Jumper 1 - Jumper (26 page)

Several pieces of paper, crumpled into small balls of paper, were strewn across the desk. Each of them had two or three lines written on them before I discarded them. Try as I might, I wasn't able to write an answer that felt right. I swept them from the desk and into the trash can.

I considered going to her, but I was afraid to. I didn't really want to see anybody.

Earlier that day, before I picked up Millie's letter, I'd found a ledge facing south, in the depths of El Solitario. I jumped there. It was more cave than ledge, a broad shelf heavily overhung with rock, two hundred feet up a sheer rock face. It was another fifty feet to the ridgeline above and only a technical climber or a teleport could reach it.

It was thirty feet deep and relatively flat. I paced forward and stood at the edge, dry puffs of wind pulling at my shirt. I was feeling careless, apathetic. The drop would be more than enough to kill me, if I reached the bottom. The sun was almost down and there were clouds made flame and billowing orange by its rays. The rock shelf projecting above stuck out even farther than the ledge, solid, palpably heavy.

It was like the mouth of a giant, mouth poised open, massive molars ready to drop, to chew the life from me.

I liked it.

That night I started moving materials from a lumberyard in Yonkers, the one I'd dealt with before. There was a guard but he stayed near the front door and depended on the alarms. I only took mortar and some concrete dyes plus a mixing trough, trowels, and some chalk lines to mark out the walls.

The do-it-yourself book on masonry told me that working with natural stone was hard, and that projects that used ordinary brick were best to start with. I ignored that part and read the rest of the book carefully.

It was cold on the ledge at night, and I settled for leaving the materials stacked at the back, out of sight of anyone but passing buzzards.

Back at the cabin, I stared again at Millie's letter. I was still confused, still angry, furiously angry, but I knew enough, now, to know that she wasn't the cause. I penned a short note.

Dear Millie,

I'm sorry. There is too much pain right now for me to be rational. What you said about caring and being hurt makes sense. If I didn't care for Mom, her death wouldn't hurt. If I didn't care for you, your rejection wouldn't hurt.

I won't be writing until I can get a better handle on things, but I'll be back. I hope that you find more good than bad in that fact. I can't give up on you without giving up on myself.

I love you,

Davy

There is an abandonment, an escape, that physical labor bestows.

I took my rocks from the scree at the bottom of the cliff. This was rock of the same color and texture, broken off and tumbled down by weather and time.

The mortar was hard to dye and I wasted a couple of batches before I got the proportions right. Part of the problem was that the color of the mortar was darker wet than after it had dried. I started the wall ten feet back from the edge, at the deeper end of the ledge, and I ran it forty feet long, about half the length of the ledge.

By midafternoon my back was sore and my arms ached, but I had a wall knee-high along my ledge. I left a gap at the open end of the ledge for a doorway, but the other end butted up against the rock face. Where the mortar on the bottom rows had dried, it was hard, even from ten feet away, to tell where the cliff rock stopped and the wall began. From across the canyon, on the next ridgeline, it was impossible.

I went swimming in the box canyon oasis for ten minutes, then came back and continued working on the wall until sunset.

At night, I raided the lumberyard in Yonkers again, this time taking prehung, double-paned windows and frames, a prehung exterior door with a cut-glass window, framing timbers, and tan paint. I also took more mortar, a wood-burning stove, a stovepipe, and appropriate hardware.

After jumping these materials to the ledge—the stove was barely liftable—I spent some time at the cashier's desk working an adding machine. I left the tape from my calculations and twelve hundred dollars on the counter, weighted down by a coffee cup.

I may be a bank robber, but I'm not a common thief.

"We missed you at lunch yesterday, Davy."

"I was walking, Mrs. Barton. I guess I walked too far."

She smiled. "Well, it's probably good for you to get some exercise. I'm glad to see your appetite is picking up."

I stared at the fork in my hand. I hadn't been thinking about food, I'd been puzzling over the window frames and air-conditioning for my hidden fortress, my "fortress of solitude." Now that I saw the egg on my fork, the food in my stomach seemed to solidify in a lump, heavy and uncomfortable.

Mrs. Barton wandered on down the room. I dropped the fork and pushed the plate away from me.

Before going out to the ledge, I jumped to New York and checked the PO box, appearing first in the alleyway before walking around the corner to Broadway to the Bowling Green post office.

There was a letter from Leo Silverstein asking me to call him. I jumped to the Pine Bluffs airport and used the pay phone.

"Mr. Silverstein, this is David Rice."

"Ah. Did you get my letter?"

"Yes."

"So, you're back in New York."

"No." I saw no reason to lie. "At the moment I'm in Pine Bluffs."

"Oh? Well, I have some business to transact. As you know, you figure in your mother's will."

I swallowed. "I don't want anything."

The image flashed in front of my eyes. The explosion, the broken-doll posture of her body, the blood and the smoke.

I can't stand to sit at the window or in the middle.

Silverstein coughed. "Well, you really should come down and hear the terms at least."

"At your office? I don't know. Have the police been looking for me still?"

"I don't know. They searched around pretty thoroughly for a couple of days, but there's a limit to how long Sheriff Thatcher is going to hunt someone whose only crime is a fake driver's license."

"I'll be right there."

I walked around the airport for a moment and watched a small single-engine plane take off. Then I jumped to the stairway leading up to Silverstein's office. There was someone on the stairs, but, luckily, he was walking down the stairs, facing away from me.

I held my breath until he'd left the building, then walked upstairs. Mr. Silverstein was standing in the reception area, looking out the window onto the square. He looked over his shoulder when I came in.

"Forget something, Joe—oh, Davy! I didn't see you on the sidewalk. How did you do that?"

"Do what?"

He shifted from foot to foot, uncomfortable. "Come on in."

Once in his office, he handed me a bundle of papers labeled, "Last Will and Testament of Mary Agnus Niles."

I looked at it and the pain surfaced, sharp and ragged. I found myself yawning, getting sleepy, my mind numbing.

Shit! I thought I was past this.

I put it down on the desk. "What does it say?"

"Essentially, with the exception of ten thousand dollars in bequests and gifts, it leaves you the balance of her estate, approximately sixty-five thousand dollars in CDs and savings, and a town house in California."

I blinked. "I guess she made good money as a travel agent."

Silverstein shook his head. "Not particularly. Your grandfather left her a good sum, especially with the sale of the house."

"Oh."

"You don't have to comment on this, and, to be perfectly honest, I'd rather you didn't, but I have the feeling that your present source of income wouldn't stand rigorous scrutiny."

He looked at me to see if I understood. I could feel my ears getting hot. He went on.

"Anyway, this inheritance would at least give you a legitimate source of income. It's a chance to get out of the gray area where you are."

I nodded slowly, reluctantly. "What will I have to do?"

"Well, the first thing you need to do is get that birth certificate. I'll handle that if you like. Then we'll apply for a social security number and a real driver's license, and I'll see about filing income tax for the time since you left your father. I don't suppose you know whether he claimed you as a dependent or not after you left?"

"I wouldn't put it past him. Uh, I don't drive, Mr. Silverstein, so the license..."

"Oh, well, there's nondriver's identification. You don't have to worry about that."

"What about the New York police?"

"Ah, well, funny about that. After you left the reception, Sheriff Thatcher was not inclined to pursue the matter without some sort of official request from the NYPD. Sergeant Washburn was furious, but, as of this morning when I talked to Sheriff Thatcher, there hasn't been any such request." He paused and looked out the window, stretching his arms. "I suspect, from what you told me and from Sergeant Baker's reactions, that Sergeant Washburn exceeded his authorization somewhat in coming down to Florida."

I exhaled. "Well, that's a relief."

"So," said Silverstein, "I take it you'd like to do this? Get the birth certificate and everything?"

I nodded emphatically. "Oh, yes. And do you think I could get a passport?"

He blinked. "I don't see why not. Why? Are you thinking of leaving the country?"

I looked out the window but my eyes didn't see the town square. Instead I was seeing the explosion that killed my mother, looped endlessly over and over and over. There was a feeling of anticipation, of things not yet realized. I shook the vision from my eyes and looked back' at Silverstein.

"I want to go to Algeria," I said.

"The first thing I want to make clear is that this violence, this terrorism, is not cultural. It isn't integral either to Arab or Muslim culture. I've done too many briefings for senators and congressmen who think that all 'towelheads' carry a pistol and a grenade. If you can't see beyond this stereotype, then we might as well stop now."

I felt my ears getting red. I hadn't really thought about it, but I must have been feeling something akin to this. It made me feel bad. Dad was the one that characterized people by the color of their skin.

"I don't believe that," I said. "I do have some hostility, though, I know that, but I'll be careful not to generalize."

He nodded. He was seated behind a wooden desk in a small office. The padded shoulders of his tweed jacket humped strangely when he leaned his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. One of his hands smoothed the red, fuzzy knit tie he wore with his gray shirt.

I'd taken the early Amtrak train from Penn Station in New York, down to Union Station in D.C. Mr. Anderson, from the State Department, had arranged the briefing. The man in the fuzzy tie was Dr. Perston-Smythe, an associate professor in Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and we were talking in his office.

"I can understand the hostility. However, you won't understand the Arab or the terrorism picture until you can get these stereotypes out of your head."

I nodded. "I understand."

"Consider this—there were over forty thousand Lebanese killed in the period between nineteen eighty and nineteen eight-seven. Over a million have died in the Iran-Iraq war. Less than five hundred Americans have died in the same period in the Middle East from terrorist actions, if you count the truck bombing of the Marines in Beirut, which I don't."

"Why not?"

"One of the problems with American public policy on terrorism is that our government insists on blurring the line between armed insurgence against military forces and installations and attacks on uninvolved civilians. Now, obviously attacking unarmed civilians who have no involvement with a particular political issue is terrorism. But an attack on an armed military force occupying one's homeland? That's not terrorism. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just saying that if you call that terrorism then the U.S. is also involved in financing terrorists in Afghanistan and Central America. See what I mean?"

"Yeah."

"Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that the proportion of American dead from terrorism is way out of proportion to the response it generates. We did nothing to stop the Iraq-Iran war because we perceived it in our interests that damage be done to both of those countries. Personally I think that's inexcusable, but I'm not in the position to make government policy. Certainly both leaders were crazy with a long-standing personal grudge, but their people paid a horrible price."

"I wasn't aware that there was a personal grudge."

"Hell, yes. In nineteen seventy-five; when Hussein settled the dispute over the eastern bank of Shatt-al-Arab with the Shah of Iran, one of the unwritten conditions was that Hussein get Khomeini to stop his political activity."

"How could he expect Hussein to do that?"

Perston-Smythe looked at me like I was an idiot. "Khomeini was in Iraq. When he was exiled from Iran he went to the Shiite holy city of An Najaf. Anyway, Hussein told Khomeini to stop and Khomeini refused, so Hussein bounced him out of the country to Kuwait which promptly bounced him out of the country to France. Over a fifteen-year period, seven hundred thousand Shiites were thrown out of Iraq. There's a lot of bad feeling there. More now of course, since the war."

I blinked. "I know you're trying to give me the big picture, but what about these particular terrorists?"

"We're getting there. It's a roundabout way, but all the better for the journey. What do you know about Sunni versus Shiite beliefs?"

I'd been doing some reading, evenings, after working on the cliff dwelling at El Solitario. "Sunnis make up about ninety percent of Muslims. They believe that the succession of caliphs was proper after Mohammed died. The Shiites believe that the rightful successors descended from Ali, Mohammed's cousin, not his best friend, Abu Bakr. They believe that the rightful descendants have been assassinated and discriminated against ever since.

"Sunnis tend to be more conservative and they don't believe in a clergy or a liturgy. The only countries with Shiite majorities are Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Bahrain."