Shallow Graves (25 page)

He closed the door.

“This character you’ve added. That’s me, isn’t it?”

He sat down slowly.

“Some of it’s based on you. Some. It isn’t what I feel about you, it’s not the way I see you. It’s fiction. A story, nothing more than that. Mostly my imagination.”

She lowered her head and read, “ ‘You’re living a dream that the past can’t justify. . . .’ ‘It’s the remoteness of the past that makes it such a safe place for you to live. . . .’ ‘The Age of Aquarius was a long, long time ago. . . .’
Janice.
Christ, Pellam, you could at least have done a better job changing my name.”

“I didn’t—”

“You!” She threw the notebook against the wall. The binding snapped. The pages cascaded to the floor.
“You’re
the one living in a dream, not me. You come into people’s lives—nobody invited you to Cleary—you come into town with the big fantasy, promising to put people into a movie, promising to take people away from here—”

“I never said that.”

She was crying again. Her hair was pasted to her cheeks; she pulled it angrily away. “You didn’t have to
say
it. What the hell did you expect people to think? Here you come, with your van and your camera, studying the town, talking to people, getting to know everyone . . . Getting to know
some
of them very well. You don’t understand the power you’ve got. You don’t understand how desperate people are. Desperate to get out of places like Cleary. And what do they do? They spill their guts to you and you betray them. Why? In the name of what? What word is sacred to
you, Pellam? Art? In the name of Art? Film? Money? How do you justify taking people’s lives and making a movie out of them?”

He stood up and reached out for her. She shook his arms away. “You just can’t drop into someone’s life, take what you want, then leave.”

“I’m sorry.”

She stood up. Walked to the door then stopped. Waiting for something. Neither of them knew what should come next.

“I thought . . .” Janine’s voice faded and she stepped outside, closing the metal door softly behind her.

Pellam sighed. He picked up the screenplay binder then bent to the floor and gathered the pages, one by one.

DRIVING DOWN MAIN
Street, Pellam passed a grocery store and parked, bought a bottle of chardonnay and walked back outside. He looked up and down the street for Janine. No sign of her. And what would he tell her if he saw her? There was no answer for that.

He looked up the street at an approaching car, an American GT of some kind, maybe ten years old, its rear end jacked high. It came bubbling down the street. The driver parked in front of the Cedar Tap and gunned the engine into a sexy growl before he shut it off. He got out and walked into the bar. Pellam walked over to the car, looked inside.

He returned to the Winnebago, fired it up and drove slowly out of town. He rolled both windows down and felt the cool air fill the cockpit.

HE IS DRIVING
fast in a fast car. A Porsche. A Hun car, because in L.A. you must have a German car. It’s not as easy as that, though. You also have to ignore the fact that a German car is the kind to have and it must seem as if you’re the first person on the West Coast to think about owning one. Pellam’s is black. He drives it hard, with the passion of someone who loves speed though not necessarily the machinery that allows the car to drive fast. Whenever anybody says, “Shit, the Germans make good cars,” he always looks surprised, as if they’d just caught on to his secret.

They are going into the desert, Tommy Bernstein and him.

“Thomaso,” Pellam shouts over the huge slipstream. “You’re going to lose your hat.”

And the man does, reaching up too late to keep the stiff, three-hundred-dollar, curly-brimmed cowboy hat from sailing into the hundred-mile-an-hour slipstream.

“Shit, Pellam, turn around.”

Pellam only whoops loudly and speeds up.

Tommy doesn’t seem to mind. Somehow, it would be wrong to stop the little black car. There is an urgency, a sense of mission. Tommy shouts something about the hat and illegal aliens. Pellam nods.

The sun is a plate of hot pressure above them. The wind, which makes their ears ache, is hot.

Los Angeles is behind them. Ahead is nothing but desert.

“John, give me some!” Tommy shouts. He repeats this twice before Pellam hears and four times before he chooses to answer.

“Please!” A moaning wail, a sound that the wind takes and instantly makes vanish.

Pellam tosses the salt shaker underhand. The wind plays hell with the trajectory, but Tommy catches it in desperate, fumbling grabs.

“Not funny.”

“Improves your reflexes.”

Tommy was trying to snort. “Too fast, I can’t—”

Pellam hits the clutch and brake. The car skids and fishtails. When they slow to sixty Tommy can snort the coke. He gives the high sign. Pellam accelerates and refuses the offered shaker.

Pellam feels philosophical. He shouts, “You think the desert’s minimal, right? Bullshit. It isn’t. It’s goddamn complex. Complex like a, you know, a crystal. Like the way colors spread under a microscope. Remember those science films in high school?”

“Yeah,” Tommy shouts. “About gonads and seeds and ovum.” He is grinning like the dirty little boy he likes to portray though he is clearly considering Pellam’s comment. In fact he is considering it desperately. Pellam wishes he hadn’t spoken.

Tommy suffers from terminally ill confidence. The actor had received one L.A. Film Critics’ award and one from Cannes, when he’d been courted and seduced by a big studio lot producer. The money was incredible, the movies worse than awful. His most recent, a critic wrote, could be stuffed and served at a Thanksgiving dinner for the population of the country. Tommy was trying to think of ways to redeem himself. “Don’t be desperate,” Pellam had told him. “This city don’t love desperate men.”

But Tommy snatched up even that advice like a life preserver.

Pellam drives in silence. A half hour later he notices a small road leading off the highway toward a huge rock eased out of the brush and dirty sand. He makes a fast turn and the car skids to a stop out of sight of the road.

They climb out, stretch, pee against rocks.

Tommy asks, “You bring the Geiger counter?”

“What do we need that for?”

“The fucking Army. They test atom bombs here.”

“That’s New Mexico.”

“Fucking no,” Tommy says. “Cruise missiles blasting sheep to hell and gone. I’m scared.” He looks around cautiously.

Pellam says, “There’re no sheep here.”

“What I’m saying! They’re dead. Got blasted into lamb chops. We’re in danger. Our kids’ll glow in the dark.”

“Let’s go to work, hombre.”

From the car they take two heavy garbage cans that ring with glass falling against itself. Pellam drags them toward the rock. There isn’t much shade though there will be in an hour or two. Tommy, now pissed about his hat, rubs suntan lotion on his face and thinning scalp, then pulls a large cooler from the car. This he plants in the sand near the big rise of rock. He returns and struggles to get two lawn chairs out of what pretends to be a backseat.

“German cars, shit,” Tommy says. He drives a Chevy Impala.

Pellam takes empty beer bottles out of the green
bags and sets them carefully on a ridge of dirt and sand about thirty feet away from where Tommy plants the lawn chairs. He surveys his handiwork then opens a pineapple-printed beach umbrella and sticks it into the ground between the chairs.

Pellam finishes setting out the bottles. He calls, “How many pages?”

Tommy flips through a plastic-bound manuscript. “One seventeen.”

“Need one more.”

Tommy pulls another bottle from the cooler, pops the lid with a church key and drinks it down. He tosses it to Pellam, who plants it at the end of the row.

One hundred seventeen bottles.

They sit in the chairs, facing the bottles. Tommy takes another snort from the shaker.

He says, “Can I have the Python. Please?”

From a large, battered attaché case, Pellam takes two pistols. He keeps the Ruger .44 for himself and hands Tommy the Colt. He places yellow-and-green boxes of shells between them.

Each now has a copy of the script. On the title page: “Central Standard Time. By John Pellam and Tommy Bernstein.”

They begin reading aloud and rewriting the script. They correct each other, changing dialogue, argue. Pellam is quieter and grimmer. Tommy is boisterous. He’ll shout, then stand and stalk around, sit again.

When they finish eleven pages—the end of the first scene—they stuff cotton into their ears, load the pistols and with fifteen shots between them take turns disintegrating the first eleven bottles.

The rules of their game.

Tommy says, spinning the cylinder of his gun, “You remember that scene, what was it from? Some old jungle movie? Stewart Granger’s aiming at Deborah Kerr’s head? She’s scared, doesn’t know what’s going on. Then, blam! He wastes a boa constrictor right behind her. I always wanted to play that scene. Why don’t you go sit over next to the rocks, Pellam? They got snakes in the rocks.”

“Yeah, hell with snakes,” Pellam says, pulling a beer from the cooler. “I always wanted to shoot me an actor.”

They work until eleven that night, and blow the last three bottles apart in the headlights of the tiny German car surrounded by the sound of its bubbling exhaust. They are shivering and it takes ten rounds each to hit the last glistening bottle.

“This fucking movie’s going to make us, Pellam!” Tommy shouts. “We’re going right to the top!” And he empties the gun into the night sky.

THE HOUSE WAS
completely quiet.

Meg had a little time until Pellam would be back. She took her coffee and walked up the stairs. She paused, then sat on the landing for a long time, looking into the hall and those portions of the den and living room she could see. The parquet floor, the furniture. The house seemed different, a stranger’s home. She didn’t recognize it. There was nothing unpleasant about the sensation; it was one of those moments when you focus on a familiar object—a doorknob, a chair, your own little finger—and it seems absurd and alien to you. This was her house, the house she’d always loved. Hers and Keith’s and Sam’s. Only something was different.

Meg went into the bedroom, got dressed. She tied her hair in a ponytail. Her hands paused, holding the ribbon above her neck.

The doorbell rang. She bounded down the stairs like Sam on Christmas morning.

She swung the heavy door open. She’d already prepared a wry comment for Pellam about Janine and was ready to deliver it.

But she blinked in surprise.

Wexell Ambler stood there, looking shy, leaning against the jamb. “I was driving past. Saw your car was in the drive. The Cougar was gone. I couldn’t wait till tomorrow.”

Meg instinctively looked back into the house to make certain they were alone. Then she glanced behind Ambler.

“Is it Mr. Pellam, Mommy?” Sam called. She wondered if Ambler could hear what the boy had asked. Didn’t seem he had.

“No, honey. I’ll be outside for a minute,” she shouted. Her hand still on the doorknob, Meg said to Ambler, “Keith’s at work.”

“I want to talk to you. I
have
to talk to you.”

“I’m expecting some company.”

Ambler had no reaction to this. She was trying to decide whether to tell him who the company was if he asked. He didn’t. He said, “It won’t take long.” Though he said it slowly, the words full of meaning, as if he wanted their conversation to last for the entire evening.

She looked behind her again, up the stairs toward Sam’s room, then stepped outside and closed the door behind her. It didn’t latch.

He kissed her on the cheek and she kissed him back, though he’d have to be drunk or crazy not to sense the hesitancy.

“I had to see you.”

“Is everything okay?”

He looked at her in surprise. “Okay, sure. I was worried about how Sam is. You never called to tell me if he’s all right.”

“He’s fine. He’ll be fine.”

“He’s a wonderful boy,” Ambler said.

They walked to the end of the porch and stood at the railing, looking out across the moist lawn, glistening in slight radiance from the house lights.

“What is it, Wex?”

“About what I asked. About marrying me.”

She turned to him. He was such a tough man. A dangerous man too, she supposed. That bodyguard thug of his, Mark, for instance. Also, the way he liked her to be helpless, almost cowering when they made love. (Meg Torrens believed sex was a window to your soul.) She’d never actually said no to him before and she wondered if there was a risk to her if she did now. She felt a chill colder than the air.

What should she say?

She suddenly remembered a line from one of Pellam’s movies. A character has to make a decision about turning a friend over to the police. He says to his wife, “The most important decisions are always made by our hearts.”

She let her heart answer now.

“Wex . . .” She looked away, fixing her eyes on a fingernail clipping of a moon over a dark wad of trees. “I can’t see you anymore.”

She wondered if it would be a total surprise. If he’d nod slowly and walk away. If he’d fly into a rage. She honestly didn’t know.

He didn’t answer for a moment and she heard his breathing, remembered the deep sound from the times they’d lain together.

Tension filled her body, turned her to stone.

“Were you going to come to the place yesterday and tell me that?” he asked. “Or were you just going to let me figure it out on my own.”

She hesitated and for the first time in their relationship lied to him. “No, I was going to come.”

Meg glanced toward the house and the driveway and then took his arm. He was shaking. Anger? Sorrow? The cold?

Will he hurt me?

She continued. “I’m sorry, Wex. I loved every minute we spent together, but . . .” She was parsing carefully, but she found she had no idea of what words she could attach to her thoughts to express them right. “But it’s just time for it to be over with.”