Falling Down (17 page)

S
wimming my way through my anger and confusion and depression, I couldn't get behind the realization that I'd been abandoned, left behind, deserted, and dumped.

I realize that women get dumped all the time. Everywhere in the world, every day, every hour. Men also get dumped, if that's even the right word.

Stroking through my swimming pool, I tried to sort out what I was feeling, but one thing was certain. My anger at Nathan's leaving, my depression, my confusion, my uncertainties—all of these feelings I powered to keep under control, knifing through the water, thinking of men in my life, try to do the working out of men in my life, going back through all the men in my life.

Swimming, I focused on doing The Work. Turning a thought on its head, as I was taught to do by Monica
Tilley and Delilah and Carolyn, my friends in Arivaca, the sudden thought hitting me that
yes
I
did
have a few girlfriends, I'd have to tell Mary.

Turning my
anger
on its head.

I
hate
Nathan because he left me.

Was that true? Two laps of the pool later, I forced myself to realize that he'd not left me, I just didn't go with him. But that gave me little comfort.

All kinds of things flooded my head.

I
hate
Nathan for not moving into my house, for not living with me all the time. Total irrational thoughts, like, do I want to kill him for doing that, for never really moving into my life? That he should love me enough to be aware of my need to have him close by, all the time?

Getting left behind really sucks. But who would I be if I actually wasn't left behind, if instead I'd been given insight and invitation to a different way of life?

 

Nathan was a good person. He just couldn't live without being on his reservation, with his own people. He didn't cheat on me with another woman, he didn't threaten or abuse me, he didn't give me the “I'm glad it's ended” speech.

 

What's the first thing I should feel an overwhelming compulsion to do?

Or is this something really basic about the kind of person I am? What if I really was selfish enough to believe that
my
life was so fundamentally more important, that actually, by not following Nathan when he needed me, I was dumping
him
?

Still swimming, my stroke and pace settled into a near-constant rhythm. So was I reacting to Nathan's selfish wishes, that he didn't want to live with me all the time? Or was I reacting to my own anger that he would not do so? And why did I
need
him to live with me all the time?

Secondary impression, my life is a soap opera.

So my pain, when I turn Nathan's own decision on its head, my pain is not that he was a total shit for not living with me, I was condemning him for the moments he wasn't nearby, but not delighting in those times his body lay next to mine or we talked or he played one of his native flutes.

Turn that on its head.

Nathan survived Vietnam. Nathan survived the brutal murder of his oldest, closest friend, Leon Begay. Nathan had already too much brutality and death in his life, Nathan wanted, Nathan's soul
needed
time on the
dineh
reservation to regenerate his soul's urge to love life.

Turn that on its head.

Nathan needed time with his people to learn how to love me.

Ah, that's a sticky unanswerable dilemma. But it is what it is.

Fleeting thought. People
watch
soap operas because, they're usually about somebody being dumped for somebody else, about the constant quest for true love, never mind that on TV this turns into the need for another hot body in bed.

Spider watched a lot of TV. One of our real differences. I liked movies, she liked TV. I liked complexity
and subtext, she liked
Desperate Housewives
and
Fear Factor
and
Survivor
. Spider loved brand names. I cared less about brand names, as a rule. But these differences didn't affect our love for each other, it just affected what we shared in conversation.

One last piece of doing The Work.

What if I didn't love him anymore? Is there even a right answer to that question? A wrong answer? Is that true, that I don't love him anymore? This is the moment of truth, when doing The Work. Turn that last question on its head. What if I just drop any thoughts about whether or not I still loved him. Or actually, is there some major answer to this question that neither angers or stresses or depresses me?

Turn
that
on its head.

Why does my self-esteem depend on Nathan loving me? What actually did Nathan have to do with my unhappiness with him not constantly sharing my life, living with me, living in my house and not just living in my heart?

This is the power of The Work. Who knows, maybe even the power of soap operas. I felt I needed him to be with me constantly. In truth, he angered me with his need that I be with
him
constantly, wherever or in whatever world that took place. So I should have the freedom of love to be able to tell him to join his people, join his clans, that I would, in my own time, be with him and his people and his clans, but that I had a life outside of his.

 

Mostly, I thought, toweling myself off beside the pool, mostly it's what I've come to expect from relationships with men. I always seem to pick men who leave me, I felt like an idiot, running through these thoughts as though I were embarking on the five stages of accepting that I had cancer. I called Mary and got directions for the swim meet. Then I called Christopher Kyle and told him to meet me at the pool.

S
ixty or seventy high school boys and girls clustered around an eight-lane outdoor swimming pool. Skinny freshmen through well-built seniors, powerful thigh muscles standing next to legs like beanstalks, girls flat-chested face-to-face grinning with large-breasted seniors. No makeup, no pretense at all in dress codes and jewelry and body piercings and everything else that teenagers use to identify with a clique and separate themselves from other cliques.

The pool itself surrounded by a ten-foot wrought-iron fence, with fifteen feet of concrete between the fence and the pool, hardly any empty space, parents and families with coolers and portable folding chairs gathered inside the fence while outside the latecomers peered through the iron staves.

Mary waved me to an empty chair, gave me a bottle of water, dragged a large cooler into the middle of a group of girls in reddish swimsuits. The other team wore blue-and-gold-striped suits, sheer fabric completely revealing body sizes, a few of the older girls already with high-beamed nipples standing out against the suits, boys with their sex clearly outlined through swimming briefs.

“Sit here,” Mary said. “I'm one of the timers, so I can't much explain to you what's going on. But quickly, the real competitors will swim the middle lanes. Beginners or just warm-up swimmers in the two outer lanes,
'cause when these kids start power-stroking they send waves across the pool to bounce off the ends. Since this isn't an official swim meet, there'll be about ten individual events for girls and another ten for boys, plus half a dozen for relay races. Who is that man?”

Kyle moved slowly to the outside of the fence, bracing himself with one arm and waving at me with the other. I waved at him.

“Who is that?” Mary said.

“A homicide detective,” I said. “I want you to meet him later.”

“Does he know?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you trust him?”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

The Catholic girls' team banded together, arms raised to touch hands in the middle for their school cheer.

“Not quite fair,” I said. “Jesus has gotta be on both sides.”

“It's just a pep cheer,” Mary said.

For an hour, I watched individual races, a few of the boys and girls clearly much better than the rest. Mary and the other timers roamed the far edge of the pool, taking down names, taking times, recording the results. Only later I realized Mary'd not introduced me to Ana Luisa.

 

Later, when the families disbanded and few people were left, Mary met me at an outdoor table where I sat with Kyle. Again, I saw that Ana Luisa wasn't present, but I didn't ask why.

“I'm not sure why you brought me here,” Kyle said.

“To see these teenagers,” I said.

“And why?”

“These kids will never have to be drug smugglers,” Mary said. “But some of them do take drugs.”

“Drug smuggling,” Kyle said. Talking to me, but
studying Mary. “Is that what this is about? Why TPD wants to hire you?”

“Yes,” I lied. Not a complete lie.

“The
maras,
” he said. “They're…they're unstoppable, you know. And they're not even the main drug smugglers.”

“And who would that be?” Mary said.

“Heroin comes from Afghanistan. Almost the entire world supply comes from new poppy fields. The government is helpless, since warlords control the opium regions. And the warlords work with the Taliban. You cannot stop it.”

“So what's practicable?” I said.

“Nothing's practicable.”

“I've got to go,” Mary said. A quick nod at Kyle, a frown to me before she walked to the parking lot.

“That lady really didn't want to meet me,” Kyle said.

“No, maybe not. But unless she saw you with me, she'd never trust you.”

“So. Laura. Is this where you get really honest with me?”

“About what?”

“What kind of work are you doing for TPD?”

“To tell you the truth, Christopher, I don't really know. And I don't even know that I want to work with them.”

“And what are you doing for your friend?”

“Mary?”

“Since I know you're working with Ken Charvoz, I just get the feeling that something happened at that park, where the two of them work.”

“Remember me asking about cockfights?” I said.

“Sure.”

“Well, somehow, cockfighting is connected to drug smuggling.”

“That's a stretch,” he said. “I told you, those guys go to cockfights for fun. No money in it, no drug cartel
would spend time running cockfights, the financial return just isn't there.”

“Maybe not,” I said.

“So I'm asking you again. What are you really doing?”

“Bob Gates told me, Bob said that his worst nightmare is not just having his kids use drugs. It's imagining them in the business, in the
drug
business. And his absolute worst horror is just the thought of some kid, the same age as his boy, that kid being a drug mule.”

“Huh,” Kyle said. “Huh, imagine that.”

“You've got kids?”

“Nope. You?”

“A daughter. And a granddaughter.”

“Huh,” he said again. “I just don't see that I can help you.”

“I may need a good friend.”

“You mean, a friend inside the police department.”

“No, Christopher, I just meant…a friend.”

“That's really sweet,” he said. “But you, computers, I'm useless. I'm just an old homicide dick. I don't even carry a piece anymore. You do, though.”

“My Beretta and me,” I said. “Sounds like a cheap movie.”

“I haven't owned a piece in years. Can't even remember the last time I fired one. So. Okay. Hope I didn't freak out your friend. Hope I've not disappointed you.”

“Not yet.”

“So what're you doing now? How about an early dinner?”

“Actually,” I said, “tonight, I'm going to a cockfight.”

“Laura,” he said. “Give this up.”

“I can't.”

“Walk away from this ugly business.”

“Thanks for meeting me, Christopher. And thanks for meeting Mary.”

“These
maras,
they're assassins. You go after them, they'll take you down. It's all just business to them. Your
name comes, you get in the way, your name goes on a contract and make no mistake, you will die.”

“Chris,” I said.

“Christopher.”

“I'm going to trust you with something.”

“Be careful who you trust,” he said. But he was eager to hear me.

“I'm not on the TPD payroll.”

“Okay.”

“But I'm working a special contract for TPD.”

“Okay.”

“Sometime really soon, word will get out that I'm hired to look at financial records of drug trafficking, smuggling…all kinds of things.”

“Waste of time,” Kyle said.

“But that's not really what my contract is for.”

“Ahhh.”

“TPD suspects they've got a dirty cop.”

“Nothing new there.”

“No, Christopher. A very
special
dirty cop.”

“Involved in what?” Kyle said.

“In drug trafficking. Smuggling. Everything we've been talking about. For all I know, even cockfights.”

“That's a real stretch,” he said finally.

“They know it's happening.”

“And they know this…how?”

“Leaked special ops,” I said. “But really meant to be a sting.”

“Well. Doesn't that figure,” he said. Disgust on his face, his eyes behind me, his shoulders rising and falling and whole tectonic plates of muscles shifting on his face. “So you've been contracted to…what?”

“Look over personnel records. Hack into bank accounts.”

“I don't understand why you're telling me this.”

“Because I need to trust somebody,” I said. “Somebody inside.”

“Who gave you the contract?”

“Jordan Kligerman.”

“No. I mean, who first came to you with this.”

“Bob Gates. Will you help me?”

“Laura. You overestimate my capability. I'm an old homicide dick. They keep me on because of sympathy, well, okay, they keep me on partially because I really know how to work a murder book. But what you're talking about, if it's not homicide, I'm useless to you.”

“Unless you hear something,” I said. “Just keep me in mind. If you hear something, give me a call. That's all I'm asking.”

“You're asking a lot more than that, lady.”