The Long Fall
Authors: Lynn Kostoff
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Criminals, #Brothers, #Electronic Books, #Sibling Rivalry, #Ex-Convicts, #Phoenix (Ariz.)
LONG
FALL
This is for Lewis and Janet Kostoff. With thanks to Melanie and Jeremy Kostoff, Marian Young and Tom Pearson, and Otto Penzler.
G
ut-shot, in the middle of his third death of the day, Jimmy Coates starts thinking about Nicole Braddock and the way her breasts torpedoed his chest when they were slow dancing at the Ocotillo Lounge the night before.
Jimmy had been camped out on a bar stool nursing a watery draft and trying to flesh out the scrawny hope that he could find a quick fix for what he owed Ray Harp before Ray went Darwinian in his collection practices. Then Nicole and six of her friends stepped through the door, a cadre of ASU students out slumming, over from Tempe for some midtown local color.
Jimmy hadn’t paid much attention to them until a Tom-and-Jerry duo, sporting some thrift-store chic and working on their attitudes bummed a Marlboro and a light from him. They got to talking, and Jimmy let it be known that he’d paid his debt to society, and seeing the chance to raise their social deviance quotient a few points by hanging out with an ex-con, they invited Jimmy over to their table and began buying him drinks. No objection there, Jimmy switching from house drafts to tequila shooters and sunrises and giving them the standard gloss on life in the east wing of the Arizona State Prison Complex at Perryville.
Wanting to keep the drinks coming, Jimmy bulked up his story line, slapping on a little muscle and sinew to his original beef by borrowing another con’s jacket, a mean little snake housed two cells down from him named Vince Treifoil, who was overly fond of entering banks and business establishments with firearms.
In actuality, Jimmy’s last crime spree had unfolded and folded pretty much without a middle, no real second act to speak of. What sent him up was a black-market deal he’d worked out with a landscaping company to deliver an illegal tractor-trailer load of state-park-protected saguaro cacti to a new resort complex being built north of Sun City. After getting busted by the Staties for burnt-out brake lights, Jimmy unluckily caught a friend-of-the-earth judge who went on to hit him with twenty-four months, one for each of the saguaro in the bay of the tractor trailer.
At some point Tom or Jerry began feeding the juke, and eventually Jimmy found himself slow dancing with one Nicole Brad-dock, dark-haired and olive-skinned, the shapely daughter of a BMW dealer in Palm Springs and who was an absolute dead ringer for Jimmy’s high school sweetheart, Jean Page—the same hair, eyes, mouth, skin—and in his arms Nicole felt like the stamp to his envelope, her head on his shoulder, Jimmy taking in the smell of her hair as they moved, Jimmy remembering all the make-out sessions with Jean, both of them seventeen, the universe running under their skin, and every necessary truth found in tongues and fingers and the sweet ache of breath, Jimmy dancing with a COD boner, and Nicole right there, not leaning away from it, Jimmy whispering in her ear, the music pouring around them, Jimmy not hearing the bass notes, only the melody line, and with Nicole pressed tight against him, Jimmy could conveniently ignore the arithmetic of passion, the very real fact obliterated by the false dawn of six rounds of tequila sunrises that the twenty-year-old girl in his arms could technically have been his daughter if Jean had run off and married him like he had asked her to instead of going along with her mom and old man’s plans for her, Jimmy following the music instead, matching his moves to Nicole’s, Jimmy leaning over and putting his lips on her neck, lightly kissing her hair, tasting perfume and the warmth of her skin, Jimmy whispering that it was a beautiful night for a ride in the desert, they could catch some stars, Cassiopeia on the rise and a new moon out there, just the two of them, Nicole shuddering under his touch and Jimmy closing his eyes, it taking him longer than it should have to realize the shudder came from her trying to stop laughing, because that’s what she was doing, laughing, even while she kept her breasts pressed against him, she was laughing, Jimmy lifting his head and looking over at the table at her friends, all of them toasting Jimmy and Nicole and laughing, too, and that’s when Nicole did it, put her hand gently on his cheek and in a low breathy voice told him that he was the genuine article, a true anachronism, one a girl like her found hard to resist, Nicole keeping her eyes locked on his, letting that little purr run loose behind her words, and Jimmy could see how much she was enjoying herself, how certain she was that someone like him wouldn’t know what an anachronism was, the college girl toying with and putting one of the local yokels in his place, the whole thing a big joke, and Jimmy got pissed, leaned in and whispered, “This is your Local Color Station with a late-breaking bulletin. One day, honey-pie, you’re going to wake up and discover those firm Tahitis you’re now so proud of are sagging and chasing your navel, and you’re going to panic and look around for that young Republican you married, but he’s going to be on the seventeenth hole of the Scottsdale Country Club wielding his nine iron and working on his second coronary, and right then, when you’re absolutely alone and up against it, you’re going to remember this dance. It’s going to ghost your bones.” Jimmy kissed her cheek, then stepped back and walked out.
Now, though, Jimmy needs to get back to the business of dying. He’s gut-shot and staggering in wide sloppy circles, waving his pistol, choking on each breath as he careens out of the saloon and into the wide dusty street, where he takes one in the shoulder and another in the chest and checks out under the hot eye of the noon sun.
When he gets up, he’s dizzy, unable to focus for a moment on the wall of faces surrounding him until one swims into view, a red-haired kid with a small, sharp chin and green eyes. The kid leans down and starts waving a program in Jimmy’s face.
Four hours later Jimmy’s in the employee locker room rummaging through his pockets for some change. He hits the vending machine for a soda and catches a shot of himself in the mirror.
He looks like a fucking idiot. Black. Everything black. Cowboy hat, shirt, jeans, holster, boots. Black. Like someone’s shadow or a charred tree trunk.
Six times a day he has to die. That’s the way it is at Big and Bigger Jones’s Old Wild West Park. Three showdowns and three shoot-outs per shift. The routines don’t vary. As a bad guy, Jimmy makes the same dumb-ass moves in each show, the same ill-timed mistakes, growls out the same dying line when he’s gunned down by the forces of frontier justice.
The all-black, though, that chafes Jimmy where he lives. He’s sweating off three, four pounds a day and chewing up handfuls of salt tablets in the name of what? Realism? He can’t believe any outlaw would be stupid enough to dress entirely in black and go out robbing stagecoaches and banks in temperatures over one hundred degrees.
The Native Americans are the ones with the sweet deal as far as Jimmy’s concerned. The Jones brothers hired a passle of Pimas, Papagos, and Maricopas off the reservations, and all they had to do most of the day was walk around looking noble and tragic and man a few of the consession stands and restock the souvenir outposts. Best of all, they got to wear a loincloth and didn’t have to worry about their nuts feeling like they’d been crammed in a toaster set on high an hour after they’d punched in.
Jimmy shakes his head and slots a quarter into the pay phone, and when Ray Harp picks up, Jimmy starts floating promises, saying he knows he’s a little late, but a couple days, that’s all he needs.
Ray doesn’t say anything.
“Two days,” Jimmy repeats.
Ray says, “It’s not like you’re going to get a monthly statement, Jimmy. I’m not MasterCard. It doesn’t work that way. You know that.”
A couple days, Jimmy promises, just until the payroll office at the Old Wild West cuts him his first paycheck. “It’s yours, Ray, the whole thing. I’ll drop it off same day.”
More silence.
“Look,” Jimmy says. “The first check’s yours, okay? I’m working my ass off here, dying six times a day for it.”
“I can fix it, Jimmy, so you only have to do it once.” A second later, Ray hangs up.
Jimmy heads back to his locker and starts undressing. He’s still sweating. He digs out more change, and with his shirt flapping around him, goes over to the vending machine and guzzles another soda. The carbonation leaves his throat feeling scoured and the inside of his nose burning.
He’s catching little whiffs of himself, and the picture isn’t pretty. His pores are leaking the residue of last night’s tequila follies and the equivalent of fast-food carbon dating for the half life of Big Macs and the Colonel’s Extra Crispy. Everything’s kicked up a metabolic notch from a small hit of speed he took after noon to help him get through his last three deaths.
Russ Crawford, the general manager, walks over to Jimmy’s locker and says, “They want to see you upstairs.”
Jimmy shakes his head. “I’ve already punched out. And I need a shower. I’ll stop on my way out.”
“Upstairs,” Crawford says. “As in five minutes ago.”
Crawford’s in his early forties and reminds Jimmy of a squirrel. The guy’s head is way too small for the rest of him. Wearing chaps and a cowboy hat doesn’t help matters much either.
“Hey, Russ,” Jimmy says. “Let me ask you something. You know what an anachronism is?”
Russ waves the question away. “I don’t want to talk about spiders. I got a job to do.”
Jimmy’s been doing an informal survey all day. So far he’s been told an anachronism is the brand name for a new line of racing tires, a flower, a street in Glendale, a rock band, and an over-the-counter antibiotic cream for yeast infections.
Jimmy knocks his locker shut and heads for the stairs, pausing along the way to grab another soda, which he polishes off while he hurriedly rebuttons his shirt one-handed. The back of his neck is tightening up, and one of his black cowboy boots has begun to squeak.
The receptionist in the main office is wearing a short buckskin dress and pale pink lipstick. Her hair’s a light brown and French-braided. She has a long, elegantly tapered neck that would give Dracula the squirts just looking at it. Jimmy’s trying to figure out if she’s wearing a bra when she tells him the Jones brothers are expecting him.
Her body language is difficult to get a read on until Jimmy finally figures out she’s trying to stay upwind of him.
“Hard day on the range,” he says, topping it off with a light shrug. The follow-up smile, a killer he’s practiced and perfected, is lost on her when she swivels in her chair and goes back to her computer. On the screen is a video poker game. A full house is showing.