Vitals Page 22

  Tammy cocked her head.

  “It’s just a helicopter,” Cousins said. “Probably on its way to LAX.”

  By then, the sound of two, maybe three choppers, blades laying down rhythm to a steady turbine roar, would have drowned out my voice anywhere but in the basement.

  “They’re too close,” I said. “Flying formation.”

  “Police?” Cousins said, but he didn’t believe it.

  I opened the outside door. Cousins stood with me in the doorway in the early-morning coolness. Behind us, Tammy busied herself moving things around. I knew without looking what she was doing. She was piling up furniture and hiding.

  Cousins and I started up the steps, me first. Without thinking, at the grind of a new and terrible noise, like Satan clearing his throat, I dropped into a crouch. Cousins nearly fell over me.

  My body recognized that awesome roar. I hadn’t heard it in over thirty years, and it was still supreme: the air-ripping, saurian bawl of the gun that kills a village.

  I lifted my head over the edge of the concrete retaining wall. Three AH-1 SuperCobras, Marine Corps jobs, little more than silhouettes in the deep gray dawn, snooted their floods down on the next house along the ridge. The first chopper’s thirty-millimeter cannon bawled again, followed by the second, then all three opened up on the house and the grounds. Braaaappp-Roarrr-hum-buzz-ROARRR and red tiles flew up in spinning fragments. Hundreds of shells per second carved away the roof. Walls flapped and curled like surgically sliced tissue. The swimming pool erupted in a thousand geysers.

  A figure in a white nightgown ran over the grass and just turned red. She seemed to disappear, like a chicken leg down a garbage disposal.

  I said something to Cousins, I don’t remember what. Even in Vietnam the damn gunships chopping up the paddies and hamlets had made me cry, and these were infinitely worse. Here I was, thirty years later, sobbing like a child.

  The third Cobra pushed back a few dozen yards and went to work on the house below the cliff. I could not see the destruction but I could hear it.

  The floodlights on our lawn went dark.

  “Not now,” I said. Don’t let them know you’re here.

  The guns stopped. Cousins poked his head up next to mine. We squatted in the well outside the door.

  Marquez ran out on the grass in his pajamas, a gnomish shadow against the glow from the valley. “What the fuck?” I heard him shout.

  The house on the next lot had caught fire. A flare of natural gas shot up like a giant Bic lighter.

  Marquez straightened and held out his arms, mesmerized by the spectacle. Not good to live a life of movies. Everything is special effects, nothing seems real.

  “It’s a mistake,” Cousins said. I knew what he meant. The pilots had screwed up.

  Just as he spoke, all three of the gunships backed off, hesitated for a few long, loud seconds, as if checking their maps, Aw shit.

  They yawed right like three toys on sticks, pitched their noses down, and flew right at us.

  PART THREE

  HAL COUSINS

  30

  IMPERIAL VALLEY • AUGUST 10

  Lissa drove. We didn’t speak until we were on 5 heading south through the long valley.

  “Don’t look at me that way,” she said. “He would have shot you.”

  “Who in hell was he?”

  “He had a gun.”

  I was still in shock.

  “I couldn’t stand seeing you both get shot,” Lissa said.

  We stopped at the Spanish Baron’s Ranch House Inn to eat. We hadn’t had dinner and it was 10:00 p.m. Rain left big clean splatters on the windshield. The air smelled wet off the asphalt in the parking lot and I realized I was happy just to be alive.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “De nada,” Lissa said. We made our way to the restaurant past a big antique steel-tired steam tractor, displays of old plows, and barn-plank paneled walls hung with oxbows, yokes, draped leather harnesses, and collections of brass hondos. The waitress guided us to a booth.

  Lissa looked tired but not one whit less beautiful. She fumbled in her purse, could not find what she was poking for. “I would love a cigarette,” she said. “And I don’t give a shit who knows it.”

  “Tough lady,” I said.

  “Tough lady,” she echoed with a decisive tilt of her head. “He would have killed you.”

  “No question,” I said.

  “He had that look.”

  “He was smiling,” I said.

  “He had that look.”

  “He looked stoned,” I said.

  “He was tagged,” Lissa said.

  “Almost certainly.”

  “He wore the most godawful suit, did you notice?” Her breath hitched and I thought she was about to cry. She wiped her eyes. “Do you think anyone saw us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  The waitress brought our drink order. I swallowed my Integumycin tablets. Lissa chased two Tums with a swallow of milk.

  “Stomachache?” I asked.

  “Calcium,” she said. “I don’t want to get brittle bones.”

  “A proper mix of male and female sex hormones is the key,” I said. “You should also begin probiotic therapy for better calcium uptake.”

  “I know,” she said. “Rob told me the same thing.”

  Now the tears came, and silent but shaking sobs. “I don’t want to do this,” she said, her voice a trembling squeak. “I don’t want to be here, I really don’t.”

  I changed seats to put my arm around her.

  We ate our sandwiches.

  She paid with cash and I drove for a few hours.

  “Numbers,” I said, “seem to be important to them.”

  But she was asleep. It was two in the morning when I stopped at a blocky, beige, eighties-style motel, another Homeaway, rising alone in the central valley, outlined by big orange lights in the dead of early morning. I walked into the lobby to rent two rooms.

  “You want them adjacent?” the desk clerk asked.

  Lissa walked in brushing her hair and said one room would do just fine. “They’re suites, right?” she asked.

  “Sure are,” the clerk said, and smiled encouragement.

  Once again, death had smoked out all my reason. We curled up on the queen-size bed, still in our clothes, and slept for four hours. When daylight peeped in through the curtains, I woke up to the sound of my brother’s widow taking a shower. It was a pleasant, reasonable sound, and the steam coming through the open bathroom door made me bold.

  I walked into the bathroom and stood there in my stocking feet, feeling the tile under my toes.

  She pulled back the curtain. “You smell like him when you sleep,” she said as she stepped out onto the mat. The hot water had pinked her all over. She looked delicious, raspberries and cream, wet hair the color of butterscotch with vanilla bean streaks. “Oh,” she said. “You surely do.” She was completely unself-conscious. She wrapped her hair in a towel and used another to dry, working from the shoulders down, rational and thorough.

  I couldn’t smell any soap. Just the steam. The bars and shampoo in the little wicker basket hadn’t been touched.

  She bent over in the small bathroom, butt pointed toward me, and toweled off her hair. She backed up a few inches into my hips and left two damp marks on my pants. She straightened, turned, and said, “We should be on the road soon.”

  All perfectly pleasant and reasonable, but with that lingering of sight lines that told me I would not be rebuffed. She took a small bottle of white skin cream—her own, not from the hotel—and rubbed it on her arms, her legs, across her breasts, then on her face.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Los Angeles,” she said, and toweled for the second time between her thighs.

  “What’s down there?”

  “I’m sorry?” She stopped rubbing.

  “In LA.”

  “Okay,” she said.<
br />
  “I’m confused.”

  “And now I’m ready,” she said, and held out her towel. She rubbed it gently on my face.

  The sex was wonderful and awful. I could not get Rob’s privilege out of my thoughts, no matter how much I reasoned that they had separated and he was dead, and that she had saved my life and I owed her something. I knew she felt as if she were going to bed with Rob again, and that creeped me out even as it excited the hell out of me.

  “Don’t tell me I make love like Rob,” I said.

  It was eight-thirty.

  “You don’t,” she said.

  “Don’t tell me I’m better,” I said, angrier still.

  “I’m sorry,” Lissa said. She lay on her side, head propped up on one arm. Her breasts were close to perfection, one in repose on the stretched white sheet, the second draped so slightly above it a feather would have escaped. I wanted her again, now.

  “You haven’t had a woman in how long?” she asked.

  “Long,” I said.

  “Poor man. Well, you have certainly done justice by me.”

  I did not know what to say. I was out of my league and had been for several hundred million years.

  She made coffee, using the room machine, and brought me a foam cup. “I boiled it,” she said. “The water’s a little salty, but this is the Imperial Valley.”

  We drank from our cups in silence, trying to discover what we added up to in this new arithmetic. Lissa had a loose, relaxed way of moving when she was naked. She smelled like hay and Lipton tea, with a rich base of beef broth and lemons. She fluffed the pillow to cushion her back, then lay against the headboard. Her toenails were perfect, unpainted, carefully but not, I judged, professionally manicured, skin without blemish. Fine little blond hairs rose from her arms, the small of her back. She did not shave her legs, and it did not matter.

  The coffee tasted pretty salty, and I only drank half. She took my cup and threw the rest down the sink. We got dressed and went downstairs.

  Lissa bought a copy of the Los Angeles Times from a stand in the lobby and tossed it at me as I got in the car. In the headlines: three Marine helicopters, ditched off Malibu, had been recovered by a Navy diving team. The helicopters had flown from Camp Pendleton and strafed a neighborhood in Los Angeles almost two months ago, killing four, including a Hollywood director. No motive, no explanation. The bodies of six aviators had been recovered, still strapped into their aircraft.

  “Anybody we know?” she asked. The look in her eyes—distant and cold—startled me.

  “Sounds like a drug thing,” I offered.

  “That’s it,” she said, jerking the car into gear. “Ace Marine pilots slam a house for a drug deal gone bad.”

  She gunned us out of the parking lot and back onto the road. We were twenty miles down the freeway when she started talking again. “Have you ever thought that looking for eternal youth is just crazy?”

  “It isn’t,” I said.

  “But isn’t believing that crazy in itself, in a way? Such confidence?”

  “Not if it’s based in science,” I said.

  “Have you got it in your grasp?” she asked, holding up a hand and squeezing as if her fingers held a juicy orange.

  “Not yet. Soon, if I can just get back to work.”

  “I watched Rob disintegrate. It started with Rudy Banning, but what if it was in Rob to begin with? A gene for insanity. The capacity to just break up at a touch.”

  “Rob wasn’t crazy,” I said. I looked out the window at fields of cotton, mottled green in the late-morning sun. The glare hurt my eyes. “Neither am I.”

  “You and Rob have the same genes. What if it’s all a circle of deluded people”—she took a deep breath—“chasing around, killing and getting killed, for nothing?”

  “Granted, it’s hard to believe any of this is happening,” I said. “But you’ve seen the results.”

  “I’ve seen the craziness,” she said, her voice rising in pitch. “I can’t see anything that makes sense. Can’t you at least acknowledge the possibility?”

  “As a hypothesis, sure. Now it needs to be supported by facts. Am I acting crazy?”

  “Your life is a mess. You said it yourself.”

  “Even paranoids have enemies,” I said, echoing Mrs. Callas.

  “But what if Rob contracted some sort of communicable disease, a virus, in Russia, something that screws up your brain, before he even knew about Silk?”

  “Now that sounds paranoid,” I said.

  “Is it really any different from what you say is happening, any harder to believe?”

  I acknowledged that it was not. “I still don’t see the point.”

  “I want to tell you what happened between Rob and me.”

  That was not high on my list of things I wanted to hear. The whole conversation was going south rapidly.

  “I don’t want to cause pain,” she began. “But I think you should take it into account. To support my hypothesis, you would say.”

  “I’m listening,” I said. But in fact something was wrong with my hearing. I scrubbed my ears with the tips of my little fingers, and still the sound in the car seemed muffled.

  “He started losing his bearings after he went to Siberia. It got worse when he met Banning. He wouldn’t shut up at night. He was amazed that someone had got there ahead of him. He became obsessed, then, he started agreeing with whatever Banning would say—”

  “The Nazi crap?”

  “No,” she admitted. “He didn’t go that far. But he started to avoid me, stay away on any excuse. I loved him, and I tried to stick with him, but he wouldn’t accept my help. He accused me of holding him back. How could I? He wouldn’t even tell me what he was doing! Then he left.”

  I tapped my jaw to dislodge whatever was blocking my ears.

  She nodded grimly. “And to tell the truth, I was fed up, too. I couldn’t stand it anymore . . .”

  The next few words I didn’t catch. I heard a humming and watched the windshield turn white as a sheet of ice. Lissa kept driving, but all the sound had been turned down. I leaned against the cool glass of the side window. Through the corners of my eyes, I watched her lips move.

  I was perfectly calm. How nice that I didn’t have to listen. But I would have to come up with suitable responses. “Probably they got to him, by then,” I said, just to stay in the conversation. “Induced madness. That’s likely.”

  She pulled over and stopped the car. In silence, she opened my door and helped me out. I saw fields of dark green strawberry plants all around. We were on a dirt road some distance off the freeway. She waved a hand in front of my face. I think she was saying, “Hal, are you all right,” but I wasn’t paying much attention. The calmness was wonderful. After all I had been through, to have this benison delivered to me was a real treat.

  She put me in the backseat. I imagined that she took off her clothes, then my clothes, and rubbed her body all over me, going through graceful contortions between the seats. She carefully rubbed her thighs, her labia and pubic hair, on my face, my mouth and nose, and over my own hair, scenting me with hay and roses. She gently inserted her finger up both my nostrils, then into my ears. I felt vividly the press of her smoothly manicured and painted fingernails. Then, as if it were an afterthought, she got me hard and slipped off her panties. She slid down over me, made me come, and went through the process all over again. When she was done, she pulled me from the backseat and dressed me.

  It was all interesting and diverting, but it did not break my extraordinary and welcome calm.

  “You are a horny bastard,” she said coolly when we were back on the road. I checked my clothes. Shirt all buttoned up. I could hear again. That was nice.

  “Did we just make love by the roadside?” I asked.

  “We did,” she said. “Thank you for remembering.” She smiled at me, beautiful but chilly.

  “Wonderful,” I said. “When are you going to let me drive?”

  “Not now,” she said
, and shook her head primly. “A freshly fucked male has no sense of danger.”

  I could not disagree.

  31

  SOUTH-CENTRAL CALIFORNIA

  My memory of events for the next few hours is muddled. I can revive images of small two-lane highways and dusty towns, and they all seem to bring me like a wash of gravel to a brown strip motel in a small town dotted with drooping, dusty green trees. I think we were somewhere east of Los Angeles.

  The calmness had filled me like a transfusion of chicken soup, healing most of my pains and making the rest seem unimportant. I wanted Lissa to rub me again, and on what I believe was our first evening in the motel, she did. She rolled me around on the bed like a happy puppy, inspecting me with sad deliberation.

  She rubbed her skin with her hands, spit on her palms, then rubbed her hands on me. Again she inserted fingers into my nose and mouth and ears.

  She did not have sex with me. And that was okay. I was just being rewarded for being a good puppy.

  She allowed me to sit in a chair on the concrete walkway outside as we waited for the balky air conditioner to cool the room. Just to make small talk, I told her about the air conditioner in the hotel in San Francisco. That made her even more sad.

  She sat beside me on the rusted metal chairs and watched the sun go down over reddish mountains. The hotel was empty except for us, a broken-down wreck on a dying old highway. Maybe that was why she had chosen it.

  A small white Toyota Celica drove into the parking lot, skirting a deep pothole. The other fellow I had seen in Berkeley, companion to the corpse in the freezer, got out, walked over, took off his Fedora, and waved it at his face to stay cool. He stood in front of my chair, watching me with fixed black eyes.

  Lissa spoke with him in a language I did not understand. I smiled at them both. Then he got back into the Toyota and sat in the driver’s seat with the door open, paying no attention to either of us. Arrogant son of a bitch, I thought.

  “You know him?” I asked Lissa.

  “He’s my trainer,” she said.

  “Like a lion tamer?”

  “No. Training for the Olympics. But I broke my ankle.”