He eases the Mirada into a driveway camouflaged by unkempt hedges. In true Shaolin fashion he has followed his warrior instincts and once again his Path has been revealed, the next step in the journey an unoccupied cabin on the banks of Lake Baylor featuring a direct view across the water to Detective Dave Kershaw’s humble abode.
He enters the front door, the one he jimmied open the day before when he tailed Faye and Kershaw out to the cop’s house and watched them go inside, Kershaw carrying Faye’s suitcase. A quick inspection of the cabin across the lake (covered furniture, stripped beds) had confirmed that it was unoccupied, its absentee owner likely a snowbird who spent the scorching Florida summers in a cooler climate up north.
In the kitchen a gust of woodsy air fills his lungs and a sudden memory of the commune on the Powder River flashes through his mind, his dad teaching him how to fly-fish the river for trout. As the sun lipped over the ponderosa pines scattered along the opposite ridge, the old poseur flicked his wrist, waiting for the yellow fly to land, without a ripple, in the center of the stream, exactly where he had aimed it. Standing behind the boy, he showed him the subtleties of presentation—the arc of the right arm generating the twist of the wrist—explaining how you had to coax, not bully, your prey.
Now he sets a sack of groceries—Swiss cheese and a loaf of bread and a bottle of cheap red wine—down on the kitchen counter before going back out to the Mirada to retrieve the rifle and binoculars as well as the flashlight he purchased earlier that day at a hardware store. Then he flips the kitchen switch to confirm that the electricity is off, a blessing in disguise: lights blazing on inside the cabin might alert a curious neighbor.
At the commune, his mother dredged the trout filets in corn meal then fried them in butter and oil. Afterwards, at sunset, they sat out on the back deck facing the river, his father reading a paperback copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance while his mother sewed a patch, a miniature American flag, on the torn knee of the boy’s blue jeans.
To the son, that first summer on the Powder River still represents, in memory, Eden before the fall. At night, drifting off to sleep, he anticipated what tomorrow might bring. A game of catch with Jimmy Kirk. A rainbow trout striking his jig. Another peaceful meal with his parents. No more rancor, no more angry threats, no more marital anguish. It was a new beginning for all three of them in one of the most beautiful places they had ever been. In the mornings, a scrim of mist lifted off the water and curled around the trunks of the cottonwoods. Then the sun peeked over the eastern ridge and the first beams slanting down through the ponderosa pines on the sagebrush hillside sparkled on the river too, the water so clear you could track the rainbows as they wiggled downstream to pause in the swirling eddies. And so another day in paradise would begin, a few neighbors joining his father for morning yoga, his mother blowing on the embers of last night’s communal fire, Jimmy Kirk, baseball glove in hand, sprinting across the grass calling out Chance’s name.
As the light begins to fade on Lake Baylor he passes through the kitchen into the living room. A sofa and a pair of matching upholstered armchairs draped with white sheets, end tables piled high with back issues of Field & Stream. A Navajo rug, painting of old Key West by Mario Sanchez, wooden rack with two fishing rods dangling from its hooks. Even with sheets covering the furniture, it’s the kind of warm, inviting home he would be perfectly content to live in, a rustic space that would allow him to reimagine, to relive, his summer in Eden, in solitude this time. Unwrapping the rifle, he leans it against the back of the couch. Across the water, Kershaw’s pontoon, cleated to the dock, rocks gently in the wake of a passing bass boat.
When a light blinks on in the back of Kershaw’s house, Chance steps outside to investigate. Focusing the binoculars, he watches the detective decant a bottle of wine and place it in the center of a farm table on the screened lanai, then return a few minutes later with bowls and glasses.
He walks down the sloped lawn to the edge of the water, keeping the lanai in his line of sight. The air is slightly cooler now, a steady breeze whistling in the leaves of a nearby willow and rippling the dark surface of the lake. Above the opposite shoreline a crescent moon tops a grove of white cedars, shining down on the lanai where Faye smiles at Kershaw as he lights a kerosene lamp at either end of the table and pours them each a glass of wine.
Chance refocuses the binoculars, irritated by the romantic tableau, the wicks of the lamps flickering in their clear glass globes while Faye and Kershaw lean over their bowls of pasta before lifting their wine glasses in a toast. He fights off the urge to retch. Because that could, that should, have been him. Not the cop, him. In the village he gave Angelina every opportunity to return his affection. Flirted, bantered, listened to her stories, laughed at her quirky asides. Offered his hand when they strolled down the beach. Told her time and again how lovely she was. And for weeks, for a month, never made an inappropriate suggestion or tried to steal a single kiss. Ever the gentleman, he was determined to wait until he was sure that she was ready.
The night he finally made his move, breakers thundered in off the sea—a storm was brewing off Cozumel—and rolled high up the beach, the turbulent weather enhancing Chance’s ardor. Lying next to her on a blanket in the sand, he reached out and slid his hand inside her dress and discovered the hard kernel of her nipple. Then his tongue searched her mouth, and when she timidly reciprocated he knew that her desire now echoed his own. He would bring her to climax right there on the sand, and from that moment on she would be his.
And then, without warning, she pushed his hand away and jumped to her feet, brushing the sand from her dress and shaking her head in rejection. Raising her voice so she could be heard over the gusty wind, she apologized, profusely. She just didn’t think of him that way, she said. Their relationship was deeper than that.
Deeper?
Our friendship, she cried.
Now he seethes, torn to the bone by jealousy as he watches Faye and Kershaw finish their dinner, recalling in the throes of his despondency the path of broken shells like a necklace of crushed pearls he followed down the beach back to the Yucatan Café that evening, where he drowned his sorrow in a bottle of mescal.
After a desultory meal and a glass of vinegary wine, he beds down on the couch and sleeps intermittently, his dreams and daydreams inseparable, a single vision illuminated by the sun riding the crowns of firs and spruces as he ascends the trail to Cape Falcon with Mindy. Weaving through pitch-scented woods past occasional glimpses of the sea, he hears a boom of waves crashing against the rock walls at the foot of the cliffs. Wind whipping the trees. Screaming seagulls.
At the Yucatan Café the bartender poured another finger of mescal into his customer’s glass, keeping his own counsel. Sometimes the gringos—especially the vets but this one too, the one they called Chance—plummeted into their dark place, their eyes going blank. The thousand-yard stare, one of them called it.
Sipping mescal and looking out at the stormy sea, Chance pictured Mindy approaching the crest of Cape Falcon, the only flat section of the trail, while he remained a few steps behind, his inner voice counseling patience, Bodhisattva calm. By the time they traversed the cape and started down the opposite face of the mountain he would quicken his pace and catch up with her. Meanwhile his father rotated his right arm and zipped his line over the Powder River, recoiling his fist just in time to drop the fly into a swirling eddy where the trout liked to rest. The boy studied his father’s technique, memorizing it, until his eyes snapped open and darted out the window at the blade of a moon severing a cloud over Lake Baylor.
Sometimes when they made love he was startled by how tiny the bones in Mindy’s shoulders were. In her pelvis, her wrists, her hips. Bird bones; a sparrow. It wouldn’t take much, it occurred to him one day, to crush them in his hands. Approaching the crest of the cape, he picked up his pace, closing the distance between him and the slut who fucked anyone, everyone; all you had to do, apparently, was ask. If she comes so easily / what must she be to other men? It was the poets, his mother claimed, who understood the hidden rhythms of the world, the music the rest of us couldn’t hear. Not the priests, not the politicians, not the tycoons; the poets. She quoted passages of Frost, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath. Frost quaint and ironic, Stevens indecipherable, Plath an open wound. He reread the poems in Ariel, never having encountered such raw emotion in poetry before, never having known such poetry even existed. Plath’s spider web mind. Her insistent voice. Daddy. Woozy, he finished the glass of mescal and staggered back to his room above the dive shop where he heard, through Dieter’s closed door, a song by Fever Tree, that pastoral flute. He twisted the key in the lock, collapsed on his rumpled sheets, and passed out. As the sun broke over the Powder River, over Cape Falcon, over Lake Baylor, he assured himself that the scream he just heard wasn’t Mindy. It was a gull.