Blind Fall (10 page)

“So it was a real marriage, then?”

“
You
are the one who is confused, John Houck. The reason Mike started using GHB is because he had a problem being naked in front of me after his right eye got blasted out of his skull and his legs got carved to pieces. And that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with you.”

“Oh, yeah? Am I the reason he almost knocked you out cold when you tried to blow him that night? Did that have anything to do with me? He didn’t even know me then.”

“He knew men like you. The world is full of men like you. And I’m sick of it. And news flash, John, Mike was sick of it, too. That’s why he was in Owensville with me, throwing your postcards in a drawer.”

“Bullshit. I’m not your mother.”

“What the hell do you know about my mother?”

“Only what you just told me, which sounded like a lot of self-serving crap. A lot of stuff made out to make you sound like a big victim.”

Alex barked with laughter and stared out the window as they passed over a lagoon that fed into the Pacific on the southern end of Carlsbad. The next town would be Oceanside, and then the long, dark expanse of Camp Pendleton. John realized he had sent Alex into a stall by bringing his mother into it, and he knew he should savor this small victory and leave it alone. But what kept the fires of anger burning was the contempt that had been in Alex’s voice as he had accused John of being the one who was full of prejudice.

“Philip says you have a thing for Marines,” John said. “It’s like a…what’s the word? A
fetish
with you.”

“Philip thinks nine-eleven was an insurance scam,” Alex said, sounding winded. “And you’re
really
not my type, so don’t worry.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?”

“Maybe Mike was just a
thing
to you. Like some kind of porno fantasy.”

“And that would mean…what?”

“It would mean he wasn’t—” John stopped dead in his tracks as he realized what he was about to say and what it truly would mean if he said it. His first thought was that he had walked into a trap Alex had set for him with his little tirade about men like John being the reason Mike couldn’t be 100 percent cool with being a fruit.

“Say it, John,” Alex said. When John didn’t comply, Alex did the job for him. “That would mean he wasn’t
like
me, right?” John didn’t answer. “Well, John, even if you and I can’t see eye-to-eye, you and Ray Duncan certainly can.”

Alex flinched as if he could detect John’s urge to clock him in the jaw, an urge that John fought by clenching the steering wheel with both hands. When John returned his attention to the freeway, he heard Alex let out a long, controlled breath. Another few minutes of this awful silence and Alex undid his seat belt and crawled over the armrest into the backseat. In the rearview mirror, John watched Alex curl into the best fetal position he could manage—maybe he was doing it to avoid more of a fight, or maybe he wanted John to feel like a chauffeur.

“Good night, John,” Alex finally said in a soft voice that had no trace of his earlier words.

The best response John could manage was to give the guy a thumbs-up, just like the one Mike had given him as he was wheeled across the tarmac toward the C-17 transport plane that had carried him out of John’s life forever.

Interstate 10 carried them east into Banning Pass, a dramatic gap between soaring mountains, where the flashing lights atop swarms of windmill generators looked like the running lights for a hundred crisscrossing runways. Weak sunlight almost the color of an eggshell began to swell on the eastern horizon as John crossed the border from arid coastal basin into desert.

Mount San Jacinto thrust itself into the sky on the southern side of the freeway. John had seen the mountain through several changes of seasons, remembered a wildfire one summer night that had turned its flanks into an orange honeycomb. Now he wondered if he’d ever be able to look at it again without seeing the photograph of Bowers and Alex riding one of the tramcars that took tourists up to its eight-thousand-foot summit. As soon as they passed San Jacinto, the necklace of communities that hugged the base of the Santa Rosa Mountains came into view, still twinkling in the lingering night. Their names—Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, Indian Wells—evoked various paradises and mocked the world that lay north of Interstate 10, the high desert where John had spent the last of his teenage years.

Highway 62. Someone had told him it was the most dangerous highway in California, all those drunk Marines speeding back to Camp Wilson in Twentynine Palms at the end of their weekend leave, burning up the last of their gas money. Indeed, before Operation Iraqi Freedom, the only funerals John had attended, aside from the one for his parents, had been for fellow Marines killed in drunk-driving accidents. But 62 was also the avenue of his adolescence. It had always amused him that the directions for traveling from one half of his youth to the other were so simple: head west on I-10. Forty-eight hours later, take a left onto Highway 62 and stop when you hit Yucca Valley, the only godforsaken town in all the high desert that can boast a Kmart. Say good-bye to Spanish-moss-draped oak trees and to people who take their time saying things so they can be sure you get the message. Say hello to tiny heat-blasted trailers with monstrous Joshua trees in their front yards and to crazy tweakers who are convinced the powers that be will be undone by a revolution that begins smack dab in the middle of nowhere.

It was five-thirty in the morning by the time they reached Yucca Valley, late enough to wake his big sister during a time of need. In his absence, the town had acquired a Starbucks and a Walgreens and terraces of newly constructed homes on the hills north of 62, many of them modeled after New Mexico desert dwellings that looked like they would suit the Flintstones. He parked on a residential block just east of the highway. Alex woke as soon as John shook him. He told him to stay put, that he’d be back in a few minutes, but that he needed to wake up and stay alert until he got back. Alex nodded; then, as if he had just remembered the blowout a few hours earlier, he sat up with his head bowed, avoiding John’s stare.

There was a pay phone in the parking lot of a strip mall off the highway. Patsy’s phone number was still sitting in a drawer in a trailer he had no plans to return to in the immediate future, so he was forced to dial information to get the number.

Without warning, these simple actions blasted him back almost twenty years, to another pay phone, this one a few blocks from the Louisiana State University campus in Baton Rouge, where he had wiped out on his bicycle after riding it far outside the five-block radius around their home his mother had restricted him to. More frightened of his mother’s anger than the warm flow of blood down the front of his face, he had used a quarter to call his sister, a senior in high school then, who, upon hearing the strangled sound of his voice, had rushed to him without any questions.

The top was down on her cherry red Miata when she pulled up. As she stepped onto the sidewalk, John pulled open the phone booth door enough for her to get a good look at him, and he braced himself for her anger. How surprised he had been when she had thrown her arms around him instead of clocking him across the back of the head. How tightly she had held his head against her shirt despite the blood on his face. How quickly and fully the smell of her had cut through the blood in his nose. Sunflowers by Elizabeth Arden. Years later, the sight of that same ovular yellow bottle with its thick white cap on the bathroom counter of a UCSD girl he was about to hook up with had so filled him with thoughts of his sister that he been forced to beg off at the last minute.

“Hello?”

John’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. It didn’t matter. As if she had been able to recognize the sound of his breathing, his sister whispered his first name in a voice that sounded shocked and fatigued.

“I need you to meet me,” John said.

“John.”

“Pick a place. Not in Yucca Valley but close.”

“Where are you?”

“Just pick a place, Patsy.”

The use of her first name seemed to startle her. “You’re in trouble? You can’t talk right now?”

“Yes,” he said, even though he wanted to come up with something more obtuse, more coded than a plea for help.

“I’m looking after one of my girls’ trailers out in Landers. She had to go to Fresno for a custody hearing. How does that sound? I’ll head there right now, then call you.”

“I’m not using cell phones right now.”

“I know. You’re using the pay phone right across the highway from where I live.” A chill went through him, and he fought the urge to hang up and run. Then she said, “Sorry. This guy I dated a few months ago, he kind of stalked me for a bit. Used to call me from there all the time, tell me he could see me going to the bathroom. Stupid shit.”

Against his will, John found his eyes drawn to the shiny new houses dotting the sandy hillside to the west. A far cry from the tract homes and trailers they had been forced to live in while she tried in vain to find a suitable husband. He’d heard through the grapevine that she had come into some money, mainly because she had eventually married her boss, a man John had never met, and inherited his bar. “What happened to your husband?” he asked.

“He’s been dead two years, John.” There was no irritation in her voice, just soft parental condescension, as if John were an infant and she had just asked him not to put Play-Doh in his mouth.

“Should I bring anything?” she said quickly, seemingly unnerved by his silence.

“Just meet me,” he said. “Please.”

She gave him directions, and about fifteen minutes later he and Alex were traveling north on 247, known more affectionately as Old Woman Springs Road. After they passed through his sister’s high-end neighborhood and crested the hill it sat on, the scorched earth beneath them began to rise and fall like petrified ocean waves, and there was a limitless expanse of cactus-studded sand stretching out toward the few barren desert mountains on the far horizons in almost all directions.

Landers wasn’t a town so much as a massive spread of trailers without any real center that had been dubbed “the land of endless vistas.” At some points a space of almost five city blocks lay between each inhabited plot of sand.

“Your sister lives out here?” Alex asked.

“No. Out here I can see everyone who’s coming. There’s nowhere to hide.”

“What does your sister need to hide from?”

“Ray Duncan needs to hide.”

Alex studied him, his blue eyes sleep-glazed, as if he wasn’t sure of John’s sincerity. Maybe the guy took it as an apology for their earlier fight. For all John knew, maybe it was.

John returned his attention to the road; up ahead he saw the trailer Patsy had described. It sat behind a chain-link fence. The trailer had been painted baby blue, and there was a children’s play-set in the front yard, in the shadow of an enormous, multibranched Joshua tree. Ribbons of various colors had been tied along the top of the front fence. There was nothing that spoke more to him of the desert than a run-down trailer whose owner had gone to every pathetic attempt to dress it up that she could afford. In Louisiana, nature itself would bring canopies of greenery to the most impoverished of homes. In the desert, the unforgiving light allowed hardship few disguises.

“Is that her?” Alex asked. But John ignored the sight of the woman sitting on the trailer’s front steps as he pulled around the side of the trailer so he could park the truck where it was hidden from the road. As they walked around toward his sister, John realized he was keeping his eyes on the ground in front of him, even as he heard Patsy’s hiking boots scrape against the concrete steps as she shot to her feet.

At the last possible second, he lifted his eyes to her. By then Alex had stepped forward and offered his hand, and Patsy Houck took it, the gesture tinkling the swarm of silver bracelets on her right wrist. She studied Alex with a furrowed brow and parted, speechless lips. His sister looked more beautiful than he had ever seen her. Her hair was a thick brown mane, with her token white streak dyed in the front. She’d had a boob job, but he was struck by the brightness in her eyes, the clear vision of a woman who had been released from most of her worries.

All this he took in while she gave Alex the once-over, and indicated with a rude silence, which was not her nature, that she wasn’t quite sure what her brother was doing riding around the high desert with a gay guy who wore chest-hugging brand-name polo shirts.

“Can he wait inside?” John asked.

Patsy nodded. “There’s coffee,” she said, and her mouth stayed open, as if she had more to say about what pleasures awaited them inside a strange woman’s trailer, but then her eyes caught John’s, and the sound of the front door shutting behind Alex seemed to lock them in a cell together.

“Whatever happened to Tina Gray?” she asked him in a bright voice, as if they had been standing there chatting for hours. “You guys dated for what—almost a year, right? She lived out here with her mom, right? Did they move away?”

John nodded. Tina Gray had taken his virginity in the backseat of her mother’s El Dorado, forever dashing John’s childish suspicion that women never really enjoyed sex, they just put up with it so men would leave them alone. Tina Gray had convinced him that there was no more beautiful a sight in the world than the creases that appeared in a woman’s thighs when she rocked her legs back to allow you in.

John said, “She ran off with some guy who worked at Denny’s. Told me she didn’t want to be with some jarhead.”

“You weren’t even in the Marines yet.”

“I know. I’d only said something about it once to try to impress her.”

“Bitch,” Patsy whispered, and John almost turned away from her and from this forced gesture of sibling camaraderie. “All I remember about her is that she was short, chubby, and blond, like all your girlfriends. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re probably still going for the baby-faced beauties, right?” He thought of Mandy, who fit this description to a tee, and the idea that his big sister could still read him after ten years brought blood to his cheeks. “Did you leave the Marines?”

John nodded, studied the road in both directions. The sun had crested the horizon, shortening the shadows of the Joshua trees all around them. The blacktop road was empty. The wind rattled a dozen small things across the vast emptiness surrounding the trailer.

“Why?”

“Because it was time.”

She nodded, eyes to the ground, sucking on her lower lip briefly, her way of saying she knew she was being lied to and she hated it but she didn’t want to drive him away. “I sent you an e-mail a couple of months ago. Did you get it?”

She didn’t add that it was an e-mail containing the location of their brother’s grave. He nodded, and for a few minutes neither one of them spoke. He had visited the grave many times, usually after fortifying himself with a couple of shots of Southern Comfort from a bottle hidden under the front seat of his truck.

“I left a sergeant,” he said. “Three years in Recon. You know, Force Recon—”

“I know what it is,” she said softly. “That’s a big deal, John.” She was doing her best to sound pleased, but he could detect the condescension in her voice; she knew he was trying to impress her, as always, and, as always, she wasn’t quite sure how to react to it. Even though she had never come right out and said it, the Marine Corps had been her last choice for him, and he knew it.

“John…who’s Alex?”

“He’s being framed for murder. And the man who did it got away because of me.”

He saw her shock turn to disbelief, and before she could open her mouth to question him, he began telling her the story, except for the part about Bowers being more than an old friend and comrade, except for the part about how he had been given Danny Oster’s home address the day before.

While he spoke, Patsy sank to a seat on the top step, her clasped hands resting against her lips, her eyes focused on him with increasing desperation as the details of the story he told her seemed to push her further away from the real reunion she had craved for so long. John ran out of things to say, and Patsy finally allowed herself to stare past him. Then, without so much as a word, she got to her feet and started walking toward the spot where her Jeep Grand Cherokee was parked in the Joshua tree’s perforated shade. The car looked new and recently washed, except for the thin coat of sand along the running boards from the ride out there. Patsy opened the passenger-side door and removed something from the glove compartment; then she started for John with an envelope in her hands. For a second he thought of the note Mandy had spied his sister trying to shove under the door of his trailer and figured she was going to force her own kind of reunion after all.

But when she handed him the envelope, he saw the words typed across the front:
SERGEANT JOHN HOUCK,
USMC. He opened it, pulled out a single sheet of paper, and unfolded it as Patsy moved beside him. It was a hand-drawn map, and it took John a minute to realize that it was the road they had just come out of. To the west of Old Woman Springs Road, a few miles to the south, an X marked a spot.

“When did you get this?”

“My night manager called me around closing time last night, said someone left the envelope on the bar. I asked him to bring it over on his way home. That’s why I wasn’t that surprised when you called this morning. I figured someone knew you were coming my way.”