Hollywood Gothic (2 page)

Which was when things began to go wrong.

The clouds were suddenly empurpled, rich and dark like overripe blueberries, and the tiny aircraft seemed in his mind’s eye to have become a shaft launched at the tightly stretched membrane covering the fruit. The darkness grew deeper in seconds, and then they had penetrated the membrane, been absorbed into the pulp of the dense clouds, and Challis realized that it was snow swirling from the cavernous blackness all around them. The gale increased at the same time and the metal of the fuselage and wings cried out, pulling at the rivets to get free and go with the wind. The other prisoner slumped sideways, dangling forward from the seat belt, his head blocking the narrow aisle. He hiccuped wetly and moaned as the bottom dropped away again and then slid steeply for several seconds: the descent ended abruptly as if ropes had yanked them to, and with a gagging sound the man emptied his stomach onto the floor. Challis looked away. The stench broke across him like a filthy wave, and he turned back to the window.

Without warning his forehead was slammed against the edging of the window as the plane skidded wildly to one side. Pain ricocheted down through his eyeballs. He was pitched hard against his seat belt, felt it dig into his belly. The guard in the seat across the aisle said, “Holy shit!” and with a cracking sound his seat belt gave way. He came flying sideways and slammed into Challis, pinning him against the curving bulkhead. Challis smelled the Tic Tacs on the man’s breath, feebly tried to push him away, thanking God the handcuffs had been taken off once they were in the air. For a moment they struggled to right themselves; then a swift bank to the left sent the guard sprawling backward into the aisle, where the edge of a seat back caught him in the ribs and knocked him to all fours.

The copilot burst into the passenger compartment, his face white, his eyes swinging wildly from the doped prisoner dribbling a fresh geyser of vomit to the groggy guard who was swearing and grabbing at his back and trying to avoid the mess in the aisle. “Everybody all right back here?”

“Sure, man,” Challis said, “this is great, just great, y’know?” He touched his forehead, saw blood on his fingers.

The guard looked up, pushing himself to his feet. “Hey, what the hell’s going on?” There was no time for an answer as the plane dropped abruptly again and the copilot was flung back through the doorway and out of sight into the cockpit. The sound of static erupted from the radio beyond the doorway, then stopped entirely. The door slammed shut, flew back open, and the copilot reappeared. “Hang on,” he yelled over the storm and the creaking metal and the groans of the sick and wounded. “Little trouble, nothing to worry about … wind’s got us off course.” He pointed at the sick prisoner. “He’s okay, is he?” The pilot’s voice came from the cockpit, loud, unintelligible, angry, and the pale copilot disappeared again. The guard lurched forward, tugging at the deadweight of the doped man, trying to get him back into his seat. Challis strained to see beyond the blowing snow, but it was useless. How far had they dropped? It was impossible to guess. He leaned back, feeling nauseated. He tried to swallow, but he was too dry: his throat opened, closed, and he began to cough.

“Goddamn toy airplane,” the guard growled, wedging himself back into the seat. “Can you believe it? They never should of let us off the ground in this thing … you all right? Your head?”

“Scared,” Challis said.

“Bet your ass, scared—”

The plane plummeted again, more severe than the drops that had come before. Challis’ breath left him; he looked out the window again and felt his eyes widen. They had fallen beneath the clouds and through the thick blowing snow which mixed with drifting bubbles of vapor hanging between the mountaintops, and he saw that they were flying in a valley with densely forested slopes on either side of them. His view wobbled as the winds whacked at the stubborn little plane. Off to the side he saw a blue-gray flatness of lake, murky behind the snowstorm. The thick fir trees seemed almost black, and he couldn’t see the tops of the mountains: just the blackish menace of the cliff walls. The engines throbbed and the plane struggled upward, desperately trying to vault whatever lay ahead. They slid off sideways and turned slowly, back toward the lake and crosswise against the wind, which was trapped and capricious in the valley. The guard stared out the window, knuckles whitened against the back of the seat ahead of him. Challis was frightened, couldn’t speak. A downdraft swept them at the lake, a great paw of wind swiping at them, and he closed his eyes again. When he opened them they seemed to be skimming across the water, fighting for altitude against the great hand pressing them down, pushing them into the lake. Whitecaps rose like a bed of sawblades, whirring.

Finally the pressure relaxed and they were pushed upward, flung ahead, speed increasing as they swung toward the hillside. Challis couldn’t estimate air speed, but the tops of the fir trees were flickering darkly thirty feet below as they grabbed for enough height to keep them alive. It took forever. Where, where was the top of the mountain? At the next glance the treetops seemed closer, and then he heard a cry from the cockpit: “We ain’t gonna make it, Charlie …
we ain’t gonna make it
.”

The last thing he saw before turning himself into a huddled ball wedged as tightly as possible between the seats was the guard’s gray face, turned toward him, mouth open in a soundless scream, eyes round like black pinpoints of terror.

The sound of the engines cut out.

The weight of the plane whisked them through the first few treetops, but in a matter of three or four seconds they began plowing into heavy branchwork and thicker trunks, and the wings flickered away like large silver birds and the fuselage tipped sideways, seemed to roll glidingly down the dense green boughs slowly, bouncing almost softly. Perhaps the feeling of gentleness was entirely in Challis’ head: the evidence, which included the decapitation of the leathery-skinned pilot by the sheared glass of the windshield, the breaking of the copilot’s neck, the fatal concussing of the guard, who bounced around the cabin’s interior like a puppet whose master was suffering a conniption fit, and the strangulation of the doped prisoner, who somehow slid down through his seat belt until it caught him under the chin and wrung his neck—the evidence gave no indication of gentleness.

When the rolling had stopped, Challis was cramped, upside down, and his own blood was running out of his nose. One leg had been bent unnaturally against the metal seat back, his trouser leg was torn, there was blood smeared across his kneecap, and the knuckles of both hands were scraped raw against metal which might otherwise have done even more damage to his head. Without really considering what had just happened, he used all his strength to lever himself out of the upside-down awkwardness. He saw the corpses of the guard and the other prisoner, smelled the flight fuel, which was undoubtedly leaking from ruptured lines, and reached out to steady himself. He missed whatever he had been reaching for and fell, lightheaded and in shock, forward onto what had been the ceiling of the cabin and was now the floor. Face to face with the strangled prisoner, whose tongue and eyeballs were ruptured and bleeding and protruding, he fainted.

G
OLDIE ROTH HAD NEVER REALLY
grown up, which was both good and bad. Good, because she remembered her childhood in remarkably acute detail, due in large part, Challis had always presumed, to the fact that she had never entirely left it. She remembered the parties at which her famous mother and powerful father had presided, with an eye and ear for literal recall which is common among the young. For instance, her grandfather, Solomon Roth, came more fully to life in her wicked little recollections than he ever quite seemed in real life; and she had a sure hand at literary caricature when it came to describing Solomon Roth’s famous employees.

When she finally put together a novel—which was widely held to be a public exorcising of her own private demons—it dealt with her coming of age at “Bella Donna,” the unfortunate name of the Bel Air mansion where they all lived and which was destroyed in a famous fire. It was not exactly a loving portrait of those years, and one rather good review was headlined, “Slow Poison by Tincture of Bella Donna.” It sold very well on the West Coast and appeared fleetingly on
The New York Times
’s best-seller list. The paperback edition eventually brought in nearly half a million dollars, and that was as far as her literary career went. But she was finally independent of the family—that is, her father, Aaron Roth—which was just as well, because her welcome in Bel Air, Holmby Hills, and the other prominent outposts of the film community, while never very warm, was effectively worn out. A lot of people were put out about what she had written, particularly those individuals making appearances in the novel’s pages under funny names but always with the right initials. Those most irritated were sometimes heard to gloat that Goldie never appeared at the Bel Air Country Club following the book’s publication, a minor triumph, however, since she had never appeared there before the book’s publication, either. But, still, she was a kind of outcast in her own country. She was no longer welcome at many private homes where she had once been a regular decoration, and for a time Seraglio, the new postfire mansion, was off-limits, as well. Solomon Roth had fought to rescind her banishment and, as always, had finally prevailed. But it had all been quite an ordeal, though vastly amusing to Goldie, who was in her mid-twenties and really didn’t give a shit.

So maybe it wasn’t good that she remembered everything. It depended on your point of view, which, Challis reasoned, made it just like everything else in life. From his point of view, at least when he first met her, it was good. Her unfettered lifestyle, her irreverence and wit—however childish and rude—at the expense of the show-business Establishment turned him on: he was introduced to her at Aaron and Kay’s annual Fourth of July holocaust shortly before the storm accompanying publication broke. He had won his Oscar a couple of years before for a film Aaron Roth had personally produced. When he tore himself away from his typewriter on the Fourth of July, he was working on an adaptation of Kipling’s
The Light That Failed,
for which Aaron and Maximus were paying him $250,000. It was never produced but he got into Goldie’s pants that first night, a turn of events which reinforced his basic belief that life is composed of a little of this and a little of that.

In addition to her natural sense of the absurd and a wonderfully dirty mouth, there was something else very good about Goldie—the way she looked. Challis was reminiscent in those days of a charming character from a George Axelrod comedy, vaguely mid-thirtyish, polished loafers and baggy cashmere sweaters, a tendency to drink too much and to be rather funny when he did; Goldie was in the full flush of her yellow-and-brown California-girl look then, and it hadn’t begun to go stale and come apart like aging hollandaise, the way that particularly delectable look so frequently, so horribly did. Seeing her for the first time, coming off the tennis court with her legs and arms and hair all honey-colored and her mouth jutting in a pout that was going to become awfully familiar, he was a dead duck. It was her manner, too: childish, spoiled, capricious, given an attractive texture by extremes of enthusiasm, high spirits, and anger. You didn’t fall in love with a creature like Goldie Roth. You wanted her as a trophy. There was one immutable truth about the prototype; it was the key to their allure, the cause of their undoing, and it never seemed to change: they liked being trophies. What they wanted was a man feeling lucky and proud to have somehow reached the pinnacle and gotten one of these rare and wonderful and doomed birds of passage for himself. But when the trophy developed a patch of tarnish here and some wine-and-cigarette breath there, when every six months or so brought a deposit of cellulite or some goddamn thing that required hugely expensive treatments by the latest European seer, when suddenly the trophy sat awhile on the shelf … why, then they wondered what it was about them that had become so unlovable. They forgot that they had defined the rules. The process never seemed to change. Challis had seen it happen a hundred times among people he knew. But watching this particular girl, with all the unimaginable tarnish and rust and nastiness just out of sight over the Beverly Hills, all Challis knew was that this blond, tan, tennis-playing trophy was exactly the trophy he’d been looking for.

Later, when they had been married awhile, he looked up from his typewriter and saw her lying naked in the sun on the deck of their beach house. She had white plastic globes where her eyes should have been and her belly kept tensing, then relaxing, tensing, relaxing. She was doing vaginal isometrics, which were all the rage that year, or so she informed him, and that was when it was getting on toward the bad part. Staying a child was becoming very hard work and the returns were diminishing. It wasn’t enough for her that she looked fine, tawny, lean: she knew by then that being a child of nature and impulse was wearisome, for Challis, for herself, for anybody who knew her. Yet she was lost looking for what role she was going to play next, now that she was over thirty.

Challis sipped his gin and tonic, listened to the crashing surf, squinted at the sunshine hitting the Malibu stretch of ocean and glaring nervously off a million waves and eddies. You could go blind watching the sunlight on the water, reflecting like an infinity of mirrors. Somebody famous ran past on the beach and waved at him, a sheepdog floundering happily behind, getting his feet wet in the surf. Goldie was listening to a rock radio station, her naked stomach and fingers jerking to the beat. At one time, a time he could barely remember, he’d have gone crazy at the sight of that expanse of brown flesh and curly hair. Beside her on the wooden deck a can of diet soda lay on its side where she’d knocked it over, the liquid staining the towel. He had a habit of looking at such scenes, any scenes really, and thinking about where the camera should be placed. Sometimes it made him angry because it removed him from reality; other times it kept him from cracking up.