#Zero

by Neil McCormick

  We staged an exit, with Freeman dispatched in full psycho regalia to greet reporters from the local newspaper while Homer led me out back. Rita and Seymour waved from the door.

  ‘How did you know I was in that jailhouse?’ I asked as we drove off in a scarlet Honda 4x4. ‘Did Freeman really get in touch with you?’

  Homer let out a peal of delighted laughter. ‘Did he tell you he can contact me telepathically? I always hear when dear old Freeman has been arrested. He’s my favourite client, albeit my least lucrative. One of Rita’s lovely sisters called to report his incarceration and happened to mention your name. There are no secrets in a small town, believe me. I’ve been stuck here for so long, tormenting Sheriff Salt is practically my only entertainment.’

  The town quickly gave way to desert plains. Homer flicked on the stereo and an exquisite melody filled the car. ‘Leonard Bernstein,’ I said, automatically. ‘West Side Story.’ It’s like a nervous tic, identifying music.

  ‘You’re a fan?’ asked Homer.

  ‘Who isn’t?’ I grunted.

  ‘Most young people your age don’t even know who Bernstein was,’ he said, in a tone that implied this was an outrageous indictment of the education system. ‘Their idea of Broadway is the cast of Glee singing excerpts from Mamma Mia.’

  ‘My mother…’ I started trying to explain. But what had my mother to do with West Side Story? My mind flooded with an image of a woman in a red dress, spinning around our kitchen, singing, ‘I want to be in A-mer-ee-ka! Everything’s free in A-mer-ee-ka!’ And there was laughter. And it must have been me who was laughing. I was spinning with her, giddy with pleasure.

  ‘Do you need a tissue?’ asked Homer, cautiously.

  Those fucking tears. I poured it all out in a torrent: my flight from New York, misadventures with gangstas, bluesmen, witches and priests.

  ‘So let me see if I’ve got this absolutely straight,’ Homer summarised, as we turned into an imposing gateway, leading to a large ranch house. ‘You have abandoned a lucrative tour, on which many people depended upon you, and for which hundreds of thousands of fans purchased tickets, in order to hitchhike solo across the continent all the way to darkest Brazil to prove your devotion to your fiancée, who, according to unreliable reports from scurrilous sections of the media, may have had her affections swayed by the attentions of another?’

  ‘I have to do this,’ I said, with a conviction the source of which I barely comprehended myself.

  ‘That is so romantic,’ sighed Homer.

  At Homer’s insistence, I took a hot shower while he made some calls. Wiping the bathroom mirror, I regarded my tired face, blurry through streaks of condensation. I didn’t look much like a poster boy now, if I ever had, but I shaved and scrubbed up as best I could. Afterwards, I sat in his study, draped in an oversized bathrobe, stuffing my face with a sandwich. ‘It’s my private sanctum,’ declared Homer, with bashful pride. ‘I don’t bring clients here, certainly not the rabble of cowboy wife-beaters and Sunday-school embezzlers you get around these parts. But I thought … you might appreciate it.’

  ‘It’s very nice,’ I offered lamely, idly stroking a tatty, theatrical feline head mounted on a wall stand, as if Homer had returned from a hunting expedition having bagged the cowardly lion from the Wizard of Oz. Walls loomed purple and puce, twisted glass cabinets displayed odd collections of kitschy tourist trinkets and sleek modern sculptures, while Homer perched on the edge of a desk apparently fashioned from the hide of a bull and still bearing pointed white horns at one end. I had shot videos on sets less bizarre than this. ‘Did you decorate it yourself?’

  ‘I come here to ponder and listen to music,’ said Homer. The bluster from the sheriff’s office was gone now. There was such softness and mischief in his round face and dark, sunken eyes that he looked like a friendly troll in his secret lair. Pride of place went to an old stereo beneath a wall of carved oriental wooden shelves crammed with a library of old vinyl. I skimmed through: Silk Stockings, Hellzapoppin’, Carousel, South Pacific, Finian’s Rainbow, The King and I, Guys and Dolls, Man of La Mancha, Cabaret, Jesus Christ Superstar. They were all original cast productions of theatrical musicals.

  ‘Do you have a personal favourite?’ asked Homer.

  ‘Not really,’ I said, but even as the words came out of my mouth it felt like a lie. And there was the woman in the red dress again, shimmering through a memory haze, singing giddy lines about going anywhere I asked, just as long as I loved her. And I was singing with her, singing male lead, and I knew every word, to her delight and mine. And could that really be my daddy’s gravelly voice, croaking along in the background? My old man never sang, not unless he was crocked, and then it was usually rebel songs or U2’s ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ with added profanity. I could see the cover of a CD with a man in a white mask, occupying pride of place in the small rack in the living room, back when there was still music in our house, back before it all fell silent. I wonder what happened to that CD? I suddenly felt like I could sing every song on it. ‘The Phantom Of The Opera,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I would never have taken you for a Lloyd Webber fan,’ said Homer, with a hint of reproach. ‘Ah well, you’re still young.’

  He picked up a pen shaped like the Statue of Liberty and tapped a pad of Little Orphan Annie paper, an unlikely signal that it was time to get down to business. Declaring he would be remiss not to advise me to end my escapade, recognising my responsibilities to various entertainment outlets and media partners, many of whom might be inclined to sue for lost revenues, he came to rest on a theatrical, tantalising ‘however’.

  I wasn’t ready to give up yet. And neither was Homer, who was forthright about his own interests. He declared himself the best lawyer in the county, his legal skills being the only reason his presence in this backwater was even tolerated. He had operated a successful practice in Atlanta for many years but returned to the family home after his father suffered a stroke and his mother was diagnosed with a long and debilitating illness. They both passed away, last year, within a week of each other. And now, well, he felt stuck. He was keen to return to a big city practice but had his heart set on New York and I was exactly the kind of client who could turn him into a major player overnight. He was made for entertainment law, in his humble opinion, but there wasn’t a lot of call for it in cattle country. He was sure Beasley had my management contracts well sewn up but the way he had been able to remotely cancel my credit card suggested close examination of my income flow might yield interesting results. Did I actually own a house? Apart from the one my dad lived in, I didn’t think so. Did I know my own bank balance, or indeed have access to my own accounts? But I had never needed to, I had a limitless credit card, and Beasley made funds available as required. Beasley took care of everything. He thought the artist shouldn’t have to worry about mundane matters and that suited me fine. ‘I don’t suppose you carry your own passport?’ enquired Homer. ‘No, silly question.’

  Homer wanted me to sign a power of attorney, so that he could represent me in a breach of trust action against Beasley. He firmly believed there wasn’t a contract written that he couldn’t wriggle out of. In return, he had another client, who owed him favours, and who could probably be prevailed upon to get me out of the country and all the way to my lady love in Brazil, no questions asked. And so I signed the dotted line, just the way I had signed all my paperwork with Beasley, without reading the small print.

  We took off in the Honda from the back of his house, driving cross-country. Just in time too, because as we reached the brow of a hill, I turned back to see a small fleet of TV broadcast vans, festooned in aerials and satellite dishes, throwing up a cloud of dust as they swarmed up Homer’s drive. His housekeeper had been left with instructions on how to deal with a media invasion. Deny everything. ‘That’s the same advice my PR always gives me,’ I pointed out.

  We drove for half an hour, staying off road most of the time, until we came down a long dirt track to an imposing barrier o
f trees and iron fencing that completely cut off the view. A dark, pretty, oval-faced woman opened the gates, holding tight to an ugly black dog that bared its teeth like it was looking forward to its next meal, which might be us. She nodded to Homer and looked me over coolly, without smiling. I felt like I recognised her but I wasn’t sure from where.

  We drove on to a tall, battered old barn overlooking a long stretch of bare dirt. The Texas sun was high and hot but we ducked into the airless gloom of an office. Behind a heavy old desktop computer, making no move to get up and greet us, sat a wiry, weather-beaten man with careful eyes. A long white scar sliced through his leather skin from a corner of his mouth all the way to his left ear, even trailing a path through a pencil moustache perched on his top lip. An unlit cigarette poked at an angle below, as if to complete a vanity of raffishness. Homer introduced him as Grover Van Horne.

  ‘I’m Zero,’ I said, extending a hand, which Grover made no move to shake.

  ‘I know who you are, boy. You’re trouble, and right now I’m supposed to be staying out of trouble, according to my goddamn lawyer.’ He looked pointedly at Homer.

  ‘Now, Grover, do try and remember your manners,’ said Homer. ‘Imagine you’re in court, that ought to help. How’s business?’

  ‘You know what people been saying since the trial,’ grumbled Grover. ‘I can’t even get a bit of honest crop dusting. They take me for a damn smuggler.’ Homer raised a sceptical eyebrow, which inspired Grover to thump the table in protest. ‘I just move cargo about, I don’t ask what’s in it. Didn’t you prove that in a court of law, dammit!’ His unlit cigarette fell out of his mouth while he was shouting but he just picked it up and stuck it back in.

  ‘Well, maybe we can help there,’ said Homer. ‘As discussed on the phone, I would like you to put your services at the disposal of this young man, take him wherever he needs to go, don’t ask too many questions and you will be properly remunerated down the line, when the dust has settled.’

  ‘It’s five hundred a day for me and the Baron, twice that if we’re crossing borders, plus fuel costs, and gas ain’t cheap anywhere these days. You good for that?’

  ‘Who’s the Baron?’ I asked.

  Grover laughed. ‘You wanna meet the Baron? Follow me, boy.’

  He led us through a side door, into the barn. There, looming out of the shadows, was a red twin-propeller aeroplane, barely bigger than Homer’s car but in considerably worse condition, with metal patches on the fuselage, rust on the wing tip and a thick black polythene sheet over what should have been a passenger window. ‘Beechcraft Baron, best damn light twin ever built,’ declared Grover, proudly. ‘Been flying this baby since eighty-eight, and the Baron’s never let me down.’

  ‘Are those bullet holes in the tail?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘We been through a couple of scrapes, the Baron and I,’ drawled Grover. ‘Don’t worry about that, it’s an aerodynamic thing. So why don’t we talk real business, Homer? If your client can put some money up front, we can load the Baron up with gas and I’ll take him all the way to Disneyland, if that’s where he wants to go, put him right down on Mickey Mouse’s front lawn.’

  ‘BrasÍlia,’ I said.

  ‘BrasÍlia, as in Brazil?’ said Grover, doubtfully. I nodded. Homer had looked it up on the Internet. This was the inland city where the film production office was based, the last point of real civilisation before the Amazon, where Penelope appeared to be holed up in some kind of resort clinic. With her fucking co-star.

  ‘As I already explained, Grover, my client is not in a position to pay your fees upfront,’ said Homer. ‘I can offer you my personal assurances, however.’

  ‘Yeah, you know how many times I’ve heard that? No offence, Homer, God knows I owe you a debt of gratitude for keeping my ass out of the slammer, but aircraft don’t run on personal assurances.’

  I suddenly thought of something. ‘I’ve got a watch!’ I shouted out, excitedly.

  ‘Well, bully for you, boy,’ drawled Grover. ‘Great for telling the time but it don’t get the Baron airborne.’

  ‘It’s an expensive watch,’ I said, taking it off and shoving it at him.

  ‘Do you see pawnbroker’s balls hanging over the door?’ snarled Grover.

  ‘Gentlemen, please,’ protested Homer.

  ‘This watch is probably worth more than that heap-of-shit crate,’ I said.

  ‘You watch how you talk about the Baron,’ said Grover. ‘He’s sensitive.’ But he took the watch and studied it curiously. We returned to the office, while he checked out the Patek Philippe Rose Gold Nautilus on the Internet. ‘Jesus, what kind of idiot spends forty-five thousand on a watch,’ he grudgingly grumbled.

  ‘Not me,’ I said. ‘It was a gift.’

  ‘It don’t tell the time no better than my Seiko,’ he muttered but I could detect a covetous look as he tried it on for size. ‘And the Baron would set you back a hundred grand even in present condition. Damn thing’s a million dollars off the factory floor. How’s a man supposed to pay for something like that without dealing in a little contraband now and again, eh?’ I wasn’t quite sure who he was talking to now, himself most likely. ‘Anyway, I can’t make it to central Brazil in one trip,’ he sniffed. ‘With all my modifications, I can get a couple of thousand miles out of the Baron but BrasÍlia’s gotta be nearly twice that. And there’s flight plans to consider, notifications, paperwork …’

  Homer winked at me. ‘Come now, Grover, as your lawyer, we both know how many times I’ve got you off the hook for incorrectly filed flight plans.’

  ‘I could maybe do a little business down south. We can refuel in Colombia, it’s just a hop from there.’

  I felt a lurch in my heart.

  ‘Isn’t that a bit dangerous right now?’ fretted Homer.

  ‘Colombia’s always been dangerous. You think a little natural disaster makes a difference to Colombians? You’ve met my wife, Homer. Actually it could make things easier. With all this humanitarian aid, flights are going in and out and no one’s worrying too much about paperwork. We could make ourselves useful, take in some water, I hear they need drinking water and there’s plenty out here on the field. And Consuela’s been collecting blankets and medical supplies, she’s had a big charity drive going on at church. She’s been fretting about it ever since the first quake, bugging me to get the Baron down there. Hey, darling!’ We glanced around to see the dark woman at the door, dog still tight on the leash, the pair of them glowering in at us. ‘Guess where we’re going, darling,’ announced Grover, brightly. ‘We’re going home! Colombia, babe!’

  Her dark face was suddenly transformed by a dazzling smile. Now I knew who she reminded me of. My mother.

  18

  It was noisy in the Baron. And fucking cold. By 6,000 feet, I had lost all feeling inside my trainers. I had flown in private planes many times before but usually in the kind of gold-plated luxury where, if you complain about a slight chill, the stewardess will pour you a hot toddy and sit on your lap. I was wearing one of Grover’s leather flying jackets. He had insisted he wasn’t taking me to meet the most beautiful woman God ever made (to which his wife snorted, and Homer diplomatically murmured, ‘present company excepted, of course’) dressed like a goddamn pansy (‘No offence, Homer,’ he quickly added, and Consuela smirked). But I was starting to shake and it wasn’t just the vibration of the plane, which felt like we were skimming the clouds on the back of a lawnmower with loose screws. ‘Get the kid a blanket, Consuela,’ yelled Grover, his voice a metallic hiss in my headphones. ‘I don’t want to have to explain to Penelope Nazareth how we had to amputate her fiancé’s dick cause he got frostbite over Mexico.’

  Consuela, travelling silently in back, pulled a blanket from behind her, and wrapped it carefully around my shoulders. There wasn’t much room for manoeuvre in the Baron. My seat up front with Grover seemed to have been constructed across a wing strut and I had to slouch for a clear view through the cockpit glass. We were squeezed ti
ght in front of a dashboard of baffling dials and a china figurine of the Virgin Mary, eyes closed, hands pressed together in prayer. I suspected that was Consuela’s touch. It was a six-seater but Grover had long since removed three seats to make more room for cargo, whatever that might be. I got the impression Homer had kept him out of jail on a narco bust. Shit, there was every chance I’d snorted bucketloads of the stuff he brought into the country. Homer, in any case, had remained behind, to manage the media bloodbath. The little plane was stuffed with crates of bottled water, piles of blankets and boxes crammed with medicines which Consuela had been stockpiling. From the footage I’d seen on TV, what the Colombians really needed were bulldozers to knock down ruins and rifles to shoot the looters but I understood the impulse. She wanted to go home.

  Grover explained that ordinarily he wouldn’t risk putting down in Olaya Herrera, MedellÍn’s domestic airport. José María Córdova International was out of the question: too many soldiers, too much paperwork. He knew some little strips in the mountains above the comunas, but he wouldn’t get a refuel without an exchange with local gangsters, and crazy as he might be, he didn’t see the point in flying coca to Copacabana Beach and back. So we’d take our chances with the aid crews, let Consuela do her bit for international relations, while he went into MedellÍn and rustled up business for the return leg.

  ‘Are they still doing that kind of business in MedellÍn?’ I said. ‘I thought they were in the middle of a national emergency.’

  ‘Kid, the day the coke stops coming out of Colombia, then you’ll find out what a national emergency is,’ Grover chuckled. ‘The whole damn US of A will go into withdrawal. There’ll be crack riots on the lawns of the White House. Prohibition, that’s what this great country was built on. And they dare to call me a damn smuggler? I’m a national hero is what I am, a proud servant of the American Dream. They should give me a goddamn medal, what do you say, Consuela?’

  ‘Chinga a tu madre,’ came a disembodied voice in the headphones. I knew what that meant. Fuck your mother.