Текст книги "The Call of the Mountain"

Автор книги: Sam Neumann

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

28

“Speak to me, Julian. Speak to me honestly.”

“I am.”

“You are not. I can feel your insincerity. I don’t fault you for it. But it’s there.”

“It’s not.”

“Tell me, my dear. What is it?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Do you take me for a fool? Do you think I don’t see the way you’ve changed? You’re distant. You’ve withdrawn.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Is it me?”

“Of course not.”

“Is it something I’ve done? Should I give you more space?”

“It’s not…it’s fine. Nothing’s wrong, Suz, okay?”

“I told you not to call me that.”

“I’m sorry. Suzanne. Nothing’s wrong.”

“You do take me for a fool.”

“I don’t.”

“I can handle you withdrawing. I don’t like it, but I can handle it. But I cannot handle a man in my life considering me a fool. I am not a fool, Julian.”

“I know you aren’t. Listen…I’m just trying to figure it all out. Everything happened so fast, you know? It wasn’t long ago I was married, living in New York. My life changed. It’s hard to deal with.”

“Are you unhappy?”

“No. I wouldn’t say that. It’s just a lot to take in. A lot to think about. Maybe I need a little time to adjust.”

“You need space.”

“I…maybe. A little. Just for a little while.”

“Very well. I don’t like it, but very well.”

“It’s not a bad thing.”

“Again, a fool. I’m beginning to wonder how you’ve thought of me this whole time.”

“Don’t be silly. I adore you.”

“Possibly. But I know what this is. This idea of space is only a precursor to the end.”

“You’re being dramatic.”

“Perhaps. But we both know it. At least I admit it.”

“We don’t. Stop it, Suzanne. I care about you. I just need some space.”

“And as I told you: very well.”

29

I visited that coffee shop every morning for the next week. Every morning I hoped to see her, but felt relief when I didn’t. I had no idea what I’d say if and when she showed up again. I had no idea if she would ever come to that coffee shop again. I just had to see her, even if I was happy every time I didn’t.

On the sixth day, at 9:15 a.m., she walked in. She wore a wool sweater and the same knit cap. My eyes locked on her as she walked to the register, and immediately my heart beat faster. I looked twice to make sure, but I knew it was her the first time. I briefly considered putting my head down, pretending I didn’t see her. Hiding out for a little while, until she left. Avoiding the situation altogether. What was there to gain? What was my goal with this game I was playing?

Nothing. I had none. But still, there I was. Something made me go there every morning, and on that day, something made me stay. I was powerless over it, and powerless over her.

She made her order and I gave her a halfhearted wave, trying to grab her attention while still playing cool. She sat down across from me and said hello.

“Fancy seeing you here again,” she said.

“I come here a lot.”

“Apparently.

We made small talk and she sipped her fancy steamed mocha concoction, me my black coffee. She was a runner. We discussed hiking spots, and she let me in on some new ones. Vince came up, and Adeline rolled her eyes.

“I don’t get him sometimes.”

My heart jumped. I took a sip of coffee. “Meaning?”

She shook her head. “Relationships. You’ve been married, right?”

I nodded.

“Sometimes it feels like that. A marriage. Even though we both said we wouldn’t.” She looked at the table. “It was exciting once. At the beginning. Now he’s so damn into his work all the time.”

“That does sound like marriage,” I said, and we laughed.

“I shouldn’t be saying this,” she said. “You’re his employee. That’s one of the rules.”

“Rules?”

“That’s another thing. There never used to be rules. I bet that’s how it is with Suzanne. No rules.”

“We’re on a break,” I said. I couldn’t wait to tell her.

30

It was at the end of August when I finally found it. The air was cold and the leaves were changing, and in the pitch black of night I drove a dusty Dodge Intrepid east down I-70. It was a normal run, with Damon miles ahead of me, the boss’s girl on my mind, and Grand Junction ninety minutes in my rearview. It was that night, for some reason, my curiosity overcame my fear, and my romantic longing for Adeline clouded my head enough to make me think I could get away with it.

We had gone hiking earlier that day. Just the two of us; Adeline and me. We met at a trailhead she liked called Mitchum Pass, and followed above the tree line, far higher than I had ever been. It took all I had just to keep up with her, and I gasped and heaved as the air thinned. The temperature at the top—after two hours of hiking up—was in the fifties, and the view was splendid. We spoke quietly and looked out over Otter Ridge canyon while I caught my breath, the two of us side by side. She leaned on me then. She leaned on me slightly as a cool wind blew.

“I like hiking with you,” she said.

Then, we started down.

It was the intoxication of this moment replayed in my head that fooled me into thinking I was invincible, and made me do the stupid thing on that run that night.

I pulled off the interstate near the same spot I had those weeks before. It wasn’t the same road, but it might as well have been. Frontage road, turn off into the forest, two miles down a poorly maintained side road blanketed in pines. Dirt road, lights off, trunk open. Sweat, bewilderment, second-guessing, and the final realization that I was completely and totally alone.

It was heroin. I couldn’t pinpoint it exactly right away—just knew it was drugs of some sort—but through some research later, I confirmed that was what it was. It was heroin, and a lot of it. Smack, right there in my trunk. I’d been hauling heroin underneath those consumer electronics, not just this time, but every time. Dozens of times. Fucking heroin.

Heroin. If it had been the white stuff, I would have confused it for coke. I know I would have. But it was brown heroin, neatly wrapped into little packages, stuffed into the spare tire compartment in the trunk of that Intrepid. There must have been twenty little bricks, sealed in cellophane. I was afraid to touch them.

When I opened the trunk, I saw a scene similar to last time: a mound in the middle of the space, covered by a blanket. Under the blanket were smartphones this time, not laptops. It almost ended there. I almost just put the blanket back, scolded myself for snooping again, got in the car and drove off. I actually did three of those things. But when I sat in the drivers’ seat, I couldn’t take it out of park. Something pulled at me; premonition or subconscious or some meddling deity. It was the same pull that drew me to Adeline, violently and irrationally. The same thing that woke me up at night with images of her. It was the same pull that brought me to Colorado in the first place—the one that opened my eyes when I heard that Ray Lamontagne song that summer morning and convinced me to leave my life in New York. It was the pull that had become the guiding hand of my life, and I realized there, in that Dodge Intrepid in the woods off I-70, that in the end, it made the decisions for me. I hadn’t even tried to fight it, ever, because I hadn’t wanted to. I didn’t want to this time, either. I got out and opened the trunk again.

This time, I slid the crate of smartphones all the way to the back of the trunk, then grabbed the handle on the pliable trunk bottom and yanked up. The pull told me to do it, and still I expected to find nothing. But I did. I did. The bottom came up easily, revealing the compact spare tire, tire jack, tire iron, and twenty small bricks of brown heroin neatly wrapped in cellophane.

I closed the trunk instinctively and looked around, then pretended like I wasn’t looking around, on the off chance someone was watching me. I tried to play cool, failed miserably and sat on the ground, leaning against the trunk. Heroin. Even if I didn’t know exactly what it was yet, I got the gist. I knew enough. I was a drug smuggler. And I was in deep shit.

I reopened the trunk again and rearranged the contents the best I could. I had to make it look normal. My hands were numb. My feet were numb. My head was light. I touched the brown packages as little as possible. Fingerprints. I remembered fingerprints halfway through stuffing them back where they came from, and halfheartedly wiped each package with my shirt.

31

After that, I entered into paralyzing fear. From the time I returned the car to the drop point, I expected to be caught. By the police, by Vince’s men, by Vince. According to the law, I wasn’t supposed to be smuggling drugs across the state, and according to my employer, I wasn’t supposed to know I was smuggling drugs across the state. They’d tricked me into moving drugs without knowing it, and now I’d committed numerous felonies. I pictured how the ignorance defense would play in a courtroom. Not well.

I drove the car to that hidden property in the hills like normal, and there I expected to be caught. I waited, to be confronted or handcuffed or clubbed over the head. But there was nothing. I got in the car with the silent man, expecting him to pull off the road and shoot me in the head and dump my body in a drainage ditch. But he did not. He drove me back to my apartment as we listened to classic rock on low, like always. I expected someone to be waiting at my apartment. I expected someone to be there when I woke up. And so on. And so on. For a week.

I stayed in my apartment, for the most part, and worried. I avoided open spaces if I could, even secluded ones; there were no hikes, no exploring. I didn’t go back to the coffee shop. I stayed by myself and looked over my shoulder, and thought. I worked through it in my head, trying to figure out what my next step should be. I thought about asking for advice, wondered who I could have asked, and mentally meandered through all my old relationships that I had either destroyed or that had dissolved through simple negligence. I felt very alone. I didn’t see Suzanne until she showed up unannounced one afternoon.

“Thought you could use some company, soldier,” she said through the screen door, holding a six-pack. I invited her in.

“You’ve been discreet,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was soft, unguarded. Not her normal flamboyance. “I haven’t seen you. No one’s seen you.”

“No one? Who else do I see that often?”

“No need to get defensive,” she said, and sat down on my loveseat. She opened two beers and I sat next to her. “How’s work?”

It felt like a knife jabbed into my ribs. The conversation could not go there. I hadn’t figured out my plan of attack, and until I did, I couldn’t risk telling her. I wanted to tell her. I wanted to tell anyone. But she was still one of them, and I didn’t know how far it went.

“Fine,” I said, and took a long gulp. “Slow right now. Nothing this week.”

This was true, and only put me further on edge. There had been no runs since the night I found the heroin. I could not imagine a world in which this was a coincidence.

“Something seems off,” she said.

I shrugged.

“Is everything okay, Julian?”

“Yes.”

“Are you unhappy?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m trying to…figure out what I’m going to do.”

“In what way?”

“Like, how long I’m going to stay here.”

She looked around. “In your apartment?”

“No. Here. I might be leaving.”

It was an idea I’d been kicking around for days; it struck me immediately after seeing the drugs and had stuck in my mind. It was the easiest solution to all this, and to most things. Cut and run. Bail. Grab a few belongings and jump in the car in the middle of the night or the middle of the day or whichever time would draw less attention, and head east. Back to New York or Boston or even Hanover, and put thousands of miles between myself and this mess. Just get away from it. Try to resurrect my old life or start a completely new one, either way. Figure it out when I got there.

These were thoughts I had, and really, I should have acted on them. It would have been easiest.

She sighed. “I didn’t know it was this bad.”

“It’s not…bad,” I said, trying to avoid the real issue. “I’m just not sure if it’s going to work out for me. Here.”

“And may I ask why?”

“A few things.”

“And they are?”

I shook my head. “Nothing specific.”

She took a drink and looked at the floor. “It’s me.”

“No,” I said, “it’s not.”

“I understand you trying to spare my feelings. Valiant.”

“It really isn’t.”

“I suppose I just don’t understand.”

“Suzanne.”

“How can it degenerate this quickly? In the beginning—recently—it was so good.”

“Suzanne,” I said, “it really isn’t that.”

“Have I not been giving you adequate space?”

“Well, yes.”

“Do you need it to continue?”

“The space?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, that would be nice.”

She frowned. “I knew it.”

“Knew what?”

“That this was a precursor to the end of our relationship.”

“What relationship?” I asked, louder and meaner than I should have.

She stood up and put a hand on her chest. “How dare you?”

“You’re kidding, right? You call this a relationship?”

“And just what would you call it?”

I threw my hands in the air. “Convenience? A fling? Those seem to sum it up.”

That hurt her. I knew it right then, but didn’t care, at least not at the time. I didn’t have the energy to sugar coat it. Later, after everything that happened, I’d look back on these comments and feel a terrible amount of regret. But at that moment, I just needed to get rid of her.

She stared at me and shook her head, and her eyes glassed over. I didn’t know she could cry. She didn’t, totally, but she got about as close as a person could without. She looked to her left, drank her beer quickly, threw the bottle on the floor, and left my apartment.

For most of the night, I paced the floor and forced my brain into motion, making plans then poking holes and scrapping them. The easiest fix was to just leave, and it seemed no matter what maze my mind wandered through, each time it ended up at the same solution. I didn’t want to leave; the options were starting over again somewhere completely new, or—even less appealing—returning east with my tail between my legs. I liked the mountains, and I had fallen in love with the new, simple life I was making, until I opened that trunk.

I drank four beers and tried with everything I had to rationalize a way to stay, but in the end my conditioning as an analyst took over and I could not ignore the mountains of risk associated with each solution. I had to leave. It was the only way. I decided this three times, the first two backing out in a hopeful effort to find another route. But the third time I accepted it: I would have to leave. It was the only realistic option, and it is what I fully intended to do.

Around 11 p.m., just after moving to the more specific stages of plan-making, and pulling my duffel bag out from under the bed, my phone buzzed. A text. From Suzanne, I assumed. I sighed and walked to the dresser, where it sat.

Are you home? it read. It was from an unknown phone number. It was not from Suzanne.

Who is this? I responded. I waited a minute and threw a few socks into the duffel bag, when the phone buzzed again.

Adeline, it read.

I stared at the phone in my hand.

How did you get my number? I wrote.

Like it’s hard. Are you home.

Yes.

Three minutes passed between my response and her next text. It felt like thirty. I wondered if she did it on purpose.

Can I come over?

The questions again. Hundreds of them now, swirling somewhere semiconscious but never making their way to the action part of my brain. I thought of possible responses. I must have gone through a hundred. But in the end, there was only one.

Yes.

32

She was drunk when she arrived, that much was certain. She stumbled up the stairs and knocked loudly on the door.

“Hi,” I said when I opened it. Her beauty and charm put me on edge, and the prospect of her visiting my apartment after dark made my stomach contort. But it was more than that. She was one of them; not embedded in the movement of drugs from what I could tell, but close enough to those who were. If Vince knew what I knew, chances were, she knew too.

It was stupid to invite her in. It was stupid to even engage her—she could be setting me up for something. I thought about this between the time I told her to come over and the time she showed up. Paranoia, I told myself, it’s just paranoia. But that wasn’t totally true. I should have just left the text message unanswered.

I didn’t, though. I answered it. I couldn’t not answer it. It was Adeline.

Her eyes were bloodshot. She wore tight jeans, a fitted flannel shirt, and a smile. I smelled cigarettes and booze.

“Hi,” she responded.

“Did you drive here?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I eyed her. “How did you know where I live?”

She giggled. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

I stepped to the side and motioned her in. “Do you want a drink?” I asked.

“That would be great,” she said, and walked to the refrigerator. She wasn’t slurring or stumbling.

“How did you know where I live?” I repeated.

She took her time and selected two pale ales from the refrigerator, then walked toward me. She twisted the tops of both and handed me one. Still no response. I tilted my head and squinted my eyes. Waiting.

“You really think it’s a secret where anyone lives?” she said finally.

“No,” I conceded. “But…you didn’t have my phone number or my address, far as I know, and now magically you have both.”

She shrugged. “I have my ways.”

I had more questions, and I was going to ask them. I started to, pressing her on what her “ways” were, exactly, but she stopped me. She stopped me because she knew she could, and so did I.

“Shhhh,” she said, putting a long, slender finger over my lips. Her touch made my skin tingle. “No more talking.” And then she kissed me for the first time.

33

In the morning she slept. The sky was clear as usual, the sunshine rousing me just after seven. I made a pot of coffee and waited for her to wake up, but she didn’t. She lay on her side and slept, her breathing rhythmic, her face and hair still perfect. There was no morning slump for her, and this did not surprise me.

With a mug of coffee, I sat on the edge of the bed, and she rolled over and smiled.

“Good morning,” she said without a yawn.

“Good morning,” I said. She put her arms around me like we were old lovers.

“Why did you come here last night?” I asked after a long silence.

She paused, then looked up and answered. “I wanted to be with you.”

“Is that all?”

“What else would there be?”

I nodded and left it at that.

She stayed for a cup of coffee. She did not scurry off like a drunken mistake. It put me on edge, her being in my apartment in the light of day, but she didn’t seem bothered by it, and I wasn’t going to tell her to leave.

“What do you do?” I asked her.

“Whatever I want,” she said, and flashed her smile.

I would have pressed anyone else. But not her.

And she was in my apartment. And she belonged to my boss. And he smuggled heroin. And all of the things associated with it. It was problematic.

“I probably don’t need to say this,” I said when she was leaving, “but this should just stay between us.”

She smiled and kissed me. “Julian, this doesn’t have to scare you. It’s not like I need to ask permission for anything. I’m my own woman.”

“Certainly. But you’re also Vince’s girlfriend, correct?”

“Yes, but I’m not his property.”

“I understand,” I said. “But I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t say anything. For me.”

She touched my face. “You don’t need to worry.” And she left.

Soon after, my phone buzzed. It was Damon. We had a run.

These odd coincidences piled up, coming one after another without a break. There wasn’t time to think, to sleep on decisions, to deliberately determine where my path would go. Instead, the path led me.

I still had a partially full duffel bag by my bed. I could hop in my Explorer and drive to Denver in a few hours, and figure out the next step once I got there. But this was hardly a consideration this time. Her scent was still on me, her spell was over me, and I couldn’t imagine not seeing her again.

I would not be leaving. I was a Dartmouth grad and a Wall Street swinging dick. These were mountain people, and I could beat them. The old competitive streak that had propelled me though high school, then college, then the job market, suddenly reared its head. It had been dormant for months, successfully suppressed and ignored since my trip west. But it was back. I was something, he was nothing. The thought came on like a fit of anger. I could beat him.