A Shadow on the Sun

by Francis Cottam

  ‘Is that you, ’Tasha? Are you up?’

  ‘Hi, you guys,’ she said.

  ‘What are you eating?’

  ‘Rye toast,’ she said. ‘Yogurt. Grapefruit juice.’ She took a sip of Coke. You could justify it in revolutionary terms. She took a bite of her sandwich and peanut butter and blackcurrant jelly oozed from between the layers of bread in her mouth. In revolutionary terms, she was liberating the kitchen.

  Her mother’s voice grew hushed again. ‘It was the lack of hope that appalled him. He spoke to men of forty who think they will never work again because of their age. He spoke to men in their twenties who will have to leave young families and move elsewhere if they are to get jobs. He wants to help them. He doesn’t just want change, he has a vision of change, a vision for America.’

  ‘You should write his speeches.’

  This time her mother didn’t laugh. ‘He writes his own speeches. He speaks a lot off the cuff. Schlesinger and Sorensen polish the phrases. I help with the structure, that’s all. He wants rapprochement with Russia, Bill. He wants to bring the Cold War to an end. Can you think of another candidate with the brains and courage to accomplish that? With the will?’

  There was a silence.

  ‘What do you think of him?’

  ‘I think he’s the best hope we’ve got,’ Bill said.

  The bus ride to New York was easily the worst part of Natasha’s journey to Europe. Salt rime from the frozen roads splashed and stuck halfway up the bus windows and above that was only a blear of dripping condensation on cold glass. There wasn’t enough light to read by. It was hard to doze against the stiff collar of her winter coat. Most of the interesting conversationalists in the party spent the ride zonked out on reefer at the rear of the bus. And the driver tuned to a series of stations that played exactly the same sorts of songs by a series of identical artists. So it was Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers and Doris Day and Patsy Cline. Her own album of the moment was Kind of Blue, by Miles Davis. Jazz was big at her school, where the girls thought John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk infinitely cooler than Elvis crooning his way through ‘I Ain’t Got a Wooden Heart’. She had a soft spot for Frank, of course. She’d grown up with him. Her favourite album of his was Only the Lonely, one of his gloomiest sets. It had this European feel that was in total contrast to the albums usually arranged for him by Nelson Riddle. She wouldn’t have said so out loud, but there was something almost existential about the mood and atmosphere of Only the Lonely. You could not have said that about Bobby Darren or Little Richard or any of the rock and rollers. It had more in common with the Jacques Brel and Charles Aznavour recordings her mother listened to. She had school friends who thought Frank Sinatra was all golf slacks and corny Vegas schtick. But they hadn’t met him. Natasha had. And if Frank wasn’t cool, then the word didn’t have any meaning.

  They took the boat train from Le Havre to Paris and it was deeply thrilling, when they changed for the sleeper, just to hear the porters on the platform shouting and gesticulating at one another in French. They walked in a file through the streets between stations. Everything smelled different and the scents of tobacco and coffee and baking bread seemed to give the light itself an antique quality. There was a burnish to Paris, a magic-lantern glow. Aboard the sleeper, she watched the city disappear into its own suburbs, transfixed by just how foreign everything looked. Then they were in a landscape of flat fields stunted by winter cloud and sheets of intermittent rain. Exhausted by the crossing and the excitement, Natasha crawled between laundered sheets and slept for ten solid hours. When she awoke, they were east of Zurich, approaching the Austrian border.

  Bill drove her mother to the airport in his Jeep. It was a sunny day in October in California and so the Jeep wasn’t that eccentric a choice. He’d changed into a fresh shirt from a duffel bag in the Jeep and didn’t look like Clark Kent caught out anymore. He didn’t appear in the slightest hungover. Her mother wore a headscarf and sunglasses for the trip, perhaps in stylistic homage to the woman bidding to become first lady, Natasha thought. But probably because the sun was reflecting off the road and the Jeep was roofless. Having seen her cycling attire, having seen her cycle, Natasha actually thought her mother one of the least vain people she knew. But she was tall and slim and possessed hauteur and she was beautiful. Her lack of vanity was an absence she could afford. As Bill drove and chatted to her mother, Natasha sat behind them and pondered on the conversation she had overheard at breakfast.

  She had been to the Kennedy compound and had seen first hand the properties people grew so excited about in Jack. Once, walking on the seashore, she had seen a shadow eclipsing hers and blinked into the light to see him smiling at her there, quite alone.

  They had walked along the beach together and discussed sophomore subjects like music and film and fiction. Discussed them in the self-conscious, sophomore manner. She had found him knowledgeable and funny. But there was this other thing, too. You found yourself hanging on his every word and gesture and storing them as if in some archival memory of immense importance and impending value. She even inventoried what it was he was wearing (pale pleated shorts, white shirt with the sleeves precisely rolled, canvas boat shoes). And the whole process was something that seemed to dictate itself and its imperatives to her, as though she were helpless to prevent herself from logging every urgent detail of the encounter. Why am I doing this? she felt like screaming at herself. I’m not impressed with your voting record in the senate, Mr John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I’m angry that you stayed silent throughout the whole McCarthyite debacle. Your father was a Nazi appeaser. Yet as they reached the end of the strand and she watched his tall figure ripple and disappear into heat shimmer, she knew it was something she would boast about to her grandchildren. I met Jack Kennedy. I knew him. I didn’t know him very well, but yes, I knew him. I did.

  They said goodbye to her mother at the terminal and Bill suggested he could take Natasha for a drive and maybe a picnic in the hills.

  ‘No booze, Bill. No stopping off at wayside taverns.’

  ‘No booze,’ Bill said. ‘I promise.’

  ‘And she has to eat something nutritious for lunch. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich washed down with cola isn’t a dietary regime she’s going to thrive on.’

  ‘How—’

  ‘She’s your mother, hon,’ Bill said. ‘She knows everything.’

  But her mother looked sad again now, solitary with her overnight bag slung over her shoulder and her eyes hidden behind her sunglasses. Natasha listened to the Tannoy as it sent some piece of travel information echoing off the hard shapes and surfaces of the terminal building. She thought Tannoy announcements the bleakest of soundtracks. Her mother leant forward and they embraced. ‘I love you, ’Tasha.’

  With Bill, she watched her walk away towards her airplane. Off to join the Kennedy coterie of Lem Billings and Chuck Spalding and Grant Stockdale and Bob Troutman and Sarge Shriver. And Larry O’Brien and Kenny O’Donnell and Teddy and Bobby. And their father, Joe. Jesus, she thought. And people called Sinatra’s friends the clan and the Rat Pack.

  ‘Bandit country, kid,’ Bill said. ‘That’s where we’re headed. Rattlesnakes. Prickly cactus. Mean varmints. Oh, my.’

  But he was watching her mother, the humour expressed merely by rote, by tradition, a look of concern and impossible tenderness on his face.

  She hurt her ankle on the sixth day of skiing, more out of ambition than ineptitude. Down at the ski station they were concerned to ferry her to a hospital and have the ankle X-rayed at enormous expense. They were thinking dollars and rich Americans, Natasha thought. The joint was bruised, the ligaments tender when she touched the area. But there was nothing torn or broken. She had gone up with a guide, skins on her skis for the climbing part, and descended too fast through a narrow, demanding chute. She’d fallen. She wasn’t dead or even crippled. She had over-reached herself, that was all. A few days and it would be okay. But she didn’t want to risk cabin fever sitting in thei
r cuckoo-clock hotel and she couldn’t settle down with Camus or Kerouac in the mountains. So she decided that she would take the bus to Innsbruck and visit the crystal museum her mother had recommended before their short-lived falling out.

  She had taken the cable car to get high on their peak with the guide. And then they had walked, climbing sideways on, using the traction given by the skins attached to their skis. Then at a certain gradient, they had taken off their skis and strapped them to their small backpacks, kicking foot holes in the frozen snow and continuing upwards on all fours. They reached an elevation where they were higher than some of the surrounding mountains. She saw peaks subsumed by cloud and suddenly freed again. She saw scats of snow on granite peaks powder in the wind. The cluster of mountains around them seemed close enough to touch. She felt party to the secrets of their colossal height and strange contours. She felt strangely privileged, exalted, to be so high among them. But she was also gasping with the thin air of altitude and when she turned to look at him, her guide looked alarmed at the place they had achieved. He pointed down. The gesture was urgent. He had no English.

  Natasha paused to look around. They were in the mountains between Innsbruck and Landeck, north of the Brenner Pass that crossed through the Alps to Italy. To the west, in Switzerland, rose the great peaks. Mont Blanc. The Matterhorn. The granite ramparts of the Jungfrau. She would like to climb them, one day, she thought. There was something vast and intimate about the challenge of the mountains. You didn’t conquer them. That was a lazy fallacy. You clung for your life to their fissures and ledges and cracks and if they respected your skill and your nerve you survived them. It was something she would like to learn and accomplish. One day she would have to find somebody to teach her.

  Her guide was gesturing frenziedly and then putting his finger to his lips so she wouldn’t play the bellowing American. It was not a time of the year when avalanches were common. She had read that they occurred mostly in the spring. But as he pointed upwards, to heavy banks of snow rising in scalloped ridges on the steep plain above them, that was clearly his concern. The snow banks were wind sculpted and massive, like the piled grey hulls of gigantic boats. And they were creaking. She pointed her skis down and descended nimbly for a thousand metres before falling and hurting her ankle. She lay in the snow and could tell by the rueful expression on her guide’s face and the relaxed way in which he shed his poles and removed his gloves and goggles that the danger was behind them. He nodded at the hurt ankle and said something in German. She didn’t understand him. She thought the language harsh sounding. But then she could not easily separate spoken German from its harsh associations. Austria had been German. This had been Germany, then. It was less than twenty years since the whole of Europe answered to commands barked in the gutteral German tongue. She held a hand out for him to help her get to her feet so that she could test the damage to the ankle with her weight. Above her, the sky rumbled where cloud now concealed the heights of the slope they had achieved.

  ‘A lucky escape,’ she said to the guide, in French.

  He shrugged, nonchalant.

  Above them, the clouds tore and shuddered with hidden turmoil and abruptly stopped. It had been a lucky escape. But she wouldn’t let it put her off. She had an attraction to such places. As her pulse slowed after the excitement of the descent, she could feel that attraction beating as if in her blood.

  Bill seemed to know lots of desolate places. She had been to parties at his house in the canyon where all the men wore tuxedoes and the women wore the poise of handsome trophies mounted on revolving plinths. There, the water cascaded to command through pools descending the length of his garden. Ice blued crystal glasses in chilly toasts. Music found its own subtle volume beneath the chat among people gathered at his house to be famous and discreet together. But there was another side to his life and it involved the wilderness. She remembered, years earlier, his joke about Jack London made when they were camping near Yosemite. There were facets to Bill. Some glittered and some were dark, some were polished and others rough enough to cut yourself on. They were on their way to one of his desolate places and he was starting to show a different facet of himself. The journey had seen the arrival of Old Bill, the one face she and her mother hated. It wore the smooth equanimity of total preoccupation. And it was fucking rude.

  ‘I want to go home, Bill.’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I don’t know why you even suggested this. We’ve been travelling for an hour and I’ve made three attempts to talk to you and you very obviously aren’t interested in having a conversation with the only person here you’ve got to talk to right now. So maybe you’re hungover or preoccupied about a case or a client or my mother or something. Anyway—’

  ‘We’re being followed,’ Bill said. ‘No. Don’t look around.’

  ‘Bill. You’re kidding me.’

  ‘Ford pickup. Kind of a mauve or a brown, depending on the light. Dented front bumper. Windshield’s been treated with something so you can’t see through it. Solarized, maybe. Three cars back and with us since the airport car park.’

  ‘Three cars back? Does that mean he’s a pro?’

  Bill laughed. Given the circumstances, he seemed amazingly relaxed. ‘First hon, don’t start using dialogue from bad movies. It could cause me to crash. Secondly, amateurs don’t generally spot professional surveillance. So I don’t think it’s the IRS or anything.’

  Natasha was scared. They were driving along a highway in bright California sunshine and somebody was following them. She was quiet for a mile. During that time she caught sight of a battered fender on a mauve hood as the pickup swung out and swung back again three cars behind them.

  ‘He just took a peek.’

  ‘Don’t be scared, Natasha,’ Bill said.

  ‘Do you have a gun?’

  ‘Yeah, there’s a loaded bazooka clipped to the side of the Jeep. I’m surprised you and your mother have never noticed it before.’

  ‘Aren’t you concerned?’ He was concerned enough to keep glancing in the rear view. The tenderness present on his face at the airport was completely absent now. The flesh looked bleached and taut across the bones and his eyes wore a dead expression.

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It’s probably some creep who tails strangers for entertainment. Like a random phone pest. It’s a sick world.’ He swung left across oncoming traffic and accelerated along a dirt road before running the Jeep into a dense patch of scrub and switching off the engine. The engine ticked and cooled. Bill took a water bottle from his door panel and unscrewed the lid and offered it to Natasha. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was. He winked and got out of the Jeep and walked through the tunnel of leaves and branches it had left to where he could see the track they had taken. Dust was still descending from the churn of their tyres on the powdery ground. But the creepy mauve pickup had not followed them.

  ‘Where do you think he went?’ Natasha had climbed out of the Jeep and stood beside Bill now, staring through the billow of fading trail dust.

  ‘Gone to find a phone booth to death-threat someone picked from the book with a pin and a blindfold,’ Bill said. He put a hand on her shoulder. His hand was heavy and dry and immensely comforting. In the distance, very faint, she thought she could hear car wheels spinning by on the freeway.

  ‘Who cares where he’s gone?’ Bill said. ‘He’s gone.’

  They left the Jeep in its berth of scrub. It was cool and dark in there and smelled sweetly of pine resin from the branches broken and needles crushed by their entry. They took the food they had bought at a grocery concession at the airport and walked up a hill to a plateau of orange groves where they found a shaded spot overlooking a small valley with a bright stream running through it. They had walked for an hour when they rested and most of it had been uphill. Hills undulated, brown and scorched on their higher slopes, into a hazy distance. It was a deceptive day. There was less light than there seemed and none of the residual heat with which the summer invests the
earth. It was warm now because the sun was out. But it was October and it would grow chilly towards the evening and the dark.

  Natasha had wanted Bill to take her home. She had been upset and scared by events on the freeway. But she didn’t want her day to be sabotaged by the antics of some creep. She did not want to appear cowardly in front of Bill. And she felt terrible about her outburst in the Jeep. She had been peevish and rude. He’d come over to rescue her alpine trip with a roll of bills in his pocket. He had driven her mother to the airport. He had invited her on a picnic. And she had railed at him for some imaginary slight. The least she could do was provide entertaining company. But she found it hard.

  They ate mouse cheese on Ritz crackers and pepper salami and sour autumnal apples and glossy, succulent plums. And Natasha found it difficult to talk and impossible to properly relax. She felt very vulnerable in the open, in the scorched glare of the hills. She knew that Bill would protect her, as she figured Bill had been doing in one way or another since about the day she’d been born. It felt like she’d known him that long. But she was spooked. She tried to put cheese on a cracker into her mouth and the cracker broke because her fingers were trembling and Ritz crumbs and cheese landed in her lap.

  ‘Oops. Sorry, Bill.’

  ‘Spooked?’

  She nodded. She wanted to sound braver than she felt. ‘Yep.’

  ‘You know all that bullshit you’ve been hearing for years about me being a hunter?’

  She was shocked. She knew Bill had a sometimes filthy mouth. But he didn’t swear in front of her.

  ‘Isn’t bullshit, kid. I’m a pretty good hunter. And I have a pretty good instinct about the people I choose to hunt with.’ He pulled back the zipper on his jacket and she saw the knurled grip of a large-calibre revolver in a snap holster in his armpit.

  ‘When—’

  ‘From the Jeep. When you were busy with the picnic food.’

  Natasha licked her lips. ‘Are we hunting now, Bill?’

  ‘He’s been watching us for the best part of an hour. I think it’s time we found out what he wants,’ Bill said. And he winked.