by John Kaye
“Yeah? Tell me about him.”
“His name is Smart Art. He’s a street mime in San Francisco. But what he likes to do best is work plastic.”
Maria leaned forward a little. “‘Work plastic’? What does that mean?”
“It means he’s the world’s greatest credit card counterfeiter,” Burk said, forgetting to add that this character was based on a true story he’d read in Crimestoppers, the monthly magazine for the National Association of Police Chiefs, that he’d picked up earlier in the week at his father’s newsstand.
Maria was silent for a few seconds. “A street mime who counterfeits credit cards,” she said, beginning to nod her head enthusiastically. “That’s a character we haven’t seen before. Do you have a title?”
“Mr. Plastic Fantastic.”
“Nice.”
Burk shrugged. “Now all I need is a story to go with it.”
Maria grinned. “You know what nine out of ten screenwriters have engraved on their tombstones: finally, a plot.”
Burk finished the first draft of Mr. Plastic Fantastic in eight weeks. “It’s not perfect. The third act still needs to be fine-tuned,” he told Maria Selene over the phone. “But overall I think it works.”
Withholding her excitement, Maria said casually, “If you can get a copy to me today, there’s a chance I could get to it over the weekend.” Burk said he would send it over by messenger, and they made an appointment to meet the following Wednesday. “That’ll give the boys a chance to read it too. It sounds like a winner,” Maria said, and when Burk hung up the phone in his den he could hear Louie furiously pedaling his Big Wheel up and down the driveway next to their house. A moment later when he pulled aside the curtain and the sweet, smiling face of his son passed by the window in the waning light, Burk felt something deep and warm stir inside him, a feeling he could only describe as a father’s love.
It was nearly eight o’clock when Sandra arrived home from Hollywood Park. “I got stuck in traffic,” she said to Burk, as she nonchalantly opened her purse and dumped a thick wad of cash on the dining room table. “I know I shouldn’t have stayed for the ninth, but I had a hunch on the exacta.”
Burk heard the refrigerator open and close, and when Sandra entered the living room she was holding a bottle of ginger ale. She took a seat on the opposite end of the couch and put her feet up on the cushion, giving Burk a brief look before she began to browse through the latest issue of Rolling Stone.
Sandra had been on the wagon for over a month, and her dirt-dark eyes—without the glaze of alcohol—sparkled in their deep sockets. Her body, too, seemed more alive. Gone was the fat around her hips, and her legs, long and lean, fit snugly inside her faded blue bell-bottom jeans. For the first time in weeks Burk felt himself become sexually aroused, but when he reached out to caress her ankle, Sandra drew back her foot and swatted his hand away with the magazine.
“Where’s Louie?” she asked, without looking up.
“Sleeping.”
“Already?”
“He was tired.”
“It’s not even nine. He never goes to sleep before nine. I didn’t even get a chance to say good night.”
“You weren’t here.”
“I know that, but still . . .” she said, her voice dying away as she stood up and walked into their bedroom.
After she did her nightly exercises and took a long hot shower, Sandra reentered the dining room and started to add up the cash that was now stacked in neat piles on the table. “One hundred and sixty-five and change. I already counted it,” Burk said from the couch. “That’s almost two grand in six weeks.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Sandra took a seat at the table and began filling out a bank deposit slip. “I guess I’m on a hot streak,” she said.
“You’ve won thirty-four days in a row. That’s not a hot streak, that’s amazing.”
“I’ve got a system, Ray. I told you that,” she said irritably, then she pulled a copy of the Daily Racing Form out of her purse. “See?” Inked in the margin next to each horse’s past performance were odd symbols and complicated algebraic calculations. “Here,” she said, pointing. “This is how I do it: Speed divided by claiming price times a factor of two, plus or minus weight allowances and track variants, equals this number. Each horse gets a number,” she said, and she snapped a rubber band around the money and dropped it into her purse. “The higher the number, the better the horse. It’s that simple.”
At first Burk thought she was joking, expecting her at any moment to break out laughing. But when he tried to encourage her with a smile she said, “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. I was just—”
“Don’t you get it?”
Burk stared at Sandra, wondering if she was going insane, a thought that had crossed his mind more than once over the last six months. “Yeah, sure,” he said finally, nodding. “I get it.”
On Tuesday, the next racing day, Burk decided (somewhat guiltily) to follow Sandra when she left for Hollywood Park. Sitting upright and holding the steering wheel in both hands, she drove south on the San Diego freeway, passing La Tijera, the exit nearest to the track. At Century Boulevard she got off and made a quick right. She drove two blocks and pulled into the parking lot behind the Paradise Lounge.
“It was one of those sleazy cinder-block dives near the airport,” Burk told Gene, when he called him later that night. “It reminded me of the Bat Cave.”
Gene said, “I think I know what you’re gonna tell me, Ray.”
“I’m gonna tell you that I don’t think Sandra has a system for picking horses, okay? That’s one thing I’m gonna tell you. And I’m gonna tell you I understand now why she bought the new Creedence album last week. You know why? Because up there on stage, shaking her tits to ‘Green River,’ is Sandra Burk, my wife. And you know something else, Gene? Even with all those scars she looked good. Trim, tan, sexy, with a big smile on her face. You hear me? A big smile. Then you know what she did? She dropped her bikini bottom and walked to the edge of the stage and hit ‘em with the pay dirt, stuck her cooze right in their faces. Can you believe it, Gene? Can you fucking believe it?”
After a short silence, Gene said, “What did you do?”
“Nothing. I just walked out.”
“Did she see you?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. If she did, she didn’t say anything when she got home. Just dropped the cash on the table like she always does, like she made another score at the track.”
“She’s doin’ it for you, so you can finish your script.”
“She looked really happy up there, Gene.”
“Don’t overthink it. At least she’s not drinking.”
“She’s developed a following, too. Clyde, the owner, said there’s a whole shitload of men who get off on women with scars.”
“Ray, I gotta go.”
“What am I gonna do?” Burk said. His voice was desolate.
“Forget about her, Ray. Just take care of Louie and keep writing. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“‘Bye.”
“You first,” said Rick Rheinis, glancing at Maria Selene, who was sitting next to Burk on the red leather couch in Sid Robins’s office. “Can you hear us okay?” Rheinis said, leaning forward in Sid’s chair to adjust the volume on the speakerphone.
“Loud and clear,” said Sid’s voice, patched in from New York, where the night before he’d attended the Broadway opening of Big Fellas, a new play by Joshua Flood, a Rheinis and Robins client.
“I had a problem with the piece,” Maria said.
“We all did,” echoed Rheinis. “But that’s not to say there weren’t things we liked. Right, Sidney? . . . Sidney? . . . Sidney, you there?”
“What?”
“I said—”
“One sec, Rick, I got a room service guy in here with my lunch.”
Burk nervously fumbled for a cigarette, dropping it on the carpet before he could put it in his mouth
. When he picked it up he glanced at Maria. She started to speak but was interrupted by Sid’s voice.
“Okay,” he said, “I’m back.”
Rheinis said, “We were talking about Ray’s script.”
“Refresh my memory.”
“Mr. Plastic Fantastic.”
“Oh, yes, of course, some wonderful stuff. Ray?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You are an extremely talented guy.”
Burk smiled. “I’m glad you liked it. I wasn’t sure if—”
“Whoa, wait! I said you were talented, not that I liked it.” Burk flushed. He glanced at Maria, trying unsuccessfully to catch her eye. “To be candid, I couldn’t make it past page forty-eight. It was too . . . busy.” Maria and Rheinis stared at the speakerphone, nodding. “I recommend we don’t send it out.”
Careful not to look at Burk, Rheinis jingled the change in his pocket for a few seconds. “I’ve got a meeting at Fox at noon,” he said, checking his watch as he stood up. “I’ll call you this afternoon, Sidney. Say hello to Joshua.”
After Rheinis left the office, Maria said, “Without the solid development of a single story you’ve got nothing, Ray.”
Burk felt his face burning. “I thought I had a story.”
Maria said, “So did we. But it got lost in the side issues and subplots.”
“Maybe Smart Art—”
Maria shook her head. “Smart Art worked fine, Ray. So did Lily and Rockabye Ralph. So did the car chase through Chinatown and the shoot-out on the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“But it lacked flow, coherence. I didn’t hear that tom-tom beating underneath the words. I didn’t know who to root for,” Sid’s voice said. “And without a rooting interest there’s no climax potential. No climax potential means . . . no climax . . . and soft box office.”
For several seconds, the only sound in Sid’s office was the hiss of long distance. “It was just a first draft,” Burk finally said, feeling shamed and outraged at the same time. “I could do a rewrite.”
“That’s up to you,” said Sid’s voice. “But it might not be worth the effort.” Then, changing the subject, he said, “Maria, I spoke with Jack Rose. I think he’s ready to commit on the Berliner project.”
While Sid and Maria openly discussed agency business over the speakerphone, Burk idly flipped through a copy of Daily Variety. He let fifteen minutes pass—by then the color had left his cheeks and he’d almost retrieved his pride—before he stood up and walked out of the office.
“Basically they agreed with you,” Burk told Sandra when he came home that afternoon. They were sitting in armchairs on opposite sides of the living room. Outside the wind swirled and a light rain was falling. “They said it was garbage.”
“That’s not what I said. I said it was too complicated.”
“Too complicated?”
“Right.”
“Fuck complicated.”
“You asked me and—”
“I worked hard on that script!”
“I know you did. I saw you,” she said loudly. “I was here, Ray.”
“No you weren’t. While I was writing and taking care of Louie, you were down on Century Boulevard, dancing naked for a bunch of fucking perverts.”
Burk stood up.
“Ray, wait—”
“Fuck you, Sandra.”
Sandra stared at Burk, and for the first time in their marriage she saw real hatred in his eyes. After a long silence, he walked past her into the dining room. “I’m going to pick up Louie,” he said, in a voice that was unforgiving, and he could not see the sadness erupt in her face as he picked up his car keys and walked outside.
Sandra’s car was gone from the driveway when Burk came back from the Goodtime Nursery School. “Mommy’s left. She’s not coming home,” Burk heard his voice say, knowing this even before he saw that her suitcase was missing, along with her shopping bag filled with old racing forms.
Louie suddenly looked frightened. “For how long?”
“For just a little while,” Sandra told Louie later that evening. She was calling him from a motel in Riverside. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
“It’s raining. It’s not safe to drive in the rain.”
“It’s just drizzling.”
“But the roads are slippery.”
“I’ll be careful. I promise.”
Louie turned his head as Burk walked into the living room. His arms were folded tight across his chest. “Daddy’s gonna miss you.”
“I’ll miss Daddy.”
“Will you call us?”
“Every night.”
“You promise?”
“Swear to God.”
“I bet she comes back tomorrow,” Louie said to his father, looking around expectantly after he hung up the phone. “She’ll be sitting right here on the couch when I come home from school. Right, Daddy?”
“Maybe.”
“I bet.”
Louie kept his eyes closed on the ride home from nursery school the following afternoon. “She’s probably stuck in traffic,” he said when he saw the empty driveway on Valley View Lane. “She’ll be home in a little while.” And before he went to bed, in a voice that Burk could barely hear, Louie said, “Wake me when she calls. Okay?”
Burk said, “For sure,” but Sandra didn’t call that evening like she’d promised, or the next. Two weeks went by and Louie stopped looking for her car when he came back from school, and by week three he didn’t dash to the phone each time it rang.
Still, every night he got down on his knees by the side of his bed and asked God to bring his mother home safely, and then he would get underneath the covers and lie motionless, moving his lips silently as he replayed their last conversation, wondering why she would lie to him like that.
Once she did come home, in a dream, and Louie threw off his blankets and shouted, “She’s here, she’s here!” repeating these words over and over as he ran through the darkened house. When Burk finally found him, he was standing on the front lawn with tears rolling down his face, staring into the outer dark. “She’s here . . . I know it,” he said in a tiny voice. “I saw her.”
Burk felt a terrible sadness sweep through his chest as he reached for his son’s hand. “No, Louie, you were just dreaming,” he said, and he led him back to bed.
Louie’s nursery school day ended at three o’clock, the same time Burk finished writing, and most afternoons on their way home they would stop at a small park on Balboa Avenue near Encino. There Louie would ride his Big Wheel or play on the monkey bars while Burk sat at a picnic table and edited the script pages he’d rewritten that morning.
One day a young woman took a seat on the bench across from Burk. “You write?” she said, and Burk nodded. “So do I,” she said, and from her purse she removed a professionally typed screenplay with the Columbia Pictures logo on the cover.
Her name was Loretta Egan. She was in her early thirties, pretty but thin, with bold eyes and dark, curly hair. Her script, Cold as Ice, a sexy thriller starring Clint Eastwood, was set to begin filming in the fall. “It’s my fourth original but my first sale. I can’t believe it’s really gonna happen,” she told Burk. “What about you, any credits?”
“No. Not really. Actually I just started writing six months ago.”
“You have an agent?”
“Maria Selene. She’s with Rheinis and Robins.”
“They’re good. You must know what you’re doing.”
Burk shrugged. “I thought I did,” he said, then he told her about Mr. Plastic Fantastic, the negative response he’d received.
“What’s it about?” she said.
Burk started to explain the plot. Halfway through, Loretta said, “Stop. I can’t follow it.”
“I guess it is pretty complicated,” Burk laughed, not altogether surprised by her bluntness. “When I’m done with this draft it will be a lot clearer. Maybe you could look it over before I turn it in. I mean, if you’re not too busy.”
Before Loretta could reply, Louie rolled up on his Big Wheel. Following him on a tricycle was a little girl with pale yellow hair that hung in front of her shoulders.
“This is Emily,” Louie said. “She’s five too. Say hello to my dad, Emily.”
Emily said hello; then she pointed behind her to a bench by the swings. “That’s my mom with the pink sweater. She’s crying. Yesterday was her birthday.”
Louie said, “Emily’s dad left her like Mom did. Tell my dad how long he’s been gone.”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No.”
“Pretty please.”
“All right,” she said, and her lips began to shake. “He’s been gone a million trillion billion years.”
Burk said, “That’s a long time.”
That night while Burk lay awake listening to Radio Ray Moore, Louie tiptoed into his room and slipped into bed next to him. In a few minutes he was asleep, so he didn’t hear the call Radio Ray took right before he signed off for the news. The caller, a woman, would not reveal her name, but she told Radio Ray that she was a regular listener. “I’ve never called in before,” she said, “but my husband did once.”
Radio Ray kept her on the line when he went into a station break, and during the network news that followed she told Radio Ray that she was staying at the Silverado Motel in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Off the air, she said, “I’m lying here in bed on my back, and across from me, on the wall above the TV, is a painting of a little girl seated at a small wooden table with her ankles crossed and her hands folded neatly in her lap. Through the window in the picture a horse can be seen grazing in a field filled with yellow daisies. And beyond the horse, on the horizon, is a single gray cloud.
“Right now I can’t see the picture because it’s pitch dark, but once in awhile a car will pass by and the headlights will flash across the wall of my room—and for an instant I might see the little girl or the horse or the cloud that is getting ready to rain.”
The caller stopped speaking and began to hum a melody that sounded familiar to Radio Ray Moore. A moment later, he heard someone pounding on her door. The caller continued to hum, louder, and the man in the background yelled, “Open the fucking door, Sandra, you goddamn cunt!”