“I’ll be glad,” said Loretta Lee, “when we can go back to the way things used to be.”
“I thought you wanted me to rest.”
“I don’t call this rest.”
Patterson guessed that it was three hours before dawn. He looked up at the stars, and there, timing it just right, was a meteor. Just a quick flash—you didn’t see it and you saw it, all at once.
“I’m starting to have trouble again,” she said. “Like in the old days.” She was wearing very little in the way of clothing, something see-through and held with a bow at the neck. “I stop in the middle of doing something and wonder.”
Bishop’s bedroom light had been out a long time. The man kept a pilot’s habits, brutality sublimated into the care he took with airplanes. A creature of some sort whispered through the air, a soft sound, a stocking tossed across a floor. Bats, thought Patterson, or one of the owls.
“You remember,” said Patterson, “that stockbroker I had on the show last year, the man who never slept.”
“What a dull man. Jesus. The only interesting thing about him was that he never put his head on a pillow.”
“He said he didn’t miss it.”
“But you got him to admit that he did miss it. You got him to admit that he really did sleep, but while he was in the middle of doing other things, little tiny naps, and what he really wanted was to lie down in a big bed under a quilt with the rain on the roof.”
“People never tell the truth,” said Patterson. “At best, they tell a lie that resembles the truth, like an insect that looks like a twig.”
“You’ve always underrated my intelligence, Red.”
Sometimes he thought Loretta Lee would never shut up. “You’re joking.”
“At the same time you plugged it in and used it, like some sort of kitchen appliance.”
He had known for a long time that some day Loretta Lee was going to be more trouble than she was worth, although if you ran a spreadsheet on her she still looked attractive enough.
When Patterson made no remark, she added, “Is Margaret going to help Curtis—help him paint the picture?”
“I am taking Mrs. Newns under my wing.” He thought that image would be the sort of thing Loretta Lee would understand, obvious and simplistic. A big rooster protecting the little hen.
“But it will help Curtis, too, right?”
“I think you really should be going to bed, Loretta Lee. Your voice has that scratchy sound it gets when you’re tired.”
“Sometimes you talk to me in that fatherly way and it thrills me,” she said. “Other times it just pisses me off.”
“It’s the adolescent in you, full of feeling, empty of understanding.”
“Tell me what’s happening here, Red. I trust you.”
He could always just drown her here in the pool, he thought. Unthinkable, of course. Besides, she was as strong as a young moose. He kept his voice gentle. “Those two statements don’t go together.”
“Let me be a part of your plans.”
“Are you really ready for that, do you think?”
“You know I only want to help you.”
“But that was always your problem wasn’t it?” he said. “You could have relaxed and made a little cigarette money, and retired by now married to—”
“To what? What was I going to do with my life?”
“You thought I was the answer. ‘I know what I’ll do. I can’t manage my own life, but I sure can handle Red Patterson’s.’”
“Do I really sound like that? One of those accents? I worked hard to get rid of it.”
“Nothing wrong with a little twang.”
She must have mistaken his tone. Or maybe she sensed that this was her last stand. Patterson knew that Loretta Lee would never have marched into the Little Bighorn with anything less than a machine gun. She put an arm around him.
She whispered, “Make me feel better.”
They went inside. They tiptoed, as though afraid to wake a crowded household.
She led him by the hand into her bedroom, and he was surprised to see new prints on the wall, cinnamon-red prints of Cézanne hillsides. Patterson smiled. Loretta Lee was trying to learn something about art.
When they first met, her pubic hair had been shaved, in preparation for a starring role, under the name Beverly Pasadena, in a movie with a good deal of action but featuring one character after another with remarkably simplistic motivation.
Patterson had rescued her from so much sleaze, and here she was, naked, slipping into the satin sheets, perhaps a little disappointed when the only act of affection Patterson was prepared to offer was a glass of water from the spring and four beet-dark Seconals, the old, bad drug, the purple bombers that had taken so many movie careers into the permanent sweet night.
But she was like a picture, a pinup on the men’s room wall, pink and brunette. Well, a little carnal play wouldn’t do any harm. It might relieve a little tension in both of them.
“I’ve been good for you, haven’t I, Red?” she whispered into his ear.
He did have a lingering fondness for Loretta Lee, thought Patterson, as he eased himself into her, letting himself take his time, waiting for her to ask him to hurry, hurry, please hurry up, just like she used to.
After all, Patterson thought, what was the act of love but the power to give pleasure, and to forestall it. Loretta Lee must realize this, and fear it: the difficulty was that love was not enough.
He knew how to work her body so it gave them both pleasure. Later, after he had made her gasp please please until it was nearly a scream, he lay there next to her in the dark. He could feel her stirring against the weight of the barbituate, working back up to him. “You’ll tell me what you’re going to do, won’t you, Red?”
“Of course I will,” he said.
Paul Angevin had warned him years ago. A psychiatrist sees himself as magic, but he tempers this sense of power with respect for his patients and knowledge of his own shortcomings.
Paul Angevin had gone to various medical experts, and collared network executives, trying to stir up opinion against the show. Paul had told everyone it was a bad idea, a sick plan, talk-show glitz coupled with the needs of real people to be healed. Paul had been a troubled man himself, a heavy smoker, a man afflicted with psychosomatic tics, rashes, illnesses. But Paul had been earnest, and people had listened to him.
A televised psychiatrist, Paul had written in his last memo, “cut off from the council of colleagues by their inevitable envy and his own vanity, trapped in the rich-oxygen of adulation, will fatten into a power he can use but not control.” The show had begun by then, and Patterson had already experienced the confidence the show pumped into him.
She was asleep. Patterson was out of bed, back into his clothes. He listened to her slow breathing. He didn’t have to search very hard. He opened the nightstand drawer. The light was not good, but he could see a box of suntan-shade panty hose, an electric razor. And several microcassettes, the kind Loretta Lee used in her tape recorder.
Patterson hurried quietly through the corridors. In his own bedroom Patterson popped a cassette into his little black Sony and sat listening.
Loretta Lee was saying it was so hot out by the pool that the lizards ran high up off the ground, as far as their legs would stretch. She went on to describe a dream about the lizards. “Someone’s in this big house,” Loretta Lee was saying. “And I know they’re going to find me, so I try to hide, but all these lizards are in the way, all over the floor—”
Patterson worked the fast-forward. Loretta Lee’s voice became a high-pitched scramble. He switched it back to normal speed, and Loretta Lee was saying that sometimes she felt afraid. “Red doesn’t look so good,” she was saying. “He looks tired and tense and—”
Patterson worked the fast-forward again, whisking through what he gathered were more unflattering descriptions of himself, and more unremarkable dreams. Dreams, Patterson reflected, were considerably overemphasized as a source of ps
ychological insight. There was a description of the house, how empty it felt. Loretta Lee talked about the locked silence of the studio.
“I’ve never seen Red like this,” Loretta Lee’s recorded voice said. “I look at him and I think—he needs help. I think maybe if things get worse here I might have to do something.” There was a click. She had shut off the tape. When the tape was recording again she wasn’t talking. “If things get worse,” she said at last, “I might have to call in someone who can help.” There was the sound of Loretta breathing. “Some kind of doctor. Some kind of authority—”
Patterson switched off the recorder.
He had hoped he would find out how innocent she was. Well, that was another pet illusion he wouldn’t bother feeding any more. Loretta Lee had kept a diary off and on for a long time. He should have cured her of the habit.
Maybe she had been contacted by one of those tabloids. He could imagine the conversation. Just keep a daily record of what goes on down there and sign right here at the bottom of this page. Maybe someone from another television network took her out for a drink a few weeks ago, bought her dinner and showed her his checkbook.
It didn’t matter who had bought her. Patterson had a lot to do.
He found his way to the studio, unlocked the door and when he was inside the big room he felt the wonder of the place, the presence of the painting. He switched on the light.
He locked the door behind him. He stepped toward the painting. It was draped with muslin, shrouded. Bruno Kraft had stood right here. Right here—and he had seen the truth.
Paul had been wrong, ultimately. Television was life. Bring all the people who have lost themselves back to the harbor. Back to life. It was not that difficult.
I have come to show you all how to leave the past. I will show you how to take one step after another upon the supple uneven surface, the sea. And you will walk. He had heard himself saying those very words on his first show, stimulated by the presence of the cameras, unsteady before a half-empty audience, most of whom were shills, there on free tickets pressed on them by the publicity department. Television had taught Patterson that anything was possible.
Patterson whisked away the sheet. The painting changed the light in the room. Television was life—but art was something more, something that out-lasted hope and doubt.
The painting was far from finished. There was so much emptiness here, so much left to be filled out, or captured, as if a painting was like one of Michelangelo’s sculptures, already in existence and waiting to be freed.
And yet, Patterson was a doctor, a pilot, a man who knew the value of being. It would be a good idea to drive out into the desert and just make sure that everything was okay.
He replaced the shroud and left the studio, testing the lock. He paused before a door down the hall, stood before it, and actually had the key in the lock.
He had told Bishop that evening, just before he had called Margaret, to prepare to wake early and “be ready to deal with a problem,” a phrase Bishop had recognized from long ago. “Anything you want,” the pilot had said. But at that time Patterson hadn’t been sure. He was just making contingency plans. You never knew what you might discover.
But now Patterson knew.
Patterson’s bedroom window had a deep sill where one could sit and observe the pool. That is what he did, looking out upon the dark garden, the aloes and the papyrus silhouetted against the rippling pool.
He unzipped an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, his own personal pharmacy. He loved the black leather, and imagined the sort of country doc who would have carried such a case in bygone days, all bedside manner and mustard plasters, in those years before it was understood that everything was chemistry, molecules linked to each other like so much playground equipment.
He selected a hypodermic, but hesitated on the choice for the work that had to be done. He gave it some thought. Sodium pentothal was the chemical he believed would be most reliable. It had worked before, and it would work again, although there was a nice sodium pentobarbital that would do almost as well. This, on top of the medication Loretta Lee had already swallowed, would keep her quiet for a long time.
Patterson had wanted more than to attend the dying, clip the tumor from its hold, stitch the shocking lips of the wound. He had wanted the spirit to exist and be free, he had wanted to ennoble what was left when illusion and pain and ignorance faded, and the self was left with so little covering.
Loretta Lee was a threat. He stood over her in the bedroom. She had that fallen, sweet look people so often take on when they sleep. He stroked her hip. When the needle went in she opened one eye, and opened her mouth like someone about to whisper an affectionate secret.
An hour before dawn Patterson left the big house. He hurried through the desert dark toward the garage. The stars above had weight, the moon so sharply cut out of the dark and its own unripened half, that Patterson had to pause and take it all in.
There was a large padlock on the garage. The lock would not release. The garage was one of those built to handle luxury cars of an earlier time, cars that never arrived, because this oasis was too far out into the Mojave. The road linking Owl Springs to state highway 127 was never built. The dream cost too much, the glamour not worth the very great trouble of having every cube of sugar and every loaf of bread flown in from Victorville.
When he finally got the lock off, the garage door was heavy. It had to be dragged, sliding, scraping. It made a squealing, animal sound as he pushed the heavy door all the way open.
God, it was quiet out here.
The door of the Range Rover opened, and then shut with a loud chunk. The ignition whined. The engine fired with a rumble. The air was so clean that the smell of the super-unleaded exhaust was enough to make him cough. He released the brake, nudged the accelerator.
He let the vehicle roll down across the apron of the landing strip, and did not turn on the headlights until he was well away from the house. There was no one to watch, no one to notice, but still he was careful.
It was cool enough this time of night for him to roll down the window and smell the dry air, the stone and empty atmosphere of desert. The big all-terrain tires popped and crunched over the stones, quartz geodes, agates, chunks that glittered in the moonlight.
He turned on the headlights and was immediately sorry. The stones ahead of him were too bright, and the rest of the desert too dark. He drove off across the rise and rubble of the land.
It was time to visit Paul Angevin.
36
It was a hard drive.
That didn’t bother Patterson. In fact, it was reassuring.
You had to have a lot of sympathy for poor Paul. Bishop had flown him all the way out to Owl Springs for a discreet meeting. Patterson had hinted at compromise. It was the putative Golden Rule of the business: Hey, we’ll work something out.
There was a predawn glow in the sky. Sometimes the tires slipped, slid to one side. Sometimes they bounded over a barrier of rock so rugged that Patterson was certain that the tires would be ripped to rags.
Patterson had always enjoyed a feel for machinery, the way some people have a rapport with animals. Engines had always been coaxed to life at his touch, and even the most stiff-handling Ford had proved adequate with his hand at the wheel. He had never been afraid to fly. An airplane was a machine, and machines were an extension of Patterson’s body—of his will.
So he took a certain pleasure in the drive. The wheel fought him, and he had to hang on, downshifting, and manhandle the Range Rover, even with its power steering.
At last he reached the spill of yellow rock.
If he left the engine running it might overheat by the time he returned, he reasoned. It was a moment of intuitive assessment. An engine, like a human body, is a tiny universe of heat. He listened to the breathy power of the pistons and turned off the ignition.
The silence was a shock.
It always was. The senses knew such absolute quiet was impossible. The engine made
cooling, ticking sounds. The sun was still below the horizon, but the pebbles and pores of the rock were gaining further definition, sharpening into a landscape, the light seeming to come from inside the land, not from the sky.
He took a swig from the canteen, and slung it over his shoulder. There was a landmark that guided him, a place in a cliff that looked torn and yellow, mustard-brown, a sharp, naked gash in the stone. This gnarled mineral spilled from the slope all the way to his feet, caramel, butterscotch, molten sulphur alternating as he hiked up the gradual slope.
Anything was possible. The trouble was: some of the things that were possible were bad. His father had once nearly killed a man on the set, a flat, hard-baked stretch of Death Valley being filmed as a backdrop to a scene in which Buck Patterson took a slug in one arm, reeled, and squeezed off a shot from the hip, the sort of aim that cinema skeptics all over the world knew was impossibly difficult.
But this Colt Peacemaker had a speck of lead residue from target practice. The wound had been tiny, but nearly mortal. The actor recovered, not due to ready medical help—there was none for miles. The fragment was small, the aorta wall just thick enough. Even so, recovery had taken six weeks.
The incident had impressed Buck Patterson into being sure that, no matter how heated the drama being portrayed, he never really took aim at anyone. He always fired wide, or into the air above the villain’s head. And it had shaken his son to discover that play, the rowdy and sometimes tiresome theatrics of movie-making, could kill.
It was a long walk.
It wasn’t hot yet, but so dry each breath made him feel parched. The ground was growing brighter, glowing from within. There was a wind, a light stirring from the east, and at times like this Patterson had the impression that the rising sun itself was compelling the atmosphere forward, driving it ahead of its approach.
Maybe he’s not there.
Maybe something has come along to move him, a coyote, or the wind.
Permanence was a law here, more absolute than gravity. A can of Dinty Moore stew would lose its color, the paper label bleached ash-white where the sun fell on it, but the can itself would be a rustless star glittering in the grit for decades. Many times Patterson had seen a gleaming pinpoint become, on his approach, the metal butt of a shotgun shell, or the single staring lens of a broken pair of sunglasses.
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