by Brian Hodge
They both laughed. Bullets cut deeper than words, but probably not by far.
“Jordy took me whore-dragging with him once,” Duncan said. “Whore-dragging, that was his word for it.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that.”
“I wish I didn’t either. We used to go to Phoenix after Jordy started driving. There was more to get into up there. Easier to get lost. So once when I was fourteen, we were up there when Jordy tells me he’s going to get a streetwalker to give me a blowjob. Fourteen years old, yeah, I was all for that.
“It was summer, early evening, still light out but that hot night coming on. He heads into this area where the girls work curbside and the corners, and we’re cruising along, and they’re calling out to us, you know, because it’s obvious we’re interested and two guys young as we are, it’s fast money—it won’t take any time at all to get us off. Jordy says, ‘Who looks good to you?’ Fourteen, it all looks good to me. But I settle on this one. She’s got long blonde hair and she’s wearing shorts and fishnet stockings and a halter top. So I point her out and Jordy says, ‘Okay, she’s the one, then.’
“He wheels over to the curb and she starts to come to my window, but Jordy motions to her no, no, other side. So she walks around the car to his window instead. Bends down and they’re talking, and I’m about to go crazy. She leans on the door…and then, no warning, Jordy grabs her arm with one hand while he steps on the gas. So he’s got her trapped there as he cuts back out into the street and down the block. And she’s screaming in through the window, and I’m yelling because…well, everything, and I can just imagine what’s happening to her feet out there. And Jordy’s laughing the whole time. He drags her a block-and-a-half, two blocks, then lets her go and she falls away from the car, and I look through the back window and catch a glimpse of her in the middle of the street as we’re rolling away. She’d been wearing platform shoes, but she’d lost them both along the way, and I can see what the pavement’s done to her. And we just kept going.”
Duncan stopped a moment, Jamey watching him pick his fingernail along the dashboard of the car. Inspecting cracks and crevices.
“I didn’t say a word to him the rest of that night, just wanted to go home. And didn’t have anything to do with him the next few weeks, either. Later he told me he was sorry, he didn’t mean it. Didn’t mean it—that’s the kind of thing that only makes sense when you’re fourteen. So we got to be friends again. But just the same, I made this promise to myself that I wasn’t ever going to watch him do anything like that to anyone again. And he never did, not that I ever knew of. Not until last October.”
Jamey said nothing. Thinking that maybe Duncan had shown more mercy to his cousin back at that salon than was deserved. Not a thing he could say aloud.
“Families, huh?” Duncan laughed. “Because the Devil can’t be everywhere at once.”
Through the windshield, they spotted Dawn up the block, heading back to the car. At a walk, not a run, still wearing those chunky-heeled shoes she’d put on to look taller. Jamey wondered if they were what had brought this memory back to Duncan.
“Don’t mention anything about that to Dawn,” he said. “She doesn’t know about it. There’s no reason for her to.”
She got in the car then, happy and at ease. Kicked off the blocky shoes while Duncan eased away from the curb, and slid down in her seat and stuck her bare feet on the dashboard. Bright blue toenails like ten sapphires in the sun.
“Does anybody besides me think it’s none of a teller’s business to ask what I’m going to do with all that cash?” she said. “Not out of suspicion, just in everyday conversation. I think that’s rude.”
“What’d you answer?” Duncan asked.
“I told her it was for casino gambling.”
Over Dawn’s shoulder, Jamey could see her shuffling through greenbacks. She turned in her seat and thrust a handful back to him.
“Here. Go buy yourself something pretty.” A delighted cackle. “I’ve always wanted to say that.”
Tentatively, Jamey took it. Counted and found that he was getting a third, over a thousand dollars in his hand.
“You’re serious?” he said.
“You wore the coveralls. You did the legwork,” Dawn told him. “What’d you think you were—our slave?”
He couldn’t recall the last time he had held this much cash in hand, if ever. There had never been the need. Income was an abstract: numbers on a check, on a balance statement, a computer screen. You touched only a small fraction of what you made, and so it was easy to forget how substantial cash could feel, fresh and green and crisp. Those double-zeros, over and over again. Rub the bills together and they made a faint rasp, like autumn leaves.
“The bank covers the loss, you said?”
“Yep. No Hanks were fleeced in the making of this profit.”
“Okay, then,” and Jamey decided to see what it felt like in his pocket. “I suppose I can always think of it as corporate sponsorship of the arts.”
26
SOMETIMES all it took to recalibrate your outlook on life was a full tank of gas and a few dozen miles.
Back in Kingman, their limbo had plunged Kristophe into such crushing despair that he’d begun doubting he had any talent at all. He would play back the brilliant scenes he’d shot there, only to watch them betray a level of proficiency that invoked the magnificently inept spirit of Ed Wood, Jr.
But now that they were on the move again, as evening descended on Arizona and blue skies bled to crimson, Kristophe’s doldrums had been lifted away as if by a troupe of Muses. No togas for his Muses—his were topless and wore black thongs. They cavorted and encouraged him until he became possessed by the spirit of John Ford and his robust vision of the American West. Mountains and mesas, deserts and arroyos, all had been placed at his disposal.
Kristophe drove with his left hand, stroked the digital Canon with his right. Six hours ago he had scorned it. Now he touched the camera with apology. Because he’d forgotten one of his Golden Rules: When inspiration flounders, a true artist never blames it on the limitations of his equipment. He blames it on the dreariness of his surroundings. And occasionally on his collaborators.
“Melissa said what?” Blayne asked.
“For us to pretend we are an ultra-right-wing death squad.”
“Why should she care as long as this gets done? No offense, Kristophe, okay…? But fuck her, all right? Why does she stay hung up on this Nazi thing for me?”
“Always she has her reasons. I assume we get to learn more later tonight.”
“At her leisure. Like everything else so far. Dude, why do you even stay with her?” Blayne began counting off objections on his fingers. “She’s bitchy. She’s high-maintenance. She doesn’t have an ounce of respect for a single thing that comes out of your mouth. The one thing she might’ve had respect for she didn’t hear, because you whispered it to Mickey Coffman…but when you got a rise out of him she couldn’t be happy for you.” Blayne huffed and let his hands fall to his lap. “She’s a knockout, I’ll admit that. But that’s not exactly a rare quality in L.A.”
“Oh, I weigh my options these days, you don’t worry about me. But not until I have my deal set up with Mickey. Dump her now and her hurting would maybe make her to poison Mickey against me. I get my deal…then I crush her heart, ja?”
“If you can find one,” Blayne said. “How’d you two hook up, anyway?”
“You know the way these things go. You meet at a party, things start to happen because she loves your accent…”
He explained how they had twice slept together around the time Melissa had first gone to work for Mickey. And how she quickly determined, since she was now divorced, that she could use someone to share expenses because of the slash in salary she’d taken for this entry into the industry.
“This was good news to me,” Kristophe said. “Because my other girlfriend and I had just broken up. This bitch, do you know how she tells me we are kaput? While I am
gone one day she packs all my things and dumps them in a pile at the door, and on top she leaves a pair of cardboard signs she has made—you know, signs like the stinking lazy street beggars hold? One says ‘Homeless, please help’ and the other says ‘Will direct for food.’ This is how she tells me our love is through.”
“Give her points for originality,” Blayne said. “And since you brought it up, about that accent…”
“Ja?”
“Don’t you ever let it drop? It’s just you and me in a car now. I’ve known you almost as long as Melissa, and I still don’t know what you really sound like.”
“This is what I really sound like now,” Kristophe said, but Blayne refused to accept it, kept digging in that flustered way that would come over him whenever the world exceeded the boundaries set by his shrunken mundane mind. Kept asking why, why bother—every moment of the day having to construct whatever he had to say around this persona that wasn’t even his.
“It is image, my friend,” Kristophe explaining it as if to a six-year-old. “And image is currency in trade. These people I much want to work with, each week they meet a hundred Christopher Plunketts from Montana. But how many Kristophes from Stuttgart? See—image! I could not take it off me any easier than you could remove each night your pectorals and put them on a shelf. You lift your weights and become big and strong? Well, I dress German, I think German, I sound German, I drive a German car…and over time I become German.”
“But do you speak German?”
“Of course not. Nobody would understand me here.”
“Why not just go deeper into what you really are? Plunkett, what’s that? Doesn’t sound German to me.”
“We were Irish, I think.”
“So what’s wrong with that?”
“How many Irish directors can you name?”
This stopped Blayne dead in his tracks. Finally, “There’s…umm…that guy who did My Left Foot.”
“Name him.” Kristophe allowed plenty of time, to no avail. “See! You are not able! You prove my point for me! But the Germans, this is different! Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, Erich Von Stroheim, Werner Herzog, Wolfgang Petersen, Roland Emmerich…you see now what I get at, don’t you?”
The miles went by and Blayne refused to let go of it, scowling and scratching his chest, refusing to be happy because he’d shaved himself raw, and now the whole world had to wallow with him in the mud of trivialities. He was like a big dopey dog with a bone. Lose the accent, Kristophe. Just say one thing without the accent, Kristophe. One complete sentence, or as soon as we get to Sedona, me and my machine gun are taking a bus back to L.A. and you can kill Melissa’s brother with your bare German hands.
“Okay, fine, asshole—you win!” shouted Christopher Plunkett of Missoula, Montana. “Happy now? ‘Eat shit and die!’ That’s a complete sentence, isn’t it?”
The car was filled with the voice of a stranger, someone he had once gone to school with, but hadn’t seen for years. With no desire to renew the acquaintance.
Slowly, Blayne raised both hands in surrender. “All right. Put it back,” he said. “My mistake. That was big-time weird. I’ll never bring it up again.”
“Ja, ja. This is how I thought you might feel.”
Perhaps this spat was just what herr doktor had ordered to clear the air. Five simmering days in a motel, how could toxins not have built up? Accommodations, food, ambience, choice of channels—all dreadful, while the locals eyed them with the kind of leery curiosity they might’ve displayed if a circus sideshow had passed through and left a pair of freaks behind.
With nothing better to do while waiting on Melissa, he’d begun filming these locals, as well. Their awe at Blayne’s physique, their debates on Kristophe’s country of origin. The two of them had become familiar enough within a five-hundred-yard radius around the motel that the Kingmanites had begun to play along. At least it helped to widen the cast, which so far consisted only of Blayne and himself. There had been an early scene filmed with Melissa, but he doubted she would be as eager to sign a release form as these desert rats.
And it really wasn’t much of a scene: Blayne loading the Audi. Melissa nagging Kristophe to shut down the camera and get moving. Then some neighbor’s Golden Retriever had wandered over and begun to sniff her crotch, and she’d kicked the pooch in the hindquarters to send it yelping across the parking lot. Yes, scratch the scene—the last thing he needed at his premier was a protest by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. They would never believe it was a stunt dog.
It had occurred to Kristophe that they had no story here, just lots of local color, much of it sunburned, and a guy who spent most of the time with his shirt off. The story was still writing itself, he supposed, and for whatever might later seem lacking, well, that could be fixed with inserts and clever post-production. And loud soundtrack music seemed more critical all the time.
“You know what we need, still, don’t you?” he asked. “For the movie, I mean.”
“I give up.” Blayne sounding very bored. Just scratch scratch scratch at his chest. “What do we need?”
“A sense of motion.” Wheels beneath him, wheels turning in his mind. “To offset all the scenes of you and me sitting on our asses.”
“If you ask me, that’s a pretty accurate depiction of what’s been happening.”
“Well, we now are on the roll again. So it should be shown too, ja?”
He pointed beyond the windshield into the night. They had left the interstate at Flagstaff a few miles back, heading south now for the final stretch to Sedona, headlights slicing through the dark along a winding high-country two-lane.
“A montage of motion, seen through our windshield. All our travels compressed into moments! From Ventura Boulevard to the loneliest desert roads.” Free-associating now, in high gear. “They dissolve into each other like we are restless souls who never stop moving. Sharks! We are sharks! Ultra-right-wing death-sharks! But we get paid! Life has no meaning unless we have someone else we’re on our way to eat. But we show this very fast. Like most of Run Lola Run and the beginning of Killing Zoe.”
“Meaning it’s been done already,” Blayne said. “So what’s the point?”
“Talent borrows,” Kristophe reminded him. “Genius steals.”
He grabbed the Canon with his free hand, brought the viewfinder to his eye and turned it on. Reduced the world into a little framed rectangle—the way he was most comfortable seeing it, really.
Blayne began to object: “Dude? Why don’t you let me hold the camera, okay?”
“Because you have no idea what it is I go after here.”
“It’s a shot of a highway at night.”
“To you, maybe! And this is why it must be me who films it.” Always, always, this tyranny of mediocre minds. “To me it is the darkness of Man’s heart and the feeble light of His attempts to find His way through the world.”
“What kind of pretentious bullshit is that—Nietzsche for truck-drivers?”
This time he’d gone too far. Kristophe whirled on him, the camera’s viewfinder filling with a dimly lit Blayne who scratched his chest and whose eyes popped wide as he yelled to watch the road. But Kristophe found himself more interested in watching what would happen when he slapped his hand into Blayne’s razor-raw pecs. You could learn a lot about your friends in a fight. Like, until now he hadn’t heard the limits of Blayne’s vocal cords. And that the guy could counterpunch really really hard.
One hand on the camera, one hand grappling with Blayne—next thing he knew, the nocturnal river of pavement had vanished from beneath the headlights, their beam now cutting through a void that seemed a lot darker than Man’s heart. The Audi tilted forward at an angle better left to rollercoasters, and it didn’t seem to matter what his foot tried with the brakes. And the noise? Gött in Himmel, the noise!
But noise was good. Silence would mean they were in freefall. Never had he wanted to keep hearing anything that sounded so punishing. He knew what it was now, t
he headlights illuminating the steep slope of a hillside strewn with rocks. As they slalomed along, Kristophe tried to steer around the biggest, but there was no way to dodge them all. They thunked and slammed underneath, wrenching tires and pulverizing metal, each impact shuddering through him from bowels to molars.
A calm began to descend when he realized he hadn’t lost the shot, the Canon braced on his shoulder and his eye on the viewfinder. He was still getting the shot. It was best to go this way. He’d always known that if he had to die young, death could be glorious if he looked at it with a camera in his hand.
As the ground began to level out, and the steering wheel had no more effect than a Hollywood promise, Kristophe held the shot all the way to the huge, gnarled trunk of the pine tree.
****
Until Jenna’s tongue came in for the kill and performed tight spirals around her clit, Melissa had been thinking that nothing about this encounter was going to push it past the “nice try, but…” category.
Trouble was, by the time she could dig her toes out of the ceiling and reevaluate whether or not this really was working, the rapture was over—a few moments of pleasure as overwhelming as a tidal wave, then back to thinking how odd it seemed to look down the length of her body at the tousled mop of short blond hair and a pert nose and a pair of made-up eyes smiling up at her over her own muff of pubes.
Jenna disengaged, and wriggled elbows-and-knees up to lie alongside her.
“My ambivalence meter is starting to tick,” Jenna said. “Too much, too soon, was that it?”
“I wouldn’t say that, no. I’m not really the wine-me, dine-me type.”
Jenna rolled onto her side, facing her directly. “If this is something you think you might want to pursue—and I’m not necessarily talking about with me, just overall—sometimes it can take awhile to get yourself over what I think of as ‘the indoctrination.’ Maybe it’s that, way down, you’re thinking something we did here is wrong.”
Melissa laughed and shook her head. “I’m not a big believer in right and wrong. Just what works and what doesn’t. I think maybe the thing is, I’m unfit for human companionship in general. And I’m not big on the animal kingdom, either, come to think of it.”