Blind Fall (12 page)

“Here’s the deal,” John said. “I’m going to teach you how to defend yourself no matter what choice you make. That means I’m going to teach you how to fight. But if you choose to use what I teach you on Ray Duncan, you’re on your own. Got it?”

“How else would I use it?”

“You could end up running from this for the rest of your life, and God knows who you would meet along the way.”

“Fine, then. Yes, John. Please. Teach me how to kill.”

“I’ll teach you how to win a fight with your bare hands. But first I’ll have to find out what’s standing between you and your ability to kill another human being.”

“And then what?” Alex asked.

“I’ll get rid of it,” he answered. He let this hang for a minute. Then he said, “Whether or not you kill anyone is up to you. But let it be said just for the record here”—he looked back at Patsy, who was staring at him with glazed eyes—” I extended two offers of protection to you, and this is the one
you
chose.”

“Fair enough,” Alex said quietly.

“Do you accept?”

At first Alex smirked at the formality of it, but when he saw that John was dead serious, he raised his head slightly, studied John intently for a few seconds, and without a trace of hesitation in his voice said, “I accept.”

Behind him John heard Patsy give a weak voice to what he was feeling inside—she cursed under her breath and started toward the trailer. Alex watched her departure with a skeptical expression.

“Looks like you should talk to her,” Alex said.

“I’ve got my sister covered. Thanks.”

“Really? It’s been—what? Ten years?”

Once again, John was reminded of the fact that Alex had been given all sorts of facts about him, while his knowledge of Alex grew inch by painful inch with each passing hour. John told Alex to take a shower and then he started back toward the Jeep, where Patsy had slipped behind the wheel and started the engine.

She rolled down the window as he approached, but remained silent as Alex walked past them and went back inside the trailer. Instead of chewing him a new asshole, his sister said, “I might have a place. It’s out of state, but we can leave tonight.”

“You’re coming with us?”

“This is a friend, and it’s a big favor. It’s with me or not at all.” He doubted the truth of this statement, but he wasn’t in a position to argue.

“Who?”

“Let’s just get there, okay?”

Her reticence relieved him. He truly didn’t want to know. His sister had been annoyingly accepting of wackos throughout their time in the desert, and there had been no shortage of Indian shamans, recovering drug addicts, and all-around loonies in her past. She must have thought she didn’t have the right to judge people too harshly, considering the universe had taken so many advantages away from them, such as parents and affordable health care.

“I’m going to withdraw some cash,” she said. “I figure we’ll need it.”

“I can’t ask you to come in on this, Patsy.”

“Good,” she said. “’Cause you didn’t.”

She took the Jeep out of park, his signal to step away as she backed out of the lot and onto the two-lane blacktop that led back to Old Woman Springs Road.

Only after her Jeep had faded from view did he realize that she had patted his hand gently before he had stepped away from her vehicle, the first time they had touched in ten years.

Forty-five minutes after they crossed the border into Arizona, John turned down the Carrie Underwood song on the radio and said, “How much longer?”

Patsy said, “We’ll probably get there just before sunrise. I figure you’d prefer it that way.”

The digital clock said it was almost midnight, and they had been on the road for almost two hours already, which meant she wasn’t taking them much farther than Arizona, possibly New Mexico if she put the pedal to the metal. She had convinced John that they should go in one car—hers—and had suggested that they leave his truck in the one place Duncan knew they had already been: the location off Old Woman Springs Road where Duncan had buried the cash box. If they had been declared fugitives, there was no mention of it in the news, and the fact that Duncan hadn’t turned to the media suggested he had a darker plan in store.

Alex was sleeping peacefully in one of the bucket seats in back, his head resting against his balled-up jacket, his lips parted. Something about Alex’s slack jaw and the way the passing headlights streaked his face reminded John of a lance corporal who had died right in front of him, just seconds before being loaded into a Black Hawk, so he tried to avoid looking at him in the rearview mirror.

Why shouldn’t he be sleeping like a baby?
John thought.
Now that I’m covering his ass.

“You know,” Patsy said quietly, and John realized she had not turned the radio back up after he had turned it down, “he might just be out to prove something to you.” She was watching Alex in the rearview mirror to make sure he wasn’t listening.

“He said I wasn’t his type,” John said.

“I didn’t say he wanted to get in your pants,” she whispered. John was startled by how easily she was able to use this phrase when two men were involved. “Maybe he just wants to prove he’s not a sissy.”

“He almost shot an officer of the law in my trailer,” John said as quietly as he could without whispering. “And it was clear he didn’t have the slightest damn clue how to even hold a gun. He’s impulsive and irrational, and if I don’t do something about it he’s going to get himself killed.”

He didn’t want to consider the possibility that there might be more truth in what Patsy was saying than he was willing to believe. But what did it matter? Doing right by Mike meant giving Alex the skills to survive whatever he chose to confront. That was where it ended. That was where he
needed
it to end.

“John?”

“Yes, Patsy.”

“When I made that comment about Danny Oster. About you—”

“Trying to kill him?”

“Yeah.” She gave him a quick glance and then returned her attention to the road. “You didn’t say anything.”

“What was I supposed to say?”

“Can we not play it like that? I know it’s been ten years, but today hasn’t really been the reunion I was hoping for, and you got to admit I’m meeting you a lot more than halfway here.”

“A couple of days ago an old buddy of mine…not just a buddy; a guy whose life I saved…he brought me a file on Oster he got from a PI buddy of his. See, I had told him the story one night after I got wasted—”

“The story?”

“Of what happened to Dean.”

“I know, John. What is it that
happened
to Dean again?” Her gaze was dead ahead, but her hands had tensed on the wheel and her voice was tight, sure signs she was gearing up for one of her subtle but effective strikes. And he couldn’t help but wonder if she was forcing them to visit the past again because she didn’t want to know what John had considered doing with the file Charlie had brought him.

“I don’t want to do this,” John said quietly. “I really don’t want to do this.”

But Patsy seemed undeterred. “Because, see, John, the story Dean told me that day is that you misinterpreted what you saw. That what you saw were two guys roughhousing on a bed and you lost it.”

John checked the rearview mirror, saw that Alex was still sound asleep, his body rocking sluggishly with the Jeep’s motion. “Is that why Oster’s pants were around his ankles? You think I made that up? He lied because he was ashamed, Patsy. Because part of him thought it was his fault.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“No,” John said. But when he didn’t finish the thought, Patsy shifted in her seat, sucked in a long breath through her nose that signaled her irritation, signaled the fact that she was holding back in a way she never would have when they were younger. In terms of cutting through any bullshit that was shoved her way, Patsy had been a better mother than their own mother, a career nurse who had only paid serious attention to her kids when they were bleeding or in acute physical pain.

“What did he tell you, John?”

“Please, Patsy.”

“I’m the one who buried him. I have a right to know.”

He was suddenly dizzy, as if he were about to take a jump off the high board, what it felt like to get ready to unload something that had tormented him for so long. “He said he lied to you so you wouldn’t hate me. So you wouldn’t think I failed.”

“Why would I think you failed?”

“Because I was supposed to be watching him that day and I was down the street at Tina Gray’s. Because I should have known that Oster was a freak who was spending way too much of his time with a seventeen-year-old boy. Because he was my responsibility.”

“Says who?”

“Me. I say it. Because it’s the truth, Patsy.”

Her stunned silence seemed to hang over them both like a kind of humidity. Finally, in a voice that had a threat of tears in it, she said, “Tell me this isn’t the reason I haven’t heard a word from you in ten years. Please, John. Tell me this isn’t the reason I’ve spent the past five years watching every newscast, waiting for some mention of your name.”

“He was my responsibility. It was just the way things were in our house. And it’s the way they should have been because, God knows, you were doing everything else.”

“He lied to both of us, John. He lied because he didn’t want either of us to know what happened in that bedroom.”

“I know what happened,” John hissed. “I was there! I
saw
it!” Patsy lifted one hand at the anger in his voice, and at first he thought she was trying to shut him up, but then, when she glanced behind her, he saw she was warning him not to wake Alex.

A long silence passed between them until Patsy found her voice again. “If you want to take this on, go ahead. I can’t stop you. But you listen to me, John, and you try to remember this along with everything else you can’t seem to forget. I never made Dean your responsibility. Not because I didn’t think you were up to it, but because I loved you. And I would never ask someone I love to throw their arms around a hurricane.”

He yearned to believe her, but part of him thought she was just so eager to have him back in her life that she would say anything to try to cut him free of their broken past.

“We better cut it out before we wake the baby,” Patsy finally said.

“I think I’m going to join him.”

She was silent as he undid his seat belt and squeezed into the back. He crawled up onto the bench seat at the very back of the Jeep, but, of course, sleep didn’t come. There was nothing to see outside of the windows except the glowing ember at the tip of his sister’s cigarette where she rested her arm out the open window. For a while she flipped stations on the radio. Then, at about two o’clock, they entered some stretch of Arizona where the only broadcast they could pick up was something that sounded like late-night Navajo hour, lots of throaty male voices coughing out primal chants. They sounded too much like the involuntary guttural noises he had heard the wounded make in combat: tremulous sounds that came from the chest, the stutter of words failing to force themselves through closing throats. He wasn’t about to ask her to turn off the radio, and Patsy seemed determined to listen to it, maybe because it was keeping her awake, so John somehow made it bearable by telling himself that the sounds of dying men were exactly what the Navajo singers were trying to emulate. This meant they shared a dark knowledge with John. This meant he had comrades out there in the dark.

When Patsy gave up and killed the radio, John heard a rattling sound behind him, turned to look into the tiny cargo area, and saw the rattle was being made by the Spartan sword, still sticking up out of the cardboard box containing the last pieces of Mike Bowers’s life, which he had removed from his Tacoma before parking it in the desert. John turned, bent over the back of the seat, and pried open the flaps of the box. It was too dark to see inside, so he reached behind him and turned on one of the dome lights, which sent a faint glow across half of the bench seat without rousing Alex.

He froze when he saw that the dark mass gathered at the bottom of the box was Mike’s dress blues, several gold buttons staring up at him like coins in the bottom of a grime-covered fountain. Their condition, as well as their position, beneath tattered hardcover novels and framed diplomas, was too appropriate a symbol of what had become of Mike’s life for John to linger on them for too long.

Is this what Mike would have wanted you to do?
he asked himself.

How could he possibly answer his own question? How could he know what Mike would have wanted when Mike had kept his real life a secret? John couldn’t ask a question of the smiling man in the photos hanging on the wall inside his secret home. He had never met that man because he had never been allowed to meet that man.

Whose fault was that? Was it Mike’s fault? Or was it the fault of the guy sleeping soundly a few feet away from him?

John woke up right after Patsy left Highway 89 and began to follow a gravel road down a scrub-covered slope into a broad valley studded with bushy trees that had hardy white trunks. Massive sandstone rock formations straddled the horizon, but soon those were lost to the trees that suddenly crowded the unpaved road they traveled. They passed through a cattle fence that had been left open for them and a humble wooden sign that had something written on it John couldn’t make out. Something about something being “the answer,” but John couldn’t tell if the first word was
Atonement
or
Acceptance.

The fact that the name of whatever place this was wasn’t posted at the front gate made John both relieved and nervous at the same time. Duncan might have a harder time finding them, but just what the hell had his sister gotten them into? “Atonement is the answer”? She’d gone through a lot of phases after they moved to the desert, but organized religion hadn’t been one of them. Maybe that had changed after he left home.

There was enough sunlight to sparkle off the waters of a creek moving slowly several yards off to the right, and if John hadn’t been paying close attention, he would have missed the large ranch house that sat just off the road in the middle of a wide clearing fringed with Douglas fir trees. Patsy continued, slowing down as the trees thickened around them. Some of them looked newly planted and were struggling to survive in the parched earth. John had been to Arizona a few times, and the redness of the place always got to him; it made the desert landscape of his adolescence seem anemic by comparison.

Patsy pulled to a stop near a smaller version of the house they had just passed. Without any words of introduction for their new home, she stepped out of the truck and started down a dusty trail that cut through the trees toward a small house with thick cinderblock walls, a low, flat roof, and a line of clerestory windows running along its side walls. John was relieved to hear the steady
thrum
of central air conditioning. They stepped through the front door and found themselves inside what appeared to be a small summer-camp cabin.

Patsy advised them that she would be back in a minute. There were four bunks in all, two against each wall. At the back of the house were a small kitchenette and a bathroom. For a moment John was reminded of his barracks during boot camp; then he saw the frames hanging above each bed, went to one, and made out the words of a prayer printed in calligraphic script:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can…

“Looks like your sister thinks the best way to teach me how to kill would be for both of us to stop drinking,” Alex said. He was sitting on one of the beds with a heavy blue book on his lap. It looked like he had fished it from the drawer in the nightstand. He held it up so John could read the words
Alcoholics Anonymous.
When John didn’t laugh at this joke, Alex rose silently from the bed and headed for the bathroom. John turned to the half-open door to the house, knowing full well just who it was from Patsy’s past that would design such a place.

He walked outside, into the strengthening glare of the sun. Just up the bank of the creek was a small circle of trees with a stone bench in the center. There was a man sitting on it, a baseball cap shoved down over his head, a cigarette sending up a curl of smoke from his right hand. He didn’t move as John entered what looked like a meditation garden. Behind the bench was a statue of Jesus on a stone pedestal. Right next to John, a matching pedestal supported a statue of Buddha. There was no denying it was a beautiful spot. Just above the tree line, on the horizon, you could see the sharp-edged sandstone formations that people around here called
mountains.
They were changing color in the light of the rising sun.

Eddie Shane took a sip from his coffee, pulled a rumpled soft pack of Marlboro Reds from his shirt pocket, and extended it to John. John held up a palm. In the years since he had broken Patsy’s nose, Eddie’s watery blue eyes had slipped deeper into his face and the lines around his mouth had multiplied, as if the skin around his jaw were tightening to the degree that it might tear at any given moment.

“There’s coffee up in the house,” Eddie said, as if they had already spent the past few weeks in each other’s company. “I can run up and get you a cup. I imagine you don’t want any of the other men to see you. That’s why we put you down here. Privacy and all.”