Word Gets Around

by Lisa Wingate

  “Nine-nine f-f-foot,” Doyle corrected, and Imagene smacked a plate down in front of him.

  “Hush up and eat,” she said, and hurried off to wait tables. I liked Imagene. She was practical and she cut the pie in large slices. She fell squarely in the Bigfoot-naysayer group, but that didn’t stop the countertoppers from theorizing about the creature’s identity. Having seen it for myself, I couldn’t help pondering the question on occasion, even though I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone.

  After almost a week of sitting in the beauty shop working on the script with Lauren while platonically eating to-go food from the Daily Café, I was about a thin half-inch from either kissing her or saying something that would cause her to once again explain her tragic past and tell me she wasn’t ready for anything other than friendship. To keep from losing my mind, I pondered the Bigfoot question. Finally, I suggested we go out to the ranch and see if we could spot the thing again.

  Lauren frowned sideways at me. “We should stay here and work on this.” She pointed to the disorganized jumble of papers. “We only have the rest of today and tomorrow before M. Harrison Dane shows up here on Monday.”

  I felt the crushing weight of expectations and the looming deadline, which was probably as responsible for my desire to go AWOL as anything. “We could have a month and we wouldn’t be ready.”

  Lauren rolled her eyes, then blinked hard and rubbed them. She’d been putting in long days, leaving for the ranch early to work with Lucky Strike before Justin and crew showed up each day. Mostly, I stayed behind to continue my efforts at turning the script into a masterpiece, using a laptop and printer Donetta had borrowed from the local school. She had let me take over the exercise room and half of the beauty shop, so I could tape scene and sequel notes and character attributes to the walls, the front window, the exercise equipment, creating giant storyboards and character sketches. In the evenings, Lauren and I discussed everything from technical details to characters. Usually, Lauren fell asleep in the chair before I finished working. Sometimes I stopped and just watched her, and wondered what she dreamed about.

  Tonight, I was feeling the pressure of Dane’s imminent arrival, along with another more vague realization. My time here was almost up. Two days from now, Dane would have come and gone, and the string of long evenings in the beauty shop with Lauren would come to an end.

  “Come on, Puggy,” I urged. “Live a little.”

  She seemed to think about it for a minute, as if tempted by the possibility. The scene stole into my mind—moonlight, pretty girl, me, whippoorwills singing in the distance, the trees swaying slightly in the night breeze … Bigfoot. The tape screeched to a halt. Who was I kidding? Lauren was only interested in the script. That was it.

  She seemed to come to the same conclusion. “I’m sorry. I know I’m not much fun. I’m just … worried about … my dad. I can’t stop thinking about what’s going to happen if this movie thing falls through, and … ”

  Swiveling my chair to face hers, I took her hand and held it in both of mine. “We’ll make it work.” I wasn’t sure if that was confidence or delusion in my voice, but I noted dimly that I actually believed my own rhetoric. Somewhere along the way, I’d come to see the movie as a reality. Without consciously thinking about it, I was planning the next several months based on the project. I was envisioning trips back to Daily, home-cooked food, stays in Suite Beulahland, and Lauren. The project and Lauren were intertwined in my mind. I wanted both.

  “It’s not you, Nate.” Her eyes were filled with a tender regret, a lingering sadness I wanted to wash away. “You’re an amazing writer. The way you put words together, you’ve captured things I can’t even solidify in my mind. If anyone can make this project work, it’s you. It’s just that there are so many variables, so many things that stand in the way of this ever becoming an actual movie.” Her fingers tensed in mine. I laid them flat, smoothed a hand over them, tried to imagine how I would write this scene.

  There were a million things I wanted to say to her, but no words seemed right. It’s so much easier to write about emotions than to live with them.

  “Lauren, life is in the variables. Things change. Things don’t go according to the plans we make. There’s a bigger picture, and it doesn’t always make sense until you’re looking back on it.” Who was this Dr. Phil wannabe talking through my head? “When I moved out of LA, I thought the key for me was to leave it all behind—the movie business, the partying, Justin and the insanity he manufactures. I thought the solution was to take myself out of it, go someplace quiet where I could focus on writing something really good, something that would make a difference to people.”

  I remembered that logic now. I remembered the exact moment, the morning after Justin almost drove us off the cliff, when I woke up with an adrenaline hangover and the realization that, but for the grace of God and a good set of brakes, I could have been in a morgue with my watch and wallet in a Ziploc bag no one would pick up.

  I packed my stuff and headed north that day, found Mammoth Lakes nestled in what seemed a safe place, miles from my old life. “But now I realize you can’t impact something you don’t touch. The world marches on, and to have input in the direction it goes, you have to join the parade. You’ve got to work with the instruments you’re given. I’ve got The Shay, whether I want him or not. I’ve got the contacts in the business, even though they come with temptations attached. I’ve got the ability to write, despite the fact that I’ve been a sellout because the money’s good. And I’ve got a history that makes me understand what that foster shelter could mean to the kids who come there.”

  Lauren’s fingers tightened around mine. She watched our intertwined hands, then searched my face. I had the sense that she understood what was inside me, that she could relate to the yearning in a way no one else ever had. Her lips parted and I focused there, had a vision of kissing her to seal the bargain.

  A door creaked and slammed shut upstairs, and the ghost knocked on the joists overhead. Lauren came out of her trance and glanced toward the stairs. Whatever she was about to say, whatever had been about to happen, evaporated like cooling steam.

  “Guess we’d better get back to work,” she said, the words accompanied with a resigned sigh. I felt the unmistakable chill of a wet blanket as she slipped out of her chair to cross the room. “How about a fresh Coke?”

  “Sure.” In the mirror, I watched her face as she put ice in the glasses and poured soda. I studied her expression, her hair falling over her cheek, the way it hid her eyes.

  She’s probably just trying to let you down easy, dude. Give it up. Don’t be pathetic. You’re not her type. She probably likes big, burly guys who can ride a horse all day and dance the two-step all night. Strong, silent types like the horseman. You’re about as far from that as it gets. No woman dreams of falling in love with a writer. …

  It occurred to me to wonder what her husband was like—if the horseman in the script reminded Lauren of him. There was a rather large black hole attached to that line of thinking, so I nixed it. Stretching back in my chair, I grabbed a stack of index cards and went back to work.

  Lauren got tired early. After a period of watching her fight dozing off with her chin braced on her hand, I suggested she head up to bed, since it looked like I might be pulling an all-nighter. By tomorrow, I had to have a bang-up proposal in Justin’s hands. By tomorrow night, we’d be e-mailing a proposal packet to Dane.

  This was probably as good a time to panic as any.

  Justin showed up shortly after Lauren went off to bed. He seemed a little less tightly wound than he had been the last several days, and maybe a little low, which worried me. For the first time since we’d come here, he wasn’t trying to drag me out to some all-night poker game. I hoped he wasn’t headed for a crash right before Dane was due in town.

  “You okay?” I asked as he rummaged through the plates of homemade goodies even Frederico had given up trying to resist.

  Fred looked like he’d gained
a few pounds since arriving in Daily, even though he’d taken up participating in the daily exercise class at the Hair and Body with Imagene, Lucy, and Donetta.

  “Yeah,” Justin muttered as he poured himself a soda. “Dane’s had some scheduling conflicts. He’ll be here tomorrow evening at five.”

  “Come again?” Hold the phone. We’re not really stepping up the time frame by fifteen hours, right? “He’s supposed to be here Monday morning, not tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, I know. His wife had something come up. They have to be back in LA on Monday. No big deal. E-mail him the proposal packet by tomorrow morning. He’ll read it on the plane.”

  “No big deal?” A golf ball went down my throat and bounced around my chest at high speed. Heavens to murgatroid, Batman, we’re doomed.

  Don’t panic. You’ll scare the talent.

  “You can handle it.” Something in his tone stopped me just before I was about to say something dire. There was a flat, listless quality, a lack of enthusiasm in those words that brought back a host of dark memories.

  “You okay?” I asked again.

  “Yeah. Just wiped. Sick of looking at the rear end of a stupid horse all day. I’ll be glad when Dane gets here and we bag this thing.” It sounded simple when he said it. I didn’t point out that after Dane came, if by some miracle we were successful in our newly shortened time frame, there would be weeks of meetings ahead, then months of casting and filming, most of which would involve horses’ rears of different varieties.

  “Lauren says it’s going pretty well with you and the horse,” I said. Justin looked like he needed some encouragement.

  He shrugged. “Amber thinks so. She came and watched today.”

  “That’s good.” But it really wasn’t. After a few days of being tied up with publicity, Amber was around town again. Justin was moody and distracted.

  “Yeah, her stupid fiancé’s coming Monday.” Ah, bingo, the reason for Justin’s melancholy state this evening. “He just gets in the way.”

  “Well, if I had a fiancée that looked like Amber, I wouldn’t leave her alone too long, either.”

  The Shay flashed an irritated look at me in the mirror. Support for Amber’s engaged state wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

  “You do anything about getting in touch with Stephanie?” Time to redirect the conversation. Let’s talk about Steph—the real reason you’re mooning over some twenty-year-old girl who’s engaged to another guy.

  “She’s unlisted.” He stirred his soda with a finger, watching the ice swirl around. “I e-mailed Marla for her number.”

  “You e-mailed Marla?” The security alarm went off in my head. The last thing we needed was for Marla to figure out where we were. She and Randall would crash our little party like warthogs at the ballet.

  The Shay snorted. “Relax, dude. I didn’t tell her anything.

  Marla’ll never figure out where we’re at.”

  “Okay.” But the eerie sensation creeping up and down my spine said otherwise.

  Justin stared out the window, the streetlights reflecting against his face. Directors would have loved that vulnerable, pensive, slightly broken look on him. “I’m going on to bed. I have to get up for church in the morning.”

  I almost choked on my drink. “Seriously?” Although on second thought, prayer probably is a good idea at this point, since we need a miracle.

  “I missed last Sunday because we were busy with the horse.”

  He gave me one of those looks intended to let me know I wasn’t adapting fast enough to his latest personality change. “Amber’s singing there tomorrow morning.”

  “Ohhh,” I said. I get it now. You’re out to impress a girl. Except for the years Mama Louise had dragged us down to the Victory Lane Fellowship, and a short stint of involvement with the new-age theology of Shokahna (which had also been about the pursuit of a girl), Justin hadn’t ever been much of a spiritual seeker. Aside from that, he needed to be in his room studying what there was of the proposal packet and getting ready for the meeting with Dane.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” He gave me a snarky sneer.

  “What?”

  “Oh-h-h.” He did a melodramatic, and fairly lousy portrayal, of me. I hated it when he got in this kind of mood. Stephanie used to call it the blue muggies.

  “Just that rolling out of bed on Sunday to go to church isn’t normally your thing, and you’ve got the proposal packet to study.”

  “I go a lot when I’m here on Sundays,” he defended. “It clears my mind. I’ll look at the proposal after church. Dane’s not coming till evening.”

  “Cool.” I went back to my work, feeling a weird shift in the world I knew—not a bad shift, just weird. Still, this new reality seemed ominously positioned on a narrow pedestal, ready to come crashing down at the slightest change in the wind.

  Justin walked a few steps away, then hovered by the exercise machines. “You can come if you want. To church, I mean.”

  “We’ll see.” I couldn’t help recalling the time he’d tried to get me involved in his stint with Shokahna. It was rally day and he needed a prospective member to bring. “I’ve got a long night ahead. I’ll have the rest of the treatment and some key scenes for you in the morning. I’ll go over it with you, and then you need to make time to study it.”

  “Okay.” Justin didn’t sound too excited about getting the packet. “I hope Willie likes it.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. Since when were we banking major decisions on Willie’s opinion?

  “See you in the morning,” Justin said, and wandered off, leaving the conversation feeling unfinished.

  I poured my attention into the script, keeping focused, like a college kid on the night before finals. Tomorrow was it. The big one. Do or die.

  Sometime around four in the morning, I lay down on the Jetsons-era vinyl sofa by the exercise room and closed my eyes just for a minute to visualize a scene. As the floor joists overhead sang a chorus of creaks and moans, I felt myself sinking deeper. I knew I should get up, collect my papers, finish a few last edits so everything would be ready to email to Dane in the morning. …

  I dreamed about the horseman. He stood at the center of a vast corral, his back to the camera. A white horse circled him, its mane and tail streaming, its strides light and free, its hooves barely touching the sand. It was a magnificent creature, strong, powerful, yet it had the wide, gentle eyes of a fawn. Suddenly, I was the horseman. The white horse circled and circled, never coming closer, never moving farther away, always watching. Finally, I held out my hand, and it drew near, blew softly over my fingers, its breath the breath of peace.

  Along the fence railing, Mama Louise and all the little foster kids cheered. Pastor Harve and his wife, Miss Beedie, saluted me with an enormous platter of unidentified fried objects as Miss Lulu’s choir rocked back and forth and sang “He Leadeth Me” in golden choir robes. Beside the old pastor and his wife, my grandmother and grandfather stood just as I remembered them. My grandfather smiled and waved. My father was with them. He motioned to me and called my name. For the first time in years, I could clearly see his face.

  “Nate … Nate, hon. Na-a-a-te … hon? Wake up.” My grandfather’s voice turned high and shrill, took on a twang. “Yer just out li-ike a light. Did ye-ew sleep here all ni-ight?”

  My eyes opened like window shades stuck down with goo. Donetta was a blur of tall red hair and bright crimson lips. She backed away a step as I sat up.

  “You hungry this mornin’?” she asked as I tried to figure out why I was waking up on the beauty shop couch. My body ached in strange places, and a combination of pressure and sweat had plastered the clothes to my back.

  “I’m not sure.” A zap of adrenaline rocketed through me as I pushed what had become sandy-colored dreadlocks out of my face. “What time is it?”

  “Oh, it’s early yet.” Giving my knee a reassuring pat, Donetta set a pan of pecan rolls on the counter by the coffee pot and started making cof
fee. “I just thought I’d deliver some rolls over before everyone stirred around. Justin said y’all would be up with the chickens, gettin’ your script out to Mr. M. Harrison Dane before church.” She concentrated on measuring coffee, then added, “Did Puggy go on up to bed last night?” I caught a curious backward glance.

  “Yes, she turned in early. Guess she was tired.” There was more disappointment in that than I meant to convey. I was a little out of it this morning. The strange dream about the horseman swirled around my head, making everything else fuzzy. “There wasn’t much more she could do, anyway. Last night was just a matter of fine-tuning some things and getting the proposal together.”

  “Oh, that sounds excitin’.” Donetta sat on the sofa beside me while the coffee brewed.

  “I can’t wait to see the movie,” she said finally.

  Stretching the back of my neck, I chuckled. “It’s a long way from film right now.”

  “You’ll git there. Lauren says you’re just an awful good writer.”

  I was surprised how good that felt. “The proposal wouldn’t have come together without her.”

  “You two are a good team.” Donetta stood up and walked to the coffee pot. “I haven’t seen her so excited about anythin’ in a long time.”

  “It’s an exciting project.” Surprisingly enough, I really felt that way, even on two hours’ sleep, and with Dane coming this evening.

  “I wasn’t talkin’ about the movie. I was talkin’ about you and Puggy.” I could feel Donetta watching me from the corner of her eye as she poured two cups of coffee and put the pot back to catch the sizzling stream. “I’ve got a sense when it comes to these things, hon.” A penciled-on eyebrow rose over one eye, and she turned toward me with stirring sticks in hand. “Cream or sugar, darlin’?”