The Long Fall

by Lynn Kostoff

  “Manners,” Ray says. “Remember your manners.” He counts out the money and then slips it in the right-hand inside pocket of his blue suit, looks around the room once more, and then walks out.

  Newt Deems hangs back for a moment, his thick features glacially moving into a frown. “I don’t get it. The whole time you had the money. Why’d you make me cut you?”

  “I’ll tell you why,” Aaron Limbe says. “Same reason a bird will fly into a window. There are some people who are just too goddamn stupid to tell the difference between glass and air. They never see what’s coming. They’re defective.”

  After they leave, Jimmy starts to open a beer and then remembers the envelope with Evelyn’s panties. He’d left it back at the Laundromat on the seat of the first chair fronting the window just inside the door.

  Jimmy humps it the two long blocks in his Force Ones. The sidewalk’s on broil, and the shoes are as unforgiving as pieces of cardboard.

  The envelope’s gone.

  Jimmy can’t find it anywhere. He goes through the mat twice.

  The woman is back. She’s sitting along the east wall near the dryers. Jimmy asks her if she’s seen the envelope, adding some fish-story visual aids, pantomiming its width and length.

  The woman flat-lines him. No response at all. Won’t even look at him.

  Jimmy tries again, tells her it’s important.

  Same deal. On one level, Jimmy’s relieved because the woman’s expression shows no sign at all of any impulse toward a Good Samaritan number. Odds are if the woman or anyone else in the neighborhood found the envelope, they’d check it for cash and then toss it, not dutifully walk it to the corner and drop it in the mailbox.

  Jimmy circles the mat, once more, for a last check.

  “About twenty-five minutes ago,” the woman says. Her voice reminds Jimmy of someone snapping kindling. Jimmy doesn’t turn around. He waits until the woman goes on to say that’s when someone came through and picked up the trash.

  “It’s in a dumpster out back,” she adds. “Help yourself.”

  Jimmy’s not sure if she’s referring to the manila envelope in particular or the trash in general, but when he walks back behind the mat and sees the fly action around the overflowing dumpster, he decides it’s a moot point. No way he’s rooting around in that buzz.

  Back at the Mesa View Inn, he grabs two beers, setting one on the bathroom sink and taking the other into the shower with him. He stays until the hot water runs out, then dries off and goes to work on his ear, dousing the cut with peroxide and wrapping the outer edge of the lobe with Band-Aids. He palms four aspirin and washes them down with the second beer.

  Tired as he is, his mood’s jump-started when it finally sinks in he’s clear of Ray Harp. No more looking over his shoulder. No more interest-choked deadlines. He’s clear.

  Jimmy figures it’s time to swing by the Chute for a little “reversal of fortune” celebration.

  He digs out a pair of jeans and fresh shirt from the laundry bag and finishes dressing. From out in the lot are two short taps of a car horn.

  A few moments later, the same thing.

  Jimmy steps through the door.

  At first all he sees is the blinding sun-glazed curve of a windshield, and then Evelyn tilts her head outside its frame. She has the engine running and the radio on. The wind has bird-nested her hair. She’s wearing large silver hoop earrings, and her lipstick’s the same shade of red as the Mustang.

  “Three days,” she says. “He’ll be gone three days.”

  EIGHTEEN

  They’re not in the house more than fifteen minutes before they end up in the bedroom. Evelyn’s surprised at how easy it is for her to tell Jimmy what she wants.

  She’s surprised, too, at how easy it had been to step out of her life, the boundaries of who she’d been. It hadn’t seemed possible before. Evelyn had always seen herself and others as weighted to the world and their lives, heavy with the obligations of character.

  Evelyn had always been good at that, keeping things from getting out of hand. Taking care of her father after her mother left, running the household at thirteen, the schoolteacher’s daughter who understood the requirements of duty; the good student who understood the requirements of hard work; the young wife who understood the requirements of sacrifice; the flight attendant who understood the requirements of civility and comfort; the friend, neighbor, and citizen who understood the requirements of living within the lines of whatever was expected of her.

  The blinds on the bedroom windows are open. Evelyn reaches to close them, then drops her arm. She likes the slant of the afternoon light, the way it reaches and fills the room.

  Jimmy’s standing next to the bed.

  Evelyn walks over and unbuttons his shirt.

  She is coming to understand something: Desire leaves no room for facts. Suddenly she is not thinking about the fact that she’s about to sleep with her brother-in-law, or about the fact that she forgot to call Linda and Marie and cancel their luncheon date, or the fact that her husband will be home in sixty-eight hours. The facts may feel solid, but if she holds them up to the light, she can see right through them.

  Desire, she’s coming to discover, leaves no room for anything but itself.

  There’s a slight tremor in her hands as she fingers the buttons on Jimmy’s shirt, the same tremor she’s felt on her afternoon drives in the desert, a trembling that runs through her legs and arms and trips the nerve endings along her spine, opening up something she can’t put a name to, filling and pressing against her insides like an umbrella suddenly torn open by an abrupt gust of wind.

  They fall into bed, and there’s a long moment just before they touch when anything seems possible, when the world has disappeared into waiting flesh.

  Everything stops and starts with that first touch.

  “Yes,” Evelyn says, lifting her hips.

  There’s fit and need, nothing else, and it’s sweet and lovely, oh so lovely, and Evelyn thrusts and follows the rush of her pulse, living in her blood, chasing a place where words falter, then break down, and the names of things become unmoored, a point where sex cleanses you of language and you simply inhabit the crush of breath and flesh and leave your name behind.

  “Hope you’re hungry,” Jimmy says. He’s standing at the kitchen counter, three eggs wedged between index and middle fingers, middle and ring fingers, and ring and pinkie. He drops his hand, turning the wrist at the last moment so that the eggs catch the edge of the blue mixing bowl with a quick simultaneous crack. Jimmy lifts his arm straight up at the moment of contact, the whites and yolks making a three-point landing in the bottom of the bowl.

  He adds three more eggs to the bowl and then ransacks the shelves of the fridge. He’s mixing up his specialty, what he calls Junkyard Omelettes, and anything’s fair game: a couple jalapenos, some onion, a few chunks of cheddar, a dash of barbeque sauce, cup of milk, a handful of leftover chicken pieces, and a half can of beer.

  Jimmy looks over his shoulder at Evelyn. She’s sitting on the sill of the bay window of the breakfast nook painting her toe-nails. She hasn’t bothered with clothes. In the slant of the day’s light, her skin’s as pale as a slice of bread.

  “Neighbors,” Jimmy says. “You’re presenting an eyeful there, Evelyn, anybody’d care to snoop.”

  “I don’t care. The light’s nice here.” She takes the brush through tiny, brightly colored maneuvers.

  Before turning back to the counter, Jimmy takes one more look at Evelyn, at the tight bow her body makes when she bends over with the brush.

  He’s not ready for what he’s seen.

  Evelyn might have been messing around, vamping it up on the windowsill there, doing some sex-pot or vixen number, but it had backfired on her. She looked beautiful instead.

  And the fact that she didn’t seem aware of looking beautiful just made its effect that much stronger.

  Jimmy moves over to the range. He’s got the skillet popping, and two chunks of butt
er chasing each other around the Teflon when he dumps in the contents of the blue bowl and starts charming the eggs with a wooden spoon.

  He’s trying to match the woman across the room to the one who’s married to his brother.

  He’s not exactly sure if he can or not and if that’s a good or bad sign.

  Right now, though, it doesn’t matter.

  At this particular tick of the clock, Jimmy’s slotted. Things are looking good. Suddenly hope doesn’t feel like another name for a new mistake. There’s no need to check the pulse on his prospects today. He’s got an empty stomach and breakfast swimming in the skillet, half a cold beer at his elbow, and across the room, a good-looking naked woman painting her nails in the late morning light.

  Jimmy tips the skillet and coaxes the eggs onto two white stoneware plates and delivers them up.

  She turned her head.

  Evelyn remembers standing behind the farmhouse on Dobbins, the smell of brittlebush, sage, mesquite, and baked earth, the sunlight glinting off the bottles and cans set among the small pale fruit in the stunted branches of the orange and lemon trees, and the pull of the T-shirt across her rib cage when she lifted the Diamondback, aimed, and fired, and then slowly let out her breath and smiled, turning her head and finding Jimmy right there.

  Evelyn returns to that moment each time she begins thinking about what she’s doing and what she’s done, and the recriminations start aligning themselves like iron filings under a magnet.

  When she starts telling herself it’s gone far enough.

  She had turned her head, and he was right there.

  She can stop things where they are and step back into her life. Chalk up what’s happened to folly. Bad judgment. A momentary weakness. Explain it away.

  Evelyn can explain everything away, except the kiss.

  That’s the moment she keeps returning to.

  There are kisses that go deeper than marrow. A type of kiss that others can easily mock or sentimentalize, but Evelyn knows better.

  You turn your head, and it happens.

  A certain type of kiss that refuses to end when it should have, and it scares you.

  That’s why she had stepped away from Jimmy and said, I’ll decide if that happened or not.

  She had been scared.

  Scared of the kiss and what it made her feel. And scared it would never happen again.

  Evelyn’s behind the wet bar, fixing them drinks. She lines up glasses, scoops out ice. She’s generous with the bourbon, lazy on the water.

  She hands Jimmy his drink, then leans in and kisses him, softly at first, then harder.

  “You didn’t close your eyes this time,” she says.

  “Evelyn,” Jimmy says, but gets no further than her name, because the phone rings and continues to ring until the machine picks it up. Richard’s disembodied voice fills every corner of the silence.

  They listen to Richard remind her that he’ll be coming in tomorrow afternoon and give her the time, airline, and flight number and then tell her that he’s missed her.

  Jimmy turns and walks out of the room.

  She finds him in the kitchen standing over the answering machine.

  He looks over his shoulder at her, then hits the Play button.

  Richard’s voice surrounds them once again.

  Evelyn raises her hand. “Jimmy, please.”

  The message has barely finished when, again, Jimmy hits Rewind, then Play.

  Evelyn hears her husband’s voice, even-toned, the words carefully measured, and she feels the slow pull of the old orbit of self, the gravitational field of a marriage.

  When the machine clicks and the red light begins blinking, she crosses the room and presses Erase.

  “That simple, huh?” Jimmy says.

  “Is that what you think, Jimmy? That any of this is easy for me?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Is it?” He takes a long swallow of his drink and then lowers the glass. “I mean, how hard exactly is it to take a little vacation from being Mrs. Richard Coates?”

  “Don’t do this, Jimmy. Not tonight.”

  “You didn’t answer the question, Evelyn.”

  She lets out her breath and looks away. Outside the bay window, there’s a fat dollop of yellow moon and a salting of stars over Camelback Mountain. Evelyn leans over and undoes the straps on her shoes, then slowly levers each off, toes to heel, and leaves them in the middle of the kitchen floor. “Let’s go upstairs, Jimmy,” she says.

  The crime lab people would have a field day if they dusted the place.

  It’s 3:00 A.M., and Jimmy, barefoot and in jeans, unable to sleep, is downstairs, moving around his brother’s house. It’s a big place, a two-and-a-half-story, with a long steeply sloping roof, its exterior a mortared wall of light gray rocks of different sizes and shapes set at angles to each other, like a landslide that’s been arrested midfall. Inside, the rooms are wide and airy, the ceilings crosshatched with dark exposed beams.

  Jimmy wants to make his presence felt. He passed on the idea of taking something from the house, settling instead on making whatever lay within an arm’s reach his. He’s leaving his prints on every available surface, touching everything, imprinting himself on his brother’s life and possessions, hoping to subtract something each time his fingers make contact.

  There are Remington prints hanging in the dining room and den. A cavernous fireplace whose mantle is lined with Paiute and Tohono O’odham woven baskets interspersed with kachina dolls. Hardwood floors with brightly dyed Navajo rugs. A framed territorial map circa 1830. A mahogany gun case. A rack of cowboy hats. Two crossed ceremonial cavalry sabers. A black wire sculpture of a thrashing bronco. A dented tin bucket mounded with silver dollars. Collections of arrowheads mounted behind glass. A horse-hoof ashtray. Immense wagon-wheel chandeliers. Vases, everywhere, filled with dried desert flowers. The furniture, squat and low, upholstered in shades of tan and brown and soft orange.

  Richard was a big fan of the fact that their ties to the region went back to the founding of Fort McDowell at the close of the Civil War through the reopening of the original canal system built by the Hohokam tribe. Their great-great-grandfather had been instrumental in stealing the territorial capital from Prescott and getting it moved to Phoenix, and their great-uncle had helped bankroll the commission for the blinding-white angel of mercy statue that eventually stood on the copper dome of the capitol building. Their grandfather and his brood had pulled a lot of heavy-duty political strings when it came to support and funding for the Roosevelt Dam and Salt River Project, and he then went on to make his money in agriculture, primarily cotton and meatpacking, when Phoenix’s slaughterhouses were the largest, outside Chicago, in the country. Late in his life, their grandfather subtracted a long line of zeroes from the family fortune when he invested in a series of resort projects lavish enough to make a sultan blush and everything went belly-up shortly after the groundbreakings.

  Along the way, Jimmy’s ancestors dropped enough coin in the name of art and culture and regional heritage to qualify as the Valley of the Sun’s version of solid citizens, and that’s the part Richard loves and plays to with his country club pals and chamber of commerce buddies.

  Jimmy eventually moves to the kitchen. It’s going on 4:00 A.M. Hanging near the phone is a wooden key chain. He spots the letters RC on one of the sets, snags it, and walks through an enclosed breezeway and into the garage.

  He gets behind the wheel of his brother’s silver Lexus.

  His brother’s got a system of shelves and wall hangings so that all the tools and hardware are ordered and in place, and Jimmy feels like he’s back on some grade school field trip, the teacher lining them up in front of a museum display that contains a lesson for their own good.

  The garage is easily three times the size of his room at the Mesa View.

  Jimmy’s suddenly thinking grand theft auto and arson. Sitting along the base of the north wall of the garage are five gallons of high-test unleaded in a squat re
d plastic container.

  He fingers the pack of matches in his shirt pocket.

  He’s considering taking the unleaded and burning his initials in the front lawn, a little signature work, twenty-foot letters charred in the St. Augustine grass like a brand.

  Then maybe take the Lexus over to Pete Samoa’s and negotiate some chop-shop action and pocket the take.

  Jimmy slots the key in the ignition and then reaches up for the door opener clipped to the visor and does an open sesame, the garage door slowly coming to life, rumbling and clanking on its tracks.

  He keeps running through the various combos of crimes against property, and they’re all holding TRY ME signs, but he’s jammed up. They all fit and simultaneously fall short of what he’s feeling. His brother’s got to pay, but Jimmy can’t settle on the right amount.

  Evelyn keeps getting in the way.

  He could have mailed Evelyn’s panties to Richard and finished things right there. He could have ignored the message Richard left on the answering machine. But he didn’t do either. Or couldn’t. A jump ball on that one.

  The garage door clicks to a stop. Jimmy’s looking at a rectangle of driveway and lawn swimming in moonlight.

  Scottsdale itself is part of the problem, with its country clubs and golf courses and art galleries and upscale boutiques and quaint restaurants and resort complexes, and there’s the Lexus he’s sitting in and the wedding cake landscaping and the big stone monument that Richard calls home, everywhere the presence of money and the truths it can buy so that even the air feels different, as if it has been jacked up a couple of extra molecules.

  Richard wakes up to all of this every day. It’s his. Jimmy will never be able to touch it.

  There’s a power in the right address and zip code that rivals any threat Ray Harp can level at you.

  And then Jimmy’s back to thinking about Evelyn again.

  And when he pulls the keys from the ignition and points the remote and watches the door accordion itself to a close, he’s thinking about how over the years he’s been accused of thinking with his feet or of thinking with his dick; and as he climbs out of the car and walks back into the house and heads for the stairway that will take him to the master bedroom and the woman who’d bushwhacked him earlier with her beauty, he’s starting to wonder just what part of him is doing the thinking now.