Redemption
On Saturday morning, Lady unpacks her Lady Smith .38 from her purse and decides not to kill the man who took her virginity all those years ago, not tonight anyway. Instead, she texts him she has to break the date they had planned (their fourth) and she’d be in touch next week. Lady had insinuated herself into his life and now the former cherry popper is halfway in love with her. He texts back an emoticon crying. To keep buttering him up, she texts back the one with the hands praying.
Tough shit. Let him suffer. After that, she texts Blue from yoga, who she’s hot for and invites him to dinner.
“Wanna go skiing or to Nate’s class?” she asks the next morning. “I haven’t seen you there lately, are you still practicing?”
Blue loves the “practicing.” It makes him feel part of something bigger than himself. As for Nate, whom he has been hired to kill, he still can’t face it. Even with Endless showing up, pointing at his watch, appearing in the doorway of the café where he gets his morning cappuccino. Endless whom he thinks of as the devil or the Angel of Death. Why does Endless want Nate dead? Once upon a time, Blue would not have cared for reasons why. Killing was necessary from time to time. But killing Nate actually feels like a sin.
Photo: Joel Goodman
Blue’s exposure to sin began in reform school decades ago and continued on to prison with the chaplains, the Rabbis and the various members of the cloth who bring with them canned goodness as fake as the canned meat they serve inside.
Since his last stint, in the first decade of the new century, yoga had entered the prison system–at least it had in California—where Blue had spent some time. There, as he had told Nate, when they had coffee together and were forming a friendship before Endless showed up and cut that off… “I practiced inside,” he had told his yoga teacher.
“Good place to practice yoga!” Nate had replied without a trace of sarcasm.
And in fact Nate was right. The guys who did yoga got out sooner than the ones who pumped or jumped or lay around doing nothing. Practicing yoga inside had saved him in more ways than one.
Yoga had brought Lady into his life. And she, thank God, was as far away from ways to kill someone as he could imagine. Lady, Blue loved the name, and that she wasn’t a lady in the sack, but had a lot of class nonetheless. Lady: her straight brown hair, thin and silky, the lines around her mouth and green eyes, the short clean nails cut like a child’s.
“Cat got your tongue, young man?”
Lady lets her smooth leg rub against his.
“Not going to Nate these days, but don’t know how to ski, babe, besides my car’s in the shop.”
Car’s in the shop is a phrase he has not used since two lifetimes ago when he actually owned a car. No use going into that now.
“I’ll drive, we’ll go to Big Bear. I have ski clothes but we’ll rent you everything you need. It’s on me, my treat!”
“Well, if that’s the case,” he smiles and rolling over on her. “Let me treat you first, my Lady.”
….
Sure it was sort of corny with the tourist stops, the restaurants, the souvenirs, the cheesy motels that but for snow looked like any other no count tourist traps he’d seen across the country. But the mountains in snow, so pure, so white, are a miracle. Blue’s uplifted by the sun shining on the trees, the trees exuding light, the look on the faces of the kids snowboarding down the mountain. This, he decides is some kind of heaven.
Endless’ pinched face, his small hole of a mouth, the stubby arms with its expensive watch on the left hand, keep appearing in his mind’s eye. Blue is halfway expecting his nemesis to show up here in Big Bear, just as he’d appeared at the café with Nate, at the beach when he was sitting on a bench with Lady.
Lady’s outfit is black and red, his own, blue because she laughingly wanted him to wear the color of his eyes and his name.
Sparks were flying between them all during the drive from Santa Monica up the mountain trails, from eight lanes to two lanes, Blue feels liberated to be out of LA, though his two small rooms above the antique shop are the only home he has known in more than fifteen years. If keeping that space—yes that holy space, fuck it—depends on him killing Nate, then he’d pay the price, though he knows, because he knows, his own days are numbered if he does what Endless wants. Fucking Endless.
Lady helps Blue with the skis. And insists he wear a helmet like she has on. She playfully pulls his ponytail that hangs down the back of it.
“We look like nerds, but so what?” she tells him. “Everybody wears helmets now.”
Blue is looking down now after his first lesson. “I get it!” he tells Lady. But poised now at the top of the little slope, fear overtakes him. His stomach drops, his balance begins to teeter. He grabs Lady’s gloved hand.
“I’m chicken shit!” he confesses. “You go. I’ll watch you!”
She soars gracefully down the bunny slope weaving this way and that. A snow angel in black and red.
She reaches the bottom of the little hill. She glides back up making her slow way smiling now by his side, a black shadow against the snow.
“It’s easy! If you fall, you fall!”
She nudges him forward, “Lean into it…”
Suddenly it’s really happening. He glides past a tree, a snowboard whizzes by, he shouts out in joy. Joy and prayer. Never has he uttered a prayer. Not even in his darkest days, not in a stinking cell, or being whipped by one of his dads, or in solitary, or on his many icy nights on the street when the cold came in to formally take him away.
Then without warning he falls. Falls right on his face, his skis splayed. In a flash Lady is by his side, smiling, bringing with her the lightest sprinkling of snow glittering against the blue sky. She offers him her hand; he takes it and pulls her down in the snow on top of him.
As they laugh and kiss, he’s surging with happiness. A phrase from an old rock song his twin brother used to play over and over sings in his head, “In the presence of the Lord…”
I won’t kill Nate, he thinks. I won’t kill anyone ever again.
“Blue,” Lady says and rolls off. “Blue your phone is ringing.” Blue puts his hand in his pocket around the sleek instrument. He knows who is calling. He doesn’t need to look at his phone…
Fucking Endless.
The characters in this story also appear in Hot Water, A New Man, The First, The Safe Zone, Aftermath, Blinded by the Light, New Year, A Meeting of Minds, and Stumbling Block.
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