by Tim Green
He finally shook his head and said, “It don’t matter.”
“That’s all we got, remember?” I said, my voice frantic. “Your words.”
“I don’t give a damn,” he said, banging his fist on the table, rattling the bottles and drawing attention to us.
“Don’t you see the way that fat guy in the front row looks at you?” he said, hissing, and spraying flecks of white spit across the checkered tablecloth. “Or that scrawny flat-headed schoolteacher? They don’t believe you. They’re gonna get you. I see it. So does Black Turtle, goddamn it. It’s not just me. That jury is people whose cards have always been bad and all you ever did was break the house. They never got a chance to do what you’ve done or be what you are. They can’t wait to see you lose.”
“It’s not about that, Dad,” I said. “Did you see them when the Red Cross lady talked about me saving that little girl? The award they gave me?”
“You goddamned fool,” he said. He had my wrist now and he was squeezing it to the bone. “That made it even worse. You just don’t see it.
“And now you’re holding aces and eights,” he said. Card players’ talk for a dead man’s hand. “And you got to fold. I don’t care how big the pot is. You take this money and you get your ass across that river. Black Turtle’s takin’ you right now. I’m walking out that door and you’re going with him, son.”
My father stood up and put his hand on my cheek. A tear hung from the corner of his mustache, glimmered, and fell to the floor.
“I’m walking out of here,” he said again in a husky voice. He turned his face and wiped it on his shoulder. “You go now, boy. I love you. I’ll come and see you over there when this all settles down and you’ll have it all again. The royal flush. Now you go.”
I closed my eyes and he let his hand fall from my face. When I opened them, all I saw was his bowed legs and his broad back, hunched over and disappearing through the door, swallowed up by the sunlight. Black Turtle’s eyes darted from the door to me.
“I’m not going,” I said, looking down and pushing the leather satchel toward him.
“I know you ain’t,” he said in his low rumbling voice. “You’re too much like him.”
15
I DIALED LEXIS from a pay phone and told her I was waiting on the street. I saw the green door in the alley beyond the Tusk open and she appeared with a small wave. There were no tables on the sidewalk yet, even though it was warm enough so that people would have used them. I brushed away the thought of Rangle and Frank and Russo and the day I could have saved myself by simply staying and drinking with them.
My throat felt tight until I saw the glint of the diamond ring on Lexis’s hand. That ring had gone off and on several times over these past months. Rocky times where she talked more and more about taking just one drink to dull the edge. Did she believe me? Didn’t she? Finally she did.
I smiled at her as she opened the door and composed a smile of her own. I looked into her blue eyes. Her teeth shone white. The sheen of her hair made me want to touch it. Beauty, with a distinct undercurrent of sadness.
We kissed quickly and I slipped my fingers through that hair, taking it in both hands and kissing it like a vestment before turning the key to my new car. They had impounded my Supra, and in order to forget about it I treated myself to a red RX-7. Instead of taking my usual right at the end of the street, I went left.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“A surprise.”
We listened to the news on NPR. I switched it to music when the local announcer started talking about the trial. I wanted to talk, but I had to choose my words carefully. One of the things we had come to argue about most was the way I talked so freely about the future, as if it were set. For whatever reason, Lexis couldn’t stand to do that. So we talked about current events or things that had nothing to do with either of us. Or the past.
That’s why I knew she’d like my surprise. There wasn’t much about either of our pasts that we hadn’t discussed over the last nine months. But there was this place that we went to when I was a kid. It was my dad’s uncle’s place. The brother of the man I was named after, Raymond Edinger. They called it the Blue Hole. I had forgotten about it, to be honest.
I turned south off Route 20 and drove down into Otisco Valley. I hadn’t been to the place in years and wasn’t even sure who owned it anymore. I didn’t want to tell Lexis about it in case we couldn’t get in. But as I turned off the road and drove down through the colonnade of massive spruce, I was heartened by the shaggy edges of the gravel drive. The woods opened up and the old white house came into view. It was empty, and one black shutter hung at an angle, distorting the face of what I had remembered as a fussy, well-kept colonial.
“Do you know these people?” Lexis asked.
“Old relatives,” I said, swinging the wheel and driving down past the house and onto an overgrown grass trail.
Brown grass and dead weeds swished beneath us and an occasional branch thumped the undercarriage. We kept going down, and as the rocks and mud rattled in the wheel wells, I knew I’d have to keep my foot on the gas to get us out.
I kept going, though, down to the bend, where I stopped and got out at the head of a footpath. The sun was bright on the naked trees that climbed the far side of the steep ravine. The crashing water nearly drowned out all other sounds.
“What is it?” Lexis asked.
“The Blue Hole,” I said. “You gotta see it.”
She took my hand and I led her, slipping and catching ourselves on the midriffs of thin saplings, down the path and into the ravine. We pushed through a crowded stand of hemlock, then came out suddenly on a shale ledge that jutted out over the swirling pool of water below the falls. The brunt of the water shot through a narrow groove at the falls’ head before plummeting another twelve feet to a whirlpool that had the reputation of being bottomless.
No less than three people had died in that hole during my lifetime and I was barely eight years old before my great-uncle closed it to the curious public. Still, the Blue Hole’s reputation tempted trespassers of all kinds, and the last person to disappear into its depths was a high school kid who had failed his final exam in math.
When the stream was high, as it was now, curtains of water spilled off either side of the shoot, hissing across the face of the precipitous shale that was bronzed with mossy slime. The noise reverberated off the steep walls and it sounded like a giant fist pounding the earth.
“My God,” Lexis said.
I gripped her hand, lacing my fingers in between hers. Already I could feel the constriction in my chest and the bolts of electric thrill surging up from my core to the spot behind my ears.
“We used to jump from here,” I said, above the din.
Lexis wiped a strand of hair from her face and wrinkled the corners of her eyes.
“What?”
I began stripping off my shirt and untying my shoes.
“Raymond?” she said. “What the hell?”
For nine months I had existed in a place between heaven and hell, neither alive nor dead, neither happy nor sad.
“Goddamn,” I said, breathing deep the smell of mud and water and broken rock, the heady sound of pounding water filling my brain. “It’s like we were here like this before.”
I handed her my shoes with the socks stuffed inside them. I stripped off my pants and even my boxers, rolling them up into my shirt, wrapping them in my belt, and handing them to Lexis.
“That water’s got to be freezing,” she said, her eyes wide, but taking the clothes and clutching them tight to her chest. “Are you crazy?”
I took her hand and gripped it again, pointing to the shale path that did several switchbacks through the steep grass before it ended at the bedrock below at the foot of another pool that belonged to a second and smaller falls.
“I’ve done it a thousand times,” I said. “I’ll meet you.”
“Raymond, you’re out of your fucking mind,” she said, yank
ing me back toward her.
I put my arm around her waist and held her tight to my naked body, kissing her hard, letting my blood rise even higher. Then I pulled away.
“I love you,” I said, letting go of her hand.
I turned and leapt from the ledge. It was the same ravine. The same crashing water. The same trees that hung on by their bare roots, fighting to stay upright. The same narrow pool that looked so ridiculously small from up here. It was all familiar to me. A feat I had performed countless times. So why was I scared so bad that my heart froze and my adolescent war cry got jammed up in my throat?
The milky green water came up fast and it hit me hard enough to jar my breath away. Then everything was cold and black and I was fighting helplessly against the swirl with all my might. My arms were flipped this way and that, out of control, grazing the rough rock walls. My feet kicked insanely and I realized I didn’t even know if I was fighting my way up or down. My eyes were wide and full of water. The blackness turned green, then white with swirling bubbles, and just before my lungs burst, I shot clear of the surface, sucking in air and flailing like a drowning cat.
The water spun me some more, and I grabbed desperately for the slick ledge on the far side of the pool away from the sheer rock. Finally, I pulled myself up, where I rested, shivering on my hands and knees, until that war whoop finally busted loose.
I heard Lexis’s voice calling my name, small between the great rocky walls. It echoed up from the hissing below. It pierced the thundering roar of the water, and I stood to wave my arms at her. She held out my clothes, and beckoned for me to come down.
That night, after we were tangled together beneath the warm blankets in my bed, she asked me what the hell I did it for.
I wanted to give her a reason that was bigger than the one I really had, but the best I could come up with was that I had forgotten what it felt like to control my own destiny.
“If you could control it,” she said, “it wouldn’t be your destiny.”
We slept like spoons with her head on one of my arms and my other wrapped around her firm belly. I kept waking up and whispering the promise to her that everything was going to be all right. I told her that she was going to be my wife and that I’d take care of her until the end of time.
The next day we drove to the courthouse through a chill rain. By four-thirty, the jury convicted me of murder. My body went numb. My mind whirled. The bailiffs snapped handcuffs on my wrists and started to lead me away. As I neared the door, I came to my senses and I looked for Lexis. Her eyes were glassy. Her mouth hung open. She slowly raised her fingers to me and then Frank was there with that slab of a hand on her shoulder, his head bowed.
I called out to her and pushed back against the bailiffs, struggling, but they shoved me through the door and someone slammed it shut.
16
IT TOOK ALMOST THREE MONTHS of processing before they were ready for me at Attica, the state prison notorious for its deadly riot in the early seventies. During that time, I was in isolation at the Public Safety Building in Syracuse. I saw Dan Parsons several times. He swore he’d fight this thing all the way to the Supreme Court. He had retained the famous Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz. But both of us knew enough about the law to realize that the judge hadn’t committed any reversible errors and no one could overturn a jury.
My father visited me as often as was allowed. Once a week.
He never mentioned my failure to escape when I could have. But just before they shipped me off, he appeared with his eyes puffy and red to tell me the news. Lexis had married Frank Steffano. She was pregnant with his child.
My father said he didn’t want me pining for her.
Because of the way I now live, in total isolation, and because I returned every one of her letters until they stopped coming, it is likely that I never would have known what happened with Lexis and Frank. Sometimes I think it would have been better not to know. Other times I’m thankful that I do. I don’t care what anyone says. I don’t care that she loved him for a couple of years. I know him. I know her. And I know this is what happened.
Frank’s hands were big, and he was careful to limit their touch to Lexis’s arms and shoulders. Nothing intimate. He was a friend she could count on. He guided her outside the courthouse and down the steps. His dark blue unmarked cruiser was parked half on the sidewalk and half off in the fire lane.
“Come on,” he said, opening the passenger door. “I’ll take you home.”
By the time he hurried around and climbed in, she was sobbing hysterically. Frank leaned over and pulled her to him, hugging her like a sister whose parents had died, patting her back, speaking softly.
“It’ll be okay,” he said. “It’ll all be okay.”
“It can’t,” she said, her voice a shattered moan.
“I know,” he said, “but it will.”
Twice people put their faces up to the window and Frank glared at them until they went away. When she finally cried herself out, he let her go and started the engine.
“Maybe you shouldn’t go home,” he said. “Maybe you shouldn’t be alone.”
Lexis said nothing. She just stared straight ahead and Frank drove two blocks, where he pulled the cruiser up onto another sidewalk in front of L’Adours, a French restaurant across the street from the stone sandcastle that is City Hall. Frank helped Lexis out and led her by the arm inside to an intimate booth in the nook beneath the staircase. He sat her down and whispered something to Sebastian, the maître d’, before taking the seat opposite her.
It wasn’t a minute before she had a glass of Alsatian Riesling in front of her and Frank was wiping the froth off his lip from a mug of beer.
“Take a drink,” he said, nudging the glass toward her.
Lexis stared at it. She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue.
“I stopped,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “This is a little different. After what you’ve been through I don’t think there’s anyone who wouldn’t give you special dispensation…”
Light from above glowed in the pale yellow wine. A small bead of condensation snaked its way down the side of the glass.
“I know I’ve got my issues,” he said with a sigh, “but the one thing you won’t get from me is any of this holier-than-thou crap. It’s okay, Lexis. One drink. You could use it.”
She reached out and touched the cool round glass. She pinched the stem between her fingers and ran them lightly up and down for a moment, then sighed and picked it up. She opened her mouth and filled it before setting the half-empty glass down on the table. She let the wine swish around gently inside her cheeks.
Frank smiled at her. Half a laugh spilled up out from his chest. Lexis looked at him and swallowed. Immediately she brought the glass to her lips again, finishing the glass before replacing it on the table without a sound. Frank upended his beer and pushed both glasses toward the edge of the booth. A grinning waiter quickly replaced them.
This time, Lexis took her time. She didn’t look at Frank, but his eyes peeked over the rim of his mug even when he was drinking. After she set down the third empty glass on the table, she cleared her throat.
“See,” she said, her face crinkling into a pathetic frown that suddenly darkened, “he promised me this wouldn’t happen.”
Frank took her hand, holding it tight and patting it softly with his other hand.
“I know,” he said, quiet and sad.
“Did he do it?” she said suddenly, her eyes locked onto his.
Frank looked down at the table and shook his head slowly from side to side. The waiter set down fresh drinks. He pushed the wine toward her.
“Three is enough,” she said. “It’s more than enough.”
“What’s the difference?” Frank said. “Stop worrying. It’s just me. Do you want something to eat? My mother always says it’s good for you to eat.”
“This isn’t a date, Frank,” Lexis said, her eyebrows knit together.
“I know
,” Frank said in his best little-boy voice.
Lexis shook her head, looking down. Just the trace of a smile showed on her lips. She took a deep staggering breath and let it out.
“I’m drunk,” she said. “Is that good for me?”
“It’s not a cardinal sin,” he said. “Even the priests drink wine.”
“You eat,” she said, her words sloppy. “I’ll have just one more and then you can take me home.”
“I’ll order for both of us,” he said.
They talked quietly as they waited for the food. Frank led her into talking about how wonderful the past two years of her life had been. He kept going back and back until finally he got to them.
“You know, my mother still thinks you and I will end up together,” he said. “She thinks you’re the kind of woman who can forgive a mistake, but I don’t know.”
“You’re just a man, Frank,” she said with a crooked smile, taking a swig of wine, “and men lie. All of them…”
Frank just stared at her.
The food finally came and he ate it in big mouthfuls, but he was more intent on making sure Lexis’s wineglass was refilled. She didn’t even pick up her fork. After the waiter cleared the plates, he returned with a small tray of tall thin shot glasses. Smoky steam curled up and away from their frosted surfaces.
Frank took one and raised it toward Lexis.
“To forgetting,” he said.
She nodded and picked up a glass, letting it clink against his before she threw it down. They had two more each, and Lexis’s eyes were beginning to lose focus.
“I should get you back,” Frank said.
“Yes,” she said in a murmur.
Frank led her to the car by the arm again, helping her inside and dashing around the front. He pulled away from the curb fast and parked on the back side of the alley, away from the Tusk. As he helped her down the alley, she began to stagger.
“Do you have your keys?” he asked.