The Long Fall

by Lynn Kostoff

  “TV time,” Jimmy says, shaking his head. He walks over and puts his hand on the small of Evelyn’s back and presses so that she drops the semicrouch action and stands straighter.

  “You don’t need both arms either,” he says, reaching over and disengaging her left hand from where she’s locked it to her right wrist. “The Diamondback’s not that heavy.”

  He tells her to stand there for a minute and breathe. Empty her mind of everything, then simply raise her arm and fire.

  She misses both cans. But not by as much as earlier.

  “This time, the trigger,” Jimmy says, stepping closer. “You’re pulling the trigger and throwing off your aim. Squeeze it instead.”

  Jimmy stands just behind Evelyn’s right shoulder. He reaches down and lays his arm over hers, encircling her wrist with his fingers, and moves her arm so that the gun is pointing straight down. He keeps his arm where it is.

  “Do like I told you,” he says. “Breathe.”

  Evelyn has her hair pulled back in a careless ponytail, and there are two small moles side by side where her hairline meets her neck. Her skin’s flushed from the heat and lacquered with a thin sheen of sweat. He smells traces of sunscreen and shampoo. He leans closer and whispers into the seashell whorl of her ear, “Don’t think. Move when I do. Then squeeze.”

  He lifts her arm in one fluid movement and stops. She fires. The can somersaults off the ledge.

  “The other one now,” he says, turning her slightly. She’s not wearing a bra. Her breast shifts and bunches against the underside of his arm.

  She squeezes. The second can jumps and disappears into a thicket of mesquite.

  He’s about to let go of her arm when she turns her head.

  She hesitates. Then he does.

  He’s thinking she’s going to step to the side and away.

  She doesn’t.

  He has no idea how long the kiss lasts.

  Neither of them says anything when they break apart. Jimmy can see her nipples through the T-shirt. A muscle in his stomach jumps.

  “I’ll decide if that happened or not,” Evelyn says.

  Jimmy looks at her, shakes his head, and then walks back over to the cooler.

  A few seconds later, there’s a pistol shot. Jimmy ducks.

  The hornet’s nest under the eaves of the house explodes.

  Fifteen yards away, Evelyn lowers her arm and slowly lets out her breath.

  FOURTEEN

  Aaron Limbe hangs back, keeping at least six cars between him and the truck. He’s working his own clock tonight, not Ray Harp’s, and holding the tail’s about as difficult as striking a match. The truck’s a boxy rental, a caution-light yellow, with an enclosed bed. Coates is sticking to the center lane, going north on route 17.

  Limbe had trusted to instinct and staked out the Mesa View Inn, and Coates and his sister-in-law had not disappointed him. She had pulled up in the yellow rental a little after 9:00 P.M. and headed straight for room 110. They left ten minutes later.

  Tonight, Limbe misses his uniform, the night-blue fit, its sharp, precise creases, the weight of the badge on its pocket. Buttoning the shirt had been as familiar as writing his signature. He misses the way the uniform placed him and established boundaries.

  At times like this, when thinking of his fall from the police department or of being reduced to working for a lowlife like Ray Harp, it becomes a test of Limbe’s will not to simply go on and kill Coates outright.

  But he must stay strong, he tells himself, and inhabit what he knows.

  Jimmy Coates is the last tie to Limbe’s old life. His death cannot be insignificant.

  Aaron Limbe must get it right.

  Jimmy Coates must fully learn the nature and breadth of consequence.

  Aaron Limbe unwraps a breath mint and slips it onto his tongue.

  Besides, he thinks, the sister-in-law is a wrinkle he hadn’t expected.

  The rental truck’s turn signal comes to life, and Limbe follows it off the Camelback Road exit, Coates heading west now, toward Glendale.

  The sky’s lower than the mountains tonight, thick and churning with clouds strong-armed by constant winds and skeined by lightning. Everything’s in motion.

  Coates slows as he passes Shoe City. The lights in the store are on, but no cars are in the lot. There’s a portable billboard out front advertising an Inventory Reduction Sale starting tomorrow and a large revolving shoe sprouting from the store’s roof.

  Coates takes the next side street off Camelback and pulls in behind the store.

  Aaron Limbe goes on for a block and circles back. He parks away from the halogen light on the corner under a line of date palms and watches Coates back the truck up to the loading bay. Above Limbe, the palm fronds snap and rattle in the wind.

  Jimmy Coates stands outside the truck for a moment, looking around, and then climbs up on the loading bay. Evelyn Coates gets out and opens the rear door of the truck.

  Aaron Limbe grips the steering wheel. He can feel the storm coming in, the sudden drop in barometric pressure, the wind shifting from a hiss to a roar, grit and sand pinging against his car, the palms’ clatter now sounding like a pencil thrust between the blades of a fan.

  The headaches again.

  Not now, he tells himself.

  He wills back the sky.

  But it’s as if the wind has found its way into the veins running beneath both temples. Limbe looks down at his hands white-knuckling the steering wheel and then slowly lifts his left and cups the crown of his head.

  If he’s not careful, the headaches take him away from himself.

  Through a tight squint, Limbe watches Jimmy Coates and his sister-in-law scramble, moving armloads of boxes from the rear of the store and dumping them in the truck. As they cross the loading bay, the wind rips the top off most of the boxes, scattering them across the lot and pinning them to the wire fence bordering the street.

  Limbe takes his camera and gets out of the car. His hands are shaking so badly that for a moment he’s not even sure he can get the lens cap off, let alone work the camera. His fingers are thick and awkward, refusing to cooperate with him or each other. The roar inside his head is indistinguishable from the wind and erases every other sound.

  Limbe leans over the hood of the car. He hears Jimmy Coates yell something to his sister-in-law, but Aaron can’t make out what. The wind is still roaring around him. He straightens, lifting the camera, and gets off three shots before the clouds break open.

  It’s a punishing rain, hard and intense and unyielding, sweeping from the east in great gusting sheets. Limbe is instantly soaked to his skin.

  The rain doesn’t let up. Within minutes the gutters are overflowing, water rushing everywhere. It pulls one of the car’s hubcaps free. The wipers can’t clear the weight of the rain and freeze up in the middle of the windshield. The air turns thick and close, and it feels like someone’s pressing a damp washcloth over his face.

  Limbe rests his forehead on the steering wheel and lets the storm pass through him.

  He has no idea how long it takes for the sky to clear. When he lifts his head, the doors to the loading bay are closed and the yellow rental is gone. The lot behind the store is completely flooded, the water dark and muddy, still now that the wind has disappeared, and dotted with palm fronds and sheets of newspaper and styrofoam cups and clusters of shoeboxes floating like tiny coffins torn from the earth.

  FIFTEEN

  Jimmy snaps out a black plastic bag, then starts stripping the bed at the Mesa View Inn. The sheets are stained purple and green.

  When he gets to the pillowcase, he smiles.

  He’s figured out a way to pay his brother back.

  After last night, he’s got all the ammo he needs.

  Neither Evelyn or he had noticed the stains until they were back in the truck headed toward Phoenix and Pete Samoa’s Pawn Emporium. The rain had drenched them as well as the merchandise, whose dyes, as Vic Stamp had lamented, leached and bled at the fir
st sign of moisture. Jimmy’s and Evelyn’s hands and arms as far as their elbows were tattooed in purple and green.

  Pete winked and slipped Jimmy the envelope Vic had left for him holding the grand but then went over the edge when he opened the doors of the rental and saw the condition of the shoes. After a few minutes of yelling and cursing, Pete slipped directly into his renegotiation mode, refusing to stand by his original offer of seventy-five cents a pair, claiming he couldn’t do better than a quarter per for damaged goods, Jimmy and Evelyn ganging up on him, refusing to help him unload the truck unless he went fifty. Pete bitched and moaned some more, and they settled on forty-five cents per pair.

  Jimmy and Evelyn returned the rental and picked up Evelyn’s car, and she took him back to the Mesa View, Evelyn still pumped up from the job, wanting to replay the details and side-order how she’d felt throughout, Evelyn doing a pretty good imitation of a crank monologue, and Jimmy let her run, interrupting only when necessary to point out a couple of things that would have given the Phoenix police an invitation to ruin the party, like Evelyn’s tendency to run yellow lights and improvise on the speed limit.

  It was going on midnight when they got back to his room. Evelyn popped the trunk on the Mustang and produced a fifth of Wild Turkey she’d lifted from Richard’s wet bar. She wanted a celebratory drink to close their deal and to clean up some before she went home. Jimmy unlocked the door to the room and hunted down some glasses and ice.

  They poured a couple. Evelyn bracketed each with corny movie-line toasts, acting as if they’d pulled off the heist of the century instead of lifting a pile of defective athletic shoes. He let her count out the the split from Pete Samoa, Evelyn squaring the bills in neat little piles in front of her and touching them whenever she lifted her drink.

  Jimmy hadn’t been thinking of the kiss. He’d been thinking instead of the envelope in his back pocket holding the grand, which, in addition to his share from the dry-cleaning holdups, would finally clear the books with Ray Harp and ransom himself from another session in the desert with the dog collar or something worse. Jimmy had simply been unwinding behind the whiskey, glad that the job earlier in the evening had gone okay and that he was off the hook with Evelyn now and on the verge of getting his old life back.

  No way had he been thinking about the kiss. The room itself conspired against it, the ambience of the Mesa View’s decor not exactly bringing to mind a love nest.

  Jimmy still can’t say for sure what the trigger was for them ending up in bed, but they had, and he can remember the surprise of fingers and tongues all right, of unsnapping Evelyn’s bra and leaving green fingerprints on her breasts, of flesh giving way to flesh and the wind of breath in his ear, of Evelyn wet and locking her legs around his waist, meeting each of his thrusts with one of her own, Evelyn’s voice mixed in there, too, low and insistent, urging him on, the muscles in her legs beginning to tighten and shudder, Evelyn pushing harder against him, wet and tight and soaking his crotch, then her voice breaking, Evelyn throwing back her head and coming, her legs squeezing him and her mouth open, the surprising, oddly intimate glimpse of her back molars and pink tunnel of throat unexpectedly jacking him to his own orgasm.

  Evelyn had immediately dropped off to sleep. Jimmy, used to being the recipient of the universal postcoital complaint, remained wide awake. After fifteen minutes of alternately staring at the ceiling and at Evelyn splayed on the bed beside him, he got up and made a drink.

  He ended up making a couple of more before he picked up Evelyn’s panties and slipped them inside his pillowcase and went to take a shower.

  He’d managed to scrub off most of the green and purple patchwork of stains when Evelyn stepped in and joined him, Jimmy feeling put on the spot, telling her he might need a little more turnaround time if she was thinking repeat performances, Evelyn looking him right in the eye and smiling as she began to soap up her hands.

  Five minutes later, still wet from the shower, they were back in bed.

  Evelyn left for home a little before 3:00 A.M.

  Jimmy, whistling, keeps snapping out plastic bags and filling them with laundry. It’s an old tune, one that anyone would recognize.

  SIXTEEN

  Richard keeps leaning across the table and waving the tickets in her face. “You forgot?” he asks. “I mean, how is that possible? I’ve been talking about it for over a month. You even marked it on the calendar.”

  “Okay,” Evelyn says, picking up her coffee cup. “I didn’t forget. I just can’t go right now.”

  Richard looks out the bay window of the breakfast nook and asks why.

  “Carol’s going through a rough time,” Evelyn says. “She needs me. I’m her friend.”

  “She’s got plenty of other friends,” Richard says, “if she needs someone to hold her hand. Besides, you know what I think about you hanging out with her in the first place. Carol’s never been very stable.”

  Yes, Evelyn knows what Richard thinks about Carol Findley. She owns and runs a small gallery in Scottsdale. Richard usually refers to her as “one of those art types,” a convenient shorthand dismissal on his part from ever having to get to know her. Which is why Evelyn used her as a cover, the odds next to none that Richard would ever call Carol and check up on any of the details Evelyn’s been feeding him lately.

  “The tickets are already paid for,” Richard says, “and we have reservations at the Marriott on Peachtree near the convention center. I can’t cancel now.”

  “You can still go,” Evelyn says.

  Richard doesn’t say anything. He looks like he’s been slapped. He glances at the clock and then gets up and walks over to the refrigerator to make a sandwich. He’d come home during his lunch hour to oversee packing for the trip. Evelyn got back sometime after 3:30 last night and had just been getting out of bed.

  “It won’t be all business, you know.” He’s at the counter, his back to her. “We can take some time for ourselves, too.”

  Evelyn knows what that means. It’s Richard’s elliptical way of resurrecting the issue of starting a family. When she first quit the airlines he had pushed hard on their having a child; and when Evelyn balked, told him she wasn’t sure if she wanted one, Richard had backed off some, stoically accepting her wishes but not giving up on the idea of a child, confident that in the end Evelyn would come around, Richard nothing if not patient; but after his father died, Richard had started pushing hard again, and things between them were always tense, their lives together like the slow grinding of teeth or the steady leak of a faucet; and for Richard, Atlanta must have seemed like the perfect opportunity, a little time together, Evelyn surely coming to her senses and seeing he’d been right all along.

  “I’d like you there with me.” His voice quiet and even.

  “I’m sorry,” Evelyn says.

  “That’s it? You’re sorry? What does that mean exactly?” Richard’s turned partway around, holding a knife in one hand, a jar of mayonnaise in the other.

  “I don’t want to go to Atlanta right now, that’s all.”

  Richard turns back to the counter and the sandwich. He has all the ingredients laid out with the efficiency and precision of an assembly line, and after he finishes one he picks up a plate and starts over. He then peels and cores a bright green Granny Smith, cutting the apple neatly in two and setting half on each plate. He pours two glasses of ice water. He brings everything over to the table and takes off his jacket. Evelyn notices small flecks of gray in his hair. The skin around his eyes is still smooth and unlined. Her husband has always worn his age well.

  He’s about to take the first bite of his sandwich when he notices the blinking red light of the answering machine on the other side of the kitchen. He asks Evelyn if she checked the messages. She shakes her head no. He frowns and gets up. One’s from an electrician, then a plumber, and finally a subcontractor. Richard copies down a series of numbers in a small notebook he’s taken from his shirt pocket.

  “What was that about?” Evelyn, s
uddenly ravenous, goes on to finish half her sandwich in three bites.

  “Some estimates for work on the farmhouse. The place is a mess. I’d like to get a couple crews out there soon.”

  “Have you told your brother what you’re planning to do?”

  Richard shakes his head and picks up his sandwich. “The place is legally mine, Evelyn. What I decide to do with it doesn’t concern him.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” Evelyn begins.

  “No,” Richard says, momentarily lowering his sandwich.

  Evelyn looks away. In the backyard, three Inca doves tumble through the air as if pulled on strings.

  She half listens to Richard talk about his plans for renovating the farmhouse, for clearing and landscaping the surrounding property, turning the place into a weekend getaway for them, Evelyn not wanting to meet her husband’s eyes, saddened and afraid of what she sees there, of what they held and did not hold ever since his father died, Richard burying him as methodically and efficiently as he made the sandwiches earlier, then dutifully stepping in and straightening out the tangle his father left his estate in, Richard keeping his grief to himself or holding it at arm’s length as he went about the business of running his business and making plans, Evelyn a reluctant witness to it all, feeling as if her father-in-law’s corpse had moved into every room of the house and her husband started and ended each day by once again burying him.

  Below the bay window is a thick cluster of hibiscus swollen with large orange-salmon blooms and the small, buzzing orbits of bees. The entire backyard is coated in the flat light of the noon sun.

  Richard has set the airline tickets on the table between them.

  Evelyn thinks of standing on the loading bay of the shoe store off Camelback Road last night, her arms full of stolen goods, the lash of the wind and rain on her face, of something large and unwieldy tearing loose inside her that this kitchen, the noon light, and Atlanta cannot touch.

  She committed a crime.

  And she liked it.