Into Thin Air

by Thomas Zigal

  “When was the last time you had a tequila sunrise?” Maya asked, a knowing sparkle in her eyes.

  One year in the seventies, he couldn’t remember which, that was their drink, the four of them. There was a designated rest spot along every hiking trail in the Valley where they stopped to pour themselves tequila sunrises from an icy canteen.

  “It’s been a while,” he said.

  “I’ll ask Consuelo to bring us a pitcher.”

  On the sun deck they sat on canvas chairs with a grand view of the clover green pasture where her husband had once raised buffaloes, before he’d sold them and reinvested in polo ponies. Beyond their property line rose another ridge, the uplift softer, more feminine, than the craggy peaks in these parts, its forest of spruce as violet as Kurt imagined the landscape of Wales. On the evening of Maya’s wedding everyone came out to watch a full moon float above that ridge like a luminous silver hot-air balloon.

  Kurt tasted the sickeningly sweet tequila sunrise and remembered why he’d stopped drinking them. He leaned back in the chair, propped his boots on the deck railing, and told Maya about the shootout in Emma, at the farmhouse where they’d eaten peyote and made apple juice in a wood press. He had trouble getting through the part about Chip going over the cliff.

  Maya sighed and reached out to hold his hand. “Poor Chip,” she said. “I remember when he came back from the Olympics. His ego was crushed. We spent quite a few afternoons together, back then, smoking hash and watching the clouds roll by.”

  Kurt turned to her. “You and Chip?” He grinned.

  “Me and Chip.” She nodded. “In those days there was something darkly tragic about him, like Hamlet. I guess I found that appealing.”

  Her hand was dry and hard and no longer the delicate instrument that created culinary artworks for the rich. It was obvious she had taken up horse-grooming.

  “Why in God’s name did all that have to happen?” she asked.

  “The Feds needed a quick fix for the Quiroga murder,” he said, an accusation he wasn’t ready to share with anyone else just yet. “They were in a hurry to book it and wash their hands, so everybody could get home for the weekend. It made me look like I couldn’t handle my job.”

  Suddenly his eye caught a flash of mirror across the pasture, sunlight on glass. A vehicle was slowly weaving through the grove of trees near the fence line.

  “What do you know about the Rostagno family?” he asked, sipping his drink. “They have a home in Starwood.”

  Maya shrugged. “Claudio Rostagno is some kind of Italian diplomat, I think,” she said, slipping off a riding boot. “His wife is Patricia Graham, one of the society ladies in Les Dames. I did some catering for her back in marriage number two, when she lived in Mountain Valley with her husband the oilman from Texas. The asshole who once dragged her out of a party by her hair.”

  “She must have a thing for men with bad tempers,” Kurt said.

  Maya pulled off the other boot and settled her stocking feet on the railing next to Kurt’s. “John thinks there’s something phony about Rostagno,” she said. “We all sat at the same table at a Les Dames gala, and after a few drinks Rostagno and John started speaking Spanish to each other. They both got a big kick out of it. Rostagno said he’d picked up his Spanish on a post assignment in Madrid. I’m not sure he realized John is Cuban.”

  “Well, I guess Don Juan ought to know a phony.”

  Maya kicked his boot with her stocking toes. “Touché,” she said.

  “What about Rostagno’s daughter?”

  Maya gave him a sidelong glance. “So,” she said, “we finally get down to the subject of this innocent little inquiry.”

  “I have a date with her tonight,” he said. “Anything I ought to know?”

  Maya sipped her sunrise and made a false smile at him. “I hear she collects scrotum. Wears them on a leather strap around her neck,” she said. “Better hang on to yours.”

  Kurt dropped his feet to the deck, stood up slowly, and gazed out beyond the pasture toward the county road. He thought he could see a dark vehicle parked beneath the trees near the turnoff.

  “I went to visit Jake last night,” he said.

  Maya said nothing for a while. Then finally, “And how is Mr. Jake Pfeil? Flourishing, I expect.”

  “He thinks I’m still angry about Bert’s death.”

  Maya was silent. Kurt drank and watched the tree line.

  “Are you?” she asked.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  She was standing now, facing the soft purple ridge. “All of that happened centuries ago,” she said. “I’m too busy to be angry.”

  He turned a slow circle, his eyes taking in the pasture, the house, the stables up the road. “This place must be good therapy,” he said. “Where do I sign up?”

  She smiled at him. “How about Jake?” Her voice was quiet now. “He miss his old buddy?”

  He shook his head. “They hadn’t been friends for a long time.”

  She looked surprised. “Oh really?” she said. “Then why were they hanging out together that last year?”

  She was probably confusing the years, Kurt thought. Time and tequila could do that to a memory.

  “I gave Bert a hard time about it,” she said. “He said they were just two old Aspen boys shooting the shit about how it had been.”

  “Bert thought Jake was a joke.”

  Maya’s voice shrank even more, to a small sad note. “I suppose there are things about Bert we’ll never understand,” she said.

  He watched her feathery hair ruffle in the breeze.

  “Maya,” he said, “there’s something else we haven’t talked about in a long time.”

  “We’re covering a lot of ground this afternoon, aren’t we?” she said. “Maybe we ought to save some of this for next year.”

  She was probably right, Kurt thought. But he wasn’t ready to let go yet. “I still wonder if he knew,” he said.

  She studied the ice in her glass. “Oh, Kurt,” she said. “It’s not as if we were serious.”

  He knew what she meant. Isolated occasions. A half-dozen times over the seventeen years they’d all spent together. The evenings when Bert went camping with the Mountain Rescue team and Meg was on retreat in some holy place like Chaco Canyon or Taos.

  “What about Meg?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “I never told her. There was no point.”

  “Do you ever hear from her?”

  Kurt tried to remember the last time he’d spoken with his ex-wife. “She calls every couple of weeks,” he said.

  “How is Lennon dealing with it?”

  “He thinks his mother is not well,” he said. “He thinks she’ll come back and see him when she gets better.”

  “God,” she said, the sound choking in her throat. She wiped away sudden, unexpected tears. “What the hell happened to us all?”

  Kurt didn’t know. He really didn’t know. He figured everything in life fell apart sooner or later. It was only a matter of when.

  He put his arm around her, and she laid her head on his chest and cried a little. After a few minutes she pulled away and rubbed his arm. “Need another drink, cowboy?” she sniffed.

  “What I need,” he said, “is a pair of binoculars.”

  Moments later Maya returned with binoculars and a fresh pitcher of tequila sunrise. Kurt stood at the railing and searched the tree line by the fence. There it was, black as asphalt, hidden in a gully beneath the cottonwoods. The old Ford pickup.

  “Have you taken up birding, Kurt?”

  When their visit was over, Maya walked him to the Jeep. “What are you going to do now that you’re unemployed?” she asked.

  “I’m thinking about traveling,” he said. “It’s time for Lennon to see the real world.”

  He drove off, watching Maya in the rearview mirror as she waved and then disappeared into the stone fortress. A hundred yards from the house he pulled over to the edge of the woods and got ou
t of the Jeep. He tucked the German Luger in his belt and hiked into the trees, following the natural trails that split off through the dappled noonday shade of blue spruce and poplars. He crawled through John Romer’s barbed-wire fence like a farmboy and jogged down into the gully by the county road. Thick cedar bushes and a nightmare of bramble vines slowed his footing, but before long he could see the rear of the pickup truck and crouched in the brush to watch and wait.

  In a short while he began to creep closer, a few yards at a time, listening, the Luger tight in his hand. The day was warm and he was sweating through his denim shirt. Finally he drew close enough to see the back of the driver’s head through the rear glass, his bare arm resting along the top of the seat like a relaxed young stud watching a drive-in movie with his girl.

  Kurt stayed low, crab-crawling through the loose soil to the truck’s tailgate. He braced his back against the dented Colorado license plate and took deep breaths, trying to talk himself into his next move. He sucked in one last breath, let it out slowly, and spun around the side of the truck, keeping low until he reached the window.

  “Don’t move,” he said, rising quietly and pressing the Luger to the driver’s temple.

  The boy was young, not a day over twenty. He reached for the pistol lying beside him on the seat and Kurt adjusted his aim six inches and fired, blowing out the back window. The boy grabbed his ears and cried out in pain.

  “I told you not to move,” Kurt said, flinging open the door, seizing him by the T-shirt and yanking him to the ground.

  He was a skinny kid, all elbows and knees, light as a sack of cotton balls. Kurt pinned the boy’s left arm behind his back and drilled a knee into his tailbone, then pressed the gun against the back of his skull.

  “That was a very stupid thing to do,” he said.

  The boy was Hispanic, all right. But Kurt had never seen him before. He didn’t recognize him from the pool hall.

  “You the guy that took a shot at me last night?” he said, twisting the arm until the boy moaned. “I don’t hear you, carnal. You the asshole that wanted to kill me?”

  When the boy began to whimper, Kurt eased up a bit.

  “What’s your name, son?” he said, releasing the arm and squatting back on the boy’s legs. “Come on, I’m not going to hurt you. What’s your name?”

  The boy fought tears. “Angel,” he said. “Angel Montoya.”

  “Why’d you want to kill me, Angel?”

  Angel lifted his head a little, then let it drop slackly, resigned to a life spent facedown with a gun at his neck. “I make a mistake,” he said in broken English.

  “And you were tailing me just to say how sorry you are.”

  “Somebody tell me you no shoot,” he said. “You no shoot my brother. They tell me you know who.”

  Kurt stood up. “I’m going to put away the gun,” he said, sliding the Luger under his belt, “but if you try something stupid again, I’ll hurt you bad. You understand?”

  “I understand.”

  For some time Angel lay immobile on the ground. Then he rolled over slowly and curled into a sitting position, his knees pulled to his chest.

  “The cops say your buddies killed a man,” Kurt said. “A writer from Argentina.”

  Angel looked up at him, puzzled. With a lazy swipe of his shoulder he brushed yellow grass blades from the side of his face. “We don’t kill nobody,” he said. “The gringos start the shooting.”

  “The cops say the writer came out to your house to look around and you put a bullet in his head and dumped him in the river.”

  Angel’s dark eyes flared with a wild intensity. He shook his head. “No,” he said emphatically. “Nobody come to our house. We don’t know this escritor. We don’t hurt nobody.”

  The boy rose slowly to his feet and Kurt took a step backward, giving him room.

  “So why they come and shoot?” Angel asked, his face reignited with anger. “Who is these men that kill my brother?”

  Kurt walked over to the truck and reached in the open door for the gun on the seat. It was an old .45 with a taped grip, the same vintage as the one he’d owned until Muffin hurled it into the void. He checked the clip and saw it was half empty.

  “Listen to me, Angel,” he said. “I ought to drag your butt to the jailhouse in Aspen and have them lock you up. You can’t go around shooting at people. Do you understand? You make a play for the men who killed your brother, they’ll kill you. It’s that simple. They won’t think twice about wasting your skinny ass. You’re just one more nameless wetback with no goddamn papers and nobody to take up for you. People around here don’t care if you live or die, son. There’s nothing to stop those men from blowing your brains out and winning a medal for it.”

  Angel seemed to be listening. He seemed to understand.

  “I’m very sorry about your, brother,” Kurt said. “I’m sorry about everything that happened at the farmhouse. But my best advice to you, son, is to fill up this old pickup and head out of the Valley.” He took out his sweat-stained wallet and found a twenty, a ten, and four ones. “Here,” he said, stuffing the bills in Angel’s jeans pocket. “This’ll get you down the road. You have friends someplace?”

  Angel Montoya stood there, stubbornly toeing the dirt

  “Do yourself a favor and go look for work where you’ve got other compadres,” Kurt said. “Maybe you should think about going back home for a while, I don’t know. But you stick around here, you’re going to get in trouble. Sooner or later you’ll get mad again and then you’ll do something stupid, like taking another shot at somebody. There’s nothing here for you anymore, my friend, but a lot of serious grief.”

  He was a good-looking kid with a square jaw more Indian than Spanish, and short black hair that had the dry, downy shape of a feather duster. There was a sweetness about him, and a clear impression of diligence and loyalty to people who were good to him. Kurt didn’t want to see him get hurt.

  “I must know who is these men that killed my brother,” Angel said in a calm, determined voice.

  Kurt stuck the old taped-up .45 in his belt next to the Luger. “Come on,” he said, gripping Angel’s arm and shoving him toward the truck. “You’re getting out of here. I don’t want to catch your ass around here again.”

  Angel tried to work free of Kurt’s grip but saw it was impossible. He stumbled into the cab, and Kurt slammed the door behind him.

  “If I ever see you again in this goddamn valley, I’m going to have you thrown in jail. Do you understand me, Angel?” He stared hard at the boy sitting behind the wheel. “You go to jail, son, you’re not going to come out of it the same. Unless you want that to happen, you better go find yourself another location to work in. New Mexico, Utah, California. Anywhere. Just stay out of my sight.”

  Angel sat in silence, his expression frozen and remote. “You saw them kill my brother,” he said finally. “He don’t do nothing and they kill him anyway. What will you do?”

  If I had any sense, Kurt thought, I would take my own advice, pick up Lennon, and go on a long trip somewhere, maybe a permanent one. Before I do any more serious thinking about what happened at Emma.

  “Get going,” he said, slapping the pickup’s roof, a hollow rumble like a kettledrum. A loose chunk of spiderwebbed glass fell into the truck bed. “Go on and get out of here, kid, before I change my mind.”

  Chapter eleven

  When he got home there was a message from Muffin on the answering machine. They’d searched the area for two hours but had found no body. She requested that Kurt come to the office at three o’clock “to get these FBI charges out of the way.”

  There was also a message from Miles Cunningham: “What transpires, law man? Some kind of palace coup? I have weapons, I have bawling hounds! We’ll by god barricade the courthouse and make the bastards come to us! You have a sacred obligation, citizen. Ye have taken the oath. Have you no pride, man? Don’t let the fish-belly bureaucrats take your badge. We’ll fight this thing together. The Rabid
Skunks shall rise redolent from the woodpile. The rabble has spoken. You are our man. Hold on to the reins till my troops can assemble. And whatever you do, permit no Mormons near the powder magazine!”

  In the tape’s pause Kurt thought he could hear the rattling of ice.

  “By the way,” the voice returned, “could you drop that Quiroga book off at the library for me? I found a note in my tickler file saying it’s somewhat overdue.”

  Kurt picked up Omar Quiroga’s book from the coffee table, cracked a beer, and went to his father’s study.

  Although Otto Muller had been dead for fifteen years, Kurt still called the room his father’s study. It was attached to the far end of the house like an afterthought, and until a few years ago, when Kurt finally cut a door through the dining room wall, the study was accessible only from an outside entrance reached with some difficulty at the end of a long stony path—Herbert Bayer’s clever idea. When they were growing up, the boys were not allowed to enter the study, unless specifically invited, and the ironclad rule of the house was that no one should ever disturb Father while he was at work in his lair.

  Kurt sank down in the reading chair, a plum-red leather monstrosity with rounded armrests worn colorless by his father’s elbows, and peered out the window into the glaring sunshine. He remembered when he and Bert were children hiding outside that window, spying on their father, wondering what he was doing that required so much time alone. When they dared to peek through the screen they always discovered him in the same pose, bent over his work desk, a pipe smoldering in the ashtray, this lanky, graying European intellectual they loved from afar but didn’t really understand, a strange man with odd round spectacles and too much hair, his pen hand forever moving across a page. Sometimes he practiced on the old Steinway piano that still occupied much of the room. The boys marveled at his music. They sat in a tree outside the window and tried to comprehend the amazing flurry of notes the way a child tries to master an unknown language by listening harder, with more effort, more concentration.