The Long Fall (25 page)

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” Jimmy says, when Evelyn’s eyelids flutter and finally open.

“Where’s Richard?” Her voice is soft and raspy, still edged in sleep.

“Uh, the cafeteria, I think. He looked like he was headed that way when I came in.”

“You don’t know for sure?” She leans over, fumbling with the switch, and adjusts the top half of the bed into a sitting position.

“I didn’t talk to him, Evelyn.” Richard’s a complication that Jimmy doesn’t need right now. Jimmy had spent the greater portion of the afternoon ghosting the lobby, watching the elevator, waiting for Richard to leave the room. The last time they’d run into each other hadn’t been pretty.

“He probably went for coffee,” Evelyn says. “I know he must be tired. He spent the last two nights here, sleeping in a chair. Or trying to.”

“Tell me about it,” Jimmy says. “I’ve been hanging around, waiting for an opening.”

Evelyn motions for the water glass, and Jimmy moves to the bedside stand, dumps in some ice, and fills the glass. Evelyn slips the straw between her lips and closes her eyes.

“I wake up so thirsty,” she says between sips.

Jimmy steps closer and rests his hand in her hair.

She shakes her head from side to side. “No, Jimmy. Someone might see us.”

He looks around and shrugs, then leans down and whispers, “I’ve missed you, honey.” He steps back and lightly pats the front of his jeans. “Jimmy Junior has, too.”

It takes a moment, and then Evelyn’s smiling, but it’s not the one he’s used to. He pulls a chair over and sits down.

“A mess,” Evelyn says, patting her hair. “I bet that’s what I look like. Hand me my purse, will you?”

She rummages for a compact, flips it open, and frowns. “I’m going to get it cut as soon as I get out of here. Short. I’ve been wearing it too long.” Evelyn digs around in the purse some more, comes up with a pack of breath mints, unwraps one, and slips it on her tongue.

“You look fine,” Jimmy says. “I’ve always liked your hair long. It suits you.”

“I’m too old to wear it that way. Shorter would be better.” She pauses and looks at the door. “Did Richard say when he’d be back?”

“I didn’t talk to him. I already told you that.”

Evelyn takes another sip of water. The covers have slipped, and Jimmy’s got a view, a nice one, of Evelyn’s breasts shadowing her nightgown below the bandages on her right shoulder.

He slides the chair closer, reaching over and taking the hand with the IV patched on its back. “Everything’s going to be all right,” he says.

Evelyn nods. “Richard told me. He showed me the article in the
Republic
.”

“That, too,” Jimmy says. “I was thinking more about Helena though. Leon’s vet buddy, Frank Lawson, the guy who owns the bar, he’s only going to hold the job for me two more days. The kidney stones, they’re giving him problems again. I figure, to get up there in time, I better leave tomorrow morning.” Jimmy pauses and nods, still moving the pad of his thumb up and down the back of Evelyn’s hand. “Soon as the time’s right, you can join me.”

Evelyn picks up the breath mints, then sets them back down next to her purse. “The doctors say it may be awhile before I get my strength back.”

“Fine. I’ll be settled in by then.” Jimmy goes on to tell her about the deal he’s worked out with Lawson. The guy’s got an apartment above the bar, supposed to be pretty nice, enough room for two people, and they can fix it up any way they want to.

Evelyn waits a beat too long to respond, and then all she says is, “Oh, Jimmy.”

The way she says it brings him up short—Jimmy now knows what that phrase means—and she’s looking everywhere but at him, and the longer it goes on, the more uncomfortable he is, because the thing is, she’s not looking at him, but she’s smiling, this wide-open smile, and he keeps hearing that
Oh, Jimmy,
the spin she put on it, and he wants to believe that smile is something that’s been pumped through the IV, a pharmaceutical afterglow, but when she finally turns her head and looks at him, Jimmy’s scared, plain flat-out scared, about what’s coming next.

“Richard is a good man,” she says.

Jimmy expects her to add something else, but she leaves it there, as if that news flash explained everything.

“He’s a swell guy, Richard is, all right. A regular saint.” Jimmy lets go of her hand and sits back in the chair, shaking his head. He points out the good man hired Aaron Limbe to kill him and almost got her killed in the process.

“He thought he was going to lose me,” Evelyn says quietly.

“You know he blames me for you getting shot,” Jimmy says. “That and the ransom. He thinks I took it.”

Evelyn looks at the doorway and nods. She starts smoothing the bedcovers. She’s got both hands going at the same time. Above her, the IV line twitches and jumps.

Jimmy can’t get past the images tumbling around in his brain, Evelyn undressing, Evelyn undressed, a swarm of fingers, lips, nipples, and thighs, of flesh cupped and kneaded, parted and entered, and he can’t shut them down or off or make the images match the woman lying in the hospital bed and what she’s saying.

The room’s squeezing him, too. Hospitals have always made him nervous, and everything here—from the low buzz of the fluorescents, the soft green and white floor and walls, the antiseptic air, the cut flowers and cards lining the windowsill and nightstand, to the television mounted high in the corner—everything unlocks an awkward mix of anger and panic in him.

“For a while there, I was confused,” Evelyn says softly. “I was confused, and I did things, Jimmy. Things that I should not have done. They weren’t me. You do that if you’re confused. I did things, and he saw. He did. He saw what I was doing, and then he showed me what I did.”

At first, Jimmy thinks she’s referring to Richard. “Wait a minute,” he says. “Limbe’s dead. He can’t do anything to you now. We’re clear.”

Evelyn looks down, tenting the top of the bedcovers, and then slips her hands beneath them.

“I wasn’t myself,” she says. “That’s what happens when you’re confused. You aren’t yourself, and then you do things.”

“Stop it, Evelyn. Okay? Stop.”

Jimmy can’t let it go, not now, not when they’ve finally got their chance and there’s nothing to hold them back, when they’ve finally come through, and everything they’d talked about, he keeps telling Evelyn, it’s right there in front of them, and all they have to do is take it.

“I’ve been married for almost half my life, Jimmy. What I did was foolish. I wasn’t thinking. Or at least not clearly. I forgot who I was for a while.”

“You’re turning everything around, Evelyn. It’s not that simple. It never was. Not even at first. But definitely not later. Not then. And not now.”

Then Jimmy’s massaging his temples and telling himself that it’s the hospital, not Evelyn, talking. A hospital’s no different from a principal’s office or a police station or any other official space, the air itself shaping whatever you tried to say into something else. They were rooms with weight, like barometric pressure you could feel on your skin.

When Jimmy looks up, Evelyn’s got that smile going again, the one that brought him up short earlier.

“Wait a second,” he says. “What did you just say?”

“I said that Richard’s forgiven me. The last couple of nights, we’ve done a lot of talking.”

Jimmy’s out of his chair and moving around the room, his breath trapped high in his chest, but no matter where he puts his feet, he keeps running up against the open door of the hospital room, and he can’t face the prospect of what lies outside it with no Evelyn, the idea of moving around a world with the heart torn out of it, no way that. No way.

“I’m not believing this,” he says finally. And that’s when he recognizes it, the smile, where he’s seen it before.

It’s her stewardess smile. The flight attendant special.

The one Evelyn brought home from her job on the airlines and transplanted for her spot in The Evelyn and Richard Show, the one Jimmy always associated with their storybook lives, a pleasant and friendly smile that went no further than itself and that always seemed to wear Evelyn instead of the other way around.

The same one she’s resurrected now and hidden herself behind.

“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” she says, adjusting the bedcovers. “I really am.”

“Sorry and forgiven. That’s some package deal, Evelyn.”

He moves closer to the bed. She keeps the smile aimed at him. He reaches down and touches her cheek. “I’m going to tell him,” Jimmy says softly. “I’m going to fucking well tell him.”

He watches the smile waver. It’s his last card.

“I’ll tell Richard who’s in the photos with you,” he says, “and then we can see just how far Saint Richard’s famous capacity for forgiveness can take him on that one.”

Evelyn closes her eyes for a moment. Her hands are trembling. “He doesn’t need to know that,” she says.

Jimmy says he’s not so sure about that.

He’s thinking, he tells Evelyn, of setting the whole table. Lay everything out. Enlighten Richard, too, about exactly what happened to the ransom money he believes Jimmy took. He’ll tell Richard how he gave the cash to Teresa Ruger and her family because Richard and Aaron Limbe killed her husband, that Don Ruger’s blood is on both their hands because Richard hired Aaron Limbe to kill his wife’s lover and Aaron Limbe missed and got Don instead, so Richard owes on that one; and Jimmy will tell Richard about how Aaron Limbe played him, cutting the face and head out of all those black-and-white eight-by-tens, suckering Richard in, so that Limbe could get paid for doing what he was going to do anyway, what he’d wanted to do for a long time, and that was to kill Jimmy, and Jimmy figures he’ll pause there, let Richard soak up where things are headed, and then double-barrel him with the truth about whose face belonged on those black-and-whites with his wife.

“No,” Evelyn says.

“What, no?” Jimmy asks.

She’s still holding on to the smile. Jimmy can’t get around or behind it.

“No, you won’t tell Richard,” she says. “You won’t. I know you, Jimmy. You’re a good man, too. You just haven’t figured that out yet.”

Jimmy’s moving around the room again, clenching and unclenching his fists. The door to the bathroom is ajar, and in passing, he gets a glimpse of himself. He doesn’t like what he sees. Not a guy centered in some solidly righteous anger, a guy who understood the mechanics of payback, a guy ready to balance the family books once and for all, no, none of the above, because Jimmy’s thinking what he saw was a guy headed for the edge of a cliff, whose next step or the one after was going to be meeting nothing but air.

“At the farm, when you were teaching me how to shoot?” Evelyn asks.

Jimmy starts toward the bed, then stops.

“Do you remember what I said to you afterward?”

Jimmy shakes his head no. He remembers the afternoon heat, the targets in the orchard, him standing behind Evelyn, coaching her on how to breathe when she pulled the trigger, him leaning in, his hand on her wrist, and then Evelyn turning her head. He remembers the kiss, but not what she said after it.

“ ‘I’ll decide if that happened or not.’ That’s what I said, Jimmy.” Evelyn lowers her head, and Jimmy hears something tear in her breath.

“Wait a minute. Okay? Just wait.” Jimmy is shaking. Everything’s glass. “No way, Evelyn,” he says, stepping toward her. “Maybe you said that. But it doesn’t work that way. It just doesn’t.”

“Oh, Jimmy.” The smile is gone, and she’s looking right at him. “Sometimes it does. Sometimes it has to.”

I
t’s been a long fall. Everyone in Helena says so. Autumn’s kited a check that winter’s pocketed and neglected to cash, the trees still holding their leaves and the leaves themselves in Crayola mode, clear light-filled days and color everywhere, the temperature unseasonably warm, the sky too big for the horizon.

Jimmy’s tending at The Corner Place.

What he hears from his side of the bar and on the street is mostly talk about the weather. The inhabitants of Montana, like Arizona’s, wallow in meteorological observations. People talk, and they talk about the weather. It’s a safe, shorthand subject that stands in for any number of others, and under the right circumstances it generates its own drama and takes on the size and scope of history lessons.

Even though Helena and western Montana have always cut a better deal on weather conditions than the eastern portions of the state, as the new kid Jimmy is treated to dozens of stories about the legendary Montana winters, the wrath of ice, snow, and chinooks, of endless leaden skies and frozen pipes and frostbite, of tire chains and snowdrifts and dead batteries.

In the meantime, it’s early November, and fall’s still holding its breath, and The Corner Place is open for business. It’s a shot-and-a-chaser kind of place, an old neighborhood bar, dark and quiet with wood-panelled walls and a long L-shaped bar, a few booths and a scattering of tables, a juke Jimmy is working on getting restocked, and a back room holding three pool tables and a bank of video poker machines.

The clientele’s working class, men and women from the area plants manufacturing aluminum, drywall, or insulation, or from one of the mines or sand and gravel yards, or the meatpacking and diary-processing plants, and Jimmy’s busiest at shift changes. He’ll have them two or three deep at the bar then, the numbers gradually thinning out over the next hour to the regulars, those who are in no hurry to get home or see The Corner Place as one.

His boss, Leon Glade’s old vet buddy, is an okay guy to work for. Unlike Leon, Frank Lawson has a sense of humor and more than one mood. Lawson’s big and balding and sports a curly oversized pair of muttonchop sideburns, has four grown kids, three ex-wives, a well-stocked weekend getaway cabin in the mountains, and a vintage mint-condition Beechcraft Twin Bonanza. Besides The Corner Place, he owns or is a partner in a pizza joint, video store, and two car washes. From what Jimmy can tell, the only things that consistently knock Frank Lawson out of a good mood are Republican politicians and his recurring bouts of kidney stones.