by Rafe Haze
Go, you loser! You goddam moron!
I took another two steps up. My breath was so labored I felt my lungs would expel themselves through my throat.
One more step.
Paul and I stepped up two steps to Grandfather’s trailer’s front door and knocked, but there was no answer.
I reached above me to grab the railing and pull myself up. I instantly felt dizzy and propped myself against the cold metal railing. I felt no equilibrium. I could barely determine what was horizontal, what was vertical, which way gravity was supposed to be pushing…or pulling…
The ground three floors below swelled and then distanced.
The television plummeted sixty-one stories from the Chrysler building’s angry eagle gargoyles and shattered on the pavement, splattering infinite shiny shards of glass and electronics horizontally in every direction…
All I could do to keep upright was grip the rail hard with my fist, straining, grasping…
Grandfather tightened his hand around mine with strength of a vice, slowly being screwed tighter and tighter, and I responded by gripping his as hard as I could, knuckles whitening, face reddening, breathing labored.
My eyesight was fading to a spotted white out. I tried to kick my foot up another step, but it was welded to the slotted metal floor. I tried to release my hand in order to pull myself higher, but it had frozen around the railing in unflinching stiffness…
We knocked on the trailer door again.
Grandfather’s trailer in Placerville was positioned next to a man-made lake. Colliding plates heaved granite ten thousand feet up from the sea while enduring glacial carvings for one hundred million years to create one of the most geologically and ecologically beautiful and serene areas in the world, but all the Sierra Mountain range had to offer wasn’t sufficient. Developers chose to dam up a creek to create a rectangularish pond in order to provide a centerpiece for a flattened, lawn-manicured, tree-leveled trailer park. Dead center of this body of water, a sprinkler stuck its head up and revolved like a perpetually angry machine gunner determined to fire until the slimy yellow and brown algae retreated to the edges.
The aluminum and glass door opened inward. The screen door blurred Grandfather’s face, and we had to back down the steps in order for him to open it. Grandfather said nothing. He did not smile. He did not frown. He maintained a stern expression that revealed not meanness, but an unwillingness to engage other facial muscles. He motioned inside with his hand.
Grandfather had white hair, thinning but still enough to comb back into youthful looking streaks that I’m sure thrilled a few septuagenarians. His face retained some of the handsome features that we’d seen in a photo on the mantle of some mentally challenged distant cousin we’d met only once years before. Although now the loose fleshiness of age and the redness of a lot of mountain sun had softened and hardened him into a different being. His body retained the proportions of a man who was once in exceptional shape, with broad shoulders, thin waist, and strong arms and legs. The joints at the knees and elbows reddened with mild arthritis, and his belly was firm but rounding outwards above his belt like the smooth curve of an archer’s bow.
Paul entered first, passing into the dark of the trailer. As Paul passed Grandfather, he looked at my brother with steady stern eyes. What was he searching for or trying to identify in Paul? I had no idea. He remained expressionless.
Then I entered.
The fragrance of cedar wood and nutmeg filled my nostrils.
He held out his hand. I was fourteen and had never shaken a man’s hand before, a testament to both my own shyness and my father’s neglect, but also to our isolation from interactions with any population. I weakly placed my hand on Grandfather’s hand and gripped it with hesitation. Apparently this wouldn’t do.
With his other hand, Grandfather grabbed me by the wrist and pulled my right hand away from his. Then, like a battering ram, he used his left hand to shove my right hand solidly into his right hand. Our thumbs brushed by each other and slammed together at the webbing. His fingers curled up and cradled my pinky ridge until it locked in a tight tongue and groove. Our palms suctioned together with a loud fleshy slap. Then Grandfather tightened his grip, solidly in control, looking me straight in the eye with commanding directness.
My breath shortened if not stopped. I was confused by the direction this man was indicating I should follow. Was the increasing pain he was inflicting punitive or instructive? I responded by tightening my own grip as hard as I could, knuckles whitening, face reddening, breath laboring When he felt the grip was tight enough, Grandfather lowered his head a centimeter in resolution, and jockeyed my hand up and down three times. He nodded at me with a look of inquisitiveness, possibly satisfaction, and I nodded in the affirmative. What I was affirming, I had no idea. And why me? Did Grandfather’s instinct tell him I was the strongest brother or the weakest? That I had to be propped up in status or diminished?
Grandfather pursed his lips a little and released my hand. To any other, this might have been a game. To Grandfather, as I later learned, it was an initiation. A test. One of a series of tests that would grow epically more intense, painful, and instructive.
He allowed me to pass into his lair.
The prefab trailer had no structural modifications: a living room, a kitchen, a hall, a tiny bathroom, a small walk-in closet, and a bedroom. The interior walls were white contrasted with that mocha brown wall siding with the fake wood grain. Grandfather lived in minimalist comfort…or discomfort. No mess. No signs of personal expression. No photos of relatives on the walls. No kitschy porcelain figures on the sill or magnets on the refrigerator door. No hanging mobiles tinkling in the sunlight. No avocado green butter caddies. The only items in the living room area were the couch that Paul and I would fold out for our bed, and one plank of knotted blonde pine resting on two small metal sawhorses to make a shelf. On the plank was a brown and silver Sony record player. Below the plank were neatly ordered records—all classical music. Specifically, all Mozart.
Paul and I placed our duffle bags next to the couch and stood at attention. Grandfather opened the refrigerator. It was full of neatly stacked bottles of water and nothing but bottles of water. What the hell were we going to eat?
I felt Paul was scanning the room with more scrutiny than I had, and then I realized what his little boy’s brain was looking for…
Where would he hide our Swiss Army knives?
Grandfather handed us each a bottle of water and motioned for us to sit. We sat. He leaned against the counter with his arms folded, staring at us, assessing. What was he thinking? He knew nothing about us, and we knew even less about him. If he wanted to know something, why didn’t he just ask? Or if he wanted to tell us the rules of the house, then why didn’t he just speak?
For minutes Paul stared resolutely ahead, still avoiding eye contact, making no expression of expectation nor acknowledging any hint of the heavy awkwardness. With a crack I ripped the plastic top off my bottle of water. I was so thirsty. The dry mountain sun was in complete contrast to the moist Pacific air. I swallowed large gulps of water, one after the other, until the bottle was empty. Grandfather raised his eyebrow. He opened the refrigerator door, withdrew another bottle of water, handed it to me, took my empty bottle of water, and placed it in the garbage beneath the sink.
He went over to the plank of wood. He crouched down at the record player and began to play Mozart—specifically, as I came to learn, the second movement of Mozart’s clarinet concerto. Since the record was already set to go, this was apparently part of some predetermined order of procedure. We heard him take a large breath, then release it. This was the first audible sound he’d made since we arrived.
Grandfather turned the rod at the side of the leveler blinds on each of the living room and kitchen’s four windows until we were almost completely in the dark. With the clarinet concerto twisting its melancholic melody, Grandfather walked away from us down the hall into the darkness. Paul looked at me with
an unspoken question. I shrugged my shoulders. We heard the closet door open.
And then down the hall we heard the hollow metallic cocking of a rifle…
“What cha doin’ out here, Demi Moore?”
I heard Marzoli’s voice above me.
I opened my eyes, confused. My hands, feet, face and limbs were blue with cold. I was shivering violently and breathing in rapid, short pants.
“Don’t give me that look,” he continued with a smile, “Did you think I was too young for St. Elmo’s Fire?”
What was he doing climbing out of Ruben’s window? What was I doing like a popsicle on this balcony?
I was confused as shit…falling…anchored…spinning…frozen…
Where’s Paul?
I felt Marzoli’s arms around me, dragging me, hoisting me. I tried to open my eyes, but the snow on my lashes seeped into my eyes. My eyeballs felt they were being slivered by icicles. I tried to swallow, but my throat felt raw and tight and painfully dry.
Was I inside my apartment or outside?
I felt Marzoli’s strong hand press against my upper back. I could not feel any of my numbed extremities, but I could feel the hardness of the wooden floor against my shoulder blades as I was lowered down onto it.
The whiteout blackened.
Chapter Fourteen
“You’ve the constitution of a sixteen year-old virgin in a Jane Austen.”
I felt the vibrations of his deep rich voice without even opening my eyes. I inhaled deeply through my nostrils as I regained some kind of mental equilibrium.
Cedar and nutmeg.
Control yourself.
“Two things are completely at odds with each other,” I began with my eyes shut, “One, what the fuck kind of Puerto Rican Sicilian uses words like constitution? Two, what the fuck kind of Puerto Rican Sicilian reads Jane Austen?”
“You don’t have to be politically correct around me, asshole. Drink this.”
I felt the hard lip of a glass click on my teeth lightly. Warm liquid swirled around my tongue. Ginger…lemon…tea. Where’s the shot of whiskey a New York detective is supposed to be giving a swooning damsel?
I finally opened my eyes.
Marzoli’s ridiculously handsome face came into focus, every pore a breathtaking symmetry of ruggedness, street tough urbanity, Italian hotheadedness, and Latin smoothness. The black hairs of his five o’clock shadow slanted southward, and I imagined running my fingers against its grain. His full blushed lips appeared all at once strong and soft, perfectly delineated by an eighth inch smoothness of bare skin before the forest of his facial hair encroached. His brown eyes looked into mine with all the clinical concern of Francois Sagat in a white overcoat in a hospital scene.
Goddamn.
When did two plus two start adding up to this motherfucker? When did I stop caring about the borderline that distinguished the sexes? Did I really need to be knocked down to the bottom of a black housebound misery to realize I didn’t give a flying fuck about the plumbing of the person I wanted to tongue from heel to hairline?
As I registered Marzoli’s presence, the truth inexplicably surfaced. I had no control over my visceral yearning for his strength, his certainty, his muscularity, his friction, his hardness, his solidity, his weight, his drive, his forcefulness, and his competence. I wanted everything he had on me and in me and part of me. I wanted to absorb it. To have it. To become it.
He took me in deeply with his eyes, his pupils cemented to mine. But…I couldn’t tell…did he feel anything for me? Was he even open to feeling anything? I’d been so far removed from connections to other humans, I had no confidence in my ability to interpret what I felt anymore let alone what he felt.
I felt a warm firmness against my neck. He was massaging me with his left hand. He smiled, his dimples pitting either side of his face.
Fuck…must…not…drool.
“Forty minutes,” he said, “That’s how long you’ve been outside.”
“Oh.”
Here I was drifting in a Jacuzzi of brainless teenage pining, and he slaps my hand with the sharp edge of a hard fact, calculated from the time I ignored his call to now. I tried to move my arms but was in the tight cocoon of a blanket. Marzoli motioned to the pile of clothes on the arm of the couch. My underwear was peeking out of the bottom of the pile.
“They were soaked so I took them off,” he smiled. “I tried to put you in dry clothes, but…honestly…I couldn’t tell what was clean, and um…”
He winked. The fucker loved his jokes.
Then it hit…
He’d taken my clothes off and seen me in all my gorgeousness. Not the most requested stop on the tour. Trust.
And yet he was still willing to sit here stroking my neck—a completely unnecessary but entirely intimate act between two men who were practically strangers. He had to be working me for information. His neck massage was not an act of caring. It was calculated. He needed my defenses lowered in order for me to slip him some tidbit of information that may or may not be relevant. He needed to seduce me into full disclosure. After viewing this lump of clay naked, how could I expect him to have any alternate impulse?
I looked away from him in irritation. This did not go unnoticed. Marzoli immediately withdrew his hand from my neck.
Put your hand back, damn it!
He stood up and took my glass to the counter, which was so covered with unattended dishes and trash and books and papers that I was surprised he could locate the sink.
He emptied the glass then turned to me with a cocky grin, which shot blood down to my groin like a drone strike. “Would you be offended if I cleaned this glass?”
Bring it on, asshole.
“What were you doing out there on the fire escape in the snow?”
Wham—the fucker switched subjects without a heartbeat of transition. I forgot I was in the same room with a brain that leaped like an escaping gazelle.
“What were you doing in Ruben’s apartment?” I challenged.
“This.”
He held up a box of matches and paused, looking at me as if I actually had the faintest fuck what he was talking about. His answer was such a non sequitur I immediately felt like I had in sixth grade: the galumph left alone with my brother in the classroom as the accelerated grade school students went on a field trip.
“Matches. I see,” I lied.
“I returned your call, but you didn’t answer. So I came over. But your door was locked. So I lit a match and held it at the bottom of the door. Air was blowing out into the hall. Cold air. Your window had to be open, so I knew something was wrong.”
“I could’ve gone out for some Cheetos.”
“But…” He hesitated. “No, you couldn’t.”
I never told him any of my shit, but…
He knew.
It’s one thing to air your dirty laundry defiantly to a stranger in order to get him the fuck out of your life. It’s another thing to try to hide your personals because you’re holding out for the slightest possibility that he might get the fuck in your life. I felt humiliated and as worthless and undesirable as a smear on a toilet seat. All I could do is stare at Marzoli, waffling between sadness at how insurmountably pathetic I was and piss-ass anger at having my shit exposed to this stranger. A tightly wrapped ball of barbed wired expanded inside my throat until I could barely swallow let alone utter anything.
I looked over at Marzoli next to the sink. With his jacket off, I could see his narrow waist with not a centimeter of overhang over his belt. I followed the outline of his beautifully round and upright ass to the sensual s-curve of the small of his back, snaking out to his broad muscular shoulder blades, and then rounding back to his thick smooth neck. His shoulders were as large as coconuts, bookending his fucking granite pumped pecs.
None of that would ever be mine.
Marzoli continued, “I went upstairs to ask your new neighbor to let me through his window to the fire escape.”
“But he wasn’t home,” I
croaked.
“But I had a copy of Nathan’s key from the landlord, so I entered. And his window was open. And there you were below, sunbathing.”
Ruben was not in his apartment after all!
For the first time, I noticed the black lump hooked on Marzoli’s belt. He had a gun, holstered and available. He’d come straight from wherever he’d been working to my apartment with lightening speed—even for New York standards—just because I failed to answer his phone call. Did his speed indicate he thought that highly of me and my stunted existence? Or merely that he happened to be nearby? Or something else entirely? Was it evidence of his eagerness to obtain from me any slightest nick of evidence to solve Nathan’s murder? And if so, what really was at stake for Marzoli to solve it?
I strained all these bits of information through my colander and pushed out a question.
“How many violations of investigative protocol did you violate by entering Ruben’s apartment without him home?”
“Too many for you to ever tell a colleague.”
I had to know why he took that risk. To investigate what was at stake for this dark and distant man in solving this particular inconsequential. To force him to detail the extent to which he identified with Nathan’s unfortunate abandonment, subsequent survival in the city, and neglected death. To identify anything else that drew him to this mystery. It was the perfect moment for me to get beyond my own self-focus and direct some sympathy toward this gilded specimen. But I could barely figure out which words to use, let alone an appropriate way to approach the subject without making him defensive.
“Are you going to tell me why you were on that fire escape?” he asked again, his voice low and resonant.
“Would you help me out of this cocoon?”
Everything in me wanted to avoid answering his question. How could I explain that the simplest act of attempting to spy into Ruben’s window had paralyzed me into a moronically inept ice sculpture? How could I possibly spin being a basket case at the mercy of the sneak attacks of memories into something exotic, edgy, and oh so damned desirable?