Winter Moon

rocks a few hundred feet below, powerful waves exploding among them, white spray cast high into the air, and he was falling, falling. He knew, then, that it was only a dream, but he couldn't wake up when he tried. Falling and falling, always closer to death but never quite there, falling and falling toward the jagged black maw of the rocks, toward the cold deep gullet of the hungry sea, falling, falling.
        After four days of increasingly arduous therapy at Westside General, Jack was transferred to Phoenix Rehabilitation Hospital on the eleventh of June.
        Although the spinal fracture had healed, he had sustained some nerve damage.
        Nevertheless, his prognosis was excellent.
        His room might have been in a motel. Carpet instead of a vinyl-tile floor, green-and-white-striped wallpaper, nicely framed prints of bucolic landscapes, garishly patterned but cheerful drapes at the window. The two hospital beds, however, belied the Holiday Inn image.
        The physical therapy room, where he was taken in a wheelchair for the first time at six-thirty in the morning, June twelfth, was well equipped with exercise machines. It smelled more like a hospital than like a gym, which wasn't bad. And perhaps because he had at least an idea of what lay ahead of him, he thought the place looked less like a gym than like a torture chamber.
        His physical therapist, Moshe Bloom, was in his late twenties, six feet four, with a body so pumped and well carved that he looked as if he was in training to go one-on-one with an army tank. He had curly black hair, brown eyes flecked with gold, and a dark complexion enhanced by the California sun to a lustrous bronze shade. In white sneakers, white cotton slacks, white T-shirt, and skullcap, he was like a radiant.apparition, floating a fraction of an inch above the floor, come to deliver a message from God, which turned out to be, "No pain, no gain."
        "Doesn't sound like advice, the way you say it," Jack told him.
        "Oh?"
        "Sounds like a threat."
        "You'll cry like a baby after the first several sessions."
        "If that's what you want, I can cry like a baby right now, and we can both go home."
        "You'll fear the pain to start with."
        "I've had some therapy at Westside General."
        "That was just a game of patty-cake. Nothing like the hell I'm going to put you through."
        "You're so comforting."
        Bloom shrugged his immense shoulders. "You've got to have no illusions about any easy rehabilitation."
        "I'm the original illusionless man."
        "Good. You'll fear the pain at first, dread it, cower from it, beg to be sent home half crippled rather than finish the program-"
        "Gee, I can hardly wait to start."
        "-but I'll teach you to hate the pain instead of fear it-"
        "Maybe I should just go to some UCLA extension classes, learn Spanish instead."
        "-and then I'll teach you to love the pain, because it's a sure sign that you're making progress."
        "You need a refresher course in how to inspire your patients."
        "You've got to inspire yourself, Mcgarvey. My main job is to challenge you."
        "Call me Jack."
        The therapist shook his head. "No. To start, I'll call you Mcgarvey, you call me Bloom. This relationship is always adversarial at first.
        You'll need to hate me, to have a focus for your anger. When that time comes, it'll be easier to hate me if we aren't using first names."."I hate you already."
        Bloom smiled. "You'll do all right, Mcgarvey."

CHAPTER TWELVE.
        
        After the night of June tenth, Eduardo lived in denial. For the first time in his life, he was unwilling to face reality, although he knew it had never been more important to do so. It would have been healthier for him to visit the one place on the ranch where he would find-or fail to find-evidence to support his darkest suspicions about the nature of the intruder who had come into the house when he had been at Travis Potter's office in Eagle's Roost. Instead, it was the one place he assiduously avoided. He didn't even look toward that knoll.
        He drank too much and didn't care. For seventy years he had lived by the motto "Moderation in all things," and that prescription for life had led him only to this point of humbling loneliness and horror. He wished the been-which he occasionally spiked with good bourbon-would have a greater