Off the Chart

JAMES HALL

OFF THE CHART

Dedication

For Evelyn, my rock, my love

Epigraph

We are wiser than we know.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Glittering with moonlight and sweat, Thorn and Anne Joy were lying naked in Thorn’s bed when she launched into the story of her turbulent childhood in Kentucky. Her parents murdered. Lunacy and violence. Pirates, pirates, pirates.

Until that night, they’d shared nothing about their pasts. A breathless fever possessed them for their monthlong affair. An unquenchable horniness. Bruises from the clash of hipbones, flushed and tender tissue, their heat rekindled with the slightest rasp of skin on skin. For hours at a time they barely spoke, and when they did it was increasingly clear the chief thing they had in common was this agitated lust.

Then that night in a calm moment she told the vivid story of her youth, details she claimed to have never shared with anyone before. Saying she had no idea why she was confessing this to him but blundering ahead anyway.

Struck by the oddity of this tight-lipped woman opening up in such detail, Thorn lay quiet, listening intently. At the time, of course, he had no inkling that lurking in that account of Anne’s youth was a foretelling of the torture and torment of Thorn’s own loved ones, the kidnapping of a child, the murders of many others. But even though there was no way in hell he could have known, no way he could have heard in her gaudy tale the dark rumbles of his own future, that didn’t keep him from blaming himself forever after.

It was a raw afternoon in eastern Kentucky. The winter sky had turned the brittle gray of old ice, but Anne’s outlaw father and her older brother, Vic, were shirtless in the cold, hammering together the rickety frame under her mother’s watchful gaze. As Anne described it, the Joys’ yard was treeless and mangy, their property perched on a bluff overlooking the grim, defeated town of Harlan.

Anne stood at her bedroom window watching her family work in the front yard. For an hour she’d ignored her mother’s calls to join in. Only seven years old, Anne already knew she wanted nothing to do with this foolishness.

By dusk the structure was finished and her father and brother had strung Christmas lights along its edges and raised the Jolly Roger flag on its mast. Skull and crossbones flapping in the frigid breeze. When her father plugged in the cord, the flimsy creation burst to life in a phosphorescent flash. Twenty feet high, fifty feet long with red and green and blue lights twinkling in a perfect outline of the brawny hull and blooming sails of a pirate schooner.

For the next eight years the contraption stood in their front yard with those strands of colored bulbs flickering all through the gloomy winter nights of that Kentucky hill country and even into the first soft breaths of spring and the muggy, star-dazzled evenings, blinking in time with summer crickets and the whoop of owls, blazing incessantly into the fall when the sky above the sugar maples filled with the sweet perfume of rot and looming cold; those lights shimmered and winked and that pirate ship sailed endlessly through the rocky, mortified seas of Anne Joy’s youth. Visible for any sane man in that region to see – a ludicrous beacon, a steady rainbow pulse of don’t-give-a-damn lunacy.

Since her own childhood in the Florida Keys, Anne’s mother, Antoinette, had been consumed with pirates, a juvenile hobby that over time turned into a full-blown obsession and finally was to become the compulsory enthusiasm of the entire Joy clan. Even Jack Joy succumbed. Anne’s father was a raven-haired, extravagantly tattooed ex-navy man who drove a fuel-injected Nash Rambler to distribute a variety of unlawful drugs for the Woodson brothers to truck stops throughout eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Even such a roughneck as Jack Joy yielded to his wife’s fixation and became an authority on Long John Silver, Captain Kidd, and Blackbeard and eventually came to measure his own daring and lawlessness by their far-fetched standards.

Anne learned to endure the schoolyard catcalls, the relentless smirks, and those chilling midnights when carloads of boys parked out front and hooted and whistled and slung beer cans at Antoinette’s pirate ship until she or Jack snatched the shotgun from the brackets on the back of the front door and stalked outside and fired a warning shot over the bow of that landlocked schooner.

Other than those visits from local hooligans, the Joy home was peaceful and Anne’s parents’ love affair was luminous and sweet-hearted. Although the townsfolk gave Jack Joy a wide berth whenever he went out in public, Anne never caught so much as a whiff of violence on him once he entered those four walls. There was even a boyish innocence about the way he adored his wife and indulged her every caprice.

Each evening when the meal was done, Jack Joy sat in hillbilly rapture while Antoinette read to the family from the book that provided that night’s entertainment. Radios and televisions were banished from the Joys’ home, and the only books allowed were those that transported them across the centuries to the days of swashbuckling sea raiders.

‘There’s other books, you know,’ Anne said before the reading commenced one night. ‘About other kinds of people.’

‘But not one of those people measure up to buccaneers.’

‘And how would we ever know that, Mama?’ Anne said.

‘Pirates are beyond compare. They made their own rules, roamed at will, survived by their wits. Even famous outlaws like Jesse James were trapped inside the straight and narrow of highways and city streets. They drove cars; they wore ordinary clothes. But pirates were untamed, free to wander. To move with the wind like the big hawks and eagles. High up on the heavenly currents.’

‘And they had cool eye patches,’ Vic said. ‘And hooks for hands.’

‘We’re not one bit free,’ Anne said. ‘Look around us. This isn’t free.’

‘Pirates are in our blood, Anne. You should be as proud of your heritage as the rest of us are. Sooner or later you’re going to have to accept it.’

‘Even if your daddy did run liquor,’ Anne said, ‘that makes him a smuggler, not a pirate.’

‘Same difference,’ her father said. ‘A seafaring outlaw.’

‘A crook in a boat,’ Vic said.

‘The point is, darling,’ said Antoinette, ‘we’re not common folk. Our bloodline sets us apart.’

‘I don’t want to be special,’ Anne said. ‘I want to be like everyone else.’

‘Too late,’ Vic said. ‘You’re weird to the bone.’

On Saturdays the four of them would sometimes drive a half-day to the closest movie house to catch a matinee of Captain Blood or Morgan the Pirate, and on the return voyage Antoinette would dote on the dozens of Hollywood atrocities that had been committed on the truth, grilling Vic and Anne, forcing them to chime out the movie blunders.

True pirates never sailed galleons, those sluggish warships that took a full hour to alter course. They used swift and nimble schooners like the one in the Joys’ front yard or sloops or small frigates, sometimes brigantines and three-masted square-riggers. And no pirate under God’s blue heaven ever relied on such a pansy-ass fencing foil as Errol Flynn waved about. Those real-life buccaneers swung heavy cutlasses that would slash a man in half in a single roundhouse blow.

‘Shiver me timbers,’ Jack Joy might say at such moments. ‘Blow me down.’ And he’d heavy-foot that full-race Rambler till the tires screamed against the asphalt and Anne and Vic were pinned giddy to their seats.

An unschooled man, Jack Joy was made sappy by love, swept away by what he considered his wife’s refined tastes and higher education. Around his wife he played a courtly role, part Southern gentleman, part movie idol. And for her part, Antoinette regularly assured any who would listen that her Jack was double the man of any Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power. For almost two decades of married life she and Jack stayed tipsy on that fantasy.

But Anne Joy had been born with a disbeliever’s eye, and when the sun poured into her bedroom each morning, she began her day by staring beyond the rickety maze of pine slats that formed the pirate schooner at the gashed hills below and the gray haze and acid stench of the underground fire that had plagued that town since before her birth. And she reminded herself of her own dream – an escape from those hills so complete that once she was out of Harlan she intended never to allow a stray memory of the place to flit through her head.

On this point Vic was her total opposite. Vic was his mother’s sworn disciple, the first mate on her wacky voyage. Vic’s favorite chore was to track down the burned-out bulbs that occasionally shut down the light show in their yard. He would spend entire dutiful afternoons unscrewing one bulb after another until he’d located the latest dud.

Whether her mother was insane or just fanatically determined to separate herself from the hard-faced local citizens was impossible for Anne to say. Such distinctions had little currency in that time and place, and it wasn’t for a child to diagnose her parents but simply to endure. Though she was sorely humiliated by her mother’s fixation, it had the positive effect of sending Anne on an inward journey in search of safer, more solid ground, starting a habit of introspection she might never have acquired had she lived in a less outlandish household.

In that town of coal hackers, dope and religion were the only release from the daily grind, and the Woodson brothers year by year grew fatter and more pig-eyed on the profits from their fields of marijuana and meth labs. Over time the entire Woodson clan, which populated the back roads of the countryside, took to driving flashy pickups and staggering drunk in public.

From time to time Big Al Woodson and his little brother, Sherman, made sudden appearances in the Joys’ living room. With big whiskey grins, they dusted their hats against their trouser legs and shuffled and nodded at Antoinette, repeating her name aloud more than was necessary as if to feel its exotic taste on their tongue.

It was on just such a night in early April that the Woodson boys made their last call and Anne Joy’s childhood was forever finished. Vic was seventeen, with sinewy muscles and his black hair swept back in an Elvis ducktail. Anne, two years his junior, already had been cursed with the lush swell of hips and breasts that was to lure men to her all the rest of her days.

Not quite summer, with green pine popping in the woodstove to chase the chill, the family had assembled in their usual fashion in the cramped living room. Anne sat on the ratty corduroy love seat while her father lay out on the blue-and-red rag rug in the center of the room. In the far corner, Antoinette was dabbing at the canvas she’d set up on a makeshift easel. An old hobby she’d recently resumed when Vic questioned her once too often about her childhood days in the lawless Florida Keys.

‘Don’t have any photographs of those days,’ she said. ‘Painting will have to do.’

After two weeks of labor, a scrap of beach and two crooked palm trees were emerging from the canvas, and in the sand by the shoreline there was something resembling a treasure chest tipped on its side with its glorious contents spilling out. In the last few days as she worked at her canvas on lonely afternoons, Antoinette had let slip that on that very beach her courtship with their father had reached its first ecstatic peak. Perhaps, she whispered to her two children, that was even the very spot where Vic was conceived.

For as long as Anne could recall, her parents had talked of returning to that far-off land where they had met and fallen in love. Someday very soon, the story went, when their savings grew to ample size, the Joys would abandon those wretched hills and make the long pilgrimage back to paradise to reclaim their rightful place in that balmy land of sun and water and abundant fish and forever thaw the bitter chill from their joints.

‘We’ll never do it,’ Anne said on one of those quiet afternoons.

‘What’s that?’ Her mother continued to paint.

‘We’re never going to Florida. That’s all a fairy tale.’

Antoinette set aside her brush and looked around at her daughter.

‘Of course we’re going. Soon as the nest egg’s big enough.’

‘We could go now,’ Anne said. ‘There’s nothing keeping us here. You could work. We all could work.’

‘And what would you have me do, Anne Bonny?’

‘You could waitress,’ she said. ‘I could baby-sit. Vic could have a paper route. Daddy could do anything – drive a truck, deliver things. Or he could be a mailman. They have mailmen down there, don’t they?’

‘Waitress?’ Her mother laughed and turned back to her painting. ‘Lord, lord, you’ll never catch me slopping food for a bunch of overfed idiots. No, sir. I’d rather die in these hills than waitress down there in Florida. And your daddy’s way too fine a man to stoop to delivering people’s bills and catalogs. When I go back home, I’m going in style.’

‘You’re just scared,’ Anne said. ‘You’d rather have us eat coal dust the rest of our lives. It’s all a lie. Every bit of it. Just one big goddamn lie.’

Her mother dabbed at the canvas and slipped off into one of her deadly silences.

On that final evening, Anne was sprawled on the love seat listening to Vic struggle with the archaic locutions of a pirate novel he’d plucked from the shelves of the school library. It was then she heard the rumble of Al Woodson’s GTO coming up the dirt drive. Her brother halted the scene and closed the book around his finger. As was his habit, Al pulled up beside the front porch and gunned his engine three times before shutting it down.

Anne’s mother put aside her brush and looked across at Jack.

‘Tell the man it’s too late for a social call. Kids got school.’

‘He doesn’t come but if it’s important. Just be a minute.’

His words were neutral enough, but Anne saw the cocky edge had drained from her father’s face. Her mother saw it, too, and stood up, and her hands knotted into fists and hung beside her hips.

‘You didn’t do anything you shouldn’t have, Jack. Tell me.’

Her father hesitated a moment, then shrugged his admission and made a wave at her painting.

‘Just to get us where we want to go a little quicker. Handful now and then, nothing serious.’

‘Oh, Jack, no.’

‘Risk worth taking,’ her father said. ‘Anyhow, there’s no way those old boys sniffed me out.’

‘Don’t go out there, Jack. Just poke your head out and send them home. Tell them we’re putting the kids to bed, saying our prayers. Settle it in daylight if there’s anything to settle. Give us time to think. Or else make a run for it.’

‘All right,’ her father said. But his words were as vacant as his eyes.

He opened the door, put his head out, then slowly opened it the rest of the way and stepped onto the porch. It was only a few seconds before the voices went wrong, turning high and croaky, then flaming up with curses and a sudden unnatural silence. Then Anne heard the moist thump of fist on bone and the scuffle of heavy boots on the planks of their front porch. The living room floor trembled and Al Woodson grunted a command to his little brother.

Frozen in the center of the room, Antoinette stared at the curtains. Just beyond that window Jack Joy groaned like a man lifting more than he could manage, and the whole house shuddered.

Antoinette flew across the room, whisked the shotgun from its bracket, and was out the door barrel-first. A second later the shotgun’s blast got two quick pistol shots in reply and the front window exploded. Jack Joy hurtled into the room, tearing down the red-checkered curtains and coming to rest in a sprawl of blood and mangled parts.

Outside, the shotgun roared again, and Vic stepped out the door with Anne close behind him.

Through the smoky dark Anne saw Al Woodson blown backward against the blinking schooner, his arms and legs tangled in the nest of wires. The bulbs continued their beat, but the big man was unmoving. On the floor at Anne’s feet lay her mother. She’d taken a slug in her seamless forehead and lay with arms flung wide against the porch as if waiting for her darling man to lower himself onto her one last time. Her foolish eyes still open, catching the green lights and the blue ones and the red, the eternal blinking of that schooner.

In the yard Sherman Woodson knelt with his hands high. Vic held the shotgun his mother had dropped. In his right hand Woodson still gripped his chrome pistol, but his hands waved unsteady circles in the air.

‘Your daddy done wrong, kid. Had his hand in the fucking cookie jar. We didn’t have no choice but to pay a visit. But didn’t nobody mean for this—’

Vic unloaded on the man and kicked him spread-eagled beside his brother into that web of lights that continued to twinkle across the dark valley below.

Anne stooped down and fingertipped her mother’s throat, felt the cold silence of the woman’s flesh, then raked the bloody hair off her face and closed the woman’s eyes. Anne blinked away the itch of tears, then turned on her brother.

‘Now what? There’s a hundred Woodsons within earshot.’

Vic dropped the shotgun in the dirt and stalked into the house and came out with a flour sack under one arm and Antoinette’s painting under the other.

‘What’s that?’

‘Our nest egg,’ Vic said.

Vic marched across the barren yard and stuffed the painting and the sack of money into the backseat and got in behind the wheel and cranked it up.

Full of the dreamy numbness that was to take up residence inside her head like a never-ending trance, Anne walked over to the car and got into the shotgun seat, and the two of them rolled silently down the hill, headlights off, and idled through the darkened town, then hit the highway south. For the next few hours bright lights raced up behind them, then slowly fell away as Vic held the pedal down and screamed through the black night.

Outrunning the Woodsons at last, they drove hard through Tennessee and Georgia, then entered the ceaseless gray monotony of north Florida, driving without rest or food, until the sky turned blue again and winter changed to summer in a single day and the birds grew stalky and white and America finally petered out and became no more than a dribble of rocky islands where the road ran narrow and low, seeming to plow a path right through the blue sea, as if Moses himself had gotten there just seconds before, leading the way to the promised land.

Beside her in the dark, Thorn listened to Anne Joy’s impetuous purging come to a close. When she was done, he lay silent for a moment more, staggered by her tale, searching for something to say. But before he could find the words, Anne slid from the bed, tramped to the bathroom, dressed quickly, and left his house without even a good-bye. Thorn hustled down the stairs after her, but she beat him to her car and was gone in a hail of pebbles.

She never returned to Thorn’s house and would only smile brightly at him when he showed up at her apartment to talk, giving no reply to his questions and finally asking him to leave.

Over time Thorn came to believe that the bond he and Anne had forged in that month of ravenous lust was simply too flimsy to support the sudden, unwieldy bulk of her past. Maybe later on if the structure had grown more secure and their trust more solid it would’ve been fine. God knew, Thorn’s own story could match hers death for death and shame for shame. But it was too early in the cycle for such a heavy dose of truth, and their fragile bond had crumbled to powder in that instant of confession.

Later, when Thorn returned to the memory of that evening, the seeds of what was to come were so obvious in Anne’s story, the warnings so goddamn clear. If only somehow he’d managed to grasp the prophetic hints, he would have climbed out of bed that very night, loaded his pistol, and driven a few miles down the Overseas Highway to kill one particular man – an act that would have spared many from death and shielded a young girl from terrible harm, that blameless, intelligent kid who was as close to a daughter as Thorn had ever known.

1

On that warm Sunday afternoon, when Thorn got back from the john, the drinks were just arriving. He and Alexandra Collins were at a table for six on the outside deck at the Lorelei in Islamorada. The sheer February light had turned the spacious bay to a brilliant blue mica. Over at the rail Lawton and Sugarman and his twin girls were peering down at the resident school of tarpon that threaded between the pilings.

‘Hey, stranger,’ the waitress said as she set their beers down on the table and put the Cokes in front of the empty places.

Thorn stumbled for a half-second, fetching for her name.

‘Oh, hey, Anne. How’s it going?’

‘Just another day in paradise,’ she said. ‘How about yourself?’

‘Fine, fine.’

She bent forward and pressed her lips to his. Inhaling that familiar scent of her shampoo, lime and something herbal, Thorn had a quick cascade of memories, a blur of nights together, their bodies knotted, sheets kicked to the floor. The final story that broke their bond for good.

More than a year had passed since Thorn had last seen Anne Joy. In her early thirties, she still kept her auburn hair cropped short, and her dark eyes had the same electric shine. Thin-lipped, with soft cheekbones, a sleek and coppery complexion, and the coolly impassive smile of a runway model. But her body was far too lushly proportioned for that profession, and no matter what bulky and unflattering styles Anne wore, she couldn’t conceal it.

She stepped back from the table and clutched her tray against her breasts.

Alexandra was looking up at Anne with a curious arch of eyebrow.

‘I think we’ll wait on the order,’ Thorn said. ‘Kids are feeding the fish.’

‘Sure, okay,’ she said. ‘Be back in a few.’

She took a second look at Alexandra, then gave Thorn a quick, approving smile and turned and set off toward her other tables.

‘I’m sorry,’ Thorn said. ‘I should’ve introduced you.’

‘So this is another one?’ Alex said.

‘Another what?’

‘Oh, come on, Thorn. Do you usually kiss your waitress? And this time don’t tell me you two were just old high school friends. She’s ten years too young.’

Alex shook her head, her smile wearing thin.