C Box - Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

The sentiment touched me and surprised me.

“Is this the drink talking?”

“Partially.”

“Well, I appreciate it anyway.”

He snorted.

“Damn, you’re cynical.”

He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “You have no idea,” he said.

ON THE WAY BACK to my house, Cody leaned back and put his head on the headrest and closed his eyes.

“One more thing,” he said.

“What?”

“Remember when I told you I wouldn’t go after the judge? That I couldn’t go after him?”

“Yes.”

Cody flicked his fingers as if tossing aside something small and dead. “Forget that. That ended in the courtroom. I’m going to war with that motherfucker.”

Then he slipped off into sleep and his head bobbed while I drove. I thought, This man will watch over Melissa and Angelina?

WHEN WE GOT BACK to my house, Cody’s head popped up, and he seemed perfectly sober and lucid.

“I guess I conked out,” he said without a slur.

“Would you like some dinner?” I forgot I was supposed to pick up something. “We can order a pizza.”

“Naw, I’m fine. I’ve got to sneak down to my place and get some clothes.”

“Should I tell Melissa you’ll be here all next week?”

“Tell her what ever you want. Just make sure she’s okay with that.”

“Cody…”

He waved me away. “Don’t worry,” he said.

I walked him to his car. “You’ll be back in a week, right?” he asked.

I said yes.

“By the time I see you next, I will have talked with my uncle Jeter,” Cody said.

I froze.

“Don’t worry. I’m just making sure he’s still around and available if we need him.”

“Don’t you know someone around here who could do the job?” I asked, uncomfortable with the fact that I’d acquiesced, that this all just seemed so inevitable. That I’d said “the job” like some kind of low-rent mobster.

“I know people,” he said. “But for something like this, I can only trust blood relations. I can’t risk somebody talking, and neither can you.”

“Jeez,” I said, “I don’t know.”

“I’m just checking on availability,” he said. “That’s as far as I’ll go. If you want to talk to Jeter, you’ll have to make that decision yourself.”

I nodded.

Cody grinned at me, then held out his hand. “Have a good trip,” he said. “And don’t worry about anything. She’ll be safer with me around than she is with you, for God’s sake.”

I think he meant it to be a joke.

LATE THAT NIGHT, Brian called. He said, “Get Melissa on the phone-you’ve both got to hear this.”

“Where are you?” I asked while Melissa scrambled to the other room to grab the extension.

“San Diego. Seventy-two degrees constantly. I don’t even know why they have weathermen.”

Melissa picked up, and Brian launched, speaking in his rat-a-tat-tat manner, “I talked to a friend of a friend who went to high school in Asheville with John Moreland. He didn’t paint a happy picture of our boy growing up. Apparently, John was the unwanted son of his wild-about-town teenage mother, who gave the child to her older sister and her husband, the Morelands. Just gave John to them. Apparently it wasn’t all that unusual down there. So John grows up in this tight-assed, repressive house hold where his ‘mother’ is actually his aunt and his ‘father’ is his uncle. They go to court and get John’s name changed to Moreland-I don’t know what it was before and it doesn’t matter. Anyway, John hates his parents. He doesn’t say a lot about them in high school, other than they ‘ try to keep him down, ’ what ever that means, but my friend’s friend thinks it has to do with his ambition. Maybe they wouldn’t sign scholarship or financial aid applications, something like that, but I’m just speculating. But when they pass on as a result of that car wreck, well, our boy not only gets two insurance-policy payoffs, but the whole world of financial aid must have opened up to him. That’s how he could afford to leave and go to CU. And he just washed his hands of his upbringing, from what I understand. Never went back to North Carolina for reunions or anything like that. Never went back to visit the graves of his parents, according to my source.

“So,” Brian said, “we’re dealing with one cold bastard.”

“But he had an alibi the night of the crash,” I said. “You told us that.”

“And he brought his alibi with him to Colorado,” Brian said. “Later, he married her. And later, she died, too.”

TEGEL AIRPORT WAS AS it always was-too small, bustling, confusing, metallic, and round. Gray-white morning light seeped through windows that seemed dirty but weren’t-it was the quality of the light itself-and I waited for my luggage at a squeaking, lurching, stop-start-stop carousel in a crowd so dense there was no way not to touch shoulders with others and be jostled. I was still lost in the familiar fuzzy twilight of jet lag. I had the feeling of being alone in my head, looking out through dry and bloodshot eyes. My skin felt gritty. I needed a place where I could regroup and shower.

Arriving passengers were a mix of Euros from the east and west on business, North Africans in flowing robes, large extended families of Turks. The crowd was veined with distinct groups of four or five who were no doubt arriving to attend WTB, as I was. Jamaicans, Thais, Argentines, Cubans-all sticking together, waiting not only for their luggage but their display booths, boxes of tourism brochures printed in German, and in the case of the Cubans their cigar-making gear so they could hand-roll smokes for select German tour operators. Everybody in the world sought the well-heeled and determined German travel market. We all wanted these people who got five to six weeks of mandated vacation time, who thought of travel as a right and not a privilege, who many times knew more about us and our geography and culture than we knew ourselves.

It was easy to pick out the Americans, with our open and animated faces, our loud talking as if no one else could understand English, our inadvertent and instinctive élan that so annoys others. A contingent from Las Vegas, including tanned men with dark, slicked-back hair and showgirls who, without their costumes and feathers, were simply too tall, pale, and thin, looked like a Mafia excursion to Tahoe or Atlantic City that had taken the wrong airplane.

As I checked my wristwatch to see how long we’d been waiting for our luggage, I thought I heard my name called out and raised my head. I recognized no faces and decided it was simply a similar-sounding word barked out in another language. Then, in an English accent, “Jack! Are you lost, my boy?”

Malcolm Harris of AmeriCan Adventures, wearing a tailored English suit with his trench coat folded over his forearm, clapped me on the shoulder from behind.

“I almost didn’t recognize you,” I said, trying to snap out of my dreamlike state so as to be as sharp as possible for the most important tour operator to our area. “The last time I saw you, you were wearing jeans and a cowboy hat and sitting on a horse.” I remembered how much he’d loved playing cowboy on a dude ranch.

Malcolm Harris was pale, with thin black hair and a twitchy smile that slid back to reveal two rows of bad teeth. His suit hid his paunch. His sharp nose was discolored with the red and blue road map of a serious drinker and there was a strand of sweat beads along the top of his upper lip.

Harris tipped his head back and laughed. “I wish I were back out in Colorado now instead of this bloody place.”