Solomon versus Lord

Four
AN ANGELFISH NAMED STEVE

The next morning was gray and cold, at least by Miami standards. Clouds the color of old nickels pushed down from the north, winds kicked up, palm fronds ripped loose from trees. Yesterday, the bird-smuggling trial had slogged along. Victoria had put on her case, Steve had minded his manners. He had even kept half his promise. He was playing nice; he just wasn't winning. Trial would resume at ten A.M. He should be spending the time preparing for court, but there were domestic duties to attend to first.

In his drafty bungalow on Kumquat Avenue in Coconut Grove, with Jimmy Buffet singing “License to Chill” on a CD, Steve grilled ham and cheese sandwiches and whipped up papaya smoothies. An unusual breakfast, but his nephew, Bobby, chose the menu. That was their deal; the kid would eat everything on the plate as long as he got to pick the food.

No matter the weather, Bobby wore baggy shorts and a Florida Marlins T-shirt. He was skinny, with pipe-stem arms and legs and sandy hair that stood straight up, as if he'd just stuck a finger in an electrical outlet. Rounding out the picture as the class uber-nerd-if he actually went to Carver instead of homeschooling-was a double track of shiny braces and thick black glasses that were always smudged and cockeyed.

Bobby could not find his way home from the park three blocks away, but he could repeat everything he heard or read. Verbatim. As a result, Steve could never win an argument about current events, baseball statistics, or whether he had promised a trip to Disney World exactly seventy-eight days, fourteen hours, and twelve minutes ago. The doctors called it echolalia, the flip side of the boy's disability.

Recently, Bobby had found an Italian cooking site on the Internet and had become obsessed with grilled sandwiches. To accommodate his nephew, Steve bought a panini grill, which he used for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Now, as Steve constructed Bobby's sandwich with the care of Michelangelo sculpting a statue, the boy stood alongside, making sure he didn't take any shortcuts. If the cheese melted over the edge of the bread or if the ridged grill marks were uneven, Bobby would scream, bang his head against the counter, and wrist-flick the sandwich across the kitchen like a Frisbee.

“The ciabatta fresh?” Bobby asked.

“You bet.”

“The ham Black Forest?”

“Nothing but.”

“The cheese ricotta?”

“Sheep's milk. Just like you told me, kiddo.”

From the intensity of Bobby's look, Steve might have been separating plutonium from uranium. Only when the sandwiches emerged from the press-ham and cheese blended into a luxurious melt, bread crusty with symmetrical grill marks-would the boy relax. While this was going on, with Jimmy Buffet advocating living for the weekend and jumping off the deep end, the phone rang. Fairly certain it wasn't the Key West troubadour inviting him fishing, Steve let the machine pick up:

“This is Herbert T. Solomon. Recovering lawyer.” Re-koven loy-yuh.

Steve's father had been born in Savannah, and though Herbert Solomon had not lived in the Deep South for half a century, he still spoke in a mellifluous, musical drawl. The accent, Steve believed, was purposeful and exaggerated, Herbert's calling card. In his father's scrapbook was a faded newspaper clipping describing one of his closing arguments as a “melodic hymn to the angels, folksy as a farm, sweeter than molasses, soulful as a prayer.” Steve's own courtroom style, should it ever be described at all, would be likened to a grenade exploding in a septic tank.

“Mah spies tell me you've been in the cooler again,” said the voice into the machine. “Stephen, ah've taught you to win with style and grace, not shenanigans and tomfoolery. And when are you bringing mah grandson down here?”

Down here being Sugarloaf Key, just north of Key West, Herbert's own private gulag, though considerably warmer than Siberia.

“Somebody's gotta teach that boy to fish, and it sure as hell ain't you.”

Granddad taking the boy fishing. Now there was a Norman Rockwell notion, Steve thought, not without some bitterness. Herbert Solomon was one of those men who became far better grandfathers than they ever were fathers. How much time did he ever spend with Steve? How many ball games? Track meets? Camping trips?

Steve knew he still resented his father for having placed career first, family a distant second. Herbert Solomon had become just what he wanted: a great lawyer and a great judge, before taking a great fall. Steve had other ambitions. Sure, he wanted to be successful, if he could do it his own way: no compromises, no political bullshit, no ass-kissing. So far, it hadn't exactly worked out.

“You couldn't hit a donkey in the fanny with a bass fiddle, much less outsmart a bonefish,” Herbert continued.

Nothing like nurturing support, Steve thought, grabbing the phone. “Hey, Dad, chill, okay?”

“Why didn't you pick up?” his father demanded.

“Because I didn't want to fight at seven in the morning.”

“Don't be such a pussy. What's this ah hear about Erwin Gridley tossing you in the pokey?”

“No big deal.”

“The hell it's not. You're a damn embarrassment.”

“I'm the embarrassment? I'm not the one whose picture was in the paper, cleaning out his office before he could be indicted.”

“Your picture's never been in the paper 'cause you handle pissant cases.”

“Gotta go now, Dad.”

“Hang on. What are you wearing to court today?”

“Jeez, I'm not ten years old. You don't have to-”

“No sharkskin suits, no diamond pinky rings.”

“Dad, nobody dresses like that anymore.” He already was in his uniform, a charcoal gray suit, straight off the rack, powder blue shirt, simple striped tie. Early on, he'd decided his actions drew enough attention without looking like a carnival barker.

“You got me on speaker, son?”

“No, why?”

Herbert lowered his voice as if he still might be overheard. “Your worthless sister called.”

Meaning Janice. Herbert's worthless daughter, Bobby's worthless mother, Steve's worthless sister. “Worthless” not so much an adjective as a new first name.

“She's out of prison,” Herbert continued.

“How'd that happen?” The last Steve had heard, his sister was doing a mandatory three years for a smorgasbord of drug and theft offenses. As for the boy's father? Spin the wheel of misfortune to figure out who that might be.

“She was evasive about it.”

“Imagine that.” Steve carried the handset into the living room so Bobby couldn't hear him. “How much money she ask you for?”

“Not a shekel.”

“You sure it was her?”

“She said something about making a big move, changing her life. Mentioned New Zealand, but knowing her, she might have meant New Mexico.”

Steve lowered his voice. “Did she say anything about wanting to see Bobby?”

“She did, but ah said you probably wouldn't let her.”

“After what she did to him, you're goddamn right I wouldn't.”

“That's what she figured. So you better stay on your toes.”

“What are you getting at?” But even as Steve said it, he knew exactly what his father meant. “You think she'd try to snatch Bobby?”

“Ah don't trust her or that pokeweed religion crowd she runs with.”

Steve couldn't disagree, so he didn't.

“You know what to look for,” Herbert continued. “Hang-up calls, someone tailing you, strangers hanging around. And don't let Bobby wander off.”

“Got it, Dad. Thanks. Sorry about before…”

Why the hell am I apologizing? He's the one who insulted me.

“Forget it. Let me talk to mah grandson.”

Steve headed back into the kitchen, gave the phone to Bobby, and checked on the paninis. But something was gnawing at him.

An old green pickup truck with tinted windows and oversize tires.

He had seen it this morning, just after dawn. He'd walked outside to pick up the newspaper before it was pelted by red, squishy berries from a Brazilian pepper tree. A green Dodge pickup streaked with mud was parked catty-corner across the street. The truck had pulled away in what seemed like too much of a hurry for six A.M. He tried to summon up the image. There was something about the pickup that stuck in his mind.

The lovebug screen fastened to the front bumper.

Meaning the pickup wasn't local. Lovebugs were an upstate phenomenon, orange-and-black insects that mate in midair and get squashed in flagrante delicto all over your metallic finish. And now that he thought about it, wasn't the truck there the other night when he brought Bobby home from getting ice cream at Whip 'N Dip? He couldn't quite remember, maybe his mind was playing tricks on him.

Calm down. Don't get paranoid.

Okay, Janice is upstate; the truck's from upstate, which means.. .

Nothing. Nada. Gornisht. But the old man's right. Be aware. Stay alert.

Steve listened to Bobby chattering with his grandfather about fishing lures, and marveled at the progress he'd made. Ten months ago, when Steve rescued him-there was no other word for it-the boy would have been too timid to talk on the phone.

Steve had never told anyone precisely what happened that freezing night in Calhoun County. Not his father. Not Dr. Kranchick. And certainly not Zinkavich.

He wondered just how much Bobby remembered. They had never talked about it. Steve, though, recalled every moment, starting with the call from his sister.

Janice had been in one of those ecstatic states that always accompanied a change in her life, until she discovered she was the same old person without values, purpose, or goals. She'd just moved into a commune run by a whacked-out religious cult. The Universal Friends of Peace, or some burnout and loser name like that. They were tucked away in the woods somewhere in the Florida Panhandle. Best Steve could figure, the group believed that God resided in green leafy plants, especially cannabis. Orgies were believed to convey healing power, though Steve thought herpes was a more likely result.

In the beginning, Janice called every few weeks, usually to wheedle money out of him. Steve always spoke to Bobby, who seemed to be growing more withdrawn with each call. Steve was worried. Not about his sister, who, like a cockroach, could survive a nuclear blast. But there was Bobby, ten years old, shy and defenseless. Janice's mothering instincts, Steve knew, were on a par with rattlesnakes, and they eat their young.

Steve remembered the chill he felt the first time Janice refused to put Bobby on the phone. Doing chores, she claimed. The next time, Bobby had supposedly gone to town with her scuzzy friends. A week later, she said the boy just didn't feel like talking.

Steve had exploded at her: “Put him on the phone, goddammit!”

“Fuck you, little brother.”

“Are you stoned?”

“What are you, a cop?”

“C'mon, Janice. Where is he?”

“He's my kid. Mind your own fucking business.”

“I'm calling Child Welfare.”

“Lots of luck. They're scared shitless to come out here.”

“Then I'm coming up.”

“Try it. We got a barbed-wire fence and some speed freaks with shotguns.”

His imagination worked up one horrific image after another. Bobby lost or injured. Bobby sold for half-a-dozen rocks of crack. The next day, Steve flew to Tallahassee, rented a car, and drove west through the Apalachicola Forest, then down along the Ochlockonee River. It was January, and a cold front had roared south from Canada, dusting the Panhandle with snowflakes. He'd spent a day huddled in a blanket on a rise above the commune, where he watched through binoculars, looking for Bobby. Looking, but not seeing him.

He saw a barn with a sagging silo, a shed with a corrugated metal roof, and a farmhouse where black smoke curled from a chimney. A dozen scraggly-bearded men in filthy clothes worked the smudge pots in the marijuana patch. Scrawny women in sweaters and long dresses brought them steaming cups of coffee. New Age music played on a boom box.

After several hours, his feet were as cold as gravestones. Finally, just before dark, he caught sight of Janice, wearing army boots and a tattered orange University of Miami sweatshirt she'd swiped from him years earlier. She was carrying a soup bowl from the farmhouse to the shed. Thinking back, he's not sure how he knew, but he did. She was taking food to her son, feeding him the way most people feed their dogs. Looking through the binoculars, Steve saw something he was sure he would remember until there were no more memories to be had.

There was no steam rising from the bowl.

On the year's coldest day, whatever slop Janice was delivering to her son was as cold as her own shriveled heart.

She disappeared into the shed, and he counted-one one thousand, two one thousand-until she reappeared without the bowl.

Twelve seconds.

Janice had spent twelve seconds with her son before returning to the farmhouse, where smoke puffed from the chimney. There was no smokestack on the shed, no power lines running in.

As a lawyer, there were only two categories of criminals Steve Solomon would not represent. Pedophiles and men who brutalize women. But at that moment if his own sister were within reach, he would have done her grievous harm. At that moment, it didn't matter that Janice was a lost soul herself, who'd gone seemingly overnight from her Bat Mitzvah to Jews for Jesus to pilfering money and drugs.

Steve waited until after midnight, watching the farmhouse, hearing laughter and music, catching sight of figures passing the windows, men urinating off the porch. He drifted into a restless, frozen sleep, awakened to the hooting of an owl in an icy rain. It was just after three A.M. The farmhouse was dark and silent as he made his way down the ridge to the shed, slipping on wet rocks, illuminated by a three-quarter moon. From somewhere in the compound, a dog howled.

The shed door was locked with a simple peg through a latch. The door creaked as Steve went inside, clicking on a flashlight. Pale and malnourished, Bobby lay curled in a metal dog cage, a bucket of urine and the empty soup bowl at his side. He wore only underpants and a sweatshirt. He was barefoot. His feet were filthy and covered with sores.

“Bobby, it's your uncle Steve.”

The boy scuttled to the far corner of the cage, eyes wide with fear.

“Don't be scared.”

Bobby rocked back and forth.

“Do you remember me?”

The rocking grew faster.

A padlock secured the cage, and Steve began working at the hinges with his bare hands, trying to lift the pin. Just then, the door to the shed flew open and a broad-shouldered man with a tangled beard stepped inside. The man could have been thirty or sixty or anywhere in between. He wore a dirty red Mackinaw and a winter hat with fur earflaps, and his face was smudged with black splotches that looked like charcoal dust. He gripped a stick as thick as a man's forearm. Probably carved from an oak tree, the stick was curved at the top like a shepherd's staff.

“I'm the boy's uncle,” Steve said. “He's coming with me.”

“He ain't going nowhere,” the man said.

Bobby continued rocking.

The man closed the distance between them and drew back the curved stick. His voice rumbled, “‘Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils.' Matthew, Chapter Ten, Verse Eight.”

“Get the fuck out of my way. Solomon. Chapter One. You don't want to hear Chapter Two.”

“Be gone!” The man swung the stick, and Steve took the impact on the shoulder and staggered backward. The man swung again and Steve stopped the stick with both hands and shoved back, hard. He slammed the man against the shed wall and pushed the stick to his neck. Steve's face was buried in the collar of the soggy Mackinaw, and a mangy smell like a wet dog made him gag. The man squirmed and gasped for air and tried to knee Steve in the groin. Steve kept up the pressure, jamming the stick hard into the man's Adam's apple. When his attacker's face turned crimson, a gurgle coming from his throat, Steve released him, and the man dropped to the floor.

Still holding the stick, Steve turned to Bobby. “The padlock. Where's the key?”

The boy stopped rocking, but he still hadn't said a word.

“Bobby, do you understand what I'm saying?”

“Uncle Steve, look out!”

Steve pivoted and swung the stick like a baseball bat even before he saw the man coming up from the floor, a hunting knife in his hand. Head down, hips turning, it was a compact but powerful swing.

The stick caught the man squarely above the temple with a crunch of bone: he dropped like a mallard felled by a hunter. Steve stood over him, breathing hard, aware of his own pounding heart. Frozen in place, filled with fear. Had he killed him?

“We better go, Uncle Steve.”

The voice was so close it startled him. Bobby was outside the cage, the back panel removed. “Mom doesn't know I can do this.”

The man on the floor was moaning, trying to get to his feet. Thank God he wasn't dead. Steve grabbed Bobby and swung him into his arms, stunned by how light he was. All elbows and knees, no meat on his bones.

They ducked out of the shed. Dogs barked. Lights flicked on in the farmhouse. Steve could make out a shadowy figure on the porch and the silhouette of what looked like a rifle or a shotgun.

“You! Stop!”

Carrying Bobby, Steve took off. He headed for the tree line, heard shouts from behind, looked back over his shoulder, caught glimpses of men with torches. A shotgun roared. Then another blast, echoing across the valley. He ran through the woods, leaping over fallen trees, slipping on wet rocks, crossing a stream, chugging hard up a hill and down the other side, through a strand of mahogany trees, running hard and not stopping until there were no more torches, no more gunshots, and no more men.

They were in the car headed toward Tallahassee before Steve spoke again. “I didn't think you remembered me.”

“You took me snorkeling,” Bobby said.

“That's right. I did. You must have been about five or six.”

“It was September eleventh. I was five plus eight months and three days. We saw lots of green-and-yellow fish with blue spots that sparkled.”

“Angelfish.”

“Holacanthus ciliaris. I gave one a name.”

“Really?”

“You told me not to touch the coral because it'll break and it takes hundreds of years to grow back. I liked the sea fans best because they wave at you like they're friendly. And the parrotfish. Sparisoma viride. They look like parrots but they don't talk.”

“How do you remember all that? How do you know their Latin names?”

The boy's thin shoulders shrugged.

“Do you want to go to my house?”

“Eleven white stones from the driveway to the front door.”

“I guess there are. Would you like to go there?”

“I named the angelfish ‘Steve,'” Bobby said.

Now, ten months later, Bobby was putting on weight-thanks to the paninis-and becoming more comfortable around people. He said good-bye to his grandfather, hung up the phone, and came over to the counter just as Steve opened the lid of the grill.

“Turn them a hundred eighty degrees,” Bobby said.

“That's what I'm doing.” Steve slid the sandwiches around to cross-hatch the bread with grill marks.

“Not a hundred ninety,” Bobby ordered. “The marks won't be even.”

“Got it.”

The melting cheese sizzled seductively, and an aroma of salty sweetness filled the kitchen. “How come you and Pop always argue?” Bobby asked.

“I guess because we've each done things that disappoint the other.”

Bobby used his tongue to snap a rubber band on his braces. “Do I disappoint you?”

“Never. Not once.”

The boy's smile was all orthodonture. “Don't burn the sandwiches, Uncle Steve.”

“Have I told you today how much I love you, kiddo?”

“You tell me every day, Uncle Steve.”

“Well, today, I'm telling you twice.”