Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

“He’s dead, Ram. Almost a year ago in Washington D.C., I thought you knew.”

  Ram finally exhaled.

  “You didn’t hear about it?”

  “No.”

  “They held a wake at The Torch Club. Didn’t anybody tell you?”

  “I haven’t been there in years, Esmé. I stopped drinking some time ago.”

  “I guess that explains why.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “I can’t talk about it. It feels like yesterday. It was very bad, very ugly, maybe another time.”

  “I understand. Let me give you my number,” he said.

  “No. I don’t talk to people from the past. One thing you should know. He left me with a son, a big strong Nordic boy who looks just like his dad. His name is Kellan, maybe you’ll run into him one day.”

  “I’d like to, Esmé. I really would.”

  For the next few weeks, he was in an anaesthetized daze, wondering what happened to Wesley, what had caused his death, remembering that he felt much the same way when he learned of Jaime’s death, remembering how Jaime’s death had inspired him to begin writing poetry again after a long hiatus, thinking maybe that Wesley’s death might have the same effect. But the struck-through lines in the composition book attested that it didn’t. He was confused and filled with a loss he found difficult to communicate. When he finished the phone call with Esmé, Ram called Vera at the studio where she was re-looping dialogue. When she called back an hour later, she could tell he was upset.

  “What’s the matter, baby?”

  “Wesley’s dead.”

  “Who’s Wesley?”

  “That first story of mine in Golden State, the guy who was the subject of it. You met him in Sagrada. Him and his wife Esmé, we went to dinner at their house.”

  “Oh him,” said Vera. Vera didn’t care for the Llewellyns, and though their response to her was cordial and welcoming, Ram could tell they didn’t much care for her either. “That pagan guy with the fat wife,” said Vera, unable to resist the impulse.

  “Yeah. Him, or them, yeah.”

  “Why don’t you come here for a few days and relax? There’s a reception at the Film Institute. I have to deliver an address to the graduating class and you can help me prepare it. These gatherings make me nervous, and I feel less so with you on my arm.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Ram said, then hung up the phone and called Phil Le Gris.

  “Geez, that’s too bad. I knew you guys were close,” Phil sighed.

  “Yeah, he was my compadre, mi hermano, a fellow co-conspirator.”

  “I’d like to talk but I’m in the middle of a meeting. Call me later at home,” said Phil, ringing off without a good-bye.

  Ram hung up the phone and spent the rest of the day wandering the house, looking at the lovely things that his and Vera’s careers had bought them. The Francis Bacon painting in the living room, the Kirschner etchings on the downstairs landing, the state-of-the-art stereo and video setups, the Italian furniture and Breuer chairs, the Khoramassar carpets, Brancusi sculpture, Mexican tile kitchen, California Mission tables, stainless steel stoves and sinks, and the German kitchen implements that cut, diced, sliced, puréed and blended, and the marbleized painted walls. All the concrete and discrete elements that signified achievement, none of which meant anything to Ram anymore, none of which said anything back to him.

  A few days later, the publishers called, offering Ram the contract for a book on Sagrada. He was numb but he knew what he was doing when he accepted it. He drove to Sagrada the next day to watch Barry Bailey being anointed as the Democratic candidate for Senate at the state party convention. The other contenders had dropped out. Media heavyweights were in attendance to proclaim Barry’s second coming.

  Ram went to Peter’s house for Easter Sunday, finding it much as he expected it, with Peter and Kelly and their boys, and Fran and his second wife Julie in from Montana with their boys, and Ram’s mother and her boyfriend whom she ridiculed throughout the day, her comments getting nastier with each succeeding bourbon.

  The conversations were embroidered with a filigree of warmth and sincerity but lacked any depth or bite or poignancy while Ram, almost a bystander to it, took it in, dissembling as coolly as he was capable of, having an exchange on Mideast politics with Peter and a discussion on French film directors with Fran.

  Ram thought of that day and the sixty-odd other days like it since he’d come back to Sagrada to begin working on the book that Beak and the editorial staff of The Stinger had recommended Ram to the publishers, even hiring Feldman, the weasel who worked for the Barry Bailey campaign as his research assistant, Ram not raising an eyebrow when Feldman turned in padded hours and expenses, not even caring that he did.

  The afternoon light was gone now as evening descended. The page he was working on was entirely in shadow. He closed the composition book, pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke out into the dusk-filled room as a waitress stopped in front of him, asking him what he wanted. It took him a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness.

  “Bottle of Becks and bourbon back. No, make it a double.”

  Chapter Ten

  Sunset was coming and the Santa Lucia’s were milky lavender under a hard-brass sun. To the west, four birds climbed into the upper sky. To the east, plowed furrows ran away from the freeway at four o’clock, vanishing into the shadow of The Gavilans. The lettuce farmers were irrigating now, the water arcing away from the sprinkler heads turning to and fro reminded Ram of swans lifting off a lily pond.

  At one time, such a scene would have caused Ram to stop and take it in, seeking a way to trap it by capturing it in verse. Now he barely noticed it, keeping his eyes fixed on the road ahead and scanning the mirrors for what might be coming behind him.

  It had been four years since Ram and Vera were in Paris. The first two years were good as Ram kept busy with writing assignments for Lumière and Elle and a new English language magazine in Paris called City of Light, writing stories on architecture and film, leaving politics alone. He’d had enough of politics for a while and declined the political story assignments that editors like Les Beak at The Stinger would call and offer him. He and Vera had a nice little house in the Pyrenees section of Belleville, and she was working predominantly with European directors now. The Hollywood money boys thought Vera was too old to carry a film as a lead anymore and, frankly, she couldn’t care less. The Europeans still loved her and paid her extravagant fees. She was always off shooting somewhere, and Ram began spending more and more time alone, or with the new friends he had made in Paris.

  Ram remembered how the marriage began ending. Vera was shooting an eighteenth-century period piece at the Esterhazy Castle in Hungary with a titled English co-star, a handsome Oxonian with political ambitions named Trevor Shelbourne. Vera was enraptured by his presence, and it was obvious to everybody they were having an affair. Ram didn’t care why she was doing him, just knew that she was and didn’t feel like faking it anymore. He’d finally had enough. After a long day of shooting multiple takes and angles of a violent confrontation between the stars that led to passionate lovemaking atop a grand piano, Ram went out and had a few drinks in the center of the city where they were shooting. He wandered into a tavern and saw Vera and Shelbourne in the corner, snogging one another. Ram ordered a crème de menthe and walked over to their table. He told Shelbourne to stand up. When he did, Ram clocked him and the Oxonian dropped to his knees. Then Ram tossed the drink in Vera’s face and told her it was over.

  “Fuck you,” she snapped, throwing an ashtray that barely missed Ram’s head, smashing on the post behind him. “Get out of here, you fucking loser.”

  Sixty hours later, Ram was back at The Arbor, considering the wreckage that he and Vera had been for a decade by then. The ranch was a shambles, the roses wild, the hedges untrimmed. The ranch mirrored the disorganized tangle of his own life as he watched the koi swimming lazily beneath the lilies. It was over—that much was clear—but what
came next?

  He hung around The Arbor for a week or so, puttering in the garden and cleaning a bit, but without much enthusiasm, trying to figure out what he should do. He cleaned the stables and the hot tub, then got up on the roof and swept it clean and unclogged the gutters filled with redwood needles. He made no attempt to do any gainful work, just sat on the upper deck smoking and pondering, looking deep into the cloud-scattered spring sky, sometimes breaking into tears or laughter as different emotions and memories slid into focus. He didn’t call any of his friends to tell them that he’d returned and he didn’t return those few calls that came in, until one day his mother called and asked him to come to Sagrada to visit her. His mom had a bottle of bourbon waiting for him when he got there. They drank and talked about Vera all evening.

  “Find something to do, Ram, something to take your mind off her.”

  “You’re probably right,” Ram said. Then he put his head down and sighed. For the next two months, Ram didn’t do much but drink, watch TV, and take his Mom to doctor’s appointments and manage her affairs. She was old now, 83, and couldn’t manage the place by herself. Ram didn’t care. He had nothing left to achieve, he thought. His world reduced itself to the shrunken confines of the cave-like interior of the condo. A few weeks passed before he called a couple of publishers to tell them he was back in town and was available to start working again. He wrote a few nothing stories for one of the alternative weeklies to rebuild his confidence, then, through accident or some other fate, Ram took on the landfill assignment. When he did, he was spun back to the beginning of his career and a story he’d been steered onto by Wesley Llewellyn, who most people called Oso because of his size.

  …It was the early 1980s, maybe a year after he’d done the Golden State story on Llewellyn, when Oso called him one afternoon. “There’s a project that might interest you,” Llewellyn opened.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the airport expansion at the Orange County Airport. There are some people who would like you to look into it.”

  Llewellyn laughed and Ram heard him inhale from a cigarette. “Well, if this was just about conning towers or runways, I wouldn’t be calling you, Le Doir. This is more than that. There’s something sleazy about this deal but we can’t quite figure just what it is. We—that’s Jack Drummond and I—think we need someone of your talents to figure out what’s going on with this thing. Can you come to a meeting at Senator Pelfrey’s office on Tuesday?”

  Ram looked at his calendar, saw it was spare and said that he could make it.

  “You might find this rewarding. Meet me there at 10.”

  The project was rewarding in some ways. After the meeting in Senator Pelfrey’s office, Ram took the assignment—as a special consultant with a small Orange County city. The city paid him a lot of money, but the assignment also led him into deep and dangerous waters that involved the Louie Verde machine, although Ram didn’t see that at the time. He left Big Louie out of the report that he wrote because there wasn’t anything conclusive at that time other than a banking investment Louie made during the legislative process. It puzzled Ram then, but he couldn’t make hide nor hair of it. But when he took on the landfill story, it all fell all into place…

  He passed King City and his mind drifted to when he and the Mad Dog crew decided to race from Salinas to Las Vegas. Ram had gotten the idea from reading Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing. He remembered that time and smiled. It was a different world now, and one that Ram didn’t much care for or seem to understand. It was obvious how things had changed since Ram had been in Paris, and the direct evidence of it became clear to him on a trip that he took right before the landfill assignment.

  During those first months back in Sagrada, Ram lay on his mom’s couch, drinking, smoking, and watching television, and re-acclimating himself to American culture and current affairs. He fell under the spell of the images washing over him. They were deadly things, famine and starvation, war and murder, floods and earthquakes, explosions and gas attacks, rape and incest; Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia; O.J. Simpson, The Unabomber, and David Koreshian; and all the talk shows where all the above were milked for maximum value.

  In the time that he had been in France with Vera, the culture had taken a sharp turn toward death—not a contemplation of it because it might be approaching, or an examination of it and what new technological breakthroughs could do about delaying it, or a metaphysical treatise on it. It was a full-blown obsession with it now, a quest for it at its most shocking and extreme; a reveling in and seeking after it; a balls to the wall party time celebration of it. It was everywhere Ram looked. A black pall had descended on the Golden State. Maybe it had always been this way, and the only reason that Ram didn’t see it or know it until then was because he was busy chasing stories and never watched TV. Now he did, and he was stunned by what he beheld.

  That which didn’t drip blood, oozed venom or racial or religious hatred, mother-daughter hatred, sibling or paternal hatred, hatred for sexual or religious preference, it hardly mattered, it was a celebration of psychosis and sociopathology for the sheer rush of adrenaline-fueled hatred, book-ended by smiling hosts and hostesses advertising more of it coming after commercial breaks, urging everybody to stay tuned.

  And there was always more, sponsors lined up around the block to showcase their goods on the worst of the talk shows, the ones with the highest ratings and biggest audience shares. The more Ram was bombarded by baleful images and the accompanying dissonant soundtrack of death and dying, the more he became depressed, numb, and entwined by the specter of it and what it seemed to signify.

  Day after day, he watched the death parade, until one day he woke up and realized that he hadn’t worked or moved from the couch for over a month. He took a long shower and afterward fixed lunch for his mom, attended to her needs, and did some shopping. Then he paid some bills and called The Stinger.

  “Les Beak,” came the familiar voice; a conspiratorial half mumble, half-whisper punctuated with stuttering unnhs that Ram and his friends who knew Beak used to imitate. Ram smiled.

  “Les, this is Ram Le Doir. I’ve got some ideas.”

  “I was wondering whether you’d fallen off the earth. What have you been doing?”

  “Not much, Les, but I’d like to get back on the horse. I’ve got a few ideas.”

  “I’m always interested. But today’s not a good day. We have a meeting of the editorial board. Unnh, unnh, let me see here.” Ram heard him rustling his calendar pages. “What about tomorrow? How about lunch at the Distillery?”

  “What time?”

  “Let’s make it 12:30.”

  “Meet you there?”

  “Very good, very good, by the way, what is it you’re proposing?”

  Ram thought about his answer for a moment but couldn’t think of anything. He decided to let Beak twist by playing the intrigue angle.

  “Tell you at lunch.”

  “Give me a hint.”

  “Not now. I’ll give it up tomorrow.”

  After his conversation with Les Beak, Ram did as he always did during the nimbus days when he needed to find a story. He drove to Monument Records, bought all the major state and national dailies, and went for coffee to scan them and see what looked intriguing. He found three items that seemed like they might work and clipped them. One was a local story about building a new dam on the Nacionalé River; another was a story that had to do with new waste removal and land development needs for the state in the next ten years; the third was a story about an oceanside hotel south of San Francisco on the coast that was once a speakeasy and drop-off point for smugglers. Ram came up with the fourth story proposal on his own: a historical piece on old California. Of the four, he liked the last one best, and after three lattes and a number of phone calls, Ram went back to his mom’s place and wrote a two-page précis that covered all four.

  The next day, Ram arrived at the restaurant early and ordered coffee, waiting for Beak to show. He was twenty minutes late
when he did.

  “My sincerest apologies, but it’s a madhouse down there and I’m up to my ass in alligators. They brought in a new handler to look me over,” said Beak, darting his eyes this way and that to check if anybody was eavesdropping. It was a fantasy that Beak had ever since Ram first knew him. He was beset by CIA spooks. They were watching his every move and taking down his every word on secret devices. Why Beak thought this was a mystery to Ram, for the stories that Beak regularly published in the Insight section of The Stinger were mostly tame affairs that dealt with sin tax increases or commercial development projects in Sagrada. Beak scanned the room looking for signs. Ram followed his eyes. He didn’t notice anything untoward. Beak stopped the passing waitress to order a beer.

  “Anything for you?” asked the waitress.

  “Water,” Ram said.

  “Okay, Le Doir, let’s get to the business at hand.”

  They placed their orders for food. Ram pulled out the two-pager and handed it across the table. After a minute, Les put the pages aside and came back with a series of questions. Ram ad-libbed answers to the questions Beak posed that Ram didn’t have hard information about.

  By the time the entrées arrived, Ram and Beak had a handshake deal on the assignments: Beak wanted the old California story first, the dam story next, and the land use story last. He qualified it by saying, “Now, you’re aware, I’m sure, that the stories are on spec—not that I’m not confident you’ll deliver one of your masterpieces, but follow the formula required for Insight—you know—”

  “—I know, facts and figures up high, tight, focused, and flinty-eyed.”

  “Give me winners.”

  “I’d like an assignment letter, Les,” Ram interjected.

  “Of course, of course, I’ll write it back at the office,” Beak said, raising his beer in toast. Beak paid the bill, gathered his things, and Ram walked him back to The Stinger where Beak wrote out a one-paragraph assignment letter on company letterhead. They parted with another handshake and Ram said he’d be in touch. Ram drove home, bought some food for his mother, and asked her next-door neighbor to look in on her over the next ten days when Ram would be on the road.