The Long Fall (17 page)

Nothing, that is, until the sister-in-law. The last six weeks have proven that.

When he’s done cleaning the weapons, Limbe wraps each in a piece of cloth and returns them to the footlocker.

He drinks two more glasses of water, then leans against the sink and closes his eyes. He feels a great still point taking shape within him.

He’s been dreaming Nicaragua.

There was a drain in the center of the floor.

The cement block walls had been painted with lime and were always damp.

A thing is what it’s named.

Insurgents, for instance. Rebels.

You asked the questions, and after a while, you were in the mouth of God.

Every death is a lesson.

There were women, locals, who came in and cleaned up afterward.

Within that interrogation room, Aaron Limbe rediscovered what he’d always known: There are only two worlds, the true world and the fallen world, and in the true world everything has its true shape and true fit, which form and complete the true universal hierarchy, which is forever and untouched by history.

In the fallen world, there is no clarity, and a thing cannot recognize its own shape. The fallen world is bloat and buzz and everywhere form without purpose.

The phone starts in again. Limbe takes his time answering it. He knows who it is.

“Aaron?” Ray Harp asks. “Where in the hell have you been?”

Limbe enjoys the mix of anger and panic in Harp’s voice.

“What do you want, Ray?”

“I want you over here. As in an hour and a half ago. I want you watching my back.” He pauses. “One of Limon Perez’s boys shot Newt Deems. He’s alive and in one of those ICU places, but it doesn’t look good.”

“I told you trusting Perez was a mistake.”

“If he’s happy,” Ray says, “the other Mexican gangs go along. They look up to him. We negotiated. Perez wanted a larger cut of the action. The way I figured it, there’s enough green to spread around, so I said okay. Next thing I know, Newt’s in emergency surgery. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Packs of hyenas, Limbe thinks, all of them—Ray Harp, his biker pals, the Mex crank gangs. All of them, nothing more than teeth and fur and the smell of blood in the air.

“I got the word out to my brothers,” Harp says. “If Newt dies, we’re going to hit Perez hard. Make a counterstatement. I’ll need you to coordinate things.”

“You waited too long, Ray,” Limbe says. “You should have let me take out Perez six months ago.”

“Just get over here.”

“I don’t think so,” Limbe says.

“Quit dicking around. You heard what I said.”

“You keep them in their place, Ray,” Limbe says. “You show them their place, then you put them in it and you keep them there. It doesn’t matter if it’s taco-benders or niggers or losers like Coates. You don’t negotiate with them. You draw lines. You hold those lines. That’s all they understand.”

“Listen to me,” Ray says. “I figure I’m going to need some round-the-clock here until we see how things play out. I want to be ready this time.”

“You’re already speaking from the grave, Ray,” Limbe says. “It’s over. Limon Perez won’t stop now. You had your chance.” He pauses, then adds, “You’re done. And I’m out.”

“What’s this shit, out? You work for me.”

“Not anymore.”

Harp’s laugh sounds more like a bark. “Who do you think’s going to take you on? You’re a sick motherfucker, Limbe. I gave you a place. No one else will. You’re too fucked up.”

Limbe has no time for the welter of appetites governed by biker logic that Harp calls a life. He hangs up the phone.

Then he takes a deep breath and rips the whole unit out of the wall.

Aaron Limbe knows this: He is coming to judgment. He is untouchable.

He walks down the hall and unlocks the door to his mother’s bedroom. He’s converted it into a darkroom, and hanging on a thin wire above the pans of developing solution are nine black-and-white shots—reprints of the center row of photographs on the living-room wall. He checks to see if they’re dry and then takes them down and carries them back to the kitchen and sets them on the table in front of his chair.

He looks over at the pale rectangle between the refrigerator and calendar where the phone had hung.

Then Aaron Limbe hunts down his Exacto knife and returns to the kitchen table.

H
ey, Leon,” Jimmy says, “you got a problem with your hearing? A little wax buildup maybe, something along those lines?”

“You want another?”

“I do,” Jimmy says, “but that’s not what I was asking you.”

He watches Leon rack down a new glass and tilt it against the draft spout, four inches of churning foam running and rising to its lip.

The fact that Leon’s got a new pair of glasses hasn’t improved his skill as a bartender. He sets the draft in front of Jimmy and goes back to work on the model airplane he’s got spread across a sheet of newspaper on the bar top.

Leon’s turned the inside of the Chute into a regular air show. Suspended from the ceiling at varying heights are scale models of bomber and pursuit planes, a floating arsenal of Bearcats and Mustangs and Spitfires and P-47s and 51s and B-17s and 29s slowly bobbing under the ceiling fans like a horde of oversized exotic insects. Leon’s even got one hanging in the crapper, a fat submarine-sandwich-sized B-24.

“Don Ruger was in earlier looking for you,” Leon says. “I’m not sure if I told you that or not.”

“You did,” Jimmy says. “Now you can add memory loss to your hearing problems.”

“He said it was important,” Leon adds.

A few stools down a couple of the regulars start launching peanuts at the aquarium tank holding the sidewinder. The snake, thick as Jimmy’s forearm, lifts its head and strikes the glass twice.

“Hey, Gene, knock it off, okay?” Leon says. “The snake’s mean enough as it is.”

“Wasn’t me. Pete was shooting the nuts.”

“Don’t care which one of you’s doing it. Just stop it.” Leon points down the bar with part of a P-38 tail section.

“You got no sense of humor, Leon,” Pete says. “That’s a real liability in a bartender.”

“Speaking of which,” Gene says, “you hear the one about the two cowboys decided to become bounty hunters?”

Jimmy waves him off. “Not right now, Gene. Leon and I were having a conversation.”

“Tell it or not,” Pete says, “Leon won’t laugh. He’s like that wooden Indian in the Hank Williams song. You know, ‘Poor Old Caligula.’ ”

“That was a titty movie with Romans,” Gene says. “Remember? We watched it on Cinemax After-Hours.”

Jimmy keeps trying to get Leon’s attention and the conversation back on track, but Leon’s hunkered over the bar, working on matching the seams in the tail section of the P-38.

Jimmy finally reaches over and lightly taps Leon on the shoulder. Leon starts, and his thumb slips. There’s a tiny plastic snap, and then a piece of the tail section’s dangling.

Leon curses and stomps off for a fresh tube of epoxy and more toothpicks.

Pete gets up and heads off to the men’s room.

Gene slides down a couple of stools. He’s got a gray crew cut, six Slim Jims marshalling the breast pocket of his shirt, and a rough red rash covering his wrists and forearms. He and Pete work for an exterminating outfit, and they’re a little lax with the gloves and masks when they’re spraying.

“This one’ll kill you, Jimmy,” Gene says. “See, you got two hard-luck cowboys named Toby and Earl. They’ve done a little of everything, but it’s tough times and they’re broke. Can’t get a job. Then they hook up with this guy tells them he’ll pay six dollars for every Indian scalp they bring in.”

“I think I’ve heard this one,” Jimmy says, but Gene won’t give it up. He rattles through Toby’s and Earl’s new career as bounty hunters. The first time out they surprise a hunting party of Comanches and are forty-eight bucks to the good. The next time they scalp six. The time after that, twelve. They’re doing pretty well and thinking about branching out to Apaches.

“So Toby and Earl, they’ve been tracking this band of Indians for five days,” Gene says, “and they’re ready to make their move. They set up camp at the base of this bluff and turn in for a good night’s sleep.”

“Okay,” Jimmy says. “I got the picture.”

“Anyway,” Gene says, unwrapping a Slim Jim, “the next morning Toby’s the first one up. He opens the tent flap and steps out, and what he sees is Indians everywhere. Toby and him are surrounded. Thousands of Indians, one horizon to the other. Toby, he just stands there, taking it all in. Then he starts hollering for Earl to wake up.”

Gene leans closer, waving the Slim Jim in Jimmy’s face. “Toby’s dancing around yelling to Earl, Take a look at this. We made it, man. The big time. Six bucks a head. WE’RE RICH!'”

Pete comes back from the men’s. Gene points out he forgot to zip his pants. Pete reminds Gene they still have one more job, a harvester-ant infestation at an apartment complex in Encanto Park, before they punch out for the day.

Before they leave, Gene tells Jimmy that Don Ruger had been in looking for him earlier.

Leon takes their empty glasses, douses them in the rinse basin, and reracks them. He draws Jimmy another beer without him asking. Jimmy knows that’s Leon’s way of saying leave him alone.

The problem is, Jimmy can’t. He needs to know if Leon’s talked to his buddy in Montana. The guy owns a bar, and Leon was supposed to put a word in for Jimmy about a job.

A regular one, strictly straight-time.

Jimmy’s trying to work something out, and that’s how he needs to play it. He can’t afford to screw this one up.

He raps twice softly on the bar top. “You know, Leon, you never got around to telling me what I was asking you about earlier,” Jimmy says. “You know, if you talked to Frank Dawson.”

“Lawson,” Leon says without looking up. “His name’s Lawson.” Leon dips the tip of the toothpick in a small puddle of epoxy he’s laid out on the newspaper and starts edging the cracked seam in the tail of the P-38.

“Back to the original subject—you told me you were going to call him, Leon.”

“He’s got this chronic thing with stones,” Leon says. He dips the toothpick back in the glue. “Been real sick. He won’t do the ultrasound thing, you know where they break them up. He waits until he can pass them instead.”

“I need that job,” Jimmy says.

“You got stones, you don’t feel like talking on the telephone.”

“Come on, Leon. This is important.”

“I’ll talk to him when I talk to him,” Leon says, setting down the toothpick and cracking his knuckles. “The guy’s in real pain.”

Right now, Jimmy could say the same thing. He can’t quit thinking about Montana. Coattailing that is his sister-in-law, Evelyn. He can’t quit thinking about her either. They keep colliding in his head like two bumper cars endlessly tracking each other.

This is what it comes down to: Jimmy’s going to steal his brother’s wife, and he wants a clean getaway.

It’s not payback for his brother finessing him out of his inheritance, not anymore. It’s both more simple and more complicated than that.

Jimmy’s in love.

There’s no other way to put it.

Jimmy’s come to recognize the signs.

For one thing, the world’s bigger. Jimmy noticed that right away. You fall in love, and the world starts growing on you. There’s suddenly all this space between things. Everything’s large. You find you have acres to maneuver.

The flip side to that is what happens to time. Basically, you run out of it. You’ve suddenly got too much world and not enough clock. Everything’s large and nothing’s slow.

That’s when you tack a map of Montana on the wall of your room in the Mesa View Inn and redline the route straight to Helena.

That’s when your days feel like a sock abruptly turned inside out.

That’s when thoughts of your sister-in-law’s left breast keep popping up in your head, and you can’t shut them down. No matter what you’re doing, her left breast keeps following you around, and you’re thinking of its heft and hang, the way its nipple is like a grape on its way to becoming a raisin when she’s aroused.

That’s when you end up with pronoun problems, the sudden and stubborn presence of an
us
or
we
in your vocabulary.

And finally, you look at your hands, and that’s when you know you’re in love, because they’re not yours anymore. What you touch, she does. It’s like her hands are secreted within yours, and your own hands are over hers, covering them like gloves. Except you can’t take them off. That’s the catch. You can’t separate your touch from hers. Her hands, your hands, they’re a perfect fit.

Anything you touch, she’s there with you.

And there’s nothing you can do about it, absolutely nothing, and that’s when you know you’ve taken the fall, and it’s the long one.

A
s he crosses Washington and starts for the courtyard fronting the old capitol building, there is a taste, like that of damp earth, that fills his mouth to the back of his throat, and Aaron Limbe unwraps a breath mint and slips it onto his tongue.

Despite the midday heat, he is wearing his dark blue suit. He has a new haircut and carries a slim brown attaché case. His black shoes are buffed to an army-regulation shine.

He passes in front of the old capitol building with its triangular cornice and six columns and tan granite walls, all topped with the massive copper dome and white angel of mercy statue. The building was converted in 1974 into a museum, where the state’s history was defanged and hung on the walls or put in glass display cases.

Free admission, Limbe thinks, to all the old lies.

Directly behind the old capitol is the new annex, its central gray facade as blankly rectangular as a wafer set on end.

Inserted between the gridwork of sidewalks are rose and cacti gardens, beds of lantana and impatiens, the quadrants edged with evenly spaced rows of boxwoods and the staggered lines of shaggy-barked palms.

He looks at his watch. The breath mint does nothing to cut the taste in his mouth.