The Long Fall

by Lynn Kostoff

  The way she says it brings him up short—Jimmy now knows what that phrase means—and she’s looking everywhere but at him, and the longer it goes on, the more uncomfortable he is, because the thing is, she’s not looking at him, but she’s smiling, this wide-open smile, and he keeps hearing that Oh, Jimmy, the spin she put on it, and he wants to believe that smile is something that’s been pumped through the IV, a pharmaceutical afterglow, but when she finally turns her head and looks at him, Jimmy’s scared, plain flat-out scared, about what’s coming next.

  “Richard is a good man,” she says.

  Jimmy expects her to add something else, but she leaves it there, as if that news flash explained everything.

  “He’s a swell guy, Richard is, all right. A regular saint.” Jimmy lets go of her hand and sits back in the chair, shaking his head. He points out the good man hired Aaron Limbe to kill him and almost got her killed in the process.

  “He thought he was going to lose me,” Evelyn says quietly.

  “You know he blames me for you getting shot,” Jimmy says. “That and the ransom. He thinks I took it.”

  Evelyn looks at the doorway and nods. She starts smoothing the bedcovers. She’s got both hands going at the same time. Above her, the IV line twitches and jumps.

  Jimmy can’t get past the images tumbling around in his brain, Evelyn undressing, Evelyn undressed, a swarm of fingers, lips, nipples, and thighs, of flesh cupped and kneaded, parted and entered, and he can’t shut them down or off or make the images match the woman lying in the hospital bed and what she’s saying.

  The room’s squeezing him, too. Hospitals have always made him nervous, and everything here—from the low buzz of the fluorescents, the soft green and white floor and walls, the antiseptic air, the cut flowers and cards lining the windowsill and nightstand, to the television mounted high in the corner—everything unlocks an awkward mix of anger and panic in him.

  “For a while there, I was confused,” Evelyn says softly. “I was confused, and I did things, Jimmy. Things that I should not have done. They weren’t me. You do that if you’re confused. I did things, and he saw. He did. He saw what I was doing, and then he showed me what I did.”

  At first, Jimmy thinks she’s referring to Richard. “Wait a minute,” he says. “Limbe’s dead. He can’t do anything to you now. We’re clear.”

  Evelyn looks down, tenting the top of the bedcovers, and then slips her hands beneath them.

  “I wasn’t myself,” she says. “That’s what happens when you’re confused. You aren’t yourself, and then you do things.”

  “Stop it, Evelyn. Okay? Stop.”

  Jimmy can’t let it go, not now, not when they’ve finally got their chance and there’s nothing to hold them back, when they’ve finally come through, and everything they’d talked about, he keeps telling Evelyn, it’s right there in front of them, and all they have to do is take it.

  “I’ve been married for almost half my life, Jimmy. What I did was foolish. I wasn’t thinking. Or at least not clearly. I forgot who I was for a while.”

  “You’re turning everything around, Evelyn. It’s not that simple. It never was. Not even at first. But definitely not later. Not then. And not now.”

  Then Jimmy’s massaging his temples and telling himself that it’s the hospital, not Evelyn, talking. A hospital’s no different from a principal’s office or a police station or any other official space, the air itself shaping whatever you tried to say into something else. They were rooms with weight, like barometric pressure you could feel on your skin.

  When Jimmy looks up, Evelyn’s got that smile going again, the one that brought him up short earlier.

  “Wait a second,” he says. “What did you just say?”

  “I said that Richard’s forgiven me. The last couple of nights, we’ve done a lot of talking.”

  Jimmy’s out of his chair and moving around the room, his breath trapped high in his chest, but no matter where he puts his feet, he keeps running up against the open door of the hospital room, and he can’t face the prospect of what lies outside it with no Evelyn, the idea of moving around a world with the heart torn out of it, no way that. No way.

  “I’m not believing this,” he says finally. And that’s when he recognizes it, the smile, where he’s seen it before.

  It’s her stewardess smile. The flight attendant special.

  The one Evelyn brought home from her job on the airlines and transplanted for her spot in The Evelyn and Richard Show, the one Jimmy always associated with their storybook lives, a pleasant and friendly smile that went no further than itself and that always seemed to wear Evelyn instead of the other way around.

  The same one she’s resurrected now and hidden herself behind.

  “I’m sorry, Jimmy,” she says, adjusting the bedcovers. “I really am.”

  “Sorry and forgiven. That’s some package deal, Evelyn.”

  He moves closer to the bed. She keeps the smile aimed at him. He reaches down and touches her cheek. “I’m going to tell him,” Jimmy says softly. “I’m going to fucking well tell him.”

  He watches the smile waver. It’s his last card.

  “I’ll tell Richard who’s in the photos with you,” he says, “and then we can see just how far Saint Richard’s famous capacity for forgiveness can take him on that one.”

  Evelyn closes her eyes for a moment. Her hands are trembling. “He doesn’t need to know that,” she says.

  Jimmy says he’s not so sure about that.

  He’s thinking, he tells Evelyn, of setting the whole table. Lay everything out. Enlighten Richard, too, about exactly what happened to the ransom money he believes Jimmy took. He’ll tell Richard how he gave the cash to Teresa Ruger and her family because Richard and Aaron Limbe killed her husband, that Don Ruger’s blood is on both their hands because Richard hired Aaron Limbe to kill his wife’s lover and Aaron Limbe missed and got Don instead, so Richard owes on that one; and Jimmy will tell Richard about how Aaron Limbe played him, cutting the face and head out of all those black-and-white eight-by-tens, suckering Richard in, so that Limbe could get paid for doing what he was going to do anyway, what he’d wanted to do for a long time, and that was to kill Jimmy, and Jimmy figures he’ll pause there, let Richard soak up where things are headed, and then double-barrel him with the truth about whose face belonged on those black-and-whites with his wife.

  “No,” Evelyn says.

  “What, no?” Jimmy asks.

  She’s still holding on to the smile. Jimmy can’t get around or behind it.

  “No, you won’t tell Richard,” she says. “You won’t. I know you, Jimmy. You’re a good man, too. You just haven’t figured that out yet.”

  Jimmy’s moving around the room again, clenching and unclenching his fists. The door to the bathroom is ajar, and in passing, he gets a glimpse of himself. He doesn’t like what he sees. Not a guy centered in some solidly righteous anger, a guy who understood the mechanics of payback, a guy ready to balance the family books once and for all, no, none of the above, because Jimmy’s thinking what he saw was a guy headed for the edge of a cliff, whose next step or the one after was going to be meeting nothing but air.

  “At the farm, when you were teaching me how to shoot?” Evelyn asks.

  Jimmy starts toward the bed, then stops.

  “Do you remember what I said to you afterward?”

  Jimmy shakes his head no. He remembers the afternoon heat, the targets in the orchard, him standing behind Evelyn, coaching her on how to breathe when she pulled the trigger, him leaning in, his hand on her wrist, and then Evelyn turning her head. He remembers the kiss, but not what she said after it.

  “ ‘I’ll decide if that happened or not.’ That’s what I said, Jimmy.” Evelyn lowers her head, and Jimmy hears something tear in her breath.

  “Wait a minute. Okay? Just wait.” Jimmy is shaking. Everything’s glass. “No way, Evelyn,” he says, stepping toward her. “Maybe you said that. But it doesn’t work that way.
It just doesn’t.”

  “Oh, Jimmy.” The smile is gone, and she’s looking right at him. “Sometimes it does. Sometimes it has to.”

  THIRTY

  It’s been a long fall. Everyone in Helena says so. Autumn’s kited a check that winter’s pocketed and neglected to cash, the trees still holding their leaves and the leaves themselves in Crayola mode, clear light-filled days and color everywhere, the temperature unseasonably warm, the sky too big for the horizon.

  Jimmy’s tending at The Corner Place.

  What he hears from his side of the bar and on the street is mostly talk about the weather. The inhabitants of Montana, like Arizona’s, wallow in meteorological observations. People talk, and they talk about the weather. It’s a safe, shorthand subject that stands in for any number of others, and under the right circumstances it generates its own drama and takes on the size and scope of history lessons.

  Even though Helena and western Montana have always cut a better deal on weather conditions than the eastern portions of the state, as the new kid Jimmy is treated to dozens of stories about the legendary Montana winters, the wrath of ice, snow, and chinooks, of endless leaden skies and frozen pipes and frostbite, of tire chains and snowdrifts and dead batteries.

  In the meantime, it’s early November, and fall’s still holding its breath, and The Corner Place is open for business. It’s a shot-and-a-chaser kind of place, an old neighborhood bar, dark and quiet with wood-panelled walls and a long L-shaped bar, a few booths and a scattering of tables, a juke Jimmy is working on getting restocked, and a back room holding three pool tables and a bank of video poker machines.

  The clientele’s working class, men and women from the area plants manufacturing aluminum, drywall, or insulation, or from one of the mines or sand and gravel yards, or the meatpacking and diary-processing plants, and Jimmy’s busiest at shift changes. He’ll have them two or three deep at the bar then, the numbers gradually thinning out over the next hour to the regulars, those who are in no hurry to get home or see The Corner Place as one.

  His boss, Leon Glade’s old vet buddy, is an okay guy to work for. Unlike Leon, Frank Lawson has a sense of humor and more than one mood. Lawson’s big and balding and sports a curly oversized pair of muttonchop sideburns, has four grown kids, three ex-wives, a well-stocked weekend getaway cabin in the mountains, and a vintage mint-condition Beechcraft Twin Bonanza. Besides The Corner Place, he owns or is a partner in a pizza joint, video store, and two car washes. From what Jimmy can tell, the only things that consistently knock Frank Lawson out of a good mood are Republican politicians and his recurring bouts of kidney stones.

  Frank’s about to be a grandfather again. His daughter over in Billings has been having a difficult pregnancy, and he’s flown there to stay with her for a while, so for the last couple of weeks, Jimmy’s been working like a regular citizen, putting in the overtime and after conferring with Lawson on the phone each afternoon, going on to pick up some of the slack in the managerial duties for running the bar.

  Any other circumstances, Jimmy would’ve worked hard to duck that kind, or any kind, of work, but he’s learning some of the citizens’ secrets, one of which is if you work hard and stay busy, you don’t have time to think, and that suits Jimmy just fine, the not thinking part, because when he does, nothing in his brain is his friend.

  The nights, after closing, are the worst, Jimmy all loose ends in the apartment above the bar, no center to anything, no hand-or footholds around, everything painful, broken, and lost in his life flying in, coming at him from under the radar, each tick of the clock its own little cage, memory marking him—his father clutching his chest and losing control of the car as it hit the entrance ramp to Route 10, Don Ruger bleeding on him in a toy store parking lot, Aaron Limbe and his dead-end eyes, Evelyn with an IV patched into the back of her hand and lost in the stewardess smile, no chapter and verse or buyer protection plan to help out with any of that, Jimmy right up against it.

  He’s found out the empty hours after midnight take everything on their own terms.

  Insomnia is a long hello. You get to meet your demons.

  So each night, after closing, Jimmy rides things out the best he can, sitting in front of the television on a piece of lawn furniture, an old chaise lounge with frayed plastic webbing he found tucked away in the bar’s storage room, Jimmy armed with an ashtray and lighter and some cold ones and watching old Westerns that he checks out earlier in the day from Lawson’s video store.

  Cowboy movies is what Jimmy had called them as a kid.

  High Noon, Rio Bravo, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Stagecoach, ?y Darling Clementine, Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Magnificent Seven, The Left-Handed Gun, The Searchers, 3:10 to Yuma.

  His favorites are Shane and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Those are the ones he saves for the heart of his insomnia, the 3 A.M. viewings.

  Then sleep, when it comes, if it comes, depending on his luck.

  Once he’s behind the bar again, Jimmy’s okay. There’s a routine to tending and a rhythm to that routine that smooth things out. Jimmy does not have to think too long about how Evelyn has never answered any of his letters or postcards. He does not have to remember a particular shade of lipstick or its taste or the lift and bend of a leg as Evelyn leaned back on a bed and peeled off a stocking. He does not have to think about the claims flesh makes upon flesh or about their hold on you.

  What’s left is Jimmy and the regulars at The Corner Place. Each day, the regulars settle in and hunker down, and it’s his job to keep the drinks coming. The regulars like him. Jimmy’s got the touch for drawing a draft right. He knows the art and physics behind a cold one—the proper temperature of the glass, the angle of the glass to the spout, the weight and pressure of the fingertips on the lever, the precise duration of the pull to produce the perfect head, which, if anyone asks, Jimmy will tell them it’s five-sixteenths of an inch. Jimmy brings his in right on the money, and if proof is necessary, Jimmy will take out the wooden ruler he keeps behind the bar next to the box for the in-house sports bets and let you check it out for yourself.

  Those at The Corner Place, like the regulars at any other small neighborhood bar, want a side order of talk or silence with their drinks. There are those who sit in front of their drafts with the thousand-yard stare and there are those who talk it up, complaining about the federal government, jobs, spouses, children, the conditions of the roads, the tax base, the cost of food, the fate of their favorite teams, or the weather; and Jimmy’s come to figure out there’s finally not much difference between the two, except in the noise level. What brings each group to the bar and keeps them there is what everybody else knows too—that things can curdle, shrink, dissolve, explode, expire, or disappear on you.

  And sooner or later will.

  But not end.

  That’s also what Jimmy’s come to figure out from his side of the bar.

  Nothing ends.

  Nothing.

  Liar’s Night, that’s what Jimmy has dubbed the second and last Fridays of each month at The Corner Place. There’s something different in the air then. Friday’s payday, and everyone’s got the green. The regulars are restless. They plot and scheme and hatch plans. They revisit and revise their lives. They conjure possibility. Promise is their pal. Life’s sweet. They have some money in their pockets, and the world’s bigger all of a sudden. So are they. So, for a while, are their dreams.

  On those nights, the place hops.

  If you walk into The Corner Place on one of those Fridays, you’ll find Jimmy, who’s never been a big fan of the facts himself, behind the bar, and at some point in the evening, you’ll see him take an empty tab sheet and fold it just so—right down the center so that the paper’s tented—and he’ll pull out a pen and block-letter RESERVED on each side of the sheet, and then he’ll set the paper on the stool in front of his station and go back to levering drafts.

  No matter how crowded the place is, none of the regulars bother the stool or Jimmy about si
tting there.

  If you ask around, someone will tell you it’s saved for Jimmy’s father.

  Ask someone else, you’ll hear it’s reserved for Jimmy’s good buddy Don Ruger.

  A woman, this woman named Evelyn, is what you’ll hear from someone else.

  Of course, you could ask Jimmy himself. He’ll pause, scratch his ear, look over at the door, and smile before answering.

  Hey, he’ll tell you, the bar’s open. The beer’s cold. You never know who might show up.

  About the Author

  Lynn Kostoff is currently an associate professor of English at Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina, and is at work on his second novel, the first of a projected series featuring a Northern patrolman transplanted to the Myrtle Beach Police Department.

  Published in Electronic Format by

  TYRUS BOOKS

  an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

  4700 East Galbraith Road

  Cincinnati, Ohio 45236

  www.tyrusbooks.com

  Copyright © 2003 by Lynn Kostoff

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Any similarities to people or places, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-3188-9

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3188-0

  This e-book edition: March 2012 (v.ep.1.1)

  This work has been previously published in print format by:

  Carroll & Graf Publishers

  An imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc.

  Print ISBN: 0-7867-1165-5