Long Shot (41 page)

He must have been twenty steps down the trail when he realized she wasn't behind him. He glanced around and saw her, brooding still beside the grave. He shouted her down. She looked up sharp.

“Hey, Greg,” she bellowed—gaily, it almost seemed, but she did not move till she said her piece. “If one of us dies—”

“Us?” he demanded. “You mean you and me?”

“Whoever's left,” she declared, “has to promise not to go out looking. As far as I'm concerned, you know it all now. There's nothing else. You promise?”

The smallest pause took hold, while he did a quick fix on her motives. She didn't seem to mean she was sorry to know the truth about her husband. She wasn't so blind as to think she kept no secrets of her own. It wasn't a dare, or an accusation. What she hoped to do was absolve them both of the sort of quest they'd just completed—at least as far as it might pertain to the matter of each other. So neither one would ever be indicted by the past.

“Promise!” he shouted back.

She walked toward him along the ridge, and she knew it would never be quite the same again. Not the way it had been these last two weeks, here at the core of spring. Strangely enough, she could live with that, and with nary a pang of regret or attendant loss of nerve. She reached the spot where he waited, his mild unhidden smile the mirror of her own. He turned and started down again.

No one led, and no one followed. They both went on their own. Not ten minutes since, the uphill climb had afforded her the long view of the world, untrammeled by a single human step. Here, on the down side, things were reversed. Greg had the world to look at. She had him.

They could both lay claim to Walden Pond, or something very like it. But hers, she saw, was a good deal more external—vivid as the opalescent surface of the reservoir, glimmering far below them now in the belly of the canyon. Hers was the dream of summer that brought the blood up in every tree. Greg's was a few miles farther off, at Cherokee and Franklin. As if the glacier that decreed such things had dug in its heels not once but twice, and made two lakes before it fled these mountains.

His was not even waterbound. The raw terrain, the rock-strewn shore, the wind in the alders—with him, it was not just all in his head, but something he wasn't terribly keen on owning up to. He lived it after a fashion, of course, but not by the book by any means. So they occupied two poles. Two couldn't live in either place, at least not two of a kind. Only those who were rare and endangered—Sid and Edna and Artie—had the right to settle on their borders.

They came off the spine of the hill and crossed the tilted desert meadow toward the house. One had to know when a thing was done, she thought, snapping off a sprig of fennel as she passed. The trick was not to mistake for done what was only gone on to another phase. What tended to complicate matters most was learning all the rhythms out of love affairs gone sour. She'd probably been through half a dozen men at two weeks start to finish. They were all of a piece. They lacked the feel of the quick of time and, ten days after she met them, seemed as good as dead. None of them ever taught her how to let a thing go and keep it by. She supposed she bolted before they had the chance.

Greg pulled open the gate's other half, and the whole full moon of the garden shone dark green beyond it. He stepped through and stopped to catch his breath. When she joined him, they each reached out to one of the gates and swung them shut, like a pair of footmen. Greg secured the dolphin latch. The sudden quiet was twice what it was before. The jasmine scent was overwhelming. After the desert hills, the moss and ferns and fruit trees were the portal of a dream.

They walked on the pebbled garden path, and each step crunched with the gravity of all their going forward.

“Remember what I used to say?” she asked, as if it were years ago. “How it felt like nothing?”

“Of course.”

“Well, that is no longer the case.”

He looked at her sidelong. Please, he thought, no sudden conversions. Let her get all rosy on her
own
time.

“What is it you feel?” he asked quite briskly. “Hot flashes?”

They skirted the redwood tub—indifferent now to its clouded depths. Then down the alley of plums again, more sure of their footing the second time through. As they pulled the French doors open, he said:

“You ought to get the whole thing down on paper. Inspiration's very hot these days.”

“Listen, honey,” she shot back, though without a break in stride. “I'm not the only one got cured of being out of it. When I met you, you couldn't leave the house.”

“Lies!” he bellowed, as they swept across the library like kids who couldn't read. “You know what your problem is? You keep imagining I'm like you.”

“And you keep thinking you're not.”

The canyon room. The spiral stair. They raced along, but they didn't tire. They rollicked down the corridor, trading remarks like a couple of standup comics.

“What's the best friend you ever had?”

“Are you counting Sid and Edna?”

“No.”

“In that case,” he retorted, “none that I can think of. Why?”

“Not even a dog, or
anything?
”

He shook his head with a drunken smile, as if this thing were a point of pride. They'd come to the double doors again. Each put a hand forth, gripped a doorknob, paused on the brink of breaking in. The music from the screening room was lonely as a desert trail. They glanced in one another's eyes without the faintest trace of caution.

“Right,” she said. “Me neither.”

Now they pushed, and the doors opened. They wasted not a moment's pang about the thousand doors they'd had to go through just to be none other than themselves. Though the dark hit hard against their unaccustomed eyes, they didn't wait. They groped their way across to the empty row of seats. Sid and Edna shushed and hissed them. They shrank to get under the beam of light, so as not to ruin the picture. They made a great show of getting sat, and when at last they looked—

“Let me tell you something, man,” said Jasper Cokes, as big as life, in a pitiless stare straight at them.

He wore a red bandanna round his neck, gritty and bunched with sweat from so much dusty riding. Needless to say, he had no shirt on. Not an ounce of flab. His tan as deep as the summer sun.

“What if that treasure's not out there?” Jasper said.

He paused, and the camera lingered on him. Whoever he was talking to had the same view of him they did, here in the hill room. The pause was full of his polished skin and the raw unruly magic in his eyes.

“Wouldn't
that
be something?” Jasper scoffed with a thin-lipped laugh. He pointed a finger into the distance. “Three more days—that's as far as I go. If I don't find it by then, I'm gonna go someplace else. Back east, maybe.”

“Come on—I'll show you,” said a young man's voice, and the camera turned an eye on him.

A kid about twenty. They were out in the yard of a wooden house, on a bluff above the Pacific. The film rolled down the beach as the two men walked. The winter sun was yellow in a deep blue sky.

What scene is this?
she wondered idly.

The only thing she knew was the end—where the sheriff's men come creeping up to the walls of the mission graveyard. This was still early on. They must be on their way to one of the bandits' hideouts.

“
Sst
,” said Edna Temple, crouching at Vivien's ear. “Are you okay? You think we're crazy?”

Vivien turned to the older woman, whose face was soft in the silver light. Close up, she was old as the hills and her eyes were dancing. Vivien thought:
I want to be just like this someday
.

“It's the strangest
wake
I've ever been to,” she whispered behind her hand. She wasn't sure whose she meant—whether Max or Jasper. “You like the movie?”

“It's crap,” said Edna. “I love it. Me, I could watch him eat a sandwich.”

She toddled back to her seat.

“There's nothing here,” said Jasper, casting a practiced eye up the muddy slopes of the wash. “The soil's too thin. You couldn't
bury
something in it.”

What the hell was this? She leaned a little forward and took a bead on the landscape. It seemed to be some sort of runoff. The winter rains from one of the canyons fed through a wide-mouthed cleft in the bluff, and thus back into the sea.

“If he left his strongbox here,” said the kid, “you're out of luck. The tides have probably taken it to China.”

“He wouldn't have made a mistake like that,” Jasper replied emphatically. “Wherever he's left it, it's safe. I
know
it.”

So he
did
still believe it was out there somewhere. He's a better actor than people say, thought Vivien, cool as a critic. He gave off an air of endless yearning. It would have been almost tawdry if he hadn't been so hot. Vivien leaned around in her chair. She was wild with delight to see Jasper alive, and she wanted to share it with Artie. Who sat curled up in the row behind—shy around Jasper as always, even here in the dark.

“What's all this shit,” she demanded, “about him looking ravaged?”

“Hey, I'm with you,” he whispered back. “He's gorgeous.”

“You think we ought to release it?”

“Sure.”

That took care of the board of directors meeting.

“How are you?” Vivien asked, still twisted so she faced him. What she was thinking was: How did it feel to have blood on his hands?

“Me?” asked Artie, a bit surprised. “The same. Didn't you know? I always come out of these blizzards alive.”

“So I've heard.”

“Sh!” Greg said.

She swung around. He was leaning forward, as if he couldn't bear to miss a word. At first she thought there must be something crucial going on. But no—it was just the two men shaking hands, on the beach below the bluff. No violence. No sex. Not a major scene at all.

“You
like
this picture?” she asked him, slightly taken aback. “I thought you stopped at the fifties.”

“We're expanding,” he said. “
Sh!
”

Well, all right. She gave it her full attention. Jasper clambered up the bank to the top of the bluff, while the kid ran loose-limbed into the surf. He dived in, swam out past the waves, and turned to the north to free-style home. He waved to Jasper once. And high on the bluff, Jasper nodded and let the moment go. He turned and loped away. The scene dissolved.

“This is
boring
,” called Sid from the back of the room.

“Be quiet,” Edna snapped at him. “It's supposed to be symbolic.”

“Well, it's boring.”

If only it weren't so badly
written
, Greg was thinking. It wasn't a half-bad story. Whoever wrote it had seen too many movies and not enough life at large. The very mistake he'd made in a dozen scripts of his own. If this were really happening, he thought, Jasper would never have left it at a handshake. He would have asked the kid to be his sidekick. He would have thrown over his quest and dived in after.

Real life had to do with dropping everything. As near as he could tell, one never made it to the mission yard. There were better dreams closer to hand—more vital, more awake. The gold was only there to get you started.

He cupped a hand over his mouth and whispered left: “Was he really this beautiful?”

So much so, he made you want to stay as close as you possibly could, on the off chance he would drop it all and take you in his arms.

“I guess so,” Vivien said.

It didn't depress her at all, to know the man up there was the real Jasper Cokes. Driving alone, as now, in a beat-up Cadillac—eating a pizza, wedge by wedge, off a cardboard tray beside him. The radio blared. The desert sun beat down on a land as blank as the skin of the moon. And the look on his face, as he readied himself for the next big scene, was rapturous with the certainty that here-and-now was all the world there was.

“The rest of us don't stand a chance,” said Greg. “It's like he's the only one who's left a shred of evidence.”

Vivien nodded in the dark. The time one lost, she thought, was never past redeeming. Here she'd managed to make it home to watch her husband die. It was coming right up in about an hour. She was glad to see that Greg did not exclude her. Technically, after all, he could have lumped her with the stars. How could she ever begin to fathom what it meant to leave behind no image and no name? He talked as if, for the moment at least, she were every bit as anonymous as they. As free to come and go.

“Can you bear it?” she asked him lightly.

“Doesn't much matter,” he said with a shrug. “It's the way things are.”

“But
can
you?” she insisted—grinning now in the ghostly light, as if it were the joke she'd waited all these weeks to tell.

“If I said yes,” he countered, “what would
you
say?”

“Me,” she said, “I can bear it fine.”

“Then the answer is no.”

“Liar,” she said gently, grazing the tip of a finger along the back of his hand.

At that, some random noise—the crack of gunfire, a door slammed shut—drew them back to the road ahead.

It was only Jasper, stopped in a lonely canyon, his hand-drawn map spread out on the steering wheel in front of him. But they watched it for all they were worth, just now, as if to prove they came this far by perfect concentration. In the moonglow pale that bathed their faces, they fixed on the field of vision like a couple of astronomers out to connect the sky. It was queer, how little the moment chose to give them. Just a shot of Jasper, staring out of his Cadillac at the vast surround of the bare rough hills. Yet they watched him—saucer-eyed, finished with grief—as if he would divide among them all the gold he found. As if, almost, he could not go on without them.