If Lance Dearing is fazed, his concealment skills are consummate. — Our Skarrish friend. Listen to me, Ray: you are in serious trouble. Let me tell you this: if you do not return that girl to the custody of her mother, a long-standing personal friend of mine, I’m going to issue an APB on you, charging you with the kidnap of a Florida minor. You do not want that, Raymond: trust me on this.
Nice, Lennox thinks. Professional tones. Letting me know the gravity of the situation, but at the same time the use of the Christian name to indicate friendship and acceptance. Attempting to isolate you while simultaneously presenting himself as your only ally. — I take it that means you’ll issue my description to all squad cars, he says. Dearing might not be bluffing.
— That is exactly what I’ll do. I’ve only refrained from taking this action so far as it would jus get Robyn and Tianna into more trouble with social services. Also, and I may be a damn fool, I believe that you got their best interests at heart. But let me tell you one thing, Ray: you are misguided and you will bring big trouble on yourself, and Robyn and that child, should you continue to keep her from her home.
— Home? A place full of fucking paedophiles, he hears himself say, — that’s no home for a kid!
It strikes Lennox that every atom of his body is pulsing with the same sense: that he’s stumbled on to something bigger than a drunken pervert and some coked-up, low-life mother who’d left her kid again. He just doesn’t know what, nor can he elucidate Dearing’s role.
— I think you got it all wrong, Ray. You are way, way out of line.
He has to think, to find out from the kid. And this Chet guy. — I’ll call you back in a while. It can either be here or on your cell. You decide.
— Where are you, Ray? Lance Dearing calmly asks.
Lennox has had enough of telephone interrogations. — Give me your cellphone number. Now. Or I hang up.
After a pause, Lance Dearing seems a little cagier when he speaks again. — Okay, Ray, but jus you take good care of that lil’ girl, y’all hear? Then he deliberately enunciates the number and Lennox scribbles it down in Trudi’s notepad, feeling the flush of his small victory.
— Do the right thing, Ray, Dearing says, — by that lil’ girl, and her momma.
He’s too quick to cede control. Is he bluffing, or holding all the aces? Lennox can’t trust himself to judge.
Then, in savage flashback, his brain sears with an image of Johnnie on top of Tianna, trying to rape her. Guess I jus like the taste of young pussy. Lance’s easy, unperturbed carriage: We all been round the block enough times to know to take our pleasures where we can get em. No questions asked.
— You haul that child across the state line and you are in big trouble – … Lance begins.
— Shut yir fuckin hole, cunty baws, Lennox sneers. — And the trouble will be all yours, that I guarantee, and he slams the phone down. Sees Tianna eagerly making her way towards him. Tries to stop shaking.
— They ain’t got much of a choice. It’s a pretty crummy mall, but I got some good stuff, and she pulls a plastic bag from her sheep’s head backpack.
— Humph. Lennox looks through the CDs. It was going to be a long ride. He shifts his gaze to Tianna. — Let’s get you something to wear. Cover up some skin.
— I guess.
It’s Monday morning and many of the shops are shut, including the Macy’s, which, as a notice informs them, has closed for inventory purposes. — Sears is open, Lennox says, pointing at the big store.
Tianna’s features pinch. — Even Momma’s grandma wouldn’t go in there. It’s true; inside everybody is old. If my ma was American, this is where she’d shop, Lennox mulls. In trying to dress Tianna appropriately, he feels as if he’s been transformed from pimp into fussy old maiden aunt. But she’s just a kid, she cannae be allowed to dress like a tart.
Lennox buys some loose-fitting clothes for her, replaces his lost Red Sox baseball cap and picks up a new pair of shades. Then Tianna heads for the mall restroom, emerging in jeans and a T-shirt. It’s better, but he begs her to wash the make-up from her face and she reluctantly heads back in to comply.
— That’s great, Lennox says, encouraged by the result on her return. She looks like a ten-year-old.
— I look like a geek, she says, but it’s a token protest.
They go to the ice-cream parlour and order. Lennox gets the best shake in Florida, chocolate. Tianna has a strawberry-ice-cream float. He looks at her again, both delighting in the crackle as the bubbled remnants of the dessert rattle up her straw. She’s just a kid. Why is he with her?
I’m a cop.
I’m not a good cop. I’ve gone as far as I can go.
No. Not true.
He’d gone as far as he needed to go. Far enough to hunt the bad fuckers, and lead the investigation from the front. Another promotion and he’d be a Toal: deskbound. His grim lot was that he was drawn to the dark side of policework – anything else would be a waste of his time – but he let it get to him. To do that sort of job, sleep soundly and get up and repeat the process the next day, you had to be like Dougie Gillman. Gillman would never get promotion. He would go before any board of suits and cough back monosyllabic answers to their bullshit questions and quietly judge them. They would feel his contemptuous wrath and scorn. Wouldn’t be able to meet those loathsome gelid eyes. Because Gillman spoke a truth – a particularly dark and brutal truth, but one that still had the power to shame and damn the liars around him.
And like Robbo before he cracked, Gillman was a good cop. The fear he inspired made you happy he was on your team. Lennox would never be like that. In a square go he could kick-box Gillman into a pulp. But he’d never end his life. So Gillman would pick himself up and come for him and snuff him out like a candle. Unlike Lennox, he set no limits. As the superior cop in the hierarchy Lennox was as powerless as a liberal parent who didn’t believe in corporal punishment dealing with a calculating, psychotic offspring.
Strange then, to be thinking of Gillman, while gazing idly at the pretty Hispanic waitress, light and graceful as she hops like a small bird between tables, dispensing coffee.
— Do you think she’s good-looking? Tianna asks.
— I suppose so, he says, musing that the kid missed nothing. It strengthens his resolve never to have children, especially a daughter. Fuck that.
Tianna’s voice goes musical. — I want my hair cut so I get bangs.
Lennox decodes the glint in her eye as sly and the blood ices in his veins. Tianna quickly picks up on his reaction. She pulls strands of hair across her forehead. — Like here, she explains.
— Oh … a fringe. Lennox is relieved, as his heartbeat normalises.
She glances up at him with an unexpected coldness, laying something inside of him to waste. The fond, paternal vibe that was settling in evaporates as he sees himself through her eyes; from the knowing, contemptuous ferocity in her glance, he might as well be a jug-eared rookie cop telling a snooty, rich woman that she can’t park here.
Uncle Chet will be the man, he thinks, his head buzzing. Chet will sort it out. He signals for the bill. The ice-cream parlour is filling up with mothers and children, cops and sales clerks. Tianna tells him about Chet’s big boat on the Gulf coast. Then her conversation abruptly changes. — The men Momma brings home are bastards, she says in a low, quavering voice, like she half expects Lennox to punish her for the profanity.
— Chet’s not like that, though?
Her head twists vigorously.
— Is he your mum’s brother or your father’s brother?
— Just Chet, and she clams up into silence again. The waitress skips over with the bill, looking to the line that has formed at the door. Lennox takes the hint and settles up, they rise and make their way outside.
Another surrogate uncle. But did that have to be a bad thing? He himself was now attempting to fulfil that very same role, and knew practically nothing about young girls. He tries to remember what his sister Jackie was like at Tianna??
?s age. It was different evaluating someone when looking up at them from a kid’s perspective. Five years his senior, Jackie was the one they thought would do well. Her horse-riding lessons were a big deal in the family, making a powerful statement about them. And she had prospered. Became a lawyer; then married a top one, a man whom Lennox, burdened with an unshakeable belief that anyone who talked for a living was a bullshitter, had to fight every impulse not to openly detest.
He’d sensed Jackie’s contempt for the rest of them growing with every riding lesson she completed. Hated his mother’s perverse pride in his sister’s disdain of them, regarding it as a victory that they’d brought up a child who had learned to patronise and loathe them, simply for their working-class status.
Jackie had her Georgian New Town home and her country place up in Deeside, her successful husband and her polite, Merchant School kids. It was her life and as far as he was concerned, she was welcome to it. But he sensed that Trudi was covetous of this status, like she believed Lennox was essentially made of the same stuff, and with her scalpel-like love she could scrape off the bad bits and put this career policeman back on the right track.
The horse-riding lessons. Horsey, horsey.
While Jackie was on horseback, Lennox and his mate Les Brodie would cycle everywhere. Told to stay off the main roads, they’d take their bikes to Colinton Dell, along the path through the woods by the river, into the darkened mouth of that old stone tunnel.
Lennox suddenly blenches as something spins past his face. His heartbeat normalises: three kids are throwing a Frisbee around in the parking lot, as their mother loads up the car with groceries.
— Sorry, sir, says one fresh-faced, skinny wee boy. With his eager but sad puppy eyes, he’s the sort of kid, Lennox considers, who will always invoke a slight sense of pity, even outside of his melancholy thought stream. He picks up the disc and spins it at the boy, who catches it and throws it back to him with a light in his eye that indicates a bona fide game has started up. Lennox chucks it in Tianna’s direction, but she doesn’t move to intercept as it flies past her.
She wants to join in, but they’re just bone-headed kids. That’s what he told her: Don’t be a stupid kid, you’re a woman, a beautiful young woman. He’d explained to Tianna how numerical age meant nothing; it was all to do with maturity. Some ten-year-olds were ten. Some were like five. Some twenty-year-olds were like four-year-olds. Not Tianna, she was always a woman; strong, proud and sexy – it was nothing to be ashamed of. Vince, Pappy Vince, told her that she should never be ashamed of not being a silly little girl.
And her childhood glided past her like the Frisbee, destined for the hands of another.
11
Road Trip
AS THE MAP shakes in his trembling, swollen hand, Lennox is simultaneously squeezed by the sense that he’s fucking up big time. Trying to drive while reading a Miami street plan and a Florida road map is inviting trouble. To his weary eyes the urban cartography is just badly printed lines of different colour: grid-like black, some reds, a few blues and the odd green. The print is so small he can barely decipher it. What did it all mean? He’s discomforted to find himself driving west on Highway 41, away from his intended route, the 75 Interstate they called Alligator Alley. Worse, it seems to take him back through the district they were fleeing from, where Robyn and Tianna lived. She’s stiff in the passenger seat, back into that silent world to which he’s denied access.
All he can do is keep going west. The two to three hours to get to Bologna on the interstate will be longer on Highway 41, the Tamiami Trail. It comes upon them bearing its frustrating announcement of a fifty-five miles-per-hour speed limit, as a median barrier of aluminium, dispassionately bearing the scars of accidents past, splits the concrete lanes of the highway.
Lennox is surprised how quickly and resoundingly the outskirts of Miami become the swamps of the Everglades. Birds of prey he has never seen before, like giant crows cross-bred with hawks, hover above. Many are splattered beneath the wheels, scavenging for roadkill and ending up victims themselves, smearing the highway in varying degrees of pulverisation. Some forested areas are decimated by what Lennox assumes to be hurricane damage. Trees are bent, buckled and wilted as if warped under intense heat rather than wind, and areas of perimeter fence are ripped aside. In the swamp big white cranes hang unfeasibly in threadbare trees, making him think again of Les and the seagulls.
Tianna has redeemed her old set of baseball cards and is counting them.
— You like these cards, eh. Do ye collect them?
— Uh-uh. I jus keep these ones. They were my daddy’s. She regards him through the shield of her hair, waiting to see his reaction. — They ain’t worth nothin but he did have some valuable ones. Do y’all like baseball?
— Not really. To be honest, I’m not mad keen on American sports. I mean, baseball’s just rounders, a bairn’s game, he scoffs, before realising her age. — I mean tae say, there was never a Scotsman who played baseball!
— Oh yeah? Tianna challenges, handing him a card.
* * *
BOBBY THOMSON
(b: October 23, 1923, Glasgow, Scotland)
264 home runs in 14 seasons. Famous for the winning ‘shot heard around the world’, which won the National League pennant for the New York Giants against the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951.
The ‘Staten Island Scot’ was the youngest in a family of six who immigrated to the USA in his childhood. He played for the Giants, Braves, Cubs, Red Sox and Orioles. Now retired, he lives in Savannah, Georgia.
* * *
Lennox steals glances as he holds it tight to the wheel. — That’s me telt!
Tianna laughs, taking the card back, and is suddenly distracted by a passing motor with two racing competition bicycles fastened on to its roof rack. — Awesome, she says, pointing at them. — Did you ride a bike as a kid?
— Aye. Lennox is cut to the quick as he recalls the prized blue-and-white Raleigh he got for his eleventh birthday. How his parents stressed he was to look after it, not give anyone in the scheme a shot of it.
— What was it like?
— Just a bike. His reply curt, as the memory stings home; his gullet acrid with last night’s liquor, his brain razing open old overgrown neural paths. He swallows hard and his sphincter muscle tightens. — What else do you like? he says, changing the subject. — I mean, do you like animals?
Tianna considers this question for a bit. Her grace in giving it the gravity it doesn’t merit paradoxically makes him feel even more of a simpleton for asking it. — I guess I like dolphins. We saw some when we were out on Chet’s boat. And I kind of like seals, alligators, fish and manatees; all the marine stuff.
— You must have seen a lot of that, living here.
— Mostly jus read about em.
— Aye, but you must have seen an alligator.
— Nope, not a real one, she says. — We drove through the Glades a whole buncha times but they always said that we ain’t got time to stop and look at no reptiles. Guess they was jus in a hurry to get to their parties. Momma and Starry and … She turns to the window, unable to finish the sentence.
He could see Robyn and Starry coked up, heading for some soirée, Tianna all drowsy in the back of the car. — Who? he asks. — Who would be driving you? Your mother?
— Momma and some other people.
Lennox watches her chewing her hair and looking towards the floor of the vehicle. — Like Lance and Johnnie?
— I don’t wanna talk about them, Ray. Her face crumples and her voice rises. — Can we please not talk about them?
— Okay, sweetheart, no worries, Lennox clumsily pats the distressed girl’s shoulder. He decides not to push it. It’s a long trip; let her tell him when she’s ready. It’s the first time, he realises, that she’s addressed him directly by his name. Fuck sakes. They won’t even let the kid stop, in the fuckin Everglades, to watch the alligators. Who are these people?
Lennox lets some avant-garde jazz
soothe him, but it soon morphs into pan-piped rest-home gloop that saps his mojo and really galls Tianna, whose arm lashes to the dial, killing the sound. — This is grossing me out!
— What about the stuff you bought at the mall?
She digs into the sheep bag on her knee, eagerly producing a Kelly Clarkson CD which she slides into the player. Lennox is relieved as the car stereo keeps expelling it. The others get the same treatment. — This is so lame!
— That’s one to report to the car-hire place, he says, struggling to keep the smile off his face. He fails, and she catches him and play-hits his arm.
— You!
They switch over to 101.5 Lite FM, which announces itself as ‘South FLA’s number-one radio station’. Chicago’s ‘So Hard to Say I’m Sorry’ comes on and he thinks of Robbo.
There follow numerous talk adverts from sincere but excited voices proffering personal loans and credit facilities on just about everything, but mainly real estate and cars. Then a plethora of agencies earnestly offering packages of debt consolidation and reduction services. Probably the same people, Lennox considers, raising a bottle of Evian to his lips, another broadside in the battle against his broiling thirst.
An eerie voice interrupts proceedings hissing: ‘If you’re sitting in a dark room holding your shotgun, thinking bout killing your boss, turn on the light. Turn on Lite FM.’
At Tianna’s urging, he changes channels. The Beatles sing ‘Love Me Do’. Lennox is thinking of Trudi, as they pass a truck with a ‘Support Our Boys’ sticker, and begins singing along in an exaggerated Scouse accent. Tianna joins in, at first under her breath, then with increasing gusto. Long before the end they are cheesily serenading each other.
When the song stops, both are embarrassed by the new-found, gaudy intimacy that has crept up on them. They retreat self-consciously like a couple in a Hollywood musical who have just enjoyed a spectacular dance. Tianna pulls her hair from her face and shyly asks him, — Back at the gas station, I guess that was your girlfriend you was callin, right?