The Fall Line

by Mark T Sullivan

  “No cliffs or crevasses, as you pointed out earlier,” Farrell said. “But at the junction, a fall of rock and stumps extends out between the two arms, it makes the going very tight, like picking your way through a mine field.”

  “And the ledge, it supports the camera, no?” she asked.

  Farrell looked through the binoculars again. “No. They’d have to be higher, in pits dug in the snow or among the trees to either side of the fork. Even then you wouldn’t get a clear angle all the way up either arm. You’ll need a third camera from across the road or from a helicopter hovering over the whole thing.”

  Inez drummed her fingers on the hood of the truck, her attention still focused on the couloir. From her hip pack, she extracted a brown notebook and began to sketch. In a few quick strokes the shape of the couloir appeared. “Tell me the thing you love, Collins, the speed or steepness?” she asked, tapping the eraser on the paper.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “This Y, it is your idea,” she said. “Which arm do you ski?”

  “The left.”

  “Alors, then Page—he skis the right,” Inez said.

  “So what makes it extreme now?” The Wave asked.

  Inez walked over to him and threw her arm around his shoulder. “Because, my little rastaman, they ski it at the same time. Two skiers race at forty miles an hour down two scars on the mountain. But then, they are in the same scar. One miss and … Oh! But what a peek through the hands!”

  The Wave’s mouth fell open. “Outfuckingragious!” he said. He dropped into a surfing crouch, his right hand drifting behind his head.

  Page sat down hard on the truck bumper, his feelings plain in his stunned expression: it’s one thing to ski radical terrain alone, quite another to play human bumper pool.

  Farrell felt sleepy as if the scopolamine had finally overtaken him. Through the daze, he studied Inez, studied her the way he’d analyze a forty-degree slope in the back country, searching for the release zone that might break and send a slab of frozen snow down upon him. In spite of himself, Farrell smiled.

  Chapter 5

  FARRELL AWOKE AN HOUR before dawn the next morning. He was in a real bed for the first time in months. He’d told Inez that while he was willing to work for nothing until he’d earned his guide title, he needed a decent place to sleep. She rented him a room in the lodge he’d worked in when he first came to Alta. The room held a double bed, a table, and a basin. Shower down the hall. The wind howled and shrieked at the cracks around the window: it was March sixteenth; a new series of spring storms raced southeast from Alaska.

  Unable to fall back asleep, Farrell’s mind ticked with the image of Page’s suddenly pale face and the weird thrill Inez seemed to get from seeing his fear. For his part, Farrell had not yet decided what he thought of the idea. A tiny voice far back in his brain screamed, No! In the tumult of his mind, though, the voice was drowned out by the trickle of adrenaline that began to seep every time he considered the race, becoming a gush the more he considered the risk, a torrent which ripped through his brain, tearing the tops off closed boxes of memory. Farrell got up and padded down the hall to the shower. He turned on the valve as hot as it would go and climbed inside. He gripped the nozzle with both hands, closed his eyes, and let the water beat on his neck. The humidity brought back memories of the Niger River in Africa and Chicago on August days and, finally, of Mexico City five years before.

  It was March of 1983 and Farrell had three years’ experience in Latin America. A friend in the Mexican Ministry of Finance told him of a businessman who specialized in hotels and import-export deals whom he might want to meet.

  Farrell remembered crossing the hotel lobby and exiting onto a narrow walkway through a curved screen of exotic plants—yuccas and jades and delicate orange blossoms—to a broad terra cotta-tiled patio decorated with white wicker furniture. Beyond the patio rose a second screen of vegetation and then a pool. A trellis covered with vines shaded the terrace. The air was heavy with the scent of tropical flowers and another which he could not name, but which faintly smelled like curry.

  It was Farrell’s first trip south of the border since Jenny’s birth two months before. Though he’d been gone only two days, he already missed how she cooed at him when he arrived home from work.

  He entered an air-conditioned office off the patio. Gabriel Cortez was speaking on a telephone. Cortez studied Farrell for a moment, held a finger in the air, and smiled. Farrell circled the office to look at a picture of Cortez deep-sea fishing and another of him dove hunting in the desert with an enormously fat man who wore thick-framed glasses. A third showed Cortez with his arms around a beautiful, dark-haired woman; they were standing on a veranda above a sweeping lawn that led to the sea.

  Gabriel hung up the phone. “How good of you to come.” He rose, came around the right side of the desk with his left hand held tightly across his stomach, and extended Farrell his other. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  Gabriel was tall and very lean, almost to the point of appearing angular. But what Farrell first noticed were his eyes: brown, warm, and inviting, the eyes of a seducer. His inky hair was slicked back in a crooner’s cut. He wore a silk jacket of blue and gray fleck, which set off the crisp white cotton shirt and the steel-blue slacks. Gabriel’s grip was firm, his smile genuine. Still, he unnerved Farrell by holding his gaze longer than seemed necessary.

  During their conversation, Gabriel managed to impress Farrell as a man who was at once enormously interested in his audience and yet totally self-absorbed. He laughed at Farrell’s jokes and listened closely to his description of his business; several times, however, his eyes flicked above and around Farrell to the enormous window that looked out onto the patio. Farrell thought later that Gabriel was evaluating the other people who coursed by. Farrell knew that Gabriel was at least five years his senior, but when he returned to Chicago and described the meeting to Lena, he told her that he’d never met a man so young who seemed to have such a firm grasp of what was essential.

  “The flowers outside are fantastic,” Farrell said. “My wife would be in heaven here.”

  “They are like miniature sunsets,” he replied. “We had them flown in from my home near Manzanillo on the coast west of here.”

  “This is your hotel then?”

  “Partly,” he said. “I invested in it and I stay here when I am in the city. I think it’s quite a remarkable restoration.”

  Farrell agreed. Gabriel said he was involved in several just like it in Mexico City and in Guadalajara where his wife, Maria Robles, was born.

  “I believe in preserving the past,” Gabriel said. “Tell me one thing you’ve helped restore. That’s what lenders do, isn’t it? Provide capital to either create or restore?”

  The waiter arrived and Farrell took a sip of his coffee before answering. “Before I got into banking, I lived in Africa and I helped fix a well. Took me five months to restore it and put a cap on top so animals wouldn’t fall in and poison the water. It’s not on the scale of something like this, but it meant a lot to the villagers.”

  Gabriel reached for his coffee. Farrell noticed the fingers: the slender, clever mechanisms of a piano player.

  “The restorations of which you speak are the most important,” Gabriel said. “The revival of a hotel or a business is largely irrelevant to the majority, isn’t it? Here, and even in your country, people live at the subsistence level. Their suffering goes beyond what you and I normally see. My father was intent on impressing these facts on me. We lived all over the world, mostly Europe. And he made me understand that even in the richest of cities—Paris, Rome, Buenos Aires—there is poverty.

  “At least once a month, I remind myself of these things,” he continued. “I ride my jeep out into the villages outside Manzanillo, which has become a great resort. Lots of money. But outside it’s different. There are fishing towns nearby; we’ve tried to help them with the management of their fleets. Do you still work at that level, Mr. Farrell
?”

  “Jack, please. Actually, the bank is always after the larger projects.”

  “Consider the way I work, Jack,” Gabriel said. “I lay out my options and figure what is best for everyone involved. Here at the hotel we need a labor pool to keep it running. I could have raided other hotels in the city for experienced workers, as I did for the managers. But I started a training program for the poor. Some are already managing. Your waiter, who may someday run the patio bar, barely finished fourth grade.”

  “Has it made a return yet?”

  Gabriel’s face lost some color and his eyes chilled.

  “I didn’t mean to be rude,” Farrell said. “This must be a great risk.”

  “That’s what life is about, isn’t it?” Gabriel said, his hands now flashing in the air. “The risk and the resolution? This is what I enjoy about it: you never know how it will all turn out. I have a boat at my home. I take it out on the ocean and drive it too fast for Maria’s taste. I love it when the hull breaks free of the water. I don’t know sometimes whether it will come down. Do you understand?”

  “Perfectly,” Farrell said. “I’m a skier.”

  “Really? I have never tried this. Exciting?”

  “Very fast, many obstacles.”

  “Wonderful.”

  Suddenly Gabriel’s shoulders drooped. He stared over Farrell’s shoulder, through the window, nodded, and excused himself. The same heavy Mexican he’d seen in the hunting photograph appeared in the doorway. Gabriel listened intently to the man, who spoke Spanish in a rapid, thick accent Farrell found difficult to follow. The fat man stood stone still during the entire recitation. Gabriel rocked back and forth from one foot to the other, then clapped the man on the shoulder, mumbled something, and shut the door.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Gabriel said when he returned. “I have just been informed of trouble with one of my enterprises near Manzanillo. I’m afraid I must fly there this afternoon. Would you care to join me for the weekend?”

  “I have a flight back to Chicago this evening,” Farrell said.

  “Next visit then,” Gabriel said. “In the meantime I’d like you to take a look at this.”

  “Hotel project?”

  “A factory, possibly in partnership with some Japanese who’ve invested in Tijuana.”

  They spent the next two hours hashing out the deal. Gabriel had a terse, lucid mind that could condense the disparate arms of a project into a five-minute description. Gabriel was a master of the pitch, not content to dwell on the broad strokes; he was as well versed in the details. Farrell agreed to take Gabriel’s proposal to his superiors and they shook hands.

  “You absorb these things rapidly,” Gabriel said when they’d finished. “I have a good feeling about this.”

  Indeed, within six weeks after their initial meeting and a flurry of phone calls, Farrell swung the loan to Gabriel.

  Farrell turned in the shower to fire his aching lower back. He thought how flimsy the banking business is. He had worked for one of the world’s largest financial institutions, flying all over Central and South America to work on deals. At the heart of it, strangers formed a superficial relationship, then passed money back and forth on the basis of ideas. It all occurred in such a quick, anonymous fashion that Farrell wondered whether people who stuffed their cash in their mattresses were correct after all.

  Someone knocked on the shower glass and Farrell sighed, turned the lever, and dried off. When he returned to his room, he found a note taped to his door:

  No Y Today

  We will Film The Wave at Snowbird

  Page will Pick You up at 9 sharp—Inez

  The tiny electric alarm clock on the table said 6:20, still another forty minutes until the dining room opened for breakfast. Farrell dressed, then flopped on the bed, took a deep breath, and reached for Lena’s diary. The knot at the back of his head began to throb again. For the sake of his short-term sanity, he ignored it. He flipped ahead and found what he was looking for.

  February 22, 1983

  It’s been a month since Jenny shot from me slick hot, screaming bloody murder. My first time to write about her and still I feel the air in that room, electric, as if God were there to brush our cheeks, mine crying, Jack’s beet red.

  Mind you, it’s not all roses. Haven’t slept right in four days, my boobs weigh a ton, nipples feel like raw meat, and my crotch still aches like I rode a horse for three weeks straight. Stinking episiotomy.

  Jenny makes it worthwhile. When I look into her eyes, I believe in the word “destiny.” It’s a sapphire, that word, blue and sparkling like her eyes which try to follow me when I bend to her and give her my breast. She is our destiny, even if it is a future that poops, barfs and keeps me awake.

  All this time working in the unit and I never really understood. I won’t be able to go back without guilt for leaving her, new empathy for the women I help through the pain until their rough jewel comes out, shuddering with the first chill of life, not knowing what they’re crying for. But I know now. It’s what their mommies are waiting for, too: Touch.

  Farrell paused. In the rough plaster on the ceiling, he saw his baby girl waving her arms at him, rolling her tongue and drooling on his shirt. He remembered the early mornings burping her after Lena had breastfed her, how he had sung to her while changing her diapers, how she belly-laughed when he made faces. He smiled thinking how quick she was to hold up her head and watch him move around the room, how by the time she was four months she’d screeched when he tickled her belly and called her “Little Miss J.”

  She loved to have him say the ABCs to her slowly, his mouth big and wide. She loved to have him growl on her stomach. Her mouth rounded when he did, her legs kicked, and she giggled. She loved to put her foot in her mouth when her diapers were off.

  During Farrell’s early mornings with Jenny, she’d made him seem like he was the most wonderful person in the world. Lena was something else again. During that first year of motherhood she seemed to grow five inches and gain twenty pounds, a powerful, joyous force that ruled their home. He guessed it’s what being a new mother is to someone who specialized in birth. His throat swelled again. He almost put the diary down. He shook his head and said out loud, “You opened, now finish it.”

  September 12

  Jack just finished putting up the gates. Jenny has a cold, but just yesterday she tried to pull herself up on the coffee table, so it’s only a matter of time before she’s racing around the house. We got a picture, of course.

  I’ve been back at work a month now and am only beginning to breathe easy when Margie comes in at eight to take care of her. Jack says I don’t have to work, these deals with Gabriel Cortez are going so well that he’s sure to get a big Christmas bonus that could tide us over. I feel an obligation to be there, working and coaxing the women.

  Jenny’s been a real pain lately, waking up and crying at two a.m. Jesus, she was sleeping through the night just last month. Jack’s good, for the most part—gets up and rocks her until she falls asleep on his chest. I found them there at six the other morning, Jack slumped to one side in the armchair, Jenny snoozing. I leaned against the door jam and just watched them. All the long nights and the frustration and the stinking breast pump—I hate that thing—faded away.

  Mom’s coming out next week for two weeks, so I’ll need Margie less. Jack’s mom, Peg, is coming right after that. It will be good to see them all together, though Peg’s so nervous on the phone to come out here, I don’t know how much help she’ll be. Jack says she’s always been like that. She doesn’t like to leave home because she’ll miss going “to see Brendan.”

  All these years after his suicide, she still goes to his grave almost every day. It’s funny and sad: when we visit Peg, Jack never goes with her. I don’t think he’s ever seen the grave.

  Farrell closed the book and locked it. He got off the bed and walked to the window to watch the snow fall. He remembered the Chicago Tribune crossword puzzle and the date above it:
Sunday, November 12. He sat in the rocking chair quietly doing the puzzle. She’d had that awful cold on and off for almost two months. An earache once. She seemed to be getting better.

  He’d put Jenny in her day crib on the far side of the room near the heater while Lena took a nap. She’d worked a rare night shift the evening before and arrived home exhausted. The rain drummed so hard on the roof and the windows that it made the city deaf. Even the strikes of hammers out on the street from city workmen fixing a busted sewer line were muffled by the wind and the downpour.

  It was a minute before three. He knew because the blue china clock his grandmother left him had made a tinging noise on the quarter hour and he had looked at it, wondering if the bells would wake the baby. He even remembered the crossword clue he was stuck on: Welcome political catastrophe. Nine letters down, starting with L, fourth letter D. The rocker creaked on the hardwood floor. Farrell tapped his pen on the newsprint, trying to will the word to tumble from his brain.

  Nothing.

  That’s what he remembered—a dull, nagging nothing. His hand froze in space. His legs wouldn’t rock anymore. The storm battered the panes on the window with sheets of rain. Inside, the dimensions and acoustics of the room seemed to have shifted. He squeezed his nose between his fingers and blew, trying to open his ears to understand the change. The blue clock ticked on the mantelpiece, the drapes fluttered, the aerator bubbled in the fish tank. At last, somewhere behind him, he heard the silence, not just quiet, but a true, ringing emptiness he’d thought was possible only deep in the woods ten seconds after a rifle shot.

  They say that people can be frozen by fear; Farrell was melted by it. His shoulders sagged. His elbows gave way as if they’d been struck by a doctor wielding a rubber hammer. The heels of his hands slid off the arms of the rocker and hung heavy and limp. The pen slipped from his fingers, clattered on the floor, and rolled into the corner.

  He got to his feet, balanced on spongy knees, turned, and lost control. He flailed for the support of the stone mantelpiece, unable to look across the room to the shape under the pink cotton blanket. The ticking of the clock seemed to slow and the thirty feet of floor he crossed twisted into an eternity of conflicting frames of reference. Recalling it now, he saw himself from different angles: from the hallway, he was a bent old man; from the kitchen, he was a ghost; from the ceiling, he was a very little boy.