Black Magic

  Dedication

  For Mom,

  Thanks for all the creative genetic material. If only I had used it for good instead of evil.

  Chapter One

  A single fried egg stared at Lyle Miller from the center of the white plastic plate. It was sunny side up, a perfect match for his ebullient mood. He was about to banish his ennui and embark upon a new Grand Adventure. He picked up a bottle of hot sauce from the diner counter and painted a ring around the egg yolk.

  He noticed that Gloria, the waitress, watched him from the end of the counter. Lyle wasn’t the usual Sunrise Diner customer, who was generally of the south Florida cracker variety. Lyle combed his thick, black hair near straight back, razor part on the right. High cheekbones gave his face great definition and his eyes sparkled sapphire blue. Despite the stifling summer heat, he wore a black, long-sleeve silk shirt. No doubt he looked a cut above Gloria’s usual ten-percent tipper.

  Lyle touched the yolk with the tine of his fork. It shuddered, as if in protest at its coming fate. He gave the egg the slightest pressure and pricked the sac. Others attacked a fried egg, slashing the liquid yolk in half and mixing it with the hard fried white. But Lyle preferred to savor that moment of victory. Bright yellow yolk oozed from the egg’s wounded side. Lyle smiled at the almost imperceptible drop in the yolk’s crown and the slow trickle from the base that telegraphed the inevitable end.

  With his fork, he led the streaming yellow liquid in a counterclockwise journey around the egg and through the red hot sauce. By the third trip, the yolk sac was flat and Lyle had a masterpiece, threads of swirled red, orange and yellow that covered the white of the egg. It reminded him of his new Grand Adventure.

  Gloria sauntered up with a carafe of steaming coffee at the ready. She was well past thirty with platinum hair and the kind of skin damage only tropical sun can inflict at that age. She tucked her gum into the corner of her mouth with her tongue and fired up a big homespun smile.

  “Warm you up?” she said with a dip of her carafe to his coffee mug.

  Lyle looked up from his plate. He guessed her life story. High school cute. A failed marriage or two. A variety of addictions and a slide down into a career at the Sunrise Diner off Alligator Alley. Nursed a stubborn denial that she was as past her prime as week-old fish. Nobody anyone would miss. He flashed her a shining salesman’s grin.

  “Has anyone ever turned down that offer?” he answered.

  She refilled his cup. “So what brings you out into swampy south Florida today?”

  Lyle caught the arrival of an old man in a green John Deere baseball hat. He shuffled in and took a seat in a booth. Collateral damage.

  “I’m a magician,” Lyle answered. “A master of illusion and prestidigitation.”

  “Like that Criss Angel?”

  Lyle kept from cringing. “Exactly. Allow me.”

  He pulled a deck of cards from his shirt pocket, though it had appeared empty. All fifty-two cards expanded into a fan in his right hand. Gloria’s eyes locked on the large dark blue sapphire ring on Lyle’s third finger.

  “Pick a card,” he said.

  She passed her hand back and forth across the deck, hesitating as if the fate of the world rested on her selection. Lyle swallowed his impatience. She pulled out a card. He placed the rest of the deck against his forehead and closed his eyes in mock concentration.

  “Seven of diamonds.”

  “Oh my gawd!” she shrieked. “How’d you do that?”

  Lyle winked away the world’s stupidest question. He extended his hand and she returned his card. He tucked it into the deck and cut it in half, face down. He held his hand over it and the top card levitated into his palm. He flipped over the queen of hearts and handed it to her with a flourish.

  “For you,” he said. “The queen of hearts, as you are destined to break so many.”

  Gloria managed a star-struck smile and stared at the card. Lyle rose and left ten dollars on the counter for his uneaten three-dollar breakfast. By the time Gloria looked up from the face of the playing card queen, Lyle’s black convertible was pulling away in a cloud of white dust.

  She tucked the card into the breast pocket of her white working blouse, behind her hand-lettered name tag. She walked the coffee pot over to the old man in the booth.

  “A little java, Sid?” she asked the Sunrise regular.

  She started to pour and she felt the card in her pocket get hot. A look of shock crossed Sid’s face. His mouth opened in a silent scream and his eyes bulged. He went red as a beet, looking like some horrific Christmas decoration in his green hat. Sid clutched his chest and fell against the table so hard his coffee mug jumped with a clank.

  “Sid!” Gloria screamed. She dropped the coffee pot. It shattered on the floor into a muddy sunburst. She bent to help Sid.

  The card in her shirt went white hot.

  She jerked upright. Fiery fingers dug into her chest and wrapped her heart like bands of flaming steel. She hitched one last, incomplete breath and collapsed to the floor.

  Ten miles away, Lyle’s black convertible took a right on CR 12 and headed north. It passed a sign that said: CITRUS GLADE 35 MILES.

  Chapter Two

  The WAMM-TV morning news had a weathergirl, all feminist wrath for the title set aside. The WAMM evening news featured staid meteorologist Chuck Randall, a weatherman. The a.m. show had a former high school cheerleader named Whitney.

  This morning she wore a tight red top with a plunging neckline that should never have seen the light of day before noon. She had mastered standing in profile to better display the pair of assets that landed her the job. Few complained when they obscured the projected temperature for Ft. Lauderdale that day. Her long blonde hair swirled as she made each overly dramatic sweep of the weather map with one hand.

  “A cold front stalled out waaay up here in Tallahassee, the capital,” she said, as if her report was part of a geography test. “So we’ll be under the influence of high pressure all week.”

  The screen behind her flipped to a radar map. It appeared to startle her as she saw the change in her off-stage monitor. She scooted to the other side of the screen and pasted her smile back on.

  “The barometer,” she said, “is up three-tenths this morning.” She pronounced it barrow-meter to confirm to any sentient viewer that she had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Our radar is clear right now but expect scattered storms to pop up later this afternoon as the temperature climbs. The high today will be ninety-two degrees with super high humidity. You won’t need a sweater today.”

  It was August in south Florida. Half the population spent the day in a swimsuit.

  “For Miami, winds are switching to come from the southwest.” She pointed to Miami with her left hand, and made a clockwise windmill with her right. She looked like a football ref calling a penalty.

  One of the cameramen groaned.

  “Calm surf and bright sun. A great day for the beach!”

  She bounced a bit, like she was still leading a cheer.

  The whole report could have been recorded yesterday, or the day before. South Florida summer days were all the same. Claustrophobically humid at sunrise, blisteringly hot by mid-morning, and afternoons peppered with sporadic downpours. The only reason viewers tuned in was to make sure they weren’t in the path of a hurricane. Or to watch Whitney jiggle.

  “Back to you, Bud,” she said and pointed at him with both hands, even though the director had told her not to a dozen times.

  Bud came back on screen with a look of resignation on his face.

  “Thanks, Whitney.”

  The rumor was that he really missed doing the evening newscast.

  Chapter Three

  A few miles south of town, surrounde
d by a sagging chain-link fence and centered in a weed-infested slab of buckling asphalt, rose the rusting hulk of the Apex Sugar Mill.

  Apex had selected Citrus Glade for one reason, and it wasn’t the quality of the potential employees. Citrus Glade was in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Naples and Miami, but it was the only high point for miles. CR 12, running north and south through town, was the only road in and out, and it had to bridge canals to make the transit each way. The low ground was perfect for sugar cane and a centralized mill on this slight elevation was the perfect processing center.

  Opened in 1941, the mill had sent packets of K-ration sugar to American soldiers fighting around the globe. The end of the war and of civilian rationing sparked a sugar boom. Adjacent to the cane field that grew on reclaimed Everglades land, the plant churned out tons of refined sugar around the clock as Americans rediscovered baking cakes and Kool-Aid. A ban on Cuban sugar in 1960 only pushed demand higher. The swelling population of Citrus Glade sold their farms to large growers and snagged high-paying punch-clock jobs.

  All good things, though, must come to an end. By the turn of the twenty-first century environmental pressures and dropping prices hit Apex hard. Sugar cane borers and whiptail disease devastated the local sugar fields. An independent operation could not turn a profit. Production sagged and a downward spiral of layoffs began. By 2000, Apex had cut its losses and closed the doors.

  Like the sunken Titanic, the remains of the mill were a reminder of past glory. The weathered three-story brick shell towered over the flat Florida landscape, a dun and red tombstone for the dead industry. The sides were mostly large glass windows segregated into dozens of panes, most of which had been shattered by vandals and the elements. A lightning strike had toppled the smokestack years ago and it lay like a crushed brick snake across the parking lot. A rust-red water tower stood near the building, a reminder of the prodigious pumping from the Florida Aquifer the plant used to require.

  Amidst all these ruins of 1940s technology stood an intrusion from the current era. A massive steel tower with satellite dishes at its peak rose from a new concrete pad. The fence around the base had warning signs with government logos.

  With the mill closed, the panicked town council needed a new employer of choice. They bet their futures on the National Security Agency. The spy agency’s latest brainchild was a communications receiver, a reception station for intercepts from across the globe. South Florida’s least appealing feature, an endless expanse of pancake-flat ground, became Citrus Glade’s selling point. Line of sight was unlimited.

  With the promise of a government employer, the town volunteered the abandoned Apex site. Sure, the Federal Government paid no property taxes, but they would clean up the eyesore at the edge of town and dole out jobs to idled Apex employees.

  But the best laid plans…

  The town council didn’t read the fine print. The huge vacant parking lot on the Apex site meant that the NSA didn’t need to bulldoze the decaying factory. They also may have confused the agency with NASA. The council members had Project Apollo-type images of hundreds of communications workers bustling around spinning magnetic tape reels. But the current reality ended up being an unmanned receiver that sent all its data elsewhere through fiber optic cables. The only local jobs generated were the three guys from Poulsen Construction who poured the tower’s concrete slab. The jobs lost were the five city councilmen, whose positions were abolished.

  But the tower’s location, the town’s water supply and the mill’s history all converged to create the perfect setting to attract one new business. Two days after Lyle Miller arrived, workers gave the façade of the former Everyday Shoes store on Main Street a fresh coat of glossy black paint. The next morning, hand-painted letters appeared in the window that spelled MAGIC SHOP.

  Chapter Four

  “How’s she doing today?”

  Andy Patterson had learned years ago to start every visit to his mother at the Elysian Fields Retirement Home that way. It was best to be prepared for the mood of the day.

  “Today’s a good day,” Nurse Coldwell said. She had a face uncomfortably similar to a bulldog and the no-nonsense demeanor to match it. In her nursing whites she looked like a stout chunk of marble behind the reception counter. “She didn’t need to be reminded you were coming today.”

  Andy breathed a sigh of relief. It was always a crap shoot when he arrived. Today he rolled a seven.

  Andy still wore the tan uniform of the Citrus Glade Department of Public Works. On his thirtieth birthday this year, he’d shaved his surviving hair down to stubble, a look that brought back a few uncomfortable memories of his recent military service. But the look accentuated his round cheeks; people said it made him look younger. He could live with that.

  He walked down the light yellow corridor towards his mother’s room. Each door he passed reminded him how lucky he was. Some of the occupants were on IV drips and lay immobile on beds that looked uncomfortably close to hospital gurneys. A few empty O2 canisters lined the hallway, their contents sacrificed to maintain the lives of others. Within one room, a man in urine-soaked pajama bottoms stared at a TV without comprehension. An orderly cleaned the floor while a nurse tried to help the man up to get changed. Compared to most of these patients, his mother was healthy as a newborn.

  The sharp impact of a wheelchair footrest against his shin refocused Andy’s attention.

  “Watch where you are going, jackass,” the old man in the chair growled. It was Shane Hudson, the eighty-year-old scourge of the Elysian hallways. His face had all the features of a shriveled raisin and his legs had atrophied to little more than candlesticks. But his silver hair was still styled in the pompadour of his prime and his eyes burned with a tiger’s ferocity.

  The angled chair pinned Andy against the wall. The old bastard had nailed him on purpose. Andy shook his head.

  “Sorry, Mr. Hudson. I need to keep my head in the game.”

  “Goddamn right,” Shane said. He fingered the black oak cane he had across his lap. Years ago he could still walk with its help. Now it was just a link to his past. Or an attitude adjuster for a less-than-attentive member of the staff. He spun his chair back a few inches to let Andy pass.

  Andy’s mother’s room was a welcome relief from the stark clinical décor of many of the others. The shades were open and bright Florida sunshine streamed in to illuminate a collection of her artwork. Framed watercolors filled the walls. Still-life studies of orchids, landscapes of the Everglades, children flying kites on a sugar-white beach. An unfinished work of butterflies among cattails stood on an easel in the corner.

  Dolly Patterson beamed as soon as she saw her son. Andy smiled back in happy recognition. That was her adoring smile he remembered blazing from the bleachers at his baseball games, from the crowd at high school graduation and from the gate at Miami International when he returned from his time in the Army. Even in the shared public space of the retirement community, that smile was a “welcome home”. The comfort it gave him made its frequent absence taste so much more bitter.

  Dolly only stood five foot three now. Seventy years had shaved a few inches from her height and now Andy had to look down into her eyes. Her hair was the same shade of auburn she always favored and had a sensible style that stopped just short of her shoulders. A paint-dappled white apron covered her pink sun dress.

  “Andy!” She pulled the apron off over her head. “Is it the afternoon already?”

  Andy held his breath, afraid she was on the edge of a backward slide into confusion. “Sure is.”

  “This day has flown by,” she said. “We spent the morning out in the gardens and you should see the flowers we have going this year. After lunch I went to a ceramics class, you know, to try something new, and well, let’s just say I know why they call it ‘throwing pots’. I had clay in my hair! That inspired me to a bit of painting. I had no idea so much time had gone by.”

  Andy exhaled. This was Mom. The real Mom who had more creative e
nergy than the world had time and more enthusiasm than human beings a third her age could muster.

  “I had the pleasure of Mr. Hudson’s company on the way in,” he said.

  “Nasty old coot,” Dolly said. “Mean when he ran the mill, meaner when they closed it, meanest when his legs deserted him, soon followed by most friends he ever had. You should steer clear of him.”

  “If it was a question of steering,” Andy said, “I think he was at fault.”

  Dolly hung up her apron.

  “Are your ready to go out for an early dinner or can you not bear to miss an Elysian meal?” Andy said.

  “I’ve been dying for fresh snapper,” she said.

  They left the building and Andy had her wait under the front canopy as he retrieved his car. As he pulled back up, his stomach knotted. His mother’s breezy smile was gone, replaced by a tight grimace. Her eyes darted around the parking lot.

  “Oh, please, no,” Andy whispered. “She was doing so great.”

  Andy pulled the car up in front of her. She took a fearful step back. She clutched her purse in a panicked, defensive way that made Andy realize how old she really was. He sighed and got out of the car.

  “Mom?”

  “What are we doing out here, Andy?” she said. “Where are we going?”

  He could try to explain it to her, try to make her remember, but that road had been rocky each time he took it and was always a dead end. When she got confused, she got scared, and only the familiar things in her room made her feel safe.

  “We’re going inside, Mom. We’re going to sit for a while before you have dinner.”

  “Good,” she said with a look of relief. She scooted back in through the door, like a tortoise back into its protective burrow.

  He pulled his car back into the same parking spot. He killed the engine and sat in silence. A good day had gone bad. But at least part of it had been a good day. He popped open the car door. Odds were, by the time he got in there she’d have forgotten he was ever there in the first place. But he’d give it a try anyway.