by Lynn Kostoff
“No,” Jimmy says. He doesn’t understand.
Then he hears something tear in his brother’s voice, and Richard says, “Evelyn. Something’s happened to Evelyn.”
It’s as if Evelyn is in the middle of a crime she can’t name. Some immense transgression with no clear boundaries.
She’s not even sure Aaron Limbe is his real name.
At first she’d assumed that Limbe had kidnapped her, but when she saw the photos of Jimmy and her thumbtacked to the living room wall, kidnapping didn’t make any sense and she started thinking blackmail; but even that dead-ended because if Limbe were going to blackmail anybody, it would have been her, and now she wonders if he’s planning to rape her; but even though he’s stripped her to bra and panties and tied her to the chair, she can’t quite believe rape is where things are heading, or if it is, she doesn’t believe it will stop there.
The room is completely dark except for the cone of light from the lamp he’s positioned at her left shoulder, adjusting its placement so that the light spills over the wall of photos ten feet in front of her and nowhere else.
She wishes she could wipe away the sweat crawling out of her pores. He’s running the furnace on high.
If she could see him, it would be easier to fight back, but he doesn’t step into the light. He remains behind her, hovering over her left shoulder, sometimes her right, his movements unpredictable and imperceptible. He’s nothing more than a disembodied voice squeezed out of the dark.
He leans in now and asks, “Did you ever pick up a batch of photos, Evelyn, you know, maybe of a special occasion, a family reunion, say, and you start looking through them, and you inevitably come across one or two shots of yourself that throw you off, and you immediately think, ‘That’s not me. I don’t look anything like that'? Hasn’t that happened to you?”
Evelyn slowly nods.
“Of course it has,” he says. “The image in the photo doesn’t match the one you carry around of yourself in your mind, and the easiest solution is to simply throw those unflattering shots of yourself away and forget about them. There are always enough others that fit what you want to see.”
Evelyn feels herself begin to tremble.
“Tell me what you see, Evelyn,” he says.
She’s conscious of the rope binding her ankles to the front legs of the wooden chair and its pull on her wrists behind her.
“Jimmy and me,” she says quietly.
“True,” he says. “And what are you doing?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Just tell me what you see.”
“We’re making love,” she says.
Evelyn hears him slowly let out his breath. “No,” he says. “You’re wrong, and you’re afraid, Evelyn, but it’s not the kind of fear that will take us where we need to go.”
A moment later, he leans over and pulls her hair away from her face and then stretches a wide swath of silver duct tape across her mouth.
It’s leaning on noon, and his brother’s been drinking. From where he’s sitting, Jimmy can’t tell how much of a dent Richard’s made in the bottle of Wild Turkey, but from the look of him, Richard must have been up all night, too.
They’re in the small office Richard maintains in the house at Scottsdale on the second floor, down the hall from the master bedroom. There’s a stripped-down military feel to the room, all right angles and neutral colors.
Jimmy’s trying to process what his brother’s just told him.
The words are still playing in Jimmy’s head, Richard’s maddeningly precise account of how he hired someone to kill his wife’s lover.
And then Richard giving him the details of act 2 when the whole thing backfired and the hired killer turned kidnapper and snatched Evelyn.
He wonders if his brother has drunk enough whiskey to find the courage to shoot him.
Because Jimmy figures that’s what he’s walked into. They’re in tabloid territory now, the finale to some third-rate tragedy destined to be supermarket-aisle headlines.
Richard picks up the bottle, hesitates, and then sets it down.
Jimmy watches his brother’s hands and eyes.
“He said it had to be you,” Richard says finally. “You had to be the one to deliver the money. No one else. Those were his conditions.”
Jimmy’s suddenly having trouble reading the compass.
“That’s why I needed you back here. He’ll only deal with you.”
“I don’t get it,” Jimmy says.
“He’s the type of people you associate with,” Richard says. “I just didn’t see it at the time.”
In a blink, he and Richard are back on familiar ground.
Maybe, but I’ve never hired out someone hit, Jimmy thinks.
To Richard, he says, “There’s a lot of things you don’t see, basically because you’re so busy being right all the time.”
“You’d never understand,” Richard says, waving him off. “You can’t. You’ve never loved anyone.”
Richard leans back in his chair, closing his eyes and bridging his temples with his thumb and index finger. “We’re talking about Evelyn,” he says quietly. “Almost twenty years. You’ll never be able to understand a love like that. If I’d known who it was, I’d have gone after him myself.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This.” Richard picks up a manila envelope from the desk and throws it at Jimmy.
Jimmy flips through a stack of black-and-white photos of Evelyn and him. In each, his head or face has been cut out.
“I had to,” Richard says.
Jimmy slips the photos back in the envelope. He thinks about being pinned down in the parking lot of the strip mall. About Don Ruger’s arm coming off at the shoulder.
“He never told you his name?” Jimmy asks.
Richard says no.
“What’d he look like then?”
Richard goes back to massaging his temples. “I don’t know. He was average looking. Medium build. Short black hair. He kept popping breath mints the whole time we talked. And he had these pale gray eyes, they made you nervous when he looked at you. That’s all I can remember.”
That was enough though.
“How much is the ransom?” Jimmy asks.
Richard sits back in his chair. He looks at the bottle of Wild Turkey. “Fifty grand. By the close of working hours today.”
“And you can get ahold of that kind of money?”
“If I have to,” Richard says. “I made a couple of calls and put a lien on the Dobbins parcel. The bank will come through with the money. All you have to do is deliver it.”
Sure, Jimmy thinks. That’s all. And give Aaron Limbe another chance to finish the job you hired him to do.
The muscles in her legs and back have begun to cramp. The floor vents are pouring heat. The room is dark except for the spill of light on the wall of photographs.
Aaron Limbe drops his hand on the back of Evelyn’s neck.
“I’m thirsty,” she says.
“Of course you are, Evelyn. Now tell me what you see.”
“Tell me what you want to hear,” she says, “and I’ll say it. Whatever it is, just tell me.” She closes her eyes for a moment.
“You’re missing the point. This is not about what I want to hear.”
“Why are you doing this?” Evelyn’s throat is parched, her voice scratchy. “You told me you were a friend of Jimmy’s.”
“Jimmy Coates is a mongrel,” Limbe says, “as worthless as any nigger or taco-bender, and I have numbered his hours.”
He puts one hand at the base of her skull and the other along her jawline and locks his fingers into place. Evelyn can’t move her head. He moves it for her.
“One at a time,” he says, levering and directing her line of vision. “Starting at the top left. And don’t close your eyes, Evelyn. If you do, we’ll have to start all over again.”
He guides her picture by picture, lingering on each, one row after another, seventy-two photos
in all.
“You’re still fighting me, Evelyn,” he says when they’re done. “I could feel the tension in your neck, the resistance the whole time. You still refuse to see.” For a moment, he sounds genuinely sorry.
Then he brings out the duct tape again.
His hand is back on her neck, hard.
“Look at the wall, Evelyn. That’s not making love. We’re not talking about love. It’s friction. Fucking. Fornication. It’s two animals in heat.”
When she tries to shake her head, his fingers lock on the tendons cording her neck. Small patches of white and yellow swim into her peripheral vision.
“Look at yourself in those photos, Evelyn. What you’re doing. Look at the way you spread your legs. Look at what you’re doing with your hands, your mouth. Look at what you let be done to you.”
No, she thinks. No. This isn’t happening.
“Jimmy Coates ruins everything he touches, and you let him between your legs and took him inside you. He ruined you, Evelyn. You’re a fallen woman. That’s what people used to call someone like you when I was a child. Fallen.” He pauses, and she feels his breath as well as his fingers on her neck. “You’ll understand what Jimmy Coates is once you accept what you’ve become.”
No.
It’s the only word that makes sense, the one she repeats to herself while Aaron Limbe continues to talk, No, over and over, to the way he’s twisted things, because she knows who she is and what Jimmy and she had together, knows how passion can burn you clean of everything except itself and how there is a grace in the trembling of flesh before flesh and how in the moment of its joining you simultaneously find and lose yourself, and that’s all love has ever been or will be, the finding and losing of yourself in the touch of another, and that’s enough,
more than enough, and probably more than any of us deserve, and if she could, if it weren’t for the duct tape stretched tightly across her mouth, she’d scream the NO she’s been repeating to herself in Aaron Limbe’s face, a NO as stubborn, resolute, and defiant as she could make it, but right now she’s afraid because she’s having difficulty remembering what Aaron Limbe looks like, and she needs to remember that, to hold on to his image, because it’s easier to fight back then, but Aaron Limbe has slowly turned into his voice, and like the darkness it arises from, the voice swallows all contexts except its own, and Evelyn’s afraid to close her eyes because that would be like inviting the voice and the darkness in, but what light she’s left with only leads to the wall and the photos covering it, and because of that, everything has shrunken to the NO she’s holding deep in her chest like a breath.
By 3 P.M., a pot of coffee has sobered Richard up, and he’s showered, shaved, and changed suits and gone on to pick up the ransom money at the bank.
Jimmy’s sitting behind the desk in the second-floor office. He picks up the phone and punches out Pete Samoa’s number.
“Oh man,” Pete says after a moment. “This sounds like a local connection. Please tell me I’m wrong here.”
“Have the cops been around?”
“Of course. You left the Renzler’s truck three blocks away. What did you think? They’re all over the place on this one. A cop got killed. They’re not going to leave it alone any time soon. I was able to tell them you were out of town, keep everything nice and neat. And then what? You show up again.”
“Look, Pete, I need to talk to Ray Harp.”
“You’re out of town and clear. Then you come back. I’m still not believing this.”
“It’s important. I need to get ahold of Ray.”
“He won’t talk to you. Not now.” Pete goes on about Ray Harp’s troubles with Limon Perez and the Mexican gangs and Newt Deems getting shot and ending up in intensive care.
“It’s Limbe,” Jimmy says. “I need to talk to Ray about Limbe.”
Pete doesn’t say anything for a moment.
“Come on,” Jimmy says. “Give me the number.”
“It won’t do you any good. Aaron Limbe is AWOL. He doesn’t work for Ray anymore. He walked about four days ago, right around the time all the trouble started with Perez. That’s all I can tell you. No one’s seen him around.”
That’s it, Jimmy thinks, feeling his hope evaporate. Ray Harp was his best chance at curbing Aaron Limbe. Jimmy figured he’d offer Ray a cut from the ransom if he’d step in. Limbe was used to taking orders from Ray, and with the right leverage, Ray might have just been able to get Evelyn back unharmed. It was a bread-and-butter plan, a basic end run, the only thing Jimmy could come up with that might work.
Jimmy racks the phone and then looks down at his hands. After a while, he gets up from the desk and wanders down the hall. He stands in the doorway of the master bedroom, looking in, listening to the sound of his breath, until he hears Richard return.
The money is in a tan canvas bag. A pair of cuffs dangles from its grip. Jimmy sits down at the kitchen table across from his brother, and they wait for the phone and more instructions from Aaron Limbe.
Behind and to her left, Aaron Limbe talks about the true world and the ascendancy of form revealed in the universal hierarchy and about the nature and breadth of consequence leading to the works of a true and perfect wrath.
“There’s no room for forgiveness,” Limbe tells her. “There never has been. Jesus wanted to be loved. So he lied. A failed romance, that’s all the New Testament is. A second-rate love story.”
He steps over and places his hand on Evelyn’s head, his fingers lightly resting in her hair.
A thing is what it’s named, he tells her.
Whore, for example.
Adulterer.
Cunt.
Then his foot abruptly snakes around the leg of the chair and pulls it off center and out, slamming her to the floor. Evelyn lies on her side, sweat sheeting her, trying to take in enough air to keep from blacking out.
Limbe rights the chair with her still in it, waits a few seconds, and then kicks the leg out again. Her right shoulder takes the brunt of the fall this time.
She won’t cry. She won’t give him that.
She’s not sure how many times he repeats the sequence. She can’t anticipate how long he’ll wait before he steps in again and kicks the chair out and lets gravity claim her. Her right shoulder burns, and her spine aches. Her breath is three steps ahead of her.
When she looks at the wall of photos this time, it seems impossible that the body she inhabits in them had ever felt pleasure or joy or desire, in fact, felt anything beyond thirst, pain, and exhaustion. What she sees, over and over again in the rows, is flesh and its demands.
Limbe twists the neck of the lamp, adjusting the fall of light, the black-and-white photos disappearing and Evelyn’s chest, lap, and legs jumping into stark relief.
Limbe unties the ropes binding her wrists. Her hands are numb. He takes them and sets them in her lap.
He then peels away the duct tape, giving her voice back to her, but her words, like the feeling in her hands, have fled, and Evelyn’s afraid to open her mouth and do anything but breathe. She’s seized by nightmare logic, afraid that if she tries to speak, nothing at all will happen or that it will be Limbe’s voice and words that spill from her mouth.
Limbe drops a manila envelope in her lap and tells her to open it.
Evelyn can’t make her fingers move.
Limbe says something about a Laundromat, Jimmy owing money.
“Look at the envelope, Evelyn. Who it’s addressed to. Then look at the handwriting.”
He waits a moment, then says, “I took the envelope from your lover. He doesn’t know I have it. He was going to send it to your house, Evelyn. To your husband.”
Limbe reaches down and squeezes her right hand hard. “Open it.”
She bends her head and slowly works her nails under the flap of the envelope and tears it open.
She slips her hand inside. No, she thinks. No.
“Meat,” Aaron Limbe says. “That’s all you are and ever have been to Jimmy Coates.
Nothing more than a way of getting back at his brother.”
No, she thinks.
“Tell me about love, Evelyn,” Aaron Limbe says.
She closes her eyes.
The manila envelope falls to the floor.
Montana was supposed to have been a blank page for both of them, she thinks.
She’s left holding a wadded pair of blue panties.
Evelyn remembers standing amidst the chaos of Jimmy’s room at the Mesa View Inn and lifting one leg, then the other, as Jimmy peeled them off, then later that night, looking for them as she dressed to go home.
And then she’s crying.
Despite everything she’s told herself, Evelyn’s crying, great chest-wrenching sobs that run into each other like waves and come from some place far off that she now can barely remember.
She holds the panties tight in her fist and cries. She can’t stop. She doesn’t even try to.
Aaron Limbe adjusts the lamp again. The north wall of the living room and the photos swim back into focus and hold.
Evelyn bows her head. She’s still clutching the panties.
After a moment, Aaron Limbe reaches over and lifts her chin.
“Tell me what you see, Evelyn,” he says. “Then you can get dressed, and we’ll take a little ride to West Dobbins for the big reunion.”
“He wouldn’t let me talk to her,” Richard says. “He wanted to make sure I had the money. I don’t even know if Evelyn’s alive. It’s going on nineteen hours.”
Jimmy looks at the canvas bag sitting on the kitchen table. His brother crosses the room and draws a glass of water. “He said you’re supposed to go someplace called the Chute at five, and he’d call you there with the final instructions.”
“Keep it on his terms,” Jimmy says. He can hear the subtext creeping into Richard’s voice. “No cops.”
“But they know how to handle things like this. They’re professionals. He’s given us an opening, mentioning the Chute.” Richard sets the glass down on the counter. Behind him, the bay window opens onto the afternoon sky. It’s filled with sour yellow light, different from the usual late-summer haze of thermal inversions, and reminds Jimmy of a piece of old newspaper.
“He’s testing you,” Jimmy says finally.