by Lynn Kostoff
He raps twice softly on the bar top. “You know, Leon, you never got around to telling me what I was asking you about earlier,” Jimmy says. “You know, if you talked to Frank Dawson.”
“Lawson,” Leon says without looking up. “His name’s Lawson.” Leon dips the tip of the toothpick in a small puddle of epoxy he’s laid out on the newspaper and starts edging the cracked seam in the tail of the P-38.
“Back to the original subject—you told me you were going to call him, Leon.”
“He’s got this chronic thing with stones,” Leon says. He dips the toothpick back in the glue. “Been real sick. He won’t do the ultrasound thing, you know where they break them up. He waits until he can pass them instead.”
“I need that job,” Jimmy says.
“You got stones, you don’t feel like talking on the telephone.”
“Come on, Leon. This is important.”
“I’ll talk to him when I talk to him,” Leon says, setting down the toothpick and cracking his knuckles. “The guy’s in real pain.”
Right now, Jimmy could say the same thing. He can’t quit thinking about Montana. Coattailing that is his sister-in-law, Evelyn. He can’t quit thinking about her either. They keep colliding in his head like two bumper cars endlessly tracking each other.
This is what it comes down to: Jimmy’s going to steal his brother’s wife, and he wants a clean getaway.
It’s not payback for his brother finessing him out of his inheritance, not anymore. It’s both more simple and more complicated than that.
Jimmy’s in love.
There’s no other way to put it.
Jimmy’s come to recognize the signs.
For one thing, the world’s bigger. Jimmy noticed that right away. You fall in love, and the world starts growing on you. There’s suddenly all this space between things. Everything’s large. You find you have acres to maneuver.
The flip side to that is what happens to time. Basically, you run out of it. You’ve suddenly got too much world and not enough clock. Everything’s large and nothing’s slow.
That’s when you tack a map of Montana on the wall of your room in the Mesa View Inn and redline the route straight to Helena.
That’s when your days feel like a sock abruptly turned inside out.
That’s when thoughts of your sister-in-law’s left breast keep popping up in your head, and you can’t shut them down. No matter what you’re doing, her left breast keeps following you around, and you’re thinking of its heft and hang, the way its nipple is like a grape on its way to becoming a raisin when she’s aroused.
That’s when you end up with pronoun problems, the sudden and stubborn presence of an us or we in your vocabulary.
And finally, you look at your hands, and that’s when you know you’re in love, because they’re not yours anymore. What you touch, she does. It’s like her hands are secreted within yours, and your own hands are over hers, covering them like gloves. Except you can’t take them off. That’s the catch. You can’t separate your touch from hers. Her hands, your hands, they’re a perfect fit.
Anything you touch, she’s there with you.
And there’s nothing you can do about it, absolutely nothing, and that’s when you know you’ve taken the fall, and it’s the long one.
TWENTY-ONE
As he crosses Washington and starts for the courtyard fronting the old capitol building, there is a taste, like that of damp earth, that fills his mouth to the back of his throat, and Aaron Limbe unwraps a breath mint and slips it onto his tongue.
Despite the midday heat, he is wearing his dark blue suit. He has a new haircut and carries a slim brown attaché case. His black shoes are buffed to an army-regulation shine.
He passes in front of the old capitol building with its triangular cornice and six columns and tan granite walls, all topped with the massive copper dome and white angel of mercy statue. The building was converted in 1974 into a museum, where the state’s history was defanged and hung on the walls or put in glass display cases.
Free admission, Limbe thinks, to all the old lies.
Directly behind the old capitol is the new annex, its central gray facade as blankly rectangular as a wafer set on end.
Inserted between the gridwork of sidewalks are rose and cacti gardens, beds of lantana and impatiens, the quadrants edged with evenly spaced rows of boxwoods and the staggered lines of shaggy-barked palms.
He looks at his watch. The breath mint does nothing to cut the taste in his mouth.
Limbe angles along the eastern edge of the capitol mall past the mounted anchor reclaimed from the USS Arizona that had been sunk at Pearl Harbor, then west to Wesley Brolin Plaza, a ten-acre park lying between Fifteenth and Seventeenth Avenues and Adams and Jefferson. At noon, it’s full of office-pale government workers, joggers, tourists, rollerbladers, senior citizens, and herds of kids on outings from day-care centers.
Limbe continues west, following a tree-lined walkway until he comes to a fountain being repaired. The workers have taken off on their lunch break. Ten yards away on a wooden park bench is Richard Coates.
When Limbe had worked in the Phoenix PD, no one had wanted next-of-kin duty, his fellow officers going to any lengths to avoid it, constantly pulling rank, calling in markers, cajoling, or outright bribing each other, anything that would let them off the hook. Limbe, though, hadn’t minded. In fact, he liked it, enjoyed the ceremony of the routine, the knock on the door, the charged interval before someone finally answered it, when he would take off his cap and tuck it under his arm, square his shoulders, and empty his face of all expression, waiting as the door opened and his presence registered in the next-of-kin’s face, Limbe a student of grief, calmly and respectfully delivering the bad news and cataloging the responses to it, a hot shuddering wave passing right through him, a secret burning that only intensified with his efforts to mask it in the face of the plaintive hysterics or mute desolation that the news usually produced.
Each time Limbe knocked on a door, he dismantled a fundamental and cherished illusion: that we own our lives.
He’s about to do the same for Mr. Richard Coates.
Limbe walks over and sits down. He sets the attaché case between his feet.
Coates looks over at him and says, “This is highly irregular. I don’t appreciate the phone calls. Or the innuendoes either. Why exactly are we meeting here?”
“Patience, Mr. Coates. I’m not here to waste your time.” Limbe is momentarily thrown off by the dissimilarity between the brothers, Richard a good five inches taller and lanky, fair-skinned with sharply defined features and fine, straight brown hair. It’s only in the stubborn set of his mouth that Limbe sees any connection to Jimmy.
“You haven’t told me your name yet,” Coates says.
“Not necessary, under the circumstances.” Limbe keeps his gaze on the dry fountain, the exposed plumbing in its center, the cracked checkerboard of missing tiles along its sides.
“You’re wasting my time,” Coates says and starts to get up.
Limbe reaches over and takes Coates by his forearm. “Do you love your wife, Mr. Coates?”
“Why’s that your business?”
“You didn’t answer my question.” Limbe keeps his voice soft and even.
“As a matter of fact, I do. We’ve been married close to twenty years.”
“What would you do for her?” Limbe asks. “Or to keep her in your life for another twenty?”
“This is highly inappropriate,” Coates says, “and none of your business.”
“Correct on the former,” Limbe says, smiling. “And incorrect on the latter.”
Limbe picks up the attaché case and sets it on his lap. “Your wife is cheating on you, Mr. Coates.”
“That’s impossible.” Coates’s voice breaks a little on the last syllable, and he looks briefly away.
Limbe doesn’t say anything. He waits.
He watches Coates debate whether to simply walk off. Coates still believes
he owns his life.
Limbe taps the face of the attaché case twice.
Coates clears his throat. “I won’t be blackmailed.”
“That’s not where this is headed,” Limbe says.
“I won’t pay you.”
Aaron Limbe smiles.
“I should never have agreed to this meeting,” Coates says.
“But you did. You were sitting here waiting for me. Why?” Limbe pauses, then goes on. “I’ll tell you. You love your wife. Things have not been quite right between you lately. You don’t want to lose her. And if you don’t do something, you will. You can’t walk away, no matter how badly you want to.”
“I’ve yet to see a shred of proof that what you say is true.”
“Are you sure you want that?” Limbe taps the attaché case again.
Coates nods and sits back down on the bench.
Limbe flicks the snaps and takes out a sheath of photographs. He hands them to Coates.
“There’s no face,” Coates says, after he’s riffled through them.
“There’s one,” Limbe says, “and it’s the one that matters. Your wife’s.”
“I don’t understand,” Coates says, going through the photographs again, more slowly this time. In each of them, Limbe had cut the head or face of Jimmy Coates out with his Exacto knife.
“Who is he?” Coates asks.
“Natural enough question,” Limbe says, “but not the right one.”
Coates looks like he’s ready to hit him.
One more push, Limbe thinks.
He snaps the locks on the attaché case and stands up, offering Coates his hand. “They’re yours,” he says, nodding at the stack of photographs. “No charge.” He waits a second before adding that he wishes Coates luck. Even to his own ears, it sounds sincere.
Coates looks up, frowning. “You’re giving them to me?”
Limbe nods. “I’m not a blackmailer, Mr. Coates. I already explained that.”
Coates sits there, clutching the photos.
Limbe looks at his watch, then adjusts the cuffs of his jacket. “My advice, though, is to forget you ever saw those. Let the affair run its course. Your wife will eventually come back to you. That’s the way these things usually work out.”
“But,” Coates says, then stops. He shuffles through the photographs once more. Limbe knows this time Coates is not seeing the missing face or head and letting his anger bully him. No, this time, he’s seeing his wife and what she’s doing and how much she’s enjoying it.
“You don’t understand,” Coates says finally. “I love her.”
“All the more reason to simply ride this out. You confront her, you force a choice. And it may be one you’re not prepared to live with.”
“Almost twenty years,” Coates says quietly. “I can’t stand by and do nothing.”
Limbe turns his head and looks through the branches of the trees lining the walk, timing his response. In the distance are the rise and fall of children’s voices.
“There are other options,” he says.
“What are you suggesting?” Coates has scrolled up the photos so that they resemble a baton in a relay race.
“What you’re already thinking,” Limbe says.
He sets the attaché case on the ground next to his feet, but remains standing so that Coates has to crane his neck to meet his eyes.
“Let’s be blunt, Mr. Coates. You want your wife back. You’re also a respected businessman with a reputation to protect. If you’re not careful, you’re in a position to lose everything.”
Limbe points at the rolled-up photos in Coates’s fist. “I can make him go away.”
“What’s that mean exactly?”
“Just what I said.”
Coates slowly lets out his breath and begins shaking his head.
“I can make him go away. That’s all you need to know,” Limbe says. “You don’t know my name. You don’t know the name of the man in the photographs. You’re absolutely in the clear. You simply go on with your life and run your business and wait until you hear from me.”
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,” Coates says quietly.
“Now you’re wasting my time,” Limbe says, picking up the attaché case and walking away.
Richard Coates catches up with him at the edge of the plaza. His color isn’t good.
“Let’s say I agree to your offer,” he says and then pauses,
waiting for a group of office workers to pass by on either side of them.
Limbe’s anticipated him here, too, figured beforehand that for a businessman like Coates, the asking price had to sting but not draw blood. Whatever his feelings about his wife, Coates would want to know he was getting his money’s worth. Limbe thought eight was a little low, twelve a little steep, and had settled on ten.
He steps off the sidewalk and takes out a handkerchief and wipes down the attaché case before setting it between Coates and him.
“Half up front,” Limbe says, “by the end of the working day. Same meeting place. Can you swing that?”
Coates nods.
“Good. I’ll conclude our business within two days and get back in touch with you. You have the other five ready.”
Limbe waits for Coates to pick up the attaché case, and then they walk back toward the courtyard off the old capitol building.
Before they part, Coates has one last spasm of conscience. Limbe smiles and unwraps a breath mint, visualizing Coates’s inner turmoil as something like a small piece of meat twitching in a skillet on a burner set too high.
“The time for second thoughts is over,” Limbe says. “Do you want to go on with it or not?”
The afternoon sun has burned a little color into Coates’s face.
He nods.
TWENTY-TWO
Evelyn’s got the Mustang pointed north on Route 17, and she likes the play of the late morning sun on the three thin silver bracelets ringing her wrist and the abrupt music they make each time she shifts gears or changes lanes.
“A whole day,” Jimmy says. “How’d you swing it?”
“We have to be back before six.” The lie had been easy enough to manufacture, a standard assembly-line version. Richard had committed them to a late dinner engagement that Evelyn knew would eventually double as a business meeting, and she had countered by telling him she was going to get her hair done and buy a new dress.
“It takes a whole day to do that?” Jimmy asks.
“The dinner is important to Richard.” She lifts her arm and points past Jimmy, toward the east, in the direction of Squaw Peak and Paradise Valley, home of Josh and Alicia Brandt. Josh was a young hotshot investment counselor who’d relocated from New York, a virtual wizard, according to Richard, at estate planning and restructuring retirement packages. His wife, Alicia, fancied herself an art collector. Evelyn was looking at an evening of anecdotes culled from Josh’s weekend adventures as a hot air balloonist and hang-glider and Alicia’s nasally outtakes on the local gallery scene. For Evelyn, the evening’s prospects had about as much life in them as the tepid minimalist aesthetics that Alicia loved. The evening would be capped by Alicia’s condescending surprise and delight that a former airline flight attendant would even know who Agnes Martin or Ad Reinhardt was.
“Something like that,” Jimmy says, “You need to bring out the Great Leveler.”
“The what?” They’ve passed the off-ramp for Metrocenter and for the thoroughbred track on Bell Road, and the traffic, like the northern boundaries of the city, is beginning to thin out. Evelyn leans a little harder on the gas.
“You get someone like that Josh or Alicia jamming you up,” Jimmy says, “acting like they’re better than you, you use the Great Leveler on them. That’ll put things into perspective, guaranteed.”
The working principle behind the Great Leveler was simplicity itself. All you had to do, Jimmy tells her, is imagine the person getting on your case taking a dump.
“And not some couple-turds-in-the-bo
wl action or a standard pop-and-drop either,” Jimmy says. “For this to work, you have to imagine a monster shit, you know, the kind you really have to work at, feels like your spine’s going to snap before you’re done, that kind. Doesn’t hurt to add some special effects either,” he says. “Imagine the person hunched over, hugging his knees, underwear around his ankles, some grimace and squint, and soundtrack the whole thing with a few industrial-strength grunts.”
“Stop,” Evelyn says, waving her hand. “Just stop, okay?” But it’s too late because she’s laughing now and because she knows, like the injunction not to think of pink elephants, what will happen when she’s sitting across from Josh and Alicia Brandt tonight at dinner.
“Hey, they might not cover it in civics class,” Jimmy says, “but if you think about it, the Great Leveler is your basic democracy in action.”
“Okay, Jimmy, okay.” They’ve left the city limits behind and have already put the rubble-strewn volcanic beds of Adobe Mountain in the rearview and passed into a stretch of open desert, flat hardpan and the vast blue tumble and reach of sky, a white sun burning its way toward noon.
Evelyn’s booked them a room in the Sheraton in downtown Prescott. It’s a small, extravagant gesture, impractical and impulsive, that she bent the day to fit. A two-and-a-half-hour drive, three hours in the room, and then the two-and-a-half-hour turnaround.
Within less than ten miles, the landscape begins to change again, open desert giving way to foothills, small clusters and outcroppings of rocks interspersed with saguaro and beavertail cacti, brittlebush and creosote. In the distance is the steady circling of a flock of buzzards, their movements resembling smoke wafting in an updraft of wind.
“Oh man,” Jimmy says, thumping the armrest. “I just thought of something. How far are we from a phone?”
“We’re just outside New River,” Evelyn says. “I need to stop for gas anyway.”
“I was supposed to meet Don Ruger today on his lunch break. I forgot all about it until just now.”
New River looks anything but new. It’s a small, dusty collection of small homes, service stations, family restaurants, and convenience stores.
