Close to the Bone (20 page)

“Paul Cizek is alive, and that’s another secret you can’t share.”

“Let’s talk about fishing.”

“He’s your client,” said Charlie. “So you can’t tell his wife, and you can’t tell his law firm, and you can’t tell me.”

“We should try to get to the Farmington this weekend,” I said. “Or maybe head out to the Deerfield. We haven’t been trout fishing all spring.”

Charlie smiled and nodded. “Sunday. Let’s do it.”

“We’ll talk baseball and mayflies. I’ve got some woman problems I’d like to tell you about. We’ll play blues tapes in the car. All professional subjects strictly verboten.”

“Agreed,” he said. “On Sunday we’ll avoid sensitive legal topics. But—”

He looked up as Ellie delivered our lunches. After she left, he took a bite of his cannelloni, smiled, and mumbled, “Mmm.”

I speared an anchovy from my antipasto. “Can we change the subject?”

“I’d sure love to know why Eddie Vaccaro wants to see Paul Cizek,” he said.

“I think it’s a moot question.”

“Why? If Cizek’s alive—”

“I didn’t say he was alive.”

Charlie took another mouthful of cannelloni. “A week or so ago,” he mumbled, “we arrested a guy at Logan Airport because he had a homemade bomb in his carry-on luggage. Crude thing. Couple sticks of dynamite, wires, battery. Probably wouldn’t have even worked. Still, a terrorist is a terrorist. Big federal offense, of course, taking bombs onto airplanes. We read him his rights, and he refused counsel. Turns out he works in a bookstore in Salem. Bachelor. Lifelong Republican. A deacon in the Episcopal church.”

“Classic terrorist profile,” I said.

He smiled. “I talked to him. He didn’t seem to understand that he’d done anything wrong. Claimed he had no intention of detonating it, or using it as a threat to hijack the plane, or anything like that. Said he just felt better having it with him. I said, ‘How could having a bomb on an airplane make you feel better?’ He said he hated to fly. He had this terrible phobia that a terrorist would blow up the plane. I said, ‘If you’re so afraid of bombs, how come you tried to bring one aboard?’ And this guy looks at me with these innocent, puppy-dog eyes and tells me, he says, ‘I called up the airlines and I asked them what were the odds of there being a bomb on the plane. About a million to one, they said. So I thought about that,’ he says, ‘and then I asked what the odds were of there being two bombs on the same plane. Infinite, was the answer. There’d simply never be two separate bombs on the same plane. It wouldn’t happen.’ ”

“Charlie, wait a minute,” I said.

He lifted his hand. “Listen. The guy is looking at me. ‘Now do you see?’ he says. And I admit that I don’t. So he says, ‘It’s simple. If
I
bring a bomb aboard, I’m safe.’ ” He spread his palms and grinned.

“That’s a pretty funny story,” I said. “What’s your point?”

“Does there have to be a point?”

“There usually is,” I said. “So what’re you trying to tell me?”

Charlie shrugged.

“If you think too much, you twist simple things around until they seem complicated. Is that it?”

“That would work,” he said.

“I’m not going to tell you what Eddie Vaccaro and I talked about.”

“I know. You already said that.”

“Justice may be simple to you,” I said.

“Basically, it is simple. It’s making sure that people who commit crimes are punished.”

“No,” I said, “it’s much more complicated than that.”

“Lawyers are the ones who make it complicated. The law is simple.”

“So why don’t you just talk to Vaccaro?” I said. “Ask him what we talked about? It seems to me that would be the simple thing to do.”

“Yeah,” said Charlie. “We’d like to.”

“So…?”

“But last night our guys lost him.”

“He gave them the slip?”

Charlie nodded.

“Well,” I said, “here’s something I can tell you. I don’t know where he is.”

“Yeah, but Paul Cizek might know.”

“I can’t help you there,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Yeah,” said Charlie. “Me, too.”

C
HARLIE AND I AGREED
to meet in the parking lot of the Papa-Razzi restaurant on Route 2 in Concord at seven on Sunday morning. We still called it “the place where the Howard Johnson’s used to be,” although the old Hojo’s with the orange tile roof had been gone for several years. We’d leave my car there and take Charlie’s four-wheel-drive van, and we’d be on the banks of the Deerfield River by nine. In June there are insects on the water, and trout feeding on them, all day long. Sulfur-colored mayflies, tan caddisflies, a few stoneflies. We’d fish till dark. We’d make a day of it.

We would discuss no business. When Charlie and I played golf we sometimes discussed cases or clients or judges or legal theory. But we had agreed a long time ago that trout fishing is too important, and requires too much concentration, to corrupt with business conversation.

When I got back to my apartment that Friday evening, I heated a can of beans and ate them directly from the pot at the kitchen table while I flipped through the current issue of
American Angler.
Then I wandered around the place, assembling my trout-fishing gear. We weren’t going until Sunday, but I wanted to have it all ready. It took me a couple of hours to find everything and to decide what to bring with me and to pile it all neatly beside the door.

Then I sprawled on the sofa and turned on the television. My old black-and-white Hitachi gets only five channels, two with considerable fuzziness, and on this Friday evening in the middle of June I found three sitcoms, an old John Wayne movie, and, on Channel 2, a show on home repair. I left it on Channel 2. A man in a beard was demonstrating the art of laying hardwood floors.

Even when I lived in a suburban house with Gloria and my two young sons, I had never contemplated laying a hardwood floor.

I was, of course, trying very hard not to think about Alex, and the fact that she wasn’t with me, and that this was the first Friday evening in almost a year that we hadn’t been together, and that I was facing the first weekend in that amount of time without her.

Trying not to think about her, of course, didn’t work. I might as well have hung a big sign on the wall that said:
DON’T THINK ABOUT ALEX.

I held out until a little past ten. Then I switched off the TV, poured two fingers of Rebel Yell over some ice cubes, lit a cigarette, took a deep breath, and called her.

She answered on the first ring with a cautious “Hello?”

“It’s me.”

“Oh, geez,” she said. “I was going to call you.”

“You were?”

“It’s Friday. You’re there and I’m here. It doesn’t feel right.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

“I was screwing up my courage,” she said.

“If I’d known that, I’d have waited. I was very nervous, calling you.”

“Nervous?”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t want to talk to me,” I said.

“Oh, Brady…”

“You know what I think?” I said after a moment.

“I wish I did,” she said softly.

“I think that not seeing you is confusing me. It’s not helping me to clarify things. Not seeing you makes me feel as if the only important thing is being with you, that nothing in my life matters except that. It makes me want to just chuck it all and go to Maine with you. It makes me want to ignore all the other variables. Not seeing you makes this big hole in me where you belong, and it hurts, and it needs filling, and the simplest thing would be just to go with you. Except it’s not simple.”

“I know,” she said.

“I could think more clearly if that hole weren’t there.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yes.”

“I do want you with me, you know.”

“Sure,” I said. “I know that.”

“You have talked a lot about changing your life. You know, the Montana dream. Simplifying. Focusing on important things.”

“I have talked about those things, I know.”

“I think you’ve been serious about it.”

“I think I have, too. But I’m not sure. I’ve got to figure it out.”

“My moving is forcing you to do that.”

“If you weren’t moving,” I said, “I might never do anything. I might just glide along the same way, year after year, until I was too old to do anything. It’s good that you’re moving. It’s forcing me to think.”

“Well,” she said, “do you think you’d like to have company?”

“Now?”

“Is it too late?”

“Hell, no.”

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

Her cheek rested on my shoulder and her fingers played on my chest. Her bare leg pressed against mine. I stroked her hair in the dark.

“If I kissed you ever so gently,” she whispered, “you wouldn’t think I was trying to manipulate you or influence any decisions you had to make, would you?”

“No. That would be small-minded and foolish of me.”

I felt her mouth move on me.

“Or,” she murmured, “if I touched you—there, like that—you wouldn’t misconstrue my motives?”

“No. Definitely not.”

“Or—mmm—if I did this…?”

“Jesus, no, Alex. Of course not.”

When I woke up, Alex was gone, and the hole in my stomach had returned. She had brewed a pot of coffee, and a note was propped against it. It read: “Call me. A. XXOO.”

Alex worked on Saturdays. She got up at seven, while I was still asleep, showered, and slipped out without waking me up. She spent all day Saturday in her little cubicle at the
Globe,
hunched over her word processor, polishing her Sunday feature. Every Saturday.

Come September, she wouldn’t be doing that anymore.

Eight or nine more Saturdays. Then things would change.

Around noon I called the Falconer house in Lincoln and found Roger at home. Glen’s condition had deteriorated. He’d been unconscious for nearly a week. There had been some encouraging signs on Thursday. He’d moved one hand and mumbled. Then his coma had deepened. Now there were indications of kidney distress. I asked if there was anything I could do. No, Roger said. There didn’t appear to be anything anyone could do. Brenda was there. She was a comfort, he said.

As far as he knew, the Concord police had made no progress in finding the hit-and-run driver, Roger said. They’d promised to tell him if and when they did.

I called Alex at one, when, I knew, she generally took a break. Her recording invited me to deposit a message in her voice mailbox.

“It is I,” I said. “If you’re—”

“Mmm,” her unrecorded voice mumbled. “H’lo.”

“Pastrami on rye?”

“Corned beef on wheat, actually,” she said. “With a big fat dill pickle.”

“How’s tonight?”

“Sure. Let’s go out and celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” I said.

“Independence Day.”

“That’s not for another week.”

“Our independence, I mean.”

“Independence from what?”

“Convention. Expectation. The humdrum and the mundane. The slings and the arrows. The tumult and the shouting. The agony and the ecstasy.”

“Oh,” I said. “That stuff.”

We ate in one of the upstairs dining rooms at the Union Oyster House. We had Bloody Marys and Alex ordered baked finnan haddie and I had oyster stew, all in the two-hundred-year-old tradition of the Oyster House.

I wanted to tell her all about Glen Falconer’s bicycle accident and my visit from Eddie Vaccaro and my confrontation with Thomas Gall. A lot had happened in the week we’d been apart. I wanted to brag about how I’d tracked down Paul Cizek, and how I’d found him emulating Thoreau on a little New Hampshire pond, trying to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts, to suck out all the marrow of life, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms.

I also wanted Alex to know that I didn’t envy Paul. Beneath his brave talk of simplicity, I sensed that he had not really escaped the quiet desperation that had sent him fleeing in the first place.

I couldn’t tell Alex about Paul Cizek, of course. She was a reporter, and I was a lawyer bound by law and ethic to protect my client’s secrets. Anyway, if we’d talked about Paul, we’d have ended up talking about me, and my own quiet desperation, and how a little post-and-beam home on a dirt road in Maine could work the same as a cabin on a pond.

Simplify, simplify.

Sure. Easier said than done.

Sunday morning at six o’clock it was my turn to slip out of bed while Alex was still sleeping, brew a pot of coffee, and prop a note against it. “Love you,” it said unoriginally. I added several
X
’s and
O
’s.

It was a glorious Sunday in June, and Charlie and I fished from a little after nine in the morning until dark, and all the way to the Deerfield and back, and during our frequent time-outs, when we sat on streamside boulders to listen to the river and watch the trout feed on insects, we did not once violate our sacred agreement to avoid all topics relating to the business of the law.

We fooled some trout, and some trout fooled us. Neither of us fell in. A perfect day of fishing. We stopped for burgers and beer at a roadside pub in Charlemont.

During the long ride home in the dark I talked about Alex, how she was moving to Maine at the end of the summer, and how I was afraid I’d lose her, and how tempting it was to go with her.

All Charlie said was “Change is hard, Brady. Either way, it’s hard.”

I dropped him at his car in Concord and it was nearly midnight when I pulled into the parking garage under my building.

I sat behind the wheel for a moment. It was late and I was tired, that healthy fatigue that comes from a long day of wading in a cold river and fly casting in the sunshine and fresh air. The yellow fluorescent lights of the garage cast odd shadows on the concrete pillars and the rows of parked vehicles, and through the half-opened car window I heard the soft echoes of water dripping somewhere.

I sighed, got out of the car, retrieved my fishing gear from the backseat, and headed for the elevator. I was reaching to push the button when I felt something hard ram into the back of my neck.

“Don’t turn around,” came a raspy voice I didn’t recognize from behind me.

“You got it,” I said.

“Drop your stuff.”