“¿Quién eres?” I asked, as the feathers softly zigzagged down.
Frank — Francisco let Dick and Liz anglicize his name — has gained twenty pounds since coming out of the arroyo to live in casita two. He works off his rent one day a week, and I pay him a fair wage for another two days a week. With twenty-five acres, an aging ranch house, six casitas, outbuildings, and a pond, there is always work to be done.
He has an aptitude for auto mechanics, having learned from his father, who owned a two-man garage in the coastal El Salvadoran village of Puerto el Triunfo. His father was shot to death in his small office for refusing to pay protection money to the local MS-13 thugs. Francisco had watched through an open door. Over the months, as I’ve gotten to know Frank, when I listen to his broken English and study his expressions, I sense in him no desire for a life in the north but rather for a return to his home. And vengeance. He talks to his family and friends on his flip phone, and my Spanish is good enough to understand his anger and calculation. He is interested in weapons, and Burt has taken him under his wing for shooting instruction. Burt also helped him get a driver’s license. Which Frank used to drive my pickup back from the desert in the wee dark hours earlier this morning.
Frank gave me his automatic smile as he helped Burt steady the wheelbarrow over the Victorian tub. The tub had been in the barn, covered but unloved, long before I met Justine Timmerman or first saw this place, one of scores of treasures left behind by generations of Timmermans. The property was just one of their many holdings in the American West. I tried to return it to her father and mother after their daughter died. The terrible plane accident happened scarcely a year after we were married. The Timmermans refused to take back Rancho de los Robles. Family is family.
Thinking of Justine, hoping that there was an afterlife and she was happy in it, I looked down at my beaten body, the clean white T-shirt I’d put on, the swimsuit, my bruised and abraded legs, the flip-flops, the blue ligature marks around my ankles. I felt helpless and witless and somehow at fault. I pictured Justine. The weather is wonderful; wish you were here.
Our fifth and newest Irregular is a young woman named Violet Drew. I could hear her and Liz playing Ping-Pong behind me, back deeper in the shade of the palapa. The ball ticked and tocked back and forth and I heard occasional yelps, but mostly I heard the steady effervescence of Violet’s voice.
She moved into casita four last month, just in from St. Louis. She was twenty-four, a flight attendant. A native of St. Louis and a graduate of Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. After three years flying for United Airlines in St. Louis, she had relocated to fly out of Lindbergh Field in San Diego. She was dark-haired, talkative, and antically nervous, often looking behind her as if someone was sneaking up.
Violet likes to run around the pond for exercise, and she does this at least once a day, sometimes two or even three times. Long, fast runs, too — half an hour or so. Her strides are graceful and strong. In keeping with her nervy personality, she looks behind her constantly. Behind and up, an airborne threat. Ponytail flying. Never breaks stride.
I think Violet is bearing secrets, but so far she’s been a happy addition to the Irregulars. I respect secrets. They help keep me in business.
9
Burt and Frank finished preparing my ice bath. They muscled the Victorian tub to the sandy beach that surrounds the spring-fed pond, propping the claw feet up on cinder blocks so the tub wouldn’t sink with me in it.
If the mid-September day hadn’t been so hot, I might not have got into the damned tub at all. Burt gave me a stern look.
I toed off the flip-flops and managed to stand with the help of Liz and Violet. Holding my arms, they guided me across the patio and down the railroad-tie steps to the soft, sloping beach. We stopped at the tub, positioned to give me a pleasant view of the water, the hills, and the sky beyond. The sunsets from here are excellent, though I didn’t think I’d last more than a few minutes in the sparkling bed. The tub was half full, and the ice had been dug out so my body could be instantly packed with cold. An unopened half-gallon of budget gin stood on the blue tile of the barbecue deck, beside a box of large freezer bags.
“After you’re comfortable, we’ll pack it in around you,” said Burt. “Then we’ll fill some bags for your face and head, and you will indeed feel as if you are in a freezer.”
He cracked the seal on the gin bottle and twisted open the top. Used his teeth to pry off the pour spout, spit it into the barbecue sink, and smiled. He had explained earlier that an ice bath without gin is thirty percent less effective.
I watched him pour the booze over the ice with lengthwise strokes, the liquid gurgling out. Frank stepped forward, pulled a garden trowel from within a clean blue shop cloth, and worked the gin into the banks of ice, carefully re-forming the body-hugging berms.
Using Liz and Violet for training wheels, I stepped in near the bow, eased down butt-first, and lay back, propping my head up on a pillow of ice. A sharp cold bit into me and my body ordered me to retreat. Burt and Frank raised bag after bag of ice, cubes clinking down over me. The women packed the cubes firmly until all I could see when I looked down was a blanket of diamonds glimmering in the sunlight. Not even my toes. I closed my eyes against the cold. Felt it sucking the warmth out of me. Where did it go? Listened to them filling the face-freeze bags. Violet warbling on about getting buried in the snow at Christmas by her brothers, a frozen-stiff snow angel and then after a while I couldn’t feel a thing. Which is what’s going to happen to you, Roland! They built up pillows between the tub rim and my neck and head. Lay the bags over my throat and face, lightly because of the cuts. Through two courtesy peepholes I looked out at the pond and the hills and the clear blue sky. Felt the ache within. Heart thumping like some separate beast. Could see the blurred Irregular shapes on the edges of my vision.
“Everything cool in there?” asked Dick. A chuckle.
“Don’t make him talk, honey — you’ll break the seal.”
“I suppose. Ignore that question, Roland.”
“Roland?” Burt’s rough voice. “I always found it helpful to count up from one to fifty, then back down again. Slowly. What you do is, when you come to a number, imagine what you were doing at that age of your life. Take a moment. Enjoy it. Then move on, up your years and back down again. You’ll get a few mulligans, since you’re only forty.”
Almost at the point when the full-body ache had become unbearable, it began to recede.
Seventeen: high school first baseman, a grand slam against La Mesa, in love with Trudy Yates, called me the “lovable lump” in the yearbook...
Twenty-two: Student Union at SDSU, history major, watching the Twin Towers collapse and burn...
Twenty-five: Fallujah. Avalos bleeding out in front of me...
From within these memories I heard Burt Short ordering the others to leave us alone so we could talk. On the periphery of my peephole vision I saw them moving away. Heard Dick and Liz grumbling, and Violet’s tale about playing tennis when it was so cold the balls froze and Frank and Burt talking in Spanish that I couldn’t quite hear.
Then it was quiet. My body was numb. Even the deep ache in my ankles was gone. I felt only a strange heaviness, meaty and alive, but not cold at all. It was as if the flames of pain in my eyebrows and lip and forehead and back had been doused.
Burt’s voice came through the frozen blanket. “Do you want me to sic the Imperial County Sheriffs on them? There are pluses and minuses for you.”