The Fall Line

by Mark T Sullivan

  The marlin jumped twice more in the next five minutes, but now that Farrell had seen the fish, it seemed less a primal force than a fleeting thrill, a ride to be enjoyed. When the steel leader appeared, Cordova undipped the rod and took it from the gambal. Farrell looked at his watch: the entire struggle had lasted thirty-five minutes, far more than the ten he’d estimated. His stomach was weak and hollow. His leg muscles twitched.

  “He’ll go a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty-five kilos,” Cordova said, peering over the side at the marlin, whose black and blue and silver head and ebony bill protruded from the water. “A trophy.”

  Emmanuel nudged Farrell: “You want to keep him, señor?” he asked. “Will look good over the wall.”

  “I’m not a trophy man,” Farrell said. “Let’s just get a picture.”

  The captain pulled from his pocket a pair of thick, leather gloves he used to work free the hook from the marlin’s jaw. Farrell leaned over the gunnel. Gabriel snapped the camera. With a quick flick of his wrist, Emmanuel freed the fish, which lolled on its side for a moment, exhausted. The next swell of the ocean revived it. The marlin brushed its great fin through the water and vanished.

  “We go back for more?” Emmanuel asked.

  “Later,” Cordova said. “We need to rest.” He and Gabriel disappeared below deck.

  Farrell collapsed onto one of the cushioned benches. He replayed the marlin’s leap from the water, enjoying the pleasant image that massaged his temples. The image was blurred when he thought of the fish lolling alongside the boat. Now he felt confused—he was happy that he’d landed the marlin, yet depressed that he’d seen it up close, its bill scarred from battling the sea, its scales worn to a dusky blue by age.

  “People go for years and never fight that well,” Gabriel said.

  Farrell cracked one eyelid. Cordova stood next to him holding a tray on which were two large thermoses of coffee, hunks of brown bread, and a slab of butter. Farrell warmed to the praise and poured the coffee. Gabriel bit into a hunk of the bread, chewed it thoughtfully, and asked: “Have you ever seen a starfish?”

  “In aquariums,” Farrell said, sipping the pungent Mexican coffee.

  “Remarkable creatures,” Gabriel said. “They survive in the harshest conditions—where the waves beat the shoreline. A delicate-looking thing, but strong because it is flexible and can adapt. It can lose an arm, even two or three, and grow them back.”

  “We are like one of those arms,” Cordova said.

  Farrell took short, tight breaths, the steamy coffee creating a mask about his face, as if he were underwater, inhaling through scuba gear. “Not exactly the kind of image a man wants to go to bed with,” he said.

  Cordova bit into a hunk of the bread and choked, “Depends on what that arm is used for, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” Farrell replied.

  Gabriel stirred more cream into his coffee. Cordova opened his mouth to speak again, but Gabriel raised his spoon and shook his head. Cordova pinched his lips together. He nodded obediently.

  “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a starfish is many things for many people,” Gabriel continued. “For some it is a road out of poverty. For others, it’s strictly a financial mechanism. For others, a cause.”

  “And for you?” Farrell asked.

  “A bit of all three,” he said, drinking deeply from the cup, then placing it in a holder on one of the chairs. He cocked his jaw at an angle and closed his eyes as if looking inside for a place to begin. “Have I told you much of my father?” he asked.

  Farrell told him what little he remembered from their first meetings nearly two years before: that he’d been a diplomat and they’d been close.

  “His name was Estefan,” Gabriel said.

  The boat rolled in the noontime swells. Gabriel related how Estefan Cortez y Madrid had been born into the Mexico City aristocracy in 1911, educated at Harvard and in Madrid. He entered the diplomatic corps after returning from Spain and spent the better part of his twenties and thirties in a variety of attaché postings in Los Angeles, Rome, and Paris. In Rome, he married a woman, Fortuna, who died giving birth to Gabriel.

  “We were happy together,” Gabriel said. “My father had mistresses, but never married again. I was raised by governesses.”

  When Gabriel was ten, Estefan began to change for reasons the son never fully understood. He accepted posts that required him to act as a commercial liaison between Mexico and the underdeveloped countries.

  “For the first time, I think, he had to begin to confront the true economics of our region,” Gabriel said. “Once he understood, he became a bitter man in many ways. He thought the future of our countries and our peoples—of Central and South America—had been ransomed.”

  In parts of Mexico and the other countries in which they lived, Estefan would lead Gabriel through the slums, showing him the muddy, garbage-strewn streets, the crude houses without running water, the children in threadbare clothes, the people without hope. He demanded that Gabriel study economics to understand these desperate scenes.

  “At first I thought it was neglect, simple and benign, that my father had—how would you say it—gone overboard?” Gabriel smiled at the image. “After all, look at what our friend Jorge rose from—simple neglect. Then people like you, bankers from the north, came and offered cash.”

  “Offered is the word,” Farrell said.

  Gabriel nodded. “I said offered. Much was taken and much good was done. But in some ways the money was like a bribe, a payoff, so we—people like me in the wealthy class—wouldn’t talk about the teeming settlements of misery sprouting all over the region. Have you ever been to the Chalco neighborhood in Mexico City?”

  “No.”

  Gabriel turned to Cordova and pointed his index finger in the air.

  “You see? All those years in Mexico and never been to Chalco.”

  Cordova belched in agreement. Farrell shifted uncomfortably.

  “It would be nice to call it a living hell, Jack,” Gabriel said. “A million people stuffed into a square mile where there was no one a decade ago. They suffered worse than all of us when the petroleum market busted and the other commodities sagged. My country and my people were left blanketed with debt.”

  Estefan died when Gabriel was only twenty-three, leaving him a small fortune and enough connections within the sophisticated Mexico City audience that he could have survived well enough had he the slimmest of ambitions. In business school at the University of Virginia, Gabriel met a radical economist named Perez, who had fought his way out of poverty in the slums of Lima, Peru. Perez impressed upon Gabriel that the route out of debt with the developed world was not Communism, but a capitalism as ruthless as that employed in the early part of the century by U.S. companies in countries like Nicaragua, Guatemala, Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico.

  “I came back to Mexico in 1976 and began to build,” Gabriel said. “We started small with redevelopment efforts, such as those which you’ve aided, projects that gave us enough cash to begin to explore applications for my old professor’s theories.”

  “We?”

  Gabriel patted Cordova on the shoulder. “By this time, Jorge had also finished his studies and he decided to work for me.”

  It was not until then that Farrell became fully aware that Cordova’s eyes had not left him once during the entire conversation; the dove boy was taking note of Farrell’s every reaction.

  “We made many trips to the States and to Europe, talking to businesses, analyzing the markets,” Gabriel continued. “We came to believe that escape is the number one desire of peoples in the developed world. One example: your countrymen spend millions, billions of dollars on the cinema every year.”

  Gabriel stood, his hand at his brow, looking out to sea.

  “But the entertainment business is locked tight,” he said. “We were going nowhere, nowhere until one day almost a decade ago. It hit me. The Colombians and the Peruvians had the answer.”

  The
re it was, what Farrell had suspected, feared and anticipated all along. Seeing it twist there in the open, as if it were hooked at the end of a line, released some long-held tension in Farrell. He relaxed into a waking dream. “I knew the story about rich Mexicans didn’t wash.”

  “I would have been disappointed had you not at least suspected,” Gabriel said. “In the early 1980s, Jorge and I set up transportation links on the coast north and south of Manzanillo and in several coves and landing strips here on Baja. When the federal authorities cracked down on South Florida six or seven years ago, we were ready.”

  “So you work for them?” Farrell asked, fully aware how melodramatic the question sounded.

  Cordova sniffed. “We work for no one but ourselves. We lease to whoever needs our equipment and services,” he said. “Despite what you read, there is little in the way of centralized organization. Everyone who does what we do is freelance. We stay far, far away from production and distribution. We know how it works, but I’ve never had to move a brick of white powder and I pray I never will.”

  “How do I fit into this?”

  “New services,” Gabriel said. “Our friends are in almost constant need of ways to invest and move their profits. We do it, take our cut, and put it to our own use—the hotels in Mexico City, the trading companies in Chiapas and Houston, the factories in Tijuana.”

  Farrell pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Let me get this straight: you fancy yourself some kind of Robin Hood, robbing from the rich Americans and giving jobs to the poor Mexicans.”

  “You needn’t be sarcastic,” Gabriel said. He yanked his sunglasses off and crossed his arms across his chest. “I’d never presume to be the leader of a personality cult. We do what we do for reasons beyond greed and ego, though we take our shares and live well. I am no saint, my friend. I believe Madre Teresa is nothing more than a jail warden in a white robe. I’m interested in getting these people out, not comforting them with words.”

  There, in the middle of the sea, as far out as one can get into the open on a day’s warning, Farrell was seized with a severe fit of claustrophobia. He had the urge to dive into the ocean, to swim until he came to shore or relaxed easily down into the water. He gaped at Gabriel; it was the first time he’d ever seen him truly angry. And he thought about drowning and the fact that they say that once you are past the first unpleasant gagging gulps, drowning is a pleasant experience; you struggle for a moment, your lungs fill and you drift with the tides.

  Against this picture, there arose in Farrell a strange, dangerous, and yet wonderful feeling of cross-purposes that he had never known before: there was the crash of jeopardy and moral muddiness; there was the stark idea that he was now in some remote manner a drug runner; and there was Gabriel’s argument that this reviled activity had an admirable purpose beyond profit. All these things melded together to leave him in a daze.

  “What do your clients think of your business?” Farrell asked.

  “What’s there to think?” Cordova said. “They know nothing of what we do with our profits, nor do they care. We know that some of them do similar things in the mountain villages down south, providing schools and clinics. Whether they tend for their people or not is not our concern.”

  “You’ve put me at great risk,” Farrell said.

  “You’ve put yourself at great risk,” Gabriel said.

  “I wasn’t aware of all the facts,” Farrell said.

  “You want out?” Cordova asked in a way that made Farrell realize there was no way out.

  “I didn’t say that,” Farrell replied. “But I tend to measure these kinds of risk with profit. More risk, more profit.”

  Gabriel and Cordova looked at each other for a long moment until Gabriel nodded. “This is negotiable.”

  The sky seemed bluer, less metallic, and Farrell found himself enchanted with his situation. He was an eager six-year-old who’d been given a bow and arrow over his mother’s objections.

  Farrell pointed out to sea. “I think I see birds circling.” Gabriel and Cordova smiled and shifted their bodies to follow the stretch of his arm to the horizon.

  A car horn sounded in the parking lot, snapping Farrell from his dream. The alarm clock said midnight. He stumbled to the bathroom, reliving the giddiness he’d felt returning to the harbor that afternoon. He had been as excited and as shamed as a boy who’d just stolen his first candy bar. Part of him still clung to the belief that he could somehow get himself out of the relationship at any time, cut his losses, return home without ever revealing his secret life.

  As they had bounded over the swells to the dock, Farrell had one fleeting surge of panic when he thought of Lena. Farrell climbed back into bed remembering that deep down he had known he was putting her in danger. A heaviness came upon him when he forced himself to face the fact that he had ignored her perspective, that he had pushed on in the anticipation of personal thrills. The invisible weight grew heavier and pressed on his chest and behind his eyes. It hung about the muscles in his neck. For a moment he told himself it was exhaustion. In the darkness he finally realized that the sensation wasn’t fatigue, but something he hadn’t allowed himself to feel in many, many years: remorse.

  Chapter 14

  FARRELL DREAMED HE WAS back in San Diego on Windandsea beach in the late afternoon. Moist sand filled the gaps between his toes like grainy paste. Lena knelt next to a faraway, wind-weathered rock. Her back was to him and she worked at a small bundle. He jogged to her. Punta and Rabo dashed out from behind the boulder, haunches low, hackles raised, teeth bared and salivating. Lena twisted into the sun, her hand at her brow. Farrell called to her, but she didn’t seem able to hear. She grabbed a piece of driftwood and beat it against the rock, the sound melding with the pounding of the surf and the barking of the dogs into thunder.

  He came awake with a start unsure of where he was, then groggily aware that someone was pounding on the door to the motel room. He jumped up, still half-asleep, aware of light and color, not really seeing, and wrenched the door open. He leaned against the transom to clear the fog. The Wave laughed and Inez said: “Oooh. Quel image!”

  Farrell was naked with an early-morning erection. He snapped backward and dove for the blankets. Inez covered her mouth with her hand. The Wave wiped tears from his eyes. Even Page slapped his thigh.

  “Do you always burst in on people like this?” Farrell yelled. He was less angry at them than himself because he realized he was embarrassed that Inez had witnessed his predicament.

  “We waited almost an hour for you,” Inez said. “Mais, from your appearance, you expect someone else, no?”

  “Yeah, the abominable snow girl,” Farrell snapped.

  “That fits,” Page said. “You on a date with the missing link.”

  “Shut the door, please.”

  The Wave stepped forward. “Wish you had the camera now, Inez?”

  Inez smiled seductively at Farrell. “What a shot.”

  “Shut the door!” Farrell yelled.

  Twenty-minutes later, the entire crew was gathered around a map spread on a restaurant table. Page’s cheeks were covered with red and purple scabs from the scrapes he’d gotten at the bottom of the Y Couloir.

  “You been up on Squaw before?” he asked Farrell in an icy voice.

  “Once about twelve years ago,” Farrell said, trying to ignore Page’s obviously hard feelings. “Came to a patrol seminar. I remember some of it.”

  Page pointed to some cliffs at the top of the mountain. “I’ll take you out on the hill in an hour or so to see what kind of shape you’re in. I want to see you fly before you try the Palisades.”

  Farrell squeezed his fist under the table; Page knew the area better than he did, but after Gabriel, he didn’t like being under anyone’s control.

  “The cliffs are more mental than technical,” Page went on. “With the Chimney, one of the four lines we’ll run on the Palisades, you drop through a five-foot opening straight down for forty f
eet, then it breaks out from under you and you drop another seventy to a wide run-out.”

  “Watermelon out the seventh-floor window,” The Wave whistled.

  “It’s deceptive,” Page said. “You’re really only a few feet off the snow the whole time, so there’s no real impact to speak of. But you’ll touch down at sixty plus.”

  “We’ll need downhill skis,” Farrell said. “Minimum two hundred and twenty centimeters.”

  “All taken care of,” Page said. “As I said before, when I go up the hill, I have every intention of coming down in one piece.”

  “Lead on,” Farrell said with as much sarcasm as he could muster.

  Page shrugged the comment off and ran his finger across the map to a second peak. “With any luck we’ll do the Main Line pocket in the afternoon. It’s steep and covered with rocks, really the most extreme thing up here.”

  Inez said: “You fall this much as off the Palisades, no?”

  “Similar,” Page said. “But you’ll get better light for the cameras. The Palisades is rarely in the sun. Here on the Mainline, there will be great color and contrasts with the copper rocks for background.”

  Ann said: “When do we start shooting?”

  “I push up the schedule,” Inez said. “Tomorrow morning.”

  “Jesus,” Page said, surprised by the announcement. “It will take a couple of days just to get our legs under us after the race.”

  Inez lit a cigarette. “I speak to my backers since two days ago. They want the rough cut of the film by the end of June, mid-July at the latest. They want to be out on the circuit by early October. Alors, we push.”

  “But—” Page began.

  “We push,” Inez insisted. “Tomorrow and Friday here, then we leave for Jackson Hole. Then Ranier and, depending on weather, McKinley.”

  “Too much, too soon,” The Wave said.

  Inez blew out a blue ring of smoke. “I decide what is too much, too soon. Ann and Tony come with me to prepare the gear. I suggest you three get out on that mountain for the practice.”