And then the door to Room 602 swung open.
There — live, in living color — stood my father.
Even in that moment I knew the man was my half-bother. The hammerhead-colored suit told me that. But it was startling to see his face twisted just like Dad’s had been during the climax of Wrong Turn, a mask of violent desperation. And I froze up seeing him so close. He wasn’t a man in black & white on a television screen, but a man with a face red from alcohol and hurt and hate and pride, a man with knuckles the color of spoiled meat.
He was the same man who stepped into his kitchen one night and found a charming Frenchman fawning over his wife.
He wasn’t thinking straight, that man.
He wasn’t thinking smart.
And I realized with complete clarity that I hadn’t been smart in coming here.
I had barely dropped the phone when he laid into me. I should have known it would be a left hook. I should have seen it coming, because I’d seen it coming in all those movies. But I didn’t see it and it dropped me.
He wasn’t finished, of course. He took me into the bathroom, where it seemed there was an acre of gleaming tile.
I remember the sound of a human skull used as a hammer.
I remember my sister’s screams as she pulled Mr. Wrong Turn off of me. I remember her yelling something about a goose and a golden egg. And then I remember the hatred in her eyes. “You take this as a warning,” she said. “You stay out of our way. Maybe, if you do that, we’ll stay out of yours.”
The man with my father’s face nodded solemnly, cracking his knuckles and grinning the way a man grins after a satisfying meal. “Well,” he said by way of conclusion, “it looks like Dad finally gave you a beating, after all.”
I passed out for a while. Then I stumbled to the bed and curled up in the bedspread. Somewhere in the middle of the night I made it into the bathtub and cleaned up. I soaked in the steaming water for a long time, eyes closed — the right one swollen shut — and when I opened my eye the bath water was pink with blood.
At the end of Wrong Turn, Tom Cassady is driving. But he’s got no place to go. All his life, Tom Cassady had nowhere to go. His road was one straight line. He killed a man with his fists and did time for it, but that didn’t change him. He lost his wife and family, but that didn’t change him. He got another wife, and he was the same way with her that he was with my mother, but wife number two was afraid to do anything about it. And he went back to work in the movies, where he pretended to lose his grip, pretended to hit people, shoot them, hurt them in a dozen inventive ways.
It wasn’t much of a stretch.
One day Tom Cassady didn’t wake up, and the thing that had burned so hot inside him was dead. But it wasn’t gone, nor was it forgotten. I remembered it. So did Jo. We remembered it every time someone discovered who our father was. We remembered how that simple knowledge could make a person’s eyes shine, the way the desk clerk’s eyes had shined in the lobby of the Cal-Neva when she recognized me.
We all want to do that. Put the shine in someone’s eyes, I mean. Sometimes, what we’ll do for that particular thrill amazes me.
I guess that’s why I wrote the book.
I was five when Dad went to San Quentin. Jo was seven. As far as I know, he never laid a hand on me. Never touched Jo, either. I don’t remember the man, to tell the truth. He never visited us after his release, never even sent a birthday card. Most of the time I spent with him, he was on a television or movie screen and I was eating popcorn.
The book was a lie. That’s what Jo and my half-brother had been able to hold over my head. I didn’t know my father. But the book was something else, too. It was the little piece of Dad that I had carried inside me for thirty-five years. It was the shadow of anger that always churned in my gut when I tried to assure myself that I was a thinker. Every key I pushed on that computer keyboard was a little jab. Every word I spoke on that book tour was a little knife. And when I cold-cocked that talk show host, I was thinking that I was going to make a million eyes shine all at once, all across America.
Because the talk show guy had pushed my button. He’d asked about Dad exploiting his crime in order to boost his career. And then he’d held up a copy of Killer Cassady, and he’d said, “Like father, like son?”
I couldn’t answer, because the thing that had burned so hot in Dad took hold of me then. I could only react, and for a short instant everything felt so very right. It was the way I felt when I wrapped the telephone cord around Jo’s neck. The way Jo felt when she saw our half-brother standing there in the doorway. The way he felt when he tore into me.
I don’t know why I thought I could steer clear of Jo and get away with the whole thing. But I took the chance. I dug Dad up. I brought him back.
But I knew, soaking in the bathtub in Room 602, that it was time to bury him. After thirty-five years, it was time to get off Dad’s road.
I had to make sure that I was off it for good. I got out of the tub. My wallet was on the floor and I picked it up. A few other credit cards were now missing, but they hadn’t touched my cash. I took the money, dropped the wallet on the floor.
I managed to get dressed. My face didn’t look too bad, if you could ignore the shut eye and the gash above it. My lips were puffy and kind of purple, but my nose looked in pretty good shape. Overall, the swelling almost had an odd symmetry. I didn’t feel very hot, but seeing that my brother hadn’t managed to crack any tile with my head made me feel a little better.
I didn’t drain the pink water from the tub. I didn’t wipe the blood off the tile. I didn’t hide the bloodstained bedspread. My wallet lay on the floor, stuffed with I. D. that bore the name my father had given me, and I didn’t pick it up. Maybe somebody would make something of it. Maybe they wouldn’t, but I had a hard time believing that. The California-Nevada state line bisected the Cal- Neva. Maybe it bisected Room 602. If that were the case, the FBI might enter the picture.
It was late. I didn’t want to think about it.
I passed the desk, showing my left profile. My right hand covered my swollen eye while I pretended to take care of an itch on my forehead. It didn’t matter. No one noticed me. I got to my car without attracting any attention.
I pictured my half-brother and my sister driving down Dad’s road, running south toward Hollywood, wearing Dad’s signature grin on their faces.
I knew they were heading for a wrong turn.
I drove north.
SPYDER
The sun is the best bullfighter, and without
the sun the best bullfighter is not there.
He is like a man without a shadow.
-Ernest Hemingway,
Death in the Afternoon
I’ll never forget Layla. Even though nearly thirty years have passed, I still picture her every time I hear a woman laugh. Still. But I see her now the same way I once saw my face up there on the screen, chiseled flat and somehow unreal. Just a dream in the dark, but spooky as hell.
The things we did together. Like the time we drove from Hollywood to the Napa Valley and back, all in one night. Impossible. I mean the Spyder was fast, but it wasn’t that fast. Layla knew how to make it move, though. A couple of drops of her blood in the carb, and that little Porsche sports-car roared like a Sabrejet.
Nothing could slow us down on a night like that. I’d worked all afternoon under a director who’d jabbed at me until I was nothing but a tangle of emotional razor-wire, and Layla had spent the evening doing her spook show, but that didn’t keep us from flying up 101 like a couple of ghosts. Layla even looked like one in her trademark ghoul makeup and the black dress with the plunging neckline, the costume she wore when she did her Rigormortia routine on TV.
It was all kind of cute. Me stealing a look at her cleavage when I had the Spyder cranked on a straightaway, just because I knew she wanted me to look. Layla laughing, catching my telegraphed glance, now and then flashing suntanned breasts knifed by Lugosi’s favorite greasepaint.
&n
bsp; Layla loved me, I guess. In her way, she loved me more than anyone else. Maybe it was because I never surrendered to her like the others did. Maybe that’s why she kept coming back for more, each time expecting that she’d finally break me and I’d be all hers. I guess that’s a strange kind of love, but Layla was strange. She had her own way of getting what she needed, even if it meant settling for less than she wanted.
Like the trip to Napa. She said what we needed was something heavy, bloody, nothing less than a good California Zinfandel. None of that sour piss they bottled in the Central Valley would do. We needed the real deal — the product of foggy nights and sunbaked days and oak barrels coopered in the Valley of the Moon.
That sounded good to me — sucker for escape that I am. The day hadn’t been one of my best. I was worried about the picture and the director (who’d been whittling my brains for four straight months), but most of all I was worried about where I was going to be in a couple of years. I’d always wanted to be on top, and once I was on the verge of getting there all I could think about was fading. Just fading, and that isn’t even romantic. Nothing so Hemingwayesque as a bullfighter dying beneath a sun that gleams like a Spanish doubloon.
When I was like that — morbid and scared and way too romantic — I turned to Layla. Back then, in the beginning, she made me feel indestructible, like I’d go on forever.
So we had our little trade-off, Layla and me. It seemed so simple at first. Too bad it changed to something else. Like I said, it was all tied up with our wants and needs — what we wanted from each other, and what we needed to survive; what we were willing to surrender, and what we needed to keep to ourselves. An ace in the hole, some secret part held back for the final hand. It was a very fine line, and we walked it like the edge of a razor blade, and damned if both of us didn’t end up stumbling.
Whoa. I’m getting ahead of myself.
Anyway, like I was saying — red lips laughing in the dark. Night wind of California slashing a dead white face with tangles of long black hair. A Spyder sports-car, a would-be movie star, and a gorgeous corpsette riding shotgun.
A quiet graveyard.
How Layla found just the right grave, I’ll never know. But she did. She eased out of the Spyder, cocked those sexy hips of hers, and stared down tilting rows of marble and granite. Then she pointed, her fingers extended as straight and stiff as marble daggers.
We waited in the darkness, the radio cutting in and out, snatches of Fats Domino and Bill Haley worrying the static that ruled the fog-choked night. Layla stood there in the dark, as quiet as stone, and I found myself remembering the crazy party where we’d met. Layla had been as quiet as stone that night, too, until she whispered that she could help me get a break. Whispering hot in my ear as she tried to maneuver me into a dark closet. That was the moment I’d been waiting for since first hearing about her. I told her no, it wasn’t going to be that way between us. And I kissed her, and I let my hand brush her breast so lightly that she couldn’t help but feel it way down deep, and I walked out on her.
And the phone was ringing in my apartment when I got home.
I’d heard all the stories, you see, and the funny thing is that there was something inside me that let me believe every damn one of them. Layla the vampire. Layla the witch. Layla and graveyards, and dead cats, and midnight rituals.
My story: Layla, as quiet as stone, in a Napa Valley cemetery
Momentarily, we felt the earth shudder.
Heard clumps of clipped grass tearing beneath the shroud of fog.
Saw his silhouette rise before us.
I guess Layla didn’t know everything, though, because she had to ask him the name of the winery where he’d worked.
I wanted to put him in the trunk. He smelled pretty ripe, and I didn’t want his muddy ass messing up the Spyder’s upholstery. Layla pointed out that we didn’t know how to get to the winery. I asked him for directions, but he couldn’t speak well enough to get them out.
So down the two-lane blacktop we went with a dead vintner sitting behind us — his feet jammed in the little space between the bucket seats; his moldy butt on the trunk; his dead hands on our shoulders, holding on for dear life… or whatever.
The winery grounds smelled of oak and stone. The place was even quieter than the graveyard. The dead man knew where a passkey was hidden. He led us across the grounds, through a heavy oak door, and down a stone-lined corridor that cut into the side of a hill. Being a man of discriminating taste, he chose a rare Zin from prohibition days, when the wineries had managed to survive via sacramental contracts.
He uncorked the bottle with precision and a certain grace, as if he wasn’t dead at all. We all had a little taste. Then we got down to business.
Layla stood behind me. With one hand she undid my fly and took me between those marble fingers. Her other hand held the open bottle.
I closed my eyes. Her fingers moved slowly. She was going to enjoy this, play it for all it was worth, because she knew just how much the director had worn me down, and just how badly I needed her help.
This time she had me at the end of my goddamn rope.
Her words tickled over my neck as she whispered the incantation. “The bottle uncorked by the man who corked it. Thirty years in the cellar, thirty years in the ground. The juice of the grape and the seed of the man. The seed of the man and the juice of the grape…” It went on from there. Then her grip tightened, and her sharp little teeth closed on my earlobe.
Skyrockets, if you want a cliche. In this case, it’s no exaggeration.
When I opened my eyes, the bottle was corked once more and wore a new lead capsule. The dead vintner lay on the floor, withered in his moldy suit. Whatever had been left in him was now gone.
But there was wine on his grinning lips, and Layla knelt at his side. The tiniest of smiles crossed her face as she rose. Her white fingers swam toward me in the darkness, and her red lips parted. Her tongue did a coy little dance over her teeth and she laughed.
She’d seen the look of horror on my face. She’d gotten a little bit of what she wanted, and I’d lost a little bit of what I needed.
A piece of me that I could never get back.
I turned away, bloody Zinfandel roiling in my gut, and hurried up the stone corridor, trying to convince myself that Layla hadn’t pulled me out of a grave, that I was still alive and breathing.
You see, she’d touched me once, and once was enough.
It was the only time I ever let her touch me.
I wrapped a big red ribbon around the bottle of wine and gave it to the director. He eased off after that. I don’t know what did the trick: Layla’s enchanted Zin or the insane deadline the studio had imposed. Either way, the sly old puppeteer didn’t have another word to say about me until the first reviews appeared.
Layla wouldn’t go to the premiere, of course. She said it wouldn’t be good for me to be seen in the company of an older woman who earned her living showing monster movies to a TV audience of slobbering teenagers. She selected a starlet who’d caught her eye, even bought a corsage for the girl. I picked her up at Layla’s bungalow in Hollywood.
Big night. Starlet and Spyder and me. Little pistons pounded in my skull, so steadily that I could hardly watch the picture. I had choke fever real bad; I couldn’t even bring myself to take the starlet’s hand for fear she’d reject me and storm out of the place in search of a real celebrity.
The movie plodded along. My face seemed to hang on the screen for minutes at a time, so huge, but like I said, flat and somehow unreal. And then the last scene finally came, all tears and shadows on the big screen. My own voice wailed at me while I made promises to a sick man who was supposed to be my father.
Eyes closed, I tried to picture it as it had happened — the director whispering instructions in my ear, the bright lights, the camera drinking it all in, the old actor lying on a phony deathbed. But I couldn’t hold the images in my head. The pounding pistons crushed them, and I was left with a single vision
.
All I could see was the dead vintner lying on the stone floor, a trickle of dark wine staining his withered grin. A dead grin, but a grin unsatisfied.
All I could hear was Layla’s mocking laughter.
I was the toast of the town for a little while. Parties. Meetings. Dinners. Then a new picture came out, and it was someone else’s turn.
For the first time I saw the nasty hook hidden in the game. Every morning I picked up the newspaper and flipped to the movie section. And every morning my sense of security shrank a little more, in direct proportion to the size of the movie ad. First my photo disappeared. Then the director’s name vanished, followed by the names of the supporting actors. Finally, my name went. All that was left was the name of the picture, along with a note that it was IN COLOR and the theatre was AIR-CONDITIONED.
Pretty soon I was the second half of a double-bill.
One morning I ran into Layla at a coffee shop. She looked up from the paper and said, “You’re not here at all.”
“It’s over,” I said.
“No,” she said. “It’s time to start again.”
She was smiling, but her words hit me with the finality of a curse.
The columnist lived in one of those suicidal houses that teeter on the side of a steep hill. Places like that are all sparkling glass and architectural majesty on a sunny day, but they invariably surrender to melancholy and jump to their deaths when gloomy storms blow hard off the Pacific and mud-slide season begins.
Normally, such a breathtaking combination of design and location would have left me with a fullblown case of vertigo, but the fog was in pretty solid on the night of my visit. I was brave enough, and drunk enough, to play with the weirder possibilities of the stage with which the columnist’s overpaid architect had provided me, because I was intent on giving the self-important scribbler the thrill of her life.
The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists Page 20