Gay Place

by Billy Lee Brammer

  “They were serving gin and rose petals at this party,” Vicki said. “I remember once Jay and I had to drive to the other county to buy more gin — and on the way back stopping at a florist shop and waking the owner and ordering more rose petals.”

  Jay tried to remember a time when they were uncorrupted. Once, farther south, they had parked on a levee, across the river from the Mexican whoretown, and kissed for a long while. There was that old Mexican. He remembered the Mexican, crawling out of a mud hut to relieve himself, and the way he jumped in the headlights of the car.

  “We were married by a one-legged justice of the peace,” Vicki said. “What you’d call a ceremony of quiet and dignified simplicity.”

  The heat was awful on the desert road, but Vicki’s sweet drunken laughter had them all feeling better. Hoot Gibson lay back in the leather cushions, grinning at everyone. The Governor had a beatific smile on his face.

  “Ah feel relaxed and beautiful,” Hoot Gibson said.

  “We’ve been gone nearly an hour,” Jay said. “Did Mr. Shavers say something about —”

  “There it is up ahead!” Vicki yelled.

  The old Dusenberg had topped a rise and now they all strained in their seats to catch sight of the village lying between the hummocky sandhills.

  Three

  SHAVERS AND SARAH LEHMAN and Sweet Mama Fenstemaker were crossing from the trailer to the limousine, transferring small overnight bags, walking off their impatience, when they caught sight of the Dusenberg returning, stirring up dust, moving obliquely in a random, zigzag manner toward the camp. The three of them shielded their eyes from the sun and watched the approach of the old touring car. Lunch was being served to the location crew underneath one of the big commissary tents, and the studio people turned away from the tables to stare. The car veered off at a sharp angle and began a long, erratic, lazy circle of the campsite. Shavers and Sweet Mama appeared to sag in the heat. Sarah hesitated, wondering if she could reach the coolness of the trailer house before the others arrived and caught her up in the general derangement. Shavers pulled out a handkerchief and rubbed it along the back of his thick neck. His starched khakis were streaked with perspiration.

  “She’s driving that old car too fast,” Shavers said. “It’s a wonder it didn’t break down on them. It’s just a damned expensive antique.”

  The Dusenberg went into another sharp turn and then moved directly toward them, slowing suddenly and proceeding on a relatively stable course to a point midway between the trailer and the limousine. Vicki’s delirious laughter could be heard above the rumble of the motor, and the others — Jay and Hoot Gibson and the Governor, the three of them flushed and dusty in the midday heat — sat upright in the car flashing tortured smiles. The Dusenberg came to a stop and Vicki got to her feet and stretched, standing on the floorboard and holding on to the top of the windshield for balance. She waved her free arm.

  “It was wonderful, Ed,” she said to Shavers. “You should’ve been there … Never seen anything like it before.”

  Shavers came closer. “Seen what?” he said. Sarah and Sweet Mama stood and looked.

  “We just gave everything back to the Mexicans! All of it! We had a little ceremony.” Vicki turned and yelled at the people eating lunch under the big tent: “You white men got twenty-four hours to clear out!”

  The studio people had all turned to look now. Sarah and Sweet Mama moved closer, following Shavers. Hoot Gibson pulled himself absolutely erect in the backseat; he folded his arms, squinted in the sun, and regarded the campsite with disapproval. Arthur Fenstemaker sat in front next to Vicki, staring at the dashboard, shaking his head. Jay tried not to look at anyone. He continued to sit upright in the backseat, and from time to time batted his eyes.

  “What’re you talking about, Vic?” Shavers said.

  “We gave it back!” Vicki repeated. “The whole damn state — every heathen’s square mile of it. To the Mexicans. We signed the Treaty of San Felipe Dolores del Rio. Governor here signed it over to the Mayor. Back there. Mexican Mayor. Deeded it over to him. Mayor promised to give it back to the Indians first chance he gets.”

  She turned to Arthur Fenstemaker, who continued to stare at the dashboard. “What was the Mayor’s name, Arthur? I forget already.”

  Hoot Gibson got slowly to his feet. “Ah got copy of ’greement raht here,” he said, pulling a piece of brown wrapping paper from his back pocket and flapping it above his head so that all could see. Everyone turned to stare at Hoot Gibson. “Name was George Washin’ton … Herrera Ebahn-yez … George Washin’ton Herrera Ebahnyez … He was part nigger Ah thank.” Hoot Gibson smiled at everyone and sat down.

  The Governor fumbled with the door handle, suddenly moved to action, and, looking at no one, got out of the car and walked directly to the trailer house. Sweet Mama broke off from the others and followed him, asking, “What happened, dear? Where on earth did you go?”

  “Vicki …” Shavers began again. He hesitated; his shoulders slumped; he appeared to have given up the interrogation as hopeless. “Come on inside with me, honey. We got to get you fresh again for the scene we’d planned to shoot.” He opened the door and took Vicki by the arm, attempting to guide her toward the trailer. Vicki came along, unprotesting. “It was priceless, Ed,” she was saying. “I’ve never seen anything …”

  Hoot Gibson was next to climb out of the car. He stepped down off the high running board and wandered toward the big tent. Some of the studio people stared at him for a moment and then turned back to their plates. Hoot Gibson sat down on a bench and waited to be served.

  Jay McGown lay back in the seat. The ancient leather was murderously hot against his skin, but he could not bring himself to move. Sarah walked to the car and Jay finally pulled himself up again and began fishing around in the ice bucket. He filled two glasses of water and passed one to Sarah.

  “It really was something,” he said, looking up and smiling and shaking his head. “Like a bad dream. When you know it’s only a dream and not really so bad. Sort of a cheerful nightmare quality.”

  “Well there’s certainly some of that quality about your Miss Vicki,” Sarah said sharply.

  Jay struggled to his feet, wiping his face. “Let’s get out of this heat,” he said. They walked together toward the trailer.

  He tried patiently to explain to her, but Sarah never seemed really to be listening. He tried, all the same, explaining that it had not been Vicki’s show; not entirely. The Governor had been very much a part of it for a time. It was he, in fact, who initiated the business about Good Neighbors and Brotherhood, explaining how the very sandhill on which they’d all planted themselves, all the goddam state, most of the western half of the continent, might be Mexico’s to this day if it had not been for a few quirks of fate, vagaries of history he called them. And Vicki had come in then and said let’s give it back, let’s deed it over — deeds, not by-God words, was what we needed — hand it all back to them for friendship’s sake. Like Good Neighbors. Neat stroke of institutional public relations! And everyone agreed. Or rather nobody objected. And that fellow Ibáñez went to his ice barrel and brought out the Mexican beer and the others in the village, the ones who’d been afraid to show themselves when the Dusenberg first appeared, those people came round and peered shyly through the grubby windows of the storefront, watching Fenstemaker raising his bottle and sealing the bargain with a toast. The fellow Ibáñez called himself the Mayor, the Judge, the Alcalde, though there couldn’t have been more than twenty or thirty Mexicans in the village: tenants and ranch hands mostly and most of them living on the Alcalde’s credit. The Governor called him Roy Bean, called Ibáñez that, called him Judge and pointed to the modern Lily Langtry poster that had been pasted across the mirror above the bar. It was the awful photograph of Vicki — Jay had seen it plenty times — old Vicki stripped naked, sitting crosslegged on a bearskin rug, holding a pink lapdog, a spitz with its fur dyed, just a pup and just large enough to cover the parts of Vicki that sure
ly everybody and his dog had seen before anyhow.

  And they’d attempted to explain to Ibáñez, communicating in stilted English and nearly incomprehensible Spanish, that the girl right here and the girl in the calendar were one and the same: Miss Vicki McGown the motion picture actress. Arthur kept introducing himself: “I’m Arthur Goddam Fenstemaker,” he’d say, pumping the Mexican’s arm, trying to make it clear who he was and what he represented — and Hoot Gibson kept trying to help, repeating over and over again, “Regardez una Governar!” Ibáñez would smile and nod and go back to his ice barrel for more beer. Then he plugged in an ancient jukebox and they all danced, Ibáñez first, doing a fantastic mambo-rumba thing with the blond-haired woman, then the Governor and then Hoot Gibson and finally Jay — they’d all insisted on it; they’d even invited some of the Mexican cowboys inside to dance with Vicki, bought them beer and given them money and tried to explain how they’d just turned back the land; and fairly soon they were all drunk, helplessly drunk before noon in the desert sun. A great tragicomic goodbye was said to the cowboys on the ruptured steps of the Ibáñez store, with the Governor trying to remember the words of his Inauguration Speech and the Mexicans whooping and hollering and banging on two-stringed guitars as the Dusenberg groaned off down the road.

  The ride back had been interminable. Several times they were not sure of the way, and he could see Fenstemaker, beginning to sober, wondering what in hell had gone on back there and whether they were now lost in the ranch country. But then Vicki had got her bearings from the mountains on either side of them, and Hoot Gibson passed round the tumblers full of ice and whiskey and soon the location camp came in sight, sprawling out ahead next to the pre-fab mansion.

  “I suppose,” Jay said to Sarah, “that a little of the magic goes out of the episode in the telling.”

  “You had to be there, etcetera,” Sarah said. She handed him a towel to wash his face.

  Jay blotted at his forehead and scrubbed his neck. He wondered about disillusion and whether it ever came to Vicki. He’d told her once, years before at college, thinking he was bringing enlightenment to an innocent, that life could be a great all-satisfying bacchanalia for anyone who did not allow tradition and convention to smother the impulse. And she’d bought the idea right off, though the funny thing was it did not seem to matter. There had to be an awareness of having sinned a little if the debauching gesture meant anything at all, and for Vicki there really never seemed anything to be liberated from.

  They moved out of the reception room and into Shavers’ quarters, where the Governor and Sweet Mama had come to rest.

  “Jay,” the Governor said with great weariness, massaging his eyes, pulling on his nose, probing his face as if conducting an examination, “we signed something out there … What exactly did we sign out there, Jay?”

  “There were a couple of things being passed around,” Jay said. “You dictated something to me — a kind of proclamation — but then you didn’t sign it. You signed the sheet Hoot Gibson was waving at everyone, something very simple like ‘I hereby give this land back to the Meskins.’ Hoot Gibson’s got the copy if you want to take a look at it.”

  “No — there was something else. There were two copies. I signed two copies. I’m sure of it.”

  “Oh, Arthur …” Mrs. Fenstemaker began, but immediately subsided.

  “What you think, Jay?” the Governor said. “You think there’s any chance of that little proclamation ever gettin’ into the papers?”

  “There aren’t any newspapers out here to speak of,” Jay said.

  “Didn’t ask how many newspapers out here. I can see there ain’t any newspapers out here — nothin’ out here. Listen to the question. Nobody listens to questions any more. I asked if you thought —”

  “No,” Jay said.

  “Good,” the Governor said.

  “Dear …” Mrs. Fenstemaker began again.

  “And if it does happen to turn up, we can deny everything,” Fenstemaker said.

  “Arthur,” Sweet Mama said, “you’re getting tired and you need some rest. You’re tired and short tempered and I think we ought to consider returning to town as soon as possible. If we don’t leave soon, we’ll have a night flight back home and the pilots don’t like night flights, remember.”

  “Hell with the pilots an’ their night flights,” the Governor said. “Let ’em miss some sack time … I’m feeling fine … Fine … I want to stay here awhile. That fellow Shavers mentioned some scenes they were shooting. I want to take a look at what it’s like. He mentioned the possibility of including me in one of the scenes. He said I had a good face — face of a leader, he said.”

  “Really? Did he really?”

  “Said I was photogenic. Wants me to play a part in the picture. Playing myself. What you think about that, Jay?”

  Jay wanted to say the right thing, but he hesitated, knowing he should tell the Governor that it was an awful idea, worst idea he could imagine. He stood there wondering if he should tell the Governor what he ought to hear or what he wanted to hear, hesitating, miserable in his indecision, not so much because he feared Fenstemaker but because he rather imagined they each wanted to stay over — and the hell with the consequences. Another twenty-four hours and Jay’s daughter might have arrived. And the Governor was obviously fascinated by the prospects of appearing in the motion picture. Jay attempted to weigh the amount of trouble they might get themselves into in another twenty-four hours against his desperate need to see the little girl.

  “Not really playing myself exactly,” Fenstemaker said. “Playing Governor of the State, though. Can’t really be me. Story takes place twenty-five years ago, during the oil boom. Who was Governor twenty-five years ago, Jay? Sarah? Anybody know?”

  Jay told him who was Governor twenty-five years ago.

  Fenstemaker looked unhappy. “Don’t know if I want to play that sonofabitch or not,” he said.

  Jay finally came to a decision. He said: “You ought to base your judgment on what exactly the part involves. You want to make it clear from the start that you reserve the right to approve or disapprove not only your role as the script shows it but the overall film itself. The finished product, I mean. You can’t trust these people. I can tell you …”

  “You sure can’t!” Fenstemaker hooted. “You fought this war long time ago, didn’t you Jay?” He seemed to think this enormously funny. His big shoulders were still heaving from laughter when Vicki and Shavers entered the room.

  Four

  SARAH LEHMAN WAS NOT ordinarily so reserved as she had been on this day. She was acutely conscious of the fact and she resented it; though her resentment was vague and notably groundless. She resented Arthur Fenstemaker for allowing such a spectacle as had developed through the morning; resented Jay for not attempting to avoid it, not making some kind of defiant gesture. And she thought she resented Vicki McGown most of all for the unsettling, graceless effect she had on those around her.

  All through that morning Sarah had felt helpless and dumbstruck in the clutch of Vicki McGown’s world. She was nearly inarticulate; she felt dull and witless and absurd, and the admission only confirmed her sense of defeat — leaving her painfully aware of the distance between the drab fact of her present conduct and her normally dazzling potential. That was the frustrating thing. She was a handsome girl, and well educated; she could see for herself that her looks were of a more enduring and flawless quality than the actress’s — and it was obvious that she had better sense. But there was something else that got in the way. Sarah had achieved very early in life a rare combination of beauty and intelligence, and now the intimidation of Vicki McGown’s presence — even the prospect of it — had dulled her head and clouded the glow of her pretty face. She wanted to cut Vicki with a word, bring her down to life size with a turn of crushing phrase, but she could not seem to bring it off against the weight of the woman’s vast and careless self-possession.

  She was furious with herself, having finally to adm
it she was helpless and ineffective in contending with another woman. And worse, the main threat was something ubiquitous and indefinable. What was it? Pride, repose, luxuriant vitality? How could one isolate the elements? Where had it all begun? She thought of Arthur Fenstemaker’s transformation from timorous, picknose politician into … whatever it was that currently passed for greatness. The Presidency makes the man? Perhaps the movie queen story, drummed and repeated, endlessly recited, over and over again, had made its impression on Vicki McGown’s muddled intellect, advancing from some dark tendril of the brain, as in a post-hypnotic suggestion, to a point where Vicki could assure herself that she was a queen.

  The charged atmosphere of Vicki’s presence was all round them again, subtle and fantastic. Shavers looked exhausted; Fenstemaker’s eyes were bloodshot; Jay and Hoot Gibson and Sweet Mama seemed collapsed in a heap on the small couch. But they came suddenly awake as Vicki moved across the room, generating her wondrous resilience. She walked to the couch and draped a dark arm over Jay’s shoulder.

  “I’ve just talked with Victoria Anne, Jay-Jay,” she said. “They’re flying her out this afternoon …”

  “Really?” Jay said. “I wish you’d let me speak with —”

  “It shouldn’t be long now,” Vicki said. “They’ll have her here in the morning at the latest …” She turned to Arthur Fenstemaker and went on: “… So now you really should consider spending another day — give Jay a chance to visit Victoria Anne and give yourselves an opportunity to see some of the other stars.”

  Fenstemaker spread his hands and said, “Well …” before Vicki broke back in.

  “You can spare the time, can’t you? I hope so. Ed told me he wants to get that handsome face of yours in front of a camera. I think that’s wonderful … You could get the shooting done tomorrow, couldn’t you Ed?”