by Boston Teran
The big man in the booth saw something right beside him. He looked up. There was Paul with that partly drunk mug of beer. He was all teeth and tight fox eyes. Whatever the big man was thinking or feeling he just looked away and kept on talking.
As he did, Caruso grabbed the phone. For a second the big man stared at his empty hand. Then he looked up again, this time adjusting his glasses. As he did, as he was about to speak, Caruso dropped the phone into the mug of beer.
It made a short kerplunk and hit bottom. Paul hoisted the glass and guzzled down the beer in thick, gruff swallows. And when he was done he let the cellular drop into his mouth and he began to chew on the top end of it like you would that worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle.
Done, Caruso set the glass down. The big man could only stare at the glass, at the badly chewed cellular, at the beer and saliva that trickled down the mug rim. He looked up at Paul, who wore this glint of classless pride.
"You're very sick," said the big man.
"Certifiable," answered Caruso.
The big man got up and squeezed past Paul. He wasn't sure if he was going to be hit next but he just kept repeating "You're sick!"
When he got to the coffee shop doorway Caruso called to him, "Hey, you forgot your phone!"
Paul came around to face Dane and Essie's booth. He had burned off a little bad energy and was ready to try out another dose of reason, but Dane wasn't there.
* * *
FENN SLIPPED away from the small clique of pilots when he saw Dane under the archway to The Burrow. Dane moved out onto the grass and Fenn joined him by a huge California oak along the walk path.
"What was that message in a bottle meant to really say?"
"My brother likes to riot. He walks around with rumors in his head about what people have done to him and planning out pay-backs."
Dane went to light a cigarette. The wind was blowing so badly he had to cup his hands around the match to keep the flame alive. Fenn even tried to help by cupping his hands around Dane's.
"We're working to make a life here." Fenn glanced toward The Burrow window where Essie sat watching. "You too."
"Is this your 'Why can't we all get along' speech?"
"It's a good idea. I don't want my brother going predator."
"You show me yours, and I'll show you mine."
Tommy Fenn thought, This is one arrogant prick I would love to bitch down. "I'm trying to work the mood. Take a breath, give it a chance."
One of the men Tommy had crossed the tarmac with called to him. Tommy waved and said, "A minute here." He was waiting on Dane's answer.
"I can do a holding pattern," said Dane.
"Good enough. And I'll keep my brother grounded."
Tommy started away and Dane asked, "Hey, how was your trip down to Tehachapi?"
Tommy said nothing but he knew. The shit was gonna give you a taste. Just enough to try and tempt you.
Chapter Forty-One
CARUSO WAS BY the register getting ready to seat the next grouping when Dane reentered The Burrow by way of the coffee shop door. Caruso took hold of Dane and pulled him aside. Referring to that conversation he witnessed with Tommy Fenn, Caruso said, "It's like a drug, ain't it."
"Better," said Dane.
"Fuck." Caruso jammed the menus he was carrying right at and into Dane's chest. "You got a little trace of the gangsta in you, hunh."
There was meant to be a heeded intent in the way he emphasized the word "gangsta."
"It's one of my inherent blemishes," said Dane.
* * *
WHEN DANE sat back down in the booth Essie handed him her pager.
"A message just came to me, for you."
"Nathan?"
"No."
Dane read the tiny screen as the message scrolled through. It was from Charles Gill. He wanted to meet at the bank tomorrow. First thing.
* * *
NATHAN WAS torn between what he knew to be true and what he needed to be true and whether he could work his will on them to be one and the same as he told Ivy, "It will be all right."
She tried to right herself in bed. The room was still dark behind drawn curtains, her voice touched by a groggy uncertainness as she leaned against the stacked pillows and asked, "He knows, and it's all right?"
"He knows, and it's all right."
Her mouth was dry. "How did you manage it?"
He was unsure he entirely had and only answered, "I appealed to his sense of loyalty. And he's hungry as any of us for a life to really workout."
"Money?"
"He's got his own baggage."
"Meaning?"
He explained Dane's response to his offer by detailing for Ivy the pure risk Dane took in desperation after his accident and how it had gotten him thrown out of Princeton.
She listened, her shadowed face too exhausted for any extraordinary expression. She responded, the words cracking against the dry inside of her mouth, "I can see now."
Could she see, or was this just a need to not see? Nathan felt as if Ivy were speaking from a passive stupor where anything he decided was decisive enough for her to believe.
"Nathan, please get me some water."
He rose. In one corner of the bedroom was a free standing bar. As he handed her the bottle of water, Ivy asked, "Are you certain we're safe with him?"
While she drank he said, "We're safe."
She did not hear his truncated answer. And Nathan, he stood there and considered, was he confronting his own courage by doing this, was he throwing a gauntlet in the face of his own guilt?
Nathan was hungry for some ultimate legacy, something that would carry past the wakes of his life. But he also knew there is, in each of us, a place where resides an eternal antagonist who remains untouched by any virtue.
"I called Charles on my way back from Lathrop."
Ivy stopped drinking. Her eyes blinked fitfully. "Why? You didn't discuss any of this with him, did you?"
* * *
DANE HAD no answer for Essie.
"Do you think you should tell Nathan that Charles called?"
"No."
They lay on Essie's couch side by side. Her head was cradled in his arm, on his chest her hand rested. They watched the dusk rise like a slow tide up the wall then across the ceiling. They watched shadows form around details that then merged with darkness. They listened to music from an apartment across that alley of a street. They heard the noises of life through the open balcony doors and a mobile dance out chime songs close by.
Essie thought about what Sancho Maria had said in the bar, but her look, touched as it was by a grave and palpable honesty, had deeply affected her. The world, Essie felt lying there, could threaten her freedom, her life. And she needed more than ever human meaning.
"Have you ever loved someone?" she whispered.
Dane's eyes moved slowly away from her. "No."
"Could you… love someone?"
His eyes moved slowly toward her. "I used to feel pity for my mother and father because their relationship had been such a masterpiece of failure. And my father, he was incapable of any real connection, right up until the end. But it wasn't pity I felt."
"Anger… was that it?"
"It was fear," he said. "That they… he really… cast a shadow over who and what I am." Dane paused. To Essie, his face changed, as if some curtain opened, however briefly, and everything shunned or hidden, everything painful or frightening, at the edge of a stage to one's life, had shown through. "They do, you know. At least he does, and in ways I can't speak of, won't speak of. I can only say Nathan pales beside him. And I want you to know that even if I am not completely open with you, I am trying to be honest about what is inside me."
With that he became quiet, with that she slipped her leg across his and cheated a bit by stretching her neck so their faces made one shadow.
"Have you ever been afraid," she asked, "that love could overwhelm you? Truly overwhelm you."
"Why shouldn't it… if everything e
lse can."
He knew, as she knew, they would sleep together. That after making love they would cling to each other in naked silence. That they would do as all people do and try to surrender to the truth of the other, to shore up any doubt that existed within themselves.
They also knew in that quiet night-filled room they would try to find safety, even as they defied safety.
Chapter Forty-Two
DAMON ROMERO TOLD the Fenns by phone to be at their place at ten o'clock Sunday night and not for one fuckin' minute to question or consider otherwise. That was all he said.
* * *
THE MEADOWS at that time of the year, at that hour of the night, on that particular night of the week was dead to the world.
Romero boated in. The Fenns had a rudimentary shack which extended backup from the dock in a gypsy fabrication of add-ons and extensions, some clap board, some cinder block. The dock squared around two sides of the house. Strewn about the property were all kinds and classes of nautical parts, airplane parts, the wingless hull of a scratch built Wag-Aero. It was the priceless debris of the mechanic and scavenger. All of which cast a keepish tableau of shapes and slants against the moonlight.
The house windows were half open and Romero could see the Fenns in those patches of yellow light and when they heard his boat coming Tommy Fenn crossed the living room and opened the front door.
Romero tied off and came up the dock silently. Tommy's silhouette waited in the doorway smoking a joint. Tommy was worried about what was behind all that bad attitude he'd been given on the phone, and as Romero approached Tommy put out his hand to shake.
"Get that fuckin' hand away from me," said Romero.
The few other lights on the slough stood out at various desolate angles and heights and were separated by long stands of trees and space so there was little chance of witnessing anything ugly that might happen.
* * *
SHANE WAS sitting at the dining room table with a beer and a cigarette. He was working through a snake pile of wire bundles tying them off with cockpit lacing. Romero stopped in the middle of the room. Tommy closed the front door behind them. The place was pure bachelor white trash that had seen a few pay-scale hikes along the way. It smelled of beer and pot. On the dining room table were airplane console wires that Shane had been cutting. There was a CD player going in the living room and a television on in the kitchen.
"What's with the crackdown, Romeo?"
He cut Shane a stare. "You know why I'm here." He did the same to Tommy. "So you better cop to it right off."
The two brothers had nothing to say. Romero went over and hit every button on the CD player to get the damn thing shut off. He walked past Shane to the kitchen and did the same with the television.
Tommy wanted to know, "What is this?"
Romero came around the dining room table and swiped at the tools and wires sending them all over the floor. "We want the jewels back."
He stood where he could see both brothers' faces and the tautology of their astonished stares back and forth between each other only made Romero all the more belligerently enraged.
"Did you think they weren't going to find out? That you could just skim a few off the top and no one would know? That they just filled up a jar and rounded off the number to the closest ten?"
Tommy put a hand up to stop Romero. All traces of calm on Tommy's face were gone. "Damon—"
Romero spewed out phrases in Spanish they couldn't understand. He yanked the dining room table up then dropped it down. Shane grabbed for the spilling beer, his cigarette tumbled out of the ashtray.
"Merton called me tonight. He didn't say anything when he was here making the count 'cause he wasn't certain and he wanted to be sure he had the numbers right before he opened that door. But he called Mexico and got the word. You stupid fuckers, thinking you could pull a scam like that.
"Eight cut diamonds. That's almost a hundred thousand dollars. You guys are gonna have to turn it over. These people Charles deals with, they're not white boy tough. They are into a whole other zone. And they take their empire very seriously." Romero began to pace the room repeating again and again "You have no idea. No idea."
Tommy sat in the cloth chair. He put his hand on the top of an empty beer can and started talking gunfire fast. "Why would we do it? We have it all working here. And we know it could fuck you up. We took that box from the hangar when we got it and we drove right to the bar and you were with us from there on. We never touched the thing. We didn't go near it."
Romero shouted him down. "You went into the box, right! You opened it up, right!"
"We never—"
As if he were repeating a tape, Romero threw back in Tommy's face what Shane had told him about Rudd showing with the box, with them opening it 'cause he said it had fallen, and the confrontation after. "Unless that was all a fantasy," said Romero. He turned to Shane. "Was it a fantasy?"
Shane couldn't, wouldn't dare look at Tommy. And Tommy, he hated his brother at that moment more than anything on the face of the earth. If he could have just walked over there and opened a vein he would have, and let that shit mouth just bleed to death.
"Why blame us?" said Tommy. "Why not blame Merton? Or maybe they fucked up the count. Maybe it was delivered short."
Romero shook his head in abject disgust. "I heard your shit talk in the bar, all right. And I just want to know after you two got to be lead studs where was I, hunh!?"
A silence fell over that small room with its low ceiling. Tommy's mouth clipped open as if it had just been injured.
"That was just trash talk," said Shane.
"No?" Romero shook his head and started for the door.
"We didn't pull a rip. Damon—!" Shane sounded as if he were pleading to be believed.
Romero was standing over Tommy Fenn, Fenn was staring down at his black ankle-high work boots. He looked like a prizefighter who had been pounded right down to his roots. Romero kicked the chair and Tommy's head sprung up.
"Do you realize what could happen if Nathan knew I was connected to you and Charles? Don't you think he might wonder how it was I ended up at Disappointment Slough the night you went to off his kid?"
"The kid shot himself," said Shane.
As Romero crossed the room to leave Tommy stood. "I swear," he said, "I swear we did not pull some rip. I swear to fuckin' God."
"I can hold off till tomorrow telling Charles. After that—"
Chapter Forty-Three
THE PEOPLE'S BANK of Rio Vista was one of the oldest and longest standing banks in Central California history. And one that was still family owned.
There was a private open mezzanine that Charles used as a waiting room for his guests. And here Dane watched the comings and goings on the bank floor while Charles took a call on his cellular from Damon Romero.
* * *
DANE HAD never been in the bank before, but everything about it, the bare redbrick walls and silver Wells Fargo safe, the venerated landscapes of California done in oils and the antique pioneer furnishings gave every ritual the perfect touch of correctness.
Dane leaned against the railing and watched the daily business of small proceedings. Faces approached the teller windows in the secret process of their lives, those that were struggling by inches for personal survival, or confronting the rates of a loan, the inability to get credit, and savings accounts depleted by taxes, school bills and illness.
How easy it is to become a captive to the show. To believe that there is, in what you see, some form of validated idealism. From the bank itself steeped in motifs to draw out your emotions, to the faces themselves. It was all there, in a form that invalidated science and logic.
And as Dane watched these people go about the basics of existence, just beyond their reach the business of centuries was being played out.
* * *
CHARLES GILL was in his private office bathroom facing down rank fear. The shifting plates of stomach muscles contracted again and again, each time with multipli
ed intensity but he held back the vomit. He would not allow his insides to completely turn against him.
He stared at his face in the mirror. The skin cadaverous pale, the eyes watered from the gagging. It was a stark but honest revelation of what he was staring at, both internally and externally.
He turned on the faucet and bathed his face with cold water. He told himself that he would confront and correct this disaster. And not be destroyed by it. He hit himself with every hostile comment Claudia had made. That he was a minor player in his own life, strictly background. That he was not strong enough, smart enough, brave enough. That it had been she herself who had seen to it he was busted all those years ago, as a way of compromising him.
He drank down every insult as if they were warm blood that would give him the strength to see through to his own survival.
* * *
I'M SORRY to have kept you waiting."
Dane turned to face a warm clean smile. He and Charles shook hands. Charles' hand was unflatteringly cold.
* * *
CHARLES' OFFICE had been the General's until Philip Morris helped clear a way for the next generation. On the office walls now were guitars of famous artists that covered the arc of music from Sun House to Stevie Ray Vaughn. They were enshrined in airtight cases with the names of each pickman scripted onto a gold miniguitar beneath the instrument that had once been theirs.
It was to Dane's thinking, the ego goin' graveyard for support, but he said "It's a collector's dream" as he walked Charles' wall of fame, "but, it might have a touch of the bittersweet, if you felt that part of your life got away."
* * *
CHARLES SAT at his desk and swiveled around to face Dane, who stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling picture window taking in a view of Sacramento where the morning sun left troughs of light on the undisturbed river.
"Funny you should phrase it like that," Charles said. "Over the last few days I've been going through quite a revelation on this very subject."
Dane came around the desk. He sat in the same chair and pulled it up to almost the same spot as had Taylor those few days before he died.
