Stars Screaming (10 page)

“I am being realistic. Why do you think we’re having breakfast? Because we’re friends, Jack. For almost thirty years! And friends help each other out.”

Jack’s face remained impassive as he watched his sleek brown Jag pull to the curb.

“I need a picture,” Max said again, his voice becoming higher as he geared up his nerve. “Let’s do something together. We’ll make a fortune.” Jack started to step away but Max delayed him with a hand on his sleeve. “Jack, you gotta help me.”

“I’m already rich,” Jack reminded Max, and gently pulled his arm away. “I don’t need a partner. I’m sorry.”

“That’s right. Just brush me off,” Max said loudly as Jack tipped the parking valet and slid behind the wheel of his Jag. “You don’t need me. You don’t need anyone. But don’t forget about
her
," he called out, his voice sounding vengeful. “Don’t forget about Lucy Alvarado.”

Instead of heading directly home, Max drove west on Sunset until he reached the Pacific Coast Highway. At Topanga Canyon Road he stopped at a small grocery for a six-pack of Hires Root Beer and a package of chocolate Malomar cookies. He continued driving north with the windows down, becoming more and more comforted by the sound of the ocean and the Mozart symphony playing on KFAC. Near Point Dume his eyes became heavy, and a mile or so later he pulled into a deserted parking lot adjacent to Zuma Beach. He took off his
tie, loosened his belt, stretched out on the seat, and began to hum, almost inaudibly, the theme from the movie
High Noon.

Thirty minutes later an ancient Studebaker turned into the parking lot with gas-blue smoke spewing from the exhaust. The driver jumped out, wearing a full Santa Claus suit, complete with white beard and wig. With him was a carload of unruly, hungry-looking children, who pummeled each other as they raced down to the sand. Lagging behind, tugging a Dalmatian puppy on a rope leash, was a girl of about ten with fuzzy blond hair and red welts on her ankles.

“Violet,” she screamed, and a stiff ocean breeze lifted her sun dress over her hips, “you better be good, or I’m gonna hurt you bad.”

Max chuckled; then he saw the little girl staring at him through the windshield.

“Who are you?” the little girl asked, yanking the leash so hard that the puppy yelped as she flipped over on her back.

“My name is Max.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m resting,” Max said, reaching for his cock and feeling it grow. “Come over here.”

“Why?”

“I want to show you something.”

“Come on, Julie,” a little boy shouted, the wind carrying his voice up from the shoreline. “Come on!”

“I gotta go,” the little girl said. “I gotta go find my dad.”

As the little girl skipped away, a large wave crashed on the beach and a single cloud slid by the sun, darkening the ocean.

An hour later a Starline Fantasy Tour bus turned right off Sunset and moved slowly up Tigertail Road. Bonnie Simpson was sitting in the seat directly behind the driver, whistling tunelessly while she rolled up her movie star map and gently slapped her thigh. When the driver said, “Now we are approaching a house that is owned by Henry Fonda,” Bonnie removed a .22 caliber pistol from her purse. Then, with an expression of gravity on her face, she pointed the pistol at the driver’s head and said, “Please pull over.”

Five

Bonnie: With Cameo Appearances by Ricky Furlong and Clay Tomlinson

Bonnie Simpson left Omaha in 1950, shortly after her son was born, and for the next three years she cropped her hair short like a boy and traveled aimlessly around the Midwest, spending most of her time in a series of detention centers and juvenile jails. Around the time of the grain harvest in the summer of 1953, she was caught hopping a freight in western Kansas and sent to live with a foster family on a farm outside of Topeka.

There everything she did was wrong, and she was beaten and repeatedly raped by her foster father and his teenage son. She finally escaped on Christmas Day, in the middle of a brutally cold winter, but shortly afterward she was taken into custody in Joplin, Missouri, where she was found living in an abandoned soap factory. She became a ward of the state and was transferred to the Mapleton School for Girls in Bascom, a town located high up in the Ozark Mountains.

Bonnie was released from Mapleton on May 18, 1954, her eighteenth birthday, the same day that a boy named Clay picked her up hitchhiking
near Davenport, Iowa, in the heat of the afternoon. He was driving a faded blue 1950 Pontiac that he’d stolen the day before from a parking lot in Terre Haute, Indiana.

They drove west for the next six hours without exchanging a word, stopping only to gas up or take a leak. Near Omaha, Nebraska, Clay lowered the radio and coasted to a stop on the shoulder of the highway. “We’re broke and nearly out of gas,” he said, his slit eyes staring ahead. “I gotta do a crime.”

“I’m not gonna help you,” Bonnie said.

“That’s okay,” he replied, adjusting the rearview mirror as he accelerated back into traffic. “I didn’t ask.”

When Clay pulled in front of the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Omaha, there was a long line of young people waiting to see
A Star Is Born
, starring Judy Garland and James Mason.

Bonnie said, “I met Judy Garland once. I went to a party at Bing Crosby’s house, and she was there.”

“Sure thing.”

“I did. I even went to the horse races with her and Van Johnson and Janet Gaynor. Audie Murphy was there too.”

“And I’m Ted Williams.”

“Don’t believe me.”

“I don’t.”

Bonnie opened the door and stepped inside the shade from the marquee. “I’ll be sitting in the sixth row,” she said over her shoulder as she walked toward the box office. “On the aisle.”

Two hours later, during the second feature, Clay fell into the seat next to Bonnie. After a few long breaths, he said, “I got seventy dollars.”

“I don’t want any.”

“It’s for gas, stupid.”

“You’re a criminal.”

“So what?”

“And you’re gonna get caught, too, if you keep it up. How old are you?”

“None of your business.”

“You’re way younger than me. I know that. You could change, but you probably won’t.”

“You don’t know nothing about me,” Clay sneered, squeezing her arm so hard that tears came to her eyes. “Not a goddamn thing.”

An elderly man holding a flashlight appeared in the aisle next to them. He shined the yellow beam into Clay’s face. “Everything okay here?”

Clay raised his hands to block the light. “Yeah. Everything’s fine.”

“He ain’t bothering you, is he?” the old man asked Bonnie.

Bonnie shook her head.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

As soon as the usher disappeared up the aisle, Clay unbuckled his jeans and stuck Bonnie’s hand inside his underwear. “Jack me off,” he said, his mouth close to her ear. “Okay?”

Bonnie felt him thicken inside her fingers. When she squeezed him, he made a sharp moan that drew a look from the couple seated across the aisle. “That was quick,” she said, half smiling as she slid down in her seat. “I hope it felt good.”

Clay didn’t reply.

As she continued to stroke him, Bonnie opened her shirt and uncovered her breasts. “Here,” she said, and she pulled his face to her chest. “Kiss me.”

When she felt Clay’s mouth close on her nipple, Bonnie took in a breath and her lips shaped the words
I
love you
. But she didn’t mean them and she never let them out of her throat.

After the movie ended, Clay decided to steal another car. “The Pontiac’s too hot,” he told Bonnie as they walked south on Douglas. “Anyway, I think the alternator is ready to go.” He stopped in front of Chloe’s Diner on North Dodge. “I’ll meet you here in awhile. Okay?”

Bonnie thought for a moment, not quite meeting his eyes. Then she glanced across the street and her face seemed to sag. A black woman in a white maid’s uniform came out of the Hotel Sherwood with a four-year-old boy. They were holding hands.

Clay said, “What’s wrong?”

Bonnie looked dazedly at the two figures moving away from her, still holding hands, and when they disappeared around the corner she turned and stared at Clay, her flat voice hiding the deep ache inside her chest. “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.”

An hour later, while Clay Tomlinson was coasting slowly out of the Sears parking lot in a shiny silver 1953 Chevy, Bonnie Simpson was riding in a Greyhound bus moving south on U.S. 75.

“A girl said to give you this,” the waitress at Chloe’s told Clay when he entered the nearly empty restaurant. She handed him a folded napkin. Inside was a Topps baseball card with Ted Williams’s picture on the front. “She also said to be careful.”

Clay felt his mouth go dry. “Just ‘Be careful’? That’s all she said?”

The waitress nodded. “Yes,” she said, “that’s all.”

Around midnight that evening, Bonnie’s bus stopped for gas and oil at a small service station in Morgan City, Louisiana. Outside, giant mosquitoes swarmed around the headlights, and above their high whine Bonnie heard a gentle blues playing on the jukebox in the diner next door. The song was “Please Hurry Home” by B. B. King.

December 3, 1969

Indian summer followed Bonnie across the Great Plains as she rode another Greyhound bus west from Detroit in 1969. Along the way she was struck by the number of young people they passed traveling on foot. The men had hair down to their shoulders, and they were dressed mostly in blue jeans and boots and Mexican shirts. Many had guitars slung over their backs. Flutes and tambourines were in evidence, too, along with dogs and young children, some carried papoose-style by strong-boned girls with daisies strung through their long blond hair.

For a while Bonnie found it odd that these dusty vagabonds rarely beckoned to the passing traffic with their thumbs. But it became clear to her after several miles that this was unnecessary, because the similarly dressed travelers who picked them up in their junky cars and vans already knew their destination.

“They’re all goin’ to San Francisco,” said Bonnie’s seatmate, a man somewhere over the age of seventy, with a shock of white hair and bright baby-blue eyes. “They’re having this big musical deal with the Rolling Rocks or something. I saw it on the news. . . . Hey, check that out,” he said, turning in his seat as they passed a Day-Glo school bus that was parked on the shoulder of the highway with cottony black smoke billowing from the engine. A bundle of men were gathered around the open hood while the women—some of them topless—sunbathed on the roof. “Now that’s what I call sightseein’.”

Bonnie laughed a little while the bandaged fingers of her right hand fidgeted nervously with the broken zipper on the red imitation-leather purse that was resting on her lap. Inside—along with her wallet and her bus ticket to Los Angeles—were four apples (two red and two green), a leftover turkey sandwich wrapped in tinfoil stained with blood, a bleacher ticket stub from a Boston Red Sox-Detroit Tigers game she attended with her therapist back in the summer of 1968, three black-and-white photographs (including one of her mother in Hollywood, circa 1942, standing in front of the entrance to Paramount Pictures), four hundred and forty dollars in twenty-dollar bills, rolled tight and secured by a thick black rubber band, and a .22 caliber pistol.

“Where you goin’?” Bonnie’s husband, Freddie Bousquet, had asked her on Sunday night, when he saw her folding her clothes into the cheap canvas suitcase that was now resting in the luggage rack above her head.

Bonnie told him LA.

“You leaving me?”

“I guess.”

“I could stop you,” he said, following her into the kitchen. “You know that, don’tcha?”

Bonnie’s hand reached for a knife. Trying to remain calm, she spread some mustard on two pieces of rye bread, before she sliced a tomato and carved the leftover Thanksgiving turkey. “But that means you’d have to kill me.”

Freddie laughed, but he stopped laughing quickly when he saw the thread of blood spilling into the sandwich from a deep gash in Bonnie’s thumb. “Jesus,” he said. “You fuckin’ sliced the shit out of yourself.”

“It’s just a nick,” Bonnie said lightly, and she used the back of her hand to wipe the perspiration off her forehead, leaving behind a jagged red streak above her eyebrows.

“You’re gonna need stitches in that. I’m serious. We’re goin’ to the hospital,” he said, but when he reached for her wrist, Bonnie jerked her hand away, and several drops of blood splattered on his face and the white-tiled floor.

Freddie struck her face with the back of his hand, drawing more blood out of one nostril, but Bonnie remained silent, standing motionless, staring at him blankly until the wall phone rang and he
roughly pushed her aside and nearly knocked over a chair in his hurry to grab the receiver.

A woman said, “Is Bonnie Simpson there?”

“Yeah, she’s here.”

“May I talk to her, please?”

“For you, cunt,” Freddie said loudly, and Bonnie, shaking inside and trying to control herself, turned her back on him and ran cold water from the sink over her hand. “I said it’s for you,” he yelled once more, jabbing her in the back with the mouthpiece several times before he flung the receiver on the counter next to the toaster and stalked out of the kitchen.

Bonnie wrapped her thumb in a paper towel and lit a cigarette, waiting until Freddie was out of earshot before she picked up the phone. Then, softly, she said, “I told him.”

The woman on the other end sighed deeply. “That’s good,” she said.

Bonnie took a step backward so she could see through the hallway into her bedroom. Freddie was rooting through her suitcase with both hands. When he looked up and saw her staring at him, the muscles went tight in his face.

“Bonnie, are you still on the line?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You remember what I told you way back when?”

“Yes,” Bonnie said, watching transfixed as Freddie opened his fly and sent a stream of urine onto her freshly laundered clothes. “I remember.”

“You’re not crazy,” Bonnie’s therapist, Rosellen Clark, told her when she first came to see her at the Wayne State Mental Health Clinic in downtown Detroit.

“I’m not?”

“Nope.”

“Then what am I?”

“You’re just . . . depressed.”

Bonnie remained silent for a moment. “I’m just depressed, that’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“But—”

“You’re sad. You cry. Your husband beats you. That does not make you crazy,” Rosellen explained. “In fact, you’re normal compared to some of the folks I see every day. For instance, earlier this morning, this white fellow walked in here and claimed he was turning into a piece of cheese. Called himself Monterey Jack and took a seat on the floor right over there in the corner next to those bookshelves. Said he had to stay in a cool dark place or else he’d get all moldy and his skin would turn as green as grass. He said it with a straight face, too.”