Falling Down Read online

  3

  I never used to dream.

  Or, at least, I never remembered a dream.

  Color, black and white, whatever they might be, those dreams stayed way down there in my head, down in that part of my subconscious where nothing surfaces while I’m awake, and yet…and yet,

  later that night

  three dreams

  If this part of my story seems to drift off, if you get bored, if you want really just to hear my story without side trips, move on.

  I got up to go to the bathroom at two in the morning. Nathan lay asleep, his eyelids twitching, just how people say what happens when you’re dreaming, and papow, there was this dream of mine came flooding back.

  I’m staying in a very, very large hotel suite, somewhere in a large city, but just that hotel room was important, not the city or even the name of the hotel. Nor can I remember why I was staying in a hotel suite, but I was far from home.

  The rooms were endless:

  kitchens

  living rooms

  TV rooms

  bedrooms

  I wander into the farthest bedroom and as if the fourth wall didn’t exist, there I am inside the next hotel suite, among people I’ve never seen before.

  Okay. I wake up. This dream I know, not so hard to figure out. Nathan wants me to move with him to the Navajo reservation.

  I sat on the toilet, lost in considering the dream.

  Went back to bed, couldn’t sleep, got the folders that Bob Gates left, and went back to sit in the bathroom and read.

  Mary Emich.

  She meant nothing, I mean, nothing, nothing at all…except…

  I’d have my PI license reinstated.

  That’s no small thing, to have a part of your identity denied. Your livelihood, your business reputation. I’d spent too many years doing illegal computer hacking, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t return to that.

  I called Bob Gates.

  “Um,” he said. Coughing, clearing his throat and his head. “Yeah?”

  “Bob. It’s Laura. Laura Winslow.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Promise me, if I visit Mary Emich tomorrow, promise that it might end there, for me, I might not have to do anything else.”

  “Mmmmm.” A deep sniff, a cough, but clarity now. “I promise.”

  “Bob,” I said. “Why should I do this?”

  His phone put down while he blew his nose, coughed, blew his nose again.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Bad post-nasal drip. You need an answer right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “If getting your PI license back isn’t good enough, I don’t know what to say.”

  “These…the maras. Why should I get involved with them?”

  “You shouldn’t. You won’t.”

  “But if I did,” I said. “Why?”

  “Are you asking again, is there a risk?”

  “Yes. Not to myself.”

  He blew his nose again and again. I couldn’t tell if he really had to do that, or if he was working out an answer.

  “You ever hear of Rage In The Cage?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Extreme fighting. Up Phoenix way, a few years back, some people wanted to make fake wrestling even more violent. Instead of a ring, they built a cage. Bars twenty feet high, chainlink fencing material all the way around. The maras took to the idea big time. Except without rules. Without time rounds or referees or corner men to deal with cuts and blood. Was like that Mel Gibson movie. Except, and I only know this from rumor, with the maras, the loser was lucky to stay alive.”

  “That doesn’t help me much,” I said.

  “It helps me,” Gates said. “It helps a lot of us taking down these skels. You…well, you decide.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Sorry to bother you. I just had to know.”

  I hung up. Still sitting on the toilet, I must have laid my head back against the wall and fallen asleep.

  Another dream came into my head.

  This time, I’m staying in a very large home, a huge home of a friendly couple, I’m taking care of this home and all the plants. There’s a large kitchen preparation area next to the living room which is decorated as though it’s tropical, vines, trees in tubs and planters, all of which I’m responsible for. In one corner is a Christmas tree, still decorated although I myself don’t celebrate Christmas, and as I’m looking at it, the tree, in its planter tub (it’s a live tree, I discover), starts to tip over and the entire root ball comes out of the planter and the tree ends up on the floor.

  A heavy wind rises, the room is now open on one wall to the outside, I’m thinking it’s like a lanai, I’m standing next to another tree in another planter tub when the force of the wind actually snaps the trunk of this tree, completely severing the top half, which blows across the room and outside.

  Suddenly my friends are there and I’m explaining, I didn’t really break these trees, it just happened. The woman reassures me that it’s okay, the man—I have no real sense that they’re husband and wife, just a couple, I’m not even sure they’re friends.

  Anyway, I tried to reset the Christmas tree into its planter, and at that moment there were half a dozen people in the large kitchen preparation area, it’s like something out of The Great Gatsby, people milling around at individual workstations. One woman is kneading bread, and my woman friend who owns the house is working at something, maybe a salad, and she continues to reassure me that the tree damage is not at all my fault, when the man becomes Sylvester Stallone and begins to threaten me because I broke his trees.

  Another senseless violent dream.

  Okay, I woke up just as that dream ended, okay, sure, I’m breaking up a home, or…Nathan is breaking up a home. Smashing the furniture, just as he’d smashed all of Leon Begay’s property a year before, destroying Leon’s possessions after his murder, making Leon’s house chindi.

  Naked, I went outside, dove into the swimming pool. The Glock still lay on the bottom. I’d retrieved it three times, but Nathan kept throwing it back.

  Took the Glock into the kitchen. Dreams will do that to you, push you toward protection from what’s in the dreams. Didn’t even bother turning on a light, I’d stripped the Glock down so many times. I laid everything out on the black granite countertop, pieces of the Glock.

  Lost somewhere after I played with the slide mechanism for ten minutes or so, and I turned on the kitchen TV, flipped through channels, and came across a scene from Bambi, my god, I hadn’t seen that movie in years.

  Distracted after a while, not really caring about Thumper on the ice, I got Mary Emich’s file again, read through it, looking for any reason to just blow her off. She still meant nothing to me, except…

  I wanted my PI license.

  That’s what it came down to, so I made that choice. I’d let Nathan leave without me, I’d do the minimal amount of work to satisfy Bob Gates, I’d rejoin Nathan and make things right again between us.

  I could control anything, I believed.

  Without realizing what he’d done, Bob Gates stuck me in a bad place. If I took his offer, Nathan might leave me for keeps. If I went with Nathan, not only might I not get my PI license back, but the state licensing bureau might look into my past arrest record that I’d never revealed when applying for the license.

  Stuck with conflicts between three new cases.

  Case file: I investigate bad cop in TPD.

  Case file: I investigate my love for Nathan, willingness to compromise same.

  Case file: I consider hacking into state PI licensing bureau files, and whatever other databases were involved, to wipe out digital records of my past.

  I didn’t like my choices.

  What PI investigates herself?

  I was losing control of my life.

  I went back into the bedroom and laid beside Nathan. Snuggled my head onto his naked belly and Jesus Christ, I don’t believe it, I swear I’m sleeping but I
’m aware, I am lucidly aware of walking through another dream.

  At last, a dream where I’m actually going to visit somebody I know, except…I haven’t seen these people for thirty years.

  My dearest of dear old friends. Anna Jean and Tom Jacqua, and their three daughters. They live on a large farm somewhere in mountain foothills, more than a farm, could even be a commune?

  I get inside and nobody’s home. Nobody. Am I in the wrong house? Suddenly a car pulls up. I run to the front bay window, thinking it’s Anna Jean and Tom, but it’s an ancient Cadillac, the kind with huge fins, rust all along the bottoms and sides and wheel wells, left rear fender covered over with rust inhibitor and a primer coat, a dull purple while the rest of the caddy is hibiscus red.

  Four men get out and immediately see me in the bay window and begin firing shotguns. I run from room to room, it’s like one of those vast hotel suites, the men tromping around and blasting everything with the shotguns before they round a corner after me until one man with a huge Fu Manchu mustache says, Christ, it’s them, and everybody leaves, the Caddy pealing rubber. Anna Jean and Tom must be home, again I’m in the bay window, it’s still all glass, I thought the shotguns had pulverized it, and outside is a brand-new Dodge Ram full-size double cab, pulling a large, trailered powerboat. Another four men get out and they’ve also got shotguns and blast away, except this time, I find a portable telephone and dial 911 and the police tell me the squad cars are already on the way.

  Ten or twelve people fill the living room, Anna Jean is hugging me fiercely, Tom comes in, he’s almost bald, a round elfish face, he can’t wait to hug me so the three of us dance in a circle and all the others join in, one of those dances they do at weddings where people hold hands and swell out to the full extent of the ring and then, with raised held hands, bunch in toward the middle.

  A detective is looking at marks all over the walls, Shotguns, all right, he says, except no slugs have penetrated the wall, the plaster has dimpled patterns, and Anna Jean says, We did that two years ago, want to see our horses? three horses are stabled in a room inside the house, everybody’s drinking Almaden wine, those jugs shaped like the bottom of an hourglass, everybody’s cooking some kind of dinner, we’re all incredibly connected as friends.

  C’mon out back, a cop says. Leads me through a grove of sycamores to an eight-sided stone house, the doorway facing east. They’re all waiting, the cop says. Inside, they’re waiting. We enter a large room, the stone house is really just one big room, essentially an eating place and a kitchen with a propane refrigerator and a fifty-gallon drum cut down to function as a wood-burning stove. Part of the room was sectioned off by hanging sheepskins and rugs. The cop held one of the rugs aside and motioned me through.

  Nathan stood in the middle of a large group of people. You’re not from my mother’s or father’s clan, Nathan said. Now there are no taboos against us, now we can get married.

  But where’s the swimming pool? I said.

  It’s out back, the cop said. Want to see it?

  Out back, nothing but desert for miles and miles. The cop held a pistol on me. You weren’t supposed to find me, he said. It was a bad mistake, your friend Bob Gates hiring you. You weren’t even supposed to come looking for me.

  But I didn’t want to find you, I said. I just wanted to get married.

  Marry this, he said. Raising his pistol.

  And he killed me.

  Ultimately, a violent dream. My life, as Nathan saw my life, the violence that Nathan rejected as though I deliberately chose violence, rather than having it wash over my life.

  When your lover says goodbye, when your lover or your partner or your spouse says it’s over, your way of life is not what I choose, you can renounce it or join me or I will renounce you.

  Whoever figures on being dumped?

  What are the odds, when you don’t see it coming?

  And what are the odds of my life of serenity disappearing into the world of random, senseless violence where assassins killed with no more emotional involvement than no me jodas?

  Those dreams really freaked me out.

  I cuddled and nested, touching my nose all over his chest and arms.

  Then I really fell asleep. Like a proverbial log, like a baby, like a lover after a picnic on a hot day, the chicken and potato salad gone, the wine bottle empty, naked on a blanket after making love.

  When I awoke, Nathan was gone.

  I ran through the house, looking. Saw his pickup was also gone.

  And the world turned. It’s a shock, it’s a crossing over, you’re in this place, then whop, you’re in that one with gates closed behind you.

  4

  All righty then, I thought next morning. Let’s look at the odds of my dilemma. I mean, what are the odds that one chosen path is better than another? Have you ever noticed, while driving, that some days you hit nothing but green lights, and on other days, all lights are red?

  What are the odds?

  I mean, is it random, like flipping a coin, heads come up half the time? Is it your karma? Your mood? Distractions from your too-spicy Thai food lunch?

  I never saw it coming.

  That he’d actually leave without me.

  That he’d actually leave me.

  Like all unsuspecting lovers, in hindsight, I should have seen the signs.

  He’d kept his own house, he’d lived in his own time zone. He’d appear to spend a week or a month with me, then he’d just leave.

  What I always expected to happen, what I’d really wanted, really dared to hope would happen, was that one day I’d have Nathan permanently at my side, arms around each other, eating at Kingfisher or Ric’s or Janos or Cuvee or Hacienda del Sol or Nonie or the Arizona Inn. The two of us seeing movies, hands across adjoining stadium seats at some mall cineplex. Okay, so I loved Robert De Niro and he liked Finding Nemo, so what, I’d see anything.

  Of course, it never really happened that way.

  In truth, Nathan Brittles, my two-year lover, my partner, he didn’t care for movies or fine restaurants at all. I might watch or eat anything. He didn’t. He’d said more than a few hundred times how he’d rather be back up on the rez. How he wanted to be dineh again.

  Indian.

  Navajo.

  One who returned and lived the old ways.

  Let’s not dwell on this, I thought. I’ll go see this Emich woman, then I’ll drive up to the rez. Just one step at a time. I heard that in a black church one day, in Yakima I think, back in my wild days. Had no meaning for me then.

  I snugged into my oldest swim suit, black, with a racer back and the embroidered Speedo logo. Chlorine-resistant, but old enough that the chemicals had degraded the polyester. I snapped it against my butt and breasts, my nipples erect under the fabric, we used to call them high beams. The suit a size too small, but this morning it protected my heart, squeezed my heart inside so I didn’t have to deal with it.

  I slid into my pool, dove through layers of heated water toward the bottom and cooler water. Breath almost gone, I surfaced like a small whale and crashed back into the water. Without thought, I swam idle laps, easing into a backstroke. Overhead, a red-tailed hawk dipped and dived, riding a thermal, surveying me and my property for

  rodents

  snakes

  birds

  anything small enough to eat.

  I powered into a freestyle sprint for four laps, focusing my body and focusing my thoughts.

  I needed my private investigator license back. I’d do whatever it took. I’d always run my life that way:

  set a goal

  move undistracted to that goal

  find another goal

  one step at a time

  This morning I fixed the most important goal in my life.

  I’d accept that Nathan had just left, unannounced, as he’d done many times. And that he’d come back to me.

  That was my goal.

  I’d meet Mary Emich later in the morning, I’d shuck her off quickly, I�
��d report to Bob Gates that I’d done my absolute best, but I really needed to get up to the Navajo rez today.

  Goal fixed.

  Head clear with determination.

  And so I’d go running, then I’d see my Reiki master and psychic.

  When I came back, Nathan might even be home.

  Or not. I’d face that if I had to.

  Later, I sat in the kitchen, munching celery stalks, still wearing the wet swim suit.

  Yesterday, sure, there were problems in my life, but when I went along with Nathan to the reservation, after he’d adopted that boy into his family, then I figured we’d just work out who lived where and how much time we should spend together. Check that. How much time I should spend on the reservation to keep Nathan happy.

  And today, everything’s so…so complicated, which is to say, I no longer felt serenely confident in working out problems, in fact, I didn’t believe there was a serious problem. I’d naively believe that my days as a licensed, working PI were over, my involvement with violence reduced to occasional random computer searches that no longer bore any resemblance to the illegal hacking I’d done.

  I stared at the television where I’d watched Bambi the night before.

  Bambi, the innocent.

  Today, I felt more like the hunter that killed Bambi’s mother, I felt…I felt as though…I felt as though I was destroying my love for Nathan, but I felt powerless to make the choice of love, to join Nathan and leave police work behind, I felt impelled to get back my PI license and in that, my dear friends, I felt more like the hunter than the innocent deer.

  Decision. Enough soul-searching, second-guessing, emotional games.

  Eventually even Bambi has to grow up.

  5

  “So what’s wrong?” Sandy said.

  After she’d laid Reiki hands on me. After I’d cried for fifteen minutes.