by David Cole
He folded a set of car keys into one of my hands.
“Ford Taurus. Government car. Don’t ding the fenders.”
13
Brittles had tried to stop me from returning to my house, but I needed too much gear. My Mac titanium laptop, some special software and data backed up on CDs, and my running shoes and some clean underwear. But when I got there, Rich was waiting.
“Can we talk about things?” Rich asked.
“Not tonight.”
“When?”
I hoped he’d go out for a walk or clean the fridge or wash the dishes again.
“Why?” he asked.
“Rich, I don’t know what to say.”
“Maybe…we could just talk. We could find out what you don’t know. Talking’s good, you know.”
“What would we talk about, if I don’t know what to say?”
“Things.”
“Things,” I said to myself.
“Yeah. What you’re feeling. What’s happening.”
“Between us, you mean.”
“Well, yeah,” he said. “What’s happening between us.”
“Nothing’s happening, Rich.”
“It’s that guy, isn’t it?”
“What guy?”
“The fed, the whatever he is. Who brought you to the excavations.”
“He’s nothing,” I said
“Yeah. I saw you looking at him.”
“Rich. Please. Nothing’s happening between us.”
“I know,” he said reluctantly. “That’s how I feel, too.”
“This has nothing to do with you, Rich.”
“Bullshit! It has everything to do with me.”
Angry, he started to straighten up the bookshelf, caught himself doing that, swiveled his head in wide circles, trying to loosen up his neck muscles, trying to loosen up his attitude so he’d gain control of his emotions enough to start talking to me again. But I didn’t give him the chance. I went out on the patio, went down through the lemon trees to the place where Don had seen me half naked, just a short time ago.
Years ago, I thought. In another life.
An open bottle of cabernet sauvignon sat on the wooden table. I drank from the bottle, scarcely breathing the first time I held it to my lips. Cradling the bottle between my thighs, I sat there for a long, long time. Sunset, sundown, twilight, evening, dark.
There are few cities in the world with such dark nights. Decades before, Tucson adopted special zoning ordinances that prohibited street lighting because of all the astronomy telescopes in the surrounding area. My rented house sat in a newer developed area, but even with zoning variances the builders and developers informally agreed to not install streetlights.
I could see the night stars, the evening and morning planets.
I sat there all night, emptying the wine bottle, moving only to go up to the house to the bathroom and get more wine. At some point I fell asleep and awoke with moonlight on my face.
I showered, ate some Total and blueberries without soy milk, trying to decide how I was going to handle my life. Mostly, I didn’t know what to think, let alone what to do, about dealing with my daughter.
Five in the morning.
Finally, I decided to run and run, to avoid thinking and just listen to hiphop. I laced up one of my favorite pairs of New Balance 990s, stretched for ten minutes, and started out on one of my familiar routes among the quiet streets. I loved running in the Tucson foothills because of the constant up-and-down pacing, which gave me the chance to work all kinds of muscle groups. Your ankle, if you think at all about how it moves, lets your foot be perpendicular to your leg if you’re on the flat. Start uphill, the angle changes to less than ninety degrees. Go downhill, the angle is more than ninety degrees. A small thing to most people, probably a nothing thing. To an extreme runner, it’s important to keep all the muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints well aligned and working right.
I ran for two hours, probably seven or eight miles, my MP3 player moving from alternate hiphop to my own tracks. I mouthed the words to all of them, tinkered with my rhyming schemes and the words in combination and alone.
Turning finally into the street that led to my house, I gradually became aware that I’d seen the same red and metallic gray motorcycle at least three or four times, the rider crouched low on the seat, leaning forward, knees tucked in and pointing ahead. I watched the rider take a corner at a fairly high speed, saw the bike lean over, a booted foot extended to just above the pavement in case the bike leaned too far.
Inside my house, I stripped off my running gear and took a shower. My water pressure was low, so I could hear Sunset’s paws as he ran back and forth from the front door to the patio door. Toweling dry, I couldn’t remember if I’d left either of them open. I put on clean panties and a running bra, pulled up some green workout shorts to go out on the patio and begin some free weight workouts. I checked that the front door was shut and locked, went into the kitchen, and saw the helmeted biker looking at me ten feet beyond the patio sliding screen. Sunlight glinted off the face mask of the biker’s helmet. I thought he was distracted, so I jumped toward the heavy glass door to slide it shut and lock it, but the biker quickly ripped off the helmet with one hand and raised a .40 chromed Llama with the other.
Hispanic, young, male, hardly more than a boy, these things registered in the same instant he pointed the gun at me and triggered off half a clip as I dived toward the left wall, thinking it would give me some protection, but the heavy slugs ripped easily through the annulated stucco exterior and the Sheetrock. Sunset put his nose against the screen, growling, and the boy must have moved the Llama toward Sunset, who scrabbled backward and out of the kitchen as the boy emptied his clip. I heard the snick of the clip release, realized that sliding the heavy glass door shut would give me no protection at all, and wondered if I could get my shotgun out of the bedroom closet in time, wondered if it was even loaded, knew I’d left four double-ought slugs in the storage slots of the stock. Bunching my body like a runner about to explode into a one-hundred-yard dash, I launched myself past the window to see the boy smile when I appeared, another clip just sliding home in the gun. But Sunset charged into the kitchen, barely slowing as he crashed effortlessly through the screen door and in just two bounds started working the boy’s throat in his jaws. I skittered down the hallway, found the Mossberg shotgun, loaded the four slugs into the tube, and came back to the kitchen to watch the boy wrestle Sunset, twisting backward so both of them fell to the ground, and in the same fluid motion, as they were falling, the Llama wrenched across the boy’s body to fire two bullets across Sunset’s back. He howled with pain, letting go of the boy’s throat, trying to lick at his back. I stood at the screen, pumping the shotgun to load a shell, unable to shoot because Sunset moved back and forth in front of the boy, who saw me pointing the shotgun at him, his Llama out of position to shoot me but he fired it anyway, smashing bits and pieces off the ramada poles and thatched roofing, the noise startling me so that I pulled the shotgun trigger without aiming, blowing a hole in a potted agave. The boy leapt to his feet and ran around the house. I lunged through the shredded screen door, saw that Sunset’s wounds were only minor, pumped another shell home thinking, Three, I’ve got three left, and started around the corner of the house, but before I got to the front yard I heard the motorcycle start up fifty feet away. I stood in the middle of the street, aiming at the back of the bike, letting off two shells, but he wove the bike from side to side, moving quickly up through the gears and going so fast that his bike started a wheelie before he leaned forward and brought the bike down to the pavement and cut a sharp left onto a cross street and out of sight.
I could hear the bike another street over, and thinking he might come back I ran into the house for more shells. But the roar slowly faded as the biker went out of the neighborhood in the direction of Tanque Verde Road.
I wasted no time. Gathering up my laptop, I shoved it into a backpack, tore my dresser drawers open, onto
the floor, grabbing whatever clothes were on top, cramming the clothes down on the laptop, slinging the backpack over one shoulder before I went out back to find Sunset. She’d already decided her wounds weren’t severe, although I could see two shallow trenches cut right through the hair and skin, each wound at least two inches long and deep enough to continue bleeding. I clucked my tongue with the Come sound, led Sunset to my pickup, where she jumped immediately into the bed. I headed out the driveway, turning in the opposite direction from where the bike had gone, and finally worked my way to I-10 north, heading to Phoenix.
At Picacho Peak I pulled off the road to make a call to a vet I knew in Casa Grande, and after dropping off Sunset, I sat in the parking lot for an hour, deep breathing, waiting for a panic anxiety attack, always happened to me before in a crisis, I’d be cruising at the speed limit, confident, secure, knowing exactly where I was going and all of a sudden my heart’s pushing down the accelerator of a Shelby Cobra Mustang and I’m running in the red here, I’m way beyond safe RPMs, my anxiety swinging toward the peg and ready to blow.
I could blow any second.
But the attack never happened.
Gradually, my pulse rate slowed back to normal. I fiddled with the car radio, looking for a hiphop station, wanting the familiar and wonderful energy as a backbeat so I could work out a plan. It seemed ages since I’d listened to hiphop.
Finding no stations I wanted, I went through some of my own raps, ending with a few more lines to my latest.
So I’m taking small steps with my eyes on
The western horizon
Even when the sun’s rising I’m trying
To envision a sunset that hasn’t come yet
And a truth that I’ve been denying
On a path that I’ve been defying
As I pass another butterfly flying
I called Brittles and told him I’d be at his house in twenty minutes, told him all about the biker with the chrome Llama.
Ten minutes after I got there, we tumbled into his bed.
14
“I have to tell you,” he said. “Any relationship that begins under extreme emotional duress is doomed to failure.”
“Keanu Reeves to Sandra Bullock. Speed.”
I thought of Rey Villanueva’s inability to discuss anything emotional unless he related it to something in a movie.
“Seemed like a good line to use,” he said. “But it was just a movie. I think when he says that, after they’ve escaped from the bus, the airplane blows up, she says something like, ‘Okay, I guess we’ll have to base things on sex.’”
“I like your house,” I said. “I like you.”
“You’re a little drunk.”
“I’m a lot drunk. I’m a lot tired.”
“At least you’re relaxed.”
“I work at that. I know how to deal with stress without taking drugs.”
“Just a bottle of chardonnay.”
“I like your house.”
“So do I. When I settle in here, it gives me a root vegetable feeling.”
“Root vegetables,” I said. “I like that. Kind of a root cellar mode, except I hate root cellars, they get me to thinking of how those old pioneers got truly depressed when all they had was life in a root cellar. Especially the women.”
“Aah, no.” Brittles frowned. “I don’t think of it as the root cellar. More like…like actual growing root vegetables. Carrots. Beets. Turnips.”
“Rutabagas.”
“Potatoes.”
“Potatoes?” I asked.
“Yeah. Potatoes.”
“Isn’t a potato a starch?”
“Whatever. We’re not talking actual things here, we’re talking a concept.”
“Roots in the ground,” I said. “But not in a sterile cellar.”
“Roots underground, storing up energy and sweetness for eventual harvest and creative combination. I get that way, sometimes. When I get weary of being manic, when my head is ready to explode, I hibernate.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”
“It’s a very active, if quiet, stage for me. It’s actually just as manic as the other stage, but the action is all below the surface. I’m not sure why I hibernate.”
“I turn off my phones. Turn off the lights. Turn on the TV, mostly. But no sound. Just the visual.”
“The visual.” He worked at the thought, agreed. “Yeah, I guess. Like when I watch movies to study the continuity.”
It’s like, left brain, right brain. Left brain logic, language, listen to the sound. Right brain, not logic at all, but symbols, patterns. Really different. If I have the sound one, sometimes I don’t even look at the picture. Sound off, I get sucked into the visuals. I don’t want to be distracted in any way.
“No. I mean entirely visual. I watch in the dark, sometimes. But we’re both seeing things without the sound on. So why do we do that?”
“There’s clearly some research or information-gathering agenda here, or maybe just a rabid curiosity, but it’s totally typical for me. I can neither really explain nor justify it. I know a lot about physics. The big bang, creation myths, other universes.”
“For me, it just is.” I sat up. “It’s the way I learn things.”
“Like a sponge, right?”
“A sponge?”
“Yeah. Like a sponge.”
“You soak things up. I see that, like a sponge.”
“Maybe thinking is more like devouring good food. I have a quick mind, so stringing the learning experience out over a long period of time feels torturous and frustrating. I do better with total immersion.”
“And when you come out on the other side, you’re new in some way and ready to tackle things again. Right?”
“Right. You go underground, you come out refreshed.”
“Underground. Maybe underwater?”
“Water?”
“Yeah. You used the word…‘immersion.’”
“Oh, I see it. Sounds like baptism, doesn’t it? Odd, because there is a kind of religious fervor to it.”
“In a small way,” I said, “it’s also why I occasionally look at tarot cards or I Ching readings. I don’t want answers from them because that’s for the psychic hot lines. But by studying what’s revealed and using it as a backboard for my own explorations, I can often work out solutions or else find new directions.”
“So if you had some tarot cards right now—”
He pronounced it to rhyme with carrot.
“Tear-oh.”
“So if you had them. If you were reading them.”
“Right now?”
“Now.”
“I don’t have any with me.”
“But if you did have them, if you were reading them.”
“Uhhh,” I said. “Where are you going with this?”
“Here,” he said, kissing me.
“Oh.”
“And here.”
“This is, like, so clichéd,” I said, “like, so Hollywood. You’ve seen too many fake love scenes to believe those clichés really work.”
I touched the back of his hand, touched the side of his neck, right on the main artery, felt his pulse thumping, his neck warm, just inside his blood running wild up and down his head, around his arteries and veins and capillaries, the wonder of the human body.
“It’s so complicated,” I said, thinking of how the body worked.
“Not so complicated,” he whispered, misunderstanding me and touching my breasts. “How about here? Let me tell you some more about the big bang theory.”
Oh. Drop out the bottom of the frame. Fade to the next morning.
I caught Brittles’s face, lying sideways on the pillow, eyes shut, lips open and relaxed as he breathed. It was the first time I’d seen him so relaxed. No vertical furrows on his forehead between the eyes, sleep even softening the lines which runneled down from the sides of his nose to the corners of his lips. I realized he was the kind of person who had to compose a business face, probably
a Law face, tighten things down, form a skin barrier against showing emotions, eyes narrowed with a private, encoded life force and lips that would never reveal it.
A face so guarded it reminded me of mine.
15
But in the morning, after a dozen phone calls, he was all business.
“Here’s the deal,” he said. “I’m not even going to explain most of this. I’ve got two major caseloads. One of them involves you and your daughter and the credit card scam. The other has something to do with all those bones you saw yesterday. And with a dead girl, down in Tucson. I think they’re connected. But I’ve got to work both cases. So here’s what we’re going to do with your daughter, and don’t argue with me because I’ve been calling in favors and making payoff promises all morning. Tomorrow, you and I will go to the Florence prison complex. To that call center, where you’ll try to figure out how information is getting out.”
“And my daughter?”
“She’s got to help me in another way. I’ve arranged to transfer her from the Perryville prison to a troubled teenager boot camp that’s only a few miles north of the Florence complex.”
“That’s ridiculous. That’s not even close to what I’ll allow.”
“Yes, you will,” he said. “You work the prison, your daughter will work inside this boot camp for me.”
“Why? What will she be doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do know!” I shouted. “No deal.”
“We discovered all those bones because of a young girl who was in the camp. That girl was murdered yesterday in Tucson.”
“Whoa,” I shrieked, “just goddam whoa right there. If somebody from the camp was just murdered, you’re not sending my daughter in there.”
“Only way,” he said. “You can come to it now or later. But until you get your head around accepting this agreement, your daughter stays in federal prison.”
“I’m going back to my house. In Tucson.”
“Think carefully about what I’ve said.”
“You’re using me, Nathan.”
“Yes. I am. But just think about getting your daughter out of prison.”
Brittles told me of the bikers who killed Theresa Prejean and a U.S. Marshal, and connected the bikers somehow with the Rapture Warriors Camp. With the biker at my home.
