Small Vices

Chapter 38

In the morning it was raining, the low rain clouds covering the tops of some of the further hills.

When it rains in Southern California the television stations do the same thing they do in Boston when it snows. They pretend the sky is falling. They show the storm’s path on radar. They give tips on how to survive the rain. They send out reporters in Eddie Bauer rain gear to ask people stuff like, “How are you coping with this rain?” Despite the emergency, Hawk and I did what we had done every morning since we’d gotten here. We walked up the road toward the hill. Hawk was wearing white Nike running shoes and black nylon sweats and a white canvas barn jacket with a corduroy collar. He had his .44 Magnum in a shoulder holster under the coat, and he was hatless, the rain beading on his shaved head.

The water drainage system all over Southern California was surface runoff, and surrounded by the subtropical growth of Montecito, babbling brooks formed along each side of the road. The water cascaded downhill through small ravines filled with trees and vines and thick-leaved green plants, went under the road in a culvert, and formed impressive waterfalls as it dropped into the cut below the roadway where flowers grew.

When we reached the bottom of the hill we stopped and looked at it, as we did every morning. It went up very steeply, turning two thirds of the way up and continuing even more steeply to the top. There were houses on the hill, and small gutters along each side of the roadway where the rain water churned downhill and spread out over the street where we were standing.

“I’m going up,” I said.

“Today the day?”

“Yep.”

“How ’bout we make it to that mailbox?” Hawk said.

The mailbox was maybe fifty yards up the hill.

“All the way,” I said.

“Might take a while,” Hawk said. “Hill’s a bitch.”

“Here we go,” I said.

We started up. I was half dragging my left leg. Hawk walked slowly beside me. On the right there was a lemon grove, the wet fruit glistening among the green leaves. Nobody seemed to be harvesting it. The fruit was yellow and heavy on the trees and littered the ground, some of it rotting beneath the trees. I was gasping for breath. I looked up and the mailbox was still thirty yards away.

“No reason not to stop and rest,” Hawk said.

I nodded. I looked back. The wet black road surface gleamed. I was twenty yards up the hill and I couldn’t talk. We stood silently together in the steady rain. I was wearing an Oakland A’s baseball cap, and white New Balance sneakers, jeans, and a bright green rain jacket that Susan said was the ugliest garment she’d ever seen legalized. In the left-hand pocket the Detective Special weighed about two hundred pounds.

“How... high... is... this... hill?”

“Never measured it,” Hawk said. “Takes me ’bout ten minutes to walk up, five minutes to run.”

“Run?” I said.

Hawk grinned.

“See that tree sticking out over the road? Let’s aim for that, when you ready.”

I nodded. My heart rate was slowing. I took in as much air as I could and let it out and shuffled up the hill a little further, dragging my left leg. Under the rain jacket I was slippery with sweat. I could hear my pulse so loud in my head that it seemed as if I could hear nothing else. I stared straight down at the wet roadway, concentrating on pushing my right leg forward, dragging my left leg after. I couldn’t get enough air in, and by the time I reached the overhanging tree I was gasping for breath again. All that kept me from throwing up was that I lacked the strength. Hawk stood beside me. I turned and looked back at the glistening roadway and beyond at the subtropical greenery, the occasional red tile roof, and far down the hillside the Santa Barbara Channel again, gray now, and choppy, with the clouds so low over it that the Channel Islands were out of sight.

“You collapse,” Hawk said, “and I gonna have to give you mouth to mouth. Neither one of us be liking that too much.”

“Let... me... go,” I said. “It... comes... to... that.”

“And tell Susan what?” Hawk said.

I shook my head. I didn’t have enough breath to answer.

“You want to hang onto my arm?” Hawk said.

I shook my head again. The rain was unvarying. In Boston when it rained it was often windy, and it made the rain less pleasant. Here the rain fell straight down through the warm air, undisturbed by wind. It dripped off the yellow bill of my A’s cap, and dimpled the puddles that formed where the road surface was uneven.

“Mailbox,” I said and we started again.

Hawk moved silently beside me, watching me, seeing everything else at the same time. I noticed grimly that he wasn’t breathing hard. Again the thunder of my pulse, the struggle for oxygen, the feel of my right quadriceps turning to jelly, the encumbrance of my right arm, the aimlessness of my left leg, the defiant pitch of the hill, the relentless pull of gravity as I inched along... I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

I rested a long time at the mailbox, before I started again. Things began to blur: rain, gasping, pain, weakness, pounding, nausea, pressure in my head, in my chest, my left leg random, nearly lifeless, the sweat soaking through my tee-shirt, the hill rising before me as I went step by painful dragging step up it, staring at it right in front of my next step, seeing nothing else, only dimly aware that Hawk was beside me, my entire self invested in the implacable everlasting hill.

On the left was a house, set back a little from the road, with a driveway that ran level from the roadway to the garage. I stopped on the level, my head down, my breath trembling in and out in desperate involuntary gasps, as my diaphragm struggled to get enough oxygen into my bloodstream. Hawk spoke to me from somewhere outside the red vortex of my exhaustion.

“’Bout ten more yards,” he said.

I looked up and the crest of the hill was before me, thirty feet away. I let my head drop again and stood entirely focused on the effort to breathe, soaking with sweat, feeling deeply shaky, as if somehow the very core of my self was beginning to fall apart. I felt like I might fall down. Hawk stood silently beside me. I waited. Hawk waited. The rain came straight down. Finally the occlusive pounding began to slow, and awareness expanded enough for me to look up at the top of the hill.

“One first down,” Hawk said.

I didn’t want to waste any breath talking. I took in as much air as I could, and went up the rest of the hill almost blindly, my jaw clamped, my eyes almost closed, my breath rasping, almost without feeling, barely aware of anything but my exhaustion, in a near anaerobic state, my bad leg useless, my good leg trembling. And made it. And stood at the top looking out across the valley at the vineyards on the far slope and the rain clouds just above them. Hawk stood beside me without comment. Turning a bit I was able to see Santa Barbara Harbor, and the boats in the marina, looking ornamental in the distance. I took my hat off and let the rain soak my hair and run down my face. The rasp of my breath began to slow. My leg-and-a-half felt weak but the trembling eventually stopped.

“Be easier going back,” Hawk said.

I nodded. Above us, a little ways east along the ridge line, was a steep meadow, and in the meadow a couple of coyotes sat, sheltered by a rock, and stared down at us.

“Waiting to see if you make it,” Hawk said.

“Next thing,” I said, and took in some air, “there’ll be buzzards circling.”

Another coyote trotted from some trees toward the two near the rock and joined them, settling back on his haunches and staring down at us. He moved so lightly, it was as if his feet reached down to the ground. I stared back at the coyotes for a while until my heartbeat had quieted enough so they could no longer hear it on the hillside. I put my hat back on.

“Let’s go down,” I said.

Hawk nodded.

“Be slippery going down,” Hawk said, “and all your brakes ain’t working yet.”

I nodded. And we started down. Going up, it had been desperately hard to go forward, now it was desperately hard not to. I fell the first time in front of the driveway, and again twenty yards beyond it, and after that I hung onto Hawk until we passed the lemon grove and reached the street, where the grade was mild, even for me, and the effort of walking was returned to human scale. I stopped and looked back up the hill.

Hawk said, “Too soon to try again.”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

Hawk shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Skip a day.”

I nodded.

“Plenty of time,” I said.

“All the time you need,” Hawk said.

I turned away from the hill and limped slowly down the road past the dripping bougainvillea and jacaranda and orange trees bright with fruit, toward the house.