| [ [_prev chapter<< _] ] | [ [_index_] ] | [ [_>>next chapter_] ] |
Kim shows up at Jimmy’s apartment the next day with a cactus. She knocks on his screen door, silhouetted by the sun outside. He rolls off his bed and hops over to greet her, grinning abashedly.
“It’s no palace,” Jimmy says, opening the door and beckoning her in. He glances around the stark apartment then turns back to her. “But hey, pretty great, right? You see the pool?”
“I did,” Kim says, a small smile on her face. It’s the first time Jimmy’s seen her in jeans, and her hair is up in a loose bun. She holds out the cactus. “Happy housewarming.”
Jimmy takes the cactus from her. It’s a bulbous little thing, pale green and almost cartoonish. “Cute!” he says. “Thank you. Very Albuquerque.”
“I’ve gone native,” Kim says offhandedly, as she looks around the mostly empty apartment. “Jeez, Jimmy, you need to hang some stuff on these walls.”
Jimmy sets the cactus down in the exact center of his tiny table and then follows her gaze. She’s right, it is pretty bleak. “Yeah,” he says. “What do you reckon, big poster of Scarface?”
Kim snorts. She holds up her hands like she’s framing a picture. “I was thinking Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Just there.”
Jimmy chuckles. “Maybe I’ll split the difference and go with Belushi.” He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Wanna head out?”
Kim nods, and they wander out into the apartment complex. It’s mid-afternoon, and the sun is high and hot in the sky. Jimmy runs his fingers through his hair as he looks around for Kim’s car, and he’s extra glad that today he doesn’t have to walk the ten minutes to the bus stop and sweat through his shirt. He lets out a pained noise and wipes a hand down his face.
“Welcome to New Mexico,” Kim says, raising her eyebrows. She leads the way to her car, unlocking the doors quickly so they can pile in. She turns on the engine and cranks up the air conditioning.
Jimmy sighs in relief, pulling the front of his shirt out from his chest and fanning himself with it. “This as bad as it gets?”
“You crazy?” Kim asks. “This is nothing. Wait until July.”
Jimmy groans, and Kim laughs. She reverses out of the parking spot, shifts into gear and pulls away from the Beachcomber Apartments, the boxy buildings vanishing in the rearview. Jimmy settles back into his seat, smiling softly.
“It doesn’t usually get this hot so soon,” Kim says. “It’ll cool down again tomorrow. And you’ll get used to it.”
“If you say so,” Jimmy says. He jiggles his knee then stops it, laying his palm down flat on the denim. He glances over at Kim as she stares calmly at the road, flicking on her right indicator and coasting onto the freeway. “You from somewhere cold, too?” he asks.
Kim folds her lips inwards and seems to think for a minute, then says, “Yes. Sometimes. Or just different, I guess. A little town in Nebraska.”
Jimmy twists to face her in the passenger seat. “Little town, huh? I took you for a city girl.”
She glances at him wryly. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, you know,” Jimmy says, and he gestures at her, “you’re so on top of it. Efficient. Like you’re used to the hustle and bustle.”
Kim makes a little hah! noise. She taps her fingers on the steering wheel, shifting lanes.
They sit in comfortable silence for a while, marked only by the hum of the tires over the road and the patter of Kim’s fingers on the wheel. Patchy green trees drift past in the freeway median strip, little decorative accents that some poor chump must have to water.
Jimmy looks over at Kim assessingly, and he can almost see the lines of legalese drifting behind her eyes. No moment wasted. “So what’s the name of the little town?” he asks, a small distracting prod.
Kim folds her lips inwards again before answering. “Red Cloud,” she says, finally, darting another glance at him. “Nobody’s ever heard of it.”
Jimmy smiles. “Nice name, though.”
Kim shrugs her shoulders, fingers loose on the wheel. “It was a big railroad town. A long time ago, anyway. Not so much for the last, oh, hundred years. Willa Cather lived there.”
“Who?” Jimmy asks.
“Willa Cather. She was a writer, wrote about the town. Had her name painted in big letters on the side of a building down Main Street.” Kim pauses, flicking on her turn signal and then peeling smoothly down an off ramp. She offers a strange, almost pained, smile, then says, “My mother had never heard of her. She always told me it was an old ad for diet pills.”
Jimmy gives a little laugh. They slow down at a set of lights, and sit for the duration of the red in silence. Downtown Albuquerque unfolds ahead, open and sprawling. The buildings are so much shorter than what Jimmy’s used to, the roads so much wider.
Then the light shifts to green and they drive on. “But hey, it’s only a few miles away from the world’s largest perfectly round barn,” Kim says. “So we got that going for us.”
“Prairie town Kim Wexler,” Jimmy says, almost wistfully. “I never would have guessed!”
“Quite right,” Kim says, and she winks at him. She pulls into an open space in a half-filled parking lot, turns off her car, then twists to face him. “All right, I got us here. Fifth and Central, or near enough. You gonna tell me what movie we’re seeing, now?”
Jimmy grins at her. “Aw, where’s your sense of adventure?”
“I think I left that back in Red Cloud,” Kim says, a little grimly.
“It’ll be worth it, I promise, just a few more minutes,” Jimmy says. He thumbs the button on his watch and grimaces. “Or maybe more. Sorry, I didn’t realize how much quicker it is to get around here when you have a car.” He climbs out of the passenger seat and is hit with a rush of heat, and he reaches up to push his hair out of his eyes. He’s gonna need another haircut soon. “So when did you say I’d get used to this weather?” he asks as Kim locks her car.
“City boy like you?” she asks, then looks him up and down. “Maybe never.”
They start walking down the main street, past shopfronts and cafés. It’s quiet—a kind of slow Sunday peacefulness, and the other pedestrians and cars move with a gentle patience. There’s a couple of taller buildings around, but for the most part the district feels like everywhere else in Albuquerque: smooth and flat and beige, the same as the desert.
“Don’t you think there’s just too much space here?” Jimmy asks as they cross a side street. He glances over at her.
Kim points down the wide, straight avenue to where the distant blue-grey Sandias arc along the horizon. “How can you have space when you have that?” she asks.
Jimmy's eyes are drawn to the mountains for the rest of their walk.
It's not long before they arrive outside the movie theater. Jimmy grins at Kim and walks up to the booth. The man working there greets him, and Jimmy chats casually, studying the other upcoming showings, making a few mental notes. As he pays for their tickets, he glances back at Kim, who’s staring at a poster for My Cousin Vinny with a knowing look on her face. Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei lean cockily in front of the judge’s bench.
“Cat’s out of the bag now, I guess,” Jimmy says as he walks back over “Here,” he says, handing over her ticket. “Congrats on surviving hell week.”
Kim raises her eyebrows. “Just on surviving?”
“Yeah,” Jimmy says. He pretends to study the poster, as Kim had been doing. “Yeah, I reckon surviving is the most important part.”
Kim looks sideways at him and smiles, then she glances down at her ticket. “Jimmy, this doesn’t start for over an hour.”
Jimmy holds up his hands in surrender. “Don’t kill me. I’ll cover for you with Ron tomorrow and you can sneak an extra hour of study in the storeroom.” He drops his hands and then shrugs. “There’s a diner over the street. We can get a coffee and you can pretend not to crawl out of your skin.”
She stares at him, eyebrows almost in her hairline.
“On me?” he offers.
“Okay,” Kim says.
The diner is beautifully old school, a great hodgepodge of knick-knacks and souvenirs, and for the first time since arriving in the city Jimmy feels like he’s somewhere actually old. The whole place has that hundred-year-old lived-in vibe, like the air is still heavy with the grease of thousands of home fries and the cigarette smoke of the motorists who ate here fifty years ago. He and Kim pull up stools at the bar against the window, red-cushioned things, their leather brittle and patinated, and Jimmy sighs contentedly. A waitress smiles widely at them and pours them each a coffee, then takes their menus after they decline to order any food.
Jimmy studies Kim. “So you wanna tell me about whatever law thing you’re thinking about?” he asks.
Kim shakes her head. “No, it’s okay.”
“You sure?” Jimmy shrugs lightly. “I like listening.”
“No—I mean, I wasn’t thinking about any ‘law thing’,” Kim says.
Jimmy lays his hand over his heart in mock surprise.
“Don’t give me that,” Kim says, rolling her eyes. “It’s been known to happen.”
“Well, you’ve basically gotta tell me now,” Jimmy says. “‘Cause I know you were thinking about something, you did the like”—he gestures to his face and does an exaggerated version of Kim’s furrowed brow and pinched lips—“the lip thing.”
“Oh really?” Kim says, lifting an eyebrow.
“Oh really,” Jimmy repeats. “So spill.”
Kim takes a sip of her coffee and glances around, eyes lingering in places Jimmy can’t pinpoint, before she turns back to him. “There was a diner a bit like this back in Red Cloud. Somewhere for drivers to stop along the main road, not that anyone ever drove down it. But it smelled the same.” She glances at him openly.
“Yeah,” Jimmy says softly. “Yeah, it reminds me of home, too. Same stools, same posters on the walls, practically.” He glances down to where a balding old man in a brown coat is hunched over the bar, eggs and bacon and a newspaper laid out before him. “That exact old man. I think they mass produce him.”
Kim laughs quietly, hands wrapped around her mug.
“Me and Marco would get root beer floats after school, sometimes. I loved it there,” Jimmy says wistfully. He stares at Kim and she meets his gaze; hers is still wide, exposed. “But maybe you didn’t like your diner all that much?” he asks.
Kim breaks his eye contact and frowns, staring out the window. The cinema across the street stands square but beautiful; it, too, looks old compared to the rest of the city, elaborate and grand, like somewhere old movie stars would attend premieres.
“Maybe you didn’t like Red Cloud all that much?” Jimmy adds.
Kim lets out her breath, gaze still locked on the world outside the window. “It was a hard place to like,” she says, very quietly. She sits quietly for a minute, then turns back to face him and smiles. There’s a little frozen moment before she shifts and says, voice light, “So, do you want to hear about the thirty year drama of Lochner v. New York?”
Jimmy returns her smile. “I’d like nothing more,” he says. He beckons toward himself. “Hit me with it.”
Jimmy sits beside Kim in the darkened cinema, the theater resplendent and beautiful and dusty.
He watches as, towering on the screen before him, Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei roll up to some rural Southern town in Pesci's rusty shitbox of a car, the engine screeching and spluttering. He watches Tomei hustle pool and Pesci con the judge with a fake name and a fake career. He watches Pesci spot a bluff a mile away, seamlessly reading people on the street and on the stand, and he watches the two of them flirt over law-talk, holding a fake trial about a leaky faucet that ends with them in bed.
He watches Pesci in his leather jacket and outrageous second-hand suit stand in court ignorant of legal procedure, but dancing with magic words and logic until the jury matches his rhythm and he wins—wins using stunts and hominy grits and tire-treads.
And he listens as Kim laughs beside him through the whole thing. Jimmy thinks he can actually feel her relaxing, and he glances at her as often as her can.
Her eyes catch the light of the big screen like fireflies.
Later, after the credits roll, they stand beside each other outside, the sky darkening with burnt orange and the deep blue of twilight. The air has chilled a little now, and a breeze caresses Jimmy’s bare forearms—soft and cool. It feels like summer nights back home and, emboldened, still hungover from the film, he asks Kim if she wants to get dinner and, to his surprise, she agrees. I know a place, she even says, eyes still twinkling as if they’ve brought the light of the theater out with them.
They end up at a spot a few minutes down the road: the Dog House, lit with colorful neons that grow brighter with every passing moment of nightfall. Kim parks outside and the two of them perch, a hotdog each, beside each other on the trunk of her car, the lights glowing behind them as they eat quietly and stare into an empty playground across the street.
Jimmy glances over at Kim. She’s sitting calmly. Her loose, blonde hair beneath the neon lights is like filament, like spun gold. He watches her until she turns to face him, and he smiles when he sees her eyes still have that bead of shining light, that trapped firefly.
“So I promised you a law movie,” he says warmly.
Kim chuckles. “You did,” she says. “Though I don’t know if I learned much that’s going to help with finals…”
Jimmy makes a pshh! sound. “I bet you didn’t know that stuff about grits!”
“All right, all right, other than that. I’ve got the infamous legal hominy grits question on lock now."
Jimmy chuckles. “Yeah, I guess he wasn’t exactly Clarence Darrow.”
“I don’t know about that,” Kim says. “That whole Monkey Trial was a big publicity stunt. Basically a circus. Apes in the town streets.”
“No!” Jimmy says, popping his last bite of hotdog into his mouth and scrunching up his empty wrapper.
Kim chuckles. “The big speeches, the showmanship…that’s Clarence Darrow right there. I think he would have been proud.” She finishes her own hotdog, chewing slowly, looking at the darkening playground. She’s so relaxed she seems almost like a different person, sat lazily beside him on the trunk of her car, miles away from the mailroom and the stacks of law books.
“Thank you for coming with me,” Jimmy says quietly.
Kim nudges his shoulder with hers. “It was nice. I needed this.”
“Yeah, you did,” Jimmy says. “I did, too. After last night at Chuck's, I don’t…” He looks down to where his feet rest on the bumper, his sneakers worn and comfortable.
“It must be a lot of pressure,” Kim says, her voice gentle but edged with something unfamiliar.
Jimmy glances back up at her. “What?”
“A lot to live up to, I mean,” she says, staring out to where a few tiny lights mark out in the crests of the Sandias. “The great Charles McGill. I wouldn’t want to have to compete with that.”
“But I don’t want to compete with him,” Jimmy says, frowning. “I don’t wanna outshine him, or whatever.”
Kim shifts, and glances back at him. “No,” she says. “No, I guess you don’t.”
“I just want…” Jimmy starts, and then he pauses. A couple of cars drive past, whirring. He sighs. “When I was a kid, any time Chuck would come home, or come visit, it was just…the greatest day, Kim. The greatest! Like, I know little kids always think their big brothers are the smartest guys in the world, but Chuck actually was. He knew everything, even then. My whole life he’s known everything.” Jimmy grins, shifting back slightly so he’s leaning against the rear window of Kim’s car, staring up at the bruise-mottled sky. “So any time he came home I’d try to trick him, right? Like outsmart him, or catch him off guard. I dunno if I ever really caught him, but he always did this thing, like a game, I guess, where he pretended not to be amused by it.” Jimmy lets out his breath in a long sigh. “But I knew he really was.”
Kim tilts back too, leaning against the glass beside him.
“So that’s all I want,” Jimmy says. “I don’t need to live up to him. I just want to find that kid again, that kid who impressed him.”
Kim nudges him with her shoulder again, then leaves her shoulder touching his, resting against it gently. It feels like a brand down his skin, somehow hot and cold at once, and Jimmy freezes, unconsciously holding his breath as if any movement might shatter Kim’s touch.
He can feel her moving with her breath.
“The day we met, you asked why I wanted to be a lawyer,” she says, after a time.
Jimmy tilts his head sideways and studies her profile.
“I’m sorry I didn’t answer then. I know why I want to be a lawyer. The law’s the one place where things make sense,” Kim says, the neon-limned lines of her lips moving around the words. “Right and wrong, black and white. Legal, and illegal.”
The colored lights catch the arc of her cheekbone, the curve of her nose.
“It’s the only place where there’s clarity like that,” Kim continues, voice almost a whisper. “Black, white, legal, illegal. So simple.” Her chest rises and falls with a deep breath, up and down, and then she stills. “Except it’s not, of course.”
“No,” Jimmy murmurs, and he twists his head back to stare up at the sky. Stars are winking into being now, pale little specks against the deep blue.
“But at least we try,” Kim says. “And I needed a place where I could try. After everything.” She falls silent, and Jimmy’s heart seems to press right up against his skin, and he wants to ask what ‘everything’ means—but he doesn’t—and he wants to ask what happened in Red Cloud—but he doesn’t. Because Kim didn’t ask what happened in Cicero. Because she didn’t force him to tell her.
So Jimmy shifts, lifting his arm and curling it around Kim, moving without thinking about it. He hears her sigh, and after a few moments she tucks herself into the side of him, nestling closer, her head resting on his shoulder. Wisps of blonde hair lift from her face and glow with neon light.
He can feel her breathing, her chest rising and falling against the sensitive skin down his side, and he thinks about how impossible she is: how she probably had no Chuck of her own, no golden god to pluck her out of Red Cloud; how she probably had come to Albuquerque all by herself, all alone; and how she had found a way to bootstrap a new life behind the elephantine wall of the Sandias, a new life made of law books and coffee and clarity.
And here she is, leaning into him like razors, like cut glass.
He remembers telling his mother that everyone around him seemed to know exactly who they were and what they were doing. He wonders if he was wrong. He wonders if Kim, too, stood in front of her mirror the first day she arrived in Albuquerque and tried to understand the new person staring back.
Jimmy’s heart presses so tight against his skin he can feel it thudding, offbeat, and he knows that Kim can feel it, too.
| [ [_prev chapter<< _] ] | [ [_index_] ] | [ [_>>next chapter_] ] |