“Hey, old one,” The Wave said.
Farrell started and almost fell off the truck.
“Jesus!” Farrell said. “You scared the crap out of me.”
“Triggering heart attacks, it’s my specialty. Here, Inez wanted me to give you the name of the motel we’ll be at. How about a ride to the airport?”
Farrell took the slip of paper and said coolly, “I travel alone.”
“Just to the airport, mon,” The Wave said.
Farrell remembered the kid’s crack in the pool room. The woman knows more than she lets on. “Get your stuff,” Farrell said.
The Wave returned with a large duffel bag and threw it into the camper. On the ride down the canyon, Farrell’s attention wavered. He found himself taking long sideways looks at the melting hillsides. He knew there was a chance he’d never be back in Little Cottonwood again and the thought depressed him. The Wave was drumming his fingers on the dashboard.
“You still got that I’m-a-lake-trout feeling?” Farrell asked.
“What’s it to you, mon?”
“I’m interested in what Inez does behind closed doors.”
“It’s weird,” The Wave said. “Maybe more than you can handle.”
Farrell braked for a car full of rock climbers that pulled out onto the road. “Try me,” he said.
The Wave’s head rocked side to side for a minute as if he were listening to some inner reggae station. “She ever do one of these talks with you? With the cameras on? Asking questions in that bizarre English of hers—no tense but the present?”
“She’s asked questions, but no cameras,” Farrell said. “She’s trying to renegotiate that point.”
“Mon, you know, I came from nothing,” The Wave said. “But she knows almost everything about nothing.”
“What, that you’re a surf bum who found out he liked the winter?”
“I’m telling you, mon, she knows about me, all of it, about Page and probably about you,” he said.
The pain in Farrell’s cheeks and hip returned, throbbing and burning. But he gave The Wave no indication of his intense discomfort.
“I don’t think that’s poss—” Farrell began.
“She keeps files, mon,” The Wave said. “Inez keeps files. I saw them in a box last week.”
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
“She sat on the bed with the camera running,” The Wave said. “Made me uncomfortable. I’d just smoked the better part of a killer spliff, getting ready to shred. I thought it would be an easy, go-for-it, kind of pep talk, you know? No, mon, she’s in my face.”
“About?”
“All sorts of crazy shit. She starts out asking me about what it was like, me growing up. I tell her I couldn’t see the point. She says if I can’t open up to her, we can’t film. Says she wants me talking to her through the lens.”
“Not so bad an idea,” Farrell said.
“Yeah, yeah,” The Wave said. “Never been to college, but I read, mon, a lot. I know about DeNiro and even that dude Stanislavski.”
“So?”
“She asks me where I was born and I tell her the truth: somewhere in Nevada during a festival in the wilderness. My mother said she was dancing with a couple of naked people covered with mud when she felt me wrestling to get out.”
“Earth child,” Farrell said.
“Sunshine, that’s what she named herself. Her real name is Frances Milburn. Smart, one credit shy of a Yale degree. Sunshine’s … a pretty funky woman.”
“And Inez wanted to know about her,” Farrell said.
“Nothing she didn’t seem to already know,” The Wave said. “Took me a minute, but I picked up on that. When it hits me, I headed for the door. No use shoveling up the bad for the movies, even if I am going to be in lights. But she stops me, says it’s necessary to her technique, says it—‘technique’—like it’s some church word.”
“Then what?” Farrell asked as they left the canyon and headed north toward the highway.
“She starts asking me about my friend, Mike. I used to crash in the back of his autobody shop when I couldn’t find another place to live. Same guy who got me into boarding: sidewalk, ocean, anything …”
“He older?” Farrell asked.
“Forties, like Sunshine, mon,” The Wave said. “They were friends from way back. He was a cool dude, made me go to school. Said he didn’t want me to end up like him—burnt-out surf bum working in a body shop. I’ll tell you, though, I never saw him like that, a loser, you know? He liked to read, and got me into it. If I stayed in the shop, I had to read something. I did: newspapers and magazines mostly. Later, reference books, encyclopedias, and quote books. Then dudes like Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins and Joseph Heller. Made me think about things.
“Anyway, I’m telling her this and she’s standing behind the camera and …” The Wave wrapped his finger tightly around one of his dreadlocks, playing with it. He coughed. “She just asks me, right out: ‘Is he, Mike, your father or something?’ I said, ‘Fuck this! I don’t have to put up with this shit to make a fucking ski movie.’ I was out of there.”
The Wave leaned against the window. Farrell didn’t say a word. When they’d turned onto the highway, heading west, The Wave cleared his throat. “There I am, off like a shot and that French bitch, she chases me across the room, telling me that ‘We’re almost done, we’re almost done.’ I don’t know what it was—the spliff or the way she sold it to me—but I went back. And she’s behind me, kneading my neck, asking me again, about Mike, about whether he’s my father.”
The Wave drummed his fingers again on the dashboard. “I said, there was a lot of people basking in old Sunshine’s rays back in those days, why not? I could think of a lot worse people to be my old one.”
“How’s that?” Farrell asked.
“She didn’t pick her friends too carefully, old Sunshine. Mike was about the only true one she ever had. He looked after her, thought about her, not what she could do for him.”
Farrell looked over at the kid, who was furiously twisting one of his dreads. Farrell surprised himself; he felt sorry for The Wave. “You ever ask him?”
The Wave crossed his arms. “No.”
“Why not?” Farrell asked.
The Wave shook his head.
“Why not?” Farrell repeated. He needed to know what Inez knew.
“I guess. … I guess I didn’t want to hear him say no, all right?” The Wave snapped. He skuffed his sneaker very fast against the floorboard. “Anyway, Inez, she starts pumping me about Mike. Only now, she’s got this folder and she’s looking at it.”
“What’s it look like, the folder?”
“One of those long jobs with the metal prongs inside you see the D.A.s carrying around in court,” he said. “Inez has hers open. She says, ‘Why’d he stop coming around?’ I got real nervous, because who knows that kind of stuff except for me and Sunshine and Mike?”
“Inez does,” Farrell said. He wrapped his fingers so tight around the wheel that his knuckles began to turn white.
“Damn straight,” The Wave said. “I decided then, it was better that I played her game, see where she was going and where she was coming from, you know, mon? I told her 1984, maybe ’85, Mike left. She asked why and I said because he probably couldn’t stand to see Sunshine that way, so he split. Five months later, I did, too. I was fourteen, living on the streets, digging half-munched burgers out of trash cans, crashing on the beach until I went and found Mike and he took me in.”
“What’s Sunshine’s problem?” Farrell asked.
The Wave snorted: “What isn’t? When she wasn’t messing with vials and tubes, she’d start talking to the wall about stuff. I still get nightmares.”
Farrell threw on his blinker to pass a slow-moving car, then veered right to get into the lane that would take him toward the airport.
The Wave said: “Last time I saw Sunshine, we got a call from the body shop from a friend of hers. We—me and Mike—we walk into
the room she was renting. Paramedics working on her. They’d given her a shot of something that makes you come back from an overdose; and she’s restrained because she’s been speed-balling. She’s wailing at them—these guys who just saved her life!—because they fucked up her high.
“When I said she should get help, she spit at me,” The Wave said.
“And Inez knew all about this?”
“She had most of it,” The Wave said, pursing his lips as if he couldn’t quite believe it himself. “Told me Sunshine was in a treatment center, some ranch in Arizona, and then wouldn’t tell me where it was or how she was doing. That’s when I told her I was going to get a lawyer. That’s illegal, isn’t it? Checking into someone’s life like that?”
“Information has a free market, I’m afraid,” Farrell said. “No such thing as privacy anymore unless you create it. Why don’t you call Mike?”
“I did,” The Wave said. “He said some people, like cops but not cops, came to see him. Probably private eyes. He didn’t tell them much. He doesn’t know where Sunshine is. Hasn’t heard from her in months.
“The goddamned point is that Inez knew. She smiled, said she’d chosen me just because I was such a hard case, that she’d found out about my real good bad attitude and she thought she could use me. She tells me I’ve got nowhere to go except with her.”
“That what you believe?”
The Wave drummed his fingers on the dashboard. “First thing I thought was that she was just power-tripping on me. The more I chewed on it, though, all I could see was me washing dishes at some resort or working a burger joint for the minimum. I want more out of life, mon.”
The kid was silent for a moment, then added: “What’s weird is that afterward, after the surf up there in the woods, I kept thinking about Inez—you know, the way she talked to me, the way I shredded.”
“You think it’s her technique?” Farrell asked, remembering the abandon with which he’d gone after Page in the Y Couloir.
The Wave curled his fingers tight against his palms as if he were trying to grip something that wasn’t there. “Maybe. It was strange. You ever been out on the ocean just as the sun rises?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know how it is that you can taste the sea, even if your head isn’t in the water,” he said. “Waiting to board in the storm up there at Snowbird, what she talked to me about was like the water, all around me, taunting me almost. I could taste it and her at the same time and it scared the shit out of me.”
“So you want to sleep with her, so what?” Farrell said.
“It wasn’t like that at all, Collins,” The Wave said, deadly serious. “It was more like being unable to get enough air. I wanted … I don’t know … to fight back maybe? But there was no one place to go after it, so I went after the whole slope, hitting back at her on the way down.”
“Her?”
He nodded and sighed. “That’s it. I don’t know, maybe both of them, maybe all of it.”
“Inez hugged you at the bottom of the run,” Farrell said. “You hugged her back.”
“Can’t explain it, mon,” The Wave said. “It’s like halfway down, I had these flashes of warm, white light in my head. They made me feel good and powerful—stoked, you know?—I couldn’t do anything wrong. For that one run, I’d been taken out of shit-happens to where I was shredding the impossible like a goddamned superhero and, for who knows why, she was the one who understood. I could tell her about it.”
He rapped his hands on the roof of the camper and leaned his head against the door frame. “The thing that has me really freaked is that afterward, even now, thinking about it, replaying the whole run in my head, I might do anything to feel that way again.”
Farrell realized that after the race in the Y Couloir, he felt the same way. He looked through the windshield at the late afternoon sun setting over the Uinta Mountains to the West, somehow scared and delighted at the same time. “How much of this streetwise act of yours is real?” Farrell asked.
The Wave shook back his dreads. “No act, mon.”
“Then I think you owe it to yourself and me to do a little burglary on Inez’s room when you get to Tahoe,” Farrell said. “Get us some information. Don’t tell Page.”
The Wave smiled a harsh smile. “Cold, cold eyes,” he said.
“You, too, rastaman,” Farrell said as the kid got out of the truck. “You, too.”
Chapter 12
MARCH 16, 1986
Seeds thrive here in any season. New shoots will burst forth from dormant bushes, especially now that winter is dying. What I wait for is June when the neighbors say that the tree that grows outside my window, a jacaranda, will flood itself with purple blossoms.
Each morning we awake to ocean fog. My neighbors say the sea is warming. The misty veil hangs in the sky until early afternoon, when the sun shines strong enough to burn it off. Then the water on the flowers—the hibiscus and the bougainvillaea and the roses—evaporates in a heady perfume.
Some days the cloud cover never yields. And in the late afternoon, while the surfers bob for the day’s last waves, Punta and Rabo and I trek to the beach. I sit on a rock, throwing sticks into the breakwater. They chase, elated. In Chicago, the fog depressed; here the mists pep up the dogs, the hibiscus, and Jack.
A few months back, I thought we’d made a mistake coming here. Jack moved about the house with his eyes half-closed, distant and dulled. I got him some scuba lessons, thought they might help. They didn’t.
Ever since Jack started working with Gabriel Cortez, however, he seems more alive. He came home the other night with a big bottle of white wine, told me he’d consummated a big deal with Cortez, and that there would be more like it. Jack demanded that we drink the bottle naked in the hot tub. How California!
He had to travel a bit to set up his deal, which like most of his financial business, I don’t understand. He’s been to Mexico City twice to meet with Gabriel and once to Panama City.
Jack’s ringers drummed on the edge of the tub and I could see the old fire in his eyes. He told me it was kind of like skiing. He didn’t know what was going to happen next and that was the best part.
He has been working steady hours for the first time since we met. We sit on the patio as dusk comes or we go out for walks with the dogs. Sometimes he reaches out and holds my hands, but he says little. He can’t imagine how just the touch of his fingers holds me in place. Without words he manages to stir in me once again the idea that I can just be. I suppose he does it by expecting so little of me.
We’ve begun to make love again. I smell his skin and hold him tight to me as if I can bring more of him inside me than already is. It only lasts for a while. Part of me drifts off and part stays alert for that moment when I feel him become anxious and determined and I push him off and reached for my diaphragm and the security of that rubber wall.
When I bend and push that barrier between us, I can see his cheeks slacken and his motions become mechanical, just searching for release. He rolls over and falls asleep.
There in the hot tub the other night, he rubbed himself against my leg. I couldn’t get to the diaphragm, and I lost myself in panic, not lust. We moved without protection. Afterwards I cried, and when he asked me why, I lied and told him it was because I loved him so much.
Farrell closed the diary, stung by the idea that she had to lie to him. He grimaced: How often had he lied to her? He stepped through the door of the camper to stand underneath the stars. He was 140 miles out of Salt Lake City, in a truck stop near the Nevada line, numbed by the painkillers, muscle relaxants, three shots of tequila, and the beer he’d consumed since he’d pulled over. Still, the pungent sage cut through the fog in his head. He gazed at the stars and said to himself, “I guess I just walked around with blinders on.”
Farrell listened to the wind and the snap of brush in the darkness. The Wave’s conversation replayed itself in his head. He was fascinated and unnerved that Inez had been able to delve that deep int
o the kid’s past. Why was he important? What was she up to? he asked himself. He needed to know more.
Farrell went back into the camper, got his wallet, and crossed the pavement to a pay telephone. He punched in a series of numbers that connected him to an overseas line, then eight more. A phone rang in an office in Basel, Switzerland. When the woman’s voice answered, Farrell cleared his throat and read off a series of numbers and letters.
“Just one moment, sir,” the woman said. The line went dead.
Farrell leaned his head against the glass, waiting for the voice of a thin man he’d met only briefly in the Bahamas. The phone clicked. “It has been quite a while, sir,” the attorney said.
“It has,” Farrell said. “I need some research done.”
“As always, we await your instructions,” the attorney said.
Farrell’s head reeled. We await your instructions!
“Of course,” Farrell said, trying to ward off the awful memories those words could generate. “I need information, anything you can get me on an Inez Didier. She makes movies about skiing and mountain climbing. I believe she grew up in Lyons, France, spent time in Chamonix.”
“Inez Didier,” the attorney repeated, then paused. “How much do you wish to know?”
“Beyond financials,” Farrell said. “I want to get personal.”
“An expensive proposition, sir,” the attorney said.
“How much?”
“For the best? A thousand dollars a day, plus expenses.”
Farrell didn’t hesitate. “Take it from the 201A account with an initial cap and report at ten thousand dollars.”
“Where can I reach you, sir?”
“You can’t,” Farrell said. I’ll call.”
“Very good, sir,” the attorney said. “And if there is more, as always, we await instructions.”
Farrell sighed and hung up the phone. Await instructions. How many times had he read those words after his first meeting with Jorge Cordova? As he walked back to the truck, he remembered the first time. It was near the end of March, about 11 A.M., when his secretary handed him the folder marked for his eyes only. He closed the door to his office on the twenty-first floor of the office building. He sat in his high-backed black chair and turned it toward the incredible view of the downtown skyscrapers and beyond them the clear blue of San Diego Bay. Farrell took a deep breath and flipped open the manila sleeve. Inside lay a simple light green telegram from a bank on the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich: RE: Account number 99236BI. Handelsregister Namen: Buena Vista Anstalt. Cumulative total received this month: One hundred and twenty-five thousand U.S. Await instructions.”
The Fall Line Page 17