We came at last to the turning that led through palm-shaded streets to my adobe cottage, set in a semi-circle of similar adobes dating from the 1930s. A cottonwood tree cast a deep shadow on my courtyard, one of its branches holding the heavy punching bag I bashed in the relative coolness of early morning. My fountain was bubbling, water gurgling from the mouth of the leaping terra-cotta fish. The hummingbirds were dodging through the bushes, the night birds were beginning to cry from the darkening heights. And there, on my small patio, sweating into a Hawaiian shirt semi-cinched at the neck by a bola tie, was the person I desired most not to see. My editor, Frye.
CHAPTER TEN
I powerfully distrusted Frye and had from the beginning. He always seemed so busy. This is a very bad quality in an editor, particularly in your editor. Such an editor is always hounding you for more details, bigger explosions, wetter tears. Frye was young, 28 or so, but I did not bad-mark him for that. He was from Texas, however, and that was unsettling. I’ve known fine journalists from Texas, but my colleagues considered Texans ego jockeys, drama princes and hustle addicts. Surely they exaggerated. But Frye fit the latter category, always churning his legs as if motion were journalism, calling for more copy, more copy.
Despite that, I had convinced him to put me on “detached assignment” to follow up on the spurious story about corruption in the Border Patrol, to set up the photos, assign the graphics, supply the “chatter” for the locater maps. In making my pitch, I threw in a few of the leftover Irish-isms and British expressions of my youth. They always fascinated him, and sometimes they surfaced spontaneously. In this case, they’d allowed me time to develop the tale of Rhea, but now my lease had run out. Frye’s appearance meant he’d stifle me just as I was close to a breakthrough.
Frye greeted me with false good-fellowship, put on no doubt for the sake of Daly, whose legs he glimpsed coming out of the car. He was preening, massaging his white-blond hair, but style wasn’t on his side. He’d tried for a unique look—a certain type of journalist does that—and succeeded too well. His Tori Richard “Shadowing Black” Hawaiian shirt slopped about him, a bola tie splayed from his Adam’s apple, and a sprig of yellow mustache twitched on his upper lip. Because he was so small, only 5-foot-4, he looked like a stick in a leaf bag.
“Thought y’all had dropped down a rabbit hole,” he said. “Decided I’d come out and see you, since you haven’t been answering your phone.”
“An unexpected pleasure,” I said, “Though I shudder to think what will happen to the Scribe with you away from your post.”
I introduced Daly as a friend, and she helloed him routinely as I retrieved her duffel bag. I concluded her coolness meant she’d thrown in with me against the outsider. Wrong. I bluffed him on inside, holding Daly’s arm to pivot her in front of him, showing him a flash of naked shoulder, an appetizer of ankle. Perhaps a bit of hippie eroticism would keep his workaday thoughts at bay while I fashioned my plans to get the hell away from him.
I plopped the bag in a corner of my hallway. He eyed it uneasily, obviously worried Daly was one more move-in succumbing to the woman-hungry Callan. But I moved quickly, ushering him and Daly into my snug living room. A nice environment for deception. Polished-cement floor, cove corners, Mexican coffee table, stylized prints on the wall, and books stacked everywhere—novels by pulp masters who wound up in the madhouse, or should have, histories of failed rebellions, and analytical works debunking flying saucers, assassination conspiracies and the Bermuda Triangle Mystery. All of them out of discount bins and used-book emporiums—I prefer my literature cheap. Daly wandered about, picking up a book here, examining a print there, as if looking for evidence of my pathology. I didn’t wait to see if she found any. I repaired to the kitchen for ice, then to the sideboard to build Frye a brain-crushing Jack Daniels-on-the-rocks.
Then I served him, taking care not to spill a drop.
“Thought you didn’t drink,” he said, eyeballing the liquor as if he might discern signs of hemlock.
“I don’t,” I said. “I keep it only as a weapon.”
He half-laughed, nipped the drink, then gestured with the glass.
“We’re going to need some copy from you pretty quick on this Border Patrol stuff. We’re starting an immigration project, and Halvorson is getting ants in his britches.”
So the managing editor knew of my supposed reporting effort. That was bad. Halvorson wasn’t easy to baffle. A big Swede out of Minnesota by way of St. Louis, he was an ex-cop who thought he brooked no nonsense in the newsroom. That was silly, of course. Newsrooms run on nonsense like internal-combustion engines run on gasoline.
“Another immigration project, is it?” I said. “How many does that make, three in the last year?”
By now, Daly was at my elbow. I moved back to the sideboard and reached for the gin. She, too, needed some softening up.
“The Hispanic population is capturin’ a large percentage of the demographic,” Frye said, as I sloshed gin over ice and dosed it with lime juice. “If we want to grow the franchise, we ignore them at our peril.”
“Nicely put,” I said, wondering how he’d react if he knew my complicity had reduced the Hispanic population by at least one. I returned with Daly’s drink, but she waved it away. My heart sank. She wasn’t having any, and I needed her with me on this one. My first attempt to put Frye off the scent had been feeble, and now I didn’t see any way out. I had no story, Frye didn’t like me, Halvorson thought I was a fuck-off, and once I admitted I had wasted three months, I was headed for the trash bin. Daly wasn’t even neutral, as it turned out. She’d decided to help the enemy.
“Tell me,” she said to Frye, “is your newspaper careful about people’s reputations?”
Frye threw out his chest.
“Sure,” he said. “It’s part of our mission.”
Really? I suppose I hadn’t gotten the memo. Just the week before, we’d outed a small-town mayor as a vegetarian cross-dresser.
Daly looked at me, still addressing Frye. “You don’t make unfounded accusations against dead people, then?”
Frye sipped whiskey, playing for time, probably trying to figure out if Daly was for or against smearing the dead.
“We sure don’t,” he said at last. Going for broke.
I moved to the sideboard and set down her gin.
“Of course, dead people are libel-proof,” I said, referring to the well-settled journalistic principle that if it doesn’t cost you a legal fee, it’s not wrong.
Then I snatched the whiskey bottle, returned to Frye and jacked up his drink.
“Does this have something to do with your Border Patrol story?” he asked.
Daly lifted her chin to reply. Well, this was it. In a split-second, she’d be spilling the beans about Rhea, describing my recklessness and arguing that I should be sacked, giving other reporters room to prove Rhea had been murdered.
“It has to do with immigration, yes,” I blurted, just to jump-start my bullshit machine. “I understand the issues, you know. I’m an immigrant myself.”
Dead people. Reputations. Immigration. Perhaps my autobiography could blend this mix into a tale that would lead Frye away from the main point.
“Immigrant, sure,” said Frye. “But you’re different. These Mexicans have to brave the desert, work for small pickins, keep an eye out for El Migra. You came over legally, unless I miss my guess, and now you have . . . prestigious job . . . distributing information to the masses.”
“Not prestigious,” Daly said. “Not the way he does it.”
She took Frye’s arm, urged him to my green Art Deco sofa and nudged him down, took his glass and placed it on the coffee table. She settled next to him, but before she could speak, I stepped over with a full glass, which he took gratefully. She glowered at me, but I warned her with my eyes.
“Daly’s right, you know,” I told Frye. “Prestige and I don�
��t get along. I fly low. I have from the beginning, because I didn’t come over legally. I have a story for you, a narrative of pain and loss in a foreign country. The tribulations might even compare with hauling one’s backside over the long trek through the Sonoran Desert known as El Camino del Diablo—the Devil’s Highway. Did you ever wonder why I don’t drink?”
“Did wonder,” said Frye, gobbling whiskey. “Irish.”
“Yes.” I smiled. I’d won him away from Daly, now I could roll. “The Irish are great swills, aren’t they? Bloody bastards who love whiskey, song, and a great ripping time with a machine gun.Well, I abhor machine guns. Very wasteful of precious bullets. But I come from swilling stock. A bit of drink and my Dad was marvelous with his fists, as he regularly showed my mother and me.”
This brought Daly up short. I didn’t know it, but I was striking a chord with her. She knew the nature of battering men. And Frye was hauling down more spirits, powerfully impressed. For all his cornpone, he’d been raised in a landscaped suburb of Houston, regularly enjoyed milk and cookies, and had gone to Princeton. Black eyes and bloody vomit and starved guts were alien to his world.
“Mum died when I was ten years old,” I said, as Daly looked on wide-eyed and Frye gulped whiskey as if it were Coca-Cola. “The doctor said it was an aneurysm, to save the embarrassment of a prosecution. Whenever I see a towel thrown over a radiator, I think of the last time I saw her. “
Frye was enjoying himself in that peculiarly deep way one enjoys a train wreck. His eyes were goggling and his Adam’s apple was pumping like a metronome.
“Do you know what’s really bad about death?” I said, looking at Daly. “It’s just ordinary. It’s supposed to mean something and it doesn’t. It’s just dreary, like a rainy Sunday afternoon when there’s no-one you can call and nothing on TV. You expect it will be horrific. But it’s just another dry sandwich on a tray that’s been left out too long.”
Daly opened her mouth, and I feared she’d say, “But what about Rhea?”
She didn’t. She, too, had a dead mother in her past.
“What did you do then?” she asked. “After she died?”
“I was alone,” I told her. “I went home from the hospital, back to my room with the wallpaper smelling of fried fat. Under my bed was a soda crate where I kept all my things: paperback books, a cat’s eye marble, a pocketknife I’d saved two summers for. My father found me there, and I was the only one left to hit, so he punched me and drew blood. I hit the bastard with the nearest chair—I wasn’t big, and I was only 10 years old, but the fury was on me. Then I ran out of the house with nothing but the clothes on my back.”
Frye asked, “But where did you stay?”
“Under a bridge, over a steam grate, in a discarded refrigerator carton. The streets offer fine accommodations for the unwanted.”
Daly said, “But you were only 10.”
“Old enough,” I replied. “I kept that up for two years, begging and stealing to get my food, huddling in libraries for the warmth, reading hour after hour until I was put back into the night and cold.”
Frye put a finger to his lips as if trying to recall something. “Immigration . . . you were an immigrant . . . Border Patrol.”
Swimming somewhere under the booze, his editor’s instincts struggled, trying to drive me back to that dangerous subject, the story I didn’t have.
“I’m getting to that,” I said, and he slumped back.
I cut a look at Daly. Her eyes had sharpened.
“If you’ve had it tough, why are you so hard on Rhea?” she said.
Frye’s head swung loosely. “Who’s Rhea?”
If we got to that answer, the game was up.
“A mutual friend,” I replied. “She used to comfort me. When I told her how I nearly died.”
Daly looked confused. I’d hit the right note, though, because she wanted to hear abut Rhea’s angelic qualities. And Frye—?
“Died?” he said. “How was that?”
He swallowed another dose of whiskey to help him listen.
“Nearly died,” I corrected. “From exposure. Two years after I ran away. Winter night, back alley in Belfast. I’d hardly eaten for a week and my internal boiler was cold. A fellow beggar had stolen my shoes and my cap. I was crunched up around a drain pipe to draw out the warmth when hot water ran through, but it was after midnight, the water had stopped running, and the pipe was just icy metal. I felt my body shutting down.”
Frye’s lips flickered over his teeth as he strove vainly for the appropriate expression.
“It was then I gained perspective,” I said. “‘I am dying,’ I thought, ‘and it will hurt less if I observe myself die.’ I drifted up and looked down at this twelve-year-old boy with the dirty face. ‘See how his body shakes and quivers,’ I thought. ‘See how he clutches the drainpipe as if it were a metal friend. See how his face is red with the chill. His ears seem to be especially red as the blood rushes to the surface trying to warm him. He really should have been more careful to guard his shoes and his cap. He will not last long. I wonder just how long he will last?’”
Daly’s eyes were big now.
“What saved you?” she asked.
“An IRA volunteer named Rory Gallagher. He’d been out casing a bomb attack. He got me warmed up with a blanket and a quart of hot coffee. Then he told me why. He had a tricky assignment, to bomb a roving patrol of British soldiers, and he could use my help. Of course, I would be paid well. He showed me a satchel bomb, assured me I could throw it and escape before he triggered it by remote. More likely, I thought, Rory would trigger it before I’d done any throwing at all. Scratch the soldiers. Scratch Callan.”
I drew a breath.
“Fortunately, Rory was bad with those detonators,” I said. “Or perhaps I was good with them. In any case, he blew himself up in the run-up to the operation, and the stash of money he’d laid aside from bank robberies made its way into my pocket. That kept me until I could talk my way into a job cleaning floors at the Belfast Herald, where I worked up through the ranks. Reporter in Belfast. Reporter in London. Laborer in America. Then, later on, reporter in Arizona. But the story has a happy ending. I’m perfectly legal now, and on top of the bloody world.”
Daly looked stunned. Frye wet his lips.
“Is all that true?” he said.
“It has the ring of truth,” I said. “Now it’s high time we got you home.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Call me gullible, but I’d always swallowed that story about Karen Silkwood running off the road because she was banged on Quaaludes, and I’d discounted the testimony about the scrapes and rubber marks on her rear bumper. That attitude came from my experience that clever conspiracies are few. But experience is always gaining on you. I began to believe more strongly in car-crash murders at the intersection of Camelback and Seventh Street, when someone tried to slam me out into the bulleting north-south traffic. Tried to jam Daly out there with me, too, because the jammer must have believed she was in the passenger seat. Wrong. Our true traveling arrangements had been shrouded by the darkness outside my adobe.
I was driving my Ford with the crumpled right rear bumper, which I’d been meaning to fix for the past five years or so. Frye was my actual passenger, slumping semi-conscious as he mumbled about convergence, diversity and out-of-the-box planning. I had him strapped in so his head wouldn’t strike the dashboard. That might have shaken loose something and blighted the future of American newspapers. Far back, and with a late start, Daly was following me, driving Frye’s 1968 Karmann Ghia. The Ghia was in no better repair than my wreck, and keeping it puffing along had been a struggle for her. She was lagging as I cruised to the stoplight at Seventh.
Several blocks before, I’d noticed a forest-green Volvo—a new one—keeping pace with us. I should have been more concerned, but I’m given to the fatalistic notion that one exits w
hen the universe decides, and that takes an edge off my target-hardening techniques. That’s not to say that I didn’t keep track of the Volvo. I even speculated briefly on who the driver might be—age, occupation, that sort of thing—categorizing by my knowledge of car demographics. Even so, my attention had slipped back into the dull-normal range by the time the Volvo whipped between me and Daly and approached my bumper as I stopped for the red light.
For the moment, it just sat there rumbling in that horsey, overfed tone peculiar to Volvo motors. In front of me, north-south traffic was light on Seventh, but I noted a rush coming from both directions. In a couple of ticks the intersection would be whipsawed by speeding Japanese sedans, brute-force Ford pickups and a Mahoney’s Cleaners van. Just at that moment, I felt a nudge on my rear bumper. There’s nothing more knee-weakening than a push from the rear, especially when you have no maneuvering room. I clamped down on the horn and blatted, but the Volvo driver didn’t brake. I cut a look at the rear-view, but the interior lights of the Volvo were off and I saw only a shadow bent forward with determination. This was no mistake. I was not to be let off the hook. The wash from the red light struck through our windshield as we edged closer and closer to the metal maelstrom. Headlights flamed at me from both directions. No illusions were available to comfort me. I’d seen too many fatal accidents. My mind filled with images of exploding metal, splintering glass, blood spreading on pavement.
The Volvo wasn’t squared-up on my rear bumper. No, the over-eager driver had angled at me, elbowing into the center of my car’s backside. Still the Volvo hit me a hell of a whack, sending me—tires squealing like doomed pigs—a good six feet into the intersection. On my left, a pickup leaped at me—one of those bleeding Big Bastard vehicles, made for humping hay bales across mountain ridges. Its headlights flashed at me, sharp as teeth, the driver in his glowing cab towering above me, his face white and wild. In a flash, I’d be a smear on concrete, swallowing hot engine oil, his piston rod pulsing in place of my backbone. I had to do something. I pissed myself, which didn’t help. But I also cranked the wheel hard right.
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