Long Shot by Paul Monette

throat. “You know,” he said, “we still have an awful lot to decide.”
    â€œLater,” she retorted sharply.
    It must have killed him to yield to her, but he had no say unless she asked, at least till Jasper was in the ground. By common consent, a widow still ran her own show, whether or not she had a publicist in residence. With Vivien, it was something even more. Her whole life long, she’d had this fear that came on her like a fever, such that she always failed in the maze of death at the first or second turning. Tonight there was none of that. The fury she rode would not be stopped. It made its own road over anything put in its way. Especially the likes of Carl.
    â€œI’ll tell you what,” said Vivien brightly. “You just wait till we’re over the Rockies. We’ll still have a whole half hour to decide.”
    â€œDecide what?”
    â€œWho to put the blame on, you or me.”
    â€œVivien darling,” Carl replied with a weary sigh, his temper razor thin, “don’t you know a thing like this is never someone’s fault?”
    â€œShove it, Carl,” she snapped at him—meaning to tempt him further if she could. “You save that shit for the cover of Time .”
    They made the run to the airport. Far down the fields on either side, she saw the blue of landing lights. She could scarcely wait to be airborne—all locked up for seven hours, and nothing to do but fight. She looked across at his shallow profile in the dark. If she had it her way, they’d be rolling in the aisle—biting, pulling hair—before they reached the mainland. She burned to make him suffer it more than she. Burned to be, as between the two of them, the one who would survive it.
    â€œYou act like you’re the only one got left behind,” he said. “You think I don’t hurt? I feel like I just lost a brother.”
    â€œWhat you just lost,” she said, “is a job.”
    They came in under the wing of the Willis jet. A steward stood on the tarmac, a fat white towel over one arm—as if someone was just coming out of a bath.
    â€œAnd I don’t need you,” said Carl, with a finger triggered as if between her eyes, “so lay it on someone else.”
    â€œWhat you ’re going to need, Mr. Twenty Percent, is an alibi.”
    The pilot opened Vivien’s door. The steward opened Carl’s. For a moment, no one emerged from the back of the car.
    â€œAn alibi for what?”
    â€œWhatever’s been done,” she said with a shrug, and gathered her things and left him there.
    The night air all around was empty of every island flower. The breeze was soft. The sky full-domed. Vivien hurried across to the waiting jet as if she were in an awful rush.
    She didn’t know what she meant at all.

chapter 2
    DESERT-GREEN, SNAKE-PROWLED, POWDER-DRY , they rise up here like the last of the West. In fact, as mountains go, the Santa Monicas play the wilderness part to the hilt. They front the coastal plain of the L.A. basin with something like the pride of ranges fully twice their size. And not because they can’t be climbed, since that is all some people ever do. But they aren’t pristine in the Tibetan way, removed forever from man’s estate. One cannot get properly lost in them, or avalanched or height-sick. Still, there are stretches not yet built on that are empty as a dream. Money claims title and trees these slopes wherever it can, from Brentwood east to the steeps of Hollywood. Yet for miles at a stretch the stubborn ground persists, from crest to empty canyon. In a city where most of the people have scarcely a three-foot square to stand on, the scrub-covered ridge of the Santa Monicas is the closest L.A. ever gets to a thing like Central Park.
    In the winter of 1919, Abner Willis was able to say that he bought Stone Canyon for a song. Nineteen hundred acres at eight cents a throw, to be precise. At the time