Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

  “You know, I take pride in my ability to read people,” Kitchell said. “I don’t know anything about the movie business, for instance, but I can look in your eyes, and I see passion and purpose there, and I know you care about what you do, you care about this movie you’re making. I can communicate with you.”

  “We both understand the nature of transactional exigencies.”

  “Exactly,” Kitchell said, then added, “I think. Anyway, I can tell you’re someone I can sit down with at the bargaining table. Not that this is the case, because it’s far from it, but it wouldn’t even matter if we didn’t like each other. There’s something you want, something we want, that’s an equation with an attainable solution. On the off chance we couldn’t come to terms, I’d understand why on a primary level. But it’s more likely than not we’d work something out, even if one party had to accept a less than equitable distribution, because we both realize there’s no stopping the momentum of commerce. Try, and you’ll get steamrolled. Doing nothing is indefensible. It’s a ruthless world, and inertia will crush you. So, like it or not, you negotiate, you compromise, you fight and squawk, eventually you sign on the dotted line and move on. This is what reasonable people do.”

  “We’d reach a modus vivendi,” Woody said.

  “Right,” Kitchell told him. “If you say so. Your brother, though—I just don’t understand him at all. Nothing he does makes sense to me. Why won’t he accept the deal? It’s a very generous deal.”

  “You won’t get an argument from me about that,” Woody said.

  Kitchell opened his laptop and called up several screens that displayed radar images and sophisticated weather graphics. “Feel like taking a ride? You’re not afraid to fly, are you?”

  Kitchell led Woody outside to the far side of the hotel, where a helicopter was parked on the grass. Seeing Woody hesitate, Kitchell said, “Don’t worry. I’m CFII-rated with over a thousand hours.”

  After Kitchell performed a walk-around inspection of the helicopter, which was painted in the same cardinal-red with gold trim as The Centurion Group’s SUVs, they climbed into the cockpit and strapped themselves into the surprisingly plush leather seats. “This is a Bell 206 LongRanger,” Kitchell told him. “It’s about as good as they come.” He went through a preflight checklist and fired up the turbine engine, the rotors whump-whumping to life, and then Kitchell lifted a lever on his left, and they wobbled up five feet off the ground and hovered rather precariously, Woody, his heart racing, looking down between his legs through the bubbled bottom window, no longer quite subscribing to the concept of man in flight. Kitchell shifted his feet on the pedals, and the helicopter rotated slightly to the right, and then he eased forward the yoke or joystick or whatever it was called, and they began moving, nose pitched down into the wind, accelerating up and away quickly toward the ocean, directly toward several seagulls that were gliding over the shore. Instead of getting out of the way, the birds started flapping right into their path, and Kitchell climbed and banked steeper to avoid them.

  “Fucking gulls,” he said. “Nothing but a nuisance.”

  Woody could hear him perfectly with the noise-canceling headphones. “You ever hit a bird?” he asked.

  “Me, personally?” They were flying past Lyndon’s property, and they both looked down at the house and farm before Kitchell continued. “No, but it’s been known to happen. It’s actually more common than you’d think.”

  If a teeny little tweety bird hit the rotors, he told Woody, it wasn’t a problem, it’d simply be vaporized, you’d see this little pink poof, and it’d be gone. But it was things like geese, flocks of geese, you had to worry about. They could break your rotor tip cap or go through your windshield and incapacitate you or worse.

  “Birds in general are so stupid,” Kitchell said. “A couple of years back, an eagle hit the main rotors of an AH-1 Cobra and got cut in half and hit the tail, busted the drive shaft, so the thing autorotated and the crew had to egress, ten million dollars down the drain, all because an eagle couldn’t distinguish a military attack helicopter from a Chihuahua. But what can you do? Most windshields are only rated impact-resistant for a one-kilogram bird. They analyze these things with bird-strike tests, using gas cannons. In England, Rolls-Royce has a contract with a farmer to raise turkeys the same weight and size, and when they have a new engine, the turkeys are trucked to the plant and shot right into the fan blades. Only reason the remains aren’t used for in-flight meals,” Kitchell said, “is the feathers are too hard to pluck.” He laughed.

  They flew down the coast, surveying the golf course, much of it still dirt, only the vague outlines of fairways discernible. Excavators and backhoes rooted into the ground. Two bulldozers with a chain between them mowed down a row of trees, knocking them over one after another like pickets.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Kitchell asked.

  Woody hardly thought so, but then the fog lifted before them, and he saw the Pacific crashing onto the craggy shore, the precipitous sandstone bluffs, and, farther down, a line of beaches and the marshes where he had dropped off Trudy and Margot earlier. Below them now, some of the golf course had been sculpted and laid down with grass—poa annua on the greens and ryegrass on the fairways, Kitchell told him—and indeed it was beautiful, breathtaking, the wild, windswept contrast of colors, the majestic collision of land and water.

  It was exhilarating being in the helicopter. The minute he got back to L.A., he was going to sign up for flying lessons. How cool would it be, casually saying to people, “Feel like taking a ride? You’re not afraid to fly, are you?”

  “Are you married? Have any kids?” Kitchell asked.

  “No.”

  “My wife died thirteen years ago. Breast cancer. We never had children. Ever since she died, I’ve gone from project to project, resort to resort, all over the country, all over the world. I’ll tell you the truth, a lot of the time, I didn’t give a shit about what I was building. It was just a job to me. I’d wrap it up and go on to the next one. But this feels different. I’m prouder of this than anything I’ve ever done. I feel like I’m building something significant here, something of permanence, know what I mean? I’ve come to love this area. After I finish this resort, I’m thinking of quitting and settling down here. I don’t know what I’ll do, maybe run a charter service, do whatever I need to do to make ends meet—fire-fight, cropdusting. I want to help revitalize this town. I’d like to coach the high school football team. Does that sound crazy?”

  Yes, Woody thought. It sounded crazy. This town might be growing on him, but he could never live here, and he didn’t see why anyone who had a choice would ever consider it.

  Kitchell banked the helicopter around, and they headed back to the hotel, following the jagged coastline. “This is what I don’t get about your brother. He doesn’t seem to care, doesn’t seem committed to anything. Not to this town, not to this community, not even to farming. His finances are in tatters, he doesn’t have any political or environmental objections to what we’re doing. Why doesn’t he sell?”

  “He’s a very stubborn person.”

  “People are stubborn because they want to prove a point. It might contradict their best interests, it might be downright silly, but they’ll do it out of spite. What’s his point?”

  “I don’t really know,” Woody said. “I’m working on it.” The problem was, despite his dedication to therapy and all manner of self-improvement and personal growth, Woody wasn’t quite sure it was possible to convert people. One of his greatest fears was the possibility of eternal recurrence, that everything he’d been through would keep repeating itself, that nothing would change. He knew that, as Nietzsche had said, he needed to embrace amor fati, his love of fate. He needed to trust that all the suffering and loss he’d endured was ultimately good, that everything that’d happened had a predestined purpose. Only then could he stimulate a transformation of consciousness. But he didn’t know. Could people really change? Could they be redeemed? Or would Wood
y always be the same person, just as Lyndon, in all likelihood, would always be intractable, and Kitchell a major dick?

  “Well, we need you to work a little faster,” Kitchell told him. “To be honest, we’re already in the eleventh hour. We really can’t wait much longer before things become desperate.”

  “And then what?” Woody asked.

  “Then we’ll have to do something more persuasive.”

  Right then an object flew past them, close enough to startle them both and make Kitchell jostle the joystick and cause the helicopter to hiccup and veer.

  “What was that? A bird?” Woody asked. The object had been small and light brown, but he hadn’t perceived wings or a beak or tail. It’d been shaped, he thought, like an ovoid.

  Kitchell was bewildered himself. “I think it was…”

  “A potato?” Woody asked.

  THERE WAS A FAT PERSON inside Woody, a person who was tired of being oppressed and denied, a person who wanted Woody to stop working so hard and accept the inevitable, that he wasn’t meant to be skinny or cut or buffed, he was meant to be pudgy, a little roly-poly. He was meant to have love handles and man breasts. He was meant to have a neck hump and static-abrading thighs, loose flab quavering beneath his flesh, gelatinous blubber and tissue and lard shifting and heaving in pendulous slabs. He was meant to be a deep-fried butterball, cured salt pork, vegetable shortening oozing out of sausage casings, a saturated swillbelly, a Mr. Blimpy, Shamu, a Doughboy Two-Ton Krispy Kreme Blobbo Chunkmeister Potato Head.

  It was exhausting not to be those things. It took so much effort. Every day for the rest of his life, he would have to diet and exercise to keep that slow but inexorable accretion of fat at bay, submit to the cardio, the machines, the free weights and stability balls and resistance bands. Sometimes he wondered if he shouldn’t just surrender, throw out his injection-molded sneakers and special moisture-wicking performance wear and stuff down churros and pizzas and steak-and-cheese subs slathered with mayonnaise. Was it so wrong to be fat? Was it such a disgrace?

  Well, yes, in Hollywood, even for people behind the camera, it was. These things mattered a great deal in a town that sustained itself on superficial illusions. Your looks, your body, every aspect of your appearance—they all bespoke who you were. They were a reflection of your character and prosperity. They defined you. As much as he hated it, Woody would have to keep working out, keep starving himself, keep getting facials and manicures and eyebrow plucks.

  He drove to the Rosarita Bay YMCA, stopping on a side street first to change clothes in his car. In his house in the Hollywood Hills, he had a fancy multistation gym, a complete set of chrome barbells and dumbbells, a treadmill, stair climber, and spinning bike. Jorgy Hecker, his sadistic Danish personal trainer, came over to the house four mornings a week to put him through his cruel paces. “More more more!” Jorgy would heckle. “Ja, Woody. Smuk, smuk!” It took Woody months to realize Jorgy wasn’t calling him a schmuck, but saying beautiful in Danish. There was never any call for Woody to go to a health club except when he was traveling. Hotel fitness centers, although less than ideal, were tolerable since he could change and shower in his room, but gyms were a problem for Woody. It wasn’t just the locker rooms—horrific breeding grounds for athlete’s foot, jock itch, plantar warts, fecal coliforms; he avoided locker rooms at all costs—but all those sweating bodies in contact with the machines and equipment. All sorts of bacteria, fungi, and pathogens thrived in health clubs: cold and influenza viruses, E. coli, staphylococcus, salmonella, streptococcus, mycotoxins, even hepatitis A.

  He brought his own towels and spray bottle to the YMCA. As far as Y’s went, it was a pretty decent facility, less than ten years old. They had a pool, a sizable basketball gymnasium, racquetball and handball courts, and a boxing room. The main fitness area was partitioned into separate sections: free weights, cardio, and strength apparatus, mainly Universal machines and a line of new Nautilus equipment.

  Jorgy had customized a gym workout on a chart for Woody, and he dutifully started with a warm-up on a recumbent bike after disinfecting it. He squirted the display panel, seat, and handgrips with his spray bottle, which was filled with a special antibacterial solution, wiped everything dry with his red towel, laid out his green towel on the seat, and patted the sweat on his face with his blue towel. He followed the same routine on the Nautilus leg extension machine. Jorgy’s chart was very specific. He harped all the time about mixing free weights with machines, not isolating muscle groups, but Woody, best intentions aside, didn’t feel up to it today. He was tired, tired of lunges and squats and deadlifts. He wanted a nice, easy workout. He would just stick to the machines, and fuck the two sets, he’d do just one. Next were leg curls, then hip adductions and adductors.

  As he moved to the pec fly machine, spraying and wiping, a woman walked up to him and said, “Is there something about me you find particularly objectionable?”

  “Pardon?”

  The woman was fortyish, past her prime but still attractive, Woody supposed, if you went for the relo, subdivision, possibly-moist-under-the-hood type. She was willowy and thin, but incipiently poochy—a burgeoning convexity to her stomach that no amount of exercise, he could have told her, would ever be able to rescind. She apparently had a workout chart similar to Woody’s, for he had been following her down the line of machines, hopping on each one she vacated.

  “I’m not even sweating,” she said, “but I’m still using my towel on everything after I’m done, per the rules and regulations and per common courtesy. Yet you persist in doing a Haz-Mat scrub-down on every surface I touch. So I ask you, is there something so offensive about me that’s compelling you to execute such a thorough decontamination?”

  “It’s nothing personal.”

  “I see, nothing personal. Well, excuse me, but I do take it personally. Very personally.”

  “I’m just sort of…I have a thing about germs,” Woody told her.

  She regarded his face, and then gave him the once-over. “Is that an antibacterial spray?” she asked, looking at his bottle.

  “Yes.”

  “You know it doesn’t protect against viruses. It’s a myth.”

  “It’s been proven to be effective on—”

  “I’ve read the studies,” she said. “You’ve fallen for clever marketing, that’s all. The active ingredient is triclosan. It’s registered with the EPA as a pesticide. What it’ll do in the long run is weaken your immune system because you’re not being exposed to beneficial bacteria. Furthermore, now that everyone’s using it, it’ll eventually create superbugs resistant to antibiotics.”

  This woman was scary, Woody thought. Quarrelsome, formidable, relentless. “Thank you for that information,” he said. “You’ve been very enlightening.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “Now I get dismissive attitude. You think I’m some sort of idiot suburban biddy who doesn’t know her head from her ass. Well, you know where you can stick that attitude.” She grabbed her towel, huffed off to the mats on the other side of the room, and began pumping through a series of crunches.

  Woody resumed his workout, going a little quicker down the line—pec flies, overhead presses, lat pulldowns. He was doing compound rows when his cell phone rang. He reached down inside his gear bag, pulled out his Bluetooth headset, and looped it over his ear.

  Roland said he had found a private investigator named Christopher Cross with the Allegiance International Security Service.

  “You lazy weasel,” Woody told Roland. “You just went to the Yellow Pages and started with the A’s.”

  “No, no. He comes highly recommended.”

  “By whom?”

  “He’s an advisor to Law & Order. An ex-cop, NYPD, Criminal Investigations Unit.”

  Law & Order? Actually a pretty smart move. Maybe he should give Roland a break. “What’s his number? Hang on.”

  The scary woman was standing in front of him again, saying, “Excuse me.”

  “Tell him to call me,�
�� Woody said to Roland, and pushed the disconnect button. “Yes?” he asked the woman.

  She pointed to a sign on the wall. “There’s a policy against using cell phones on the premises.”

  Lady, he thought, you really need to get laid. “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  After a pointed stare, the woman went back to the mats.

  Woody changed his phone ringer to vibrate and grabbed the handles of the compound-row machine to finish his set. Not that he himself had been laid recently, he thought. How long had it been? Almost a year now. The last had been Annabelle, a twenty-four-year-old D-girl with Miramax who’d sucked two pairs of Manolo Blahniks and a Versace dress and a substantial portion of her car lease out of Woody before dumping him. She had been, however, gorgeous. A woman his age had once asked Woody why he dated younger women, and he had wanted to tell her, Why? Because I can. Why in the world would I go out with someone like you when I can wedge inside the sweet loins of a taut-skinned, perky-breasted knockout half my age?

  His phone was illuminating and vibrating in his gear bag. He glanced down at the caller ID screen: 212 area code, New York. He palmed his headset and crept into the hallway.

  It was Christopher Cross. Why did that name sound so familiar? “What have you found out?” Woody whispered.

  “I can’t hear you very well. Is this a bad connection?”

  Cross hadn’t discovered much about Kyle Thorneberry: Sudbury, Massachusetts; Buckingham Browne & Nichols; Harvard; Wharton; Morgan Stanley; Goldman Sachs; house in White Plains; wife, three kids; no criminal record; cause of death conclusive as suicide; firearm registered to his name.