Free Buzz Cut by James W. Hall

scalp, a buzz. Found that her skull had some interesting ridges and knobs, little plateaus she'd never known were there. The buzz cut didn't make her ugly, but it helped. The men steered wider arcs. This close to Key West, they assumed she was butch. Though that didn't stop all of them. She did her hair twice a week. Kept it to a pinch, that was it, a fine blur of yellow.
    For three years she'd been doing the Sugarloaf shuffle, the same strict ceremony every day. Irma Slater becoming solid inside her. A woman of simple tastes. In the cockpit by six, broiled yellowtail two hours out of the water. A plate of conch fritters on the side, two beers. For the next couple of hours, she'd watch the sun tick lower until it flattened against the Gulf, then watch its golden fire leak away into water and clouds, watch the pelicans darken to silhouettes. Then the moon would rise and some nights it coated the black water with silver as if a giant parachute of lace had drifted to earth. Irma briefly considering watercolors, acrylics, oils. But decided no. A greater challenge to continue with ink. The white page. Make that silver lace visible through the magic of omission.
    While she dawdled over the second beer, she hummed along to the ten-year-old country tunes playing on the jukebox. At eight or nine, warmed by the Heinekens, the fritters, the yellowtail, she'd pace the quiet hundred yards along the seawall to her motel room. Take a quick shower, crawl naked inside the sheets, flip on the light, and forge on through the next chapter of the biography of the week. Whatever the librarian was pushing. Submerge herself in Truman's life, Monroe's, for an hour or two, fill herself up with someone else's tragedies, conquests, their inevitable last days. Fall asleep listening to the clicks and baby babble, the sweet gasps of Sweetcakes ten feet beyond her open window.
    In these last three years, three barefoot, liberated years, the euphoria had flattened out, become a steady, reliable hum of pleasure. A Zen calm. Watching the next moment, the next after that. No expectations, no aspirations. Breathing and eating, sleeping and fucking, working and reading and drawing, satisfying Irma Slater's spartan needs. Building her nest egg. Her crisis fund. And in those three years she'd filtered out most of the residue. Not cured, not by a long shot. But a start, a damn good running start on some kind of deliverance after all. Self-pity in remission. Penniless and anonymous. What more could she want?
    That Friday night she was down to the last sips of her second Heineken, a small crowd accumulating along the railing beside the canal. Motel guests, snared by Jesse's gaudy neon sign. A couple of Japanese girls taking flash snapshots of the pelican sleeping on the tallest piling. At the picnic table a family of blond giants from Minnesota ate fish sandwiches and sipped Cokes. She watched a flats boat skim off the dark bay, come surfing in on its following wake. The jukebox throbbed with Hank Williams, the moon a smiling sliver in the east.
    She was lifting the last conch fritter to her mouth when a man filled the waitress's station to her right. Jesse gave her a look, see if she wanted help. She grimaced that she didn't as she munched the fritter. Since coming to Sugarloaf, she'd made it a part of her training to learn how to handle the bozos, defuse the lust that she still sometimes inspired. Her figure decoded inside the shapeless shirt.
    "I'm waiting for my boyfriend," she said, eyes on her beer. "He's Italian and the last guy he caught putting the moves on me is in the trunk of a '55 De Soto in a Dade County canal."
    The man didn't move. He was tall, she could sense that. Standing quietly, making no attempt.
    She drank down the last of the beer.
    "Abracadabra," the man said quietly. "Abracadabra."
    She kept her eyes down.
    "It's a beautiful word, don't you think? So full of magic."
    She turned her head, took a glimpse of this one.
    Tall with blond hair down