American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “Maybe.” Teddy’s face was illegible, perfect for an agent. “Code of silence, my friend.”

  The two men stood without saying anything. Down on the sand, Kate streaked back to pick up what looked like a hairband and then followed Rufus DeLong into the house. Sunlight flamed over the water.

  “Better?” Teddy said, after a moment.

  “Yes.” Beau sighed. “Theodore, you are a lifesaver.”

  “We all feel that way, Beau.” Teddy searched him. “Whatever it is that ails you.”

  Neither of these men was an introvert. Teddy had been to Stanford on a full scholarship, was easily the most educated man—even beyond Williams—Beau had ever known. He was also just a poor boy from the deepest reaches of Burbank, beyond where the studio lots had ever existed to prop up the economy, where the city tapered off into shabby ranch houses, yards filled with arguing Hispanics.

  “Thanks, Teddy.” Beau chortled. “You scan the very reaches of my soul.”

  “An agent’s job.” Teddy’s eyes gleamed, as ever, with irony. “We’re the Jewish confessors.”

  He tucked what was left of the joint in Beau’s pocket, before the latter turned and moved through the crowd. The air smelled of briquettes, lighter fluid, the hopeful scent of barbecue. The dope should have relaxed Beau finally, but it didn’t. The patio thronged with his friends, people who’d known him for years. Yet who did they know? The friendly fat man, bonhomous Beau. Not the fearful fetishist, panic-stricken dreamer. His forehead felt cold, the tops of his ears. He hadn’t had an episode like this since before The Dog’s Tail was in production. He found a bench on one of the lower levels of the garden. He wanted to be alone. He dropped his face into his hands and waited. The moon was full, the sky purple. Beau sat in the posture of a man grieving. Around him the torches flickered, offering up their obscure signals of smoke and fire.

  “You wanna see it?”

  “What?” Kate spoke. “See what?”

  “I don’t want to see it, Rufus.” Severin, as ever, was the voice of reason.

  “No.” Bullying Rufus’s voice had already dropped an octave it seemed, and he was easily three inches taller than the other kids. They were out on the sand again. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  Kate stood next to him. Bryce’s son, weak little Sergei, was in Rufus’s shadow, literally and figuratively. A sickly blond, with sunken cheeks and dolorous gray eyes.

  “I don’t want to see it either,” Kate said, echoing her brother. “I know what one looks like.”

  Four children were on the sand. Alone, unnoticed.

  “Have you ever held one?”

  “No!” Kate’s tone said, gross. “That’s a boy thing.”

  If Beau had overheard this, would he have put a stop to it? Of course. The fuck are you doing, Rufus? He’d have swatted his client’s kid as surely as his own father had once swatted him, because Davis DeLong’s little pig of a boy deserved it. They were down on the damp sand where the surf lapped in, close to the shadow of the house. The waves were thunderous enough to drown their voices. From where he sat, Beau might have heard only wind-ripped pieces.

  “ . . . not what I’m . . . ” Rufus again protested. “ . . . else. Sergei’s dad has one.”

  “My dad has one,” Sev said.

  “No, he doesn’t,” Kate said. “Sev, he does not!”

  They’d lit a few sparklers before, and smoke bombs. The gray cadavers of glowworms littered the sand, the baked stubs of Roman candles. The adults were all upstairs, waiting for the real fireworks to begin.

  “ . . . come on,” Rufus said to Sergei, to all of them really. “Come on . . . ”

  Beau stood up after a while. He felt better: sane and heavy and restored to himself. He felt hungry, and not just for food. He waded back toward the house while the first ooh went up from the crowd, a blue shower of sparks bursting out over the bay.

  “Hey Jeremy, seen my kids?”

  “No sir.”

  “What about that girl?” Beau stretched, his stubby arms pointing to the corners of Bryce’s den. “That one that came with Davis.”

  “Her?” Vana scowled. “Big game, Beau. Not sure she’s old enough to vote.”

  “I’m not looking to poll her.”

  The two men chuckled. Vana sank in his armchair as if despairing, blinking dully at an empty glass. Most of the others were out on the balcony, so the two were alone inside this room where Beau used to sleep. The house looked prosperous, redone and repainted. A pair of nice couches had replaced the battered pull-out.

  “What’s cooking?” Beau dipped down to the table and picked up a saltine, slathered it with Brie. “You look like someone pissed in your spittoon.”

  “Never give it all up for an actress,” Jeremy said.

  “That Li’s a tough nut,” Beau said. He represented her, so he should know. “I warned you.”

  “That girl with Davis is an actress.”

  “It’s OK.” Beau clapped Vana’s shoulder. “I wasn’t planning to sell the farm.”

  He moved on, into the kitchen. What was he really after, anyway? Like a lot of actresses, this girl seemed quietly sexless. The kind of girl who’d come like someone stretching in her sleep. He drank a Perrier and set the empty bottle on the counter. He belched and then prowled until he found her.

  She was alone in the back bedroom. She sat on the edge of the bed, staring at her face in a compact, adjusting her lips.

  “I was looking for you.”

  “Yeah?” She snapped the compact shut. “Do I know you?”

  Beau shut the door. “I’m Davis’s agent.”

  “Oh. I’ve heard of you.” Her face collapsed, like a soufflé.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Fucking Davis.” She was close to tears. “He’s such an ass.”

  He came into the room. He moved toward the bed with his shirt untucked and a rumpled, easy manner, the comfort he’d attained in all things. Was this simple for him? Of course it was, but it wasn’t like you’d think. This girl was a person, he met her in empathy. He sat down on the bed, amid the scattered purses and coats.

  “What did he do?”

  She shook her head. Beau knew. Davis was a bigger pig than Steve McQueen. Didn’t even need to fuck a girl to enjoy dumping her. The latter was more fun.

  “You want some grass, sweetheart? I’ve got some dynamite shit.”

  Beau was a man who’d suffered all his life, enough never to get his kicks from pure exploitation and was torn, thus, between conflicting impulses. This girl was pixie-ish, pale and frail: that waiflike, Mia Farrow look. Her hair was auburn, highlights red in the lamplight.

  “Don’t worry about Davis,” he said. He didn’t even want to sleep with her now, it was more important to console her. “Actors are such beasts.”

  Outside the fireworks boomed. The voices of the crowd rose and fell, in towers and showers of disappointment.

  “I’ve been doing this since ’65,” he said, “and it’s never any different. The stars think it’ll never end. But the worm always turns.”

  If he’d listened closely he would’ve heard a sound, different from all the others. It was sharper, higher than those booming shells along the beach. Beau lifted his head a second.

  “You don’t know,” the girl said. Suddenly, she was eager. “You don’t know the things Davis is into.”

  “Sure I do,” Beau said. “There’s nothing in sex that doesn’t come out in business.”

  But the girl would tell him. They were rapping about acting and politics. Suddenly his hand was on her knee. She didn’t move it. She just sat cross-legged in front of him while the lamplight spilled shadows across her face.

  “Carter’s a farmer,” he was saying. “He’s weak—”

  But she was leaning forward to kiss him and vice versa. They were ready to meet.

  “Dad!”

  Severin ran across the beach. He’d come down the splintering stairs from the terraced garden and now went up
the ones that led to the balcony on the other property, tracing a big V because he couldn’t find the path that connected the garden to the house.

  “Dad! Dad!”

  I don’t think anyone knew. He was so small, and at the same time so intrinsically self-possessed there wasn’t any way to measure; he was just an eight-year-old boy scrambling to find his father.

  “Have you seen my dad?” He tugged Vana’s sleeve in the living room, where the adults had just finished watching the fireworks. The mood was smoky and mellow and logy and calm, with people getting ready to have coffee and brownies, including some special ones Beller had made himself. “Have you?”

  He’d gashed his foot on the dull end of a nail that was sticking up from the stairs but hadn’t yet noticed. Blood streaked the pale carpets, the trail of an injured animal.

  “Nah. Hey, what’s wrong?” Vana set down his snifter. “Is something wrong?”

  Severin worked his jaw. But nothing happened.

  “What is it?”

  Little kids got upset when they were hungry, right? Clueless Jeremy didn’t have any. But Severin opened his somber mouth and what came out was a chest-deep wail.

  “I want my daddy,” he said. “I WANT MY DADDY!”

  As every adult in the room turned for a moment to look.

  Beau balanced the girl on the bathroom sink. Some people were leaving through the vestibule right outside, and they didn’t want to get caught, so he’d carried her into the next room and they were fucking with his hands under her thighs. Her head banged against the medicine mirror. She was so brittle it was like carrying a paper doll.

  “Fuck me!” She wasn’t at all the way he’d expected. She was one of those: a director. Clawing his back and spitting into his ear. “Fuck me!”

  Ordinarily, Beau wasn’t into this. He hated being told what to do. But this girl was hot. His fingertips slid against her thighs. She grabbed his hair, his ear, and yanked hard.

  “Ow—fuck!” He came, he liked it. Davis had bragged this girl was a she-wolf, but Beau hadn’t believed him. Everybody lied about the women they were with. “Jesus!”

  He bucked up against her and the sink’s cold porcelain, which felt good too, icing his balls. His knees and his legs shivered. His arms fell, and he pinned her onto the sink. There was sweat on his forehead, breath on the mirror. He closed his eyes. As she went slack too, her hands draped around his neck. His ear and the side of his head still stung.

  “Wait.” There was always this moment too, when the girl seemed to realize abruptly whom she was with. “Ouch.” She shifted. “Get off!”

  “Dad!”

  Severin couldn’t speak. This was the only word he’d say. Jeremy Vana led him around by the hand, room to room while they searched for his father.

  “Dad!”

  The tears were dry now, but his voice was tense with emotion as they circulated through rooms of oblivious adults topping off their glasses and feeding the munchies. Even Vana could tell it was serious. He’d bandaged the kid’s foot with a napkin.

  “What’s wrong?” Jeremy said. “What’s wrong?”

  Severin shook his head. A reflexive little jerk.

  “I want my daddy,” Severin repeated. “I can only tell him.”

  They checked the living room, the kitchen, a quick peek downstairs. A woman’s voice rose, feigning peevishness. Where is Mitchell? Why isn’t he here?

  “Beau?” Vana poked his head into a laundry closet. “Hey Beau?”

  They made it to the back bedroom last. Beau was just coming out of the bathroom, with that semicomposure that says only one thing, when Jeremy opened the door.

  “What’s up?” Beau said. “What is it, Jer?”

  “Your son.” Severin stampeded into the room. Behind him that woman’s voice lifted again. Oh my goodness! Oh how awful! “He was looking for you.”

  Beau knelt as Sev raced toward him. “Hey, killer. What did I miss?”

  He gathered his son in his arms. Severin was still light and small enough to pick up without difficulty.

  “Thanks, Jer.”

  But Vana was already gone. Beau felt Severin trembling and had the presence to spin around so his son wouldn’t see the actress, who was just now exiting the bathroom. She stopped and hung back when she saw what was happening.

  “Is something wrong? Sev?”

  But he could feel it, in his son’s shell-shocked vibration. My God.

  The actress just watched as Beau kissed his son’s cheek and whisked him outside.

  “Talk to me, Sev. Talk to me.”

  Beau felt his son’s forehead. There was no fever. But he couldn’t go outside, wouldn’t. They knelt for a second at the edge of the living room.

  “Will you show me?” Responsibility argued with terror and won. “Can you show me what’s wrong?”

  Severin shook his head, more virulently than ever. Guests drifted around them, but the party had thinned. Traffic would be bumper to bumper on the PCH. The jangling of keys as people searched for their wits and their host. A woman dressed in white passed by, swirling dregs of wine in her glass, a murky, blond, hypnotic swill.

  “I can’t help if I don’t know what the problem is.” Beau stood. “Where’s Kate?” Severin was solemn as a little soldier. And Beau fought the fear, as anyone would. “Where’s Katie? Severin, take me to your sister.”

  On these words, Severin took his father’s finger and led him onto the balcony. Out toward the wooden stairs and the sand.

  Beau followed his son down to the beach, then looped up the terrace garden’s steps. His feet were still bare, and they slapped behind Severin’s on the brick. He should’ve put shoes on.

  “Sev?” He called up to his son, who just kept marching ahead. “Sev?”

  He made his way up the steps, through the different portions of the garden—most were just scalloped platforms, planks on which there grew cacti or bonsais or iceplants—up toward where it flattened out and there was Bryce’s shed and a courtyard leading onto the garage. Teddy had left his hat on one of the benches. But the garden was empty. It was cold, now. Most people had either left or gone inside.

  “Hey!” He called up. Severin had stopped on the landing and looked at his father. Inscrutable now in the dark.

  “You understand.” Beau squatted down before his son. He clasped Sev’s shoulders. “You understand . . . whatever it is . . . ”

  He couldn’t breathe now, couldn’t get the words out. He meant to say, It’s not your fault. Without knowing what it was, without daring to imagine.

  “Wait here.” He held Sev by the shoulders, rooting him in place. “You wait.”

  It was so quiet. There was just the thunder of the surf, and wind. The fizzle of fireworks farther up the beach and the dispersive murmur—not much, now—of the guests next door. He kissed Sev’s forehead and rubbed his hair. Wait.

  He stood up. His whole body felt cold, spreading from the chest. There was moonlight on the brick, and snails glistened among the wind-pushed roses. There was steel in his spine as he approached the shed and went in alone.

  Bryce’s shed was five by eight. There wasn’t anything in it, besides a cot and a Coleman lantern. A primitive rectangular tape-player for his chants. No magazines, no cigarettes or dope. Any other night, the kids might’ve ignored it, but children go where they are most forbidden. Most nights too it was locked, but someone had forgotten earlier to fasten the padlock Bryce had bought to keep out the critters.

  Someone.

  “Lemme see it!”

  Beau would have to imagine this scene. No one else ever described it accurately. For Severin, it left a kind of blank. A caesura in the thick of his experience: he claimed never to remember it.

  “No, Rufus.” Beau would picture it, though, over and again. How Sergei was the only one who knew how to handle the gun safely. Bryce had shown him. “No!”

  Rufus pulled it away. The safety was on, unless it was off. It was Beau who’d last handled this too, and what did he
know about guns? Bryce usually kept it in the house, in a safe. Sev was the last to come in. Outside, the sky was bruise-gray. Moonlight and fireworks glowed across the water.

  “Give it here, Rufus.” Sergei, a Cub Scout, picked up a pack of matches.

  “No.” Rufus snickered. He and Sergei sat on the bed while Sev and Kate stood. “What are you supposed to do with this anyway?” Rufus said. “Is it just for playing?”

  “Uh-uh. It’s real.”

  “It’s not. It’s just like in the movies. You can’t shoot anybody with this.”

  “You can. My dad says—”

  “He shot John Wayne with it, and John Wayne didn’t die in real life.”

  True. Yet surely you’d have to be an idiot to confuse life and the movies, even if you were still a kid.

  “It was only loaded with blanks then,” Severin said. “Those weren’t real.”

  “It’s not loaded with anything now.”

  “How do you know?”

  How stupid did you have to be?

  “My father keeps it unloaded,” Sergei said.

  Through all this, Kate didn’t say anything. She just stood where she was in the lantern’s flickering glow. It was the flame’s motion that caused her shadow to jump. And this was where Rufus aimed.

  “Bang!”

  That was all it took. One kid’s stupidity, or else just that fractal difference. The twitch of a finger, which was all that ever separated real from make-believe.

  Rufus pulled the trigger. This was the sound Beau had heard in the bedroom while all the other adults had stood out on the balcony and watched the fire-spattered sky. The shot was louder, but noises were everywhere: Roman candles, firecrackers, strings of M-80s. A few people turned their heads, but most were too drunk or stoned to put it together.

  The moment it happened, the instant the gun went off, the two other boys, Rufus and Sergei, took off running. They weren’t going to hang around to see what they’d just done. Rufus dropped the gun and they bolted, bashing past Severin through the door.

  He didn’t see it either, really. His eyes were closed, and he was already running, even as he heard the shot and then the sound of something heavy, the suddenly inanimate freight of a body as it clattered against the shed’s wooden wall.