The Darker Saints

by Brian Hodge

  “Even so, the high-tech gloss of computer graphics just doesn’t suit the Mullavey Foods image. You’ve got your Evangeline line of Cajun and Creole foods, your Heart of Dixie line of more traditional Southern fare. And your ads for these reflect very down-home sensibilities. Just because Magnolia Blossom uses a relatively new wrinkle in coffee technology doesn’t mean we should automatically gloss it up. People don’t buy technology when it comes to coffee. They buy image, they buy brand identification. It’s an emotional issue entirely.”

  Mullavey nodded, impatient. “I’m glad you understand that. Is there a point to this?”

  “You bet.” An emphatic nod. “Open question: What’s the one thing that captured the romance of the South more completely than anything else you can think of?”

  Silence. Facial expressions of puzzlement, concentration. Even Mullavey was putting his gray cells to it. Suggestions came forth, tentatively. Steamboats. The Confederate flag. Grits. Justin shot them all down, until:

  “Gone With the Wind?” Nan almost whispered it.

  Justin tapped his finger to the tip of his nose. “Exactly.”

  And damned if Mullavey’s face didn’t brighten at the mere mention of the title. Like a shot of speed, and Justin felt the burn, the high of sighting in on someone’s interest and readying for the kill. Surely it was some throwback to the days of cave-dwelling hunters. Can’t bring down a mastodon anymore? A nice fat account is the next best thing.

  “When it comes to conjuring up that romantic imagery from the Old South,” Justin continued, “this decades-old film is so ingrained in American culture that even people who’ve never seen it can still identify what it’s all about.”

  Leonard picked right up on the drift. “So if we tap into that we can let that imagery do half our work for us.”

  Justin smiled. “Before we even say a word.”

  Mullavey was staring down toward the table in concentration, leaned back with hands draped over his stomach. When he looked up, he was aglow. “Now this has possibilities. This I like.”

  Justin snatched one of Nan’s black markers, then crossed around the tables to the easel. He took the posterboard on which the TV spot had been laid out, flipped it around to blank white and began to sketch in quick lines. Nothing fancy, but eight months of marriage to an artist had sharpened his own skills considerably. They would suffice.

  Hurriedly, he sketched a superimposed product shot in the lower right foreground, a box of Magnolia Blossom. He filled in the rest with a discernible rendering of a woman in full skirts and hat — holding a mug — seated on a swing suspended from a mighty tree limb. In the background several lines converged to suggest a massive estate, a plantation house. He paralleled a few lines for a heading and a copy block and stepped away.

  “If we use a setting something like this, it can work both in print and on TV. Keep it simple, it’ll be very flexible.”

  “Why not try an entire series of spots based on Gone With the Wind?” Leonard said. “No need to leave it at just one, not with a three-and-a-half-hour movie.”

  “What kind of licensing situation are we looking at?” Mullavey asked.

  “This is where we’ll be treading a fine line.” Justin capped the marker and returned to his chair. “Despite the fact that they contracted Alexandra Ripley to write the sequel to the novel, Margaret Mitchell’s estate is opposed to the commercialization of her story. But look, we’re dealing with images from the movie. The way Scarlett O’Hara looked didn’t get fixed in people’s minds until Vivien Leigh was cast in the role.”

  Mullavey had both elbows on the table now. Into this, oh was he ever, so into this. “Then who owns the movie rights?”

  “I did some checking the other day.” Actually, Justin had blundered across a small article in USA Today and read it on a whim. But why split hairs? “The film rights belong to Ted Turner. He shows it every day at a theater in the CNN Center in Atlanta.”

  “Ted Turner!” Mullavey shuddered. “Thank God they shot the film in color to begin with.”

  “I think we could make this work without any sort of direct link with the movie,” Justin said. “There’s no need to say Gone With the Wind at all. Or Scarlett O’Hara, or Rhett Butler, or anything that would legally tie us to it.”

  “Just let the presentation suggest it,” said Ty Larkin, the promotional VP. “We’ll know it’s Gone With the Wind, they’ll know what it is … we just won’t say it.”

  “That’ll save us a pot of money in licensing fees,” said the marketing VP.

  “Do you think there’s a possibility of any flak from Turner’s people for copyright infringement?” Mullavey asked.

  “We’ll have to run it by the lawyers,” said Leonard. “But I shouldn’t foresee any problems, not if all we’re doing is using look-alikes. That won’t give them much room to stand on.”

  Silence descended for several moments, the pause a fulcrum on which the decision was balanced. All eyes were on Mullavey. And when he spoke, Justin could not have felt more triumphant.

  “Let’s go with this,” he said.

  Ninety more minutes of nerve-racking euphoria, conference walls rebounding with the logistics of implementing Justin’s idea. They double-checked that client and agency were on the same wavelength so as to avoid any future differences of opinion, the likes of which had nearly soured goodwill earlier in the meeting. They penciled in the conceptual, copy, and production deadlines.

  Once it was over, and the crew from Segal/Goldberg were standing at the elevator bank, Justin found himself caught in a massive bearhug from Leonard Greenwald, who said, “You just have to love him, have to love this guy.” Justin was grateful when the elevator call bell chimed, unless Leonard planned to continue all this affection down to the main lobby.

  “Hold up a minute,” someone said, halfway down the hall.

  Ty Larkin, the promo VP, was quick-stepping toward them. He’d been the youngest of Mullavey’s group, in his mid-thirties. Sandy haired, lanky within a suit that looked ill fitting from most angles. A face too plain to be thought handsome, too amiably pleasant to be thought merely plain.

  “Mr. Mullavey’s putting in a call to Tampa, but he wanted me to pass along the word before you left.” Larkin scrupulously avoided eye contact with Todd, and Justin suspected what the news would be. “He wants Justin to take over as senior copywriter on the account.” Larkin hunched his shoulders, smiling faintly, c’est la vie. “He tends to get his way, you know.”

  Justin smiled, low-key, a gracious winner. Turning cartwheels inside.

  Spike point, he thought.

  Chapter 3

  Baggage

  Justin got home earlier than usual that afternoon, came through the door carrying flowers. Daisies in blue tissue, maybe one day before they would start to look sad and wilted. Two, tops. It was the thought that counted.

  Home was the second-story loft, still, where April Kingston-Gray had lived and worked for nearly four years, operating her own commercial art studio. It was roomy enough for them both after she’d agreed to wear a ring on her left hand and add a hyphen and an extra syllable to her last name. There had been no need to start afresh in a home that would have been equally alien to them both. What little he had owned last year, when marriage became a viable probability, the loft accommodated readily.

  Ajax greeted him first, twining herself around his ankles in feline hedonism, purring with urgency, peering up at him with vacant yearning. The cat was in heat, he swore, 60 percent of the time. The rest she ate and slept.

  “Hello, slut.” He knelt to scratch behind her ears, and Ajax ground against his fingers. He indulged her ardor until she spun to back her rump into his hand, and he stood. That always creeped him out.

  Justin peeled his jacket and tie onto the kitchen table, then found April in the bathroom, air steamy from her shower. The wedding hadn’t been so long ago that there still wasn’t immediate delight in finding her naked. The towel wrapped around her waist could ea
sily be dispensed with. He liked it, inexplicably, that she wore them this way. Every woman he’d known well enough to view fresh from the shower had worn them knotted between her breasts. It set April apart.

  She smiled at him via the mirror, streaked from a hurried wipedown. He held up the daisies, let her see their reflection, and she turned to kiss him from tiptoe. Her hair was still wet, smelled of wildflower shampoo. She accepted the daisies and buried her face for a sniff.

  “Aren’t you the sweetheart today,” she said.

  “I got them at the airport. Three bucks and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon gets my soul. I’m getting to be a real bargain hunter.”

  “I’m touched.” Her eyebrow was cocked, a light dusting of sarcasm, and then she turned to pull a comb through her hair.

  Justin stepped closer, reached around her to crush them together, her back to his front. He cupped a breast in each palm. Small breasts, tight. They matched her body, whose chromosomes carried one-quarter Japanese genetics. April shut her eyes and leaned back for a few seconds, then pulled forward.

  “Stop that.” He took grim pleasure in that there was at least regret in her voice. “You know we don’t have time, not tonight.”

  She was right, of course. They had a client reception to attend in an hour — hers, this one. He enfolded her anyway, kept the passion on simmer, shut his eyes and leaned into her, her damp hair cooling, soothing. Small kisses, like stolen moments. A two-career couple, sex sometimes had to be relegated to a holding pattern. But they had made a pact: Tenderness there would be time for, always.

  They looked good together, as he caught their mirrored portrait. Looked right together. One-quarter Japanese and three-quarters white-bread Americana, April exuded a friendly sort of exoticism. Asia wasn’t readily apparent at first glance, but caught in glimpses, peripherally. At a certain tilt of her head, or when the set of her eyes suddenly became less round, more almond. The mystique was undeniable. Justin counterbalanced her nicely. They matched in the same black hair, similarly brown irises. But a long-ago Welsh heritage had bestowed upon him a high-cheeked, fine-boned roguish androgyny. The sometimes glint in his eye had undoubtedly been cultivated through years of occasional outlaw forays. He looked healthier than when he had moved down to Florida from the Midwest fourteen months ago, and he supposed he was, mentally as well as physically. More exercise, less drink, regained control over his life. The rest was the tan — enough to give him some color, not so extreme as to worry about a serious flirtation with melanoma.

  The clinch was broken and April drew the blow dryer from its wall hook, wielding it with gunslinger proficiency.

  “How’d the meeting go today?” she asked over its roar.

  “Better than expected. For me, anyway. Except when Todd tried to kill me.”

  Uncertainty, mirrored back at him. Was he serious or joking? He really did have ghostly bruises on his throat, the size and shape of Todd Whitley’s fingers, but they were scarcely noticeable with his head kept level. He recapped the meeting, blow by blow, milestone by milestone. When he got to the kicker — being given the Magnolia Blossom account at specific request of the company’s lord high potentate — April squealed in delight and whirled for a victory kiss.

  “It felt good, but really strange. Like I hadn’t worked for it at all.” Confessional. “And then on the plane home? Allison Hunter made a play for me.”

  The dryer was gusting April’s hair into a whirling cloud, and she paused in maximum disarray. “Let’s hear about this, then.”

  It had transpired somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico. The five of them were on the right side of a DC-9, the three-abreast seats, Justin on the aisle. Nan in the middle, Todd on the outside; he’d made her switch so he could sulk out the window. Allison and Leonard had been seated behind them. Justin had felt a tapping at his elbow and turned to see Allison’s face looming around the seat at him. She was tall, blonde, perfectly made-up, and not his type at all. He could never imagine her sweating. Humanity stayed walled behind a Revlon facade.

  “That was quite impressive this morning,” she had said. “Congratulations.”

  He thanked her, admitted he’d been winging it and had simply gotten lucky.

  “You’re a crafty one, aren’t you? You just sat back, and took it all in … and then you made your move. Todd never knew what hit him.” She smiled with cool-eyed mischief. “And you got off on it, too. I could tell. I suppose those stories we heard about you from last year are true, aren’t they?”

  His eyes had turned downcast; last year was a topic he preferred to avoid. “Things get exaggerated.”

  “Mmm. Maybe. But one thing’s clear to me: You’re not the type of man to turn your back on.” And then, the look. The Look, the one that announced her intentions all too clearly. “Of course … I can think of one instance to turn my back on you. I’d probably be on my knees at the time.”

  Justin had felt a lurch as severe as sudden turbulence. No idea how to react. Allison Hunter was forty, ten years his senior, and firmly entrenched in her own stratum of power and authority several layers above his own. He had assumed that sexual politics would play no part in their work relationship, ever. He found far more shock treatment than flattery in being wrong.

  Finally, Allison had turned off the spotlight. “Think about it,” she’d said, and settled into her seat again.

  April was using a brush to rein her hair under control. “You know, you should probably take it as a compliment. Allison likes to fuck power.”

  Justin sputtered a small laugh. “Lots of guys there are higher up on the scrotum pole than I am.”

  “Doesn’t matter. She sensed a definite shift in power this morning, I’d say.”

  “You mean I’ve arrived, finally, at the agency?”

  “It’s one of the signs. Some know they’ve made it when they get a key to the executive washroom. Some know it when Allison Hunter wants to jump their bones. Kind of pathetic as initiation rites go, isn’t it?”

  April was treating it lightly, Justin knew; not quite flippantly but close enough. As if to treat it more seriously would only legitimize the threat, make more of it than it actually was. Reverse psychology defense. But the fear would cut deeper than admitted; this Justin knew as well. No matter how strong the bonds of fidelity, no matter how fervent his promise months ago to forsake all others, the fear would slice in and snuggle up to suspected inadequacies, shortcomings that another woman could fulfill too easily, if only temporarily. Irrationality knew all the tricks, and the low-down dirtier, the better.

  How to allay the fears, this was uppermost. They both knew, from hard experience — with each other and with others before — just how cheap mere words came. One moment of manipulation could give rise to a tide of obsolete promises, empty assurances.

  Justin tugged the blow dryer’s plug from the outlet, let the warm air die in her fist. He held her close, now front to front, and there was time. All the time in the world.

  “I love you,” he whispered into her ear. “You.”

  There. It was hard to improve upon the classics.

  It hadn’t always been this way.

  And they were always there, the memories of last year. Useless baggage to be forever carried, never opened. He could peer with a hollow gaze into any mirror, wondering how well he knew who really lived behind his eyes.

  Justin had migrated down a year ago this past May, a final attempt to rebuild life after a well-deserved arrest in St. Louis. He’d exchanged state’s evidence for freedom, but his career and marriage number one had been flushed down the toilet. The one saving grace had been his best friend, Erik Webber, alive and well in Tampa. Erik had been the one to introduce him to April.

  Wrong place, wrong time, wrong decision — a chance encounter with second-generation Colombian-American Tony Mendoza and some monstrous drug from the Venezuelan rain forests had sucked them all into a dark vortex of death and betrayal, and Erik had been the first to fall. Everything had culminated two weeks
later out on the causeway over the Old Bay, halfway between Tampa and St. Pete. Shrieking tensions had been so great the night before, however, that he and April had stood on bloodstained asphalt, aiming guns at each other in a fractured stalemate. But the causeway had finished it all, had left them looking at each other, even as he tried to walk away forever, yet still wondering if they could ever reclaim their former intimacy. He had to know. For everything she’d put him through, he still cared for her. Clung to her inside because, get real, what were they both but a couple of dismal, battered human beings? Justin wouldn’t have believed in himself either, had he been her. They deserved each other, could either be each other’s salvation or final damnation.

  He had to know.

  They’d tried, halfheartedly. But reconciliation didn’t mean happily ever after.

  Left to themselves, it might have been successful at first. But the aftermath of the entire Mendoza affair was like the Chinese Death of a Thousand Cuts. Rene Espinoza, the sole Tampa cop who had been in his corner, had tried valiantly to make it easy on him, but even she butted her head against stone walls of bureaucracy. The Coast Guard had eventually dredged Mendoza’s body from the bay, and once the eyes of justice saw what metamorphosis it had undergone, and Justin’s story had been validated, lids had clamped down tight. The less said, the better.

  But lids leaked. Persistent media jackals, whirling and snapping for meat regardless of the blood they drew. Somehow his name had gotten out, and Justin had found himself dodging phone calls and driving on past April’s whenever he would return from an errand or a bar to find someone camped out awaiting his arrival.

  Under the glare of spotlights, he and April found themselves at each other’s throat, reopening old wounds, each grinding the other’s nose in sins and mistakes better off forgotten.

  Finally he had left. He’d inherited Erik’s car by default, and drove it down into the Keys with no more idea of what tomorrow held than what ten years hence would bring. He sat on beaches, and against palm trees with fronds rustling overhead. He cut his feet wading on coral reefs. His beard grew, his skin darkened, his body lost the last traces of softness stemming from yuppiefied easylife.