by Nick Cole
Roger’s grandfather was a very old man. He was small, wrinkled, and brown. Each day as they returned home from the set, he would be waiting in the front yard for them, one hand grasping the other arm behind his back. He would dance back and forth slightly as Roger parked the car, and then he would pat Roger on the shoulder as his grandson walked past him and into the house. The grandfather did not speak. He just smiled, even when Kurt tried, uncomfortably, to introduce himself.
That night as they drifted off to sleep, Kurt asked Roger a question. Roger, who was listening to a “Sounds of the Rainforest” playlist, had to take off his earphones to hear the question.
“Why does your grandfather jiggle that string when he sits in the back yard?”
“I don’t know. Go to sleep.”
Chapter Sixteen
Sign and Countersign
The Fox called late Friday afternoon. The Executive VP had to answer the phone from his secretary’s desk. She had gone for the day to some personal appointment, which he suspected was dubious at best. Doctor’s appointment indeed, he thought. She’s probably out shopping, or getting drunk.
“It’s me, Fox. You’re talking to me.”
“Who?” asked the clearly confused Fox.
“It’s me. Go ahead.”
“What about the code word?”
“Oh yes… I have always enjoyed a good lemon tart.”
There was a long pause. Then, “That’s not it.”
“But I thought… I could have sworn it was.”
“You’re giving me ours. You have to give me Judy’s first.”
“What?”
“You have to give me Judy’s code sign first.”
“You have a code sign with Judy also?”
“Yes. I had to.”
“Why?”
“How is she going to know I’m the Fox? Doesn’t she always say, ‘I have the Fox on line one for you’?”
“Yes, she does,” admitted the Executive VP.
“Well, that’s how she knows I’m the Fox. Otherwise I would have to use my real name.”
“But I know your real name.”
“I know, but this way it helps me to remain anonymous. You know, phone logs and all.”
“Well,” sighed the exasperated VP, “I don’t have her code sign, she’s sick. She went to the doctor.”
“Oh, is she okay?”
“Well, I hope so, she was feeling—do you have information for me or not?”
“I might, and I might not even know what you’re talking about. First can you give me the code word?”
“Fine. I have always enjoyed lemon tarts.”
“No, that’s a code phrase. I need Judy’s code word. We use a single code word. You know, like ‘rabbit’ or ‘tiger,’ and then I say ‘carrot’ or ‘cage.’”
That seems kind of obvious, thought the Executive VP without saying it.
“I don’t know Judy’s code word. But it’s me. So go ahead and give me the report!” growled the Executive VP.
There was a long pause.
“Listen, I want to, but I don’t work this way. Things are starting to heat up. I deal in very sensitive information of a confidential nature. If I divulge that information to the wrong person, it could cause the people I work for, and myself, a lot of heartache. That’s why we have these codes in place, to prevent amateur screw-ups that cost people their careers. Okay?”
“But I’m the people you work for!” pleaded the Executive VP.
“That’s what I hear on the other end of the phone. But if you were this person, you would know the code word. Then we could proceed to the next level of security. Okay?”
“But I know the next level. I have always enjoyed lemon tarts. That’s the next level. I didn’t know there was a level before that, so I don’t know the code phrase.”
“Word,” corrected the Fox.
“Yes. Well I don’t know it!”
“Maybe she wrote it down.”
“That doesn’t seem very clandestine, now does it?”
“I admit you’re right. But sometimes people do. I told her to if she was having trouble remembering it. Are you sure she’s okay? She didn’t look sick the other night,” said the Fox.
“You’ve met?” replied the Executive VP incredulously.
“Yeah. We go out for margaritas every Wednesday night.”
“But you’ve only been working for me for a week.”
“Yes. But we had so much fun we decided to make it a regular thing. They have karaoke.”
“That’s great. Listen, things are winding up here and I need to get home early tonight. Could you just bypass all this and give me the report? Please.”
“Listen. You sound like you and all, but it’s a town full of actors and someone could be doing a bang-up job of imitating you. I think we’d better meet face to face this weekend.”
“But, I’m…” started the Executive VP in protest. “Fine.”
“All right. Some friends and I are taking our trucks and dirt bikes out to the desert. Meet us at Flat Rock campgrounds space number four on Saturday morning.”
“Flat Rock campgrounds?” whined the Executive VP.
“Yeah, it’s an hour south of Riverside. Dress warm, it’ll be cold out there. Oh, and bring a case of beer or Scooter’ll give you hell.”
“Scooter?”
“Listen. I know it’s far away. But the stuff I have is important. It’s better this way. Trust me, okay?”
“All right. Fine.”
Snap snap.
“Do you like to shoot guns?” asked the Fox.
“What?”
“Do you like to shoot guns? We’re bringing our shotguns and a whole bunch of stuff to shoot. It’ll be fun.”
“Neat,” said the Executive VP in a voice that indicated the opposite.
“See you there?”
“Fine.”
The Executive VP hung up the phone and put his head down on his secretary’s desk, breathing through his nose. When he opened his eyes he was staring at two words written side by side. “Rabbit” and “carrot.”
Chapter Seventeen
The Last Hand
The Great Director passed by the make-up trailer early Monday morning. Inside, through an opened door, he could see a very bleary-eyed and disheveled Kurt Dalton. Granted it was six thirty in the morning, but he seemed more destroyed than usual. Which was perfect for the bar fight scene in which Kurt gets beaten up and thrown into an alley out the back of the bar. So with very little extra effort, the make-up girl was getting his look just right for the camera.
The Great Director had wanted Kurt for this part because he was so perfectly wrong for it. Everyone, press and studio, protested the choice of Kurt Dalton, action hero, playing the lead role in the Fat Man’s latest novel turned movie. This was the Great Director’s hoped-for opening sour note. If he was going to get out of Hollywood alive, he was going to need all the bad press he could get for his opus of awful.
But bad things had not worked according to plan. Kurt Dalton, now bleary-eyed, red-nosed, vacant-looking, and sitting in a make-up chair with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, had shown up and surprised everyone by actually acting. Gone after the first take was the Saturday matinee hero who had once fought off a super-elite band of ninjas on board a runaway nuclear train. A square-jawed hero who’d delivered the catchphrase “end of the line” with a straight face, making Death Train that summer’s must-see blockbuster hit ten years ago. Gone was the man who had once seriously been considered for the roles of Batman and Indiana Jones. Gone were all the cute expressions and crafty tricks he’d learned in an effort to do exactly what Hollywood expected him to do. Act with his chin, talk with a gravelly voice, and stand where he was told.
Now Kurt was doing something different. He was takin
g chances and going new places with his craft. He was spending every amount of energy he had to connect with the scene and those in it, right there, in front of the camera. And just when the crew thought he had done everything perfectly in a scene, another take often revealed he had more to show. In short, Kurt was doing the finest acting of his life.
The Great Director clung to the hope that Hollywood would absolutely hate it. The execs wouldn’t know how to calculate the change of Kurt’s brand from one-liner Hero-Guy who kills people left and right in new and terrible ways to Serious Actor-Guy who doesn’t kill anybody. Unable to assign a monetary value, it would drive them, the execs, nuts. “We’re making money here, not art,” the Great Director could hear them screaming at him. That would be the hue and cry. They would beg the Great Director to change the performance back to something known. Anything, in fact, to just get Kurt back to being the Kurt they had the math for.
But the Great Director would be, by then, far beyond their pleadings. Kurt’s performance would be so new and fresh and unlike anything Kurt had ever done before, and by that point the movie would be unchangeable. The studio would cry “Unmarketable!” and wail with weeping and gnashing of teeth.
The Great Director felt a brief moment of happiness.
In the make-up trailer, the artist working on Kurt took the cigarette from his mouth and ashed it into a nearby paper cup. She cooed and clucked over him like a mother hen.
It was warm in there. The Great Director watched for a moment, then began to feel guilty. As he walked away from the trailer, he grasped, directionless, for the cause of his sudden angst. He assigned the feeling of guilt to the witnessing of something private. The make-up girl and Kurt getting ready. Their ritual having nothing to do with him.
That was why he felt guilty, he told himself, and tried to believe it.
***
Kurt left the trailer feeling empty. The weekend was behind him and now the week ahead held nothing but work. Work without pay. He was on the verge of starting a fresh round of cursing himself when Roger appeared. He was holding a hot cup of coffee for Kurt with one hand, and in the other, after Kurt had taken the coffee, Roger extended a Styrofoam plate with a glazed donut on it.
For a moment Kurt stared into Roger’s dark eyes, looking for something.
Roger didn’t say anything. Not even with his eyes. He just turned and stood by Kurt’s side. Each stared at the picture of a movie set in early morning, an army at dawn. Kurt was wearing a disheveled business suit. Roger was wrapped in a Minnesota Vikings winter football parka, made with Gore-Tex and lined with fleece. It was not the kind you could buy in stores. It was the kind made especially for players. Where Roger had gotten it, Kurt didn’t want to know. The thought of gambling made him sick to his stomach this morning.
It was going to be a tough scene today. A choreographed bar fight. Normally very simple for action hero Kurt, except this time, he would be losing. Then the emotional breakdown in the alley behind the bar. This had been the part Kurt had worried about since he’d first read the script.
He had been angry on camera before. He had been daring, seductive, macho, intense, kind, gregarious, sullen, and even perplexed, his toughest one, but he had never broken down before. It had not been asked of him since college. Even then, not very much. Now he would have to do it in front of an entire crew, and really, the entire world when you thought about it.
He should have spent the weekend preparing for it. Not gambling away what little was left of his paycheck. He had no idea how to prepare to lose your marbles on camera in an alley. Not even the slightest clue. He knew he could get glycerin drops and fake it if he had to, but something held him back. He’d felt good about his performances so far. He’d felt free. Like he was breaking new ground. Like he was finally doing something important for once.
On the previous Friday, after they had finished shooting, Roger drove Kurt to the bank. Kurt expected to find a much larger check deposited than the one he’d actually received. The studio had been forced to garnish his wages due to court orders from Kurt’s ex-wives and other creditors. After Kurt paid Roger the money he owed him, it had been his intention to never see Roger again. He told the kid thanks for the help and bid him a terse goodbye, leaving Roger standing outside the bank.
He rented a car and hit the card clubs, playing it safe and building on a small stake. But with each passing hand, he knew “playing it safe” would not give him the money he desperately needed. He called it an early night on Friday, ahead only slightly. That night he lay awake in bed at the Beverly thinking about cards.
By Saturday afternoon, he found himself in the backroom clubs east of the city, playing high stakes poker. His victories mighty and few. His defeats steady and small like mosquitoes in the dark of a hot and very long night.
At seven o’clock on Sunday morning, he played his last hand, and he played it knowing its outcome before the cards were even dealt. He went down to defeat quietly. He found a bar and got drunker than he already was, hoping at the end of the binge one of his credit cards might have enough left on it to pay the bill.
Afterward, he walked quiet streets through the windy afternoon that Sunday had become. When the wind had taken every good thing from him, he found himself at Roger’s house. He straightened himself as best he could, approached the door, and knocked. Roger’s mother answered. Kurt attempted to mumble something through his whiskey-thickened tongue. She said kind things to him and took him out of the cold wind and into the warm kitchen, where he ate soup.
Roger watched all this from the TV room. He helped Kurt out of his clothes and put him in his own bed. Roger would take the floor. For a while he sat on the bed next to Kurt. Then he asked, “Tomorrow we go to work?” The anger was still there in his voice. Kurt could hear it.
Kurt concentrated for a moment, forcing his tongue to obey. Then, very slowly and with great care, he replied, “I would like that very much.”
***
The morning progressed quickly, and soon the crew was setting up for the breakdown scene. The setup took a long time, and lunch was called. After lunch, the lighting was finished and the actors were brought to the set while everyone took their places. Behind a side door, Kurt stood with the two actors who were playing the bar patrons who would shortly beat him to a pulp. They looked more like longshoremen.
“Action!” is called, and the two men grab Kurt and toss him through the door, where he lands in a pile of carefully selected trash. They follow him, delivering a series of kicks. Kurt rises and flops with each blow.
They exit the scene with an insult. Kurt moans and rolls over as the camera moves in closer on the piece of human wreckage he has become. He smells the alley and feels his hand in scummy water, and he wants to vomit. He wants to expunge the whole weekend and every bad thing he’s ever done.
So he does.
He turns away from the camera and vomits. He pushes out emotional bile and personal failure in a gut-wrenching heave. Turning back to the camera, wiping the detritus from the side of his mouth, he coughs or sobs. No one is sure. For a moment he is still.
Then he looks skyward.
Is he asking for help?
He is alone. He is the character. His wife has died in a car wreck. Everything that he, this character, has built and worked for all his life, is gone now.
He is in an alley and he begins to weep, making an ugly crying face, not caring anymore. He just wants his wife and his life back. But he knows those things are gone forever now.
Some of the crew look away. It is too painful to see a human in the throes of such animal pain, but the camera does not look away. The camera moves forward. Others watch, mouths open, eyes wide. Unforgiving, as the camera moves closer, hoping to see his soul.
Quietly, the Great Director whispers, “Cut.”
No one moves.
Then slowly, a few at first, and then eventually all, be
gin to clap. Kurt blinks and then remembers where he is. He smiles through his tears. A make-up woman comes forward and lifts him up from his pathetic position. She gives him an encompassing hug and pats him on the back, then leads him back to the trailer. This is her other job. The one she doesn’t get paid for. The one she does the best and is the most needed for. She mothers him back to life. And Roger is there too.
“I think that’s all for today,” says the Great Director softly.
Chapter Eighteen
The Death of Bones Wilson
The Great Director awoke before his Perfect Robot Wife. He looked at her for a long time, admiring her tan, toned beauty. What had once been so naturally Midwestern had undergone a subtle metamorphosis into a statuesque Southern California blonde. Still, he misses the farm girl she once was. The girl he once knew. In his new life, after this one is gone, he tries to imagine if she will be happy. If she will flee with him. He wonders if he can become a Gauguin. And can her programming be optimized for such? Is there an island girl setting?
After his escape.
But this morning as he woke and dressed, she arose and started again her ceaseless morning routine. Launching herself with vigor and optimism at the never-ending tasks and errands confronting her. She spoke at him. Communicating instructions. She did not talk to him, like she used to. He felt a momentary urge to tell her about his plans. His crazy, crazy plan of escape. About the bears of the Alaskan wilderness and how they would survive being eaten by them. But he couldn’t think of how to begin such a sentence. He knew only that she would be perfectly dressed in the latest North Face had to offer in snowsuits if she chose to follow him into exile.
But he doubted she would.
Just as he was finishing his shave, he heard her call for him with pained urgency from the landing down the hall. When he came to see what the matter was, she was bending down next to a small closet.