“Accuse me, mister smoke,” she said, and outside of signing bank statements or paying bills, the name James went out the window.
He raised an eyebrow at her. “Mister smoke?”
She smiled. She was just tall enough to clear the fence. “Mister smoke, yes. Can I help you?”
“Can you help me?”
“Yes. Of course I can.”
Talk about turning the tables. The woman’s smile was infectious. “How can you do that? Help me, I mean?”
“I can clean your house for you.”
He frowned. “Oh, that’s okay. I don’t need any house cleaning, thanks. I just moved in, and I don’t have very many things. In any case, I only have the basement.”
She went away, but the next day she was back.
“Mister smoke!”
“Yes,” Smoke Dugan said. “I am Mister Smoke.”
“I am thinking last night. It is a terrible shame about this garden. It is such a wonderful place.”
Smoke looked around at the murky jungle that surrounded him.
“I can help you with that,” the lady went on. “I propose a deal.”
“Oh, I’m not thinking about doing any gardening.”
“That is the beauty of it. You don’t do any gardening. You don’t pay me. I do the gardening. I pay you rent in the food I grow.”
“Well…” he said.
“You will eat only the freshest foods. No bad chemicals on them. I only grow them natural. Please? I have such a small garden at my home. This will be much better. It will be the wonder of the whole town.”
And so it began. Against his better judgement, Smoke had keys made for Lorena. He had to have keys made because there was no entrance to the yard. The only ways to get in were either by climbing the fence (quite out of the question for a woman “of a certain age” who just about cleared five feet tall), or by coming through the basement apartment. Lorena came there early in the mornings, tip-toeing through the efficiency apartment, past a sleeping Smoke Dugan. In the afternoon she came back, stopping for some small talk with Smoke if he sat at the back table, or leaving him alone if he was in his work shed. Smoke would sit at his table, absorbed in the problem of this or that, and gradually his awareness would begin to include sounds. The sound of clippers cutting, or the grunts of an old woman as she pulled weeds, or the squeak of the ancient wheelbarrow she had arrived with one afternoon.
And the place took shape. She cleared half the big yard that first year, the half that ran the length of the concrete wall. There was cabbage that year, tomatoes and green beans. The cucumbers were a disappointment, and the peppers were so hot that Smoke couldn’t put them on anything. But all in all, he had to agree with Lorena that the backyard was better for the garden.
Now the garden was an oasis. She had put in flagstones to mark the path to his patio, and then on to his workshop. There were giant sunflowers. There were all manner of vegetables and herbs. There were flowers. She kept the mosquitoes under control through a variety of natural means, and in any event, mosquitoes tended to stay away from Smoke’s cigars. All summer long he would get some vegetables here and there when their time came. But every year at harvest time, she presented him with a bounty of food, her part of the bargain for his allowing this garden to happen.
“Smoke,” she said now, placing three giant cucumbers and a pile of green beans in front of him, next to a paper sack filled with ripening tomatoes. “It is a beautiful, beautiful day, no?”
“It sure is,” he said.
“On a day like this, I feel like there is nothing in the whole world to worry about.”
He grunted at this, hoping his grunt sounded like agreement.
“Hmmmm?” Lorena Hidalgo said. “You say something, Smoke?”
“It’s a great day,” he said.
Open on the table was a large book of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci – anatomical studies, studies on the nature of water, drawings of the Deluge, and of various machines and other half-completed projects. Smoke loved Leo, less for his art than for his mind and for how he had pushed the envelope of human knowledge. Leo and his zany, high-speed dissections of the fresh corpses of criminals – there was no way to preserve the dead in the 1500s – had bridged the gap between the medieval understanding of the human body and the modern. Smoke could picture Leo, up to his elbows in wet gore, carefully describing and illustrating the relationships between the organs, the skeleton, the nerves and the muscle systems. But anatomy was just part of it – the sheer range of topics that came under his investigation was amazing: zoology, botany, geology, optics, aerodynamics and hydrodynamics among others. Long before these things came into being, Leo had imagined and drawn the bicycle, the automobile, the submarine, and the helicopter.
Today Smoke had hoped to study the plans for Leo’s proposed bridge across the Gulf of Istanbul, connecting the Golden Horn and the Bosporous. The bridge plan was squelched by the engineers of the time, who cringed when they found out how big it was supposed to be. Somewhere, Leo had gotten the last laugh, however, because modern engineers determined that the bridge would have been completely sound, even with the materials and methods of the 1500s.
But Smoke couldn’t focus on Leo. Instead, he kept thinking about simple booby traps. Ones you could make easily and that were practically guaranteed to seriously maim, or even kill. Wasn’t that funny? There was a long road between Smoke Dugan and Leonardo da Vinci.
The particular death trap Smoke was fixated on at this moment was a light-bulb trap. He had made one earlier in the day. So simple, a child could do it. He had taken a medical syringe and filled it with gasoline. Then he had injected the gasoline into the top of a 100-watt incandescent bulb. It had taken some doing to poke a hole through the top of the bulb, but once he had, it was nothing to inject the gasoline. In fact he injected several syringes full.
Then he had screwed the bulb into the overhead light fixture of the small corrugated shed that crouched in the back of his yard. The shed served as his workshop. Voila! The bulb hung naked, and was turned off and on by a small chain that hung down beside it. If someone were to pull that chain, the bulb would come on and the filament would ignite the gasoline. Instantly. The bulb would shatter, spraying liquid fire all over anyone standing below. Breathing the flames would roast a person’s cilia, the tiny hairs in the esophagus that protect lungs from harmful pollutants. Should be enough to kill anybody.
Maybe the person would even catch fire.
Now that would be something.
Smoke didn’t like heights.
That’s how he thought of it: he didn’t like heights. He didn’t consider that he was afraid of heights. He rarely talked about it, and when he did, he didn’t describe the breathlessness, the shaking, the heart palpitations and the fear – nay, terror – of dying that seemed to come over him when confronted with a high place. Even in the reaches of his own mind, he seldom admitted the sense of things spinning out of control that heights brought on, or the waves of unreality that seemed to wash over him.
He didn’t like heights, that was all. He didn’t like them a lot.
On the drive over to Lola’s apartment, Smoke got caught on the Casco Bay Bridge. He watched with dismay as the red lights began to flash, the safety arms – so like the safety arms at railroad crossings – came down, and the traffic ahead of his little Toyota Tercel slowed to a stop. The span that crossed the high end of Portland harbor, where it met the Fore River, was a drawbridge. He put the car in park and sullenly stared ahead as the giant steel grates of the bridge began to inch toward the sky.
He was ten cars back from the front of the line. He was way up there, six and a half stories above the high water mark. And it seemed like more than that.
Smoke knew how high he was because he had studied the schematics in the public library. He crossed the bridge damn near every day – he figured he ought to know something about it. It was a new bridge, opened only in
