Detour

TWENTY-THREE

They’d traveled over the Williamsburg Bridge, then through the Lincoln Tunnel, headed to a place somewhere outside Jersey City. It was five o’clock. They were on a mostly empty road flanked by fields of swaying cattails. High as an elephant’s eye. The lyrics were from Joanna’s favorite musical, Oklahoma! They’d attended the revival on their last anniversary, Paul told Miles.

The word last stuck in his throat.

It was three days and eighteen hours since he’d left his wife and child.

The swamp was throbbing with the steady hum of insects. Still, you could hear the Major League scores clear enough. Miles was listening with rapt attention.

“Baseball,” Miles said, “is the hardest sport to handicap. Brutal.”

“You mean bet on?”

“Yeah, bet on. You’ve got to give runs, two, three, depending on the pitcher. The worst team in the world wins sixty times a year. Go figure. It’s a sucker’s bet.”

“You bet on sports?”

“Well, sure. Penny-ante. You know, twenty, thirty dollars—just to keep things interesting. It’s my little rebellion against prescribed living. Orthodoxy has little rules for everything. It can drive you nuts.”

Paul guessed that going to work without his yarmulke was another one of Miles’ little rebellions against prescribed living. “Did you ever think about not being Orthodox?”

“Sure. But then what would I be? It’s sort of like asking a black person if he ever thought about not being black. You can think about it all you like, but it’s kind of who you are.”

“So? Are there rules about betting on baseball games?”

“Yeah—you have to stay away from the Padres.” Miles turned up the radio for the National League scores.

Paul felt like mentioning that he and his coworkers had spent more lunch hours than he cared to remember establishing risk ratios for specific pitches thrown to specific batters in specific parks. A bunch of regular Bill Jameses. He could’ve told Miles, for example, that throwing a down-and-in fastball to Barry Bonds in 3-Com Park had a risk-to-reward ratio of three to one. Every two times you got Barry, he’d launch one into the stratosphere.

He didn’t, though.

Paul understood Miles was talking about sports so they wouldn’t have to talk about something else. What they were doing. Meeting drug dealers in a swamp outside Jersey City. If they talked about it, they would be forced to acknowledge that they were hopelessly out of their element.

“Thank you,” Paul said.

“For what?”

“For doing this with me, I guess.”

Miles remained silent for a minute. “I sent you to Bogotá. I told you you’d be safe. That makes me kind of responsible, doesn’t it?”

“Great. Can I hire you to sue yourself?”

“Sorry. I don’t do suits.”

“How long have you been a lawyer?” Paul asked after turning up the AC.

“How long?” Miles repeated, as if he’d never been asked that particular question before. “Too long. Not long enough. Depends on the day.”

“Why did you want to be a lawyer?”

“I didn’t. I wanted to be Sandy Koufax. God didn’t cooperate. My fastball was more like a change. If you can’t be Sandy, you get to be a doctor or lawyer. Indian chief wasn’t available—it should be, we’re a tribe, aren’t we? I went for lawyer. Maybe not the kind of lawyer they expected.”

“They?”

“You know, all the wise men of the tribe. Everyone goes real estate, tax, or corporate. I went legal aid. Juvenile division.”

“What was that like?”

“Crazy. I had a caseload of about a hundred fifty. I’d get about ten minutes with each kid and a quick glance at their file before saying hi to the judge. That was it. And it’s not like I could do any pleading-out there.”

“Why not?”

“You couldn’t threaten the prosecutors with a long jury trial because there are no juries in juvenile, and kids don’t really have any information worth trading. No one wants to deal. The best I could do was get them committed to a Bronx hospital, because it was safer than putting them in a juvenile hall.”

“Hospital?”

“Yeah, a mental hospital. They’d do their time popping meds instead of getting gang-raped. Trust me—it was heaven next to your average juvenile prison. For them it was the safest place on earth. Anyway, when I got to court and began mistaking Julio for Juan, and María for Maggie, I thought I might be in trouble. I told my supervisor he had to lessen my caseload—that I was committing borderline malpractice. He said keep dreaming. I left.”

“So you went from juvenile delinquents to Colombian babies.”

“Yeah. I thought I’d get involved at an earlier stage of development. It pays better. What about you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Hard to believe you always wanted to be an insurance man. What did you do—fall into it?”

No, not fall, Paul thought. My mom died, he wanted to say. My mom died and I got scared. He felt like explaining this to Miles, that like Einstein, he was merely trying to impose order and probability on a cold universe.

“More or less,” was all he said.

A dirt road appeared to the passenger side of the car—not so much a road as an indentation in the muck. A trail to nowhere in particular.

Miles slowed, then pulled over.

“They said a dirt road about three miles down,” he said, trying to peer ahead down the mostly hidden path. “Oh well . . .” He turned the car into the opening, bouncing over a small hump.

Suddenly, cattails were scouring both sides of the Buick, making it feel as if they were traveling through a car wash. Paul, who’d hated roller coasters as a kid, hadn’t liked car washes much either. His fervid imagination had attributed a malevolence to those stiff bristles, smothering sponges, and scalding jets of water.

He felt the same kind of vulnerability now. The car was safety. Outside in the swamp, who knew?

He peered through the windshield, which had quickly become a battlefield of slaughtered swamp bugs. Miles turned on the wipers in an effort to clear them—but it was as if they were beating against a monsoon.

When the road ended, they were in a small clearing all by themselves. Miles stopped the car.

“I guess this is it,” Miles said. He tapped the steering wheel, once, twice, peering nervously from side to side. Miles might’ve felt half responsible for Paul’s predicament, but it seemed like he might be having second thoughts about actually accompanying him. “What’s the protocol with drug deals? Half-hour waiting time?” He looked at his watch. “We’re five minutes early.”

Paul said, “Are you sure this is it?”

“No.”

“Great. Just checking.”

Ten minutes went by. Miles commented on the weather, then immediately ran out of small things to say. Paul understood. Making conversation when you’re scared shitless was an effort. Paul rubbed his hands together and attempted to swallow his own dry spit.

Paul heard the car first.

“Someone’s coming,” he said.

A minute later a blue Mercedes-Benz emerged out of the cattails and came to a lurching stop about twenty feet from them.

Both cars sat there, facing each other.

“Okay,” Miles said after a good minute went by, “I guess we get out.”

Miles flipped the trunk switch, pushed his door open, and gingerly stepped out of the car. Paul followed.

They met at the back of the car.

“You want to hold it?” Miles said. “Or me?” The well-traveled black bag was peeking out from under an old tarp.

“I’ll take it,” Paul said. “I’m the one who was supposed to deliver it in the first place.”

He pulled his bag out. No one had gotten out of the other car. It was still sitting there, its engine idling, no discernible movement from inside.

“Did you hear the one about the lawyer and the actuary?” Miles said.

“No.”

“Me either.”

They approached the Mercedes side by side. It reminded Paul of a western—just about every western ever made, where the two lawmen stride toward the gunslingers shoulder-to-shoulder in the movie’s final showdown. As a responsible actuary he would be remiss not to mention that legions of western heroes had defied the odds—roughly fifty-fifty—of getting their heads blown off.

The Mercedes’ driver’s door opened. Two men stepped out of the car. They might’ve been car salesmen. No mirrored sunglasses, heavy gold chains, or garish tattoos. Instead, they wore well-pressed chinos and golf shirts. One in a powder-blue Izod, the other opting for a striped Polo.

The driver—he was in Polo—nodded at them. “You guys look a little nervous.”

Okay, Paul thought, give him points for being perceptive.

“Which one’s Paul, huh?” he asked. He spoke with a noticeable accent—Colombian, Paul assumed. His voice was high-pitched, almost girlish.

Paul had to restrain himself from raising his hand.

“Me. I’m Paul.” They’d stopped about five feet from each other. The black bag seemed to be growing heavier by the second.

The driver nodded, slapped his neck. “Fucking mosquitoes. I’m gonna get West Nile.” When he took his hand away, there was a blotch of bright blood on his neck.

He looked at Miles. “Who are you, my friend?”

“His lawyer,” Miles said.

“His lawyer?” He laughed and turned to his companion. “Fuck me, I don’t have a lawyer.” He turned back to them. “Are we going to have to sign papers or something?”

Miles said, “No papers. If you could just make sure they give him his wife and daughter back.”

“Hey, don’t know what you’re talking about. Not my job,” he said, affecting a thicker accent for comic effect. No one laughed. “I’m here to sight the white, okay?”

“Okay,” Miles said.

Paul remained silent. Good thing. He was too scared to speak.

“So, boss?” the driver said. “You here to give me the bag or ask me to dance?” The other man laughed.

Paul held the bag out at arm’s length.

“Open it,” the driver said. “I like to see what’s inside first.”

Paul laid it on the dirt ground and zipped it open. When he bent down, he felt light-headed and nearly tipped over. Something began humming in the swamp, an überhum, the biggest insect in the pond.

The driver stepped forward and gazed down at the bag.

“Huh? Looks like fucking rubbers to me.” He had a lazy left eye; he seemed to be looking in two directions at once.

Paul started to explain. “They’re filled with—”

“Shit, I know what they’re filled with. I’m goofing with you, boss.” He smiled. “Let’s take one out and make sure, okay?”

When Paul hesitated, the man said, “You do it. No offense, but they were up your ass.” He turned to his pal. “Culero, eh?”

The insect hum had gotten louder—Paul’s ears were ringing. Paul reached into the bag and took out a condom, neatly tied in a knot by one of those women back in Colombia. He held it out in his now seriously sweating palm.

The driver pulled something out of his pocket.

Click. A sinuously shiny blade caught the light. Paul tensed, and Miles took one step back.

“Relax, muchachos.” He gripped Paul’s hand, almost gently, and pointed the blade straight down. Paul wondered if the man noticed his hand was shaking.

He did.

“Don’t worry,” he said to Paul. “I’ve only slipped a couple of times.”

He flicked the blade at Paul’s palm. When Paul twitched, he laughed and did it again. The other man—the one wearing the Izod with the little green alligator—said something in Spanish. He had a thin, almost whispery voice.

The driver jabbed the end of the blade into the condom, opening up a tiny slit. He was reaching down to scoop up some of the white powder onto his finger when something happened.

It was that hum.

It had grown even louder, annoyingly loud, as if it were causing vibrations in the ground itself. You wanted to shout shut up, to swat whatever it was with a newspaper, to crunch it under your shoe.

It would have been useless, though. Using your shoe.

The two cars plowed out of the cattails at about the same time.

Jeeps, the kind with fat, deeply treaded tires and juiced-up engines. They were belching black smoke and closing fast.

The man looked up and slapped his neck again. And just like last time, his hand came away with smeared blood.

“They shot me,” he said.

He grabbed the bag and ran. The other man too. They vanished into the cattails. Polo and Izod.

Paul felt frozen to the spot. It took something whizzing past his ear and puck-pucking into the ground about a foot from his left shoe to actually get him to move. That, and Miles, who grabbed his right arm and yelled, “Run.”

He scrambled after Miles into the weeds.

He could hear this behind him: the sound of rumbling engines being shut off, of car doors slamming, of shouts and screams and war whoops. He thought westerns again: the outlaw band riding into town on a Saturday night intent on letting off a little steam, firing their six-shooters into the air. Jeep Riders in the Sky.

Only they were shooting semiautomatics, and they were shooting them in their direction.

Paul ran straight through the cattails, dry thin stalks whipping his face and arms. He followed the shape of Miles’ disappearing body. The ground wasn’t conducive to running for your life—it was wet, thick, and mucky. Ten seconds into the weeds his socks were soaked to the skin.

Behind him the men were still screaming. They were still shooting too—cattail heads were disappearing like airborne dandelion spores.

And something else, something that had become uncomfortably and chillingly clear.

The gunmen were following them.

The cattails, Paul gratefully noticed, were as high as an elephant’s eye. Wonderfully, gloriously high. High enough, Paul thought, to completely swallow them. He could barely make out jittery patches of blue sky overhead. The dealers had chosen an impenetrable place that would be hidden to just about everyone.

They stood a chance.

He remembered something. In the childhood game of rock, paper, scissors—paper, the most fragile substance on earth, always won out over rock. Why?

Because paper can hide rock.

Somehow the thought didn’t comfort him.

He kept running, panting after Miles as if he were a faithful hound out duck hunting. He tried not to dwell on the fact that they were the ducks. His feet churned up dollops of mud, his blood jackhammered into his ears.

The men were behind them and gaining.

Paul wasn’t certain whom it occurred to first—Miles or him. It seemed like they both stopped running at almost the same moment. They turned and stared at each other and made the same unspoken decision more or less in unison. They dropped straight to the ground.

If they could hear the men chasing them, then the men could hear them.

Lie down and do nothing.

Their pursuers would have to get lucky.

Do the numbers. He imagined it as an actuarial problem that had been dropped on his desk. The square mass of two bodies, divided into the square mileage of this swamp, divided by six or seven people looking for them. What were the odds of being found? Substitute the cattails for hay, and they were the proverbial needles.

They hugged the ground.

It soon became apparent that Izod and Polo had different ideas.

They were still running. Somewhere off to the left—the sound of two small breezes whipping through the weeds.

But behind them a kind of tornado.

Run, Paul thought. Run, run.

They had the drugs. They were carrying Joanna’s fate in their hands. They had to make it out of the swamp.

But the sounds of separate footsteps seemed to converge into one dull roar. Then someone screamed, and suddenly all sound stopped. Even the insects seemed to bow their heads in a moment of silence.

After a minute or so it picked up again, like a skipped record finding its groove.

What happened?

Paul received his answer almost immediately.

“Hey!” someone shouted. “Hey! We got your dancing partner here. He looks kind of lonely.”

They’d captured one of them. Izod or Polo. Just one. The other one was still out there. He was probably lying low like them—being a needle.

The sound of the gunmen searching wavered in and out, like a faulty shortwave signal. Once Paul glimpsed a red Puma sneaker about ten feet from him—that’s it. He shut his eyes and waited for the bullet in his back. When he opened his eyes and peeked, the sneaker was gone.

He went back to the problem that had been dumped on his desk. Risk ratios had to be formulated, tabulated, and segmented for another potentially dangerous activity.

Plane Travel.

Driving a Car.

Construction Jobs.

Lying in a Swamp Being Pursued by Homicidal Gunmen.

“Tell you what,” one of their pursuers screamed. “Got a deal for you, bollo. You come on in now, we won’t kill you. How’s that?”

Bollo. Pussy. One of the Spanish words eighth graders taught themselves, snickering, between classes.

Okay, Paul wondered, why were they only concentrating on the other drug runner in the weeds? Was it possible they hadn’t seen Miles and him in the clearing? Was it?

Miles answered the question for him. “He must have the bag,” he whispered. “They want the drugs.”

The man with the high-pitched voice and lazy eye. Polo. He’d snatched Paul’s bag when the shots rang out.

The gunman shouted for the lazy-eyed man to come in, called him a bollo, an abadesa, a culo—all not-so-nice things, Paul imagined. He repeated his proposition. If he’d only stand up and walk toward them bag in hand, he’d get out of the swamp with his life—honest injun.

Still no answer.

Paul assumed Polo didn’t believe a word of it. They’d already put a bullet into his neck—if he wasn’t going to die of West Nile, he might expire from that.

“Okay,” the man shouted, “okay, that’s cool. How about some music while you think it over? For your listening pleasure.”

Someone walked back to the Jeeps and turned on a CD player. Or maybe it was the car radio. Latin samba came wailing through the cattails. Screeching trumpets and a good steady beat. Music, that’s nice of them. Only something seemed wrong with this music. It sounded shrill and off-key.

It took a minute or so for Paul to understand why.

At first Paul thought it might be a trick of the air, an aberration in sound waves caused by the thick cattails and even thicker heat. It wasn’t.

It was a man screaming. Izod.

They were torturing their prisoner in time to the music.

To cover up the sound. Or because it made it more fun. Or because they liked samba.

One, two, three . . . scream.

They kept at it for an entire song—the longest song on earth.

“American Pie” might be nineteen and a half minutes. This song was longer.

Finally, it stopped. “What ya think?” the man shouted. “Celia Cruz, mi mami. A fucking scream, no?”

Paul turned to Miles.

“Who are they?”

When the Jeeps had burst through the weeds and the men surged out with guns drawn and firing, he’d thought the police. Government agents. Narcs.

Not now.

Miles didn’t answer. Maybe because his hands were up over his ears. His eyes were closed as if he didn’t wish to see anything either. A long bloody scratch went from one side of his forehead to the other. He’d done Paul a favor, he’d extended himself beyond the call of reasonable duty, and now it was very possible he was going to die because of it.

“Julio.” Another voice now, thin and whispery. “Juliooooo . . .”

There was something pitiful about this voice.

“They broke my fingers, Julio. They broke my whole hand. My hand, Julio . . . You gotta come in! You hear me! I can’t . . . Please . . . They want the llello, man, that’s it. For fuck’s sake, come in!”

The torturer’s deal had fallen on deaf ears. They’d changed tack. It was Izod’s turn.

“Listen to me . . . They broke my fingers, all my fingers, Julio . . . every one of my fingers . . . Bring in the hooch . . . They’re killing me . . . Please, Julio . . . please . . . You hearin’ what I’m sayin’?”

Julio remained mute.

They gave it another song.

Another samba, played with the volume cranked down, so the man’s screams were louder, in your face, standing out even over the spanking rhythm and blaring horns.

Sometimes he screamed actual words.

Ayudi a mi madre!

Please help me, Mother!

The music stopped again.

Paul heard sniffling, a horrible mewling sound.

“Julioooo . . . my ear. They cut my ear off. It hurts . . . oh, it hurts, Julio . . . oh, it hurts . . . Come in . . . Please come in . . . Please . . . You GOT to . . . They cut my ear off, Julio . . . You understand . . .”

Julio might’ve understood—he would’ve had to be deaf, dumb, or dead not to understand. He wasn’t coming in.

Paul pushed his head to the ground. It stank like rotting vegetables. If he were an ostrich, he would’ve stuck his head into the ground and kept it there.

It was hard listening to a man being tortured. Even one you didn’t know. He knew him well enough to see him. Neatly pressed pants and a powder-blue Izod turned bloodred. There was a black hole where one of his ears used to be.

“No . . . no, please no . . . Don’t . . . No, not my balls . . . please, not my balls, no . . . Julio, don’t let them cut my balls off . . . Pleeeeease, Julio, no . . . Don’t let them do that . . . No—”

A bloodcurdling howl.

It was so loud one of the torturers told him to shut the fuck up. The man whose testicles he’d just sliced off.

The man did shut up.

For a while there was mostly silence. Just the insects, the slightest breeze rustling through the cattails.

May I have some water?

It was him again.

I’d like some water. Please. Some water . . .

Softly and politely, as if he were in a restaurant talking to a waiter.

As if they might politely answer him back.

Sure, still or sparkling?

Eventually, he stopped speaking. At least actual words. All verifiable human language ceased. He reverted to a guttural, indecipherable whimpering.

His tongue.

They’d cut out his tongue.

Paul couldn’t listen anymore.

He needed to stop hearing.

The odds of accidental death from being struck by lightning are 1 in 71,601 for an average lifetime.

The odds of dying from being bitten by a nonvenomous insect are 1 in 397,000.

The odds of drowning in a household bathtub are 1 in 10,499.

The odds of . . .

“Maricón, see what you made us do. Fuck—your boyfriend bled like a fucking cerado. All over my goddamn shoes. We gave you a chance, you cocksucking motherfucker.”

Their prisoner was dead.

Someone went back to the Jeeps. Paul could hear doors being opened, then slammed shut.

“What are they doing?” Paul whispered to Miles. But Miles still had his hands over his ears—his skin had turned the color of skim milk.

They were on the march again—one or two of them, slowly moving through the fields.

Paul smelled it first.

If Joanna were there, she would have sniffed it out minutes sooner, he knew. She’d have lifted her head and said how odd, do you smell that?

It was wafting in through the cattails. When Paul lifted his head again in an effort to make sense of it, he heard sounds of splashing.

“They’re making a line,” Miles whispered, his first actual conversation in the last half hour. He’d finally taken his hands off his ears—was all ears now, but he clearly didn’t like what he was hearing.

A line? What did Miles mean? What line?

“The wind’s blowing that way,” Miles said. First an enigmatic pronouncement about lines, now the weather report.

“They’re going to burn him out,” Miles said in a weirdly detached voice. “They’re going to make him run right to them.”

That smell.

Kerosene.

Okay, Paul finally understood. He got it. Much as he didn’t want to, much as he wanted to remain dumb and clueless. They were laying down a line of kerosene. They were making this line behind them, behind the wind itself, which was blowing away from them. Paul pictured it—a solid wall of flame. And he pictured something else—that house in Jersey City. What used to be a house in Jersey City. The place he was supposed to meet the two guys in the blue Mercedes, Polo and Izod. Only he hadn’t met them, because someone had burned down the house—reduced it to a dark primeval hole.

Who?

The same guys who were circling them with kerosene in their hands. That was the logical conclusion—what the empirical evidence would lead you to.

Paul had twice tried to deliver the drugs, and twice he’d been stopped by the same band of arsonists.

Paul turned to Miles once again to ask him something, but the question flew out of his head at the sight of Miles edging backward on elbows and knees. He looked . . . odd. Like a white person trying to dance black. Like he was doing the worm. He was doing it double-time; moving at the speed of panic.

Paul saw why.

The odds of dying from smoke or fire are 1 in 13,561.

The first flame had shot up into the air about fifty yards behind and to their right. It looked biblical—like a solid pillar of fire. The line of cattails would light up like briquettes soaked in lighter fluid, then be spurred forward by the wind. If they ran from the fire, they would only wind up facing another kind of fire, the kind produced by semiautomatic weapons. Miles, who’d been known to bet on a baseball game or two, was betting that he could go the other way—that he could go toward it. That he could make it out before the entire line lit. That he could race the fire and win.

By the time Paul caught up to him, Miles had turned himself around. They shimmied through the weeds on their bellies just a few feet apart from each other, noses inches above the pungent stink of the swamp, an odor still preferable to its alternative.

Burned flesh, Paul couldn’t help noticing, smelled sickly sweet.

The men had miscalculated—tried to get someone to run who was very possibly past running. The bullet in his neck, Paul thought. The man in the Polo shirt was dead.

They kept crawling.

Picture those half-fish creatures in the Pleistocene era, slithering out of the water onto dry land on their way to a better future. If they’d only known what awaited them, Paul thought, they might’ve turned around and gone back.

He felt only half human now. Covered in slime and mud, bleeding from the razor-sharp weeds and furiously biting insects. Breathing was next to impossible—sinewy lines of choking black smoke were already snaking across the ground.

He was traveling blind. His eyes were dripping—half from the smoke and half from the awful knowledge that he’d failed.

He could sense the fire to their left. How far away? Twenty yards? Close enough to feel the heat like a wave—the kind that tumbles you into the surf and just won’t let you go. Faint blisters were rising up on his forearms.

Faster. Faster. Faster.

What were the odds they’d make it now? The actuary in him said: Nil. Zippo. Nada.

Give up.

He couldn’t. Self-preservation vanquished self-pity. If his wife and child were going to make it out of Colombia, he had to make it out of the swamp.

Paul could see the first jagged slivers of fire flickering through the stalks. The cattails were crackling, snapping, literally disintegrating in front of his half-blinded eyes. It felt as if every bit of air were being sucked out of there. The men were screaming over the fire’s deafening roar like college students before a pregame bonfire.

Miles collapsed to his right.

He lay there on his belly, wheezing, desperately trying to gulp in air.

“Come on, Miles. A little further.” It took an enormous effort for Paul to get the words out of his mouth. They tumbled out half formed and garbled, as if he were speaking in tongues. They had zero effect. Miles lay there, unmoved and unmoving.

The fire was making a beeline for them. It was almost there.

“I . . . can’t . . . ,” Miles whispered between gasps. “I . . .”

Paul grabbed his shirt collar—hot and steaming, like laundry fresh from the dryer.

He pulled.

It made no sense. It was merely symbolic, since he didn’t have the strength to pull Miles from the fire, any more than he had the strength to stand up and take on the murderers who’d started it.

He pulled anyway.

Suddenly, Miles seemed to gather what little energy he had left. He moved. Just a foot or so. Then another foot. And after coughing up some black phlegm, a foot more.

It was too late.

They were in the mouth of the furnace. It was yawning open for them. They weren’t going to make it.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, my . . . My rod and my . . . My rod . . . Where were the words when you really needed them? He was down to crawling on bloodied hands and knees. He was doing what any atheist does in foxholes. He was mumbling the magic words he’d abandoned as a sad and lonely little kid.

Miles was there beside him. The fire lit him up like someone in a flash-frame.

Paul’s flesh began to sear—to literally burn off. He took one last lunge, then covered up his face, hoping it wouldn’t hurt.

That was all.