Go West Young Man

by Robbie Michaels

  Chapter 21

  Shuttle Diplomacy

  AS BILL headed upstairs as Moira had directed, she stepped out the back door and walked across the lawn toward the apartment. She didn’t think I would be asleep. She didn’t have to go all the way to the apartment, though, because she found me sitting by the pool, looking out at the ocean below. The moon was full that night, casting a beautiful light over the ocean. Somehow, though, she didn’t think that the beautiful night was what I was studying.

  She sat down next to me, which startled me. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi. What’s up?”

  “I’ve been talking with your boyfriend.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Yes, you do. And he has quite a tale to tell.”

  “Lies. All lies, I’m sure. Look who he’s been hanging out with for all these weeks. America’s number one actor.” I tried to make the word “actor” sound like a foul four-letter word that should not be muttered in polite company. “I’m sure some of his skills at deception rubbed off while they were screwing.”

  “From what Bill says, Australia was a nightmare beyond all nightmares. He said it rained day after day after day and they were completely cut off, unable to work, unable to get out, unable to communicate, unable to do anything but sit and wait for the rain to stop. Sounds like it got really ugly when they ran out of fuel for the generators. He said he tried to start walking out—all 150 miles. Derrick stopped him because it would have been suicide.

  “Since his trailer-mates were trying to kill one another, Derrick had him come stay in his trailer—one of the few that wasn’t leaking from all the rain. He said that yes, they slept together in the same bed, but that no, they did not have sex. He doesn’t know who took the picture of the two of them in bed together. He swears that all of the other pictures are complete forgeries, that there was no picnicking because there was so much rain and mud, and when it wasn’t raining there were flies and mosquitoes everywhere which forced everyone to stay inside. There was no one for 150 miles around, so there were no cafés with or without candlelight.

  “It sounds like someone is doing a very effective job of dismantling Mr. Derrick St. James’s reputation. What I don’t know is who or why. So it’s up to me to figure it out and do even a better job of countering their campaign. I can do that. What you’re gonna have to do is be mad, but be mad at the proper person—the person who is behind this whole smear campaign. It sounds like Bill is an innocent bystander who was an effective prop and nothing more. He said he didn’t know anything about any of this until you showed him the newspapers.”

  “I don’t buy it. Who would hate somebody enough to do something like that? Sounds all too made up for me.”

  “Why did he show back up here tonight, then?”

  “Probably Derrick kicked his ass out of bed and sent him packing, so he ran back to the only thing he knew. But I’m nobody’s second best.”

  “I agree. Hold onto that anger, but wait until we know where to aim it. Can you do that for me?” she asked.

  “I’m not promising anybody anything at the moment, since I don’t know what I’m capable of delivering to anybody, including myself.”

  “Fair enough. But give me a little time to do some research and a little digging. And you should get some sleep.”

  “Not likely.”

  “Give it a try. You’ve got class in the morning.”

  “Not like I care much at the moment.”

  “You care. And I care.”

  She kissed the top of my head and walked back to the house. Bill was upstairs, in the shower. Rather than wait for him to finish, she walked into the bathroom and yelled, “Bill! I need you to tell me about everyone who was on set. I need every detail you can give me. Names, descriptions, jobs, characteristics. Did you get any pictures? If so, I want to see them ASAP.”

  He squealed in surprise at someone walking in on him naked in the shower. “Can I finish my shower first?”

  “Only if you do it real quick. Now haul that pretty ass of yours out of there and get downstairs. We’ve got work to do.”

  Five minutes later Bill joined her in the kitchen and started to provide answers to the questions she had asked. His pictures gave her the best help she could have asked for. She looked at one photo in particular and said, “Well, I’ll be damned. I thought he was dead.”

  “Who?”

  “Him,” she said, pointing to one man. “What the hell was he doing there? That answers a whole lot of questions if he was there.” She reached across the table and grabbed her telephone and a telephone book. She started dialing, and less than a minute later was talking with someone she had known and worked with some years back. From what Bill could tell, she was recruiting someone who owed her a favor to go out to the movie set and pay a visit to the film crew. She filled him in on who he was going to see and what was happening. Apparently the person she was talking with knew all the players and knew what they were getting into.

  After a thirty-minute phone conversation, she hung up and looked at Bill. “Well, I’ve made my first move. Now we wait. He’ll call us back tomorrow, once he gets out there and delivers the message.” She looked back at the computer screen and then explained to Bill. “You don’t know this—hell, very few people know this unless they’ve been around this town for as long as I have. You see that man?” she asked, pointing at the man who had caught her attention earlier. “Do you have any idea who he is?”

  “He was the sound guy.”

  “No, darlin’. That might be the ruse he used. You remember Elmer’s wife? That’s her daddy. Elmer never knew the man, which is good, because the man hated Elmer with a cold, hard passion. He hated the way Elmer was using that girl as a cover. Of course, he never stopped to figure that she was using him just as much as he was using her. That’s where I hold a couple of cards I can play. I know where some bodies are buried. My best guess is that he took the picture of you and Elmer in bed together after watching the two of you interact while you all were stuck there. The rest is just some creative computer work. I can get those pictures analyzed and dissected by experts.”

  She reached for her telephone again and called someone else. It didn’t matter that it was after midnight. She reached whoever she wanted, told them what she needed, and told them she needed it ASAP. Before she hung up she half joked with them, “You got my answers yet, darlin’? Well, shut up and get to work. I need answers yesterday.”

  She was on a roll. She finished one call, looked up another telephone number, and made another call. She continued like that. Bill soon realized that he was no longer essential, so he went upstairs and went to bed. His body didn’t have a clue what time zone it was on. All he knew is that he was falling over tired. He fell asleep hoping that this had all been a bad dream and tomorrow he’d wake up and it would all be over.

  Chapter 22

  In the Light of a New Day

  LIKE earlier, even though I wasn’t there when this actually happened, I’ve heard about it practically word for word, so I feel like I was there and can tell you about what happened to Bill that morning. When Bill awoke the next morning, at first he wasn’t sure where he was. The room was not one he recognized. After a moment, though, he remembered the way his already ruined life had crumbled even further the previous evening. Oh, right, Moira’s house.

  Rising, he found his clothes from the previous day and slipped them on again, even though they were dirty and sweaty from twenty-four-plus hours of travel to get home. Even before he got downstairs he could hear Moira’s voice coming from the kitchen. He found her exactly where he had left her, seated at the counter talking on the telephone. He wondered if she had moved or slept in the intervening hours.

  Smelling the wondrous, rich, heady aroma of coffee, he helped himself to a cup before moving to his seat from the previous evening.

  “That is fan-fucking-tastic, my dear. You are a doll, and I love you forever—or at least until you piss me off again. Thanks. You�
��re a lifesaver.”

  She hung up the phone and gave Bill a look of absolute delight. “All right! Progress!”

  “Good news?”

  “You bet your sweet ass there is progress. That scum bag masquerading as a sound guy has been questioned and crumbled like a cheap paper bag. He’s just been questioned on camera, explaining that it was all a fiction and that he falsified everything.

  “My photo analyst finished her work. As we knew, the photos were all doctored, and not that well, as it turned out. For example, no one seems to have noticed that your right hand in the café photograph is actually black. That’s right. Your white head was pasted onto a black body. Whoever did it was either in a terrible hurry or was really lousy at their work.

  “The photograph of you two on a blanket enjoying a picnic? Well, that one is the clincher. I thought it looked familiar, and I was right. It was actually the photo used in a men’s fragrance print ad piece from a couple of years ago. Again, someone used Photoshop to put your heads onto the bodies of the original models. I can’t believe no one else spotted that, but they sure as hell will when I get done with them.”

  The telephone rang. Before it could ring again she pounced on it and started animatedly talking with someone that she clearly knew quite well, by the sounds of the conversation.

  Even though these were exciting developments, Bill was still trying to wake up, so he wasn’t keeping up with everything she was saying. His attention focused on her once again when she gave a hoot and a holler of triumph. “We’re in business. I’ve got to fly out of here if I’m gonna pull this all together in time for the evening news.”

  Bill noticed for the first time that she must have moved from her seat sometime during the night, because she was dressed in clothes that she normally wore to work. “You stay here today and get some rest. I’ll be back, and with any luck by this evening we’ll have this entire episode cleared up publicly and put behind us.”

  “Wonderful. I wonder if I should try to talk to Mark again.”

  “They left for school some time ago. You’ll have to wait until tonight when everything hits the news.” And she was out the door and gone before he could ask any other questions.

  Bill was at a complete loss for what to do with himself that day. He had slept all night, but he still felt tired and thought he could sleep some more. But before he lay down to test that hypothesis, he put on his shoes and walked back to his former apartment. I had said the previous evening that I had put everything of Bill’s out a few weeks ago. He checked, and, sure enough, all of his things were stacked against a wall waiting for the trash man to come haul them away. He cried again at the complete mess that his life had turned into, seemingly overnight. For about the millionth time he cursed his decision to ever go to Australia for the damned movie.

  He started to pick up a few of his things but then realized that none of it mattered. He didn’t know what he should do with his things. He couldn’t get into his own home any longer, since the locks had been changed. He didn’t want to take a bunch of stuff to Moira’s house. And otherwise he had nothing. No place to go. He just hoped that I hadn’t permanently changed the lock to my heart as well.

  Slowly, he walked to the door of his old apartment and looked inside. He didn’t try the door. He didn’t want to be there without me. He walked around the apartment to the pool, studied the ripples of the water as the filter moved the water in and out. He turned and stood facing the ocean.

  It was almost inconceivable that he had just been on the other side of this same body of water—that this ocean was all that had separated him from home, from me, from everything he knew and loved. But that ocean was huge and was proving to be harder to cross to get back home than he had ever anticipated.

  Chapter 23

  Breaking News

  AT A loss for what to do with himself, Bill retreated to Moira’s house and returned to bed. He didn’t think he would sleep, since he hadn’t been up all that long, but sleep he did. In no time he was sound asleep and slept for hours.

  He roused sometime later when he heard voices downstairs. He once again had to look around for a minute to try to remember where he was. When he remembered, he rose from the bed, peed, and went downstairs to find the source of the voices.

  “Where’ve you been?” he heard someone say when he entered the kitchen.

  Figuring out that the voice had been Moira’s, he tried to take the words apart to ferret out their meaning. Oh, right. Question. Questions required answers. “Sleeping.”

  “You must have been tired.”

  “Huh?”

  “Not quite awake yet, are you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, you better finish waking up pretty quick.”

  She turned on the television in her kitchen. He hadn’t even noticed that there was one there until she turned it on. Finding the channel she wanted, they sat at the counter together and watched the news. How long had he slept, anyway? Oh crap! It was six o’clock already.

  The lead story, in fact the only story that made it on the first ten minutes of the local news that night, was what Moira had been working on so determinedly for eighteen hours. In a very orderly fashion, using the information she had fed to them all day long, the news program opened with the “shocking” reversal and retraction on the story that everyone had run so energetically just a few days earlier about Derrick St. James’s new “boy toy”.

  Point by point, the news reporter outlined the flaws that had been discovered with the story, including a careful demonstration of how the photographs had been falsified, showing the picnic photograph side by side with the original photograph. Yep. No mistaking that that one was a forgery. The other photo showing him at the café was also clearly a forgery when it was shown that the color of the skin on the face and the hand of the person purported to be him were quite different: one was black and one was white. Didn’t work that way, except maybe on an old Star Trek episode.

  Bill’s photograph from the set showing the members of the crew appeared on screen next, and a circle was drawn around one face. As his identity was given, other photos of him from his previous days in Hollywood were added to the screen. Again, no question. Same guy.

  The real clincher, though, was the next piece of video footage. The guy that Bill had known to be the sound guy on the movie set was shown sitting at a table, looking especially scruffy, being questioned by someone. He admitted to the photos being falsified. He admitted that he knew of no evidence to indicate that Derrick St. James was anything other than what he said he was—namely, heterosexual and happily married.

  When that video clip ended, another face appeared on the screen. This one Bill recognized from his time having dinner with her—Derrick’s wife. With camera flashes going off every second as countless photographers all snapped the exact same photo—really, why did they need so many?—Derrick’s beautiful wife, a famous actress in her own right, spoke to the cameras. “I am appalled and embarrassed by the actions of my estranged father in trying to besmirch the reputation of my husband. Derrick St. James is my husband and I love him, as he loves me. We are happily married, something that my father has never approved of since the beginning. But to have the man go to such lengths to discredit Derrick is infuriating.

  “By his own admission, he set out to ruin my husband. I will never understand why he felt he had to do what he did. He lied to all of you, and I am profoundly unhappy that so many have been harmed by his thoughtless actions. I have spoken with my husband, who is at the moment on a plane on his way back to the United States from an overseas filming. He and I together want to offer our profound apologies to the innocents who have been harmed by the insane actions of one man. We extend our public apologies to Bill and Mark for any damage my father’s actions have caused you. You are both totally innocent, and just got dragged into this nightmare unawares. Derrick and I are sincerely sorry for any harm you have suffered, and we thank you for your continuing friendship and loyalty to
us. Your friendship means the world to us. Thank you.”

  The talking heads recapped what everyone had just told them, pulling all of the pieces together from the various clips and reports and interviews they had just shown. After a commercial break, the first one in more than ten minutes of coverage, the same talking heads came back and once again recapped what they had just recapped not more than sixty seconds earlier. Other talking heads were introduced who added commentary and analysis about how a rumor had taken such hold and how many people had missed several very obvious, glaring mistakes in the photo doctoring.

  “You’ve been busy,” Bill said admiringly to Moira.

  “I’m good too.”

  “No argument. I wonder if Mark saw this, though? We don’t… well, we didn’t have a TV before I left.”

  “I don’t think that’s changed while you’ve been gone. He was supposed to work after class today, so maybe they’ve had the news on while he was working. Doesn’t matter. I’m recording all of this here and at my office, so we can show him when he gets home.”

  “If he’ll listen.”

  “He’ll listen. He may not hear it at first, but he’ll listen, and eventually he’ll hear.”

  “I wish I had your confidence, but sadly, I don’t.”

  “I’ve been around a lot longer than you have and seen a lot more than you have.”

  “I don’t know if I want to live anymore if he doesn’t….”

  “Don’t you dare! Do you hear me?” she yelled at Bill. “Don’t you dare to even think about something so stupid! I lost one son! And I’ll be damned if I see another good kid….” She stopped, looked away, turned her back for a moment to collect herself.

  “I’m sorry, Moira. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to remind you of….”

  “You both remind me of him every day. In a way it’s been like he’s alive again after all this time.”