by English, Ben
Jack started to ease back down the alleyway, back the way he had come, then stopped himself. You leaving? a dry inner voice chided him. Not my fight, he silently responded. The man had already taken his wife by her arm, and was gently trying to propel her further down the passageway. He was speaking softer now, apologizing. They drew nearer, and Jack saw that the man was in fair shape, probably able to handle the assailant by himself. The woman walked more guardedly, with her purse strap diagonally across the whole of her body instead of dangling loosely from one shoulder. Good for her. At least she was following the advice in the tourist books, he thought. Both were in their late twenties, with faces aged only by fatigue and the long-exhausted enthusiasm of adventure in a new city. The young man wore a yellow Tshirt and tan chinos. Both had on new Reebok cross-trainers, the laces twice-tied. He’s not ready for this, Jack realized. The lank-haired young man, smiling now as he whispered something into his companion’s ear, was blithely unaware of the impending confrontation, of the dirty knife in the doorway’s penumbra. Only a half-dozen more steps.
Whose fight, then?
Jack grimaced, nearly swearing aloud. Even as his eyes scoured the narrow alley, he inwardly cursed himself. Why’s it always have to be this way, he thought, then found a rough chunk of pottery, a nearly-intact flower pot turned over against the wall a few steps away. The grainy jaggedness bit into his hand as he hefted it. How many more times could he be expected to do this, he wondered, then his mind snatched itself away like it always did, plotting, planning, projecting angles, amounts of force; summing up position and aspect of possible outcome. It took less than a second, and he was ready by the time the young couple took their first step into the intersection. The woman’s hair was as yellow and straight as fine straw, Jack noted, and then he moved.
The thug flinched beneath the hurtling pottery, throwing himself out of the confined entry as the pot exploded and showered him with dust and blunt shrapnel. He didn’t even see Jack, who erupted into him a moment later, slapping aside the knife and landing six open-handed blows from his kidney up along his tattoo of a writhing, many-legged serpent to his right temple. He hit the ground at nearly the same time as his shapeless hat.
A slight scrabble behind him was all the warning Jack had as a second thug launched himself out of the doorway across from where his cohort had hidden. He ducked, and the man’s leather kosh only glanced the back of his neck. Jack stumbled under the blow, pushing himself off his assailant’s body towards the wall. The man swung again, and numbing fire took the place of Jack’s right arm from the shoulder down. His opponent stepped back slightly for a better swing, and Jack’s eyes focused on a prognathous jawline almost basaltic in its thickness and texture, a clipped, ragged slash of a mouth over mismatched teeth, and a bony forehead. One single eyebrow jerked like a bolt of bristling lightning over intelligent, deep set eyes.
As the man leaned forward, shifting all his weight into his stroke, Jack snapped his leg up and in, then violently out and into his opponent’s solar plexus. The impact sent Jack into the opposite wall, and threw the other man straight backward into the doorway, where his head rebounded wetly against the jamb.
As the man slid moaning and nerveless towards the ground, Jack hit him along the left temple, then again, harder. He sagged into the doorjamb, breathing heavily, vision swimming. Up! he thought. Up, there might be more of them!
Belatedly, the woman screamed. A figure loomed close, but it was only her husband, jabbering rapidly and reaching out to help Jack up. He pushed the American back, using the wall behind him to lever himself all the way to a standing position.
“Are you two okay?” he asked. Feeling was beginning to return to his arm, and painful as it was he flexed his fingers and rotated his wrist and elbow. Nothing broken. The fellow was still chattering at Jack, trying to offer money, still speaking in broken, tourist French, and Jack switched to English. “Be quiet! There may be more of them close by.”
A point which eluded you a few moments ago, idiot, he chided himself silently. But his returning senses brought no warning, no precursor of attack.
Jack bent over each of the assailants, patting them down for identification as he listened to their breathing. He thumbed their eyelids up, checking for the uneven dilation that would indicate concussion or brain injury. Both would wake with considerable discomfort, but at least they would wake.
“What are you doing, um, now?” asked the American.
Jack flipped through the cards in the larger man’s wallet. “See all these Visas?” In addition, he found what must have been over three hundred dollars in American and British currency, which he pocketed, and two more knives. The thin man also carried a snub-nosed revolver, dark with grease. Jack threw the weapons down a nearby sewer.
The baffled tourist, Mike, returned to his wife and held her until she quieted, then the three of them made their way out of the rubbish-filled labyrinth, Jack in the lead.
They were out under the streetlights near the Seine when the man decided to speak again. He’d had a bit of time to think, Jack noted, and even the man’s posture had changed. He now stood nearer to his wife, within easy distance. Indeed, from time to time Mike would reach out to touch his wife’s hair or hold her arm, and he was particularly solicitous toward her as the three of them maneuvered to a well-illuminated park where a pair of benches faced each other above the river. They spoke quietly for a few moments, Jack pointing out the lights of Notre Dame a few hundred yards down the river before warning them against taking any more shortcuts. Mike and Debbie were from Tennessee, recently married and celebrating their new Master’s degrees. A nice enough couple, Jack thought.
“Well, my apartment is only a few blocks up, and I’m sure you’ll want to get down to the cathedral. I bet you’d like the archeological exhibits underneath, too. And, Mike, no more shortcuts! Debbie, don’t let him talk you into swimming the Seine, or anything like that.”
They laughed, and then Debbie said. “You know, you look an awful lot like the guy in that movie we saw on the plane–what was his name, honey? The guy in The Walking Drum.”
Jack nodded, letting an ounce of chagrin steal into his voice. “Yeah, I hear that a lot. Wish I made his kind of money, eh?” Mike nodded. “And that reminds me,” said Jack, fishing out the wad of money he’d taken off the two thugs. “You look like a couple who could find a way to use this.”
They tried to refuse, but Jack pressed the money into their hands, anyway. “Courtesy of the Paris underworld, or something. Take it. Ride in taxis. Go to EuroDisney–no, never mind; you want to have a good time, don’t you?” This elicited another laugh. “Enjoy yourselves. Stay in love.”
They parted company with enough handshakes for a crowd of twice as many. Jack walked a dozen steps before turning to watch the young couple, strolling away through the pools of amber light. They walked, heads close together, arm in arm, Mike now considerably more watchful, which pleased Jack. Debbie was leaning into her husband more than she had in the alley; allowing him to cradle her to a greater degree. Jack looked after them until the sweep of the river carried them out of his line of sight. Odd. Only a few years separated them, yet Jack felt ancient compared to the young couple. Older by eons.
Yet maybe he could survive this.
He looked across the bridge, and could almost see her coming to him through the gathering gloom. Almond-shaped eyes, lustrous dark hair as pure as a raven’s wing, and a gypsy’s smile. A Black Irish girl.
But no form carved itself out of the glittering night. Jack sighed, rubbing at his temple briefly. Time to go back to pretending you have a normal life, he thought. He looked once more down the Seine, toward young love, and then stalked briskly into the Parisian night.
Girl in a Berkeley Sweater
Forge, Idaho, United States of America
7 AM
Garret leaned through the doorway, arms against either jamb, and felt the muscles across his chest tighten as he looked out at the pool. It was
already half awash in the slanting sunlight of early morning, as placid as the surface of any mirror. Garret had been a lifeguard at the Forge city park for two years—had practically lived at the pool every summer, as far back as his memory ran—and the sight of the L-shaped pool motionless against the morning light always somehow reminded him of a great, sunken slab of lime Jell-o.
He wiped the last of the sleep from his eyes and stepped, barefoot, onto the concrete deck. It was cold, as usual, and its dry porosity clutched at his feet as he made his way to the centermost guard tower. He swung his steel whistle around his wrist by its lanyard until it slapped against his arm, then reversed the swing, keeping time with his slow, unhurried stride across the deck. Though it was still early, he slipped on his sunglasses.
The steel gates leading to the locker rooms creaked open, emitting the half-dozen patrons that forced Garret out of bed at this ungodly hour. He swung his long, lean body up the brief ladder of his tower, then sat on its edge, watching as the elderly women arranged their paraphernalia on the benches at the shallow end of the pool. One of them smiled at Garret and waved as she tucked a loaf of blue hair into the side of her equally blue swimming cap. He waved back.
The Fish family (if that wasn’t ironic, Garret didn’t know the meaning of the word) came nearly every day. If the yelling in the dressing rooms was any indication, the kids had arrived. Their parents were religious swimmers, absolutely addicted to the water. They kept their children in the water nearly all day, starting with lap swim, then lessons, through two swim team practices, and then picking them up at 7:30 at night, after open swim. Garret smiled. Pretty smart parents. No doubt the chronically hyperactive kids fell over themselves trying to get to bed.
The morning shift wasn’t so bad. Between the older ladies who drifted, jellyfish-like, from one end of the pool to the other, and the thrice-weekly triathlon maniacs who showed up an hour before lessons started to grimly thrash out their two miles, Garret had an easy time of it.
And the past few days, one visitor in particular had made it even better.
He yawned, this time in earnest, closing his eyes and tilting his head back until it felt like he was flexing his entire face. The sun had eased up over two-thirds of the pool now, and small curls of steam began to appear above the water, quaking now as the ladies edged into the pool.
“Gets colder every day!” one of them said.
Another, submerged up to her waist, shot back, “The city ought to pay its electric bill!”
They all laughed. Part of the morning ritual. They chattered among themselves like they did every morning, commiserating their fate and admiring their collective willpower at being able to withstand the frigid water. Listen to them, he thought, you’d almost expect to see chunks of ice floating in the water around them.
Ripples spread out across the pool, deepening as they widened.
The city pool stood on a small hill in the center of the park. From his vantage point, Garret could see over the fence and down into most of the wooded, terraced grounds. The sunlight was still caught in the tops of the trees; it hadn’t yet found its way down onto the jogging paths and brown benches. As he watched, half of the sprinklers shut off and the other half sprang on, sweeping fine, pale arcs of mist across the meandering footpaths.
Any minute now.
Garret had been manning the till at the front counter a few days ago when the woman had first come to the pool. An older guard, a college guy named Tommy, had nudged Garret aside when she stepped up to the counter and asked if a week’s pass to the pool still cost ten dollars. Even Tommy had swallowed before he could reply, though Garret had to hand it to the older guard; he’d recovered far better than Garret had. His brain felt like a movie projector that had run out of film and left the ragged end of celluloid flapping noisily against its own apparatus.
She’d been wearing loose shorts and an old Berkeley sweater, but that hadn’t been the kicker. Days later, when he tried to recall the exact details of the woman’s features, he was left with only a vague impression of a tanned face framed by hair that looked like liquid gold. What lodged in his mind’s eye most firmly; the memory that reached out and shook him nearly every time he’d thought of her since, were the woman’s eyes. She’d looked at Garret over Tommy’s shoulder as the older guard had begun to turn on the charm, had winked when Tommy looked away briefly to check his hair or whatever in a nearby mirror.
What cobalt did for the color blue, her eyes did for green. Even that dusty morning, in the washed-out blue of the pool building’s office, she had been luminous.
Garret remembered the feeling of his cheeks beginning to burn, and he quickly busied himself with counting quarters in the change drawer. He noticed in passing as the other lifeguard explained the pool’s hours that he’d tightened his own pecs and stomach the instant the woman had walked in.
Tommy had finished his baritone rendition of the pool’s features and paused, trying himself for eye contact before delivering the punch line. “So if you’re new in the area I could maybe show you around town. Forge isn’t that big, but we’ve got a lot to offer in local color, y’ know?”
She’d begun to fill out the application form as he’d spoken, smiling faintly to herself. She kept Tommy there at the counter until he’d begun to fidget. Garret couldn’t tell how old she was, he realized. She looked to be close to Tommy’s age, maybe a year or two older.
“So what about it,” Tommy said. “Want to get some coffee or something?”
Those green eyes flashed up again, sparkling. She smiled as she handed back the clipboard. “Thanks, but I don’t date lifeguards anymore.”
Then she’d paid her bill and left, Tommy still leaning against the countertop.
As soon as she’d turned the corner they both had lunged for the clipboard on which her application lay. “Definitely not a local,” Tommy said. “Idaho couldn’t be so lucky.”
She was staying with her cousin, Diane Bergstrom. Garret’s neighbor, and a pool regular for years. She’d left a number for a satellite phone, proof positive of her exotic nature. And the name at the top of the application for a week’s pass to the Forge pool was like something off a movie poster.
Mercedes Adams.
And just like that, Garret had learned to love the early morning shift at the pool. He watched, rapt, as she appeared out of the trees, jogging evenly across the manicured grass. She scorned the footpaths, but always approached the pool from the same route, apparently choosing the steepest path up the little hill towards the entrance. She ran in blue cotton shorts and a matching tank, her hair pulled back in a thick ponytail, bouncing loosely against a small backpack. She doesn’t know how good she looks, he thought.
She slowed to a walk and circled the fence once, breathing deeply. Garret heard the hollow slap-slap of her steps on the wooden deck that wound from the parking lot into the locker rooms.
The Fish kids–only two boys and a girl, but loud enough for a crowd of ten--ran out onto the deck. Howling from the cold cement, they cannonballed into the six-foot area. Man, but they were noisy, Garret thought, but at least polite enough that they kept their early-morning hijinks out of everybody else’s lane. One by one they broke through the surface and began splashing one another. Garret swung his whistle up into his hand, but let it fall again. They weren’t hurting anything, and their parents would appear shortly enough and set them all to doing laps. Assuming, of course, they hadn’t drowned themselves, lost their goggles in the drain, or given each other concussions on the pool bottom by that time.
Garret’s thoughts were interrupted when she stepped out onto the deck. She wore her pink suit today, he noted. It was a sturdy two-piece that showed off her tight stomach. She passed his lifeguard tower on her way to the broader section of the pool deck, over the drain tank, where the sun had been warming the cement the longest. “‘Morning, Garret,” she smiled up at him good-naturedly, dripping. Garret managed a wave he hoped was nonchalant. He never had found out how she k
new his name.
Her back to him, the woman shook out a long towel and set about her daily routine of lower body stretches. On her first morning at the pool, before making her appearance on deck she’d taken the obligatory shower, even though there had still been a sharp chill in the air. This surprised Garret, as most people ignored the shower rule, and the lifeguards were always ambivalent about enforcing it with anyone over the age of thirteen. Garret noticed that she never deviated from her routine, nor did she seem the least bit uncomfortable or self-conscious as she worked the lactic acid from her jog out of thighs and calves that looked like they belonged on a model runway somewhere.
Even safe behind his sunglasses, Garret felt a bit like a voyeur. This is my job, he thought furtively, but all the same he had to glance away as she stretched her hamstrings. She’s so fluid, he thought, checking over the bevy of elderly women trolling blissfully toward the shallow end.
He looked back in time to see her reach back to tighten the ponytail, and admired her deltoids, like arrowheads pointing from her shoulders down either arm. She reached up and grasped the top edge of the Coke machine, leaning into a full stretch, and Garret saw her whole body ripple, from her exquisite pecs down around the sheaves of muscles that wrapped themselves about her entire frame. He wondered, as he had every morning since she appeared, why a woman so good-looking to begin with would take the time to further buff herself up. Her undeniably feminine layer of fat was a thin sheath overlaying more resilient muscle. Garret wasn’t complaining, but he had to wonder why. Why did she do it?
*
Mercedes bounced a few times on the balls of her feet, enjoying the pleasant tightening along the lines of her calves. She could feel the sun on her back. This was the best part of the ugly morning jog, she thought, stepping to the side of the pool. The indented gutter below made a rhythmic slurp-slurping sound. She slipped in, and the water was a warm envelope sliding over her chilled skin. Mmmm. Too bad Diane and Alice wouldn’t try this. Couldn’t get the girls out of bed before sunrise with a six-alarm fire, unless maybe Zac Efron, or Ryan Reynolds, or maybe Jack Flynn–hah!--was the lead fireman. Even so.
