Way Down on the High Lonely

Part One
Cowboys
1

This is some weird kind of place,” Joe Graham said.

He and Neal were sitting in a small pavilion at the edge of the knoll. The tiled roofs of the monastery below glinted in the sunshine. Monkeys perched on the curved eaves, waiting to leap down onto the courtyard to pounce on any morsel of unguarded food. Brown-robed monks crossed the courtyard with one protective hand held over the tops of their bowls, steam from the hot rice gruel rising through their fingers.

“Tell me about it,” Neal answered. He’d been a prisoner in the weird kind of place for three years, long enough for the strange to have become the familiar. He filled Graham’s cup with green tea, made a small bow out of habit, then filled his own.

“You have any coffee?” Graham asked.

Neal shook his head. If three years’ confinement in a Buddhist monastery had done nothing else for him, it had cured his caffeine addiction.

“How about milk and sugar?” asked Graham.

“Sorry.”

“A clean cup?”

“It is clean.”

Right, Graham thought. He’d seen the rats scurrying around the dining hall down the hill.

“I’ve missed you, son,” Graham said.

“I’ve missed you, Dad.”

Neal had never met his real father, a guy who apparently hadn’t figured on getting a kid for his twenty buck investment, so Joe Graham had pretty much taken over the role. Neal had thought about him every day of his imprisonment. No, not imprisonment… “internment” is what the Chinese had called it. An internment that was finally over. Or was it?

“Did you come to bring me back?” he asked Graham.

“No, I’m picking up my laundry.” Little asshole, Graham thought. I’ve only been tracking you down for three years, ever since they told me you were dead.

“Let me tell you, kid,” Graham said. “It cost the Bank one hell of a lot of money to spring you. Next time get yourself popped in Rhode Island. A pizza with extra cheese and you’re out of there.” Graham tasted his tea and grimaced. “What, they mow the lawn and then dump the grass into a pot of water?”

“How much money?” Neal asked.

“I don’t want you to get a swelled head. But we’re talking about a low-interest, unsecured loan for ‘agricultural development in Sichuan Province.’”

“A bribe,” Neal said.

“Big time bribe.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re a ‘friend of the family.’”

Friends of the Family, Neal thought. The Bank’s shadow department that handled difficult problems for its larger investors. His erstwhile employer. Or was it?

“Do I still work for Friends?” Neal asked.

“Did you ever?”

Since I was twelve years old, Dad. Since you caught me picking your pocket and put my dubious skills to work for you. And now you’ve come to take me home.

“Besides,” Graham said, “we got an errand for you.”

“What?”

Graham looked at him quizzically. “Three years’ vacation isn’t enough for you?”

“Vacation! You call hauling wooden buckets of water up this frigging mountain a vacation? Lugging bundles of firewood on my back? Listening to a bunch of religious fanatics chant the same goddamn note for three years-that’s a vacation?”

“To each his own.” Graham shrugged.

“I want to go back to New York, Graham. I want to sit in the Burger Joint, with the ink from my New York Times smudging the bun of a rare Swissburger as the juices run down my wrist. I want an iced coffee sweating there right beside me… where I can just reach out and grab it. I want to walk down the west side of Broadway and then amble back up the east side. I want-”

“I, I, I,” Graham titched.

“Graham!”

“Don’t get all worked up,” Graham said. “I’m just talking about a little job I need your help with. We’ll stop off in Los Angeles, do this thing, and you’ll be back in New York slobbering your food before you know it. I worry about you, though, you know? Locked up all this time and you think about cheeseburgers.”

“What kind of job? What ‘thing’?” Neal asked. The last job had landed him in this place.

Graham peered into his teacup. “I don’t suppose they have egg creams, huh?”

Neal shook his head.

“A missing kid,” Graham said. “Daddy picked him up on Friday for their one weekend a month visitation. Didn’t bring him back on Sunday night. No big deal.”

“What’s wrong with the sheriff’s department?”

“Nothing’s wrong with the sheriff’s department,” Graham answered, “except that they don’t pay much attention to custody cases, even when the mother is famous.”

“What’s she famous for?” Neal asked. Famous was bad, famous was trouble.

“Something to do with movies. What, you need a resume? Are you working for us, or what? Because the Chinese can’t cash the check until you’re safely back in the States, so we can still tell them that you’d rather stay here. I just need you for backup. I can get anybody.”

Actually, I can’t just get anybody, Graham thought. I need you. But we got to take this one step at a time, ease you back in while I can keep an eye on you. See if you can still do the job or whether you’re a burnout case. Three years of what amounts to solitary confinement can do strange things to even the best. And Neal Carey was the best… had been, anyway.

“Look,” Graham continued as Neal sulked, “we’ll pick up little Cody, drop him back on Mommy’s lap, and go right back to New York. You’ll have the whole summer to jerk off before you start classes.”

“What classes?”

“Weren’t you in graduass school when we last saw you? Trying to con them into giving you your masturbator’s degree? Which should be a lock, if you ask me.”

Columbia University… English department. His would-be master’s thesis, “Tobias Smollett: The Outsider in Eighteenth-Century English Literature.” It seemed like a different life. Come to think of it…

“Wait a minute,” Neal said, “I’m supposed to be dead.”

Graham nodded. “It’s an appealing fantasy, I agree. So you were dead, now you’re alive. A glitch in the computer. Nothing a little WD-40 and a contribution to the library can’t take care of.”

We have to get him back in school, Graham thought. If Neal’s finished as a detective he’s going to need a trade. Seeing as he can’t do anything useful, he might as well be a college professor, which is what he wants to be anyway.

Neal poured himself another cup of the excellent green tea. He knew it had been provided only because he had a foreign guest, so he might as well take advantage of it. He listened to the sound of the morning chants rising up from the main temple, the numbing monotony that was supposed to focus the chanter on nothingness-and did.

“So,” Neal began carefully, “all I have to do is help you pick up this kid, and then I can go back to New York and back to grad school?”

It sounded too good to be true-a life again.

Graham asked, “You think you got that now, or would you like me to repeat it again? Make up your mind; I want a cold beer and a hot steak.”

Neal laughed. “It’s a long hike down the mountain, Graham.”

Graham stared at him for a long moment. “What, you never heard of a helicopter? Honestly…”

Neal lifted his cup to his lips, thought it over, and then poured the tea on the ground.

“Do they serve coffee on this helicopter?” he asked.

“For the money we’re paying, they’d better.”

Neal stood up. “Let’s go.”

“About goddamn time,” Graham said as he got to his feet.

Then Neal Carey did a very un-Chinese thing. He reached out, grabbed Joe Graham by the back of the neck, and pulled him close.

“Thanks for coming to get me, Dad,” Neal said.

“You’re welcome, son.”

So Neal Carey came back from the dead.