The Juliet

by Laura Ellen Scott

  “Can I help you,” Carter said in a way that made it clear he wasn’t truly customer service oriented. He shifted the rifle so that he was holding it in both hands like an oar.

  Rigg Dexon sized him up. Kid was fidgety, younger than his sunburned face suggested. Maybe not even thirty, and a born and raised desert rat by the looks of it. “I suppose you know I’m here on behalf of that Willie Judy gal.”

  “I know that. I just got a call from the Alkali. They said you were making your way out here.” The boy was calm and steady, but he’d been given the lines of a nervous fella. “We don’t have a problem, me and you.”

  “I think we do.” Rigg grinned and took a heavy step on the gravel because this corny macho stuff was still fun, really.

  “Man, you’re a real pain in the ass.” Carter’s face scrunched up in the sun. “Before this gets stupid let me ask you a question.”

  “You fired her.”

  “Do you not see that I’m armed?”

  “Is that your question?” Rigg was trying to get his blood up. “It’s kinda pointless to threaten a man that’s ready to die.”

  Carter lowered the gun butt to the asphalt, holding it around the barrel. “No, that’s not my question. My question is, how long did it take you to drive out here?”

  The boy seemed to have skewed priorities. Rigg answered, “About an hour and some.”

  Carter nodded. “Exactly.”

  Rigg added it up. It had been a quick drive. Rigg was beginning to see Carter’s point. Not much reason for Willie to make a day out of a simple carburetor delivery.

  “And look, Mr. Dexon, I like her too, but Willie’s just not cut out for deliveries. Maybe the gig is too simple, you know? Maybe she’s not Zen enough. The best couriers are retirees with Lincolns or Crown Vics. Guys who like to drive the Valley all day. If it’ll make a difference I’ll call her and apologize, but I can’t rehire her. It’s a man’s job, pure and simple. Ladies think too much.”

  Rigg’s knuckles were aching for action, but Carter was rapidly becoming un-punchable. If Rigg weren’t an actor, he might have felt foolish that his mission was a failure, but a man who has worn a chicken suit could never be humiliated. “Were you really gonna try to use that thing on me?”

  Carter tilted the butt in the gravel. “Might have slowed you down.”

  “Only on a sober day son, and I try not to have too many of those.” Rigg considered his options, and decided he needed to refuel. “Where’s the nearest tavern?”

  Carter squinted. “I got beer if you want that. I got weed, too.”

  “What a huge surprise.”

  Carter picked up his gun and propped it on his shoulder like a toy. “We okay?”

  Rigg accepted the invitation. “I suppose.”

  There wasn’t a single window of Carter’s Auto Repair & Supply that wasn’t repaired with duct tape. Most of the duct tape covered cracks, but some of it covered holes. That much Rigg could tell when he got inside, enveloped in cold air and the rich smell of rubber, grease, and something else—something as sweet as hippie perfume.

  Carter said, “You gave Willie The Mystery House.”

  “I did.”

  “Man,” Carter said wistfully. “I guess she got to you. She’s never even been there, you know?”

  “You have?”

  “In high school. We’d sneak up there to party.”

  Carter gestured for Rigg to follow him through the front office, through the garage, and even farther back where Carter’s Auto Repair & Supply morphed into a low-lit, sloppy bachelor’s lounge with a TV, a mini fridge, a beat up sofa, and bench seat that looked like it had been salvaged from a semitruck. Carter pulled a canned beer from the fridge and told Rigg to take a seat. He chose the truck bench; it was the cleanest option.

  Carter held up a finger before slipping through a back door that he opened and closed so quickly that Rigg almost didn’t see the rack of grow lights back there. Almost. When Carter returned he was firing up a generously packed joint. Before he handed it to Rigg, he said, “Just take it easy with this.”

  Kids with pot were always warning him about how strong their stuff was, as if they assumed Rigg hadn’t smoked since the seventies. He let them think what they wanted, let them show off and overdo it. It was cute the way they’d sort of tilt and fall over eventually. But not Rigg. He knew how to keep upright. He’d been practicing on barstools all his life. He accepted the joint and filled his lungs with its sweetness. It did hit quick, he noticed. His spine grew warm, sending a fat tendril of well-being into his skull.

  “So,” Rigg said. “Did the girl know she was delivering more than car parts?”

  Carter sat on the sofa. “I don’t tell the couriers. Is that shitty of me?” He had pulled a sagging cardboard box out from under a table and was rummaging through it. DVDs with homemade labels, some obviously pornographic.

  “That’s another reason you like old fellas, then. No one ever pulls them over.”

  “You know it. Ha, here we go.” Carter waved a golden DVD with the words “Hot Gun Job” scrawled on it in felt-tip marker.

  Rigg was surprised. “How the hell?”

  “Buddy of mine transferred a bunch of VHS tapes to disc. You know these titles aren’t available anymore.”

  Rigg leaned back. He thought he’d met every kind of fan out there, but this was a new one. A kid born in the eighties who liked bootleg softcore. “Son, the women in those films…”

  “I know. They’re my Mom’s age.”

  “And more’n half of them are dead. That was a dangerous industry back then.”

  “Dude, be cool. Vintage is awesome.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you were vintage yourself.”

  Carter wasn’t listening. He’d found at least two other discs that he laid out on a coffee table. “I wish I had the tapes though, if only for the box art.”

  “Well I’m glad you don’t. That’s a chapter in my career I don’t get nostalgic about.” After the movie and TV roles dried up, Dexon enjoyed an ironic comeback of sorts, guest starring in a few adult video features, parodying the Summer Man character he made famous.

  Carter slid a disc into the machine. Rigg was prepared to strenuously object, but the truck bench had become very comfy, warm as skin. He and Carter watched the previews flip by, along with the PSA about legislative moves to curtail rights to private entertainment, etc. Carter laughed like a child. He was stoned already. The movie started, and Rigg made his first appearance two scenes in. He played a detective in a trench coat, despite the obviously sunny California location, and he’d stumbled in on a girl–girl scene. That would be the pattern throughout the film. Sexual encounters would commence, and the detective would intrude for comic effect.

  Carter asked, “You bummed you never got to do the wet work?”

  “Nope. They didn’t have the budget.” Rigg watched as an actress in a red wig and nothing else tried to hide in a closet that was already occupied by two other naked women. Soon there’d be five or six of them in there, performing a lipstick lesbian homage to the Marx Brothers. There were lots of hammy close-ups of Rigg’s wide-eyed surprise. He remembered that girl. They went out a couple of times. She was kind of a gun nut, as he recalled.

  “But you got plenty of action behind the scenes.”

  Rigg nodded sagely. “You see ‘Cowgirl Style’?”

  “Sure.”

  “Producer of that one ran out of cash and tried to pay me in pussy.”

  “Cool.”

  “Not cool. I had a mortgage payment to make. So I took a Leroy Neiman original instead.” Rigg had liked that picture. Horses at a racetrack, lots of reds and greens and yellows. A man’s kind of painting. Too bad the faux-redhead gun nut ended up with the painting after a coked-out skirmish ended their romance. Rigg helped himself to another beer, and he grumbled, “Shoulda took the ‘tang.”

  They finished the joint, and Carter rolled another. The
movie was half over when he cooked up a frozen pizza for them to share. Rigg was making a huge dent in the beer, but Carter didn’t mind. He seemed very happy. Rigg was a little worried about the protocol should the boy become aroused in his uninhibited state, but that never happened. Carter was sort of like an old man that way, as if he were watching a sporting event. He asked a lot of technical questions, but the only urges he succumbed to were hunger and thirst.

  At one point during the gang-bang finale, Carter offered Rigg the last piece of pizza, and that was moving. Rigg had made a lot of new friends lately, and now here he was, getting high and watching bad porn in the twilight of the day and his life. Rigg was on the verge of sentiment and philosophy. He said, “You know son, I’m glad I met you.”

  “Yeah, I sorta wish we’d gotten together earlier, when you were giving away houses, man,” Carter said. “You wanna bunk here tonight, seeing as you’re homeless and all?”

  “Nah, I’ll be all right,” Rigg said. Then he leaned back on the truck bench to rest his eyes for a minute or ten.

  * * *

  There are always stars in the desert night sky, but they don’t do enough, and in between them the dark spots are darker than anywhere else on earth. A bit after midnight Rigg’s headlights were bouncing down the mountain at 80 miles per hour. He nearly sideswiped a pickup coming in the other direction, before the Jeep’s speed decreased, and it rolled all the way down to a kiddie-car crawl. Eventually it veered off the road into the flower-filled basin, bouncing a path through the field before coming to a lazy, bumpy stop. The headlights lit up two long shafts of pink blooms that seemed to quiver under the illumination.

  Rigg woke up behind the wheel. It was not his first blackout. It was not even his first while driving. This kind of event used to scare him straight for a week or two, but these days he was more sanguine about his biochemical adventures. Jammed into the deep inner pocket of his jacket was a white paper sack full of goodies courtesy of his new pal, Carter. Rigg had to admit he did not know where he was in the world.

  He twisted in his seat to look over his shoulder. With a few feet of the wrecked path discernible in the backup lights, it seemed possible to trace the way back to wherever he came from. Night blind and about blind drunk, it wasn’t going to be easy. A skinny coyote trotted across his exit, out of the weeds and back into them like a ghost, and Rigg was startled enough to consider how this was one of those times where he was truly in the moment.

  When he got back to the road he just drove, and soon he realized he was on his way back to The Mystery House. He’d driven the route so many times over the past four months his memories had melted into pure knowledge, as if he’d lived in the Valley all his life. He sang to himself:

  Ride your mystery horse to The Mystery House

  There’s a wild woman there loves only you…

  The song named the house, and the stories of ghosts, murders, and treasure came after. A lot of history was like that, all twisted and made to fit. No one seemed satisfied with the way things really started or ended.

  As Rigg pulled into what used to be his driveway, he saw the blank shape of a vehicle parked in front of the house and the faint glow of light within. Willie Judy had wasted no time in taking possession of her new property. Well, that was a good sign, wasn’t it?

  Except it wasn’t. He pulled up alongside the parked vehicle and realized it was the old blue Subaru from the morning. The prospecting couple had returned and made themselves at home, apparently.

  “Not cool,” Rigg said for the second time that day, and possibly for the second time in his entire life. He had a handgun in the Jeep, a Walther P99 his agent bought him as a retirement present, but over the years he had never experienced a situation that was improved by a gun. He preferred not to bring one into this situation if he could avoid it.

  Rigg pushed the front door open but remained on the other side of the threshold as he listened to the couple going through his things. They weren’t speaking, but the rhythmic scuff of paper and boxes was unmistakable. The only light inside was indirect, and then he saw the sweep of a flashlight beam bounce off the doorframe. They had made their way through to the back of the house.

  A stack of map pieces lay on the floor.

  Of course the real reason he didn’t go collect his gun out of the Jeep was that he tried real hard not to think about the gun at all. A man alone with a firearm starts to hear it talking to him, same as the drink does, except you can’t blow your brains out with a tumbler of Laphroaig. Not in one second, anyway.

  Rigg weighed his options. Shout hello or retrieve his gun and say it more quietly. From within he heard a thud and a whispered, “Goddammit.” Someone banged a shin. It was nice when the cosmos humanized the enemy.

  “Hello in there.”

  All shuffling ceased. Rigg imagined the couple seized in freeze tag pose. He spoke to the air, “Ah, I said hello. Don’t be rude, now.”

  Not a peep.

  As Rigg recalled, the man was portly and the woman was a sack of bones. He hoped they weren’t preparing some kind of embarrassing ambush. He felt pretty sure they weren’t career criminals. The best approach was probably a direct one.

  “Hey y’all. Don’t jump me. I know what you’re after, and it ain’t here.”

  The bedroom light flicked on.

  “Where’s your dog, then?”

  The man’s face appeared in the shadowed hallway, floating like a moon until the rest of his body attached itself. He was dressed in an American flag t-shirt and track pants. His ankles were pink, and his feet were jammed into cheap brown loafers. Who ransacks a house in loafers? Rigg expected to see the woman bringing up the rear, but instead he heard the creak of the bedsprings. What the hell were they up to back there?

  “Missy’s back in the trailer,” the man said. “We’re staying at the Alkali RV park.” He held his elbows in his hands as if to hide his belly. “Why aren’t you angry?”

  Rigg stepped in and flicked on the wall light. “Honestly? I’m bombed.”

  Both he and the man winced at their mutual exposure. Rigg scanned the room and saw several tidy piles of map pieces, ready to be boxed up and spirited away.

  The man said, “You lied to us. This is The Mystery House.”

  Rigg nodded. He crossed over into the kitchen area where he put the goody bag on the counter and pulled a bottle of water from the fridge, turning his back on the man before he said, “That give you a right to trespass?” He nearly drained the bottle in one go. He could feel a familiar stale ache commence behind his eyes, knowing soon it would spread out into a cap of pure white pain. He needed hydration, a lake full of water to wash away the hangover coming on.

  “They said you abandoned the place. We didn’t know you were coming back.”

  The bedsprings creaked again. This time the woman emerged with palms blackened and the knees of her jeans dark with dirt. She did all the crawling for this team. She wore an identical American flag t-shirt, but somehow it looked almost fashionable on her angular frame. Now that Rigg could get a better look at her, he saw that she was a good deal older than her husband. Rigg’s age, in fact. The woman’s face was pinched into a scowl, and she was the sort who could blend elements of embarrassment and anger into a whole new emotion.

  “Who said that?” Rigg kept an eye on her but talked to the man. “I didn’t abandon shit.”

  “We had lunch at the Alkali. They were all talking about it.”

  “Well, you misunderstood. So you two just get along now, and we’ll say nothing more about it.”

  The man and the woman exchanged confused looks. That was it?

  Rigg shoved the bag a little further under a cupboard, hoping for the camouflage of shadow. There were piles of reasons Rigg was disinclined to call the cops, but these folks didn’t need to know any of them. He pointed towards the map pieces. “And leave those right there.”

  The woman shrugged. “You have a couple of rare ones.
You could get something for them on eBay. I could help you with that.” She behaved as if she hadn’t just been caught in the act of scavenging a stranger’s house. In fact, she acted as if she were owed more for her trouble. She looked at the map pieces and then at Rigg. “And how long have you been looking for her?”

  “Long enough,” Rigg said. “The Juliet ain’t here.”

  “But you thought she was.”

  Rigg did not respond.

  The woman persisted. “And you believed the map segments were real.”

  “Look, get out of here already, or I’ll call—”

  The woman leaned forward. “Do you think you have them all?”

  Rigg said, “There is no all.”

  The man chimed in, “Of course there is.”

  If Rigg’s anger hadn’t ignited, he would have felt sorry for the pudgy dude. “Do you even know who I am?”

  “We do now.”

  “Good. Then you know I know what I’m talking about.” He grabbed up one of the piles of green map segments and shook it at the man. “I’ve studied these for years.” The paper rattled and the sound sent hangover sparkles across his vision. “Some of these match up to real places. Some are just diagrams of, I don’t know what, middle fucking earth or something.”

  The woman nodded. “And if anyone ever found The Juliet, there’d be no reason to buy Nuggetz, would there? Stuff was awful.”

  Rigg rubbed his face and tried to recover his cool. “They went out of business anyway.”

  “What do you think happened to The Juliet, then?”

  These two were too calm. It didn’t seem right. Either they were accustomed to getting caught like this or they had been conjured up by Rigg’s drink and drug addled subconscious mind. “Everybody asks me that. I’m tired of coming up with hypotheticals.”

  “So, you think they never hid it.”

  “Hell no.” The bottom of Rigg’s stomach went chilly, as if the hatch had been left open in his soul’s root cellar. “Hell no,” he said again, just to make it stick this time. “It’s all just a bunch of stupid stories.”