Small Vices

Chapter 39

I squeezed a rubber ball in each hand most of the time I was in California. The first time I tried it with my right hand the ball dropped to the floor. I hadn’t enough strength to hold it. Hawk hung a heavy bag from a tree in the meadow behind the house and I banged at it every day, weakly with my left hand, barely at all with my right. The next time I essayed the hill, I took Pearl on a leash and she pulled me maybe five yards farther each time between stops. Progress. By the end of January, I could go halfway up, and my left leg wasn’t dragging. My beard was thick and bothersome. My hair was too long. Hawk and I went up into one of the canyons back in the hills and began to shoot. I held the gun in both hands, though my left was doing all the work, and I was able to level it mainly by pulling my right arm up with my left. My only success was that I didn’t shoot myself. I was up to five-pound dumbbells. With my right arm I was actually moving the weight, curling it maybe halfway so that my forearm was at right angles to my biceps. Hawk and I moved from the hill to the dumbbells to the heavy bag to the improvised pistol range to the dinner table for cold chicken and the local wine. One of the many drawbacks to Southern California was that most of the basketball games started at 4:30 local time. Another drawback was that the Clippers played in some of the games. I kept squeezing the rubber ball. Susan had gone to a drug store and bought a bunch of vitamins and I took them every morning with the local orange juice. Susan was pushing big doses of Vitamin C. She said it helped in the healing process. We spoke to no one. We called no one on the phone. We wrote no letters. As far as Boston was concerned, we were gone. As far as the Gray Man was concerned, I was dead. There was no reason to think he didn’t believe that. Still, I kept the Detective Special with me even though it was like carrying a bowling ball up the hill. And Hawk was never away from me, and never without a gun. And the shotgun leaned in the corner when Susan and I went to bed. In mid-January, I made it halfway up the hill before I had to stop, and Pearl wasn’t pulling me. It was a sunny day and when we came back down the road to our house, Susan was standing in the front yard watching me. She had on white sneakers and white short-shorts and a dark blue sleeveless blouse and her black hair must have been still damp from the shower because the sun glistened on it. Or maybe I just thought it did.

“You’ve got legs like a rainy day,” I said. “I’d like to see them clear up.”

“You say that to me every time I wear shorts,” she said.

“Nice to be able to count on something,” I said.

“Besides, my legs are hideously pale, pale, pale.”

“Never my problem,” Hawk murmured.

“Your legs look great,” I said.

“Are you aware,” Susan said, “that as you walked down the road toward me you weren’t limping?”

Progress.

It was raining lightly on a Tuesday morning, but Hawk and I were out hitting the bag anyway. The way we did it was to work on one punch at a time, banging the same punch over and over again into the bag, first with my left, then with my right. And even though the right did little more than twitch, I went through the whole process in the nervous system just as if the right hand moved. By the third week in January, I was starting to thump the bag pretty good with my left, and this morning, a Tuesday, in the light rain, I got a right hook into it. It wasn’t much of a right hook. It wouldn’t have knocked the lime slice off a margarita, but it was a hook. I did it again, and eight more times. Neither Hawk nor I said anything. But when I finished on the heavy bag that day, I put out my left fist and Hawk tapped it gently with his. Progress.

A week and a half later, Susan brought home a bunch of Pacific lobster tails and we had them with lemon butter and rice pilaf, which Susan cooked. We ate it on a glass table out on the patio with white wine and a salad. The sun slanted in, low in the southern sky, edging down over the Pacific, highlighting the ridge line on the hills across from us. There was no wind, and the smell of flowers and trees and green grass hung in the quiet air.

“Want me to cut up that lobster?” Susan said.

I smiled at her and picked up the knife with my right hand and carefully sliced a bite off the lobster. It took me longer than it should have, and I nearly dropped the knife once.

“You’ve been practicing in secret,” Susan said.

“Un huh.”

She leaned over and kissed me on the mouth.

“Coming right along,” she said.

But the sunshine was fleeting that year in Montecito. Most of the time it rained, while bits and pieces of the town washed into the ocean. There was mud clogging much of downtown Santa Barbara and the people on the tube were paroxysmal about it.

“You build on a flood plain,” Hawk said, “you got to consider the possibility of a flood.”

We were in the Montecito YMCA lifting weights. Or I was. Hawk was standing around with his gun hidden under a loose warmup jacket, trying to look like a trainer. I wasn’t lifting a lot of weight. But I was actually moving the weights that I was lifting. Most of the equipment was Nautilus machines. There wasn’t much in the way of free weights, but I couldn’t do much with free weights yet. I was doing chest presses. They were very light chest presses, but I was using both hands.

“Aren’t you supposed to say things like, ‘You can do it!’ and ‘Atta boy’?” I said.

“Don’t want people looking over, see what you lifting,” Hawk said. “Be embarrassing.”

There was a ravine between the Y and the parking lot with a wide, planked wooden bridge across it. When we left the gym, the rain was steady as it had been when we came. The ravine, bone dry when it wasn’t raining, was snarling with flood waters only a couple of feet below the bridge.

“Keeps raining,” I said, “Susan’s going to start running in circles.”

We got into the Explorer and Hawk started it up.

“She ain’t had much to do here,” Hawk said. “’Cept food shop and make supper, and cheer you up.”

“All of which she hates.”

We pulled out of the lot and out to San Ysidro Road and right up toward East Valley. The wipers were on steadily. There was something soothing, I thought, about windshield wipers.

“Maybe she don’t mind cheerin’ you up,” Hawk said.

“Maybe not,” I said. “But you know how rambunctious she is. She can’t even take Pearl out running because Pearl won’t go out in the rain.”

“Hell of a hunting dog,” Hawk said.

“And she’s got no patients to work with,” I said.

“’Cept you.”

“And most of what I need you do better than she does.”

“Like getting your sorry ass up and down that hill,” Hawk said.

“Like that.”

“You think you be able to handle all this weakness and pain without her?”

“I hope so.”

“You handle it as well, you think?”

“No.”

“I don’t think so either,” Hawk said.

When we got home, the door to our bedroom was closed. I could hear the television blatting inside. I opened the door quietly. One of the indistinguishable ghastly talk shows was on. The room was empty. The door to the master bath was open, and Pearl came out of it and wagged her tail and jumped up and gave me a lap. I went in. Susan was taking a bath. She had moved the shotgun in, and it leaned within reach against the laundry hamper. Pearl lay back down on the rug near the tub. I went to the tub and bent over and kissed Susan.

“Does this mean something good for me?”

“Not right away,” Susan said. “I got us reservations at Acacia.”

“Should I take a shower?”

“Unless you’d like to make a separate reservation for yourself,” Susan said.

So I did. And Hawk did. And we dressed up with ties and jackets, and Susan put on a dress and some sort of high-laced, high-heeled black boots to subvert the rain, and Pearl got in the car with us, and we drove down to the lower village and parked and left Pearl in the locked car and went in to Acacia.

Acacia is the kind of place that people have in mind when they say they’d like to open a little restaurant somewhere. It’s a small building with a patio in front and the look of bleached wood. Inside there are tables up front, a bar along the left wall in the back, and booths opposite the bar. There was a mirror over the bar, and I got a look at myself unexpectedly as we went to our booth. I was walking upright. I didn’t limp. I had a hint of a tan from running up the hill in the occasional sunshine. My collar didn’t look too big for my neck.

I had fried chicken with cream gravy and mashed potatoes and a gentle Chardonnay from a winery about half a mile down the road. I cut my own food. It was the first time I’d eaten in a restaurant since I’d gone off the bridge.

“For dessert,” Susan said, “I think I will have something packed with empty calories and covered with chocolate.”

“Good choice,” I said and put my right hand out and covered hers for a moment. She smiled at me.

“Maybe I’ll have two,” she said.

She didn’t. But she had one huge ice-cream-and-chocolate-cake-and-fudge-sauce thing, which for Susan was an Isadora Duncan — esque act of joyful abandon.

The rains abated in late February. By that time I was beginning to put some right hooks into the heavy bag with enough starch to discourage an opponent. By mid-March I was able to lift the entire stack on the chest press machine at the Y. By the end of March, I was able to shoot right handed and hit something. Hawk had a speed bag up now, bolted to the inside wall of the garage, and I was starting to hit it with some rhythm. Hawk had the big target mitts on and I was starting to put combinations together on them, as Hawk moved around me, holding the target mitts in different positions. All of us, Pearl included, after I’d slogged up the hill each morning, went down to Santa Barbara Harbor and ran along the beach, down near the water where the sand was harder. Pearl peeled off regularly to harry a sea bird, and then caught up to us easily. There were signs that said No Pets, but no one seemed to pay them any mind, except a few beach drifters who were grouchy about Pearl, but nobody paid them any mind either. Glowing with sweat, and breathing deeply, we went to the upper village and, except for Pearl who waited in the car, ate late breakfast on the terrace of a little dining room attached to the local pharmacy where movie stars ate. I had fresh orange juice and whole wheat toast and something they called a California Omelet. I drank three cups of coffee. People probably thought I was a movie star.

One morning I ran up the hill. All the way.