Blind Fall

by Christopher Rice

  Alex shoved Mike’s back against the seawall, sank to his knees, and swallowed Mike whole. For a while, there were just the sounds of the surf, the wind, and Mike’s strangled groans as Alex built up enough momentum to do him serious injury. Convinced he had subdued the guy, Alex got to his feet, grabbed Mike by one shoulder, and tried to push him to his knees. When Mike’s entire body went rigid underneath his grip, Alex only pushed harder. “No,” came Mike’s firm, suddenly sober response.

  “What?”

  “I don’t do that,” Mike mumbled. “I’m not like that.”

  Alex snorted and didn’t let up on Mike’s right shoulder. Mike responded by batting Alex’s arm away with one powerful forearm. A badly aimed blow, but strong enough to send Alex skittering backward across the sand, where he landed ass-first in the surf line, his upper half suddenly inside the glow of light from the streetlights overhead. “You’re not like what? Like me? You’re not one of me? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Mike didn’t respond. Alex’s anger was replaced by fear as he remembered that the guy who had just knocked him off his feet was trained to kill with his bare hands. Suddenly Alex wondered if this was what happened to that poor raver kid who had his jaw broken, if gay-bashings often had more acts to them than newspaper reports would have you believe. Mike took a step forward, his face in darkness. Alex shot to his feet and took off up the stairs. When Mike didn’t call out to him, Alex assumed he was being chased, so he jumped into his car, locked the doors, started the car, and slammed his foot on the accelerator.

  He was about to make a right turn off Coast Drive when he saw in the rearview mirror that Mike hadn’t pursued him. Instead, he was standing atop the rock shelf that marked one end of the beach Alex had just fled. When the car’s brake lights illuminated, Mike lowered his arms, turned to face the sea, sprinted for the far end of the rock shelf, and dove over the side and into the whitecaps below.

  Alex pulled over, locked the car, and broke into a dead run, down the winding coastal road, past the entrance to the condo high-rise, jumping the white clapboard fence, and skittering out onto the now empty shelf of rock from which Mike had just taken a flying leap. He reached the end and was greeted by the sight of rolling whitecaps. He had just pulled his cell phone out to call the police when two strong, soaking-wet arms shot up under his armpits and clamped down on his shoulders with enough force to turn his ankles to jelly.

  “What’s your worst fear?”

  “You are!” Alex said.

  Alex fought images of a Hollywood-size shark rising from the water to catch him in its jaws. “Funny,” Mike said. “Mine used to be drowning.”

  Mike threw his entire weight against Alex. They fell as one—Mike’s body going straight and rigid, forcing Alex’s to do the same—and hit the water like a splintered jackknife. The current pulled sharply on them, from one direction, then another, and the surrounding blackness was so total Alex might have mistaken it for death had it not been for the muffled roar of whitecaps overhead. They broke the surface just as they were drawn into the first swell of a fresh wave. Alex heard his own gasps, saw that the rock shelf they had jumped off was several yards off to the right. They were on a diagonal path toward the beach, and Mike was keeping them on it by kicking into the current.

  When Alex tried to breathe, fire erupted in his chest. He started to spasm with deep coughs, releasing water he hadn’t known had forced its way into his lungs. Mike had curved one arm around his chest now, lifeguard-style, as another wave drove them toward the beach. When they finally scraped sand, Alex felt total exhaustion overtake him as he tried to lift himself onto all fours. He almost fell face-first into the sand before Mike curved an arm around him again to keep him supported. His hacking coughs had the ragged edges of sobs, and as they grew more intense, he was distracted by the feel of Mike’s hand kneading the back of his neck.

  Alex sank forward and rolled onto his back, found himself staring up at Mike’s shadowed face, unsure whether it was this brief frenzy of violence that had posed them like lovers or whether Mike had deliberately positioned them that way. “Easy,” Mike cooed, his voice as gentle as a mother’s. “You were in perfect hands the entire time. I’ve been drownproofed. I’ll take you to Las Pulgas sometime and show you a real jump. They’ve got a diving platform that’s thirty feet up.” He grabbed the back of Alex’s neck and brought their noses together, clenched his teeth, and in a low growl said, “That’s where you find the parts of you that are soft and make them hard, son. Because Recon Marines get hard by doing hard things.”

  “Why don’t you just learn how to suck dick instead?”

  The terseness and crudeness of this statement seemed to resonate with Mike as nothing else Alex had said to him quite had, and a rich laughter erupted from deep within his chest. Alex saw a light come into his eyes that had been all but extinguished earlier that night by bourbon and self-loathing.

  Once he caught his breath, Mike said, “I’m sorry I made you fall.”

  “Into the ocean?”

  “Before that. When I knocked you down.”

  “Oh. I see…. So you hurling me into the ocean afterward was, like, completely okay with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why’s that, Recon?”

  “Because I went with you.”

  Then, somewhere overhead, a police siren hiccuped. Mike sat back on his haunches like a frightened dog; then he pulled Alex to his feet and ran them toward the shelter of a narrow cave that cut under the rock shelf. No doubt someone in the high-rise nearby had heard Alex’s wail and called for help. Inside the cave, Mike pressed Alex against the wall with one arm. They could now see a police cruiser parked next to the white clapboard fence ten feet above the beach. The lights on the cruiser were flaring, but the siren had gone silent. The cop was probably just putting on a show for whoever had made the call. Silently, they watched the police officer’s flashlight probe the spot where they had washed up, then travel out over the water. When the silence between them became oppressive, Mike looked back over his shoulder at Alex and said, “Sorry, dude.”

  Alex sank into a seated position, hands pressed to his mouth. Mike fell to his knees next to him, clearly terrified by this sudden transformation. The fact that Mr. Force Recon Marine couldn’t tell that Alex was laughing only made Alex laugh harder. Because after meeting him piss drunk, decking a stranger, almost getting him fired, throwing up his guts, shoving him on his ass, and then almost drowning him, Mike had simply apologized to Alex as if he had done no more than step on his toe. Once Mike realized it was laughter shaking Alex’s soaked body, he had to fight it himself, which he did by pulling Alex against his chest until the cop’s flashlight disappeared and the cruiser pulled off silently into the misty night.

  Once they were alone, Mike withdrew. Alex brushed past him, stepped out of the cave and onto the sand below. “Where are you going?” Mike asked.

  “Home,” he said. “I didn’t take you there because you said you didn’t want to go to a gay place. I live in a gay neighborhood.” Even though it was too dark for him to see Mike’s face, Alex turned to face him so his last words wouldn’t be carried away on the wind.

  “You can come with me if you want. But you have to be one of me. That’s the deal. I’ve played the other game, and nobody wins.”

  Alex started across the sand toward the steps. He waited until he had reached the sidewalk above before he looked back. When he did, he saw that Mike was behind him, carefully taking each step with a greater degree of consideration than he had done with anything else that night.

  John waited what he thought was an appropriate amount of time after Alex fell silent. Then he said, “So I guess I passed your test?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I didn’t throw up or pass out, so I passed your test, right?”

  “That’s funny. I tell you a story about Mike and you think it’s about you.”

  “Why bother telling me at all then?” John asked him. He told h
imself to shut his mouth. Between the sight of the asses on parade in the gay bar and the idea of Bowers getting blown by a dude, John could feel himself reaching a boiling point. All things considered, he thought he was being pretty goddamn accepting, but he was pretty sure the guy he felt shackled to wasn’t about to give him a lick of credit, and it pissed him off.

  “I do think it was about me,” John said. “I think you were testing me. Seeing how much I could handle.”

  “Maybe,” Alex said. “How much can you handle, John?”

  “What you and Mike did on that beach isn’t any of my business. And it doesn’t have any bearing on what I’m doing here. Mike was murdered. We know who did it. We have to decide what to do about it.” You have to screw your goddamn head on straight and go to the cops, he wanted to say. But instead he said, “That’s our mission.”

  “I’ve got the feeling everything you do becomes a mission, John. Going to the drugstore. Opening a beer bottle. Yours is a world of missions.”

  “Yeah, well, right now that’s serving you pretty well.”

  “Right now I am in a truck heading I don’t know where, because you feel indebted to Mike. Not to me. To Mike. Now, if your plans include impressing me with your fortitude and your fidelity to Marine Corps values, then I am eager to see what you have in store for me because we are not there yet, John. I’m sorry if this doesn’t sit well with you, but you’re still the man who almost cracked my skull open the other night. You’re still the reason Mike’s body is…” His voice caught, which struck John because he had sounded determined up until that moment. “If his parents get their hands on his body before I do, I will never get a chance to say good-bye. Do you understand me?”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “I hope not,” Alex whispered.

  “It’s not going to happen, Alex.”

  He could feel Alex studying him, so he kept his eyes on the freeway. “He thought about telling you,” Alex said.

  “You told me,” John said stiffly, because he didn’t want to hear that again.

  “But he was afraid to. Some Marines knew, John. Not you. He thought you wouldn’t take it well.” When Alex fell silent, John was confident he was being baited and kept his mouth shut. Alex continued, “To be honest, he thought something had happened to you. Something you didn’t want to talk about.” Another silence, and then, “He thought maybe you had been mol—”

  When Alex jumped against his seat belt, John realized he had slammed the top of the steering wheel with one fist. “You want to know what I thought of your fucking story? I thought it was weird, all right? Not because it was about two guys slipping it to each other. You all can do whatever the fuck you want—I don’t care. What was weird about it, what got to me, is that you told the story like it was something to be proud of, even though it was such a struggle for him. Now, I don’t know what’s politically correct or homophobic or whatever, but what I do know is that I don’t have to down a bottle of the date-rape drug every time I go to bed with a woman!”

  “And what do you think that means, John?”

  “It means he was confused. It means he was different. Look, you may think I don’t know anything about this kind of stuff, but I do, all right. I’ve got Marine buddies who have taken money to jerk off and screw around with guys they found on websites. They do it because they’re hard up and guys like you are really fucking eager to pay for it. So when they can’t find work they get what they need. No harm, no foul. I don’t judge it. But that’s all it is.”

  “You think Mike was after my money?”

  “I think Mike was confused. I think he was different. I think he was exceptional, and I think that put him in a class by himself, okay? And I think it was lonely for him. And being with you—maybe it was easier than being with a woman. Maybe you asked less of him than a woman would. Maybe that’s how grateful you were to have a hot Marine in your bed.”

  “Go fuck your sister, white trash,” Alex said quietly. John flinched and forced himself to maintain his two-handed grip on the steering wheel. Apparently pleased by John’s reaction, Alex said, “That’s how it feels. Even when you take out the curse words and replace them with psychobabble.”

  “So it was a real marriage, then?”

  “You are the one who is confused, John Houck. The reason Mike started using GHB is because he had a problem being naked in front of me after his right eye got blasted out of his skull and his legs got carved to pieces. And that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with you.”

  “Oh, yeah? Am I the reason he almost knocked you out cold when you tried to blow him that night? Did that have anything to do with me? He didn’t even know me then.”

  “He knew men like you. The world is full of men like you. And I’m sick of it. And news flash, John, Mike was sick of it, too. That’s why he was in Owensville with me, throwing your postcards in a drawer.”

  “Bullshit. I’m not your mother.”

  “What the hell do you know about my mother?”

  “Only what you just told me, which sounded like a lot of self-serving crap. A lot of stuff made out to make you sound like a big victim.”

  Alex barked with laughter and stared out the window as they passed over a lagoon that fed into the Pacific on the southern end of Carlsbad. The next town would be Oceanside, and then the long, dark expanse of Camp Pendleton. John realized he had sent Alex into a stall by bringing his mother into it, and he knew he should savor this small victory and leave it alone. But what kept the fires of anger burning was the contempt that had been in Alex’s voice as he had accused John of being the one who was full of prejudice.

  “Philip says you have a thing for Marines,” John said. “It’s like a…what’s the word? A fetish with you.”

  “Philip thinks nine-eleven was an insurance scam,” Alex said, sounding winded. “And you’re really not my type, so don’t worry.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “Maybe Mike was just a thing to you. Like some kind of porno fantasy.”

  “And that would mean…what?”

  “It would mean he wasn’t—” John stopped dead in his tracks as he realized what he was about to say and what it truly would mean if he said it. His first thought was that he had walked into a trap Alex had set for him with his little tirade about men like John being the reason Mike couldn’t be 100 percent cool with being a fruit.

  “Say it, John,” Alex said. When John didn’t comply, Alex did the job for him. “That would mean he wasn’t like me, right?” John didn’t answer. “Well, John, even if you and I can’t see eye-to-eye, you and Ray Duncan certainly can.”

  Alex flinched as if he could detect John’s urge to clock him in the jaw, an urge that John fought by clenching the steering wheel with both hands. When John returned his attention to the freeway, he heard Alex let out a long, controlled breath. Another few minutes of this awful silence and Alex undid his seat belt and crawled over the armrest into the backseat. In the rearview mirror, John watched Alex curl into the best fetal position he could manage—maybe he was doing it to avoid more of a fight, or maybe he wanted John to feel like a chauffeur.

  “Good night, John,” Alex finally said in a soft voice that had no trace of his earlier words.

  The best response John could manage was to give the guy a thumbs-up, just like the one Mike had given him as he was wheeled across the tarmac toward the C-17 transport plane that had carried him out of John’s life forever.

  8

  Interstate 10 carried them east into Banning Pass, a dramatic gap between soaring mountains, where the flashing lights atop swarms of windmill generators looked like the running lights for a hundred crisscrossing runways. Weak sunlight almost the color of an eggshell began to swell on the eastern horizon as John crossed the border from arid coastal basin into desert.

  Mount San Jacinto thrust itself into the sky on the southern side of the freeway. John had seen the mountain throug
h several changes of seasons, remembered a wildfire one summer night that had turned its flanks into an orange honeycomb. Now he wondered if he’d ever be able to look at it again without seeing the photograph of Bowers and Alex riding one of the tramcars that took tourists up to its eight-thousand-foot summit. As soon as they passed San Jacinto, the necklace of communities that hugged the base of the Santa Rosa Mountains came into view, still twinkling in the lingering night. Their names—Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, Indian Wells—evoked various paradises and mocked the world that lay north of Interstate 10, the high desert where John had spent the last of his teenage years.

  Highway 62. Someone had told him it was the most dangerous highway in California, all those drunk Marines speeding back to Camp Wilson in Twentynine Palms at the end of their weekend leave, burning up the last of their gas money. Indeed, before Operation Iraqi Freedom, the only funerals John had attended, aside from the one for his parents, had been for fellow Marines killed in drunk-driving accidents. But 62 was also the avenue of his adolescence. It had always amused him that the directions for traveling from one half of his youth to the other were so simple: head west on I-10. Forty-eight hours later, take a left onto Highway 62 and stop when you hit Yucca Valley, the only godforsaken town in all the high desert that can boast a Kmart. Say good-bye to Spanish-moss-draped oak trees and to people who take their time saying things so they can be sure you get the message. Say hello to tiny heat-blasted trailers with monstrous Joshua trees in their front yards and to crazy tweakers who are convinced the powers that be will be undone by a revolution that begins smack dab in the middle of nowhere.

  It was five-thirty in the morning by the time they reached Yucca Valley, late enough to wake his big sister during a time of need. In his absence, the town had acquired a Starbucks and a Walgreens and terraces of newly constructed homes on the hills north of 62, many of them modeled after New Mexico desert dwellings that looked like they would suit the Flintstones. He parked on a residential block just east of the highway. Alex woke as soon as John shook him. He told him to stay put, that he’d be back in a few minutes, but that he needed to wake up and stay alert until he got back. Alex nodded; then, as if he had just remembered the blowout a few hours earlier, he sat up with his head bowed, avoiding John’s stare.