Pine Island Coast Florida Box Set, page 69
part #1 of Pine Island Coast Florida Series
Then he was here again, trying to figure out if he had ever left. Jared looked toward the pile of boxes again, and a fresh resolve ran through him. He was either leaving this attic with his life or he wasn’t. If he was, it was going to be with that box.
TICK-TICK-TICK. His blood iced over again, but instead of freezing where he was Jared boldly took a step forward. And then another. He trained the meager light ahead and squinted, bringing his face close so he could read the words written on the side. He could hear his heart pounding on his eardrums, fully expecting a claw or a withered hand to come over the top and grab him. He tried taking a deep breath to steady himself. “Ike’s Childhood toys” one box read. “Quilting” another, “Southern Living” another.
A surge of confidence flashed through him when he saw it: “SUNDRIES.” Oh, the beautiful, matchless grace of the sundries box! A conductor in a silk top hat had just come by and punched his ticket. “Good day to you, young man. I hope you enjoyed the ride. Be safe getting off now!” Jared was getting out of here.
The box was near the top of the stack, with only one other on top. It was half the size of a couch cushion and twice as high. Jared reached to grab the box and then realized, to his horror, that the light virtually disappeared when he would grab the corner of the box. Then he had an idea that for the rest of his childhood he swore saved his life. He put the tail end of the flashlight in his mouth. Now he could swivel any which way and keep the small mercy of the light while keeping his hands free. With both hands he reached again for the box and pulled it out of the stack, pressing his forehead against the top one to keep it away. He stepped back, and the box he had no interest in went crashing backwards and tumbled behind the stack into the darkness.
tick, tick, tick, tick…squeeeee. tick, tick, tick, tick…squeeeee. It was rhythmic now.
Jared turned and ran. He ran in an attic. He ran in an attic with rafters set overhead. He wasn’t the smartest boy in his class, but he had enough sense to know that if you turned your back on a creature of hell it could get its claws and teeth into your spinal cord faster than you could run. It was a foolish choice. He should have backed away slowly and kept the puny light trained ahead. But instead, he ran. He ran in an attic.
He got not three steps when his forehead plowed into the side of a rafter. He lurched backwards and crashed onto a flat plank. The flashlight fell from his hands. Panicked and only half aware Jared stood up on unsteady feet. He ducked, staggered forward. He didn’t see the head of the nail sticking out of the board in front of him. It snagged into the toe of his shoe and got him off balance. He couldn’t get his other foot in front of him before his hands and head dipped through the attic opening that led back to the safety of earth.
The box hit the top of the ladder first. Then his face crunched into the box. Gravity pulled him down two rungs before his feet left the attic and tumbled over him. The sundries scattered down the hall hitting the furnace door at the end of the carpet like they too were fleeing from the horrors above. Jared crumpled into a heap onto the bottom step and the carpet. Fire shot through his elbow, and a dull ache pounded on his forehead. He lay there with his eyes closed, ignoring the pain, forgetting the fall. He was smiling.
He had made it out alive.
“Jared?” His granny’s frail voice drifted down the hall.
Wincing, he gathered himself, slowly stood up. “I’m okay, Granny,” he yelled out, then looked down at his arms and legs to check for damage. His elbow throbbed something fierce, and he stepped over the scattered pieces of his grandmother’s past into the kitchen. He opened the freezer, grabbed a bag of peas, and stuck them to his skin. He winced again and walked back to the hallway. With one arm Jared folded the bottom legs of the ladder back and pushed the whole unit toward the darkness. It slapped the frame and all was quiet. Hell had been sealed.
He picked up the box, now lying on its side, and set it on its bottom. By the looks of it half the contents of the box were still intact. Surveying the carpet he found plastic cases of cassette tapes strewn about. Jared spent the next thirty seconds gathering the tapes and putting them back in the box. He squatted down, grabbed one, and searched the label for the name of the musician. Teddy Fairbanks: Live in Atlanta. He’d never heard of Mr. Fairbanks before. He dropped it back in and picked up another. Howard Hoffstetter: All Is Yours to be Had. Never heard of Hoffstetter either. He turned it over. The man had shaggy brown hair and was wearing a suit with a bright orange tie. Jared tossed Hoffstetter back in his cardboard home and picked up the box. A hot pain cut through his elbow. He exerted a muffled shout and shot his knee under the box to keep it from falling. After composing himself and letting his good arm take most of the weight he sauntered back into the living room looking like a hunchback. He quietly heaved the box onto the coffee table and then leaned back into the La-Z-Boy, his chest heaving and grabbing great gulps of air. He hadn’t seen anything up there in the dark. But he could feel it. Whatever was there he had conquered it. He had won. This must be how the kids in the horror movies felt after they took down the ghoul. Jared hadn’t pierced anything in the heart, hadn’t set anyone on fire, hadn’t discharged a silver bullet, but he had, somehow, beaten it.
His granny stirred, groaned, then opened her eyes. She looked toward the coffee table, and Jared thought she looked confused, like she didn’t know where she was. “Granny?” he said.
“Hmmm,” she moaned softly.
“I got the stuff you wanted. From the attic,” he added. A proud soldier indeed.
“Good,” she said slowly. “Did you see a little...bag? Red velvet...not any bigger than your hand.”
He didn’t remember seeing something like that. But he hadn’t actually gone through the box yet either. He jumped out of the chair, kneeled down, and started fishing around the contents of the box. His fingers navigated the plastic cases and the loose cassettes and something else that felt like wood. Then he felt along the bottom of the box until his fingertips felt something soft. He pinched it and pulled it out. He held it up. “This it, Granny?”
She opened her eyes again, and they revealed the slightest sliver of joy. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Open it...it’s...yours.”
Jared fumbled with the tiny cord that drew the fabric together. Using his teeth he unraveled the knot then loosened it with his fingers. Using his right hand he turned it upside down into his left. A piece of metal dropped out. He released the little sack it had escaped from and looked it over. It was a large coin. He didn’t know anything about coins. Not unless it was a dime. That would buy him a canned soft drink. Or a quarter. That would buy him a couple baseball cards down at Rylie's Comics. “What is it, Granny?”
She focused on getting air through her lungs before she answered. “That...is a 1900 Morgan silver dollar. My...my...father gave that to me when I was a...little girl. We went through the Depression...you know. He wouldn’t let me sell it.” Her breathing wheezed and slowed. “Keep it for yourself.”
Jared had only seen pennies and dimes and nickels and quarters. This coin was half the size of his hand and was heavy for its size. The edge looked burnt, like someone had taken a torch to it. He rubbed his thumb over an image of a lady wearing a headdress. Flipping it over, he thought the eagle looked a lot like the one on a quarter.
“Do...you like..it?”
His smile was genuine. “Yeah, Granny. This is terrific.”
Jared turned it over and over in his hand. It really was terrific. He didn’t have anything near like this. Not this old. His father’s softball glove hung on his bedpost, and his mother’s favorite mug—the white one that said ‘Life is Good’—sat on the top of his dresser against the mirror. This coin was his. He picked up the velvet pouch and slid it back in. After tying it shut, he slid it into his pocket. Once he got back to his room he would put it under the mattress.
“Hey, Granny? What are all these cassettes and stuff?”
She slowly moved her eyes up to focus in her grandson’s direction. She managed a smile. “Those were your father’s. He had a lot of them. He was...always trying to better...to better himself. They probably don’t...even work now. Heat from the...attic.”
There had to be fifteen or twenty of them. He got up and walked over to the wall hutch, opened the center drawer, and pulled out his Sony Walkman. He unraveled the headphones and went back to the box. After two minutes of searching he decided that ol’ Hoffstetter would do.
His granny’s voice made his muscles jerk. Apparently his nerves had some recovering to do. “Jared. Come here...a minute.” He moved around the table and kneeled before her. Her face was pale, and the muscles so relaxed that they made her facial bones protrude like they were being pushed up from within. “You need to...to know something.” He stared at her, searching her tired eyes. “It wasn’t...right that you...lost your parents. My oldest son…he was a good man.”
“Yeah, Granny,” he said. He didn’t like thinking about it.
“When I pass...you can’t stay here alone.”
He didn’t like thinking about that either.
“You’ll have to...to go with Ike, you know. When I’m gone.”
Jared’s blood shifted cold, his eyes went wide, his breathing faster. “What? Ike? Why? Can’t I go with someone else?”
“Who, honey?”
Who? Mrs. Watkins worked second shift at the corner store. She was always nice to him. Ms. Ida sometimes gave him an extra serving of mashed potatoes in the cafeteria line at school. The postman for crying out loud. He shrugged.
“We got no one else,” she said. “It’ll be...all right. You’re a tough boy, you know. I’ve done my best by you. Now it’s time I...go on.” She closed her eyes and left the room in silence. Jared was startled when she spoke again, keeping her eyes closed. “Ike, he’s...had it rough.”
Then why didn’t my dad turn out like him? They had the same past. It’s what he wanted to say but didn’t.
“Deep down, he...wants to do good. There is a...gentle heart deep in there...somewhere.”
That’s pretty stinking deep. Like bottomless pit deep.
“Did you eat dinner?” she asked.
“Yes, Granny.”
She patted the top of his hand. “I’m going...to sleep now. Don’t forget to brush...your teeth.”
“I won’t.” Then Jared did something he had never done. He stayed where he was and watched his grandmother sleep. He watched her chest slowly rise and fall, rise and fall. She had just told him she was leaving him soon. He might be just eleven, but he understood that. He blinked hard. She had done right by him. Ike was gonna get a fistful of knuckle if he tried pulling anything with Jared. He gently slid the afghan up so it rested just beneath her chin. He stood back up. He slid the headphones over his ears and mashed the play button. Nothing. He tried again. Nothing. Shaking his head he ran back into the kitchen, back to the junk drawer, and grabbed two mismatched AA batteries then made a mental note to turn the flashlight into rubble with the heel of his foot later on. He went back to the living room and settled back into the threadbare La-Z-Boy. He reached over and threw the wooden handle back, and the chair popped his head back and his legs up. Then he dumped out the dead batteries, fed the new ones in, and after snapping the back cover on hit the play button. The Walkman squealed to life, and the film clicked and crackled through it. Hoffstetter’s voice was deep. Like an “I’m in command” deep, Jared thought. Like an “I know what I’m talking about” kind of deep. He closed his eyes and listened to the man who knew what he was talking about go on about the flood waters of life and how they try to drown you. About how life is sometimes unfair but you have to rise above the waters. Hoffstetter had a perfect cadence that was almost enchanting, and for the next ten minutes Jared Robinson was lost in a world of positive assertions and the furious energy that was Hoffstetter’s. His father had liked these, his granny said. And no wonder. This was euphoric, energizing.
He looked back at his granny, his head bobbing in beat with the rhythmic voice of the speaker. She was calm, peaceful. He had not yet heard of the word “serene,” but if he had he would have thought that word too. The young boy was too focused on the hypnotizing energy of the speaker to notice that his granny, two minutes earlier, had taken her last breath.
Hoffstetter’s voice pulsed through the headphones. “You can do thissss!! Whatever life throws at you, you can do this! Say it with me now! ‘I can do this.’”
“I can do this,” Jared said.
“Every day and every way I’m getting better and better!”
“Every day and every way I’m getting better and better!” Jared could feel his spirit rising.
“Every day I will be more! Come on, say it with me!”
“Every day I will be more!” He was yelling now, sitting up a little straighter. He could feel himself rising into the air around him, like he was coming out of his body.
“Whoever you are, all of you here today and listening on tape. You...can...do...this!” The music faded in, then faded out, and ten seconds later the tape clicked off in the player.
Jared sat in the La-Z-Boy staring at his kneecaps, his heart beating wildly against a whole new way of looking at life. The clouds had pulled back. The sun had dawned.
“I can do this,” he whispered.
“I can do this.” In his mind he could see Ike walking through the kitchen door, moving in, never leaving.
“I can do this.” He could see Ike standing over him, a belt raised high. “I can do this.”
I can do this.
Vacant Shore
BOOK 4
Chapter One
I saw the long line of the vacant shore,
The seaweed and the shells upon the sand,
And the brown rocks left bare on every hand,
As if the ebbing tide would flow no more.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
He had already thrown up twice. Once at the dock and once here, in the boat.
The rum hadn’t helped. It was supposed to take the edge off—dull the senses—and, he had thought, make it so that taking your own life wasn’t so hard to do.
The bucket was full of concrete, and he shuffled it along the deck toward the transom. His heart was knocking hard behind his sternum. Maybe he would just have a heart attack and wouldn’t have to go through with this.
Kyle Armstrong grabbed the bucket handle and checked the straight link chain attached to it. It ran around his waist and knotted at the front. Everything was secure.
His mouth was dry now and his thighs were shaking. His hands were cold. He looked out over the water. From here he could just see Bokeelia, the north end of Pine Island, and he was reminded of when he had asked Carlene to marry him nine years ago. They had eaten at Suzie's Crab Shack, walked out across Bokeelia Fishing Pier, and, as the fiery orange sun faded below Cayo Costa, he got down on a knee and asked her to be his forever. She had stepped back, said yes through surprised fingers, and as he stood up she reached in to hug him, overstepped, and they both joined the fish. They’d come up laughing and had never really stopped.
That is, until a couple of months ago, when Ringo decided to use Wild Palm as a distribution hub for his cocaine.
Kyle sighed. Then he closed his eyes and said a quick and silent prayer.
There was no coming back from this. He knew that. Once he went over the side, he couldn’t put it in reverse. Images of his children—Sophia, five; Chase, three—ghosted across his vision. Maybe it was his biology’s final effort to save itself, leveraging the psychological to turn things around, to get him to stop this nonsense. With a quick shake of his head, Kyle blinked his children away and heaved the bucket over the transom.
The water displaced around him as he fell through the surface. He let go of the bucket, and the extra eighty pounds of concrete swiftly pulled him eighteen feet to the bottom. The pressure gathered around his head like a vice, and he thought that before he could die of drowning the water would rush in past his eardrums and explode his brain from the inside.
He had made a mistake.
Panic clutched at his chest and he struggled against the chain. He pulled, yanked, and tore at it. The lock held. The key to the small lock was at the surface, on the boat. Furious bubbles escaped through his nose and wobbled toward the surface, as if they wanted no part of what he was doing. He worked the bucket handle, trying to break it free from the plastic, trying to undo his decision. But he couldn’t. The bucket handles weren't made to slide out.
His lungs burned as he ran out of oxygen, and tiny stars shot across his vision like runaway comets. Kyle closed his eyes, tried to calm himself, and gave himself over to the inevitable.
He hoped that Carlene would find love again.
Chapter Two
The wide arc of the horizon held a muted orange that would soon give way to a desert darkness, turning the sky into a spyglass that looked out into a universe dazzled with a billion fires of distant starlight. Joe Ferguson went back into the cabin and watched the coffee drip into the pot, waiting for it to finish. It was decaf. At his age, caffeine consumed after lunch meant spending half the night staring at the ceiling or reading a book by lamplight, waiting for a drowsiness uneager to come.
Joe would head back home to Scottsdale in the morning. He had spent the last two days tracking antelope accompanied by his compound bow. It was the tail end of August—the beginning of mating season—which meant that rutting bucks were territorial, busy trying to gather a harem of does; a temporary endeavor that made them lose much of the natural wariness that protected them the rest of the year.
Several hours ago he had decided not to tag out. In a rare moment of self-honesty he had admitted to himself that he was tired. His doctor had warned him that it was still too soon after his surgery to be tracking and bringing back a heavy animal. “Go out to the cabin,” his doctor had said. “Rest up. Watch a few sunrises; enjoy a few sunsets.” It had not yet been five weeks since his double bypass, but Joe, because he was stubborn and did things his own way, went hunting anyway.
