The Fall Line

by Mark T Sullivan

  Inez pointed a finger at The Wave. “I took you to a world you never knew before,” she said. “I take you there again!”

  The Wave leaned against the wall. He cleared his throat and skuffed his high-top black sneaker against the wooden floor. “I was the one who went. Not you,” he said. “I did it alone.”

  “Now who lies?” Inez snapped. “You know I show you the way!”

  “You don’t understand what it’s like to be there,” The Wave said.

  “I surprise you, I think,” Inez said.

  “Maybe with some bullshit description,” The Wave said, “or some piece of film, but since you haven’t gone, you don’t know.”

  “Oh, but many times I am there,” Inez said. “In my own way, but many times. Because I know this way well, I understand how to get you to take this route.” She paused to stare at the bottle of whiskey, which reflected the crazy five-tone color of the lamp above the pool table. “Or something like that.”

  “Close enough,” Farrell said.

  “You’ve lost me,” said Page.

  “By the way you’ve been staring at Inez’s bum the last five minutes, it’s no surprise,” said Farrell.

  “Hey, fuck you,” said Page defiantly. He pivoted back toward Inez. “I mean, I have not.”

  “At least five minutes,” Inez said, patting him on the cheek. “But I think this is a hill you have not the capacity to climb.”

  Page stared at her, then looked away: “Maybe I’ll have some of that whiskey.”

  “Everybody drink,” Farrell said, uncapping the bottle.

  The three men flicked down their shots. Inez left hers on the table.

  “I cannot drink more,” she said.

  Farrell waited until Page had set his glass down, then said, “Page, tell us what you think about all this.”

  “Everyone has a limit they can go beyond if they’re pushed.”

  “A secure response,” Inez sniffed. “It does not reveal.”

  “Hey, I’m on your side,” Page protested.

  “I am on the side of no one,” Inez said.

  “All for none and none for all!” The Wave cried, holding his right index finger in the air.

  Page flipped his cue from his right hand to his left. “Okay, so now I know the rules.”

  “Took you long enough, mon,” said The Wave.

  Page ignored him. He faced Inez and said: “You don’t even approach overload through a camera, you know, like Miles Davis on a particularly hot night.”

  “There you go,” Farrell said. “But this music thing: that’s not what we’re looking for. Miles Davis, that’s genius. So’s a baseball slugger on a streak. They all call it being outside, or walking beyond or give it some mystical flip, call it being unconscious. It’s not the same—”

  Inez interrupted: “You are beside the point. To operate out there, this demands genius whether you blow the horn or ski or parapent—”

  “Nah,” said Page, cutting her off. “The difference is penance. All Miles can do is bust a lip or blow a shitty off-note. And the big slugger? He fans or at worst loses the World Series. We fall, and—how did you put it the other day?—we hit an obstacle or fall off a cliff or are beaten to death by the rocks around us. Don’t tell me it’s the same.”

  Farrell raised the bottle and poured. “Well put for a con man.”

  Page’s right upper eyelid twitched. He drank the whiskey.

  Inez said, “So you think you are somehow different from me just because you play at these sports of mortality?”

  The Wave laughed. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  “No, I’m here to ask questions,” she said, and she seemed surprised at the answer. “I feel drunk.”

  “She’s got all the questions,” The Wave mumbled. He nodded to himself and said louder: “What are the questions?”

  “What’s the worst that can happen if you fuck up?” Farrell said.

  “That’s not the question,” said Page.

  Farrell waved his hands in a circle: “Okay, okay. So it’s one of them. Answer.”

  “You’re crippled or you get your head bashed in,” said The Wave.

  Page slammed his hand on the edge of the pool table. “You’re in the closed box, that’s the worst.”

  “C’mon,” Farrell said. “That happens all the time. How many die in Chamonix every year, Inez—forty? fifty?”

  Inez ran her hand along the edge of the pool table. She closed her eyes as if she were off by herself, listening to a favorite piece of music. Farrell took a belt straight off the bottle, then whispered, “The worst is someone else suffers for the risks you take.”

  He weaved slightly on his feet, immediately regretting the statement. He sat down hard on the chair and held his head in his hands.

  In an instant Inez snapped out of her daydream, raced over to him, and ran her hands over his shoulders. “This is okay, let it out now,” she soothed. “Just let it come all out now.”

  Farrell raised his head. Inez’s cheeks were flushed, her lips open, her breath shallow, and her pupils huge and shiny. “Tell me what happens?” she asked. “Tell me all of it.”

  The hair along Farrell’s spine stood erect, hot. He wanted to tell her everything. Over her shoulder, The Wave appeared to draw his finger across his throat. The Wave said, “I think we’re forgetting something. What about when you cause another person to die and you survive?”

  Inez’s pupils constricted and her fingernails dug into Farrell’s shoulder. “I tell you that isn’t my fault,” she hissed.

  “Sleep well thinking like that, Inez?” The Wave replied.

  Inez reached for her pocketbook and pulled out another Gitane cigarette, which she had trouble lighting because her hand shook. She shut one eye, gazed at The Wave with the other, and blew out a cloud of smoke that turned lavender in the lamp light. “Petit cochon,” she said. “Do you sleep well last night thinking of your sunshine?”

  The Wave took a step toward her, his fists clenched. Page stepped between them.

  “That’s enough!” Page said. “We’ll all fall apart if we keep this up.”

  “You ain’t gonna keep it up,” said the cowboy bartender, who’d slipped up behind them. He was angry, but it was an even, professional anger, nothing personal. “Whose quarters?” he asked, pointing to the row on the edge of the pool table.

  “Mine,” said Farrell, who had regained enough composure to stand.

  The cowboy handed them to Farrell. “People come in here St. Patrick’s to have fun, not to listen to a bunch of god-damned drunken yammer about the glory of getting crunched. It was nice having your company, but that’s it for tonight. Who’s driving?”

  “Me,” Page said.

  The cowboy eyeballed him. “Against my better judgment. Now, get you and your frog woman and your freako rastoman out of here, pronto. That or I’ll put more scars on someone’s face.”

  The whiskey talked to Farrell. He swung his elbow at the bartender’s nose. A meatloaf of a hand caught it two inches from the intended impact point and spun Farrell around and into the wall.

  “I was watching you, bright boy,” the cowboy grunted. “You got that fuck-it-all look.”

  He grabbed Farrell by the belt and the collar to haul him across the room. Halfway to the door, Farrell reached out for a beer bottle on a table, swinging it up and over his head until he heard it strike flesh and break. The groan came loud in Farrell’s ear, followed by a relaxing of the insistent tension at his collar. The bartender thudded to the ground. “Fuck it all!” Farrell yelled.

  Page latched on to Farrell’s arm and dragged him toward the door. They all raced to the car, Inez cursing in French, The Wave stumbling through the gravel. Behind them Farrell heard a door swing open and the sound of other feet crossing the parking lot. Page already had the truck running by the time the bartender’s friends reached them. They spun out onto the main road with their headlights off and their tires squeeling.

  “You shithead!”
Page roared. “We could have all been arrested.”

  “Nervous tick in my arm,” Farrell said, his face pressed against the cold window. “It’s genetic.”

  “If you ruin my film, I sue,” Inez said.

  “What’s the matter, Inez,” Farrell said. “Get too close to the action?”

  Inez swung around in her seat, her eyes blazing. “You do not know what the action is yet.”

  Farrell found himself wanting to strike her and hold her in the same moment. There was something in her expression, something that repulsed him and attracted him like nothing had in a long time, something totally unpredictable. She did not turn away, neither did he. The interior of the truck around Inez seemed to slowly whirl. He turned away to fight the sensation, to press his face against the window as they rushed toward the entrance to the canyon. The storm was clearing.

  Behind him Inez put her fingers on the back of his neck and stroked in a light, delicate pattern. Farrell shivered to her touch, then shrugged away and rolled down the window. He stuck his head out to see if the cold air would stop the whirling. He put his hand out, too, spread his pinkie and thumb and let the tension go; it was a game he’d played as a child, pondering what the bird senses in flight. He remembered how much skiing had reminded him of being a bird. His mother’s brother gave him the skis as a present his eighth Christmas. Outside on that Maine morning it was snowing hard. He bundled himself up with goggles and a scarf across his mouth. He’d crow-stepped up the hill in their backyard, held to the wooden skis by awkward cable bindings. He pushed off to sail down through the snow, feeling it hiss at his shins. The wind sang an unfamiliar song in his ears, flooding his eyes with water, squeezing his throat, buckling his knees. He collapsed into a drift. He bit the scarf, rejoicing at the buzz through his body, knowing that behind the bulky clothes his parents couldn’t see his excitement from where they stood at the back door.

  Then the memory began to twist. He saw his father take the skis away for almost a year. He saw himself sneaking out the door at night in winter with the skis to race down the hill in the darkness, dodging the dim forms of the trees while his parents slept.

  A wracking pain in Farrell’s stomach doubled him over. “Stop the car,” he gasped. The beer, garlic burger, and whiskey had taken its toll. He stumbled out the door when the truck had stopped, lurched to his knees, and retched. Behind him, just before he lost consciousness, Farrell heard the crunch of a boot.

  “Poor chéri,” Inez said. “He looks like the little lost dog.”

  Chapter 9

  IT WAS PAST NOON when Farrell fully regained consciousness. His head pounded. He was slung over a plastic bucket. His side ached. Page later told him that he had fallen on a log. He closed his eyes, vaguely remembering that Page and The Wave had carried him to his room and that Inez had stood against the wall watching him before he drifted off. He lay there now, listening to the conga line in his head and wondered if this was the feeling bears have coming out of hibernation.

  Gripping the wall for support, he staggered down the hall to the shower, turned on the water as hot as he could stand it, and asked himself what he was doing. He grasped at the credo of his early twenties: that life was a medieval fairground and he a reveler. But the twisted backs and limbs of his particular court grotesques—of Gabriel, Cordova, and Stein, the FBI agent—kept crowding in. The words of The Wave in the bar the night before—She knows more than she lets on—rambled to him again. He realized that while he’d come to Alta to find peace, he was racing again. Although Farrell adored the rush, he demanded control. As usual he knew too little about the people he was involved with. Hadn’t it happened the same way with Gabriel? Everything about him and the job in San Diego seemed legitimate.

  In retrospect, the interviews had been too easy. San Diego First Fidelity was a tiny bank by the standards to which Farrell was accustomed. “Silent” Jim Rubenstein had met him at the airport, a short, sallow man with a thick shock of carefully coiffed silver hair and the unnerving habit of waving his pinkie slowly under his chin as he spoke. Rubenstein was not a banker by training; he was an architect and developer of strip malls. In the mid-1980s, when the real estate market in Southern California exploded, Rubenstein and several other investors bought the bank from an old-line San Diego family whose only successor was a gay twenty-six-year-old named Ralph Cardell, who was more interested in the Los Angeles performance art scene than finance.

  “I need someone with hands-on experience,” Rubenstein admitted over dinner that night. “I’m the bank president, but really it’s only a title. I’m a land developer, not a financier. I know Gabriel Cortez through some people who are developing land in Tijuana and he said you might just be the man I’m looking for.”

  The deal was this: Rubenstein needed someone to develop business in the Latino community in San Diego and northern Mexico, what he called “the great untapped market.” Although Farrell’s domestic experience was minimal, the six-figure salary and bonus that Rubenstein offered, not to mention the expense account, swayed him. But Lena’s demand to leave Chicago made him accept the offer.

  Standing in the shower, he saw once again the image of Lena sitting alone in the nursery. That stark vision was followed by the memory of the pleasant sensation of Inez’s fingers on his neck. Farrell thought of Timmons and his advice to return to what was basic and important. I’m no Timmons. For a few minutes Farrell chilled this disturbing idea by imagining himself churning through the fine silk powder snow that gathers in the Windows glade at Vail. He thought of flurried turns in the cinched aspen groves at Steamboat. He considered a hypnotic 3,000-foot float down the Hobacks at Jackson Hole. Pristine vistas after heavy snowfalls—if things got stranger, light, dry snow still fell on the jagged peaks of Montana. There was an avenue of escape.

  He decided in the process of the shower that such a monster hangover demanded penance. He would read more. It was past two when he went out to the camper. The sun was intense and had turned much of the parking lot outside the lodge into mud. He put the key in the camper door, and as he twisted the knob, he noticed with a sinking feeling that the tape he routinely placed across the corner of the door was broken.

  His hand rose from the door handle. It was not a conscious action, but one linked to the image of Gabriel behind his desk in Manzanillo. He thought, Why not now? This is where it’s all been leading and there is some justice in it: one last surge of adrenaline, then a roar of orange and red … into an eternal arcing drift through the white.

  Farrell yanked the door open. The hinges squeaked. He lifted his right foot to the bumper step, but pulled it back before he put weight on it. He dropped to his knees and looked underneath for a suspended metal plate or wires, new solder or an electric switch, any evidence of a trigger. Nothing. He ran his hand around the inside of the door, searching for fishing line. Nothing.

  At first glance, the camper seemed undisturbed: the drawers under the bunk bed tightly met the plywood frame; the cabinets above the door were shut tight and latched. Maybe I didn’t tape the door, Farrell thought.

  Then he saw it: a tiny envelope on the floor. He picked it up and looked at the address of the bank in Telluride. It had been in a drawer the night before, he was sure of it. Farrell jumped on the bed to reach along the frame until he found the gap in the plywood that betrayed his secret compartment. He tugged. Nothing—not the envelope containing his cash, not Lena’s jewelry box, not the documents that listed his bank account numbers—was missing or disturbed.

  Farrell jumped backward off the bunk and looked into the crawl space underneath. His bedding seemed undisturbed. He tugged it out, then stretched back to the darkest corner and up to a two-by-four brace. The white leatherette diary was as he’d left it. “Thank you,” he whispered.

  A more thorough investigation revealed his reading books slightly out of order. The tool box had been rifled. A flashlight was in a different drawer. Someone had opened his maps. Farrell collapsed on the bed to consider the evidence.
It seemed as if the searcher had made calculated mistakes, as if he wanted Farrell’s understanding to come incrementally, with a gradual, rather than an immediate, sense of shock. Or fear.

  Whoever had violated the camper achieved both. Farrell ran through the possibilities: Gabriel’s men could be waiting in one of the cars in the parking lot, ready to take him as he emerged. Or this could be Inez’s doing, part of her peek through the fingers. Or Page. Or The Wave. Or just some broke lodge employee hustling cash.

  He stayed there for almost an hour, running it all back and forth. The sharp edge of the bunk dug at his shoulder blade, but he ignored it. Part of him wanted to flee, to follow the original plan, head north to the snow fields. He imagined camping along the moist alpine meadows north of Missoula in late May, watching young elk calves trail their mothers through the blue-eyed grass and the rose-root and water-leaf. He took a deep breath and exhaled, watching it cloud and fragment toward the open door. With the next breath he recalled Inez’s touch and the expression of longing on her face the night before. He didn’t want to leave.

  The interior of the camper swirled with the last remaining dregs of the whiskey. Farrell got to his feet, the diary in his hand, and walked to the door. His knees trembled under him as he climbed out into the bright sunshine, but no one called to him, no one watched him from any of the cars. All he heard was the dripping of water off the roof and the grinding of a truck on the road above him.

  Back in his room, Farrell drank tumblers of cool water and ate aspirin. Between naps, he read.

  June 1

  We say good-bye to Chicago the day after tomorrow. They say San Diego has the best climate in the country, almost always seventy degrees.

  Christina gave birth two weeks ago to a baby boy, Anthony James, and when she left a message on my machine, I stood there looking at it for the longest time as if I could see her words become real and heavy and I could handle them. She called three more times.