I broke a glass tonight. It fell in the kitchen. Pop! It made me think of Elizabeth. It’s been nine months since I’ve started here, nine months and now we see them every day like Elizabeth, these little junkie babies.
Only three weeks old. Heroin. She needs so much liquid to get through withdrawal that she’s peed herself into second-degree burns.
Day one she shook and twisted like an 80-year-old with Parkinson’s. Even today she tremors when she sucks at the bottle. In the past week she’s bucked her knees and elbows so often against the sheet that she’s worn her skin away. Her legs and arms are raw, fitful, and angry, as if it were possible to develop colic on the flesh.
We got a water bed for the babies last month and Maddy says they seem calmed by the warm water under their bellies. Maybe it reminds them of the womb. Maybe it reminds them of when they had a steady fix.
Elizabeth’s twin, Antonia, died on day two. The first and only question of Lydia, their mother, was if their fingers and toes were all there? Lydia is exactly twenty-eight, my age, and she frightens me because I wonder if such an anonymous common denominator as the number of years on Earth we share makes me capable of being Lydia.
Elizabeth, her daughter, is six pounds now. Her hair is brown and her skin fair. I hold her in my arms and try to get her to rotate her head in the direction of my voice. Healthy babies can do this in seconds. Elizabeth’s quaking eyes come to me in half a minute and she closes them, exhausted.
How much better it would be for Elizabeth that Lydia screw up the next time she wants to put a needle in her arm and leave a bubble in the needle. Pop!
Why can’t I arrange that? Pop!
But I can’t think like that, just can’t.
Farrell looked up from the pages. The weight on his shoulders had returned. It was heavier now and had sharper angles. He had felt awkward and dull when he discovered who Lena’s patients were. He did everything he could to suppress the thought that he was somehow responsible. He chose to dwell on the thrills he was getting.
One night Lena forced him to look in the mirror. It was early December. They sat in their living room before a roaring fire while rain pelted the windows. Punta and Rabo lay on the rug and snored.
“The government should go after them, put them away,” Lena said.
“People will get it one way or the other,” Farrell said, shifting uncomfortably. “And you’re being a hypocrite, considering.”
“I’ve smoked pot and, yes, we used cocaine a few times,” Lena said. “What did we know then? Look what I know now: dozens of them every day in every hospital in the city.”
A distance opened between them. Farrell imagined it was the day before and he was out scuba diving; Lena was on the surface leaning over the side of the boat talking to him. He could see her lips moving, but her voice was muffled.
Farrell yawned nervously. “I’m tired. Can’t we talk about something else?”
“I always have to hear about your latest deal. But you never want to hear what happens to me.”
“That’s not true. It’s just the talk of hospitals makes me jumpy.”
“Some of the people you work with make me jumpy.”
“Name one.”
“That man, Cordova. He’s the eeriest person I’ve ever met.”
Cordova had come to the house the week before for dinner. Farrell and the dove boy had been in Houston to pass papers on a small apartment complex. Cordova decided to return with him for a night before flying back to Mexico City. At the time it had seemed a perfectly normal thing to do. Farrell thought that, in retrospect, Cordova may have had ulterior reasons. Had he been checking up on my home life?
“You just don’t like him because he’s fat,” Farrell had told Lena.
“That has nothing to do with it,” she said. “He has a strange way of looking just to the right or left of you when you are speaking.”
“It’s probably just the glasses. He doesn’t see well without them.”
“It’s not his vision. I, well I … got the feeling he knows what I look like without makeup. I just don’t want him here anymore.”
“So now I can’t have one of my most important clients to my house?”
“Take him to a restaurant.”
“Fine. Who are we going to have to our house? One of your little shaking babies?”
Lena’s mouth hung open.
“I shouldn’t have said that …” Farrell said. “I …”
Lena had already walked from the room.
Farrell held his head in his hands, feeling the breeze pick up out on the lake. How could he have been so cold? He opened the diary.
December 5
Jack’s been sleeping on the couch the past few nights. Nothing said, just agreed upon. Sometimes he’s like a picture in a magazine ad; after a while it becomes familiar, but you don’t know who the model really is.
He leaves tomorrow for Mexico. His last long trip of the year. I tried to make his leaving as smooth as possible, but after two or three glasses of wine I couldn’t help bringing up Elizabeth again. I watch her and the other kids and don’t know what to do. She’s going home tomorrow. Child Protective Services say Lydia’s agreed to go into rehab and the baby should go with her. She’s her mother after all. I tried to tell Lydia today that Elizabeth is different, that the drugs make her too sensitive. Lydia just smiled. She tickled Elizabeth’s little toes and fingers, torture for this kind of baby. It went on and on until Elizabeth threw her hands in front of her face as if to say, No more!
Lydia told me her baby was waving at her. I just turned away and prayed for Elizabeth.
Jack seemed to listen, but didn’t. When I pressed him, he slammed his hand on the table, yelling at me that we had one last night together. Why couldn’t we talk about something other than “those warped little kids.”
He was that model in the magazine ad again. I screamed back that I had to talk about Elizabeth because it’s what I see every day, not little bank account slips. Real people.
I don’t know what has gone wrong with us. Maybe time apart is what we need. As awful as it sounds, I’m thankful he will be away.
A chipmunk chattered on the end of the log a few feet from Farrell’s head. He watched it scamper under a branch and stare out at him with big brown eyes. Farrell tried to feel happiness at such a sight, but couldn’t. He remembered how leaving the house that next morning had been like stepping into a spring rain. He could breath again. Sitting there on the cliff over Tahoe, Farrell experienced a ruthless pressure where his jaw met his skull. His eyes seemed ready to float. He realized he was grieving. Farrell stood before tears could form. He lifted the binoculars to his eyes, scanning the water and the mountainsides in an effort to still his head with the awe of late winter landscapes.
“Snowfields exposed daily to the sun are receding on the south-facing slopes,” he mumbled. “Shale rock splintering into tiny chunks dislodge and roll into a ravine two hundred yards above the road. Perhaps they break away from the melting water or maybe an animal I can’t see has triggered the slide.”
It was comforting to think that somewhere above him, blacktail deer and sheep and coyotes and bear moved within the forest. Dusk settled around him now and in the waning light of day, the breeze strengthened, blew steady from the northwest, and puffed white caps. Farrell turned to it, enjoying the force, the crispness and within it the smell of the lake, fresh and yet ancient, like a woman after her bath.
Far below him on the lake road, a brown truck swung through the turns and switchbacks. At the bay, the road climbed in a gradual spiral from about 200 feet above the water to almost one thousand feet at the point where Farrell stood. Farrell trained the binoculars on the truck, tracking its course from almost a mile away.
Page was driving the truck, alone, bobbing his head to some local radio station. As the truck began the final ascent to the point, Farrell lost sight of the vehicle. He tracked it by the high whine of the gears which now cut the quiet scene. The truck buck
ed and groaned as Page downshifted by the entrance to the park. The tires crunched through the gravel and salts left by the winter snowplows and were gone.
Another vehicle, this one smaller, a blue Nissan sedan, moved into the spiral. Again Farrell watched through the binoculars. Inez was driving, her fingers firm on the wheel, advancing the car at a steady forty-five miles an hour, as if she did not want to gain on Page until it was necessary. In the last light of day, Farrell got a good look at her through the windshield: she was massaging her throat.
Farrell scrambling back through the brush and the rotting spring snow toward the truck. “Looks like someone’s playing crack the whip,” he told himself, “and I’m going to be at the tail end of it.”
By the time he reached the truck, Farrell could barely hear the screech of the loose fan belt on Inez’s Nissan as it coursed the road to the south of the point. A pitch, moonless night had fallen when he passed through the spruce flat on the road to South Lake Tahoe. Every few moments the red taillights of Inez’s car would flicker and fade around a bend in the road, which widened, accommodating homes, motels, and restaurants.
They turned left on Route 50 toward the Nevada line and the traffic built. Farrell had a difficult time staying far back enough from Inez that she would not recognize his truck and yet still keep her in sight. He was seven cars behind her when he saw her signal blink. She made a right turn next to a bagel store. He followed, struggling to adjust to the dark street after the neon blare of the main strip. Inez was three blocks ahead of him when she stopped so suddenly Farrell had to slam on his brakes and spin the truck into an alley.
He turned off the headlights. He slipped from the truck with the binoculars. Crossing the alley into a yard, Farrell crouched behind a tree twenty-five yards from Inez. She had the window down and was watching a house a block away. Farrell trained the binoculars in the same direction, seeing Page’s truck parked in front of a green cottage, the arched roof of which tilted well-off center. Paint strips hung from the clapboards. The yard was dominated by a bulky black car, vintage 1950s, which squatted on cement blocks next to a sagging picnic table and a rusted weight set.
No lights shone in the dwelling save a single glaring bulb on the front porch. Page appeared from around the side of the house near the old car. He mounted the front steps, and standing rigid, he knocked. Inez leaned out of the window to see better.
Page hunched over his knee and scribbled in a notebook. He stood, ripped out a piece of paper, and placed it between the battered screen door and the frame. He pivoted, walked out into the street, and did a slow 360-degree turn with his hands on his hips. He paused twice during the turn as if he were examining every tree limb and front porch on the street.
Without looking back, Page strode to the truck and climbed in. Inez laid down in the front seat of her car. Afraid of being caught in Page’s headlights, Farrell sprinted back across the yard and into the dark alley. He waited to start up the camper until Inez had turned around and followed Page.
Farrell lost them in heavy traffic toward the state line. Inez’s car was eight ahead of his when the light changed yellow, then red. She sped through after Page, leaving Farrell to watch their tail-lights recede up the slight grade toward the flash of the casinos. He rapped on the steering wheel. What was she up to? Why was she following Page? Then it hit him. She keeps files. But why?
Farrell knew he risked exposure if he blindly drove up the crowded strip to look for them. It had to be done. If he were caught, he could plead the plausible—he’d come to Tahoe to gamble.
Farrell kept the truck in first gear, double shifting through the parking lots in back of the casinos. After nearly a half hour of searching, he pulled into the rear lot of the High Sierra Casino, a three-acre affair that held hundreds of cars. Page pushed through the service entrance door to the casino. Farrell panicked; if he could see Page, Inez was close by. He threw the truck in reverse, punched the light switch off, and backed the truck as far into the rear of the lot as he could.
It took him almost ten minutes of searching with the binoculars in the cold dark, listening to the pounding at his temples, to spot Inez’s car. The Nissan was about twenty rows forward and slightly off to his right. If she knew Farrell was there, she didn’t show it.
An hour passed before Page emerged with a woman almost his height, who wore the white shirt and tan jumper of a banquet waitress. Her hair was strawberry blond, streaked with silver, twisted into a long braid and tied off with a red ribbon. Page touched the squared, once-lovely face of the woman, touched her high on the cheekbones. She shrugged away, hugging her own shoulders. It could have been the awkward lighting, but Farrell swore that her face was bruised.
They talked. At one point, Page raised his hands to his ears, then threw them out and to his side and took a few steps away. The woman reached out her hand to him, her entire upper body leaning toward Page. She stroked his neck and he flinched, but his legs didn’t move. Farrell wanted to put the binoculars down, but he couldn’t. He was watching the scene with the strange melange of titillation and embarrassment he’d endured when he and some teenage friends had leered in the window of a local bank teller who enjoyed making love with her bedroom drapes open and the lights on.
At last, Page held the woman’s hands. He leaned his face to hers and kissed it. Even from so far away, Farrell could tell she cried. Page trudged down the stairs to his truck, waved once, and drove off.
Farrell expected Inez to follow, but she didn’t. Farrell remained behind, too, watching the watcher, until she slid from her car and passed through the service entrance.
Twenty minutes later the same woman followed Inez out of the door. Inez smiled and laughed and shook the woman’s hand. To the ordinary observer it would have seemed an easy meeting. Something about it bothered Farrell. He watched closely through the binoculars. Sure enough, when the woman turned and disappeared through the door, Inez’s entire body language changed: she slouched; she swung her loose right hand in a series of circles in the air; and her smile—so animated a moment before—faded completely. But that didn’t describe it. There was something else. He tried to figure it out as he waited in the parking lot after she’d left. The words would not come. It was not until he was driving back to the north side of the lake that he got it: Inez’s entire face had virtually melted away; he had never seen anyone so devoid of expression. What haunted him throughout the rest of the drive was the fact that seeing her like that, so cold and plastic, turned him on.
Chapter 15
FARRELL SLEPT FITFULLY THAT night, his dreams a mash and roll of fragmented memories, specters, and pangs in the gut. Inez was there, her face and hands like soft clay, capable of being shaped into whatever Farrell wanted her to be. First she was the powerhouse saleswoman he’d met in the Jacuzzi back in Utah. She mutated into the obsessed director taunting him from her helicopter. Her clothes melted away and she was nude and on film. Finally, the planes of her face softened into those of Maria Robles. Farrell groaned.
He sweated the sheets dreaming of Maria and Gabriel and the second trip he’d made to Manzanillo. Farrell was now fully into the world of money laundering, hooked on the rush, a junkie for danger. Before heading south, he devised a plan so daring, yet so potentially profitable, that he could barely contain himself on the jet.
Gabriel was leaning against a stanchion at the airport in Manzanillo when Farrell cleared customs. His cheeks were hollower than usual, his skin was pasty.
“The flu?” Farrell asked.
“That would be easier,” Gabriel said. “The volume of business is off and there are several projects I need cash for if they are to go ahead.”
Farrell smiled, cocked his head back, and showed him his palms. “I think you’ll be happy to hear my plan.”
Gabriel eased his dark sunglasses onto the bridge of his nose.
“Always the salesman, Jack,” he said, and he smiled wanly. “Know what the customer wants to hear.”
“Isn’t t
hat the trick of the trade?” Farrell said.
Maria greeted Farrell at the door, but she, too, appeared to have slept little in the past few days. She kissed him on the cheek and wandered off.
Even though a strong breeze blew off the early winter ocean, Gabriel insisted on running the air conditioner in his office. His heels rested on the edge of his desk. He smoked a cigarette and drank from a small glass of white wine. “Tell me how bold we will be,” Gabriel said.
Farrell clicked open his briefcase and gave him the rehearsed pitch.
“There are places like Otay Mesa in every border town in America,” Farrell began. He spread out a map of the Southwest on the desk. Gabriel dropped his feet and leaned forward with his head in his hands.
“Go on.”
“Here outside El Paso, Laredo, Nogales, and even Douglas there are miles of scrub land,” Farrell said, tracing the line between Mexico and the United States with his middle finger. “Much of it is owned by the government. But there are private parcels which may be developed as Maquiladora factories. Buy the land and build plants.”
Gabriel screwed up his face. Before he could speak, Farrell broke in. He explained that in the short term the properties would serve as useful blinds for the cash they needed to hide. In the future, Gabriel and his clients would be positioned to develop legitimate factories and warehouses.
Farrell stood and bent over the map. “Here’s the kicker. Think of the possibility of owning buildings on both sides of the border which are not subject to the normal scrutiny of either country’s customs agents.”
Gabriel rolled his eyes at the ceiling and took a deep inhale off the cigarette. He seemed preoccupied, so Farrell raised his voice and said: “Gabriel, I’m talking an almost open door for whatever you want to bring in or out of the States.”
Gabriel blew the smoke out and gently said: “Don’t patronize me, Mr. Farrell. I know exactly what you are talking about. I may be many things, but stupid isn’t one of them.”
This was all delivered in such a menacing tone that Farrell rubbed his jaw and sat down hard in the red leather chair. “Stupid is not what I’d call you,” Farrell said.
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