Howtown (19 page)

Away from the cars and businesses and people, the air was fresher, and the odor different, mixing the smell of the muddy earth and anise, and some underlying scent of vegetable decay that I’d never smelled anywhere other than by the banks of this river. Stands of bamboo obscured the river at points, but then we would pass an open space and it reappeared, leaves and spores of cottonwood glancing its surface. The sky was beginning to change, darken, and the sun was slipping out of view in a slow smoke of red and orange and violet.

Our pace had steadily increased and now, as we passed a wooden mile marker, I felt my breath deepen, my legs relax and my arms develop a rhythm instead of simply jerking at my side. We’d been running abreast but I knew that if Ben increased the pace I’d have to drop behind. I found myself remembering my boyhood runs along the river with Mark Windsor.

Except for the methodical rasp of our breathing, Mark and I had run in silence. Occasionally one of us would see something at the side of the trail, a covey of quail or a skunk or some hippie’s marijuana patch, and would nudge the other to alert him to the sight. Mostly, though, we just ran, side by side as if yoked together, and I had the absolute certainty that everything I was seeing, Mark was seeing at the same moment with the same eyes. I’d never felt so much a part of another person as I did then; it was what sex was supposed to be like but, as I discovered soon enough, seldom was.

When we stopped one of us would say, “Good run,” or “Hard run,” and we’d strip off as much of our clothing as we thought we could get away with and dash into the river. There for the rest of the afternoon we’d swim and float, sit on the bank, again not saying much. In fact, I never knew what Mark was actually thinking or how he felt. I just assumed that he was as happy to be with me as I was with him. At twilight we’d get dressed and go to our respective houses for dinner and I wouldn’t see him until the next day. Sometimes it was only the thought of the next day’s run that got me through those tense and silent meals.

Ben and I were coming up on two miles. I was still holding my own, but I could hear the rattle at the end of my exhalations. It seemed as good a time as any to get on with my purpose in having suggested this outing.

“What did you think about the prelim?” I asked.

Ben glanced over at me, sweat beading at his hairline. “It was real interesting. I never testified before except one time for drunk driving.”

“I was real surprised by those pictures. Had you seen them before?”

He worried his brow. “Hey, should we be talking about this?”

“What’s the harm?” I panted. “Everything was laid out at the prelim.” I jogged a couple of steps before adding. “Wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, sure.” He speeded up a little, forcing me into overdrive.

“The pictures surprised me, that’s all. Makes me kind of wonder if the DA has anything else up his sleeve.”

“Don’t know,” he replied, uncomfortably. Eyes forward he added, “I don’t know much about the case. They just brought me in on the search.”

“I know,” I said. It was getting harder for me to keep up my end of the conversation as we passed the two-mile mark. “Getting a conviction’s not too hard in most criminal cases, it’s making it stick.”

He looked at me. “What do you mean?”

I slackened our pace. “The DA has to win fair,” I said, “or it’s no good. I figure I’ve already got three or four grounds to appeal if Paul gets convicted.”

We slowed even more. “Like what?” he asked, intently.

“There’s that bogus search warrant,” I replied, “and then the way the judge ran all over me at the hearing. But the biggest thing is those pictures. Paul says he didn’t take them. He says that roll of film had pictures of something else.” We were trotting now. “I have a witness who’ll back him up.”

“Uh-huh,” Ben said, and quickened the pace. “Who?”

“I’m afraid I can’t say. It gets into his alibi.” For a few minutes we ran in silence. My knees were complaining. To shut them up, I said, “I believe my witness. So I also have to believe that someone switched the film you took from Paul’s car with the film those pictures at the prelim came from.”

“Uh-huh,” he repeated, increasing his speed again. Sweat ran down his face, and soaked his singlet.

“Can we slow down?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, but didn’t.

“Are we at three miles yet?”

“Just about.”

“Let’s turn around.”

“One more mile.”

“There’s still three miles back, Ben.”

“One more,” he said, and spurted off.

Watching his fierce legs pumping, I muttered, “Jesus,” took as deep a breath as I could and pushed on, managing to stay a few draggy paces behind him. Now, though, it was painful to breathe and my legs were cramping. Meanwhile it was also getting dark and there were small eruptions of sound from the riverbank, crickets, frogs, muskrats slithering across the mud and into the water. We passed a lacy railroad bridge, unused for decades.

“This is it, Ben,” I shouted, when we got to four miles. “I’m heading back.”

He looked at me over his shoulder. “Two miles to the park,” was all he said.

“Asshole,” I thought and prepared to turn around and start back. I figured this was his macho revenge for my having impugned the integrity of the cops. The sight of his broad back as he stripped off his singlet enraged me. I’d been running this trail when he was still in grade school and I was damned if I was going to give up. Fueled by anger, I pushed on, waiting for that moment when my body’d go into overdrive and break through the pain. It had been a long time since I’d called upon it to break that barrier and I wasn’t sure I could do it anymore. But I carried less bulk than he did and I’d been at this for a lot longer. Long enough to know that he had speed but no strategy for a long run. Strategy was all I had left.

At about four and a half miles, just when I seemed to be losing sight of him in the darkness and the distance, my breath evened itself out and the pain in my legs subsided. Up ahead, his pace slackened, all that muscle weighing him down. Resisting the impulse to spend everything in a sprint to overtake him, I increased my speed just to the edge of pain and kept it there, testing that limit, accustoming my body to it.

At five miles I was close enough to see that his running was getting sloppy and wayward. A moment later I was alongside of him, listening to his shaky breath. Glancing over I saw sweat pouring down his chest, the strain in his face. Although I knew that it must be almost chilly now, my skin was so hot that I dried up my own sweat.

And then the pain lifted and I saw with incredible clarity the pavement beneath my feet, the curl in Ben’s fingers, the dark leaves in the bushes along the trail, the moon rising above the levee. I felt myself smile and with a choppy breath surged forward a step, then two, then three, until I was running ahead of him, high on the euphoria of the effort. It no longer mattered whether he caught up or not, or how long I ran or that my body was knotted in pain just beneath the euphoria—I was ready to run until I dropped.

At mile six I turned around and could no longer see him. Ahead was the entrance to the park. I came in at a jog and then slowed to a walk. Tomorrow would be torture but at that moment I was sixteen again. A few minutes later, Ben shuffled in, veered off toward some bushes and threw up.

He came up to me, wiping his mouth on his singlet.

“Good run,” I said. “Are you ready to head back?”

Panting, he said, “Let’s flag down a patrol car.”

When he’d recovered, we walked up the levee road and stood there shivering in the darkness. On the other side of the levee a field stretched away into the night beneath the moon. Although my knees ached and my chest was wracked with pain each time I drew a breath, I still felt wonderful.

“You okay?” I asked Ben. His face was tense.

“You run pretty good for an old man,” was all he said. A moment later, a black-and-white came down the road and he flagged it down. It took us back to the Hyatt.

Outside the hotel I asked, “Where did you park, Ben?”

“In the lot,” he said, “downstairs.”

“I’ll go down with you.”

We went into the lobby and took the elevator to the parking lot, saying nothing. I walked him to his car, an old Chevy lovingly cared for. He leaned against the driver’s door and grinned at me.

“Man, you’re a ringer.”

“Were you trying to kill me out there?”

“I guess I got kind of pissed off at you when you was talking about those pictures.” He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Anyway, it don’t make sense, about switching the film. Morrow booked it right away.”

“Two hours after the search,” I corrected him.

“It takes that long to do the paperwork.”

I didn’t want to admit that I’d also thought of this. A car skidded around the corner. “I just wanted to give you something to think about.”

“Why me?” he asked. “Morrow’s the one you should talk to.”

“I know. I was talking about Morrow.”

He frowned. “I told you, Morrow’s my compadre,” he said, using the Spanish expression that described a friend whom one thought of almost as kin.

I persisted. “Morrow was the investigator the last time Paul was arrested. You’re the one who told me he was pissed when Paul got off. Maybe he’s trying to make up for that.”

“I don’t know nothing about that, Henry.”

“I just want you to think about it,” I replied, shivering in the chilly subterranean air.

Ben opened the door of his car, reached in and pulled out a sweatshirt. “Here,” he said, handing it to me.

“Thanks,” I said, putting it on. It was too big by half.

He stood irresolutely for a moment. “Can I ask you something, Henry?”

“Yeah.”

“When I came up to your room the other day, and that guy answered the door. What was going on?”

“We were sleeping.”

He looked at me. “Together?”

“Uh-huh.”

He nodded, slowly. “I thought maybe he was joking when, you know, he said that thing about me joining you guys.”

I studied his expression. He seemed neither particularly upset nor even especially embarrassed. “He was joking, Ben.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, like you said, different strokes for different folks.”

He opened the door to his car again. “I got to go.”

“Here,” I said, taking off the sweatshirt.

“You can give it back to me next time,” he said, getting into the car. He rolled down the window. “Thanks for the run.”

“See you, Ben.”

“Yeah, see you.”

I stood aside and let him back out. He waved and drove off. I waved back and headed up to my room, thinking I owed Josh an apology. Standing next to the car, talking about Josh and me, Vega’d had an erection.

“Hiya, pal.”

I glanced over in the direction of the bar and saw Mark standing half in, half out of the doorway with a tall glass in his hand. From the way he was holding himself, it didn’t look like his first drink of the evening. I went over to him.

“Mark. What are you doing here?”

He held out his glass. “Happy hour. You want to join me?”

“I’m not really dressed for it.”

A sloppy smile slid across his mouth. “I guess not. You been out running, huh?”

“Yeah, a lot farther than I wanted to. I need to go upstairs and clean up.”

“How ’bout some company?”

“You alone?”

“I was kind of waiting for you, Hank. Henry.”

His eyes were streaked with red, and I could’ve got drunk just by breathing the same air. It wasn’t the way I wanted to remember him. “I’ll have to take a rain check, Mark. I’m really beat.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but then just nodded.

“I’ll call you.”

“Yeah, do that. Do that.”

The rest of the week passed quickly. Peter and I worked around the clock to put together the motion to change venue. It was in good shape by Friday, and I left Peter to finish it up, then went to see Paul before catching a flight to LA for the weekend.

Though I’d talked to him on the phone a couple of times, I hadn’t seen Paul since the prelim. Over the phone he’d been listless, barely interested in what I’d had to say. The longer he was jailed, the more the jauntiness and defiance he’d displayed the first time I’d spoken to him had slipped away. Even so, I was still shocked by his appearance. He seemed to have aged ten years—ten bad years. He had a fatigued jailhouse pallor, bluish-white, and the lines around his eyes and mouth puckered sourly.

“Have you been sick, Paul?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“You look like it,” I continued. “I think maybe we should have a doctor take a look at you.”

In a low, tired voice, he said, “I don’t need a doctor, I know what’s wrong. This place is killing me.” He shut his eyes briefly. “Fucking guards. All day long it’s ‘Hey, pervert,’ ‘Hey, asshole.’ The cons are even worse.”

I frowned. “I thought you were in high power.”

He shook his head. “They moved me out after the prelim. I got my own cell but it’s on a regular cellblock. This big Mexican said to me last night, ‘I hear you like to fuck with little girls. Wait till lights out and I’ll fuck with you.’ I told the guard, the decent one, and he put me in another cell-block.”

“I can get you moved back into isolation.”

He shook his head. “And go crazy by myself?” Rubbing his eyes, he said, “I’ll take my chances. Last time I was here it wasn’t this bad. Of course, I bailed out after a couple of weeks. Now it’s been what, six, eight weeks. I lost track of time. So what’s going on, Henry?”

“I’m going to file a motion to transfer venue on Monday. If we win, they’ll move you down to San Francisco. If we lose, I’ll go up on appeal.”

Grimly smiling, he said, “And I get to remain a guest of the state no matter what, right?”

“I’ll make another bail application.”

“In front of Phelan?” he asked. “He’s the one who wouldn’t drop charges last time. I’ve got a feeling that I’m just where everyone wants me.” He yawned. “Sorry, didn’t sleep much last night.”

“I bet.”

He half-smiled. “I wasn’t worried about getting raped. What happened is that they brought in this kid a couple of days ago, maybe eighteen, nineteen, kind of pretty if you go for that. Someone did, last night.” He bit a nail, spat it out. “You know what’s happened to me in here, Henry? I heard that kid and did I call for the guards?” He shook his head. “No, I beat off.” He looked away from me. “Can you believe that? I don’t even like boys. When I get out of here, I’m going to take what’s left of me and kill it.”