Shallow Graves (17 page)
“Movie people.”
“Are just like everybody else,” she countered.
“You’re glad he’s staying, aren’t you?”
“Wex, what’s this all about?”
“Drugs and—”
She said, “You take it on your shoulders to be the moral protector of the town and you scare all these people into thinking that the big bad world is going to gobble them up alive.”
That made him nervous. He considered. No, there was no way she could know about what Mark had done. She wouldn’t be here if she suspected that. He said, “You give me more credit than I deserve.”
“You bully people.”
“As if I could bully the whole town of Cleary.” After a moment, he said, “Did you talk to him about a job?”
“No.”
“Would you?”
“I considered it. I thought—”
He scoffed. “You thought you’d be Lana Turner.”
“I’m wasted here. My life is wasted. I should . . .”
“You should what?” he asked, edging back toward desperation.
“Nothing.”
“You’re life’s not wasted at all.”
“I feel like I’m just drifting.”
“How can you say that? You’ve made
my
life something wonderful.”
The lines fell like a lead sinker. She squeezed his shoulder but he was glad for the darkness. His face burned with embarrassment.
He asked, “Have you ever thought about moving?”
A pause. “I’ve thought about it.”
“You’d just leave, without talking to me about it?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth. I didn’t say that. I’ve got a lot of possibilities.”
“Some of them involve me, some of them don’t. I see.”
“Wex.” There was a bony edge to her voice. Ambler didn’t believe he’d heard this sound before. He wondered if they were going to have their first serious argument. That would be very bad—in light of what he was planning to tell her.
She continued, “Don’t disrupt things. Between us, I mean.”
“Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing’s wrong. What do you mean?”
This was sounding like the conversations he used to have with his wife. Before he fell out of love with her.
He backed off. “You just seem . . . I don’t know.”
She said, “We were just having a discussion. Don’t take it personally.”
“You’re the one who seems to be picking a fight.”
“I am not.”
After a moment he felt her stiffen and draw away from him. Only millimeters—but it was enough so that he refused to do what he instinctively wanted to and touch her leg in a chaste way, seeking forgiveness for his vague crimes.
The day wasn’t going as he’d planned. Not at all. He wished they hadn’t made love. It tilted the balance of power against him. Men and women. Never changes.
He felt a shudder of pain and anger course through him.
There was silence for a long moment. He debated then wiped his sweating palm on the sheet. “Can I ask you something?”
She didn’t answer.
Ambler said, “We’ve been seeing each other now for, what? Six months?”
She said a neutral, “About that.”
“I was thinking. . . . I’m not good at this.” (The same way he hadn’t been very good at asking her out the first time, he recalled.)
She softened. He knew that she had a weakness for chivalrous, struggling men. “What are you trying to say, Wex?”
At least the terrible edge was gone from her voice.
His mind went blank, then he blurted: “I think we should get married.”
He wanted to be light about it. He wanted to joke. Like middle-aged couples on sitcoms. Snappy comebacks. Rejoinders. Mugging for the camera. He couldn’t think of a single thing else to say.
And from her: Utter silence. As if she’d even stopped breathing.
It couldn’t have been that she’d never considered this before, could it? Was he so far off base that he’d completely misjudged? His heart pounded. He actually heard it.
Her hand touched his arm. “We said we’d never think about it.”
“That was before.” He looked futilely for some appropriate milestone in their relationship—the twenty-fifth time they’d had sex? The twelfth candlelit dinner together? The sixtieth time they’d laughed at a private joke?
She sat up and reached for the night table. The light snapped on. It was a low bulb, which she’d asked him to put in the lamp. He knew she hated bright lights.
Meg Torrens pulled the comforter around her shoulders and said, “Oh, Wex.”
And in his name, spoken through a loving, gentle smile, he heard the word No as clearly as if she’d shouted it.
TO SLEEP IN A SHALLOW GRAVE/
BIG MOUNTAIN STUDIOS
EXT. ROAD TO BOLT’S CROSSING, NEAR FOREST—DAY
ECU: JANICE’S FACE. It is not aged so much as weathered. You can see in it the hampered beauty of a woman at forty. An earth mother. She was at Woodstock. She cried at Woodstock and got stoned there. The long hair falls across her face, subdividing it into patches of ruddy skin. She brushes it aside. The wind pushes it back.
MEDIUM ANGLE: SHEP. He’s leaning against his motorcycle. The lights should be gelled magenta to put an aura on the chrome, harmonizing with the sunset that’s approaching behind them. He’s torn. He’s told her he’s leaving, and he wants to go. But also wants desperately to find something about her that will keep him from leaving. Is it pity? Or is it something more genuine, more mutual? He doesn’t know.
Pellam sat in his hot camper—though he was really in Bolts’ Crossing, not Cleary, New York.
Which was where he needed to be at the moment.
In Bolts’ Crossing, there was no stinking hulk of a car, punctuated with scorched tufts of upholstery shooting outward like patches of hair.
In Bolts’ Crossing, the only people lying still in funeral parlors weren’t dead at all and in four scenes would be prowling around in flashbacks, lusting and ornery and laughing.
In Bolts’ Crossing, people like Marty never died.
CUT TO:
MEDIUM ANGLES, CROSSCUTTING between Janice and Shep
JANICE
I took a chance you might be here.
SHEP
(Avoiding her eyes) Brakes gave me some trouble. Thought I should fix them before I left.
JANICE
I was thinking about what you said. Last night? About me.
SHEP
I was mad. I—
JANICE
You were right. I keep looking for answers in the
past. If I’m not careful, there won’t be any future left.
Pellam pulled the sheet out of the typewriter with a satisfying buzz of the platen. He wrote
Insert 58A
across the top and slipped it into the script, which he’d unfastened. It was now just a stack of a hundred fifty sheets of wrinkled paper, filled with his handwriting and interleaved with inserts like this one.
He put his hand on it, then picked it up and riffled the pages, feeling the thin breeze on his jaw.
He walked to the front of the camper and sat in the driver’s seat, looking out the grimy windshield. Now he wasn’t seeing the cinematographer’s stunning dusk in Bolt’s Crossing but the winding country road that led into Cleary.
The Winnebago’s engine turned right over. He drove downtown, parked and stepped out into the brilliant sun. Blinking his way along Main Street he found a stationery store that did photocopying. He gave them the script and asked for a copy. The polite acned teenage boy behind the counter told him the job would take about twenty minutes. Pellam offered to pay now but the boy said, “No, sir, no hurry. Want to make sure you like the job.”
Pellam hesitated then said, “Sure,” remembering that he wasn’t in Los Angeles or New York and that there was no reason to be suspicious of politeness.
He wandered out into the street, blazing with its raw sunlight, to get a cup of coffee. He saw Marge’s across the street but, thinking of the day he and Marty had gone there, decided against it. Also, he preferred to go someplace where he wasn’t so well
known. He didn’t want to be adored by the help, he didn’t want to talk about Marty, about parts in movies, about Hollywood.
He walked into a drugstore, with its snaking turquoise lunch counter and chrome and red vinyl stools.
“Hey, Mr. Pellam.” From one of the clerks—a middle-aged man Pellam had never seen.
So much for anonymity.
And for hostility too. Whatever the official opinion about drugs and movies, the half dozen people in the place all glanced at him with meaningful, eye-involved smiles that said,
I’m not asking but if you want to haul me off to Hollywood and put me in a sitcom episode of your choice, go right ahead.
He nodded, walked to the pay phone and tried to make a credit card call. His company card number had been canceled. He sighed and billed it to his personal card. After five minutes the assistant producer came on the line. The boy was in high spirits.
“Yo, hombre. You better hope Lefty don’t have a homing device set up. ’Cause he do, there’s a scout-seeking missile aimed for your crotch this minute.”
“He hasn’t unfired me, huh?”
“Whoa, boy. You came real close to cratering that movie but I think it’s going to fly. He bent over for one of the money cows and I guess it worked out okay. Shysters said Marty’s accident was a force majeure. So he’s got another couple of weeks.”
“You got a location?”
“Not yet, but they’ve got a free-lancer down in Pennsylvania. Season’s later. Gives ’em more time to shoot.”
Pellam said, “Pennsylvania’s all wrong.”
“I’ll connect you with Lefty. You can tell him.”
“You sound pretty calm.”
“I’m medicated.”
“I’m going to do something and I need your help.”
“No.” Cheerful, cheerful, cheerful. “Absolutely not.”
“Listen to me. I’m going to—”
“John, clue me in—are you trying to get
me
fired?”
“Every assistant producer gets fired. It’s a rite of passage.”
A sigh. “Okay, talk to me.”
“I doctored the script.
“What script?”
“Shallow Grave.”
“Hmmm. Why?”
“I want you to get the changes to Bob. Is he still directing?”
“Pellam, are you mad?”
“Don’t show them to Lefkowitz. Only the director.
Répétez après moi.”
“No.”
“Answer my question. Has Lefty fired Bob?”
“No, and he can’t. He’s in too deep. His deadline problems are almost as bad as his herpes.”
“Good. I’m sending it by Express Mail.”
“John, no.”
“To you.”
“John, there’s no way they’re going to hire you back.”
“That’s not what I care about. I don’t even want a credit. It’s too good a story to screw up with that half-assed script. Get it to Bob and don’t let Lefty see my changes.”
“John—”
“Bye.”
“—no.”
Before he sat down at the lunch counter Pellam noticed a rack of sunglasses. His had met the same fate as his Polaroid, thanks to Meg Torrens’s little Toyota. He decided to buy another pair. He noticed some mirrored teardrop shapes. He tried them on, checked them out in the mirror.
He smiled. Perfect. Yep:
Cool Hand Luke.
The middle-aged man behind the counter said, “They’re you.”
“How d’I look? Like a small-town sheriff?”
“Yessir, you could man a speed trap any day with those.”
“Take ’em,” Pellam said.
“You want the fake leather case?”
“That’s okay.”
He sat at the counter. The clerk didn’t seem much interested in a Hollywood career and just talked to Pellam about traveling, of which he’d done a great deal. He told Pellam how he and his wife had taken this year’s vacation in Peru and Chile.
“The air is the thing you don’t think about. The altitude, you know. You walk a couple blocks—well, they don’t really have blocks but you know what I mean—and you’ve gotta lie down and take a nap. It’s exhausting! I mean, I thought I was in good shape. I can chop a couple cord of wood and no problem. But I was beat. And there are all these little old women steaming along like it’s nothing to them and trying to sell you pottery and these blankets and jewelry. They see money and they run right at you. They sprint! In air like that. It’s all what you’re used to.” The man summarized: “Everything’s relative.”
“Suppose so,” Pellam said, and listened to the history of Machu Picchu.
Pellam checked his watch, said, “I’ve got to pick up something.”
“We did the Orinoco too but I didn’t see one crocodile.” He grimaced.
“Life’s full of disappointments.” Pellam stood and put his deputy glasses on.
“No disappointment at all. Sally and me’re going back in October. We’ll find one. I promise you that.”
Pellam wished him luck.
PELLAM PARKED THE
camper in the driveway of the Torrens house (the word “homestead” came to mind). Meg stepped out onto the porch, then smiled and jumped down the few steps to the walk that led to the driveway, wiping her hands on a scallopy apron and looking just like a housewife out of a 1960s sitcom.
A housewife, however, in a tight, blue silk blouse, the top two (or was it three?) buttons undone.
Eyes up, boy.
My God, she’s got a freckled chest.
Pellam just loved freckles on women.
“What brings you here, Pellam?”
“Came to borrow something.”
She blinked. To joke, or not to joke? “Butter churn?”
“Naw.”
“Bear grease for your muzzle-loader?” she asked.
Gotcha.
He smiled indulgently. “As a matter of fact,” Pellam said, “you’re talking to one of the only people in the state of New York that’s fired a Sharps .54.”
And she didn’t miss a beat. “A Sharps? Forget
about it, boy. That’s a drop-block breechloader, not a muzzle-loader.”
Gotme.
She laughed hard at his jolted expression. “Girls usually melt at gun talk, huh?”
He said, “Nobody in the goddamn world except me and born-again gun nuts know about Sharps anymore.”
“I never fired one but my daddy had one. He collected guns. I’ve got myself a Springfield breechloader in the den.”
“No.” He laughed. “A forty-five seventy?”
She nodded. “Carbine. With a saddle ring and everything.”