I WAS TRAPPED at the top of a roller coaster with a yellow-eyed witch and a drunken maniac was taking potshots at us from the Playland midway below.

Call me crazy.

Shivering eighty-five feet in the air in my slippery, size-12 Florsheims on a coaster rail while gravity, high wind and hard rain tag-teamed with two idiots who wanted me dead was a better gig than another night swimming in grief and Bushmills Irish.

Except for the dying part. There’s nothing like imminent death to shock you into thinking that maybe you’ve been taking this breathing gig for granted.

****

Just two hours before, I’d been shuffling out of the Paramount Theatre on 9th and Pine and into the chilly November air, after two lonely showings of The Awful Truth.

It was exactly the kind of screwball comedy that my ex-wife Sophie had loved. Sophie was mad for Cary Grant and in the days before her death, madly in love with me, once again.

I stretched and sampled the amber inside the flask my best pal Godfrey Daniels had given me. I lit up a Lucky and pointed myself westward toward the Rosie, my nickname for the Roosevelt Hotel at 7th and Pine. I stopped at the light, exhaled, and my sore eyes laid hold of Miss Fortuna Soriano alongside me.

“Murder!”

She was beautiful.

I must’ve said it out loud, because she smiled and in Italian said: “Com’è?”

We feasted on warm champagne and cold roast beef in the Rosie’s kitchen. A bottle and a half later, guiding Fortuna Soriano upstairs to sweat under satin sheets seemed the only logical option.

Then she mentioned a dipper and a coaster.

It took awhile, but I finally figured out that Fortuna was talking about the Giant Dipper, the pride of Playland Amusement Park on the south shore of Bitter Lake.

She was requesting a coaster ride on a November night unusually cold even by Seattle standards, and I was drunk enough to say: “Why not?”

With Franco Devlin, a lady could always get what she wanted, until she wasn’t wanted anymore.

Thirty minutes later we were stuck at the Dipper’s highest point above the midway. Our high speed November night’s ride was over.

I was a bit uneasy about the stalling, but Fortuna seemed ecstatic, as if she was in love with the night and the coaster and enchanted by the shy moon, which kept peeking at us from between the clouds and then hiding in them.

She gesticulated wildly, her hands everywhere as she spoke incessantly in Italian and broken English. Her accent was like aural velvet, musical, passionate, and while I didn’t catch every nuance, I understood her red lips and full figure perfectly.

“That sweet man…Signore Eli…velli? I kiss him for stopping the coaster-roller so, um, so close to the sky!”

“Who? Oh, Elavari, I paid him to stop the… coaster-roller right here, where we’re closest to the moon, how you say it, la luna?”

She giggled. “You pay?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

My old friend, night watchman Henry Elavari would have agreed to the private ride even if I hadn’t slipped a few bucks in his shirt pocket. He knew my mother, Querida Devlin. Henry’s like family.

I’d paid only for the ride, not the stall, but I didn’t want Fortuna to know that.

****

The November wind was kicking up a bit and I watched as the first droplet of rain hit just under her right eye and roll down her cheek like a tear. I caressed that check and it warmed to my touch.

“Are you scared?”

“Che?”

“Afraid. Are you afraid?”

She giggled.

“Of you, Franco Devlin?”

From her lips, Devlin sounded like Devil-Inn.

” No, no, Devil-Inn. I fear no thing. I am, how you say, less fear.”

“Me too, Fortuna. I fear no man or no thing.”

She kissed me back, and said:

“Maybe you speak too soon, eh?”

***

FORTUNA LAUGHED and then I laughed and then we laughed, and then I stopped laughing and she didn’t. I opened a flask and took a long drink of amber. By the time I’d finished she was still laughing.

“I have a-something … for you…”

She reached down for something on the floor, offering a pleasant hint of cleavage as she bent forward.

She bent down further, then looked up from between my legs.

I grinned.

She grinned mischievously. Then I could have sworn that I saw her eyes flash from chocolate brown to yellow and back to brown.

Suddenly the lights on the coaster and the few lights on the Midway faded out and then lit up again.

“WHAT THE–”

My “gift” turned out to be a stiletto knife! Its long, deadly blade jumped out of its black handle before I knew what it was, and Fortuna intended to filet me with it.

The lady launched her midnight attack faster than Johnny Weissmuller wrestling a crocodile in Tarzan and His Mate.

I jumped out of the car, which was exactly the wrong thing to do, and slid along the coaster rail in precisely the wrong direction, too far away from the car to take hold of even the edge of it. I stood briefly on the rail, vainly attempting to balance myself when a sudden gust of wind talked me out of it. I quickly genuflected.

The disdainful sky spat rain at me, the spittle multiplied into an angry rain storm, unusually hard, even for Rain City. Each drop the wind blew into my face felt like a well-aimed needle.

And Fortuna was lunging after me, her insults and her dagger stabbing wildly at me.

****

I’M STILL YOUNG, 27, strong. When the quarter century mark hit me like a sucker punch to a glass chin, I recouped by increasing my workouts at Padre Al’s Gym.

Then last Summer, when the car crash killed my Sophie and left my body feeling like a North Coast Limited train wreck, I had to sweat like a madman in the gym to regain my strength. The Padre says I’ve made great progress. I’m a strong guy, tough, tall and heavy with muscles, but let’s face the music: this chassis ain’t exactly built for slip-slide gymnastics high above the Midway in high wind and bitter rain!

Fortuna, on the other hand was younger, smaller, and apparently, a gymnast. She moved easily from the coaster car onto the rail, defying wind, rain and apparently, gravity, as she stabbed at me again, and again, spitting epithets at me in English, Italian and Spanish between knife thrusts, as I twisted left and right in the wind. I was a busy guy just then, dodging a knife, startled by every bullet that hit the railing, and trying to keep from falling.

I scrambled away from her, but made it just far enough away to notice that the track was about to take a decidedly precipitous drop.

She threw the knife toward me and I barely dodged it. I heard it ding against the metal of a lower rail before it fell to terra firma. She cursed even louder than before. It was hard to tell because of the near-darkness but she seemed to be scrambling back toward the coaster car. I couldn’t help musing that either our fearless Fortuna wasn’t so fearless after all, or that she had another weapon in the car, if not a shiv, then maybe a bolt of lightning.

I irrationally prayed that before her first shiv hit the Midway, it would pierce the skull of the twit with the rifle. Then I thought about Henry, and hoped that he’d forgotten us and stumble-bummed his way back to his hiding place.

If Fortuna’s shiv or one of Stroheim’s stray bullets found Henry, he’d leave a widow with six hungry children as well a few spinsters and widows he visited on the sly. Henry is quite a character.

Fortuna had lost her stiletto and I wasn’t dead. Fortuna was not happy. In the wink of an eye the beauty had turned from a warm Italian maiden into one of those murderous Spanish vixen right out of the Sephardi stories my mother used to tell my brother Danny and me. In Spanish, she screamed at me through the howling wind:

“I SHOULD HAVE CUT OFF YOUR TESTÍCULOS WHEN I HAD THE CHANCE!”

“DOES THIS MEAN THAT THE WEDDING IS OFF?”

****
FOLKS SAY THAT Bitter Lake gets its name from its water. For decades an old sawmill that used to stand nearby had dumped logs into the lake. The logs had emitted tannic acid, giving the water a foul taste, but if the water had tickled my palette like champagne, my memories of the lake and the town surrounding it were reason enough to name it “bitter.”

She pretends to be her own city, but Bitter Lake is really a part of northwest Seattle. There is no discernible transition between the two towns. You’re driving your 1936 Ford Roadster on Aurora Avenue in a more or less northerly direction and you’re in Seattle one second and in the next you’re in Bitter Lake. It’s all the same.

As a lad I had a lot of girls from Bitter Lake, but none as pretty as Sophie Madison. We met in January, 1931. I was doing double duty at a dance marathon at the Playland Ballroom, attacking my saxophone with the dance band when I wasn’t on the floor with the Husky Hooligans, a dance relay team comprised of my pals from the University of Washington. Sophie had a delightful wiggle and a smoky voice twice as intoxicating as the bootleg booze we were drinking. Our team came in a distant third, but we didn’t care. We were thrilled not to be dancing anymore and delighted with each other. In a heated fit of drunken confusion, Sophie and I had drafted the Bitter Lake Justice of the Peace into blessing our dirty weekend.

Sixteen months later, on a cool summer’s evening, I was rowing and Sophie was looking back at me through the saddest shutters I’d ever seen. The Seattle sun was sinking into Bitter Lake, and our marriage was going down with it.

Sophie told me that I treated women the way I boxed in the gym. She said that I was all charm and flashy foot work in round one and scored a few hard and sweaty hits in the clenches, but by round two I was out of one ring and into another.

I didn’t argue. She was mostly right.

She tossed her wedding band into the water. It was an expensive baptism. I baptized mine there too, and as I rowed the boat to shore there were no more words between us. No more verbal sparring matches, no more battles of wits, no more jealous fits, no more hits. Not that I ever hit Sophie, but her little fists had stung my chest and face a well-deserved time or two.

I don’t hit women. I inspire them.

Fortuna Soriano, for example, was inspired to creative violence. She was more than willing to gut me like a salmon and happily watch as my innards followed my carcass down to the main drag. She leaned forward from the rail, bending so far downward that I was sure she was going to fall. I couldn’t figure out whether she was defying or collaborating with the phony Jerry on the midway.

SHOOT HIM! SHOOT ME! SHOOT SOMEBODY, YOU FOOL!”

“HE CAN’T HEAR YOU! WE’RE UP TOO HIGH, FORTUNA, AND IT’S TOO RAINY AND WINDY!”

“YOU KILLED MY SISTER!”

Maybe it was the booze, but I couldn’t help laughing. In my jaded past I’d earnestly offered that weak excuse a time or two.

“I DIDN’T KNOW YOU HAD A SISTER!”

This time, finally, it was true. I didn’t know her sister, and if her sister had Fortuna’s disposition, I didn’t want to know her sister. Then again, if she was built like Fortuna, I might.

“Did you laugh, IRISH BASTARD, when you killed her?”

I growled. I considered myself legitimately Irish.

“YOU SHOULD HAVE STABBED THAT SHIV IN MY FEMORAL WHILE YOU HAD THE CHANCE.”

“CHĖ?”

I started sliding and slipping in her general direction.

“YOU’D BETTER HAVE ANOTHER KNIFE, YOU YELLOW-EYED LA BRUJA! , BECAUSE I’M–”

I lost my grip momentarily and my heart was beating in my throat, I forced my arm upward and around the bar.

“–COMING–”

It took nearly all the strength I had left to drag my carcass upward and back onto the rail.

“–AFTER YOU!”

She scrambled back to her coaster car.

Far below us, the baritone with the slurred speech and the exaggerated accent announced his intentions to us. We could barely hear him. We were high above the midway, in the wind and rain, but his voice was amplified as if he was using a megaphone.

“YOU VILL DIE NOW…YAH, YOU VILL DIE!”

Whether he was talking to me or to Fortuna, I didn’t know, but I was presently delighted that the aspiring Erich Von Stroheim’s aim was as awful as his accent. I was thinking it was a good thing that we were so high in the air, and that the wind and rain and the semi-darkness, despite their siding with my enemies, had at least managed to provide me with some protection.

Then, sometime after Fortuna’s attack and at least a dozen of Stroheim’s misspent bullets, I decided that Stroheim would have needed a lucky shot to nail us if we were five feet away. An armless, legless alcoholic with astigmatism in his right eye and a cats-eye marble in his left socket would have had better aim than this jerk.

I was slipping and sliding toward the coaster car, nearly falling twice, but couldn’t shake my desire.

What does it say about me that I was still hoping to nuzzle Fortuna Soriano between satin sheets at the Rosie?

What had my womanizing ever gained for me? Brief. intense pleasures, and blissful, temporary anonymity, to be sure, but also divorce and indirectly, the killing of my sweet Sophie. Not much else, unless you count a knife wound, a gun shot wound, a recent head injury, and over the years, the loss of a gunboat load of dough.

Yet there I was, angling on the slippery edge of a coaster rail, jumping out of my argyles with fright, and still, I was more than willing to help Fortuna escape from her clothing.

I was interested and afraid and irritated as hell that I was still interested and so afraid.

After all, I have a reputation for being an Irish tough guy, despite Hershey chocolate hair and eyes bequeathed by my Spanish mother. My face resembles my Da’s baby face more than my mothers, but I’m tough enough. Jesuit priests at St. John’s had taught me how to box, but the streets of Seattle had taught me how to fight.

I’m six four and two hundred pounds soaking wet. I’ve won more fights than I’ve lost, but the roughest bum this side of Idaho would shudder if his date’s eyes changed color and she suddenly turned from being a willing woman into a murderous wretch.

That kind of stuff isn’t supposed to happen until AFTER the honeymoon.

My right hand felt like it was filled with lead as I grabbed the edge of the coaster car. I could barely make out the image, but Fortuna seemed to be cowering on the floor, mumbling something in Italian, her palms pressed together and pointed upward. Whether she was praying to the Blessed Virgin or to the devil I couldn’t say. It was disconcerting to see my would-be assailant praying at all.

I might have scratched my my rain-soaked head in bewilderment, but I needed both hands to pull the rest of me up, over and into the coaster car to overtake Fortuna.

The girl radiated so much heat that I was sure I could have warmed my ice cold hands over her. Instead I knelt before her.

Even in the midst of angry rain and wind, I couldn’t keep from grinning. Fortuna Soriano, the beautiful and insane was more intoxicating to me than the whiskey had been. She looked up at me, recognized me and smiled sweetly. She started to speak.

As I knelt, her visage faded. Soon she was as transparent as a ghost. And then she was gone. A few seconds later, so was I.

Everything had faded into blackness and then the blackness was nothingness.

The last words I remember hearing were like echoes inside my head.

“I have a-something … for you…”

(DEFLIN’S DEADLINE. Excerpt copyright 2009 by Anthony Royka
All Rights Reserved)