Into Thin Air

by Thomas Zigal

  The phone rang ten times before Miles picked up the receiver.

  “Hello, Mr. Cunningham,” Kurt said. “This is the Supreme High Elder of the Church of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. I was just calling to assess the status of our military vessels at harbor in the creek near your property.”

  “Fuck you, ex-law man,” Miles blubbered into the receiver. “I won’t stand for this feeble mockery. I’ll feed your entrails to my hounds.”

  “Listen, Miles, I know it’s late and you’re probably blown out of your skull, but I need your help, man. I really do.”

  Silence, a crackle of labored breathing.

  “I have to know what a Spanish word means and I think you can probably tell me.”

  Kurt heard the sound of a man choking on his drink.

  “Am I hallucinating,” Miles said, “or are you calling me up in the middle of a perfectly transcendental veejay interview with Snoop Doggy Dogg to ask what a fucking word means?” Kurt could almost feel the spray of spittle. “Didn’t they teach you how to use a dictionary in that podunk Aspen school you went to?”

  Kurt downed the tequila and chased it with beer. The place was packed with beautiful strangers arranging their evenings together. He noticed a young man sitting at the end of the bar, hunched over his drink, listening with sullen indifference to an older fellow at the next stool.

  “I think it might have something to do with Omar Quiroga,” Kurt said. “You’ve been to Argentina. You know Spanish.”

  Kurt said the word.

  “It means ‘dry toast,’” Miles said. “It’s a favorite party food in Buenos Aires.”

  “This is serious, Miles. Don’t fuck me around, man. I’m in no mood right now.”

  “How the hell should I know what it means, Muller? You’re probably not pronouncing it right, you moron.”

  Kurt spelled it for him. “Is it somebody’s name?” he asked. “You’ve been down there, Miles. You took pictures at those trials. Does it ring a bell?”

  “Christ,” Miles breathed. “You’re making me miss the part where Snoop discusses his favorite German philosophers.”

  “You fucking sot!” Kurt screamed into the phone. He banged the receiver against the wall. “Don’t dick me around, man. This is important. So straighten your ass up, goddammit, and give me your undivided attention!”

  Complete silence on the line. Kurt thought he might’ve broken the phone. He looked up to find several party cruisers raising their eyebrows at him. Even the sullen young man at the bar glanced his way. Turned-up collar, coal-black hair glistening with gel, skin the color of bronze. As unlikely as it seemed, Kurt felt he knew him.

  “There’s an old Portuguese aphorism my dear departed mother once taught me,” Miles finally spoke. “Roughly translated, If you want a sailor’s eye, don’t piss in his ear. What the hell have you been snorting, anyway?”

  As Kurt began to tell Miles what he wanted him to do, he finally recognized the young Romeo at the bar. He let go of the receiver in mid-sentence and stood up. The young man stood up at his stool.

  “Angel?” Kurt said.

  Dressed for an evening on the town, Angel Montoya looked older, more sophisticated. The little fool hadn’t taken his advice to leave the Valley.

  “Stay right there,” Kurt said to him. “I want to talk to you.”

  Angel turned quickly and headed for the bank-vault door.

  “Excuse me,” Kurt said, elbowing people aside. He bumped someone’s arm and she spilled her drink on her date’s tasseled loafer.

  “Asshole,” the date said.

  “Angel!” he said, shouldering his way through the jam of drinkers. “Hey, don’t run, I’m not going to bust you.”

  Every face in the club turned to regard him. “Get out of the fucking way,” Kurt said, shoving a tall nosy fellow into a crowded table. They all began to yell at him.

  Out on the street he caught a glimpse of Angel disappearing into the swarm of evening strollers on the pedestrian mall.

  “Angel, wait!” he shouted.

  He wanted to ask him what he knew about Rostagno’s man, the barrel-chested pool player in the Más Mota T-shirt. But Angel was gone. Passersby were looking at Kurt the way everyone had looked at him tonight. As if he were a homeless drunk babbling to himself on a public street corner.

  Kurt sat on a curb next to his Jeep and watched the drowsy light soften the curtains of Jake’s suite. There were no shadows, no furtive figures gliding past. He kept thinking about Cecilia and Jake, the two of them up there together. They were meant for each other.

  “Hey, Muller, you all right?”

  The city cop named Mike Magnuson was standing over him, amused. “We got a report some drunk was sitting on a curb bleeding like a stuck pig,” he said.

  “I’m not drunk,” Kurt said.

  Magnuson grunted and bent down to examine Kurt’s face. “Jesus, man,” he said, “you been in a fight or something?”

  Kurt didn’t realize that the stitch had started to bleed again. The side of his face was sticky with blood.

  “Come on,” Magnuson said, extending a hand. “We better get you to a doctor.”

  “I’m all right,” Kurt said. “It’s just a torn stitch. I’ll get a Band-Aid.”

  “Why the hell are you sitting here, anyway?”

  Kurt grabbed Magnuson’s hand and pulled himself to his feet. His legs had lost their feeling. They were the legs of someone else.

  “I don’t know, Mike,” he said. “Trying to figure out where everybody’s gone.”

  He could imagine Lennon sleeping peacefully on the sofa in Mrs. O’Carroll’s den. Right now all he wanted in this life was to hold that sleeping boy in his arms, to feel his sweet soft cheek against his own. Then the bleeding would stop and every wrong in this sad old world would almost be right again.

  Chapter fifteen

  Kurt arranged the blanket around Lennon’s shoulders and kissed him gently, then went to the fridge for a beer. Sitting in his favorite armchair in the dark living room, he closed his eyes, drifting into that weightless nebula between consciousness and dream, poking absently at the Band-Aid Mrs. O’Carroll insisted on applying to the stitches. It had been a long strange evening and his body had finally given out.

  He wondered if Cecilia was involved with Omar Quiroga’s murder. Could the broken wineglass stem mean that she had spent the evening with him at Star Meadow and things got a little too rough? But what about the bullet behind the ear? Professional work. And what had happened to Graciela?

  He could still see the two of them sitting together at Andre’s, baring old bruises, an intimacy he hadn’t felt with a woman since his best years with Meg. Perhaps that was why he was so drawn to Graciela. She reminded him of someone he had once loved.

  Alone in the dark, half asleep, drinking, he felt an aching coldness, a sudden and inexplicable sensation of being washed aground in a quarry of sharp rocks, his skin softened by days in the water, sliced open, a sack of broken bones. Then he realized it was not his body but Graciela’s. He was never going to forgive himself.

  The phone rang. He sat up quickly, startled. For a fleeting second he forgot where he was.

  “Hello, darling,” the voice said. “Did I wake you?”

  Fifty years in America and she still spoke with the unmistakable accent of an immigrant.

  “Mom,” he said. “What are you doing up this late?”

  “An old lady doesn’t sleep so much,” she said. “Is my little dumpling in his bed?”

  “Hours ago,” Kurt said, a partial truth.

  “He’s probably as tall as his grandmother now,” she said. “When I see him next he’ll be driving a car.”

  “Mom, he’s only five.”

  “Ach, mein einziges Enkelkind. Does he still play in the trunk?”

  She had left her stage trunk with them, the stickered, rusty-latched repository of her life in the German theater. Masks, slippers, a gauzy costume dress, colorful playbills crumbling lik
e ancient parchment. He and Bert loved to dig through the junk when they were kids. It was all that was left of their mother’s world before she married the bespectacled composer from Salzburg and fled to America.

  “He likes those damn greasy face paints,” Kurt said. “They’re impossible to wash out of his clothes.”

  “Do you show him that picture of his grandfather? I don’t want him to grow up not knowing.”

  “He has a picture of you both, Mom. The one where you’re side by side on skis at the foot of Little Nell.”

  His mother had looked a hundred years younger then. Tan, fit, her hair short and tousled, smiling that self-mocking theatrical smile, exhilarated from an afternoon on the mountain.

  “And Meg?” she asked. “Does the little dumpling hear from her?”

  “No, not very often,” he said hesitantly. “She’s still in her ashram in Oregon. He’s better off without her right now. There’s no telling what kind of life he’d be living. Meg’s smart enough to know that.”

  “A boy needs a mother,” she said with mild accusation.

  Kurt sighed. “I do what I can, Mom.”

  “I know you do, darling. The two of you should come live with me. I know how to take care of my boys.”

  It had been a year since he’d seen his mother. Last summer he and Lennon drove down to Scottsdale to visit her in the comfortable suburban bungalow, its pristine lawn kept alive by a computerized sprinkler system. He was certain her monthly water bill exceeded the gross national product of a small emerging nation.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked. He was concerned about her heart condition.

  “Don’t worry about the old gal,” she said. “I couldn’t be better. The tests were very encouraging.”

  “Tests? What tests, Mother?”

  Too often she called to tell him the results of tests he didn’t know about.

  “My heart, dear.”

  He sat up straight. “Are you having problems?”

  “So at seventy-seven I’m not a spring chicken. Dr. Fischman is taking very good care of the old gal. You shouldn’t worry so much.”

  But he did worry. “We’re coming to see you,” he said, a sudden inspiration. “August. Before Lennon gets started in kindergarten. I’ll let you know.”

  “I would move heaven and earth to see Aspen for a few days,” she said wistfully. “I miss the place. I miss my boys.”

  They both knew that was not advisable. The last time she’d come, against the wishes of her doctor, she was hospitalized for dizziness and heart palpitations and sent quickly back to Arizona. The altitude was too much for her now. Her home of forty years, the place where she’d raised her children, buried a husband, scattered the ashes of a son, had finally begun to choke the life out of her.

  “Why don’t you and Lennon get on a plane tomorrow and fly down to see me?” she said. “My treat. I have a plastic credit card, you know.”

  “We’d love to,” he said, “but this isn’t a very good time right now.”

  “Ten years a sheriff and they can’t give you a few days off to see your mother?”

  At this late hour he didn’t have the energy or the courage to tell her he’d resigned. Or to bring up what had happened to Chip.

  “I’m working on a tough case and can’t get away just yet.”

  “I hope it’s not like that Ted Bundy mess,” she said. “I saw a television program that showed how simple he got away. Your name they didn’t mention, thank god. But you could tell they thought you were an idiot.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I appreciate the encouragement.”

  “I always thought you would make a good instructor. Skiing—or backpacking even better. Sheriff is not for you. You’re too nice a boy to be talking every day to killers.”

  “You’re such a stage mother. Always looking out for me.”

  He could hear her take a secret drag on her cigarette. Even a heart condition hadn’t broken her of the habit she’d acquired decades ago as a young professor’s wife in Chicago. One of these nights she was going to fall asleep with a lighted cigarette and set her cozy bungalow on fire.

  “Guess what I have in my lap?” she said. He could actually hear the smile on her face.

  “A .357 Magnum with a custom-built silencer?”

  “Such a funny boy,” she giggled. “Always the joker.”

  It made him feel good, her giggle. This late at night it soothed him like a warm glass of milk.

  “I know what you have in your lap, Mom. Give me a hint which one you’re looking at.”

  She kept the old photo album by her bed and phoned him sometimes, when she was turning casually through the sticky, tar-like pages and came upon a picture she needed to talk about. He was the only person alive who understood the common language of those yellowing family hieroglyphs.

  “Your father called it the architecture of the gods,” she said.

  The smile was still there in her voice. Sunlight slanting through her memory.

  “Ah, yes.” He grinned. “Mesa Verde. We had a woody station wagon as big as a pt boat.”

  “Do you remember the year?”

  “Uhhh. About 1956.”

  “Wunderbar! A gold star for the tall Muller boy!”

  On one page, he remembered, there were a half-dozen photos of Bert and him climbing around the dusty stone balconies of the Cliff Palace.

  “The Pfeils were there on that trip too,” his mother said. “Have you forgotten? Poor little Katrina ate something that didn’t agree with her and she threw up on her brother, that Jacob.”

  “I knew there was a reason I liked Katrina,” he said.

  The halcyon years, before the feuds, the lawsuit, the eventual wall of ice between the two families.

  Kurt didn’t realize he’d drifted off, lost in those sweeter days of crew cuts and coonskin caps, until her sniffling brought him back around. “Mom, are you okay?”

  “I manage,” she said, an old woman softly sobbing. “There’s so much that’s gone, darling. The old gal has outlived a husband and a son.”

  Kurt felt awful. He was powerless to make her life any better.

  “Mom, we’re coming to see you, I promise. In August.”

  She sniffed, catching her breath. “Something was bothering him,” she said. “I don’t know what, Kurt. Something. A mother feels these things.”

  He had heard her talk like this before. “Yeah,” he said, a slow nodding confirmation.

  “He should have talked to me. We were always so close. When he was a little boy he loved to touch my hair. Some children had a special doll, a blanket. Your brother had my hair. I sometimes thought I should make him a wig to hold.”

  Kurt smiled.

  “I don’t understand why my boy didn’t come to me and tell me his troubles. Something was wrong. I could have helped.”

  He didn’t know what to say to his mother. She had been grieving like this for so long,

  “Today I was trying to remember the last time I actually talked to him,” Kurt said.

  She took a deep breath and sighed, holding back the tears. “You’re the only one I have left in this life,” she said. “You and my little dumpling. Come to me if there is something,” she said. “Whatever it is, Kurt, promise me you’ll come and talk”

  Kurt made the promise she needed to hear.

  “Now put out that cigarette and get some sleep, Mom,” he said. “It’s very late.”

  “An old woman doesn’t sleep so much,” she said.

  “I love you, Momma. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “I love you, too, darling. I love my two precious boys.”

  He hung up the receiver, dragged himself to his feet, and went to check on Lennon. His son was a hot sleeper and had already kicked off the covers. Kurt knelt on one knee, straightened the sheet, and bent to place a kiss on the boy’s forehead. Lennon moaned and brought an arm around his father’s neck, grabbing a handful of hair.

  In the middle of a deep sleep Kurt hear
d something. A footstep on the stairs, perhaps. He told himself to wake up. To open his eyes and reach for the gun in the night-table drawer. He had had this dream many times. He needed to wake up but he couldn’t. Something terrible was going to happen if he didn’t wake up, but he just couldn’t do it.

  He thought he heard Lennon’s voice. “Daddy,” the voice said, a sleepy mumble.

  Kurt sat up in bed. He was reasonably sure this wasn’t a dream, but he could barely focus, keep one eye open. He found the cold flashlight on the night table, got up, and stumbled to the stairs.

  “Daaa-ddy.”

  This time he was certain the voice was real. Lennon was having a nightmare. Kurt lumbered down the stairs, yawning, still trying to open the other eye glued shut with sleep.

  His son was standing in his bedroom doorway. White moonlight washed through the room behind him, outlining his silhouette. “Daddy,” he said, “is that you walking around?”

  “Yeah, sweetheart,” Kurt grumbled. “Do you need a drink?”

  Suddenly a dark figure stepped from the shadows and grabbed the boy, and Lennon screamed like Kurt had never heard him scream before.

  “Lennon!” he shouted.

  A blunt hard whack dropped Kurt to the floor. He rolled quickly and came up swinging the flashlight, striking someone, batteries scattering like marbles across the pine boards. The assailant cried out and fell backward onto the coffee table, splintering wood.

  “Daaaaddy!” Lennon screamed, squirming and kicking.

  Kurt lunged for his son, but another solid blow put him facedown on the rug, the life gone from his legs. A hand snatched his hair, smashed his face to the floor. Everything went numb, his nose, his cheekbone.

  The man holding Lennon barked orders in Spanish. There were three of them, maybe four.

  Kurt reached up, gripped a loose shirt, and slung the guy off his back. He swung and missed, swung wildly in the darkness.

  Lennon was crying hysterically, calling for his father.

  “Let him go!” Kurt bellowed.