A Drink In Hell

  

That ordinary autumn sunny Sunday morning had all the signs of being unforgettable. It had rained that morning and the smell of wet earth seemed to have had a poetic effect on anyone who passed there at that time of day. The leaves of the trees were soaked and the sun's glare made the street almost phosphorescent.

A cloud of butterflies danced in disordered beauty and while a couple was doing acrobatics in a red dahlia bed, the rest of the mob danced around a hundred-year-old peanut tree, freely without form or direction.

Sal and his eight-year-old son, Jet got up before the alarm and ate breakfast joyfully, careful not to wake Jet’s mom, who had worked late the night before on her freshman students’ tests from the Pomona School of Fine Arts. Sasha would get up later to meet them at the school where her son would compete in the championship soccer final that happened to be at the beginning of winter vacation. As was their custom, after Christmas, Solomon, Jet and his mother would ascend the hill to the family’s cabin in the village of Lake Arrowhead, which at this time of year would be covered with deep snow and double its normal population, people who had left Los Angeles in search of peace and winter sports.

After breakfast, father and son got their gear together for the game and started out for school. Before they had to make a quick stop to pick up a friend of Jet’s who lived a few blocks away. Since there were no parking spaces, Sal parked in the first spot he found around the corner.

When Jet crossed the street he was hit flush by a large fast-moving truck. Wally Copperfield, a gay lawyer, was having an argument with his boyfriend on his cell phone on the way to the Country Club for his Sunday tennis match. He expected to find only empty streets, and being late for his game, had a heavy foot on the gas pedal. Jet was hurled violently onto the sidewalk and desperate, Wally continued to accelerate until he realized he was already far away.

The lawyer’s mind in such a situation works rapidly. So he continued driving; he would eventually find a place to hide, but his career was ruined. If he returned to help, in addition to a ruined career, he was looking at jail time. He took the first choice. At that hour of the morning there weren’t a lot of people up, and who knew, there might be no witnesses who could identify him later.

The dry sound of the hit caught the attention of Solomon and the shock set off a deep and satisfying memory. He remembered from when the boy had been born a healthy baby weighing almost three kilos and the arc of his life to today when he was to participate in an important game as a key player for his team, the feared right point man Jet Klein.

He was out of the car like a shot and arriving at the corner saw his son lying covered with blood near the crosswalk. He put him on the rear seat and raced like a madman to the nearest hospital, but when he got to the emergency room, Jet was already dead.

After a month of waiting for results, Sal, disillusioned with the work of the local police, decided to find a criminal lawyer who could do a parallel investigation. He spent nights going over the lists of the Los Angeles Bar Association trying to find the right man for the job, and at the same time, after talking with friends came to hope that a hot tip would relieve his terrible agony.

About then, Burt, Jet’s godfather, came up with a friend of his who was one of the most brilliant LA criminal lawyers. He had a series of successful cases where the motorist had left the scene of the accident without stopping to help. His name was Wally Copperfield. Because the request to take the case came from a friend to whom he owed many professional favors, Wally was obliged to accept it.

After knowing him for only a short time punctuated by a series of small coincidences, Sal began to suspect that it was Wally he had been looking for. A resident of that neighborhood remembered seeing that morning a big black vehicle, maybe a 4 x 4, race by his garden as he was returning from picking up the paper. After some research, Sal found out that Wally drove a Chevy Suburban. The day they arrived together in front of the building where Wally had his office, Sal noticed that that according to the sticker on the back window, the lawyer’s car was a rental. He called the office immediately and found out that the vehicle had been rented the day after the accident.

To make things even worse his wife Sasha was having near psychotic episodes. Her conversation was filled with non-sequiturs, and she sometimes burst out laughing for no apparent reason. In the middle of winter, she stopped wearing underwear even in family parties in the back of her house. And on the weekends when she would parade topless down Melrose Avenue after catching a flick at the Beverly Center, preferably a European film with Michael Caine, one of her favorite actors. She was picked up by the police, taken home and received a warning.

Finding the situation unbearable, Sal decided to invite Wally for a drink at a local pub. After slipping a mickey in the lawyer’s drink, he walked him out to the car as if he were drunk and took Interstate 10, which went to the cabin he had at Lake Arrowhead eighty miles from LA. Before getting to the San Bernardino Mountains, Wally woke with a thundering hangover and became terrified when he realized his hands and feet were tied with nylon rope and a piece of duct tape covered his mouth.

After a brief chat in the cabin, the lawyer, weeping, admitted everything. At this time, overcome by a wave of malice, Sal thought only to take a slice off Wally’s body for every year of his son’s life. Luckily his son had only been eight and not twenty. He began with the left earlobe, took off his n*****s, and the torture only ceased after Sal had cut off one of his son’s killer’s balls.

At this point, Wally was just a rag, more dead than alive, and Sal just wanted to end the whole thing. In the small hours of the morning during a snowstorm, he put Wally in a huge plastic bag and dropped him still alive into the lake. Before leaving, he checked that there were no mortal remains bobbing up, and under a malevolent sky, took the long road back to LA. Instead of returning avenged, he came down the mountains overwhelmed by a wave of grief that hit him like a wall of water. How could a decent guy like him be suddenly transformed into a murderer so cruel that before finishing off his victim he had tortured him sadistically?

After two weeks of torrential rain followed by deep snow, the lake froze. Sal never said a word to his wife about what had happened in that charming mountaintop village, and in spite of his excessive drinking did all he could save the marriage. After an entire year trying to close the wounds, they decided to visit the cabin at Lake Arrowhead again.

Sal began to drink heavily before he had even unloaded the car. That night to Sasha’s annoyance, he left to get something for them to eat, arguing that he knew a recently opened new Italian restaurant in town, which should be worthwhile trying. The place was cozy and right on the lakeshore. After ordering lasagna with ricotta cheese and stuffed eggplant to go, he was off like a shot to the bar and continued drinking while waiting for his order.

When Stevie Nicks’ voice came over the jukebox speakers, Sal went nuts. On the night, he had asked Sasha to marry him they had gone to a Fleetwood Mac concert, and since then “Gold Dust Woman” had become their song. Drunk out of his mind, Sal began to lose it. Without having any idea of whom among the people who were with the girl for whom he performing to attract her attention was her husband, Sal became a prize jerk, mocking everyone in a loud voice.

Some guys gathered quietly to wait for him to come out, balancing the packages of lasagna and eggplant, and before he got in his car, fists began to fly. In the middle of it all, Sal took a right to the chest and collapsed like a sack of potatoes into the lake. The guys took off without a backward look. A week later, the lake froze over.