That’s when he went out over the side of the cliff, his hand clutching some gnarly bush that poked from the dusty soil, praying there would be something soft to land on down below. Instead, surprisingly, his feet hit ground. He took one step, then another, picking up speed big-time, but was still beginning to think he’d lucked out.
Then the bush in his hand tore loose like it had never had roots in the first place and there was nothing underneath him but air. He went out into space, his breath gone, his stomach seeming to fly up through his chest, his arms and legs wind-milling.
As he fell, he cursed his father for dying intestate, cursed his impossible, quarrelsome brothers and sisters, cursed the Kingsville cop whose job was so pitifully boring he’d pulled him over for a broken taillight and stumbled accidentally onto Paco’s stash, he even cursed the member of the Lomos he’d had to cut with a converted butter knife he’d taken in trade for his old man’s watch, for if that little Chicano jerk had been any kind of thug at all, he would have gutted Paco right there on the hardball court of the Permian Basin Correctional Facility and saved him from the terrible fate of falling off a California cliffside to his death.
He was trying to think of someone else to curse when he hit the tree. He felt something snap and rip through his side with an icy pain, felt another something shoot up under his shirt and jacket, trench the flesh along his spine. A jagged point of wood shot up through his collar, took out the lapel of his new coat, glanced off his jaw. His head snapped back as hard as it had the day Chico from the iron pile decided he didn’t like some
gringo pendejo
walking around with a Mexican name, sucker punched him into another orbit.
But hey, Paco was thinking, screw Chico, screw the tree limb, screw his old man and his brothers and sisters and the horse they all rode in on, because the fact of the matter was, even if he was bleeding from several different places now, even if his side was ripped open and his jaw was kissing his own ear and his sphincter was shrunk to where he could crap through a straw, the main thing was, he was no longer falling. He realized, in fact, after he’d finally mustered the courage to open his eyes, that he was hanging like a scarecrow in the clutches of a tree, a tree that itself had defied gravity to grow nearly sideways out of the sheer cliff.
Beneath him, another thirty feet or so, was the backyard of an expensive house, a spacious area laid out in what seemed to be Japanese gardens, with a sizable grotto pool where great red fish lazed in the soft glow of hidden lights. He looked up, to the lip of the cliff where the limo sat, and saw that he couldn’t have fallen more than twenty feet. It seemed to have happened years ago.
He saw the cruiser then, sliding to a stop on the graveled shoulder. Saw its passenger door fly open, heard the whine of its big cop engine dying down. He saw a cop approaching the limo, a flashlight beam dancing in his hand. Saw another beam from the other side of the limo, knew there was another cop over there somewhere.
There were voices, and muffled replies from inside the limo. Then, drifting down clearly on the sinking canyon breeze, “Open a door.”
Open a door
. What a weird way to put it, Paco was thinking, until he realized that the cop had some strange kind of accent.
Again the command, “Open a door.” Then the sound of that very thing happening. A pause.
“Officer…” Mendanian’s voice, commanding exactly nothing. “Hey, what is this…?”
And then, the terrific explosion. The sound of shattering glass and steel. The biting stink of powder drifting down to him.
Shotgun
, he found himself thinking.
It took Paco a moment to understand, but when he realized what it was, what it had to be—it wasn’t really cops up there at all—a fear swept him that made his tumble through the void seem something only good and true.
He heard the woman’s screams, the sounds of footsteps running through gravel. More explosions. And the screaming stopped.
“…where is driver?” Paco heard. Same voice, same accent. Paco was trying desperately to untangle himself from his ruined coat, now.
A second voice, this one in an Oriental language, someone shouting back to the other phony cop. The new voice much clearer, the guy probably right at the top of the cliff now, having figured out just what Paco had—only one way off this island, Dan-O.
Paco yanked wildly at his coat sleeve, felt the fabric give way, felt himself swing away from the limb that had nearly taken his head off. He was dangling by one arm now, some zoo monkey who’d escaped but lost his way.
He squinted when the flashlight beam swept across his face, tried to shield himself with his free hand.
His grip was slipping now, some kind of oddball California tree bark peeling away beneath his fingers. One way or another, this would not take long. He imagined the big red fish down there, gazing up, their mouths popping open and closed, fins flapping them nowhere, unfazed and simply waiting.
“There,” he heard a voice above him say. “In tree. In goddamn tree.” Then the roar of the shotgun. Paco felt a stinging here and there, but nothing fatal yet. Then the blast of another weapon, maybe a handgun, but no pain, these guys apparently unequipped for anything that wasn’t short-range.
Come on, hurry up, get lucky
, Paco was thinking. Some guy as dumb as Chico from the joint up there, doesn’t know what to do when the script changes. Then he heard another crack, realized that this time it was the sound of wood shattering…and finally, he felt a kind of relief, flying, going down to meet the great red fish.
“God in heaven,” Janice was saying. She shook her head at something she was reading in the paper. “It happens everywhere, doesn’t it.”
Deal heard, but hadn’t heard, not really. His mind was out there over the vast plain of sawgrass, twisting and turning lazily with a squadron of November buzzards riding the rising currents.
This was why Florida had been invented, he’d been thinking. A cold front had swept down the state earlier in the week, pushing a stubborn winter heat wave well out into the Caribbean, leaving behind bright skies and air that made you want to weep with gratitude.
Something had awakened him early that morning, some signal from the gods, that’s how he saw it. Up before the sun, before Janice had even stirred, banging around the kitchen, brewing a pot of coffee thick enough to spoon into the Thermos, laying out a phalanx of his special avocado and tomato sandwiches, sourdough bread on the bottom, slabs of hand-cut whole wheat on top, lemon pepper and a drizzle of vinaigrette dressing for Janice, Captain Rick’s Caesar for himself, then fruit yogurt, juice bottle, and any number of snack things for their daughter Isabel, all of it packed and their bikes loaded into the back of the pickup they called Big Red, and the sun still just a hint at the horizon.
Janice had been grumpy at first, but was finally game—it was an annual trek, after all, their first foray into the Everglades with the mosquitoes gone into hibernation and the park empty, the crowds of snowbirds still massing up North, shining their Winnebagos and white shoes and dreaming of a paved spot in the Florida sunshine.
The tradition had begun when they were courting, a dozen years ago, two rent bikes tethered to the trunk of his car, and a bottle of wine, out the Tamiami Trail past the dikes and the last tendrils of urban sprawl to the shuttered visitors’ center at Shark Valley, over the chained barricades with the bikes to the loop road, and a seventeen-mile circle through corridors of sawgrass and hammock. They had ridden past alligators, raccoons, ibis, and anhingas, all the creatures still too stunned with the rhythms of a solitary summer to pay much notice to a single pair of humans cruising through.
That first trip they’d found the observation tower at the halfway point closed, but Deal had jimmied the door to the stairwell with the awl point on his Swiss Army knife. They drank the wine on this same shaded stairwell landing and made love there, their first time, while the sun sank steadily and the air grew cool, almost as cool as the air on this day, and had to ride the bikes back flat-out in the gathering dusk, dodging the rousing gators all the way.
That’s where his mind had been on this day, twelve years later, while Janice lounged in a sunny spot on the landing, reading the copy of the
Times
they’d picked up from a box in a strip mall on the way. Isabel, no early riser, even at three, had stayed at home after all, watched over by Mrs. Suarez, their neighbor. “Let her sleep, Deal,” Janice had said. “Let’s do this, just you and me.”
And now they
were
doing it: Deal was sitting with his legs dangling in space, his arms hooked over a part of the stair railing, his chin resting on the cool metal. He lay his cheek on the rail and watched her as she read, her brow furrowed, her head still shaking in consternation. He thought that she hadn’t changed much in the intervening years, not in physical ways, at least. She was a little leaner maybe, her hair shorter, with a fleck of gray here and there; if anything, her soft, pleasant features had acquired an underlying edge, a character that only intensified her beauty.
Here is a woman who might be great-looking but has never let it get in her way
, he thought. He was still a bit in awe of that.
And in awe of what she’d overcome. Two years since the fire that had destroyed their home and nearly claimed her life. Two years of painful surgery to soften the scars and restore the flesh the flames had stolen from her. It made his own skin feel taut and fiery just to think about it. And yet, looking at her now, it seemed almost as if it hadn’t happened. There were places below the line of her jaw where the grafts below showed lighter, some telltale scarring if you were looking for it, but makeup could very nearly erase those traces. It was, in fact, a miracle.
“You remember the first time we came here?” he said.
She looked up from the paper, her eyes seemingly unfocused. “What?”
“The first time we were here,” he said. “I was just thinking about that.”
She stared at him, her gaze coming into focus. It was as if he could see her thoughts rearranging themselves, leaving whatever had held her in the paper and moving to a consideration of him.
“You always think about
that
,” she said.
He wasn’t sure if she was joking. “Not just the sex,” he said, trying to protest. “I was thinking about all of it, what a great place this is. In fact,” he added, “I think we probably owe our relationship to the fact we started out, more or less, I mean, right here, right in the middle of all this. Just look at it. It
looks
like a place for beginnings, right?”
He swung his arm enthusiastically out into space, over the vast expanse of sawgrass below, where a breeze they hadn’t felt cut a sinuous pattern of waving green off toward the horizon. It was as if a huge, invisible hand were smoothing the nap on a giant rug.
She gave him an odd stare. “That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”
He nodded, a little deflated. That was Janice, all right. You couldn’t count on her to lock up with your own train of thought. She was probably still thinking about whatever it was she’d been reading about, was only giving him the appearance of her attention, even now.
That was something she’d been better about, though, especially since Isabel had come along, being
here
, in the world. In their first years together, there were times when she would drift away so completely, become so self-contained, that he worried she would never come back. More properly, he worried that she would not need him in the same way he needed her.
But that was silly, she assured him. She did need him, he had no idea how much. “You come from one of those touchy-feely Walton kind of families, Deal,” that’s what she told him once, laughing. “Popcorn on the Christmas tree, everybody kissing under the mistletoe, all that. My mother’s idea of affection was a handshake.” She claimed never to have seen her parents kiss, could not fathom the very intercourse that had brought her into existence. “I guess they tried it at least once,” she’d said, shaking her head. “But they couldn’t have enjoyed it much.”
Janice herself had no such reservations, though. They’d both been oozing blood from their concrete-raw knees and elbows the night of their first ride back through the Everglades, and that aspect of their relationship had never cooled. Still, there had been times, even after the most stunning, exhausting sex, when he’d sensed her slipping away, drifting off to that place where he could never go, even though he’d hold her as tightly as he could.
Although he assumed the episodes had something to do with growing up in such a frigid household, Deal had no way of knowing how accurately Janice had described her parents’ shortcomings. Long before he’d met her, they’d both died, killed in an automobile accident, a head-on collision with a tractor-trailer on an icy Ohio two-lane while Janice was away at college. And that was reason enough, he had long ago decided, to allow her those moods, to try to understand them, and most important, to not be threatened by them.
Given what they’d been through the past few years, she was entitled. And, he told himself, they were tiny blips, more a reflection of his own insecurities than anything else. He had a beautiful wife. Their life together was good. They could talk about things that mattered. They had a lovely child. DealCo, his contracting business, was finally on solid ground again. He had a lot to be thankful for.
She was staring out toward the horizon now, her face drawn in thought. He felt a flood of warmth wash over him, a mixture of desire and gratitude. He found himself thinking of their first visit again, felt a sudden wave of arousal. Maybe Janice was right. Maybe he
was
always thinking of that. Still, nothing wrong with the way he was feeling, was there? Perfectly innocent. Not what had been on his mind when he was getting ready for this trip. He’d been the one willing to wake Isabel, after all.
“What were you reading?” he asked. He could be patient. They could have conversation. Just be together. And be patient. See what happens.
“What?” she said, turning to him. Her eyes blinked again, refocusing, coming back. She glanced at the paper, which ruffled in a momentary updraft, then waved, as if to dismiss the memory. “Just another killing,” she said, wearily. “A man and his wife shot in their car.”
“Here?” Deal said. It was a fact of life now. Murder in paradise, a wrap-up of the prior day’s slaughter part of every breakfast newscast. Tourists blown away on the interstate, 7-Eleven clerks macheted to pieces at the till, cops picked off by snipers passed over for promotion at the post office. He wondered what South Florida atrocity had been remarkable enough for the
New York Times
to pick up on.
She shook her head. “In Los Angeles,” she said. “The man was a movie producer and his wife was an actress.” She glanced away, again, shaking her head. “It happened on Mulholland Drive.” Her voice had grown faint, almost pained.
Deal looked over at the paper, curious. “Did you know these people?”
“No,” she shook her head. “But I was on Mulholland Drive once,” she said. He saw a tear break from the corner of her eye, slide down her cheek. There was a tiny scar there, near her chin, nothing anyone else would have noticed, only enough to shift the course of the tear a fraction. She gestured out at the scene before them. “It
is
pretty here, Deal. That’s what got me thinking. And that was the prettiest place too…” Her voice was faltering.
“Janice…,” he said, reaching out for her.
Not again
, he was thinking.
Not now
…
She turned to him, held her hand up, turned her head, a gesture that said
stay back
. A chill swept over him. It was a stranger’s expression on her face, come over her in an instant. Even her posture, the cant of her body, seemed wrong. Flashes of a dozen bad science fiction films ran behind his eyes: “
She looks like my wife, but she isn’t. She isn’t
!”
“I can’t do this any longer, Deal,” her voice strangled. “I’m sick of pretending.”
“Do what?” He reached for her again, but she lurched back, toward the railing, which looked suddenly very frail to him. “What’s wrong, Janice?”
“This is not your fault, Deal,” she said, her eyes jittery. She took a breath, gathering herself, avoiding his gaze now. “You’ve tried. I know you want me to think that I’m still attractive…”
He stared at her, felt his mouth working dumbly. “Stop fooling around.” She backed farther away at the sharp tone of his voice, and he stopped, then began again. A knot of pain had formed in his chest. “You
are
attractive. You’re goddamned gorgeous…”
“Don’t lie to me, Deal. We’ve always been honest with one another.” She ran her hands along the line of her jaw, tracing the thin scars, then abruptly clenched her fists, pulling back her shoulder-length hair. “You can’t deny this.” She swung her head to one side, then the other, like some petulant child. The tissue of both ears was still gnarled, much of it angry red, but that was normal. The process of reconstruction was nearly complete. Another operation, possibly two. And meantime, with her hair worn down, who would even see what scarring remained?
He felt stunned, even nauseous, with helplessness. At the time of the accident, the doctors had cautioned him that burn victims often experienced bouts of depression over the course of reconstructive surgery, but Janice had seemed immune. She’d weathered the worst times without a whisper of complaint. And suddenly, now that she was, by anyone’s measure, nearly back to her old self again, she was suddenly falling apart, disintegrating, before his eyes.
“Janice, I know it’s been tough on you, but you’re fine. You look wonderful…”
Her scream cut him off. Froze him. Her eyes clenched tight, the tendons jumping from her neck. She threw back her head and screamed until her breath gave out. The sound echoed off the steel and concrete, splintered the pristine silence about them, worse than any sonic boom or airboat engine could have. A flock of ibis who’d been foraging in a soggy meadow at the foot of the tower rose and soared away, their wings slapping the air a dozen feet from where Deal sat, as stunned as Lot looking at his wife.
Finally, she opened her eyes, took a breath, turned toward him. “Don’t
ever
,” she said abruptly as the sounds died away. “Don’t
ever
say that again.” Her voice had regained that same desperate note. She’d drawn her legs up under her body, staring at him warily, as if she were ready to spring backward, out into space.
Deal locked his gaze with hers and nodded. “All right,” he said, forcing his voice to sound calm, the apotheosis of reason. “I won’t. I promise.”
She seemed to relent then, sagging as if all her energy were suddenly spent. He leaned forward, caught his arms about her shoulders, pulled her close, away from the landing’s edge.
“Janice,” he said. She was sobbing now, her body shuddering as she gasped for air. He had one arm locked about her shoulders, pulling her steadily from the edge, using his free hand to stroke her hair. Far out of the Everglades, the buzzards were still soaring, and the ibis had fluttered down to another, quieter meadow. He held his lips to her forehead and rocked her in his arms. “Dear Janice.” Where would they go from here?