…”
She poured for both of us, handed me a glass, and sat at the far end of the sofa, curling her legs under her. “He’s gone. I can feel it, Jake, an emptiness spreading inside me.”
There was sorrow in her voice. My look shot her a question.
“ He’s still my brother, el es mi unica familia.” She stopped, and we both thought our private thoughts about her brother.
“ You know I wouldn’t hurt Blinky,” I said. It was more of a question than a statement.
“ Of course, Jake. I told Abe that, but so far, you’re his only lead. Abe has that cop mentality. A shaky case is better than none.”
Distancing herself from Abe Socolow, showing affection for Blinky, trusting me, what was happening here?
“ I wish everything were different,” she said. “With Luis, with you, with me. I wish I could turn back the clock.”
Her eyes were moist. It was so unlike her, at least unlike the Jo Jo Baroso of the past decade. How long had it been since I’d seen her display any emotion, other than total indifference tinged with antipathy?
“ I tried to change the world and change you, and I couldn’t do either one,” she said.
“ You reminded me of an assistant coach who wanted to move me from linebacker to fullback, even though I couldn’t hang onto the ball.”
“ I don’t blame you for leaving me, not anymore.”
“ At the time, you called me a commitment-phobic coward.”
“ I was impossible. What we had was real.”
Was it?
I didn’t know, because I always cut and ran from what was real. Real symbolized a mortgage and a pension plan, a morning commute, and evening meetings with the civic beautification committee. Real was for suckers, not for me, a guy who could leap tall linemen in a single bound.
As I thought back now, it was such a brief slice of our lives, and our playback equipment shows the past through a soft focus. Days were sunny, winds were cool, a young woman loved me, and the future was without limits. In a sailboat anchored off Elliott Key, we shared a bottle of wine. I remembered the slipitty-slap of water against the hull and the scent of salt in the air. I remembered Jo Jo saying she loved me, so why didn’t it work?
“ Our timing was off,” I said. “We always had different goals, or maybe I didn’t have any.”
“ You had potential, Jake.”
“ Granny always used to say I’d grow old having potential.”
It had grown dark outside the windows. The first thunder rumbled in the distance. Jo Jo trembled at the sound. “I wanted you to reach for the stars, and you…”
“ Short-armed it,” I said, using the disparaging term for chickenhearted wide receivers.
She moved closer to me on the sofa, closing time as well as space. “You cared for me, Jake, I know that. But something inside of you tightened up when it came time to show it. Maybe you were afraid that if you cared too much and lost me, you’d be hurt again, like when you lost your father and mother.”
Maybe she was right, I didn’t know. I’ve always found introspection to be painful, and analysis from someone else is downright excruciating.
“ Why did you leave me?” she asked.
I thought about it. Really thought. And it was agonizing. But in the reflected glare of intermittent flashes of lightning I looked at her face and tried to remember what it had been like.
After a moment, I said, “I was a fool. I hadn’t grown up. You were right about me, and I didn’t like hearing the truth.”
“ Oh, Jake!” She breathed the words, and in that graceful way women move, she was in my arms. I don’t remember turning toward her. I don’t remember putting my arms around her, but I held her close, my face pressed to her neck, inhaling the scent of warm flesh, and in a moment, I felt a warm tear trickle from her cheek to mine.
Then, it was just like the old times, or was it? Could it have been, when each of us had traveled so far. Her breath was warm and sweet as I kissed her, cradling her head in my hands. Her full lips parted, and we kissed again. She delicately rubbed her face against mine, catlike, and nipped at my earlobe, then ran a hand through my hair, tugging at it. In a moment, she slipped out of her halter and her shorts, and it was all so familiar. Had it really been all these years?
Her nimble fingers unbuttoned my shirt, and she ran her hands over my chest, tracing figure eights with her nails. Then she unbuttoned my pants, and I fumbled with my shoes, kicking them off, as she tugged at my belt. My hands explored the slopes and curves of her, and she whispered something in Spanish.
A bolt of lightning, followed by the crackle of nearby thunder, lit up the sky and rattled the windowpanes. We changed positions on the sofa, and she emerged on top. The rest was a blur of mouths and hands, the fullness of her breasts, the ripeness of her hips. Again, we tumbled over one another, and this time she was beneath me, our bodies pressed together. When she spoke, her voice was low, the words throaty, “ Quiereme, te necesito! ”
I obliged, and she wrapped her long legs around me. We lay there, rocking in perfect harmony on the sofa like a sailboat in gentle seas, and she exhaled several short gasps, then opened her eyes long enough to let them roll back in her head. “Jake, te amo,” she said finally. “ Siempre te he amado.”
Fat raindrops were plopping off the tin roof now, and driven by the gale, pounding into the windows. Tree branches strained, whined, then snapped and fell against the house. We listened to the wind and the echoing thunder as the storm sat above us. “Thunder and lightning, clouds and rain,” she said.
“ Are you giving a weather report?”
“ With you, Jake, I feel the lightning and the thunder. Then I drift above the earth in the clouds and the rain.”
Later, as the storm moved on, we lay there, limbs still entwined, and she said, “I didn’t know how much I missed you. We could have been so much to each other, Jake. We could have changed each other’s lives.”
“ Maybe we still can,” I said, smoothing her dark hair from her face, not knowing just how true that was.
We were snuggled into a bed a bit too short for me when I said, “Tell me about Kit Carson Cimarron.”
I felt her body stiffen.
“ What do you want to know?”
“ Everything.
In the darkness of the small bedroom, she sighed. Outside the pounding rain had let up, and a light drizzle pinged against the roof. I was on my back, and she lay with one knee over my leg, her head on my chest, breathing in time with my heartbeat. “It was so stupid of me that I’m embarrassed by it, even now. I was so alone then, and he seemed so attentive, so caring. Simmy’s a powerful man, very determined, very strong. It’s quite a combination, Jake, and I just fell for it, very hard.”
“ Simmy?”
“ It doesn’t fit at all. I mean, he’s as big as the side of a barn, but I thought I detected a gentle side to him. I was wrong. He’s an egotistical manipulator and a master operator. He makes my brother look like the pope. In fact, Simmy is what Luis always wanted to be.”
“ What about Rocky Mountain Treasures?”
“ It’s Simmy’s deal. He brought my brother in on it.”
“ Blinky told me it was legitimate.”
Jo Jo laughed. “Only in the sense that neither one is likely to go to jail. It’s a great, legal scam. You’ve seen the prospectus. It’s got all the exculpatory language: ‘Be advised this investment is highly risky, and you may lose part or all of your capital investment.’
“ That ought to keep people out.”
I felt her hair swishing across my chest as if she was shaking her head. “You’d be shocked how many people read those clauses and still put money into oil wells filled with sand and mountaintop property with no access roads. People are greedy and gullible. When I prosecuted consumer frauds, I was constantly amazed how easy it was to separate people from their money with a great sales pitch.”
“ Which is where your brother fits into the deal.”