Tropical Freeze by James W. Hall Read Free Book Online

to enjoy. Only reason she was runner-up to Miss Florida was that Darcy had not really given a shit about the whole thing, and when they asked her what she wanted to do with her crown if she won, she said to nail it on the wall just below the 110-pound tarpon she hauled in last summer. That was that. It got a laugh. And second place.
    But this new Darcy had a tang of bitterness in her voice. A nervous impatience that Thorn assumed came from working in Miami all week, only getting back home on the weekends. As if she were taking on the accent of the fast-lane Miami hotshots she had to work with.
    “I’m sorry, Thorn.” She reached over, touched his hand briefly. “Don’t mind me. I’m just going through something. I don’t know. Maybe it’s El Cambio. Hot flashes, loss of procreative urge. General aimlessness.”
    “Maybe it’s just a tropical depression,” he said.
    “I’m serious, Thorn,” she said. “I read about this. It’s like a disease that everybody gets, middle-age measles. It’s on page one twenty-three of that book, whatever it’s called. A person turns thirty-six, the longing genes switch on. You start thinking about Yeats, him saying that life was a long preparation for something that never happens. You just got to wait it out. Twenty pages farther in that book, your genes are going to throw something else at you. May take a few years, but it happens.”
    “And while you’re waiting?”
    “That’s what I’m working on at the moment,” she said. “A whole new career. I’m sick of predicting the future. I’d like to cause the future, make something happen.”
    Thorn said, “If your genes are going to change you anyway, why do anything? You could just lie around, watch the clouds for five years till life had meaning again. Rediscover your navel.”
    He liked being a little boozy. You could have conversations like this. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d said “life” and “meaning” in the same sentence. Maybe never.
    She said, “Even you, Thorn. You’re not immune. You roll a rock in front of your cave, but that won’t stop the changes. That’s my point. It doesn’t matter what you do, whether you’re striving or not striving, you still change.”
    “All I’m striving for is to finish my damn house,” he said. “Live on land again. I’m sick of that boat. I turn around, I hit my head on something. I turn the other way, I hit the other side.” He sipped his beer, and they were quiet for a moment. She kicked off her leather pumps, and Thorn watched her wiggle her toes, playing scales in the air.
    She said, “Sometimes I think, just quit your complaining, Darcy. You’re the weatherlady. You’re the vivacious beauty queen with the big knockers. What’re you bitching about?”
    “Big knockers?” Thorn said.
    “Yeah,” she said. “I had large breasts once. You never noticed? I had them all through high school. It’s how I got hired at WBEL. Out to here.” She motioned in the dark. “A couple of years ago I had an operation, had them reduced. I was sick of them. My back hurting all the time. You men don’t know about big breasts.”
    “We’re always happy to learn.”
    She was silent. Down the row of trailers, Bruce Springsteen was getting weepy about steelworkers and their bars. Pushing his voice down into his throat, between a grunt and a C flat.
    “Size doesn’t matter,” Thorn said. “They say it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
    “You guys got a million of those,” she said. “I heard ’em all. It’s not the length of your wand, it’s the magic with which you wave it. Horse pucky.”
    “OK, we’re in touchy territory here. I’m sorry, I thought we were still joking.”
    “Yeah,” she said. “We are, I guess.”
    They listened to Bruce going on about the shot-and-a-beer guys, Thorn thinking he could use a couple of shots just now.
    She said, “Only guy I ever knew who didn’t feed me