Zab leaves a message on my voice mail. I drive to a pay phone and wait an hour and a half. I'm reading Dear Abby for the third time. My mother won't come to our wedding unless we invite her boyfriend and he's alcohol dependent and blah blah blah. The phone finally rings. Zab's lined up a real estate deal in Salt Lake City. Real estate is code for jewelry. A cherry, he says. We agree to meet next week at a Best Western in the Beehive State.I fly into Salt Lake on a beautiful June afternoon. The air out there is so damn clean, the mountains, everything. I pick up a cab, the driver goes three-fifty easy, bleached hair and chin whiskers. She doesn't get out to open the trunk.
"Throw your bag in the back, sugar, and sit up here with me." As we circle toward the airport exit, my rear end feels damp.
"I'm so sorry," she says. "I spilled a whiskey sour, I thought it had dried. You want one?" I open the Thermos and pour the plastic lid half full.
"I have six kids and they're all geniuses," she tells me. "Chuckie's getting his MBA next year from BYU. Gonna make big money. You believe in fate?" she asks. I don't know. "You believe folks go wacky on the full of the moon?" She likes to talk. I read that research showed the full moon thing is a crock. "Wrong," she says. "I seen it every month. Loony tunes." She laughs so hard she swerves into the head-on lane but there's nothing coming. Is that fate? Are our lives steered by tabloid astrology?
Zab is watching CNN. He's a news junky. Things are bad in Russia. He tells me about a place in the suburbs, K. Kalin & Son. It's in a strip mall, minimal security, nice inventory. Only one son? I ask. Son or sons, he says, what the hell's the difference? Zab is thin-skinned. He takes me out there in a rented Town Car.
It's & Son. Only child. At least I had my sister. When I was little and things went sour with Pop, Karen and I used to pull our conspiracies over our heads and wait out the storm. I miss her.
Zab lets me off, I push open the thick glass door. I'm wearing the new seersucker I bought for this, the horn-rim glasses, the mustache and goatee I'll shave afterward, fancy cufflinks, an Oyster Perpetual on my wrist. We specialize in watches. Some of them are worth as much as an expensive car, but they're easy to transport, easy to fence.
A young man shows me his pearly teeth. Mr. Kalin? No, no, he died, like, eight years ago. The father? No, the son. His wife's family runs the business now, the Langdorffs. Oh.
The guy's scrubbed, crew-cut. I wonder if he's a Mormon. We talk watches. The crystal is cut from a solid block of sapphire, he tells me. Some of them are good down to four thousand feet. I tell him I'm thinking of upgrading to a President model. We talk fluted bezels, high-polish bombé bezels, diamond lugs, white gold, yellow gold, ice-blue dial, platinum bracelet with brush finish. Options. The gab lets him know I know watches, puts him at ease. He shows me his stock. I'm counting 30, 40 watches, 10 grand and up. Nice. No men with guns in sight. I'll think it over, I tell him.
Okay, I say to Zab. He drives us to a supermarket. I wander the rows in the parking lot until I spot a Taurus with a wad of keys hanging on the ignition. Lot of people leave them. A fuzzy frog clings to the back window with suction cup feet. The interior smells like cherry soda. I toss the pink cardboard Christmas tree from the window as I wheel out of the lot.
I park a couple of blocks from the motel. I'm on the second level off the courtyard. I change and go down to the pool. I have a routine, stomach crunches, push-ups, stretching. I can hold a handstand five minutes. When I'm done I dive in and swim a couple of laps. Underwater I hear a hum, I guess from the filter, but it sounds as if the whole earth is vibrating, as if I'm down four thousand feet. I go sit on one of the deck chairs. The sun is hot and I can see snowy peaks floating in the blue.
I was having some personal problems that spring. My wife and I had split, not for the first time. She wanted stability, predictability, I don't blame her. I was running around trying to put together middleman deals in high-grade hydro pot. Other things. Drinking way too much, alcohol dependent I guess. Plus Karen's cancer had really twisted my head around.
In May I experienced a couple of episodes. I don't know what to call them, kind of the opposite of blackouts. As if somebody suddenly cranked up the juice of reality. They scared me. There's mental illness in my family. It's not like coming down with a cold. Your sanity goes, brother, you go.
So I was feeling adrift there in Salt Lake. Adrift in my life. Alone. Zab is not a friend of mine in any sense. I don't like the guy. He claims he has an IQ of 180, but I don't believe it.
A woman in a blue bikini comes down the metal steps from the second tier. She's thin, but not bad looking. Petite, you would say. The little girl with her, maybe seven, is carrying an inflated dragon. She drops it in the shallow end and pushes it back and forth with her toes. The woman sits in the second chair over from mine. She spends some time smearing lotion on her legs, running her hands up them as if she were pulling on stockings. She's wearing a hat with a floppy brim. She opens a thick book.
The girl eases into the pool step by step. Even in the shallow end the water is up to her armpits. She clasps her hands on top of her head and squints at the sun.
"She can swim very well," the woman says. "I taught her when she was a baby. Her father said not to, but I just tossed her in. Babies swim by instinct. It's the best way to learn."
The girl isn't swimming, she's carrying on a whispered conversation with the dragon. The woman's oversized sunglasses make her face look small.
"I'm getting ready for my real estate exam," she says, nodding at the book. "The way the 30-year fixed is going, I figure it's a good way to earn some money. We just bought a house ourselves, out in Draper, and we're waiting to close. That's what gave me the idea."
"Everybody's always moving."
"You bet they are." Her short hair sticks out from under the hat in unruly curls. She turns a page in the book.
The girl goes under. Time passes. Ripples carry the dragon toward the middle of the pool. I bolt upright in my chair. I can't see the girl. I stand. She's face down in the deep end. I take one step toward the edge, a flame of panic igniting in my chest. She kicks and surfaces. The woman looks at me and smiles.
"Told you," she says. "Her name's Rosa. After Rosa Parks. We're white—her father was, too—he died just before Christmas -- but I admire the hell out that woman. Wouldn't sit in the back of the bus. You know?"
"I've heard of her."
"I'm Tammy. You here on business?" Is she testing the waters? Or is she just being friendly? I glance at her tanned legs.
"Jojo. Business and pleasure."
"That's the idea, mix 'em up."
"The crash driver's here." Zab has approached from behind. "Why don't you come up and meet him."
I look at him. He talks in code over a pay phone and blabs in front of a stranger. Some I.Q.
"I'll be there," I say.
"What's a crash driver?" she asks me when he's gone. She's the curious type.
"That guy?" I say. "He's loony tunes. It's been a pleasure talking to you, Tammy."
"Likewise." She slips her sunglasses off so I can see her eyes. They pierce my soul, the way women's eyes often do. She smiles and I smile back.
I put on slacks and a teeshirt and go down the walkway to Zab's room.
The crash driver is Lonnie. His face is stamped with a million bad dreams. His eyes, his voice, the way he sits on the bed with his elbows on his knees, the way he holds his cigarette, it's so goddamn obvious.
"Where'd you do time?" I say.
"Ely, over in Nevada."
"He's a friend of Willie Rodriguez," Zab says.
"Who's Willie Rodriguez?"
"You know, from Albuquerque. Lonnie's clean. No drugs, right kid? No pills. He's born again."
"By the grace of God," Lonnie says.
Great. I've been inside county jails a couple of times, but never more than three months, never in a state facility. You soak up a prison smell in there, a cop can sniff you from a block away.
We drive out again in the Town Car, me in the back seat watching through the smoked window as the stucco houses and optometrist shops glide by.
"Through a glass darkly," I say. "What's that mean?"
"What are you talking about?" Zab says.
"I'm asking him, the Bible pumper. Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. What the hell's that supposed to mean?"
"Means what it says." Lonnie chuckles.
Zab says something about the wide, wide streets. Lonnie's explaining how they're like that because Brigham Young wanted to be able to do a one-eighty with a team of oxen. Lonnie's not a Mormon, but he says he admires them. Fellow Christians.
"I don't believe there ever was a Christ," I say. "There's no historical evidence Jesus ever existed. It's a big fairy tale."
"Don't start," Zab says.
"You turn the other cheek in the joint?" I ask Lonnie.
"Look," Lonnie says.
"Come on, you guys. We've got work." Zab pulls into the parking lot by K. Kalin & Son. "You're going to be over there driving the Town Car," he tells Lonnie. "I'll be in a white Taurus here. The whole thing takes exactly one minute. Jojo goes in, we all start counting. One Mississippi, two Mississippi. At 60 Mississippi, Jojo comes out. We both roll, nice and easy."
"And if something goes wrong, when do you take off without me?" I ask Lonnie.
"I don't know, when?"
"Doomsday," Zab says, "and not even then. Right, Jojo? Never."
I told him to call me Jojo on this job, I don't know why. It's a monkey's name and I guess I felt more or less like a monkey those days.
The whole time we're on the case, I'm only half paying attention. I keep thinking about Tammy. I have an urge to rush back to the motel and pound on her door. I can't shake the idea that she's a chunk of my future in danger of breaking off and drifting away.
How it works, you have one guy to drive the car, one guy to go in, one guy, the crash car. When you make your getaway, the crash car follows in case of pursuit. Zab and I have done half a dozen of these. He always recruits a local guy for the crash car and pays him a straight fee.
We cruise the route twice. Zab notes every light, every stop sign, turn here, turn here. Keep the speed even. This is where we switch to the Town Car. When we're done we'll drop Lonnie across town and head for the airport. Two hours after it goes down, Zab and I will be in different cities.
Do I like robbing jewelry stores? I don' t know. There's a lousy edge you get before you go in, and a big rooster-in-the-morning feeling afterward. While it's going down it's just scenery rushing past. You're not doing anything, it's just happening to you. You know it's your voice, your feet on the floor, but you don't connect to it the way you do to everyday reality, which a lot of people think is the only reality. You feel the heft of the sawed-off in your hand, but it's so light you could throw it through the ceiling. You're eleven feet tall and you can run the hundred yard dash in two seconds, leap tall buildings. Maybe that's the attraction, that wild sensation. But it's not what you would call pleasant.
I've only fired one warning shot, that was on my first job. I did it just to see if I could, just to see people react. It was a rush. A shotgun going off in a jewelry store makes a hell of a noise, I'll tell you. My ears were still ringing an hour later.
People will say it's the money. A job like this, you walk away with three or four hundred thousand in take. Even fenced at thirty cents on the dollar, it's a good chunk of change. But I blow most of it buying gifts for the wife, for my niece and nephews, friends. I party, stay drunk a week, maybe take a month in the islands. The money doesn't last and it doesn't get me anywhere. It doesn't change who I am.
We stop at a Red Lobster for tails and popcorn shrimp and bottles of Sam Adams. Lonnie complains to Zab I'm eyeballing him.
"He eyeballs everybody," Zab says.
"I'm gonna pray for you, man," Lonnie tells me. Moron.
After dinner, Zab drops me at the motel and goes to take Lonnie home. I'm the young and the restless. I'm thinking a lot about the job, but not in the right way. You have to imagine it going down smoothly. I keep seeing all the ways it could turn south. I see myself losing it. What do you lose when you lose it? Control? Connection with reality? I don't know. But the idea starts to eat at me. A kind of claustrophobia builds inside me. I can't breathe.
I had spotted a bar just up the road, the Wildcat. I make a plan. I'll stroll up there, have a few drinks, dampen the sensation before it gets away from me.
It's a mild pastel evening. On the walkway outside my room, I look down at the pool, at the way the water makes the turquoise swim. It fascinates me and makes me feel queasy. I'm standing there staring when Tammy opens her door. She invites me in.
"You remember Rosa," she says. "You want a beer?"
Clothes are scattered around, toys, stuffed animals. The dragon, deflated, is draped over the top of an open suitcase. I smell shampoo. Rosa is on the bed drinking juice out of a little box. She waves to me as if she has spotted me a long way off.
"We're just going to watch 'Jeopardy,'" Tammy says. "Sit down." The loping theme song is already on.
"It's our favorite show," Rosa says.
Tammy hands me a beer and takes the chair, I sit on the bed with the little girl. They're starting the opening round—Historic Heroes, TV or not TV, "G"eography, How Soon We Forget.
"Did you meet your crash driver?"
We exchange a look over that. She knows something or she's toying with me. It doesn't matter. I like her.
What is Georgia? Right. Geography for four hundred. This river in India is considered holy by Hindus.
"What's the Ganges?" Tammy says. "I like 'Jeopardy' because when it comes down to it, life is about asking the right questions, not about giving the right answers."
I laugh at this nonsense and she joins me, her eyes sparkling. Suddenly I think I could love this woman. I feel as if we fit, as if we're already family. We could live together and ask the right questions forever.
How soon for two hundred. This male chauvinist was defeated in a notable 1973 tennis match with Billie Jean King.
"Who's Bobby Riggs?" I say.
"You know your forgotten people."
Lines run from her nose to the corner of her lips when she smiles and traces of them remain when her face relaxes. Years are passing, for her and for all of us. Losing a husband must be a killer. Karen's death certainly gave me a flash of what's behind the curtain.
How soon we forget, six hundred. His cars appeared in 'Back to the Future' but his company went broke.
"Who is Santa Claus?" Rosa guesses. None of the contestants can think of John DeLorean. I know it, but don't say. I don't like people who act bright.
To have a kid and see her change, see her blossom like the flowers in a fast movie, what would that do to me? Is that my silver destiny?
This lead singer of Jefferson Airplane sang 'Somebody to Love.'
"Grace Slick." Tammy says.
"Who is?" Rosa corrects her.
Her mother croons, "Do-on't you need somebody to love?"
The idea of family spooks me. Pop was a brooder, a man of a thousand disappointments. He would shower me and my sister with blackness. One Christmas Eve he went off the merry-go-round and tore the tree down. Nice memory. My mother treated his tantrums as jokes. It was her defense, I guess. Karen was the only one on my side. I wish I had done more for her when she got sick. I wish I had said what I was thinking.
"Did you say you worked in sales?" Tammy says. She's handing me a second bottle of Bud.
"No, I'm a consultant," I say. "I talk to companies about employee motivation. What it comes down to: Work or you're fired. Only we tell them how to say it nice."
"Interesting. You travel a lot?"
"Wherever the job takes me."
"Have you been to the North Pole?" Rosa asks.
"No, I haven't."
"That's where Santa lives. And my Dad is there. He's not in heaven. Is he, Mom?"
"I think he is, sweetie."
Rosa shakes her head.
Double Jeopardy. Literature on Film, Old Testament Figures, Fictional Places, Famous Sparklers. Am I dreaming? Is this a fictional place?
"I took the Bible as literature when I was getting my associates," Tammy says. "There is some weird stuff in there. I have friends who are holy rollers and I always ask them, 'Have you actually read the thing? Have you read Leviticus?'"
"Religion is a racket."
"Who told you that?" She laughs and I know she's way ahead of me.
Lake Woebegon is right. I'll try Famous Sparklers for four hundred. This forty-five-caret blue stone has long been thought to have a curse on it.
"The Hope Diamond," Tammy says. "What's the Hope Diamond?"
"What's soap-on-a-rope?" Rosa says and laughs wildly.
"Do you think there's hope?" Tammy asks me.
"I guess you never know what's coming down the pike."
"Is that what hope means, not knowing the future?"
It's the birthstone of those born in April.
"I live day by day. I don't know how else to do it."
What is the emerald? Correct.
"To me, hope is praying without God."
Sparklers for a thousand. Weighing in at five hundred and sixty carats, this largest sapphire of its kind was formed some 2 billion years ago.
Nobody can guess it. "Star of India," I say, just before Alex Trebek.
"Yea, Jojo!" Rosa cheers. She puts an arm around my neck and kisses my cheek. Her mother smiles again.
"I've gotta get going," I say.
"No, you can't," Rosa whines.
"Stay for Final Jeopardy at least." Tammy frowns and smiles at the same time. The look stabs me in the heart. I stay.
The category is Famous Criminals. Tammy looks at me and stifles a laugh. Asked why he robbed banks, he said, Because that's where the money was. You have thirty seconds.
"Willie Sutton," I say over the tick-tock music. "Only he didn't actually say it. He said the real reason he robbed banks was because he felt more alive inside a bank robbing it than he did at any other time in his life."
"Aren't you smart."
Time's up. Two of the contestants guess wrong. One gets it and, with twenty- six thousand, four hundred dollars becomes our new champion.
Tammy and I say our good-byes while Rosa turns somersaults on the bed.
"You staying in Salt Lake long?" she asks.
"Flying out tomorrow."
"Oh. Well, good luck."
Good luck. I walk over to the Wildcat. A couple of young dudes on the make are seated at the bar, four guys in suits and two businesswomen are finishing dinner. I drink two or three vodka and tonics and watch a beauty pageant on the television over the bar. Miss Belize looks good, but all these girls have too many teeth, like sharks dressed as women.
I down a couple more drinks. Vodka has a numbing effect on me. It cleans out my head. Walking back to the motel, I notice the moon is full. The sudden sight of it creeping over the mountains makes me reel. The blacktop jumps up and scrapes my palms.
In my room I leave the light off and lie on my bed. The glow from the pool angles through my window and throws a pattern of ripples on the ceiling. I keep expecting Tammy to tiptoe down and tap on my door. A fantasy of it fills me with aching life. I can see the white imprint of her bathing suit against her tan. I can imagine the two of us lying face-to-face and whispering secrets. But it's after midnight. Somebody turns off the lights in the pool.
I'm already awake when the clock radio erupts. The long wait has begun. The event is like a train way up the tracks. You see it coming, it seems like it will never arrive, then it rushes down on you all of a sudden.
The morning's chilly for swimming. In the lobby behind the glass walls, the business patrons are chowing down on the free continental breakfast—coffee, juice, pastries, miniature boxes of cereal. They stare at me staring at them.
I plunge. The water is light as air, as if it's carbonated. It doesn't touch me. I inhale the chlorine, look up at the immaculate blue. I take some deep breaths and dive to the bottom. No hum now, utter silence, peace. I wait there until my lungs turn to stone.
Then we're riding in the Taurus, which still stinks of air freshener. We stop at a light. The taxi cab I rode over in pulls up beside us. The driver stares at me. She's not jolly today. She scowls. Maybe Chuckie flunked out of school or maybe she had to deal with too many lunatics last night. Her mouth forms three nasty words. My window's rolled up but I can almost read her lips. The light changes.
Zab is going on about the fence, the split, how he's going to credit part of my cut to an American Express card I use, but I'm not listening. My teeth are clenched. The anticipation is mounting the stairway to heaven, filling me with a loud, tense clangor of anxiety. I'm used to it.
Zab mentions something he saw on the news last night. The ice cap is melting. Polar bears are floating far out to sea on slabs of ice, doomed. The future is going to hell.
Can a man even exist four thousand feet down? If he can, does he need to know the time? Do the ticking seconds become even more important down there?
We pass Danny's Donuts, white enamel exterior, neon dunker in the window. A woman wearing emerald slacks is carrying a paper cup with a plastic lid. She has the self-composure of a realtor on her way to a closing. We pass the well-kept homes of Mormons, green grass and picket fences. A polar bear stares at me from a front yard, his face at once desperate and resigned.
A cloth sack is folded in my pocket. I'm wearing sunglasses.
Jesus Christ stands in front of a brick building, his white plaster arms outstretched. As we roll past, he lifts them toward me, calling me back.
I heft the gun. Zab has found me a pump Remington Sidewinder with a pistol grip. He's hacksawed the barrel to a manageable length. Very intimidating weapon, but easy to come by in any gun shop. I don't want to kill anybody.
I hit a plateau. I feel as if I could hold my breath forever. An excruciating calm descends on me. Every movement, even shifting my eyes, becomes deliberate. The drip of time slows. I watch each second gather and swell before it falls. I know the car is cruising at normal speed, but to me it seems we're barely moving. A lawn sprinkler throws an iridescent arc into the air.
Zab finally turns the car into the parking lot. Now the rush begins. Now a thousands bits of chrome light up, a miniature sun shining from each. Now the world turns to glass. Now a vibration starts inside my skull. Now I say a prayer without God. Now I think of Karen, see my father's icy eyes on me. Now I am more alive than at any other time in my life.
Lonnie has been following us in the Town Car. Zab checks to make sure he's in position. We sweep to the curb.
With the door open, I hesitate. Heels click, click on the cement. Tammy doesn't look at me as she strides along the front of the store. She's dressed in a crisp sky-blue business suit. She's holding Rosa by the hand. Rosa glances in my direction and, for a split second, smiles. They turn in at the entrance of K. Kalin & Son, stepping forward to greet their reflections in the glass door. They disappear inside.
The Hope Diamond was stolen from the forehead of a Hindu goddess. Life, they say, is like a vision in a dream. My mouth goes dry as ash.
" . . . ready?" Zab is saying.
I tuck the weapon under my jacket. I step out. The sunlight is making jewels come alive in the sidewalk. The breeze descends from the white peaks and raises a sound like the swell of a pipe organ in church.
I exchange a look with Zab. In that instant we are brothers, we are the only men on earth. He nods. I nod.
One Mississippi.