The water was warmer than she wanted it, so she turned off the hot and left the cold running. It came halfway up her thighs now, washing the stickiness of their ice war off her genitals. She touched herself, rubbing herself lightly with her fingertips, and wished that Eddie would come in.
He did, easing the door back without knocking, moving to the side of the tub, looking down at her. He was still in his clothes, which smelled of rum, but she could see the bulge in his pants that she put there.
“I was just thinking about you,” she said.
“Good I hope.”
She didn’t ask him about the phone call. “Okay,” she said coolly.
As he knelt on the floor next to the tub, he noticed the wet footprints on the tile. A series of quick calculations raced through his mind, and his eyes followed the trail of the footsteps to the bathroom door. So she was in the tub and she got out. She went to the door. While he was on the phone. He didn’t like that.
“Just okay?” he asked.
“Well, maybe a little better than okay,” she said.
He bent low over the lip of the tub and kissed her between her breasts, where the water hadn’t reached yet and she still tasted of sweat and rum. He moved his kisses slowly down her body and she raised her hips to him so that he could have his fill of her without drowning. She made a soft, low moan of pleasure because she liked what he was doing and wanted him to know it.
He reached toward her face with the hand he had been holding himself up with, felt her cheek, felt her turn her head to kiss his fingertips, licking them as though he were an ice cream cone. His hand moved on, to her ear, tangling in her hair. And then, with no warning, he was pushing down hard on the top of her head. If she had been braced for it she could have resisted. But she wasn’t, and the pressure forced her head down into the water and she choked on it. If he thought he was being funny, he wasn’t. He didn’t even give her time to take a breath.
Her head flailed like a fish at the end of the line, except that a fish fights for the water and she was fighting for air. His grip tightened and for the first time in her life, really, she was afraid.
Her legs kicked. Both hands grabbed for his hand. Christ, he was strong. She couldn’t move his hand, couldn’t get herself free of it, couldn’t breathe.
She thought in another minute, no, less than a minute, she would drown. She tried to turn, to roll over on her side so she could push herself up, but she couldn’t move. She felt like she was crying under the water.
And then his hand was gone and she pushed herself, gasping, out of the water, sitting up, coughing and choking.
Eddie looked at her with his big Eddie grin.
It took forever until she could say anything, and then she said, “That’s wasn’t funny, Eddie.”
“No shit.”
He was still grinning, like a little boy peeking into the girls’ dressing room. She couldn’t think of anything to say.
“You went for a little walk,” he said.
She didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
“What were you, listening?” he said.
He pointed toward the door. She looked and saw the footprints, saw the big puddle of water next to the tub from her thrashing.
“I was just wondering who you were talking to,” she said.
“I was talking to who I was talking to,” he said. “Is that any of your fucking business?”
“No, Eddie,” she said, because she knew right then that it would be dangerous for her to say anything else.
Later he went out to score some coke. She didn’t go with him because she had no interest in leaving the room, which was finally growing cooler as the sun sank. And because she didn’t want to be with him right now. She was afraid when he said he was going out that he wouldn’t let her stay behind by herself, but he just said, “Fine, I’ll be back.”
She cried when he left and she thought about leaving so that he’d find an empty room when he got back. But somehow that seemed like it would take more strength than she had right now. So she lay down on the bed and waited.
She had never done coke, in part because it didn’t interest her, in part simply because the kids she hung with weren’t into drugs much beyond an occasional joint when someone else supplied it. She was proud of her abstinence even though it had cost her nothing. But she sat up on the bed when Eddie came back with the coke and crossed her legs, yoga-style, and smiled at him when he showed her what to do.
It was Jeffrey’s idea that he and Fiore take separate flights to Oklahoma City. He didn’t want a record of them traveling together. He flew straight in from New York and Fiore came by way of Dallas but got there first. He waited for Jeffrey at the gate, unaware that the man standing opposite him was the man he had come to meet. Jeffrey introduced them, saying simply, “This is Chet Fiore. He’s involved in the proposition I mentioned.”
Fiore said he had to make a phone call. Jeffrey offered his cell phone but Fiore declined. He went to a phone booth only a few yards away.
Clint Bolling kept his eyes on Fiore’s silk-suited back. “Your friend looks like a hood,” he said, keeping his voice low.
Jeffrey said, “He is.”
Bolling didn’t say anything as he processed Blaine’s terse response to what had been on his part simply a harmless little ethnic joke. Blaine must have been joking, too. The guy couldn’t really be a gangster, could he? On the other hand, Blaine didn’t strike Bolling as the kind of man who kidded around, certainly not about a thing like that.
So that left two possibilities. Either he hadn’t heard right or this New York guinea was exactly what Bolling’s New York banker said he was.
So be it.
Both men had brought only light overnight bags, which Bolling insisted on carrying, slinging the straps over his shoulders like bandoliers. He led the way to his metallic blue 4Runner, parked in a remote parking lot a good twenty-minute walk from the terminal. “They didn’t have parking spaces in Oklahoma?” Fiore asked as they trudged across the melting macadam.
Bolling laughed but declined to explain that he had put it in the long-term lot to save a buck or two on the parking.
Along the way, Jeffrey peeled off his suit coat and slipped off his tie, neatly folding the tie before sliding it into the breast pocket of the coat. Fiore kept his coat and tie on, despite the Oklahoman’s invitation to “make himself comfortable.”
“I’m always comfortable,” he said.
For all practical purposes, this ended conversation for the rest of the hike. Fiore contented himself with taking in the scenery, which was essentially an endless plain of dry, flat land that stretched beyond the airport to the horizon, shimmering like a bleak, waterless mirage. Fiore, who had spent his whole life in New York, except for one week of what was supposed to have been a two-week vacation in Europe with a twenty-year-old actress, had never seen anything even remotely like this.
Jeffrey sat in the back seat as a courtesy to Fiore.
At the parking lot gate Bolling asked for a receipt for the two and a half dollars the parking cost him. He folded the slip when it was handed to him and inserted it at the center of the thick roll of bills he had taken from his pants pocket to pay for the parking.
He glanced over at Fiore, who was looking at him like he just farted.
“I always get receipts,” Bolling said. “For everything.”
Fiore didn’t say anything.
“You don’t?”
Fiore answered with a flat “No,” as though this stranger had asked him a personal question he had no business asking.
Bolling glanced to his right, checking out either his passenger or the side mirror as he changed lanes. “I can understand that,” he said, and then added, “I guess there’s something to be said for not wanting a whole lot of paper keeping tabs on what you’re doing and where you go.”
Fiore turned his head slowly. “Are you trying to make some kind of point, Mr. Bolling?” he asked.
“No. No po
int,” Bolling said.
“What is it you want to know?”
“When I want to know something I’ll ask.”
Jeffrey watched the two of them from the back seat. He could have said something to turn the conversation in a different direction and end the macho testing process going on in front of him. If he had been on his way to a normal business meeting with Fiore and Bolling, he would have done so. He was a master at facilitating the relationships he wanted to see flourish. But in this case it didn’t particularly serve his purposes for these two to like each other. There are situations when distrust is as good as trust; in the end they pretty much come to the same thing. So he said nothing, letting the tension of the moment play itself out on its own.
Which it did quickly enough. Bolling’s eyes went back to the road and Fiore’s to the scenery.
“It’s something, ain’t it?” Bolling said, with a wave of his hand that took in everything outside the car. “What you see is what we’ve got. Soil so thin a chicken can scratch through it. A man doesn’t have to live here too long or think about it too deep before he comes to the conclusion that sometimes even god fucks up.”
“It may be thin soil but it’s got oil under it,” Jeffrey said from the back seat.
Bolling looked at him in the mirror. “That’s true enough,” he said. “But you can’t farm oil. You can’t use it to water your stock. All it’s good for is making sons of bitches like me rich. Everybody else around here is just about dying.”
Fiore thought he understood. “Your people were farmers,” he said.
“Yeah,” Bolling said. “Were.”
Well beyond the city, perhaps twenty or thirty miles out, where the land was all gray with dust, with here and there a few head of cattle listlessly picking their way among the brown weeds, a sudden oasis materialized beside the road. An immense green lawn, well watered, immaculately tended, as smooth as a pool table, stretched back easily three hundred yards from the opposite side of the highway. Stately shade trees, poplars and oaks and elms, rose above the plain in dense groves, punctuating the flatness. A double row of maples flanked both shoulders of a long drive leading back to a sprawling one-story building so densely surrounded by shrubbery that it looked almost like an underground bunker. Jeffrey knew enough to know that these trees were not part of this landscape. They had to have been trucked in at great expense.
“My office,” Bolling said laconically, letting the dreamlike splendor of the site do its own talking.
And then it was gone and the land was brown again. There had been no sign at the head of the drive. Apparently the people who did business with PetroBoll could be counted on to know it when they saw it.
Bolling punched a single digit on the tiny keypad recessed into the hub of the steering wheel. In a moment a woman’s voice said, “Yes, Mr. Bolling?” She sounded young.
“Any messages, Doll?” Bolling asked.
“Mr. Jeffers from Getty. He went on about how he wants you to call him back.”
“Well you know that’s not about to happen. Anything else?”
“Nothing you don’t know about, Mr. B. Wilson’s still walking around like his dog died, waiting on you. What time are you going to be in?”
There was a comfortable Texas drawl to her voice, as though the words had a hidden melody.
Bolling said, “You tell that scapegrace if he wanted to talk to me so bad he should have been out on the highway. I just drove past.”
“Sir?” She sounded puzzled.
“I’m taking Mr. Jeffrey Blaine and his associate out to the house. What I want you to tell Mr. Jarrett Wilson is that I pay him all that money to figure things out himself.”
“No, sir,” she laughed pleasantly, “you don’t want me telling him that.”
“Love you, Doll,” he said, and pressed another button on the keypad.
“Colored girl,” he said, glancing across to Fiore. “But damn, she knows more about the business than I do.”
Bolling’s home, another fifteen minutes east on I-40, mirrored the office complex on an only slightly smaller scale. The trees and lawns were visible from the interstate.
The 4Runner pulled off the highway onto a county road and then turned immediately onto the shaded drive. Even in the closed car, Bolling’s passengers could feel the drop in the temperature outside as the greenery sucked the heat out of the air.
They passed a sizeable pond, perhaps two acres of shimmering water surrounded entirely by evenly spaced shade trees. The drive went on another half mile and then the house was visible before them, low and close to the ground, sprawling in all directions as though new wings kept growing out of it like a plant spreading roots. They rolled to a stop in front of the main entrance. Bolling left the engine running and got out of the car. A Mexican in jeans and a Western shirt peeled himself away from the soccer game he was watching on the television in the carport, settled his hat on his head, and loped toward them to take the car. Bolling greeted him in Spanish, then got the bags out of the back and led the way to the house.
Two shallow steps rose to the railless deck that edged the front of the house like the running board on a vintage car. A massive oak door carefully worked with Mayan-style carvings opened easily at his touch despite its enormous weight. Bolling stepped back to let his guests precede him inside.
The foyer was large and bare, except for a pair of ancient seven-foot wooden benches, their seats uneven with wear, the armrests at either end worn to a warm, rounded polish. Bolling’s first wife acquired them in Southern California. They were the pews from an eighteenth-century Spanish church that had fallen down from neglect. Bolling, who gave prodigiously to religious charities, had been approached to contribute to the church’s restoration. He took María with him on an inspection and she fell in love with everything inside the church, the fragrant woods, the fragrant leather. So Bolling made them a proposition. He would build them a new church on the very site, in exchange for which his wife would be allowed to choose what she wanted from the furnishings of the old church.
The young priest and the elderly parishioners debated the proposal for weeks. What they wanted was the restoration of their beloved Church of San Junipero Serra. But they had been able to raise very little money for the work, largely because most of the philanthropies they approached assumed that the Roman Catholic Church had tons of money. Which it did, of course, but not for impoverished Mexican churches south of San Diego practically on the Mexican border. Though old, the church was considered to be without artistic merit. Its name appeared in none of the guidebooks to Southern California.
A delegation of parishioners came to the motel where Mr. and Mrs. Bolling were staying. Their priest announced that they were happy to accept Mr. Bolling’s generous proposal. But the parishioners looked grim and sorrowful, the way a woman might look when she is constrained to accept a marriage proposal from an unattractive man she doesn’t love. They took some consolation from the fact that María Bolling was Mexican.
In the end, all she took from the church were these two pews, which, Bolling joked from time to time, cost him two and a half million dollars apiece. But he never regretted the expense. When María died two years later, he had the pews moved to the foyer, where they would remind him of her every time he came into the house.
Between the two pews, a large double doorway opened into a sunbaked central courtyard. Jeffrey and Fiore followed Bolling through the door and straight across the courtyard, where a pair of stone lions bellowed water from their mouths, and entered a long corridor flanked on both sides by closed doors and decorated with watercolors and hanging tapestries. There appeared to be eight guest rooms in this wing. Bolling stopped at the last pair of doors, where he handed Fiore and Blaine their bags.
“I think you’ll find everything you want,” he said. “You probably didn’t bring bathing suits but there’s a couple in the dresser. You might want a swim. Take as long as you want. I’ll be at the pool. We can talk there.”
; He turned and retraced his steps down the corridor.
“The pool,” Fiore said with an odd, ironic emphasis.
“I’m sure we’ll be able to find it,” Jeffrey answered. “Do we need to talk before we talk to him?”
“I wouldn’t know, General,” Fiore said. “This is your show.”
He opened the door and disappeared into his room. Jeffrey followed suit, entering the room on the opposite side of the corridor.
The decor was surprisingly spare and simple, although there were half a dozen charming lithographs and oil paintings on the walls depicting rural Mexican scenes.
After a brief inspection of the room, Jeffrey stepped to the floor-to-ceiling window and found himself looking out at the swimming pool and its surrounding patio of beige tiles. A woman lay on a chaise. Although her face was averted, it seemed to Jeffrey that she was very young, in her early twenties at most. She had long jet-black hair that flowed over the edge of the chaise almost to the tiled floor. Her body was tanned the color of the Oklahoma earth. She was bare-breasted, her breasts rising in rounded shallow mounds, soft and full. It was hard to tell with her lying on her back, but it seemed to Jeffrey she was very generously endowed. He felt the tension in his loins that told him he shouldn’t be looking but couldn’t bring himself to back away. His lips felt dry and tight, the thrill of her nakedness mixed with a stinging sense of mortification, as though he had just been caught looking in a window like a common voyeur.
Jeffrey turned from the window and moved away. He put his bag on the bed and began to unpack, filled with a strange feeling he had never been aware of feeling before, a sudden and inexplicable consciousness of the power he commanded. For an instant, more like an impulse than a thought, he felt himself drawn back to the window. He would stand there openly until, inevitably, she turned and saw him. He would hold her eyes with his, challenging her to make something of his presence.
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