The Fall Line

by Mark T Sullivan

  Portsteiner and Farrell took off and skied down toward them as soon as she had moved. Out of the corner of his eye, Farrell saw Page dropping into the basin from the opposite side. The three of them pulled up just as Inez reached The Wave. She seemed not to know they were there. She held out her hands to The Wave like a mother to a hurt child. Tears streamed down her face. “This is okay,” she said in the soft, soothing tones of a nurse caring for the sick. “This is okay now … you know. … Now, you know.”

  The Wave wall-eyed her, as if he thought she might strike.

  “Do not be like this,” she begged. “Please. Do you not see? You were there. Really there. You are the champion!”

  Adrenaline jellied down Farrell’s spine all the way to his knees. Who was this woman? What had she said to The Wave that had sent him into such a frenzy? Farrell wanted to look away from Inez and The Wave, but couldn’t. He stared at her with a longing he did not understand.

  The shuddering woman hugged the white rastaman whose eyes rolled in his head. Farrell leaned over his ski poles, shaking his head to dispel the dizziness that took him. Portsteiner tugged furiously at his ear.

  “Always be alert to sudden weather changes in winter,” he said. “Consider what the effects will be on the snow cover, and proceed with extra caution when a stable weather period of any sort comes to an end.”

  “E. R. LaChapelle,” Farrell mumbled.

  Chapter 7

  THE WAVE’S SCALP WOUND took twenty-three stiches to close. Sitting alone nursing a double George Dickel at the bar that night, Farrell thought how fast things had happened. Portsteiner had pried the kid from Inez’s arm and over her protests rushed him down the hill on the snowmobile. Farrell had followed. A doctor stitched him in the infirmary at the base of the lodge. Try as they might, they couldn’t get The Wave to talk of what had happened in the woods near the Thunder Bowl. Every time they asked, The Wave would turn away and stare at the wall.

  They took him back to his room after the sewing was over. When Portsteiner left, The Wave reached into one of his long duffel bags, pulled out a bag of pot, and asked Farrell to roll it for him. Farrell saw the kid was in bad need of another reality, so he turned him a joint as thick as his middle finger. Three huge puffs into it The Wave’s eyes glassed and Farrell asked again: “What the hell happened?”

  The glowing ember of the joint trembled in the darkened room. “Surfed, mon. That was it.”

  “You like to think you’re a tough ass.”

  “Mon, you don’t even know the meaning.”

  “Funny. Up there you looked like one of those little snot-nosed kids on the playground who just met the bully.”

  The Wave sucked on the joint again, his eyes focused on the blazing tip and the popping noise it made as he sucked. He held his breath, then let the smoke go in a rush. “Never boarded like that before. Not once, not even close. Only in my dreams.”

  “What about the trout? What’d she say to you in her room?”

  The Wave gritted his teeth. “You better leave, mon. You better leave now.”

  Sitting there in the bar, Farrell took a sip of the whiskey and realized he’s seen the expression on The Wave’s face before. He’d had it himself the day Gabriel had called and said he had a proposition he thought Farrell might be interested in. It had been nearly five months since Jenny’s death. He’d come to dread returning at night to his home, an apartment of enforced quiet, where the inhabitants acted as if they feared waking a terrible guest who slept in the back room. The next thing he knew he was in pure flight, streaking south to Mexico, home and Lena aching sores he tried to salve with distance.

  He purchased a ticket all the way to Manzanillo, almost 700 miles west of Mexico City on the tropical coast. But because of a storm, the local airport was closed and his flight was rerouted through Colima. The plane was cramped and packed with packages and even chickens in cages. Like old times. He’d once spent five hours in an African bush taxi ducking shit from a goat that was tied to the roof above his window. Gabriel was waiting at the airport with a jeep.

  “The wind was high, but my truck is heavy,” Gabriel said as he helped Farrell load his gear. For almost two hours they wove west through forests and mountains still shrouded in fog and light rain. Gabriel spoke of his projects: another hotel in Puerto Angel in Oaxaca; an import-export business in Tapuchala with a Guatemalan businessman; and a minority share in a Maquiladora factory near Tijuana. This last was a growing concern. The U.S. and Mexican governments had recently signed an agreement easing trade barriers along the border, a move which enabled businesses to erect factories in Mexico to take advantage of the cheap labor and to suffer fewer tariffs bringing the goods into the United States.

  “Now you’re thinking,” Farrell said. “Those plants are the future.”

  Gabriel slapped his hand on the dashboard. “I go where there’s money to be made!” he said. “I tend to work near borders. There’s a chaos there. If you can create order from that, you’ll profit.”

  They topped a ridge about two in the afternoon, just as the last of the clouds broke to allow the sun to bore down hot on the terrain which broke away for thousands of feet to the Pacific.

  “Colima coast,” Gabriel said. “Some of the best tuna fishing in the world. Yellow fin, blue fin, and albacore. And out there in the channel—martin. To your left, Manzanillo.”

  Farrell followed his finger until he saw bleached white buildings bunched far in the distance. The bay curved in a lazy arch. What appeared a Moorish castle loomed at the tip of the curve. “The Las Hadas resort.”

  “Your home is there?” Farrell asked.

  “North,” he said, then he gunned the motor and they raced down the side of the mountains along a twisted, narrow road. At times the bank lazed into hundred-foot falls. Gabriel spun the truck through a hairpin turn. “You like this, don’t you?” he bellowed.

  Farrell gripped the edge of the roll bar and clenched his teeth. He wasn’t the type of person who liked being out of control. He didn’t like roller coasters and hated being a passenger on a motorcycle. Gabriel, however, was a master behind the wheel; Farrell grinned into the wind that tore at his cheeks.

  They turned onto a rutted road twelve miles north of Manzanillo and bounced for another mile before meeting a wall of flowering camelias which hung crazily, torn asunder by the strength of the gale that had passed the previous evening. A man with a gun sat in a shack next to the gate.

  “Even here the troubles of the outside world penetrate,” Gabriel said. “An unfortunate repercussion of success.”

  The guard opened the gate and they drove up a narrow track through a thin grove of cottonwood trees. A flock of peahens and two large peacocks scavenged in the dust under the trees. “Maria’s pets,” Gabriel said. “Beautiful birds, but I can’t stand them. The cock, he roosts on the roof each evening and calls to the stars ‘A-hole! A-hole!’ ”

  Gabriel nosed the truck through the last break in the glade to a parking spot below a white hacienda with a red tiled roof which sat on a small hill. There was a veranda on all sides, bordered by shrubs flowering red and pink. Huge oak posts, embraced by lime vines, supported the latticework, which was smothered in wild roses. The veranda itself was tiled in terra-cotta squares. Beyond, Farrell could make out a roll of grass and then the deep blue of the ocean still churning with the power of the departing storm. A light wind flitted through chimes. Somewhere bees were active. It was just like the photograph in Gabriel’s office.

  A lovely woman, Farrell’s height, with shoulder-length ebony hair, brown eyes, and a delicate olive skin opened a glass and rosewood door. She wore a lavender cotton jumpsuit she’d cinched at the waist with a sash of indigo. She walked directly to Gabriel and kissed him.

  “My wife, Maria,” Gabriel said.

  “Mr. Farrell, how good of you to come and be our guest,” she said in flawless English. “For a few hours very early this morning we thought there would be little of the house left for you to
see.”

  She pointed out the broken limbs on the trees and the petals of the flowers strewn like a carpet across the veranda. Farrell thought of the two-bedroom apartment he and Lena were living in at the time, very comfortable by Chicago standards, but penurious compared to the Cortez’s home.

  “A beautiful place,” Farrell said.

  “It was my mother’s,” she said, pleased. “And her father’s before. She inherited his textile factory in Guadalajara and ran it for many years. This was her retreat, her paradise.”

  She paused, studying Farrell. “I can see Gabriel drove with the roof down. There is red mud splattered on your shirt. Just watch out if he gets behind the wheel of the boat. I won’t let him if I’m along, you know. I drive.”

  Inside the house, they passed through a room with a ceiling almost seven feet high. The walls were white-washed, the furniture hand-made leather. Next came a library: bookcases of the same heavy oak found throughout the hacienda and dominating the room was a ponderous desk with legs that were carved with inlays of a rising sun.

  “So many books!” Farrell said.

  “We spend much time here when Gabriel is not traveling,” she said. “You will go crazy living so remote without these for escape.”

  Farrell walked to the bookcases, seeing a series of works by Jorges Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Spanish. “I wish I could read them,” Farrell said. “My Spanish is primitive. I learned to read French in Africa reading the French writers I’d already studied in translation: Camus and Rimbaud and Baudelaire.”

  “And these—Borges and Marquez,” said Gabriel. “They intrigue you?”

  “Marquez has the unnerving ability to make you want to laugh and cry reading the same page. I feel uncomfortable reading him, but I do,” Farrell said. “Every one of Borges’s stories left me staring into space, or what did he call it, ‘the crossway of the stars’?”

  A small Brittany spaniel scampered into the room, across the tile onto the maroon rug, and growled at Farrell.

  “Meet Cazador,” Gabriel said, kneeling to rub her behind the ears. “She hunts with me in the hills here.”

  “Unusual,” Farrell said. “I mean a Britt in Mexico.”

  “A friend of mine gave her to me. Said she’d run all day, and if I trained her right, she would quarter true even in dense brush. He was right. Do you hunt?”

  “I used to hunt whitetail deer with my dad in Maine.”

  “We shall go sometime,” Gabriel said. “Good quail here. Fantastic doves in Sonora.”

  “Enough talk,” Maria said. “Why don’t you get the cook going with dinner?”

  “Of course,” Gabriel said. “Let me get Jack settled first.”

  After Farrell had laid his luggage in a small room with a terracotta floor, a single bed, and a desk, he and Gabriel hiked out through the trees with one of his servants, a portly man with stubble on his chin. “We shall have fresh capon for dinner,” Gabriel said as they approached a pen where a dozen chickens milled about.

  The servant entered the pen, made two surprisingly quick steps, which scattered the other birds, and grabbed the capon by the neck. Hens squawked at his feet and the capon struggled frantically, the talons on the back of its legs ripping the air.

  “Hold him tight,” Gabriel laughed.

  With a wicked twist, the bird slashed a talon into the thumb of the servant, who cursed and relaxed his grip. The bird hit the dirt and scrambled into the far corner of the pen, triumphant, with the servant in close pursuit.

  “Choose another,” Farrell called in his rudimentary Spanish. “Spirit like that deserves a longer life.”

  The servant turned and looked at his bleeding thumb.

  “Señor?” the servant said, looking at Gabriel now.

  “He’s our dinner,” said Gabriel.

  “The same, señor?”

  Gabriel nodded as the capon tried to take cover among the hens. “Get him.”

  Gabriel clapped Farrell on the shoulder. “The recipe the cook follows with capon is masterful.”

  They drank a Napa Valley Petit Syrah with the capon, which was served in a sauce of jalapenos, shallots, chives, and garlic. Afterward, they watched a sunset that turned the ocean and their faces crimson. It turned out that Maria had studied archeology for a year at the University of Chicago on a fellowship. She and Farrell talked about the problems on the South Side and the battleship-gray winters. Gabriel was lost; it seemed Chicago was one of the few places on Earth to which he’d never been. After dinner, they sat in the wicker chairs on the veranda, drinking port and listening to the crash of the sea. The electric lights were off, leaving only the cotton illumination of a kerosene lamp that hung from one of the oak beams.

  “Is your wife also in banking?” Maria asked.

  Farrell winced and realized he hadn’t thought once about Lena since arriving. Guilt flooded in. “No, a nurse,” he said. “She works in a hospital. We lost our child this year. She’s taken it very hard.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Maria said. “And you?”

  “I’m learning my way again,” Farrell said. “Do you have any children?”

  “We can’t,” Gabriel said, with such an air of finality and sadness that Farrell did not push the issue.

  “I’m sorry, too,” Farrell said.

  That night he slept in a guest room. He felt a genuine pang of anguish for them, this handsome couple that could not have children. He thought about Jenny and wondered if the thread that tied him to the future had been permanently snipped. He thought again of Lena, which threw a shadow of remorse across his chest bared to welcome the warm wind that coursed through the open window.

  About two in the morning, he came awake and alert not knowing why. He opened the thick door, which swung silent on well-oiled hinges, and heard Gabriel’s voice, steady but insistent above the buzz of an old air conditioner behind the closed door to his study. In the moonlight to his left, across the living room, he saw a movement on the veranda. It was Maria in a full-length white nightgown, leaning against one of the oak pillars. Farrell almost crossed the room. Something about the stiffness of her shoulders and the way she leaned on the railing for support froze him. Time seemed to melt away, stirring the terrible memory of how his father had turned away from him when he was seven and had hit a double in his first baseball game. Farrell had danced into the house twisting and punching the air. He reenacted the swing for his mother, who beamed with pride until his father had put down his paper and frowned. “I told you not to ever let him get excited like this,” he had said firmly.

  “But I hit a double, dad,” Farrell said, and he skipped into the kitchen and assumed his hitting stance again.

  “Maybe it would be better if you didn’t play anymore,” his father said.

  Farrell burst into tears.

  “Brendan, that’s a little—” his mother began.

  “What do you know about this, Peg?” he snapped. “Have you ever, ever spent a day when you see the world through a summer cloud in the morning and a charcoal curtain in the afternoon?”

  “I know that a game won’t hurt him,” his mother insisted.

  “Really?” his father said. “Look at him.”

  Farrell moaned and collapsed into the corner, his arms over his head.

  “Come on now,” his mother said, and she picked him up by his elbows and led him down the hall to his room. She washed his face.

  “You know how your father feels. Now take a nap, and when you can be calm, you can come out.”

  Farrell laid on his bed and cried as he listened to her lock the door behind her.

  He’d continued to play baseball in secret. But at those times when Farrell was unable to contain his joy, his fear, his longings, his despair—the day in 1967 when the Red Sox won the American League pennant, the afternoon his mother had a minor heart attack, the Christmas morning he’d received his first bike, the black day his beagle was struck by a car—one of his parents would step in between him and whatever
object or experience had stirred his passions.

  The techniques they used to calm him could be as benign as teaching him to breathe slow and deep after stubbing his toe, or as blunt as sitting him in a darkened room with quiet music after his dog had died in his arms; or standing him in a cold shower when he came home elated over seeing a beaver swimming in a stream.

  As much as he wanted to, even now, he couldn’t really hate them. He knew that, in their own way, they were trying to shield him from what is passed on in the genes, to battle the relentless roller coaster that haunted his father’s side of the family.

  In the bar, Farrell raised his whiskey glass to the mirror and examined his new face. He knew every stitch by now, yet these remained the eyes and cheeks of a stranger. He downed the drink and headed to his room, recalling how he had left Maria Robles standing in the moonlight. As he’d gone back to sleep, the croak of the peacock had echoed through the window to him: A-hole! A-hole!

  Farrell shut the door to his room and got the diary out from underneath the mattress. He lay there on the bed thinking of how he’d found his wife standing in the doorway to the nursery the night before he left for Mexico.

  “It would better to get Jenny’s things out of here,” he had said. “I’ll pack it all when I get back.”

  Lena shook her head. “No, I’ll do it while you’re gone. I’ll call a moving company to take it away.”

  Farrell tried to say more, but couldn’t. He just nodded and walked back into his bedroom to finish packing.

  March 3

  Therapists will tell you that writing to the dead is a good thing. I can’t bear to write her: you send a message, your return address goes along. They know where to find you. Sooner or later you’re not home, you’re not anywhere; it’s dark, the world spins and hits you like a fist.

  They say the coming back takes time. But I don’t think you can come back. You just go in a different direction. Jack’s got the right attitude, you go away.