The Triggerman Dance (5 page)

"Off we go, son."

"Into the wild blue yonder."

"Get that shoulder strap nice and tight. Don't want my copilot falling out."

The radio burped non-stop static which his father, amazingly, seemed to understand.

Five minutes later they were lifting up into the sky. John was surprised how the airplane moved not only up and down and went left and right, but kind of twisted, too, as if pivoting on its belly. The engine worked hard, he thought, and the view was not as good as it could be because the windows were a little high up.

Looking down on Orange County, John noted that all of the tracts and lots and groves seemed a lot more organized than they did from the ground. From above, they were all part of a grand design. He saw a kidney-shaped swimming pool and wondered if you jumped and managed to land in the deep end of the pool— feet first, body stiff, arms to the side—would you live or not.

His father guided the plane out over the Pacific. John was sure that if you jumped and did all the right things you could land in
that
and live. He looked down and saw the two jetties at Balboa, and the Wedge, where he had spent hours watching the bodysurfers ride the neck-snapping waves that build and lurch off the jetty rocks.

For a few moments he studied nothing but his father's forearms—one of John's favorite parts—and admired once again the stout arm emerging from the rolled-up shirt sleeve, the abundant hair that grew all the way down to where the wrist began, then reappeared behind the first knuckle of each of his father's fingers. Did it grow
under
the skin for a ways? He watched the wrist tendons flex when his father adjusted their course back around to the east. He casually ran a hand over his own wrist, assessing the wispy golden fuzz.

"What do you think, Johnny?"

"It's fine. Would you live if you landed in one of those swimming pools, but feet first and stayed real stiff?"

"I wouldn't want to try."

"The wind would blow you onto a roof or something, probably."

"Probably. Look down on that county, son. It's yours. That's a nice thought, isn't it?"

"It's not really mine, dad."

"No. It is. It belongs to whoever puts down his roots there. Your mother and I have. You will. When you look down on it from up here, you see that it's not really such a big place at all. It's like a back yard. It's yours to play in and live on and take care of. Look at that ocean. Look at the mountains. It's a good place, John—you're lucky to grow up here."

"I'll bet you could live if you landed in the ocean."

"Maybe you could. Just maybe."

John sat back, felt the drone of the engine and looked out at the sky. He listened to his father talking with ground control on the radio. He felt good being up here with his father, sitting beside him, a part of his world. A father was someone who controls things, he thought: a plane, a county, the sky.

John looked down at his thin dark legs, his feet, his shorts. Then he looked at his dad. He saw all the changes he would have to go through to become like his father, but he couldn't imagine them taking place soon enough. Everything grew so slowly, just a few inches a year. He tried to imagine himself as big as his father, with all the hair and the rough chin and the way air opens up easier around you when you're bigger. For a while he pretended he was his father's age, his father's brother, in fact. He relaxed into the seat with one knee lifted and his arm draped casually over that knee.

"Yeah," he said. "This county is mine."

"Take your foot off the seat, John."

On the way back to the airport, John convinced himself that they were going to land for just a few minutes to pick up his mother, then the three of them would fly away together for a long vacation in a dangerous place, but a place that had baseball. He loved this reverie and it was believable until he looked back and realized that the plane had only two small seats. He thought, that was really dumb of dad to get a plane that doesn't have enough room for all of us. And he wondered if maybe his father did it on purpose.

Two days after the meeting in Olie's, Weinstein and Dumars were waiting for John outside his trailer when he got home. It was just after six, and the generous September daylight bloomed from a red sun in a blue sky.

John saw the helicopter resting on a flat piece of desert not far from the trailer, heat waves wavering up from the engine compartment.

The two agents, dressed in suits, stood in the shade of the trailer awning, trying to be comfortable and inconspicuous here at the High Desert Rod &c Gun Club, which they certainly were not. John glanced up the dirt road toward the club house, where the property caretaker, Tim, was sweeping off the steps as an excuse to look down on the visitors and their gleaming chopper.

"The secret agents," he said with a small smile.

"The city editor," said Weinstein without one.

Boomer smelled shoes as John unstacked three plastic lawn chairs he'd bought to entertain guests, but never used. Bonnie watched from beneath the trailer, with black Belle already asleep beside her. John dusted off the seats with his hand, and offered them to Weinstein and Dumars. He opened up the trailer windows and returned to the deck with beers.

He opened the bottles, gave one to each of his visitors, and

sat.

"Nice trailer," said Weinstein, without looking back at it. He looked instead at John's flat-soled moccasin boots, his worn duster, brown vest and the eternal fedora.

"Thanks," said Menden.

"I can tell by your face that you read the letter."

John said nothing. He had in fact read the letter ten times, each reading bringing him closer to her, each reading taking her farther away. It was a sublime torture. To see actual words written by her hand, words revealing her love for him, her heartache over Joshua Weinstein, her confusion and her fear, was something that John never thought would happen. All of the distance he had put between Rebecca and himself closed again, in a rush, when he read that letter. Almost closed, because no matter how hard John imagined her as he lay in the trailer bed that night, his eyes locked shut and all his powers focused on the task of summoning her back to the present—if only long enough for the good-bye he never got to say—the final distance could never be closed. She was beyond him, and during all his days on earth, he knew, she would stay that way. She had dabbed her scent on the paper.

"You only stayed in Orange County a few weeks after the shooting. You gave up a pretty plum job, cashed out your retirement, closed up your house in Laguna. Why?"

John took a drink of the beer and decided that even if, according to the ways men should live, he had wronged Joshua Weinstein, he still didn't much like him.

"You're the spy, Mr. Weinstein. You're the gatherer. You know a lot more about me than I know about you. Why don't you tell me why?"

Weinstein had set his beer on the deck and loosened the knot of his necktie. His nine-to-five pallor was luminous in the sunlight filtered by the awning.

He looked across with an expression John took to indicate sympathy, but read as little more than a bureaucrat's professional interest.

Joshua said, "My mother used to tell me that to be happy in life, you need three things: something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to. You had them all. Then you lost Rebecca and tossed the other two away. You traveled some, then came out here to lick your wounds—"

Rebecca.
The sound of the name takes John Menden back to her. As clearly as if it was yesterday, no, as clearly as if she were there right now, he feels the warm October sunlight on his skin the evening they sit on the balcony of the old Laguna Canyon house and he actually touches her for the first time. She has a scar that runs from the base of her right thumb across to the center of her palm, and that clean thin line of tissue—a line he has seen and contemplated so many times before—is soft beneath his finger as he traces its length across her hand, then back to the thumb again. She says a gypsy told her it cut across her lifeline but not to worry because all wounds are superficial compared to fate. She looks at him in a way that is both innocent and knowing, both assured and inquisitive. Rebecca's hair is golden in this autumn light. Her skin is fair and her eyes are blue. Her nose is longer and sharper than the popular notion of beauty. Her face is slender. Her mouth is wide, full-lipped, healthy. She wears a frank red lipstick that frames, when she smiles, her very white and even teeth. She is vain enough, and practical enough, to know that her smile is her best feature. She also assumes that she is not particularly beautiful. He knows that she is not beautiful, though his eyes have made her perfect.

John has always believed that he can judge a person's character by their face, that no amount of acting or cosmetic alteration can change the truth of a face. In the case of Rebecca, he had seen it all very clearly the moment he met her in the
Journal
lobby. She was bright, curious, forgiving, optimistic and possessed a hopeful soul in spite of the darkness she tried to hide. Rebecca Harris, he immediately saw, was the kind of woman he wanted to spend his life with. He saw her ring, too, and realized he would not.

And later, sitting on his balcony after touching her scar, then looking away at the arid hillsides of Laguna Canyon, John Menden felt a true sense of honor at having touched her.

You shouldn't have done that, she says.

I'm sorry. I've wanted to touch you for a long time. Now you're here. I never imagined you here. It's throwing me a bit.

I've imagined me here. Too many times. Maybe that was a mistake, but I couldn't help myself. Everything starts there, in the imagination, don't you think?

No, it starts in the eyes, and then the imagination kidnaps it.

To where?

To the heart, I guess. Then the heart makes it real."—to forget, to start over."
Weinstein's voice severed the reverie like a sword. "So you come here, to nowhere, looking for the next avenue out."

John looked at his dogs, asleep in the dirt beneath the trailer. Rebecca's face fades away. "You've boxed me neatly, Mr. Weinstein."

Sharon shifted uneasily in her plastic chair. "Mr. Menden," she asked, "have you thought over what we talked about last time?"

"Of course I have." In fact, he had thought about almost nothing else. He understood that he was being vetted and auditioned—for what he could only guess. With the words of Rebecca's letter still whispering in his mind, it was difficult to hear much else.

"What are your feelings?" Sharon asked.

"I want to know more," said John.

Joshua nodded and stood, setting his half-empty beer on the chair. "We can't bring the facts to you, so we'll bring you to the facts. Get the chopper ready again, Sharon."

John was ushered through a back entrance of the Orange County FBI office, Dumars on one side of him and Weinstein on the other. They went down a long hallway covered with a pale green industrial carpet, then turned right and passed down another corridor. No one passed them in either. The building was quiet. After hours, thought John—the Feds are home with their little Fedettes. Joshua unlocked a heavy wood-veneer door and let them in.