Small Vices Part 28

"There's no guarantee I'll come all the way back," I said.

"I think you will," she said.

"And if I don't?"

"For richer, for poorer," she murmured, "in sickness and in health."

"You'll be here," I said.

"I will always be here," she said.

And she pressed closer to me and we were silent and I smelled her, and felt her and listened to her, and knew that if I had nothing else but this, this would be enough.

Chapter 38.

IN THE MORNING it was raining, the low rain clouds covering the tops of some of the further hills.

When it rains in Southern California the television stations do the same thing they do in Boston when it snows. They pretend the sky is falling. They show the storm's path on radar. They give tips on how to survive the rain. They send out reporters in Eddie Bauer rain gear to ask people stuff like, "How are you coping with this rain?" Despite the emergency, Hawk and I did what we had done every morning since we'd gotten here. We walked up the road toward the hill. Hawk was wearing white Nike running shoes and black nylon sweats and a white canvas barn jacket with a corduroy collar. He had his.44 Magnum in a shoulder holster under the coat, and he was hatless, the rain beading on his shaved head.

The water drainage system all over Southern California was surface runoff, and surrounded by the subtropical growth of Montecito, babbling brooks formed along each side of the road. The water cascaded downhill through small ravines filled with trees and vines and thick-leaved green plants, went under the road in a culvert, and formed impressive waterfalls as it dropped into the cut below the roadway where flowers grew.

When we reached the bottom of the hill we stopped and looked at it, as we did every morning. It went up very steeply, turning two thirds of the way up and continuing even more steeply to the top. There were houses on the hill, and small gutters along each side of the roadway where the rain water churned downhill and spread out over the street where we were standing.

"I'm going up," I said.

"Today the day?"

"Yep."

"How 'bout we make it to that mailbox?" Hawk said.

The mailbox was maybe fifty yards up the hill.

"All the way," I said.

"Might take a while," Hawk said. "Hill's a b.i.t.c.h."

"Here we go," I said.

We started up. I was half dragging my left leg. Hawk walked slowly beside me. On the right there was a lemon grove, the wet fruit glistening among the green leaves. n.o.body seemed to be harvesting it. The fruit was yellow and heavy on the trees and littered the ground, some of it rotting beneath the trees. I was gasping for breath. I looked up and the mailbox was still thirty yards away.

"No reason not to stop and rest," Hawk said.

I nodded. I looked back. The wet black road surface gleamed. I was twenty yards up the hill and I couldn't talk. We stood silently together in the steady rain. I was wearing an Oakland A's baseball cap, and white New Balance sneakers, jeans, and a bright green rain jacket that Susan said was the ugliest garment she'd ever seen legalized. In the left-hand pocket the Detective Special weighed about two hundred pounds.

"How... high... is... this... hill?"

"Never measured it," Hawk said. "Takes me 'bout ten minutes to walk up, five minutes to run."

"Run?" I said.

Hawk grinned.

"See that tree sticking out over the road? Let's aim for that, when you ready."

I nodded. My heart rate was slowing. I took in as much air as I could and let it out and shuffled up the hill a little further, dragging my left leg. Under the rain jacket I was slippery with sweat. I could hear my pulse so loud in my head that it seemed as if I could hear nothing else. I stared straight down at the wet roadway, concentrating on pushing my right leg forward, dragging my left leg after. I couldn't get enough air in, and by the time I reached the overhanging tree I was gasping for breath again. All that kept me from throwing up was that I lacked the strength. Hawk stood beside me. I turned and looked back at the glistening roadway and beyond at the subtropical greenery, the occasional red tile roof, and far down the hillside the Santa Barbara Channel again, gray now, and choppy, with the clouds so low over it that the Channel Islands were out of sight.

"You collapse," Hawk said, "and I gonna have to give you mouth to mouth. Neither one of us be liking that too much."

"Let... me... go," I said. "It... comes... to... that."

"And tell Susan what?" Hawk said.

I shook my head. I didn't have enough breath to answer.

"You want to hang onto my arm?" Hawk said.

I shook my head again. The rain was unvarying. In Boston when it rained it was often windy, and it made the rain less pleasant. Here the rain fell straight down through the warm air, undisturbed by wind. It dripped off the yellow bill of my A's cap, and dimpled the puddles that formed where the road surface was uneven.

"Mailbox," I said and we started again.

Hawk moved silently beside me, watching me, seeing everything else at the same time. I noticed grimly that he wasn't breathing hard. Again the thunder of my pulse, the struggle for oxygen, the feel of my right quadricep turning to jelly, the enc.u.mbrance of my right arm, the aimlessness of my left leg, the defiant pitch of the hill, the relentless pull of gravity as I inched along... I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

I rested a long time at the mailbox, before I started again. Things began to blur: rain, gasping, pain, weakness, pounding, nausea, pressure in my head, in my chest, my left leg random, nearly lifeless, the sweat soaking through my tee-shirt, the hill rising before me as I went step by painful dragging step up it, staring at it right in front of my next step, seeing nothing else, only dimly aware that Hawk was beside me, my entire self invested in the implacable everlasting hill.

On the left was a house, set back a little from the road, with a driveway that ran level from the roadway to the garage. I stopped on the level, my head down, my breath trembling in and out in desperate involuntary gasps, as my diaphragm struggled to get enough oxygen into my bloodstream. Hawk spoke to me from somewhere outside the red vortex of my exhaustion.

"'Bout ten more yards," he said.

I looked up and the crest of the hill was before me, thirty feet away. I let my head drop again and stood entirely focused on the effort to breathe, soaking with sweat, feeling deeply shaky, as if somehow the very core of my self was beginning to fall apart. I felt like I might fall down. Hawk stood silently beside me. I waited. Hawk waited. The rain came straight down. Finally the occlusive pounding began to slow, and awareness expanded enough for me to look up at the top of the hill.

"One first down," Hawk said.

I didn't want to waste any breath talking. I took in as much air as I could, and went up the rest of the hill almost blindly, my jaw clamped, my eyes almost closed. my breath rasping, almost without feeling, barely aware of anything but my exhaustion, in a near anaerobic state my bad leg useless, my good leg trembling. And made it. And stood at the top looking out across the valley at the vineyards on the far slope and the rain clouds just above them. Hawk stood beside me without comment. Turning a bit I was able to see Santa Barbara Harbor, and the boats in the marina, looking ornamental in the distance. I took my hat off and let the rain soak my hair and run down my face. The rasp of my breath began to slow. My leg-and-a-half felt weak but the trembling eventualy stopped.

"Be easier going back," Hawk said.

I nodded. Above us, a little ways east along the ridge line, was a steep meadow, and in the meadow a couple of coyotes sat, sheltered by a rock, and stared down at us.

"Waiting to see if you make it," Hawk said.

"Next thing," I said, and took in some air, "there'll be buzzards circling."

Another coyote trotted from some trees toward the two near the rock and joined them, settling back on his haunches and staring down at us. He moved so lightly, it was as if his feet reached down to the ground. I stared back at the coyotes for a while until my heartbeat had quieted enough so they could no longer hear it on the hillside. I put my hat back on.

"Let's go down," I said.

Hawk nodded.

"Be slippery going down," Hawk said, "and all your brakes ain't working yet."

I nodded. And we started down. Going up, it had been desperately hard to go forward, now it was desperately hard not to. I fell the first time in front of the driveway, and again twenty yards beyond it, and after that I hung onto Hawk until we pa.s.sed the lemon grove and reached the street, where the grade was mild, even for me, and the effort of walking was returned to human scale. I stopped and looked back up the hill.

Hawk said, "Too soon to try again."

"Tomorrow," I said.

Hawk shook his head. "No," he said. "Skip a day."

I nodded.

"Plenty of time," I said.

"All the time you need," Hawk said.

I turned away from the hill and limped slowly down the road past the dripping bougainvillea and jacaranda and orange trees bright with fruit, toward the house.

Chapter 39.

I SQUEEZED A rubber ball in each hand most of the time I was in California. The first time I tried it with my right hand the ball dropped to the floor. I hadn't enough strength to hold it. Hawk hung a heavy bag from a tree in the meadow behind the house and I banged at it every day, weakly with my left hand, barely at all with my right. The next time I essayed the hill, I took Pearl on a leash and she pulled me maybe five yards further each time between stops. Progress.

By the end of January, I could go halfway up, and my right leg wasn't dragging. My beard was thick and bothersome. My hair was too long. Hawk and I went up into one of the canyons back in the hills and began to shoot. I held the gun in both hands, though my left was doing all the work, and I was able to level it mainly by pulling my right arm up with my left. My only success was that I didn't shoot myself.

I was up to five-pound dumbbells. With my right arm I was actually moving the weight, curling it maybe halfway so that my forearm was at right angles to my bicep. Hawk and I moved from the hill to the dumbbells to the heavy bag to the improvised pistol range to the dinner table for cold chicken and the local wine.

One of the many drawbacks to Southern California was that most of the basketball games started at 4:30 local time. Another drawback was that the Clippers played in some of the games. I kept squeezing the rubber ball. Susan had gone to a drug store and bought a bunch of vitamins and I took them every morning with the local orange juice. Susan was pushing big doses of Vitamin C. She said it helped in the healing process. We spoke to no one. We called no one on the phone. We wrote no letters. As far as Boston was concerned, we were gone. As far as the Gray Man was concerned, I was dead. There was no reason to think he didn't believe that. Still, I kept the Detective Special with me even though it was like carrying a bowling ball up the hill. And Hawk was never away from me, and never without a gun. And the shotgun leaned in the corner when Susan and I went to bed.

In mid-January, I made it halfway up the hill before I had to stop, and Pearl wasn't pulling me. It was a sunny day and when we came back down the road to our house, Susan was standing in the front yard watching me. She had on white sneakers and white short-shorts and a dark blue sleeveless blouse and her black hair must have been still damp from the shower because the sun glistened on it. Or maybe I just thought it did.

"You've got legs like a rainy day," I said. "I'd like to see them clear up."

"You say that to me every time I wear shorts," she said.

"Nice to be able to count on something," I said.

"Besides, my legs are hideously pale, pale, pale."

"Never my problem," Hawk murmured.

"Your legs look great," I said.

"Are you aware," Susan said, "that as you walked down the road toward me you weren't limping?"

Progress.

It was raining lightly on a Tuesday morning, but Hawk and I were out hitting the bag anyway. The way we did it was to work on one punch at a time, banging the same punch over and over again into the bag, first with my left, then with my right. And even though the right did little more than twitch, I went through the whole process in the nervous system just as if the right hand moved. By the third week in January, I was starting to thump the bag pretty good with my left, and this morning, a Tuesday, in the light rain, I got a right hook into it. It wasn't much of a right hook. It wouldn't have knocked the lime slice off a margarita, but it was a hook. I did it again, and eight more times. Neither Hawk nor I said anything. But when I finished on the heavy bag that day, I put out my left fist and Hawk tapped it gently with his.

Progress.

A week and a half later, Susan brought home a bunch of Pacific lobster tails and we had them with lemon b.u.t.ter and rice pilaf, which Susan cooked. We ate it on a gla.s.s table out on the patio with white wine and a salad. The sun slanted in, low in the southern sky, edging down over the Pacific, highlighting the ridge line on the hills across from us. There was no wind, and the smell of flowers and trees and green gra.s.s hung in the quiet air.

"Want me to cut up that lobster?" Susan said.

I smiled at her and picked up the knife with my right hand and carefully sliced a bite off the lobster. It took me longer than it should have, and I nearly dropped the knife once.

"You've been practicing in secret," Susan said.

"Un huh."

She leaned over and kissed me on the mouth.

"Coming right along," she said.

But the sunshine was fleeting that year in Montecito. Most of the time it rained, while bits and pieces of the town washed into the ocean. There was mud clogging much of downtown Santa Barbara and the people on the tube were paroxysmal about it.

"You build on a flood plain," Hawk said, "you got to consider the possibility of a flood."

We were in the Montecito YMCA lifting weights. Or I was. Hawk was standing around with his gun hidden under a loose warmup jacket, trying to look like a trainer. I wasn't lifting a lot of weight. But I was actually moving the weights that I was lifting. Most of the equipment was Nautilus machines. There wasn't much in the way of free weights, but I couldn't do much with free weights yet. I was doing chest presses. They were very light chest presses, but I was using both hands.

"Aren't you supposed to say things like, 'You can do it!' and 'Atta boy'?" I said.

"Don't want people looking over, see what you lifting," Hawk said. "Be embarra.s.sing."

There was a ravine between the Y and the parking lot with a wide, planked wooden bridge across it. When we left the gym, the rain was steady as it had been when we came. The ravine, bone dry when it wasn't raining, was snarling with flood waters only a couple of feet below the bridge.

"Keeps raining," I said, "Susan's going to start running in circles."

We got into the Explorer and Hawk started it up. "She ain't had much to do here," Hawk said. "'Cept food shop and make supper, and cheer you up."

"All of which she hates."

We pulled out of the lot and out to San Ysidro Road and right up toward East Valley. The wipers were on steadily. There was something soothing, I thought, about windshield wipers.

"Maybe she don't mind cheerin' you up," Hawk said.

"Maybe not," I said. "But you know how rambunctious she is. She can't even take Pearl out running because Pearl won't go out in the rain."