Up Looking Down; Down Looking Up – Chapter Seven

I end up in San Diego earlier than I planned, stopping only one night in Dallas with my buddy, making excuses about having to be on the job right away, last minute demands from the Marshals Service. I lie to him basically, and then I skip my next stop completely, another buddy just outside of Los Angeles. I call him on route and promise to drive up and see him after I get settled into the job.

Everything is a little different in San Diego – more stucco, more Spanish, palm trees instead of oaks and bigger cockroaches and scruffier looking coyotes, and the ocean and the desert and the border with Mexico defining everything. All that, and plastic surgery and tequila. The guys who've been here a while, the ones I work with, not the kind with any plastic surgery, laugh when I order bourbon at the bar the first night in, telling me I'd better get used to tequila. They introduce me to both the cheap shooter kind, which I've had before, and then the aged sipping kind that reminds me more of whiskey. I still keep a bottle of bourbon from a shop in the city at my apartment though, for when I'm drinking alone, and a bottle of Jameson for when one of my old Ranger buddies shows up. I'm not converting to tequila any time soon, just doing the 'when in Rome' thing.

The job keeps me running, just like I hoped it would when I took it. I spend half my time in a truck driving over the border and back again. It's a bit like doing missions back with the Rangers, target acquisition, in and out. We spend a lot of time tracking guys, trying to get a location, or we get lucky and get a tip, and then we hook up with the Federales, maybe some DEA guys, and head south and do what we got to do to bring in a fugitive. I've been in more gun fights down here in the first six months than I have since my last combat rotation in Afghanistan. Kentucky seems kind of tame in comparison, IEDs and Harlan and mineshaft graves and all. Here it's machetes and Tijuana and caustic sodas and every fucker and his sister has got an automatic. I feel right at home. We even wander east to Chihuahua and Juarez once in a while, though there's enough just in Baja to keep us busy.

I feel sorry for the regular folks down here in Mexico. They don't want anything to do with this, with us, with the narcos. When they say it's a war zone in parts of that country, they're not kidding. The shit I've seen.

I know what Art meant when he said this wasn't what I needed, and he was right, and I chose to ignore him. It's what I wanted.

There's a bar down the street from the office and we all hang out there off-hours and they know me by name now and they've started stocking bourbon for me. The woman who works the bar during the week is nice to talk to. Her husband was killed in Iraq and she has a kid, fourteen now and a handful, had her young. It seems everyone I'm in contact with here has had all their happy compacted into a sharp laugh and a smile that seems to be more skeleton than flesh. Like I said, I feel right at home.

I walk into the bar early, around five, back from Mexico after a long few days in a truck. There's a cowboy hat drinking at a table in the corner. Imagine my lack of surprise. I order two cold beer and two warm bourbons, seems fitting, and go join him.

He never appears to change, Raylan, just more gray under the brim of the hat which he knocks back off his forehead, careless and practiced, like he's been wearing it for years and pushing it back to reveal his face when he wants you to see it and kicking out a chair with a boot, all of it in one motion, all of it like he's been doing it for years, and I know for a fact he has. He gives me a face that sums up everything ever existing between us, good and bad, and flicks it all aside like it means nothing now, in fact probably never did to him, not the sarcasm, the disdain, the shit, the shots fired, the dead and dying, the lives knocked about, and the lies, and the occasional truths. Right now it's just about the drinks on the table and the next sentence and the reason he's here. It's the reason he's here that makes me take the seat that he's kicked out for me, like I'm visiting him at his bar, not him at mine.

"Knew I had the right place when I saw the Jim Beam on the shelf. Tim Gutterson's been here, I figured."

I smile for the joke. Why not? Set the beers on the table. Sheryl, the woman working the bar, follows with the bourbon and I introduce her and everyone's very polite.

"How you been?" says Raylan when we're alone. "Fitting in alright?"

"A little too well."

"I knew it'd work out. The job posting was pretty much a description of you."

"How's Miami?"

"Hot."

"How's Winona, and your girl?" I add the last bit in as an afterthought, still awkward with Raylan as a daddy, and I can't remember her name, his daughter.

And he looks awkward with the question, finally says, "Cold."

That knocks me back, mouth dry, thinking of Christine, cold. "What happened?"

"I guess she's remembering why it didn't work the first two times we were together, remembering how she reacted then and getting it down to an art now."

Cold – now I get it. I'm tempted to hit him for his stupid, cryptic response. It might get my world level again if I did – the room's tilting. "Fuck, Raylan, I thought you meant… Fuck."

Raylan catches on then. "Shit, Tim, no, they're fine. They're fine. Willa's a going concern. Winona's…Winona." He stops talking then and starts drinking and I join him.

We drink a lot while we're catching up, and I entertain him with stories about vicious narcos and their dirty deeds.

"Pozole?"

"That's what they call it, the Mexicans, a nickname. It's a soupy stew or something. We call it a caustic soda. Basically they dissolve a body in an oil drum of something nasty. Sometimes they put them in alive."

"Jesus. And I thought a hand grenade in the mouth was awful enough."

"There's always someone trying to outdo the most recent horror show. They should open a category in the Guinness Book of World Records."

"Jesus."

"I love the human race." We're drunk enough by this point that I get mean and personal. "So does Winona get triple alimony if you split again?"

"I don't think it works that way."

"Definitely cheaper than marrying three different women and divorcing them. Aren't you clever." I raise my glass to him.

"Either that or the stupidest bastard ever to get into the gender war."

"Yeah, that's probably it. I like your explanation better."

"Insult me all you want, Tim, I'm still staying at your place for a few days."

"Excuse me?"

"Hotels here are either stupid expensive or roach-infested shit holes. And by the way, you're accompanying me across the border tomorrow on Marshal business. I already okayed it with O'Neil."

"What?"


I remember when Raylan first arrived in Lexington, that evening he walked into the office. As ridiculous as it was, he wore that hat well. First appearances – I've heard they're important and I've heard they're deceiving. I agree with both. How often do you get a second chance to make an impression, seriously? But how often are those first impressions wrong?

That first month, we all tried to impress Raylan Givens. By the second month I couldn't give a shit what he thought of me. So much for first impressions.

It was the exact opposite with Christine. I couldn't give a shit what she thought of me at first. I don't know when it started creeping up on me, that I wanted her good opinion. I can pinpoint the day that I became aware of it, though. I mean fully aware. It hit me hard. She snuck up behind me a few weeks after our conversation about ex-cons, ex-offenders, whatever. It's all the same thing to me – all I see is a folder and a name and a face, and mugshots are rarely flattering, and sometimes I like the ex-con or ex-offender, sometimes I don't, and I can't tell by looking at them which way it'll turn out though I'm always anticipating that I won't. Not that that has anything to do with me and Christine – I'm just saying, is all. I was washing my truck when she snuck up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder. It was a hot day, mid-June, summer back and making no attempt to be subtle. She's lucky I didn't spray her with the hose because she startled me badly and I don't like being snuck up on. She was wearing shorts, short shorts, and carrying two sweating bottles of beer, twisted the tops off using her t-shirt and baring skin above her shorts in the process and…shit. I tried not to look – I really did – but there was no taking it back. I saw that skin. She was a woman then, and for the first time I didn't wish her gone. She smiled at me, a genuine smile, a smile that warmed the air around me even more than summer could, and my whole body took notice of her, every inch. I probably licked my lips. I remember taking the beer and managing a thank you and a smile back.

I accused her later, when we were past it all and had been living together a while, of flirting with me. She said she was just curious about the man that her daddy liked so much and spoke so well of, and that she never expected to fall in love with me. But I still think she was flirting, and I'll hold to that opinion for my ego's sake. Like Jen said – she looked yummy.

I left off washing the truck and we sat on the step and talked about how we grew up, her so different from me, until a carload of her friends from school came by to pick her up, a mix of guys and girls, and I took her empty bottle and watched her squeeze into the back. She waved out the window and smiled again. I noticed for the first time that she was beautiful.

I couldn't ever look at her the same way after that, just like I couldn't ever look at Raylan the same after he took advantage of my friendship with Bren at the FBI, like he didn't give a shit. Some moments you just can't step back from. Once they happen, that's it, you've seen something, good or bad, that is drawn in permanent marker on your awareness, you've crossed a line and triggered a wall to spring up behind you that you can't ever get to the other side of again, can't ever see a view of the world like you did before. And you can't do shit about it.


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