And West Is West (28 page)

CHAPTER 59

Seminole City

Dear Winter,

You may think a week is no time at all to a jailbird with a twenty year sentence. But doing time waiting to hear from someone when you are already doing time multiplies each day into a month. Which makes it seven months in my world since we spoke.

First of all I expect you want to know how I got your New York address. That was easy. I asked the warden's office. I guess they must like reading what I send out. But their spying on me makes no difference anymore. I have no secrets now. Not since I learned that my cellmate ratted out where Jessica was living. I wrote directly there in care of the landlord and this nice fellow Kelso wrote back right away with good news. He says that the FBI did not catch my little girl. He also says that a man of your description stopped by. Anyway I want to find out what has happened to Jessica since and am writing for your help. As I know not to expect favors from anyone maybe we can do a trade. I have a story to tell you. One that might set you free.

You already know I am not much of a man. Just a two-time loser who has got what he deserves. When I was young I was the kind of punk to abandon his wife and three-month-old daughter. To shack up in a Miami Beach motel with an underage runaway. And when the bucks ran out I was dumb enough to sell an ounce of baby powder to an undercover cop. Only there was enough cocaine in the Johnsons for a ten month sentence. So adios me. Six months later though I get a letter from my runaway begging me to come get her. She is going to have my kid she says. And that is how your Zoe came into the world. Soon as I got free I headed north for her and Suzie.

Well Suzie by then is seventeen and bored. She starts sneaking out to see me behind her parents backs.
T
he old man caught us once. Gave me a lookover and put me down for a dirtbag. Held off calling the cops though. Probably afraid of the scandal. Just told me to get lost. Like I would. And Susie kept coming to me. Sometimes she brings Zozo. Biggest eyes on a kid you ever saw. Eyes that have me making plans for our little family. We are going to run off to Canada. To Mexico. To Australia even. All dreams. All lies. And Suzie is no dunce. She is figuring out that the best honest job I will ever get is minimum wage. That I will never have the money she needs to escape her life. Three weeks into our reunion and all we do is scrap.

Then one night Suzie sneaks out to the Trumbull roadhouse where I told her I got a waiter job. Only she catches me in the kitchen elbow deep in soapy pots. Fuck you she starts yelling. Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you until the manager drags her out the back door. Of course I am right there. Right until she locks herself in her dad's Land Rover. I jump into my Florida junker and block the lot exit. But Suzie drives out over the sidewalk and then torches the pavement. My mistake was to go after her. Chased her in my old wreck onto the parkway. Thats when she really took off. Her taillights disappeared around a bend and the next thing I know. Oh hell. I see the overpass and the fire.

Every night I ask myself why I went after her. And every morning I crawl out of the sack asking for forgiveness and knowing I'll never get it. After that what kept me going was thinking of Zozo out there living her life. Now I dont have that. So what I am telling you Ethan is something you got to believe. What happened between you and your Zoe was not what happened between me and Suzie. I aint no priest and I dont have rights so all I can do is tell you that you are not guilty. That you got to let go of your ghost. Put our little girl down into her grave before she owns you the way my ghost owns me.

Don Aldridge

CHAPTER 60

Sagaponack

“This place is
sick
,” Alex says, enthusiastic as a teenager, of Sergei's mansion. After Sergei's fiftieth, Alex had hitched a ride on his patron's jet, which set down in East Hampton an hour before. Ethan has just arrived by jitney from the city, where he'd been holed up in his apartment since his return from Florida—until Don's letter awoke him. Ethan and Alex have texted sporadically, but this is their first face-to-face since before Zoe's funeral.

Alex looks puffier than he had. He seems a little worn. This is odd to Ethan since Alex had always gotten energy from doing his art. But then Ethan had never known his friend to take a commission before. He had always painted what he'd wanted. Maybe it was the flight home. Then Ethan notices that Alex is in a windbreaker. It's not something he would normally wear, and this jacket especially not since it is logoed. There's an SAS over the heart.

They are leaning on the rail of a high deck that overlooks a field and then a dune and then the ocean—Sergei has bought the land to keep the view. Ethan is facing the ocean. Alex has his elbows on the railing and is admiring the house, a small distance away and accessed by a raised walkway.

“Truly sick,” Ethan says. “In college I wanted to be this rich.”

“In college I wanted to be the next Jackson Pollock,” Alex says.

Ethan turns to lean back against the railing. From the rear Sergei's house has an Escher-like appearance. External staircases lead to dead-end cupolas as if in homage to the widow's watches used by sailors' wives.

“The thing is,” Ethan says, “you still have a chance to be a Pollock.”

“You mean, because of those reviews.” A
Times
critic had favorably mentioned Alex's show at Medusa and
New York
magazine listed it in its Approval Matrix. “I can thank Sergei's PR team for those.”

“He must think highly of your work.”

“He thinks more highly of his ability to spot talent.”

Ethan cannot really say whether Alex's paintings are good or not—not any more than Alex could determine if one of Ethan's predictive algorithms was viable. After all, what's really big in art seems to be giant puppies made of flowers or great white sharks embalmed in vitrines, and these don't appeal to Ethan.

The two men, hearing screeches, turn back to the ocean. Just off the beach a mass of seagulls is harassing an underwater shadow. Gleaming fish begin to leap and the birds swoop to feed.

And then someone else comes onto the deck.

“My man, 'bout time you got here! How is
it
hanging. Not too droopy, I hope.”

“John Guan. Alex Carr,” Ethan says, introducing his two worlds.

“Artiste par excellence, I hear,” says Guan.

“Thanks, I think,” says Alex.

“It's all good,” says Guan. Then he turns to Ethan. “How cool is this? We going to be working together again, bro.” Guan, wearing his gangsta sneakers and sagging pants, is still cultivating his own style, has even added a goatee—facial hair that employment at UIB had disallowed. And this grooming actually almost works.

Ethan looks at Guan's outstretched hand. “I just came out to give Sergei some respect. Tell him no to his face.”

Guan, for a second, resembles a confused robot—
This does not compute
. “Fuck me,” he says. “You got another job.
Nyet
,
nyet
,
nyet
. The Russian won't be digging that.”

Ethan looks at Alex, who starts to nod.
I get it now
,
dude
.
Run for your life
.

“It's not another job,” Ethan says.

“Then why, homie?
Why?
” Guan asks.

“Excuse us,” Ethan says to Alex and pulls Guan to the far side of the deck. “John,” Ethan's face is stone now. “This isn't the only reason, but that decimal point. Did you move it?” Ethan knows that Hoke couldn't have done the work on his own.

Guan takes a step back. “
Homie
. I mean, get real. Screw you over like that? I mean . . .
shiiit
. It wasn't like that. I mean, like . . .
wait
. Remember that morning you called my voicemail, said you were taking a personal day?”

How could Ethan forget? He was calling from the hospital in Ulster County while Zoe was getting her stomach pumped.

“I was slammed that morning, bro. Eventually got to what you asked—dry-ran those patches you installed the night before. Something was buggy and I was doing a trace when Hoke pulled me in to block a hacker breach. I warned him there was shit in your code, but he blew it off. Said, ‘Fuck Winter's bonus.' Anyway, later, after the Islamabad car bomb and your algo got jiggy, the Hokemeister had to punk you to cover his ass.”

“Hold up,” Ethan says. “
I
programmed the error? That's not what Sergei told me.” He is getting that sick feeling in his gut again.

Guan, grinning, leans close to Ethan's ear. “What I told Sergei was”—Guan's voice is barely louder than the waves breaking on the beach—“that the bad code was not
your
bad, that it was Hoke's. Get me?” Ethan listens to Guan breathing in his ear. It is as if they are little boys sharing secrets. “Homie, I didn't give Sergei the detailed why—which was because El Duce put me on another task. But yeah, bottom line, you did code that blip. Can't help that Sergei thinks otherwise.” Guan pulls back and looks at Ethan as if he expects thanks.

But Ethan is feeling paler now. His coding confidence is shaken. His desire to code, leaking away. Ruined as much by his error as by the betrayals behind it, as by the uses his talent had been put to and would still be put to. “John, you could have told someone that Hoke didn't let you find the error. That it wasn't all mine.” He is grasping.

Guan squeezes his eyes shut and then opens them in a disbelieving blink. “Come on, my man. Get real. Then UIB would have put you, me, and Hoke out on our asses. Besides, you knows I was that bitch's bitch. Anyway, so what I be saying is, today, me and you, in the here and now, we are cool, brutha. That old stuff was UIB biz. A completely diff situation,
stitch
uation, son-of-a-
bitch
uation. Not anything I would do on my own. Like I said it was all
achtung
,
Sieg heil
,
jawohl mein Herr Hoke
! But that's done now. World War III's over. Armistice's declared. Prisoners are released. I vouched for you to Sergei, didn't I? So you can't hold anything against me. Right? Right, Ethan? Yo, bro. We are cool,
right
?”

Ethan is walking away. Passing Alex, he grabs his duffel and descends from the deck onto a staircase that leads toward a dune.

“Dude, where you headed?” Alex calls after him.

“Gotta go, dude,” Ethan calls back.

“Where?
Where
are you going?” Alex shouts.

ETHAN IS NOT
an outdoors type, a reveler in nature and life, a man like Thoreau to whom “the sun is but a morning star.” He sees only a fearsome nuclear sphere descending toward the western horizon, a ball that would incinerate this planet if it orbited any closer. The few others sharing the beach with him on this late September afternoon—a fisherman, an older couple with hiking poles, a twenty-something running her greyhound—seem less wary of this precariousness. Of Ethan's, they certainly take no notice. He walks past the seaweed line and collapses by a sand castle, battered from the last tide but still possessing a turret. From his bag, he removes Zoe's urn and pushes it into the beach between his sunken heels.

The day is passing. The sun is sinking lower, growing smaller and less intimidating. Along the water's edge travel infrequent passersby who don't look Ethan's way. And then the incoming tide begins a new siege of the castle. A breaker topples its turret and sends Ethan crab-scampering backward to stay dry. When the wave recedes he retrieves the abandoned urn and, gathering courage, tries to pull off the lid. After a minute he figures out that it's threaded.

Inside the urn Ethan discovers a tied bag. The plastic packaging, being just that, seems disrespectful, unnatural, and he undoes the tie and tilts the urn until the ash, fine and gray, begins to pour. She runs silvery through his fingers. Zoe.

EPILOGUE

January 2014

Florida, New Jersey, Arizona

Dear Ethan,

Glad to hear from you again and a happy New Year to you too. Your last letter adds up to three each we have exchanged over the past months. That probably makes us regular correspondents by now. Funny what brings people together. What I mean is you know me because you knew a daughter I never did. And now we are corresponding about another daughter I have lost and whom you never met.

First off I appreciate you still trying to find out what happened to Jessica. Your offer to hire a detective on your own dime is solid generous since I doubt you are making buckets of money. But if doing your old work was making you sick what else could you have done but got out of the biz. I dont know much about banking except those people in it long as they make money dont care if they put families on the street. So I bet your gut was telling you something important that your head had not caught up with yet. Your old man by the way sounds like a great guy finding you that teaching gig even if you did have to move out of the big city. After you figure things out maybe being a teacher permanent will be the course you choose. But like I always say. What do I know.

One thing I DO know though is that gutshot feeling. If I had ever paid attention to it I might have built a different life for myself. Starting back by sticking with Jessica's mother. And that would have changed history. Ours anyway. There would have been no Zoe and you and me would have never met. Th
e big question is where would we be today. Me not in prison maybe. But you probably still at your bank and not sick over what you do. So here is a fact I do know. For whatever reason you have a chance at something I missed out on. I never grew into anything better than what I was. Is that what Zoe's death was about? Making you a more decent man? It got to have some meaning.

Anyway about Jessica. I been thinking over what Zoe's mother taught me. That it aint no good to chase after people who do not want to be chased. So my friend. No detective.

And besides I have big news. A picture postcard came.

Except for my prison address there is no handwriting on it. But the postmark is Tucson and the picture shows a big cactus that seems to be waving. I might be reading more into it than there is but I believe that Jessica is out there saying she is OK. That she will reach out to me when she is ready. That I should just be patient. And so this I will be. Our search for Jessica is over.

But I do hope this dont mean that you and me are done writing. I expect those middle school kids of yours will be giving you plenty of war stories I will want to hear. And not to go soft on myself but sometimes I think a good teacher could have helped me way back when not become the man I turned out. What I mean is that if you save one kid well that is worth something. Its about more than teaching them math.

Ha Ha! Hearing all this from a con. Just keep writing me Ethan and I will be keeping you on the straight and narrow like a preacher. But to go back to serious. When I do get word from Jessica again I will let you know. Maybe you will be lucky enough to meet her someday. On an Arizona vacation maybe. And maybe then you can tell her a little about what her sister was like. Anyway. A man can dream.

Your amigo,

Don

Dear Don,

I'm writing you during school hours—after school actually since as a rookie instructor one of my assigned duties twice a week is to monitor the afternoon detention class. I'm beginning to see that many of these kids actually try for detention just to stay off the streets. It's safer in here from the drugs, the bullying, the God knows what. So even if I'm no great shakes as a teacher, at least I'm doing this much for them.

About your Jessica. It's curious how much I think of her, someone I only know through you and your letters. Of course this must have to do with Zoe, whom I think of every day, though not every minute of every day as I used to. Sometimes I come out of my daydreams not believing she's gone forever. It must be a little like how you feel about Jessica—in mourning for her absence, her absent letters. If you ever want me to take up our search again just give me the word. Knowing she could be in Tucson would narrow things down for us.

As to my moving out of New York, I guess there are some regrets. But those years I spent in the city I was pretty much a zombie, trudging the streets between work and home. I could have been living anywhere. It helps that my best friend has moved away also, up the Hudson to where life is saner for an artist than in the Manhattan hustle. We've become suburban boys, just like we were to begin with. He tells me he likes the quiet, the mountainscapes. I tell him I'm getting used to the chalk under my nails and how the decibel level in my classroom picks up whenever I turn to the blackboard. I certainly am collecting those war stories you wrote wanting to hear about.

One is happening now. A young man just asked me what I was working on so hard. He said I looked funny, hunched over, like I was taking some kind of exam I hadn't studied for. This made my other detainees laugh. I explained to him that I was writing to a friend who was a prisoner. My student nodded. Then he took out a sheet of paper and started writing. He's asked me a couple of times how to spell words. ‘Arrested.' ‘Penitentiary.' Maybe he's hustling me for sympathy. Or maybe I motivated him to write to someone he knows in prison. His dad, an uncle, an older brother. That more than a few of my students might have a relative in prison wouldn't be unlikely. Anyway, Don, I don't know if I could even save one of these kids. That's a large request you've laid on my plate. How does one learn how to really help another person? Or even yourself? There's no twelve-step program for that. All I seem to know is that it's going to take me a lot of steps to get to where I need to be. And maybe a trip west as you suggested, to the land of the waving cactus, will be one of them.

Okay. My class is getting rowdy. Detention hour is nearly over. It's back to work for me, dismissing the kids in one piece. I'll stay strong if you will. Till later.

Your friend,

Ethan

“Go west. Go to the arroyo!” Jessica whispers.

She is frustrated. The figures on the monitor have started moving again. But they're headed northeast, the wrong way. They're going deeper into the desert.

“No,” Jessica says, though of course the couple can't hear her. And then she worries about who can. There's a camera in the corner of the ceiling, but it's merely there to document who enters and exits. Jessica doesn't think it's an employee spy cam so it probably doesn't have a microphone. But who knows.

Turn back
, Jessica silently pleads. The couple, now climbing a hillock, are going to force her hand.
You don't want me to call the
federales. But she may have to, to save them.

The phone rings and Jessica answers it through her headset. A digital voice says, “Count backward . . . from one hundred . . . by sixes.” It's another random check to make sure she's not snoozing on the job.

Jessica responds, “Ninety-four, eighty-eight, eighty-two, seventy—”

“Thank you.” The robotic call disconnects.

Though Colonel Voigt recommended her for this position, he would hardly approve of the corporate efficiency. At least two people were responsible for flying any single Air Force drone, but here, in a windowless Tucson warehouse, Jessica is left alone for hours at a stretch monitoring a retrofitted Predator while it tracks the Sonoran Desert. True, the vehicle is smart enough to pilot itself home if she drops dead at the stick. The thing's image-deciphering algorithms will even tell her when there's suspect activity on the ground. So mostly Jessica babysits. She suspects the main reason Defense of America, Inc., hired someone with her experience was because its government contract required it.

Atop the hillock the couple stops to scan the horizon. They are in a basin surrounded by distant ridges and their options are nil. Just from being where they are tells Jessica a little about them. They are poorer or more hurried or more inexperienced than the usual illegal. She knows this because they did not hire a good
coyote
, if there is such a thing. Theirs didn't even escort them to within sight of a road, wasn't going to risk patrolled land, had merely got them past a remote part of the border fence and dumped them in the desert. They probably hired the first border rat they met in Nogales.

The woman, shading her eyes with a hand, begins to turn slowly around. Jessica targets her with the drone's camera and zooms. Through heat waves rippling off the sand she sees why the woman could not wait another day to immigrate. Her stomach is bulging; she's trying to get into the States to give birth to an American citizen. But if the Border Patrol catches her before this happens, they likely will expedite her deportation.

“For the kid's sake, turn around,” Jessica whispers at the man, who has started to slog down the desert side of the rise.

Yet he has just resolved Jessica's conflict. Now she has no choice but to have the two immigrants picked up. She will execute her job to the letter—as Voigt guaranteed she would four months ago.

“Bar none, Aldridge here is one of the best UAV operators around,” he had told the group from DoA, Inc. They were the reason he had flown her back to Reeger on that transport. And a day after that Jessica was traveling down to Phoenix to see about their job offer. She was nearly sidelined by her interviewer's first question.

“Why did you leave the Air Force?”

“Family matter,” she'd said.

“That has to do with letters to your father in prison.”

“Yes.”

“Much of your job will be to watch for Mexican cartel activity. As such, you're prohibited from associating, communicating, with anyone who has a record of drug offenses. Your father, for example. Can you agree to this?”

Jessica took a moment. Then she nodded.

Later she would worry less about being fired than about disappointing Voigt. Would the colonel consider her disloyal if he knew about her wordless cactus postcard to Don?

Back in the now, Jessica is circling her drone a mile above the couple. The man waves at the pregnant woman to follow him deeper into the desert and Jessica opens a pop-up window on her screen to copy their coordinates into an email to the Border Patrol in Tucson. They will forward the location and coded explanation—probably a 10-60 and a 10-11, meaning “sensor hit” and “investigate subject”—down to their Border Patrol's Ajo station. DoA has yet to work out a better system. Nevertheless, if Jessica hits Send, a mobile border agent will likely contact her and she'll assist him with real-time coordinates the way she did ground troops in Kandahar. With luck she will get a military vet who knows his nine o'clock from his three o'clock and the intercept will be clean. Or maybe the CBP won't have the resources to send anyone out today, or even tomorrow, and the couple will end up as bones in the desert.

Jessica enacts in her mind a best-case scenario: the couple's future capture—their hearing an engine, their taking cover in the scrub, their slumped posture after Jessica leads the border agent's vehicle to the couple's hiding place—and she hesitates. She always hesitates now before pulling any such life-changing trigger. She no longer even pretends to be a dispassionate operator executing orders. And then, from her eye in the sky, Jessica watches the woman stubbornly refuse to follow her partner's disastrous course into the wasteland.

Jessica is transfixed. She does not believe in telepathy, yet the woman—unlike the men she had targeted in Somalia—seems to have heard her thoughts. At her insistence, the couple has turned west and after ten minutes has come upon and are now following an animal path through a shaded arroyo. The gulch leads to an old jacal—a mud shelter that, over the past months, Jessica has seen used as an end point by desert hikers. She hopes the couple will find there some bottled water and, possibly, dehydrated food.

And then, behind her, the warehouse door swings open. Dry heat presses in and Jessica turns to see, early for his shift, Bob Sanders. Pasty and sweating through his dress shirt, he shakes his head at Jessica and his chins follow. “Hellhole hot out there, Sergeant,” Sanders says and shuts the door.

“Airman,” Jessica replies. Using their old titles seems to keep Bob's spirits up, though for Jessica the nostalgia is tolerable perhaps once a day. She turns from Sanders to refocus on the UAV's controls.

“Action on the ground?” he asks.

By now her couple is off the monitor. Jessica is banking the Predator toward where it's supposed to be, forty miles southeast, between Organ Pipe and the border. “I spotted a couple near the jacal . . . hiking.”

“Friggin' socialist yuppie sport,” Bob says.

As well for old times' sake, to show her old friend solidarity, she doubles down on his hiking crack. “Right. If it was a real sport they'd show it on TV.”

“Amen the NFL,” Sanders says, putting his hand over his heart. Then, hovering by Jessica's shoulder, he scans the UAV display. “You sure those hikers aren't smugglers?”

“They weren't backpacking marijuana bales as far as I could tell. Might have been illegals though. Maybe I should do another flyby?”

Sanders stretches his chins toward the instrument readouts. “For two strawberry pickers? Nah. Save the fuel.”

Sanders goes off to raid the coffee cake in the fridge, not asking if Jessica wants any because they are prohibited from snacking at the controls. But ten minutes later, after slapping the crumbs from his hands, Bob sidles up again close to Jessica's shoulder and looks at the monotonous yellow-brown expanse of desert discoloring the monitor. “Ready when you are,” he says.