We met in the time of the, "I Love You" Killer, and because of that, I made every effort, even as our relationship progressed, not to share my true feelings with her. Our introduction, since one may wonder how two people as different as we were ever crossed paths, came about by way of a shared acquaintance, a woman named Jane, who as well as being a ski fanatic, or I should say, a fanatic of après-ski, also worked for the City of El Paso in a capacity, the exact nature of which had, until recently, remained a mystery, which occasionally brought her into contact with the Justice Department and, thus, the District Attorney's Office. For the sake of completeness, although it has no bearing on this story, of which she plays no part, or very little part, other than having introduced us, I should mention here that this woman, Jane, was recently apprehended on charges of setting brush fires. El Paso residents have surely tired of the details of this incident already, repeated ad infinitum on channels 12, 5, and especially 9, but I'll recap quickly – it's better to get this out of the way here and then never mention it again – for those less removed. Her crime occurred in the fall, although it wasn't at all dry at the time, since fall is actually the rainy season here; on top of that, she chose to light her fires in an area of El Paso known as the, "Low Quarter," or, "La Zona Baja," which, as its name suggests, is the lowest and, thus, the swampiest place in town; finally, her description to reporters upon being arrested of having to shield her lighter from the driving rain – it was raining torrentially the night she attempted to commit her crime – went a long way toward explaining why nothing of real consequence came of it. Anyway, to finish up this awkward business and move on, as part of the media frenzy which accompanied her apprehension, which actually turned out to be a welcome relief after three months of oppressive, "I Love You" Killer updates, it came out that she was employed by the Department of Parks and Recreation. When Dana heard this bit of news, which was repeated incessantly, although now that I think about it, she found out before the story even broke, since Jane herself called one evening – we were living together by that point – making a tearful confession, after several years of close friendship, including overnight trips together, multi-night trips, of her employer's true identity, she commented, "How ironic," but from my point of view, especially now, and this is typical of us, it wasn't ironic at all. In fact, at the risk of getting sidetracked, I would like to state for the record that, far from finding irony in this factoid, since that's all it was to me, although Dana considered it a great revelation, I thought it was truly bizarre. After all, here was a woman who was supposedly one of Dana's closest friends. Aside from the Mayor of El Paso, Alvarado Alvarez, with whom she spent unusually long hours – but that was all work related, or at least that's what I thought at the time – Dana probably spent more time with Jane than with anyone else she knew. So, and this may turn out to be a relevant point with regards to the issue of premeditation, the only question in my mind was and continues to be, "Why all the secrecy?" Truth be told, and there are many people up at the ski resort who would be more than happy to confirm this, Jane was anything but secretive. Moving along with the story of the, "I Love You" Killer (thank you for your patience), and the effect that his presence, if presence is the right word for it, had on this normally forgotten city of a few more than five-hundred thousand inhabitants, a word of caution: readers should note that, since no trial has been held as of yet, Jane is still presumed innocent of any wrongdoing. That's not to say that she isn't guilty, the evidence certainly seems to indicate that she is, as well as her own confession, but in today's climate, to say the least, we should all understand the need not to rush to judgment.
Our first date, as with all our subsequent dates, due to our busy schedules, occurred on a Sunday, just five days after the official start of ski season, although this year, because of the record early snowfall, the lifts at most of the big resorts (big by El Paso standards, that is) had already been running consistently for more than three weeks. Dana was late arriving, I assumed due to the snowy conditions – it had snowed in the city too, which is unheard of – so I spent fifteen minutes looking out the restaurant window at the whitened streets, where cars slowly crept by at under five miles per hour, their wary drivers hunched forward over their steering wheels, scanning the street nervously from side to side and, as if in constant need of reassurance, continually tapping on their breaks. Despite this seemingly excessive amount of caution, it was only a matter of minutes before the first crash occurred – a second one followed a short time later, just as Dana arrived at the table – involving two slowly moving vehicles, both of whose drivers, upon seeing the other, although they were in separate lanes, had abruptly slammed on the breaks. After making impact, although at such slow speeds, the damage, if any, was minimal, both cars continued to slide along together, as if stuck to each other, the two drivers looking around helplessly until, as if it were one vehicle, they bumped up gently against the curb. While the first driver rummaged around in his glove compartment, apparently hoping to find something there which would melt away all the snow and ice, the other one got out of his car only to immediately fall flat on his back, his legs sticking straight up in the air as if they were frozen, before managing to pull himself up by grabbing onto his door handle – the first driver was completely oblivious to all of this – and then – the street must have been slightly uneven – he began to slide slowly away. At first, he just let himself go, as if realizing that any effort to fight against what was happening would only make it worse, but then, as he increased in speed, he began to make a swimming motion with his arms (first the crawl, then the breaststroke), although obviously this had no effect since he was only pulling on air, and then, as he approached the corner of Paseo and Gran Norte, he began to trot, as if he were on a treadmill which had been programmed to always spin its belt a little faster than he would have liked, no matter how fast he ran, and he was sprinting now, until finally he panicked and leapt forward, landing spread eagle in the snow. The first man had found what he was looking for in his glove compartment and, upon exiting his vehicle, seemed surprised to see the second man lying flat on his face in the street about twenty feet away. He raced over to him – his shoes obviously provided far better traction than the other man's – knelt down beside him, and began asking him a series of questions while palpating different parts of his body. I couldn't help but laugh as I watched all this, which was unfortunate since Dana arrived just then – I don't know how long she had been standing there looking at me, but when I looked up, and this is when I heard the noise of the second crash, she was staring down at me with an expression of mistrust.
"I'm sorry," I stammered, as I jumped up to pull out her chair, knocking over a glass of ice-water in the process, which I frantically mopped up with several cloth napkins, elegantly embossed with the initials, "W.G," for, "William's Grill," which was the name of the restaurant I had chosen – one of my favorites – "I don't want you to think that I'm someone who takes pleasure in other people's misfortunes, it's just that –," and here I glanced out the window at the other two vehicles, one of which, a red 4X4, was keeled over in the middle of the street, smoke billowing out the broken passenger-side window, "there was just something funny about the way –," but the sound of Dana yanking down on the window shade, leaving us in semi-darkness, made me lose my train of thought, and I sat back down dejectedly.
Dana sat down too, although visibly hesitant, glancing around at all of the other tables first, which gave the impression – and I don't think it was a mistaken impression – that had there been a vacant table available anywhere in the restaurant, or even an empty seat at one of the occupied tables, she would have chosen to sit there first, even if it meant enduring the company of strangers, or eating alone, rather than sit with me. Luckily, the place was packed. We hadn't even had a chance to introduce ourselves yet, which would have been a challenge anyway since she refused to look at me, when the waiter arrived, which didn't surprise me at all since he had been lurking nearby ever since I had told him that someone would be joining me, as if he didn't believe it, and since I had already had a chance to study the menu, I ordered my favorite dish, sirloin with Portobello mushrooms and a side salad, before realizing that Dana was glaring at me – although she turned away as soon as I looked at her – she didn't even have a menu, so I passed her mine, which she studied for several minutes, during which time I made small talk with the waiter, who, it turned out, had never been skiing, so I offered him complimentary lift tickets – which he hastily grabbed away from me, as if fearing that, at any moment, I was likely to retract the offer – since that was one of the perks of my job, and also to show Dana that I wasn't the cretin she surely thought I was, until she finally ordered a Cobb Salad. "Would you like something to drink with that?" I asked her, trying to rectify my previous offenses, but now I had unwittingly offended the waiter, who repeated my question in a betrayed tone, looking at me askance and pushing the lift tickets even further down into his apron pocket. "Yes, I would," Dana replied enthusiastically, as if she and the waiter had finally succeeded in putting me in my proper place, and the two of them giggled together as she ordered a Dr. Pepper. Before I had a chance to ask for a Dos Equis, the waiter flipped his little book closed – which made a sound like the cracking of a whip – and left.
Dana reached across the table, and for a moment I had the ridiculous impression that she was about to challenge me to a thumb war, but in reality it was only to grab the wine list and tuck it inside the front cover of the menu, which she placed on the side of the table, saying, "Peter must have forgotten to take this away," as if they were now best of friends. I smiled at her, thinking, "Better to let this one have it her way," but she continued to refuse to make eye contact with me, glancing all around me, at my shirt, at my forehead, at the family sitting behind me, over her shoulder at the exit, lifting the corner of the shade to peer out at the street, at her napkin, which she folded and unfolded repeatedly, at my Adam's apple, yet despite all this, I couldn't help but be struck by her self-confidence. After all, as the Assistant District Attorney – and this was the only piece of information Jane had given about her, other than the fact that she was, "a hottie" – she was undoubtedly more aware than most were of the details of the, "I Love You" Killer's crimes, which had been enough to cause many women to stop dating altogether, or at least to avoid first dates, which were the most dangerous, since you were dealing with a total stranger, unless, of course, it was something which had evolved out of a friendship – but the, "I Love You" Killer surely had friends as well – or, as in our case, a blind date set up by a common acquaintance, at which point everything depended on the trustworthiness of the acquaintance. On the other hand, there were some women who argued that first dates were actually the least dangerous – the most extreme members of this group adopted a policy of, "only first dates," which, in personal ads, was expressed, "OFD" – since it was very unlikely that any man would tell you that he loves you on a first date. Following this line of reasoning, many women had actually ended long-term relationships – of course, if the words, "I love you," had already been spoken, there was no reason to do this – in the hope of heading the killer off at the pass, although after cutting these well-worn men free, the women now found themselves in the uncomfortable situation of having to start from zero with a total stranger, someone they had met, "in the time of the 'I Love You' Killer," as people had come to describe it, and who was, for this reason, forever suspect. A side effect of this practice was the creation of a growing pool of single men in El Paso, all of them proven capable of maintaining a stable relationship, yet suddenly cut free through no fault of their own, many of whom began to offer their previous girlfriend as a reference, although the previous girlfriend was in no position to guarantee that the man in question wasn't the, "I Love You" Killer, she could, at the very least, state that this man had, in fact, dated a woman for an extended period of time without showing any inclination toward saying anything suspicious. As for those relationships where the words, "I love you," had already been spoken – and this assumed, of course, as most people seemed to believe, that the, "I Love You" Killer always acted after saying the words for the first time – women began to take extreme measures not to let this most prized of catches get away, since it was now literally a matter of life or death, to the point where it became common to witness scenes around El Paso of a man desperately trying to break free of a union, either by car or on foot, and of a woman, sometimes crying, but usually shouting angrily, doing everything in her power to prevent this outcome, by putting herself in the path of the vehicle, by maneuvering another vehicle into the path of the getaway vehicle, which was often driven by a sympathetic friend, or by tearing at the man's clothes. Yet here was Dana, although nervous and, occasionally, eyeing me suspiciously, something which I attributed to the police sketch released that morning based on the description provided by the latest victim, who had also managed to escape unharmed, as had the previous two victims, by fighting the killer off, after hearing those terrible words, which made three failed attempts now, after two successful murders, all of which had occurred within the last six weeks, a sketch which was very different from the other two, which weren't at all alike either, yet somehow, and this was probably true of eighty percent of the men in El Paso, my own face seemed to fit comfortably somewhere near the center of the triangle formed by the information provided, and the fact that in all three cases, the killer had used a name beginning with the letter 'F' didn't help either, although this provided no comfort to women dating men with names beginning with other letters, since he was obviously just making them up, not only willing to go out on a first date, but trying to gain the upper hand at every turn as well.
“You must be busy at work,” I said to her, although I immediately realized that this comment had been a horrible error in judgment, since she threw herself down flat on the chair next to her – at one point I peeked under the table and saw that she was clutching onto the wooden chair for dear life, eyes closed tight and teeth gritted in anticipation – disappearing from my view entirely for a minute, during which time I could only listen to the sound of her heavy breathing, which became an even worse experience after witnessing the expression of terror on her face, before the top of her forehead finally reappeared, followed by her eyes, first one, then the other, peering up over the edge of the table. There’s no telling what might have happened next if Peter hadn’t arrived, carrying a single Dr. Pepper on a round tray, not even a glass of water for me, so I had nothing now, since I had knocked over the other one, except for a pile of wet napkins, which, of course, he pretended not to see, but at least Dana had straightened back up when she saw him, a friendly smile spreading across her face, and she even provided the courtesy of attempting to wipe off a small stain which had appeared on the front of his apron. They bantered back and forth for several minutes – it turned out that Peter was quite the lady’s man – and this gave me my first opportunity to learn a little bit about her. She was twenty-nine years old, born and raised in El Paso, although she had gone to law school in New Orleans, where she had graduated at the top of her class, “of course, that isn’t to say,” she clarified to Peter with a wink, that she hadn’t known how to, “have a blast,” while she was down there, especially during Mardi Gras, which was what she missed most about the place, and she still tried to go back every year, “with a friend,” and I assumed this meant Jane, who although enigmatic when it came to her work life was anything but around the hot tub, where she had been known to bring, “a little bit of New Orleans,” to the Franklin Mountains, loved the desert air, and planned to stay here, if at all possible, for the rest of her life. As Assistant D.A., she, “worked like a dog,” but loved every minute of it, especially the fact that she was able to, “rub shoulders,” with the other, “high-government officials,” which included the Mayor of El Paso, Alvarado Alvarez, who she considered, “a mentor,” often going entire nights without sleeping during the week, although she insisted to her boss, the D.A., who she didn’t seem to particularly care for, that her weekends belonged entirely to her. Unfortunately, and the pain was visible in her eyes when she said this, she had been forced to make an exception to this rule recently, since she had decided, with the Mayor’s blessing and encouragement, to run for the post of District Attorney in the coming elections – “So young?” I interjected when she said this, but no one was paying any attention to me – “which,” she explained, putting an unusual emphasis on this word, were about six weeks away. “In fact,” she told Peter, placing a hand on his forearm as her voice rose thrillingly, “we just kicked off the campaign this morning, which was why I was late getting here,” as if he were the one she was dating. Their conversation wrapped up with Peter wishing her good luck and telling her, “You have my vote,” and that the food would be out shortly. “Do you have a close relationship with the Mayor?” I asked her as Peter walked away, although I felt a little bit as if I were intruding on a private conversation. “We have a working relationship,” she responded sternly.
The scolding nature of this comment seemed to cut short the possibility of any further conversation between us, but luckily, and I mean this sincerely since I have nothing to hide, a squad of police cars pulled up outside just then, their sirens blaring and their flashing red and blue lights inundating the restaurant. The intensity of the lights seemed to be strongest right where we were sitting, probably because we had the shades drawn and, because of this, occupied an area of relative darkness. After briefly stealing a look behind the window shade at the street, where the four accidented drivers had huddled together in a small circle to keep warm, I looked across the table at Dana, her forehead mirroring the flashing lights of the squad cars, first red, then blue, and I got the sense that the tension was slowly draining out of her body – I felt much more comfortable too now, in the presence of the law, which must have been the prevailing mood throughout the restaurant, since an audible sigh of relief was heard, stronger in some areas than in others, probably due to an unequal distribution of people on dates – not only was she quite capable of looking me in the eye now, and this made me realize that to say a woman is beautiful without first looking into her eyes, in person, from about three feet away, is pure nonsense, but we were finally able to carry on a fluid conversation, at least as fluid as her conversation with Peter had been, since that had become the standard of her openness, without fear or inhibition and in an atmosphere where companionship was still possible.
“It was nice of Jane to bring us together like this,” I opened.
“Yes, it was.”
“Do you ski?”
“I’ve never been skiing.”
“A lot of people are trying it for the first time this year.”
“How do you know?”
“I can tell by the way they get on the lift.”
“So you’ve been a lift operator for that long?”
“Eight years.”
“Don’t you ever get bored?”
“Not at all. You have to remember, the ski season is very short here – I’m sure you’re aware of this. Sometimes, it doesn’t last more than a week. Other times, there isn’t one at all. The snowfall is sporadic, to say the least. I can remember a year when we opened for a week in December, closed for all of January, then opened again in late February, but only for one day. Another time, we only opened in January. Another time, only in March. It all depends on the weather. And then, of course, there’s the après-ski.”
“Yes, Jane mentioned that. So what do you do the rest of the year?”
“Do you mean me, or the resort?”
“Don’t you stay at the resort?”
“Yes, I do. We have summer activities too. I lead nature walks.”
“Then you must dread winters.”
“Why do you say that?”
“What you do in the summer sounds so much more interesting.”
“You have the wrong idea.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I’m not upset. It’s just that so many people seem to have the wrong idea about what it means to operate a ski lift.”
For some reason, Dana grinned when I said this, which turned out to be fortunate since Peter was arriving with the food just then, and I didn’t want him to think that we weren’t having a good time.
“Well, I suppose it’s something that should be left to the experts,” she concluded.
“Yes, that’s right,” I quickly agreed, not wanting to give Peter, who was placing the food on the table, the opportunity to butt in on our conversation. “You should come up to the resort sometime,” I continued, without leaving any space between my sentences, since Peter kept opening his mouth. “Like I said, if you were ever going to do it, this is the year, you won’t feel at all out of place, there are so many beginners around, many of them haven’t ever even seen snow before, it’s quite comical really,” but then I remembered the incident with the man in the street and added, “of course, it isn’t funny at all, not everyone can be expected to know how to walk on snow and ice, or sit down on a moving chair, these are things that have to be learned, just like anything else, that’s where I come in, there’s only one lift at the resort and I’ve been operating it for eight years, Sunday is my only day off, people know who I am and that makes everyone feel much more comfortable.”
I paused for breath here, since Peter had given up and sulked away, and also because Dana seemed to have been struck by the last words I had spoken.
“Does seeing your face have that much of an impact on people?” she asked, and now it was as if she couldn’t take her eyes off me.
“One,” I began, and I let this word hang in the air, realizing that I had unexpectedly stumbled across what was the equivalent of opium within the context of the current El Paso dating discourse, “should never underestimate the effect of a familiar face on an unquiet mind.”
For a moment, as Dana remained silent while she took in what I had just said, I feared that I had overplayed my hand; the last thing I wanted to do, given the current climate, was to say something which could be interpreted as being, “creepy.” Because of this, I let out a loud sigh of relief when she smiled at me, and then, without either of us having to give any sort of an explanation, which I considered to be a very good sign, we laughed together for the first time.
“So,” I said to her gaily, lifting up my knife and fork and slicing into the tender steak, as if I didn’t have a care in the world, like someone on a lunch date in Dallas or Houston, “let’s hear something about you.”
She began – and this may well have been considered an innocent enough way of beginning in normal times, but remember, this was El Paso, U.S.A., in the time of the, “I Love You” Killer – by telling me that she had been born and raised, “right here in, ‘The Sun City’,” which left me taken aback, to say the least, since that was exactly what she had told Peter, although using different words, and wasn’t I, her date, even in these troubled times, I found myself wondering, entitled to receive better and more complete information than the waiter? Of course, it would be correct to object to this, and I don’t doubt that many readers are lifting a finger in the air right now with this very intention, by pointing out that had it not been for the platoon of squad cars so impressively arrayed in the street just outside the restaurant window, without whose presence Dana may well have been cowering under the table at that point, or screaming for help, or landing a solid right hook to my jaw, or scrambling towards the nearest open doorway, rather that chatting with me calmly as she was doing, and we were both appropriately grateful for this opportunity, or at least I was, I can’t speak for her, to learn a little bit about each other, I would have never been naïve enough, or bold enough, to make this assertion, since without, “police cover,” so to speak, there would be no reason at all, quite the contrary, for me to claim that I had some set, “right,” to receive more information about my date than Peter, since in this case the advantage would be all his, being a disinterested bystander, a complete stranger, and to top it off, someone Dana would most likely never lay eyes on again for the rest of her life, but the reality was, and this was what made her opening remarks so much the more discouraging, a large contingent of law enforcement agents was, in fact, positioned within a hundred yards of us, separated from us only by an easily-penetrable window. In my initial despair, which overcame me quite abruptly, although it was hard for me not be get distracted by the movement of her lips, since I judged that everything which had been gained moments earlier had now, just as hastily and unexpectedly, been lost, I almost cut her off by saying, “Yes, I already heard that. Didn’t you realize that I was listening?” but as she continued speaking, I quickly understood that while she was planning on reviewing much of what she had gone over earlier – looking back, I would wholeheartedly concede this point to her, although now I’m not sure that she would agree with it, since how was she to be certain, beyond a reasonable doubt, which I assumed was her standard (she was, after all, a lawyer), that I had really been paying attention? – she was also planning on supplementing it with new and more intimate details, the kinds of details that only the person you are on a date with would be expected to hear. For example, while she had told Peter that she had been, “born and raised in El Paso,” she told me that she had been, “born and raised right here in, ‘The Sun City’,” where she had grown up in a house which had originally been built by her great-great-grandfather, Don Aurelio Garcia, who, “remarkably enough,” had also been El Paso’s first elected judge. “This historic house,” she went on, almost as if she were reciting part of her campaign speech, which didn’t bother me at all, was later passed down to her great-grandfather, then to her grandfather, and finally to her father, who still lived there, “to this day.” “As you can imagine,” she added with a smile, which I returned to her appreciatively, the house contains quite an impressive library, since all of the Garcia men, following in her great-great-grandfather’s footsteps, had become lawyers, and then judges. “Not just the men,” I responded with a laugh, even though she had never been a judge, I still felt that it was an appropriate comment, and she nodded her head and said, “I spent a lot of time in that library.” I asked her if an old house like that needed a lot of repair work, and she said, “Yes,” but that it was all tax deductible since it was a historic landmark. “Where do you live?” I asked her, and although this came off rather bluntly, she still answered me in a friendly way, telling me that she lived in a high-rise downtown, “near the Mayor’s Office and the Courthouse.” As if following a script, she began reminiscing about her days in New Orleans, repeating most of the comments she had already made to the waiter, with a few additional details, before launching into a story about a stilt-walker at Mardi Gras who, insisting on leaning over to give her a kiss, after she had rejected his initial proposition, had toppled over head-over-heals, which was unusual since stilt-walkers at Mardi Gras were usually quite adept at this kind of thing, pitching over headfirst into a group of drunken revelers. “Without missing a beat,” these same revelers had hoisted him skyward and paraded off with him, his, “skinny stilt-legs,” kicking slowly back and forth in the air above the crowd. We were both laughing uproariously by the time she finished telling this story – initially, I had waited for her to laugh, not wanting to commit another blunder, but I had quickly caught on, by observing her attitude about the whole incident, that it was OK to find humor in it, no doubt, I concluded, because it had happened in New Orleans and not in El Paso – and for some reason, as if she needed air, or a reality check, she reached over and pulled open the window shade, revealing the snowy street, the squad cars, at least a dozen police officers, another dozen or so firemen and emergency workers, the four accidented drivers, all of whom, apparently, had been traveling alone, two ambulances, and a fire truck.
All of the vehicles, including a tow truck which was just now approaching, still had their lights flashing, which, Dana commented, “was appropriate,” and the entire area had been cordoned off by wrapping yellow tape around four snow-covered cactuses, planted at each street corner as desert accents. Dana immediately became gravely serious upon witnessing this scene, and then she suddenly swiveled her head and looked directly at me, without any warning, as if the last few minutes had been nothing more than an elaborate setup, or a test, a test which I had now failed, since I found that I was still smiling because of the stilt-walker story, causing her to shake her head with disappointment, but also, I couldn’t help but noticing, an unmistakable satisfaction. In the blink of an eye, I inverted my grin, realizing that I had to act fast, since we were both finishing up our meals, and it would soon be time to deliberate the issue of whether or not there was to be a second date. “It’s a shame that this had to happen,” I said, as a way of trying to regain my footing, although the words didn’t even ring true to me, and I realized that, based on my previous behavior, not even my own mother would vouch for the sincerity of the sentiments I was now expressing. Dana didn’t even bother to respond. She was looking around impatiently, at first I didn’t understand why, but then I realized that she was trying to find Peter. I began wringing my hands in front of me, hoping that, through some miracle, his shift had ended and he had gone home, although I knew it was completely impossible, since this was no doubt the moment that he had been longing for since he first laid eyes on me, and when I saw him approaching our table, a severe look on his face which matched Dana’s harsh expression precisely, I knew that my luck had run out, and my heart sank. Dana told him, as if he were our chaperone, that she was, “ready to leave,” and he responded by saying, “I understand,” and that he would be back, “as quickly as possible,” with the bill, before racing away, slaloming between the closely-packed tables at a breakneck speed. I reached for my wallet – as difficult as it was, I knew that this was my only recourse – but just then, a man at the next table shouted out, “Good Lord!” and we all looked out the window.
It turned out, to everyone’s great shock and dismay (although the word, “salvation” came into my mind) – a collective gasp was heard, which whipped through the restaurant like a cold wind, along with several exclamations along the lines of, “Heaven help us!” and, “Oh, no!” – that one of the police officers was sliding away down the icy street now, knees bent, “snowboard style,” as a way of trying to maintain control over what was happening to him, or to simulate control, since it was obvious from the way he groped for his two-way radio, which his overstuffed mittens barely allowed him to grab hold of, that he had lost control several seconds ago. The other officers didn’t dare to budge, no doubt out of fear that they could just as easily find themselves in a similar situation, until one of them reached for his own two-way radio, on which the first officer was presumably calling for help, immediately fumbling it into the air, where he batted it three times before it finally fell to the ground in front of him (I was surprised to hear Dana mutter the word, “dumbass” at this point, and when I quickly swiveled my head to cast a reproachful glance in her direction, I saw that her teeth were gritted in anger. I would eventually learn that whenever she muttered something under her breath like that, which she did quite frequently, it was inevitably directed at the Mayor, who, in this particular case, she would later explain to me, had insisted – over Dana’s objections, and even over the objections of the El Paso Chief of Police, a man by the name of Francisco Ocampos Luis Perez – on issuing mandatory-use mittens to the entire E.P.P.D.), at which point he attempted to dive on it, but another officer, the one standing immediately behind him, lurched forward and grabbed his arms around his waist instinctively, preventing him from diving too far and slipping away, but also preventing him from reaching the radio. I managed to pull my eyes away from what was happening to look across the table at Dana again and, to my surprise (I didn’t know her well enough yet), she was staring right at me – examining me would probably be a more accurate way of putting it, the way a jury examines the accused, paying special attention to his facial expressions, after a witness gives damning testimony during the course of a trial. I immediately became acutely award of my own facial expression, which, to my great relief, was somber and apprehensive. Dana seemed to note this too and she nodded slightly with approval. Realizing that this was my last lifeline and not wanting to put it to inefficient use, I summoned up all my earnestness and, with a solemnity and gravity impregnating my voice in a way which surprised me, shouted out, “The radio!” Another voice echoed my call, yelling, “He’s got it!” and when I looked back at the street, I was able to confirm that the diving officer had, in fact, managed to secure the radio clumsily between his mittens, although, and this was implicit in the fact that he had reached it, he had now slid away much farther than the third officer, who was on top of him, would have liked, and, to make matters worse, the two of them, because of their combined weight, although they were moving quite slowly, had gathered an all-too-easily appreciable quantity of momentum, which left little room for optimism about their eventual fate. I looked back across the table at Dana, who was now looking out at the street, the slightest hint of a grin on her face, which made me realize how cold El Paso women had become – how cold, how calculating, how knowingly deceitful and how willfully duplicitous, but also how intriguing. Several shouts rang out at that point – if I remember correctly, two men shouted out, “No!” and a woman, “Please, let it hold!” – but I was still unable to pry my eyes off of her – it wasn’t that I didn’t want to, but that I couldn’t – until finally, with a great effort, I managed to break free of her hold and look back at the street. The situation was grim, to say the least, which explained the crashing sound behind me as a woman collapsed out of her chair to the floor. I was probably the only one in the restaurant who was aware that this was what had happened, since I threw a quick glance over my left shoulder, seeing the woman, who wore a tight-fitting, leather mini-skirt, lying on the floor in a heap and also noting that no one in her party was paying a bit of attention to her, not even her husband, whose eyes were still riveted, just like everyone else’s, on the window. A part of my mind was telling me to point his wife’s condition out to him, since she was lying quite still, but another part was screaming at me to look back outside, not out of curiosity or for entertainment’s sake, since I had already seen more than my share of this type of action up at the ski resort, but since what went on out there, and how I reacted to it, had such a direct bearing on my chances of ever seeing Dana again. When I looked back outside, I realized that the first officer had slid up against the two-inch wide strip of yellow tape, which had buckled, but held. The problem was, and everyone in the restaurant was surely turning over these same numbers in their minds, if one calculated the extent to which the tape was now bowing under the weight of just the one officer, who was, by far, the thinnest of all of the officers out there, and the angles at which the tops of the two cactuses which held the tape in place were now inclined, and if one then estimated the additional bowing and inclination which would take place once the other two officers, who continued to slide, slowly but surely, toward the first one, made their inevitable impact, it was impossible not to come to the conclusion that the tape would never hold – that it would snap – that the two cactuses would spring back to their original upright positions, but that the officers, who, judging by their facial expressions and by the way they frantically waved their mittens in front of themselves, had also come to the same conclusion, would suffer a far more uncertain fate, since beyond the area which had been cordoned off with yellow tape, the road continued to slope, ever so slightly, yet implacably into the distance as far as the eye could see. “What do you think will happen to them?” Dana asked me, probingly. “I don’t know,” I told her, stone-faced, and then added, “Let’s just hope like hell that it holds.” The next few seconds, which were marked not by the ticking of a clock, but by the shattering of glasses, platters, plates, the clanging of silverware of all types, the smashing of wine bottles, which slipped out of people’s hands as if they had suddenly gone rigid, the swooning and fainting of women, and the cringed-faced groaning of men, seemed, by this measure, like an eternity. The one thing that stood out in my mind, and still does to this day, was the contrast between the slow and steady movement of the two officers sliding along on the ground, who seemed to have resigned themselves to their destiny – to the point that the bottom officer actually arched his back, stiffened his legs, and stuck his arms out to both sides, as if he were flying, while the top officer buried his head between his partner’s shoulder blades and clutched onto him for dear life – and the frantic flapping of arms of the officer so delicately supported by the yellow tape, who, finally, and only after he achieved it did his intention become clear, managed to fling his mittens to the ground just as the other two officers made impact with his legs. This turned out to have been an act of incredible foresight, since his legs were immediately swept out from under him – he now found himself on top of the other two officers, all three of whom drifted slowly underneath the yellow tape, but the fact that he had taken his mittens off allowed him to firmly grasp onto it, while at the same time holding onto the other two officers with his legs, which, once again, left us all with the question of whether the tape and the cactuses, from which many puffs of powdery snow were constantly being shaken free, would hold. As the three men-in-blue continued to slide slowly along, and as the rounded, bowed shape of the tape was gradually transformed into a sharp angle, I found that my mouth had dropped open, and when I realized, out of the corner of my eye, that Dana was studying me again, I left it that way, crowning the image by whispering, “Hold, damn it, hold.” “It held!” shouted the husband of the woman who had crumbled to the floor moments earlier, where she still remained, quite lifeless, and I was the first one to jump to my feet, followed by Dana, who flung her arms around my neck as I lifted her up and spun her in circles. The whole restaurant burst into applause, with shouts of, “They did it!” and, “We’re saved!” A joyful expression on my face, I scanned the room from side to side, looking for Peter, and when I finally found him (trying to hide himself behind another waiter), I winked at him, making sure not to let go of Dana just yet, although she was beginning to squirm slightly in my arms. After we sat back down, he had no choice but to sulk over with the bill, which I immediately paid, leaving him a generous tip. He didn’t say anything, so I told him, “We had a wonderful time,” to which he nodded his head submissively and slunk away in defeat.
Dana immediately began gathering up her purse, as if our date had been scheduled ahead of time to end as soon as the last person had stopped sliding around in the street outside, and I said to her, “We should do this again.” “How does next Sunday sound?” she replied, without looking at me, and I answered, “That sounds fantastic,” and added that we both, “no doubt,” had very busy weeks ahead of us. I regretted this comment after making it, since it caused Dana to look at me strangely, although I was sure, by then, that I had accumulated enough points to carry me through. This turned out to be the case, and as we made our way across the crowded restaurant, several people said, “good-bye” to us – it felt almost as if we were already a couple, although I didn’t dare mention this to Dana – as if the experience we had all shared that afternoon had made us intimate. But when I pushed open the front door, we were greeted by a blast of cold air which caused Dana to shiver and pull her collar tightly around her neck. She looked at me without even a flicker of warmth in her eyes and commented, “You know, I’ve been, ‘OFD’ for several weeks now.” “Well, I must have done something right then,” I said with a smile, placing my hand in the middle of her back, out of fear that she would slip and fall on the icy sidewalk. “Just don’t expect a third date,” she told me, grabbing my arm and flinging it away from her body in a way which seemed overdone, almost as if she were acting, before hurrying off, alone, across the frozen street.
