Bare Branches

Chapter One

MIDTOWN

Sally Luck burst through the revolving door onto the sidewalk along Fifth Avenue. She would run the errand herself. It was St. Patrick’s Day, after eleven a.m., and a Saturday.

She wondered why she loved it so, building it around herself, creating it every second, this feeling of New York City, this bustle, this feeling of early warmth and winter fled—this fresh, new season—this chance.

She lived in the shock of these passing eyes, flashing, in the sidewalk’s tramping, dodging, and uproar—this feeling of privilege.

Her hair, the shinning black of ravens, nearly reached her waist. Her thick bangs blended into her brows and lashes like a curtain rising above the largest, darkest, and most inscrutable of eyes—that could ruin a man for anything else. Her black blazer, an expensive fabric, stopped at her short, beige leather skirt, tightly recommending her contours. Her nylons were textured gray. Her red shoes had three-inch heels, signaling in flashes.

Hong Kong and Taipei may have had newer buildings, but they lacked the democracy of this controlled chaos, enabling each impulse. She was finished with Hong Kong. She was finished with Ohio, too. She walked faster now, getting ahead of the parade. She would cross at the corner ahead of it.

The Irish were having their day. She knew the Irish—Rory, her Yank, left behind, a thousand miles, desperate with wanting—as he deserved—when she vanished. She was finished with that.

This was in her way—all of it. She had nearly timed it right—skittering over the curb, rounding the barricades, with nimble feet, expert, like a skater’s—except the strutting band major darted ahead to gather her, swooping in merriment, turning her, as she joined the parade. Her purse swung by long, cordovan leather straps. The first impulse to anger smoothed at the sight of a thousand pairs of eyes looking at her in the only way that people can look at Sally Luck—with longing.

The base drum behind her boomed out the marching rhythm as she, too, raised her knees in exaggeration. Her red shoes, adjusting in a quick two-step, fell in line—the Irish following a Chinese, like always, she thought. She relaxed. The snare drums rattled. The trombones slid out long notes.

Her smile, like no other, brought fresh hope to each. Behind her, giant balloons, pulled northward on long tethers, wobbled above the floats. Her head tilted back in triumph, as Sally Luck led the 2012 Saint Patrick’s Day parade.

She noticed the television cameras—enough of this, too, her point proved again. She quickened her pace to pull from the band major’s arm. Sally crossed diagonally, through a break in wooden barricades—the police admiring, the crowd parting, hands clapping. Confidently, she rejoined the sidewalk’s busy flow.

"You have an order for Design Differentials," she announced. Sally turned her back to deny her face to the countermen. She tapped her right shoe, impatiently. The thirty-six inch roll of drawing paper thudded on the counter followed by the swish of a plastic bag.

She reached into her purse for two pieces of twine. We have an account, she said, stepping back and spreading open the straps as she lowered her purse to the floor, pausing, still not looking at him. Place the roll of paper on my purse and then secure the straps around the roll with these. Be sure to center it. Tightly, please, tightly she directed.

A quick signature, then she shortened the straps through the buckle and pulled her purse off the floor as she straightened. She was strong. Snatching the plastic bag like the flick of a whip, she walked briskly from the store. The business along the counter did not resume until after she had walked past the window.

Once again, there was the problem of the parade; Sally was again on the wrong side of the street. It provided the perfect excuse to enter a jewelry store on company time. She was drawn, as always, to the faithful sparkle of diamonds.

An elderly man warily walked to Sally who pointed to a blue diamond saying, Third row from you, second from your right. She produced a jeweler’s loop from her purse. He asked if she was in the business. Her eyes were hooded. Occasionally, she replied, squinting. Do you sell wholesale? He said he did not.

She could tell that he would normally have walked to another customer, but something kept him there, looking at her. You have a very rich voice, if I may say, very deep for a woman and with highlights of British and Chinese over American Midwest.

How does a Jewish jeweler know linguistics? she asked, peremptorily.

He shrugged, looking out the window. He spoke liltingly. It is an international business.

You’re worried about the coming war…are you not?

Again, he shrugged. There is always a coming war. The god of hosts will protect the children of Israel, but my diamonds, he may be too busy to help. The South Africans are not what they used to be. I take it you know people in the orient?

I’ll make this my first stop, when war breaks out.

Why wait for then? he protested.

The price will rise.

You’re no better than the Dutch, he croaked, but far more beautiful. He added, reverently.

This one has a flaw, she whispered, handing it back to him, dismissively.

But the color makes up for that, he bargained. How many dialects of Chinese do you speak?

Mandarin and Cantonese. Good Bye, she said, crisply, as she lifted her heavy purse.

I will remember you, he said after her, his voice trailing off into thought. How could I forget you, he wondered, silently.

All that could wait. She wanted to see Paul. The attention of men had aroused her. There was something so fresh about a new boyfriend. It was like opening the door to a hotel suite, everything gleaming and in order—a new bed made up with crisp linen stretched tautly. How could she ever forget such a perfect morning?

The booming, and the rattling, and the long notes receded with a Doppler Shift, into even longer notes in the distance. The tail of the parade, finishing, had just cleared her intersection. Sally, on her side, faced a sharp wall of people toeing a line on their side—an elevation of eyes and shoulders, bags and briefcases and a myriad of shoes in alignment. She could feel the menace—like Pamplona.

What would happen when they met in the middle of the street, when the light, as if all seeing, all knowing—waiting for the moment, suspending it out of reach—turned green, releasing them?

Magically, they interwove. The controlled chaos of New York worked again.

After the bracing morning air, the lobby smelled stuffy. She reached the elevator bank and studied the glowing floor numbers above the doors. She waited, rigidly—her hooded eyes frozen, but alert on either side—to hear the bell of one, chiming open—ding!

She rode up five floors. The elevator door again chimed open. To her front was a two-foot square logo, mounted next to a door, displaying a Greek delta noting on each side: structural, mechanical, electrical. The suite at the end of the hall, placed to observe the length of the corridor, was being readied for a new tenant. Though the glass she noticed the drop cloths and paint cans. A workman was mounting the new signage, and blocking her view.

Sally muscled into Design Differentials, quickly leveraging her weight on the door handle, frowning, pivoting on red, high heels. She worked her rounded, athletic shape inside her tight, leather skirt—her heavy roll of drawing paper thudding through the doorway—huffing and grunting, noisily, in an obvious call for help. Men dashed forward too late. She gave one final glimpse toward the new office. Down the hall, behind the glass door of the stairwell, the sound of heavy boot falls intruded, pounding up the steel stairs.

Paul Van der Waals had put his want ad in the Times and waited for the phone to ring. He worried that the one with the deep voice was over-qualified with her bachelor’s degree in business. Why would she take a job as office manager? Her voice indicated an intimidating intelligence.

When the beautiful woman stepped off the elevator, he doubted she was coming for the interview. When Sally stepped into the lobby of the suite, she doubted that this handsome man could be the owner. This business of men gets easier, Sally noticed.

Sally dropped the roll of paper on his desk in the private office and pranced around to where Paul sat. Let’s shoot the juice! Let’s shoot the juice, she implored, eyes agog with rapture.

Sally, he whispered, worriedly, "we’ve got to get this project out the door. The bid date is already scheduled. That’s why we came in on a Saturday," he implored. A month ago, he would have swept everything off his desk to clear a place to lay Sally down.

Then at noon, she bargained, when they all leave for lunch. Ten minutes. I’m wearing suspender hose, She added, shyly.

He knew it would take fifteen. Sally, can’t it wait till after five? His responsibilities existed in an uneasy alliance. Each clamored for a larger share of him. Finally, he thought they took it all, and used him up. He did not understand that men are empty without them.

There it was again, Sally thought, the long, slow slide into indifference. I practically stop a parade out on the street and he prefers figuring thrust loads. Sally inflated a large pout and moped her way toward her office. Never pass up a chance.

Sally thought about the faithful sparkle of her diamonds. She had removed parts from a calculator and had hidden a small cloth bag of diamonds inside. It sat at the bottom of her lingerie drawer. She thought they were worth a hundred and fifty thousand.

For those in the Far East with secret hoardings, there was not a safe exchange. She told them that she must get settled first. That meant finding the right bank and the right Jews. She would deal only with Jews. Each type had their uses, she knew—the Chinese for some things, Jews for another, and the Irish, too. She allowed herself the briefest feelings of longing.

There was another bag of gems. She pictured it back in Ohio, hidden in Rory’s basement, in the rafters where an I-beam sat in the recess of a concrete wall, covered with insulation. She had hidden it one morning while he slept. She could breeze in and claim it any time, she knew.

Sally had chafed in her father’s house in Hong Kong’s elite Happy Valley and later, in Taiwan—after fleeing again, when the British had lost the city.

For Sally, it had been like binding feet. Private musings took the place of conversations—she refused to speak with servants. Or perhaps, it was like wrapping a bonsai tree. To be ignored is unnatural. It is like keeping a bird.

Her parents were distracted. Honors in school were not enough. Beautiful was not enough.

Sally decided that she wanted cowboys. She wanted to live in the Painted Desert among the buckaroos. She wanted to live on a ranch, where loneliness was understood to be a disability.

She informed her father that she wanted to go to college in the middle of North America. She wanted to be the queen of the rodeo. For Sally, life would always be a rodeo.

When noon came, she waited at her desk to see if Paul would change his mind. After five minutes, she grabbed her purse and marched toward the lobby, insulted. She lost patience with the heavy door again; and, after fighting her way through, she paused to read the new logo down the hall, now that the workman had left. It read COMEDY TONIGHT. Sally’s face exploded into a smile. She took a few steps toward it, drawn toward such delight.

As the door next to it began to open, Sally shyly turned away, back toward the elevator. A sprightly voice behind her asked, Do you like it? I mean, it isn’t silly, is it?

Sally turned to see a woman, about her age, taller, stepping quickly. "I think it’s charming, Sally gushed. It’s just what this stuffy building needs."

The other woman, obviously delighted, thrust forward her hand, saying Jillian de Guerre, what’s yours?

Sally Luck, she said; noticing the large eyes; the short, layered hair, thick, with brown bangs reaching her eyebrows; the olive complexion; and the single detracting feature: a hint of a nose once broken, a small knot.

Where do people go for lunch around here? Jillian asked.

Do you like Jewish? Sally asked.

I love a good deli, Jillian said, enthusiastically.

Then let’s have lunch together, Sally said with finality, with a smile at once both eager and as modest as a China doll. The elevator door chimed open.

Sally Luck and Jillian de Guerre aroused comparison as they walked cross-town, west on 47th Street. In a continuous fidget, Sally swung her purse from shoulder to shoulder by its long straps while whipsawing her long legs to land precisely, step-by-step, upon the centerline on which she walked. With her long hair in animation, and with her hands looping and sawing in emphasis, she was a devotion. Sally Luck was the hallelujah in the hymn. She was halted only by the fast blink of a camera’s lens shuttering silently ahead, at the limits where distance smears pixels into little daubs of color.

Jillian swung her small backpack smartly across the shoulder of her black, hooded sweatshirt that cloaked her in shapeless folds. She withdrew her face into the mystery of the deep hood from where her large and lovely eyes looked out, as from the coif and veil of a nun’s habit. She listened to Sally in growing wonder, with her red lips pursed in a curious pout, like a hooded girl distracted on her way to grandma’s house. Her blue jeans bunched carelessly at the tops of her jump boots, which splayed open, laced halfway up.

Jillian strode, noiselessly, in determined union with the nimble steps and clatter of Sally’s red high-heeled shoes. They walked up the middle, parting walkers to either side—who turned their faces, like playing cards in a slow shuffle, to prolong their stare another second. They rounded the corner at Broadway, heading north, with Jillian peering behind, lingering at the turn.

A waiter from the Stage Door Delicatessen rushed outside to pull Sally out of line, with Jillian following, to seat them at the small table he had been saving.

You’re five minutes late. I almost gave away the table, he scolded her, and you’ve brought a friend. My name is Saul. Any friend of Sally’s is a friend of mine, unless it’s a man.

Isn’t it all fun? Sally asked, leaning confidentially, with a low and breathy voice.

What is? asked Jillian—distracted, pulling back her hood and looking carefully around the room for long and patient moments.

Life, Sally insisted.

Jillian nodded, absently. Yeah, this really blows my skirt up,

Sally guffawed in shock and smacked the table.

Jillian, surprised, could not help but laugh—the sex appeal, the oriental mystery discarded in a blink for a belly laugh like an ironworker’s.

Chapter Two

SPANISH LADY KEY

Rory Haggerty slept alone in the motel room of Spanish Lady Key Reef Resort. He had dreamed about loss all night long. He awakened, each time the wind picked up, to the sounds of palm fronds striking the standing seam roof, like brushes on a snare drum. He awakened to the sounds along the highway, of the palm trees shimmering in the headlights, like cheerleader pom-poms on the sidelines.

Each time he awoke, the tailings of desperate images glimmered for long moments before they blurred, before the voices stopped—with him always naked and with Sally Luck always fully clothed. His dreaming had no mercy.

Finally, Rory awakened unevenly, as sleep sputtered like an engine running out of gas. His broken heart, always a light sleeper, woke up with him. The injury should take a month to heal, if left untreated. Home remedies only make it worse.

Sitting up in bed, mouth ajar, he felt Sally Luck must be there, that the last month had been only a bad dream. He reached across the bed, in the dark, franticly patting the mattress—nothing. He was alone. His dreaming clung to him stubbornly, bitterly recalled like a broken promise. He did not recognize the shapes emerging around him.

Surely, this night is only a dream returning from some other long night. Surely, he was only dreaming of a dream. Sally must be here. Slumping back down, exhausted, he began dreaming before he fell asleep—and so the dream had stopped his fall. He dreamed just below the surface of awakening. It was like looking up through water. He dreamed of himself remembering.

This time Sally stood in three-inch heels. He watched her bending down over his conference table. He saw the curtain of shiny black hair streaming forward, to conceal her face, to cover her arms, as she leaned on her elbows. She propped her head up with one palm. She turned to reveal a single eye. She watched him lift her skirt. She saw him kneel. He knew she felt him pull her panties down along her grey and textured suspender hose. Rory saw her rise up, to step from her panties, to lift them by the toe of one red shoe, and to flick them sailing across the carpet.

He watched her widen her stance, lustily bracing herself, shifting her weight back and forth to test, digging into the carpet. Relaxing, she pushed her arms forward, bending again, flat against the tabletop. She leaned her head softly into the crook of an elbow. She closed her eyes as she presented her bare, rounded ass to him, like a gift.

His unchaste vision dissolved into backlight. The glowing blinds ratcheted one notch brighter. The compressors rattled back to life behind the dive shop, as this Saint Patrick’s Day began. It must be seven a.m., Rory thought, waking once again. The boats would leave at eight. Becker was coming.

The tile floor felt cold. All around his two dive bags, the floor had dried, but it was gritty against his bare feet. He tugged open the door to his room and stepped out on the second floor balcony that ran the full length of the motel. He leaned against the railing. He looked down at the four dive boats tied to the pilings of the dock, along the pock-marked and lacy limestone channel cut out of an ancient reef.

The new day was warm already, but it was windy. It was blowing hard from the ocean side. That concerned him. Then the compressors turned back off. He waited. He heard motel room doors open and shut below him. Still, none of the crews stepped on to the boats.

When the wind was right, Rory could hear a solitary motor. Rory could see Captain Becker’s boat. It was a mile down the ship channel that ran north in a straight line from Gun Carriage Harbor, ending at the motel. Becker’s boat moved slowly along the line of boats tied to old tires at the pilings. It was a motley string of boats, each for their different use—some low, some tall, some with Bimini tops, some with flying bridges, some for fishing, some for diving, some for running to the grocery at Summerland Key. Becker was early.

The sun had not yet cleared the mile of roofs that stretched south toward Hawk Channel and the Atlantic. Rory had a weak hold on wakefulness. A kind of dreaming persisted in the brief half-dark netherworld before daybreak. He saw silent gulls flying out to sea.

Surrounded by this film noir of day emerging, she came to him again. Her low breathy voice returned. Rory heard Sally Luck say: I guess I have to take the car and drive into Key West. I guess I have to shop all day by myself. Don’t you ever wonder that I’ve met someone and have gone to a motel with him? Don’t you ever think of me when you’re out on the reef? Just don’t ask me to come along, to sit in that dirty, smelly boat.

The knife in his heart took a quarter turn. He looked behind him, just to be sure. He was alone, yet he watched her wanton mincing emerge along the second floor balcony. She was a free-loving sprite once again, in her little white shorts and in her bright white deck shoes, prancing toward the stairs. Her lusty black hair flounced for him in shiny waves.

He watched her stop just before the corner. She turned to face him, grimly, in a cloud-built pose that swiftly became the truest thing he knew. She said, simply, Yank, and then vanished. From behind the houses, the sunlight ratcheted a second notch brighter to reveal colors against the horizon.

Rory stepped back into his room and pulled a dive bag out onto the balcony. He could see Becker now, barely. He walked back inside and pulled up one of his weight belts from a pile—the twenty pound belt, the one for a full wet suit. He would be cold. He had made so many dives in so few days that he was having trouble maintaining his body temperature. He watched the long fronds of palm trees blowing.

He was closer now. Becker waved his usual straight-armed Nazi salute. Becker was no more a Nazi than he was. Rory knew that Becker did that just to give you a chance to make something of it.

Rory saw the top of Becker’s shaved head shine above the blackness of his sunglasses. Becker Kraus was hell held in check, but he was Rory’s friend.

Making the turn into the docks next to the motel, Becker removed his sunglasses. His stare made you freeze like the growl of a watchdog. This dog was alert, but indifferent, having made up his mind that you were not worth chasing, and most people were inclined to leave it that way.

I think that it might be rough out there, today. No one is going out…except for us. Becker slyly added. He paused, stiffly, waiting. Are you sure you’re up for it? Becker demanded, loudly. Rory shot him a look. I had to know, Becker said softly, almost gently.

Then, modulating yet again, Becker announced in sudden, high spirits, Today, I will teach you how to rig for heavy weather diving. Becker paused again, waiting for Rory to speak.

I’ll bring four tanks, Rory turned and began the walk down the dock to the back door of the dive shop. Becker turned to sit atop a cooler, next to the wheel. He bent beneath the instrument cowling, out of the wind. He lit up a Marlboro. He raised his head and watched his smoke ring pull apart in the wind. Becker knew that it did not often blow like this on sunny, warm days.

A slow smile crept across Becker’s face. You shall see what it is you are made of. Take a careful look. Not every man gets that chance. Most men die strangers to themselves.

He knew that Rory appeared to others to be a fitness fanatic, or someone whose love for the sport withstood brutal repetition. Becker suspected otherwise. It might be that Chinese girl, but likely, it went deeper. It was some private hell. One that Rory pretended did not exist. It was a voice that Rory tried to silence. There could be no talking, no thinking, only doing. Becker knew that this voice cannot be turned off. It might spend itself and quit, but more likely, it must be over-topped by some louder voice. Over the years, Becker had heard this louder voice, several times.

"There is one big voice you cannot turn off. All of the other voices within your head will show respect for it and become silent. It is time for you to hear it, my friend. This is the voice that tells you…that you may die." This was Becker’s cryptic whisper.

Becker could be stuffy, Rory thought, but at least he was doing the talking. He thought that was why they were friends. Becker did not like people trying to prove something by talking. You do not compete with Becker Kraus by talking. You had to show Becker if you had it in you.

All of the boat captains looked forward to