T. Parker: The Triggerman Dance

His father guided the plane out over the Pacific. John was sure that if you jumped and did all the right things you could land in that and live. He looked down and saw the two jetties at Balboa, and the Wedge, where he had spent hours watching the bodysurfers ride the neck-snapping waves that build and lurch off the jetty rocks.

For a few moments he studied nothing but his father's forearms-one of John's favorite parts-and admired once again the stout arm emerging from the rolled-up shirt sleeve, the abundant hair that grew all the way down to where the wrist began, then reappeared behind the first knuckle of each of his father's fingers. Did it grow under the skin for a ways? He watched the wrist tendons flex when his father adjusted their course back around to the east. He casually ran a hand over his own wrist, assessing the wispy golden fuzz.

"What do you think, Johnny?"

"It's fine. Would you live if you landed in one of those swimming pools, but feet first and stayed real stiff?"

"I wouldn't want to try."

"The wind would blow you onto a roof or something, probably."

"Probably. Look down on that county, son. It's yours. That's a nice thought, isn't it?"

"It's not really mine, dad."

"No. It is. It belongs to whoever puts down his roots there. Your mother and I have. You will. When you look down on it from up here, you see that it's not really such a big place at all. It's like a back yard. It's yours to play in and live on and take care of. Look at that ocean. Look at the mountains. It's a good place, John-you're lucky to grow up here."

"I'll bet you could live if you landed in the ocean."

"Maybe you could. Just maybe."

John sat back, felt the drone of the engine and looked out at the sky. He listened to his father talking with ground control on the radio. He felt good being up here with his father, sitting beside him, a part of his world. A father was someone who controls things, he thought: a plane, a county, the sky.

John looked down at his thin dark legs, his feet, his shorts. Then he looked at his dad. He saw all the changes he would have to go through to become like his father, but he couldn't imagine them taking place soon enough. Everything grew so slowly, just a few inches a year. He tried to imagine himself as big as his father, with all the hair and the rough chin and the way air opens up easier around you when you're bigger. For a while he pretended he was his father's age, his father's brother, in fact. He relaxed into the seat with one knee lifted and his arm draped casually over that knee.

"Yeah," he said. "This county is mine."

"Take your foot off the seat, John."

On the way back to the airport, John convinced himself that they were going to land for just a few minutes to pick up his mother, then the three of them would fly away together for a long vacation in a dangerous place, but a place that had baseball. He loved this reverie and it was believable until he looked back and realized that the plane had only two small seats. He thought, that was really dumb of dad to get a plane that doesn't have enough room for all of us. And he wondered if maybe his father did it on purpose.

Two days after the meeting in Olie's, Weinstein and Dumars were waiting for John outside his trailer when he got home. It was just after six, and the generous September daylight bloomed from a red sun in a blue sky.

John saw the helicopter resting on a flat piece of desert not far from the trailer, heat waves wavering up from the engine compartment.

The two agents, dressed in suits, stood in the shade of the trailer awning, trying to be comfortable and inconspicuous here at the High Desert Rod amp;c Gun Club, which they certainly were not. John glanced up the dirt road toward the club house, where the property caretaker, Tim, was sweeping off the steps as an excuse to look down on the visitors and their gleaming chopper.

"The secret agents," he said with a small smile.

"The city editor," said Weinstein without one.

Boomer smelled shoes as John unstacked three plastic lawn chairs he'd bought to entertain guests, but never used. Bonnie watched from beneath the trailer, with black Belle already asleep beside her. John dusted off the seats with his hand, and offered them to Weinstein and Dumars. He opened up the trailer windows and returned to the deck with beers.

He opened the bottles, gave one to each of his visitors, and sat.

"Nice trailer," said Weinstein, without looking back at it. He looked instead at John's flat-soled moccasin boots, his worn duster, brown vest and the eternal fedora.

"Thanks," said Menden.

"I can tell by your face that you read the letter."

John said nothing. He had in fact read the letter ten times, each reading bringing him closer to her, each reading taking her farther away. It was a sublime torture. To see actual words written by her hand, words revealing her love for him, her heartache over Joshua Weinstein, her confusion and her fear, was something that John never thought would happen. All of the distance he had put between Rebecca and himself closed again, in a rush, when he read that letter. Almost closed, because no matter how hard John imagined her as he lay in the trailer bed that night, his eyes locked shut and all his powers focused on the task of summoning her back to the present-if only long enough for the good-bye he never got to say-the final distance could never be closed. She was beyond him, and during all his days on earth, he knew, she would stay that way. She had dabbed her scent on the paper.

"You only stayed in Orange County a few weeks after the shooting. You gave up a pretty plum job, cashed out your retirement, closed up your house in Laguna. Why?"

John took a drink of the beer and decided that even if, according to the ways men should live, he had wronged Joshua Weinstein, he still didn't much like him.

"You're the spy, Mr. Weinstein. You're the gatherer. You know a lot more about me than I know about you. Why don't you tell me why?"

Weinstein had set his beer on the deck and loosened the knot of his necktie. His nine-to-five pallor was luminous in the sunlight filtered by the awning.

He looked across with an expression John took to indicate sympathy, but read as little more than a bureaucrat's professional interest.

Joshua said, "My mother used to tell me that to be happy in life, you need three things: something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to. You had them all. Then you lost Rebecca and tossed the other two away. You traveled some, then came out here to lick your wounds-"

Rebecca. The sound of the name takes John Menden back to her. As clearly as if it was yesterday, no, as clearly as if she were there right now, he feels the warm October sunlight on his skin the evening they sit on the balcony of the old Laguna Canyon house and he actually touches her for the first time. She has a scar that runs from the base of her right thumb across to the center of her palm, and that clean thin line of tissue-a line he has seen and contemplated so many times before-is soft beneath his finger as he traces its length across her hand, then back to the thumb again. She says a gypsy told her it cut across her lifeline but not to worry because all wounds are superficial compared to fate. She looks at him in a way that is both innocent and knowing, both assured and inquisitive. Rebecca's hair is golden in this autumn light. Her skin is fair and her eyes are blue. Her nose is longer and sharper than the popular notion of beauty. Her face is slender. Her mouth is wide, full-lipped, healthy. She wears a frank red lipstick that frames, when she smiles, her very white and even teeth. She is vain enough, and practical enough, to know that her smile is her best feature. She also assumes that she is not particularly beautiful. He knows that she is not beautiful, though his eyes have made her perfect.