"Sure you were!" the boy countered. "I'll bet you saved the team. When was that? A couple years ago?"
"More like twenty."
Sam rolled his eyes. "Holy cow, you're older than my mom. You don't look old."
Pellam laughed. He'd forgotten how completely kids nuked your careful adult delusions.
"Hey, Mr Pellam, can we like practice passing sometime? My mom tries but she's a girl and all, you know. Maybe you and me could practice, you could give me some tips. My dad, well, he's busy a lot of the time. All he cares about is his job."
Pellam knew enough not to get into that one. He said, "We'll see."
"My mom'd like it if you stayed around for a while. She likes you, I can tell."
Or into that one either.
They came to a ridge that overlooked the parking lot where Marty had died. The lot was about two hundred yards away. There was only one other high point that Pellam could see that had a view of the lot and that one was five hundred yards. Not an impossible shot with a good scope but this would be the more likely spot for a sniper. Also, this faced the rear of the parking lot, and, if Marty had parked head in, would offer the car's gas tank as a target.
Still, it'd be a bitch of a shot in any kind of breeze, and on a warm day-as that day had been-heat waves from the valley beneath would have blurred the line of sight.
"Okay, Sam, go to work. Find me what you can."
The boy wandered back and forth for ten minutes, retrieving two mashed Coors cans and a quarter ("It's yours, son"). Suddenly he shrieked and ran up to Pellam with a.22 long rifle cartridge in his hand.
"Nope, too small. I'm looking for centerfire. You know the difference?"
"No, sir."
"Firing pin hits a.22 on the rim of the shell. So they're called rimfire. Bigger calibers hit the percussion cap in the center. They're called centerfire."
"Wow, that's neat."
"Come here, I'll show you." Sam frowned, then his eyes went wide, as Pellam opened his jacket and pulled a gun from his waistband. It was an 1876 Colt, steel with dark rosewood grips
"Wow," the boy whispered.
Pellam kept the gun pointed at the ground. "Always pretend a gun is loaded, even if you know it isn't, and always pretend that it could go off at any minute. So you never point it at anything unless you're prepared to shoot it. Got it?"
"I got it. That's a cowboy gun."
"It's a Colt Peacemaker, a.45." He opened the thumb cover and with the ejector rod eased the shell out. He held the end up for the boy to see. "There, that's the cap in the center. The pin on the hammer hits the cap and that sets off the powder. The old-time guns like this use black powder. Like the one your mother's got. Newer guns use smokeless."
"Can you take me shooting, Mr Pellam? Please?"
"Let's talk to your parents about it. Maybe."
"Shoot something. Will you?"
"Not now, Sam. It's not a toy." He put the gun back in his waistband. "Let's find me my cartridges."
With even more enthusiasm the boy swept the detector over the ground. Pellam wasn't paying much attention to him, he was looking at the dark patch of plowed-over earth in the distance, the parking lot, where Marty'd died a horrible death. He didn't notice the boy stoop down and pick up something then come racing over to him.
"Look what I found, Mr Pellam. Look!" Sam dropped the two cartridges into his hand. They were.30 caliber, though the length was odd, stubbier than a.30-'30 or.30-'06, bigger than a Garand. They couldn't have been from a carbine like an M-1 because a short-barreled rifle wouldn't have been accurate enough for a shot of this range.
"Good job, Sam." He patted the beaming boy on his shoulders. "Just what I'm looking for." He dropped the cartridges into his pocket.
"You show me your collection some day, Mr Pellam?"
"You bet, Sam. Time to get home."
"Aw…"
Together they walked down the mountain, swapping fishing stories.
That night, Sam upstairs, and Keith still at the company, Meg Torrens ate a turkey sandwich with cold cranberry sauce and drank a glass of white wine, reading the headlines and the first paragraphs of all the stories in the New York Times.
She heard the clicks and tiny pops of the hundred-year-old house, the muffled roar of the furnace coming on-something reassuring about the way its simple brain kicked the machinery on and coursed hot water through the pipes. It would shut off and there'd be moments of complete, muffled silence.
She finished the Arts section, dropped the paper and walked upstairs to Sam's room.
"Hi, Mommy."
She walked to his computer.
"Tell me again. You dial, then what do you say?" Meg looked at the computer.
"Aw, Mom," Sam said. He was tired, it was nearly nine. "It's a modem. Nobody says anything. You just get a tone. That means you're on-line."
"Show me." In the master bedroom the clock radio played a sad country western tune, an old Patsy Cline song.
Sam bent over the keyboard and typed rapidly. Meg and Keith spent thirty dollars a month for access to a current events database, which Sam had learned contained a sports submenu; they'd ended up with huge overages one month when he'd printed out the starting lineups of every baseball team since 1956.
He picked up the phone, dialed, his mouth twisted with exasperation, though Meg knew he was tickled to show off this esoteric knowledge. A squeal came from the phone. He held it toward her like a ray gun. "Zap, zap, zap!" And pressed a button on a small box. The computer screen came to life.
"You're on-line, Mom. What do you want to look up?"
"A name. I want to look up a man's name."
She typed in some characters. The response come back in five seconds. Meg scrolled through the text. "How do I print it?"
"You either do a screen dump or download the whole file."
Where did they learn this stuff?
"Just tell me what to push."
"Here." Sam happily hit a button, and the raspy matrix printer began its satisfying sound.
Reminded her of the Polaroid.
Bzzzt.
The sound lasted for some time. There was a lot to print.
13
Apples. A thousand apples, a hundred thousand. A million.
Pellam'd never seen so many apples in his life. And in so many forms. Apple pies, fritters, turnovers, apple butter, jelly, pickled apples and candied apples. You could dunk for them. You could buy them fresh by the bushels, buy them dried and painted and glued together into wreaths and wall hangings shaped like geese and pigs.
There were girls dressed up like apples. All the boys seemed to have round, rouge cheeks.
A woman tried to sell him a chance to win a Dutch apple pie by tossing a ring onto a board with apples nailed onto it.
"I don't really care for apples," he told her.
The football field was filled with more than a thousand people, milling through the booths, playing the games and examining the junk for sale-sweaters, wooden trinket boxes, clocks made from driftwood, ceramic, macrame. Janine had a jewelry booth. Pellam had homed in on it right away, waited until she was busy making a sale, and did the obligatory appearance. All she had time to say was "Dinner tomorrow, remember?"
He nodded.
"At four. Don't you forget, lover boy." She winked and blew him a kiss.
Pellam estimated half the crowd was tourists, half was locals. No one older than seventeen seemed exactly sure why they were there. The tourists were catching the tail of some indigenous upstate experience-the country, the country!-and holding on for a while, buying vases, jewelry, decorations, food to take back to their Manhattan apartments. The Cleary moms and dads were gossiping and doing some serious eating. The kids, of course, were the only ones really enjoying themselves because for them it was nothing more than tons of apples. And who needed more than that on a nice fall day?
No more 'Roids. He'd left the camera in the camper. Now, he was just another tourist scoping out the leaves, the boo
ths, the scenery.
The Toyota showed up five minutes later, racing through the parking lot and skidding to a stop on the crumbling asphalt. Meg saw him right away and waved. Keith wasn't with her but Sam was. The boy waved energetically. He wondered if Sam had said anything about Pellam's tendency to collect lethal weapons.
Like the other night at dinner, she looked ten years younger than the upstate matron who'd visited him in the clinic. Her hair wasn't teased and stiff but was tied back in a ponytail. She wore tight jeans and a dark paisley high-necked blouse under a suede jacket. A silver antique pin was at her throat.
The boy stayed close. "Hi, Mr Pellam."
"Howdy, Sam."
"Hello," Meg said to Pellam. He nodded in reply.
They were suddenly enveloped in a large crowd of Izod-shirted Manhattanites. The men with curly dark hair, the women in black stretch pants. Everybody had great forearms and calves, courtesy of the New York Health and Racquet Club.
The gang passed and they found themselves alone.
"You made it," Meg said.
"Wouldn't miss this for the world."
"Here," Meg called. "A present."
She pitched him an apple. He caught it left-handed.
"I hate apples," he said.
Sam grinned. "So do I."
"Cleary still a small town?" Pellam smiled.
She frowned.
He asked, "Won't they talk, we walk around like this?" They circled on the fringes of the festival.
"Let 'em," Meg said. "I'm feeling rebellious today. Phooey."
Sam was running sorties to the booths but always circling back to study Pellam with casual awe. Then he'd be off again, hooking up with some buddies from school, conspiring, looking amazed and devious and overjoyed-and always on the move.
"Energetic, aren't they?" Pellam watched an impromptu race.
Meg said, "There's nothing like children for perspective. What they teach you about yourself is the best. Somebody said that the most honest and the most deceitful, the crudest and the kindest of all people are children." She laughed. "Of course, that's only half true when you're talking about your own kids."
"You think about it, there are very few good movies about children," Pellam said. "Sentiment, mostly. Or revisionism-directors trying to patch up their own childhood on celluloid. Or trying to put adult values on kids' shoulders. Cheap shots, you ask me. I'd like to see a movie about the ambivalence of being a child. That would be a good project."
"Why don't you suggest it to your studio?"
Former studio, he thought, and didn't answer. Meg jogged away quickly to keep Sam from climbing a fence.
Pellam found himself in front of a turkey shoot booth, where you could win stuffed birds, chocolate turkeys, and a fifteen-pound frozen one by plinking tiny sponge rubber ducks-painted to look like turkeys-with a battered Sears pump action.22. Pellam called Sam over to him.
"What do you want, son, one of those little stuffed turkeys or a candy one?"
Sam looked shyly at his mother, who said, "Tell Mr Pellam what you'd like." She looked up, grinning. "This, I've got to see."
"I guess chocolate, okay?" His eyes on Pellam.
Meg said, "If he can win it you can eat it."
"But maybe not all at once," Pellam said. "It looks pretty big."
The booth attendant took a dollar from Pellam, who asked, "How many to win one of those chocolate turkeys? The bigger one?"
The man loaded the skinny gun. "Six hits out of ten."
"Okay." Pellam leaned forward, resting on the chest-high bench, and fired four shots slowly. They all missed, kicking up dust in the sandbag bullet trap.
Sam laughed. Meg did too.
Pellam slowly stood up straight. "Think I've got the feel." He quickly lifted the stock to his cheek. Six shots-fast, short cracks, as fast as he could work the slide. Six ducks flew off the board.
"Holy shit," the booth man whispered. Then he blushed. "Oh, beg your pardon, Mrs Torrens."
Pellam handed the gun back, and Sam took the candy, staring at him. Eyes wide. "Wow."
"What do you say, Sam?"
"Holy…" the boy began slowly.
Meg warned, "Sam."
"… cow. Wow, thanks, Mr Pellam. That was like totally fresh. I mean, totally."
Meg said, "Sam…"
Sam said, "Mom thinks I don't speak English."
"I know fresh," Pellam said. He looked at the candy. "I hope that it is too."
Sam peeled back the foil and bit off the bird's head. "Wow," he said through a mouthful of chocolate and walked away, looking back every fourth or fifth step. Another story was about to circulate.
They wandered on. She said, "I thought all you knew was muzzleloaders."
"I drive the L.A. Freeway. You gotta know how to shoot."
"Where'd you learn?"
"My father," he said.
"Where'd you grow up?" she asked.
"Simmons."
She turned to him, "No! Not just across the river?" She nodded west.
"The very same."
"It's a lot like Cleary."
"Little poorer, little scruffier," Pellam said. "And we don't get the tourists for the leaves. It's mostly pine."
They walked in silence for a moment, kicking through the tall grass at the edge of the football field.
"Keith couldn't make it?"
"He'll be coming by later. He's at his company."
"It was good of him to help me the other day."
"He said somebody'd stolen what you were looking for."
"Yep. We got outflanked."
They walked for a few minutes then, as if Pellam had asked about her husband, Meg said, "Keith's changed. When his partner died, it affected him. He got an edge to him."
"Really? I didn't sense anything like that."
"I wasn't sure he'd help you. He doesn't like things that are out of his own, you know, orbit. I'm glad he did."
They were being examined-dozens of heads turned conspicuously away while eyes followed them.
After five minutes of looking at booths, he said, "Why did you leave Manhattan?"
"Keith got a job with a drug company up here. I wasn't getting modeling work and just couldn't break into acting. I had a baby. I always wanted a house."
"And you like Cleary?"
She gave a nervous laugh and looked away. "It's tough for me to give you an answer. And it won't matter if I live here for another twenty-five years. I'll never know the place well enough to talk about it. These places, towns like this, they're born into you. The roots go way back. You come any other way, you're just a houseguest. You may be the life of the party, you may even get yourself elected to the town council, but places like Cleary don't become part of you. It's in the genes or it isn't. It's not in mine."
Applause not far away. A new Miss Apple had been crowned. Pellam saw a couple of kids gravitating toward him and Meg. Word was out that the location scout could shoot out a sponge duck's eye at fifty feet. The boys kept their distance as Meg and Pellam circled the field. The ripe, rich scent of decomposing grass came to them.
"Your hair looks nice that way."
Her fingers reached toward her ponytail then she stopped the acknowledgment and lowered her hand. Her eyes fled from his and she concentrated on something on the horizon. They walked to the festival's zoo-a sad collection of cows, goats, geese, ducks and a pony-before she said, "Is that why you and your wife broke up?"
"Uh, why's that?"
"Sorry, I was just thinking about you traveling around."
"There were a lot of reasons. Sure, the job had a lot to do with it."
"You were away from home six months, eight months-"
"I didn't travel as much then."
"I'd love to travel," she said. "Maybe do some acting. Not be a star necessarily. Character acting maybe. I'd even like your job."
Even your job. Just a location scout. "I don't think you would."
She said, "Well, I love my house. I wouldn't
give that up. But seeing all those new places…It's like going on vacation, but having a purpose. I think that'd be wonderful."
Women said that. My house. Never our house. He remembered his wife saying just those words. Of course, in the end, that was how it worked out. It did become her house. Self-fulfilling prophecy, he guessed.
"… I guess what I'd want is Sam to come with me for maybe a week or two at a time." After a moment, she said, "Keith too of course." She looked at him but he gave no reaction to the lapse. If a lapse it had been.
Pellam steered away from the domestic situation. He said, "I can't really tell you why I like it. The thing about scouting is, it's not the work itself-finding a spot that'll work for the film. I mean, that's fine, that's what they pay me for. But I like the being on the road…" He waved his arm. "Simmons is, what, less than a hundred miles from here? I grew up with colored leaves and Victorian houses. But I was real glad to get that call and hit the road, scout for towns like this." He waved to Sam. It seemed his fan club had grown to a half dozen.
"One March," he continued, "I'd been sitting home for a month. I got a call from a producer who wanted me to scout for a labour union film. I got in the camper and headed right out to the steel mills in Gary, Indiana. Ugly, cold, gray. Walking through slush. That place was as close to hell as any I'd ever been. But I was so glad to get that call."
She wrinkled her nose. "I'd only go to fun places. Rio, San Francisco, Hawaii…"
He laughed. "You wouldn't get many jobs."
"No, but I'd have a hell of a good time on the ones I got."
"They have beer around here?"
"Probably, but don't you want some cider? They make it fresh."
"No, I want a beer. I hate apples, remember?"
"Then I guess an apple festival doesn't have a lot for you."
"I wouldn't say that."
Meg ignored the flirt and they steered toward the food concession.
As his mother and Mr Pellam were walking through the farmyard zoo Sam ran off toward a bow and arrow shoot. He thought about returning to the rifle shoot and winning something for Mr Pellam, but he remembered seeing the bow and arrow game-where you shot at paper targets of deer. One of the prizes was a small plastic football and because Mr Pellam had played in school that's what Sam decided he was going to win.
Shallow Graves Page 14