The Long Fall

by Lynn Kostoff

  When Jimmy gets to the country club, he’s relieved to see Evelyn’s reserved a table in the smoking section. His server’s name is Peter, the guy coming down hard on the first syllable and letting up on the gas for the second. Jimmy tells Pete he wants a cold one and then torches a Marlboro.

  The table’s next to a window. Below Jimmy is a bunch of flowerbeds, then two small ponds ringed by palms and boxwoods, and in the distance, a cluster of golfers teeing up.

  Eighteen hours since the Tempe job and he hasn’t been arrested yet.

  None of it makes any sense.

  Even though Evelyn had made him at the scene, she had handed over the money in the register and the safe, but then told him if he tried to leave town, she’d call the police and turn him in.

  Jimmy sips at his beer. Evelyn shows up a half hour late.

  He watches her cross the room, pausing to say hello to some of the moms, waving and smiling at a couple of tables of suits, the ghost of her years as a flight attendant in the way she carries herself. Her hair’s just brushing her shoulders. It’s the color of a slice of wheat bread. She’s wearing a red sundress covered in clusters of tiny yellow flowers. Jimmy reflexively checks out the cleavage, and he’s thrown off a little because the breasts aren’t as big as he remembers. Not that Evelyn’s lacking in the chest department—a view’s a view—but Jimmy can’t help feeling like he did when, as a kid, he first saw Mount Rushmore, the real thing just not matching up with the idea he’d been carrying around in his head.

  Evelyn sits down across from him and pushes her sunglasses high on her forehead. Pete, the server, nods, and without her having to order, delivers a large martini.

  Jimmy lights a cigarette. Evelyn waits, head tilted, until he offers her one.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” he says, sliding the pack over.

  “Family secret,” she says and waits again until Jimmy lights it for her.

  “I can’t imagine Richard there, him lighting one up for you.”

  “Richard doesn’t know everything about me,” Evelyn says, “and neither do you.”

  “Hey, you’re a complicated person,” Jimmy says. “We’ve established that.”

  “You don’t like me very much, do you, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy takes a sip of beer.

  “You think you have me all figured out. I’m the second half of a boxed set in your eyes.” Evelyn raises her hand, and Pete’s right there with another martini.

  “What do you want me to say? You married the guy, stayed with him, what, going on eighteen years? Your choice. I didn’t have one. That’s the thing about brothers. You’re stuck with what you get.”

  Evelyn studies him over the rim of her drink. There’s a light flush building at the base of her throat and slowly spreading upward. She takes another of Jimmy’s cigarettes and lights it herself this time.

  “Anyway,” Jimmy says, “what does how I see you have anything to do with why we’re here?”

  “It does, Jimmy. It has a lot to do with it.”

  Jimmy leans back in his chair and looks at the ceiling. “Am I missing something here?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time, that’s for sure.” Evelyn’s pointing at him with the cigarette when he lowers his head.

  “Okay. Tell me this. How’d you make me for the robbery?”

  She explains about the T-shirt, the split seam, and the tuft of shoulder hair.

  Jimmy starts laughing, despite himself. “I got to give it to you, Evelyn. That was good, you noticing that. You were supposed to be looking at the gun.”

  “Afraid for my life,” Evelyn says.

  “That’s the general idea, yes.”

  Pete comes up for their lunch order, Evelyn going with a Greek salad and another martini, Jimmy a burger, heavy on the mustard and mayo, some house fries, and another cold one.

  After ordering, there’s an awkward silence, Jimmy figuring since he’s about to eat lunch at the Scottsdale Country Club that Evelyn hasn’t told Richard what she knows about the robberies, but Jimmy not sure how to maneuver to keep it that way. The Evelyn sitting across from him is not the one he’s used to dealing with.

  She’s turned quarter-profile from him when she suddenly asks, “Would you give me the money back if I asked for it?”

  “Fact of the matter, I’d rather keep it. But I guess if you were going to turn me over to the cops if I didn’t, then, yeah, I guess I’d give you back my share.”

  “Your share? Not the whole thing?”

  “You made me, Evelyn, not my partner. He did what he was supposed to, so I gave him his share.”

  “What would you do if I said you had to give him up to keep from going to jail?”

  “Like I said, Evelyn, this is between me and you, not him.”

  “Would he do the same for you?”

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy says. “Probably not. For one, he’s got a family. Another thing is he’s afraid of prison.” Jimmy pauses to light a cigarette. “So you want the money back, that’s it?”

  She shakes her head no. “I don’t care about the money.”

  “Then what was the point, all the questions?”

  “I’m trying to get a better sense of who you are, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy slowly shakes his head from side to side. “Hey, unlike you, Evelyn, I’m not very complicated. I’m just a regular guy.”

  “No,” Evelyn says, flushing. “What you are is full of shit. You’re patronizing me, Jimmy.”

  Pete brings up a little two-tiered tray with lunch.

  Evelyn’s ordered another martini before he’s done setting out the food. Pete glances over at Jimmy. “You the designated?”

  Jimmy tells Pete he’s the designated waiter and not to worry about it. Evelyn’s turned back to the window again, and the noon light’s not going easy on her. She looks like she hasn’t slept in a while. She’s lost the poise and the carefully constructed beauty Jimmy’s always associated with her. The seams are showing today.

  After Pete leaves, Evelyn pushes her salad aside and asks, “Why’d you rob Frontier Cleaners in the first place? Why not something else?”

  Jimmy ticks the side of his beer glass. “Richard took something that belonged to me. I wanted him to know what it felt like.”

  “You mean your grandfather’s place?” Evelyn pauses, furrowing her brow. “According to Richard, he saved it.”

  “Well ‘according to Richard’ is not the same as ‘according to Jimmy.’ We’re talking different species of the truth here. My grandfather intended for that land to be mine. My dad knew that. Richard knew that, too.”

  “He took your dad’s death hard,” Evelyn says. “It changed him in ways I’m not sure he’s even aware of.”

  Jimmy shakes his head. “No way it changed him. It just made him more of what he already was.”

  “That’s harsh, Jimmy. Unfair, too.”

  Jimmy slowly lets out his breath. “Look, Evelyn, to get back to the point here, I don’t want to end up in prison again.”

  She takes a large swallow of her drink. “I don’t blame you.”

  “And I don’t want to die either,” Jimmy says, “which is what Ray Harp’s got lined up for me unless I get him his cash.”

  “I told you already.” Evelyn waves her fingers. “You can have it.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Jimmy says. “What you haven’t told me is what you want in return.”

  There’s no focus to Evelyn’s smile. It’s floating, separate from her features like the lipstick smudges on the rim of her glass.

  The smile goes on too long. The same deal with the eyes, the blue unwavering gaze she’s training on him.

  “What I want,” she says, “is to commit a crime.”

  “Get real,” Jimmy says, looking around.

  “I am,” she says. “That’s what I want. A crime. I want to commit a crime, and I want to get away with it, and I want you to help me do it.”

  “Come on,” Jimmy says. “You? That doesn’t mak
e any sense.”

  Evelyn aims the smile at him again.

  THIRTEEN

  Only one thing, Jimmy had told her. I set something up, no guns. No way, guns.

  Evelyn had gone along with that, but still wanted to learn to shoot.

  Which is why she’s riding in Jimmy’s pickup this afternoon. The windows are open, filling the cab with a hot rush of air. Evelyn’s got her feet propped against the dash. She’s humming a tune the radio might have played if it worked.

  Jimmy’s routing them through a series of back roads toward Dobbins. They pass a stretch of homes that tried out for the middle class but got cut from the team, and then after the land opens a little, they pass small horse farms and wide, flat soybean and cotton fields. Every now and then, he’ll catch a thin glint of light from the surface of the city’s canal system. When the wind shifts, there’s the smell of the stockyards to the west, a rich heavy smell like stale chocolate floating in warm spoiled milk.

  Ahead, South Mountain National Park enfolds the southern boundary of Phoenix. From this distance, the mountains resemble an immense open accordion lying on its back.

  “Loosen up, Jimmy. You’re acting like a little boy who’s been forced to invite a girl to his birthday party.”

  Jimmy keeps his eyes on the road. “This Bonnie and Clyde thing you cooked up, you sure you want to go through with it?”

  “We made an agreement, Jimmy. Nothing’s changed.”

  Jimmy starts tapping the top of the steering wheel. “Why are you doing this? I still don’t get it.”

  Evelyn reaches back and lifts her hair from the back of her neck, holding it up one-handed. “Don’t worry about my reasons. Just hold up your end.” She waits a moment, then looks over at Jimmy and says, “Speaking of which.”

  “I’m setting something up, okay? I’ll fill you in, all the details, when you’re done shooting.”

  “Sounds good.” Evelyn lets her hair fall back down over her shoulders.

  Jimmy turns right on Dobbins, heading west. The farmhouse is a stucco rectangle setting atop a flattened crest, a long gravel drive curving along its eastern boundary.

  He stops in front of a shiny new aluminum gate that Richard had put up. He gets out and picks the lock, then hops back into the truck, moving up the drive, the gravel jumping under the tires and popcorning the truck’s undercarriage.

  “When I was a kid,” Jimmy says, pointing out the window, “my grandfather told me there was buried treasure on the place. Supposed to belong to a gang of outlaws who came to a bad end. Untold wealth, that’s what he said. The son of a bitch even went so far, drew out a map on some ratty paper, and then passed it off to me as something his grandfather had taken from a dead man’s pockets. Hell, I was eight years old. I believed him. Every chance I got, I was out here with a shovel. Gramps, there, sitting on the back porch in a lawn chair, big tumblerful of bourbon, egging me on.”

  “What about Richard?” Evelyn asks. “Did he help you look?”

  “Nah,” Jimmy says. “Richard, he had a paper route. Two of them actually. Even then he was branching out.”

  Jimmy parks the truck on the gravel apron next to the house and gets out. The whole place has gone feral. He can barely match memory to fact.

  The dark brown stucco walls of the house have been weatherworn to a dirty tan. The roof on the back porch has partially collapsed. There’s a papery gray hornet’s nest, squat and bulbous as a basketball, hanging from the eaves above the kitchen window. The front lawn, or what once passed for it, is four acres of tangle and choke.

  Until Richard put up the gate, for over two decades the locals had been using the back seventeen acres as a dumping ground. Scattered among the evenly spaced rows of the orchard Jimmy remembers—now nothing more than a bunch of brittle sticks holding sickly golf-ball-sized oranges and lemons—are televisions and refrigerators and stoves and sofas and bedsprings and mattresses, piles of bald tires, an installment plan graveyard, even a rust-eaten carcass of an old Chevy Nova, sunk onto its shocks, its windows and engine missing.

  It’s not the memories or the present state of things that matters though. What matters is the dirt under his feet and who holds the deed to it. Twenty undeveloped acres in a city ringed by mountains and very little space to grow. What matters is the raw potential, the cash cow that his brother had taken from him.

  Jimmy watches Evelyn climb out of the truck.

  He then walks into the ghost of the orchard and sets up targets—old paint cans, glass bottles, beer cans—on the spindly limbs and outcroppings of rocks. He walks back to the truck and takes out a canvas bag holding a Colt Diamondback .38 and enough ammunition to wipe out Utah. He loads the Diamondback and hands it to Evelyn.

  “Pull the trigger,” he says, “and you’re in business.”

  Jimmy drags the cooler from the bed of the truck and cracks a beer. Evelyn’s positioned herself about ten yards from the targets. Jimmy sits down on the lid of the cooler. He’s got an unencumbered view of the skyline of Phoenix, no thermal inversions, the day clear enough that he can see past Squaw Peak to the mountains on the city’s far northern rim. In the middle distance is Sky Harbor International, and he watches three jets circle and make their approach, wings blinking in the sun as they bank.

  Evelyn’s watched too much television. She’s got herself set up in an elaborate shooter’s stance that might make for high drama on a cop show but won’t do her any good out here. She misses everything she fires at and walks over to the cooler.

  She’s wearing a pair of faded denim shorts, a crisp white T-shirt, and a pair of espadrilles. No makeup or sunglasses. She’s pale-skinned, the shade you find on the inside of an orange peel.

  Jimmy gives her a beer and shows her how to reload the Colt. He’s not in the mood to do much more than that right now. She takes a box of bullets and goes back to her original position and starts blasting away.

  This whole crime thing, Jimmy has no intention of disappointing Evelyn and landing himself back in prison, not now when he can use the green from his share of the dry-cleaning holdups to get himself clear with Ray Harp.

  Jimmy also has no intention of ending up in prison again from committing a crime with an amateur for a partner.

  He’s set something up that’s safe and sweet.

  Yesterday, Pete Samoa had intro’ed Jimmy to a guy named Vic Stamp, who owns a large volume-discount shoe store. Vic has a little problem with some of his stock, in particular, a line of athletic shoes he can’t move, the shoes neon green on purple with thick yellow soles and flashing red lights embedded on the sides of the heels. That they’re ugly is bad enough, but the death kiss on sales is the dye they used on them, which has the unfortunate tendency to run every time the shoes get wet.

  The manufacturer, after stalling on returns, has gone Chapter Eleven, so Vic Stamp’s stuck with five hundred pairs of Force One footwear. He needs someone to come in and rip off the overstock so he can collect on the insurance.

  The job’s a straight grand, plus whatever Jimmy can lay off the shoes for. Pete Samoa’s offered to pick up the lot for seventy-five cents a pair, which Pete will then turn around and fence through a deal he’s cut with one of the government agents on the reservations.

  Everybody’s happy. Evelyn gets her crime. Vic collects on the insurance. Pete turns a tidy profit. Jimmy pockets his share of the thousand and can pay the balance on what he owes Ray Harp. And until the first rainstorm, five hundred Native American kids will have some snazzy new sneakers.

  Evelyn will never have to know about the insurance angle. Jimmy can pass the job off as a straight burglary, giving it a little glamour and danger to sweeten it up for her. Vic Stamp wants them to hit the store tomorrow night when they’re doing after-hours inventory. He’s arranged it so the manager will go on break around ten and forget to set the alarm. Jimmy and Evelyn will have a little less than thirty minutes to get in and out.

  Jimmy lifts his head at the sound of glass breaking. Evelyn’s finall
y zapped a target. She walks over and Jimmy gives her a beer, takes another for himself. Evelyn’s face is flushed from the heat, and there’s a dark wedge of sweat running from the neckline of her T-shirt to the middle of her chest.

  “Shooting’s harder than I thought it would be,” she says, tilting back the can.

  “That’s your problem,” Jimmy says. “Thinking about it. You shouldn’t do that. You need to think with your body.”

  “How are you supposed to do that?”

  “You jumped rope when you were a girl, right? You start thinking about jumping rope, you can’t do it. You’ll trip yourself up. Same thing with shooting a gun.”

  Evelyn finishes the beer and drops the can on the ground. “Show me,” she says.

  Jimmy reloads the Diamondback and walks over to where Evelyn had stood earlier. He points out three bottles he’d set among the limbs of a dying lemon tree and two cans resting on top of a ledge of rock. He takes a deep breath and slowly lets it out, then raises his arm and gets off five quick shots, hitting everything but one of the cans.

  “I thought you didn’t like guns,” Evelyn says.

  “I don’t. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to use them.” He hands Evelyn the Colt. She steps up and points out two cans.

  “Those,” she says.