Fool Me Twice

Chapter 14

Continental Divide

I grabbed Kip from the conference room and told him we were taking a little trip. He’d been pestering me about going to Universal Studios near Disney World, so he figured we were headed to Orlando. I reluctantly promised we would another time, and on the way to the airport, gave him my sermon about the paving over of Central Florida, a land of motels, alligator shows, pancake houses, shell shops (with imported shells), go-cart tracks, miniature golf courses, T-shirt shops, and medieval castles made of plastic. Call me a curmudgeon, but I just don’t go for pre-packaged, no-surprise, sterilized “attractions.” I’d rather take the kid fishing.

So I told Kip where we were going and added that he’d better tie the laces of his high-top sneakers, and he began asking the first of six hours of questions. “But why are we going out west, and why couldn’t we get my clothes first?”

“ We’re going because the state attorney here thinks I killed someone, and a dangerous guy there thinks I double-crossed him.”

“ Broly! Just like North by Northwest.”

“ Huh?”

“ The cops think Cary Grant killed this guy at the UN, but it was really an assassin hired by James Mason, who thinks Cary Grant is someone else, and-”

“ Kip, this is real life.”

“ I know, but you can learn things from the movies.”

“ Yeah? Like what?”

“ Like, if you see a crop duster flying real low, you better duck.”

“ Okay, got it. As for your clothes, I’ll get you duded up when we get there.”

He made a face. “Duded up? Uncle Jake, that’s totally geekified. I mean, nobody talks like that, not even Pee Wee Herman.’’

On the expressway, just before the airport exit, a blond woman in a red Porsche cut me off, changing lanes. I gave her a friendly honk-honk, and she responded with the middle finger of her left hand. A bumper sticker on the Porsche read: “I still miss my ex, but my aim is improving.”

From a phone on Concourse E, I called Charlie Riggs to tell him what I was doing. “Are you going because of the girl or to get yourself out of a jam?” he asked.

“ I don’t know,” I answered, honestly.

At the other end of the line, Charlie seemed to think it over. After a moment, he cleared his throat with his genial harrumph. “Plautus probably said it best.”

“ He usually did,” I agreed.

“ Ubi mel ibi apes. Honey attracts bees.”

“ I know what you’re saying, Charlie. Be careful of that other bee, the one with size-sixteen cowboy boots.”

“ Surely, but be careful of the honey, too, my friend.”

The flight to Denver was uneventful, unless you count the look the flight attendant gave me when Kip asked whether they had Dutch beer instead of that canned piss supposedly made from Rocky Mountain spring water. I made a mental note to watch my language in front of the lad, maybe get some advice from Granny, who would probably hoot and offer us both some moonshine.

I tried to nap, but my hand, out of its cast, began throbbing, maybe from the cabin pressure, maybe from the task of opening all those little brown bottles with Mr. Daniel’s name on them.

We had ice-cream cones at the new Denver airport, and I bought Kip a Broncos sweatshirt, which matched his Day-Glo shorts and his orange sneakers. We rented a Mustang convertible, and top down, headed west on Interstate 70, the summer sun hotter than in Miami.

“ Where’s the snow?” Kip asked.

“ Off yonder,” I said, pointing straight ahead at the unseen mountains.

I told him everything I knew about Colorado, which wasn’t much. Just before I retired from pro football, which sounds better than saying I was put on waivers and twenty-five other teams didn’t notice, I had gotten friendly with three of the Packers defensive players. They kept bugging me to come skiing at the end of the season. When I finally gave in, I discovered that skiing was a lot like windsurfing, the combination of recklessness and gracefulness, although I always had a lot more of the former.

After that, I’d meet the guys each January, usually during Super Bowl week, so we could forget we weren’t there. We’d team up with a few guys from the Vikings and Bears, rent a couple of houses within snowball range of each other in Aspen or Crested Butte or Vail or Telluride, ski all day and play poker and drink bourbon most of the night. One of our number eventually made it to the Hall of Fame-football, not skiing-and all of us gathered in Canton, Ohio, for the ceremonies. Nobody, least of all the honoree, was sober, which may explain his emotional speech, which began, “I want to thank everyone responsible for my being indicted.”

Our gang was not the most skilled of skiers, what with creaky knees wrapped and braced against the torque, and our penchant for dueling with ski poles on the way down the slopes. We wore torn jeans and mismatched gloves and women’s stockings over our heads instead of ski masks, and we grossed out everyone with our sweatshirts, which had cute slogans, including, “Who Farted?” and “How’s My Skiing-Call 1-800 EAT SHIT.”

We didn’t always follow etiquette on the slopes or in the coffeehouses, tearooms, and chichi, wood-beamed creeping-ferned restaurants that abound in such places, and in general, we were as welcome as a Christmas week thaw. We did manage to avoid arrest and deportation, but not for lack of trying. We were remarkably unsuccessful with women, especially in the tonier places like Aspen where they talk about apres ski, causing me to coin any number of phrases, such as “Apres ski, I’m gonna take a crap.”

I had never been here in the summer, and I had never chased a woman here, if that’s what I was doing now. I thought about it. The grand jury would have already met, and the foreman would have signed an indictment with my name on top. Sure, Charlie, I was here for Jo Jo, but I was here for me, too.

I was squinting into the late-afternoon sun, and the air was getting cooler. We passed Vail and got off the interstate to head south on U.S. 24 to Leadville, the old silver mining town. Kip had fallen asleep, and I woke him so he could see Mount Elbert and Mount Massive, both over fourteen thousand feet. Kip thanked me by growling and curling up again, his head in my lap.

We kept going south along the Arkansas River, then hung a right at Twin Lakes and up two-lane Route 92 toward Independence Pass. By now, it was downright cold. The top was up, and Kip was awake, reading the fine print on a tourist brochure we picked up at a gas station. We wound up the mountain road, slowed to near stops on a variety of hairpin turns, and below us, where we had been, was now a darkened, faraway valley.

“ When they were looking for gold, the first miners traveled on burros in the winter over Independence Pass,” Kip informed me, reading aloud in the dying light. “They went through thirty-foot snowdrifts.” He looked out the window. “Hey! There’s snow! Stop the car!”

I did, and Kip got out. Just before dusk, and the wind was howling. Bright wildflowers, blues and reds and yellows, grew out of a moist topsoil, and nearby was a patch of wet, melting snow tinted reddish-brown by the blowing dust. Kip leaned down, gathered up a handful, and patted himself a soggy, misshapen snowball.

“ Hit me with that,” I said, “and you can take a burro over the pass yourself.”

He aimed at a road sign but didn’t come close. “I never saw snow before. Bitchin’ stuff!”

“ Totally,” I agreed.

He grabbed his video camera from the trunk and began recording the flowers, the snow, and every rock and shrub within eyesight. Then, we both started shivering, so I hustled him into the car. In a few moments, we passed the lookout point, driving through low-hanging clouds, a fine mist glistening in the headlights.

“ That’s the Continental Divide,” I told my nephew, spotting a tourist information sign, but sounding as if I were an old Rocky Mountain hand.

“ I know,” he said. “It’s a movie with John Belushi as a newspaperman who doesn’t like nature ‘till he gets out here.”

We began the long descent into the next valley, and just then the mist turned to rain, and in a moment, chunks of ice fell from the sky, pinging off the hood and plopping onto our canvas top.

“ Jeez! What’s that?” Kip was wide-eyed.

“ Hail, my boy. And not little pebbles, either.”

“ What a racket. Yikes!”

I rounded a curve a bit too fast, then hit the brakes, just like you’re not supposed to do. The Mustang’s rear end skidded toward the darkness of a sheer drop-off. I let up on the brakes and swung the wheel back the other way. Too hard. We fishtailed toward the mountain side, nearly slamming into a boulder the size of a house. Again, I whipped the wheel the other way, and we skidded toward the black abyss. This time, I gave it some gas, tugged the wheel gently toward the mountain, and we straightened out, but I was in the left-hand lane, and a Jeep was headed toward me, headlights flashing, horn honking. I spun the wheel once more, and we skidded onto the gravel on the mountain side.

A long-lost word popped into my head. Makua, the Hawaiian word meaning “toward the mountain.” It came from a trip to Maui, and a deadly drive down Crater Road on the slopes of Haleakala. I’d gone after a woman then, too. What was the other word? Makai, “toward the sea.” If you’re going to go off a mountain road, choose the makua side. Always take a ditch or even a boulder over a two-thousand-foot drop.

I fought the skid and the urge to stomp on the brakes. The Mustang thudded to a stop and stalled in a shallow ditch. The hailstones, more like slabs of ice, clanged off the car with a frightening noise and stuck to the windshield in frozen sheets. Steam rose from under the hood. I sat there with both hands on the wheel, my heart pounding. Then I turned to Kip and tousled his blond hair, giving him a forced smile that said Uncle Jake had everything under control.

Our breath and body temperature was fogging the inside of the windshield. In front of the car, shrouded by our man-made fog and the frozen windshield, the mountain towered over us.

“ You okay?” I asked Kip.

“ Sure.”

“ You’re kind of quiet.”

“ Uh-huh.”

“ What are you thinking, young man.”

“ Nothin’”

“ You sure?”

“ Yeah. It’s just, I guess…”

“ Go on, Kip. Tell me.”

“ Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

I gave Kip his first driving lesson. It consisted of my standing in the ditch up to my ankles in slushy mud, bracing my arms against the trunk of the car and pushing as if the two-ton chunk of metal were a blocking sled. All the time, Kip was supposed to be gently giving it gas. Except he wasn’t so gentle. The rear wheels spun and splattered me with mud. I was just happy he didn’t throw it into reverse.

The hail stopped and was replaced by a fine cold mist. I tried to wipe off the mud, but it was everywhere, including in my right ear. I rested a moment and checked out the car. There were a few dents on the right side where we’d sideswiped a boulder shaped like a tombstone, but otherwise, we were fine. In a few minutes, Kip got the hang of it, and together we rocked the car out of the ditch.

Kip took a long look at me when I slid back behind the wheel. “Yuck!”

We started down the mountain toward Aspen. I was cold, filthy, and exhausted and now, on this narrow, slippery road, I began to wonder again just what I was doing. I didn’t know the territory. I didn’t know if Jo Jo wanted me to follow her. I didn’t know how to clear my name.

I had just traveled two thousand miles, but I didn’t have a plan. Where to begin?

With Jo Jo? With Cimarron? I decided to take one step at a time. It’s the way you build a case in the courtroom. The big picture is sometimes too complex, too daunting. So first, figure what you need to prove, then take a small step in that direction.

Kip flicked on the inside light and buried his head in the tourist brochure.

I kept thinking. And driving. I’m not sure I could have chewed gum too.

Inside my head I was pacing. Socolow thinks I killed Kyle Hornback. Cimarron thinks I defrauded him. Covering up the fraud was the motive for the murder. So, if I can prove I didn’t defraud Cimarron…Right.

That’s thinking like a lawyer. Building my case, chipping away at the other guy’s, proving I had no motive to kill, maybe proving that somebody else did.

Which made me think of Kit Carson Cimarron again, which in turn, made me flex my right hand. Clenching the fist was fine, but spreading the fingers caused the hand to flare with pain. If I hit anybody tougher than the Pillsbury Doughboy, it would hurt me more than him.

Kip turned off the map light and looked toward me. “You know why they call it the Continental Divide?”

“ Something to do with the way the water flows,” I said, remembering a tidbit of lost information from a long-ago geography class.

“ Right. It’s the part of the Rockies that divides the continent, east from west. On the Leadville side, the Arkansas River flows east. On the Aspen side, the Roaring Fork and the Frying Pan flow west, eventually reaching the Pacific. Do you believe that, Uncle Jake? I mean, if the wind is blowing one way, or if the raindrop hits this rock or that one, it determines whether the drop goes to the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean?”

“ Sure. It’s just like with people. Little things push us one direction or the other. But we’re not drops of water, Kipper. We’ve got free will, and the power to act, to change course. Trouble comes when we see that shallow reef dead ahead, and we plow right along, damn well knowing that any moment we’ll hear the crunch of coral against hull.”

That quieted him for a moment, but not much longer. “Is this one of your lessons about life, Uncle Jake?”

“ Yep.”

We were slowing down again as the two lanes seemed to narrow, and we crept along mountainside cliffs cut deep by torrents of water that tumbled into channels alongside the road.

“ I get it,” he said. “That’s the reason we’re here, right?

Like you could stay in Miami and get scorched by that goober, Mr. Socolow. But you’ve seen the reef and decided to change course, right?”

“ Something like that.”

“ Totally excellent. I’ll help you steer, Uncle Jake.”