The Long Fall

When he saw me Twill stood up, but we didn’t embrace. Twill is too cool for kneejerk expressions of fondness; I guess I am, too.

“Hey, boy,” I said. “What you doin’ here? It’s nearly two in the morning.”

“Mr. Lewis called,” he said. “He told me that you’d been arrested and so I called up to find out what precinct Detective Kitteridge was working out of.”

If anyone was an example of having too much on the ball it was my son. He would track down Satan and then try to brace him for a bad debt.

“This is Lonnie,” Twill said. “She’s waiting for her boyfriend, Juman. They got him in here on a seventy-two-hour thing. I gave her Mr. Lewis’s number. I hope that’s okay.”

Lonnie had the lovely, and somewhat awkward, physical contradiction of skinny legs and big breasts. She stood up and shook my hand like her mother had taught her when she was five.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. McGill. Your son is great.”

“Tell Breland to call me,” I said. “If it’s just a simple thing, I’ll cover the charge.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said. “He’s really not a bad guy at all.”

Before we left, Lonnie kissed my son on the cheek and whispered something to him.

“WHAT DID LONNIE say?” I asked Twill. We were walking down the ramp that led to the garage where he had parked my classic car.

“She wants me to call her. Says that Juman is on the way out and she’d like to buy me a coffee or something.”

I gave him a doubting stare.

“Don’t worry, Pop. She was just thankful to have somebody help her out in there.”

He didn’t say whether he was going to call her or not.

ON THE WAY home Twill asked me about the interrogation. I told him what happened, then tried to get deeper into him.

“So you didn’t really say if you had a steady girl,” I ventured.

“Don’t worry, Dad. Lonnie’s not my type.”

“I’m not worried about her. I just wanted to know if you had something going on. You know, a steady, like.”

He laughed. I think he might have been a little embarrassed.

“What’s funny?” I asked him.

“Here some man you never even met tries to beat you to death and you’re asking me about if I have a girlfriend or not?”

“Near-death experience makes a man want to pay attention to the little things. Is it so hard to answer a simple question?”

“I’m not gay, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“You know, son, you’re better than I was in that interrogation room.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something’s going on with you, Twill. I want you to trust me.”

“I trust you fine.”

“Then talk to me.”

“I’m okay, Dad. You don’t have to worry about me.”

Most parents of teenagers could identify with that banter. There I was, the dedicated fisherman, and he was like a lively trout slipping between my fingers in an icy-cold stream.

The difference between Twill and other young men was that he was planning a hit in New York City with no more trepidation than a teenage girl fixing her lipstick between kisses.

“Tell me somethin’, Pop.”

“What’s that, son?”

“Why’d they let you go? I mean, Mr. Lewis said that he thought they’d keep you all night at least.”

“I think they just got tired,” I said. Then I yawned.

Ê€„

25

Oh my God. Oh my God,” Katrina chanted again and again, daubing my head with a damp towel. “It’s so terrible. Why would a man hit you like that? How could someone be like this?”

It’s a disheartening feeling when you can’t stand the touch of someone but neither can you push them away. There hadn’t been love between Katrina and me for a dozen years at least, and before that the passion was sporadic at best.

It would have been impossible to explain in a court of law, or in a marriage counselor’s office, how I believed that every gesture she made, every comment that came from her lips, was considered before its fabrication. Katrina had made herself into the image of a loving wife because she had tried her best to leave and the ground had fallen out from underneath her.

Sometimes I wondered how my life ended up in that sad configuration. How could I be the father to other men’s children, the life-partner of a woman who believed that wealth and beauty somehow combined to make up love?

I was like a man, shovel in hand, finding himself standing in a freshly dug grave but with no memory of having dug it. I stayed there because at least if you’ve hit bottom you had no farther to fall.

“Leonid?” Katrina said in a tone that made me think she’d called to me more than once.

“Yeah?”

“Are you insured?”

Every now and then even my wife could say something to make me laugh.

I AWOKE AT five the next morning, as usual. I’ve always been a nervous sleeper, an early riser, and prone to naps.

After two cups of extra-strong press-pot French roast I honed my thoughts down to the trouble I was facing. I needed to extricate myself, but before I could do that I had to understand the nature of the mess that I was in.