Anyone Can Die (2 page)

A sturdy concrete bridge took them over the Rio
Grande. Midway across they spotted the hot spring, a semicircular outcropping of rocks jutting into the river about a half mile north. On the far side, they parked in the dusty day-use area and headed for the path that would take them to the spring. The path, hugging the gorge wall, wide enough for one person at a time, ascended steeply to a plateau that overlooked the river. This area they had also seen from the bridge, along with the small group of people standing on it smoking and talking. The climb was difficult and slow, the path narrow and rocky. They stopped often to catch their breath and to look down at the deep blue river flowing through the gorge. The late morning sun blazed down on them through a cloudless pale blue sky.

At the top they were hot and sweaty and stopped to share a beer from the six-pack Pat was carrying in his knapsack, sitting on a fallen tree trunk bleached to a whitish-gray by the sun. The group of people they had seen from the bridge turned out to be three young men, in their early twenties or a little older, all dusky, black eyed and black haired; probably, Pat thought, Indians from the nearby reservation. Their clothes-boots and frayed jeans and cutoff shirts-were covered with dust, as if they had been recently doing hard labor somewhere. They were drinking beer and smoking and listening to Santana on a boom box that had been placed on a pile of rocks near the edge of the cliff. The tallest of the three returned Pat’s stare a little too long and a little too hard for Pat’s taste before turning and flicking his butt over the edge of the cliff. Pat surveyed the scene. To the left of the Indians was
the plateau’s edge and the river some hundred feet below; to the right he could see their weather-beaten pickup, and beyond it a long expanse of pale brown dessert dotted with brush and stretching to the horizon. After their beer, as they passed the group, Pat smelled marijuana and heard one of them call out, “Sexy
chica
,
muy
sexy lady.”

The descent to the river was gradual and easy, and the spring, collected into a man-made, half-moonshaped rock retaining wall, well worth the drive and the hike. Lorrie had on her bathing suit under her hiking shorts and cotton blouse. Pat stripped to his boxer shorts and they sat in the 90-degree water with their backs against the low rock wall and luxuriated. Occasionally they slipped over the rocks and into the bracingly cold Rio Grande for a minute or two, holding on as the current swept by and over them, before climbing back into the naturally heated water of the spring. At the foot of the path was a small hardpan area where they had left their gear. Beyond that was a wide, low cave entrance at the base of the gorge where they could make out the shape of another pool, this one bubbling: the source of the spring.

On what turned out to be the last of their hotcold-hot sorties, when they returned to the spring, they found the tall Indian standing a few steps up from the bottom of the path, about fifteen feet away, staring at them. He seemed a bit older up close, maybe twenty-seven or -eight. His black hair was greasy and long, almost shoulder length. There was a mixture of contempt and amusement in his coal-black eyes, in
the slight curl of his upper lip. He had, Pat realized, been watching them as they climbed back into the spring, shivering and laughing, Pat effortlessly lifting Lorrie to help her over the rock wall. The Indian was wearing a sleeveless denim shirt, which showed to good advantage his shoulder-to-wrist tattoos: an uncoiled rattler on both arms, the snakes writhing under well-defined muscles, their forked tongues ending at the back of each hand.

“Are you going to fuck?” he said.

Pat felt Lorrie’s hand on his forearm under the water, but there was no need for her to calm him, if that’s what she was doing. He was fine.

“We were just leaving,” Pat said, rising to his full six-foot-three. He reached for Lorrie’s shorts and blouse, which she had draped over a rock near the path, and handed them to her. They stepped out of the spring together and Pat stood in front of his bride, keeping his eye on their new friend, while she dressed. When she was done, she grabbed Pat’s arm again, but Pat was in no hurry. He put his Garvey’s Gym T-shirt on, pulled his khaki shorts on over his wet underwear, then sat on a rock outcrop not far from the Indian to put on his hiking boots and socks. Lorrie did the same, sitting close to him. When they had their boots on and laced up, Pat, who fought in the heavyweight division at 205 pounds, but now weighed closer to 220, rose to face the Indian. Lorrie also rose and held Pat by the bicep. He could tell, from the pressure she was exerting, that she was afraid. This did not occur to him until this moment, but it did not bode well for the Indian.

“Excuse us,” Pat said.

“You are leaving so soon?” said the Indian.

“Yes,” Pat answered. “We have to get going.”

“But the spring is so much fun,” the Indian said. “My girlfriend and I have fucked here many times.”

“Pat!” Lorrie said, “let’s just go.”

Pat had not moved a muscle after their friend’s last remark, but he was about to punch him in the solar plexus. Not too hard, not so hard it would give him a heart attack or kill him. Just hard enough to collapse him to the ground, the breath knocked out of him. Lorrie’s sharp calling of his name had stopped him.

“After you,
pendejo
,” the Indian said, turning sideways to let them pass.

“Let’s go, Lor,” Pat said, nudging her to go first. “Take your time.”

Halfway up the cliff path, Pat turned and saw the Indian following them, about twenty steps behind. Pat smiled as they made eye contact. At the top, the other two Indians were still standing a few yards from the plateau’s edge, drinking beer, listening to their boom box. They stopped talking and stared at Lorrie and Pat as they emerged from the path onto the plateau. Pat did a quick one-eighty: the desert, the pickup with pieces of what looked like scrap lumber sticking up from its bed, the two Indians, the cliff’s edge, the river below. In the distance he could see the bridge and at its near end the parking area, where four or five people were sitting on beach chairs next to a Volkswagen bus.

Pat took Lorrie’s hand and started across the
plateau. As they were nearing the two Indians, one of them, short, but stocky and well muscled, stepped in front of them.

“Not so fast,” he said. “Have a beer with us.”

“No thanks,” Pat said. “We don’t drink.”

“But we saw you drinking beer before. You have it in your knapsack. You don’t like Indians.”

The tall Indian had come up from the path and walked around to face them, standing next to his friend. The third was still standing near the boom box, about ten feet away, sipping beer.

“They don’t like Indians,” the stocky one said to the tall one, who was holding something in his right hand that looked to Pat, at his first quick glance, like a knife. Looking again, he saw that it was a barber’s razor, its shiny curved blade fully extended. The sun was past its zenith now, but still blazing. In its harsh glare Pat could see the stocky Indian’s teeth, white and even and glistening under his mustache as he smiled broadly.

Taking aim at these teeth, Pat stepped forward and hit the stocky one with a right cross directly in the middle of his face. He crumpled immediately to the ground. Pat put Lorrie behind him as the tall one showed his knife, his eyes dark with anger. Pat nudged Lorie backward, toward the pickup, away from the cliff, watching carefully as the third Indian also pulled a knife and joined his partner. At the truck, Pat reached behind him, grabbed a two-by-four, and in a long sweeping motion swung it at the tall Indian’s head. He ducked but not quickly enough to avoid a glancing
blow, which knocked him to the ground. Pat immediately swung the lumber again, against the Indian’s rib cage, a blow that he knew would cause him great pain and debilitate him for days. As Pat was delivering this blow the third Indian rushed at him, his knife high. Pat turned toward him in time to see Lorrie swing the knapsack with five cans of beer still in it against the side of his head, spinning him into the front fender of the pick up, where he hit his head with a clank and fell to the ground.

“Fuck,” said Lorrie, taking in the three Indians in various degrees of consciousness on the ground around them. “Fuck all.” Her eyes were blazing as hot as the sun.

“You’re not mad at me, are you?” Pat asked.

“Mad at you?”

Pat picked up the razor and the knife and with a heave of his long, powerful right arm, flung them as far as he could out into the desert. “We have to go,” he said.

“Mad at you?” Lorrie said again. “Are you kidding?”

On 522, not far from Taos, Pat found a spot to park, slightly elevated, in the evergreen forest just off the highway, with a view of the road of at least a mile or two in each direction. Behind them was a rushing stream and beyond that the outline of a small motel, probably a fishing camp. They waited in silence,
watching the highway. Pat’s adrenaline had been coming out of his pores, but he was calm now, able to think. His life had been a rough-hewn one since his father died when he was fifteen and his brother went off to the army a year later. Away from home, working on different projects, he spent his nights in bars, where he had his share of run-ins with the local crazies. But he had never faced a man with a knife before, or a weapon of any kind. He felt like he had passed a test, punched a ticket. And then there was Lorrie. If the Indians had hurt her, they would all be dead now. This thought, a simple statement of fact, confirmed for him that he had done the right thing in marrying her, despite the feelings of inadequacy that were more or less with him all the time.

“I’ll go to Paraguay,” Lorrie said, breaking the silence. “But I have one condition.”

“What’s that?” Pat asked.

“We save all the money. When we get back we’ll buy a house.”

“Will it be enough?”

“More than enough.”

“That’s fine with me. I agree a hundred percent.”

“We can still work and go to Sacred Heart nights.”

Lorrie, who worked days in a lawyer’s office, had thirty credits under her belt going part time to the small Catholic college in Bridgeport. In the past winter, Pat had taken a three-credit geology course there at night, selected by Lorrie. He had loved it and
gotten a B, amazed that he could acquire an understanding of how the earth’s rocks were formed, the very rocks he grappled with in his work.

Paraguay, he thought, we’re going!

“How long should we wait?” Lorrie asked.

“They’re not coming.”

“You were unbelievable back there.”

“Just doing my job.”

“I mean it.”

“It’s a good thing you picked up the knapsack. You saved my life.”

“No Pat. I saved you from killing him.”

“Killing him? No way.”

They were silent for a second. There was very little space between them in the front seat of their small car. The smell of the tall pine trees that surrounded them, cooked by the sun, wafted sweetly through the open windows. Lorrie turned sideways to face Pat. She put her hand on his shoulder and pressed down on the muscle and bone beneath.

“I don’t know if I want to see that look ever again,” she said.

“What look?”

“The look in your eyes when you hit the tall one with the two-by-four.”

“How do you know it was a two-by-four?”

“I know my lumber.”

“Do you know how much I love you?”

“Till death do us part.”

“Yes Lor, that much and more.”

Megan Nolan emerged from the bowels of the Abbesses Métro station into a cold and raw late afternoon in January of 2001. Rawer and colder, it seemed to her, than when she had entered the Métro near her apartment in the Latin Quarter only twenty minutes earlier. To catch her breath, she lit a Gauloise and stood near the station’s covered entrance. A passing businessman slowed to stare at her as she stood and smoked. Her strawberry blond hair flowed down to the shoulders of her dark green, au courant wool overcoat, which itself flowed down to the tops of her knee-high Prada boots. Under the coat, she had on faded jeans and an ivory-colored cashmere turtleneck sweater. She did not wear jewelry in Montmartre as
she had heard stories of the sudden knockdown and necklace-, or worse, earring-grab by marauding boys. Her hair and her gold-flecked green eyes were her best accessories anyway. She did love jewelry though, to wear and to sell, which is why she was going to see her friend Annabella Jeritza, the widowed gypsy fortuneteller whose shop was only a few blocks away near the obscure little Olney Park.