Free Silencer by James W. Hall

worked up the nerve.
    But everything was so helter-skelter, with so much ridicule, jeering, whistling, and hooting, Thorn believed it might be better if he saved the proposal till later, when he and Rusty were alone. More romantic. And just in case she said no. Given Thorn’s history, all the disasters and upheavals he’d attracted, a woman with any sense would turn him down. And Rusty had a lot of sense. So he decided to wait. Sober up, do it in the bedroom with the lights low. If she refused, she refused. They could work out some other kind of arrangement. It didn’t have to be marriage. Nothing magical about a legal document. Thorn didn’t have a single legal document to his name as it was. Another good reason to wait and do it later.
    After his speech he danced with Rusty. They danced slow, and they danced fast, then slow some more and even slower. Sweat soaked through his blue-and-yellow shirt with the oversized hibiscus flowers on it, his one and only party shirt. Sugarman broke in to take his turn, not with Rusty, but with his pal Thorn. Thorn went with it, the two of them putting on a giddy show, spinning and dipping. Sugar and hepranced around for about half a minute before someone shoved Thorn from behind and sent him splashing into the lagoon. He swam around out there and took more shit from his friends and their friends and a lot of complete strangers who’d shown up for the free beer.
    He guessed it was a good party. He hadn’t thrown a lot of parties over the years, and this was by far the loudest, the biggest. As the night wore on, more people were pushed into the lagoon, including Rusty.
    All those wet dresses and blouses and T-shirts clinging to those pretty breasts and rounded hips changed the atmosphere. A few couples slinked away into the shadows and came back later, smiling and holding tight to each other. Someone cranked up the music, which seemed to drive the mosquitoes back into the mangroves. A couple of Monroe County sheriff deputies showed up, not to shut down the party, because Thorn’s nearest neighbor lived a long way off, and that neighbor, a retired math professor, was at the party enjoying himself with a couple of younger ladies, but the deputies were off duty and had heard about the party and wanted to visit with Sugarman, their old buddy. And they wanted free beer.
    So it went on like that. Good music, a lot of old favorites, country and classic rock. That reggae tune Thorn liked, “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?” Some Mary Chapin Carpenter, Dixie Chicks, a few ancient Beatles, Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Marley. Some more country, Lucinda Williams, that daughter of a poet and a poet herself. A few cuts of Crosby, Stills, and Nash and a little ZZ Top. Around midnight a Jimmy Buffett number came on, a song from back in the day when the guy still had that gritty edge, before he got so slick he became the John Denver of the Keys. For three minutes everyone became parrotheads and sang along to that one.
    Now Thorn was ready for all of them to go home. It was nearly three in the morning and he believed he’d celebrated just exactly the right amount.
    He liked his friends and he liked the strangers and he liked all thenoise and commotion, but now he was ready for it to end, but the party wasn’t thinning out and had the look of one that winds up with everyone sitting on the edge of the lagoon, or swimming in it and watching the sun come up over the Atlantic. A party where you had to wake people up who’d passed out in the grass and the beach chairs and on the living room couch, wake them up tomorrow at noon and hand them aspirin and a glass of water and send them on their way. Probably better than forcing them out on the overseas highway drunk in the middle of the night. Probably better than that.
    Thorn dumped the remaining bags of ice into the washtub and opened another Red Stripe, definitely the last he was going to