, did you notice that?”

Speck paused a moment at the open door to the hiredhand’s shack to make his presence known before he walked in. Calvin remained where he was on the bed. Marcy jumped up and hurried over to the door, and when she took the canned goods Speck had brought over she brushed her hand across his. She was a couple of inches shorter than the boy, and she looked up to speak.

“Thank you, Speck,” she said.

“You’re a regular little gentleman,” Calvin said, lifting up from the bed. “Your daddy must of raised you right. But you don’t favor him.” He turned to Marcy. “He must take after his mama. Maybe he’s his mama’s boy.”

“You should stop,” Marcy said.

“He knows I’m just fooling,” Calvin said. “You didn’t take offense, did you, son?”

In reply, Speck shook his head and walked quickly out the door. Marcy followed him.

“You shouldn’t let my daddy bother you,” she said. “He didn’t mean no harm. He was just saying how much he admires you and your father for working so hard up here all alone.”

They were standing in the middle of the clearing between the two shacks, near a rough-hewn table with stumps for chairs.

“Do you mind if we sit here awhile? My feet ache from walking.” The girl’s palms were rubbed raw from carrying the battered suitcase, and the broken-down brogans had rasped blisters on the heels of each foot.

She said they had walked all morning from Perrine before turning off onto the log road and heading up the ridge into the woods. Some cars passed. Two or three slowed before speeding on, and one pulled to the side of the road, but it too hastened away when the driver apparently got a closer look at the two.

“People just aren’t too trusting,” she said. “But just listen to me complain. It sure was nice of your daddy to let us stay.”

Speck spat in the dirt and sat. “What do you want?” he said.

“Just talk,” Marcy said. “How old are you? How long you been out here? How much longer you going to be working here?”

The boy said he was sixteen. He and his father had hauled the tractor mill up Cutler Ridge more than a year before and had been working this stand of scratch pine ever since. But no matter how hard they worked something was always breaking down, and then the sawyer would say it was God’s will. They were on a contract with the owner of the land, a farmer who himself barely scratched out enough of a living to make his mortgage payments to the land company. If they didn’t finish here in the next two weeks and move the mill they’d forfeit the contract, and the lumber already cut would go to the farmer.

“Where’s your mama?” Marcy asked.

“She died in a hurricane three years ago,” Speck said. “That’s why we came out here. My dad was a minister in Miami, but he said he was through with preaching. He was through with people, I guess. We come out here and went to work for ourselves.”

“Looks like you could use some help.” She reached over and put her hand on the boy’s. But Speck stood up.

“We’re managing,” he said.

“I was just observing,” she said. “And I was thinking that if you did need a helping hand then maybe you’d put in a good word for us with your daddy.” She smiled sweetly. “I sure could use some rest.”

The boy backed away a few steps and then turned toward the main shack. “We’ll see,” he muttered.

Back inside the main shack, he watched the girl rubbing her feet in the middle of the clearing. He knew his father would let her and Calvin stay on. The sawyer wouldn’t ask where they’d been, what they were running from. He’d never bothered to ask any of the hired hands. All that mattered was the work. In their time on the ridge a half dozen men had come and gone. Black, white, young, old, every one had something or someone trailing them, pushing them south and then, when there was almost no farther south to go, west toward the swamps. This ridge was the edge of the solid world, and no one who thought he had any other choice would put up with the heat and bugs and toil for more than a few days. The sawyer would let the strangers stay for as long as they were help. He would overlook their trouble because he had no choice. He’d make use of them, the same way he’d made do with the cranky tractor and balky sawmill. The boy would put aside his suspicions too, because the girl would be close for a while. But it wouldn’t be for long. This was not a place where strangers took comfort or refuge.

Speck was up early the next morning, and as he stood at the edge of the woods, he watched Marcy shuffle out of the helper’s shack and make her way to a little creek just beyond the clearing. She was carrying clean clothes, which she hung on a branch, and then leaned from the waist to pull off the dingy dress she was wearing when she arrived. The boy saw the gray hem rise like a curtain revealing pale shins and thighs, the dark triangle between her legs, the slight swell of her belly, and the circles of her breasts. She waded into the green water up to her waist and bathed, and as she climbed back onto the bank she turned and looked up into the woods where Speck stood still, trying to make himself invisible. If she saw him, she pretended not to notice. She pulled on the clean dress quickly, washed her dirty clothes, and hung them on tree branches to dry. Then she slowly made her way back up toward the mill yard. The boy moved over to the sawmill and pretended to study the machinery.

Calvin appeared in the doorway of the helper’s shack, barefoot and shirtless, and when he stretched his arms mightily high over his head, he revealed a red scar that curved along his pale flank. When the boy looked over, Calvin balled his hand into a fist and made a pumping motion toward his groin. The boy glared at the man.

John Talley came out of the main shack eating a biscuit. He walked on over to Calvin. “Well, sir, I guess we might see how it works out with the two of you here awhile,” the sawyer told Calvin. “I don’t know you from Adam, and I don’t need to know. But the fact of the matter is, I have to get this lumber cut and delivered to the collection yard. Truth is, it’s hard, hot work, and I’ve had men come and go that wasn’t up to it. But you’re saying you can, so I am offering you a chance.” Together, they worked out the wages. They agreed Calvin would be paid after the sawyer delivered the last load of lumber to the collection yard.

“I’d like to get to work,” the sawyer said. “So soon as you’re ready, come on out to the mill. I’ll have Speck show your girl to the supplies so she can get started on dinner. You be quick about it,” he then told Speck. “We got work to do.”

For a week, Calvin worked shoulder to shoulder with the sawyer and the boy, cutting the pine, dragging it back to the clearing, and bucking the timber at the tractor mill. And then one morning when Calvin didn’t show up for breakfast, the girl said that he had left the night before to take care of some business.

He still hadn’t returned the next day, and that night there was light in the window of the helper’s shack, and the girl was moving about inside alone. Speck stole closer in the darkness to the window.

Marcy wore a clean white dress, and arranged around her on the bed were women’s things, brushes and tins and powder. She sat with her back to the window and picked up the brush and began to stroke her brown hair. But then she heard the boy at the window and turned with a start. “You scared me,” she said.

Speck moved closer and looked around inside.

“It’s all right,” Marcy said. “I’m all alone.”

“I’m sorry,” Speck said.

“Sorry I’m alone, or sorry I caught you peeping in my window?”

“I saw the light and wanted to make sure everything was all right.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I just wanted... Sorry,” he said, and he turned to leave.

“Wait a minute,” Marcy said. “Go around by the door. I’ll be out.”

When she met him at the door, the boy reached to touch her cheek. He wanted to do something, to kiss her, maybe, but he didn’t know where to start.

Marcy reached up and took his hand before he touched her face. “Be careful,” she said.

“I was just—”

“You was just maybe figuring we’re alone out here and you’d take advantage of the situation. If my daddy knew, he’d—”

“I’m sorry.” The boy turned his head to check the edges of the clearing. “Where is he?”

“He went looking for something to drink,” Marcy said.

“He won’t find much around here.”

“He’s got his ways. He says he’s got a sixth sense.”

“A what?”

“Sometimes he sees things before they happen. Not always, and not that he can control it, but I seen it work. Like coming here.”

“Visions, like?”

“I don’t pretend to understand it.” The girl’s face darkened for a second and she shivered. “I shouldn’t be talking to you. If he knew I was alone with you...”

“He won’t know if you don’t tell him. We’re just talking. So why are the two of you out on the road?”

“There was trouble.”

“With your mama?”

She looked up at the boy. “My mama’s dead. This trouble was with the law up in Duval County. They said Cal, my daddy, they said he stole. Said I was in on it. It was a lie, but we had to go anyway. I didn’t have no one else, so I went with him. I didn’t have a choice.”

“You could leave him.”

“He needs me, and I need him. You understand that, don’t you? Ain’t that why you’re out here in nowhere?”

“I could leave. I will someday.”

“But you haven’t yet.”

“It don’t seem right, though. You, a girl, out on the road.”

“Well, we’re not on the road now, are we? Come on inside. There’s something I want to show you.”

Marcy took Speck’s hand and led him inside over to the bed. She reached down and slid the battered suitcase from underneath. “This is my hope chest.” She untied the twine and lifted the lid. She took a carefully folded white cotton dress from the case and then a patchwork quilt, a pair of polished black leather shoes with hard buckles, something made of lace that she quickly hid beneath the quilt, the brush and mirror, and finally a photograph — Marcy when she was a fair-haired child wearing a long white dress — in a gold frame.

“This ain’t the hope chest itself, naturally. It’s what goes in one.” She arranged the few pieces on the bed. “These are my pretty things. I’d hate worse than anything to part with these.” She lifted from the suitcase a wad of newspaper and unwrapped a small glass globe.

“I thought it’d be broke,” she said. “It’s so delicate.”

She showed Speck. Beneath the little roof of glass there was a tiny city of white with steeples and onion-shaped domes, castles, and palaces. Blue lagoons and arched bridges connected the white streets. On the bottom of the globe there was gold printing: Enter herein ye sons of men.

“What is it?” Speck said.

“It’s the World’s Fair. In St. Louis a long time ago. This came from there. It was a keepsake. It’s for looking and dreaming. Watch.” She turned the globe upside down and hundreds of silvery flakes floated above the miniature city before settling silently back to the bottom. “Don’t they look just like stars?” Marcy said. “Don’t you wish you could be somewhere so pretty? It was handed down in my family from my mother’s side. Her daddy helped build it — the fair.”

“You saw it?”

“It was a long time ago. It ain’t there no more. They built up this great white city and people came from all over the world, and then when it was over they tore it all down like it never happened, like it was kind of a dream. Still, I want to see where it was someday.”

“I could take you there.”

“That would be nice. Maybe someday you’ll be there, and you’ll look up and I’ll be getting off a trolley car, just like that. It’s nice to think so.” She carefully rewrapped the globe and put it back in the suitcase in the folds of the quilts and dresses.

“Why can’t you just go back to where you came from?” Speck asked. “Back to your people. There must be someone.”

“I told you, they wouldn’t want me,” she said. “Not now.”

“But why? You deserve better than... than this.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad.” She cupped her hand on Speck’s smooth cheek. “Now you better go.” From within the woods came the sound of movement, and Marcy told Speck, “Go. Now.”

The boy ran for the door as Marcy hurried to put out the light.

Calvin made his way unsteadily toward the door and then stopped and pissed on the ground before going inside. Speck creeped around to the back of the shack and watched through the widow.

“What’s all this?” Calvin said. He grabbed the girl and threw her onto the bed. Marcy tried to scramble for the door, but Calvin caught her by the leg and dragged her back. He pulled his belt off in one quick motion and began to lash her legs. Marcy curled into a ball and covered herself with her hands, but then Calvin whipped the belt across her face. She whimpered and begged for him to stop. And then she lay still while he climbed on top of her.

The boy felt powerless to stop it. He told himself it was for the girl that he hesitated. That it would be worse for her if he interfered. But he knew he was afraid for himself. So he waited while the man’s grunts and moans subsided, watched as the girl turned her face into the mattress and waited for the whole thing to be over.

The next morning, Marcy moved like an awkward, tentative bird. She wore the old floppy men’s hat pulled down over her forehead. Calvin, meanwhile, emerged from the shack smiling his thin, menacing smile. “Breakfast ready?” he said as he passed by Speck on his way to the sawmill.

Marcy’s eyes were raw and the red edges beneath her right eye darkened to almost purple above her cheek. Before Speck could speak, she said, “I fell. Don’t ask no more.”

“He did this to you,” the boy replied.

“I just fell,” she said, looking over the boy’s shoulder. “Leave it alone. You’ll be better off. I have to get the cooking started.”

“This ain’t right. You can’t... Your own daddy... Something’s got to be done.”

“Not now, and not by you,” she said. And she pulled the broad brim of the hat lower over her eyes and started off for the main shack.

Speck hurried to catch up with her. “I want to help you,” he said.

She stopped abruptly. “Then leave me alone. I appreciate you wanting to help. But this here, this little mark on my eye, it’s a pimple, a scratch. If you want to help, leave it alone.”

Speck reached his arm as if he meant to wrap it around her, but she backed away. “What are doing? Didn’t you hear a word I said?”

“I’m not afraid.”

“You should be,” she said. “Go on. I’ll find what I need.”

Calvin sat at the table in the middle of the yard smoking and gazing absently into the clear blue morning sky. He turned abruptly and grinned slowly at the boy until Speck turned away.

“Where you been?” John Talley asked, coming out of the sawyer’s shack. “If you’re running off like that without any notice, I got no use for you. You’d be better off gone.”

“I’m here to apologize,” Calvin said. “I know it was sudden. But it couldn’t be helped. I had business, a personal matter. I hope you can appreciate that.”

“What I’d appreciate is if we could cut some lumber,” the sawyer said.

That morning they hauled and cut more timber than Speck and his father had for the previous two days. The boy had to race to keep up with the older men. The two of them winched the pine logs onto the sawmill carriage, and then while John Talley kept an eye on the big blade Speck and Calvin would move around to the other end to buck the cut timber as it came off the saw.

“We keep this up, we’ll strip these woods bare in no time,” John Talley said to Calvin. “Glad you come back.”

“Ask and ye shall receive,” Calvin said. “I do believe in that.”

Calvin and Speck hustled another log down onto the carriage. “How ’bout you, boy, what do you ask for when you say your prayers at night?” Calvin said.

“Nothing,” Speck said.

“I don’t believe that,” Calvin said. “Young, healthy boy like you must want a lot of things. I know I did when I was your age. Still do.” He stopped to wipe the sweat from his face with his shirtsleeve, watching Speck from behind the crook of his elbow.

“I doubt I want what you want,” Speck said.

The saw screamed and sent up a cloud of sawdust that settled down on Speck and Calvin, who had moved to the opposite end of the mill to catch the ripped lumber.

“How ’bout it, boy,” Calvin said, effortlessly swinging a ten-foot pine plank down off the mill. “You think the man above sent us here?”

The boy was sweating, trying to keep pace with the older man. “I thought it was the fella from the collection yard,” Speck said, and he loaded the plank onto the wagon bed.

“Maybe you get that smart mouth from your mama too,” Calvin said.

Just then the saw made a terrible screech as its teeth bit deep into the hard heart of the log. The blade stopped, but the tractor engine kept growling. Speck grabbed a piece of scrap board and reached in to push it against the log.

John Talley came running from around the far end of the saw, waving his arms. “Cut it off!” he screamed.

Calvin ran to the tractor and pushed in the throttle.

The sawyer grabbed Speck by both shoulders. “Don’t ever reach in to that machinery,” he said. “You know better. That old mill’s touchy. Any trouble, that’s it. You shut it down. You hear?”

Speck tossed the scrap aside, and the sawyer and Calvin rocked the log until they inched it away from the blade. Across the yard, Marcy called from the doorway of the main shack.

“Dinner’s ready,” John Talley said.

The men and Speck sat outside at the rough table and waited for the girl to carry the plates to them. She was flushed when she finally sat down. Calvin attacked his food while John Talley said grace. The girl wiped her forehead with the back of her arm. A strand of brown hair stuck out from under her hat and was matted across her pale brow.

“This is real good,” the sawyer told Marcy, his mouth full of cornbread. “You ain’t eating?”

“Not hungry,” Marcy said. “I just need to sit awhile.”

“And I need some pepper,” Calvin said.

She stood and began to make her way back to the shack, but halfway across the yard she slumped to her knees. Speck stood, but he didn’t move when he saw how Calvin looked at him.

John Talley waited for the hired man too, but Calvin continued to eat. “You think you might better see to your daughter?” the sawyer said.

“She’s all right,” Calvin answered, and he leaned over his plate and spooned in another mound of beans.

“She’s hurt,” Speck said. “You did this.”

Calvin’s fist, still holding the spoon, pounded the table as sudden and sharp as a thunderclap. “What do you know about it? If I say she’s fine, she’s fine. You can just stay the hell out of it.”

“I won’t,” the boy said. “This ain’t right. You’re a goddamn criminal.”

The sawyer straightened his spine. “That’s enough,” he said. “You, boy, hold your tongue.” He turned on Calvin. “And you had best remember why it is you’re here. I need help with this timber, but you can just keep on going down the line if you mean trouble.” And he went to help the girl back to the table.

Speck could see the storm pass from Calvin, at least for the time being. His smile showed his stained teeth and pieces of his dinner.

“She’s overcome by the heat,” the sawyer said. Then he looked at Calvin. “What happened to that eye?”

“She fell out of the bed,” Calvin said. “She ain’t used to sleeping in a bed. She was turning in her sleep and fell out. Them things happen.” And then he continued to eat beans like he didn’t have a care in the world.

“You’re a goddamn liar,” Speck muttered.

“I told you, that’s enough,” John Talley said. “We’ve got work to do. But she’s got to get that eye seen to. Speck, I want you to take Marcy to the doctor.”

“She don’t need no doctor,” Calvin said.

“I don’t understand you, mister,” the sawyer said. “Your girl is hurt. If you don’t care no more for her than that, then maybe you should be on your way. Maybe we’d all be better off. Right now, though, she’s going to the doctor.”

“Go on, then,” Calvin said, and waved them off.

Marcy said she didn’t want to go to town. She was feeling better. But the sawyer made her get in the truck with the boy.

As they pulled onto the main road toward Perrine, Marcy told the boy again not to take her the doctor. “I’m fine,” she said. “Really.”

“If you don’t go,” the boy said, “I’m taking you to the sheriff. I may go myself anyway.”

“You can’t do that, Speck. You don’t understand.”

“What I don’t understand is why you put up with him.”

“I tried to tell you, I’m his daughter,” she said. “I don’t have anyplace else to go. And he ain’t a bad man, really. He’s just rough.”

“Only an evil man could do such a thing. Especially if he’s your father. Where did you come from? Don’t you have people who could help?”

“The kind of trouble I was in, they wouldn’t want no part of. I can’t tell you, Speck, what it was. Can you just not ask me to tell?”

“But you’re not in trouble now. You don’t owe him. You could tell him to leave. You could stay here.”

“With you? How would your daddy like that? You think he’d welcome me just moving in with you?”

“You heard what he said. He wouldn’t turn you out.”

“And I’m supposed to just tell my own daddy that he’s going and I’m staying? He’s not the type that’d just leave. And say you and I did go away — it ain’t that easy. He wouldn’t rest till he found me. And nothing and no one would stand in his way.”

“Maybe I could, I don’t know... do something.”

“Speck.”

“He hurts you.”

“He’ll hurt you worse.”

“We could run him off, my dad and me.”

“Your daddy’d have done that long ago if he cared about such things.”

“There must be something.”

Marcy touched the boy’s face. “Don’t say no more,” she said. They were nearing the town. Marcy leaned over and almost in a whisper said to the boy, “If you could find us something to drink, maybe we could find us a peaceful spot and just talk like friends.”

It didn’t take much liquor for the boy to get drunk. Marcy didn’t try to stop him when he kissed her, and she helped him when he fumbled with his pants. It took him only a couple of seconds, and even then he didn’t know at first when it was finished.

“That was real nice,” Marcy told him.

It was getting late, and they still had to go to the grocer’s to pick up supplies. The boy was too far gone, so Marcy drove to the store and parked the truck on the street a few buildings away. They both got out, and Marcy went on into the store with the sawyer’s list while Speck lingered outside. On the window of the grocer’s someone had pasted a single piece of white paper. The black type said:

Identical handbills had been pasted on the windows of nearly every shop and office she passed on the street. Speck rested his head against the glass of the front door. Suddenly, he doubled over and vomited into the street. He stood up and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

Speck went to wait in the truck, but before he opened the door a man in a white shirt and bib overalls came walking over from across the street. He held a stack of papers and handed one to a passerby.

“I hate to trouble you, son,” the man said to Speck. He had the leathery neck and hands of a farmer. “My name’s Whitt,” he continued, handing Speck a flyer. “I wonder if you’ve seen a strange girl around. Her name’s Mary. We heard she may have come this way.”

“What?” Speck said.

“I’m her father,” the man said. “I’m afraid she’s mixed up with some bad sorts. I’ve been looking for her. I want her safe, I guess you might say.”

Speck nodded, took the handbill, and backed away.

“Don’t forget,” C.W. Whitt said. “She’s dear to us.”

Speck folded the handbill and put it in his pocket and sat and waited for the girl. He knew that C.W. Whitt was Marcy’s father, and whatever it was that she or Calvin had done he had already forgiven. He could tell her, and she’d be safe, free to go back to wherever she’d come from. But then he’d be left to go back to the mill where Calvin was waiting. He knew Marcy was right, that Calvin wouldn’t just allow her to walk away. He was afraid of Calvin. But he was even more afraid of losing Marcy. The two of them could find a way so that they could be together.

The boy was quiet on the drive back to the mill, and so was Marcy. Finally, he took the handbill from his pocket and studied it. Marcy pretended not to notice the paper.

“This changes things,” the boy said.

“Changes what?”

“That farmer back there in town gave me this. This is you. He was your daddy. Whatever you did to him, whatever made you think you couldn’t go back, you were wrong about him. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be out searching the country for you.”

Marcy pulled the truck to the side of the road and took the paper from the boy. She read it several times before she spoke.

“I stole his truck and twenty dollars,” she said. “It was Calvin’s idea. He told me if I went back they’d throw me in jail.”

“Now you know better. We could just turn around.”

“There’s still Calvin. You seen him. You think he’d just let me go? You think he’d not bother you or your daddy?”

“Nobody’s looking for Calvin,” the boy said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that if he vanished from the face of the earth, no one would miss him. If he was to fall and hit his head on a rock stumbling through the woods, no one would mourn his passing. It’d be better than he deserved. I could make him just disappear.”

Before, when he talked about her leaving Calvin, it was just ignorance and fear, and he gave her no reason to trust him. She knew not to listen, for her sake as well as his own protection. Now, things were different. He knew full well what kind of man Calvin was, knew what danger he could be. He knew the truth about her. Killing was a sin, no matter what. But was it worse than keeping her from her tormented father? Was it worse than keeping him from Marcy?

“You can’t do it, Speck,” the girl said. “You’d be doing it for me, and I ain’t worth it.”

“To me you are.”

“But I wouldn’t be if I let you do this. I’m no older than you are, but I’ve seen enough to know that no one just disappears. The past don’t give up easy, no matter how far away you get from it. You think your daddy’d just let you walk away?”

“You could stay here. Without him here, you could stay.”

“I have to go back, Speck. And you have to stay.”

There was no sign of the sawyer or Calvin when Marcy and Speck pulled into the clearing.

“Quick,” Marcy said. “I’ll get my things, and then you can drive me back to town.”

Speck had grabbed the ax from the side of the building and was standing watch outside the shack when he heard the tractor engine start up and looked over to see Calvin move in place to hoist a pine log onto the carriage. When he glanced up and saw the truck, Calvin dropped the timber and headed directly for the shack. Before Marcy could get the suitcase back under the bed and hide the handbill, Calvin was at the door.

“Where’s my father?” Speck said.

“Mr. Talley is up in the woods cutting timber. But my question is where the two of you have been, and what’s that you’ve got there, darling?”

Calvin ripped the paper from her hands, read the handbill carefully, and smiled. “Well, well, now. This is quite a little bit of news, ain’t it?”

Speck could see the wheels spinning in Calvin’s head.

“Looks like the cat’s out of the bag,” Calvin said. “Looks like somebody needs you more than I do. Reward and everything. Hoo haw. Well, sweetheart, I tell you what, I’ve never been one to stand in the way of family harmony. I think what this means is our time together is come to an end. It’ll pain me to part with you, it really will, but you’re worth more in leaving me than in staying. I think I’ll just borrow this young man’s truck here and the two of us can go and find Mr. C.W. Whitt and see about that reward.”

“I’ll not go another step with you,” Marcy said.

“Oh, I think you will. I don’t see how you or anyone else’s going to stop me.” He grabbed Marcy by the arm and pulled her outside.

Speck followed them. He raised the ax, and Calvin released Marcy, but he advanced toward the boy.

“Get inside,” Speck told Marcy. But Marcy followed as Speck began backing toward the saw.

“So this is how it is!” Calvin said. He had to shout over the roar of the tractor. “You think you can take what’s mine, boy?”

He careened around the saw and had to lean on the carriage frame for balance, but Speck stood his ground, and when Calvin came close the boy swung the ax wildly. Calvin leaned away, and the blade stuck deep into the log on the saw carriage. While Speck struggled to pull the ax free, Calvin steadied himself and pounced. He grabbed a handful of the boy’s yellow hair.

“You’ll pay now,” he growled. He let loose of the boy’s hair and stood catching his breath as if he was plotting just how to resolve things. The boy crouched by the side of the

Speck looked up just in time to see Calvin’s arm come swinging around at his head. He didn’t try to duck away; instead, he lowered his head and threw his weight against Calvin. Calvin’s feet gave way and he reached out blindly for something to catch him from falling.

The sound of the man’s hand crushed in the mill’s flywheel was no more violent than the snap of a pine bough. The sound Calvin made, though, was long and loud and anguished. After a moment of struggle to withdraw his hand, he dropped to his knees and then slumped against the carriage frame. Blood ran back down his wrist and arm and then into the sawdust.

His arm was drawn up into the machinery of the saw well past his wrist. He was moaning in pain. The boy went over and shut off the tractor. Marcy had reached the saw, where she watched blankly as Calvin’s eyes rolled back and his head dropped. His face had been red with rage a few seconds earlier. Now it was the color of weathered lumber.

“Do something,” Marcy said.

“He deserves it,” Speck said.

“He’ll die, bleeding like that.”

“What do you want me to do? He’s caught in the gears. I don’t think I can take it apart. There’s no time to go get help. We’ll have to take him into town. But he’s going to have to go without that hand. You decide. I’ll do whatever you say, but you tell me what to do.”

Marcy looked at Calvin, still slumped against the machine. “You can’t ask me to decide,” she said.

“You can leave him and we can go for help, or we can get him loose and take him into town. I’ll do whichever you say.”

“How’re going to get him loose?”

Speck pulled the ax from the log and showed it to the girl.

She breathed slowly, watching the blood run down Calvin’s arm and drip off his elbow into a pool beneath him. She held her head up. “Cut it off,” she said.

Speck didn’t hesitate. He raised the ax and brought it down. The first blow struck just above the man’s wrist and produced a dull sound followed by Calvin’s piercing shriek. The second one sounded only of metal and bone. Calvin made not a whimper.

They wrapped the ragged wrist in one of Calvin’s white shirts, and Speck tied a piece of twine high up on the wounded man’s arm to keep him from losing any more blood. He and the girl dragged Calvin to the truck and loaded him onto the bed.

“Get in,” Speck told the girl.

She shook her head.

“Why not? He can’t hurt you now.”

“You go on. I did what I had to. Now I’m through. You go on and when they ask, tell it all just like it happened.”

Speck backed the truck in front of the log wagon. “Marcy, go on and get your things. There’s no time to argue.”

“My name’s not Marcy,” she said.

“I know it. But it doesn’t matter now,” Speck said. “Get your things.”

“I can’t go with you,” she said.

“If you don’t, I’ll dump him in the swamp where nobody will ever find him.”

“No you won’t. It’s all over, Speck. You go on.”

“You wait for me here. I’ll be back and we’ll tell my daddy. We’ll go to St. Louis to the fair.”

“That’s all over with, Speck. You go on now.”

She wore the white dress and carried the battered suitcase. She had cleaned up the main shack and then packed everything of hers and gathered Calvin’s things from the helper’s shack. She went outside and built a fire and fed the man’s clothes and finally his sailor’s bag into the flames.

Alone by the firelight, Marcy took the glass dome from the suitcase and held it out. At first it seemed empty, a void above the dark outline of the miniature city. But then she shook the thing in her fist and held it out again, and the tiny silver flecks caught the light from the fire and glowed there in the night, brief sparks, like stars you glimpse through boughs of pine.

She set the globe on the table between the two shacks. She picked up her belongings and walked off down the log road, toward the place — she didn’t know where yet — someone was waiting for her.