I sat down on the railroad tie and watched him sleep until Punta dashed up and licked his ears. He startled and swore at her, saw me, and looked confused as if I were a dream. I reached out and stroked his face.
He told me he had weeded my garden and planted the impatiens. I pressed my fingers in around the stems, feeling for the depth of the root systems and the density of the soil. I told him it was a good start, led him into the house, and stuck him under the shower where he told me about Mexico.
I turned green when he said they knew he’d been followed. But I took some hope: during the entire story Jack never once dropped into the quick, chopped delivery of a conspirator that would have told me he enjoyed it. Jack was terrified in Mexico.
I fixed us some dinner. He told me about Maria and how she’s gone to the bottle. I asked if it was because of Gabriel. He said he thought it was part of it. I stopped stir-frying the vegetables. He was staring into his drink. And I knew now there was more than idle chat between them and I felt sick and betrayed.
I screamed at him that starting over at anything starts with confession. He got real stiff then heaved his glass across the room where it struck the blue china clock on the mantelpiece and shattered it. He ran to the mess, knelt, and picked up one of the shards. It cut him. He sat there looking at the blood in his hand, telling me in a low voice that his grandmother had left it to him because he liked to wind it when he was a kid.
I didn’t say a word, just put the pieces in a paper bag. He told me about Maria. I wanted to strike him again, but didn’t. I took him to the bathroom and sewed the cut up myself. With each push of the needle through his flesh, nothing to ice his pain, I thought of the bitch and how I wished his hand were hers, too.
Stern and Kennerson arrived at Farrell’s home exactly seven days later in a van marked with the name of a local janitorial service. They came to the door in white overalls with mops and buckets in their hands, a sight Farrell took slight pleasure in at the time. Lena had taken the day off and, over their objections, sat with him. Since he’d confessed, she had taken over. Farrell felt impotent and lost when he looked at her. She was strong, he was weak; any decision about their future together was hers. She needed to hear everything.
Stern played back the tape, and even though it was somewhat marred by static, Cortez’s voice could plainly be heard: “We are all well aware of the procedures and records.” As Farrell had feared, the second conversation hadn’t recorded clearly.
“I think you’ve got it in that first talk,” Farrell said.
“I don’t know,” Kennerson said doubtfully.
“But Jack described the whole organization,” Lena said.
“Sure he does,” Stern said. “He does. God, we needed Cortez to buy the Tortolla plan.”
“I got nothing then?” Farrell said, dejected.
“No. There’s something,” Kennerson said. “It’s open to interpretation, so you’ll have to testify. Grand Jury.”
“What are the odds they buy it?”
“Fifty-fifty,” Stern said.
“What about Rubenstein’s marriage to that man from Colombia’s cousin?” Lena asked.
“Shows the web,” Kennerson said. “But being remotely tied to a kingpin—even by blood—is no crime.”
“If I testify, they’ll know,” Farrell said.
“Grand Jury’s secret.”
“They’ll know,” Farrell said. “They’re watching. I don’t know how, but they are.”
“We can compel you to testify,” Stern said.
“I was offered immunity,” Farrell said.
“Only if you gave us Cortez.”
“You lousy bastard, Stern,” Farrell said. “I’ll plead the fifth.”
“You’ll do time,” Kennerson said.
“I expect it,” Farrell said. “But you won’t get what you want.”
Stern glanced at Kennerson, who nodded.
“Protection throughout the trial could be provided,” Stern said.
Lena stood up. “Not good enough. What about this federal witness program you read about?”
“That’s for people in imminent danger,” Kennerson said. “And we’ve got no indication that these people are physical threats.”
“You came to the house in janitor’s overalls!” Lena said. “What do you need, a black glove in the mailbox? A kiss on his cheek?”
Kennerson sat silent for almost a minute. “Okay,” he said finally. “I’ll try to set it up for the both of you.”
Lena cleared her throat and glanced at her husband. “Set it up for one. I’m not sure where I’m going yet.”
The muscles in the backs of Farrell’s legs cramped. Stern and Kennerson looked at the floor. Farrell chewed at the inside of his lip. “Set up different plans, then,” he said.
Over the course of an hour, they struck a deal: in two weeks Farrell would testify. That same day, he, and possibly Lena, would fly to eastern Washington for relocation. Farrell would return under guard for trials. If Lena decided to leave, she’d be moved to another location and eventually back to Rhode Island.
When the two men left, Lena held up her hand before Farrell could speak. “I can’t tell you if I’m going. I was scared when you were gone, scared worse then I’ve ever been. Worse than, well … you know.”
“They said we’d be safe.”
“I said I haven’t decided yet, end of conversation,” she said.
“What haven’t you decided?”
Lena looked at him like he was a very little boy. “If you have to ask, Jack, maybe that’s the problem.”
Farrell turned off the light in the motel room. He listened to Ruby pant near the heater. Sorrow and lament, new emotions, pulsed up the back of his spine, soaking every thought. Face it, you snipped every strand in the web of your relationship. Worse, you didn’t even do it consciously, you did it with indifference. He could see that blaming genes and his parents for his actions wouldn’t wash anymore; their fear of the future could not be used to erase the responsibility of his past. Or present, for that matter.
He moaned, feeling again the hot needle as Lena sewed his cut palm. Even then, with his wife scoring his flesh, he’d told himself that the effect he’d had on Maria was somehow noble; for a brief time he’d given this lonely, self-tortured woman the gift of forgetfulness. Now he saw Gabriel and Cordova and Maria for what they really were: the vulgar reflections of his own weaknesses, of course; but more, they were the brutal weapons he’d used to hurt his wife.
Why? He turned that question over several times, and found to his horror and his shame that it was simple: Lena had had the opportunity to know him. And that he had feared more than life itself.
Chapter 25
FARRELL WAS STANDING OUTSIDE the pharmacy at 8 A.M. The attorney’s faxed report was several pages long, double-spaced. The printing was smudged, but readable. He stuffed the papers into his jacket next to the diary and drove the camper to the edge of town. He felt he needed to be outside before reading again, as if the sky and the wind could help him plot a course through the last sad yards of thicket and bramble.
He parked the truck next to a butte that hems in Jackson. He and Ruby climbed up through the sand-colored brush, skirting what snow remained under the bright warm spring sun. Two bands of mule deer lazing on the ridgeline leaped from their beds. The deer bounded across the top of the butte toward a stand of cotton-wood trees.
Farrell found a boulder on top and sat on it. The town was spread out below him, and in the distance he could make out the elk at the reserve. The herd had dwindled in the last few days as more of the animals realized the days were longer and the snow pack in the foothills thinning. One by one, the beasts crossed into the trees and left the winter meadows behind.
Despite the inherent tranquility of the scene, Farrell’s breath became labored. There were only three more entries in Lena’s diary. And he had the final report on Inez. He shut his eyes to concentrate on a spot above the bridge of his nose, trying to rem
ember the meditation techniques his mother had taught him. But the musty odor of decay that rose from the thawing soil around him hampered his efforts. Ruby destroyed them, howling when a rabbit broke from a nearby bush and tore across the butte. Farrell watched her give chase, her quick, darting moves reminding him of how Punta and Rabo had torn after each other through the house while he and Lena had packed the week before he was scheduled to testify. She had been feeling sick to her stomach.
Farrell asked, “Have you decided?”
Lena refused to meet his gaze. “Not yet.”
He said, “I still love you.”
Lena nodded. “It’s not a question of love. That would stay no matter what happened. It’s whether you feel what you’ve done.”
“I know what I’ve done,” Farrell said.
“I think you do know,” Lena said as she left the room. “I want you to feel it in the same awful hollow way I did when Stern pounded at the door with a search warrant.”
Farrell hesitated. He tried to will the sensations to surge within him, but all he got was words. “I regret what I’ve done,” he said helplessly.
She walked off without replying. Farrell listened to the echoes of her footsteps. He wanted to chase her, but his feet wouldn’t move. He remembered hiking into the desert in Africa late one winter afternoon. After an hour of walking, he had come to dunes and he rolled down one, then another and another. Suddenly it was dark and the rolling had stripped him of his sense of direction. He had shivered in the sand all night, waiting for dawn, waiting for the sun to lead him back.
Sitting on the butte, Farrell shivered, enduring again the same loss of direction. He opened the diary.
August 2
I threw up twice this morning. Last night I sat upright in bed while Jack slept, fighting heartburn, trying to figure out whether to go with this cripple or leave him to hobble alone. He has left me with scars worse than Jenny, and I can’t help loving him. He has abused me, but he is not a striking abuser or even one who does it with intent. Jack’s sin is that he focuses so much on moving, he doesn’t have to look at himself in repose. He can’t see anything or anybody else still and isolated, for what they are. He is happiest when racing through life, everything smeared at the edge of his vision. I tell myself I could slow him down. I tried that once, I guess, asking him to move to San Diego. I don’t know if he can change.
The problem is I’m a nurse. And I don’t know if I am callous enough, even after all of it, to leave someone wounded by the side of the road.
August 4
Jack talks sometimes about the nomads he saw in Africa. He watched their ancient way collapse around them as political borders and drought and economics forced them into cities. Sedentary.
Stern says we will leave in the middle of the night. Nomads breaking camp in the desert, stealing away to the next oasis. Jack has spent his adulthood roaming from one place to another. I allow myself some degree of amateur analysis if I ask whether this rootlessness contributed.
Lydia told me once that she couldn’t help reaching for her needle. She said she can see how much pain the needle might bring her, but there’s nothing she can do because she knows it’s also going to make her feel good, real good.
That’s how it is with me tonight. On Friday, Maddy did some tests on my constant nausea. She drew blood. I see blood every day, yet the sight of my own has always chilled me. Yet when I saw the red flow into the needle, I was like Lydia, full of dread, full of desire.
Farrell didn’t turn the page. He knew after the next entry the pages were white. He felt damp even though he sat in the warm sun. He closed the diary and locked it. He tried to recall the last days before he was scheduled to testify, tried to match them up with this entry. He figured she must have written it the day they had made a brief appearance at a lawn party at Maddy Crukshank’s home in Del Mar. Lena made the perfunctory rounds, introducing him to other members of her team. They were an earnest lot and all of them smiled at him, except Crukshank, whom Lena had told; she refused to shake Farrell’s hand. He went and sat in a chair away from the crowd. He drank five stiff piña coladas until the agave and desert star plants in Crukshank’s garden seemed to move. Lena put her hand on his shoulder and led him to the car.
The next day, forty-eight hours before he was to testify, they left the BMW in the driveway and took the Jeep and the dogs to the mountains east of San Diego. They hiked through the pines to a point where they could look out over the whole of the Anza Borrego desert, a dusty chalkboard that melted into rock and dune on the horizon. Lena spread out a blanket. Farrell watched the dogs, who nosed pinecones over the side of ridge, only to chase them as they rolled.
“Are you ready?” Lena asked.
“I told you once I’ve never not had the urge to walk along a cliff,” Farrell said. “I’m scared to walk along this one.”
“You’ll get through it.”
“I don’t know if I will,” Farrell said. He held her hand. “I just want you to know, it wasn’t ever anything to do with you.”
“Yes, it was,” Lena said. “Nothing takes place in isolation.”
Ordinarily he would have protested. Instead, he looked at the outline of her breasts and the roundness of her hips and knew she was right somehow. In the late afternoon, Farrell tried to seduce her, but she pulled away. Lena cried on the ride back into town.
Farrell barely slept that night. He slipped down to the kitchen in the early morning and reviewed the documents Kennerson would question him about in the secret jury room the next day. There would be three days of testimony and then he’d fly. A small town outside Spokane where evergreens would shield him from curious neighbors.
Lena came into the kitchen dressed for work. She put her hand on his shoulder. “We’ll talk tonight, okay?”
“We can talk now,” Farrell said. “I’m done.”
“Tonight,” she smiled.
Relief surged through Farrell as she moved to the door that led to the garage. “So you’ll go with me?”
“We’ll talk tonight about it,” she said again. The dogs bolted through the door after her. They thought it was play to chase her and climb into her car.
“Just a second,” Farrell had called after her. “I’ll get them.” Sunshine flooded into the garage as the automatic door opened. Lena moved into the light, the dogs beside her.
“You’re not going to the hospital with me, sillies,” she said, and she shooed the dogs away with her hands.
Now, the dampness of springtime on the butte turned to a kind of cold he could not name. And the almost imperceptible tremble that had developed in Farrell’s hands during the last five minutes of reading turned to a full palsied shudder. He hugged himself, rocking back and forth to prevent the stupefying chill from reaching his heart. Ruby whined and stuck her nose under his arm.
Farrell swayed and squeezed until he felt a glimmer of warmth in his fingers. He told himself that to truly recover he had to open this last closed box in his mind; to set himself free he had to relive this final horror. But he didn’t have the courage. The old escape patterns kicked in. He thought instead of Inez, crouched over him, a naked, savage force beckoning him toward recklessness. He reached into his coat to pull out the report. He pressed the flimsy pages against his knee and read.
Didier, Inez/Chamonix.
Didier arrived in Chamonix in the fall of 1981, and found work photographing tourists for three guides on the popular seven-mile glacier run. Guides names: Eric LeCompte, Paul Treynor, and Henri Rassond. This last was an accomplished mountaineer with vast expedition experience.
Rassond’s most ambitious climb was in 1973. He was twenty-five, and second man on the French team to Kanchenjunga, Nepal, Himalaya range. According to members of the climbing community here, Rassond, who is nicknamed L’Aigle (the Eagle, for his prominent nose or swooping skiing style, depending on whom you speak to), was considered likely to lead future French assaults on Annapurna and Dhaulagiri if the Kanchenjunga assent was su
ccessful. Rassond and two other men reached the third camp at 26,000 feet on May 10, 1973, and planned to assault the summit the next day. A brutal storm rolled in and they were stuck at the high camp for four days. One of the climbers, Christophe Marginot, died. Rassond suffered pulmonary edema and was carried off.
With the death of Marginot, Rassond lost his lust for the sport, faded from the pack of top climbers. He supported himself by guiding inexperienced alpinists.
Didier seemed to have discovered what many local mountaineers had known for years: at thirty-three, Rassond was an underused, undervalued commodity. She took pictures of Rassond on his many trips across the glaciers, selling them to climbing and ski magazines. By the spring of 1982, the two were inseparable. The following winter Didier used the money she’d made on the photographs to produce a film of Rassond.
Le Retour à L’Aire (The Return to the Aerie) documents Rassond’s comeback climbs and his pioneering ski routes in the Italian Dolomite mountain range. The film caused a minor sensation when it debuted at the Chamonix film festival in October 1983. The local newspaper called it “markedly different from modern mountaineering cinema. The juxtaposition of Rassond’s first descents and the moody nighttime footage of the guide as he walks the streets of Chamonix talking about his triumphs and failures as a mountaineer and as a man, in effect, transcends the term documentary and borders on art.”
In February 1984, Rassond suffered a terrible fall in the Langkofel spire group in the central Italian Dolomites, which left him paralyzed from the waist down. Didier saw Rassond through the initial phase of his recovery, but within months was seen in the cafés with Alain Valoir, a young Chamoniard who was making a name for himself as a practitioner of enchainment (the linking of extreme climbs, skiing routes, and parapents in a single day).
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